More informed than you. Until 2014, net neutrality was required by the FCC under the “Open Internet Order” and its predecessor rules, as (broadband) ISPs were deemed to be common carriers. In January 2014, the DC Circuit said the FCC did not have the necessary rulemaking authority to require ISPs to treat content neutrally. This is the first time that Congress had needed to act on the issue.
Seriously, almost everything you’ve posted in this thread is wrong.
Thank you for this explanation. When I heard the original story about “Blackberry wants government to force Netflix to write a Blackberry app”, it sounded so ridiculous that I assumed that the actual content of what was said differed significantly from the sound bite reported. Knowing that the story really is “Blackberry wants government to force Netflix to stop sabotaging other people’s attempts to write a Blackberry app” makes it make more sense.
Why?
Do a bit more studying and maybe you’ll get it right.
The FCC did not put the ISP’s under common carrier status…that is what Obama is currently requesting.
Net neutrality has been a principle in the US and nothing more.
Seriously, everything I have posted is accurate.
So, you’re going with “nuh uh”?
From a bit of quick reading it’s a bit more like: BB wanted to license the Netflix API to build their own app and Netflix said no. Likely because the user base wasn’t large enough to justify having to deal with a potentially broken app. I don’t think there was anything particularly nefarious regarding locking out BB users - just a simple “not worth our time to support your platform in our API” for the price you’re willing to pay. It sounds like BB10 users can use the Android Netflix app anyway (although it might not work very well).
A bit different from Google not releasing Maps apps for Windows Phone devices. That’s more clearly a case of protecting their OS/mobile environment.
Neither case has anything to do with the regulation of content carriers, pretty obviously, since Netflix isn’t anything like a utility which, arguably, consumer broadband providers are.
(bolding mine)
Are you under the impression that Comcast owns all the land where they have pipe? :dubious:
AFAICT, Omar Little is right about the nitpick, but Really Not All That Bright is right about the substance.
The FCC never classified broadband as a common carrier, but did impose net neutrality restrictions on broadband because it believed it had the statutory authority to do so. Some of these rules, specifically the anti-discrimination rule and anti-blocking rules, were struck down by the DC Circuit. But case-by-case FCC rulings on anti-discrimination/anti-blocking still apply to some individual providers, like Comcast.
So Omar Little is wrong to assert that net neutrality has never been the law in the U.S. It was the law until the D.C. Circuit opinion, and remains the law as to some aspects of net neutrality and as to some broadband providers.
I stand properly (partly) corrected.
This seems a strange principle to try to support. Isn’t charging a set price for a commodity the normal practice? The idea that somebody could say “Normally, I sell these products for ten dollars but you’re rich so I think you should pay fifty dollars.” The idea of charging somebody a higher price because they have more money seems vaguely communist to me.
Speaking generally, it’s pretty common for companies to look for ways to charge higher prices to people who are willing and able to pay higher prices. This would include things like a college charging high tuition rates but being generous with financial aid for students who can’t afford those rates; hotels and airlines charging high regular rates but then trying to fill unsold rooms/seats via special offers, Priceline, etc.; and media (books, DVD, music, games) whose retail price gets lowered after awhile to try to sell copies to customers who want the item but aren’t willing to pay the original, higher price for it; and theaters (for example) offering discount tickets for children or seniors.
But, I’m not sure how relevant that is to what this thread is basically about.
Websites like Netflix (and others) are in direct competition with the ISP’s. The ISP’s initially resisted putting content online because they sold content as cable (or satellite) and wanted to keep their subscriptions necessary. But people are “cutting the cable” in droves and going online for content. They (the ISP’s) were late to the game so now they want to throttle the competition.
If there were several, as in more than say ten, ISP’s it might work out where the customer could shop around and find an ISP that offered the desired content, and could also price compare. As it is in my town, there’s two ISP’s…and that’s looking like it’s not going to change. No way would I want to hand these ISP’s a monopoly on content.
I’m going to briefly post my views on this issue, because I think that the entire public discussion has gone down a confusing and irrelevant tangent.
(1) Net Neutrality might be good, but it should not be public policy.
(2) Instituting Net Neutrality won’t accomplish what it’s backers think it will.
These two points are tied together. Make no mistake about this however: I wouldn’t really have any problem with breaking up Comcast and Time Warner, or forcing more competition. Those might well be completely good and don’t bother me in the slightest. However, Net Neutrality won’t do that. It doesn’t break up or harm Comcast in any real way.
Yes, it will prevent them from grabbing some money from Netflix and others. But protecting Netflix’s profit margin, making sure people can see Youtube videos at high-def, and otherwise making sure people are happy with their video quality really isn’t something I considered a worthwhile public policy. Net Neutrality will not help accomplish any real improvement in broadband. Why would it? Denying Comcast revenue doesn’t improve the position of any other Telco.
I also see another fundamental reason to hold off on Net Neutrality, at least for the present time. We don’t know that charging heavy internet producers is actually bad policy. It may become an issue that needs addressing - but not yet. We have time, and this isn’t exactly such a crisis that it demands immediate public action. If it would be a problem later, there’s no reason to think that Comcast will have magically pissed off fewer customers.
Yes, charging for heavy use is inconvenient to some people at some times, but it also may ultimately spur more capacity investment. I can think of at least two possible mechanisms for this, and at least one would result in more competition among telcos, while the other might induce more competition among the big sites for traffic. Both would ultimately help the public.
SO there’s my basic view of the issue: be very clear on what you actually want to accomplish, and do not fixate on a symbolic and currently unclear policy that “feels” right even thoughy ti might not be useful.
Strictly speaking, net neutrality means that when data is broken into packets each packet shall be treated like every other packet.
Anything else is just a desired regulation by a constituency added to ‘net neutrality’ legislation. Each one should be discussed on its merits and not lumped together as if they were all part of one necessary thing.
The problem I have with this is that in many ways the internet infrastructure is still a nascent industry and far from being a commodity. Moore’s law keeps changing the game, and therefore we still need lots of venture capital and other new investment and R&D to continue. We also have to admit that we are still learning about the most efficient ways to deliver data to the public, and we have no clue what the data carrying needs of the public will be in the future. That means freezing an infrastructure scheme in place through regulation may not be a very good idea at this time.
Also, part of what makes a commodity a commodity is the undifferentiated nature of the product. Commodities do not have significant differences in value or cost between different suppliers. We are not there yet with the internet infrastructure.
Let’s say we get the net neutrality regulations you’re hoping for. Now virtual and augmented reality applications become the big thing. Thing is, they really suffer hard from latency. Are we sure then that everything should be exactly neutral? That we should be equally sharing bandwidth between a packet that has to be there in milliseconds and one that’s part of an E-mail?
And if virtual reality needs huge bandwidth, would it really be so bad to charge extra for that data so that investment in additional infrastructure can take place?
And new application requirements may require significant upgrades to infrastructure. Do you guys really trust a public utility model to perform as well as a competitive market when we still need significant infrastructure innovation and development? If so, I’d like ask what you’re smoking.
The real solution - the only solution - is to make the market truly competitive. We need to change policy to enable additional competition and end the local monopolies of the big ISPs. Any regulation required should be aimed at making the market function better.
The notion of turning the entire infrastructure into a regulated public carrier but without price controls is kind of nuts - it’s a formula for price hikes as the cost of new regulations gets passed on to the consumer and the industry uses its new relationship with the government to extract maximum profit. There will then be a clamor for price controls, and the industry will demand profit guarantees, and the industry will begin to stagnate.
Actually, it’s very capitalistic, and many companies try to do exactly that. It’s just difficult to put in practice, and they have to find indirect ways to do it. The obvious example being rebates during sales (people who are price sensitive will wait for the sales, people who are less so will pay the higher price). Another is identical products being sold under different brands at different prices.
The idea isn’t to make the rich pay more, but to make everybody pay as much as they’re willing to. A primary example is downloaded video games, books, music, etc… The cost of creating a new “copy” is virtually zero. Ideally, the company would sold the copy for $1 to whoever is willing to pay 1, for 10 to whoever is willing to pay 10, and for 100 to whoever is willing to pay 100. The trick is to find a way to make the later actually pay 100, while still catching the still profitable $ 1 of the former.
What would you suggest?
There’s a lot of dark fiber out there - auction it off to independent ISP’s. Don’t allow the big carriers to bid on it.
Some munipalities want to run their own internet services, and are being thwarted. Let them do it. But don’t allow them to use zoning laws or municipal ordinances to prohibit competition.
Other companies have proposed providing broadband through satellite networks, balloons, or even fleets of drones. Let them do it. Encourage them to do it.
Crack down on monopolistic behaviour wherever found, Some ISP’s try to lock users into long-term contracts. Some intricately tie their phone, cable tv, and internet services together in ways that make it hard to switch one of them. Stop that practice. I might even consider legislation that prevent phone and cable companies from also providing internet service unless it can be shown that a well-functioning market with plenty of choice is already in place.
Investigate price fixing and data cap fixing wherever you think it’s happening.
Perhaps regulation that allows people to switch ISP’s with minimal pain. Here in Canada for instance, if you switch cell providers you can request that your telephone number transfer with you. This is a ‘good market’ reform I approve of, because it makes it less likely that customers will be locked in place, and therefore gives the public more bargaining power against cellular service providers. This is a good example of how the right regulation can actually make markets more free while benefiting the consumer over the corporation.
See, I am not advocating for laissez-faire here - the nature of the current broadband industry makes it hard for the market to work properly. So this is an area where we need regulation. Just not the kind being advocated under ‘net neutrality’. The only reason net neutrality is an issue at all is because of the limited competition in the ISP space. With real competition, anyone who tries to censor traffic or rip people off will find their customers fleeing,
What we absolutely must not do is create regulations that fix prices, that lock in specific technology choices, that mandate how data must be handled inside the ISP’s network, etc. And a public utility model is just nuts. The minute you make these companies regulated monopolies or public utilities, they will work to begin twisting the regulations to their benefit. Regulate them without price controls, and they’ll jack up prices on consumers because they can - they’ve got a monopoly, after all. And if you put price controls on them, investment in new infrastructure will die.
Learn the lesson of Mintel in France - at the dawn of the internet age, France decided to leap-frog what people saw as a market that was ‘broken’ due to the ‘chick and egg problem’ - not enough people were using the internet, so business wasn’t investing. And people wouldn’t go on the internet until the businesses were there. Or so it was thought. France decided to use government to ‘break the logjam’ and created a national public data network. They gave everyone a terminal, and made sure that lots of government services were available on it to encourage use.
For a short while, advocates were crowing that France had solved the problem through the use of a public utility model. And for a while, France looked like a success. But it turned out that the ‘chicken and egg’ problem was but a minor pause for breath before the dot-com boom, and the internet exploded. Very quickly the innovations of the market made France’s terminals look archaic - but the public was locked into the model. And the result was that Minitel struggled along for years, then the whole thing collapsed. And France wound up with one of the lower internet adoption rates in Europe and it took several decades for it to recover.
Set up a public utility model for the internet, and you may see some price reductions and much-publicized improvements in some services in a few places. Then you will start to fall behind the rest of the world. But because the world also depends on the U.S. infrastructure, we will all pay the price for it.
That’s a bad analogy for you. You’re taking for granted that the internet has been great - a free market of ideas in which anyone can bring a product or service to anyone in the world. That’s why the internet trounced Minitel.
And yet you advocate for a thing that would remove that which made the internet great - an open forum in which anyone can create information, and anyone else could consume it.
You would admit, I’m sure, that the internet is a wild success. In fact, it may be the greatest demonstrator of the strengths of the free market. There is very little in the way of traditional barriers to entries that innovators face outside of the internet. It’s the best invention/infrastructure ever in terms of being able taking a good idea and bringing it to people.
And part of why it has been so successful is that has been the policy of the internet has been neutrality. Net neutrality is the status quo of the internet - it is the thing that has made it such a great driver of innovation and such a powerhouse of free market success. It allows small players to have the same voice as big players, the same channels with which to reach people. The internet, as it exists, with neutrality, should be your shining star example of your entire ideology.
But you argue against it. You argue that giant conglomerates who dominate the market should be allowed to decide who should be able to see what information. This would result in a world in which those who are already powerful can shut out innovative upstarts to protect their market share. It is a policy of destroyed innovation.
You’ll say “oh, but we should have more competition”, and while indeed that would help, it’s not a panacea, or really, a practical solution at all with current telecom models. Laying infrastructure in this way requires the use of public powers - it is simply not practical to string up and bury wire across millions of pieces of property, public and private, for every potential ISP that’s out there. It’s an awful use of a society’s resources to have lawyers spend years to secure easement rights with governments at every level, and countless private owners, and all the complications that entails, to set up redundant infrastructure in the name of potential competition. And then tremendous work has to go into actually implementing this infrastructure. It would be an enormous society-wide waste of resources to dig up a hundred thousand conduits for fiber optic cable, only to have another company also dig up a hundred thousand conduits for fiber optic cable, and all of the receivers and muxers and splitters and downstream infrastructure required to eventually wire everyone’s home. It is essentially a happy coincidence that the cable TV infrastructure that was laid down over decades at enormous cost ended up working well for internet access. Creating entirely new infrastructures - and potentially many, for each entrant into the market - would be enormously difficult, slow, and expensive.
Granting certain companies rights to do this as a public trust is actually solid public policy for this reason, because it would be a clusterfuck to have multiple redundant similar infrastructures in the name of everyone having to have their own competitive infrastructure. Such a policy would clearly be more costly than any sort of lack of QoS optimizations for traffic shaping that you could make in favor against neutrality.
But anyway, with that public trust comes the idea that the public has some say that the product delivered, that which uses public resources, has to conform to certain standards to serve the public good. And the internet has clearly done that to a great extent.
Quite frankly, Sam, I don’t know why you argue this point. If I erased your memory of the internet, and told you the history of it, you would think it’s the greatest thing that could ever happen to demonstrate the free market. You should be hanging your hat on how great the internet has been driving innovation and taking the power to stifle innovation out of the hands of those who already dominate a market. You would probably rail against the idea that some big telecom giants should determine what you could see and who could show you. You should be the biggest, loudest advocate of neutrality out there.
I can only guess that because that network neutrality has been identified as sort of a left-leaning issue (I guess because anything that allows those who are already power to exert even more power and influence and crush those who compete with them is a core tenant of right wing beliefs) it seems like you argue against it reflexively.
Anyway, your analogy works against you. Minitel was a system in which an entity told you how you’d consume your data. Who could send it to you, how you could seek it out. The internet crushed it because the internet is a neutral free market of ideas in which anyone can reach anyone else.
Your potential Comcast and Time-Warner controlled internet is much closer to Minitel, since a big entity is dictating how you can interact with the information that’s out there, and who can post it. If the internet weren’t neutral in the past, it would probably look something more like the competing networks of Compuserve and AOL.
And in the other corner you have, well, the internet. The internet as it exists today, and as it always has existed. Free, open, neutral. The very same thing that crushed Minitel.
The neutral network internet wins in both analogies.
So instead of taking existing infrastructure and forcing traffic competition over it you’re…taking existing infrastructure and forcing competition over it.
I don’t see that much of a difference there, except that perhaps you don’t realize that there are multiple definitions of “dark fiber” out there, and your definition may not have as much as you think. Plus it has a particular problem of being a very, very finite amount.
And it still doesn’t solve the problem of getting it to my house. Sure, that cable they put in between Dallas and Chicago may have plenty of spare capacity, but one of the big reasons telcos and cable companies were granted monopolies in the first place was that we didn’t want dozens of fly-by-night companies getting halfway through stringing up cables in the neighborhood then going out of business.
I’m not aware of any really huge effort to keep this from happening, other than general concerns about drones and such. Those only work real well in areas that don’t have a wire solution because they suck. You have speed of light problems that are kinda hard to get around for satellite, and really any wireless runs into regulation issues that are arguably as bad as the ones for wires.
“Net Neutrality” rules are being proposed not because people don’t want pure competition, they are because your proposed concepts of pure competition will never exist. “Oh, hey, let’s just imagine a situation where government isn’t influenced by large corporate lobbyists, where regulatory agencies work swiftly and levy appropriate penalties, we don’t need net neutrality regulations there” Well, yeah, no shit. Those of us in the real world deal with a Comcast/NBC Universal merger in which one of the regulatory approvers most vocal in favor of the merger left their post almost immediately after the merger for a high-level job at Comcast.
Even at their best, “Net Neutrality” laws are not ideal by any stretch. But they’re better for wishful thinking of some sort of equitable dark fiber distribution.