I think it’s fine for a website to pay for data for their service to customers. This lets Wikipedia provide free Wikipedia access to impoverished people around the world, which I see as a great thing. It also lets Facebook provide free facebook to people around the world, which I see as kind of a bad thing, but not one worthy of banning. But ultimately, I don’t see why this should be banned.
My analogy for this is free shipping. The post office is a common carrier, but there’s no reason we shouldn’t allow companies that ship things to pay for the shipping costs to their customers.
Does this make it harder for smaller companies that don’t have the logistics or economies of scale to compete with Amazon? Sure. But so what? France, by the way, banned Amazon from providing free shipping because it was competing too effectively with local bookshops. That is not the regulatory world I want to live in with the internet.
I think it’s fine to have different quality of service levels for different data. Video calls, for example, needs a short path and high bandwidth more than does a video stream, which in turn needs more than email, and so on down the line. Designing a network so that all services are supported at the level that the most demanding service requires is either wasteful since it’s over-engineered, or more likely (what we have right now), the low-priority services sometimes preempt the high-priority services and the high-priority services don’t actually work very well.
There are ways to allow both of these things that don’t open the floodgates for the sort of nasty behavior we actually want to prevent, like artificially slowing competitors’ services or letting certain companies become gatekeepers for who gets to do something on the internet.
On the other hand, the bad situation you describe is very similar to what I experience now. My landlord provides wi-fi for my house, but it isn’t quite fast enough for the number of users. Without net neutrality, I suspect my Netflix would work better (because both Netflix and the ISP benefit from coming to some kind of an agreement to prioritize Netflix streaming), while my neighbor downloading illegal torrents and porn (It’s my neighbor, I’m telling you!) would be throttled.
In the end, it seems to me that ending net neutrality benefits existing big players who have the capital and the clout to negotiate good deals, and shuts out smaller players, start-ups, and non-corporate open-source-philosophy systems like torrents. That’s a harm, to be sure, but not one that gets me as a consumer all that het up. I’m not even sure it wouldn’t benefit me individually, as someone who relies more on Netflix and Amazon than other sources.
I like this idea. I would like to see it expanded to water companies being able to treat (heh) some water differently than other water. If you pay for the deluxe American Family Safety Water bundle you get micro-organisms filtered out. If not, well…
You mean like, say, using grey water to flush toilets, instead of drinking water? Which, by the way, most plumbing codes prohibit, even in places where we have chronic water shortages.
This is not a good analogy. The post office doesn’t care whether a business offers to pay shipping cost or not. They just deliver the package. A more accurate analogy is the post office is the ISP and the “free-shipping businesses” are the content providers on the internet.
It’s fine if Netflix or Hulu offer various incentives to get you to buy their product. Maybe a 1-year free subscription or something (analogous to Amazon paying for free shipping). It is not fine for them to pay off an ISP to throttle competing content providers data.
It’s fine if Amazon offers free shipping as an incentive. It is not fine if they pay off the post office to throttle the delivery of competing companies packages.
My mailbox is actually not all that big. As it is a finite resource, could amazon pay USPS not to deliver, or at least deprioritized packages from Etsy coming to my mailbox?
I find that that is a much closer analogy. Well, it would be closer if USPS could also look inside of my packages, and sell that information.
Did you read the end of my post? We can and should have regulations that prohibit that sort of thing.
But current Net Neutrality proposals would prevent exactly the cases I suggested, of a content producer paying for their customers to receive content, even if they did not in any way disrupt the ability of those customers to connect to other websites.
Which is why I think those proposals go too far. I don’t think we should have no regulation. I think that proposed net neutrality principles are more restrictive than is optimal.
Something to note about this action:
The stated driver from the GOP perspective is that the FCC assumed control of an area the GOP feels should be handled by the FTC. The FCC did this by voting to classify IPS’s as common carriers which the FTC can’t regulate, and then began creating rules like this one that is getting nixed.
If this is the true motive, then the GOP would need to change something so the FTC can then create these types of rules.
But maybe they just want to enable commerce via ads/marketing.
I like the post office analogy, but tweaked just a bit.
The post office does not treat all mail equally. For 49 cents, they will deliver a letter for you in a few days. For a few dollars, they will deliver a package in 5 business days. For a few dollars more, they offer 2 day delivery, and for a few dollars more than that they will deliver overnight.
So when I and half a million other people get “free 2-day shipping” from Amazon, that’s because Amazon pays the USPS to deliver their packages overnight (also because I paid Amazon $99 for my “free” shipping). A small startup company can’t make the same offer to their customers because they simply can’t afford the cost. Amazon doesn’t need to pay the USPS to “throttle” deliveries from their competitors; the USPS basically does that for them as part of their business model.
Yet small companies continue to stay in business, by offering their customers something of value other than “free 2-day shipping”. I suspect that if net neutrality were permanently banned, we would all grumble and moan for a while, then life would settle down and we’d all get along just fine.
I assume the Kremlin will have the fee waived if they want your history.
I don’t think anyone should have any expectation of privacy when using the internet. Someone, somewhere is tracking your every visit. If they can make a buck off of selling your history, they will. Far be it from this administration and this congress to prevent mega-corporations from making money by whatever means necessary.
The post office analogy is a great analogy. Just because it’s not perfectly parallel in every way doesn’t make it bad. There’s no such thing as a perfect analogy, since if two things were actually identical, it wouldn’t be useful to analogize between them anyway. And, yes, I acknowledge that there are technical differences between mail delivery and packet routing where the analogy will not hold.
But you can easily use the analogy to reason about whether regulations make sense:
Is it reasonable for the post office to have different rates for different delivery speeds? Yes.
Might it make sense for some packages to be delivered more quickly at high cost, and for others to be delivered more slowly at lower cost? Yes.
Is it reasonable for the post office to enter into an agreement with one shipper where they only offer high speed to that shipper and artificially delay other shippers’ packages? Absolutely not.
Should everyone have access to the post office at fair and publicly published rates? Yes.
Is it reasonable to let either the shipper or the receiver to pay for delivery? Yes.
I think all of these are directly applicable to the internet.
For those saying it’s a bad analogy, please provide some examples of parallel analogous questions for the post office/ISP that have different answers. I suspect you will have to go fairly deep into technical corner cases to do so (though I’m willing to be shown otherwise).
One major issue I have with that analogy is that having a post box on my house does not make me a customer of the USPS. Only if I am sending mail am I a customer. Only if I am sending mail do I need to pay for access. So, in a large sense, only the people who are sending mail are USPS’s customers, and anyone just receiving mail at their house is not. Access to the mail system if free.
With an ISP, I am paying them for that access. I am paying them to deliver content to my home. I am a customer of theirs whether I am sending or receiving bits, or even if I have my computer offline. For them to now take on another customer, a customer who may have different priorities than I have, a customer who may in fact cause my service that I am paying for to be affected negatively, creates an interesting conflict of interest.
Now, if we want to create a situation where broadband internet service is free to the end user, and the costs are supported by content providers paying ISPs to carry their content, that would be a very complicated model, and I don’t think that it would work very well, but at least then it would be clear who their customers were, and where their priorities lay.
This is all, of course, in addition to the privacy aspects of net neutrality. The USPS cannot sell information about your correspondence to advertisers, and absolutely cannot open up your mail to see what the content is, and sell that information to advertisers. ISPs can do both of these things.
That’s an analogy for ISPs offering various connection speeds at corresponding prices, which everybody accepts as perfectly normal and reasonable. The analogy that would apply to net neutrality would be the post office delivering Amazon packages right away and letting Etsy packages sit in the back room for a day or two because Amazon paid them (in addition to the standard shipping cost) and Etsy didn’t. For some ISPs (those which are also content providers, i.e. cable/internet companies), a better analogy would be if the post office ran its own mail-order business and delivered those packages right away and let everybody else’s sit in the back room.
This is an interesting distinction, although I’m not sure how or if it breaks the usefulness of the analogy. Can you come up with a proposed internet/post regulation that ought to have different answers because of this distinction?
I think that conflict exists with the post office too, we just don’t really notice it, or we don’t think that the service degradation is important. For example, adding more postal customers may result in re-configuration of routes, which might result in your mail being delivered later in the day. That’s clearly a degradation of service. If enough new customers get added elsewhere, the post office may have to shift employees around, which might result in your mail delivery being delayed by even longer. If enough new customers get added, the post office has to hire new employees. New employees are probably not as good as experienced ones, which will result in more lost and misdelivered mail. Etc. The post office makes relatively weak guarantees about delivery of most mail, which allows them lots of logistical flexibility to do these things anyway, but changing who pays for mail doesn’t fix potential network effects.
Yes, but I think we both agree that ISPs shouldn’t be able to do these things. The usefulness of the post office analogy is that it gives us insight on how we ought to regulate ISPs. It does not give us much insight on how they are currently regulated.
Perhaps that’s the point I failed to communicate well that caused people to dislike the analogy.
There is no difference between your good and bad scenarios. You say that everyone agrees that it is okay to charge various prices for different speeds. In your example the post office is charging Amazon for a faster speed than Etsy.
The hypothetical danger is that this faster speed allows Amazon on monopoly on delivered goods. The problem is that if Etsy is so concerned about Amazon’s products being shipped faster, they can pay too. It is highly unlikely that one producer can afford to pay an ISP enough money to throttle everyone else’s data.
Some of us are old enough to remember before Fedex and UPS when deliveries were normally 4-6 weeks. Then companies jumped in and built infrastructure that allows overnight and 2 day delivery. Because of that unless you are ordering from China everything comes faster than it used to. If Netflix and Amazon are allowed to pay ISPs for higher speeds the ISPs will then be able to build faster infrastructure and everyone’s speeds will get higher.