YouTube and Netflix account for about 2/3 of the all the data downloads in the US on a daily basis, and have been at this point for the past several years.
ISPs and the internet at large doesn’t have infinite bandwidth.
So, just so I’m clear on something, net neutrality opponents: your position is that the scenarios liberals dream up of ISPs throttling everyone who doesn’t pay them, putting effective roadblocks in front of negative press, etc. etc. just won’t happen? If so, can you clarify why you don’t think it’s a serious possibility?
Also, do you agree with a conservative blogger I read who claimed that net neutrality is “Venezuela for the Internet” whose goal is to make the government the sole ISP?
They don’t have to; no matter how many competing websites there are, there is a theoretically limited amount of demand for bandwidth. If a serious competitor to Facebook springs up, we’re not going to see the bandwidth allotted to facebook suddenly matched, we’re more likely to see the bandwidth facebook used to take up split between the two. Or if Vimeo somehow became the next Youtube, it wouldn’t just make people watch twice as many videos. Here again, the analogy is being muddled. In the supermarket analogy, bandwidth is not shelf space, it’s the speed at which the checkout counters work. If you suddenly doubled the shelf space of the supermarket without increasing the number of customers, your checkout speed would remain largely untouched, because people aren’t suddenly going to be buying twice as much food just because there are twice as many options.
I’m still making up my mind on the larger issue, but I have two points.
First, let’s be clear that the term “throttling” means actions that would generally be considered punitive to limit access to certain services. If I pay for 25 mbps access, and my ISP gives me Amazon at 100 mbps because of a deal they have, and literally everything else is 25 mbps, I would not say I’m being throttled. If it is Amazon at 100, nearly everything else at 25, and Netflix at 10, then I’d say my use was throttled. Do we agree?
Second, I recently read an article by a Wall Street analyst on a company that was making huge profits but in a predatory way because it was essentially acting like a classif monopolist on certain manufactured items… The analyst advised clients to stay away, because companies that treat customers like things to be punished typically end up having a reckoning, as opposed to treating customers like someone you have to offer value to. I find that to be generally to be the case.
There are some industries that I think it is very risky to take the view that the market or general government oversight (like hauling in CEOs to Congress to explain their actions, as was done with United Airlines this week) will correct predatory business practices. Like, banks and the energy sector. I’m fine with strong regulations on those sectors, because people can be ruined or even die if companies carry out abusive business practices.
At this moment, I don’t think that ISPs are in that category of risk that regulations are immediately needed to prevent irreparable harm. If AT&T offers its deal with DirecTV streaming, I’m still not sure what the problem really is. If Verizon starts throttling Netflix to make it unusable for its customers, maybe its customers will revolt and the policy will be changed, or then we can see that regulations really are needed.
I literally have no idea what this means. Can you link to the article?
Ok, I found the article about Venezuela on the Internet. I think it’s total bullshit written by an asshole.
The issue I’m struggling with is, “Is there an actual problem that needs to be fixed by mandating net neutrality, or is this a chicken little situation in that its a solution in search of a problem?” As you can tell, I’m leaning toward thinking that the problem might be imaginary, but it isn’t totally settled in my mind.
As for the article, it was a waste of time for me to read it. There’s literally nothing in there that I consider to be a thoughtful point. It’s just name-calling and stupidity.
Well, would “don’t let companies dump uranium waste products in our drinking water” be a solution in search of a problem? Probably, I can’t think of anyone doing that or wanting to do that. I still think it’s better to have a law on the books, because when people start doing it, it’ll suck quite a bit.
Customers revolt… And then? It’s not like Verizon is the most popular company in America right now. Granted, it’s probably the most popular ISP in America, but that isn’t saying much at all. They’re all marked with terrible customer service - do you think that south park episode about Minecraft shat all over the cable company for no reason*? These folks are infamous for their crappy service, and for the fact that most people don’t have much in terms of options. For most people, it’s the crappy service from Comcast (or Time Warner), or resorting to far slower or far pricier options like satellite internet, dial-up, or mobile broadband. Not great options, in other words. The customers can revolt all they want, but competing in this field is essentially impossible because of the high costs and legal barriers to entry which no amount of libertarian theory can completely do away with.
*Okay, bad example…
Net neutrality is not a new regulation seeking to solve a problem. It is how the internet has always worked till now and the Comcasts of the world have been doing just fine.
In their corporate zeal to make more money they want the neutrality rules removed and there is no way to see this as a good thing for the consumer.
ISP=supermarkets
Bandwidth=shelf space
Web sites/apps=Suppliers of goods
The demand for bandwidth is no more “theoretically infinite” than the demand for shelf space at a grocery store. Both should be priced by the market.
Bandwidth is already priced by the market. Always has been (well, considering the ISPs are monopolies or duopolies I would not call it priced by the market but to your point we can say it is).
I bet your ISP offers different bandwidth packages such as 10mbps, 50mbps and 100mbps.
No one is complaining about that. If you are Netflix you are paying for massive bandwidth. The consumer at the other end is paying for bandwidth sufficient to get Netflix.
What the ISPs want to so is throttle Netflix at the consumer end unless Netflix pays more money.
I understand that. Supermarkets limit consumer’s access to certain goods by not stocking them because the suppliers won’t negotiate better deals. This happens all the time. It is capitalism 101.
Net neutrality activists are trying to pretend like this is something new. It’s the “barriers to entry” argument, > 100 years old.
I’d say that dumping radioactive waste is something that causes irreparable harm to the public, so, like the finance and energy sectors I mentioned before, I’m totally fine with strong regulations to prevent that harm from happening in the first place.
In your opinion, does an end to net neutrality cause a humpty dumpty sort of problem, in which if it happens, we simply can’t recover from it if we later judge that we need a new regulation or law to require net neutrality? Again, I don’t know this issue very well, but it doesn’t seem to be. But I’m open to learning more as to why we might not be able to put a genie back in the bottle.
Let’s be precise here: net neutrality has always been the practice, but until last year (or was it 2015?), there was no rule requiring it to be the practice? I’ve understood net neutrality to be the custom, but not a requirement, and the dispute is about whether to make the custom a requirement. Is that wrong?
The difference is there is a lot of competition among supermarkets. If one supermarket doesn’t stock something I can go to one that does. There are nearly a dozen supermarkets within a mile of my house (just checked Google Maps and counted). If that doesn’t work I can probably get it online and have it delivered. Lots of choices. Lots of competition.
Not so with the ISPs. They have a hammerlock on the local market with at most two choices available and more often than not only one choice.
In fact, when local communities have decided to take matters into their own hands and build their own internet infrastructure the ISPs lobbied the state to make that illegal (in many places).
That is correct.
The rules were brought about because Comcast and Verizon flouted that practice and let Netflix traffic bottleneck. Netflix had to pay to make it stop.
Very interesting – I didn’t know about that. I’m going to read more about it.
You can do your own Googling of course but if it helps I found this story to be a good account of this: The inside story of how Netflix came to pay Comcast for internet traffic
No, it’s the exact same. Yes, if people switch from Youtube to Vimeo it doesn’t matter. But when Youtube became popular it was a huge change. The amount of bandwidth people consumed did just about double. So in the supermarket analogy, a new product did cause people to buy twice as much food.
From the ISP’s perspective a Netflix user uses significantly more bandwidth than one who doesn’t. Say in dollar terms it’s $5. The ISP can either (1) charge everyone $2 more, (2) charge Netflix users $5 more, or (3) charge Netflix $5 for each user. From a economic efficiency and fairness perspective (2) or (3) are better than (1). Obviously Netflix loves the current arrangement because it is massively in their benefit. Non-Netflix users are effectively subsidizing Netflix users.
I don’t think so.
First off, ISPs have shown no desire to police content. If they start, it opens up a massive can of worms for them because they now become partially responsible for the content going over their network. For example, if they reroute a negative article on cnn.com but not howtobuildabomb.com then they are open to a claim of negligence.
Second, there is enough ISP competition in existence. If an ISP is doing enough things to piss their customers off, most have a viable second option. Not necessarily a great option, but enough to be some limit.
Third, if Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. get pissed off enough they can start a rival ISP with the change between their couch cushions. Google did that with Google Fiber and it spurred incumbent ISPs to get their shit together. That’s enough of a threat to keep ISPs from doing egregious things.
From a consumer perspective if net neutrality goes away I can see (theoretically) three immediate benefits:
(1) Video conferencing over the internet gets much better. Right now, the lag makes it less than ideal.
(2) My Google Home will lag less when responding.
(3) My ping in online games would go down
I’ll read that too. So walk me through this: the ISPs are claiming that handling Netflix traffic has additional costs for them, so they essentially want to make Netflix pay for that. And Netflix is saying, why should we have to pay those costs when other content providers (let’s say, cutecatpix.com) aren’t being shaken down for money. Am I generally on track here?
So I see two questions: First, is it generally true that ISPs have to deal with some sort of marginal increased cost for a service like Netflix, because they use a lot of bandwidth and if they don’t get it, essentially their service doesn’t work well? (Or to use the analogy in your previous link, the restaurant (ISP) needs to hire more waiters (something about opening new ports)?) Or is there reason to believe that opening new ports to handle Netflix volume is essentially cost-free to ISPs?
Second, if there is a legitimate case that ISPs do bear some increased costs to deliver content like streaming video as offered by Netflix, it seems to me it is a question of who should pay that cost. The only options I see are Netflix or the consumer, under the principle that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. It seems like the implication of net neutrality is that the consumer ought to pay such costs as a routine part of their service, rather than having the content providers work out (or be arm-twisted into) a side deal with the ISPs. Thoughts?
By the way, thanks for the conversation on this. I really am learning quite a bit.
Can you explain how a Netflix user uses significantly more bandwidth than one who doesn’t if they both purchase the 10mbps plan?
If you have a 10mbps plan, that does not mean that you are using 10mbps. In fact, most people are not using nearly that, so they may have 1000 subscribers with 10mbps plans in an area, but only have 1gbps connection to it.
If more people use more bandwidth, then they either need to make the plans more expensive, to price many of the people people out of the 10, and put them into the 5mbps plan, or they need to increase their bandwidth to the area, in which case, they would also make plans more expensive.