Court strikes down net neutrality. Who's on the side of the angels here?

Great Debates
41

Except users can’t decide. All of this is done behind the scenes. All they will find out is that they have to give up service to get Netflix and get another service. So instead of going “Hey, this new startup rocks!” they’ll try to get there, find it blocked and go “Awwwww.”

This hampers innovation. If you can simply block all of your competition or charge them outrageous fees, you will NEVER innovate. This is especially true when they are startups. YouTube before google would not have existed long enough for Google to buy it if Comcast could have shaken them down for millions of dollars. They either never would have been found by the general populace, or wouldn’t have been able to thrive.

Actually, it does. Do you want your website to show up when you start Deeg’s Hammer Business? Then you better be prepared to pay for a graduated scale to each and every backbone provider, plus the last mile infrastructure owners. Deeg’s Hammer Business will go out of business because you will have no way to advertise your new, improved, and awesome (e.g. innovated) hammer.

All of the internet companies you know and love/hate wouldn’t have gotten where they are today if they had to pay fees to every provider for their early access. We wouldn’t have Paypal, SourceForge, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, BitTorrent, Hulu, Ebay, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, HotMail (pre-Microsoft). Not a single one would have made it.

This isn’t “letting companies innovate new ways to make money.” This is “Microsoft wasn’t using anti-competitive tactics to run Netscape out of business.”

As was said up thread, this isn’t about “Better” service, this is guaranteeing that we don’t slide back to 56k for half of the internet because providers want more money from every single actor on the internet.

Allowing net neutrality to be compromised does nothing but give a huge edge to those that have already made it. It’s at the cost of both the potential upsets by the new comers and is the consumer by giving them a shit product at a shit price without having to ever change. After all, where will you go for the internet, now?

42

I’d like to point out that the FCC’s authority to regulate broadcasting is completely different from its authority to regulate common carriers (telecommunications). It has authority to regulate broadcast content because Congress has given it the authority to do so. With respect to common carriers, it is authorized to ensure fair access and adequate competition. The FCC does not regulate the content of telecommunications services. Indeed, it prohibits telecommunications carriers from discriminating on the basis of the content that users want to transmit. That’s the same thing that it would do for internet services.

43

I’ll admit I’m not necessarily opposed to net neutrality regulations, but I am skeptical of a need for them. I think a lot of thought needs to go into the proper design of any regulations that do go into effect.

If I’m the consumer, I would drop Comcast and get mobile broadband through T-Mobile and use that for my home Internet. If this actually happened, I’m fairly confident that providers like T-Mobile would offer plans with more data than 10.5 GB (T-Mobile® Official Site: Get Even More Without Paying More).

I would be worse off (less data), although I would be paying less each month for internet if I stick with that $70/10.5GB plan. Netflix would certainly lose out on some customers, but not every Comcast customer (many would switch from Comcast). T-Mobile would be a little bit better off maybe, with more mobile broadband customers. Comcast would probably take a big hit, and I doubt they would make all that back in cable subscriptions.

The thing is, Comcast could have done this a long time ago, and they didn’t. I wonder if they realize that it wouldn’t be a net gain, even given their substantial market power.

44

I see two sides to this issue. BTW, I work for Cisco, and that gives me a little insight into some of the technical issues. But I don’t speak for Cisco, and due to the nature of my work, I don’t have much insight into either the details of the legislature or our customers’ viewpoints.

For one thing, the same features used to provide “net non-neutrality” (mostly, features called QoS, for Quality of Service) are used to provide what are called “Service Level Agreements” between carriers and their customers. My guess is that carriers can still offer SLAs to customers, but according to Net Neutrality, can’t use them much for their own purposes, or to differentiate between communications streams based on the “not our customer” end.

In other words, as I understand it, NN allows ISPs to offer faster/better service to a class of customers at a higher price, but doesn’t allow them to affect the customer traffic based on other more arbitrary criteria (for example, based on the other end of the data flow).

Now, I certainly don’t want to promote business models where my ISP can give its own services better service to me than a competitor’s. That is, I’d rather my ISP be nothing but an ISP, without any of its own content, and without any incentive to be anything but net-neutral. However, I’d also prefer a world where phones are commodities, and phone companies don’t charge way more than their service costs in order to offer us “deals” on new phones. The free market would tend to favor commoditized phones where we buy the phone we want, and commoditized phone service where we pay for the service we want, without this silly setup we have. So, I don’t trust the free market in the US to necessarily provide the best outcome (despite the fact that I do think the free market is an incredibly powerful tool for allocating assets and fostering innovation.)

So, I’m “pro NN” regarding the kind of service I’d rather have. But I’m not convinced that NN legislation is best. For one thing, I believe it cuts too broad a swath. On example I heard on NPR about how NN can stifle innovation is that it prohibits ISPs from developing faster/better service classes for medical purposes. I’d like to hear more details about why they can’t do this as a customer SLA (for hospitals etc.), but perhaps NN doesn’t allow them to make the kind of provider-to-provider deals they’d need to arrange to provide end-to-end higher quality of service.

I can see another more mundane application. As a musician, I’d like to play with other musicians online, in real time. The problem with this is that round-trip latency (the time it takes for a packet to go end-to-end and back) is critical. If it’s much over 10 milliseconds, you can’t play together and be very tight or establish much of a groove. It sure would be nifty if music host sites could offer (at a cost) the ability to get low latency traffic for this application. Note that it would only be for this application, rather than something I’d want for all my traffic: low latency is of no importance when I’m browsing the web. So, whatever it costs, I wouldn’t want to have to pay for it for all my traffic, just a small portion. I suspect that NN makes this kind of thing impossible.

Ideally, no regulations would be required except possibly transparency laws, so that ISPs have to state what non-neutrality they use. Even without transparency, it’s probably possible for watchdog organizations to measure non-neutrality, and for each ISP to be benchmarked, and for people to choose whether they want a lower cost with less fairness or higher cost with neutrality.

But as I pointed out above, we seem to be too stupid to pick mobile carriers that charge us what the service is worth rather than adding a big pad so they can discount the price of our phones (to suck us into yet another 2 years of higher than necessary rates). Too few of us are savvy enough for this to be a significant business model, so it’s only available from marginal carriers with spotty coverage. (Let me know if I’m wrong. I know Google is trying to fix that, but I don’t know how successful they’ve been.)

45

I sort of agree, I could see a benefit in “internet packages” like “cable packages”. Where you can pay for superfast internet for youtube+gmail+photobucket+steam downloads+whatever, and shitty speeds for other webpages (split into multiple tiers as appropriate). If you really want, you can pay similar to what’s now full price for the “yes, even full speed for your shitty Angelfire pages” tier of service. That wouldn’t be particularly evil, and could actually help in the long run.

However, I don’t trust ISPs to actually do that.

46

Because the default regulation has been “net neutrality” It wasn’t until the last 10 years of lolcats taking off that they really started complaining about how much use of bandwidth there was and how their poor little sacks of dollar signs couldn’t take it.

As for your response, most of the cell providers have patchy service for data speeds. For instance, on T-Mobile and Sprint, I have a single spot in my house that gets LTE speeds. That spot is in my shower. Verizon only does slow tiers of 3G in this neighborhood, and AT&T has 4G service, but it’s at the max end of their 3G speeds. I can switch to DSL for the same price and get half the download speed, plus an incredibly neutered upload speed. When my wife uploads a video to Facebook, the entire house goes down for five minutes. And then there’s satellite, which is twice as much as either of those ground-based options.

So, yes, I technically have seven options. But it’s not, really. I have two options. And one blows and one will blow, shortly, when Netflix doesn’t pay them to use their network.

Plus, if you are watching Netflix, you have to realize how much you get with 10GB a month. Netflix HD is 3.8mbps. That’s roughly 1500MB for 30 minutes. Which means you get 6.6 30 minute TV shows. A month. And nothing else. No email, no other data service. You can, literally, burn your LTE connection in less than a week, even if you only watch one show per day.

And then, what if you have Amazon Prime or Google Play or Apple iTunes content? Sorry. You watched 3 hours of netflix. You don’t get any of that, either.

So, really, you decision to go with LTE because you wanted Netflix didn’t work out. It wasn’t really an option. What are you going to do? Oh…That’s right. Get a Cable TV package from Comcast.

Funny how that works out in their favor, eh?

47

You realize that the last year this has been changed in a major way due to TMobile, right? You can get plans without having to sign for two years, now, on pretty much any service. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile all offer these new plans.

48

Do you have a cite for this? It’s only been in the last five or so years that the FCC has attempted some neutrality regulations, IIRC.

Right, I agree that it would be shittier than it is now. My point, though, is that I don’t think Netflix would go out of business, and more importantly I think it would be a net loss for Comcast, so they probably wouldn’t be that drastic in the first place.

49

Do you have a cite for this? It’s only been in the last five or so years that the FCC has attempted some neutrality regulations, IIRC. EDIT: A quick look at Wikipedia shows that the FCC only took up NN in 2005, but they didn’t attempt to enforce any sort of neutrality until 2008.

Right, I agree that it would be shittier than it is now. My point, though, is that I don’t think Netflix would go out of business, and more importantly I think it would be a net loss for Comcast, so they probably wouldn’t be that drastic in the first place.

50

Yes, the FCC adopted “Net Neutrality is Good” in 2005, but by default most service providers weren’t interested in much beyond bandwidth caps before 2003-2005, which is when things like YouTube started (~Oct '05). BitTorrent hit around 2002, causing all sorts of traffic fun. iTMS started around June of 2003. Valve released Steam in September 2003.

All of these products and services, at the beginning, were fairly benign - data wise. Around 2004-2005 is when ISPs started complaining that heavy data use services should be paying them because, you know, the load.

However, most of the ISPs started rolling out upgrades to their networks to handle the load, which they had been fairly reticent to do because it hurts their profits. I would note that most of the current last-mile providers (or in many cases the networks that were purchased by the current last-mile providers) received government money to expand internet services in the 90s, which has been charged as not being used effectively. (Some people charge that the payments were largely given over to profits and not used to appreciably expand the networks beyond what the networks’ existing plans already were. I don’t have information on this piece of it, though.)

While I agree, this won’t be in two months time, I can easily see it being the SOP for Comcast by the end of 2015/start of 2016 without much exertion of my brain.

51

The problem with saying these media companies will simply provide faster speeds to their own media packages is that we’re looking at the speeds currently offered as some baseline when it is arbitrarily set on the lower end. And of course these companies will spin it as they’re offering us more when in fact they are denying us higher speeds in order to make it look like you’re getting a deal.

These public bandwidths should not be theirs to dole out. They need to remain neutral. If I get my internet from Time Warner and they own Hulu, I don’t want them to offer me faster Hulu while lowering Netflix, I want them both to be the exact same speeds and let me choose for myself. Not regulating that and forcing companies to do that will be terrible, akin to AT&T offering you a higher voice quality on their phone plan vs. if you decide to go with T-Mobile.

52

But what if they offered you a discount? Say they lop off $20/mo so that they can de-prioritize Netflix. If you were a heavy Hulu user and didn’t care about Netflix this would be a great deal. NN would prevent this.

T-Mobile used to have a plan where talking to other T-Mobile users didn’t count against your minutes. Would that be allowed under neutrality rules?

53

They wouldn’t discount. No behavior in the history of our American ISPs have had the services declined in cost. Bandwidth isn’t like a road or a water faucet. Reducing throughput doesn’t eliminate any costs. You pay the same electricity, you pay the same maintenance costs for your equipment and so forth.

The only place where reducing throughput would make sense would be a cable shared node network where they might do it to reduce congestion. But it would be easier for them to it as they already do: When there’s a lot of activity, everyone’s everything traffic gets throttled and offer you nothing off of your bill. There’s a reason their ads say “Up to X mbps”. :slight_smile:

The only reason to change how their networks currently operate is to gouge more money out of both subscribers AND data heavy service providers on the internet.

Additionally, a cell phone’s network use and how the internet works are very different. It costs TMobile over the long run less money to route directly through their network for all cell-to-cell calls.

In the case of service providers for the internet, you are not allowed to run a server in accordance with the ToS. So you wouldn’t be able to have a deal where all data to your fellow ISP subscribers is free, because that would be less than 1% of all traffic on their network. All of the servers you know and love are hosted on facilities that have a huge pipe directly to an area backbone.

54

This is not correct. A system has a top capacity and increasing that capacity requires investment. Depending on the system it’s quite possible that increasing throughput for in-house traffic sources is cheaper than external sources. If there was viable ISP competition then Comcast (or AT&T or whomever) would have to pass some of that savings on to the customer or watch users flock to other ISPs. This is a great example of why I believe competition leads to a better result than NN.

55

People have to stop thinking of the internet as being just like cable or telephones. They are not the same, the internet is different and so it should be treated differently. It does sound great in theory if I’m not a Netflix user to restrict that and get better access and/or cheaper plans to focus on Hulu. However, I have zero confidence that in practice it will work out that way. The danger you ignore is that there definitely will be some one-upsmanship as media companies restrict one site or service to favor their own. Given the less than universal coverage of broadband service in the country, do you want to be stuck somewhere where you can only get get Time Warner and they offer you the dichotomy of Hulu or slow Netflix? A Netflix user would be screwed.

Compare that with cable and telephones where it doesn’t matter where you live, phone coverage is practically universal and so is cable channels. Where there is non-availability of some particular channel proves my point: if you live there and want to get the unavailable channel, you have no other recourse.

I’ll admit, we’re spoiled when it comes to the internet. No matter where you live, if you have acess, you can get the exact same websites as anyone else. With such universal coverage, why would you want to risk the possibility of restriction? What makes you think media companies who make quarterly decisions based on short-term bottom line gives a damn about your accessibility when they have their own services to push?

Discounts sound nice, I want want. I don’t watch some of the standard channels available on my cable package but I don’t want to be given a list of 500 channels and told to pick which ones I’m willing to pay for. Like Farin said, what looks like a choice and a discount is skewed heavily in favor of the media companies. You’ll end up paying more if you have such choices. The easiest and best way is to have an all-in-one package, which we currently have, instead of a piecemeal division of services and sites. Besides, how much are most people paying for just the internet now? Like $20 a month? How much cheaper do you really think you can get it?

56

Do you have a cite for this $20/month internet? We have Time Warner, no TV, no phone service, just the Internet. My wife sees the bills, but I know it is on the order of $70/month.

This is a tricky example. You’re right that it would suck to not have any Internet options that allow Netflix. But what sucks worse is not having any Internet whatsoever. There are millions of people who cannot afford the Internet: http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/26-million-americans-cant-afford-the-internet. That’s a serious quality of life issue. If the $20/month Internet becomes $10/month as long as you don’t use any streaming video services, then a lot more Americans can now afford it and their lives just got a lot better.

57

My point is that there was no net neutrality crackdown by the FCC until 2008, and even then it’s been spotty and subject to legal challenges. So if it was really in the best interest of ISPs to, e.g., charge YouTube more money to run on their pipes, or ban YouTube entirely, there was very little standing in their way. Why didn’t they do it? And if they didn’t have the incentive to do it then, why do we think they will have the incentive to do it in the future?

EDIT: I guess I’m more in a camp that says, net neutrality regulations may be useful, but let’s wait and see what kind of non-neutral behavior crops up before we start in with all kinds of regulation on the subject.

58

My mistake, I meant to limit it to non-broadband which, while no sane person would choose it, could be understood to be a basic package. Those are cheap. I do pay around $70 as well.

Hopefully the internet can be soon considered to be necessary to basic requirements, sorta like the government forced phone companies to put phone lines everywhere. Everyone should have access if not now, then soon, because I do see it as a basic necessity of life just under the big 3 absolutely necessary ones. To me, the thing holding this back is more political will than anything

59

Except that it doesn’t on all wired connections. You have to do the same investment to let your users share unlimited amongst themselves as you would to have them share unlimited to the internet.

It’s not like a personal network in a home or small business where the switch is 10GBe and everyone can just madly screw around inside the house and then have to actually wait for the internet when something leaves the switch via uplink.

The reason for that was that the FCC regulation didn’t take effect for two and a half years and everyone waited to see what would happen. The actual enforcement came soon after as a test case to challenge the oversight that the FCC claimed.

And this is a bad idea, in my opinion. US Business cares about one thing: profit. If they can drive more money out of anyone, they will. So, once they have their networks setup to milk Netflix et al for every last penny, they’ll push so much lobby cash at Congress that the FCC will never have the chance to make them change course. Once they have their revenue, it won’t stop.

60

What’s wrong with establishing a set of principles that protects the Internet as an essential public service and sets the ground rules for how it must be run – and doing this before ISPs invent and start deploying new business models to leverage their content divisions through their ISP operations?

Exactly my point. Once commercial interests are entrenched Congress becomes their lapdog.