None of the examples you offer correctly describe net neutrality. The repeal of the net neutrality rules does not permit DNS queries to be hijacked, for example, to deliver different address records for hosts.
Would you be open to a remedial rule if Madison River Communication blocked all VOIP except for the VOIP provided by Madison River Communication?
Yes. I’m not persuaded this this is a likely outcome, but I’m open to the possibilit that my prediction is wrong, which is why I said, “Potentially a good thing,” and “I’d be open to addressing any future abuses with further rules.”
The problem described there is at a higher level than DNS queries. Sure, you’d get the correct IP address for Giovanni’s Pizza, but when your browser tried to go to that IP address, the ISP would reroute your connection to “Totally Awesome ISP Pizza Place”
Perhaps they would flash a warning such as “Sorry, we don’t allow connections to Giovanni’s Pizza, but since it seems like you want pizza, try some of the great pizza at Totally Awesome ISP Pizza Place - we will re-direct you.”
Good, because I’m just discussing these future abuses with you.
But still, the only “potentially good thing” I’ve seen from you is “Less regulation is better”. Do you have anything that is potentially good about this that benefits the consumer?
Ok, say you get in a taxi and ask to be driven to a restaurant. If it’s Applebee’s, the driver takes you straight there, if anywhere else they charge you twice as much and drive around for an extra half hour.
Or you buy a kindle book, but if it’s not one that’s published by Amazon they only let you read a page a day.
So how does allowing monopolistic business practices like these increase competition and benefit consumers? Personally I don’t find shouting “Free market!” and hand waving to be very convincing.
I grant that this is a technical possibility; I don’t regard it as remotely likely.
And if it became reality, I’d be open to addressing it with regulation.
Then I guess you’re not convinced. I’m not upset.
But things like that were starting to happen, which is why they started treating it like a utility in the first place. It wasn’t just “Hmmm. Nothing is really affecting anything, I guess we will just change the way we treat ISPs because we have nothing better to do today”
Things were happening that required addressing it with regulation. And they addressed it with regulation. And now you seem to be saying “The things that happened before they addressed it with regulation aren’t happening anymore. Therefore, we don’t need the regulation”
So - thanks to the rules we had - there were no current abuses.
There now is a potential for abuse thanks to removing the rules.
And now, thanks to no rules, we have to wait for abuse in order to create ‘new rules’ to prevent abuse that would have already been prevented under the current rules.
Seems to me this is entirely backward - when you have a chance to create some rules ahead of time to keep things ‘free and equal’ - you do it.
In this case there is absolutely the potential for abuse - since many ISPs also have thier own services (streaming is a good example) - and they want to make sure that thier content is favored over other providers content. (In speed and quality).
Yes, and that kind of regulation, expressed as a set of general principles, is called net neutrality. My somewhat picturesque analogy was not meant to be taken literally and, as already noted, anti-competitive practices can be a lot more nuanced than blatant DNS hijacking.
Here are a few examples that happened in my area, or else were about to happen before the government firmly stepped in.
One was broadband ISPs intentionally throttling sites or protocols they didn’t like, and even having the audacity to deny to regulators that they were doing it (“how would those idiots ever be able to prove it?”). Well, unlike the Trump gang, the regulators were responsive to consumers, not the monopolistic greed of the industry, and responded to thousands of consumer complaints, including complaints that the throttling was also having unintended effects on other protocols and applications, by ordering the ISPs to stop all throttling and curtail all practices of header and deep packet inspection – i.e. - you are a common carrier and have no right to be selective about what you carry.
Another was a joint proposal from both the cable and the telco broadband ISPs regarding bandwidth quotas. These two industries are usually fierce competitors but boy can they ever get cozy together when it comes to self-serving common interests. In this case, participants in both industries were in agreement that the consumer should be shafted with a baseline monthly bandwidth quota of 25 GB, which effectively prohibits streaming or buying movies online except under terms dictated by the ISPs. Not coincidentally, this came just before both ISP groups spun off their own streaming services, which of course would have been immune to those quotas. So you have a whole world of possibilities of ISPs giving their own services preferential treatment, or the services of favored providers in contrast to less favored ones: “Nice online business you have here. Would be a shame if customers couldn’t get to it because your bandwidth sucked.” Is that your idea of free markets?
Fortunately, regulators here ordered the ISPs to stop throttling, told them to go pound sand with respect to super-low quotas, and have generally kept a tight rein on monopolistic practices, all of which is the opposite of where the FCC is heading.
I’m not sure I agree that there’s a cause and effect relationship there.
Huh.
Welp, seems to ME that you don’t impose rules in a free society unless there’s no other choice.
My mother didn’t wait for me to get hit with a car before she taught me to look both ways before crossing the street.
So are you ignoring the abuses that caused net neutrality to begin with.
And here’s a question for you: my ISP decided to deny customers access to Netflix. What are my options?
When you enjoy monopolistic authority the normative approach should no longer be the market behaving on its own.
Was your mother otherwise occupied when the schedule called for her to explain that “looking both ways” is not a good analogy for these rules?
Also, at a 4-way intersection near my house, there were a lot of accidents. The city put up 4-way stop signs and the accidents dropped to almost zero.
Someone came along years later and said “What are these stop signs here for? There hasn’t been any accidents here for years - get rid of them!”
Lo and behold, accidents started happening again! Who knew??
I’d say that if you’re a natural monopoly, that might be true, but that ISPs are not always natural monopolies.
Perhaps your mother, or Inner Stickler’s mom, failed to inculcate in you the observation that what’s missing in your analogy is the “lot of accidents,” prior to net neutrality rules being implemented.
So you were charge a nickel per post back in 2014? Yes or no?
Because the rule didn’t exist in 2014. It went into effect on June 12th 2015. Linky.
As to why the rules are bad, why don’t we check with small internet providers:
Or, how about those evil municipal broadband providers? Surely they think the rollback will cause undue hardships, like a nickel per post on the Straight Dope, right?
The Wireless Internet Service Providers Association release the following statement:
It is rather funny to watch people freak about a two year old rule getting overturned. Will some providers attempt to profit from this change? Certainly. Will it work? I suspect that it won’t as the consumers will freak as will local politicians*.
Slee
*In many areas, as far as I can tell, the biggest block to having multiple broadband providers is the local government.