It isn’t and they should not discriminate.
Where I could see some discrimination is in the delivery of emails. They can be a lower priority and if your email arrives in 10 seconds or 30 seconds it is not a big deal and not noticeable to the consumer.
A key component of your argument is that governments are limiting competition in the ISP market. You choose not to argue against these regulations. For what? Of course ideological predisposition. You are arguing from a position of “big company= bad”.
You go on about how there is no competition in ISPs, yet you favor regulation that would essentially make them wards of the state like the big banks. Net neutrality crushes competition between ISPs. They have very limited room for product differentiation under that regime. If some company wants to offer internet services that cater to a specific type of user, you blast them out of the water.
Let’s make ISPs a public utility to promote competition? Yes, there is great competition between public utilities. :dubious:
The TV networks were regulated heavily. “Why there is high barriers to entry, and little competition.” Mediocre minds, like ourselves, did not predict cable. I am comfortable in knowing that I do not know what improved state of affairs will be ushered in under a free market in ISPs. I do know that when the government regulates a utility it’s provision does not improve much. If you want to freeze the internet in 2017 so that you feel more comfortable, then say so. Please do not cloak your authoritarian anti-market ideology in the language of free market economics.
Emails are a tiny part of traffic compared to streaming. I don’t know that I agree that deprioritizing them is the right thing to do in the first place, and I doubt that you would see any bandwidth savings anyway.
And, in any case, it would be noticeable. I trade emails with people all the time in near real time. A 30 second delay would be noticeable, and quite annoying.
The reason that they are a monopoly is because it is logistically difficult to have more than one or two sets of wires running over a city, not because of any particular govt regulation
Quite the opposite - I challenged you and your ilk to first fight against the laws that prevent competition before we remove the protections of neutrality.
It’s your side that relies on the argument that competition will fix everything, but you’re willing to work on removing neutrality without working on creating competition, which means you’re working towards an outcome that even under your own ideology will be bad from the consumer. You can’t simply say “oh but let’s create competition too” as a way of waving away the complaints about the potential abuses of neutrality if you know that changes in the laws that disallow competition are not going to change.
So let’s see you guys work on that first. Eliminate the barriers towards competition that might potentially alleviate the downsides of neutrality and then we can talk neutrality.
Do you understand that the “product differentiation” that you advocate here essentially is that you have some choice in how the internet is made worse for you?
ISPs already can compete on things like available bandwidth, service reliability, network quality, etc. They have an incentive to be better.
What sort of “product differentiation” does net neutrality disallow? Okay, so one company can offer a “news tier” package where they allow you to access fox news, breittbart, and worldnet daily for an extra $5 per month, and another ISP can give you a news tier with NBC news, the new york times, and google news for $5 a month instead. This allows competition and product differentiation, right? Except it is clearly, uanmbigiously, and hugely worse for the consumer than the current situation in which the user can already access any content they want for no extra fees.
All of this “service differentiation” you claim neutrality allows is simply a restriction or extra charges as compared to the service we get right now with neutrality, where we can access anything we want without paying extra. How in the world is that a desirable outcome?
And yet… you have reliable water delivery, sewage, electricity, etc. Your ideology suggests that the nature of the arrangement utility companies have means the whole thing would be a huge failure, and yet with a few notable exceptions like Flynt, public utilities work great 99.9% of the time. Would it really be so bad to have the internet be like your water and sewage hookup? It just works when you need it so much that you don’t even notice it there and take it for granted?
Net neutrality is not a “heavy” regulation. It simply says that everyone needs to have access to all information. It’s just about the most freedom-oriented regulation you could have.
It’s so frustrating that you can’t see it. You want to give the power to control who can even enter the market to less than a dozen companies in the US. You want to make it so that one company can deny access to certain information and certain products to tens of millions of people who today have free access to all the information in the world. And you think that isn’t freedom, because it restricts the freedom of ISPs to act as gatekeepers to determine what you can and can’t do on the internet. In essence, you think that Comcast deciding what you can and cannot do on the internet is a more free situation than having everyone in the world be able to access any information in the world. It’s such a dogmatic and oblivious position. It is extremely anti-utilitarian.
I agree that it is logistically difficult. Many things are. Government regulations are a huge part of why they are logistically difficult.
If you are concerned that they are a monopoly, why treat them like public utilities?Public utilities are the only examples of monopolies that have lasted any meaningful length of time, and they have a worse track record when it comes to customer service.
Net neutrality activists jump up and down about scary monopolies, but their recommended polices basically etches in stone the status quo. When there is a dearth of competition in any particular industry, the answer is not to prevent would-be competitors from offering a distinct product.
This is not a problem at all.
When the government opened up long distance phone calls to competition the competitors did not have to run new phone lines everywhere. Instead, they used existing lines and paid a fee to the owners of those lines for their maintenance.
Interestingly long distance calls became so cheap they were often less expensive than local calls (which are still a monopoly). So much so that I installed a system for a mortgage company to digitally send their mortgages to their office in Ohio which would then fax the mortgage back to Chicago rather than make the local call. Saved them loads of money.
Wow…your grasp on this is tenuous at best.
I am not saying big company = bad. I am saying big company that stymies all competition is bad. Competition is what we want. Competition is decidedly not what we have right now in the ISP market.
Net neutrality regulation would not make them wards of the state. It would codify how it has always worked till now. In that time Comcast has never not been profitable and usually very profitable.
Nothing would change with net neutrality regulations. It would merely prevent the ISPs from instituting NEW schemes that would damage the very thing that made the internet great and stymie yet more competition because they can pick winners and losers.
Okay, so do you believe that there is sufficient market freedom for the average American in terms of Internet service?
Also, what legal limits, if any, do you believe there should be on ISPs to do what they want with the data they transmit (throttle to unusability or speed up to max for any reason - economic, political, or otherwise)?
Markers and prioritization are additional issues to be considered. Under a traffic-neutral system, backbone ISP servers only consider the target IP when deciding what to do with a packet. Priority markers, or just source-based prioritization, requires the backbones and ISPs to spend additional time and effort in deciding how to handle traffic. The extra work may be trivial, on a packet-by-packet basis, but over billions of transactions, the effects will become observable: all traffic on the internet slows down somewhat, or perhaps a lot, under prioritization. Net neutrality is simply a more efficient way to operate.
Then, of course, we have the hackerz. If they could crack the backbone, they would have the ability to decide what should get priority. Given the general sloppiness in software design, cracking the backbone might be as simple as sending out packets with malformed headers/priority tags. This is an attack surface that we do not need to add to the internet.
Net neutrality has worked quite well for decades. Eliminating it is offers no real value to the network and could be potentially dangerous.
I agree. I am for Net neutrality. I was just responding to the “Get rid of net neutrality so my video conferencing works better” argument.
Yet you do nothing to enhance competition in the ISP market. Monopolies, or what people call monopolies, do not survive in a free market. The only way a monopoly persists is through government intervention. Net neutrality stifles competition among ISPs. That is what you do not grasp.
So admit that you want to limit change and innovation by enforcing net neutrality. You are comfortable with the status quo, so you want to freeze the internet in 2017. You want to keep Comcast in business forever, but you want them to yield to democratic whims.
Exactly, nothing would change. That is not capitalism, it is extreme conservatism.
No there are too many government imposed impediments to competition.
There should be no regulation of ISPs.
You’re right that monopolies do not exist in a free market. What makes you think this is a free market as regards ISPs?
There is abundant government intervention here but the intervention is all on the side of the ISPs. The ISPs have “persuaded” state governments to ban cities from building their own internet service.
Wow. You must be a Comcast CEO (or part of his family) to peddle this absolutely wrong, on all counts, ridiculous assertion.
I said it before and you ignored it so I will say it once more:
NET NEUTRALITY HAS BEEN THE WAY OF THINGS SINCE THE INTERNET WAS INVENTED. IT SPURRED ONE OF THE GREATEST BURSTS OF ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. ENDING NET NEUTRALITY WOULD END THAT.
I am not sure you have any idea of what is going on here. What you said is reversed from reality.
Then perhaps you can explain what you mean by that. It is an utterly baffling assertion.
Yes, they have taken one more step in that direction: ISPs will be able to collect and sell your internet usage histories. Maybe you can explain how that is a good thing.
I am not sure why competition is necessarily a good thing, per se, in this arena. If I could choose from a dozen ISPs that all provided much the same service for a fairly comparable price, why is that worse that competition? I mean, that one over there gives me up to five e-mail accounts and 50Mb of web space, but this one over here gives me two e-mail accounts and no web server space, for about the same price (a couple dollars less). I choose what fits my needs (if I have access to options like this). If you need differentiation, it does not have to fall in the realm of whether I can get the data I need when I need it. That should be a non-issue.
The thing stifling competition among ISPs is the cables, not what’s running on the cables. You could give them complete, godlike control over every bit running through their systems and it wouldn’t change the fact that what’s blocking competition is the massive cost of laying down cables and the regulatory hurdles to doing so. Fix that, then talk about net neutrality as a competition killer.
In all fairness, this is a textbook fallacy of an appeal to tradition. We can all think of many, many examples of practices, laws, or traditions that have been so for a long time. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. The fact that a practice has been around for ages is not proof of its benefits.
That’s not true at all.
The internet has been revolutionary to the free market exactly because everyone has equal access - every business, no matter how big or how small, can sell their products and services on the internet. Every consumer can reach any product, service, or information in the world.
This greatly levelled the playing field. Big corporations were not able to control the entry into the market like they are in most traditional markets, the internet is the great equalizer.
Neutrality clearly played a pivotal role in this revolution, because if a few companies had been able to decide the fate of the internet - who could sell their services online and what services, products, and information consumers could even see - then it would share similarities to the pre-internet markets in which the big players could throw their weight around to control the market. Losing neutrality takes that revolutionary free market and puts it back into the hands of less than a dozen huge corporations to control the market in a way that benefits them. It attacks the heart of what made the internet so revolutionary.
No, my criticism is exactly valid. You’re presenting fair, substantive points of why ISP customers ought to pay all these infrastructure costs in the future. Your comments deal with the merits of the issue.
To have people repeating, “But it’s always been this way!” is not a substantive point. We got along without an Internet for 100,000 years of human history, but that doesn’t mean that we should communicate the way we did for 99.99% of our history.
You’re kidding, surely.
The “net neutrality has always been the policy” statement would be an appeal to tradition only if it were being used to answer the question “why is net neutrality good?”
That’s not what’s happening.
People are saying “net neutrality has always been the policy” as a matter of fact to counter the false premise behind the question “we have done without net neutrality thus far, so why do we need it now?”
That’s not an appeal to tradition.
I think most of the point of saying that this is the status quo is because the right wing media is spinning this issue as “a government takeover of the internet!” and a lot of the advocates buy into that bullshit. It’s important to note that neutrality is the way it has always been, not some new idea.
It’s astonishing to me that none of you seem to appreciate just how great the internet has been. You have, at your fingers, access to any information in the world, with no one to get in your way. Most of you have very high quality access with the ability to do any bandwidth-intensive task you choose, and latency so low that you can play video games with people across the world. The idea that we need neutrality to incentivize the creation of better infrastructure is proven wrong by the real world - internet service has been getting better and better for decades now even with neutrality in place. The internet, right now, is amazing, and no one seems to appreciate just how much this is.
So let’s say you get your wish and neutrality is killed. How much benefit do you think you’ll see from these traffic shaping services you clamor for? At best, marginal. It doesn’t matter if you can stream video 20% better if you can already stream it perfectly. Maybe you shave off 10% of your ping in video games - big deal. And I doubt even that much, because in order for ISPs to figure out what the traffic is and what to do with it, they have to do a deeper inspection than just seeing the destination address, and that itself adds latency to the process.
So, on the plus side, we might see a marginal and almost unnoticeable improvement in network quality. That’s pretty much the best case scenario.
And the worst case scenario is that we have active censorship, that you can only see what Comcast wants you to see on the internet, that several huge ISPs will determine who can and cannot be a success on the internet by denying them access, that we’re monetized much more heavily in our internet usage because we have to buy “tiers” of internet packages to access certain sites or services like cable TV tiers, that we’ll increase the price of internet services and products as companies will have to essentially pay protection money to ISPs in order to remain accessible and unthrottled, and they’ll pass that cost to the consumer, and that some services will be subject to degraded performance because a competitor bribed Comcast to make that happen.
Given that the internet is amazing and wonderful as it is now, what’s in it for you to advocate for risking the integrity of it when the potential upside is an extremely marginal increase in performance and the potential downsides are catastrophic and world-changing? Why would you want to take that gamble just to line Comcast’s pockets and increase their presence and control in your life? It’s so bizarre to me.
To me this is as nutty as suggesting we remove all the protections from harmful contaminants in our water, because hey, we should let water suppliers compete on whether or not they deliver safe water, and you can go to the store to buy bottled water anyway. Why in the world is that better than just having what we already have - cheap, reliable, and clean water piped into our homes?