Right, because there’s just so much evidence that ISPs are just yearning to start censoring people’s lives.
And of course, rather than rushing to control them over what they *might do, if they actually start doing these things there is plenty of time to craft specific legislation to stop them.
If you start with the premise that every corporation out there is a vicious beast caged by government regulation, you can make a case for all government regulation of them.
And again, Net Neutrality legislation is new. Why didn’t any of this happen in the 20 years of the internet before net neutrality became a thing?
Since the start of the internet, there have been people trying to control and regulate it. Hell, before it became commercial I remember the universities and the academic users screaming bloody murder when the rules were changed to allow commercial activity. We were told then that it would be a wild-west hellhole if those evil capitalists could actually make a profit off it. I was present at a conference in the mid-1990’s where the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave a presentation calling for the licensing of web programmers, because allowing ‘just anyone’ to program web sites would lead to disaster. Later conferences had people demanding that programmers be unionized, that government inspectors should approve web sites to make sure they weren’t stealing data or installing viruses on people’s machines, that each web site be audited for compliance with the Americans with Disabilities act, and on and on. On the right, there were calls for government censorship of porn and other ‘objectionable’ content. There have always been enemies of a completely free and open internet.
The internet is what it is today because we ignored those calls for regulation. But the control freaks never stop. There’s always some vague disaster waiting just around the corner if we allow those dastardly profit-seeking capitalists to make their own decisions without the benighted hand of a benevolent government to guide them to the land of fairness and justice.
Really? What a lame analogy. In fact, isn’t it entirely the opposite? ‘Road Neutrality’ means that heavy trucks and small cars share the same roads, to the detriment of the smaller vehicles. Toll Roads are non-neutral - they provide higher-speed access for an additional fee. When the Coquihalla highway was built in BC (a toll road), it was built as additional capacity. It gave people who value time more an option to pay for it, and it also offloaded those people from the public road. Everyone wins.
Road neutrality is what causes traffic congestion and hurts the environment. If we had congestion pricing, it would make the road system much more efficient - and more fair. Likewise, if I’m not a gamer I’d rather gamers pay for their own high-speed network than slow down the one I use to waste time on the SDMB.
Alright, Sam, I think most of your arguments stem from a fundamental false premise, a misunderstanding of the issue.
Network neutrality has been the rule in the United States since the inception of the internet. You’re acting as though it’s this new fangled idea the government came up with to destroy the internet, and quite the opposite: only recently have telecom companies been violating the established principle of network neutrality, and so the government has intervened in order to protect the way things have always been. You’re the one who is advocating a massive change in how the internet works, to empower ISPs to censor, strangle, and control in a completely unprecedented way. I’m the one advocating for keeping the internet how it has been from the start - open, uncensored, and wildly successful.
Network neutrality is absolutely heavily intertwined with “open, free internet speech”. Network neutrality guarantees free access to any information available on the internet because your ISP cannot discriminate on traffic, and so everything must be allowed through. Sure, hypothetically, they could simply re-order their traffic for efficiency, but once net neutrality is gone there’s nothing to keep them there. There’s absolutely no reason they can’t censor or deny access to anything they wish, or to make access to certain products so slow and burdensome that they might as well be censored.
You acknowledge that telecom companies have been profitable. And they’ve been profitable under neutrality rules, because that’s how we’ve gotten where we’ve gotten. The idea that they need to invent novel niche techniques to profit is disproven by the fact that having them provide neutral internet connections has gotten us to where we are now.
The first questions are what I answered in my opening paragraph. The latter is so obvious that I can’t believe you sincerely can’t answer that question for yourself. A current relatively innocuous way that they are infringing on network neutrality is this: they’re institution unnecesary data caps (their own internal documents confirm that this is indeed not a network congestion issue) in more and more markets. But their own services - XFinity and other related streaming applications - are not metered against this cap. So already you have a limited amount of Netflix you could watch each month through Comcast, but an unlimited amount of Comcast’s own streaming service. This isn’t good for the consumer - choice is reduced, the amount of service is reduced, the user is coerced into buying their ISP’s product over one they might otherwise prefer. This is purely Comcast using its ability as a gatekeeper to control what content you can access to enrich themselves as the cost of consumer freedom.
At this stage that’s relatively innocuous - it’s a very real issue but it will affect relatively few people. But what if, in the age of cord cutters and reduced profits, they decide that their caps need to keep coming down? We’ve already established that they have no technical or infrastructure reason for this to be the case, it’s purely a move to put limitations and extra profiteering (you pay extra for extra data) on their customers. So then what’s to stop them from continuing down this path until you can only watch 100 hours of netflix a month vs unlimited Xfinity? 50? 25? What’s to stop them from tacking on a “video streaming tier” for $30 a month to your plan in order to have more bandwidth to use netflix, the way they try to get people to upgrade to cable TV packages?
Also, the vast majority of media in the US is owned by 6 or 7 conglomerates. I’m sure you’re well aware what a sorry state journalism is in in the US. Partly because these 6 or 7 megacorporations want to control our information in such a way as to not rock the boat. True investigative or adversarial journalism is completely dead on broadcast TV, and largely dead in print. The internet has allowed us to work our way around these limitations to some degree. But what happens when ISPs can control what news you can see? Often the very same companies that have ruined broadcast journalism. Comcast is already part of the NBC Universal conglomerate and Time Warner is part of another of those conglomerates. Those are the two biggest ISPs in the US who are controlled by companies that already control the majority of non-internet media. Allowing them to decide which news you’re allowed to see would cement their control over our way of getting access to information.
I’m not familiar enough with the policies of other countries to answer that.
Neutrality has been the effective policy of the internet in the US since the inception. There is no one specific neutrality law that you can point to that I’m aware of - there are things like the Open Internet Order that wasn’t established until 2010, but before that the FCC would make rulings against ISPs in the event that they tried to infringe upon network neutrality, like when they stopped Comcast from throttling bittorrent traffic in 2008. In practice, all major ISPs in the US have been neutral from the very start - with small attempts to infringe upon this neutrality being smacked down by the FCC in specific rulings.
But whether it was because of FCC rulings, or bylaws, or other factors (there was a lot of public telecom funding in the last 20 years or so that probably had provisions of neutrality), or because the industry was good at policing itself to avoid further regulation, in any case the result was the same: the internet in the US has effectively always been neutral, with only very slight blips of ISPs testing the limits, with the FCC smacking them down. Neutrality is the status quo - allowing ISPs to infringe upon neutrality would be the new territory, not a regulation codifying what we’ve always had.
I think a lot of people are too cynical about corporations. They always assume some evil motives even when their motives are transparent and reasonable. But I think you’ve got the opposite problem - you live in a world where corporations always have your best interest at heart and would never harm the consumer because it was convenient or profitable.
I do have a concrete example, which is what I mentioned above - Comcast excepts their own services from data caps that they’ve chosen to impose for reasons purely of control and profit. Is this the slam dunk “Comcast blocked netflix!” evidence that you want? No. But they would never do that, because they know it would get them smacked down. So they’re going to phase this one in with little pushes around the edges. Okay, everyone has a 1TB cap, but Comcast’s services are excepted. Okay, everyone has a 500GB cap - that’s perfectyl reasonable, 99% of our users don’t exceed that. Everyone has a 300GB cap. Hmm, with 4k streaming becoming common, it’s going to be hard for you to stay under that cap if you watch a lot of TV… why don’t you try Xfinity instead? You have unlimited data for that!
I’m sure you’re able to see it when the government is responsible for this sort of power creep, controlling us and infringing upon our rights a little bit at a time, with the boiling frog method. Can you not see that a corporation looking not to rock the boat so hard as to create a public demand for regulation would do the same?
Let me ask you this - if the internet has not been neutral, as you indicate that you believe is the case, why is there no history at all of ISPs offering niche novel services like this?
I think you vastly overstate the need for some sort of novel infrastructure among ISPs. The reality is that they aren’t going to be digging up fiber and re-making their network for one particular purpose in this manner. They’re going to be doing infrastructure improvements that affect all traffic on their network.
(As an aside - you’re a software engineer, right? This particular example doesn’t really make sense. No one is going to be rendering VR remotely for transmission due to the inherent input lag (and not even just by the network latency - by video encoding), so the VR will be rendered locally, with other game elements and players interpolated in the same way that online games currently are - no one is going to be puking due to high latency in this scenario. This is nitpicking, I realize, and maybe there’s some application out there for this hypothetically super low latency infrastructure - but the reality is that we’ve never seen ISPs undertake this sort of infrastructure project, and it would be very niche. And general infrastructure improvements already make this situation better without relying on niche scenarios we’ve never seen)
I don’t think what you’re describing is an accurate portrayal of my position, but even if it were, sure, it computes.
Let’s say there’s a little oasis in the desert, and a little town grows around it, more successful than any towns nearby because everyone can have all the water they need. And for a long time, everything goes smoothly. But at some point a big, rich player comes into the market and buys up all the land around the shared watering hole. And now they get to decide who can and can’t have access to water, or prices it in a way severely detrimental to the average person in that community.
By your logic, if the government steps in and says “we’re going to regulate the watering hole, and everyone can use as much water as they need, the same as it has always been”, then you’re saying that “does not compute” - that it doesn’t make sense. After all, the town grew large and productive for years without any regulation saying that everyone needs to have access to water, so if the government is going to establish that regulation now, they must inherently be doing something negative. They cannot simply be protecting what already worked for the town, because the town didn’t have that regulation before. The government is intervening in a new way.
But the reality is that the government is simply responding to a new scenario that threatens to upset the status quo in a negative way for the people by keeping things the way they’ve always been. ISPs pushing the boundaries of how they’re allowed to control the internet (possibly spurred on by the growing loss of cable TV, their cash cow) creates a new threat to the way things have always been, and regulation may be needed to keep things how they already were.
I suspect you have such a visceral reaction to the idea of regulation that the idea that the government can create a regulation enforcing the (successful) status quo “does not compute” for you.
Google gave up on their project. Because it was too hard and expensive and legally difficult to lay new cable. They’re keeping their existing coverage, but they’ve stopped trying to expand. They’ve given up, they’ve admitted defeat.
If Google, a company strongly financially and morally in support of this initiative, with nearly unmatched technical expertise and funds, can’t make competing ISPs viable, how in the world are these little ISPs going to spring up everywhere once Comcast starts pissing everyone off? The reality is that if Google can’t do it, no one can.
The other stuff - that’s cool. Novel ways to access the internet are cool. But the reality is that nothing is going to compete with wired telecom infrastructure. Satellites have rather severe drawbacks, as do cell phones. You will never see satellite or cell phone bandwidth that’s anywhere near what we can achieve with wired telecom. So while satellites and high altitude balloons are interesting tools against the coming fight for an open internet, we shouldn’t look at them as viable alternatives to wired telecom for every day uses. And in fact saying “sure, Comcast blocks you from seeing what they don’t want you to see, but some rogue companies are going to launch high altitude balloons that will let you get access to it” makes me feel like some East Germans trying to get a signal from Radio Free Europe so they can get access to outside information. The fact that we might need satellites and high altitude balloons one day to access what we can now access from anywhere is a scary thought, not a liberating one. Being able to access any information in the world is one of the greatest inventions for freedom and personal enrichment that there has ever been. It’s insanity to me to take that - something that we can all routinely do - and put that in the hands of a few gatekeepers. It’s such a huge step back for freedom for everyone in the country except the shareholders of a few telecom corporatons.
I feel like there’s a fallacy I can’t name at work here. Essentially, saying “sure, this will empower Comcast, but they have to behave because we’ll see lots of competition if they don’t!”, but it fails to acknowledge the incredible difficulty of laying telecommunications infrastructure. In essence, you’re saying “don’t fight neutrality rules, fight the rules that stifle competition!” but what you’re actually selling us is “no neutrality, and no competition” because you know that creating a scenario in which telecoms give up their regional monopolies is far more difficult than passing regulations to stomp out neutrality.
Or, to demonstrate that another way: How about you fight to get the laws changed first that stifle telecom competition, and then once you’ve got that competition going, then we can reconsider neutrality? You’d never take that deal, because you know opening up telecom competition is a much harder prospect than killing neutrality. So then just saying “let’s tackle neutrality, then we’ll work on opening up competition!” is not a good faith proposal. I want to say this is some sort of fallacy or other flawed argument, but I can’t think of any that apply.
Yes, that’s exactly what’s happening right now with Comcast’s imposed data caps and self-provided meter-free service.
Let’s say hypothetically that there was only one ISP in the entire US. Everyone had to get their internet through the same provider. Now this one source would be the gatekeeper to all the information in the world, wouldn’t it? All the e-commerce. Can you imagine there wouldn’t be deals where Walmart paid them not to allow people to go to Amazon, or where they stamped out Netflix in favor of their own streaming service? Is it so hard to imagine that they’d only allow news sources that they found were sufficiently uncritical towards them? Or a thousand other examples. That telecom company would be the most powerful company in the world - they’d essentially control every aspect of how we interact with everyone and everything.
Is it so hard to believe that when a few companies in the US hold the vast majority of internet connections, generally with very few alternatives, if any, in any given regional market, that they aren’t looking to act the same way?
Your incredulity at the idea that a few companies controlling our access to information and commerce abusing that is, quite frankly, disturbing to me.
I’m saying that the internet and the neutrality thereof is the greatest demonstration of the free market in action that anyone has ever seen. Libertarians should be absolutely in love with a neutral internet. But instead what they’re in love with is fighting each and every regulation they hear about. The effect of their advocacy is not to protect the greatest human mechanism ever created for commerce and information sharing, for consumer empowerment and for the best products and services to win in a fair and free market. The effect of their advocacy is to give more and more power to a handful of telecom companies who can rig the market and rig our access to information in any way they want.
Rather than embrace this greatest of equalizers, you would rather empower current large businesses to control the market in any way they wish. You are giving up the ability of millions of businesses to reach their customers unhindered for the enrichment of a handful who now get to control who can access the market and who can’t. You make large telecom companies, already known for their extreme consumer unfriendliness, into the gatekeepers to all the information, services, and products in the world. You fear the slightest bit of government regulation, but you’re completely comfortable with handing incredible amounts of power to a handful of super conglomerates.
Essentially, you are trading global access to information and commerce for the possibility of some unlikely and niche telecom offering. One of the greatest freedoms ever afforded to a human being against the profitability of a handful of companies.
I think I’ve covered this one well enough previously. I’m looking to protect the way things have always been. You’re the the one advocating for radical new changes that will make the internet less free.
Hypothetically, can you even acknowledge that if a handful of companies controlled all internet access in the US, and there was no regulation keeping them in check, that they would act as gatekeepers for what information, products, and services would be available to people? If so, do you think that this scenario is ultimately more compatable with a libertarian utopia (because hey, telecoms are companies too and deserve freedom) than a neutral internet?
Tell you what - why don’t you get working on that, and once you’ve made some significant progress, we can start talking about removing neutrality rules. Seem fair? Why or why not?
I see where you’re coming from, and you’re just advocating the opposite thing here that you claim to actually stand for. It’s dissonant.
I think I understand the cause: essentially, you have a very strong reaction to the idea of regulation without much thought about what the regulation seeks to achieve.
“Some people think websites should be licensed and approved by the government! Others think porn should be banned!” is the polar opposite position of “I think everyone should be able to put anything they want on the internet, and anyone else should have access to it” - but you’re perceiving them as both being of the same kind when they’re clearly not.
So you oppose the former as bad regulation, but you also reflexively oppose the latter because, well, it’s also regulation. Even though those things are polar opposites.
I hope you’re able to see this, although you’re going to have to take a step back and look at your own values and thought processes to get there. Net neutrality IS the “completely free and open internet” you claim to want to defend. Except in this instance, you’ve allowed your reflexive opposition to regulation to oppose your own philosophical position.
Or to put it another way. Imagine you’re at those proto-internet meetings, and people are clamoring for web developer licensing and censorship and all that. And the guy who was in charge of regulating the internet said “no, we won’t have any of those rules. In fact, the only rule we’ll have is that everyone can put anything they want to the internet, and everyone else can seek out whatever they want on the internet, and no one providing internet service can get in the way of that” - you would be on that guy’s side, right? That’s… that’s what net neutrality is.
I’m trying not to say this in a condescending way - I actually have great respect for you - but I think you’re experiencing a dissonance that you’re not recognizing, and you need to take a step back and rethink this.
I think part of the misunderstanding is that a lot of people think that a free market is what happens automatically, when you have no regulation at all. It isn’t so. The free market is a tool. It’s an incredibly powerful and versatile tool, probably the greatest economic tool ever invented, but it’s still just a tool. And like the Swiss army knife in my pocket (which is also a very good and versatile tool), it does absolutely nothing unless it’s wielded. If you want to use a free market, you have to actively wield it. And that wielding comes in the form of regulations.
Toll roads are much more tangible than an internet connection. And anyone can use them as they please.
IMHO, if large corporations are allowed (for a price) to squeeze more traffic on existing roads, that’s what will happen. That will hurt everyone but the businesses that can pay for it. Big business will profit as well as the ISP’s. Everyone else will lose.
Sorry for the long delay in responding. Life intrudes…
That is not even remotely what net neutrality is. Net Neutrality is a set of regulations that prevent service providers from charging some content providers more than others. It has nothing at all to say about content, or unionization, or the ADA, or anything else. It does NOT guarantee free speech. It’s a technical regulation applied to certain businesses in a misguided attempt to keep things ‘fair’. For example, Google or facebook deciding to censor ‘fake news’ is not a violation of net neutrality. Google deciding that global warming ‘denier’ sites should be singled out of their page-rank algorithm and lowered in search rank is not a violation of net neutrality. The government passing a law that says all web pages must be ADA compliant is not a violation of net neutrality. Licensing programmers or forcing certification standards on web developers is not a violation of net neutrality.
You brought up the Comcast ‘throttling’ of Netflix as an example of why we need Net Neutrality. I think you have that all wrong. Have you actually read the details of what happened there? Comcast did not throttle Netflix. Netflix’s service caused congestion on the peering ports, and opened up a financial problem in that peering agreements had always been free, because it was assumed that traffic would flow both ways and even out in the end. Enter Netflix and massive amounts of streaming, which broke the old peering system. The solution was to build an infrastructure for direct connection of Netflix to Comcast, and take the load off the peers. The question then became “Who should pay to build out that extra infrastructure?” Netflix claimed that Comcast should because Comcast would be unfairly singling them out if it made them pay while other services didn’t have to. Comcast’s argument was that since this is a special infrastructure that is only for Netflix, they should pay at least a part of it.
You can make arguments on both sides, but the entire case indicates the complexity of the problem. And note that it wasn’t Netflix being throttled - Netflix caused the latency of the entire network to go up, affecting everyone including themselves.
And I think the opposite. I’ve been thinking about this problem for 25 years. I used to BE an ISP in the early days of the internet. My company provided a public gateway to internet E-mail and UUCP traffic long before there was a public commercial web.
The problem in these debates is that people don’t have a very good definition of what ‘net neutrality’ actually is. Like you just apparently did, they think it just means a ‘neutral’ internet in some vague fuzzy way. I suspect that’s by design - the very name tends to suggest that. But Net Neutrality is a very specific set of regulations applied to very specific organizations, and is not a sweeping ‘hands off the internet!’ rule like you seem to think it is.
I’m re-ordering this first answer to the front because it makes the post flow a little better later on.
You didn’t read what I said. I’m not talking about peering. That’s a separate issue.
I’m saying that comcast is easing in to the most innucuous-sounding of net neutrality violations - limiting the amount of content you can receive from other sources, but giving you their services in an unlimited way as a way of pushing you towards their own services. Obviously while the net neutrality debate is in the public eye they’re not going to jump right to the worst case scenario they can inflict - so instead they’re starting with one of the easiest ones to slide in there. Re-read what I wrote.
You’re right when you say I’ve gone too far with my analogies and say that net neutrality wouldn’t directly affect government licensing of web developers or ADA compliance. While those would be sister issues to people who advocate for net neutrality, it doesn’t directly fall under net neutrality regulations.
However, you’re wrong about the rest. Net neutrality does indeed prevent a service provider for charging for some content more than others. But that’s only one of its functions. It prevents providers from discriminating based on traffic for any reason, whether it be throttling it, prioritizing it, redirecting it, tampering with it, or failing to let it reach its destination all together.
ISPs deciding that people who use VPNs are suspicious and it would reject to pass through all encrypted traffic is a violation of net neutrality. This is especially likely - VPNs would be a way to work your way around the limitations an ISP has given you and would almost certainly be banned or extremely de-prioritized.
ISPs deciding that they’d allow people to pay them to make the connection to their comptitor’s service throttled and low quality is a violation of net neutrality. In a thread long ago about net neutrality, you said that Microsoft might pay an ISP hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to upgrade their networks in a way that would make Xbox gaming more appealing and fast - but I replied that the far, far more likely, easier, and cheaper result would simply gaining a competitive advantage by making Sony traffic slow.
Giant media conglomerates (Comcast/NBC/Universal) is currently in talks to merge with Time Warner, if you aren’t aware - so that the majority of internet access in the US would go through one giant media conglomerate where it now goes through two) deciding “we really don’t like people getting news from sources we can’t trust, so when you try to go to bbc.com or cnn.com or any other news source, you’ll be redirected to ComcastNews.com” is a violation of net neutrality.
ISPs deciding “you don’t really need netflix, do you? Xfinity is really a better service” and enforcing that with throttling or other methods of control is a violation of net neutrality. They could do this in multiple ways - simply just flat out block netflix, or (more likely) just allow a trickle of high latency connection so they’re technically not blocking it but the stream stops every few seconds and then blame netflix for their low quality, or even just implementing data caps and then excepting their own services for the cap - which is actually what they’re starting to do right now.
ISPs working as henchmen for the government to make sure you can’t read wikileaks.com is a violation of net neutrality.
ISPs deciding to try to replace their lost TV revenue by creating internet packages similar to their old cable packages is a violation of net neutrality.
I think this is part of your fundamental misconception of the issue. Google and facebook are products on the internet. ISPs are access to the market. ISPs are the gatekeeper that decides what access you get to the market place at all.
So if google and facebook become poor products, people can just as easily go to bing or whatever pops up to replace google for people who don’t like google’s results. People can switch from facebook to whatever trendy site tries to give you a way to realize you hate the rest of your family because they’re all rabid Trump supporters and post about it all day. That’s the market in action.
If facebook decides to censor fake news, you can always go to ConservativeGrandmaChainEmailLiesBook.com to get all those delicious feel good lies back in your system. If comcast decides to censor something - you simply have no way to access it anymore.
And I understand that your answer to that is “well, you can shift away from Comcast to using a rogue network of high altitude balloons (that will never replace the effectiveness of your wired connection)! that’s the market in action!” is your answer to that one.
But the thing is - having the products of the internet accessible to everyone is a desirable function. It makes things better for the consumer. It makes society better. If someone comes up with something better than facebook or google, fantastic - that completely benefits everyone. The barrier to entry on internet products is extremely low. You just need a host name, some web servers, and a product. That’s why the internet is the greatest economic tool ever devised.
But people having to switch their ISP because their ISP is interfering with their access to the market, their access to both information and the market - is undesirable. It makes things worse for the consumer and worse for society. It’s not easy for an alternate ISP to pop up to replace Comcast the way it is for an alternate facebook to pop up to replace facebook. In fact, it’s really fucking hard.
There’s no better proof of this than Google - one of the richest, most ideologically motivated, legally empowered, and technically savvy companies in the world gave up their fight to provide competition to regional ISPs because it was too expensive and difficult. You could say “it’s only difficult because of government cronyism” and you’re at least half right, but so what? You can’t wave away that well-established cronyism. So saying “well let’s just get rid of neutrality now and handle the cronyism later!” is not a good faith argument, as I outlined in my previous posts. You’re offering up something you know is very unlikely to happen as a way to offset the negative effects of what you advocate, and acting as though they’ve been offset by merely invoking that idea.
The other issue is that it’s simply not desirable as a use of societal resources to have multiple redundant wired telecom infrastructures. Just like we don’t have two entirely separate road networks out of some ideological nod to road competition, it would be an expensive, disruptive stunt to create a new, separate wired infrastructure. Laying out telecom wire is a huge undertaking - securing easement rights, physically digging everywhere, wiring up tens of millions of homes - that’s a huge amount of effort and a huge pain in the ass to do every time we decide we need a completely new network of ISPs to get around the censorship and control of the old one. Our current telecom networks have evolved over decades. In contrast, making a regulation that says the ISP can’t censor and control their data is trivially easy and basically free.
Having better products replace existing products on the internet, or the threat of better products keeping the current products consumer-friendly is desirable and leads to a positive outcome. Having an ISP being able to control what you can and can’t see so that you’re forced to flee to an alternative (and inferior) method of accessing is a negative outcome, worse than what we have now.
I think one of your fundamental disconnects here is that you’re unable to recognize that ISPs are fundamentally different from internet sites - you think they’re both products that can easily be replaced by competition. But what you’re seeing is that what makes the internet such an open, free flowing marketplace does not actually apply to ISPs. The actual internet sites - google, facebook, amazon, the SDMB - these are the new, wondrous products of the internet. These are the products where an idea, a service, a product can compete fairly across the whole world. One little startup with idea can become one of the biggest companies in the world. That’s what makes the internet marketplace so amazing.
But here’s what I think you don’t understand: ISPs are not a product on this new revolutionary marketplace. ISPs are actually quite the opposite, they’re a product of the old marketplace. You need large amounts of capital, huge amounts of physical infrastructure, you need to secure easement rights in the real world, co-operation of local authorities. You need to get out there with shovels and create a whole huge telecom networks.
And existing telecoms can control the market in a way that internet sites cannot. Everyone used to use myspace before everyone decided facebook was a better product. But it’s not as if a new telecom company could spring up as easily and have everyone using comcast migrate to the new one in the same way that myspace users went to facebook.
Comcast already has a huge leg up in that they’ve been building a telecom network for decades, originally intended for cable TV but it gives them a huge, probably insurmountable head start on some new entrant to the market who has to create a whole telecom network from scratch. Comcast already has massive amounts of capital they can use to bribe politicians (telecom companies are the biggest lobbyists). They have the advantage that they were there first, and it’s a huge pain in the ass at a societal level to create multiple redundant telecom networks. They have the advantage that they’ve had the laws written around how they operate already.
No one can replace comcast the way that facebook replaced myspace. Google tried. And everyone wanted it to work. Every single person in the world would prefer google fiber to comcast. People would check google’s news about where it was expanding their internet coverage every day in the hopes that they’d make it there. Everyone fucking hates the shit out of comcast.
And yet, as I said - a rich, ideologically motivated, legally powerful, technically proficient company is giving up its dream to provide an alternative to local telecom companies, something pretty much every consumer wants. If they can’t manage it, no one else will be able to either.
I think that’s the part that’s not quite clicking for you. The internet is amazing for commerce exactly because it doesn’t operate like the old-world economy ISPs. You don’t get to be successful on the internet because you already have old infrastructure, or because you can use your market share to force out competitors, or because the laws were designed around protecting you. On the internet, you have to offer the best idea, product, or service.
You’re treating ISPs as though they were, themselves, similar to an internet product, and it’s actually exactly the opposite. In the pre-internet economy, big companies would use their control over the marketplace, and also (as I’m sure you’d agree) their influence over government to empower themselves and protect their place in the marketplace. An open and neutral internet has completely changed that paradigm.
But by advocating against neutrality, by saying that the ISPs can control content in any way they want, you’re allowing them to use those old-world economic tools to crush the new-world economic tools. You’d be allowing them to translate their market share, power, and crony capitalist government connections to control of the internet.
Really, this is the fundamental disconnect that you’re not getting. You react so strongly to the idea of any regulation that you oppose them even when they protect something so friendly to your ideology. This is the point I’ve been making all along when I’ve said it’s so perverse and so misguided that libertarians are the people who are most adamant about letting ISPs and their old-economy power to upset and control the amazing new-economy wonders of the internet.
Neutrality is the way to keep old-economy ISPs from using their old-economy tools to stifle out the new-economy wonders of the internet.
Well said. A free market is decidedly not the natural state of affairs. The natural state of affairs is anti-competitive practices, cartels, corruption, profiteering exploitation, theft, and every player doing their utmost to ensure that the playing field is not level. This is the fundamental misconception of extreme libertarianism. Everyone who truly respects free markets must do a lot of hard work figuring out just what regulations are required to make a market “free”. That would include, for example, ensuring that the true total cost to society (environmental impact, for example) is reflected in market pricing. Only then will efficient capital allocation and the benefits of competition result.
Well, I believe the thinking is that the FCC just enshrined the principle of Net Neutrality in law early last year. So … what were companies doing the year before that was terrible that the FCC helped put a stop to?
Only somewhat related but I would assume that the current FCC intent to have cable settop boxes replaced by an App on our tablets, Rokus, XBoxes, PS4s etc. is going to be dead in the water too.
Since we know that telecom companies do have incentive to speed up their service and make the internet a better place under neutrality - because that’s what actually happened so far - there’s no reason to think that neutrality will stifle a general improvement of internet speeds.
So in the potential benefits category of getting rid of neutrality rules, we have:
Telecom companies can invent new and novel traffic management techniques to improve the responsiveness of certain types of data and applications. While this would have some usefulness, internet connectivity as it currently exists is pretty damn amazing, with low latency, high bandwidth channels being the norm. There is no reason to think this will stop since it has been the status quo since the inception of the commercial internet.
And the downsides are:
Telecom companies, often effective monopolies, have complete control with how we interact with the rest of the world via the internet. They can favor some services over others, censor or block whatever they want. They can violate your privacy by banning VPN and encrypted traffic. They could disrupt competitor services to make them less appealing and steer you towards their own. They could literally only choose to let you visit an approved list of websites, similar to how China controls internet access to its citizens. The idea that if this were to happen, we could retreat to other, inferior services, who may have their own block lists or other manipulations is still far inferior to the status quo, where we don’t have to worry about having to be limited or censored in our internet access. They could also start nickel and diming people for access to specific sites much like they construct cable packages. And in fact, with the increase in the number of cord cutters and the loss of their cash cow cable TV buisness, they’re definitely looking to monetize internet access in new ways.
It’s entirely clear that for consumer interest, the latter cases are much more damaging than any potential loss of the former. The internet in the US is already remarkable fast - everything the vast majority of people do on it is effectively instantaneous. I can get packets of data from here all the way across the continent in under 100 milliseconds. We can have millions of people simultaneously streaming video with no problem. Could that be improved a little bit by creating some sort of gamer-tier that I can pay for that increases my priority? Probably a bit. Although the deep packet inspection that would go into making this happen would add its own latency, so I’m not sure how big a victory that could be. But for the cost of such a thing, I would be handing over control of my access to the global network of information, communication, and commerce to some of the most hated, most customer-unfriendly companies in the world. And we’ve done ourselves enough harm by consolidating all of the broadcast, print, and radio news and information into the hands of a few conglomerates - giving them similar control over the availability of information on the internet would be extremely detrimental to society and consumers.
So the upside is possibly creating a very minorly more responsive internet, and the downside is giving comcast & friends complete control over your access to the rest of the world. The only reason this is even a debate of any sort is because telecom companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars bribing - er, lobbying to give them control over how people interact with the internet. Biggest lobbyists in the country, telecom companies.
And saying that neutrality is obviously better for the consumer is understating it. The internet is critical to our lives - even beyond the commercial uses, it’s the very life blood of communication and information exchange. It’s not some optional, luxury product - it’s a core part of our daily lives. Giving unchecked control of it over to some of the worst companies in the world is a horrifying thought.
NN laws have only been enacted recently AFAIK. There appears to be a lot of hand-wringing about what ISPs could do without a lot of evidence that they would do it. Any ISP that throttled NetFlix would immediately lose massive market share.
For all we know ISPs could offer tiered solutions so that lower-income households could better afford it.
The ultimate effect of Trumpism will be like being “Free, White and 21 (and, ESPECIALLY AND: Male)” was in the 1950’s, but it will be re-worded as “Rich and With The Right Friends”.
If you can’t afford what it costs, you don’t get it. See: Enron and the CA “Rolling Brownouts” of 1998-2000. Market manipulation by those who could.
See also “Corner the silver market” bu those fun-loving Hunt Brothers.
The Koch Brothers are bringing you the “Alt.Right” and “Tea Party”.
I have no doubt the the Republic will survive as long as the rest of the world figures out to just "Ignore the US Federal Idiots - just another hiccup in the parade of American Presidents.
If they actually think that Trump’s blathering is serious, we could be in trouble.
Just to clarify: The problem you seek to solve, by rescinding net neutrality rules, is that the Internet suffers from a lack of innovation and ingenuity; that entrepreneurs have been unable to take advantage of the Internet because of this government meddling.
So this must be why Internet companies like Amazon, Netflix, Facebook have been plummeting in value and people still buy their books at Borders. Got it.
Is there anything that can be done to protect net neutrality? I know that you can contact the FCC, but is there anything else that can be done? With what the new chair has been saying it sounds like he’s going to get rid of it, but I remember the uproar from a few years ago and I was wondering if something like that could happen again and protect net neutrality.
I’d like to do something if possible but I’m not quite sure what to do, and searching online about protecting net neutrality I’m having trouble finding current information.
There is, frankly, very little need for innovation on the hardware side. We are far, far below current tech capacity at this moment.
Yes, innovation can be done on the content side, but that depends on there being a free market. And a free market for content requires net neutrality, so that the hardware companies can’t bias things so that they maintain an artificial monopoly.
The only thing that should determine if an internet content service survives are not is how many people use it, and how much money they are willing to pay for that.
It would be like having all toll roads owned by Macy’s, where you don’t have to pay the toll if you’re going to buy stuff there. That is not a free market.
