What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States.
Think about it: these are service plans offered through cables that already exist, and that cross defined borders right? But what all an ISP has to do to offer different service plans in California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona is to merely offer different terms to different people based off the State they reside in. That’s just paperwork (and you know, delivering on the agreed upon service for the agreed upon price), not automobiles.
So I don’t really buy the argument that because California did a thing, ISPs couldn’t do all the supposed bad evil stuff they were going to immediately do once the FCC failed to “save the internet” anywhere else (although maybe other States also did the thing California did).
Users in California may download from a service in New York. Users in New York may download from a service in California. I suspect it would be more expensive than it's worth to have asymmetric infrastructure that would allow them to them to throttle the New Yorker without violating the law for the Californian.
All that network management would require teams of engineers and specialized hardware, all for something that may change on a whim and be obsoleted. What if New York copies California law? Bam. That investment instantly evaporated.
It's probably not worth it to add in a whole bunch of BS just to try to make a bit more money in maybe Fl and Tx.
Especially given the fact that it's not as straightforward as it seems - and legal consequences could easily outweigh any benefits.
On top of that, I'd be surprised if ISPs tried to throttle traffic even in Fl and Tx and people in those states didn't pressure their government to ban it as well.
> Net neutrality is wildly popular with the public.
I didn’t say it explicitly but I think this is the real reason that the ISPs largely haven’t changed their business practices independent of what the FCC says it can or can’t do. They don’t want the FCC in their shit, but they also don’t plan to do all of the worst case scenarios envisioned in say, this video from 2006: https://youtu.be/cWt0XUocViE
> Netflix ultimately paid ISPs for interconnection but the dispute had an impact on the FCC's net neutrality proceedings. The FCC didn't ban interconnection payments but set up a complaint process so that companies like Netflix can challenge specific payment demands as being "unjust" or "unreasonable." There have been no major public disputes since then.
So I mean, I get it. In 2006 it was easy to see how turning the Internet into cable TV would be terrible, but if that was ever a danger, it probably isn’t now? And the internet is so much more important now that if it ever did look like that was going to happen, we could pass a real law then. In the mean time I’m going to enjoy listening to the court proceedings when the FCC is sued because they said they didn’t have the power to govern ISPs when they had a different set of commissioners.
> Net neutrality is wildly popular with the public.
In the tech bubble.
Outside of the bubble you will be hard pressed to find people able to actually articulate what net neutrality is. And those people are easily swayed by partisan means: ('The democrats want more government regulation that's going to increase your internet and wireless bills') ISP's only have to claim 'your costs have gone up due to new government rules preventing us from selling discounted service' or something to that effect and you will find that 'widespread' support eroding away.
Average Joe and Jane consumers are quite familiar with data limits, more expensive access to highspeed data, throttled data based on arbitrary stuff, etc. People may not have heard of net neutrality, but that doesn't mean the basic concepts are over their head.
"AT&T could choose to throttle your streaming data when you don't use their partnered app to watch sports on your phone" cuts through the BS pretty directly.
Same way California auto standards impact auto standards across the entire country. California is the most populous state with a higher disposable income. At some point, creating a product specifically for 12% of the US population with money to spend while maintaining a separate product for the rest of the country becomes too much of an economic burden and the standard gets applied across the board instead.
> What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States.
What I've never understood is the argument that what Europe does regarding privacy could actually affect the privacy of other countries.
Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally because it is easier and cheaper to do that than do a "means testing" and apply specific rules. Creating all those rulesets makes for an increasingly complex system, makes it more prone to error (which includes doing those banned actions within California and resulting in a lawsuit), and just is overall more expensive. Determining country origin is presumably a lot easier than determining state origin too. Not to mention that California is the most populous state and the biggest tech sector. Pretty much the argument is ISPs have bigger fish to fry when they're restricted from doing something to a large portion of their customers.
No one and nothing are truly independent. That's always been a lie being sold. Choices you make affect others and choices collectively made affect you. It's literally the definition of a society. On HN we have these discussions about Chrome's dominance allowing them to have control over how the internet is structured. We've had these discussion about Apple's dominance influencing right to repair. And so on. Monolithic forces are never going to be stopped by single player boycotting. My usage of Firefox for over a decade never did anything to dethrone Chrome and I never expected it would, but hey, it also can't happen without people like me. Just needs to happen at a larger scale.
When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders and laws governing it. My ISP throttling their New York customers who try to use Netflix isn’t going to affect me. Honestly throttling their Oregon customers wouldn’t either.
This is factually different from Facebook who serves people independent of their location, residence or citizenship and don’t give a fig about who your ISP is because laws might cover someone based on any or all of those whereas a Californian who invades Texas is no longer covered by California-specific consumer protection laws, and to the extent that businesses choose to adhere to them in Texas is incidental. ISPs are very much bound by the location they setup infrastructure in in the way that the services you access through that connection are not as evidenced by the fact that they already take into account your residential address when determining 1. if they can service your location at all and 2. what services and what quality guarantees they can make to you.
Also just to make a note on GDPR, one of the screwy things about it is that covers EU citizens. EU citizenship is a complicated enough thing, but there’s a lot of people with EU citizenship living elsewhere in the world. Fully complying with GDPR is a much more onerous requirement in terms of infrastructure and professionals you need to hire than ISPs complying with a net neutrality law in one State. I’m not saying there’s no additional overhead, it probably is easier to have contracts that are as standard across as many markets as possible, but ISPs are already skilled at working within local jurisdictional requirements.
> When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders
It's messier than that. This works if all NY, OR, <whatever state> gets its traffic distributed through a guaranteed hub in those locations. Specifically when you know the end point of the user. Let's just take the simple case and say a Google employee sitting in a CA office is working with a Microsoft employee sitting in a WA office and assume OR has a throttling service. The hubs along the way are Seattle, Vancoover, Portland, Eugene, Redding, SF. Do the Portland and Eugene servers throttle? To do this they'd need to know: 1) the source destination, 2) the final destination, 3) the type of traffic, 4) the type of service, and so on. Are they going to have that? Probably not. And then it'd be trivial to get around if you start using encrypted traffic and encrypted DNS services. The ISPs just can't do that wish such granularity that they don't risk being sued by CA.
> Also just to make a note on GDPR, one of the screwy things about it is that covers EU citizens.
A note on the CA thing, the DOJ and several ISP lobby groups tried to get CA's law overturned at a federal level immediately after it was passed. It's been upheld. So they kinda already looked at a solution that strongly implies what the parent implied about other states likely implementing similar laws were the ISPs to start such fuckery.
CA here isn't just acting as a filter in that they do a thing and so having to work around them is more cost than its worth. They are _also_ an example, where they tried to get the laws overturned and failed. So they don't want to get any more similar laws in other states because that will have even more of an effect and tighten what they can do even further.
ISPs are already rate-limiting users based off the service tier they paid for. If you’re paying for 250 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, you’re not getting the 1 Gbps down 5 Mbps up connection that your neighbor is offering. If you choose to upgrade to the 1 Gbps plan, you’re using the same equipment over the same wire.
Choosing to then sell you an additional premium option where you get the full 1 Gbps you theoretically could get but don’t already pay for, but they’ll give it to you for a selection of curated services including their own is possible, and to incentivize you to not use a VPN, they won’t count it against your data cap when you access Netflix at 4K on 4 screens simultaneously because you’re now a VIP customer—all of that would violate the spirit of net neutrality. T-Mobile already does similar things as a “bonus” for their customers and technically, it’s not net neutral. There’s all kinds of ways to discriminate between paying customers, and that was the original fear of not having net neutrality: that the internet would become just like cable TV. That hasn’t happened with or without net neutrality as law (or as an FCC rule at least). Pretty much most markets have explicit data caps on some ISPs at least now, but the way it started was ISPs rolled that out slowly, over the course of years, market by market.
You are correct that other States could pass similar laws. I don’t follow the politics of other States much, but if California can do it, so can they, but other States can’t rely solely on the fact that California did a thing and now they don’t have to bother taking any legislative action themselves, if it’s important anyway (and I’m not convinced this particular issue counts as important). California even won in Federal court, great! There’s precedent for it now, but that doesn’t mean ISPs would necessarily lose in a different circuit, and they could always force a circuit split in a friendlier district.
I know for a fact there are tech companies that build out separate systems for EU and US data pipelines. It's not really a big deal to have a lawyer look over the data that's being collected and flag stuff as can be collected in Europe, and can be migrated to the USA for processing. Companies generally run EU-specific infrastructure anyway. GDPR is honestly one of the easier aspects of operating in Europe.
> I know for a fact there are tech companies that build out separate systems for EU and US data pipelines.
Great, me too. I thought it was clear in my first sentence...
>> Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally because it is easier and cheaper to do
The FCC declared that it didn't have authority to regulate net neutrality. When they did, California declared that if it's not in-scope for the FCC, then there's no federal-state conflict in California regulating it themselves.
Parent is saying that California may not have the legal authority to regulate the internet in that way, since some powers are given only to the federal government.
Whether they do or do not have the authority isn't something that can be answered by anything but speculation until it's been tested in court, and I don't think any of the ISPs had enough to gain through packet prioritization that it was worth the risk of going to court.
"Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously in January 2022 that California's net neutrality law may continue to be enforced and cannot be overridden by the FCC as, current as of the decision, Internet services were classified as information services."
There's still one more higher court that can overturn that decision - SCOTUS. They could conceivably rule that no government agency, state or federal, has the ability to enforce such regulations.
That there was a hail mary appeal to the Supreme Court possible that they elected not to pursue does not negate that the issue is clearly not that the broadband ISPs didn’t see “enough to gain through packet prioritization that it was worth the risk of going to court”.
That's fair. SCOTUS is a roll of the dice lately, and there's no way of telling what crazy rulings they might back. As far as I know, though, that ruling hasn't been appealed.
Exactly. Even if their laws only technically apply within California, no car maker is going to build a car that cannot be legally sold in the single largest market in the US. It gets even more difficult with the internet as there are few internet providers who don't have at least some kind of connection to California and therefore fall under its jurisdiction, and ensuring you only apply prioritization to packets that don't involve California is extremely tough.
These emissions regulations don't cover just California, but most of New England, the Pacific, and the mid-Atlantic states as well. I think New York has a way to "fast track" new emissions laws from California, so that the states are kept in sync.
"California cars" were a thing in the early days when emissions were difficult to comply with. Even modern cars come with a "50-state compliant emissions" line item on the window sticker.
If California ratcheted up emissions standards too high, there's the possibility that such segregation could emerge again, particularly when it comes to trucks. There are already several trim levels of trucks that are specific to Texas, because the market there is so big. I could see a truck coming with a sticker that says, "RAM TRX can not be registered or sold in CA, WI, NY, [...] due to emissions restrictions."
> I thought the internet was purely a federal law domain
It is not, there are plenty of state laws that have applied to the internet. On the specific issue of net neutrality, the FCC in 2019 lost in the D.C. Circuit in its attempt to assert that state law regulations for neutrality were preempted, specifically because the repeal rested on them reclassifying in a way which means they don’t have the power to preempt state regulations.
> It looks like this law was challenged on those grounds
It was (EDIT: well, not on the broad “internet is a federal law domain” grounds, but the narrower “net neutrality regulations by the states were preempted by the terms of the FCC neutrality repeal” grounds), by multiple parties, and those challenges failed.
> but the challenge lasted until after Biden was elected and the suit dropped.
No, while the DoJ dropped its case then, the case making the same arguments by the broadband industry continued until the industry participants dropped it after the Ninth Circuit ruled (similar to what the D.C. Circuit had previously), that by reclassifying broadband under Title I in its net neutrality repeal, the FCC had removed its ability to restrict state regulations, which would only exist if it were regulated under Title II.
Why would you think it was a federal law domain? The federal government is technically only allowed to do what is granted in the Constitution. The 10th amendment says anything else is left to the states. Last I checked nothing in the constitution mentioned the internet. Not that the federal government lets that stand in their way.
Like the other comment said, the internet is basically as interstate as a thing can get by design.
The interstate commerce clause is extremely broadly interpreted. It can, for example, be used to prevent a farmer from growing grain on their own farm to feed their own cattle that reside on that very farm(Wickard v. Filburn)
I think Wickard vs Filburn is one of the worst decided cases out there. If I live in California and visit a website hosted in California there is no reason why there should be any interstate commerce involved.
That is possible, but not guaranteed. I don't think the federal government has any authority to regulate the traffic that remains in one state only the traffic that goes through another state. I would also mention that not all traffic would be commerce as well. Going to HN isn't commerce so I don't think the federal government would have any authority even if the traffic crosses state boundaries unless it is genuinely commerce.
Yet it can’t be used to stop California vehicle emission standards, which is why almost all car manufacturers in the US make cars up to California’s higher standards, because they’re so big.
In fairness, while I detest that California's laws become de facto national laws, it doesn't seem appropriate to use the commerce clause there. California isn't trying to regulate interstate commerce, it's not their fault that manufacturers are too cheap to have different models that meet California's standards while having a normal model for the rest of the country.
Not a lawyer, but I found an explanation about why states can pass net neutrality laws. Communication over the internet has both interstate and intrastate components. More on the intrastate component later. The Commerce Clause gives Congress authority to pass legislation to regulate interstate commerce [1]. Congress can also delegate a portion of its authority to federal agencies such as the FCC.
What happens when the FCC chooses to abandon its authority to regulate ISPs? More specifically, what happens when the FCC chooses to deregulate the ISPs by reclassifying broadband from Title II to Title I? Then the FCC cannot preempt state laws regarding telecom unless Congress gave it an authority to do so. In Mozilla Corp. v. FCC, 940 F. 3d 1 (D.C. Cir., 2019), the FCC tried to argue that it could preempt state net neutrality laws [2].
Quoting the page 132 of the case text PDF (which you need to download to ctrl-F, since Justia's PDF viewer messes up whitespace between words) [3][3.5]:
> Third, the Commission points to 47 U.S.C. § 160(e). That provision says that “[a] State commission may not continue to apply or enforce any provision of [the Act] that the Commission has determined to forbear from applying under subsection (a).” Subsection (a), in turn, gives the Commission some flexibility to forbear from regulating technologies classified under Title II. Id. § 160(a).
> That Title II provision has no work to do here because the 2018 Order took broadband out of Title II. So the Commission is not “forbear[ing] from applying any provision” of the Act to a Title-II technology. 47 U.S.C. § 160(e). On top of that, Section 160(e)—as a part of Title I—does not itself delegate any preemption authority to the Commission. People of State of Cal., 905 F.2d at 1240 n.35.
In short, the FCC gave up its authority to preempt state net neutrality laws the moment the FCC reclassified broadband from Title II to Title I.
There's another important point which starts on page 134 and continues to page 135 [3.5]. (If you want to ctrl-F it, you'll have to select just the first few words because page breaks in the PDF obstruct paragraphs.)
> Not only is the Commission lacking in its own statutory authority to preempt, but its effort to kick the States out of intrastate broadband regulation also overlooks the Communications Act’s vision of dual federal-state authority and cooperation in this area specifically.
Meanwhile, back on page 126 [3.5]:
Section 152 of the Communications Act provides, as relevant here, that “nothing in this chapter shall be construed to apply or to give the Commission jurisdiction with respect to * * * regulations for or in connection with intrastate communication service by wire or radio of any carrier.” 47 U.S.C. § 152(b). That provision divides regulatory authority “into two separate components: interstate communications, which can be regulated by the [Commission]; and intrastate communications, which cannot.”
Therefore, states actually have Congress's blessing to regulate broadband to some degree: states have authority over communications confined within the respective states.
So what about the Dormant Commerce Clause, which prohibits states from "passing legislation that discriminates against or excessively burdens interstate commerce" [1]? I don't know whether courts have come to an answer about whether state net neutrality laws violate the Dormant Commerce Clause. So instead I'll pose food for thought: To what degree do you think state net neutrality laws burden interstate commerce? Is the burden excessive? Net neutrality means that an ISP can't restrict traffic on the grounds of content, senders, and recipients [4]. What kind of burden does that place on an ISP which offers internet in multiple states?
I don’t know the specifics of federal authority when it comes to internet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it fell under interstate commerce, which is how they justify federal drug laws.
I can live in California and visit a site in California and my traffic might not leave the state. That is pretty much irrelevant now that Wickard v. Filburn is a thing though.
Internet communications which exit/enter the state do, but there's still the issue of communications which stay within the state. The states have Congress-given authority to regulate intrastate (not interstate) internet communications. Moreover, by reclassifying broadband from Title II to Title I, the FCC gave up the part of its authority that allowed it to preempt state net neutrality laws. I wrote more on this technicality in a different comment [1].
Even when conduct could Constitutionally be regulated by the federal government under the Commerce Clause, that doesn't preclude state regulation unless Congress has (1) specificallly regulated that states may not regulate, or (2) has regulated in a way which the State regulations at issue would fundamentally conflict with.
So, yes, the internet is Constititionally a thing the federal government can regulate, but that doesn't make it Constitutionally a thing state governments can not regulate.
I can live in California and visit a site in California and my traffic might not leave the state. That is pretty much irrelevant now that Wickard v. Filburn is a thing though.
The lawsuits over the FCC repeal, the California law, proposed laws in other states, and the Presidential election and the expectation that the FCC would revisit the issue and readopt neutrality regulations (and that any major conduct violating the neutrality principles made that both more likely and would be specifically targeted in the new regulations) all contributed to restraint.
>T-Mobile’s situation is a little more complex: most customers shouldn’t have any issues with iCloud Private Relay. But those who use content filtering services (like the carrier’s Family Controls) won’t be able to use iCloud Private Relay, the carrier tells us.
Which is reasonable, since a content filtering service is incompatible with a VPN
There have been many reports of ISPs overwriting ads and adding content to non-https content. Also bundled content on mobile providers not counting against caps, etc.
Many also lie on speedtests, though I don't know if that counts.
In the neighborhood where I live, there are exactly two choices: Comcast or AT&T. Every time I think I have a grip of which one is more evil, I am proven wrong.
(Starlink is not an option, for a huge number of reasons that I won't get in to here. T-Mobile has an attractive-looking wireless 5G package for home Internet, but hide the fact that you're getting third-world service via CGNAT, which means it is really only useful for content consumption.)
Interesting as this talking about performance degradation and payments from netflix to comcast in Dec 2013-Jan 2014. Nextflix happened to raise prices of their service a few months later in Apr 2014...
And when Netflix stops paying money to ISPs, the ISPs will get that money from... your pocket.
All of this is fungible and companies compete for the marginal dollar of revenue. Despite the wishcasting of central planners, there's no magic way to manifest money out of the pockets of one class of corporations without the system shifting to a new equilibrium.
Tell PA to stop granting them a local monopoly in my area then. I'll gladly switch when I have an alternative that works. I have nothing here in rural western PA except comcast and they have just been jacking the cost up year after year and sucking more and more.
Their big argument there was around asymmetry. "Netflix sends us a huge amount of data. That's not what peering was made for - it was meant to be more equal sharing of traffic. That's why we want to charge them."
So how about "We send BackBlaze, Dropbox, Acronis, etc., huge volumes of our customer's backup data, so we should be paying them"?
This was why Netflix setup Fast.com to use production servers and use data loads that mimic actual streaming video. Early on in streaming ISPs were throttling Netflix traffic when the household streaming demands started spiking (around 6 at night when every house in America would get home and turn on some streams). I believe there was a whole fight over peering agreements related to that... Speedtest.net was definitely getting gamed and may still be or at least Comcast et al was prioritizing burst traffic because residential customers realized the 'up to' home internet service could be pretty bad if your cable lines was over subscribed.
> Speedtest.net was definitely getting gamed and may still be or at least Comcast et al was prioritizing burst traffic
Hell, during the height of this Comcast partnered with Speedtest, and now hav their own Speedtest servers all over the country, so you don't even leave Comcast's network.
> Hell, during the height of this Comcast partnered with Speedtest, and now hav their own Speedtest servers all over the country, so you don't even leave Comcast's network.
Most ISP's do, and if you tell it to use the server of some other provider off-net they'll happily make the excuse that "we can only guarantee bandwidth to the edge of our network."
It's a crap excuse, because, duh, you have no control over the path traffic takes once it leaves your AS on hopefully the best route - but if you have poor connectivity to your peers that's still on you.
I think most larger ISPs current have their own speed test nodes these days.
It’s problematic if they don’t, because if Comcast detects a virgin running a speed test, they can throttle virgin traffic to give lies as results. So virgin need to run their own nodes.
If you kill net neutrality, that behaviour is legal.
Simplest way to do this: good speed on Speedtest, rubbish everywhere else.
Also, by default Speedtest tests the connection from you to the nearest testing node. A lot of times it's the one hosted by your ISP, so the measured speed is the speed inside the ISP's local network and not the speed from you to outer Internet.
I've been using the Google widget when you search "speedtest"
It tests using a node 200+ miles away (they tell you where) AND it actually shows slow numbers when the pipe is slow. Turns out Amazon Video was the culprit, somehow using 80% of a 100Mb connection for a single stream...
> I've been using the Google widget when you search "speedtest"
Google doesn't show me this widget, but the speed test on Google Fiber's website is just a frontend for Ookla's Speedtest I mentioned. So I suspect that the widget does the same or similar stuff. I don't know for sure though.
> It tests using a node 200+ miles away (they tell you where)
"200+ miles away" from your physical location doesn't mean "outer internet outside your ISP". It doesn't mean "far away from your ISP's network" either.
For example, some mobile carriers may operate country-wide, but route everything through Important Central Connector To Outer Internet™ in the capital city. Consequently, internet services think that user's phone is in capital city.
So while you see "City 200 miles away" as a test node, it may actually be the closest one because your ISP's network structure adds these mandatory 200 miles. ISP's internet access node and speed test node may be literally across the street or in adjacent server racks.
Not saying that it is certainly the case, just trying to explain why words on test screen may mean things different from the ones we assume.
> AND it actually shows slow numbers when the pipe is slow. Turns out Amazon Video was the culprit
From your words, it didn't show you slow pipe. It showed you regular one that was busy with streaming video.
Also, ability to watch streaming doesn't necessary indicates actual internet speed since streaming services like Netflix can provide ISPs with the hardware for caching [1] and streaming from inner ISP network. Not sure if Amazon does that though.
> Amazon Video was the culprit, somehow using 80% of a 100Mb connection for a single stream...
Amazon streams with a higher bitrate than most of the competitors. 80 Mbps isn't that surprising given that Bluray disks have 40 Mbps bitrate for 1080p video. With streaming you also preload some video ahead in a buffer, so hitting 80 Mbps is completely normal.
The other node is in another country that does not have the same ISP. Again, it seemed accurate, so not sure why your even bringing it up. We could watch it change as we turned on and off the Amazon stream. That's how we figured out that it was this one service, not the ISP or Internet at large
Amazon says how many gigs per hour it uses for different qualities, none went over 2 digits in an hour, so there should have been sufficient bandwidth.
I have had my internet dragging to crawl open speed rest and suddenly all of my tabs finish loading and have decent speed for the next 30 minutes just to slow down again. I am considering making a cron job to run wget to load speedtest home page every 20minutes
Your ISP controls the flow of traffic to many different networks. Speedtest is always on a fast connection to give you the big number. Meanwhile they may aggressively throttle traffic to 80% of the other networks. Fast.com is a better speed test that is more (but not wholly) representative of your bandwidth to the internet at large.
This isn’t lying, it’s measuring something accurately but not measuring what you want it to measure. There isn’t a contract or regulation that they can’t prioritize certain traffic.
It does feel a bit deceptive, I grant. But to me, lying would be if they tricked speedtest into display 10mbit when only 2mbit of traffic was transferred.
Everyone games the tests. That’s why you can’t trust just about any performance test unless you run it for your workload.
I think other comments have already answered this. But in the back of my mind I imagine if companies abused it much worse than they did, they would've gotten much more unwarranted attention, and it was already deeply hated amongst tech savvy people and ISPs are already some of the most hated companies in general. Taking advantage while they could have would have dug that hole yet even deeper and would only make it more likely that a law would be created sooner rather than later making it illegal, so it just wasn't worth the investment on any meaningful scale.
The original Net Neutrality rules exempted cellular. The FCC used Title I regulatory authority hoping to use a "light touch" least ISPs sued and an appeals court voided the regulation with the rationale the FCC did not have the authority to do as long it continued to classify broadband as Title I "information service" instead of "telecommunications."
When the Net Neutrality regulations were re-done the FCC re-classified broadband as Title II "telecommunications" for more solid legal authority.
When the FCC changed to Republican majority they repealed the regulation and reclassified broadband back to Title I.
Yea that's probably an example - those companies get preferential treatment on the network w.r.t traffic and so competitors have a harder time entering the market.
If you're on the top plan then you haven't experienced it. The irony is that T-Mobile was one of the ISPs throwing support behind net-neutrality, and now they are one of the most aggressive net discriminators.
I don’t think bundling other paid services counts. It’s only if the ISP treats the traffic to/from those paid services differently that you run afoul of net neutrality.
TMobile gives me free Netflix, but I use it on my television which uses my home internet. So even if they zero-rated that service, in my case it's irrelevant.
Plus I think I have an unlimited* plan, so zero-rating something doesn't have much impact.
yes, they extorted netflix and other big providers into paying them or else they'd use the lack of net neutrality to basically delete their service. Which ends up meaning you pay more for streaming services like netflix and it's competitors.
Directly, I think every ISP that allowed unlimited traffic for their own streaming media service while counting third party streaming services against a cap.
Any financial lever will get pulled, its just a question of the right enshitifiers in charge, so just a matter of time. Expecting anything else is naive imo.
This is exactly the kind of thing I point to when disaffected people say that voting for Democrat or Republican presidents makes no difference. I'm not saying either are roses, but one has clearly different results in unsexy-but-important issues like net neutrality.
It's not clear to me which party is more supportive of a 'free' internet. During the Trump and COVID era Democrats became much more aggressive in advocating for and explicitly pushing censorship regimes against what they consider to be misinformation.
Probably any political faction on earth is going to want to control information flows to their advantage. Whoever you vote for will probably want to censor or limit the reach of the speech of their enemies. The parties don't have actual principles on this stuff--vote for whomever has the same enemies as you I guess.
If I were able to convince a large swath of the population to participate in a suicide ritual a la Heaven's Gate, do you think that it's wrong to quash the spread of that message on the internet?
It is not wrong for websites to restrict certain information by their own choice. It is wrong - unconstitutional, even - for the government to force them to do so. You should read a bit about Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) [1] and Hess v. Indiana, 414 U.S. 105 (1973) [2]. (By the way, suicide is not lawless action anyway. Whether advocacy of it is lawless is a different matter, but likely free speech.)
While you bring up important points, they take away nothing from the merits of restoring the FCC's authority to restore net neutrality rules, and the FCC's authority as a whole has nothing to do with misinformation on the internet. Moreover, I think that courts will strike down Democrats' unconstitutional speech laws (such as [1], should it ever pass) at least as reliably as they strike down Republicans' book bans [2].
> Probably any political faction on earth is going to want to control information flows to their advantage. Whoever you vote for will probably want to censor or limit the reach of the speech of their enemies. The parties don't have actual principles on this stuff--vote for whomever has the same enemies as you I guess.
I'm reminded once again of why I dislike the political party system in the US. Principles are not necessary for candidates to win votes, and the political parties don't value people with principles, such as Gigi Sohn with respect to internet access policy [3].
I agree with you and should have been more clear on this point: net neutrality is something I support and anything in that direction is a good thing. It's almost hard not to be a cynic now, but kudos are in order here. I just am sufficiently disillusioned with the political parties that I'm a bit knee-jerk against anything I perceive as tribalist there.
Yeah, I know and agree, but I've had (my only) two comments flagged for being more direct in accosting enlightened centrism.
Disgusting to me to see people on this forum of normally highly intelligent people comparing in any degree the side that tried to over throw democracy, denies basic science from vaccines to climate, is against voter rights like mail in ballots/accessible polling stations, against women's and gay rights, with the democrats, even with all their problems. Frankly it is straight evil, or supremely ignorant at best to do so.
Enlightened centrism is indeed a fog used to hide conservatism though, just like "libertarian", "centrist", and "independent" (in the US), but you have to be careful calling out centrism on this forum.
fwiw, I'm not a centrist. I am to the left of both major political parties in the United States on issues of political economy. I worked on democratic political campaigns and grew disillusioned with that party many years ago, largely (but not solely) due to their ties to Wall Street / etc.
I am more centrist on social issues, in that I share mainstream opinions on gay rights, etc (I've always supported gay marriage). It's not great if you think I'm the big evil supremely ignorant person that you think is an enemy in sheep's clothing. Brandishing people with whom you presumably have much in common as evil makes it difficult to build a majoritarian political coalition.
>grew disillusioned with that party many years ago, largely (but not solely) due to their ties to Wall Street / etc.
The first issue I take with your comment. Politics is not a religion you need be fervently impassioned about, it's making a pragmatic choice.
Especially in the US, that means choosing between two corporatists, agreed. But this gives me very big "a lefty was mean to me on twitter and THAT'S why i vote for fascists now" vibes. I don't care what their ties to wall street are. I care which party is the better option for the working class. Which support things like a stronger NLRB? When you stop with the religious purity bs you can ask material questions about who is better for X. And the answer is always democrats if the X is anything but "the .1%".
>I am more centrist on social issues, in that I share mainstream opinions on gay rights, etc (I've always supported gay marriage)
Ok, you must be longggg out of politics or playing glib here. Supporting gay rights is NOT centrist. One party supports gay rights, the other is burning and banning books that mention gay people existing and calling trans people groomers. This is what i mean when I call centrism fucking evil. The sides are NOT comparable.
Saying "durrr but dey both take money so samsies???" is so ignorant and vacuous a statement as to be malicious from someone who has SEEN a college, which I presume most people here have.
>It's not great if you think I'm the big evil supremely ignorant person that you think is an enemy in sheep's clothing
Big evil? Nah, probably not.
>supremely ignorant
Yeah. Much more likely you are. If you think supporting gay rights is a "centrist" position, you are not paying attention.
>Brandishing people with whom you presumably have much in common as evil makes it difficult to build a majoritarian political coalition.
No, the literal fucking fascists in our midst gutting the voting rights act, removing polling stations in democratic counties (look up harris county voting), gerrymandering to the point 65% votes gets you 35% of the legislature, trying to literally stage a fucking coup, deny vaccines, climate science, etc etc etc, are the f'ing problem. If you are a centrist comparing them, you are complicit in their fascism, or supremely ignorant. Which are you?
I don't define centrism as some middle point between the two parties. Polling on same sex marriage and relationships is highly supportive, I'm among the great bulk of people on this. At one point my position was relatively radical, but it is now a mainstream view.
My view on political parties in general is they all have a constituency, they work to serve that constituency to the extent they must to continue being voted in, and morality beyond doesn't have much to do with their behavior. To the extent parties can maintain the vote of their constituencies / coalitions by demonizing the other instead of actually delivering, all the better. I've watched things quite closely for many years and all I conclude is parties are amoral entities. I don't pay as much attention to the theater now as I used to, but I know what's going on.
I don't have loyalty to any party, but I do make the pragmatic choice you're speaking of when elections come around and even donate to candidates, usually in Democratic primaries. I've voted for green or other candidates in the general elections for the past few cycles, though it doesn't matter in my district.
As for lefties being mean to me, trying to impute that I'm stupid, ignorant or fascist or complicit in this or that, I don't really care. My feeling is it reflects worse on them than me. I don't have to reduce all of reality to some Manichean conflict between good and evil. I find I like living in the world more without having to view roughly 50% of the population as horrible monster people who are voting for evil.
As if given by the gods to illustrate my point, https://x.com/noliewithbtc/status/1716927057954029974
don't try to credit the republican voters as supporting gay marriage when they oust their own for supporting it, lol.
>Polling on same sex marriage and relationships is highly supportive
So is support for abortion, but what party is passing anti choice laws?? Don't make the mistake of excusing those who vote for fascists because they claim not to support the things republicans do in office... That is the issue of centrists.
Missing the only important bit because of some polls. What they do. The laws they pass. I do not care what republican voters say they support in a poll. If you vote for republicans you vote for evil, for death. From ectopic pregnancies of those who can't access medical care to excessive covid deaths, eg medical workers who got it from the maskless hog who ended up in their ER. Republican voters are not excusable people because they say they support some less than evil shit sometimes in polls.
If you can recognize the need to at the end of the day be pragmatic why do you give a fuck what the polls say they support? The only thing that matters is what those in power do. And republicans are going after something ~70% of the public support in birth control access. So i don't care what they say they support. The fascists they vote for do evil.
>I don't have to reduce all of reality to some Manichean conflict between good and evil.
Again this hand wavey platitude acts like I'm not talking about a material reality. A real political party. One that empowers climate change denial, vaccine denial, voting rights restrictions, bans on women's medical autonomy, trans discrimination, book bans, etc etc etc I could go on. This is not some philosophical exercise on good vs evil this is a cold hard recognition of the material evil that the conservatives are in the US. That said to be clear I make no statement on any conservative s/ism outside of the US.
I'm still broadly convinced that the whole net neutrality outcry back in 2017 was due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how peering works and misplaced anger due to the peering dispute between Cogent and Comcast (and Verizon, and I'm sure plenty of others).
None of the promised apocalypse materialized, because the marketing materials used to make the case for it were fundamentally wrong.
> None of the promised apocalypse materialized, because the marketing materials used to make the case for it were fundamentally wrong.
Keep in mind that states passed net neutrality laws [1], and large ISPs such as Comcast and Verizon tried to ban states from doing so [2]. Even so, the reclassification of broadband from Title II to Title I formally removed much of the FCC's authority to regulate ISPs at all [3]:
> A big part of the FCC’s plan involves rolling back the FCC’s tailor-made authority over broadband providers, then shoveling all remaining government oversight to an FTC ill-equipped to handle it.
> Why is that a problem? The FTC has no rule-making ability, and can only move to protect consumers after a violation has occurred. And that action can only occur if it’s painfully clear that an ISP engaged in “unfair and deceptive” behavior, something that’s easy for an ISP to dodge in the net neutrality era, where anti-competitive behavior is often buried under faux-technical jargon and claims that it was done only for the health and safety of the network.
Federal net neutrality rules were significant but nonetheless were a fraction of the broadband consumer protection debate. You are correct that an apocalypse didn't happen. Rather, the US already was mired in monopolization, fraud, and regulatory capture. These are problems net neutrality can provide only a bandage for. The FCC couldn't begin to help with the larger issues without restoring at least some of its Title II authority (regardless of whether the FCC would actually acknowledge the monopolization in the first place [4]).
What we need is to move all last mile infrastructure to municipal broadband.
US ISPs have been an unmitigated disaster that have exposed everything wrong with how infrastructure is built under a capitalist organization of the economy. Monopoly franchise agreements, rent-seeking, bundling of cable channels, lobbying for laws against net neutrality, lobbying for laws against municipal broadband and lobbying for laws against "overbuilds" in general.
On top of that ISPs place significant hurdles over anyone who gets permission to build. This can be as simple as the process by which cables are strung up to poles. In some places each pole may require a separate planning application and existing cables may need to be moved. The owners may have 90 days to move their cables. They will take that. They may even take longer and just pay the fine. If several need to be moved they may be done serially so it may take 1-2 years just to get permission to put a cable up on a pole that the city technically owns.
We have service blackspots where ISPs are given huge sums to roll out service and simply don't. A lot of municipal broadband started because Comcat, AT&T, Spectrum or whoever simply refused to provide service or charged a ridiculous amount (eg $50k to connect).
The best Internet in the US is municipal eg Chattanooga.
Utilities are heavily regulated because we know what would happen if they weren't: inelastic demand would simply result in providers jacking up prices to increase profit. People would die from necessities like electricity, water and heating being withheld.
I support net neutrality but it largely wouldn't be necessary if we had municipal broadband and the infrastructure for virtual network providers. Some effort would still be required for peering arrangements.
Not an American: what is the non-libertarian public-facing argument against net neutrality?
I'm sure its opponents say it's bad for the general public for some reason, and one of them might be some kind of "let market competition work it out" etc. If you discard that, what is left?
There is probably also the argument that various businesses want this repealed, this is kind of clear.
There are 2 'net neutrality' items in play and are conflated and team lines drawn up ages ago.
One is the double charging of services. Buy service XYZ on the internet then the ISP says 'hey you buy or special package or ABC is throttled'. That is the one most people think of when they hear net neutrality. Or 'we have not cut a deal with XYZ no data for you'.
Then there is the 'stop the cap' ones. Where 'hey here is a nice unlimited service except when you use more than X data then its not'. 'want more data pay for more on top of your "unlimited" plan'.
Also at one point both 'sides' playing the other side. The donations flowed and the 'sides' were drawn up. I have watched this since it started. That was wild to watch. Then instead of passing laws to do it right they again are pretzelling the existing laws. Made some up and said yep thats good. Each "side" of the argument has had control of both houses and the presidential. Yet none of them got it done. Instead we are going to end up with more rubish and no real laws. Just made up interpretations that can change on a whim (and it will).
Then both sides are pretending there is robust competition and not oligopoly/monopoly pricing. When the reality is I used to be able to choose from 20 ISPs with different perks or whatever. I can now realistically pick between 2. They are then stepping in with a bunch of rules that make it even harder to make an ISP. That is by design and called regulatory capture. Not once have they talked about how to make competition more robust.
If you look at Ajit Pai's (former Verizon lawyer turned FCC chairman who did away with NN) comments, he basically says "there is no problem to solve".
However, you can read through this thread and see if you feel this is true or not today in practice, let alone in perpetuity in theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37945011
This is not true at all. What it means is that an ISP can't prioritize their own video service over say, Netflix. Or their own (perhaps ad-infested) download service vs a straight ISO download from a distro's site.
Net neutrality prohibits ISPs from restricting internet traffic based on content, senders, and recipients [1]. It is not exclusively about restricting internet for profit reasons.
The former Net Neutrality regulations provided exceptions for an ISP's own VoIP (phone), IPTV and other managed services. That means the bundled phone service is inherently more reliable than an unaffiliated VoIP service using best effort delivery. As long as they did not anti-competitively block or hobble a competing over the top phone service they were legally fine.
On cellular the effect of priority is much more apparent. The "bundled" phone call service has very high priority and can function normally under network stress/congestion. Over the top Whatsapp or Facetime calls will suffer audio glitches or fail to connect under the same conditions.
Indeed. There should be no need for bandwidth "allocation" because fiber would provide enough for high-bandwidth tasks (video and games) and low-bandwidth tasks (sending emails) at the same time, for everyone. If large ISPs hadn't been purposefully committing subsidy fraud instead of building fiber, they wouldn't have to rely on lies about network scarcity. (For bonus info, see another comment I wrote [1].)
Data traffic goes up to the physical limit, and everyone's services get sluggish with "no way" to fix it. Of course they could spend more money to fix it/compete but wanted an alternative.
I really wish more of my fellow network engineers contributed to these conversations but alas.
As weird as it might sound, net neutrality really doesn't present any meaningful technical challenges.
As a network engineer working for one of the big service providers, the only major change I foresee would be the person telling me which/whose traffic they want me to prioritize/throttle...
The other aspect I wanted to mention is when we're talking about service provider networks QoS ought to be viewed as a short-term answer rather than a permanent solution. (which is almost always more bandwidth) Think of it like taking a pain med when you have a cavity... Great way to alleviate some of pain in the moment, the problem is only get worse if you don't see the dentist.
Some applications want extremely low latency compared to pretty much anything else such as cloud gaming. Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently. It's kind of like how when ordering stuff online, sometimes you don't care if it takes 3 weeks to arrive but other times you want same day shipping. It would be a bad experience if USPS was forced to only offer one priority class for delivery since people ok with slower delivery would be forced to pay for faster service than they need and people wanting faster delivery wouldn't have that option.
However, I think rules could be put in place to prevent the anti-competitive practices without limiting the legitimate use cases for going against net neutrality.
> Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently.
This is not convincing to me at all. ISPs could have supported low latency internet for everything, not just for gaming. If latency is too low then it's because the large ISPs are purposefully doing a bad job of upgrading to fiber and expanding fiber to places without internet access. Fiber would allow ISPs to provide service for cheap and still profit in the long term [1]. Subsidy fraud is as normal as breathing among large telecom companies such as AT&T [2], Comcast [3], and Verizon [4].
Internet bandwidth is not like shipping of physical goods. Sending twice the data doesn't cost the ISP twice the money, nor does it take twice the time. Data caps are artificial and unnecessary [5]. Any ISP trying to justify expensive, fast internet by bringing up metaphors of physical transfers and physical scarcity is lying to you.
You can believe whatever you like, but the fact is that it is may be expensive to get the necessary agreements on the backend for extremely low latency. I'm not talking about negotiating for 15ms, I'm talking about negotiating for 2ms latency.
> Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently.
Could you provide an example of how net neutrality might impact a companies ability to form peering relationships and/or raise the difficultly of securing reasonable/enforceable SLAs with service providers?
One group of corporations lobbying for a brand new law to cripple another group of competing corporations, with the side effect of good PR and a theoretical benefit to consumers, is not the proper way to regulate this issue.
The primary reason for people supporting net neutrality is due to the existence of clear-cut ISP monopolies. This problem of monopolistic ISPs could be easily solved by enforcing the existing anti-trust laws that have long been on the books. Net neutrality essentially gives these monopolies a pass, so long as they make some vague promises about not throttling.
Net neutrality is the convoluted nonsense regulation that gets written by politicians who are trying to balance the various sets of competing lobbying interests.
The correct and proper solution would be to simply enforce existing anti-trust laws.
> Did you catch the part about "give the FCC more authority"?
The FCC ceded authority as a way to get around having to make a damning call not to assert net neutrality under the last administration. Unless I'm misreading, this is just a return to form.
Be careful about how short you cut quotes. "give the FCC more authority" is irrelevant in a vacuum. "more authority to protect national security" is worrying, but to me comes off as performative nonsense and overstepping authority on Commissioner Rosenworcel's part. The FCC does not have authority to censor speech. And the FCC does not control surveillance by ISPs. (The NSA [1] does, and the FBI takes advantage of it [2].)
What the FCC does need is the authority to restore net neutrality laws, which it can't have without reclassifying ISPs back to Title II. Admittedly, Congress would do well to pass legislation declaring ISPs utilities and giving the FCC the authority to enforce net neutrality without invoking Title II.
Sidebar: I was 1000% pro-Title II last time this came up in 2015 and went through https://www.battleforthenet.com/ , I think to email my legislators.
Fortunately, I used a tagged/aliased email address. That address has apparently gotten into the Democrats' "never lose this email" bin. I regularly get emails from politicians I absolutely never wanted to hear from, all to that email. I try to unsubscribe, but they won't let me go.
Thanks for that link but I'm having trouble parsing Ben Thompson's argument.He says that he's in favor of net neutrality but against this specific regulation.
Why?
Because...I think...at some point somebody fell for a fake tweet? Also because regulation is bad because of..completely unrelated example of regulatory excess involving restaurants in SF?
I mean, is he saying he's against any regulation of anything, now? Or just against Title II? I'm sure he can't seriously mean the former. But as to the latter, I honestly missed the part where he substantiates why Title II specifically is excessive.
Seriously, I think I clearly missed a crucial step in his argument.
You're right--I don't read a specific "here's the onerous parts of Title II" bit in that article. I think his argument is that:
1. The problems that supporters say net neutrality would fix are fictitious (the tweet), already handled (Comcast and bittorrent traffic), or not necessarily addressed by net neutrality (zero rating)
2. Title II classification entails much more regulation than net neutrality
3. Therefore applying Title II to ISPs will raise the barrier to entry for new entrants and not address the supposed harms
> at some point somebody fell for a fake tweet?
Not just "somebody"--the guy who coined the term "net neutrality" and advises the government.
Ok, thanks for the clarification. Even there I think he's presuming some bad outcomes and discounting good ones, but I do understand the reasoning. I appreciate your reply.
For a relative layman like myself, can someone give examples of recent actions by providers that would be illegal under the Title II rules? Like, would null-routing websites by Tier 1 providers be made illegal?
Is data portability being treated by any government group? The last time I tried LinkedIn denied my access to their API, it seems it is "arbitrarily open".
I don't know, but that has nothing to do with the FCC. The FCC does not have the authority to regulate what online companies do. Data portability is something Congress has yet to pass laws on. If Congress passes such a law, then it would probably place the responsibility of enforcing data portability onto the FTC.
> Title II regulation isn't just about net neutrality, Rosenworcel said, arguing that the reclassification will give the FCC more authority to protect national security on broadband networks. "When we stripped state-affiliated companies from China of their authority to operate in the United States, that action did not extend to broadband services, thanks to the retreat from Title II. This is a national security loophole that needs to be addressed," she said.
I know I'm far too cynical these days, but this smells like the beginning of the Great American Firewall.
My impression is that Commissioner Rosenworcel is just being performative. Let's be clear that net neutrality has only incidental relevance to national security. (At most, a rare national security issue would result from something similar to what happened when Verizon throttled emergency responders [1].) Also, in case anyone else brings the following up, net neutrality has nothing to do with government censorship of speech. Moreover, the FCC does not have authority to regulate speech on the internet (or any private speech at all, after the FCC repealed the misleadingly named Fairness Doctrine [2]).
Even if you have a problem with other parts of Title II, net neutrality is a net good for consumers. Or, it would be if the FCC believed in fighting for consumers in the first place [3]:
> And while Democratic FCC Commissioners Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks talk a good game about bridging the “digital divide” and addressing the “homework gap” (a lack of affordable broadband for kids), they generally lack the courage to even identify that concentrated monopoly power is the primary reason US broadband is spotty, slow, and expensive. It’s a political risk to do so.
There was at least one major (non-residential) ISP that used Huawei routers in a lot of places. Due to the previous law/rulings they were required to replace all of them with non-prohibited vendors.
The quoted segment sounds like they want to extend that to residential ISP's which makes sense to me. Using network hardware from an adversary nation is very risky. Especially when it's China which has an extensive record of state involvement in it's tech companies.
Fortunately there is no indication yet that regulators in the US want to get involved with routing, or anything resembling a great firewall. The closest thing to that right now is "age verification to visit porn sites" laws that some states have enacted.
> There was at least one major (non-residential) ISP that used Huawei routers in a lot of places. Due to the previous law/rulings they were required to replace all of them with non-prohibited vendors.
That ISP not be fulfilling that requirement due to insufficient funding.
Yeah, I understand the premise, but I would need to see a cost breakdown before I accept the claim that they needed significantly more money than they already got. Industry groups have a tendency to plead for handouts endlessly.
Lobbying and fund-scamming are disproportionately done by major ISPs. Small, local ISPs are far, far less likely to have the resources to - 1) pull it off and 2) insulate themselves from the consequences.
The original parent comment was referencing a local ISP.
There are plenty of overt attempts at legislating surveillance and censorship, so there's no point in being paranoid in cases like this, where the government is probably just trying to prevent cheapskate companies from buying backdoored hardware from foreign countries. Legislation that accomplishes that will actually improve privacy and free speech for a change.
This might be changing in a recent SCOTUS case [0]. The Court may indeed rule that agencies must defer to Congress (although usually they state that such cases aren't meant to be changing precedent as a whole and just rule in the particulars of one case).
Our laws are very similar to our medicine. We take a pill that causes a side-effect, which requires a pill to fix that side-effect but causes another side effect... so on.
We start with state interference of the free market in a small way, and it mangles the fair game. And then we "need" laws to "protect" us from issues caused by state interference in the first place.
Regulation is a response to bad behaviour, not the cause of it.
We started with a free market. People acted poorly. In came regulation. Specifically: regulation that was not imposed on us as society, but of our own choosing.
Not to say that regulation can't cause issues of it's own. But regulation (believe it or not) is there for a reason, even if imperfect.
Actually, it's quite telling that you confused 'free market' with 'fair game'. Who says a free market is a fair market? Free market doesn't mean fair, it means free. Free to exploit people, to act monopolistically, to abuse your market power and inflict pain. It does not mean fair.
>Regulation is a response to bad behaviour, not the cause of it.
Regulation is a means to an end. Sometimes the goal is to curb some bad behavior. Sometimes the goal is to give the appearance of doing something (like looking tough on crime). Sometimes the goal is fundamentally corrupt, such as the bans of municipal fiber networks pushed through by incumbent ISPs. Sometimes the regulations even mostly achieve their goal without much in the way of unintended consequences. But it's certainly not as simple as regulations are always an effective response to bad behavior that do not themselves cause bad behavior.
Leaving it up to what people are willing and capable of doing sounds as fair as can be to me. That's what competition is there for. It also is not perfect, but it is better.
I expect to get dogpiled on Hacker News though. The demographic here has a fondness of rules. We give computers rules. That fondness translates to non-technical fields, for better or for worse. In this case, worse.
> Leaving it up to what people are willing and capable of doing sounds as fair as can be to me. That's what competition is there for. It also is not perfect, but it is better.
Is it better? Congress and the FCC has never done much to punish wrongdoing by ISPs [1]. Large ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon commit subsidy fraud with impunity. (See the links in my other comment. [2])
And on the issue of fairness, large ISPs [3][4][5] and some government officials [6][7] do their best to prevent broadband subsidixes from reaching small local ISPs. At the very least, the FCC should (and won't, but should) place heavy penalties on large ISPs for their abuses of customers [8]. By heavy penalties, I mean at least 80% of the revenue gained from anti-competitive practices.
>By heavy penalties, I mean at least 80% of the revenue gained from anti-competitive practices.
How is a fine of less than the proceeds a heavy penalty? There needs to be punitive damages or personal liability for the responsible executives, otherwise it's still a profitable business strategy.
I prefer my markets free as in GPL, not free as in BSD. Net Neutrality ensures the freedom of the market itself. Absence of Net Neutrality gives incumbents the freedom to lock competitors out of the market.
Capitalism only works if purchasers can choose between options that are competing on their own merits. Monopolies are the opposite of a free market.
I like the metaphor, because people try different combinations of meds until they reach a tolerable state that was better than the starting condition.
I think it's an incredibly succinct way of describing how libertarians look to non-libertarians "just let the free immune system decide" to hell with these medical "interventions."
Did ISPs throttle competition?
I haven’t seen any reports of this happening. I haven’t seen any studies showing this happening systematically.
I’m woefully uninformed, so I really would like to hear more about this. What has been happening these past few years?