Seriously?
Net Neutrality is central planning? Are you serious? A spectre is haunting the internet, the spectre of COMMUNISM?
Right. Because the awesome, high quality products we have all around us would not exist if it weren’t for government keeping all those rapacious companies in check. Because the most regulated economies are the most dynamic and produce the highest quality goods, right?
The sort of pre-emptive, assume the market will screw you so let’s regulate it first argument could be used as a justification for heavily regulating any market at all.
There is only one valid argument for net neutrality, and that is the semi-monopolistic positions of some companies that may prevent market forces from regulating corporate behavior. But there are several answers to that:
First, the monopolies some companies have are *because[/] of government intervention, and can be rolled back.
Second, we already have anti-trust and other laws that prevent anti-competitive behavior - such laws have already been used against ISPs in the past.
And finally, the monopoly problem has been over-stated by net neutrality proponents. Prior to the FCC decision, they arbitrarily declared that the new threshold to be considered a ‘broadband’ provider was 25 mbps, when it used to be 4mbps. That reclassification removed a lot of ADSL and other providers from the ‘broadband’ list and made the problem of choice much worse. But in fact, almost everyone in America has a choice between at least two providers, if you include the slower speed services and mobile. And most Americans have multiple providers to choose from.
I don’t suppose it would slow any of you down to consider that most economists on both the left and right opposed making the internet subject to Title II regulations? If you don’t believe Net Neutrality laws were stifling broadband investment, why was almost every manufacturer of internet infrastructure hardware and software opposed to it?
The internet is where it is today because it has been allowed to evolve almost entirely without regulation, despite efforts of some to attempt to heavily regulate it right from the beginning. Until we have actual proof of serious, internet-threatening problems that cannot be solved by the market, we should keep it that way.
As for an example of something that Net Neutrality would prevent, I can offer an easy example: Let’s say Virtual Reality becomes the next big thing, and some startups form to provide internet MMO type VR experiences. The only problem they have is latency - VR requires extremely low latency, and would almost certainly require major upgrades to the infrastructure, including fiber pullout to homes.
Under Net Neutrality, just how is this supposed to happen? The ISP says, “Sorry, the best we can do is the same latency that E-mail packets get, because bits are bits. And we’d love to upgrade our network for you, but we’re not allowed to charge you extra, and our other customers will not pay for a low-latency network because it’s not required for their application. So, I guess you’re out of luck.”
Without Net Neutrality, the ISP can say, “Hmm… we can build out a high-speed, low latency fiber network, and pay for it by charging both customers and the providers a little more for it.” That’s how infrastructure grows - through risk, investment, early adopters paying more, etc. Eventually, prices come down because other providers get into the mix and start offering their own low-latency services, and eventually it becomes the new norm.
Will only the wealthier be able to play VR on the internet? Maybe for a while, until the mass market drives economies of scale and competition brings prices down. In the same way, at one time only the rich could afford ABS brakes and airbags and stability control and all the rest. If we had ‘car neutrality’, and everyone paid the same price for a car, innovation would have died and none of those technologies would even exist today, as they would never have made economic sense.
That’s the real risk of net neutrality - that it will choke off innovation and act as a barrier to small entrants into the market who cannot handle the heavy load of Title II regulations. Eventually, the ISP’s and other large corporations will constantly lobby for rules that turn the regulations in their favor and restrict entry into the market even further.
When Ma Bell was granted a government monopoly in 1913, we saw little improvement in telephone service for decades, and what improvements we saw were primarily for Bell’s benefit, such as getting rid of manual operators. Bell got the law changed to prevent 3rd party equipment from being connected to their network, so our big ‘innovation’ over a period of about 50 years was to go from rotary dialing to touch-tone. And that wasn’t for the benefit of consumers - bell did it so it could automate its exchanges more easily.
Once the phone company was deregulated and competition allowed, innovation came fast and furious. Telephone answering machines, cheap FAX machines, modems, etc. The price of service also dropped rapidly.
Does anyone remember how much it cost to make a phone call in the good old days when the phone company was a government monopoly? In 1970, a self-dialed phone call from coast to coast cost .70 cents. In today’s dollars, that’s about $4.50. For a three minute voice call.
After Bell was broken up and the market opened up to regional providers and long distance carriers like MCI and Verizon, and consumer choice improved and prices fell dramatically.
But if we hadn’t deregulated and broken up Bell (and a lot of people fought against that, using the same arguments we hear today for Net Neutrality), we might still be paying exhorbitant fees and not have half the innovative products we have today - but we’d never know what we lost, because you can’t see the path not traveled. And had there been a form of ‘telecom neutrality’ that had included internet (which was largely on modems back then), Bell might have been able to stop cable companies from getting in the game at all, and today we’d all be using the same crappy old modems on a voice network at 56K Baud.
So the biggest problem with Net Neutrality and Title II is that it imposes rules on the internet that may choke off innovation and investment in new products in ways we can’t begin to know today. That’s a high risk for a law that was put in place to stop a harm that hasn’t even happened yet and might be completely theoretical.
Wait, so you are saying that the US marketplace is not swirling in shit products and scammery? Or are you just not in the US?
The closest analogy to Bell is Verizon/AT&T/Comcast/Charter/Time Warner/etc. A few companies that are acting in monopolistic ways providing a needed service but having total control over it.
Having a few giant entities totally control the market is bad. That’s why Bell was bad. That’s why Comcast/Verizon/etc. are bad.
A neutral internet is the radical tool that breaks through such control, who allows everyone in the world to access any service product or information in the world. You are so fixated on the idea of “regulation” that you can’t understand that you are arguing against the free market in this case. In your own analogy, you are advocating that Bell should be given even more control over their monopoly.
Neutrality doesn’t make ISPs a “government monopoly” and you have to twist yourself into ridiculous contortions to see it that way. Neutrality is what makes the internet such an incredible demonstrator of the free market in action. Anti-neutrality forces want to empower a few ISPs at the cost of literally every other business on Earth. Anti-neutrality gives those few companies the power to decide who can even make it to market and who is unfairly promoted.
If you could back off of your “regulations bad, the freedom for comcast to control everyone’s information is more important than the freedom for people to seek out any service, product, or information in the world” dogmatic view for just an instant, you’d realize that you are fighting your hardest against the best free market we’ve ever seen in the world.
Not so, as was noticed early in the thread too.
Your example here is 90% garbage and %10 subtle suggestion that extortion is awesome.
The garbage part is when you claim that ISPs can’t charge customers more for low latency networks. That’s bullshit, and obviously so. Now, it may be the case that there isn’t sufficient demand for a low latency network to justify the cost of installing and operating it, but that’s not net neutrality’s fault, and won’t change if net neutrality is revoked.
The extortion part is where you casually tossed out the term “and the providers”, by which I presume you mean, “We’re going to extort Netflix so hard that they’ll have to raise their rates to $69.99 a month.” If that’s what you mean then yes, the ISPs with dollars in their eyes can specifically target companies that have deep pockets and charge the living crap out of them, getting them enough cash to maybe (probably not) bother installing faster cables, while also allowing (certain) poorer content providers to keep running cheaply so that the users of their service don’t suddenly find they can’t post on the Dope anymore. Obviously the extorted companies will pass the “savings” on to their customers, and/or go out of business if they can’t maintain a customer base at the new levels. But honestly I’m sure the extortion will be calculated very carefully to avoid killing the cash cows.
If this is what you mean, the extortion angle, then at least you’re not babbling complete nonsense. It’s a touch improbable that customers would be too thrilled with the spikes in price across the width and breadth of the content markets, though.
This is of course assuming that this is the particular extortion method the ISP chooses, mind you. If the ISP is also a content provider, with their own product that competes with netflix, they might not bother with the extortion and choose to just kill their competitor directly - on their fast and cheap lines.
…while I’m a net-neutrality supporter: lists like this curated by random places on the internet really need to have their primary sources vetted. I picked this one at random:
2007 – AT&T censored Pearl Jam because lead singer criticized President Bush.
So I checked their cite:
This story has nothing to do with net neutrality. AT & T were the broadcasters. They censored the broadcast the exact same way any other broadcaster can do. I haven’t checked the other items on the list. The original list (that the wccftech claims this is an updated list of) doesn’t include the Pearl Jam incident and I suspect has been curated better, but YMMV.
Sam Stone - you’ve asserted that without network neutrality, ISPs can charge customers more and invest that in improving service.
Over the last five years, my ISP has raised its prices by about $30 a month, and the network speed has gone up from something like 10 Mbs to 60 mbs.
Are you saying that my ISP violated net neutrality over the last few years?
Great and my cost of flying went down as they saved money. Oh wait …
No, that is OK, it has to be noted that I did look at other examples in that list and they do check up as abuses of net neutrality, one reason I did link to it was to also cite the Vonage issue already talked about early in the thread.
The Pearl Jam one is indeed not an example of net neutrality, although it does show how AT & T was and is evil; besides also appearing in other examples of abusers of net neutrality.
Yep, this is the key for me.
As someone who is a supporter of net neutrality, i’m open to the possibility that the repeal of net neutrality might work out just fine. I’m not panicking yet, and i remain hopeful that i will be able to continue to enjoy solid, fast, working internet that allows me to look at what i want to look at.
I would, however, be far more sanguine about all this if there were true competition among internet providers in my area. But that’s simply not the case. I’ve posted this before in other threads about the internet, but i’ll post it again here.
I live in an urban neighborhood in San Diego, America’s 8th most populous city. It’s a comfortable neighborhood, with plenty of professional families, and with an average household income above the California median. It’s just a few miles from downtown, 15 minutes from the airport, is served by a decent bus system, has multiple restaurants and bars within a short walk, and has a WalkScore of 87.
And yet, in this thriving neighborhood in a large, modern city, in the wealthiest country in the world, i have exactly one provider of proper broadband internet to choose from. One. For me, it’s Cox or nothing.
Time Warner Cable does operate in San Diego, but the two companies have split the city geographically. If you’re south of the San Diego River, you have Cox; if you’re north of the river, or in Coronado, you have TWC. No price comparisons allowed. No competition allowed. I even created a map a few years back to show the distribution. As you can see, there’s a thin strip in Mission Valley that gets to choose from both providers, but for most of the city it’s one or the other.
In some areas of the city, i could check AT&T to price compare their UVerse system with Cox, but where i am the best internet connection i can get from AT&T is 1.5 Mbps DSL. One point five fucking megabits? These days, that might as well be dial-up. With Cox, i’m on their third-tier package and still get 50 Mbps (nominally at least; when i test it’s usually about 36, which is plenty for us).
Luckily for me, Cox has been great in terms of speed and reliability, but their prices keep creeping up and up, and there’s absolutely nothing i can do about it, because there is literally no-one else i can go to. I can’t threaten to leave Cox in order to get a break on my bill, because they know that i have nowhere else to go, and when they raise my rates every year, i have to bend over a grab my ankles. If their service suddenly became unreliable, i’d be equally fucked. And now, with the end of net neutrality, they’re going to have another way to screw their captive audience.
Some opponents of net neutrality have argued that ISPs won’t screw things up, because they don’t want to piss off their customers. But why would they care? I need the internet, and the only people i can buy it from are Cox. If they start fucking me over, i can get as mad as i want, but i can’t drop their service.
There are millions of Americans in a similar position.
(Passed along by a friend, who got it at some site called Daily Cause…Daily Cost?..something like that…)
No. I’m saying that under net neutrality they would not be allowed to charge you an extra $20/mo for ‘VR networking’. And they wouldn’t be able to charge the company looking to provide VR services extra for providing a low-latency network for their product.
This is similar to the Netflix case which has been cited widely in the net neutrality debate. Netflix’s new usage model of high speed streaming video broke the ‘peering’ arrangements ISPs had with each other, and the amount of sudden bandwidth being consumed by Netflix and its customers was not just causing Netflix to slow down, but it was causing web browsing to get worse for everyone. This is a good example of the kind of innovation I’m talking about - no one was prepared for the massive increase in streaming video that Netflix caused, and they were stressing the infrastructure like crazy. So Netflix agreed to pay AT&T. Comcast and Verizon to upgrade their networks.
My understanding is that under Net Neutrality, the providers would not have been allowed to charge Netflix more. So just what do you think would have happened? Two options: 1) customers get to put up with a lousy infrastructure and get choppy streaming and slower web access, or 2) The ISP’s have to dump the entire load for the buildout onto their customers. And since they couldn’t charge extra for a ‘fast lane’, they would have to spread the charges across everyone. So now your poor grandma on a fixed income gets to pay $80 for her internet, when all she uses is E-mail and facebook. Does that seem fair to you? Why should everyone have to subsidize the consumers of the highest bandwidth? What’s so wrong about allowing tiered or bespoke services, or having big rich companies like Google and Netflix pay their share for the new infrastructure their services uniquely need?
It could be, but it’s my impression that being able to charge higher prices for types of content isn’t allowed under the previous NN rules. Do I have that right? Was a provider allowed to charge more for say, traffic from pornhub to ensure reliable connectivity? My impression was that they had to be neutral as to the content of what was passing over the network.
The way I think about it, is that to ensure that the rules of NN are being followed, there would need to be some kind of monitoring/reporting. It’s not a stretch to think that at some point the government would require some kind of monitoring on major router traffic to ensure that rules are being followed. Given that the government has already intercepted these kinds of things by installing spying tech, I’m assuming they would continue to do so under the guise of this monitoring. Because i think this type of broad spying is bad, I think this is bad.
In any event, I think the strongest arguments in favor of NN are that ISPs function as monopolies or quasi-monopolies. Once agreement is reached on that point, regulation is the logical conclusion since the market is no longer functioning.
That’s not true. You can certainly charge people for the quantity of data, just not the type. Peering agreements are generally for simplicity sake - roughly equal traffic goes in either direction so it’s easy enough for the L3 providers to just call it even. Netflix did upset this balance, which means that some sort of new contractual arrangement would need to come about to handle it. But that’s between Netflix and their content delibery networks (and the CDN’s connection to the internet backbone), a contract/payment issue, not a neutrality issue.
It makes no sense for a residential-facing ISP like TWC or Comcast to charge netflix in this way. Their customers are already paying for the data that the Netflix content is using on the downstream. It’s netflix’s upstream providers that would have reason to charge netflix more. That’s the way data generally works - the content providers pay for the bandwidth they use to send downstream to consumers, the consumer ISP doesn’t charge each content provider for traffic on their network.
The ISP’s move here was simply extortion - netflix has money, and if they don’t want a significant portion of their customer base to be effectively cut off (throttling service so that it’s so poor no one would want it) they better pay up.
This is more than slightly specious, because every broadband ISP I know of does offer varying service rates. When I first got DSL, it was 256Kbps peak, because I was near the physical boundary of where they could reach. Later, I was able to upgrade to 1Mbps peak because they were able to build out, I guess. If I wanted, I could still get the slower speed (for a minimal saving), or possibly faster now, though this speed works well enough.
But none of that has anything at all to do with traffic shaping or net neutrality. My ISP offers basic services, e-mail and a useless news aggregator that I want nothing to do with. All the content I want is out there on the 'net. What “innovation” could they, my basic gateway, offer? Like, I think, most people, I want a good connection. That is it. Everything I want is out beyond my ISP. And I certainly do not want them deciding for me what I should or should not have access to – which, without regulation, I fully expect them to do. Not tomorrow, not next month and not noticeably at first, but I have no doubt they will gradually shape traffic to their own ends and not to mine. I want to be able to read about their bullshit on bigmegainterlinksucks•org without having to worry that they will block that site for my convenience.
For most Americans, the internet is a want, not a need.
But in 2002, you could probably say that there’s no way to support streaming movies without doing away with net neutrality. I don’t see why we have reached the limits of ISPs in 2017, such that we are losing out on innovation.
Is there something about net neutrality that prohibits this?
My ISP offers 1 gig service, 10 mbps service, and severa tiers in between. The cheap service is about 5 times cheaper than the fastest service. So, grandma can choose the service that suits her best.
Further, I don’t see why an ISP couldn’t offer 1 gig service with a data cap of say, 5 GB if grandma wanted it for a low low price. Or 1gig service with no caps for a lot more.
This is the one part of your side of the argument that makes some sense: why shouldn’t Netflix chip more into the kitty for the benefit of their customers? Or to put it another way, if I sign up for 50 mbps service, and Netflix and my ISP have a deal to give me 150mpbs for Netflix content? I don’t see how Amazon is harmed.
So if the regs allowed fast lanes, without allowing throttling, then I wouldn’t have a big problem. But the absence of regs allows both, with customers being asked to trust that ISPs won’t ever do anything to throttle or block content.
I was undecided on this issue for a long time, but now I see it that there’s a lot of potential downsides for customers with few potential upsides.
Faster service? We will get that eventually anyway. Lower prices? I doubt it. I can’t even think of another possible upside for consumers.
Cite?
No. mhendo made the claim that he “needs” the internet, and then went on to say that millions of Americans are similarly situated.
I would like a cite for that.