A question from the IMHO thread: is there any way whatsoever that action like folks here are fearing could possibly be interpreted as de facto control of content, thus making the ISPs legally liable for whatever content they do allow through?
I doubt it. They’ll analyze traffic type and not traffic content. E.g. if it looks like encoded video and it’s not from a service they are supported by, they will lower the priority of delivery at their gateway.
Whether that video is Netflix or illegal sex video wouldn’t come up in this method. They could still claim common carrier protection.
NM
That’s kind of the thing: “if not from a service they support”. That is arguably moderation in and of itself and could open up the ISP to content provider liability.
I am not entirely convinced that we need neutrality. If ISPs can benefit from a sort of “captive audience”, then we’ll see a significant increase in the number of ISPs - and, more importantly, in the number of technologies allowing ISPs to enter our homes. It may not make sense for (say) Verizon to build a citywide over-the-air network when the bandwidth will be taken up by third party content, but if half of it is going to your own subscription services…
Actually it isn’t. The connection from a remote server plus the header detail for packets contains this sort of information and is required for data to properly find it’s way to your device. It’s how the internet works. Adding on QoS rules doesn’t change that.
The problem is that last mile services are VERY expensive. Any new comers will be unable to compete simply based on the cost of rolling out the network. As I noted, before, the existing networks were partially funded by taxpayer dollars in the 90s, so they had an unfair advantage to begin with.
OTA providers (like a mobile carrier) can compete but they also have their own costs (the costs of purchasing spectrum from the government as well as setting up signal towers).
Additionally, each and every one of these companies are being paid a lot of money for access to the internet by the consumers. Why should they get to double dip? This works in no other business. Does a grocery story get to charge both the consumer AND the manufacturer to carry product? Do you get to charge a gas station for fueling your car? Of course not.
Now, if they wanted to charge a different tier to the consumer only for data caps (like they do now for speeds), that’s one thing. But they found that consumers flee when they do that. That is competition. Competing for the consumer. It is NOT competition to arrange a back-alley deal to make sure that YouTube is served as a priority to Jimmy’s Video Site. Or FoxNews is served as a priority to WhiteHouse.gov.
You may scoff, but that’s the sort of slippery slope I’d like to avoid altogether. Just look at who in this country has all the money. Those are the people and companies that would be able to buy access to things like this. So while someone waits an extra 15 seconds for WhiteHouse.Gov to load to fawningly read Obama’s latest missive, 150 people in their area were given their FoxNews doses in less than a second. FoxNews’ers get served first.
As I said, this would have left the internet as a collection of Geocities pages if net neutrality wasn’t an operating principle. No iTunes store, no Google Play, no Smartphone revolution, nothing. Because the incumbents could purchase access to existing networks and new players could not. There would be no need for even big guys to venture into new territory because upstarts wouldn’t challenge them. This is why net neutrality is good. The fewer barriers to entry, the faster you have to innovate to stay relevant or a new comer will eat your lunch.
I’m not sure your double-dipping analogy is a fair way of looking at this. Nintendo sells video game consoles, and only Nintendo-licensed developers get to sell games for them. Grocery stores may not be able to charge the manufacturer to carry their products (though I gather some retailers operate on this basis), but they can sure as hell give priority to their in-house brands.
I think you’re confusing what manufacturers pay for. They pay for advertising. When you see Coke or Pepsi as an end cap, one of two things is going on: Most likely, Coke/Pepsi paid for end cap time. Also possible is it’s some point when manufacturers don’t pay for an end cap (in January, in-store marketing dollars fall until the last week when they gear up for Val’s). Usually this means that you, as a store, put up generic product or put a store brand on sale on an end cap.
On the aisles, every brand that sells stays. If you sell 1 case of coke a month and 2,000 cases of Pepsi a month, your Pepsi section grows and your Coke section shrinks. If you go through a period where your store brand continually outsells the name brands (like, in a recession 
) the store brand takes up more space and the name brands shrink.
The actual space on the shelf is very rarely determined by a manufacturer. However, you do have places like Best Buy that will take money from Samsung and Apple to have a mini Samsung and Apple area in their stores. But that tends to still be marketing, even if it’s (much) longer term than something like an end cap in a grocery store.
As for Nintendo (or Apple, or Sony, or Google, or now Microsoft) selling a device that they control, that’s not really the same thing. If you, as a business that makes widgets, opens a Widgets R Us, then we can expect there to be only Widgets in there. They can control access to that device as much or as little as they want.
The internet is a service, though, not a device. Just like a grocery store is a service. They facilitate purchasing random things from 1,000 different places. You could go straight to those manufacturers, in most cases, and buy directly from them. But most people don’t.
Now, let’s repeal the neutrality of grocery stores: You pay for all of the stuff in your cart right now. But you don’t get some of it until tomorrow. Awesome, you’re having a party tonight and you’re going to bring soda. You buy some Coke and some Pepsi. The Coke can go home right now. The Pepsi you can’t have for 24 hours.
What are people going to buy more of? That’s right. Coke. Even if they want Pepsi. Why? Because they were artificially stopped from getting what they wanted. What if Coke had done this when Pepsi was first founded? Pepsi never would have been sold and would have failed in the first year, two years if they were lucky. No one wants to wait 24 hours for a bottle, even if it is cheaper.
Tiering data based on who pays your internet provide is just as much of a bad idea. It stops competition, gives a huge leverage for the company providing the services’ own media interests and stops innovation.
That’s a fair assessment. Flawed in details, but the overall sentiment is a fair debate.
The key difference here is the proposition that internet service is a vital enough piece of our infrastructure to consider the public good over oligopolistic considerations.
The argument ran the other way decades ago. The Bell system was allowed a virtual monopoly in the interests of getting telephony services rolled out to as many people as possible as quickly as possible. It was considered more vital we get it pushed out to everybody than enforce competition, which may have hindered rollout.
The difference in in-house brands is that no retailer ever had the market penetration of a telco. But if one did or even got close to that, it’s likely the government would want a say in things. The antitrust division involvement in the failure of the AT&T/T-Mobile merger is proof of that.
The real heart of your statement is how much we can stomach a monopoly or oligopoly and/or actions that strengthen government sanctioned monopolistic/oligopolistic actions - whether at a national or regional level.
The Bells were broken up because AT&T owned every inch of the network and was a classic monopoly. There may not be a great deal of competition in the ISP market, but it’s a long way from a monopoly.
One thing that’s been implicitly mentioned but not explicitly are barriers to entry.
There are much lower barriers to entry in the mobile phone market than the household internet service market. And even there, it’s almost an oligopoly. We have to watch out for the big companies swallowing up all the smaller ones.
The US has rarely been a country to encourage additional competition rather than discourage oligopolies. We’ll step in when market power gets too concentrated (like efforts at net neutrality), but we generally let things slide otherwise. Our attitude has usually been more that if the market wants competition, it has to handle it itself.
The ISP market isn’t a national monopoly, but a set of interlocking regional oligopolies/monopolies. That’s not much better, but it’s better enough that antitrust provisions aren’t at play (until/unless AT&T or Comcast or other larger ISPs want to buy or merge other large telcos - the DOJ tries to squash some of these).
As noted, most people have the choice between their local phone company and their local cable company. No, that’s not a monopoly, but it’s not much better, either. Bit a question of semantics at that point, really, since an oligopoly can be almost as bad.
You have to purchase spectrum from the government to operate anything that transmits a signal above certain power constraints. And even then, without spectrum dedicated to you, you have to use certain public use bands.
Satellite MIGHT be easier to implement, but you still have to buy the spectrum. (“Might” is for launching a satellite.)
Why not just use the ISM bands?
Because those specifically forbid the use of telecommunications when they were set aside?
What? Wi-Fi and cordless telephones use them. Cellphones too, I think.
Sorry, I made a poor choice of vocabulary. The ISMs are originally supposed to be for low-power, local-range transmissions - originally for Industry, Science, and Medical applications. The FCC opened these up to general use, assuming that use didn’t interfere with anyone’s license use of the bandwidth. As a part of this, they are forbidden from using long range signals: The transmission requirements would override anyone using low power signals with a license. Thus, creating a satellite or mobile network would most likely violate these rules. (Technically, you could use long range communications if you didn’t violate anyone’s licenses, but good luck with that.)
A wifi router and 900Mhz cordless phone base station, while telecommunications devices are very short range. About 10-25 meters for 900mhz and 30-80 meters for 2.4ghz, both depending on transmission power.
If the ISP charges the content provider the consumer loses all power over the ISP.
If Comcast tells Netflix to fork over 20 million or else all Comcast customers will get dial-up speeds, Netflix will probably give in rather than lose half of its customer base. They will then pass this on to Netflix customers. Switching from Comcast to Verizon doesn’t help because I’ll still have a high Netflix bill, as well as the fact that Verizon will presumably make the same threat to Netflix because its free money for them and there is no downside.
The Wired op-ed I linked to earlier talks about this. The author’s opinion is that municipalities have given cable companies de facto monopolies by negotiating deals. The kind of legislation I’d like to see passed would be to help lower the barriers to entry. Imagine what would happen if Google Fiber was available in most of the country.
Another thing Netflix might do is partner with Google to make Google Fiber available in markets where Comcast and Verizon were trying to gouge them.
The problem is that while you wait for Google Fiber to reach your node (or was that one FTTP?) you get boned as a consumer.
As well, this doesn’t lower barrier to entry in any way. Laying infrastructure takes a long time and a lot of money, especially for long underground fiber runs. There’s no way around that. You have to go through everything that’s already extant, such as roads. Even if you manage to get a deal with the power providers like the cable companies do, that’s still a lot of leg work and specialty hardware (heat / cold /wind / rain sealed) that makes it expensive, anyway.
ETA: Actually, I’m not sure fiber can be run on a pole. Doesn’t it break in strong wind?
How?
The barriers to entry aren’t mostly legal. It’s mostly the massive upfront costs any such company would have to spend.
The problem is that the local cable and phone monopolies have had decades to lay infrastructure and build up. Better yet, we allowed them to charge existing customers a fee to help fund additional infrastructure upgrades. They already have monopoly power and we gave them public money to get further ahead.
Few companies (Google is one of the exceptions) have the literally billions of dollars necessary to play catch up. Municipalities themselves might jump in the game, but it still involves millions of dollars for each town.
Legislation would help a bit, at least to prevent telcos from suing or making costs even higher in other ways. But unless you have magical soil digging and cable laying technology, legislation doesn’t address the biggest barrier of all - the physical one.
And let’s say you are an investor with billions of dollars. Do you really want to invest that money in physical infrastructure that may take decades to pay off? Or may not ever pay itself off? Or do you fund a bunch of smaller companies, risk less of it on any single project, and start making overall profits relatively soon? Google Fiber works because Google as a company is willing to make those kinds of bets. Most companies aren’t. Most investors aren’t. We’re fortunate that somebody was willing to even make the attempt.
In the mean time, things like net neutrality try to keep the playing field from becoming too uneven while we work out how to actually foster competition.