Just curious about how this will help me. Will I save some money or get faster browsing? I don’t want to miss out on this one.
If you’re an optimist, allowing companies to pay ISPs for giving you faster access to their websites might encourage ISPs to invest more in their networks to deliver faster internet services to you. The ISPs might be able to use those payments to keep your internet prices down or to expand services to new areas. They might even expand competition in some areas or reach areas that have no broadband now.
If you’re a realist, it costs nothing for an ISP to throttle all your internet traffic and then allow full-speed traffic only to companies that are bribing the ISP. So, for most sites, your speed will be reduced. ISP profits will increase because they will get revenue from companies who don’t want their traffic slowed. ISPs are monopolies that have no interest in head-to-head competition and many of those potential markets are protected by local utility rules and agreements with municipalities that entrench their monopolies, so the ISPs will not expand to compete with each other. They will not need to expand their networks or improve them to carry faster traffic since they will be artificially throttling data anyway. ISPs may, at the margins, expand into a few places that would almost have been profitable with net neutrality and which might become profitable without net neutrality and the resulting bribes from companies that want to deliver faster website loading. So, do you live in a place that should have high speed internet but currently lacks it? Maybe, in a few years or so, you will benefit by getting high-speed internet access. Otherwise, you won’t benefit at all.
This ignores the benefits you might have if you are a large, successful website that might be able to bribe ISPs to carry your traffic faster. They will be at a competitive advantage to upstarts that don’t have money for bribes. This same benefit will also accrue to websites affiliated with ISPs.
My ISP is also my cable company, which is facing a lot of pressure from Netflix, Hulu and the like. If those streaming services don’t pay up, their bandwidth could be throttled, leading to poor service. If they do pay up, look for streaming rates to rise. Either way, you lose.
Not to mention the effect on innovation. Amazon, Netflix, etc. are the 500-pound gorillas of the internet. If ISP’s demand a toll for them to get through with fast service, they might be able to afford it. (But then. you’ll pay for that in the long run). If a start-up comes along that could provide better or cheaper service or something wonderful new, they would be too small to pay every ISP in America to get the same high throughput.
In the cable TV model, the cable company charges you then pays the TV channels (sometimes) to be allowed to carry them. In the ISP model, they will charge you for high-speed then fail to deliver unless the website also pays. The extra profits go into lobbying (such a polite word for it) politicians to stop any competition that would compete with this river of money.
The rallying cry of net neutrality is “all bits are eual.”
To the extent that this isn’t true, regulating it as though it were true might be inefficient. And it isn’t true. The bits from your streaming video require higher throughput and lower latency than the bits from, say, the bittorrent movie you might watch in a few days. And the bits from a remote surgery operation require all that speed along with some kind of uptime guarantee. If your Netflix stream has trouble midway through, that’s a bummer, since you can’t finish your movie. If your surgeon has trouble midway through, that is a significantly bigger bummer.
So we should expect that the things that would work less well under net neutrality are uses of the internet that have significantly different requirements for their bits than the average, since if we have to treat all bits the same, the price will be set for the average. Things like remote surgery are on the “higher than average value bits” end, but there are probably some uses of the internet that will be on the lower end, too. Some kind of low-priority service that uses cheap bandwidth when it’s available, but doesn’t really care about speed or quickness. Maybe some kind of slow mass distributed filesystem backup thing? Not sure.
As an analogy, consider shipping of physical goods. What if there were only one speed at which packages can be shipped, or only one sized box, or only one price for that box regardless of origin/destination? Let’s call it “postal neutrality”. Think about what it would mean? Well, it would mean that things like Amazon Prime, or getting fresh flowers delivered from across the world might not exist, since the economics don’t work out. On the slow/cheap end, you wouldn’t have things like media mail, which would make shipping books more expensive.
It’s easy to see how getting rid of those (imaginary) regulations would make shipping better serve most people.
A historical example would be the telephone system. It used to be quite regulated. And quite expensive. And quite limited. And then it got deregulated in the 80s. And all of a sudden there was an explosion of new uses of the phone network. Cordless phones, faxes, dial-up internet, weird heavily-advertised discount long distance card things where you’d call a number and then get re-routed somehow. Carrot top was involved (so, it wasn’t all good). Cell phones! There were like 3 decades where a telephone was an essentially unchanged heavy black thing that sat on a desk, and then all of a sudden there were cell phones. That wasn’t a coincidence.
So, net-un-neutrality could, on average, make the system more efficient. Which could translate to lower prices, better performance, etc.
Of course, as people have pointed out, there’s plenty of room for abuse, so perhaps it will not make things more efficient, it will simply lead to monopolistic gatekeeper ISPs holding every other service hostage in their attempt to extract usurious rents. So, we clearly need some regulation. But it’s not clear to me that we need “all bits are equal” regulation.
It will be interesting if Amazon, Netflix and the like refuse to pay for higher speeds. The ISPs could be left sucking hind tit if the Big Boy providers tell them to pound sand.
How does lower bandwidth for Netflix hurt Comcast?
There’s one western country where your ability to get health care depends on your ability to pay or buy good insurance. There are many other western countries where everyone gets the same service, Whether that’s good or bad depends on whether you have money or not. Whether health care is a good metaphor for internet service is debatable.
There’s nothing in net neutrality that stops an ISP from determining throughput based on type of service. Many do throttle heavy users, for example. but if an ISP should happen to provide a basic service where service is optimized for all sorts of traffic - voice and streaming video get priority, for example- where’s the payoff? the incentive absent rules (and competition) is to make basic service bad to encourage additional payments for improved service.
Except the FCC net neutrality rules already had allowances for this kind of thing; and managing remote surgery traffic differently from game downloads was in fact totally allowed under the FCC rules. One cite
So what’s your point?
He just likes being contrarian.
Also, this is a horrible analogy that has nothing to do with net neutrality.
To benefit, start wanting what Comcast wants you to want. And, much more importantly, stop wanting to explore anything else.
Also as an analogy, currently when asking for delivery of physical goods, you, the consumer of the delivery service, decide what level of service you want. You can pick same day delivery for flowers (at a high cost) or “whenever” delivery for garden gnomes (at low cost). The shipping companies offer a variety of services, and the consumer picks what is in their own best interest.
Now, suppose, instead of you deciding what service level you want, the shipping company decides what level of service you get. Then maybe only the flower delivery service owned by the shipping company gets fast delivery for flowers, and all of the others get “whenever” delivery. The shipping company gets to decide winners and losers in the flower business, based on a parameter other than the quality of their flowers.
Net neutrality does not mean that different service level agreements aren’t allowed. Right now from Comcast I can purchase three different download speeds, and that is just fine under net neutrality rules. But having purchased the service level I want, I can use that bandwidth for whatever I want. Comcast is to data packets what UPS is to physical packages – a transport service.
What NN prevents Comcast offering only one service level to me, but letting Comcast extract fees from the various online services I use to give me better access to them (or to stop Comcast from giving me worse access to them). Under NN, the service level I get is the one I decide upon. Under non-NN, the service level I get is dependent on whatever deals Comcast and various entities have worked out.
This is so false it’s laughable.
How Net Non-Neutrality will benefit you depends on what category of people you’re in. Category 1 consists of owners of telephone and cable companies which happen to also be ISPs. If you’re in this category, you’ll benefit by being able to extort money out of anyone who attempts to compete with your core business, without the pesky bother of having to make your service any better than yours.
Category 2 consists of Ajit Pai and certain key members of Congress. If you’re in this category, you’ll benefit from getting kickbacks from the folks in Category 1.
Category 3 consists of everyone else.
Now THIS is a good analogy. The shipping company also owning something that they ship is the key.
There are a lot of links in that cite. Are you referring to the one that points to herethat says that Comcast supported a ban on paid priority as long as it included exceptions for “specialized services”?
If so, it seems thinly explained, but maybe sufficient? My worry is that requiring an exception for specialized services might be too narrow, and might require a whole lot of foresight on the part of whichever regulator is charged with determining if it’s sufficiently beneficial. It’s often not obvious which sorts of new services are actually going to be really useful in the future. The nature of progress is to experiment and innovate, and that is slowed by having to have things approved via a regulator.
Also, note that this exception seems to only cover the “more valuable than average” uses of bits, not the other end.
I’m open to the idea that net neutrality is, in toto, a better regulatory scheme than many. But regulations have both costs and benefits, and the costs are often much harder to see than the benefits.
The OP asked how net un-neutrality would help him. I attempted to answer that question. And my answer was pretty well qualified. I answered how it might make things better. I acknowledged in my original post and in this one that the naysayers may be right, and that we’ll be much worse off without it.
One thing that might be useful to think about is what kind of metric we should use to judge the effects of net neutrality. In 5 years, what should we measure to figure out if this change was a good one or a bad one? I’m not sure what the answer is, but it’s worth thinking about it beforehand, since there will almost certainly be both negative and positive changes to the internet in the future, and if you just want to support your point of view, it’ll be easy to find things that do so.
Here’s one possible one: What fraction of profits in Internet-related companies is captured by ISPs. Like, if we add up all the profits from Netflix and Youtube and Facebook and Comcast all the way down to buybeetsonline.com, what % is the ISPs’s? My thinking is that if lack of net neutrality is bad, we should see other businesses starved out as ISPs capture a greater amount of profit. Is that a good metric? Those who think that net neutrality is better, do you agree that it’s measuring what we want to measure?
I agree this is a good expansion of the shipping analogy (also, I appreciate that you have delved more into details to improve the analogy rather than just saying it’s a bad one with no explanation).
But I am confused about something: Is there any regulation that requires shipping companies to do this?
Let’s say that a flower-grower sets up a shipping company that does exactly what you said. They ship their own flowers quickly, but also, since they know they’ll have some slack in their delivery logistics, they also accept some other shipments, but only on a slow/unreliable basis. Is that illegal? Should it be?
Or, another hypothetical. Let’s say that UPS wants to expand into the flower-growing business. They go and plant some fields, harvest the flowers, and tell all their current overnight refrigerated flower customers: “Sorry, we’re no longer offering that service.” Is that illegal? Should it be?
Those are serious questions that I think reasonable people could have different answers on (well, the second one. Presumably there’s only one answer to whether those behaviors are actually illegal. I just don’t know what it is). My answers are that those things shouldn’t be illegal. Respectively, my reasoning: the fact that some business offers a service to one of its subsidiaries that’s better than the one it offers on the open market is ok. And the fact that a company that used to offer a service to an industry realizes that it can stop offering it and use the resources for internal use is also ok. UPS doesn’t have a general obligation to transport others’ flowers in the future.
Is it? What do you think about my shipping/flower examples above?
The government shouldn’t insert itself into the marketplace to dictate what certain companies can and cannot do with their own investments. It destroys innovation and growth. If AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter, Cox, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc. can’t optimize the investment they made to maximize returns, what’s their incentive to continue to build expand their networks?
Yes, that is more like it. Also sorry, you are right that just saying “That is bad” is kind of jerkish.
I don’t think your new analogy would be illegal, because there are numerous other ways to ship goods. If entire sections of the country were only able to receive goods from that shipper, then that’s when there is a problem. Similar to the sparse offerings of ISPs in some parts of the country.