Are we going to lose net neutrality?

Great Debates
241

There has never been a “natural monopoly” that has occured on the free market. Monopolies have only been successful in sustaining their monopoly status when government has limited competition.

As I have said, if you are concerned that there is too little competition in the ISP market, then you should be against net neutrality. If net neutrality is enforced, you can be sure that competition will be discouraged from entering the market.

Yes, this old saw. I’m sorry that our mediocre, non-entrepreneurial minds cannot fathom what will be the next thing to topple Comcast et al. If I had a much more impressive mind, I could convince you that such and such will be just around the corner.

The difference between us seems to be our understanding of the history of monopoly and competition. I understand that monopolies do not and have never persisted in a free market. Indeed the late 1800s was marked by fierce competition and falling prices for consumers across the board. It was only when certain organizations were able to capture the government franchise that these monopolies were able to squash competition.

Yes government franchise monopolies are protected from competition by government. You cannot compete with your power company by laying down lines. It is illegal.

242

Why?

243

Anyone attempting to compete with the current ISPs will have to abide by net neutrality rules. There will be no product differentiation. Say a deep-pocketed content provider wanted to provide internet services cheaply, but favoring their own content. Not allowed. There are all types of internet consumer, but only one type of ISP is allowed? That makes no sense. Why must the internet be frozen in its current state when there are so many possibilities for innovation?

Net neutrality reeks of century old misunderstandings of the market economy.

Say an analyst is deciding whether Comcast should extend services into area A. They will decide how much money they can make in area A. If it doesn’t reach a certain threshold, area A does not get Comcast as an option. If net neutrality is not in effect, maybe they can make more money selling their Netflix equivalent, so expansion makes sense. Area A has an option they would otherwise not have. Of course it wouldn’t meet the standards of the net neutrality activists who scoff at such bourgeois services.

244

Sure it makes sense. Just realize that the internet is a basic background piece of our infrastructure. On a very rational and real world basis almost everyone benefits from it being a neutral conduit to commerce and the exchange of ideas. Your argument is based solely on political philosophy purism and nebulous innovations.

245

One thing I perceive as a likely problem is what I call “The Application Conundrum”. I recall having several different applications that did almost exactly the same thing, but one had this here special feature and another had that there special feature, and so on. Sometimes, to do what I wanted to do, I had to open a file in one, do the thing, then close the file and open it in another to do the thing that the other lacked; sometimes, it was simply not possible to do that. And, of course, each application had the full feature set, plus a bunch of crap that I would never use, all filling up (then-precious) storage space.

So, if ISP A offers me accelerated connections to servers D, F and R, and ISP B offers fast connections to servers G, K and N, but I mostly use servers F, N and R, how do I choose? I mean N is at least as important to me as F and R together, and G is moderately valuable, but I never use K or D. To get what I want, I would have to subscribe to both ISPs, which is exactly like buying the second cable tv tier for the three channels you want and a hundred you do not. This kind of market model sucks.

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Sucks for the consumer.

Bonanza for ISP’s.

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How is that worse than the current situation where you get accelerated connections to nothing?

248

Are you serious? The “accelerated connections” just mean they’re slowing other traffic down. On average, everything on the network is slower because of the added time to analyze the nature of the traffic in order to route it.

To see why it’s worse, imagine that it’s not just “accelerated” or “slowed down”, but that ISPs differentiate themselves by what they block. Imagine that ISP A has a list of 200,000 websites that they block you from having access to at all, and ISP B has a list of 100,000 websites that they block, with some overlap. Do you not see why it’s more work to choose your ISP when you have to figure out the details of how they treat hundreds of different sites you might be interested in? Compared to simply having fast, equal access to any site in the world.

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Feel free to respond to the half dozen times this has been asked and answered.

If we engage in wild speculation of possible nightmare scenarios while dismissing any benefits then yeah, getting rid of net neutrality looks bad.

250

Ok,

where was this question answered?

251

I think you owe me responses to 205, 213, and 247.

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Consumers interact and engage with the internet in many ways. It makes absolute sense that a company should be permitted to serve their desires in the best way. It makes no sense for it to be settled democratically.

My argument is grounded in the history of monopolies. They do not persist in free markets. This is what net neutrality activists do not understand because they are coming at the problem from an anti-market ideology.

253

Your idea that they need to be able to differentiate themselves by offering worse service than the current internet is absurd. You think that it benefits the consumers if the ISPs are able to differentiate themselves by taking away things that the consumers already universally have. What could possibly beat “you have access to all information, products, and services in the world”?

One company differentiates themselves by banning Netflix but promoting their own content. One company differentiates itself by not allowing access to “mainstream media” and catering to conservative crazies. To you, this would apparently be better for the consumer because now ISPs offer differentiated services. Just like instead of a water utility with clean water, we should have several water providers that all poison their water in different ways to differentiate their products so that consumers have options.

Just like you can’t beat nearly free, unlimited, clean water delivered right to your house, you can’t beat “you can access any information, product, or service in the world” with less than that. Undoubtedly that “differentiation” you seek is bad for the consumer, it has to be a downgrade.

I already basically addressed and destroyed those claims of yours in this post, but you’re just going to keep repeating them as if I didn’t.

So I challenge you yet again:

Making the ISP market a free market is simply not on the table right now. This anti-neutrality regulation does not do it. There is no viable proposed law to do it. The Republican party is not interested in doing it. And the things entrenching current ISPs legally are spread across the federal, state, and local level. Creating a free market for ISPs is a much bigger problem logistically than either protecting or removing network neutrality. And you must know this.

So, then, if you say “we should remove neutrality because a free market for ISPs will correct the problems that would cause”, knowing that there’s no chance that there will be a free market for ISPs, you are not arguing in good faith. You know the actual outcome is that the protections of neutrality are removed, and none of the legal powers and preferences that entrench the big ISPs will be removed. No one is going to lay redundant fiber all over the country. No one is going to overturn local and state pre-emption laws.

So you advocate for removing neutrality knowing that the things you claim need to come with it in order to create your ideal outcome will never happen. Which means you know you’re advocating for the worst of all possible outcomes.

So I challenge you: since creating this hypothetical ISP free market is a much harder proposition than removing neutrality, and yet necessary to it if we want to prevent the anti-consumer negatives of such a thing, then work on creating that ISP free market first.

Because if you advocate removing neutrality knowing that your ideas about the free market of ISPs is going nowhere, then you are actively advocating for the worst possible outcome of consumers while relying on a premise that is given in bad faith.

254

What is absurd is that you can’t imagine an improved service without net neutrality despite the fact that they exist. T-Mobile, for example, doesn’t count video against the user’s data cap. That is a net neutrality violation but clearly is a benefit to the consumer.

255

Could you explain why you think this is a net neutrality violation?

256

Wikipedia sez:

T-Mobile is treating video data differently than other data by not counting it against the cap. That violates the “should treat all data on the Internet the same” maxim.

257

Did you even read that entire article?

From your cite:

258

Not closely enough apparently. Either way, from reading the report it looks like the FCC found that T-Mobile wasn’t harming consumers not that it wasn’t a net neutrality violation. It’s a clear violation of net neutrality. T-Mobile treats the providers in their Binge On program different than those not in it. If you google “binge on net neutrality” you will find plenty of links arguing the point. Here’s one sample:

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2016/01/t-mobiles-binge-violates-key-net-neutrality-principles

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While I don’t agree that users voluntarily agreeing to data limits based on content violates Net Neutrality, I find one thing surprising - You quoted a blog that shows how Binge On supposedly violating Net Neutrality limits user choice, harms innovation, distorts competition, and stifles free speech online, in the same thread where are you arguing that Net Neutrality should be done away with :slight_smile:

In other words, the blog you cited as supportive of your argument about Binge On, is actually against the Net Neutrality argument you are making.

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One issue that I have not seen addressed is botnets. Right now, there are some absolutely huge botnets, primarily based in compromised IoT devices. “Deregulating” the internet does absolutely nothing to improve this problem, and I believe it could result in net negatives.

If you have IoT-enabled devices, they are almost certainly compromised. This means that when a botnet controller decides to use your device in a DDoS attack, you will not realize it until your service is cut off due to data cap overruns. Until you disable the device, you will be vulnerable.

Botnet attacks come from everywhere, so routers will be helpless when it comes to deprioritizing them: even if they put the packets in the eventually-queue, they still have to receive them and determine how to handle them. They will consume transmission, processor and storage bandwidth, which has crippling potential for a router.

Removing net neutrality could, I suspect, make the situation worse. DDoS attacks are targeted on specific offenders (often sites that publish articles that offend botnet operators). If “internet freedom” is perceived as being abused, DDoS attacks might well be perpetrated on the abusers, which could end up being your ISP. And there could be potential for the botnet operators to provide attack service for compensation.