Consumer ISPs are not a free market, they're a collection of regional monopolies. The solution is not regulation, it's increasing competition. If every consumer had a choice of 5 or more competitive ISPs, then the market would sort this out. ISPs could literally advertise "We won't slow down your favourite websites! All websites equally fast!"
Sure, but the reality is that none of the ISPs are going to lay any new cable. Don't forget, all of the original copper laid was financed by the govt back in the 50's/60's. For fiber, unless there's a real need for an ISP to add more, they're just not going to do it. There is absolutely no incentive.
I am not a believer in big or overbearing govt per se, but I feel like, just like power or water, Internet is a utility and it needs to be regulated - hard. The future depends on it. Imagine you're a startup and between 2p-6p you don't have any or super stoddy internet access. Kinda like Comcast from 5p-11p actually..
Anyway, It's pathetic really; we invented the f-ing internet and other countries completely surpass our speeds and ability to access. My brother teases me all the time because he has gigabit in Japan (in the early 00's, he had 100 Mb).
Step outside the US and you realize our options are a total joke.
The problem with Internet as a utility is that unlike water (and power?) the tech isn't stable for 30-100 years. If you're using the same Internet equipment in 5 years you're hopelessly behind other countries.
Internet as a utility seems like it will quickly be out of date and getting governments to upgrade it will be just as hard as getting them to upgrade anything else.
We tried that in the netherlands. Our approach did not work out that well. In all cases there's the maintainer of the hardware (cable) and a lot of "providers" on that hardware.
I'm not well informed enough to know why, but in all cases (cable, railroad, powerlines, ether frequencies) the system devolved into a state where the "provider" linked to the hardware maintainer is the dominant player still.
I'm not syaing it can't work, just that over here it didn't really work.
Practically overnight (metaphorically) it went from only metered dial up or expensive isdn to ultra fast dsl. There was huge competition mostly lead by SoftBank Japan. The actually handed out routers at subway station exits. Every time their competitors including the old monopoly matched their speed they'd double it. It was awesome to watch
Why does one provider get a privileged relationship with the maintainer? I'm surprised that in all those industries there was never a complete division of control.
I used to live in a town with a similar system, which worked great. I suppose the difference was that the maintainer (the municipality power company) was never an ISP themselves.
Not only are the monopolies or at best duopolies but their networks rely on public right aways(underground ducting and trenches)that are owned by you the tax payer! To operate a cable franchise you need to have a municipal charter, but you can't count on your local government to apply any pressure they generally just rubber stamp approval on these.
The real solution is to municipal networks. Which would look like: consumer -> municipal network -> Tier 1 ISP -> website.
Its been done in Tennessee. Los Angeles was looking at implement this model as well. But wouldn't you know the cable monopolies has sued and threatened to sue the local governments because they say a municipal would have an "unfair advantage." These assholes couldn't compete in fair market, they'd be out business.
> The solution is not regulation, it's increasing competition.
There are two responses to this. The first is OK do it and then we'll get rid of the regulations as soon as there actually are 5 or more competitive ISPs.
But the more important point is that it doesn't actually solve the problem in question. There could be 10 ISPs that every consumer could choose from but every website would still have to pay all of them if they were allowed to charge websites, because the site can't get faster access to Verizon's customers by paying AT&T or vice versa.
The things that make connections fast or slow are sometimes opaque to users. For the market to really deal with these problems we'd need to give participants better information, either through technical or legislative means.
For example, say I'm paying for a connection with a 20 Mbps upload speed but when I upload to backblaze my upload only runs at 10 Mbps. The problem could be my hard disk, filesystem, CPU, software, wifi, router/modem, ISP, or backblaze themselves.
Currently we don't do a particularly good job of giving nontechnical users the information they need to make rational decisions about what they need to change or upgrade.
Google did this with YouTube. I'm sure a service would pop up any commercial website could contract with to do the same thing and inform the customer about speed limits and which ISPs are fast or slow
> With proper competition nobody would dare to introduce something like that, because people would just switch to one of the other ISPs in a heartbeat.
One of the ISPs would charge lower prices while offering crappier service. Some customers would still stick with it because it's cheaper. That ISP then strikes a deal with some smaller websites to make them faster than their competitors. Then the ISP offers a sweetheart deal to the larger competitors (at first) which they'll take to avoid losing ground, so then everybody is paying them for faster service.
Now that ISP has the lowest prices and their service is suddenly better because it's being subsidized by the websites, so they get more customers. Then they use the leverage of more customers to negotiate higher prices from the websites ad infinitum. The competitive advantage forces other websites to adopt the same business model.
It isn't a problem that competition solves because the people who have to pay can't choose between competing ISPs.
So much This. ISPs could also advertise "we pass subsidies on from our preferred partners (web businesses) to you. [fine print: traffic with non-preferred partners is deprioritized]." That's not a value proposition that everyone, or even many, would accept but it's one that should be permitted and subject to (adequately competitive) market forces rather than regulation.
Please tell me your plan for increasing consumer ISP competition without regulation? Because we once used to have a great variety of ISPs and they are almost all gone now. Existing players with money and infrastructure put them out of business.
Approximately 0.000% would advertise that. Instead they would all compete on how fast Netflix, Facebook, Youtube, Wikipedia and their special "Adult Package" were. The market would eliminate every site outside of the top 5% entirely (who probably account for 99.9% of all pageviews.)
I agree that there should be less regulation, not more.
Sanders said that Romania has faster internet than USA, but it's not because the romanian government did something about it, but exactly because it was oblivious to it's development.
It started when campus students started laying ethernet cables to connect into a big LAN party. Then any kid with some knowledge of networking got some switches and cables and connected with his neighbors, sometimes connecting two or more blocks of apartments. When grown big enough, they got an internet connection directly from a backbone provider.
Soon enough, cables were flying around, from rooftop to rooftop, and almost everyone had 50Mpbs/100Mbps (and dedicated IP) for around 10$ a month (and most providers were registered companies, paying taxes).
The providers were usually small (hence were called "neighborhood networks"), but some grew big (2-3 of them grew to almost 1/6 of the city, each).
Thankfully, the government learned only to late of this little activity, and everyone was already high with internet.
The networks weren't regulated, but none dared to limit or censor (or cared to). They probably over-committed the bandwidth, but the speeds were good.
There were some issues. The block of apartments have something called an "administrator" handling the maintenance of the building. Some companies started bribing (or administrators demanding bribes) to deny access to competition in the block and cut cables.
Then there was talk in the parliament and the city hall to remove the cables (because it was "ugly"). But every cable cut during day reappeared over night.
At that point, the only alternative to those networks was at most, 256kbps DSL.
Lucky enough, a big provider came and bought all the big networks in the city, buried the cables, but kept the service (probably to avoid a fallback to the old ways).
I now have a 1 Gbps fiber for same 10$. They also offer unlimited SIM cards with unlimited 4G for 3$, but they don't guarantee signal coverage (mostly in rural areas).
So, increasing competition is the solution. No one will dare slow down anything, or if they will, a new player who doesn't will appear and steal the market.
No, each ISP would offer a different set of fast/slow websites to the consumer, because that's how they can differentiate and segment the market. Various costs of switching/vendor lock-in will keep consumers from bouncing around, and it's in each ISP's own interest to leverage these effects to extract profits from content providers.
Similar practices already exist with satellite TV providers, who drop content providers over contract disputes [1], and with cell carriers, who provide preferential billing for in-network calls. Not that these practices are inherently bad, nor are monopolies good, but these are clear examples of the free market inducing discriminatory carriage, directly counter to your claim.
"The market" only "sorts things out" in fantasy worlds with infinite liquidity, no financial transaction friction, and no information imbalance. The world of consumer internet is none of these things. The most direct route to net neutrality is regulatory enforcement via common-carrier status.
