> Go wild and Tweet every 10 minutes until the FCC vote, change your job on LinkedIn to “Defending Net Neutrality” or say you’re “Married to the Open Internet” on Facebook. Do whatever you can to get everyone’s attention
Sigh. I don't know who made that page but if they thing tweeting every 10 minutes or changing your job desc on LinkedIn will get anyone's attention, yet more everyone's, it's not even wrong. It's just sad.
Moreover, everyone's attention would be completely useless, as everyone, especially everyone who reads random twitter feeds of people that have time for such shenanigans, have absolutely zero input to FCC decisions.
Of course, you can do all this and feel you contributed to a great struggle. Or you might spend this time doing something useful. That's always an option.
> Or you might spend this time doing something useful. That's always an option.
Genuine question: what are some ways in which we can usefully contribute? Seems like there's not a whole lot of options there... Especially for non-US people (because right or wrong, a lot of countries tend to follow in the footsteps of the US. If Net Neutrality officially dies there, it won't be long before it dies in many other places in the world.)
I agree tweetstorms will probably result in a few articles and that'd be that...
I’m switching my cellphone from Verizon to Credo. (Due to Verizon’s successful lobbying campaign for this and other, related moves by the FCC).
Credo uses Verizon as its underlying network, for better, or worse. I know exactly what coverage to expect, and I’ll be feeding less money to the beast.
(Credo is a politically-active progressive company, with a good privacy policy and warrant transparency. Verizon has historically been none of these things, other than “politically active”).
Also, I don’t have decent sonic.net or unwired ltd coverage at the house, but if you are in the SF Bay Area, it’s worth taking a look at them (instead of comcast/at&t).
I used sonic.net. They advertised (and still do) $40/mo internet, but turned out it's $40 plus phone taxes (they sell only internet+phone, no option to decouple) + equipment rental + other stuff, so first it was $55/mo and then they raised it to $65/mo - 2/3 higher than their advertised price. I switched to other provider as soon as my contract lock-in expired. Oh yes, and they dinged me for another month as a parting gesture, because apparently you can't just cancel with them as with other providers, you have to wait a month to be able to cancel. Nope, thanks, never again. I've heard a lot of horror stories about comcast/at&t, but neither of them tried pull such tricks on me.
Yeah i don't get these passive-aggressive suggestions at all.
I have in the past seen people switch their twitter "avatar" to highlight certain causes, and i guess that for the most part it basically acts like a pacifier for the user as they get to feel they have done something.
If you can do something better to protect Net Neutrality, do that, but it's not like bringing attention to an issue isn't going to make any difference. They'll think twice about enacting something like this when half the country knows that they're actively working against them. Revolutions are unlikely, but they probably don't want to risk it too much either.
It's a nice sentiment but somewhere around 80% if the country wants to maintain NN. And it's not as if the FCC doesn't know this -- their position has been for a while that they know better and that mass support of NN doesn't rest on technical merit but the influence of tech companies that have a financial interest in NN.
Shouting louder probably isn't good to do anything.
I accept the premise of your comment, though it would be a shame not to harness any passion for the topic with some suggestions of what might be the 'something useful' you are suggesting ?
TLDR: Would anyone care to explain to me pros and cons of net neutrality and Pai's plan?
Confession: I have never really understood what net neutrality was about. So I decided to look it up (again).[1] And also asked the internet what the FCC plans to do to repeal it.[2]
I am interested in seeing actual thoughtful discussion of the issue instead of mudslinging, pretty please. I am open to hearing arguments from both sides. I just would like it served up without name calling and that sort of thing. You know: Like HN encourages routinely.
Then maybe I can decide in some kind of semi informed way if I want to help break the internet or not.
Having strong "net neutrality" means that all bits are equal. It's like imagining that your ISP can't see where the bits go, they just come read the meter. In fact, the analogy to your electric bill is quite apt.
Imagine if your electric company billed you more for using your toaster than it did for using your refrigerator. Imagine if you had to pay to add devices to your electric plan, or if you had to pay extra to be able to use full power on your microwave. Because the electric company just "reads the meter" and treats all "bits" of electricity as equal, you are free to use your electricity as you choose. This means a guy in his garage can run a server and start a business and break into markets (that actually requires both "electricity neutrality" and "net neutrality."
The ramifications of having no net neutrality regulations range from simply throttling certain websites, like netflix, in order to squeeze them for more money, to charging to access certain web sites or selling "packages" of web sites you can access. If that sounds terrifying to you, you're not alone.
I'm a tad skeptical of the electrons vs bits (packets) analogy.
Electrons are commoditized and generic - and they don't suffer from prioritization issues except during brown-outs/black-outs. When you receive a stream of bits you are routing very specific non-generic packets via various network interconnects from very specific content providers. The routing and interconnect/bandwidth costs will vary significantly depending on the content provider, content type, and consumer usage.
It's my understanding that the ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can offer premium guaranteed/prioritized QoS for specific content types from premium partner providers (e.g. real-time applications such as medical/security devices, VoIP, video conferencing, and streaming audio/video). You can't do this with electrons.
No. ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can vertically integrate their content and delivery products, mostly because their content offerings are utter crap and can't compete in a free market. The intent here is patently obvious; the industry analysts working for major ISPs don't even pretend anymore.
Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)
> You can't do this with electrons.
Huh?! yes, you absolutely can.
We happen to mostly use photons these days, but I'm having a really hard time seeing why this distinction between "you can only use the electron for x,y,z" and "you can only use the photon for x,y,z" is anything but completely arbitrary.
If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations? Thats... rather confusing.
Or, more succinctly, "you can't microwave Netflix(R)-brand Popcorn with bits"
> ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can vertically integrate their content and delivery products, mostly because their content offerings are utter crap and can't compete in a free market.
This is certainly true as well. But we've seen with T-Mobile's zero-rating that it's faster and cheaper to acquire/retain new customers through partnering and network management. To your point, and to compete with Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, I believe T-Mobile announced a TV-related acquisition today.
> Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)
Hospitals are already being addressed, as you say, with dedicated lines and VPNs. I'm referring to the millions of device endpoints sitting on consumer-grade (NN limited) wired/wireless networks. Rescinding NN will allow the ISPs to sell premium prioritized QoS to medical and security services companies who can bundle access to their customers. I'm not sure how this will play out in practice though.
> You can't do this with electrons.
The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis. On the contrary, electricity is generic and is (ideally) sourced on a lowest cost basis and QoS is strictly determined on a supply/demand dimension.
> If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations?
I'm not advocating against NN. I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate. I'm also pointing out that the ISPs want to offer premium Qos and, yes, their own content offerings.
> I'm not sure how this will play out in practice though.
I'm very skeptical. This doesn't sound necessary, or in some cases even very smart. An extremely niche use case.
If you want to see what death of NN will mean in practice, look at what companies were willing to do in order to test NN regulations in the past. Hint: it's not prioritizing medical traffic.
> The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis.
The 2015 order may or may not be the best implementation of net neutrality. But I think it's entirely reasonable to have a regulation that says "you can't change what you charge / how you behave based on who is on the other end of the line, but you can -- in a pricing-agnostic way -- prioritize/shape traffic".
> I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate.
I'm still not convinced.
You can equally make the argument that in a brown-out, electricity companies should be able to prioritize consumer-grade medical devices and so on.
The only difference is that it's easier to implement this prioritization.
"because we can" is a really poor justification for doing something.
> It's my understanding that the ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can offer premium guaranteed/prioritized QoS for specific content types from premium partner providers (e.g. real-time applications such as medical/security devices, VoIP, video conferencing, and streaming audio/video). You can't do this with electrons.
This is actually allowed under current net neutrality rules. As an ISP I can use QoS to make VoIP more reliable, for example. What I can't do is make one specific VoIP provider more reliable than another. If that's the argument that large ISPs are making then they're not being truthful.
I have worked at small ISPs for the last 15 years or so and worked on systems that did these things. FWIW I strongly support net neutrality and I'm especially annoyed with any rhetoric that suggests net neutrality is bad for small ISPs. It's really not.
Adding more precision: current net neutrality rules allow for some traffic prioritization if the network is at capacity. When the network is not at capacity, bits flow through at line speed but when a network hits it's capacity queues start to fill up. QoS doesn't do anything until queues start to fill up. So if I'm an ISP and I add QoS rules to prioritize VoIP over browsing traffic so that when the network gets congested VoIP calls don't drop (at the expense of web browsing speed) then that's ok - as long as I'm not artificially slowing things down and as long as I'm not prioritizing one company over another (Vonage over Skype, for example.)
Removing net neutrality allows ISPs to make deals with VoIP providers (or anyone, really) so that their VoIP always works the best (or even so other VoIP services work poorly or not at all.)
Correct. Except this has nothing to do with "specific types of content" and everything to do with "specific large incumbents paying providers to make their competitors slow". If it was just about broad traffic categories, then maybe it wouldn't be as awful of a plan.
Really, ISPs don't want to just be a utility. Imagine if instead of having to charge for service provided, they could have large companies like Netflix and Hulu bid for the exclusive privilege among video providers to not be throttled; the profits would start raining in without having to even innovate on actual product or service provided. How wonderful.
Ehhh, not really. I’m pro net neutrality as much as anyone on HN, maybe more so. But recognize that there is a real business point: content delivery cohosted at the ISP is “free” other than electrical cost of the server, which is probably paid for by the content provider, and is a profit center even without kickbacks. Bits routed to other networks cost money and are a cost center. With last mile speeds increasing but backbone data rates not dropping fast enough it can be a real problem. People who torrent or run bitcoin full nodes are probably costing ISPs large amounts of money.
> People who torrent or run bitcoin full nodes are probably costing ISPs large amounts of money.
As a customer that is not my problem. If I have been sold a 10MB line which has unlimited data then the company doesn't get to complain when I use all of what has been sold to me, the source of the traffic is completely irrelevant.
The issue is that ISPs oversubscribe residential connections massively (say a contention ratio of 50:1) and have done for years, this is now biting them in the ass with high bandwith apps like video streaming becoming the norm.
This doesn't need to be fixed by destroying net neutrality and shaping traffic that they don't get paid for from both ends (the subscriber and content provider), it needs to be fixed by fixing their packages.
But hey, when you can get paid both ways who cares if you're fucking over both parties?
> content delivery cohosted at the ISP is “free” other than electrical cost of the server
Packets delivered to the ISP at an exchange are equally free. Noone is asking for access providers to collect packets in asia and move them to their customer in the US for free. All this is about is that if I pay a transit provider to move my packets from asia to the US, then the access ISP in the US doesn't get to charge me for actually delivering the packet to their customer, or prioritize someone else's packets over mine. There is nothing wrong with ISPs engineering traffic to be delivered to them via the closest exchange possible, they just don't get to abuse their monopoly over their subscriber's line.
> Bits routed to other networks cost money and are a cost center. With last mile speeds increasing but backbone data rates not dropping fast enough it can be a real problem. People who torrent or run bitcoin full nodes are probably costing ISPs large amounts of money.
Which is solved by discriminating between services how?
If outbound traffic is expensive, you have to charge for outbound traffic, not make youtube free (or whatever).
There is nothing wrong with traffic to on-premises hosted servers being free--if everyone can host servers there under the exact same conditions. The problem is an abuse of a monopoly position, not charging based on costs.
> Packets delivered to the ISP at an exchange are equally free.
> There is nothing wrong with ISPs engineering traffic to be delivered to them via the closest exchange possible, they just don't get to abuse their monopoly over their subscriber's line.
I don't think the ISP's problem (opportunity) resides in the scenario you're describing. The problem is the top .0001% of Internet destinations congest the ISP generic network interconnects. Hence, these larger vendors (Netflix, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc) either pay the ISP for direct network peering or server hosting to sustain acceptable performance. However, this typically leaves the cost of growing internal network backbone capacity on the ISP. I believe the scenario you are describing would allow ISPs to offset this capital cost to both the big content providers and the biggest consumers.
> Which is solved by discriminating between services how?
The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session. As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis. However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.
> I don't think the ISP's problem (opportunity) resides in the scenario you're describing. The problem is the top .0001% of Internet destinations congest the ISP generic network interconnects. Hence, these larger vendors (Netflix, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc) either pay the ISP for direct network peering or server hosting to sustain acceptable performance. However, this typically leaves the cost of growing internal network backbone capacity on the ISP. I believe the scenario you are describing would allow ISPs to offset this capital cost to both the big content providers and the biggest consumers.
I really don't understand what your point is ... how does avoding load on the internal backbone leave which costs of growing the backbone to the ISP?!
> The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session.
Uh? How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!
> As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis.
Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.
> However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.
Which isn't necessarily that bad, as long as there is competition among CDNs. A CDN ultimately is just a different kind of transit provider.
> how does avoding load on the internal backbone leave which costs of growing the backbone to the ISP?
I didn't say anything about avoiding load. They don't want to raise capital to build their own backbone - so they want to pass off the cost to the largest traffic sources (Netflix etc) and largest traffic destinations (most oactive consumers).
> How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!
More connection requests means more CPU usage on a router. More open connections means more RAM usage.
> Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.
Non-discriminatory means they offer all content providers the same prices. Now if you're saying that they can overcharge because there's no competition, then I agree. This is a problem in the short term. But if I understand Pai's logic, this gap in the market will spur competition (and solutions) to emerge through innovation. I'm skeptical about this logic but cautiously optimistic.
I grant you that this is not a satisfying answer when you only have one shitty ISP option like Comcast and there's no hope fore a competitor in the short term. But given the growth of fixed residential wireless and new spectrum like White Spaces it's possible that a Comcast/Verizon would be doing more damage to their own brand (and content offerings) in the long term by mistreating their customers.
The simple way to solve this is charge larger customers more. Usage caps have been 100% the norm in Australia since the end of the dial up era. Of course we have other unrelated internet issues, (NBN CVC usage cost crippling ISPs, etc) I pay $69.99 AUD for the ability to transfer 1TB of data in total, up and down, over my ADSL2 connection at “full speed” before the ISP will throttle me down to something like 128 or 256 kbps which either way is uselessly slow (insert web page bloat rant here) until the end of the calendar month when the counters reset. If I ran a torrent client uploading lots of bits, all I would do is “burn my allotment faster” thereby creating an incentive for me to not abuse their network, at the same time as me paying a rate proportional to my use of their network capacity.
Usage caps make no sense. In normal countries the actual cost to the ISP of higher usage is negligible. Having capacity and not using it doesn't save any money, and the same equipment that allows for higher instantaneous transfer speeds (the thing they market) also supports more total capacity.
The actual cost to the ISP of a customer using 100% of their connection the whole month is not very large. If only a small minority do that then the amortized cost per customer is negligible. If everyone starts to do that then the ISP is still fine as long as they price plans appropriately -- a 100Mbit plan costs more than a 20Mbit plan.
Bandwidth caps are ridiculous. It's like saying some people drive more than others so to reduce traffic congestion, after you've driven more than 500 miles in a month you can only drive 8MPH for the rest of the month. What kind of sense does that make unless you have some weird agenda like getting people to take a "free" bus which happens to only travel directly to your own store?
In theory they could charge more for higher usage, except that if they charged their actual cost for additional bandwidth then it would be so close to zero as to make little difference, e.g. an extra $5/month for full 24/7 usage. Passing traffic is really not that expensive. The cost of getting and maintaining a wire into your house to begin with absolutely dwarfs it.
> You can't simple ignore fixed overhead costs (including capacity to avoid congestion) just because they aren't marginal costs.
There is no ignoring them, they're just small relative to an ISP's other costs.
It costs millions of dollars to lay and maintain cable. You have to dig up the road. The equipment gets damaged by weather and bad drivers and idiots with backhoes and has to be repaired on a regular basis. You have to staff a call center to provide customer support, pay for all the advertising these companies do, bill customers, process payments, handle delinquent debts, hire a bunch of lawyers, pay all your technical staff to maintain the network, pay rent and utilities, etc. etc.
That's what your monthly bill pays for. Not one of those things costs a penny less if you can convince people to transfer less data. The only thing that changes is that the ISP has to upgrade a switch to one with more or faster ports, which is a fixed cost of tens of dollars per customer per upgrade cycle, and in many cases it happens regardless of usage because the existing equipment has reached end of life or newer equipment uses less power. The added cost is a tiny fraction of the bill. Make it twice as big and it's still negligible.
My electric company gives rebates if you buy qualified new energy efficient appliances, or if you connect your smart thermostat to their API so they can throttle it down a bit to prevent brownouts during peak times.
That's a rebate if you provide proof of purchase though, and a rebate for general use. Neither of those discounts are something that relies on the electric company knowing what is plugged into your house at any given moment, because _they cant_ tell what's hooked up at any given moment.
If net neutrality goes away ISPs not only will be able to tell what you are doing, but they will charge you more for it too. You can always try to use a VPN but nothing is stopping ISPs from charging x100 times the normal rate for VPN traffic or telling your von provider that they need to cough up if they don't want their traffic slowed.
All of this might even be acceptable if ISPs were just in the internet business. Companies would bid up for use of the internet the same way that Google is pulling some of the best engineers by paying triple what a small business in the Midwest would pay even though they both need software engineers.
Unfortunately ISPs are also in other industries like content, and they are going to be incentivized to nuke their competitors. Since the US apparently has no concept of enforcing anti trust laws anymore, ISPs can just slowly chip their way into other internet based businesses. They can either get into industries themselves or they can blackmail industry leaders to stay faster than competitors. That will lead to both increased prices for consumers as companies pass on their costs, as well as a lack of any competition because there's now a giant wall of ISP fees to overcome for any startup to try and compete with.
> ...or if you connect your smart thermostat to their API
In a way, this sounds like a car insurance company lowering your rates for keeping their sensor device in your car.
Comcast is getting into the home automation/security/IoT business too - ISPs haven't been profitable for decades, which explains why they (1) keep squeezing their existing customer base for more money, and (2) keep expanding into new - possibly unrelated - markets like stadium ownership. Anything to avoid lowering the dividend price.
Wow. That would be nuts - Since when? this is America, where ARPU is measured in its native currency of the dollar without a conversion cost, in a nation where they have some of the worst competitive landscape, subsidized roll out, and yet incomplete roll out of infrastructure.
And they are still not profitable ?
Sorry, for the request for a source, since it may come across rude- but I’m damn surprised. I evens recall most telecom operators being positive about their growth and numbers overall.
Perhaps the parent poster is right and America would be much better off with nationalized internet infrastructure.
If you’re reliant on private capital to build and upgrade internet infrastructure, what matters is rates of return on other potential investments that are competing for the same sources of capital.
But you are not - as I recall there are subsidies given to the telcos and telecom spectrum and rights of way are on public grounds.
So from the get to it’s not comparable to other industries.
A specific weakness of your argument - Your position holds for a certain kind of investor but has nothing to do with running a business of building a business- nothing to do with Operations.
The risk profiles and returns on telecom are known, and so investors in it know what they are getting.
So telcos can raise debt, with maturity and interest rates suitable for them.
And financiers spread risk. If black stone doesn’t want to invest in telecom, some other firm or telecom focused fund will invest.
At the end of the day, there are only so many above average or average returns you can get per billion of dollars - so people invest in multiple industries.
And when they invest - they examine (comp/compare) the firms against the others in their market.
> But you are not - as I recall there are subsidies given to the telcos and telecom spectrum and rights of way are on public grounds.
Mostly not true. In rural areas, telcos receive subsidies. Those subsidies are paid for with taxes on telecom services. Telcos based primarily in urban/suburban areas bear a net tax, not a subsidy. Telcos pay for both spectrum and rights of way, such as rental charges on utility poles.
> The risk profiles and returns on telecom are known, and so investors in it know what they are getting.
We’re in an environment right now where a huge segment of telco revenues, for video, could evaporate due to cord cutting. The percentage of high income households which have cut wireline service entirely (in favor of wireless) has grown from 6% to 15%. People have been reluctant to switch from cable to faster technologies like fiber, with FiOS struggling to clear 40% uptake rates. Investing in a telco today (or a wireline project specifically) is not like investing in a electric or water utility (or the phone company back in the day)—there is real risk.
If you want to actually skip to the end and see the ARPU chart, feel free.
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>mostly not true
Mostly not true is 1 for a binary yes and no scenario. The question at play was the comparability of telecom to other industries.
The fact of subsidies, spectrum, and right of way make this is a non comp, which make the chart being shown irrelevant.
If you truly believe that a simple industry ROIC comparison makes a difference, explain how that makes an iota of impact to AT&T or Comcast in terms of their Capex decisions.
Are they going to pull up their wires tomorrow and go all in and become Google?
Will they Not invest in capex at all? Or Seek money from the markets?
They will - and the markets will ask a known set of questions:
Are The revenue streams for pharma, or movies, or insurance of the same periodicity as telecom? What are the running costs, manpower costs?
How cyclical or not is telecom? What are the operating margins? What is net profit or EBITDA?
How much return on capital can they expect for the next 4 years, or 10 or 20? Or forever?
This is not an argument I am having with you. I am telling you, that industry comparisons are done within the same industry.
For the same reason that when buying microwaves, you don't look at refrigerators.
Each market has their own forms, issues, strengths and weaknesses.
ALL investors at the level where a capex influencing financial investment arises, are aware of this.
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As for the risk - its risk, not uncertainty.
Its pretty much a line item on multiple excel sheets all around wallstreet.
It will influence number of users by 10% over the next 15 years,
which will turn into an ARPU of X for these years.
This will in turn turn into revenue for that period, which will be then reduced down to an expected value of the firm today.
Hell, the expected rate of interest, could easily have a greater impact on the share price and risk of a telecom firm than cord cutters.
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Its very hard not to invest in such an industry which obviously has so many things going for it that it can persist in this manner.
Centurylink's CEO has been having to defend their dividend in the face of a slipping stock price and questionable profit.
Our local road infrastructure and our highway road infrastructure are both largely government-operated. Many local and municipal governments operate their own ISPs. Yet people illogically fear their government more than their ISP.
You just made an excellent argument for starting to enforce antitrust laws again. But not a very good argument for net neutrality. (And Title II actually exempts ISPs from FTC regulation.)
We need to fix antitrust. Of course, one of the biggest sponsors of every net neutrality-supporting website on the Internet (Google) doesn't want to fix antitrust. This is why net neutrality regulations are carefully designed not to apply to tech companies, and why things like the old ISP privacy rules that were repealed solely targeted ISPs. (When states tried to reimplement those privacy rules, but including tech companies, Google, obviously, came out strongly against them.)
Which is why Comcast slowing a competitor is a mortal sin, but Google's websites not working on Firefox (or them outright blocking Amazon devices) is no big deal, legislatively.
Let's get the FTC back to what it was built for: Breaking up companies like Ma Bell and El Goog.
I've heard this argument many times, but I have yet to find a convincing take on it.
What is the difference? If a company is using their monopoly, be it a network or a service or a platform, to do anticompetitive things that violate the law and hurt consumers, how are they different?
Why do ISPs need special regulations that DON'T apply to other types of monopolies?
I'm buying the infrastructure to communicate from one, and the other does, well, does anything.
Should anyone that uses the telephone to do business, even exclusively, be a Title I carrier? No, that would be absurd because they don't sell telecommunication.
> If a company is using their monopoly, be it a network or a service or a platform, to do anticompetitive things that violate the law and hurt consumers, how are they different?
I mean, I could ask you the same about standard oil and Microsoft. How are they different? They both abused their monopoly.
> Why do ISPs need special regulations that DON'T apply to other types of monopolies
The same reason we grant phone, electric, water, sewer, and natural gas companies the same types of monopolistic leeway in exchange for some additional regulations: infrastructure is expensive and takes up space. It's difficult to have multiple of any of these providers in the same geographic market. How many water lines can you run in a street? Sure, we can run many phone and isp lines, but it becomes extremely messy and leads to other issues that eventually led to the types of regulations in exchange for monopoly were discussing. This isn't a new problem.
Now, I'm not saying Google shouldn't be subject to antitrust law. I'm saying Google doesn't sell me telecommunication services and therefore it doesn't makes sense to regulate it as one. (Project Fi and Google Fiber both fall under their respective FCC regulations.)
Bear in mind, neutrality laws could be just as applicable to platforms as infrastructure. What's the difference between Comcast deciding to charge differently for different types of content on it's lines, and Google deciding to charge differently for different types of content on it's cloud services?
What's the difference between Comcast blocking say, video content it doesn't like, and YouTube doing the same?
> I mean, I could ask you the same about standard oil and Microsoft. How are they different? They both abused their monopoly.
This is my point: I don't see why we need specific laws carved out for ISPs, as opposed to laws that do equally apply to Standard Oil and Microsoft.
The regulations that are being repealed don't solve the problem. They're extremely narrowly designed to regulate a couple businesses by an agency who's job isn't policing business practices, but what those businesses are doing that needs to be regulated is already supposed to be regulated a different way: Anticompetitive practices are already illegal, and we need to enforce those rules. This is an FTC and DOJ problem, not an FCC problem.
> Bear in mind, neutrality laws could be just as applicable to platforms as infrastructure.
You had me here. No they cannot. Google is not selling telecommunication services. Should the Butterball turkey hotline be regulated as a telecommunication provider? No, no they shouldn't. Just because they use phones to do business does not mean they ate a telecommunication provider.
Now, there are a couple things leading to your confusion, I think.
Right now net neutrality is tied to Title II, which gives the isps some leeway in antitrust issues in exchange for more regulation. If you would like to discuss that issue, I'm all for it. However, Google is not a telecommunication provider and net neutrality doesn't need to be tied to Title II. (However, Congress would need to step in at that point.)
So, if your point is why are we granting ISPs any monopoly privileges via Title II (which doesn't happen in quite a direct way), I refer you to why telephones, electric, gas, water, and sewer are regulated as utilities, that is given a monopoly in exchange for tighter regulations.
Why does it matter if Google is a telecommunications service or not? Anticompetitive business practices are illegal, are they not? What makes telecommunications services special in your book?
Why not just let the FTC go after companies (telecommunications or otherwise) when they misbehave?
> Why does it matter if Google is a telecommunications service or not?
Because we're discussing regulations that only apply to telecommunication providers?
I have never said antitrust laws shouldn't be enforced. In fact, I believe net neutrality is important even if we had a bustling isp sector.
Net neutrality is also not an issue because of local monopolies, although they make the issue more visible.
So, until you convince me that Telecommunication regulations should apply to companies that aren't providing telecommunication, I don't understand your point. Specially that data cannot be modified or throttled based upon content or destination.
I'll continue to agree with you that antitrust laws. I'm not sure what your argument is.
Why are we discussing regulations that only apply to telecommunication providers? Why shouldn't Internet companies be subject to identical neutrality provisions?
Why should a platform like YouTube be permitted to make judgment calls on how to handle content on it's services, but ISPs can't make judgment calls on how to handle content on theirs?
You haven't given a single reason for why telecommunications companies are different.
For the same reason we prevent phone companies from doing the same. Until you're ok with phone companies not letting you call the Butterball hotline because they support another turkey company, I don't think you have a point.
Moreover, even without any antitrust issues, the number of ISPs, especially in rural areas will always be limited by start up costs. In cities it'll always be limited by space on lines poles or conduits underground.
I guess until you convince me phone operators shouldn't be regulated as common carriers, you won't convince me isps shouldn't.
It feels like you're actively avoiding the question. Let me show you:
If phone companies blocked you from the Butterball hotline because they support another turkey company, that would be what's known as an "anticompetitive business practice". Now, if you removed the special exemption telecoms get, the FTC would fine them for that, and tell them they can't do it.
In the same way, if ISPs were to prioritize their own video services or block a competitor's, that would also be against antitrust law, and the FTC could fine them for it. Hilariously, the common carrier designation actually prevents this from happening.
At the risk of aggravating the moderators, to ask this a third time what is so special about telecommunications companies, that, unlike other monopolies, need a whole different form of regulation?
> At the risk of aggravating the moderators, to ask this a third time what is so special about telecommunications companies, that, unlike other monopolies, need a whole different form of regulation?
I mean, you could ask the same thing about electric utilities. What's special is that as a society, we've decided that we don't want dozens and dozens of companies running infrastructure through public land. We grant some private companies space, for rent, but that also comes with the burdens of public process. In more space-constrained areas like telephone poles, streets, and conduits, it's often better to have a small number of companies utilize the space, but at the cost of additional regulations.
Electric, gas, phone, and water companies have captive audiences, but at the same time need the PUC to approve rate increases and are required to meet certain performance guidelines.
I'll also ask for the third time: Why should ISPs be different than the phone company?
ISPs shouldn't be different than the phone company: Both should be prohibited from anticompetitive actions via the Sherman Antitrust Act. It's time to do to both El Goog AND ISPs what was once done to a phone company: Breaking them up.
For the record, I didn't address your "space-constrained areas like telephone poles and conduits" before because neither is remotely space-constrained (especially in the fiber age), and this is a complete red herring.
Telecommunications are rolled out either on poles or underground, which incidentally is exactly where our other utilities like electricity, phone, and water/sewage are laid out. We used to have hundreds of wires overhead everywhere and roads being dug up all the time to add new pipes. Our society has decided that the benefits of competition are outweighed by all of destruction and blockage done to the limited space of our roads. Additionally we have decided that those industries are too important to deal with outages that would come from competition and having companies go out of business. Telecommunications have reached that stage in the US at least, and given this space constraint and need to keep the service running 24/7 they should be regulated as utilities. If we split the actual ownership of the wires off into a separate utility and had different companies selling the bandwidth and services like the UKs setup, then leaving the service up to normal regulations would be fine.
As long as they own the physical network they should be a utility
PG&E also has discounts if you install a device that would turn off your AC in peak times. And of course it also has time-dependent rates (opt in). Yup, no electrical neutrality - electricity at 2am is not same price as electricity at 2pm. And of course prices are usage-dependent - if you're a heavy user, you pay more per kwh.
Exactly. The first thing you will experience is the data plans will become cheaper and your favourite channels faster. Big companies will pay ISP to make their data free and faster. This will leave all smaller competitors and startups unable to compete with the big guys. So the second thing you will experience is the big companies abusing their power, charging more, offering less. But at this point you will not have a choice anymore - there will be no Netflix competitors to choose from, no new social media to experiment with, no fresh dating apps etc, no independent opinions. Ony the big companies will have the money to pay ISP for reasonably fast and cheap data - and they will charge YOU extra for that.
This is one reason for the cable cutters to give up on it and go for internet-based alternatives instead (youtube, netflix, etc). No net neutrality would mean ISPs could start charging extra for premium access to these services - basically going back to the cable system.
The non-cynical view is the under NN you are paying for the huge amount of Netflix traffic whether you're a subscriber or not. When that cost is passed to the subscribers directly it's better for everyone, no? For subscribers it's probably a mild hike but but non-subscribers get a discount.
Sure, but consumer 'service plans' are an abstraction on top of the reality that you pay to send traffic through someone eles's network. Why do you think that the rules for last-mile ISPs should be different?
Maybe - but it will also give ISPs an excuse to artificially slow down any website which doesn't pay. And that would hurt all the small websites out there that either don't want to or can't afford to pay off the ISPs.
Today, you can make a new facebook competitor that will run just as fast as facebook.com. You just have to rent some servers and write some software. Without net neutrality, that might no longer be the case.
Nope, big companies don't get their money from thin air, they get it from the consumer. Company expenses === consumer cost.
And even if they did, it wouldn't make the internet cheaper for you - it'd make it "not more expensive". Getting rid of net neutrality will give ISPs and such more tools to make the internet more expensive.
It's not that simple. Google could build a fiber network itself. If it's more efficient, wouldn't this allow Google to lower prices for their own services? Also if Google didn't connect to every consumer, Google could lease lines to ISPs and other businesses. As a result, there would be a complicated market, and consumer data would be subsidized by other businesses indirectly.
That's a good question, the problem is what if your only available ISP makes you this hypothetical deal:
For $59.99 a month:
- Get Facebook, Google, Netflix at 100 Mbps max.
- Any other traffic is limited to 5 Mbps max.
Watching Hulu, or Amazon Video for instance would be limited at 5 Mbps max.
But in that case your own VPN would also fall in the second category, so even if you tried to watch Hulu via VPN, you'd still get only 5 Mbps max. (And you'd be then stupid to watch Netflix through your VPN since it would also be at 5 Mbps max instead of 100 Mbps max.)
What you describe is already being done by the likes of T-Mobile and other wireless carriers such as their BingeOn program, to little fanfare.
The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality. But in the long term it will hurt the tech economy as they have all risen from net neutrality.
T-Mobile's BingeOn is more of zero-rating than penalizing the speed/accessibility of non-approved "partners", but IMHO it's still a violation of the principle of Net Neutrality.
> T-Mobile's BingeOn is more of zero-rating than penalizing the speed/accessibility of non-approved "partners",
Erm ... so, if users want to access non-approved "partners", that's way more expensive ... but that does not affect accessibility? If you really think that, you simply fell for their psychological trick. It's simply irrelevant whether the accessibility is limited technically or economically, as one is always convertible into the other (if they limited access technically, you could still restore access by offering them enough money).
> The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality.
That's simply not true. BingeOn is hurting the consumer. T-Mobile could just as well simply add x GB of traffic per month to their plans that you could use with any services you want, that would result in the same costs for them, and avoid the discrimination. But instead they manipulate their customers into assuming incorrectly that BingeOn is somehow a free gift from T-Mobile, to get them to form an opinion that is against their own interest. It's nothing but deception.
> Second, the program is supposedly open for anyone to join.
Except it (a) isn't, and (b) even if it theoretically were, the model of having to follow the rules of every ISP on the planet to fall under their respective zero-rating plan, or even just the overhead of coordinating with them doesn't scale, and thus is inherently only an option for large companies. Being accessible globally via IP is a matter of renting a small virtual server for a few bucks a month. Being zero-rated by thousands of ISPs is a major undertaking.
Yeah, I know, but imagine if it was fully automated on both ends. The platonic ideal of letting all medium-bitrate video be cheaper is okay or at least not awful.
It would still be awful, because it would disadvantage other forms of content that have the same bandwidth needs but are not video, and also anything that doesn't have "both ends".
And also, obviously, that ideal is completely unrealistic: Either the ISP gets to look into the video stream to verify that it is indeed video, which would be awful, or what you in effect end up with is a flat rate for "medium bit rate connections", which would be fine, but absolutely not what any of those ISPs want.
Sorry, VPN's require business grade internet starting at 300$/month.
Nothing stops them from throttling VPN connections, or even all encrypted traffic. Read up on The great firewall of China and how it really does stop VPN connections. Further, it's much easier for ISP's to block stuff because the first hop for every connection you make is through them.
VPNs stick out in Wireshark or other packet captures like a red flag, and blocking most VPNs is as simple as closing port 500. (Port 500 is the default. Who changes default settings?)
In Wireshark, normally you'll see flurries of variable-sized traffic across 53 then either 80 or 443. But for a VPN, you just see a constant flow of boring packets over 500.
Why doesn't China's national firewall block port 500? Possibly because it would also block the personal VPNs of the leadership of the Chinese government.
It's a little more insiduis than that. They don't want to make it clear by blocking things what they can and can't track. Instead they degrade service from things they have little control over to things they do.
It is not difficult to block traffic you don't understand. Require end users to only use plaintext protocols, even go so far as install your own certs to MITM them. Make it a requirement for using the service.
Just charge any business that needs encryption several million per year, and everyone else can get fucked.
Even beyond the FCC backing this sort of business now, what other part of the government would care to stop that? The only other parts in charge of anything touching on communication technologies are all law enforcement and they are already explicitly stated that they want access to all encrypted communications
The can and will come at it from the other side. They will charge Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, etc. money to get access to "their" network. And of course, those charges will be passed on to you resulting in higher bills.
Of course power users will figure out ways around the restrictions. What we're fighting for is the general consumer use case and what eliminating neutrality does to the innovative potential of the Internet. Eliminating neutrality will entrench existing players in the marketplace. New internet-connected startups will not only have to compete on product, they'll also be artificially disadvantaged by the gatekeepers.
These new startup's customers' packets can be deprioritized by the customers' ISPs unless the new startup pays a bribe.
The bribe that existing big players (Facebook, Netflix) need to pay will be significantly less (or even zero) because of the leverage of their large customer base and brand recognition. The ISP may face blowback from its users for degrading service to those existing players. The fledgling startup doesn't have this leverage, so the ISP can extort it.
You realize that there are two sides to every internet connection right? It doesn't matter if you are running your end through a VPN, they can slow / filter it from the content provider to you.
Presumably they are talking about a VPN service hosted somewhere outside of your ISP's network, so your ISP could only throttle traffic between you and your VPN service but not between the VPN service and the content provider.
The VPN's ISP or the content provider's ISP or any transit provider in the middle could throttle between the VPN service and the content provider, but there is far, far more competition among ISP's suitable for server farms and transit providers than there is among residential ISP's so they are much less likely to be able to get away unreasonable throttling.
The traffic isn't completely circumventing your last mile ISP. Just because you tunnel over that connection doesn't mean they're not serving your traffic.
Likely the outcome would be "we couldn't identify this traffic as one of our approved providers, so we used the lower of the rates we offer."
e: the second bit of that was to compare to the plan offered by a peer comment, with e.g. netflix, youtube served at higher rates and the rest at lower. So you would never see the higher rates.
"Well, sir, if you look in our terms of service, it says quite clearly that if most of your traffic goes to a set of services that we have determined are most likely VPNs because we control most of the end-traffic on the internet, well then we can disconnect you. I know, sir, machine learning is wonderful as I'm sure you've read on Hacker News that you visit regularly. What's that? You swear it isn't VPN traffic? Ok, can you provide any evidence to that effect? You can't? Ok, well, you have been disconnected sir, and if you like, you can pay a $300 fee to get reconnected and rejoin our new VPN plan at $150 per month. If you want to use our VPN plan that will be $30 per month on top of all the other services you will need to select"
I suspect you can. You can certainly analyze the timing and lifetime's to identify VPN's vs HTTPS (at the expense of a few websocket false positives). And I suspect you could even characterize entropy.
Even if this were true, it would be very easy for an ISP to insist that their own certificates be trusted as part of the terms of usage. This would give the ISP data access.
Thats because you will limited unless you use specific services.
In Germany, two operators (T-Mobile and Vodafone) offer special "passes" for different services. These do not count against your monthly quota (if you use up all your data, you will be limited to about 64 kbit/s).
So, yes, you can use a VPN, but this will count against your data cap. While, if you use the services they choose for you, you basically get "free" extra data.
Did you just really link a power utility bill rating to say it's illegal to run a computer?
Son, what?
It is not illegal anywhere to run a computer as a server. In fact a computer that serves data, is a server. If you've ever hosted a file on your computer or sent one, you're a server. Ever had a Facebook messenger call or uploaded a picture, you're a server.
I am just arguing that you have different rates if you use your electricity as resident or use it as a commerce. It's not about servers. It's contradicting the point of the OP that every bits of electricity is treated the same.
Except it's not. Commercial vs. residential electricity really is about load profiles (which correlate with costs) and simply are a simplified method of capturing the load you put on the grid. Ultimately, they don't care whether you are actually a residential or a commercial customer, and they also don't care what you use the electricity for, all they really care about is the load you put on the grid throughout the day. If you manufacture gadgets in your basement with a load profile like a residential user, they would rather have you as a residential customer.
Well, "commercial" really usually encompasses a whole range of different kinds of contracts depending on the specifics of the load, and there usually are also multiple categories for residential loads, but in the most common case it's simply a matter of the time of day and day of the week that electricity is used.
Commercial use in this general sense is relatively flat throughout the day with little use during night, whereas the residential load profile has peaks in the morning and in the evening with little use late at night and during working hours--it's simply a profile of the average load of a typical household throughout the day vs. the profile of the average load of a "typical business".
Of course, this "typical business" mostly matches offices and retail, industrial users usually have different load profiles, or, for that matter, no real load profile at all, in the sense that they pay based on peak power, not based on energy used, which in effect is an incentive to keep the power profile as flat as possible. Though deviations from that are possible in the form of load shedding, for example, where the utility company can remotely switch off some machinery in the factory to reduce load during peak demand times in exchange for cheaper electricity (this is typically employed with stuff like heating or cooling where it's easy to build your system in such a way that hour long interruptions here and there simply don't matter--your cold storage will stay cool enough even if you stop actively cooling it for an hour, for example).
The overall point is: The utility company doesn't really care what you use the energy for. They don't care whether you produce luxury cars or cheap gadgets. If you are willing to have the lighting in your offices switched off remotely during peak load times, they will happily sell you such a contract for your office building. If you insist on operating your aluminum smelter 24/7, you can have that, though it's going to be expensive. What they care about is the load on their grid and generation facilities, not what you use the energy for.
Well, if your home internet connection's TOS prohibits running servers then it could be a CFAA violation. It would involve exceeding the allowed access (of the ISP's routers) of a computer involved in interstate commerce (the ISP's router is almost certainly used to buy things across state lines, someone has gone to Amazon or such).
> It would involve exceeding the allowed access (of the ISP's routers)
That's quite a stretch. You, the server hosting customer who pays for internet access, aren't "exceeding the allowed access". Your website visitors are accessing your server. If there's a thundering herd, the ISP is allowed to protect it's network accessibility (IIRC Comcast did this and the FCC lost a lawsuit against them[1] afterwords).
Typically ISPs care more that you are actually abusing the expected bandwidth of your connection (thus deteriorating service quality for your neighbors and eating into your ISP's profits), not that you are running a server at all. Every time you have to open a pinhole in your home router, you are "running a server" of a sort.
I'm an advocate for the principles of Net Neutrality and to clarify the vagueness of CFAA, but I don't have a clue how to implement them.
> Having strong "net neutrality" means that all bits are equal. t's like imagining that your ISP can't see where the bits go, they just come read the meter.
For a basic explanation the electricity analogy posted above is fair and accurate. I don't think consumer ISPs blocking port 25 is related to the discussion on net neutrality. It's blocked because spam/viruses would be much worse if it wasn't.
> I don't think consumer ISPs blocking port 25 really weakens the analogy.
I think it does? Port 25 is only blocked if you don't pay for the premium service of having it opened. It's very much similar a case of the ISP deciding that it would rather you have a client (toaster) than a mail server (refrigerator) and charging you accordingly.
It's an analogy. It gets the point across. Yes, as you've pointed out, there are exceptions, but then you'll be ignoring the spirit of the argument. The point is that it shouldn't matter what services are used, everything should be priced the same, companies should not be able to bribe an ISP to prioritize their traffic instead of their competitors.
Yes. My comment was an existence proof against 'dataflow's assertion that "Port 25 is only blocked if you don't pay for the premium service of having it opened."
>>> My ISP (sonic.net) doesn't block anything, specifically including port 25, and I'm not paying them a premium to do so.
> My comment was an existence proof against 'dataflow's assertion that "Port 25 is only blocked if you don't pay for the premium service of having it opened."
You got my statement entirely backwards. I said port 25 is blocked only if you don't pay for it to be opened. This is logically equivalent to "if port 25 is blocked, then you can pay for it to be opened". In other words, your payment is a sufficient condition for it to be opened, but it's not necessary because not every ISP will have blocked it in the first place. (You missed the word "only" in my sentence.)
It's been many years since I studied logic (but, as a philosophy undergrad, it was required), so I may be wrong here, but ISTM that your construction is an "iff" — "if and only if". But whatever. If I mistook your meaning, my apologies.
Regardless, I think port blocking is orthogonal to Net Neutrality, and that it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. That is, specifically: it's about prioritization not blocking.
Yeah, no, I didn't mean an "iff" when I wrote "if". As a general rule of thumb, it's safe to assume everybody understands that there are exceptions to every rule (yes, including the very rule that there are exceptions to every rule). Furthermore, it's unhelpful to contest minor points like this when they're not germane to the argument being presented. Nothing in the point I was trying to get across would have changed even if I had neglected the exceptions out there.
> Regardless, I think port blocking is orthogonal to Net Neutrality, and that it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. That is, specifically: it's about prioritization not blocking.
I'm sorry, so are you saying that as a consumer you would consider it net-neutral if they blocked everything except Facebook unless you paid an additional fee, as opposed to merely de-prioritizing that traffic? You're fine with blocking but not with prioritization?!
> You're fine with blocking but not with prioritization?!
...and you think I was mischaracterizing your comment?
No-one I've ever seen on the Anti-NN side is talking about blocking either content or traffic. That would be antithetical to the narrative that doing away with it is a "freedom" issue, and which has somehow been spun into the crazy notion that NN entails censorship. They're talking about prioritizing — or, rather, de-prioritizing — content whose provider doesn't pay for a fast-lane.
Bringing blocking into the discussion distracts from the actual issue. To then double down on that and make the utterly unsubstantiated leap to inferring that I might somehow be okay with blocking content but not prioritizing it — when I specifically said "I think port blocking is orthogonal to Net Neutrality", never mind that this entire sub-thread was about blocking ports, not content — is fatuously specious.
If that's the kind of discourse you have to offer, I'm done here.
...you entirely missed my point about port blocking (perhaps my fault).
The point I've been trying (and apparently failing) to make is that this is an email port that is being blocked and sold as a premium feature. In other words, ISPs are deciding that it is OK for you to use your internet service for browsing, but not for hosting email, unless you pay extra. Just like your power company deciding it's OK to let you have a toaster, but not a fridge (even if the fridge draws less power than the toaster [yes, I realize in reality it's probably the other way around, but a fridge is more like a server...]), unless you pay extra. And this is something people are okay with, and which they vehemently deny to be a net-neutrality concern.
Okay, fine. So far, I'll swallow this.
But at the same time, people are freaking out about a whole variety of scenarios, a pretty significant and frequently-repeated one of which is the idea that their ISP might decide "you should pay $X for social networking, $Y for videos, $Z for VPN", etc. when net neutrality is repealed. They very clearly see those as net neutrality issues and are vehemently against them.
So, to recap: blocking email and making it a "premium" feature is perfectly OK and not a net-neutrality issue, but doing the exact same thing with VPNs or pretty much anything else is a net-neutrality issue.
To me, these two positions are blatantly contradictory. It means people are either overreacting about the whole thing and the fears are baseless, or otherwise have incoherent & inconsistent positions on what the entire concept of net neutrality they're advocating for even is. Which would not be surprising, considering that the question of "what is net neutrality?" was one of the top questions here, which, in light of all this, I was very glad to see.
If people object to idea of their ISP choosing what kind of traffic they can transmit, then the ship sailed away from beneath their noses long before anyone noticed it, and it's clear that the subsequent "net neutrality" rules didn't bring it back. If, on the other hand, they're okay with the idea, then they need to examine and correct the inconsistencies in their positions (perhaps through the addition of more nuance rather than emotion in their discussions) and stop spreading all the "If this rule is repealed then your ISP will charge $5 for social media, $15 for email, and $999999 for VPN!!" FUD.
if they throttle all videos equally, I think that it could be considered somewhat neutral... but if they prioritize some videos, it is a different story
For international shipments the government can, but Fedex is not supposed to. (Of course for international shipments fedex do have access to what you say is in the package)
There some answer is because different applications require different latencies. VoIP and video conferencing, for example, have hard latency requirements that even other high bandwidth activities like viewing YouTube or Netflix do not.
As a user, I would prefer if my video calls are the highest priority, whereas I wouldn't care if my YouTube videos downloaded in batches in the background, as long as I didn't encounter buffering.
But wouldn't that use case be best solved by your router, giving priority to some kind of traffic instead of other? (most routers come with QoS, which is exactly that)
Why is it better to give all the power to the ISP? You're losing your ability to choose if what you need isn't included in a pack.
QoS needs to be configured on the ISP's network to really work. Your home router can only impact your outbound traffic, not the bottleneck on your inbound traffic 4 routers up.
As another user said, QoS on my router won't much matter when I have only one computer connected to it. Content-aware load balancing/QoS at higher stages, if done correctly/morally, leads to better service for everyone.
There's a counterargument to this that you should just be able to purchase a dedicated/guaranteed 1 gb/s, and I can buy that idea, but currently, that kind of thing is really expensive (and I expect that there's a dirty little secret that the service provider will still use "your" bandwidth if you aren't).
> Content-aware load balancing/QoS at higher stages, if done correctly/morally, leads to better service for everyone.
"Content-aware" isn't really what's required. You can get decent QoS by just putting CoDel on every buffer, so that congestion doesn't lead to unreasonable latency. Your latency-sensitive traffic will still get its share of packet drops in proportion to how much bandwidth it's using, but the end result will be that your latency-sensitive traffic won't be affected by congestion as much as the high bandwidth bulk file transfers that are causing most of the congestion.
If you want to go further to protect the latency-sensitive traffic from packet drops in the event of congestion, you can upgrade from codel to fq_codel. Then the traffic flows that are using most of the bandwidth will get the packet drops first, and your low-rate latency sensitive traffic will be unaffected until it's taking up your fair share of bandwidth.
None of that requires being explicitly content-aware. Traffic flows on port 80 get treated with the same rules as traffic flows on port 500. UDP flows get the same rules as TCP flows (except that your UDP traffic almost certainly doesn't support ECN). Flows originating from Netflix get the same treatment as flows originating from Windows Update. And it all works well for the users, while being content-blind in every way except for deciding which packets are related to each other.
Not only does it work well, but it almost always works better than any manually-crafted QoS ruleset that singles out certain ports and protocols and endpoints and applications. Those rulesets are inherently fragile and riddled with corner cases, and require expert maintenance to keep up with changing usage patterns.
Does such a scheme continue to work well for high bandwidth, low latency traffic (videoconferencing, potentially livestreaming)?
Essentially, I believe such a scheme would break down if you had, for example, 4N bandwith, 3 users using an average of N, with the ability to buffer, and one user using an average of N but fluctuating by +- .5N, and without the ability to buffer. I don't think the scheme you described would work in such a case, but an "intelligent" provider could give everyone in this situation a "perfect" experience.
Granted, I'm not sure how realistic what I just described is, but still.
> if you had, for example, 4N bandwith, 3 users using an average of N, with the ability to buffer, and one user using an average of N but fluctuating by +- .5N, and without the ability to buffer.
Are you referring to buffering in the endpoint, as for video streaming? The buffers I was referring to are the queues in the network itself. Properly managed queues can absorb bursts of traffic but will otherwise maintain a steady state of minimal buffer occupancy, so packets spend minimal time waiting in the buffer even when the line is running at full capacity. Even when a user is experiencing packet drops as a congestion signal, the packets that make it through the bottleneck will do so without undue delay.
If I understand your hypothetical correctly, user number 4 has higher latency sensitivity than users 1-3, but they're all trying to use at least their full fair share of the bandwidth. Furthermore, users 1-3 are transferring at a fairly steady rate, indicating that their traffic is being managed by a relatively intelligent endpoint that is using something like TCP BBR.
Depending on the timescale of user 4's traffic volume fluctuations, his experience may differ. Short bursts of traffic will get buffered, and so the tail end of the burst may experience a few milliseconds of delay (and also induce a few milliseconds of delay on the neighbors' traffic), but if the burst is large enough that it would monopolize the line for tens of milliseconds, packets will start getting dropped as a congestion signal, and user 4 will experience most of those drops. On a long time scale of seconds, if user 4 is still trying to use more than his fair share of bandwidth in spite of having had enough time for congestion signals to make a round trip, then user 4's packets are going to get dropped as much as necessary to keep them under control, because user 4's traffic is behaving badly.
In the real world, Netflix-style video streaming tends to be fairly well-behaved, dropping to lower resolutions in response to congestion. It is also fairly latency-tolerant because of client-side buffering. Interactive videoconferencing is more latency sensitive but has similar congestion response and is almost as loss-tolerant. Video games, DNS lookups, and early-stage connection handshakes are all relatively unresponsive to congestion signals and very latency-sensitive. But because those are almost never the traffic flows that are using the most bandwidth, they're never first in line to be dropped in the event of congestion and they usually are the first packets to be forwarded by a fq_codel style traffic manager.
Your ISP prioritizing your video call over your youtube videos on your link according to your wishes is not a violation of NN. The problem is when they prioritize your video call over your neighbour's youtube videos.
> if they throttle all videos equally, I think that it could be considered somewhat neutral... but if they prioritize some videos, it is a different story
The definition above was far stronger than this assertion, hence my comment.
I have no problem viewing the scenario "throttle/charge-more-for Reddit specifically" as a nightmare, as an unambiguous violation of NN, and as a bad thing I'd like to prohibit.
But, per my other comment [1], NN seems to be used in a much stronger sense than that, which covers any arrangement whereby you can pay more for a dedicated pipe.
To extend your electric company example:
Let's say that the mains actually had two pipes (type A and B) bundled together and you could branch off of one or the other to set up a power outlet. Further, in times of brownouts/undercapacity, type A would keep the same voltage, whatever, while type B would die out.
What if the electric company charged more for every type A connection you wanted? That doesn't seem like it's obviously a bad thing, since there are legit usages where you might want the steadier power and be willing to pay for it. It's certainly not on the level of charging by what is plugged into the outlet.
Edit: Also, type A is equivalent (in some sense) to running your own generator that just services your demand. Surely that can't be evil?
You're free to pay for an internet line with an SLA attached, with better support, with redundancy, etc... None of that is a problem under net neutrality.
No, in this example, I pay my ISP to make my end faster, the person on the other pays their ISP to make their end faster.
In the no net neutrality example, the person on the other end pays their ISP to make their end faster and then they also get contacted by my ISP who asks them to pay to make my end faster when talking to them.
So instead of agreeing with my own ISP on how fast I need my traffic to be, my ISP cuts me out of the loop and goes and talks to some third party to decide how fast to make my traffic.
I understand the downsides of extorting specific sites to pay more or be artificially throttled. That is an unambiguous case of NN violation and the kind of thing (per original comment) I'm in favor of prohibiting.
But NN advocates (as best I can tell) want it to go further, and prohibit
A) the other end voluntarily subsidizing my end on the condition that the funds be used for pipes that they (having partially paid for) have privileged access to.
How is that any worse than the paying for a bigger chunk of the ISP's pipes? And it seems economically equivalent to:
B) A content provider P subsidizing a mobile data network's increased capacity on the condition that P's transmissions not count toward customers' limits.
(I know B drives many people mad as a NN violation, while other advocates are like, "nah, cell data is okay.")
Furthermore, B only seems to differ in degree from:
C) An ISP spending customer money to interface with content provider P's system for replicating P's content within the ISP's network [1] so that access to P's content is faster an less expensive -- instead of spending that same money to make the network faster for all customers and all remote servers.
(Case C is like B, but where the "subsidy" is the expense of making Open Connect-like systems work.)
And yet, everyone seems fine with C.
If it seems like I'm nitpicking, let me step back and look at the big picture: NN looks like a bundle of good ideas ("don't artificially throttle specific sites"), married to a bunch of economically dubious hate for (the equivalent of) toll roads and desire that there be no downsides to higher usage -- the classic motte-and-bailey[2].
Like many anti-competitive behaviors, A and B are seemingly beneficial to customers, but in the long run they are harmful to the market by preventing smaller players from competing fairly.
> married to a bunch of economically dubious hate for (the equivalent of) toll roads and desire that there be no downsides to higher usage
I have never seen a net neutrality proposal that includes something that prevents higher charges for higher usage (except when mis-attributing usage, e.g. saying that Netflix uses an excessive amount of consumer ISPs' bandwidth, which is not the case, the people watching Netflix might be overusing their ISP's bandwidth, but Netflix is not using the ISP's bandwidth at all). This is a complete straw-man argument.
>Like many anti-competitive behaviors, A and B are seemingly beneficial to customers, but in the long run they are harmful to the market by preventing smaller players from competing fairly.
But what's the difference between those and C? Or between those and me building a dedicated line straight to my favorite server, just for us? Or are you really against Netflix's OpenConnect as a NN violation?
>I have never seen a net neutrality proposal that includes something that prevents higher charges for higher usage. ...This is a complete straw-man argument.
From a very quick search:
"Net Neutrality is one of only a few tools available to the FCC to keep ISPs in check. Banning data caps and zero rating schemes would be another great way to protect consumers from Wall Street’s insatiable demand for companies to extract more revenue from consumers."[1]
There -- a major advocacy group (stopthecap.com/tag/net-neutrality/) equating net neutrality with a ban on data caps (a species of charging for usage). [2]
The fact that you are too smart to make the argument doesn't mean others aren't, nor that it isn't polluting the discussion, nor that I can't legitimately object to NN if it's read so broadly.
[2] That's on top of the ever-present poster who thinks NN will keep their ISP from throttling their constant bittorrent streams in favor of granny's occasional emails.
Banning data caps is very different from not allowing higher charges for higher usage.
Most data caps are of the type where you pay a flat fee for a fixed amount of data and then pay an outrageously high punitive fee for overages that is vastly out of proportion with the amount you are paying for the data below the cap. In other instances your speeds get dramatically throttled after reaching the cap or are completely cut off if you go over the cap too often. I think that should be outlawed.
Those aren't good faith attempts to charge people for what they are using; they are attempts to shut down heavy users, often because the ISPs are also in the cable TV business which competes with streaming video that is responsible for heavy data usage.
A good faith attempt to charge heavy data users fairly for their use would probably look something like the billing models used for electricity.
>Banning data caps is very different from not allowing higher charges for higher usage.
>A good faith attempt to charge heavy data users fairly for their use would probably look something like the billing models used for electricity.
It's not "very different", it's one way of charging higher users more. And the fact that it's a bad way doesn't mean the NN crowd supports the good way either! They object to the electricity model on the grounds that "bandwidth isn't scarce[1]" and that high users should be just as capable of crowding out low users during peak times, that there shouldn't be any downside to higher usage.
[1] in the true-enough sense of "the relevant scarce parameter is not how much you download in total, but how much of the flow of the pipe you are using at any given moment".
It's still neutral. The reliability doesn't depend on the contents that you're transmitting. Cat pictures sent over a 5-9's SLA line are just as reliable as your video conference.
Sort of. When generation is unable to keep up with demand, and the generators can't maintain frequency keeping, the grid can go into load-shedding mode. Progressively disconnecting consumer sections until the generators can keep up.
The segments that have hospitals will tend to be the last to go.
Right, but that doesn't sound like (an analog of) the proposal under discussion which would be "anyone, so long as they pay the uniform rate, gets the hospital treatment during brownouts".
Well there are dedicated lines when you need more than a certain amount of power. As for brownouts, they can promise priority in repairing power outages but at that point the client is expected to have backups or UPSes of their own
Analogies only work until they don't. For this one to be applicable, the power company would have to be using the dual-lines to pitch their own (or their partners') ancillary services, or degrading standard service in order to push customers towards the premium service.
To understand Net Neutrality you first need to have an understanding of how the internet works. The internet is basically composed of a bunch of different networks. These networks interconnect with each other (see Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) for more details).
There are basically three different kinds of networks:
1) Networks that primarily host content; azure.
2) Networks that primarily do transit; level three.
3) Consumer Terminating Networks; Comcast.
I admit this is a generalization, and some networks fit multiple of these categories, but lets not get too bogged down in the details here, as I don't think it's necessary to understand net neutrality.
Given these types of interconnected networks lets go through an example. Let say a consumer wants to watch Netflix. The consumers pays Comcast to access Comcast's network and get some bandwidth. Netflix pays their hosting network, and possibly a transit network for bandwidth. Comcast either directly, or through another networks connects to Netflix's hosting network. Neither Netflix or Comcast necessarily pays anything to these in-between networks. This works because these in-between networks trade about the same amount of traffic (see Peering). This is basically net neutrality; you pay Comcast for some bandwidth, Netflix pays their host and the content flows freely.
Without net neutrality Comcast can change you, Netflix, or both more to connect to each other. It can make Hulu free to connect to. It can make youtube inaccessible unless you get the super premium package. No one is just paying for bandwidth anymore, someone is paying for individual services on top of bandwidth. This allows Comcast to either pick the winner by making their services cheaper, or lets the company which pays Comcast the most be most available to their customers.
So what it really boils down to is, are you paying for bandwidth that you choose how to use, or not.
My problem is that you're currently not paying for bandwidth either, because ISPs generally don't promise you all of the advertized bandwidth all of the time. There have been times when my ISP has been unable to deliver the bandwidth that was advertized to me without throttling things like BitTorrent. I would be 100% for net neutrality if that problem actually got addressed. Most of the examples I've seen of companies throttling things are actually very high-bandwidth services - it's not just things that people are willing to pay more for or that compete with the ISP. Without that solved, then yes - I'd like to be able to pay more to get my work prioritized over entertainment or piracy.
If they throttle due to load, then they should simply throttle all load equally, or in accordance with consumer preferences (e.g. per-line prioritization of VoIP above torrents, but not, say, Comcast VoIP above Google Voice). When the network is full, every customer should get their fair fraction of the network to do with as they please.
Con net neutrality argument: The first net neutrality rules were implemented in 2015. For 25 years the internet blossomed without any net neutrality rules in place. Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that if this rule is repealed, Verizon will force me to pay extra for Netflix or will prevent me accessing websites they don't want me to see. There were instances in the past of ISPs behaving badly but they were resolved on an individual basis. If you're worried about freedom of speech on the net, edge providers such as Google, Facebook and Twitter are for more of a threat to free speech than ISPs.
This isn't really true though. NY AG Schneiderman had a good response to this in the earlier AMA (which I've pasted below).
"As a preliminary matter, it’s important to recognize that net neutrality principles and protections in different forms have actually been around since 2005 and even earlier. So the flourishing of the internet and everything relying on it during that time occurred under the protections. A few years ago, however, the courts struck down one form of net neutrality protections (those that had relied on Title I of the Communications Act), so then in 2015 the FCC put net neutrality protections back in place under Title II instead (they also expanded the earlier protections, e.g., to include protections against abuses related to interconnection, which had not been the subject of net neutrality protections before 2015). Now, in 2017, the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to repeal net neutrality protections altogether (and the courts’ earlier decisions effectively foreclose a return to net neutrality protections under Title I). So that would be entirely new territory for the internet.
Why do we think that’s bad? Well, as I explained in my own public comment in the current proceeding (https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10717583023587/FINAL%20RIF%20Co...), we’ve seen how companies behave in the absence of net neutrality protections, specifically in the area of interconnection before it was regulated in 2015, and their unregulated conduct harmed consumers. In essence, they made a deliberate business decision to let the quality of internet access degrade, knowing that it hurt consumers, to try to squeeze revenue out of edge providers like Netflix and backbone providers like Cogent and Level 3. Plus, we know that many consumers have few ISPs to choose from, so competition isn’t as effective a check as in other markets. So I believe strong net neutrality regulations are needed to avoid harms to consumers."
Thank you for the refutation to this sadly-commmon misconception that NN only dates back to 2015. Another sad misconception is that NN was proposed by the Obama administration.
Con democracy argument: the first democracy is at most 2500 years old. For hundreds of thousands of years the human race blossomed without democracy.
The reason the internet was pretty good without any rules for the first 20 years is because big commercial interests didn't understand it until relatively recently, they didn't see the opportunities to exploit the exclusive access to the subscriber's home. They understand it now.
Only in the past 10 years or so have we come to need reasonably-priced and stable internet almost as much as we need electricity or water.
The issue, I think is not about net neutrality laws. It is the lack of competition between ISPs. And this is what the government should enforce, for example by requiring established ISPs to rent their lines at a reasonable price and make access to utility poles easier.
In countries where there is competition, there is no need for net neutrality laws, because people don't want arbitrary restrictions, and they will naturally vote for net neutrality with their wallets.
Furthermore, net neutrality rules don't solve every problem, because it doesn't deal with peering. For example if an ISP is also a content provider, they can connect their servers directly to their backbone, it will be fast. But their competitor isn't, which mean traffic will have to go through the global internet, which can result in congestion. Effectively having a fast lane without explicitly violating net neutrality: they don't discriminate traffic, they just deploy their network following their best interests.
I'm not saying that it is a bad idea to enforce net neutrality, but IMHO, the priority should be to restore competition.
I roughly agree, but I'm guessing the big ISPs will like that even less. Like most big problems in the US, the best solutions seem completely impossible, because big changes are too hard to get enough people to agree on.
So you'll often see the biggest support for fighting a "bad" change, "holding the line" at the current compromise.
The reason the internet was pretty good without any rules for the first 20 years is because big commercial interests didn't understand it...only in the past 10 years...
You realize your analysis completely ignore the 2001 tech bubble?
Big corporations have known and invested heavily in the internet for a lot longer than the last 10 years (since 2007?!?)
They were interested/excited by it, but didn't fully get it. The internet was just then replacing walled gardens like aol and prodigy.
Most people used dial-up for many years, and that sort of piggy-backed on the common-carrier status of the landline phone companies. So there was plenty of competition there. Cable internet providers were new around that time, and competing with cheap and good-enough dial-up and roughly-equivalent DSL (which could deliver service from a third party, somewhat like dial-up, e.g. earthlink). So the idea of only having one fast-enough option for internet in your town was novel.
Further, there were far fewer paid online services. So there wasn't an ecosystem to support partnership/promotions/schemes like today.
> Con democracy argument: the first democracy is at most 2500 years old. For hundreds of thousands of years the human race blossomed without democracy.
It survived, blossoming depends on your definition. In that regard the human race has only blossomed in the last hundred year or so, quadrupling in size.
I would call the scientific revolution a blossoming, and although democracies (notably the Dutch Republic) participated, most of it happened in monarchies and principalities.
"resolved on an individual basis" like Netflix paying ISPs to not throttle their traffic?
Part of the problem is that telecos are too large. Over the last 25 years we've seen a consolidation of companies into a few large telecoms that absolutely dominate the market. Most customers don't have choice like they did in the dial up days. Deep packet inspection technology means ISPs can effectively filter traffic. And, as they merge with entertainment giants, they have their own media business interests to protect and foster.
I'm just as sad an anyone to see the internet becoming a place of rules and laws but the internet is a different place than it was 25 or even 10 years ago (when the net neutrality discussion began)
Those instances were usually resolved, but other times ISPs continued misbehaving, and in fact when the FCC has sued, the courts have actually said that they could've won and prevented the bad behavior under Title II [0]
Also, the argument that "the internet worked fine before" is misleading, because technically the FCC worked under the same wireline "neutrality" rules and norms applied to AT&T back in the 70s. A little more history here: [1]
The first net neutrality rules were implemented in 2015.
This is patently incorrect. The Open Internet Order of 2010 established a set of rules based around 3 concepts[0]:
1.) Transparency. Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of their broadband services
2.) No blocking. Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.
3.) No unreasonable discrimination. Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.
From 2010 until 2014, that was Net Neutrality. In 2014, in Verizon vs. the FCC[1], the appeals court struck down the No blocking and No unreasonable discrimination sections of the Open Internet Order. The court at the time noted that as long as ISPs were considered under Title I, those sections could not apply to them. However, the court also noted that, in general, the FCC did have the power to enforce the Open Internet Order using Title II, and that the FCC had the ability to reclassify the ISPs under Title II.
Thus in 2015, the FCC reclassified broadband providers under Title II, thus making the No blocking and No unreasonable discrimination sections apply to them once again.
The history goes:
2010-2014: Transparency, No blocking, No unreasonable discrimination
2014-2015: Transparency, blocking ok, unreasonable discrimination ok
2015-now: Transparency, No blocking, No unreasonable discrimination
What the FCC wants to do now is to repeal the action taken to classify broadband providers under Title II, and move them back to Title I. This would again eliminate the ability of the FCC to enforce the Open Internet Order's No Blocking and No Unreasonable Discrimination sections.
If you believe that Net Neutrality is something that the FCC made up in 2015 and that for 25 years the internet blossomed without net neutrality rules in place, then you are believing an obvious, and easily researched lie.
1. I'm not in the USA :-)
2. Competition will result in the more rapid expansion of things like Google Fi.
3. I wouldn't mind paying less if I don't use Netflix.
4. I'm wary of regulation. The FCC was founded to ensure radio waves don't conflict. Now it regulates speech.
> Competition will result in the more rapid expansion of things like Google Fi.
You may not be aware of this, but in the US there is almost no competition whatsoever for ISPs. Most people are lucky to have two choices for internet, and they tend to keep their prices relatively similar.
> I wouldn't mind paying less if I don't use Netflix.
I don't like to admit it, but I'm in the same boat as you. I've heard NN used, depending on the context, to refer to prohibition of:
1) Throttling sites the ISP doesn't like.
2) Any kind of penalty for heavier users.
3) Charging for access to special pipes that are faster, when both sides want to pay a premium for speed and reliability.
Unless I ask directly I have a hard time discerning what someone means by NN, and even then I don't know how well it maps to what new regulations will actually do.
Edit: Another attempt at clarifying first sentence.
All of those things are possible consequences of repealing net neutrality.
Simply net neutrality is your ISP ignoring the contents of your packets and simply routing them to their intended destination.
Repealing net neutrality would allow ISPs to more interesting traffic shaping based on the contents of the packets, e.g. allow unlimited data caps if the user pays for the ISP for unlimited netflix.
The pros for net neutrality are that the ISPs have historically done all of the practices that you mention. And actively practice them in countries like Portugal which have no net neutrality.
The con is that some sites are much heavier bandwidth than others, and do represent a much higher cost to the ISPs. For instance I've read that netflix takes more than 50% of North American bandwidth during peak hours. Repealing net neutrality would allow ISPs to have more flexible pricing models that in theory could allow the consumer cheaper broadband by choosing different traffic shaping options. In my opinion, this is unrealistic because ISPs are a natural monopoly in most places and thus the incentive is to skew pricing for what costs their routing infrastructure the least rather than be competitive with other ISPs.
> Simply net neutrality is your ISP ignoring the contents of your packets and simply routing them to their intended destination.
That doesn't make sense. ISPs have long blocked "dangerous" or "premium" ports, like 445 (SMB) or 25 (SMTP). Those are parts of the contents of your internet packets and yet even the net neutrality regulation didn't prohibit doing that. And you can't argue those are "headers" rather than "contents" because then throttling packets based on IP addresses would not require looking at packet contents. So I think your definition is incorrect?
What people do and what is legislated are two different things. The point is that with a law on the books you can fight about your SMTP connection being closed, but without the law then there is no framework to even complain.
> What people do and what is legislated are two different things. The point is that with a law on the books you can fight about your SMTP connection being closed, but without the law then there is no framework to even complain.
That seems orthogonal to my comment. I was responding to the parent comment on what net neutrality even is, not trying to debate its merits.
I was right with you until you brought up Netflix. I'm unclear on why Netflix being a big source of traffic is a problem. It's not like people are having trouble accessing Netflix now. And Netflix makes extensive use of CDNs and co-locates caching servers in the ISPs' own data centers, so it's not like the fact that everyone's using Netflix is really burdening the ISP.
The ISP's feel like, burden or not, since Netflix represents more of the traffic they should pay more of the infrastructure cost. Many people fear that if Net Neutrality is repealed, the ISP's will have a giant lever (in the form of levying fees on customers for accessing Netflix) to squeeze Netflix to get them to cough up more cash.
It's an old & interesting debate about how data service ought to be billed. If 26 customers pay for 50MB/s service, most use 2MB/s, one uses 50MB/s, and the uplink is sparsely provisioned at 100MB/s, what is fair? One customer is using half the capacity of the link but only paying 1/26th of the costs, while the others are using 1/50th of the capacity and paying 1/26th the cost. Many might argue the one customer should be paying more.
Do you want your ISP to charge you extra for the "privilege" of being able to get access to Netflix ("Streaming media package!"), or Twitch ("Esports!"), __in addition__ to any subscriptions you would already pay to Netflix?
You're misunderstanding me. My point is that a common anti-NN argument is "but Netflix generates so much traffic..." and I'm saying that argument is without merit.
I don't understand how traffic directionality affects peering. The path of routers between the client and the server handle all packets. The fact that the source is mostly from one size doesn't affect the load on the routers, they're still handling the same number of packets whether the traffic is symmetric or not.
They could send back a whole bunch of zero bytes to make the traffic symmetrical. They save everyone's resources by not doing that, yet somehow that means they should be charged...
The direction of the traffic is meaningless. What matters is the endpoint of the connection. ISPs should be happy to peer with anyone for traffic that has their users as an endpoint.
>Simply net neutrality is your ISP ignoring the contents of your packets and simply routing them to their intended destination.
So then, concretely: say I have an expensive, faster link in my network. I don't look inside the packets, but I allow them to specify some flag in the header that indicates they want to use the fast link (and I keep track of which peer is requesting it to compare to how many such usages they've paid for).
Is that a NN violation? Is that harmful to the internet? Do current or proposed regulations allow it?
If the ISP customer is able to specify which link to use and be charged accordingly, that's not necessarily a violation of the spirit of net neutrality. If a bad ISP implemented this and made the slow path absurdly slow, well then you just always use the fast link and it's the equivalent of the ISP just charging you more. It's not harmful to the Internet, and I believe current regulations allow it.
If the server the customer is connecting to is able to specify which link to use and the server pays the bill for that usage, that's a different matter. If a bad ISP implemented this and made the slow path absurdly slow, servers would be forced to use the fast link in order to access the ISPs' customers, and now the ISP is forcing Netflix et. al. to fork over money just to be able to access their customers. That will hurt the Internet, and current regulations do not allow it.
Lets say I'm an ISP and I build out 2 networks. 1 is 10 times faster than the other. Both end up at the same place and then go out to users.
If I offer companies the option of paying more for the faster network, why is that a problem?
In your scenario it certainly seems reasonable that I should be able to just switch off the slower network, and keep the new prices under the argument that I put in significant amounts of money to upgrade.
> Lets say I'm an ISP and I build out 2 networks. 1 is 10 times faster than the other. Both end up at the same place and then go out to users.
> If I offer companies the option of paying more for the faster network, why is that a problem?
If the company in question is a customer of the ISP, there is no problem. The problem I mentioned was when you, as a company, have to pay money not just to your own ISP, but to your customer's ISP, just to give them their data.
Yes, because it means treating packets different based on their contents. In this case, the contents are some header flag.
Is it harmful to the internet? Yes, because it promotes winners and losers. Not just from the consumer perspective. Maybe corporations can pay to have faster downlink to your customers using the same technology.
Current regulations do not allow it. Or, at the minimum, it's a grey area.
You might have seen your argument branded as an "internet fast lane," which I'd suspect would be so much of a fast lane as a slow lane for everyone else.
How is that any different from allowing someone to pay more to use more of a plane (e.g. first class seats)? Is this just a general argument that everyone should pay the same and get the same?
The analogy of the planes is not very helpful, because each flight is paid for individually. The idea is that traffic to certain peers (not the ISP customers, but whoever they are communicating with) should not be discriminated against. So you can pay for faster service, but all packets coming from or to you would get flagged, not just those going to certain servers.
None of those are net neutrality, but all of those are things that are prevented by the presence of net neutrality.
Net neutrality is currently enforced because ISPs are regulated as "common carriers", meaning they can't intentionally prefer some traffic over other traffic. The vote on Thursday is to reverse this regulation.
If ISPs could prefer some traffic over others, they could do any of the things that you suggest, enabling censorship.
Sorry, I edited it to indicate that those were things that may or may not constitute an NN violation.
>all of those are things that are prevented by the presence of net neutrality.
How is 2)? If you're penalized by total usage [A], irrespective of source or type, that seems pretty neutral. Whether it's a good policy in general is debatable, of course.
(That's another problem with the debate: that "NN violation" is casually equated with "imprudent policy". If an ISP throttles everyone to 1 KB/s, then, yeah, that's a jerk move, but it's definitely content- and source-neutral.)
>If ISPs could prefer some traffic over others, they could let do any of the things that you suggest, enabling censorship.
That doesn't follow. Let's say they lay down some new expensive pipe for some link in their network, on top of what they already have, and then allow anyone to pay for access to the faster pipe. Data continues to get through at the pre-existing speed if you don't pay. How is anyone being censored?
ANd if you find that objectionable, how is that any worse than toll roads or even e.g. convenience stores, where you pay more in order to have a shorter checkout time.
[A] In this context, I have in mind something like "charging more for users who download more than X bytes, weighted by time of usage" or "slightly reallocating the pipe in favor of lighter users at times of peak usage".
>Is the definition of censorship. ISPs could just choose to not let anybody access their competitors' websites, for example.
You're changing the example -- the scenario was allowing transmitters to opt to pay for the faster link. Packets would still get through at the same speed as e.g. today. It's not blocking them wholesale. At most, it's favoritism, and downloaders still get the data at a reasonable speed as under the pre-upgrade terms.
And the example involved a simple "did you pay?" structure, which is otherwise neutral. It would be a different story if favored sites got the fast pipe without paying, or if only some favored sites were allowed to buy the fast hop at all. But this example doesn't have that.
Prudent policy or not, I don't see how that comes close to censorship.
Do you say it's "censorship" when an activist wants to drive to other activists' houses to plan subversive activities, since it takes longer when you don't use the toll roads?
I can't be changing the example if I'm quoting you.
I am not discussing the presence of fast lanes right now, which have their own problems. I'm talking about the literal prevention of accessing specific data because your ISP decides you aren't allowed to access it.
Without net neutrality, if my ISP sees I'm trying to access a political site that they don't like, they could just make half of all those requests fail. If they like a particular political candidate for office in my area, then they can prevent me from accessing all the other candidate's sites or reading a news story about a positive thing the other candidate did.
This is absolutely enabling censorship and yes we are discussing different examples but I do not need to demonstrate how your example is censorship when another example (that you said was a possibility!) does, if I am trying to demonstrate how this enables censorship. This is not a case of (All things prevented by net neutrality) but (There exists a thing prevented by net neutrality) that enables censorship.
I'm sorry -- this no longer feels like a productive discussion. I described two scenarios: a) one where the ISP deliberately throttles sites with views it dislikes, and b) another where everyone gets the normal speed but some may pay more for faster.
You claimed that any non-neutrality would permit a). I disagreed and gave an example of someone violating neutrality by doing b), where all views are still transmitted, but some have the option to pay for faster transmission.
In every reply, you changed the example back to a) and insisted you were quoting me. That is not responsive, and I cannot justify further engagement unless your replies can more narrowly address the scenario that I was actually talking about.
a) is the only example anyone is seriously worried about. I don't think anyone in their right mind thinks that Comcast or Verizon will make special pipes that are faster than what we have today and keep the "slow" pipes to match the speed we have today. Obviously they will instead call what we have today the "fast" pipes and will throttle (or block) everything else. I would bet my life on it.
That's because NN is a proxy for what most people really want, which is competition among ISPs. If we had a choice of several good broadband providers, we wouldn't need regulation, we would expect competition among them to protect consumers' needs.
Since we don't, we need some kind of regulation to keep ISPs from abusing their monopoly status. In general, "pro net neutrality" means you think the regulations should be abundant and strict (like they are with water and power utilities) and "anti net neutrality" means you think they should be light and weak (like they are with, say, cable TV). Disagreement within those camps on specifics does not mean that there are not, broadly, two camps.
Your quote is a great example of Pai strategically shining Net Neutrality in a negative light. In the current day and age there is plenty of concern around and overreaching government so hey, lets make the argument that this vote is about giving the government less control of the internet!
Except that's not what this vote is about. The government currently says that ISP's must treat internet traffic equally. This is a good thing and is hardly micromanaging. Without it, an ISP is able to kill their competition and extort other companies.
Examples:
In 2005 the FCC ordered an ISP to stop blocking VOIP calls on their network. The ISP had their own phone service, so they started to block VOIP services on their network in order to force customers to use their phone product. Without NN, this is okay.
In 2005 the AT&T CEO claimed that "Anybody who expects to use our pipes for free is nuts!". ISP's want to demand a cut from every website just to reach their customers. Without NN, this is okay.
In 2012 AT&T decides to block FaceTime on its mobile networks for subscribers unless they enter into a “Mobile Share” plan. Without NN, this is okay.
The internet should really be nothing more than a dumb pipe. Your ISP should be doing nothing more than connecting you to the internet. They should not have a say in what websites you go toor what services you can use. They should not be able to force websites to pay for access to their customer base. The ISP should provide you X Mbps for Y GB of bandwidth and that's it.
I'll share a case against the current NN framework, even if I don't wholly buy it.
First of all, this vote is factually about giving the government less regulatory power by reclassifying ISPs under Title 1. The legal basis for Net Neutrality under Title II allows the government to dictate prices and essentially regulate ISPs like they do water or electric utilities. Obviously ISPs would prefer to not have this axe swinging over their heads.
> The government currently says that ISP's must treat internet traffic equally. This is a good thing and is hardly micromanaging.
It's a matter of opinion whether this is a good thing. One counter-argument is that it limits the size of the menu that ISPs can offer. My parents, for example, want fast home Internet access but do not watch streaming video. However home ISPs cannot offer downgraded video, so my parents must pay more.
Zero-rated ("free streaming") music - blatantly non-NN - is another argument. Obviously people like streaming music for free. NN proponents think this makes it hard for startups to compete with deep-pocketed established players. But this does not seem to be happening: lots and lots of services, both big and small, are now zero-rated on popular plans.
> The internet should really be nothing more than a dumb pipe.
Well, maybe it shouldn't. Applications have different needs: twitch games want low latency, streaming services want high bandwidth, overnight downloads can have low priority, etc. If you had a knob that controlled your Internet latency, wouldn't you use it?
But even if you believe it should be dumb, is it proper to declare that ISPs are natural monopolies and therefore ought to be regulated aggressively under Title II? Or is it better to apply a light touch and find ways to encourage competition, under the premise that competitive markets are more consumer-friendly? The recent upheavals in the mobile telecom market (led by T-Mobile) show that established players can be more vulnerable than they look.
I think basically we don't know. The most compelling arguments for NN are all hypothetical, because we have been living under a NN regime so far.
Less government regulation makes sense in places that don't endanger people (e.g. food quality) and in fields with a lot of competition. A large number of people in the united states only have access to one ISP, or one fast ISP[1].
Your single ISP available to you could decide that you don't get to access your favorite site(s) without charging an additional fee to access them. They could refuse to offer any unknown sites, and just offer facebook, youtube, etc, each costing some number of dollars to use.
If competition is working effectively, then government management usually does more harm than good. The question is, is competition working effectively in telecommunications? In much of the country, I suspect that the answer is no.
And the reason for the lack of competition is, again, the government with its enforcement of ISP monopolies. Why don't they stop micromanaging the markets there as well?
Even without the government's involvement, infrastructure (internet (cables, dishes), transportation (e.g. roads, rails), cell service, sewage, electricity) all has such a massive initial investment that competition just won't naturally happen.
A company has to lay so much fiber or wire to service even a reasonable number of households that the barrier to entry is huge.
The biggest argument for maintaining net neutrality is so that ISPs don't provide worse service to websites competing with their own products. The most obvious case there being Netflix vs your cable company's streaming service. If you get high latency and frequent video stutter when using Netflix but not for your ISP's version, you'll use that. Even if the cause of that stutter is your ISP.
To my mind, governing least means judiciously intervening when it actually requires it, but no more. If this is a situation where intervention makes sense, I am fine with that. I am just trying to comprehend if it is or not.
This essay from Stratechery, and the accompanying podcast, I think sums up the way I feel about it and gets into how emotional people get over this topic [1]. I'm always going to be skeptical of whatever the ISPs are telling me, but I think Thompson's point here about how we don't know what things in the future won't exist if we mandate NN is worth at least considering, so I tend to agree that light-touch is probably a better approach.
Except that they're charging you for some of them? There is no structural difference between zero rating certain traffic and adding surcharges for certain traffic.
At the risk of splitting hairs, Thompson actually argued in favor of mandating net neutrality, but against the stringent Title II regulations. He also argued that re-classifying ISPs would not necessarily lead to the end of net neutrality.
Every business wants the services they rely on to be commodity, but they don't want to be a commodity to the layer above them - they want to extract some of the value those upper layers provide. For example, a toll bridge is a commodity; it charges the same fee for a truckload of diamonds as a truckload of coal. If you were a bridge owner, you'd prefer to be able to charge more for people getting a lot of value out of your bridge.
Similarly, people who own the Internet pipes want to claim part of the value of new innovations build on them - to charge differential pricing for, say, streaming movies, vs less profitable types of content. The people building those innovations say, no way - charge us by the bit and it's not your business what those bits are doing.
I would be curious to hear it as well (EDIT: specifically others' thoughts on Pai's plan). I understand net neutrality and am all for it, but I seem to remember a decent percentage of HN was against accomplishing it through reclassification before it was passed in 2015. I also don't see how going to the regulatory situation before reclassification is an Internet destroying disaster. The Internet seemed to get along just fine before 2015. I worry that maybe we are not focusing on the right thing and the true path to securing a free and open Internet is by increasing competition in the ISP space. Although that is a much harder battle since it must be fought on so many difference fronts in local and state government.
The Open Internet Order of 2010 established a set of net neutrality rules based around 3 concepts[0]:
1.) Transparency. Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of their broadband services
2.) No blocking. Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.
3.) No unreasonable discrimination. Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.
In 2014, in Verizon vs. the FCC[1], the appeals court struck down the No blocking and No unreasonable discrimination sections of the Open Internet Order. The court at the time noted that as long as broadband providers were considered under Title I, those sections could not apply to them. However, the court also noted that, in general, the FCC did have the power to enforce the Open Internet Order using Title II, and that the FCC had the ability to reclassify the ISPs under Title II.
Thus in 2015, the FCC reclassified broadband providers under Title II, thus making the No blocking and No unreasonable discrimination sections apply to them once again.
The history goes:
2010-2014: Transparency, No blocking, No unreasonable discrimination
2014-2015: Transparency, blocking ok, unreasonable discrimination ok
2015-now: Transparency, No blocking, No unreasonable discrimination
What the FCC wants to do now is to repeal the action taken to classify broadband providers under Title II, and move them back to Title I. This would again eliminate the ability of the FCC to enforce the Open Internet Order's No Blocking and No Unreasonable Discrimination sections.
This comment crystalizes the paradox of activism in a community of contrarians: after months of build up, we are spending our last organizing hours convincing ourselves (and each other) of something we already know.
I'm not a contrarian. I'm a freelance writer who is less tech savvy than a lot of people here.
I am not comfortable with taking action without understanding what I am supporting. I am also not comfortable sitting idly by on the excuse that I don't really understand it.
It is a completely sincere question and I very much appreciate all good faith efforts to answer it, from either side.
I'm not questioning your sincerity (or talking about you at all, really).
I'm observing that the HN community is a poor fit for activism. It's crunch time (activism-wise) and the top comment chain is a relitigation of the whole issue from scratch, even though we've been talking about it for months (and years).
Or maybe people are willing to go the extra mile to get a neutral party on board who might otherwise do nothing because I am not comfortable taking action on an issue I don't really understand.
I don't see it being relitigated. Most stuff here seems pro net neutrality, but with good explanations instead of the political sniping I was seeing before I asked.
> Or maybe people are willing to go the extra mile to get a neutral party on board who might otherwise do nothing because I am not comfortable taking action on an issue I don't really understand.
So... did they succeed? Do the pro net-neutrality explanations make sense and persuade you? And if so, what do you plan to do in this critical moment before the impending FCC vote?
I did tweet a few things recommended on the break the internet article and I am debating what else I might do. I recently moved, so I have not yet registered to vote and I am not a phone person. I also recently started over on Twitter, FB and other things. I am not sure my efforts make any real difference. I also have only voted twice in my life. Politics is kind of a foreign land for me.
But I do feel I understand it better and it does matter.
Basically, net neutrality prevents ISPs from using a form of price discrimination to sell a lesser internet, where certain sites are blocked or throttled, or where certain sites have to increase service charges to pay back costs imposed on them by ISPs. Eliminating this would enable ISPs to charge lower prices to segments that currently go unserved. This is considered a bad thing because:
- In modernity, not having internet is considered untenable. Essential things like applying for jobs, interacting with friends, or performing political activism require the internet. Moreover, a free internet is important for these tasks, becaue only then can the tasks themselves be performed freely. Imagine an internet where the only social network is facebook. This would be extremely limiting, and facebook would love to implement this.
- Many ISPs would use this price discrimination to steal customers away from other ISPs, rather than unlock new customers. This is hailed as "competition". The problem is that all ISPs would steal customers from each other roughly equally. Therefore, the effect would be merely to lower prices (for a lesser product) for certain customers. Without a corresponding lowering of costs, ISPs would have to raise prices for the rest of their customers. To get the same price as today, you would have to purchase a non neutral package. Rather than it being merely grandmas and poor people with a limited version of the internet, nearly everyone would have it.
There are a lot of wonderful, elaborate, technical replies to your post. But the simple version is this:
The major ISP endgame is to have a cut of every single transaction that happens on the internet over their pipes (from both ends)... well... if they aren't already the ones selling the product in the first place, that is.
They are chomping at the bit to flex their monopolist, anti-competitive muscles to achieve that goal. They will go as far as we let them (just as any self-interested party would in their unique position).
Net-neutrality rules helped (somewhat) to stop them. If you think that possible future is bad, you probably ought to support net-neutrality.
It's as simple as that. If the ISP is discriminating against certain types of content, then the internet is not neutral, which many think should be illegal to preserve innovation on the web (allowing small companies to rise up as fast as Google, Facebook, and Youtube did, instead of being bogged down by ISPs charging them fees for "access to their customers" or some nonsense).
That article doesn't help anything. That is still a pure FUD based article. It offers no info and just speculates that without regulation, ISPs will just charge you more and have "fast lanes" and packaged plans.... I'm so sick of that argument. We've never seen anything like that in America before NN. Its a pure strawman argument.
I am not trolling and yes I've already read those articles. That is exactly what I am complaining about. There is no evidence that these strawman arguments will come to pass. And even though "bad" things happened without NN, they were ultimately resolved (without NN)
You are totally trolling. Yeah, nobody can guarantee that these things won’t happen. But they’ll be enabled. It will increase profits. So it will likely happen.
It is the idea that an ISP should not treat different data differently. Their job — what I am paying for — is to deliver data I transmit to the Internet, as efficiently as possible.
The only strong-ish argument that I've heard against net-neutrality is that "why shouldn't the ISPs be able to sell off the limited resource of bandwidth to the highest bidder? Does not offering higher-paying individuals result in a more efficient allocation of the resource? I would argue, no, because:
1. Most people don't have a choice about their ISP, and their ISP knows this. Most Americans have a single broadband Internet provider, that's it. The ISP has no competition to encourage setting a fair market price, because no fair market exists. (I think I would be much more inclined on most of these points if ISPs were not local monopolies.)
2. Allowing the ISP to price discriminate (by charging upstream content producers more for getting out of the slow lane) creates a barrier to new entrants to the market. One of the great things about the Internet today is that if someone invents, say, the next YouTube, Google, or Wikipedia, it is essentially on equal footing w/ the other services that exist today. Forcing new services that may be bandwidth intensive to pay up help lock in the established big players who can outbid the smaller fish. This is particularly dangerous in the example that an ISP could sell access to only a subset of the Internet: imagine a package that only allows access to Google, FB, and a handful of other sites. Competitors are now cut off from those customers. (This is not theoretical, either; there are examples of exactly this happening abroad.)
3. ISPs have repeatedly demonstrated that they would like to offer competing products to those offered by non-ISPs, and will abuse their monopolistic position to promote those products. (By offering them at higher speeds, not counting them towards data caps, etc.)
4. The incentives created by content producers paying for bandwidth are perverse: the ISP would get money, but would be disinclined to reinvest that in the local infrastructure. Doing so would increase the available supply of bandwidth, decreasing the price that it would fetch. American's ISP offerings already lag behind the rest of the world, in some cases, by an order of magnitude. This would not help.
It seems to me that the question they asked is overly broad:
> it is a good idea to let companies that send video or other content to consumers pay more to Internet service providers for the right to send that traffic using faster or higher quality service
That could just as easily be interpreted to mean the content providers are paying their own ISP for faster service which net neutrality would allow as it could to mean the content providers paying their users' ISP which net neutrality doesn't allow.
The really big ones that send really huge amounts of data to a really large number of users do that, but that is definitely not a majority of content providers.
Ah, you want contrarian! You've come to the right place.
As a paying customer, I'd love the ability for streaming sites not to impact my bandwidth quota. I get 1TB a month. That's it. I've run over that limit once, and you can guess where 90% of it went.
This is especially true on mobile, where the bandwidth cap is literally 100x lower. 10GB is not a lot, and you can burn it on one long train ride.
It's absurd that we have to deal with caps, but... The world has accepted them. So if they're here to stay, why not classify streaming sites into a different mental category? They're bandwidth hogs.
I'd rather keep NN in place, but that's one flipside.
Suppose your town decides the mall is the most important destination in town, and dedicates this year's road budget to a really nice new highway between the mall and the suburb where most the mall shoppers live. What happens to the roads in the rest of the town?
On the other hand, it's typically only specific streaming sites that get placed in a different bucket. Thus, it becomes more difficult for new (potentially better) services to enter the space. I don't think that's a net positive.
Repeal NN => youtube/netflix no longer counts toward cap => cap no longer causes problems.
Some ISPs (verizon?) do similar things, where if you use their app then you're allowed to stream as much as you want. But I'm not sure whether that runs afoul of neutrality laws.
This is admittedly a weak argument, since companies would end up eating the cost, further entrenching the existing monopolies. But they were looking for arguments in favor of NN.
There are other contexts where non-neutrality might be useful: A local startup once tried to roll out a lower-latency service for gaming, based on intelligent routing. It was unlikely to succeed, but even if it were technically possible it would definitely violate NN to be prioritizing/rerouting certain classes of traffic.
> It was unlikely to succeed, but even if it were technically possible it would definitely violate NN to be prioritizing/rerouting certain classes of traffic.
That doesn't seem to address the natural follow-up: what stops me from claiming all my traffic is VoIP so it gets processed faster? Is there some offsetting downside that disincentivizes someone from labeling it that way? (something like "any request for lower latency will also reduce your throughput, so don't call it VoIP if you really care about the overall transfer rate)
It's fairly straightforward: everyone gets high priority up to X mbits/s with no upstream oversubscription. Everyone gets best effort up to their last mile speed after that. If there's still available bandwidth, everyone gets idle-only traffic without a cap.
You could add more priorities in between, etc. as needed.
Then that just means everyone will call their first X mbit/s "high priority" and then relative priorities are unaffected and nothing can be privileged.
That makes no sense. The first X mbit/s will be privileged. If you waste your priority allotment on torrents instead of voip that's your choice, and that choice doesn't affect anybody else.
The problem with what you want is that there are only two extremely obvious sides in the argument:
1. ISPs, who without net neutrality get to nickel and dime everyone else. (Subscribe to Internet Plus for +$25/month to get access to Facebook and Reddit! Subscribe to Internet Pro for +$80/month to get access to VPNs!)
2. Literally everyone else, including every individual internet user and every non-ISP business in the world.
This is a great piece.
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=232617
It's written by a disagreeable, cantankerous man, but he used to be the CEO of an ISP in Chicago years ago. He knows what he's talking about.
Think of it this way, NN is like the post office being forced to charge the same shipping price and provide the same speed for two varying weight packages. A dumbbell vs a letter. The post office is a unique situation because it's crappiness is subsidized by the government and it can continue operating at a loss.
As far as I personally understand, net neutrality is mostly about disconnect between content and src/dst - under perfect net neutrality only source and destination should matter for packet delivery. Does not matter whether this is a last mile connection or tier 1 intercontinent connection. I personally believe that DNS/IP site blocking is against net neutrality. Net neutrality, common carrier, DMCA safe harbour and similar are based on similar non-discrimination provisions.
All analogies I can think of are a bit leaky, but the closest to my mind is package shipping. Under perfect net neutrality, a resident purchases two mailboxes from last mile provider (ISP) under certain fee. Last mile provider commits to emptying outbound box and filling inbound box two times a day. If everything destined to resident does not fit into mailbox - packages will be redelivered at next scheduled delivery. Obviously resident can only send as much packages at a time as they can fit to the mailbox (connection speed). Last mile provider commits to delivering wherever the packages are destined to be delivered even if the package smells of dead dead bodies and make geiger counter scream. If they have to hand off packages to peers - that is their problem and their expenses. Continuing this analogy, FCC's plan is to allow shipping companies to make clients submit unpackaged parcels (meaning subcontractors can open packages and inspect contents and both last mile carrier and original sender) at packaging station where company can inspect the parcel, source, destination and charge/queue packages differently based on these criteria. Some practical consequences of that could be for example shipping time dependency on retailer/product. You could get a WD drive from Amazon in a day, but Seagate drive in a week. The same company could ship Seagates from Wallmart in a day, but WDs in a week. As a customer you could have no idea.
Net neutrality, on the other hand, does not allow to deliver packages from you to your neighbor (which is obviously cheaper) at reduced price. If your neighbors constantly fill their outbound mailboxes to the extent that pickup truck has to ride back to distribution center, come back to to your street and resume collection, net neutrality does not allow pickup truck to skip packages to pick your once in a month package for faster delivery. If the package is too big to fit into mailbox it has to be split into smaller packages and assembled by recipient. If you received your large machine critical to your business in small pieces over a month, assembled and are only waiting for batteries to arrive, net neutrality does not allow to ship your batteries under higher priority than hair tie to your neighbor who has moved out a week ago.
So this is something of a multi-part response, corrections appreciated. Full disclosure I am highly pro-Net Neutrality, although I believe the authority problem is complex enough that congress should just pass a bill mandating it, to clarify the situation and make it harder to undo.
0. In the US, there's a legal status for telecom companies called "common carrier", and multiple subcategories (Title I, Title II). Basically common carrier status says that you have to abide by certain regulations around who you serve, and in return your company gains some benefits (among them, they're not liable for illegal material transmitted over their networks). So your phone company, a Title 1 common carrier, can't charge you more to call Best Buy than to call Amazon, but if you plan out a bank heist with your buddies over the phone, the phone company CEO doesn't go to jail. Right now ISP's are classified as the less regulated subcategory, Title II.
1. The first question, orthogonal but critical, is whether the FCC has the legal authority to set and enforce policies around net neutrality to anyone at all, or only Title I common carriers. The exact authority to do this was never enumerated to the FCC by congress (because the FCC was set up long before the internet). There's also a question of whether the FCC can just reclassify ISPs as common carriers at will. There is an ongoing legal dispute that the FCC has currently lost at the DC Circuit court level where the court said that the FCC can't regulate net neutrality without reclassifying ISPs as the more regulated category. The FCC then reclassified them, which is in the courts. I bring this up because it's one argument given by republicans who oppose it: They don't believe the FCC has the authority in the first place, some believing it's the FTC's job, some believing that nobody has that authority until congress gives it out. Those who feel this way generally don't think congress should give that out. The most used reasoning i've read is "Things have been fine for 25 years, why add more rules now?".
2. Assuming you think the FCC has the authority here, net neutrality as it's been laid out since 2010 basically says "all lawful bits are equal, with reasonable allowance for quality of service". You can still charge differently for different amounts of bandwidth, but are not allowed to block or modify traffic by type or source. Wiki has a nice summary here: [1]. Peering agreements between bandwidth providers are also still legal. The quality of service stuff is beyond my level of knowledge, but I believe it's intended to allow for things like blocking denial of service attacks or taking links down for maintenance.
Without it, ISPs are free to discriminate based on source, content type, etc. So they can charge you more for just video services, or slow down just netflix but prioritize hulu, etc. The nightmare scenario for many internet advocates is that image you've probably seen of an ISP ad with different packages for allowing gaming, video, etc. [2]. For the record, comcast has promised not to do this.
Another worry of open internet advocates is that the ISPs will go to Netflix, Amazon, etc, and ask them to pay more to guarantee quality of service. This could raise prices for these services. If this included speedups over competitors, rather than just slowdowns of big bandwidth users, it would discourage competition from startups who couldn't pay huge amounts like major companies.
The counter-arguments vary, but tend to fall in a few camps:
a. ISPs have not done this in the past, so why add more regulations and increase their costs of doing business (more legal costs to understand the laws and ensure compliance).
b. Market competition will ensure that if one company starts ripping off consumers, another will move in. Regulation is unnecessary and may have nasty second-order effects.
c. If Netflix is taking up a non-trivial percent of Comcast's total resources, why shouldn't they have to pay more? Same for game networks, etc. This is especially interesting with file-sharing services, which are a big bandwidth suck are commonly viewed as mostly illegal activity (piracy).
d. These companies are afraid to start new lines of business that will employ people and help consumers. I've yet to dig up any good proposed examples, of anyone at HN knows of one that would be cool. Pai in particular has mentioned this a number of times.
The anti article is by Ben Thomson, who has a deep and interesting insight into quite a number of things about how businesses on the internet work. I don't always agree with him, but he usually states a sane, informed case. His biggest claim to fame is his work fleshing out an economic idea called Aggregation Theory, which was in part a response to/criticism of Clayton Christinsen got wrong about New Market Disruption.
On the pro side, Mike Masnick is an intellectual property attorney who now, I think, runs techdirt full time. He's been working on the legal issues surrounding the internet since the 90s. Interestingly enough, his attitude was similar to Thompson's around 10 years ago, but the way things have evolved, he's come around to seeing things this way.
I find myself unconvinced by Thompson's argument. It's a wait and see argument that basically says, "We know regulation sucks. But we don't know exactly how bad the ISPs are going to be when they are unregulated."
The reality is that Internet Access is the defining technology that will drive the global economy for the next few generations at least. It's not unreasonable to compare it to access to coal, oil, or electricity (at different times in the last few hundred years) in terms of how it enables people and companies to create jobs as well as go about their daily business.
I don't think the electricity analogy is particularly good. It's oversimplified, and it doesn't exactly frighten anyone because no one can imagine anyone charging more for running one appliance rather than another. But it would improve that analogy a little if it went like this: you pay x amount for running your fridge if it's a Samsung smart fridge. You pay 10x if it's not.
I think a better way of explaining it is in a way that really resonates with people's pocket books. The price of gas. Imagine that gas stations charged variable rates depending on where you do your shopping, where you go for entertainment, or where you go to dinner because the companies that provide these things are allowed to subsidize your travel to them.
Want to buy your groceries at Super Walmart this week? Yay! Your gas is free! Oh, you want to go to the local farmer's market? Your gas is $10/gallon. Want to go see a movie at your local AMC GigaPlex 42 in 5D? 50 cents/gallon. You want to go see a small modern dance performance at your local community theater? $8/gal. Hey! Go eat at an Applebee's 40 miles from you. Getting there is free! And you can stop at any of these participating shopping malls along the way to pick up some clothes from Banana Republic. Oh, you want to go to a local diner run by some of your friends? Fuck you. Gas is going to be $50/gal for that.
Worst of all in this analogy is this: If you'd like to go vacation at a Disney resort, gas to get there is free no matter where you are. But wait, you'd like to go to the MOMA and look at art? Well, a lot of artists are pretty shady people. They do drugs and have sex. We're not selling you any gas at all for any price if you're going to drive there.
And to take it mildly political and back to technology, wait until news media companies get a chance to buy in. Do you want to live in a world where visiting Fox News is free and visiting nytimes.com costs 5 cents per click? (Or vice versa depending on your political leanings).
If we're somewhat concerned about the role that advertising and social media are playing in our political discourse now, just wait until you add traffic shaping through cost incentives into the mix.
Not having this regulation is the equivalent of letting a few companies create and OPEC-like cabal that sets the price of a vital resource for the U.S. and the U.S. only. In my opinion, it's a guaranteed disaster for our country economically, politically, and socially.
And by the way, I'm including examples of zero-rating here (making certain internet resources free) because I think that's a vital part of net neutrality. The rules put in place need to be strengthened, not eliminated to maintain a neutral internet service. I think Thompson's arguments on that point are way out of line.
Well that's not productive at all. If anything, the HN comment section is the best place on the internet I know of to actually hear reasonable explanation of this.
Net neutrality is simply requiring that all packets and data are treated identically by ISPs. They can offer faster speeds to all sites, but Comcast cannot offer faster speed to only Comcast Video on Demand, for instance. Or similarly Time Warner, who owns CNN, could not decide to throttle down all news sites except CNN. It's extremely desirable at a glance, which is why this issue is so divisive. A glance is all most people give most issues!
If you'd like to understand Pai's argument, you're going to need to read unedited interviews with Pai himself. The media in general is giving a very one sided view of this issue. I tend to agree with the desire to keep net neutrality as well, but I think Pai's view is also perfectly cogent and deserving of more than the mob-driven straw manning that it's been given.
So what is his view? Let's start with Google Fiber as an interesting case study. Google Fiber has effectively been a failure. In the ~6 years of operation to 2016 it managed an estimated 0.07million television subscribers, 0.45 million broadband subscribers. They've since rolled back further plans for expansion and engaged in lay offs and downsizing.
Why did it fail? There are quite a large number of reasons but the most fundamental issue is that they didn't attract anywhere near the number of signups they likely anticipated. Why not? The most basic reason is that they announce they're coming to an area. They then spend billions of dollars setting up their infrastructure, advertising, hiring, and getting ready to launch. The day before they 'flip the switch', Comcast/Time Warner announces they are price and speed matching them. Some people sign up out of spite, but most do not.
The thing about competition against a monopoly is that you need to not only be able to beat what they are charging, but what they can charge. Or you need to create a different, somehow more compelling offering. So what does this have to do with net neutrality? Net neutrality in essence requires that ISPs behave identically to one another. Their only distinguishing factor is supposed to be speed and cost. This, in turn, means companies have to be able to offer prices or speeds that Time Warner/Comcast simply could not match. And this isn't really possible. Given their size, these companies could even afford to run at a loss to drive out competition if necessary.
A recent NYT article stated something that seems to contradict everything I just stated. In particular they imply that France and the UK have strong net neutrality, yet also have some 13 and 50+ telecom companies, respectively, competing for business. I asked people why that was here [1]. The responses there are very informative, but I also found them somewhat ironic. It's about bundling, per site performance in some cases, and more. In other words, the behaviors that eliminating neutrality would overtly allow are already what is helping drive competition in these areas.
If Pai is right then disabling net neutrality will help drive competition and investment in telecoms. If he is wrong then instead you'll simply see the doomsday scenarios I described in my first paragraph. So that gamble is disconcerting. There are rules and regulations in place for anti-competitive behavior that could help preempt some of these scenarios, but that's certainly hardly a relief given the current state of telecom operation in the US is presumably completely legal. But on the other hand before you assume the doomsday scenarios do come to pass, how do you think that would change the calculus for competition from an upstart? When Comcast/Time Warner only need worry about the price/speed of things, the determination of consumer perception is simple. When it starts coming down to far more nuanced issues of service management and packages, it's not so easy for them to simply say "We match this, exactly." In some cases that may not even be possible - an upstart ISP with agreements with various companies could create offerings that would be money losers for other ISPs.
I don't really think any one knows. I've since just figured all the FUD is just because half the nation doesn't like the current president. I've read a large part of the bill and nothing particularly stuck out as bad, though I admit I didn't read the bill that it is replacing.
I don't really think anything will change either way. Even though there are few ISPs to choose from, many areas have both a cable company and a telecom company to choose internet from and I think that is sufficient enough to keep either one from filtering or throttling. Case in point, I know plenty of people that will flip flop between spectrum and ATT every year simply because one has an internet plan that is $5 less than the other one for a year contract. Then rinse,wash, repeat on the next year.
"Many areas". So fuck everyone else then. I live in an affluent area, schools that score 10/10, and even I don't have two choices for an ISP. I have 100Mb/s with the cable company and 7Mb/s from the phone company. But yeah, I guess you and your buddies are ok then.
In Atlanta I have the option for ether 100mbps Comcast, or 35mbps ATT, sure other city’s have different offerings however Comcast is my ONLY fast option for myself.
With: sites are as fast as the slowest network link in a path from a server to your device.
Without: sites throttled or blocked completely, depending on the monetization,
political and/or any other bullshit whims of your internet/mobile service provider.
———
Evil Mobile cell phone plan options:
Want PornHub? $10/GB and $5/minute at 0.5 Mbps max, priority 1
Want Netflix? $5/GB and $30/month at 3 Mbps max, priority 3
Want YouTube? $10/GB and $20/month at 1.5 Mbps max, priority 4
Want YouTube in HD? Add only an additional $5/GB and $10/month, priority 5
ford.com, vimeo.com, pepsi.com and reddit.com not available on any plan.
gm.com and coca-cola.com available without data charges.
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I wrote my senator who is in favor of the repeal and this is his response (which I don't endorse - just forwarding as a view point):
"However, I do not agree with the FCC’s 2015 “Open Internet Order,” which abruptly decided, on a partisan vote, to apply outdated, utility-style regulations to the internet. This inappropriate regulatory framework was intended for monopolistic telephone companies in the 1930s. Instead of leaving the internet vulnerable to the consistent threat of interpretation and change by a group of unelected FCC commissioners, Congress should craft bipartisan legislation that preserves a fair and open internet. If the FCC reclassifies internet service providers, legislation passed by Congress will make policies governing the internet transparent and consistent; rather than subject to change from one administration to the next. This is an issue of great importance that requires a thoughtful, transparent debate on the best path forward."
Unless your senator has sponsored or cosponsored a bill advancing this platform, they are essentially lying to you. There is no need for the FCC to repeal the 2015 act for Congress to set up laws on the issue.
Even if you follow your senator's logic, you only need to compare current telcos to Ma Bell and draw some comparisons in order to toss out the idea that the regulatory framework is inappropriate.
This could all be taken care of if the internet would be classified as a utility like the telephone services. You can't do this sort of thing to a telephone service, as it is a government clasdified utility, and while that isn't my favorite thing in the world, if you did it to the basic levels of it, the laws governing it would (should) still apply to the higher levels if it. Won't happen with an obvious puppet put in as head of the FCC and a rubber stamp house and senate who placate a president with a 32% approval rating.
There was quite a bit of discussion last year about making the internet a utility. I don't remember all the details, but it has to go with how it will be treated federally, with taxes etc. and will cost more eventually if not.
I'm not too convinced either way though, so there's that.
The best argument I heard against was the stifling of innovation and it turning into land lines, which turned into useless monotech who refused to change without a form 37-41B, which most certainly did not exist. I can't argue that, as they're all hypotheticals, as all of these exist in a world of hypotheticals, including my original statement, so these types of discussions turn into sticky wickets super quick.
I appreciate the effort - but the internet is not the US. I don't think all the international users will be so pleased to be interrupted by nag-screens calling them to action for what, in the end is a domestic issue of the US.
We feel the same about the EU and all of the "THIS SITE USES COOKIES" banners.
It shouldn't be terribly hard to isolate the effects to browsers that request language-locale tuples from the US or run the JavaScript conditionally on the browser if the locale+timezone is set to something in the US.
I understand the frustration with making content region-specific, but the less annoying cookie-law banners irrelevant to my jurisdiction on the web, the better. I'd be personally fine with that sort of location-based variance: it's not that different from setting a default weather location for a news website, for instance.
If US loses net neutrality, people from other countries are also fucked, other governments are likely to follow the US path.
Besides let's be honest, 90% of the useful and interesting internet sites, companies, innovation originate in the US(from my personal experience). If it changes, that's bad for everyone.
It will affect startups as well. If you're interested in building an online business based in US, you don't want your site to get throttled.
besides a slippery slope argument is the a technical argument why it will be worse outside of the US? does the change only effect the last mile internet consumers or will this effect backbone connections as well?
i have seen a lot of stuff about the proposed FCC changes but every time someone asks about how this will effect non-US internet users the reply is always "because the USA is the best and your government will copy us"
Don't get me wrong i competently agree with the need for net neutrality, ISP's should not be allowed to throttle or dictate which data you can access or at what speed. I just want to understand the issue better and how it effects the global internet community.
I also don't think we should limit action to just the US region, if a website wants to protest let them do it for everyone to see, it might help when the fight starts in what ever country is next (apparently) but they do risk alienating global consumers who frankly don't care about US politics.
I don't know about the slippery slope argument, but there are lots of economic arguments why people and companies outside the USA should be worried.
BBC, Al-Jazeera, any kind of non-USA news site should be terrified of losing US business. They will be an obvious choice to not include in "default" bundles.
Any non-US video or music startup (imagine one competing with Netflix) will have no chance of getting off the ground in the USA, one of the biggest potential markets in the world.
More nebulous, but a bunch of startups in the USA that would have otherwise succeeded and brought innovation or service to other countries, will not be squashed a fail.
If the US starts selling domain/service packages to customers in the US, what stops them from doing the same to the cross Atlantic fiber lines? Or increasing the costs of services being provided to those lines?
I mean, I find it annoying to get a nag screen when I can't even do anything about it, but repealing net neutrality in the US will have plenty negative effects on me either way, so I'm perfectly ok with it.
It'll fuck competition in the US even more, resulting in even more monolithic companies from the US flooding our market and killing off competition here. And it will result in my data being sifted through by the ISPs of the webpage owners in the US, whose webpages I visit.
The best way to break the internet has already been done. It was when the CEO of CloudFlare proved that he had the ability to remove a site from the internet, simply because he didn't like it. When he did a lot of people applauded it by saying "but they are Nazis" - which is true - but isn't a defense of what he did.
Net Neutrality is dead - either by the FCC mandating it, or by Silicon Valley choosing which viewpoints are "allowed" within their walled gardens, which are quickly taking up more and more of the internet.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding net neutrality. CloudFlare isn't an ISP. CloudFlare removing a website is analogous to Google removing a link or Facebook deleting a post. CloudFlare is merely a third-party internet service that companies are free to use or not.
ISPs are different because they are much more prone to monopoly and abuse compared to CloudFlare. For a real life example, consider this: it's one thing for a bakery to ban Neo-nazis, and another thing for the public bus system. Granted, ISPs aren't public utilities, but they are much closer to one than CloudFlare, because CloudFlare provides a service that lends itself to competition. If you don't like CloudFlare, the upfront costs of creating a competitor pale in comparison to the costs of creating a competitor to Comcast or Verizon.
To that end, CloudFlare banning Nazis is just as much the death of net neutrally as me getting fired for calling my boss a "kike" is the death of free speech.
That issue was definitely a free speech problem, however, not nearly as threatening to free speech as net neutrality. Websites can move to other hosting providers or even self-host in your own garage. Without NN, an ISP can completely cut off access to many, many sites very easily. Furthermore, there are very few ISPs in the USA with consolidated power as opposed to many web hosts in the world.
Not justifying CloudFlare's decision at all, just saying that I view dismantling NN as a much bigger threat.
Whether or not you believe him, the CEO claimed [1] he dropped them because they falsely claimed they had his support, not because of the content of their website.
It's worth noting that was the public statement.. the internal email[1] was less altruistic:
> "This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
> Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet."
Wow. That is bold. In most ways I think that is an insane abuse of power. In others...I kind of respect it. Effectively it amounts to probably nothing, but for a period of time that's a proper GTFO
There's a difference between refusing to serve someone because of race, gender or sexual preference (none of which is a choice, and none of which causes harm to others) or religion (which is a choice but does not by definition cause harm to others though some religiously motivated actions may) vs refusing to serve someone because they actively advocate harming other people, which for one thing is a choice and for another is (duh) harmful.
This false equivalency around Nazis and free speech makes me vomit. If they could, the advocates of this extreme free speech position would force a descendant of holocaust survivors to host speech by people who actively advocate killing him or her.
It is only the government that has an obligation to censor no speech whatsoever (and even that obligation has limits when such speech leads to physical harm - the "'fire!' in a crowded theater" standard). Private entities have no such legal obligation.
And just as your right to swing your fist ends where my face begins, my moral obligation to broadcast someone else's speech ends where the threats or advocacy to harm people I care about (physically or even by boycotting, or reducing their civil rights and liberties) begin.
Edited to add: And in this category, I include (non-exhaustive list by any means)... slander/libel ("Jews eat babies!", "The gays are all child molesters!") - which is on its own harmful. Intention to intimidate ("Let's march through the minority neighborhood in white hoods", "Let's bring our firearms to Charlottesville and show them who's in charge") - which causes harm by interfering with people's right to go about their business free of fear and intimidation as long as they're not attacking anyone else.
I think there's an argument to be made that nobody has a moral obligation to provide a platform for any speech they disagree with. Whether or not you agree with that, I'd consider the above standard (threats/advocacy of harm, broadly construed) highly defensible.
When i read "break the internet" i was kind of hoping for something more radical, like the screensaver software Lycos made back in the days, to fight spammers by DDOS: "Make Love Not Spam", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lycos_Europe#Make_Love_Not_Spa...
I’m all for activism, but it’s pretty clear that Pai doesn’t care what “the people” think. He isn’t an elected official, he doesn’t need to raise money, he is guaranteed a few board seats or consulting positions after his term that will pay millions. I fear there is no stopping this one. We need to spend our efforts on the long term - state laws, 2018/20/22+ elections - rather than burning energy on a lost cause. The battle is lost, but the war can be won.
Sure Break the Internet but also remember protesting the wrong way -- annoying people who don't have an interest in the topic will turn them against the cause.
I may be alone, but this feels completely hopeless. This administration is the most corrupt, craven, and citizen-hostile in our history. Net neutrality is hardly the biggest problem facing America, and they keep doing much worse things, almost out of spite. And Congress has proven to be utterly feckless in their duty to hold the executive branch accountable. So I guess I just don't really see the point of engaging, because they. do. not. care. about. us.
At the end of the day, we need to flip control of Congress. I don't think anything else will work.
I would say don't blame the administration. Blame the corps and don't wait to vote every 4 years in the elections, vote every day with your wallet.
To start, be reactive, switch to T-Mobile or any telco that is pro-net neutrality
Then start being pro-active. Look for bad patterns in companies and punish them. For example, Google says they support net-neutrality but are happy to block amazon devices from playing youtube. Maybe it is time to give a clear message to Google that behaviors like this are not accepted by you?
Replace Google with any X company. Don't be surprised if in 20 years X-company will only allow you to access X-stuff on X-devices running on X-network.
Money is what makes the world go around. Use your money to steer the world to the direction you want.
Or, you know, just keep using Google and Verizon because it is more convenient. But in this case you lose your right to complain.
Binge on also "optimizes" your stream for mobile performance, i.e. throttles it to the data rate of SD, which is also against the rules in net neutrality.
> The important part is that T-Mobile is not one of the companies that want to destroy net neutrality.
T-Mobile gets free press and gets to publicly swipe at AT&T and Verizon (the big gorillas in the mobile data space), but what they are doing is called "zero-rating" which isn't very different from violating the principles of Net Neutrality.
The difference between data that is accessible versus partner data (NN) is that is gratis to access (zero-rating) isn't that much if you can barely afford your cell phone bill (which is about 50% of the US population if surveys about financial savings are to be believed).
I proved to you that T-Mobile is violating net neutrality and you respond with "T-Mobile is not one of the companies that want to destroy net neutrality"
You don't seem to understand what net neutrality means, but you're not alone, it seems like few do.
Why would you recommend that people protest NN repeal by switching to a service provider that you claim is "pro net-neutrality" despite the fact that they built and delivered a product that is in violation of NN?
My theory is that your understanding of what NN means doesn't line up with what the law says.
Consistent with the 2010 Order, today’s Order applies its rules to the consumer-facing service that broadband networks provide, which is known as “broadband Internet access service”
(BIAS) and is defined to be:
A mass-market retail service by wire or radio that provides the capability to transmit
data to and receive data from all or substantially all Internet endpoints, including any
capabilities that are incidental to and enable the operation of the communications
service, but excluding dial-up Internet access service. This term also encompasses any
service that the Commission finds to be providing a functional equivalent of the service
described in the previous sentence, or that is used to evade the protections set forth in
this Part.
Ive never understood how such a system is profitable. Surely it costs them money to provide streamig service. How is it that they are able to sell it for free? Perhaps it is provided as a loss leader?
I think it helps them control costs. My understanding is T-mobile is basically providing a lower speed than normal pipe for video so it streams at a lower quality. On mobile it probably quality doesn't matter as much, so overall it reduces the overall network bandwidth.
The problem with that argument, is it's damn near impossible to simply buy your way out of a rigged system. It's a nice premise, shopping ethically, but much like recycling isn't going to stop climate change, there's only so much power an individual consumer has in a large and complex system with perverse incentives.
Obama's administration got a lot of things wrong too, but at least we won that fight, right? At least they eventually responded to their constituency? I may have the facts wrong though, please correct me if so!
Yep you’re right. I just want to make sure this isn’t a “left” versus “right” issue or an “anything but Trump” issue. This is about corporate sway of people who don’t have a lot of background in the subject.
Congress was feckless when the Democrats controlled it, too. Congress has been growing increasingly useless for the last 30 years at least.
Something is breaking in US politics. Or, rather, several things are breaking - decency, civility, honesty, common sense, and probably several other things. I don't know what the root cause is, or even if there is only one.
Simon Sinek has an interesting hypothesis about the cause of the breakdown in politics in his book "Leaders Eat Last". I'm giving a very brief summary, but in that book he suggested that most US federal politicians used to live a lot of their careers in Washington DC, attend similar social events and send their children to the same schools, which helped them relate to each other (across party lines). It is suggested that the closeness created decency and civility between them, but now that a lot of them still live in their home states, they no longer see the opposition as similar to themselves, and it's become a "us vs them" kind of thing for everything.
The root of the problem is we only have 2 choices: red vs blue. 2 choices is only slightly better than no choice (1 choice). With just 2 choices, almost no one gets what they want. And every 4 years, one party just undoes what the last party did.
What we need is 50 different choices. Let each state do what it wants, give states most of the power. States should get most of the taxes, federal should get a small sliver. Federal government should be small, and only do things that can only be done at the federal level. States having all the power is how the US started out and that's how it was meant to be. We need to get back to that. The US is way too large for a 1 size fits all policy.
There's that and the fact that our federal representation being so heavily based on the arbitrary geographic divisions that are states is in practice a giant gerrymander in favor of rural voters. Some rural citizens of low population states (say, in Wyoming) have Senate votes that carry 100 times the weight of the Senate vote of a citizen of a large state like New York, California, or Texas. Their Congressional vote may have nearly triple the weight of that of a city dweller simply because of minimum district sizes in states with more than one district, and their Presidential vote 8x because the 2 extra electoral votes corresponding to the senate seats are diluted among fewer congressional districts.
As long as we have this system, our democracy and the ideal of "one person, one vote" is a joke.
Oh happy friend! There is only one choice. All our congresspersons represent the rich and Princeton University did the analysis to prove it: https://youtu.be/5tu32CCA_Ig
Flipping congress isn't something that is just going to happen spontaneously. The change will take work and coordination from many people to accomplish that goal.
So engaging today isn't just about fixing this issue in this moment (which I'd agree is unlikely), but it's also about finding others who believe as you do and maybe crossing paths with them as part of a community protest activity on and offline, and helping to create communication networks that do help flip control of congress (but I'd add also reinvigorate the voice of more regular people) in the future.
Other than that, I'm not going to wade into politics here on HN today (learned that lesson the hard way a few times) other than to say I think we are at a point where actual representative democracy is at stake over the next couple years, and net neutrality, while a huge deal, is small potatoes compared to the fights we need to figure out how to win.
Representative democracy is in real danger, if not already lost. To me, what's damaging it is that representatives regard themselves as representing Team Red or Team Blue, instead of their constituents.
I think the coming fight is over Constitutional limits to executive power. If we lose that fight, it's game over. If we win it, we can worry about trying to fix representative democracy.
It's almost tragic poetic justice that all the people on the right /and/ left that were trying to convince the middle that you don't concentrate so much unaccountable power in the Executive Branch during the Obama years only had to wait until the next election cycle to see what happens when someone truly unfit for that power grabs the reins.
I've been following this administration closely in the past year. It appears that they do nothing in good faith. Just look at how Congress tried to pass the health care bill and tax bills. If you want to fight for net neutrality you better turn out to vote for candidates who support your position. At the end of the day control of Congress is the only way to ensure this.
Have you considered that maybe there are thoughtful reasons why people might disagree with your policy views? If you really can't understand conservative policy aside from it being "corrupt, craven, citizen-hostile and spiteful", then I don't think you're giving the issues an objective analysis.
I can sympathize with the idea of relying more on market-based approaches, but in my view that would require pretty aggressive anti-trust enforcement. In other words: I can see an argument for allowing monopolies but regulating them heavily (a-la the AT&T of old), or for light regulation in a highly competitive market (and relying on competition to prevent companies from screwing their customers).
It seems like most Republicans want neither significant regulation nor significant anti-trust enforcement, and I just can't see how they would honestly expect that to produce any result other than a small number of monopolies charging customers whatever they want and ramming whatever practices they want down their customers' throats.
My view on this administration is about more than their policy positions.
For the record, I grew up conservative, my whole family is, I'm fairly libertarian in my views, and I didn't vote for either major party due to their policy positions. I understand conservative policy perfectly well.
For the record, I'm not much different from a stereotypical commie pinko in my views, but I agree that this administration is cynical and "for sale" on a whole new level, and would vastly prefer dealing with actual libertarians or conservatives. I'm actually somewhat conservative myself, in the sense of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." But pick your favorite issue, and there's a good chance that the Trump folk are on the wrong side.
You are being disingenuous at best, because Ajit Pai certainly has a principled argument against the FCC inventing Net Neutrality. You may disagree, but you are just making ad hominem attacks about corruption. I think this interview with Hugh Hewitt and Ajit Pai sums up his position clearly. TLDR: The FCC doesn't have teh authority to regulate the Internet, Congress does. If you want net neutrality, pass a law.
HH: Now I want to geek out with a fellow lawyer. Years ago, Dick Wiley tried to get me to become a coms lawyer, and I didn’t choose that path, and I’m glad about that. You went down that road, but I want to talk to you more broadly about the Chevron deference issue that came up with Justice Gorsuch in his confirmation hearings. The Congress has never passed anything about the internet. There is no predicate for you guys to regulate. And to me, that’s the beginning and the end. And the idea that we would have Chevron deference towards rules that have no predicate in a legislative act is extraordinary to me, Chairman Pai. Do your Democratic colleagues not get that?
AP: Well, I think they tend to think that the law is more elastic, that even beyond Chevron, if there is a gap in the law, that you can simply essentially make it up, even though Congress didn’t necessarily have the internet in mind when it crafted Title II in 1933 which I think is a fair assumption. Nonetheless, they think the worst thing in the world would be, to be, to have a market that is simply unregulated. We have to find some way to fit this square peg of 2017 into the round hole of 1934 laws. And that’s part of the problem, I think, is that Chevron presumes that an expert agency is acting within the scope of its expertise. And I don’t think it was here. It was more of a political impulse to, as I said, solve a problem that doesn’t exist. And that is, that’s buttressed by the fact by President Obama’s instructions who was to adopt these regulations. We didn’t adopt them of our own free will in 2014 and 2015.
HH: Well, this takes me back to why I favor what you guys do on the AM/FM band, for example, is rooted in a real law that existed, that was passed after radio came into being, and when people understood that there would be problems. When I bring up Mexico stations, it’s, I’m asking the FCC to do what it was intended to do. But obviously, nothing has ever been passed about the internet in the way that you are empowered to regulate concentration between AM and FM bands, and we talk about the subcaps. You are not authorized by the original Constitutional Article I authority to weigh into the internet.
AP: That’s exactly right. We are an independent agency that is a creature of Congress, and thus, we can only exercise the authority that Congress has given us. And the argument I’ve consistently made is like look, I know that this is an area of great public interest, but the right way to channel that public debate is through Congress…
There are thoughtful reasons why people might disagree with policy views, yes. And, speaking as a conservative, I appreciate you trying to keep people from painting me with their broad brush.
But (again speaking as a conservative) there is something completely abnormal about this administration. It rode to power on conservative votes, but it isn't a conservative administration. It seems mostly to be knee-jerk ego-driven reflex reaction to each day's hot news, rather than coherent policy.
Perfectly said, but ironically, since I'm not on "the other side" here from a political perspective. I voted for Bush twice, Obama once, didn't vote in 2012 (sadly) but would have voted for Romney, and wouldn't be saying any of this if Mike Pence was president. But amusingly, you assume that my disapproval of Trump means that I'm "on the other side" and just spouting platitudes. Ironic.
For better or worse (probably worse) we have a two party system, and one party has full control of Congress and the executive branch. So "flipping control" in this case means breaking that lock on power. I don't really want Democrats to hold Congress and the White House either.
Nothing will fix everything. But that wasn't my claim, so I'm having trouble seeing how your comment is being made in good faith. Is this just a "whataboutism" to imply that Democrats are just as bad so it doesn't matter?
It's clear where this debate is going. But to take us back to where we started, I would suggest that it's highly unlikely that a Clinton-administration FCC would be preparing to repeal the Title II protections for broadband. Not that I don't care about plenty of other issues, but the difference on this one seems clear.
Actually, they didn't get half the votes. And the tribalism that's rampant in our politics today means that many voters are making choices based on lies and misinformation.
I'm not above falling victim to bad sources, confirmation bias, or other foibles of human knowledge, but I try to be aware of that and guard against it. Not perfectly, I'm sure, but that imperfection doesn't mean that we all have an equal grounding in the truth.
This downward spiral into a crisis of epistemology ("who can really know anything for sure? there are so many lies out there! there is no way to discern truth!") is a fundamental strategy of authoritarian regimes (Russia), and it's being put to good use in this country.
As a non-american, both side seem to be equally part of "they". H. Clinton is only the "other side" of Trump because the american politic system is de facto bipartite. Which easily answer one's wonder: "they" did not only get half the vote, "they" got all of them.
To the question "how did they got the vote to be finalist", I'm afraid I don't have a better answer that the one that's repeated and repeated so much that it's becoming a gimmick: money, media, fear and stupidity
Is there any difference between being able to pick and choose TV channels through a cable provider, and being able to pick and pick and choose services via ISPs?
Seems like a lot of people are against bundling when it comes to cable providers, but it seems to be the same arguments would apply to being against NN.
Why aren't all of the major tech companies pouring money into a swarm of lobbyists to stop the repealing of net neutrality if they are concerned it will be bad for business?
The shoestring startups are the ones that will be hurt, not deep pocketed tech
companies.
Major tech companies already live in an environment of parasites that sue them daily like non-practicing entities + patent infringements. This will just become another "fee" they pay.
Plus, Ajit Pai has already been seated as FCC commissioner. He already has a Republican majority on the commission. It's basically a foregone conclusion and lobbying Congress now is too little too late. If tech companies with clout were going to do this, they would have done it years ago.
Well, I hope the FCC vote goes through, just to annoy all the opposants to Trump. And since I don't live in the USA, but in a state without net neutrality, but with an healthy competition in the sector, with strong pro-consumer laws, it won't affect me much.
Still, in my opinion, the current situation is not freedom vs corporation, but more an opposition between old internet companies (ISPs) against the more recent ones (google, twitter...)
These are great suggestions. It would be even better to add a link to greenpizza13's explanation WHY the free internet is so important (for your untechnical facebook friends).
Some years ago Mr. Schwarz died defending the internet, don't let him die twice.
Yes, he was making papers freely available online. Papers that are created by the U.S. Academia system, which (in my opinion) is a highly regulated / controlled / subsidized ecosystem of institutions.
As far as I know Schwarz never campaigned for the Department of Education to mandate "open access" to papers. Using Schwarz' name here to imply he would be -for government regulation- seems extremely wrongheaded. Using any deceased persons life as an aid to your own cause seems extremely wrongheaded too, but I suppose the major religions of the earth all rest on that very tactic...
So, I think we, as a community, have just been nerd sniped, big time.
Every time the topic of net neutrality comes up, there's a top level, completely reasonable sounding post that says "why is this bad", and completely derails the vast majority of the discussion away from the topic at hand and into arguing back and forth about what is reasonable and what isn't.
Articles then disappear as these discussions trigger HN's flamewar detectors, quite effectively burying the topic. For example, right now there's 140+ comments on a story with fewer than 100 upvotes. I mean, just look at the number of responses the "Would anyone care to explain to me pros and cons" has spawned, and not a single one talking about the actual article.
Perhaps I'm just paranoid, but derailing topics with arguments is a well explored method of stopping productive discussions.
TL;DR: Someone, at this point, who claims they have never "understood" net neutrality and wants a "thoughtful discussion" is lying to us in an attempt to derail discussions.
[EDIT] No, this is not a charitable view of someone's potentially pure motivations. But after a few dozen iterations of the same thing again and again, you stop being charitable. Sorry.
You've obviously broken HN's civility rule here. That's not ok. HN is a big place and the things that seem completely obvious to you may well be quite unclear to someone else. This is one of many reasons why the site guidelines ask everyone to assume good faith. Threads occasionally getting derailed isn't great, of course, but that's a lesser concern than people attacking each other.
Then feel free to email the mods, explain my no-good-nick ways and ask for a remedy of some sort to whatever harm you believe me to have done rather than talking trash about me in public.
There was plenty of flaming going on before I asked for nonflaming explanations of the issue. And it looks to have not dropped off the front page. So I don't see the harm you are imagining.
Re your edits: There is nothing wrong with noting that noob questions get asked routinely about x subject and that it is problematic when large numbers of people jump on answering such questions. The problem with your comment is in injecting ugly characterizations of the asker and assuming I knew this would get a lot of replies. I didn't. I frequently ask or post things that are utterly ignored.
Holding me responsible for the decisions other people made to reply en masse is ridiculous. Why not hold them responsible for choosing to be the umpteenth person who felt compelled to reply?
I am not feigning ignorance. I have looked it up before and I don't feel I understand it well enough to jump on board any activism happening. If I am going to call my congressman or something, I want to do so because I think it matters, not because it is the trendy thing to do.
People complain about non IT people being sheeple, but if you ask a question here in good faith hoping knowledgeable types will actually enlighten you, you get called a liar?
> TL;DR: Someone, at this point, who claims they have never "understood" net neutrality and wants a "thoughtful discussion" is lying to us in an attempt to derail discussions.
This is not a charitable opinion. Reading old threads on NANOG¹ has convinced me that net neutrality is more nuanced and technical than the "people vs big-ISP" narrative advanced by campaigns such as the OP. If anything, the reddit and battleforthenet bandwagons have created a hostile environment for actual debate.
¹ AFAICT, the majority NANOG opinion on net neutrality is that it doesn't actually address the underlying issue that prevents natural competition in the ISP market.
I will add that anyone who ever wonders why women/blacks/whomever may not feel comfortable here, this * type comment would be one reason why. It presumes malice for asking an honest question and then talks trash about the asker. If you don't already know what "insiders"/the majority here know and think what they think, god help you for trying to find out.
There are plenty of ways to comment on the concern of the discussion being derailed by noob questions that don't involve personal attacks, assumptions of malice aforethought, etc.
I think it's not necessarily a malicious act. Seems like an honest tactic to start a debate.
I think the bigger problem is the unending "It will be just like cable" meme, complete with infographics and blah blah blah.
It turns an issue with many serious consequences into one that ISP companies can "solve" by just not doing that. Are they blocking torrents, banning VPNs unless you get a business enabled account, extorting fees from companies, engaging in zero rating deals, etc... absolutely.
But you can access pretty much whatever site you want. So obviously everything is okay because what reddit said was wrong and we can trust the ISPs.
> [EDIT] No, this is not a charitable view of someone's potentially pure motivations. But after a few dozen iterations of the same thing again and again, you stop being charitable. Sorry.
falcolas, I was going to ask something similar to Doreen had she not posted first. While I can understand why you might assume that these posts are intended to derail and deceive, I think it's more parsimonious to believe that these HN posters are genuinely looking for discussion and enlightenment.
None of the posts you provided seem sinister. The only thing shared between them is that the posters are hesitant to throw in their support without a detailed argument befitting a complicated issue like net neutrality. An explanation like the following (battleforthenet.com):
What is net neutrality? Why does it matter?
Net neutrality is the principle that Internet providers like
Comcast & Verizon should not control what we see and do online.
is insufficient to someone looking for something more comprehensive. If anything, the FUD and tribalism¹ surrounding this issue are clear signals that the underlying truth is probably quite complicated.
¹ From battleforthenet.com:
We are Team Internet. We support net neutrality, freedom of speech.
They are Team Cable. They want to end net neutrality, to control & tax the Internet.
Sigh. I don't know who made that page but if they thing tweeting every 10 minutes or changing your job desc on LinkedIn will get anyone's attention, yet more everyone's, it's not even wrong. It's just sad.
Moreover, everyone's attention would be completely useless, as everyone, especially everyone who reads random twitter feeds of people that have time for such shenanigans, have absolutely zero input to FCC decisions.
Of course, you can do all this and feel you contributed to a great struggle. Or you might spend this time doing something useful. That's always an option.