I live in a small-ish market in the Northeast that has been under Time Warner's thumb (now Spectrum) for some time. Since moving here ~2012 there has been the promise of fiber to the home by a small local ISP. To everyone's surprise, and even TWC, expansion started really happening in 2016 and has exploded since for this same small ISP. They're relying on actual order fulfillment with payment once property easements are settled and engineering completes in what they designate as individual districts. With packages promising 100mbit/10mbit as base for $50/month and up to 1gbps/100mbps for $100 ($110 for static IP) TWC couldn't come close (30mbit/5mbit for $70+ at the time I was able to switch in spring 2016). This expansion prompted TWC to expand their packages after the Charter merger but they still cannot deliver what this now growing ISP can promise at similar cost.
This is what Net Neutrality means to these large ISP's. Giving equal footing to consumers and small businesses they have been fleecing for so long though nowhere near actually being equal. It's clear people are fed up and can express that. Pai & his FCC removing any semblance of voice to that public is shameful and unethical and clearly, as has been stated over the previous months, not based in fact.
Isn't it the opposite? A new ISP competing is presented as something noteworthy and unusual. That's exactly what we would expect to see in an environment of crippled investment.
>A new ISP competing is presented as something noteworthy and unusual.
But it is. I moved here from a large city and my _first_ thought after having FiOS for a couple years was damn, TWC; throttling, data caps & absenteeism. I heard nothing but complaints and horror stories from locals but the only alternative was (only) Frontier which was somehow worse.
In the view you present, how is overturning NN not benefiting TWC while at the same time allowing for more investment and growth? Wouldn't that be detrimental to TWC's business? Not to mention this new ISP's expansion didn't really start until after NN was enforced, whether coincidentally or not.
Hi neighbor. After the Charter merger Spectrum dropped my grandfathered $35 plan, so now I'm switching to <small local ISP> since I'm lucky enough to have enough interest in my neighborhood to have service from them. Glad to FINALLY have some competition around here.
Howdy! I hope you get to enjoy their service. Just some notes from having been a customer for almost 2 years:
Be prepared for some growing pains. It took around a month or two for me to get close to link capacity for various reasons that were both issues with my hardware (needed a "real" router for 1gbps) and issues with the service. It took maybe 3 or 4 service tickets and multiple config changes on their end but I've not had issues since.
In the nearly 2 years as a customer they have switched networks twice, three times if you include Level 3 sale to CenturyLink. Around the switch to L3 to accommodate new growth CGNAT was deployed. I have no idea about actual numbers but districts would be behind only a handful of public IPv4 addresses across a large area. IPv6 is ready to go but until user experience is improved (too much IPv4 only on the web) they will not enforce. The $10 I mentioned in previous post for static IP was for people that already had accounts when this change occurred. New accounts have to pay $25/month. When I first switched from TWC they provided 2 public IP's so this was a bit of a downer. I received notice this past week that emergency maintenance was to take place next weekend which always makes me hold my breath as more expansion occurs.
They also I don't think service the northern, poorest part of the city. This could be due to lack of interest/knowledge that the service exists or part of the arrangement that TWC has contractually with the municipality (pure speculation). Also, there are certain areas that will not get service ever. It seems that buried utilities have the greatest impact on such decisions.
Supposedly "anti-regulation" forces energetically oppose Net Neutrality -- but don't expect them to follow through and remove the regulations that protect the telco monopolies.
"Anti-regulation" rhetoric against Net Neutrality is either sock puppetry or useful idiocy.
Actually, I and a number of other engineers submitted comments on this proceeding to that effect. Pai's argument is, in part, that ISPs provide access to information services (social networking sites, email, video streaming, etc.) and should therefore be considered information services. Of course, any form of communication, even carrier pigeons, can be used to communicate over the Internet, so in theory what he is saying is that nothing can be regulated under Title II.
The FCC's draft rules respond to this objection by simply dismissing it. The draft rules basically dismiss all commentary that did not come from ISPs as "not persuasive." The only reason any of those comments were cited at all is to prove that all submitted commentary was considered, something that is legally required of them.
On multiple occasions, Pai has indicated he is going to roll these rules back regardless of what anyone says. He did claim that he would entertain a sound argument proving that Title II hasn't hurt investment, but the only way to prove that is with the cooperation of the entities that stand to profit.
This is why there is a good chance this will be tied in the federal courts. The comment process is supposed to prevent an "arbitrary and capricious" decision by a federal agency. Pai's comments could be used to make a persuasive argument that this is arbitrary (says we're desperate doesn't help). Capricious is a much harder thing to prove. I think the fact that data shows the comment period was tainted by foreign entities, false entries, and that 98.5% of the valid comments were in support of NN could use to show this is capricious in that his actions show a disregard for the consumer.
"Anti-regulation" rhetoric against Net Neutrality is either sock puppetry or useful idiocy.
A lot of it is just a misunderstanding of how the Internet works and what net neutrality is. Many conservatives will give arguments like "you should be able to charge people more if they're watching Netflix all the time and using lots of bandwidth". Which is true, but to show why that's irrelevant to net neutrality you have to go into the details of routing and peering and you'll lose most people three sentences in. See the comments at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0iv4nmPz8A&lc=UgwIM85WNrVRv..., where a few conservatives who work in tech try to explain what's going on, without much success.
I keep seeing everywhere comments against Net Neutrality using this argument. And saying that it cripples free market, because new ISPs wouldn't be able to compete having the expense of regulatory compliance. But _nobody_, absolutely no one explained to me _why_ would it cost even a cent to ensure Net Neutrality (that is not part of ensuring a quality service in general). We should ask this more when discussing that argument, because it seems there's a lot of people truly believing this having that notion unchallenged.
Unregulated Capitalism in the very reason monopolies are created. Founder of Capitalism favoured an economy where a lot of small companies competed together to the benefit of consumers. He also recommended regulations where natural monopolies arise due to limited supply. As an example, he recommended heavy taxes on rent seeking[1].
This is a case of American Capitalism taken to its logically conclusion where any regulation makes it anti competitive. American psyche is so attuned to "Free Market" that anything lazy argument will be invoked.
On the contrary we have Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) in India which has done wonders for us. Our market is highly regulated, yet we enjoy cheapest ISP services. We have also favoured Net Neutrality by opposing Facebook[2] when they came knocking on our door and now its part of our regulations after a year long deliberation [3].
Counterexample: we had mostly unregulated (except for mandatory government survelliance boxes, billing software licensing, and a reasonably affordable license to provide telecommunication services if you have more than 1K subscribers or more than 2 years in business - but all of this wasn't particularly heavy) market in Russia and the competition had worked. From the subscriber perspective, it was a norm to have 5+ different options, that had actually competed on pricing, quality and features. Every year prices used to go down. Then, when they got real low (like 100-200 RUB - when it just didn't made sense to go lower), speeds and packages started to grow. And whenever one option did something wrong (like throttling P2P traffic) they started lose active userbase very fast. It really worked.
Then things had changed. Last 5 years our Czar and his pet Duma noticed there is lack of regulation, so they started to write laws one after another. All sort of mandatory logging, censorship, peering policies (who can and who can't peer), extra licensing rules, UGC-related policies, etc etc - and, of course, all for the sake of subscribers' and national "security". Small ISPs died like it was a plague. Larger ones grow even larger - for obvious reasons.
Various explanations are possible (and regulations here are mostly different from NN, just authoritarian government strengthening their hold), but here's what I'm absolutely certain of: not all regulation is good. At the very least, consider if you trust your government (and all future governments) with such powers.
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Full disclosure: I've worked for 10 years for an ISP in Russia. Haven't been to the U.S. so don't know how exactly things are there. Yet, have a preliminary/uneducated opinion that they should've either hold NN (as a sort of a kludge - but there is no competition) and think how they can add more competition (=choice), or abolish NN but only simultaneously deregulating things so new ISP startups can actually enter the market.
> and regulations here are mostly different from NN
Not mostly, but totally. It costs very very little to comply with NN law, and protects the consumer. The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom.
> or abolish NN but only simultaneously deregulating things so new ISP startups can actually enter the market.
There's a lot of regulations that should be gone, but NN is not one of them.
> The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom.
Also, the problem is sometimes things work differently. For example, licensing/certifying billing system (not a recent thing, though) was meant to protect customers from broken accounting. In reality it primarily worked as providing "certified billing providers" a source of revenue. And billing failures were still not unheard of.
Data storage requirements (recent set of policies) were sort of pro-customer, with the idea to help privacy of personal information. In reality, it doesn't do any much (except for the fact every form with personal data now has an extra mandatory "I agree" field)
> It costs very very little to comply with NN law
The recent edition (as I've briefly seen it) - yes, probably you're right. It fixes the issues I'm about to mention. The "customer traffic is sacred" edition I think there was once (unless I'm mistaken - maybe I read someone's incorrect interpretation, or some early edition that wasn't complete) - nope.
Having a ton of hacks that analyze traffic and policy/route it differently - I believe is a norm for every ISP that respects their customers.
Without that you have phone lines full of customers complaining that YouTube buffers every minute, their favorite MMO ping is crappy so they can't raid, VoIP calls drop, commodity WiFi access point fails because it's overloaded by torrents, etc etc. In an ideal world, everyone would correctly tag their packets, no one would try to abuse the system and so on. In reality, sometimes even quite nasty hacks are necessary just to make users happy.
Heck, I'd admit - we even had to intercept DNS records once as a temporary measure. It was early 2010s, Google had some issues back then - some of YouTube servers were just slow and no amount of routing hacks (we tried to use every upstream) had helped. A great sin, but at least users were able to watch videos they wanted. And we had "don't mess with anything" option, directly in the self-service area.
That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition - when consumers can switch providers literally in a matter of days if not hours, so providers deeply care about customer satisfaction. Otherwise it's just irrelevant, and I'm generally against useless regulations.
Disclaimer (again): I've worked for an ISP so I'm probably biased. I try to debias myself (and I swear, I believe I write honestly), but still I can't be sure.
> That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition
This is completely true. America, as it happens, loves its natural monopolies wherever it can get them, and so that's why this kludge is our best (and only) option.
Your first paragraph is exactly what happened here but with regulations in place. Local ISPs here provides 20Mbps symmetrical bandwidth for $10 per month and this cost is going down rapidly. I think problem with Russia is its pseudo democracy which makes doing these things very easy. We have a messy democracy but it seems to works somehow :)
Might be OT but how does small ISPs operate in this market? Just as a last mile provider? I always thought they have to hook into one of the few backbone providers as only a handful of operators control the backbone worldwide due to requirements of heavy investment.
OT: Last mile, yeah. I've worked in one startup ISP (forked from a large company but started from scratch; our CEO was an ex-CEO of the other telco). Started small, with just a few households, and gradually grew to cover almost the whole city except for some hard-to-reach areas and far suburbs (city's Veliky Novgorod, 200k population; 90km²/35mi² area; about 200km/125mi from St. Petersburg).
There were also companies that had last mile fiber but offered other ISPs to use that fiber to provide actual Internet connectivity. I think it started that way because one larger ISP wanted to split into few smaller companies for tax purposes, but not sure.
We (and other our competitors) bought upstream bandwidth from higher-tier providers and covered the city with our own fiber. I don't think anyone (except for one large telco that's now a part of Rostelekom) got or had tried to get their lines to an IX in e.g. St.Petersburg.
There was some choice in higher-tier providers. We had 3 different uplinks and there were still at least pair of more options available that I've heard of. Maybe more, I don't know. Negotiating price downs ("hey, that other company said can give us a better offer") was quite common, I think I heard that every year or another.
I've worked on software components (website, various network services, software network access servers), though and wasn't deep into peering agreements and physical network building stuff.
Companies will be opportunistic. OT but I am not sure why AntiTrust is not invoked against Facebook. They don't have any competition and have done things which can be considered abuse of position.
The net neutrality order from 2015 did more than just mandate network neutrality. It also requires ISPs to keep certain records, possibly beyond their business needs (and other legal mandates). It also requires ISPs to make information available to the public via their own websites, which costs at least a cent ;).
Yes, it's all weak and such costs would be covered by just one month of customer bill payment, but ISPs like to complain and Ajit Pai has made a big show of addressing these costs. For example, the FCC will host information about ISP practices for any ISP that finds it too burdensome to have a website of their own.
One bit of irony here is that the ISPs have argued that there is too much uncertainty surrounding the Title II regulations. Today the FCC does not impose rate regulation, for example, but maybe tomorrow's FCC will. Of course, now it is becoming clear that the rules will change whenever the presidency changes parties, so if anything it would seem that there is far more regulatory uncertainty with Pai's approach.
>Today the FCC does not impose rate regulation, for example, but maybe tomorrow's FCC will. Of course, now it is becoming clear that the rules will change whenever the presidency changes parties, so if anything it would seem that there is far more regulatory uncertainty with Pai's approach.
This is also why the health insurance industry was overwhelmingly opposed to the Republican healthcare plan, why the financial industry was opposed to certain Republican regulation rollbacks, etc. All the infrastructure they'd built to refocus their business around the regulations might now be useless, but probably not, because there's a decent chance the Democrats might recapture the Senate and/or Presidency in 4-8 years.
Uncertainty is expensive and exhausting. Businesses are desperate for a compromise that lasts. Drastic and potentially ephemeral GOP regulation-slashing really serves no one except their own donor class -- not even big business, let alone small business and the middle class.
Comcast sells digital video services for hefty subscription fees to tens of millions of its customers. Those video services presumably use bandwidth that could be used by Google, Netflix or any of a dozen other competitors if the customer preferred. Under Title II, what stops the FCC from mandating that Comcast “open the box” and allow all competitors access to that bandwidth in a neutral fashion?
That’s the argument. Title II is just a framework for regulations that could potentially turn ISPs into true “dumb pipes”. While many have convinced themselves that would be great for everyone, there’s not a lot of money in the dumb pipe business.
To put it another way: 10 cent SMS messages built a lot of cell towers!
What about Title II do you think makes boundary caching untouchable by regulators as well? Remember, this is the framework created to bring Ma Bell to heel.
Why should Comcast be allowed to build “fast lanes” for their own NBC content and exclude Netflix, just because the delivery vector is an IP cable box instead of an IP WLAN hub?
Remember, this is the framework created to bring Ma Bell to heel.
Is this irony? In what sense has Ma Bell been brought to heel? Do you mean that ATT and VZN haven't yet merged? Perhaps you mean that neither of them has yet consumed CenturyLink?
It was the 1930's, and since that time the baby Bells have slowly re-merged. You mentioned CenturyLink (formerly USWest) ans Cincinnati Bell also still exists, as well as some other remnants elsewhere. Many people make the argument the the Communications act of '96 stifled DSL, which pushed data heavy users to cable internet as soon as it was available.
Given how things stand, and who is in power, I think it would be best to be pushing for further deregulation in telecom, since that is the argument they are making. They need to put up or shut up.
Net neutrality cripples rent extraction by semi-institutionalized quasi monopolies and tapestry of highly bureaucratic resistant to instant competition environment.
While I agree it doesn’t cripple some investment. I can see how it can cripple other investments. It’s essentially choosing a winner and declaring the other folks to be utilities without actually calling them utilities.
I've seen some similar language from some politicians, but they have been confused over the difference between an ISP and a web site. To use a meat space analogy, they can't tell the difference between a taxi company and Walmart, and think that they both should fall under the same regulatory framework and have the same rules.
The roads are still privately owned in the net neutrality analogy. So the government isn’t paying to maintain or upgrade them. However the taxi companies also don’t have any direct payments or influence since the roada must remain neutral.
If we want net neutrality than make the roads a public good. To do this FCC political play is just silliness.
> If we want net neutrality than make the roads a public good
That would be nice, but unfortunately the same corporate interests that are presently disassembling net neutrality rules already prohibited public-sector projects that might compete with them and interfere with their monopoly rents.
There is no feasible route to public ownership of the infrastructure at the moment; ensuring reasonable and non-discriminatory access to it, on the basis of that infrastructure only existing due largely to license and permitting agreements (use of public land, pole leases, etc.), is -- or rather was, until last November's election -- a reasonable step in the right direction.
I wouldn't mind a public conversation, though, about seizing last-mile infrastructure and making it a public good, just as a sort of Overton Window-shifting maneuver. Right now the momentum favors the ISPs, and they are going to continue to consolidate their monopoly positions and extract maximum rents from consumers while the regulatory environment favors them. Blunting the momentum and inevitability of their regulatory takeover would be good, although I'm pessimistic about being able to do it in the near term.
It used to, but the current administration is intentionally handing the control of various regulatory agencies over to the industries that they regulate.
There is little reason in trying to argue with those in charge of the FCC, EPA, etc., because they very obviously don't care about arguments based on public benefit or their agencies' traditional mission. They are interested in creating a regulatory environment that is more profitable for the entrenched players, that is all. And they are going to do that, as long as they have the power to do so, and damn what anyone has to say about it.
Ajit motherfucking Pai doesn't care what anyone in the public sphere thinks about him; he's almost certainly doing what he's doing, in full knowledge of how hated it's going to make him, in exchange for some sort of payback on the back end that he believes is worthwhile. Presumably "fuck you" money; enough that he thinks he can live comfortably and ignore the people he pissed off to get there.
I do not think that there is much that can be done, presently, to stop these people. However, I do think there is, or rather will be, an opportunity once they leave office to discourage anyone from doing it again, by doing all that is possible to prevent them from simply retiring comfortably from the public eye and enjoying their ill-gotten wealth. Anything that can be done to disrupt their lives on a personal level, keep the public aware of their doings and whereabouts, and prevent them from knowing peace, will be a good warning to others who might consider doing the same. I have no faith in the legal system to do this, so it will need to be done extralegally through the press and social pressure.
I’m pretty sure I can explain the decline in investment in 2015. The tl;dr version: Time Warner cooked the books by cutting spending on essential maintenance during the proposed acquisition by Comcast.
Here’s why I come to that conclusion. In early 2015, I had TWC Business Class installed at our Downtown LA warehouse. One day, the time between scanning a shipment to print the shipping documents and the acknowledgment beep from the system grew from sub-second to 15-30 seconds. The scanning would trigger access to an internet-hosted database to update the order, and would initiate a label request to our postage provider. The label requests would time out. It was huge headache for us.
I begin my investigation by pinging my local router. Nice 1-2ms responses. Pinged the modem, again 1-2ms responses. Tried pinging 8.8.8.8 and WOW! 1200-15000ms response times. FIFTEEN SECONDS for an ICMP request/reply! And a lot of packet loss to boot. I worked around the problem by using my phone as a hot spot for the computers in the warehouse.
I called TWC and since it was Business Class, they rolled a truck within 4 hours. The tech was from a third-party contractor and was very competent by all appearances. He was astonished by my observations. He put his scope on the line in my unit and saw a minor deviation in signal loss. He replaced the drop from the pole to my unit, and said the female receptacle on the pole looked a little worn so he moved the new drop to a new location on the terminal. And the ping times went back.
But the story doesn't end there; in fact this went on for nearly 2 months. During periods of the day, the lag and timeouts would occur. I improved the software to add some retries to the postage provider if the label request failed. I started pinging 8.8.8.8 on a constant basis so I could show the patterns of packet loss and high latency. About the third visit from the same tech, he told me that card in my local node was oversubscribed. He said a single card was intended to serve about 250 customers and that my card had about 600 customers on it.
I hammered on TWC for weeks. I coordinated with my neighbors who understood what "oversubscribed" meant and spoke decent English to do the same. After about 8 weeks, the same tech came knocking and told me the node had been upgraded and wanted to check in. Ping times were great. We had no problems after that.
Sounds like a one-off just bad luck, right? Not so fast. Fast forward about a year. The TWC/Comcast merger is off. I'm sitting at home one day, using my TWC consumer service. Something took to long to load, so I looked a little further, and what do you know? Long ass ping times to 8.8.8.8 and packet loss. I call. I have to wait days for the truck to arrive because I'm not Business Class at home. One tech comes out and observes a few db of signal loss and decides to replace the drop from the pole. I point out the drop was only about 2 years old and was replaced due to a different problem. It's now a two man job, and we wait for the second tech. Once he arrives, they cheerfully install a new drop, and then the problem didn't go away. I told them based on my experience I thought the local node was oversubscribed. They punted and said someone else would come the following day. They arrive with two techs and a lead or engineer. The lead calls various plays to rule out numerous things. After about an hour, they have ruled everything out. He confirms my local node has an excess of subscribers on it but they had not seen it causing this kind of problem before. He pulls up a network schematic on his ToughBook, and isolates the identifier of my local node. Then he switches to - THE SMOKING GUN - a list of about 25 or 30 node identifiers, each with a date in the second column. It's a maintenance schedule to upgrade the nodes that they let languish during the TWC/Comcast acquisition phase. He tells me my node will be upgraded in about 3 months and they leave. About 3 months later, I got a follow up call. Things worked fine, case closed.
I filed a story tip with Ars Technica about this. They never got back to me.
This is what Net Neutrality means to these large ISP's. Giving equal footing to consumers and small businesses they have been fleecing for so long though nowhere near actually being equal. It's clear people are fed up and can express that. Pai & his FCC removing any semblance of voice to that public is shameful and unethical and clearly, as has been stated over the previous months, not based in fact.