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The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes (stanford.edu)
433 points by rsingel 8 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 320 comments



The thing that is actually missing from this entire essay is competition.

The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite is because of the monopolies that exist.

In the EU there are similar offers for "enhanced" access, but its not speeding up/slowing down apps, but giving "free" access, as in not counting to your data cap.

Instead of making the FCC stop fast lanes, the FCC should either be breaking up infrastructure from retailers (ie allowing regulated priced access like openreach) or splitting up operators and fining ones that dont provide proper access.


Actually, the empirical record on this shows that we see more net neutrality violations by ISPs in marketplaces with high competition.[1]

This is counter-intuitive but here's how it works:

In a competitive marketplace ISPs have tighter margins and look for every opportunity for cost savings, so if throttling a high-bandwidth application only affects a small percentage of customers, and only a tiny tech-savvy minority of those affected will accurately attribute the effect to ISP throttling, it will incur only the tiniest competitive pressure on the ISP, so the ISP will do it to increase profits.

We actually saw more net neutrality violations in competitive EU markets than in the US, until EU-level net neutrality rules passed.

Another way to look at the limits of competitive pressure is from a startup's point of view: if your startup is offering a new videoconferencing service, how will competition help you when a rogue ISP breaks your service for 10% of your customers by throttling your service but putting Zoom in a fastlane? Your customers will not think "oh, I'd better switch to a better ISP," when ~10% of call participants are unintelligible. They will think, "oh, this new service sucks, I'm going to stick to Zoom."

Competitive pressure on ISPs does not protect nascent startups with small userbases from ISPs. And yet, everything we care about on the Internet started as a nascent startup with a small userbase.

Competition is great for keeping prices down and the US needs more of it. But to protect the long tail of startups and all the new ways people use the Internet from ISPs you need net neutrality laws.

1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2700055. Key finding: Relying on consumer switching behavior to provide more comprehensive competitive discipline was insufficient for a variety of reasons, including the presence of switching costs.


Why doesn't the monopoly employ the same cost-saving measures for even bigger margins?


> Why doesn't the monopoly employ the same cost-saving measures for even bigger margins?

They would.

The issue is that competition alone wouldn't fix it, because there is an information deficit. Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors. And since this is always bad -- it's anti-competitive in the market for over-the-top services, so this is an anti-trust rule -- it should be prohibited regardless of whether there is competition in the ISP market. Because you need it in order to preserve competition in the markets for other services.


Except I live in one of the places that has widespread competition (Utah) and can pick from one of dozens of Fiber Internet providers, including some that can provide 10Gbps service, a cable company, and even technically Starlink.

How many of them are throttling content to prevent competition in this hypothetical anti-net neutrality scenario? Exactly zero.

Which is evidence to me that Net Neutrality is a sham, what more people need is a free market. Not another government monopoly with some regulations slapped on.


They're two independent things. You can still require network neutrality in a competitive market with multiple providers.

Whether a market would converge on providers violating network neutrality depends on the characteristics of the market and its customers etc. But if nobody would have violated it anyway, what's the benefit of not having the law? Whereas if you don't have the law and do have violations, that's bad.


What if some people would be happy to pay more for priority, and others would be happy to receive cheaper non priority service.

These are very real things. Regulating them out of existence makes no sense.


How competative was the isp market in Utah before Google fiber subsidized the massive build-out?

Google threw in the towel on wiring more new cities about mid-way through the SLC build, which makes need think perhaps the biggest obstacle to your thesis bearing fruit, is upfront infrastructure investments…


Google all but abandoned Utah, as soon as we got municipal fiber in most cities (Utopia). Utopia was built out by government issued bonds and shares 0 physical infrastructure with Google. Google refused to participate in the program, because they didn’t like the idea of dark fiber where anyone could “choose a provider”.

Google wanted a monopoly.

The nice thing is that they can properly screw off, because now we have dozens of better options where I’m supporting the little guy instead of Silicon Valley Big Tech.


I live on (presumedly) the other side of Utah, right by the Arizona border, and we have no competition — a single real option. It’s the best, fastest, most reliable, and cheapest internet connection I’ve had access to in my life. What’s the lesson from this? No idea. There are some good companies out there I guess?


So the solution there is transparency.

I'd be much happier if the government regulations gave me information to make an informed decision rather than forced a decision on me.


Transparency is part of the problem. It makes the anti-competitive practice easier to carry out because customers don't know they're getting screwed. But there's still a potential anti-trust issue even with perfect information.

Suppose Facebook doesn't want anyone using their competitors, so they subsidize the cost on some ISPs that then block their competitors. The customers of those ISPs are 15% of the market, and they know the other competitors are blocked, but they want the discount. Then the other 85% of people have to use Facebook in order to communicate with anyone on one of those ISPs, and social networks have a network effect, so now everybody is stuck on Facebook even if they don't use one of those ISPs, because they know somebody who does. This is anti-competitive and so an anti-trust problem.


I think it's much more likely people stop using Facebook in that condition. People may be "stuck" with Meta because everyone is on it but the situation you're describing is a big difference between zero friction to make an account and join everybody else and change your ISP so you can talk to your grandma and look at cats on instagram.

I'd rather have choice and transparency and see if the situation you've described arises. It sounds completely unrealistic to me and we don't have to make laws and regulations cover every single edge case right away, they can be modified as we go.


> people stop using Facebook in that condition.

You've failed to understand the example. Nobody would have to change ISPs to use Facebook because Facebook paid off the ISPs for some form of exclusivity. It is Facebook's competitors who would struggle wity user acquisition because not only do you have to convince users to change ISPs to use your competing platform, but you have to convince all your frienda and family to switch too if you wanna be able to call them.

> It sounds completely unrealistic

You are incredibly naive then. This sort of thing regularly happens all around the you. Kickbacks, exclusivity and companies colluding for competitive advantage is commonplace, not unrealistic.


> think it's much more likely people stop using Facebook in that condition.

For the US, looking at iMessage's example, I'd say the trend would go the other way and Facebook getting way more power.


> I'd rather have choice and transparency

it is very hard to force trancparancy.

Transparancy (at least how I see it) is matter of culture.

For example, if you open up ISP accounting books to the public, creative people will find ways to hide things. Instead of line item “10M € kickback from facebook”, there will be “10M € sale to facebook”.


I’d say the exact opposite. It’s clear the majority of customers here cannot make an informed decision either by way of incompetence about the technical aspects that would enable them to detect bad faith behavior on the part of ISPs, or lack of transparency, or outright lack of competition in their market. Competition does not work to increase quality if the customer cannot judge it. The entire benefits of markets and competition break down and become irrelevant.

Instead: make it a utility, subject to regulation and codes as any other. I don’t need to be a plumber to ensure I get adequate sewer service, I don’t need to be an electrician to ensure that I get adequate electrical service, why should I need to be sysadmin to make sure I get adequate network service? It makes no sense. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it makes even less sense because those examples require less education overall than you would to detect bad faith behavior on the part of your ISP. if you don’t have enough water pressure for your shower to function, you don’t need to be a plumber to diagnose that. If your homes electrical service is so bad that you can’t run your appliances you don’t need to be an electrician to judge that. But how do you know if your given ISP is throttling Netflix without substantial IT in your background?

I don’t think it’s an outrageous opinion that any Tom, Dick, or Harry, who is participating in this market should be able to get the service to a reasonable standard of quality that they are paying for without needing to verify it independently.


> It’s clear the majority of customers here cannot make an informed decision either by way of incompetence about the technical aspects that would enable them to detect bad faith behavior on the part of ISPs

Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.

I’d sooner trust an average 15 year old to regulate the Internet than literally any elected politician or professional lobbyist.


> Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.

This is such utterly brain-dead individualist defeatist nonsense that I struggle to respect it as an actual position. Do you believe either the common consumers or the politicians understand vehicles? And like, even the broad topic of vehicles belies several specifics of interest to regulators like emissions and safety features. Of course they don't know all of that. They hire in people qualified to judge the effectiveness of those systems and to write the regulations that will then be enforced by agencies charged with that task.

Is this perfect? Of course not, no human system is or ever will be, but I would argue that based on the overall trajectory from the initial rollout of cars in the 1940's to the average consumer, where we started with brutally primitive machines that would kill people basically all the time, both pedestrians and their drivers/passengers, that spewed black vile smoke out of completely audio and emission unmitigated exhausts and were utterly terrifying at even their comparatively low speeds, all the way until today, when you can, as a consumer, purchase a car that manages it's own emissions within the bounds of reason, has numerous safety features to keep you alive, and can safely travel at speeds that well exceed the maximums posted on any highway without utterly flying apart, as an original Model T probably would have attempting half that speed, and you can do that all without knowing fuck shit about cars, ensured of the fact that you will get at least a decent product that will not harm you if used properly? That seems to me to be overall, quite an effective regulatory atmosphere. Not perfect, again, but quite effective. And that regulatory market is broadly practiced every day for probably hundreds if not thousands of products you have purchased without a second thought, because you don't need to think about them, because government agencies you know nothing about are working to ensure the safety of that market.

We have had this shit figured out for almost a century I would say. The fact that ISPs now operate such an utterly critical resource for our daily lives with near total absence of regulation in terms of the product they deliver, the quality of it, the usability, etc. etc. is frankly ludicrous. We're sitting here having arguments about which ISP throttles which sites worse and how to avoid them, when the solution is clearly: Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service, you should be able to access Netflix, YouTube, Mega filesharing, 4chan, Imgur and fuckin PornHub at will with zero thought to the notion that any of them will perform any worse than any other because they didn't put together a sweetheart deal with your fucking cable company.


> Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service

The problem with that statement is, like anything else imagined by bureaucrats, is divorced from reality. Hence my point that I wouldn’t trust the government to regulate the Internet.

Internet providers peer with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other networks. They do so in some cases by paying money, but in most cases through something called settlement free peering, which came out of mutually beneficial agreements to connect at perking exchanges. In all cases providers have avoided passing the costs down to consumers, even though the economics are incredibly complex.

IMHO Leave it to the experts. No one is paying a special fee to access 4chan or Netflix. It’s a big fat, widely disproven lie that proponents of net neutrality made up and have been arguing for nearly 15 years now, one that never came to pass.


The only reason utilities are regulated are because they are natural monopoly. It doesn’t make sense to have more than one utility company with right of way to dig up streets to create the needed infrastructure.

To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.


> To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.

It's a natural monopoly in exactly the same way any other utility is. "It doesn't make sense to have more than one utility build towers everywhere to create the needed infrastructure." In theory if only one company did it you would only need one set of towers and costs would be lower. But a private monopoly doesn't exactly optimize costs either, and some utilities cost more to duplicate than others. It's much more expensive to have redundant roads than redundant cables running along the same set of utility poles or in the same cable trench, and cell towers are on that end of the range.

The spectrum is a red herring. You could operate live auctions to bid on spectrum in real time in areas of scarcity instead of allocating it permanently to particular companies. This would also give companies the incentive to operate more towers at lower power levels, because you'd only need to bid on spectrum in the same collision domain and lower power levels would cause that to be smaller areas with less contention, lowering their spectrum costs.


Do you realize how complicated that would make both the phones and leaving an area? Besides, even today some phones only operate over certain parts of the spectrum and some parts of the spectrum aren’t even conducive to transmitting through walls - the issue T-Mobile had for years.

And what problem are you trying to solve again?


The only reason why anything is regulated is because society decided that the consequences of not regulating it produce undesirable outcomes for too many people in said society.

This is decidedly the case with ISPs today, so arguments over the pedantic definition of monopolies and whether it applies here are rather irrelevant.


We are talking about mobilr providers. Are you really saying there is no competition?

What do you hope to gain by regulation?


Agriculture isn't a natural monopoly either, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have food safety standards.


Yes because something that will literally kill you if there aren’t standards is analogous to net neutrality.

But even if it were, it’s #199542 why HN commenters don’t understand what a “monopoly” is and why utilities that require physical infrastructure which are natural monopolies aren’t the same as cellular where there are three healthy competitors.


And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email.

Don't assume that people only pick these plans because they're uninformed.


The informed customers aren't the issue. If Disney is paying to make Netflix look bad, it's because somebody is getting fooled into thinking Netflix is to blame for this, otherwise what is Disney getting for their money? So that plan is an anti-competitive measure, regardless of whether it also presents an arbitrage opportunity for customers who don't care about video streaming. If its only customers were the arbitrageurs then Disney would have no reason to pay and it wouldn't exist.


> Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors

> And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email

It seems unlikely that there are anywhere close to as many of the latter as the former


If the FCC does not do something, they will.

As to why it has not happened yet: it is easier to corrupt a new infrastructure from the beginning than change one that is already entrenched.


I thought net neutrality was about ISPs trying to get netflix, facebook etc to pay them extra not to throttle. The only throttling I've heard of here in the UK (which has lots of providers and competition) is on torrenting.

Are there examples of what you are talking about with zoom etc? Because as far as I can reason: if an isp throttled something like that in a high competition market, they'd lose their customers. And if it was a low user / start up phase app it wouldn't provide any competitive advantage for an isp to throttle it.


Getting a high-traffic service to pay extra or degrading other services are basically the same thing. Because the obvious question is “what happens if they don’t pay”? The obvious answer is throttling.

> And if it was a low user / start up phase app it wouldn't provide any competitive advantage for an isp to throttle it.

What we’ve seen in developing nations is internet that’s subsidized but only for certain companies (eg free Facebook, paid everything else) and people just use Facebook and have 0 access to the outside internet.

There are examples in the US at least, albeit less severe. It was (is?) common for cell phone companies to offer unlimited data cellphone plans, but they throttle video streaming to a lower resolution. Then offer “unmetered streaming of Netflix” (pick your VOD provider) while, again, degrading the video stream of other companies.

I’m pro-net neutrality but also I question if subsidized internet would actually be bad. If you can take a heavily metered or poor service, and subsidize it, then that could be the tool that helps bring internet to more people at less cost to those users. Advertisers would basically be subsidizing internet through these giants. The catch would be to find rules that don’t throttle competition which I don’t know if that’s possible.


Taken straight out the mafia for dummies handbook. "It would be a shame if something were to happen to the bandwidth of your service in our network".


It is multiple things based on a simple concept: no traffic should be discriminated based on source, destination or type. That means that netflix ones and zeros are treated the same as facebook, same as your web page filled with cat pics, same as torrents.


Can there be technical things why cerain services get lower level service?

I’ve read that ISP buys various links to to other networks at various prices.

So maybe something like: if facebookBar server is on pricier linkFoo and for that reason ISP buys cheaper version of linkFoo effectively downgrading facebookBar service (along with everything on linkFoo)?

If such scenario is realistic, maybe it could be due to valid financial stuff, not due to anticompetetive behaviour. (Just saying, some technically valid scenarios should be taken into account)


> I thought net neutrality was about ISPs trying to get netflix, facebook etc to pay them extra not to throttle.

It was mostly. Basically in the USA it costs money to peer with people, and even more money to put edge caches inside the ISP's network (because that means the ISP can't charge for peering.)

This pissed of a bunch of rich web firms, so they poured money into pro net neutrality publications. (also a lot of anti copyright stuff as well, so they didn't have to pay content creators, but thats a different topic)

In the UK, peerings is much much cheaper because of LINX and other peering exchanges. moreover, having an edge cache inside your network saves you cash as you don't need to spend as much arranging upstream peering. (It might save money on transfer between last mile and the core network, but I'm hazy on the costs there.)


This isn’t at all true in the way you are portraying it. Of course, if you have more of something, you have more of the related things. If you have more oranges, more oranges are going to be rotten. This is obvious if you can think about it for more than 30s.

The overall net effect isn’t what you say it is though.


Net neutrality is pretty silly as a regulation, and most economists are against it.

You are right that net neutrality, and competitive markets (and thus low prices for consumers) don't really go together.


Most economists? BS.

Most economists understand that ISPs in the US are a natural monopoly, you simply can not have more than 1 or 2 choices in most locations.

And when there is no possibility of competition, regulation becomes necessary.


Huh, ISPs are far from a natural monopoly. What makes you think they are? Especially if you take mobile broadband, paid 'public' wifi and satellite internet into account.

(Regulations that make market entry harder push things into the monopoly direction, but that's far from 'natural'. See some of the recent troubles SpaceX has been having.)

See also https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/net-neu... or https://www.cato.org/regulation/winter-2011-2012/economics-n...

> Network neutrality makes competition and consumer welfare dependent on law and lobbying, not natural competition. So you’ve chosen the area in which the telcos are strongest on which to fight!


> Huh, ISPs are far from a natural monopoly.

Black is white. War is peace. Yeah, we know that.

> What makes you think they are? Especially if you take mobile broadband, paid 'public' wifi and satellite internet into account.

Neither mobile nor satellite (even Starlink) can compete for the main Internet connection for the majority of people. Around 50-70% of the US population has exactly ONE choice of a wired broadband ISP, and maaaaybe 2 if you count ADSL as broadband.

Less than 10% of the population has access to 3 or more wired broadband ISPs.


Why do you restrict your comparison to wired connections only? No one cares how the internet comes into the house.

Btw, you can also do ethernet-over-powerline for the last mile. And there's tv cables, and the plain-old-telephone wires already in the ground.

If there's not enough competition, you should perhaps looks into regulation that's strangling that competition; instead of assuming blindly that more regulation is the answer to problems caused by too much regulation.


> Why do you restrict your comparison to wired connections only?

Because wireless simply is not enough. There is a pretty fundamental limit to it, called the "sampling theorem". You simply don't have enough available bandwidth for the cell wireless to replace the wired connections, even in moderately dense environments.

This is not a theory, btw. I had T-Mobile 5G "fixed wireless" connection and could immediately tell when major live games were on. It also became nearly useless during the Superbowl. And that's with T-Mobile limiting the number of subscribers (there's a waitlist for 5G home Internet in my area).

> If there's not enough competition, you should perhaps looks into regulation that's strangling that competition; instead of assuming blindly that more regulation is the answer to problems caused by too much regulation.

The main problem is morons who think that you can compete within the ISP market, and thus strangling regulations meant to improve it.

After all, don't we all have 10 different tap water and sewage providers?


> There is a pretty fundamental limit to it, called the "sampling theorem". You simply don't have enough available bandwidth for the cell wireless to replace the wired connections, even in moderately dense environments.

I live in Singapore which is denser than basically any place in the US, and people are obsessed with their phones. Mobile bandwidth works just fine.

I suspect your underwhelming 5G experience could be related with cells in your area being rather big, so they had many people in them? If you have a higher density of people, you need a higher density of cells.

> After all, don't we all have 10 different tap water and sewage providers?

Try starting up a new tap water or sewage provider. I don't think the government will let you.

In any case, providing new 'last mile' connectivity whether with wires or with water pipes is hard to make work economically, if someone else is already there with an established service. (So in that sense I agree that last mile connectivity does have network effects. Though I wouldn't classify things binary into 'natural monopoly' or not; it's a spectrum.)

In any case, that's why I was emphasising the different wires we already have (cable tv, plain old phone cables, power line, and in some places optical fibre, etc) and the wireless options (3G, 4G, 5G, wifi, satellite, and the more directed exotic microwave transmission, etc). I probably missed a few.

If you can sort out the last mile, or you can piggy back on some already existing last mile, the tendency for what you call 'natural monopoly' drops a lot.

If there's insufficient competition in the US, perhaps don't blame 'nature'.


> I live in Singapore which is denser than basically any place in the US, and people are obsessed with their phones. Mobile bandwidth works just fine.

For 4k video? No, it doesn't. Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.

I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.

> I suspect your underwhelming 5G experience could be related with cells in your area being rather big, so they had many people in them? If you have a higher density of people, you need a higher density of cells.

It's both. The US favors low-density housing, as it's much more people-friendly than any other alternative. The other option is high-density Downtown hellscapes with scyscrapers. Both areas are not great for wireless.

> In any case, that's why I was emphasising the different wires we already have (cable tv, plain old phone cables, power line, and in some places optical fibre, etc) and the wireless options (3G, 4G, 5G, wifi, satellite, and the more directed exotic microwave transmission, etc). I probably missed a few.

Only cable is capable of 1G speeds. Phone wires realistically max out at ~30/10 Mbps up/down with VDSL. There is no Internet over powerlines in the US, and there'll never be because of RF leaks.

So your realistic option is either the coaxial cable or newly laid fiber. And fiber is often owned by the same company that owns the cable.

> Try starting up a new tap water or sewage provider. I don't think the government will let you.

Nothing stops you. There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools. It's just not economically feasible, unless there are special circumstances.

> If there's insufficient competition in the US, perhaps don't blame 'nature'.

There are no countries that are similar to the US that have competitive "last mile" Internet. None.

All the more successful countries (e.g. Sweden) decouple the last mile, making it a state-owned (or a heavily regulated) utility. And then ISPs can just buy access to it and compete based on services/price.


> It's both. The US favors low-density housing, as it's much more people-friendly than any other alternative. The other option is high-density Downtown hellscapes with scyscrapers. Both areas are not great for wireless.

Alas, the US presents a false dilemma here: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

> Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.

Yes, and that's great. The density of cells goes up with the density of people.

> I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.

The free government wifi we get here in many train stations and hawker centres regularly gives me 50 Mbps (on fast.com), and I never got less than 10 Mbps.

That's plenty fast for many applications, especially when it's free.

4G and 5G Mobile broadband is usually a lot faster than that.

> Only cable is capable of 1G speeds.

Singtel advertises that they have Gigabit mobile, and that's on 4G technology. 5G is going to be faster.

> There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools.

Interesting. How do they get the water to you?


> Alas, the US presents a false dilemma here: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing

That's beside the point. Nobody is going to rebuild the entire US for better Internet.

> Yes, and that's great. The density of cells goes up with the density of people.

The problem here is the same. If you can get connectivity very close to consumers, you might as well just provide fiber to home.

> The free government wifi we get here in many train stations and hawker centres regularly gives me 50 Mbps (on fast.com), and I never got less than 10 Mbps.

See? Free handouts from government, not multiple competing providers.

> Singtel advertises that they have Gigabit mobile, and that's on 4G technology. 5G is going to be faster.

4G peaks at 100mbps per channel, you can use multiple channels for about 500mbps in total. But that's shared across _all_ users. 5G has better efficiency, so you can get about 2gbps in total for low-frequency (i.e. actually useful) bands.

That's why "1Gbps" mobile Internet borders on false advertising. You _can_ get that speed, but only if all the stars align. It also won't be super-reliable.

> Interesting. How do they get the water to you?

Tanker trucks. It is usually cheaper than municipal water sources because pool filling companies can reuse the water. They also don't need to purify it to drinking water standards (in fact, they can _not_, pool water has to contain fairly high levels of chlorine).


> See? Free handouts from government, not multiple competing providers.

Huh? We have multiple competing providers for normal paid Internet services.

Btw, I called it 'government wifi', but I think it's actually provided by multiple competing companies (but I don't know how it's financed. I assume the government pays for it. You can research for yourself if you care , it's called 'wireless@sgx'.)


Selection bias. They only picked UK and US. Plenty of countries in Asia have robust competition and is arguably a reason why they are so cheap and so good. One company offers twice the speed for the same price. People quickly start switching and new accounts (people coming of age) go to that cheaper better company. The other companies are forced to follow suit or lose their customers.


Yes, competition works for factors that the majority of consumers are aware of, like price and speed. But it doesn't work for enforcing net neutrality.

If you model it, how could competition work to protect a YC startup with 1,000 or 10,000 users?

You can't start an alternative ISP at that scale, so it's unthinkable that a new ISP would emerge just to serve that throttled startup's pissed off users.

And again, only a tiny minority of users would correctly attribute throttling-induced failure to the ISP. Most will attribute it to the new startup being janky.

Even or those who do correctly attribute it, what are they going to do? Convince everyone they want to use this new product with to switch ISPs?


> In the EU there are similar offers for "enhanced" access, but its not speeding up/slowing down apps, but giving "free" access, as in not counting to your data cap.

That's also in breach of EU net neutrality laws. A Dutch ISP lost a lawsuit over this for providing free Spotify traffic. I don't remember which one, I think it was T Mobile (now called Odildo or something lol)


Odildo? Cant be truth in a country where almost all people speak english!


It's actually Odido but everyone I know calls it Odildo :P it was really a stupid name choice


I must be weird, but I like the name. It's a palindrome and I dig their symmetrical logo.

And of course, it is clever marketing. Even here we are talking about it.


I suspect it's a brand name they tested across multiple languages, etc


Most countries are somewhat familiar with english slang, such as the word dildo.


It's not slang, it's just a word. And the Dutch for dildo is ... dildo (I would have expected shared roots in French or some such, but apparently it's a loanword from English since the 70s).


Spanish: jodido


Haha yes that means fucked (as in "you're fucked"). I speak Spanish and I didn't actually think of that.


Kinda funny how neutrality is hurting consumers. I dont think many of us thought about this potential benefit.


It's not hurting consumers. These companies are not coming up with these plans because they're cheaper for the consumers. They're doing it to entrench them into their service and then extract money in other ways.


It was always going to hurt consumers short-term. I don't know why anyone is surprised.

Maybe it's just because I'm old and remember the clusterfuck when the EU decided one TV company couldn't hold the rights to all the football matches.

(They divvy the rights up in such a way that you can't see a single competition on just one service, let alone just one team's matches.)


Do you think that laws that make buying electoral votes illegal (where they exist) should be repealed on the basis that they are harming people who'd prefer to take that cash?


I was definitely someone who wrote the FCC (futilely) in support of net neutrality in 2017, and I figured the inevitable outcome of the FCC decision back then would be skyrocketing broadband costs, fast lanes, etc.

Except none of it happened. It turns out there's actually kind of okay competition in this space. Maybe not as much as there should be, but prices have stayed reasonable, broadband access is expanding, and people by and large don't seem bothered by data caps when they're subject to them, and they have access to reasonably priced, uncapped plans.

All that said, I certainly won't say no to reinstating net neutrality, since I don't think you can argue it'll make anything worse. In fact it might make competition easier. But it's not the existential pillar to online existence that we seemed to think it was.


AFAIK the actual reason most of these things did not appear is because of many states passing their own net neutrality laws, such that it would be a regulatory nightmare to offer services in violation of net neutrality without coming under fire.


The California law is particularly strong and had a huge impact.

The other big factor is the threat of new FCC rules, state laws, or federal law. As long as net neutrality advocates can pose a credible threat of passing rules that, from the ISP's point of view, are more restrictive than the status quo, ISPs have to think twice before engaging in what John Oliver famously called "cable company f*ckery".


That's because the internet went to shit and actually very little happens outside of major platforms anyway. This type of traffic shaping would just cement it as-is, making it almost impossible for a new platform to come up.


Tiktok would beg to differ. Starting a new social network is hard, but bandwdith/net neutrality is the least of your problems.


One of the issues here is decentralized services. If you're starting a new centralized service, you can pay a CDN which itself is already paying the danegeld or is too big to degrade without the ISP's customers blaming the ISP. That's a tax but if you're state-funded or VC-funded you can just eat it.

Whereas if you want to build something based on IPFS or just host your own website out of your home/business, ISPs have the incentive to thwart this, because then they couldn't double dip anymore. See also cable companies explicitly designing slow upload speeds into the most widely deployed versions of DOCSIS.

So then you're creating a bias towards centralized closed-source services instead of open standards and self-hosting.


This is some research it would be cool to see: was TikTok adoption measurably slowed in countries where net neutrality violations were common?

For example, it's the norm across Africa for providers to offer plans with radically lower per-GB costs for WhatsApp, Youtube, and other mainstream apps, as a way to price discriminate and charge a premium to tech and white collar workers who need access to the actual Internet. In such countries you would expect TikTok adoption to happen more slowly than expected.


I know there’s a gun pointed at my head, but listen, nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine.


Sounds like your position is one where no empirical evidence could convince you otherwise, because even if the apocalypse did not come to pass you would use the "gun pointed at me but they didn't pull the trigger" excuse.


We can turn this around though, can't we? If the ISPs have no designs on violating network neutrality then why do they oppose it?

If you repeal the law against burglary and then burglary doesn't immediately skyrocket, would you say that we shouldn't have a law against burglary? Of course not, because regardless of how often it happens, you'd like it to never happen and would want to prosecute it any time it does regardless of how often.


Huh?

> "Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to stop."

This is literally what the article is about. It's happening now, it's been happening, it will continue to happen unless the laws get restored.


1. If your claim was that the net neutrality doomsayers from 2017 were correct, then your original comment of "[...] nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine" does a terrible way of conveying that. Any reasonable person reading that comment would interpret that as you conceding that the the doomsayers' predictions have failed to pass, but nonetheless refuse to admit the predictions were incorrect because it was only a matter of time before the predictions would become true.

2. "Net neutrality" is a term that doesn't have a precise meaning, and I'd rather not get into a fight about what it really means. That said, in the context of this discussion about the net neutrality fight in 2017, and whether the doomsayers' prediction came to pass, I think it's fair to compare to the pre-2017 net neutrality regime. In that context it's not clear whether "degrading video quality for mobile users" would be illegal. For instance "network management" was explicitly allowed, and only "pay for priority" would be banned[1]. Moreover there was a court case a few years before where FCC fought to prevent bittorrent being throttled, and lost the case on appeal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...


Your link has a definition of Net Neutrality in the first paragraph. If you recall, one of the big points that groups like Comcast kept trying to make was that they weren’t just a dumb pipe for the internet, and instead had enough value-add for consumers that people would choose them over a competitor with the same internet service. And NN would prevent them from offering these competitive services.


Mobile ISPs like T-Mobile are quite open about wanting to offer plans that privilege certain services over others.


> I know there’s a gun pointed at my head, but listen, nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine.


It's been 7 years, but any day now we'll wake up to broken online video, random timeouts, paltry data caps, and skyrocketing costs.


> Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to stop.

"Not with a bang but a whimper."


This is like the folks who compare the covid death rate with treatment, mitigations, and vaccination to prove we could have let it run its course in 2020.

Public sentiment was pretty high and we actually had network neutrality for the first 40 years of the Internet not to mention the over 100M people who live in states that adopted laws.

https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/net-neutra...


This is like the folks who think the rapture is coming, any day now. just be ready, its coming.


I’m constantly having buffering videos across many websites and paying significantly more for this shitty service than nearly anywhere else in the world pays for something significantly better.


Looking at the rising prices of streaming services and their increased enshittification via ads even in paid subscriptions, I find it hard to take the "prices have stayed reasonable" claim at face value. It's not just about the price of the internet access itself, but also about the price of the services that actually make said access useful and valuable.


Yeah, the discourse around the Net Neutrality thing was intense. I was one the few people who argued it wouldn't change much, and I remember being struck by the state of near-internet-apocalypse people were predicting at the time.

Helps that I was seeing the whole thing from the outside as a non-US-resident.


I have to take the L on going with the flow there. It's impossible to build a case that repeal of net neutrality was apocalyptic.


That the potential of a future FCC reinstating it precluded ISPs' baser instincts?

Their goal was to avoid excess, so maybe they could argue that net neutrality wasn't a good idea anyway, so they could gradually introduce new revenue streams from apps/platforms.


That repeal lasted five years, with virtually none of the visible effects people predicted. By contrast, when the Trump administration started tearing down environmental regulations, mining companies jumped on the occasion within months.

If ISPs are playing the long game, they're being incredibly patient about it.


> If ISPs are playing the long game, they're being incredibly patient about it.

They actually are, and this is how politics and lobbying work. In 2017 it made no sense for US ISPs to run ragged over net neutrality when the 2020 election was looming and far from predictable. Even less once Biden gets elected.

Plus there was the credible threat of state-level laws, which are even worse from the ISPs standpoint since each might go farther than the FCC rules in certain ways.

The California law passed and was a really big deal.

If you're looking for a controlled experiment of what the world looks like without net neutrality rules, just look to countries where there was never any such movement or credible threat of them.

Across Africa, for example, 1GB of mobile data can cost 10x more if you're accessing the normal Internet, vs. a mainstream service like WhatsApp or Youtube.

ISPs use net neutrality violations for price discrimination to extract more from white collar workers who need access to the Internet beyond WhatsApp-- which is fine until you think about the effects on any new WhatsApp competitor.


Much as I agreed with net neutrality, I could see that it was being driven mainly by big tech lobbying for their profit margins. This is also why the attention and outrage was way out of proportion to the actual impact.


> It turns out there's actually kind of okay competition in this space. Maybe not as much as there should be, but prices have stayed reasonable, broadband access is expanding, and people by and large don't seem bothered by data caps when they're subject to them

lol. This is better attributed to you getting used to the shitty situation you, and everyone else in your country, is dealing with. Your speeds are shit and you're paying too much for them, and those "not bothered by data caps" just don't know better anymore.


I pay $50/month for 300/30 in the middle of nowhere. Symmetric gigabit is available for $80ish/month in small cities around me. Unlimited phone data is widely available and fairly priced. It's not impossible for things to be acceptable for the vast majority of use cases just because some predicted apocalyptic event which was hyped up by certain large players (and not out of the goodness of their hearts) didn't come to be.


$90/month for 25/2.5 Mbps here. I honestly never thought we'd see that kind of speed. In late 2015 it went from 512 kbps to 10/1 Mbps on a new system. Four years later (2019) they upgraded it to the present speed with no increase in price. It's all wireless and since we're in AT&T telco territory there is no chance of them doing anything (the phone lines have been in the ground since the late '70s), so this independent telco built out as a WISP almost 20 years ago. They're looking at doing their own FTTH in this area.


Wow, that is very expensive


I'm afraid to tell you what I pay for starlink for speeds much lower than that. Still very grateful as without starlink is have 20 M down and still pay $75 per month for it


Better than Hughsnet which was the only option for a long time other than cellular.


You, and everyone paying those absurd prices, is getting ripped off.


I've got a symmetric gigabit.

I could have five but what would I even do with it?


>Your speeds are shit and you're paying too much for them, and those "not bothered by data caps" just don't know better anymore.

None of what you've listed would be fixed by net neutrality.


Sorry officer, not intimately familliar with your american laws!


Giving “free data pass” to limited set of apps is even more harmful IMO, the monopolies can afford pay the network infrastructure but small app developers will not be able to.


This. If ISPs want to QoS traffic into different lanes... fine.

But those lanes should:

   - Be general categories of use
   - Only be created by regulation
   - Be freely accessible to any app
   - Not involve any app-ISP payment


Or, or, hear me out. The companies that need such high speed networks, should pay the infrastructure companies and get their own communication lines built, instead of buying QoS access on publicly funded projects.


I don't think any company should be able to buy QoS access.

They should simply qualify for it on the basis of their use case.

E.g. "video streaming" or "real-time telecom"


I agree. What do you think about fair use policies? Things like having 250GB/Month kind of limits.

The internet infrastructure was built with certain utilization and speed in mind. Instead of owning up to the fact that it’s not as good as it used to be, these companies are selling quality of service products. Otherwise it’s too much of a publicity hit if they admit it.


I'm in favor of things that ultimately benefit the consumer.

"Unlimited" plans have always irked the hell out of me, because they rarely are.

I think capped totals (ideally without overage charges and with slow-lane bandwidth until reset) are perfectly fine.

But I'm 100% against named exclusions that don't count against a cap -- that's unfairly preferring an existing incumbent, and doesn't benefit the consumer in the larger/competition sense.


This is what big CDN and cloud vendors do. You can see them as part of the infrastructure. For big users of cloud you can get dedicated connections, for example Azure ExpressRoute.

That's a complete different game than that between end-customers, ISPs and service providers.


> and to a lesser extent Canada's

Not to turn this into a pissing contest, but Canada's internet is far more shite and far more captured by an oligopoly. Independent ISPs are harder to find than competition up here in the North.


Canada isn't so bad off when it comes to wired service. Several ISPs are owned by the government: Sasktel, Bruce Telecom, Tbaytel, CityWest. And many more are co-operatives owned by the customers.

The mobile space is more challenging. A number of those co-ops and government ISPs were running mobile service back in the mid 2000s, but they never found the customer base and most of them eventually shut it down, Tbaytel and Sasktel being the exceptions.

That said, many of those ISPs have more recently turned to reselling Big 3 service, so you can still at least minimize how much the Big 3 take, giving the small guy at least some of the cut. Maybe some day they can take that small cut and build out their own network again? But, you get what you choose to become a customer of, I suppose.


>Several ISPs are owned by the government: Sasktel, Bruce Telecom, Tbaytel, CityWest

That's cold comfort to the overwhelming majority of people who aren't served by such ISPs. Population of...

Saskatchewan (Sasktel): 1.1M

Bruce County (Bruce Telecom): 66.5k

Thunder Bay District (Tbaytel): 146k

Prince Rupert, British Columbia (CityWest): 13k

That makes up a total of 1.3M, against Canada's population of 37.0M.

Moreover, looking at Sasktel's website[1], their prices don't look too competitive. They're asking for $105/month for 1G (promotional offer, regular price $150), which is actually worse than what corporate ISPs offer, eg. $110/month for 1.5G (promotional offer, regular price $130)[2].

[1] https://www.sasktel.com/store/browse/Personal/Internet/Inter...

[2] https://www.rogers.com/internet/packages


> That's cold comfort to the overwhelming majority of people who aren't served by such ISPs.

But is actually warm comfort as it shows a proven model that anyone, anywhere in Canada can also do. It's just a matter of whether or not the people actually care if they are a customer of an independent, or if being a customer of a major is just as good or better.

> Moreover, looking at Sasktel's website[1], their prices don't look too competitive.

Sure. Nobody said owning your own business allowed it to operate for free. Publicly-owned and co-op businesses are not a panacea. But they are independent and free of a major private business, which is the topic at hand.

Saskatchewan's population is ~80% rural, and Sasktel doesn't operate outside of Saskatchewan. It isn't terribly surprising that it costs more to service rural areas, and without much in the way of an urban base to help subsidize the operation. But this does indicate that other providers are operating within reasonable margins. Indeed, Canada is a very expensive place to do business in, and not just in telecom. You are never going to see cheap internet compared to other countries, or much of anything, without radically upheaving what the country stands for.


Those are completely irrelevant in 95% of Canada. There's bell, Rogers, and Telus. I guess Videotron in Quebec too. That's pretty much it and even then, here in Quebec it's either Videotron or bell, or their resellers. At least in Montreal.


> Those are completely irrelevant in 95% of Canada.

But quite relevant as they provide a proven, working model that can be used anywhere in Canada. That's the beauty of public/cooperative ownership – all people have to do is do it.

> here in Quebec it's either Videotron or bell

What about CoopTel, Sogetel, and Téléphone de Courcelles?


Well I'm not saying they are irrelevant in the sense that they don't provide a good model for what an ISP should be, but more so that they are irrelevant because they don't provide services to the vast majority of people.

Also a part from sogetel, those are either very small or regional. Even sogetel is regional and doesn't really provide services outside small villages and cities. That's not bad, but it's not enough to say that Canada's market isn't deeply uncompetitive. Even the US has tons of cooperative and WISPs that follow a similar coop pattern.


> more so that they are irrelevant because they don't provide services to the vast majority of people.

The vast majority of people can do the same. What do you think public/cooperate ownership is, exactly? It isn't something that magically comes down from space by aliens or sent to us by god. They are by the people. All the people have to do is do it!

> Also a part from sogetel, those are either very small or regional.

So? They still exist in Quebec. The question was really trying to ask why you didn't mention them?

If you like their model, and want to see them grow, then you'd think you'd be preaching their existence to high heaven. The only way small businesses can grow to cover the nation is to have people talk about them. No business has ever swept the nation in secrecy. Yet here we are, even after we started talking about them, being told that they shouldn't be talked about because they are too "insignificant".

Why is it that the people who complain about the "Big 3" most are the ones who seem most happy to keep on using their service?


This is similar to what I see too. I've actually gotten a borderless phone plan from AT&T just so I don't have to deal with the Canadian oligopoly.


> The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite is because of the monopolies that exist.

New Zealand went from having a single provider for service and infrastructure, to having actual options. The breakup of the monopoly was imposed by regulation [1]. Following this there was a lot of taxpayer investment in fibre and while it’s been a flawed rollout, it’s made a hell of a difference. I’m on symmetric gigabit and have 2gb/s, 4gb/s and 8gb/s options if I pay more.

[1] under history section https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_New_Zealand


Yes I'm sure it's all due to competition and not the EU's 2015 law that explicitly requires net neutrality (Net Neutrality Regulation 2015).

> In the EU there are similar offers for "enhanced" access, but its not speeding up/slowing down apps, but giving "free" access, as in not counting to your data cap.

They do that because speeding up/slowing down apps is illegal and they are using loopholes in the law to get around that.


> Yes I'm sure it's all due to competition and not the EU's 2015 law that explicitly requires net neutrality (Net Neutrality Regulation 2015).

Why do these have to be in contention?

Regulations are a critical factor in ensuring competition in markets. Without regulations monopolies quickly come to power because your power and influence is not linearly (or sublinearly) correlated to your size (even excluding lobbying power). A free market is a ,,well'' regulated market. A laissez-faire market is only free in passing.


> Why do these have to be in contention?

I never claimed. I simply pointed out that claiming something illegal is not being done by corporations due to increased competition is inherently a BS argument. It's not being done because it's illegal irrespective of the competitive landscape.


A free market is not a lawless market but instead free within regulations. However, the amount of regulation should not make it impossible for competitors to join the market either. With the amount of subsidies in the US for ISPs, I think the services they render might be event called a public service, more than a utility.


We don't disagree. I just thought it was obvious enough that an over regulated market isn't free that it need not be stated explicitly. Especially since this is the general belief.


Sorry for not clarifying. I do agree with your initial statement and wanted to add something to it, not criticize it.


Okay, I was not quite sure if you were criticizing, rebuting, or what. Thanks for clarifying.


One is an explicit policy stating expectations and the other is a speculative hypothesis that the same policy will naturally happen through some form of economic osmosis if only we leave things unmolested enough for an unspecified duration.

I for one, would rather not rely on the assumption of magic.

We know what we want and it's achievable directly. Let's not Rube Goldberg it.


Yeah, but the loophole is also illegal. (so it’s not a loophole?)


I live in a city with a competitive municipal network and Google fiber. If you live in a house down the street from me, you can get 1gbit for $70.

Yet somehow, I'm paying $100 for 190mbit. The price and ISP (not the speed) are literally written into my apartment's lease agreement. This is an apartment managed by the same developer who owns every other apartment I can afford, so it's not as if I have any bargaining power here, either.

My parents, who live in a remote area, but happen to be next to a major fiber line, pay even more than I do for less than 20mbit FTTH!

I think we have made a grave mistake obsessing over the word, "monopoly". It doesn't take a monopoly for anti-competitive behavior to absolutely ruin a market. Even if healthy competition thrives in a market, some participants will find a way to abuse some customers.

We shouldn't be so lazy that we point a finger at what's working, and pretend the rest doesn't exist.


The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) {insert industry} is shite is because of the monopolies that exist.


ppls comments on this thread towards Canada really struck a nerve with their cluelessness about Canada. People from other countries always act like it's some shining example of the Western world, but that's not the real deal at all.

Canada is basically just three big resource companies propped up by a massive housing bubble that traps newcomers in debt slavery in a form of reverse colonialism where they trick immigrants to become serfs paying rent so people who bought homes in the 80s (after working for like 6 months) can keep flipping it to the next wave of immigrants and blame them with the media owned by the very oligarchs that are supposed to regulate the real estate industry (lol!).

They don't even bother using or valuing the skills and experience these immigrants bring - you've got surgeons from the UK working as cashiers, immigrants without income so all they can do is start businesses or become traders, all to line the pockets of the ultra-rich oligarchs who get everything for cheap and flip at insane markups. They have every Prime Minister wrapped around their little finger, letting them monopolize everything and then screwing over everyone that comes to this miserable piece of land.

Take this one famous billionaire in Vancouver - I'm not gonna name names, but this dude practically owns all the salmon in BC, along with Aboriginal monopolies that were handed out just because of what has been described in anthropology textbooks as "white guilt". Then there's another billionaire from Ottawa who has a monopoly on the legal drug market - guy ended up getting choked out with a wire, and the RCMP just called it an "accident." Oh, and let's not forget the billionaire who somehow scored the exclusive rights to run the only online casino in BC. The list goes on and on.

There's no such thing as a free market in Canada - it's just a banana republic country club for the rich old Canadians at the top. Actually, I'm not even sure if the casino guy was born in Canada, but he definitely looks like he could be.

So yeah, to a lesser extent makes no sense here as somebody that has decades of experience with that country. At least America still recognizes the value of some free market and competition with or without a housing bubble.


This was my thought. My municipality has been working towards laying a city-owned fiber network that ISPs compete on, and if that goes through I would have no problem with some of them running the kind of programs described in TFA. If consumers want it they'll choose those ISPs, if they don't they'll choose ones that offer flat rates for all traffic.

The problem with unregulated broadband isn't the lack of regulation in the abstract, it's the lack of regulation over a sector that has 2(±1) choices per household and no easy path for new entrants.


Best internet in the country is offered by a monopoly in Chattanooga. Up to 25 Gbit up/down.


Monopoly? That's a bit bold of a claim.

The provider you're talking about is the utility company. You might not know why the utility company provides the internet either. It's because before that they couldn't get the other companies (AT&T, Comcast, Hughe, Verizon) to offer good speeds and reasonable rates. The utility also doesn't take a profit. Mind you, those other companies still operate and no one is holding them back. They just decided that the profit margins weren't worth it, though they did lobby against NoogaNet.

It's not a monopoly. It's a city coming together and saying

  Fuck you, give us good internet or we're going to build our own internet  w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶j̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶o̶k̶e̶r̶s̶
And overnight all those companies increased their speeds. They found what they were happy with and NoogaNet still decided "fuck it, we're going to just be better." I really REALLY wish more people/cities would take this "fuck you, we'll do it ourselves" attitude. Waiting on others to fix our problems clearly isn't working.


It's weird that we keep seeing this happen and work but then it isn't more popular. Government services are typically inefficient, but so are private monopolies for almost exactly the same reasons. If you put them into competition with each other then they both have more competition and have to do better.


I think it is because it requires significant cooperation. And by significant, I mean size, not the actual amount of action required by an individual.

This is an interesting problem to me and seems to be quite a prolific issue. I think it is because everyone feels like they are a tiny meaningless cog in a giant machine. But this confuses me. Even tiny cogs play an important role. Even if your function is redundant, that redundancy is built in for a reason. I hear the common sentiment "you're replaceable" and I think people take this to be "perfectly" fungible. But you may be a replaceable worker, but that also doesn't mean replacing you is easy. They usually gotta look for someone new, pay them more, and then train them (this is why I'm also really confused why companies won't increase existing workers' salaries against new hires. Because your current workers likely have significantly more utility than a new worker. You lose money by doing this. Not to mention essentially give away your work practices to competitors, weirdly leveling the playing field).

But it infuriates me when there are things that are universally hated, have relatively easy solutions, AND no one does anything. Be it a boss/manager who just says no to pressing a button that enables functionality where all the work has already been done and tested. Or simply voting in a new politician when everyone hates the current one. Or how 1 in 4 Americans dislike both Trump and Biden. How the early primary states will not even use their advantage to push towards a different candidate because we're playing this stupid game of chicken where people act like the primaries aren't actually the BEST time to vote or signal for a different candidate. I just don't get it...

And I've always been a fan of government directly participating in the market. (Even though I generally like weaker/smaller governments.) They can set a baseline. Gov is always participating, regardless, since they do regulations and all that, so I don't buy those arguments. But there are many more things becoming natural monopolies as advantage is provided by scale. A government actor essentially is able to set pseudo regulations by participating. USPS helps make FedEx and UPS better, but now they get so many cuts that UPS uses them as last mile deliverers despite operating in the region. Still, USPS ensures mail gets to people who would otherwise not be able to even get mail. I don't see why we don't have similar services from broadband and telecommunications. They are essential services these days. Plus, it would create a lot of good quality jobs as not only those people needed to maintain the systems but even all the contractors to do the initial buildouts.


> Or simply voting in a new politician when everyone hates the current one.

Oh, we already know how this one works. People generally like their elected representative, because that's how they won in that district. The district has e.g. a large employer, and the representative makes sure those jobs for the people in the district aren't lost. Even though that's the very thing people in other districts are complaining about, and in order to get that one thing the representative had to betray the citizenry in 250 other subtle ways to get votes from 250 other districts.

This is why federal legislation was originally meant to be limited in scope and require approval from both the House and the Senate, the latter of which was meant to be appointed by the state legislatures and thereby more inclined to reject that kind of populist vote buying and expansion of federal power. But we changed all that without thinking it through and now we suffer the consequences.


> People generally like their elected representative

This is definitely part of it but not all of it. There's more. I hear people complaining about the exact people they vote for.

I think another part of the problem is simply parties. We vote along lines rather than actual beliefs. I actually believe we'd be better off without them. Or at least affiliations on ballots. Like how we do judges. Hand out a booklet, let people vote by mail and take their time. But don't give people the super lazy version. Some friction is good, too much is bad.

The issue I see is it just makes tribalism very easy. And it's very easy to abuse this. Even countries with more than two parties only effectively have two either via major parties or through coalitions. America just has their coalitions under two big umbrellas (Biden and AOC in the same party? Trump and Romney? Those would be different parties in many European countries, but under the same coalitions)


Parties are a naturally emerging phenomenon in representative democracies, though. Simply put, if you can band together to pool votes somehow (e.g. by agreeing to disagree on some matters to some extent), you consistently win over those who do not. So it's inevitable that someone will do just that, and then others will respond in kind.

Fundamentally, this is a problem with representative democracy in general. There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place. In US, the original design of the system explicitly recognized that: "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand". The problem, of course, is that this wasn't sustainable as population grew, which is why it eventually became a fixed number of seats instead. Either way, even with 30k per representative, there's just no way one can well and truly vote on their actual beliefs in a consistent way. You have to compromise some of them for the sake of others, and then justify those compromises to yourself somehow. And the easiest way for our monkey brain to do that is to do the us-vs-them thing, and then justify the compromise by asserting that it is for the sake of "us".

I think that if we want actual democracy of beliefs, we need to seriously start looking into either more direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days), or else multi-level federated systems such as council democracy.


> Parties are a naturally emerging phenomenon in representative democracies, though.

My main point is about putting party affiliation on ballots. I have less of a problem with the existence of parties than I do as making it the only deciding factor in a person's decision to vote a certain way.

I want people banding together over ideas rather than labels. While this may be the intent of parties, we can observe that in our current form, labels are more important than ideas. So my point is about adding a rather minimal amount of friction between the two. So that we can better distinguish labels from ideas.


> Simply put, if you can band together to pool votes somehow (e.g. by agreeing to disagree on some matters to some extent), you consistently win over those who do not.

This leads to coalitions, not necessarily parties. And then the coalition changes as a result of elections, because a different combination of blocs can form a majority.

It also doesn't necessarily have to be the same set of people even within an election cycle. Suppose you have (representing ideologies rather than parties) 40 democrats, 40 republicans, 15 libertarians and 5 greens. The greens wouldn't have enough seats to do anything, and the democrats and republicans together could do whatever they wanted, but so could the libertarians and either of the democrats or republicans.

Then in the same session you might have a bill that eliminates mandatory minimum sentences favored by the democrats and libertarians, another that lowers taxes on small businesses favored by the republicans and libertarians, and a third that creates a new Medicare benefit favored by democrats and republicans.

Then in the next election one of the major blocs ends up with 48 votes, which is very different, because now a majority coalition is either them and anyone else including the smallest bloc, or not-them but all of the other blocs together.

> There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place.

There is no way for a policy to represent any plurality of distinct individuals, because they'll each want different things. But a representative can try to balance their interests as best they can, and an election using a less defective voting system than FPTP would actually impose consequences on pissing off significant parts of the district, because a candidate which is similar but different along that dimension could plausibly replace them in the next election.

> direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days)

Direct democracy is best when it's used to repeal or veto things or otherwise bind the government, acting as one of the checks and balances against corruption. Using it to create new crimes or spending programs leads to unchecked populism.

We have enough trouble with that as it is because we made it too easy to pass national laws without broad consensus. What you want instead is "laboratories of democracy" where different localities try different things and then everyone can see how each of them goes and make their own decision, and continue that way until the right answer is clear enough to achieve consensus and go through a much more deliberative process to pass a national law. Or, for that matter, just let each of the localities separately pass the law there is now consensus should exist.


Voter coalitions are just parties in their earliest proto-stage. Coalition politics necessarily requires some amount of tit-for-tat and trust building, which forms long-term connections, which lead to organizations like parties over the long term. You can't ignore human mass psychology here; working together towards a common goal is not something that can just be completely disregarded in the next electoral cycle.

There's no way for policy on one issue to represent a plurality of distinct individuals, but most issues are broadly orthogonal and not particularly strongly related in and of themselves. Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.

I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists. If you're really lucky, you get someone who runs on a populist platform and then turns around and does the whole sage king thing.

We're in enough trouble as it is because we shoved most politics up to national level. On that level, any way to enact extensive policies will be problematic simply because broad consensus doesn't scale well to that level. I agree that the solution to that is indeed "laboratories of democracy" where highly localized decisions can be made tailored to the local wants and needs, and where people can easily vote their feet - somewhere around the municipal level is probably fine-grained enough for that, I think, although large metropolitan areas would need further breakdown (which is not a problem with multi-level federalism). But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.

I also agree that it's generally too easy to pass "will somebody please do something?!" type legislation, but that is true in either representative or direct democracy, and so there need to be checks on that either way. Supermajority requirements & automatic sunsetting can help a lot there, especially if the sunsetting term is proportional to the amount of votes the law gets - so e.g. if it can barely pass, then it needs to be re-enacted every year, while something that has near unanimous support is kept around for decades.


> Voter coalitions are just parties in their earliest proto-stage. Coalition politics necessarily requires some amount of tit-for-tat and trust building, which forms long-term connections, which lead to organizations like parties over the long term.

The difference is that the majority coalition changes with every election, which prevents ossification. The positions of Democrats and Republicans are fairly stable over time; the positions of a majority coalition will depend entirely on its membership.

> Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.

The bundling is a feature, provided that similar but not identical candidates aren't suppressed by the voting system. It allows the candidate to find the compromise on each issue that best satisfies the district, or lose to someone who does.

> I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists.

This happens when the representatives are all just proxy votes. The degenerate case is where you elect someone to represent you for the vote on a single bill and then elect a new representative whenever there is a new bill. Obviously that isn't going to act as much of a check on populism.

But now consider the original structure of the US Senate. Senators were appointed by state legislatures across staggered 6-year terms. In order to enact a populist federal policy, you have to capture a majority of state legislatures, then you had to hold that majority for six years to replace the majority of Senators. In order to enact a populist policy expanding federal power, you had to overcome the tendency for state legislatures not to appoint Senators favoring the expansion of federal over state power. It actually worked pretty well until the 17th Amendment broke it by causing Senators to be directly elected. After that populism was unavoidable whenever the majority party in the House matched the one in the Senate. By no coincidence did this then happen immediately.

Adopt a cardinal voting system so there are more than two viable parties and go back to Senators being elected by state legislatures and see what happens.

> But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.

If you make the jurisdictions small enough then direct democracy works okay, modulo some constraints on what policies can be enacted so you don't have towns coming up with ways to abuse non-constituents, e.g. by imposing extractive tolls or fines on anyone who has to pass through. Or to pick an existing major problem, zoning to price out existing non-residents. But the hyper-local laws aren't usually the problem to begin with, because then people can viably vote with their feet and the jurisdictions are under significant competitive pressure. The main problem is what to do about federal laws.


That most often happens in one-party districts because the incumbent doesn't have to please the voters when the district would never go for the other party.

The two party system itself is caused by first-past-the-post voting. In that system if there are more than two parties, the two most similar parties split the vote and both lose, giving them the incentive to merge together instead of running against each other, until there are only two left. Score voting/approval voting fixes this.


It's not __caused__ by FPTP, but yeah that certainly doesn't help. But I am glad that my excessive campaigning on this site for Approval/Star/cardinal systems has had some effect :) (Very happy to see ordinal systems not being suggested)

There's much more complexity to it all, but yeah, voting systems are important. The cardinal systems are just about better embedding preference while minimizing the capacity to hack. But they still assume rational voters. These cardinal systems may make strategic voting less effective, but they don't prevent them. A major benefit to be though is transparency, since it is easier to understand the tallying. Especially when it is (parallel) column sum and argmax. Much easier to understand than multi-round elections. (Could you imagine the Arizona recount with RCV...)

But again, you can build more representation and transparency into the system but it doesn't remove the human component. Where name recognition is a major predictor in winner. Where people are not investing time to vote. This takes a much larger cultural shift to have things like giving people time to research their candidates. But a single extra day off is probably just going to be used to catch up on all the more immediate issues we have. We're all constantly playing catch-up and truth of the matter is that politics is much more abstract than these things and so it gets de-prioritized. Voting systems won't fix that (obviously I still actively advocate for cardinal systems though. I'm a firm believer in addressing problems from the bottom up)


> It's not __caused__ by FPTP

Isn't it? FPTP makes it all but impossible to sustain a third party because of the vote splitting effect. Even when there have been new major parties in the past, they replaced one of the major parties instead of coexisting alongside them for any significant period of time. The most viable districts for minor parties like the Green Party are the ones where the least similar major party is completely out of the running and then the minor party serves the role of the second party rather than a third.

> Where people are not investing time to vote.

But these things are related. If you have a two party system then you typically either have a clear choice where you know without doing much investigation which party you favor, or you don't align with either of the major parties and then no party satisfies you and your choice is basically a coin flip. Neither of these promote investigation because either the choice is obvious or the choice is unsatisfying and equivocal.

Wheres if you had e.g. four viable parties, there would much more likely be one that does closely represent your interests, and another that could come close, giving voters the incentive to at least pay enough attention to distinguish them.


> Isn't it? FPTP makes it all but impossible to sustain a third party because of the vote splitting effect.

I guess it depends how you are using "cause." Is it a causal variable? Sure, I wouldn't push against that. But I want to stress rather that it is a pressure rather than the only contributing variable. That there are more variables with similarly strong pressures, such that by fixing voting we shouldn't expect to have a stable system with multiple parties overnight. Unfortunate as is, things are never that simple. Even more unfortunately, not being transparent about this seems to have the effect of making more progress because people will reframe things as "well we were promised x would fix y, and it didn't, so why should we expect z to be any different?"

But I want to be abundantly clear, I am very in favor of changing to cardinal systems and it is one of the few things I take very seriously when it comes to politics. It is hard to know me and not know about approval and star. You could call me annoying lol. But I want to also make clear that while this is an important step, it isn't the end. It is especially important to remember that democracies are not stable equilibria, but unstable. We will always need to take care and never get lazy. It's unfortunate, but that is the price of freedom. Luckily with most things, effort is low to maintain systems if you are consistent. Unluckily, we're really bad at maintenance and think it is best to fix things when they are problems rather than fixing things before they're broken (a much cheaper solution in money, time, and effort). We've been fooled by "don't fix what ain't broke." That's actually the best time to fix things.

> But these things are related.

I agree. And that's part of an even larger coupled system. The tyranny of coupled systems is that you can't solve the problem by solving one equation at a time. You have to solve them together.

I'll give you an added incentive for cardinal systems that you might not be aware of. They're also REALLY good for analysis. Much better than ordinal actually. Reason being exactly why they are good for voting too actually. It is all about how we embed information. Cardinal (with exception of approval) has the benefit of non-fixed distances being placed upon candidates. While this doesn't have infinite resolution, it can allow us to express how much more we like someone than someone else. You probably know this part but it needed be restated. The analysis part comes down to looking at all these interactions beyond who just wins an election. You have a much better idea about where your voters actual preferences are. You do likely have to end up doing some proxy estimations here (such as most of winning candidate A's voters who did not pick them as their primary candidate picked candidate B. This suggest A should shift more towards B's policy for proper representation! Not only do we pick a better candidate, but we have a clearer picture of where the actual public preference is. This can, and should, be used even down to a regional level to help candidates become the best representatives they can.

BUT like all things, this too can be hacked. You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue[0]. I should also add that of course voter preference actually lies along a much higher dimensional manifold than the one we are expressing with any proposed voting system. I don't actually suggest increasing the dimensionality because you have to balance simplicity and transparency. But there is a problem that distances are far more complicated of a subject than many actually like to believe. This is actually at the core of the Curse of Dimensionality (the furthest point becomes more difficult to distinguish from the nearest point, which is why it is generally discussed with kNNs, but generally this isn't always stated or remembered). It's also important to remember that operations may not always be well defined. I am mentioning this because the issue being discussed in [0] can be exploited in any dimension and any distance function we set. This can better illustrate the point I made about unstable equilibria. And you'll notice their suggested defense explicitly depends on the public coming together to act as a coalition and to treat policy setters (government) as an adversary. Which we both have agreed in the past is a core American ideal. It is why I am against labeling and any form of tribalism. But we must admit this is a difficult task, even if it is a core concept of what makes civilization possible in the first place: considering your neighbors. So I just want to always stress that. Don't just consider what is best for you, or for your family. But make sure to always consider those around you, especially those you disagree with, because they are the ones that can be leveraged against you (and you against them!) to have a worse outcome for everyone.

The tyranny of the modern world is that it is complex and interconnected. That we've solved most of the simple problems. So the dangers that are presented to us generally are due to abstraction and complexity. There are not more "first order" (if this then that) problems. And anyone trying to sell you that is either naive or deceiving you. Even if that person is ourselves (it often is).

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goQ4ii-zBMw


> But I want to stress rather that it is a pressure rather than the only contributing variable. That there are more variables with similarly strong pressures, such that by fixing voting we shouldn't expect to have a stable system with multiple parties overnight.

I'm not sure that's the case, at least if you're willing to extend "overnight" to something like "over two or three election cycles."

If we were to adopt e.g. approval voting, the immediate effect would be that existing third party candidates who currently get ~1.2% of the vote would be able to get 20-30%, because voters would no longer have to be concerned about "wasting" their vote on a non-major party candidate they might actually prefer. In a small number of districts, like Libertarians in parts of New Hampshire or Greens in parts of California, the third party candidate might even immediately win.

Which in turn would change the nature of the very next election, because the media would have no excuse to dismiss a candidate who got 30% approval in the previous election when the losing major party candidate only got 32% -- or 29%. Then third party candidates get into the debates and have the opportunity to turn their 30% into 55%.

Moreover, it doesn't take a lot of seats to make a difference. Suppose the Republicans have 48 seats, the Democrats have 49 and a third party has 3. Those 3 seats are all either of the major parties need for a majority, so the third party would have a significant amount of influence.

> You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue

Isn't this exactly the thing which is solved by cardinal systems? If you put candidate A, B and C or policy A, B and C all on the ballot together and have people rate them, there is no longer an ordering problem because you're not holding separate votes for A vs. B and, B vs. C and C vs. A. If Policy A gets a higher average rating than Policies B or C then it will always win when they're all on the ballot until voter preferences change.

The people choosing which candidates or policies make it onto the ballot have a lot of power, but that's always the case. Even if 100% of voters agree that Policy A is the best policy, if the only policies on the ballot are B and C then nobody can vote for Policy A. Obvious solution is to allow any policy or candidate onto the ballot that can gather a threshold number of signatures, instead of giving control over this to some manipulative autocrats.


> I really REALLY wish more people/cities would take this "fuck you, we'll do it ourselves" attitude.

This is hard. Start here: https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-i

The problem is the activation energy and a bunch of people who will oppose you no matter how useful something is.


Why are you calling their municipal fiber internet a monopoly? Not only is it a utility, here is a list of 10 other broadband providers including att fiber, xfinity and verizon 300mb 5g:

https://broadbandnow.com/Tennessee/Chattanooga

Pretty ridiculous and disingenuous to call it "monopoly".


Does someone else have access to that infrastructure that can offer the service? Utilities are granted monopolies.


> Utilities are granted monopolies.

You can say that as many times as you want, but you don't have any evidence or even an explanation.

If there were ten power lines and ten water pipes to your house would say each of those twenty companies had a monopoly?

Repeating something isn't evidence of anything.


That's amazing. I just upgraded my home network to 10G to take advantage of my 1.5G internet connection.


I immigrated from China to Canada and I'm not sure if monopoly is the root cause. In China, ISP is state-controlled and 100% monopoly, yet the plans are dirt cheap compared to those in Canada.

I just looked up the price in my hometown in China: 1000 Mbps fibre internet + 3 mobile phone lines (105 GB data) + IPTV = 249 CNY tax included (30 USD / 42 CAD / 28 EUR)

The 1000 Mbps fibre Internet plan alone (no phones no TVs) I have in Canada is $65 + tax. And it's a discounted plan. The price on the ISP website is $100.

Also in China phone plans have fast lanes as well. SNS and video streaming data are treated separately (cheap or even free).


I lived in China for 9 years and always found the internet, even for going just to Chinese sites, to be really slow. Like sure you have 5G, but the overall internet trunks are just saturated and not built out enough. Maybe it has gotten better since I left Beijing in 2016?

It was definitely cheap and affordable. But I always felt a huge speed bump (along with easy access to foreign web sites) when I went to Thailand or Indonesia for vacation.


> always found the internet, even for going just to Chinese sites, to be really slow

A lot of that is because of the GFW.

MITM/TLS decryption/DPI has a massive performance overhead (and why the first question any agent based security product is ask is whether it is "in the path of traffic").

It's basically a giant version of Zscaler Private Access (ZPA)

The performance hit is a major reason why a lot of edge computing development has happened in the Chinese ecosystem (you can't guarantee stuff works with latency, so how do you solve that)

This is an older investigation (2017) by ThousandEyes about this - https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/benchmarking-network-perfo...

Note that the infra has changed drastically since 2017.


Hmm, then I’m not even sure why they bother with lines out anymore. They’ve blocked pretty much everything abroad, it seems like they could speed things up by just scrapping the GFW and physically disconnecting their internet from the rest of the world.


> it seems like they could speed things up by just scrapping the GFW and physically disconnecting their internet from the rest of the world

If you do that, international commerce for China grinds to a complete halt (though ik one very large F50 that is in the process of completely decoupling in the next 2 years)

Especially because this kind of an en masse disconnection means completely disconnecting Chinese assets abroad from their mainland HQs.

Down the grapevine, I have heard some provinces testing that kind of a whitelist, but I'm not sure how true that is.

If an actual nationwide whitelist is implemented, I think that is proof enough that war be coming. Even Roskomnadzor didn't try implementing a similar system until the 2022 escalation.


That makes sense, but at least China has to pay a cost for keeping it kind of opened but mostly closed.

It is also really hostile for foreign tourists. You'd be surprised how many people still go to China and have all their trip plans stored in Google docs...doh. Although if you come with a foreign SIM and use roaming, you circumvent the GFW automatically for some reason.


> Although if you come with a foreign SIM and use roaming, you circumvent the GFW automatically for some reason

That's because when your SIM is in international roaming, traffic is routed by the local telco to a tunnel back to the home telco provider. This ofc decreases margins significantly (because those bytes are routed via fiber or satellite by a Transit Service) and is why roaming costs are so high.

> It is also really hostile for foreign tourists. You'd be surprised how many people still go to China and have all their trip plans stored in Google docs...doh

Oof. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that Google is banned in China, but I guess some tourists just aren't tech savvy, so who am I to judge.

> China has to pay a cost for keeping it kind of opened but mostly closed

Not really. As an individual you are definetly paying a performance cost in the form of low latencies and speeds, but this is also why edge computing solutions (eg. Compute offloading, packet size optimizations, etc) are heavily researched by Chinese players compared to Western players. In isolation, it's a good forcing function for innovation.

That said, it is absolutely 1984-esque.

Also, a lot of these innovations seem to be a result of the Urumqi and Lhasa riots from 10-15 years ago as well as Tahrir Square, so clearly maintaining the political status quo seems to be top of mind.

It's bad for business, but China (and especially Xi) has seemed to have taken a very statist approach after the 2015-16 financial crisis.


> Oof. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that Google is banned in China, but I guess some tourists just aren't tech savvy, so who am I to judge.

We hosted an ACM conference in 2011 in Beijing. One of my friends came, first trip to China, really smart guy just finishing up his PhD in EECS at UCB, but OMG did he mess that one up. We had to use the guest wifi in my office so he could make offline copies. If you aren't used to it, and don't follow China closely, you could be very technical and still be caught off guard. Lots of people will tell you China is just a normal tourist spot like Japan, Thailand, or Indonesia, but it really isn't.

> Also, a lot of these innovations seem to be a result of the Urumqi and Lhasa riots from 10-15 years ago as well as Tahrir Square, so clearly maintaining the political status quo seems to be top of mind.

I was in Beijing for those. A lot of things blocked afterwards, we slowly lost more services that we had previously. I would say 2008 was a peak for Chinese internet liberalization (and well, lots of other liberalization, I also spent 6 months in 2002 so can compare), and then it just tanked from that point on to present. They made a show for the Olympics and then decided they didn't need to bother anymore. It doesn't help that Xi is much more assertive and autocratic than Hu was.


> those. A lot of things blocked afterwards, we slowly lost more services that we had previously

Until a couple years ago, it was fairly common to smuggle VEOM, Airtel, and Ooredoo sims in much of Xinjiang and Tibet, because the Uyghur and Tibetan diaspora largely uses WhatsApp to communicate as the Uyghur diaspora is largely in the CIS, Turkey, and Pakistan and the Tibetan diaspora in India, Nepal, and the US.

> OMG did he mess that one up. We had to use the guest wifi in my office so he could make offline copies. If you aren't used to it, and don't follow China closely, you could be very technical and still be caught off guard

Oh boy! That sounds rough, but also makes sense.


> I lived in China for 9 years and always found the internet, even for going just to Chinese sites, to be really slow.

Did you have your VPN / proxy on? That might be one of the reason as Chinese internet is only fast for traffic within its borders. Traffic that crosses borders are super slow in terms of throughput AND latency (if not blocked altogether). If you have your VPN / proxy on, your request basically crosses the borders twice before it reaches the destination web server.

Another reason I can think of is the mobile ISP incompatibility. For some ridiculous reasons, most "foreign" phones' (iPhones exempt) do not have full radio coverage when connected to CMCC.


We tried many VPNs, and they all would stop working after paying for the mandatory few months, so I eventually gave up. IT is slow inside China even without using a VPN, and only accessing domestic Chinese websites (well, if you don't have YouTube, at least you have tons of pirated content to view).

This is with a wired line from China Telecom, China Unicom internet is fine for text viewing, I don't I bothered much with video (and really, it is slower than China Mobile 5G, I guess this has changed now).


Communist and capitalist monopolies are two completely different things.


The OpenReach model doesn’t make much sense for wireless, where the market can support three competing providers (plus a ton of MVNOs) and overbuilding is necessary to provide sufficient capacity anyway. (E.g. AT&T couldn’t serve everyone with just its own cell towers.)

I think the more salient issue is the market simply doesn’t care about this stuff. As long as you can get on Facebook and instagram they are not mo rd by what’s going on behind the scenes.


I'd agree with this comment if it was 2010. But today the US has good internet speeds -- in general much better than Europe despite it's bigger geographic size and less-dense population.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...


Despite the category mismatch (continent vs country) .. Europe and USA have very similar population densities (~35 p/km2) [0] [1] [2] [3]

Also, many sparsely populated European countries have relatively good internet speeds (eg Iceland, Sweden).

[0] https://database.earth/population/europe/density

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula...

[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=U...


There is no “monopoly” on cellular service. There are three national carriers and a few regional carriers that have their own network.

How exactly do more carriers competing locally even work? You slice the spectrum they are allowed and have worse service? Do you remember when t-mobiles spectrum allocation was so bad that you couldn’t get a signal inside of a building?


I haven't checked lately, but Comcast tried that data cap crap and was completely pushed back on in every economically important state they tried it in or there was actually an option someone could switch too. I was shocked in Chicago when I got an overage fee, but I promptly switched to RCN even before Illinois shut it down.


T-mobile offers it in the US still: https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on

In this mode, video streams will be limited to 480p but will not count against your bandwidth cap.


And by "video" we mean "Netflix". There goes neutrality and fair competition.


Canadas ISP situation was far better when Crown corporations were providing better, cheaper services. In standard fashion, conservative government successfully convinced half the population that it’d be better if the crowns were sold.

Spoiler: it has gotten way way worse. Not better.


>In the EU there are similar offers for "enhanced" access, but its not speeding up/slowing down apps, but giving "free" access, as in not counting to your data cap.

there were such offers. about 10 years ago, but they are illegal EU-wide.


> The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite is because of the monopolies that exist

Hot take - Reliance Jio+Bharti Airtel, China Mobile+Telecom+Unicom, and NTT+KDDI are basically duo/triopolies yet were able to roll our 5G nationwide in just 2-4 years in India, China, and Japan while keeping competitive pricing, and make the US market look free in comparison.

The issue seems to be the relative lethargy of the FCC and regulators, along with issues around deprecating older infra.

This doesn't mean we should go all Reagan, but if this is streamlined at the executive level, it would really simplify everything.


> the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite

Why to a lesser extent? In my experience Canada's was way worse than the US, which I honestly didn't think would be possible.


The worst part is, imo, US taxpayers paid for all that infrastructure.

These ISPs absolutely should be forced to open their infrastructure to other providers, like in Europe, and for the same reasons.


> The worst part is, imo, US taxpayers paid for all that infrastructure.

Isn't that exactly how it always worked? Whatever public service works well is privatised (for some reason I don't get), and whatever is a source of cost stays public. Such that the taxpayer keeps paying, and some people get rich by screwing them.


Not sure why I got downvoted for that. It seems only rational that private actors may want to privatise and buy any public service that is profitable. Because private actors seek profit.

Now many times I don't think it is a good idea (why in the world would one privatise public transports? "Public" is in the title...), but that is another question.


If that's true, then why does the US have higher average and median broadband speeds than pretty much every European country[0]? The narrative that is seen online isn't necessarily representative of the reality, Americans just like to complain more. In my experience, bundled data whatsapp/YouTube or whatever else is much more common in Europe too and no one really complains because again, Americans are just that much more vocal.

[0] for mobile, they are also in the top 15. For fixed broadband, they are 5th. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed



The FCC did that with DSL. The incumbent telcos retaliated by not maintaining their copper plant and killing their own line of business as an ISP.


The mistake there was in leaving the private monopoly intact whatsoever.

If you want to have ISP-level competition, one of the better ways to do it is to have the government install cable trenches along the roads which the government then owns and provides cheap access for anyone to lay cable. Once the trenches exist, wiring a neighborhood with fiber is then far less expensive and makes it feasible to have multiple competitors.


All the free access has been removed in Germany a while ago because of net neutrality.

The free access also came with a limit like bitrate and video resolution.


I think there is limited room for competition in many of these categories. For example, the infrastructure costs for telecoms make it very difficult for new competition (like a startup) to enter the market. The existing ones benefited from past funding and a lack of competition, but have captured market share. In some cases, there are other practical limitations, for example, splitting up wireless spectrum. Apart from Starlink I’m not sure there can be viable alternatives in this space


You force the infrastructure operator to allow competitors to use their infrastructure on a fair basis. It’s what happens in Europe (including the UK). It works.


OR, (and I know this is near heresy) you force the infrastructure operator to allow competitors to use their infrastructure regardless of whether it is fair to that operator.

This isn't a schoolyard playground. We don't have to play fair and treat these megacorporation with kid gloves. When the shoe is on the other foot, corporations don't play fair with us. "Fair" doesn't even come into the picture when they are in the conference room deciding their prices and terms. So why should the government treat them fairly when it comes to a regulatory solution?


“Fair” as in “on the same terms that their own retail unit gets”, without any terms that would be anticompetitive.

And no cross subsidisation.

(I meant “fair to competitors”, but I think you thought I meant “fair to the infrastructure owner”.)


In Europe they only do this for the last mile as far as I know, and this actually also prevents innovation since again there isn’t competition that can meaningfully introduce alternatives (let’s say cable versus fiber versus whatever). But I agree that approach is still an important tool (certainly better than nothing) and the US should adopt it.


> In Europe they only do this for the last mile as far as I know, and this actually also prevents innovation since again there isn’t competition that can meaningfully introduce alternatives (let’s say cable versus fiber versus whatever). But I agree that approach is still an important tool (certainly better than nothing) and the US should adopt it.

Actually many places offer choice between cable and DSL variants. But once there is fiber in the ground it actually doesn't make much sense to go with anything else, so choices disappear (only for connection type, not ISP). With fiber it's much cheaper to provide high speed access (and there is a much clearer update path).


I live in sweden and can pick from roughly 30 different ISPs where I live. I don't live in some big city, but in a smaller village. There is tons of room for competition if the laws are set up to push for it.


Do you know how they are set up? What elements of their networks they share?


Broadband funding just funded some competition here.

Before: One ISP. Spectrum $120/mo 1Gb down & 40Mb up.

After: New choices of 8 fiber ISP. Opts inc $35 250Mb/250Mb, $50 1Gb/1Gb, $70 2.5Gb/2.5Gb, $120 10Gb/10Gb.

ISPs spend billions on politicians to make sure (the most possible) Americans don't have choices. They get their money's worth.

ref: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/04/28/infuriating-tel...


I lived in Tennessee when Google Fiber was announced there. At the time Chattanooga (and a few small towns) already had fiber internet that were offered by the utilities companies.

It was an absolute shitshow. Actually, a shitshow would have been cleaner.

Immediately AT&T rolls out gigabit internet, but not everywhere. I was in one of the small towns with gig and the previous renter had AT&T. AT&T literally cut the lines into the apartment instead of disconnecting them, causing me to have a $50 install fee (the technician was clearly also annoyed).

Then Google, AT&T, and Comcast got into a big fight and it got political. Politicians would talk about how Google coming in was preventing competition (I shit you not) and attacking the little guys. Then a judge ruled that Google couldn't operate on telephone polls because Google would "cause danger to employees" and "be a union violation" (not the unions saying these things, it was AT&T. Obviously this made people think the unions were blocking things and continued to get mad at unions)[0]. So basically one of a Comcast and AT&T technician had to be there while Google would place in fiber and you know how it goes.

It was a literal circus and the whole while it was politicized and misinformation was spreading like wildfire. Big Tech screwing over the little guys. Big Tech coming after the public utilities (never happened). Unions making everything impossible. Something about Big Tech and liberals/trans/gays taking over at some point. Like the on the ground conversations that would happen were mindbogglingly dumb. It actually was hard to figure out what was actually going on because every person and news article would have a unique story to tell. But the weirdest thing to me is about how nearly everyone I knew was a self-proclaimed Libertarian who hated government yet was licking their boots ad propping them up because they didn't want those gay/liberal/furry/godless/<insert random insult> techies rolling in decreasing competition and destroying the free market. That's when I truly started to believe that there's no such thing as a Libertarian (or any other cleanly encapsulated idea, but Libertarians are in your face), it's just a label. Because I watched anti-government free market devotees bend over backwards to protect monopolies and not even have a clue of the cognitive dissonance. It also made me really pay attention to how this happens more often than we care to think (including how we ourselves do it).

[0] https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2017/11/22/judge-rule...


Libertarian does seem to mean different things to different people, but if somebody is supporting government or propping them up because they are concerned about preserving or maintaining current or traditional social values, that is the definition of a social conservative, not a libertarian. A libertarian position on that would be a "you do you" , but don't force others to do "you." A "the government should enforce or promote this" is a social conservative position.

But yes, I mostly agree. Most of the people I know who would identify as libertarian, suddenly become much more comfortable with government action when the government is wanting to do something they like, or is even run by their person. Once "the other side" gets in control, they seem to rediscover their libertarian principles. Seeing this was a good reminder to me that we should look at actions, not words, when deciding who to vote for.


Most of these people would repeat the common lines of taxation is theft, government is bad, prefer small government, complain about things like that existence of USPS/FDA (and an inaccurate story about peanut butter)/health instructors, and all those things you'd stereotype of those positions. They'd also take positions like you say about things like drugs (despite the state having a lot of dry counties, including the one Jack Daniels is in...).

Truth is that people say they believe a lot of things but don't act as if those beliefs are true. I think people like labels more than beliefs.

A common one is how common it is to say that all politicians are corrupt. I know people that say that like it's a catch phrase and then when we talk post voting they vote in incumbents. ¯\ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯


> The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite...

Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.

Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?


Both experiences can be true in the same country.

For me, internet is great (both wired and wireless). For wired, I have a choice of cable and FTTH in my apartment, both cancelable month-by-month and without any bullshit fees ("taxes and surcharges", yeah, believe it or not I also pay taxes and I don't make it your problem, ISP!) beyond the sticker price.

No idea if this is due to competition, regulation, or both; I suspect that at least the "no bullshit fees" part is due to the latter, as I can't imagine major US corporations all somehow collectively dropping them in one region but not the other.

I also don't doubt that it is significantly worse for somebody living elsewhere. Data caps seem to still be a thing for wired access in some places.


Heres a little illustration. I used to work for a multinational company that had its main office in london and a number of satellite offices around the world. We wanted to install decent internet into everywhere so we could begin to manage our data in a more effective way.

London: look for a good offer, phone up a few ISPs, get a quote, work out if we have spare capacity in the building (we did) boom, 1 gigabit install inside a month.

Redwood city: 6 months. we had some sort of shitty T3 line installed as a stopgap. It never reached SLA. I had to phone the NOX, get a report. I then phoned the EMEA president of $large_International_network_provider to complain personally that I had to do the work of half his fucking company to get dailup++ installed. I left before they managed to get actual fibre into the building.

Santa Monica: "we cant install fibre as the previous engineer reported seeing eyes under the building" Try and use a different company. Turns out that there is only that company in santa monica (Can't remember which) Ok, order an upgrade to what we already have. "line is bad needs replacing" cue me having to _fucking fly out_ and manage the fourth attempt at upgrading because the company are such useless fucking pricks.

domestic wise

I am in the suburbs, they've just rolled out fibre to the house. I have 900 meg down with 100(might be more) up for £50 a month. Thats the pricy version with a fixed ipv4 address.

I can get a less fancy version for £30.


What's your Internet speed up and down, provider, and monthly cost? Actual monthly cost, not temporary promotions.


I’m currently doing 6.3/9.1 with 81ms latency on AT&T. I’m seeing Europe averaging 48 Mbps [1], though my experience in Italy and the UK has been far spottier than in America. (Lot of people in this thread confusing home and mobile internet. I get 1Gb/35 for $65 at home, but that’s irrelevant.)

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/689876/average-mobile-sp...


That average looks outdated, and includes a lot of rural and under-developed areas. It also varies a lot per country[1].

Most people in urban areas can get deals like 300-500Mbps for < €30/month. I have symmetric 1Gbps and pay about the same, could get 8Gbps for €80 but have no use for it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...


In France, I pay monthly 27.48€ (~$29) for 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up (in theory, in practice, it's more like 500~600Mbps down, 250~300Mbps up). This includes a TV option for 2€ (without it, it's 25.48€).

My provider is SFR (the only one giving access to optical fiber in the small village where I live).

EDIT: I'm talking about home internet. For mobile internet, I pay 19.99€/month for unlimited access (5G), but I haven't done a speedtest.


For comparison, I live in Washington State 50km away from Seattle, and I get 1200 Mbps down and 200 Mbps up (in practice more like 900/100) for $115/month. This is just pure Internet, no TV or anything else.

The ISP that I currently use - Comcast Xfinity - is also the only cable provider in this area. I can get some mobile and satellite options, but they are all more expensive for lower speed and higher latency.


I pay $55 a month for 1gps symmetrical at&t fiber. No caps I normally hit 2TB a month and they've never complained. Somedays I only seem to get like 800mpbs of that gig but it's rare.


It's like $50/mo for 200/50 I think. Why, what are yours?


West coast USA.

My current service is 130 a month for 200/20.

Its getting replaced: 50 bucks a month for 10gig fiber.

It's going to cost me 800 ish bucks to set up to take advantage of that (routing, switching, nic's)... I will still come out way ahead before the end of the year.

Competition has its benefits.


The GP is comparing the US to the rest of the world, and they're correct: the US (including yours) lags behind other modern countries. Singapore, for reference, offers 500/500 symmetric connections for approximately the same price as you're paying. 2gbps symmetric is less than $200/mo.

You're saying your Internet is fast enough for you, and that's fine and probably correct, but you're still getting slower speeds for higher prices than you should. You're also likely better situated than much of the rest of the country.


If by "the rest of the world" you mean a cherry-picked selection of the most advanced countries, then yes, the US is behind on internet access (and everything else).

It never makes sense to me when people say how the US ranks last among developed countries on a bunch of metrics. Of course, that just means the US is indeed... less developed than those countries. If it's not fair to compare the US to Somalia, it's not fair to compare it to Sweden either. It just is what it is, somewhere between the two development extremes.


How, exactly, are you supposed to compare if not to other countries? There’s no bar for “this is what a developed country’s internet should look like” so the only way to compare is to do it against other countries roughly in the same range as the US.

It’s also entirely factual to say that in comparison to other developed countries, the US lags in internet.


If the US is significantly behind developed countries in practically every category, why do you consider it a developed country? What does “developed” mean?

> other countries roughly in the same range as the US.

The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?


There are several definitions for what makes a country “developed” and the US is solidly in all of them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country

I’m not sure how you can possibly argue that the US is not “developed”.

> The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?

Feel free to take any of those lists and compare the US to countries around them in those lists. The countries might differ slightly, but the notion of what is a “developed” country has been firmly established for a long time now.


> I’m not sure how you can possibly argue that the US is not “developed”.

The U.S. is considered developed only because it’s extremely rich. However, the general state of its infrastructure, education, governance, media, etc. is more typical of a developing country in many ways.

That’s my point: all these lists of things the U.S. is worse at than every developed country are collectively what it means to be developed, more so in my mind than just being rich.


only because it’s extremely rich

Wtf!? Yes!

Now I'm curious what you thought developed means.


You compare cities, since you need to include average income.


My prices are much lower in the states than in my place in Italy right now. Service sucks here too.

Anyway you're ignoring income. Seattle is around triple the median of France for example. You need to compare cities of similar size and income.


> but you're still getting slower speeds for higher prices than you should

And what is your solution to that?


Aggressive regulation of large businesses, and local government-run non-profit ISPs to provide a sensible baseline that can be relied upon without being at the whims of private companies.


Not vote for politicians that are ardently anti-consumer and anti-infrastructure? We’re talking about what exists, not who you can call to upgrade your internet :/


What is great about paying $50 for such low bandwidth?


$70/month for 10Gb/10Gb

Actual speeds are more like 5/7. But I’m happy!


In the great Europe (Germany, Telekom) I pay 50 for 16MB/4MB… good deal!


In the US? Can you link to the promo page showing where others can obtain such a deal?

Even if you deliver, surely you know that such a connection is an extreme, extreme outlier?


That's not really that rare in the USA though? Most decently sized cities have some form of fiber offering that will at-least give you a gig for $50 a month or so.


California. I have multiple multi-gig fiber options available and they compete.

https://www.sonic.com/residential/internet

Looks like the prices must vary by location. They don’t have a price there.


Symmetrical 1G, Verizon, 60/month in NYC


There's actually a couple of local providers that aren't bad, for example, https://www.sonic.com/.

$40/month (if you don't rent a modem/eerio, which, why would you) for 10 gigs up and down, not to mention excellent customer service.

But I will happily admit that they're a bit of an outlier and the offerings in much of the country are complete shit.


> Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?

once you get outside of truly major metro areas, internet access tends to go to shit.

i've got 1G fiber internet in Seattle now, but in Everett ~25M shared access comcast is the best you can do in a lot of places. and it isn't like you need to be surrounded by cows and horses to have bad internet, you can have the boeing factory just down the road, but you're living in a ~100k population city as opposed to a tech hub.


(also that 25M cable modem is going to be twice as expensive as 100M fiber in a major city and at least half the country only has access to DSL at those kinds of costs for anything half usable)


ISPs are desperate to be part of the monetary exchange of services over their infrastructure, they've been trying to become more than "dumb pipes" for decades and virtually no one wants that. Imagine if the water company could charge you more for a glass of water than a toilet flush.


Well they sort of do already — typically you pay less for water for irrigation (usually because sewerage is metered by water usage and obv if it goes on the lawn it’s not going down the drain).

In places like Florida however irrigation water is reclaimed and not treated the same was as drinking water and has totally separate plumbing and metering (and pricing).


I'd push back on "typically." In my municipality, they have no way of measuring water used for gardening / lawncare independently from drinking water. So it all gets billed to the same drinking water and sewage rate.


> Well they sort of do already — typically you pay less for water for irrigation (usually because sewerage is metered by water usage and obv if it goes on the lawn it’s not going down the drain).

Aren't you paying more for your lawn water then?

If your sewer bill is based on your water bill[1]: a gallon of water for drinking results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment, which you'll use. A gallon of water for irrigation results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment which you won't use. Caveats: maybe you pee on the lawn, probably you perspire, sewer pipes are leaky: some of your sewage escapes out, some of your irrigation water escapes in.

[1] this is common, but I don't think anywhere close to universal; even ignoring lack of universal municipal water and lack of universal municipal sewage. Flatrate by connection size is also common. Approximately zero households have individual sewer meters, but some commercial/industrial customers may have them so they can be billed on actual usage.


There's a second meter that tracks the irrigation usage and that's how they subtract the sewer charges for irrigation. Of course you have to pay extra for the meter to be installed and there's often an additional "standing charge" for that extra meter in every bill, but it's usually since the sewer rates are quite high, it's worth doing.

My municipality uses 75% of the water usage (minus the reading from the meter used for irrigation) as the basis for the sewer charge.


So you’re not using the sewer then? Isn’t that completely logical not to pay for it?


Exactly, but they have no easy way of direct metering domestic sewerage usage, so they do it indirectly via your household water usage (usually something like 75% goes down the drains). There needs to be a second meter to "subtract" the irrigation usage from the household usage so you don't get billed for that (and if it's a separate reclaimed water supply, then there's no subtraction, it's just a separate line item).

If you don't have the 2nd meter and your irrigation is running from your domestic water supply, then yes you're absolutely paying for sewerage you're not using.


The number of places in Florida that do that is tiny.


I suppose it depends, but it's pretty common to see signs saying "Non-Potable Reclaimed Water used for Irrigation" in and around housing developments, hotels, shopping and commercial areas as well as resorts and golf courses.

According to this, Florida uses 820M gals of reclaimed water per day although this isn't all necessarily used for irrigation.

https://floridadep.gov/water/domestic-wastewater/content/flo...


Bad example, because drinking vs flushing water can have real differences in properties affecting their price, availability and quality. Just like QoS can be meaningful to differentiate low-latency vs high bandwidth. The problem starts when service level is is based on the service-provider, not the type content, when Spotify music is cheaper than Apple music, even though both are just music.

A more accurate analogy would be if the cost was based on the brand of the faucet, or if electricity was charged differently for using your stove vs running your AC. Or if roads had a fast-lane to drive to Costco, while the rest share a jammed single lane.


I find it interesting how nobody blinks an eyelid at the massive profits raked in by companies like Google, Facebook etc. but as soon as the ISPs that create the infrastructure that makes all this happen (and innovate massively in the process) want some piece of the cake everyone cries foul.

Now I actually strongly support net neutrality and maybe ISPs don't really need a piece of the cake, but it is still interesting how the online companies have captured most of the profits, but are also considered the good guys in his scenario.


> but as soon as the ISPs that create the infrastructure that makes all this happen (and innovate massively in the process) want some piece of the cake everyone cries foul

I pay my ISP well over $100 a month for their service. Far more than I pay outright to Google or Meta or Apple. Why should they try to skim even more off the top?


> are also considered the good guys in his scenario.

You can have multiple bad guys. Just because one of them is the worse guy doesn't mean the other one is good.


There’s a reason for that. Neither Google nor Facebook are infrastructure providers. Infrastructure is a different business, and, since it frequently has natural monopolies, we regulate it so to provide the greatest good for the public and maximize stability and functionality. Infrastructure is an enabling foundation for competitive enterprise.


how is gcp not infrastructure?


Public infrastructure, like water, sewage, and electricity. I.e., utilities. Telecommunications is another. GCP is B2B; compute infrastructure isn’t generally consumed by the public as a whole.


Most people view ISPs as a utility provider, so it should be expected that people would be annoyed at the idea that they get to double dip in the profit.

I pay my electric company (the ones that create the infrastructure to make an ISP possible and have massively innovated in the process) the same for kWh if it’s for a lightbulb or my work laptop


Infrastructure like that is a natural monopoly - I certainly would have an easier time switching from Google than I would Comcast, the latter would require me to move or put up with 90's era internet over copper lines.


> I find it interesting how nobody blinks an eyelid at the massive profits raked in by companies like Google, Facebook etc. but as soon as the ISPs that create the infrastructure that makes all this happen (and innovate massively in the process) want some piece of the cake everyone cries foul.

The ISP did nothing to earn any of the cake beyond provide me a pipe, and I already paid for that. I'm not defending Google's profits or calling them the good guys, I'm saying my prices shouldn't change because Comcast is jealous of Facebook. If ISPs get to tax Google and Netflix, they'll just charge me more, and I don't want that. If you sell shovels, you don't get part of the gold nugget profit.


I don't think they're seen as the good guys in this scenario, but ultimately those services are what we are paying the ISP access for. Also, I don't think nobody blinks an eyelid at the profits of those companies like Facebook and Google.

Facebook, Google and the like do much much more than provide internet.

The problem with fast lanes is that it makes the internet an uneven playing ground for the distribution of services. It is completely changing the fabric of how they operate at the expense of the consumer.


It would probably be easier to root for the ISPs if they weren't a bunch of monopolistic assholes. I know that's the reason I personally root against them.


What innovations to ISPs make? I thought they largely just installed equipment from the same group of vendors.

I’m genuinely curious if anyone knows of any.


You're staring right at it:

5G --> 3GPP --> ATIS[1] --> includes every major ISP in the US

Equipment manufacturers are just one piece of a much, much bigger puzzle. Standards development towards at-scale adoption, global interoperability, etc. is just as important; consumers just see the end game of all that backend work, and to be quite frank, it's grossly underappreciated.

[1] https://www.atis.org/overview/membership/members/


Reminds me of how maintaining essential system like the banking systems are seen as cost centers and run on a tight budget, but if some young men make a webpage that barely works venture capitalists are tripping over themselves trying to shove millions into their hands.


Have they? You’d think after 30+ years of commercial ISPs they’d have actually done something by now if they were “trying”.


I expected electricity grids to do that. Different prices for EV charging, for home use etc.


We need neutrality up and down the stack elsewhere too. I would consider hosting (including DNS, cloud infrastructure), financial services (banks, PayPal, stripe), and others as needing their version of net neutrality laws, where they cannot refuse customers or treat them differently or pick winners/losers or charge differently for different use cases. These are all utilities that are necessary to survive in today’s societies, and therefore they must be treated as if they were publicly run, through the power of regulations.


You cannot mandate both neutrality and liability for things on the payment stack, it is too burdensome.

Personally I would prefer neutrality over liability.


Agree, and I like the phrasing of neutrality over liability - captures this tradeoff well.


> where they cannot refuse customers

Having seen the degree to which spammers, scammers, and malicious hackers will abuse services to no end (often while carefully avoiding explicit violations of the law) I can assure you that you do not want this.

Forcing every company to host everyone only sounds good in theory.


We force power utilities and such to support all users. These companies can solve the problem and pay the costs. But if the laws for scammers aren’t adequate that’s a separate issue that should be solved on its own.


I think the article gets network slicing wrong. Using network slicing instead of the traffic shaping that the mobile edge router probably supports is a strange idea. The showcase network slicing use case was public safety comms. Network slicing is AFAIK not much used because it clashes with roaming. The article describes network slicing as reserving spectrum for certain apps. That's not how it works. It reserves capacity.

Still, zero-rating and traffic shaping should not be used to favor apps, especially not on a pay to play basis, for all the same net neutrality arguments as ever.


So surprised I had to scroll too far for this reply. I actually work for one of the major US carriers. My job is literally to figure out how to apply the technical capabilities of 5G to solve business problems. NONE of the US carriers have figured out how to actually deliver network slicing beyond, say, reserving capacity for first responders. And, as you say, it’s about capacity, not speed per se. We want to make sure that, say, an AGV can offload kinematics to the MEC and navigate in real time in dynamic environments. The poster child for network slicing is the surgeon doing telesurgery over a 5G network (But that’s likely to remain a poster child). We’re figuring out how to provide network slices for autonomous vehicles, mobile teleoperation, etc., in all use cases we’re examining it because something BAD could happen absent guaranteed capacity. I have never ever heard anyone talk about using network slicing for QoS for consumer apps.


iOS 17 added explicit support for 5G slicing for QoS in consumer apps: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/network/nwparamete...

Android 14 added 5G slicing upsell for consumer apps: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/5g-slicing#5g-s...

This is imminent.


This is correct. Slicing can offer significant performance gains in certain situations. For example, lower latency when certain users need it while not overburdening the network by having to give that to every user.


My experience with 5G is that it's strictly worse than LTE. At this point, if I see the 5G symbol on my phone I'm conditioned to expect the internet to barely work. Requests frequently seem to just hang.


Are you possibly on a 2nd-tier plan (like mine, I have grandfathered T-Mobile "simple choice" @ $10/line)? MNVOs like Mint, etc are also typically 2nd-tier.

Telcos typically downrate 2nd-tier data, so if it's there's congestion, we feel it most.


Then something is definitely up with either your device or your local network base station(s).

I used to have major problems with one network one particular street corner where data throughput would reliably drop to zero on 5G, but calls still went through somehow (even though they're also data on 5G, albeit with a different QoS). Signal strength was always shown as full. A phone restart would sometimes, but not always, fix it – without moving anywhere!

Never happened again since switching away. 5G is a standard/protocol; it doesn't somehow inherently prevent bad network management.


My experience with 5G is that it's strictly better than LTE. At this point, if I see the 5G symbol, I'm conditioned to expect there to be 10-100x more bandwidth available than with LTE and latencies to be at levels at par with wired connections.


Fast lanes are the biggest selling point of 5G due to limited backhaul bandwidth. Instead of eliminating fast lanes, force ISPs to provide access to fast lanes equally ( must issue, not may issue).


How is this different from the last "net neutrality" mess? I remember shortly after commercial activity on the internet came under the purview of the FCC, all these mobile carriers started offering deals, T-Mobile in particular offered "YouTube doesn't count against your data cap" and basically we got the opposite of what we were sold with the pitch "net neutrality".

Then, when online commerce was restored to being under the purview of the FTC, all those special deals stopped. No ISP gave special fast lane access to any content service provider. Perhaps "net neutrality" is a lie, like "patriot act"? What we hear when we hear the term is not what lawmakers mean. We hear "ISPs must treat all traffic the same" (except for content with a DMCA takedown notice, of course) but what they mean is "move regulatory authority over commercial activity online from the FTC to the FCC." I'm curious why this, the crux of the matter, is never addressed in these articles. In any case, it seems to me like we get more net neutrality when the FTC is in charge of the commerce.

Commerce online seems to be much more neutral when the FTC is in charge, to me at least. I don't think it's a stretch to say that big multinational corporations like Alphabet want the FCC to regulate the internet for selfish reasons, and if I have to guess, I'd guess that it's because they don't want to fall under the FTCs regulations pertaining to anticompetitive behavior.


Hot take from rest of HN: I don't think lack of competition is the cause for the slow uptake in the US.

Reliance Jio+Bharti Airtel, China Mobile+Telecom+Unicom, and NTT+KDDI are basically duo/triopolies yet were able to roll our 5G nationwide in just 2-4 years in India, China, and Japan while keeping competitive pricing, and make the US market look free in comparison.

The issue seems to be the relative lethargy of the FCC and regulators, along with issues around deprecating older infra.

This doesn't mean we should go all Reagan, but if this is streamlined at the executive level, it would really simplify everything.


I think when people talk about lack of competition, the argument really isn't framed as the government just mandating things as an option. It's the free market solution. Of course we could just say "it's illegal to have shitty internet". I would support that, but, y'know, we love our freedom to have shit infrastructure here in the US. It's our goddamn right.


"Lack of competition" implies an antitrust solution, yet I have examples of countries where markets are extremely consolidated (and would be a slam dunk FTC case) yet are able to benefit the consumer.

My argument is that the amount of litigation needed in coordination with the FTC, FCC, and others makes an opaque system.

The American system isn't truly a free market - it's increasingly ossified, with decisions immediately litigated following a regulatory decision.

This incentivizes larger organizations with the capital to initiate litigation and continue to be players at the expense of potentially disruptive upstarts (ie. Startups).

At the end of the day, some industries are suboptimal if following a New America/Warren style vision of antitrust.

I don't disagree with the notion of antitrust, but I think "consumer harm" is a better heuristic than an "open markets" approach.

If an oligopoly arises yet is able to keep inflation down and production high, so be it.

If a monopoly or oligopoly is abusing it's position to extract higher than needed costs, then it's time to use the DoJ hammer.

An "open market" approach can be diametrically opposed to "consumer benefit" as it can prevent the economies of scale needed for commercial players to meet their financial needs. Instead, a subsidy or PLI driven approach to build more players would be a much better option, and we've already seen the positive impact that has had via the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.

This is also the approach used by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and has helped minimize the amount of financialization compared to the US or the EU, and has helped maintain their commanding heights.


Why do I get the feeling that this is overly dramatic? A network operator works to install exceptionally fast internet for limited applications and the data transfer. But this exceptionally fast internet is seen as biased. And instead it is better if the network operator didn’t install any such service.

What kinds of limited applications will be given priority? The network operators’ own information systems; their own services; and their partners.

This is a threat to companies who are operating in industries that network operators could compete with. “Network neutrality” is meant to protect them from competition from network providers. And this is not right.


I must be missing something in the discussion. My perception of the network neutrality is that it is supposed to force ISPs to treat every traffic the same. The network operator can still prioritize packages about network balancing etc. There is no need for routing update after a node goes down to wait thousands of packages for streaming. However, this doesn't mean that they can favor their own streaming service over any other.

Regarding the high speed connections. There is only one issue in mind. Did the network operator install these new high speed lines as a network operator or as a streaming service provider? Nobody is expecting a streaming service to favor their competition. It's a complete conflict of interest though that such companies have multiple hats.


The conflict of interest part is a bit funny. Keeping network operators from participating and competing with other web services is going to weaken the network industry. Losses in one sector will cause bankruptcy, if other sectors do not make fill in the losses.

A similar situation occurred with transportation companies in the US. Rail companies were prohibited from operating buses because of a conflict of interest. Rail failed. Busses prospered. Until both industries failed. And now airlines prosper.

We are just one stone throw away from causing network operators to be bored with their jobs. And then abandon ship until some weak dipstick can’t get a job anywhere else and ends up with securing your boring network.


I agree. I think it’s similar to the power grid. Razor sharp margins that keeps falling down and sustainment is being provided by ever decreasing number of professionals or being handed down to folks that don’t know what they are doing. Queue the forest fires in California.

The cost is laying down a fiber network and sustaining it is there and it’s going nowhere. Somebody needs to pay for it. Current approach is to bundle various services under a service umbrella and try to stay profitable. I don’t know what will happen when the streaming boom cools down. It might cause some “network providers” to just bankrupt.


How many times do we need to fight the same battle? Where I live Netflix has a fast lane and from 6:30pm to 10:30pm every night my internet is unusable.


I don’t think Netflix has a fast lane anywhere.

Netflix does offer to give servers to ISPs to put in their datacenters. So if your ISP is seeing congestion on the IX links, it is entirely possible that Netflix still works fine (because the traffic doesn’t leave the ISP and is therefore not hitting the congestion). But that is not a “fast lane”


At that point Netflix should just provide its own VPN / internet access for paying users


Netflix puts servers in datacenters to cache content, so you access it much faster. Not sure what problem Netflix VPN will solve.


You're missing the point. Netflix is fast in these situations because your client can access the server in the ISP's data center and video traffic remains local to the ISP and doesn't traverse the congested link to the IX.

Other companies embed servers with ISPs as well.


Yikes, where do you live and how is that sort of thing justified?


not OP but i could see this being normal traffic shaping

netflix users are going to complain and change providers if their tv show buffers at all, so it makes sense to prioritize that traffic - not for netflix's benefit but to avoid angry customers


Or, alternatively, your local ISP did not invest enough into the infrastructure and created a network that can only serve 10-20% of the population with the promised high speeds (25Mbps). Therefore, when everybody comes from work and try to use the internet at the same time, there is not enough bandwidth for everyone so it just becomes unusable.


Why does Stanford want everyone to have unusable congested 5G experience, instead of letting people who want more bandwidth to pay for it?

BTW is mobile networking finally turning linespeed "bandwidth" back into true bandwidth? That's a glorious victory for language!


The prior FTC rule stopped this before it became a problem, which is probably why we are battling it again.

Politicians are very reactive, hesitant to fix a problem until they're unable to ignore it.

Obviously not a good way to govern, but it's the way things are now.


FCC*


This is one of the few cases where there could be a better title on this for HN.

"FCC May Let Mobile Providers Speed Up or Slow Down Individual Apps and Website, Risking Open Internet"


I’d like to see a lot more nuance.

> For example, would it be “unreasonably discriminatory” to create a 5G fast lane that includes the most popular apps in a category since it responds to consumer preferences?

What’s in it for the ISP if they can’t collect money for it?

> There’s lots of ways for ISPs to use slices for things that are not normal internet service such as a dedicated slice for a farming operation using remote controlled tractors, slices for telemetry data and oversight of autonomous cars, or providing a slice for a stadium’s video system at a crowded game.

Really? Will the ISP allow anyone to get such a slice under fair, reasonable, and non discriminatory terms? Or will this just favor companies with a cozy relationship with an ISP? Just because these industries aren’t direct-to-consumer doesn’t mean the same issues don’t exist?


I have another proposal. I think ISPs should provide the same QoS options to everyone. With guaranteed speeds and also data caps and all. At least this option would make things more transparent.

AFAIK, most of the backbone and rural networks were subsidized with public funds to provide broadband internet. I find it disturbing that some private companies are trying to secure high QoS for themselves without paying for the infrastructure itself. It's like crony capitalism where losses are socialized while profits are privatized.


Tacking on to this, what is the justification for charging for tethering and would net neutrality do anything about this?


The justification is that they can.

This is all marketing. All the speed tiers, all the add-ons, etc. are all marketing. There's no technical reason for any of it. 5G has huge bandwidth, and the fiber backhaul has huge bandwidth. The most that can be argued is that a saturated link needs fair queueing applied to it to give customers fair bandwidth while the company installs more capacity.

But you can't underprovision and then charge a premium for a fast lane if you are running the company on technical principles.

If you asked for justification, the carrier would say that tethering is usually used for business needs, and the increased use would be unfair to non-business users.


Sort of related: "GSMA Open Gateway", specially the quality related APIs.


Preventing fast lanes will likely hamper the development of novel applications that we cannot even conceive of today. Banning throttling while keeping speedups open (subject to review) seems like a good balance.


On the contrary, net neutrality would ensure that the innovation can continue. Here's why I think this way. Networks are getting clogged down due to increased usage in the last 15 years and big companies want to ensure that they are not affected by this. Whatever new technology we create will surely need open access to the internet. So, we should invest in improving the infrastructure itself, not grant favors to some private companies. This is the only way we can give change to the new technologies and other applications of the internet.

When Netflix first came along, ISPs wanted to charge them because of the high traffic usage. Some even slowed down their traffic. ISP networks were designed with a particular usage pattern in mind and things were changing. ISPs couldn't ask their customers to watch less Netflix and didn't want to put data caps etc. for obvious public relations reasons. What customers do with their internet connection is up to them, ISPs should never have a say in this. Just like the electric companies should have no say in which kitchen appliance I use. ISPs can sell different packages with various limits in speed quota etc. but favoring private companies with lucrative deals, or tracking the DNS traffic and selling marketing information about their customers should not be an option.


For anyone confused by the headline, this has nothing to do with 5G conspiracy theories: it's about net neutrality.


“The FCC is set to vote on April 25 to restore its authority”

This needs to be controlled by congress. Directly.


The thing about administrative government is that you free up congress by allowing them to approve the creation of administrative bodies. It was pretty much the only good thing President Wilson did, help create the administrative state. FCC already HAS the authority designated by Congress. This is about choosing to use it.


I think he means we need this to specifically is important enough to society that it should be a matter of law, so it doesn’t change every administration due to people like Ajit Pai (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai) coming into FCC positions


It means congress is out of practice doing routine policy, and instead has big fights over very little


Why do you think abolishing independent agencies will change that in any way?


Congress approves the governors and they held up the appointment of the deciding vote for years.


I'm totally for net neutrality but I think the article focuses on the wrong "consequence". Do you really need superfast internet to scroll tiktok? if you think you do then you're probably willing to pay more vs a cheaper plan if you don't care.

It might even backfire and stifle the good parts of the proposal.

As mentioned by someone else, the title wording really appeals to conspiracy theorists.


Recently Jon Stewart talked about the burden we struggle with having to deal with an obviously corrupt government:

In order to make this world one where I would consider living...

It is a day in, day out, lunch pail type job. Thousands of people banging on doors, until they get something done.

And then, keeping it done takes thousands more doing the same thing

DAY IN, DAY OUT, FOREVER.

Truth!

People ask, "How many times?"

Now they have their answer. We either give a shit and act, or we fund others who can act

, or

Our lives are going to be enshittified.

The lure of creating near infinite artificial value means Net Neutrality is a constant fight, ever present for the remainder of our lives.


I see that sentiment isn't popular.

Yeah, join the club. I don't like it either, but I can tell you Stewart is awful close to truth on this.

Lived experience. In his case, getting and maintaining services for 9/11 responders and then keeping that in place happened to be his heavy lift for the decade he was away from "The Daily Show"

Mine was a ton of activism last decade. Bumped into that "thousands of people" myself and saw the need first hand.

Those people need to eat and fund their work somehow, or it does not get done.


summary of all the comments: mental gymnastics to not say the obvious: municipal internet provider

everyone will say more regulation, more competition... while drinking their municipal internet and using their municipal electricity


i spend way too much time around friends that indulge in conspiracy theories, my first reading of the headline was NOT AT ALL what it is lol


Yeah, I am tempted to post it into certain channels, where it will probably relinked a couple of times, before anyone reads it, (and understand enough) to get confused.


I also was thinking some conspiracy theory now is served from stanford domain..


Sunnyvale, CA has the worst service ever (Verizon)


"We could see offerings like this"

At least get a new trick.


My views on this have changed over time. More and more it seems like policy people encroaching on technical decisions without fully understanding the rationale behind them. Is there a good reason to segment different types of content, such as for optimal network performance? Ultimately all wireless communications have to work within the bounds of physics no matter what the made up human laws say. If there's a limited amount of bandwidth you have to work with, does it make sense to waste all the bandwidth on streaming HD videos and block off all the other traffic in the name of "neutrality"?

I would understand if there's some profit motive behind this, but I'm not seeing it.


ALL discussions of Net Neutrality allow providers to prioritize traffic for capacity management purposes. This so well known by now that I have to wonder if this comment is part of an astroturf campaign (or maybe you’ve been influenced by one).


I'm not sure how much people actually read the link, but I'm talking about this "problem point" specifically relating to network congestion:

> However, there’s a huge problem: the proposed rules make it possible for mobile ISPs to start picking applications and putting them in a fast lane - where they’ll perform better generally and much better if the network gets congested.

> T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon are all testing ways to create these 5G fast lanes for apps such as video conferencing, games, and video where the ISP chooses and controls what gets boosted. They use a technical feature in 5G called network slicing, where part of their radio spectrum gets used as a special lane for the chosen app or apps, separated from the usual internet traffic.

> The FCC’s draft order opens the door to these fast lanes, so long as the app provider isn’t charged for them.


>This so well known by now that I have to wonder if this comment is part of an astroturf campaign (or maybe you’ve been influenced by one).

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. "

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


With T-Mobile, I get free MLB and Netflix - both are things I normally pay for.

I wonder if net neutrality becomes law, will they have to stop paying for me to access those services? If so, that would be a bummer.


If it’s pricing meant to protect limited bandwidth and not a profit motive, I think this regulation has to make it so that neither content providers nor consumers are charged differently. The proposed regulation lets the carriers charge consumers (you and I) different prices for different packages that treat traffic differently.


The big difference is "type of content" vs. "brand of content".

If a network theoretically prioritized phone calls, email and registered messaging platforms, or deprioritized bulk file-sharing during congested periods, that would be reasonable.

What I see here is ISPs trying to rent-seek and get big players like Netflix or big game companies to pay for being on the premium tier, while charging customers for the privilege as well.

And from a privacy perspective, ISPs shouldn't know what kind of traffic is on its network anyway. I'm on VPN as much as possible these days.


>If a network theoretically prioritized phone calls

This already exists and is an example of a good use of priority. Cellular networks offer Voice over LTE and this is inherently prioritized over all other network traffic. This is done specifically for E911 but also implements special settings so calls can continue to go through even when coverage is very poor (and where VoIP apps would start to fail).


We already know how technically successful those implementations will look in practice; Look at the "messaging only" free tiers in airline ISPs which are only able to distinguish permissible traffic from a selected few partners (mainly Apple/Meta) and likely requires cooperation in the form of special APIs and agreements between the companies.




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