Net neutrality has been the default rule all along. Why would there be any such examples?
Even if we assume your facts, we are still dealing with hypotheticals. To use your example, we didnt regulate arsenic in water until arsenic was shown to be harmful.
I think the internet is an example of capitalism. Probably the best example of capitalism we have ever seen. There are very, very few regulations that stop you from setting up any kind of enterprise online. Barriers to entry are low, there are no licensing requirements, no government approvals, no censorship.
We can see both the good and bad of that. No one ever said that capitalism is perfect. It’s just better than the alternatives, because it simply allows power to reside where the bulk of the information is - among the various people. There’s still that pesky reality, which means you can’t always get what you want, and that humans will make mistakes or act out of malice or greed. So we need a few baseline rules for conduct, but otherwise we leave people alone. And most especially, we allow them to retain the capital they earn so they can continue to invest it and grow the economy. That’s what capitalism is.
The internet represents all those aspirations, and is a great example of what a capitalist society really looks like - warts and all. So we get Amazon.com, but we also get fake news and viruses. But then, we have an army of hackers fighting those viruses, too. In the end, it’s hard to imagine a heavily regulated internet with a centrally managed plan being anything but a shadow of what the real internet is today.
Very much so. It’s a relatively frictionless way for producers and consumers of goods and information from around the globe to directly connect with each other.
No, and I would think so whether there was ‘net neutrality’ or not. Government monopolies and oligopolies are a bad thing for a host of reasons. So let’s focus on that problem, if you’ll agree that ‘net neutrality’ would cease to be an issue if there was a free and open market for internet service.
You yourself admit that the internet was de facto ‘neutral’ before this legislation was passed. I assume you think that it’s passage wasn’t to correct a previous failure, but to lock in the current practice before the ISP’s start to take advantage of it?
But if regulation is necessary to protect consumers from the dastardly machinations of the ISPs, why haven’t they really done it before? Perhaps the market is already doing the job of preventing that behavior? The consumer blowback from doing something like censoring specific content would be enormous, and they know it.
Heck, the ISP’s even pass through porn and illegal content, because the minute you start acting as a content filter, you become somewhat liable for the content you didn’t filter. But if you just take a ‘hands off’ approach, you can try to claim that you have the same kind of immunity as a common carrier like the internet backbone itself.
That’s one reason the ISP’s went along with the Net Neutrality legislation - it made them common carriers. But that also opens the door for a lot more government regulation than we’re talking about right now, and the only thing stopping them from doing things like controlling rates is the whim of the administrator. That’s too much power to leave in the hands of unelected bureaucrats.
No, in the name of capitalism I want to focus on making sure the market is working properly, rather than replacing its function with government regulation.
Is there ANY evidence for this scenario? Any at all? Because I don’t see this behavior in other markets - even ones with few competitors. In any event, the answer to lack of competition is more competition, not government regulation. But first you need to show me that this market is so broken it needs this legislation.
Think about what the ISP’s are facing. Many of the wealthiest people in the world have made their billions from a free and open internet. Segei Brin, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg have all been exploring alternative internet delivery mechanisms. Why? Because they do not want the internet to fracture and start becoming walled gardens or premium only sites. They have the power to severely punish any ISP that starts to really censor the web or attempt to bifurcate it into premium vs peasant web or something. And if the ISP’s didn’t listen, it would just accelerate the speed of adoption of a new alternative. Elon Musk’s plan is to to launch an entire global high speed internet constellation.
The barriers to entry in this market have been very high, which has been the basic justification for regulation. But high does not mean impenetrable - especially not when the people who would compete with you could buy your company with the change in their sofas.
You mean, neutral except for the people who actually provide the physical internet connection to almost all consumers. They no longer get to decide how to invest in their business and who they can charge for it.
It seems to me that this kind of regulation runs a real risk of stifling innovation and
reducing investment in the infrastructure. We don’t know what infrastructure we’re going to need for the internet in 2030. Locking in the idea that the internet providers must always treat all content exactly the same is a denial of the reality that all content is most decidedly NOT the same, and does not have the same requirements for quality.
In a fully competitive world, I should be able to build a startup company for providing extremely low-latency, high speed internet for virtual reality or control systems at a premium price. And if I realize I have enough excess capacity that I could also sell standard plans at standard prices to piggyback on the same infrastructure, I should be able to do that too. Or vice versa - if AT&T wants to get into the network VR biz, but it will cost five billion dollars to build out the infrastructure, they should be able to charge higher rates for access to it.
And yet, somehow the system that evolved to behave this way is inevitably going to turn evil and act against the interests of the public, unless government steps in now to prevent this future catastrophe.
Except, you know, that it’s a little less free. For freedom.
But do they? Really? It seems to me that the extent of Roger’s perfidy is that it has kind of shitty customer service. I’ll believe they are evil geniuses ready to control the people through the power of the internet just as soon as they manage to roll out a cable box UI that is remotely usable.
Do you know how condescending it sounds to basically say your opponents are clearly too stupid to understand the nuances of the debate? You might want to keep your mind open to the possibility that there are people out there who understand the issues extremely well, yet still disagree with you.
This isn’t a matter of ‘fact’. Where you fall on this issue will in large degree depend on the worldview you already held, because that will shade how you weight the various risks and benefits.
Are you trying to imply that neutrality - the principle under which the internet was developed and spread - is a “heavily regulated internet with a centrally managed plan”?
If not, why is that statement relevant here? No one is proposing a “heavily regulated internet with a centrally managed plan”, nor anything like it.
If so, you’re essentially saying that an internet with forced neutrality would never develop into the internet of today… except that the internet of today did indeed develop from an environment of forced neutrality.
I feel like I’ve had to say this a dozen times, but neutrality is not some new concept being forced in from the outside. Neutrality has been the rule since the beginning. The modern commercial internet branched out from the NSFnet - the national science foundation network - in the 80s into the 90s. Commercial and other ISPs were able to use this infrastructure but one of the requirements from the very start was for neutrality. It was only in 2014 that the neutrality rules were loosened to allow “fast laning” of certain traffic due to a shift in FCC administration, which were then reversed in later FCC administration. That brief period was the only time the internet did not, by rule, require complete neutrality.
The telecom lobby - the biggest lobby in the US, bigger even than the oil lobby, which is to say that they give the most money in bribes - wants to influence the FCC to once again remove the neutrality rules. And so the people who want to enforce neutrality are worried that the FCC internal regulations are no longer consistent enough to enforce neutrality, and so they want it protected under the power of law. So we’re essentially trying to codify what has almost always been the rules of the internet into a law so that it’s not subject to the whim of the FCC chairman.
This is not a grand government takeover of the internet. It’s not some sort of dystopian centrally planned internet. It’s the same internet that has always existed, just with a law protecting neutrality rather than FCC policy.
I posted this earlier in the thread:
If you’re going to use the competition argument as a solution to the downsides of losing neutrality, would you agree that we should first ensure the viability of competition in the telecom markets before we removed the protections of neutrality? Otherwise you open up the far more likely scenario where the protections are removed, but competition is stifled, and the consumer is fucked.
As covered above, they didn’t do it because it was already FCC regulation - the law empowers the FCC to do things like force net neutrality, but the problem is that if it’s just an FCC power then it can be gutted by FCC leadership hostile to neutrality, like there is now. So enshrining it in law gives it more power.
So the ISP haven’t done anything bad because it was already prevented by rules of the FCC.
I’m actually not sufficiently sure of the legal details to contest this statement. There was no new net neutrality legislation passed, so I’m guessing you’re referring to the 2015 FCC policy shift of classifying internet access as a telecommunications service under the Communications Act of 1934, is that what you mean? If so, I don’t honestly know if that “opens up the doors for more regulation” - can the 1934 law allow the government to do what you say it does? Would you happen to have a source that explains this?
In any case, that’s a stop-gap measure to me. We should write a new law guaranteeing neutrality, and such a law would have no need to give bureaucrats such power. Network neutrality is extremely simple to codify.
But you admit that regulation is sometimes necessary. And “all traffic must be treated equally” is one of the simplest, least exploitable regulations I can think of. One of the fairest. And one that most equalizes the playing field between big players and small, which is one of the greatest parts of the internet as a market.
The internet has not been neutral because of the market, nor has it given startup companies a chance to compete with the giants because of the market - it has done so because neutrality already is, and always has been, the rule of the internet.
This idea has always been the greatest insanity of libertarianism, to me. The idea that an incredible complex and costly market fix is somehow superior to a simple, cheap fix using the law.
“There should be no regulation on water quality! Instead, you could subscribe to a company that would put out a magazine every month detailing the water tests they did across the country, then you’d know what water is safe to drink.”
“But what if they’re not thorough enough? Or they were paid to hide bad water by companies trying to sell water?”
“Well then after you died of lead poisoning, your family could sue them, of course, and that’s the market solving them. Plus you could subscribe to a meta-magazine that would rate the quality and reliability of all of the various water safety publication magazines!”
“Or… we could just make a law that said that water delivered to consumers had to be safe to drink”
“Preposterous! Big government takeover!”
If internet satellites and internet balloons expand internet access to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the internet, that’s fantastic. If internet satellites and internet balloons are necessary because Comcast won’t allow you to get the real news on the internet and you essentially have to act like a pirate radio user trying to catch a broadcast of Radio Free Europe behind the Iron Curtain, that’s horrific.
To me, saying “if one ISP censored the internet, someone would come along with space balloons!” is a nightmare, not a dream. It’s like the kooky libertarian ideal of having water-rating magazines where you have to read consumer reports on your water and food on a regular basis to avoid harm instead of simply having laws and regulations to dictate that things are safe. Knowing that my ISP must allow me to access any information in the world is far better to me than hoping Elon Musk can sneak some truth into the Dark Zone with balloons.
As I said in this post:
Sufficient competition is not a guarantee. Sufficient competition may not even be desirable on a society-wide level if we view internet access as a utility, just as having 5 different redundant underground pipe and sewer networks is not desirable as a society just so you can make a choice of whose pipes hook up to your house.
Competition should not be assumed to be a safeguard against abuses by the current telecom giants, and it’s not even good at theory. “I’ll rig up a space balloon antenna so I can get the real news!” is not a society I want to live in.
They’d still have the same control over these things as they did before. They’d decide when and where to expand their capacity, they just wouldn’t prioritize or block certain traffic. So many of your assumptions and assertions have already been proven wrong in the real world. You say that ISPs have no incentive to improve their service or create better networks in a world with neutrality, except that they developed under a world with neutrality and they’ve all dramatically grown and expanded their capabilities over the year. The ISPs would have an incentive to improve their bandwidth, latency, and coverage across the board - just as they always have. And thus far, ISPs have always improved their networks by expanding coverage, increasing bandwidth, and decreasing latency for all traffic rather than through traffic shaping mechanisms. And it has been very successful.
We’ve discussed this before. Microsoft is never going to pay 5 billion dollars to create The Xbox Network to chop 15 milliseconds of latency off xbox online gaming. But what they could potentially do is pay Comcast some amount of money to simply delay Playstation traffic by a few times that much. Now Microsoft can (correctly) advertise that their online gaming is way faster than playstation online gaming - but they haven’t improved anything for anyone, only hurt it for certain consumers. The latter scenario is about a billion times more likely than that companies are going to invest in brand new infrastructure.
The internet is already incredibly fast, incredibly low latency, and has incredible bandwidth potential. The real power to change the market on this one lies with making your competition slow or inaccessible. And that route requires no new infrastructure or spending from the ISPs - only reordering their current traffic, so it’s essentially free to them.
But even if I concede that you’re right, that’s the only actual legitimate negative for neutrality that you’ve raised - that allowing traffic management could hypothetically make the internet better for certain uses. That is miniscule compared to the downside of letting fewer than a dozen companies in the US essentially control who has access to what information and what services at a whim.
Again, the internet has been neutral from the start. From the use of the NSFNet backbone, to public funds used to build out ISP infrastructure (which was largely squandered or pocketed, but probably came with strings attached in terms of regulation), to specific FCC requirements and regulations to keep the internet neutral ISPs have been constrained from doing the evil things they now want to do.
Furthermore, internet access was not the primary business of the telecom companies that provide most of it until recently - data has only been the primary use of phones in recent years, and cable TV used to be a way bigger moneymaker than cable internet until the current era of cordcutting and ubiquitous broadband.
Furthermore, ISPs in the US used to be fragmented over a larger numbers of competitors, many of which who have sinced merged into just a handful of very large corporations that provide the vast majority of internet access in the US, which concentrates their lobbying/corrupting power and their ability to shape the market.
And even furthermore, they’ve had even longer to solidify their legislative hold on the telecom markets. Attempts to create municipal broadband networks to save people from the abuses of bad ISPs are routinely shot down by state legislatures. As the companies get bigger, richer, and have longer to use the government as a tool to enforce their own hold of the market, their hegemony increases. Creating competing ISPs is more difficult than it has ever been.
So there are reasons that ISPs are trying to play a more active role in fighting network neutrality rules, even if your premise that they’ve behaved until now out of their own good will is correct, which it isn’t.
This is dogmatic. Imagine one company controlled all internet access in the US. If they decided to block a website (or block every website except for ones they approve), everyone in the US would be restricted to seeing what they allowed. Would there be more freedom because this company was free to exercise control of its own infrastructure, or less freedom because 300 million people were no longer able to access all the information and services in the world?
Libertarians are the only ideological group that I’m familiar with would say that it’s the former.
I don’t think this makes the point you intended.
Comcast is known for all sorts of unethical business practices, and they’ve got extensive control over legislatures all over the country - and yet people often think very poorly of their products. I’m not sure why you seem think delivering consumer-oriented products and working behind the scenes to use their power to secure even more power are connected in that way. It seems like the trend is quite the opposite - if they’ve secured their market by using their existing power to codify and expand their power, they have less incentive to give a shit about their consumers.
I didn’t say you were stupid. I said you were simply wrong about a lot of your premises, and that your biases are extreme.
You’re still harping on the false premise that net neutrality is a new concept, a new government takeover of the internet and a dramatic change in how things are done, rather than a preservation of the status quo. That’s quite possibly the most important part of this debate, but you keep managing to forget this.
As per this post and others, one of my main points in the thread is how baffling and frustrating it is to me that libertarians are some of the staunchest advocates against network neutrality. In these posts, I’m not calling them stupid, I’m saying that their biases are so strong that they’re knee-jerk reacting negative to the idea of regulation, even when that regulation preserves the greatest real-world demonstration of the free market. Their bias against “government takeover” is so strong that they advocate against their own self interest and their own philosophy because they can’t get over the anti-regulation bias.
It is interesting, though, that the only people against neutrality are the ISPs themselves and libertarians who worry about some of the biggest companies in the world not having enough control. Pretty much everyone else in the world who know anything about the issue is pro-neutrality. But it probably won’t matter - the telecom industry has a whole lot of money to throw around.
Right. To date, we’ve had net neutrality for the most part, and the regulations kicked in when companies started eying their options. The problem here is that the reasons one might want net neutrality gone are almost all bad for the consumer, and simultaneously really good for the ISP. Being able to divvy up internet content into tiers and sell it to us at higher prices? Sucks for us, great for the ISP. Being able to throttle or block contents from people providing competing services, like Comcast blocking Netflix to give their own streaming service an advantage? Sucks for us, great for the ISP. And so on, and so forth. And it’s not like competition is an issue.
To address your analogy:
This is more like, “We know arsenic is harmful, but we’re gonna let people dump it in our drinking water anyways until we can prove that there are actual problems that come from letting people dump it in their drinking water. After all, maybe people won’t dump it in our drinking water!” To put it bluntly, this is idiotic. It’s deregulation for deregulation’s sake, like ditching an umbrella in a rainstorm because you haven’t gotten wet. It’s exactly the same kind of “logic” that brought us the loosening of the Voting Rights Act, based on the fact that the behavior it made illegal hadn’t been happening - at which point, the behavior immediately continued.
…But that’s what ending net neutrality would do. You seem to miss this point. Net neutrality is what keeps the internet from having a centrally managed plan. It’s what ensures that ISPs can’t filter and reroute traffic to sites they’d rather people go to. Or is it somehow not central planning if the people doing the central planning are unaccountable corporate suits with complete power over the economy, rather than elected government suits with complete power over the economy? That’s bizarre.
Given the fairly absurd startup costs and legal hassles involved with what is, in reality, far more akin to a utility than a service, a free and open market for internet service (without demanding things like state-mandated equal access to existing cable infrastructure, which I assume you’d also be against) is a fantasy. The barrier to entry is too high and the return on investment too low. Even Google couldn’t do it.
This is part of why the landscape of ISPs is so screwed. How many people are actually happy with their service provider? I know for a fact my dad hates working with Time Warner, but his other option is not having Cable or Internet, or working solely off his 3G contract, which is nowhere near good enough for what he uses it for. This is far from abnormal across the USA. In fact, it’s pretty much taken for granted.
Of course, in the past, ISPs weren’t quite as consolidated. But even if we take this argument as a given, it’s not a good idea. We know this is the behavior we want from these corporations. We want net neutrality. ISPs shouldn’t be able to centrally plan how the internet runs; indeed, it would be a huge loss to society at large. Oh, and look, they’re already doing that right now! So there’s literally no reason not to turn it into a legal regulation.
To go back to our arsenic example, this is like having the company which has been dutifully not dumping arsenic in streams make a whole lot of noises along the lines of “We’d sure like it if there wasn’t any regulation stopping us from dumping arsenic into streams”. Then people say, “Well, shoot, they haven’t been dumping arsenic in our water supply, so we shouldn’t force them to keep not dumping arsenic in our water supply. We can trust them to go on the honor system.”
Except that there is literally no non-ideological reason to go on the honor system. None whatsoever. The only reason they would want that is so that they have the freedom to dump arsenic if they are so inclined.
But the ability to end net neutrality as we know it - that’s not too much power to leave in the hands of unelected businessmen? Say what you will about those unelected bureaucrats; at some level, they answer to us. The CEO of Time Warner Cable does not. Not even in the vague, intangible “Customers will ditch you” manner, because most customers don’t have a whole lot of choice when it comes to internet service providers.
How does this even work? No, seriously, explain it to us. How do we make sure that the market is working properly when the barrier for entry to the market is this prohibitively expensive and litigious?
Look man, after Google brought a better product that many people wanted to an underserved market most commonly characterized by how much people hate the existing companies in that arena and failed, I don’t know what else we’re supposed to do.
Again I ask: who here would personally benefit from the elimination of Net Neutrality, and how exactly would you benefit from it?
Interesting article from The Consumerist concerning misleading claims from the FCC and the various ISPs about Net Neutrality.
Anyone who uses something where low latency is critical (teleconferencing and games are the big two that come to mind)
Anyone who doesn’t do a lot of online streaming. The way ISPs price their service, low utilization users are effectively subsidizing higher utilization users.
Potentially everyone. We’re to the point where a handful of highly profitable companies are responsible for a large majority of the traffic. Yes, they pay to put their data on to the network, but hooking up a massive pipe to send 1TB/s is a lot cheaper than hooking up a million little pipes to receive that 1TB/s. Allowing ISPs to recoup money from big content providers theoretically ought to lower the cost to consumers.
Looking at the million different ways cable companies nickel-and-dime it’s customers to death, I find it hard to believe that the CEOs of those companies would look at all that extra money and say to their Boards “We’ve got this extra money, and I’ve decided to give it back to the customers. What do you think?” :rolleyes:
You’re just begging the question. The argument you give is no more than no net neutrality is bad because no net neutrality is bad.
That’s it? I answer a specific question you asked and you come back with snark addressing merely 1/3 of the answer?
No net neutrality is bad because it grants ISPs the power to block, hinder, or favor specific sources of traffic. It grants them the power to blow up the bedrock of a free and open market that has so characterized the internet. Indeed, just about the only reason they might want to get rid of net neutrality is to abuse that power. Speculation about, “Oh, maybe they’ll do X which is good for consumers” is asinine; we’re talking about companies who exist in a monopolistic setting and have a record of being extremely unfriendly to the consumer - there is no reason to believe that they want this for our benefit, and every reason to believe they want it to fuck with us further.
The potential downsides of not having net neutrality are well known and well-understood. I don’t think you know what “begging the question” means.
Did you happen to glance at the short article I linked to in post #87?
Is priority mail bad because it allows the post office to block, hinder, or favor specific sources of mail or is it good because it gives choice?
If you were designing the internet today you would not design it to treat all packets the same since they are not all the same. Things like teleconference and gaming which require low latency should have access to a fast lane. Things like video and file transfers which aren’t latency dependent should be relegated to a slow lane.
Both sides of the argument are giant corporations operating in a monopolistic setting. Neither have a record of being particularly friendly to the consumer.
Please be gentle, here, because I’m far from conversant on this issue.
Czarcasm asked who would benefit from a repeal of net neutrality. Let me ask this: I’ve noticed that since AT&T bought DirecTV, there have been ads talking about how AT&T cell phone users can stream DirecTV programming with no data fees if they are also subscribers to DirecTV. I think that offer may have been expanded for a much broader streaming plan, but again, I don’t follow these things very carefully.
So if AT&T offers to stream DirecTV content to their cell phone users with free data, is that considered a violation of net neutrality, since the same free streaming doesn’t apply to HBO Plus content (or whatever)?
The FCC (before Trump) said that this was probably a violation of net neutrality:
Thanks. Let me throw this out there as an analogy, and get some reactions:
There’s a debate among iPhone and Android aficionados about how those two platforms have different approaches to apps: Apple and its walled garden, and Android and its openness. Sometimes I hear the pro-net neutrality side talk about concerns about access and openness, it seems like there’s an expectation that ISPs will gravitate to a model that sort of emulates Apple’s approach, as though that is the natural state of being for a business. And yet, the Android approach to business that attaches great value to openness still persists.
Is the concern on the pro-net neutrality side that all or most ISPs will adopt content restrictions (in various forms)? Or is it that if even if a fraction of ISPs adopt such models, that’s a fraction too many?
I’m still trying to think through the harm in the worst case scenarios here. I’m not entirely convinced that, to use one example, that AT&T streaming DirecTV is a loss for people who want to stream Dish Network on their phones. And, there’s plenty of iPhone users who actually LIKE the walled garden business model, which to me might indicate that some users would end up preferring advantageous access to streaming Amazon content while Netflix content would be treated like any other data.
Yes. Very important pro-capitalist point Ravenman.
That analogy has some legs. How about Supermarket Neutrality. Certain brands should not be able to negotiate for prime shelf space and supermarkets will have the incentive to keep competitors out and hock only their store brands.
The analogy breaks down at several important points. Stores do not have infinite shelf space; there is theoretically near-infinite space for competing and unrelated businesses in the internet; as a result, they must prioritize what gets shelf space. Additionally, even if certain stores almost exclusively sold store brands (and there is a reason this exists), you know what’s entirely possible and not even particularly difficult? Opening another store. And, unlike laying an entirely new set of redundant, unnecessary cables, it stands a good chance of not being a huge waste.
I’m trying to see this through your perspective, and I think there’s a divergence of terms here. You are totally right: based on physical space, stores have to make choices on what products get choice space. ISPs don’t have to do that. But from the consumer point of view, in either case, choice is not infinite: any store is going to have a few brands of pasta, and for the most part, consumers are going to have a handful of choices for internet search, video streaming, and other major services. I readily admit that consumers will have more choices in other areas for Internet services: say, there are more news sites than there are brands of pie fillings.
So I’m still thinking about this: consumer choice is never unlimited. But… does it harm the consumer if some products are promoted? And, how likely is it that some products would be sandbagged or prohibited? (eg., Netflix may get super-fast speeds, Amazon maybe is treated neutrally, but Hulu is crippled/unavailable)
The point about the investment needed to start a new ISP is well taken, but let’s not be flippant about the challenges of opening new grocery stores. I know some neighborhoods in DC that had been trying to attract a grocery store for two decades.
But it leads to another question: some people have said that competition in ISPs is only an urban thing, which is a fair point. If rural areas had access to competing ISPs, like through the various ideas to have wireless broadband from satellites, would this issue be just as important to you?