He is so completely full of shit and blatantly trying to use rhetoric to justify the fact that he's going to vote for corporate interests that bought and paid for him. I can't help but get angry about this.
What's that fallacy called where you fabricate a problem where there isn't one?
Net neutrality advocates have never, ever wanted to limit what you're allowed to pay for as a consumer, and are pretty much unanimously in favor of distinguishing between paying customers to adjust connection speeds and uptime.
If a hospital wants to pay $5000/month for a direct, guaranteed connection to their doctors, they are free to do that. It's no different from paying for a faster or slower connection.
FWIW, Oettinger is something of an expert in discovering "new lows". He could be really funny if he wasn't in a position where people actually take him serious.
It is not surprising he would just parrot the talking points of the telcos. I sometimes wonder, though, if he actually knows what complete BS he is emitting or if he actually believes that (and I am not sure which alternative I would prefer).
My guess would be that despite what they are advocating believes are something you cannot be too tightly bound to as a high ranking government official.
But this discussion is becoming increasingly off topic.
When you buy power to toast some bread, do you pay a different dollar-per-watt rate, depending on whether your toaster was made by the same company that owns the power plant?
The problem with allowing special arrangements it that companies can--and do--use them in anticompetitive and manipulative ways.
Because net paths can be congested, there can be many different ways at different costs to deliver the same bits, and different net applications have different sensitivities to lag/loss, the electrons/bits analogy isn't very applicable.
Let ISPs try to abuse their momentary position. They're newish businesses in a rapidly-changing market and technological environment. Not one of them has the same "single provider at any cost" monopoly that phone companies had when the Title II telecom regulatory regime was designed.
Some of the companies they might try to shake down – Google, Apple, and others – have the capital to route around them with better services.
>They're newish businesses in a rapidly-changing market and technological environment. Not one of them has the same "single provider at any cost" monopoly that phone companies had when the Title II telecom regulatory regime was designed.
On the contrary, almost all of them have that monopoly, oftentimes to the point where they've negotiated with exclusivity arrangements with municipalities. This means that even if Google, Apple, Netflix, etc. are willing and able to to lay down their own infrastructure, they're prevented from doing so by the government. If that doesn't make ISPs deserving of Title II regulation, I don't know what does.
You seem to be counting only cable companies and the highest-end services to imply a 'monopoly' over internet service where none exists.
Other sets of wires into the home exist and are capable of delivering high-speed internet. (Most notably: legacy copper wires offering DSL.) More wires can be run, just like cable TV was. It'll be even easier now than the cable buildouts of the 60s-80s; the world is richer, awash in capital, with better tools.
Wireless also keeps getting better and is now competitive with wired for most daily internet needs – email, web, VOIP, audio streaming, light video, gaming – all except for bulk HD video. (Just like people have 'cord cut' their cable TV to rely on net entertainment, others are 'wire cutting' their fixed-line internet service, and relying solely on their wireless internet, from one of 3+ providers.) So speaking for the US, most people have 6+ options to get core internet service. That's no "ISP monopoly".
We agree that locally-franchised monopolies over certain wireline services are a problem, where they exist. (OTOH, some localities have enabled multiple cable companies and other competitive wireline services, like Google Fiber.) Those localities with bad policies should undo their mistakes, as they see neighbors and peer-localities having made much better choices. But those scattered problem communities are no reason to compel a specific national service formula on all ISPs everywhere, even where there is competition.
Not one [ISP] has the same "single provider at any cost" monopoly that phone companies had when the Title II telecom regulatory regime was designed.
Isn't one of the major arguments for net neutrality that, at least in some parts of the world, the above situation is effectively what is happening today, and therefore the local ISP can effectively hold the entire community hostage?
Where that's true, antitrust action to create competition could make sense, or even perhaps specific regulations against abuses that actually happen. That is, focused on where choice is lacking, and tailored for particular abuses that are observed.
But in the US, most people have 2 or more wired internet options and 3 or more wireless internet options. The feared abuses are almost entirely hypothetical-future-risks. Any attempts to "hold communities hostage" would create massive openings for both competitive marketing and technological countermeasures.
By all means, any local communities being "held hostage" by a single provider should remedy their situation. Locally.
I'm not in the US, so maybe I've got the wrong idea. However, based on numerous previous articles and discussions, I was under the impression that quite a high proportion of US households really did only have one wired ISP available, that the relatively small number of major ISPs operating in the US at all tended not to compete over territory in this respect, and that there had been significant legal games played to block attempts by both heavyweight competitors like Google and local initiatives to create alternative provision.
In other words, almost all the evidence I've seen as an outsider suggests that much of the US does not, in fact, have a functioning competitive market for residential high speed wired Internet access, but rather a complete monopoly whose single provider will furthermore spend a fortune on legal manoeuvres to defend that position if necessary. The net neutrality movement and efforts to classify Internet access as an essential service subject to regulation seem to be the first serious moves at national level to counter some of the resulting problems.
> I'd like to pay $3/month for my Netflix traffic to not count towards any caps. Is that allowed?
No, because it's discriminating against non-Netflix traffic. But there is certainly nothing wrong with paying the market rate for all your traffic to not count towards any caps (i.e. an uncapped connection).
Basically, the whole principle of Net Neutrality (as I understand it without knowing the details of the U.S. law, much less the European one) is: you bill data in the last mile to the consumer and you are not allowed to charge them based on the semantics or origin of the data. You do not charge the provider at all, unless they are the direct ISP you are peering with. You can however, give the customer a fast lane and a slow lane if you want, with different caps, and they can tell you which traffic they want you to get to them faster.
As far as I understand it, nothing prevents the hospital to get:
Connection 1: Availability guarantee 99.999%, bandwidth 150Gbps max with 50Gbps dedicated, RTT for last mile: <=80ms
Connection 2: Normal, small business grade connection.
Then the hospital can use connection 1 for critical medical equipment and connection 2 for everything else. But, they could do just the reverse (why would they?) and the ISP would need to abide by connection 1's guarantees regardless of content (assuming the upstream connection from the provider is also good enough).
The problem occurs if I, an entrepreneur, want to solve the hospital's problem for them, and sell them a single connection that meets their application-specific needs. I'd set it up so that I could always meet their demands, and a sensible way to do that would be with app-specific routing rules. Also, to help make that peak, application-specific offering possible, it would likely help for me to sell other nearby connections that have much softer throughput/lag requirements – users who don't mind if the hospital's needs occasionally stall their YouTube/Netflix, because they're getting such a good deal most of the time on most of what they use.
NN regulations make such economically-sensible, mutually-beneficial business arrangements illegal. Everyone's got to buy the mandated, "neutral" service tiers – rather than other cheaper mixed-traffic-treatment formulas that could meet their needs.
I don't understand why you think the rules need to be application-specific or why you think the alternative would be more expensive.
If you want a high-bandwidth low-latency guaranteed-reliable fully-provisioned circuit then it's going to be expensive. Providing the same guarantees but only for a single application doesn't reduce the cost at all. If the customer is paying you to guarantee the delivery of packets, it doesn't cost you anything more if the customer then decides they're going to be YouTube packets rather than telemedicine packets. None of the things that cause that level of service to be expensive are application-specific so there is no savings to be had by treating applications differently.
Thank you for the clear, honest answer. So the great-grandparent post is misleading, and those in favor of government-enforced "net neutrality" do want to limit what I am "allowed to pay for as a consumer".
> Thank you for the clear, honest answer. So the great-grandparent post is misleading, and those in favor of government-enforced "net neutrality" do want to limit what I am "allowed to pay for as a consumer".
Phrasing it like that is political maneuvering. There is nothing you cannot get. No application is made not possible by network neutrality. There are only some things which, if you get them, the ISP has to provide for all your data and not just data for a particular application or source.
No, the regulations have made it illegal to purchase a service I might want to buy (or sell), instead requiring the purchase of a different "guaranteed neutral" service instead.
This new federally-mandated kind of service, as it meets extra legal constraints and prevents certain kinds of side-payments from happening, is almost certainly going to be more expensive and available from a smaller set of fewer, larger providers. (Title II/common-carrier regulation does nothing to create new provider competition, but rather assumes that monopoly is the only possibility and cements it into place.)
The "guaranteed neutral" service is a superset of the other service. You're complaining that you can't buy something when the reality is that you can't not buy something, which is different.
> This new federally-mandated kind of service, as it meets extra legal constraints and prevents certain kinds of side-payments from happening, is almost certainly going to be more expensive and available from a smaller set of fewer, larger providers.
You're talking like there is some kind of vigorous competition going on at present which is going to be impeded. And the side payments you're talking about don't make things cost less, they interfere with competition in other markets that actually are competitive, which would ultimately make things cost more.
> Title II/common-carrier regulation does nothing to create new provider competition, but rather assumes that monopoly is the only possibility and cements it into place.
That's because it is. Utilities are natural monopolies. The duopoly that was created by accident when telephone and cable TV both merged into internet has been a disaster.
The bulk of a last mile ISP's costs are based on the area they offer service in rather than the number of customers they have. A strand of fiber costs the same amount to install and maintain whether it carries the traffic of 100 customers or 200. That means if you want to have two ISPs you would have to pay almost twice as much for internet service at the same level of ISP infrastructure investment and profits because each ISP would have to cover all the same costs with half as many customers. If you want to talk about what makes things cost more, it's trying to "create competition" in a natural monopoly market.
A utility isn't a natural monopoly because the government said so, it's a natural monopoly because adding competition makes prices go up.
The question of whether the restrictions are desirable is separate from whether "Net neutrality advocates have never, ever wanted to limit what you're allowed to pay for as a consumer."
Regulatory-NN advocates do in fact want to legally ban a class of services, with unmetered/prioritized data paths for certain applications (like perhaps "Wikipedia Zero"), that would have willing customers if available on the market.
If the Netflix traffic was exempt from your data cap, you would be paying $(Netflix rate)/(Netflix usage) for Netflix, while you would be paying (monthly rate)/(other usage) other usage. That means different rates for different types of data. The core problem that net neutrality addresses is that, in allowing the ISP to charge different rates for different data, they can prioritize data based on their own interest, rather than what the consumer wants. Say your ISP decides that, instead of offering a flat rate to deliver Netflix service, it will launch its own content service which, when accessed, would not count towards your data cap. In this way, the ISP can undercut Netflix's service because they own a monopoly on the mode of transmission - that is, you can't get Netflix through any other mode of transmission. The same can be said about speed: if your ISP limits the bandwidth of Netflix's video streams so that you can only watch in standard definition, but places no such limits on its own service, then the ISP can again unfairly undercut Netflix (and this happened, actually - Netflix was strong-armed into paying a large sum so that an ISP wouldn't rate-limit Netflix content). Net Neutrality prevents such scenarios from arising, by forcing ISPs to treat all types of data equally. Therefore, it cannot leverage its monopoly on distribution to prevent innovation of Internet services by competitors.
I think that's a long way of answering my question, "no". Net neutrality advocates do want to restrict what I am "allowed to pay for as a consumer".
(Additionally, if I were to start a competitive ISP somewhere, use non-neutral routing as part of my value proposition, and attract willing customers to my service, the regulators would come and fine me, and then perhaps impound my assets and imprison me, because my service doesn't match their formulas.)
Data caps do not exist for non-mobile Internet connections in Germany. The speed of the Internet is still increasing. We are at a point where i don't even care about getting more. Bandwidths of 250mbit are announced to come to the market in the coming years. I can live with stable 50mbit. The real problem are rural areas where people are stuck with 2mbit/256kbit lines and throwing away net neutrality will not change a damn thing about this. Laying kilometers of fibreglass into the ground for less than 500 customers will never be profitable. Even if they can charge half of them with a premium fee.
During my training I knew a guy whose ISP sent him a letter threatening to cancel his contract if he kept taking the "flat rate" literally.
Admittedly, that was one of the really cheap ISPs whose business model was selling "flat rate" accounts to people who would most likely never make substantial use of them.
Also, some ISPs have at least the option in their contracts to throttle the bandwidth after a certain amount of traffic. AFAIK, no ISP has used that option yet, so it has not been challenged in court.
People living in rural areas do have problem, indeed. I know a woman who until a year ago was stuck with freaking ISDN. There are many cases of rural communities pretty much begging the Telekom (Germany's largest ISP, I think) to hook them up with DSL, the Telekom ignoring their requests until the moment those communities start talking with some other ISP. The moment that happens, Telekom will hook them up with DSL faster than anyone can say "Internet".
So far i only heard of o2 (telefonica) having bandwidth throttles and when you can choose o2 you can usually choose other providers. Most cities have local providers with really good connections, stable rates and no overly expensive prices.
Kabel Deutschland is a problem. Their 100mbit is a joke and not better than 16mbit from a proper provider. I wonder if its just the cable technology or them throttling traffic randomly. They alsp give me horrendous international routing. Websites not located within europe go through 300 hops are slow and unenjoyable. I had better experiences in the same city with other ISPs.
This is really bad for rural communities. Not only for having not internet but alos for their Economy. I know a company who are stuck with 1mbit and after experimenting with satellite internet and mobile-internet they are pretty much on the brick to move towards the city. Is everyone left behind is suppose to grow potatos for a job?
If such a unequivocal "every protocol ever" warranty is such a good idea, let it be offered by the market, not imposed on every provider, and every consumer, even if they'd prefer another cheaper or more-flexible arrangement.
Here in the US, I had as much neutrality as I wanted or needed before the FCC got involved, from the 3+ wireline and 5+ wireless providers in my area (San Francisco). Can I and my chosen ISP opt out of this new set of constraints from DC lawyers/lobbyists/politicians?
1)
But that is the whole point:
It is warranted, because it is imposed on the providers( at least until law changes).
It is quite obvious that ISPs have no interest in doing so by them selves.
Netflix was slow because Verizon throttled their traffic, not because they didn't have the capacities to route it properly.
They simply wanted a piece of the Netflix Pie.
So net neutrality will prevent that not cause it.
2)
This is not about the big content providers at all. They would simply pay the ISPs a fee and pass it on to their customers.
So net neutrality actually prevents increased consumer fees.
>I had as much neutrality as I wanted or needed before the FCC got involved, from the 3+ wireline and 5+ wireless providers in my area (San Francisco)
3)
The fact that you can choose from so many ISPs in SF is good for you, but you are probably well aware that in more rural parts of the country this is not the case. What will people in those areas do, if their only ISP decides to throttle a protocol
that is important to them?
4)
Most importantly, the traffic we create is growing constantly. Not only Downstream but Upstream.
Especially since more and more "services" become decentralized.
Decentralizing architectures is one of the biggest challenges we face today as internet citizens.
Decentralized search engines, social networks and who knows what will come in the next decades.
Decentralized Systems are more democratic, enable people to actively take part and give us back a piece of independence from the goverment (no, i am not an Anti-Gov't lunatic) as well as corporations.
But for that we need to have our packets routed from A to B without being throttled, because some ISP cannot make a quick buck out of it.
The proposed NN rules would be much less harmful if they allowed providers and consumers to consciously opt-out, as you seem to propose, by simply using different clear language.
This doesn't even make sense. So, if the kids in the back are playing games and the providers pay more to have access than the cars networked safety feature - we're in a worse off place.
Also, I'm not so sure there are any issues with capacity and more is being added daily. Capacity for networked devices is not like making capacity for ambulances (not his analogy but essentially his point) and firetrucks.
The second a government or any entity starts to decide what is first class, second class and n-class information and thus priority, the internet goes from a place of equality and freedom to a fascist place controlled by those who have dominion.
Whatever the upside or downside of net neutrality may be, the fact is that net neutrality laws are specifically and only about regulating the choices made by routing software. You are claiming that the government not regulating routing software on an extremely fine grained level is somehow "facism". You are as ridiculous as the politician in this article.
In fact, net neutrality favors large monopolistic ISPs, while possibly making them slightly easier to bear. It forces information transmission to be a commodity, ensuring that only large monopolistic commodity providers can survive. It makes it impossible for any newcomers to take market share with innovation by making innovation illegal.
Locally based networks providing fast access to their subscribers and filling in the slow times with other traffic? Illegal.
Decentralized mesh networks allowing people to "mine" cryptocurrency with a transmitter on their roof? Illegal.
Those are just two of the business models made illegal by net neutrality. I'm sure there are many more that I can't think of right now.
I think you got it backwards -- net neutrality is about making sure anyone can create a new protocol and be hooked to an ISP to serve their content through the Internet.
> Locally based networks providing fast access to their subscribers and filling in the slow times with other traffic? Illegal.
As an ISP subscriber, why would I want something other than what I decided on ?
> Decentralized mesh networks allowing people to "mine" cryptocurrency with a transmitter on their roof? Illegal.
I don't see what's illegal here. If you have a transmitter on your roof you are your own ISP. It is perfectly fine to not allow a kind of traffic if you're your own ISP.
This guy, Günther Oettinger, has been against net neutrality from the beginning, and he's now in charge of setting the net neutrality agenda. He was also the one the newspapers lobbied so he would campaign against Google and force it to pay money to newspapers in Germany.
Worse yet, he even said that ISPs should be able to lock-in customers for longer periods of time so they can "recover their investments", or something.
The EU Commission should stop pretending that net neutrality is getting killed by national governments. They have an inside man doing the exact same thing there.
Oh, and he'll also be responsible for drafting the new EU-wide copyright laws. So yeah...the next couple of years are going to be very interesting.
Julia Reda had a talk at the latest CCC on the upcoming copyright law:
I notice that he does not at any point explain in any way why net neutrality as an "issue" (whatever that means) is "Taliban-like" (whatever that means).
He's not even trying to be believable. Not even trying to make a serious argument. He therefore deserves scorn.
In fairness this is only a brief translated extract from a 35-minute panel discussion. My German's pretty weak, so it's I can't tell if if there's any additional context, but I don't think it's a good idea to draw firm conclusions based on selective quoting.
I'm not impressed with him, but nor am I very impressed with the non-substantive response of demanding lists of every product, installation, and system - a bullshit non-argument when the discussion is clearly about trying to come up with a framework that protects both sets of interests. Perhaps the Commissioner's attitude stems from a failure of the Pirate party to persuasively articulate their case? I haven't followed the debate in Germany, but I'm often struck by the way that political arguments can end up with people talking past each other and dogmatically repeating their own ideological standpoints without really engaging each other. Simply repeating 'the internet does not work that way' isn't a good negotiating strategy.
Server hosting companies like OVH maintain their own lines or earmarked-guaranteed bandwidth shared-lines (I imagine the intercontinental ones) between their data centers. It may not be practical for hospitals and other real time needs based organizations to maintain their own physical limes, but isn't this the point where such an organization directly makes a business contract with a near backbone provider like level3?
If you need guarantees, I really doubt civilian or home consumer ISPs will fill the need.
If congestion is a problem so packets are unfavorably delayed or dropped, shouldn't that mean those which need greater guarantees provision their communication assets accordingly?
Traders in Chicago and New York are coming up with their own solutions, be it more direct and dedicated fiber optic lines or even direct to direct chained microwave line-of-sight towers. Net neutrality or not, they need greater guarantees than offered to home consumers or small businesses, and I doubt most ISPs can provide such guarantees with our infrastructure.
Guaranteed bandwidth shared lines are a violation of net neutrality. Tell me how this differs from having a Priority Lane that's reserved for Comcast's real-time video streams. Tell lawmakers how to write laws that differentiate them, even when cable companies are playing word and classification games.
Net Neutrality is a far more complex issue than Title II regulation in the US. Title II is a good first step, but will bring with it many problems, that we'll soon have to deal with.
> Guaranteed bandwidth shared lines are a violation of net neutrality. Tell me how this differs from having a Priority Lane that's reserved for Comcast's real-time video streams. Tell lawmakers how to write laws that differentiate them, even when cable companies are playing word and classification games.
The solution for this is quite simple. The customer can buy whatever performance and quality of service they like, but it applies to all the customer's traffic, to any transit peer up to and through the peering point.
> Guaranteed bandwidth shared lines are a violation of net neutrality.
Perhaps of an poorly written net neutrality law. But can you predict what will be a violation of net neutrality before the laws are written and the courts interpret them?
It's certainly a complex issue, requiring deep understanding of the Internet. I support it in principle, but have little faith that any government will handle it well.
Oettinger's rhetoric is ridiculous hyperbole. Taliban? Huh? Its a shame because he is making what I consider to be a reasonable point: there are use-cases where traffic prioritization makes sense.
All his examples require guarantees, not just priority. All of these examples are therefore unsuitable for a packet switched network.
Whoever needs such services should get a fixed line (real or virtual) that needs to be implemented at a lower layer than anything that the net neutrality debate is all about.
And for automotive communication, the "fixed line" problem is a physical one, since wireless communication is by definition a shared medium. Better just make cars not depend on guaranteed connectivity in the first place.
He's trying to argue that net neutrality would mean a child watching youtube could slow down another user's content, like a hospital. This is silly and shows he knows nothing about current technology. The current system allows customers to pay for guaranteed speeds from their ISP. The net neutrality issue involves the ISP charging content providers to delivery content to their customers who are already paying.
He uses "Taliban" as an image for extremism, where some other would say "nazi". In this case, he refers to "fair use" extremist who want the latest episode of their favorite show never to buffer, even if this mean slowing down other.
Seems like this EU gov't isn't as "pro-freedom" or "pro-internet" as the previous one (?) was. And I don't want to believe that's just because Viviane Reding is gone from it.
What's that fallacy called where you fabricate a problem where there isn't one?
Net neutrality advocates have never, ever wanted to limit what you're allowed to pay for as a consumer, and are pretty much unanimously in favor of distinguishing between paying customers to adjust connection speeds and uptime.
If a hospital wants to pay $5000/month for a direct, guaranteed connection to their doctors, they are free to do that. It's no different from paying for a faster or slower connection.