Woops, when I clicked “read first unread post”, the usually-faulty forum software took me to post #58. So I thought that was your only post, I didn’t see the previous post, #57. So read my response to you in that light.
I’m not opposed to a common carrier model. It seems to have done well for the phone network after deregulation until the legacy phone network became nearly irrelevant. But such a reform is far more radical than enforcing what has already been the default, historical state of the internet. The internet works fantastically right now. Even with all of the broken promises by ISPs, where they took public money to build out infrastructure and pocketed it, internet service in the US has never been better. We’re not at serious risk for swamping our infrastructure, and we’re in a good place to keep building out from here. And we’d likely see better returns in terms of infrastructure capability if we actually forced the ISPs to do what they said they’d do (example) than to reward their abuses with the gift of greater power over the internet.
The very real risk from giving giant megacongolomerates who own industries all across the telecom, media creation, and other industries using their control over the vast majority of American internet connections to help themselves is obvious, huge, and potentially an existential threat to all that has made the internet great. The case for sub-optimal quality of service that stems from neutrality (from lack of hypothetically benevolent traffic shaping), in comparison, is a far more hypothetical problem with far less potential damage.
Well, the problem I see with that view is that it leaves us in the same boat: no build-out or build-out. We could build more capacity and make it available, but adopting NN isn’t actually going to achieve that. If anything, I expect it will make the ISP’s hunker down and short customer service even more. The more regulated they become, the more they will act like public utilities, taking their virtually-guaranteed profits and not doing very much except trying to rip off customers with overpriced packages.
This is why making the internet provider business a public utility is a really bad idea. The three companies above just invested $1 billion in a plan to provide a constellation of satellites that will provide internet access around the world. Google is also buying up dark fiber and building out its own ISP busineess that way, and is investigating many other ways to expand internet coverage.
Under a regulated public utility model, investment like this gets much dicier. If prices are regulated, no one will make investments like this. Likewise, if the government regulations mandate access that is unaffordable to provide, investment like this won’t happen.
In any event, the fact that new avenues for internet access are still being developed means that there is still a functioning market and regulators should stay away from it.
There’s price regulation and then there’s price regulation.
Regulating the price that ISPs can charge their own customer is bad. But I’m not seeing the problem with regulating the price for someone else to connect to that customer. (Compare to the old landline phone call system: the caller pays, the called does not.)
I’m paying for my bandwidth through my ISP; why should Netflix also be charged for that same bandwidth? If what I pay doesn’t cover the ISP’s cost, then they need to charge me more.
It seems like opponents of net neutrality want to shift the bandwidth costs from individual users to content providers. Which is why I’m rather confused about the politics. Naively, I’d expect the left to be against net neutrality (because it transfers costs of network connections from consumers to corporations) and the right for net neutrality (because it maintains the most open marketplace for network connections).
The problem is the closing of markets.
For me, there are two things that happen when you don’t have net neutrality:
**1. You block new entrants into the content market. **
If Youtube had to pay huge connection fees for both ends of its deliver, paying both its own service connection and for every ISP with users it wants to reach, it would have a much larger barrier to getting up and running. Now that it is part of Google and a hugely successful platform, that is not a big concern. But it is for the next video streaming service that wants to start up. They will need a major backer with big pockets just to get to market. If you think what we have now is what we should always have and that our current providers never need any competition, then this is a good idea.
2. ISPs that are also content providers can destroy their competition.
This is the same issue the original trust busting tried to deal with in the late 1800s. Standard Oil bought up a bunch of railways, built with similar public assistance as the internet and cable/telephone lines, and then used there control of transportation to prevent other oil companies from getting their product to market at a reasonable price.
I get my internet via Comcast. I do not have cable TV. I do have Netflix and Amazon Prime, and may get Hulu Plus at some point. Without NN, Comcast can slow down or limit my total downloads from “out of network” sources, limiting either the video quality or the total amount of video I can watch without paying extra. Or they charge the other video services a hefty access fee, thus forcing them to raise their prices. Double win for Comcast, as they would directly profit by either charging me more to watch other services or charging the service providers; and indirectly profit because it would make their offerings, which are uncapped, more competitive. All based on their control of something granted by public.
So let me ask you - what happens when I come up with a great product that the world would love, but for it to work it absolutely has to have guaranteed bandwidth and guaranteed latency?
If my carriers are not allowed to charge me extra to carry my service, they aren’t going to give me the guaranteed bandwidth or the guaranteed latency. So my idea dies, and the world never gets to experience massive online virtual reality, or real-time music concerts with musicians joining from around the world, or whatever. Sorry, doesn’t fit the public utility model.
Or you could say, “Well, they can just upgrade their whole network so everyone gets those benefits!” Except that’s highly inefficient - there’s no reason to create a low-latency infrastructure to transport packets of E-mail messages.
What should ideally happen is that the service says, “We will pay you X dollars more per kb if you guarantee it will be there within 15ms.” Or, if they can’t afford to fund the upgrade outright, they might cut a deal with the ISP to offer their service to customers at a premium price. The ISP’s can then use the promise of that revenue to justify investment in the infrastructure required to provide that service.
So in your model where consumers cannot pay extra for specific content, and internet providers cannot charge businesses more for certain types of requirements, how would this investment ever happen? WHY would an ISP bother to upgrade their infrastructure? They have a local monopoly on customers, and they are not allowed to charge more for that new infrastructure, so why on earth would they build it?
Sam, you’re arguing against internet access as a public utility. That is not strictly tied to net neutrality. We have an option to simply continue the status quo of the internet as it has always existed. Title 2 is only an option, and even if they invoke that option (and they don’t have to in order to get net neutrality), that doesn’t mean that services automatically become fixed-cost public utilities. Net neutrality and “a government takeover of internet access” as some are calling it are separate issues.
And even then, a regulation of the services which use public infrastructure like the cable network wouldn’t disallow new entrants with entirely new types of infrastructure like a hypothetical worldwide satellite access (which incidentally will probably only be useful for very rural parts of first world countries and mostly third world countries with no internet access) would not need to be regulated under such a law since they’re not using the existing public infrastructure to do it. As a concrete example, as far as I know cell phones don’t follow the same common carrier regulations as land lines do.
Your example of a low latency connection is indeed the sort of hypothetical benefit we could get from traffic shaping. Maybe one or two novel services that actually benefit people might emerge. But you can pretty much guarantee that thousands of more limitations that are against the public interest will emerge. The same thing that lets them give your hypothetical real time music concerts with low latency also lets them decide that we’re going to make the experience of watching netflix painfully slow and awful, and we’ll “fast line” ComcastFlix instead to make it look more appealing. Oh, you didn’t pay the $50/month premium latency service? Now all your traffic has +150ms added to it. Oh, you want to play online on your xbox? Top tier service, microsoft paid us $200 million. But oh, Sony didn’t pay us, so your playstation online play is going to be awful. Oh, you want to go to amazon.com at all? Sorry, we’re in a disagreement about peering, access is cut off entirely. Oh, you want to go to comcastsucks.org? Huh, that’s weird, it looks like our DNS servers aren’t familiar with such a site.
Comcast and Time Warner and some of the worst companies operating in the US. They consistently get ranked at the top of the worst companies list, and there are endless examples of documenting comcast abuses, like how if you move they’ll charge you an unreturned equipment fee even if you video tape yourself taking it to their office and getting a manager to sign a statement saying it was returned. In practice, the effects of giving such entities control over what content you can have, and at what performance, is almost entirely going to be bad. For every potentially good application, you’ll have a thousand abuses. It will, undoubtedly, be a net negative for the consumer. By a long shot.
No, my model is all the costs are borne by the user of the bandwidth, not the source of the data.
Do not conflate “net neutrality” with “public utility”. A public utility has the price it charges to end users regulated, while the price it charges producers is not (or less so at least). Thus, when I buy electricity from my local power provider, that price is regulated. But the prices that power provider pays on the spot market has market-based pricing.
I advocate that ISPs work the opposite. I pay for my bandwidth (and low latency, etc), no matter where or who I’m connected to. Whoever is sending me data pays their own ISP for bandwidth, but then my ISP doesn’t get to double dip and charge for the bandwidth they already sold me.
And it is definitely double-dipping: for example, I pay Netflix to watch streamed movies. A portion of what I pay goes towards Netflix’s ISP costs. Without net neutrality, I am paying for bandwidth from my ISP and then paying Netflix to buy bandwidth from my ISP again. Instead, my ISP should cut out the extra step and simply charge me what it costs to provide that bandwidth to me. It makes for a more transparent market with fewer hidden costs passed on.
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Of course, no matter if we have net neutrality or not, we need to have more competition among ISPs. Every internet user should have access to more than one high-bandwidth, low-latency service. Without that competition it hardly matters what pricing structures ISPs use, they will become rent seekers instead of innovators. I don’t consider publicly owned networks to be especially helpful, but localities should have the option if they want it.
No, but people keep tying all kinds of things to ‘net neutrality’. Net neutrality also has nothing to do with bandwidth caps, increased fees for service, or a host of other complaints people have that are getting lumped in together with ‘net neutrality’.
To be clear again, all that network neutrality means is that once a payload has been broken into packets, all packets should be treated the same. Also, ‘net neutrality’ strictly speaking has nothing to do with the internet backbone, connections to businesses, etc., but is specifically about how ISP’s treat the data they are providing to consumers. That’s it.
And yet, the main ‘net neutrality’ proposal being talked about right now is Obama’s plan to turn the internet into a public regulated utility, but without the price caps. Can we at least then agree that this idea is nuts?
Getting back to the idea that all packets should be treated the same - this may have been reasonable in the earlier days of the internet when the data was all equally time sensitive - if you wanted to watch a movie, you downloaded it first. Most data consisted of web page content, downloadable files, etc.
Today’s internet is diverging away from that fast. Netflix and other streaming services have much different delivery requirements than, say, a kindle book. Live gaming requires low latency. When the Oculus Rift and Microsoft Hololens ship, there will be incredible demand for extremely low latency data streams so that people across the world can share virtual experiences without the kind of lag that causes headaches and breaks the illusion of reality.
So who says that a packet that contains, say, real-time head tracking data should be treated the same as a bittorrent download? And if the low latency connections require extremely expensive hardware, why shouldn’t the users of that service pay extra?
In theory, maybe. In practice, once you put regulations on the industry they will A) work to capture the regulatory process and turn it to their benefit, and B) Raise their prices. There is no option C) where the businesses just ‘suck it up’ and provide new services at low price and ‘take it out of profits’. That simply won’t happen.
Once prices rise and service declines, pressure will be on the government to impose price caps, and/or start subsidizing the industry. If they do either, then that will in turn force more interventions to correct the problems arising from that.
I guess the difference between us is that you can see regulation as this targeted, effective, intelligent intervention that will be lightly applied and stop at that, and the world will be better. I look at the history of such things and conclude that once the government has its regulatory foot in the door, we can look forward to increasing regulation.
Once government regulates part of the industry, they will squawk hard if new entrants come along who aren’t burdened by the same regulations, and the government will be pressured to stop the competition. This is not hypothetical - just look at the resistance Uber and AirBnB are getting from the establishment. The thing is, in exchange for regulation the government often promises protection from competition. That’s the tradeoff - you get a monopoly on a segment of the public, and in return the government gets to regulate how you do business - with guarantees of profit, of course.
Look at the sweet deal the insurance companies cut with the Obama administration in exchange for their support of the ACA - if they suffer losses, the government has agreed to compensate them. That’s the kind of nonsense you can expect out of a heavily regulated internet infrastructure. Distortions, cronyism, control by bureaucrats instead of market forces, and the death of innovation.
Hypothetical? Ever try playing Rock Band on a high latency connection? One of the big hurdles online video games face today, and have faced for years, is dealing with latency. And there are many applications we simply don’t even attempt today because we know the latency of the network makes it impossible.
And maybe there are a thousand services that would collectively change our lives much for the better, which will not be able to navigate through the maze of ‘net neutrality’ rules and find a pathway to success. One of the worst things about regulated industries is that you can never know the things that might have been developed but weren’t because of the cost of regulation.
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But you can pretty much guarantee that thousands of more limitations that are against the public interest will emerge. The same thing that lets them give your hypothetical real time music concerts with low latency also lets them decide that we’re going to make the experience of watching netflix painfully slow and awful, and we’ll “fast line” ComcastFlix instead to make it look more appealing.
And if you do that, the other ISP’s will immediately advertise a better offer, and they’ll lose market share. That’s how competition works, and it’s why Ford doesn’t decide to offer you a vehicle that goes 0-60 in 20 seconds and falls apart in a year. Their competitors will eat their lunch if they do.
It’s a trivial exercise to come up with some hypothetical bad behaviour that will screw over the public. Hell, they could raise their prices to $500 per GB! What if they start censoring commercials for products that compete with them? What if they set up their own movie streaming service and cripple the others?
Coming up with hypothetical behavior is easy - the hard part is explaining why that doesn’t happen in other markets. If businesses were so quick to try to fleece the public, why do competitive markets drive products towards maximal quality/price ratios? If businesses are so powerful to control consumers, why is it that the average profit margin among businesses in the U.S. under 10%, and the average profit margin in the telecom industry only 6.6%?
The key is fostering competition. Create a competitive marketplace for broadband services, and all these problems take care of themselves. The real problem is the fact that internet ISP’s are basically cable companies leveraging an existing infrastructure, creating a form of quasi-monopoly. Cell companies and phone companies get a piece of the pie, but cell is too expensive to compete with landlines today. but the market overall is more like an oligopoly than a truly competitive marketplace. THAT is the problem, and that’s what we need to address. So long as their is a monopoly on service, regulations will just distort the market and shift costs around - they won’t do anything to encourage the kinds of fundamental breakthroughs and investment we’re going to need in the future.
How come that hasn’t happened so far? We’ve all been connecting to ISP’s for many years now, and I’ve never heard of one intentionally throttling back traffic on specific services just to extort money out of you.
If that $200 million actually went into infrastructure upgrades, why is that a problem? Why should Sony get to free-ride on Microsoft’s investment? Of course, that wouldn’t happen under such a regime because Microsoft wouldn’t invest in the first place. And therefore, no one gets the better service. Hey, it’s the socialist way. We can all be equally deprived. That’s better than having some pay for an infrastructure and then get to use it before others do, huh?
This pattern has existed all through the technological era, by the way. If we had ‘car neutrality’ where every safety device had to be deployed in all cars equally, Mercedes would never have bothered to develop all the safety features that first appeared in their cars before trickling down to the rest of us. I mean, how fair is it that the poor have to drive in less safe cars than the rich? Let’s level the playing field! Then none of us will have it!
Early adopters have been critical to the advance of the computer industry, the commercial space industry, the internet industry, etc. And they are almost always wealthier than others. The first artificial heart could only be afforded by millionaires. The first space tourism rides cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Innovation in small jet engines and composite manufacturing for aircraft was originally only available to very wealthy people. But eventually this stuff makes its way down to the masses. Take away the early adopters, and this stuff will never emerge at all.
Again, that could be happening today. How come it isn’t? And if it does happen, wouldn’t you like Amazon and Google to be able to partner up and build out a competing network? That won’t happen if the current infrastucture becomes protected through regulation. During the days of the Bell monopoly, you weren’t even allowed to plug a 3rd party telephone into the phone network. And the devices that were available from the phone monopoly were old and clunky and cost a fortune.
Bugged about customer service at ISPs? Lily Tomlin made a career out of parodying the incredibly bad service you used to get from the phone company when it was a regulated monopoly.
And the best way to punish that behaviour is to ensure that there is plenty of competition for them. It’s amazing how quickly a company will straighten up and fly right when a nasty practice suddenly causes 20% of their customer base to flee.
You know, we already have an example of how the government controls public carriers, and it has a lot of the bad characteristics you are talking about. Remember the ‘fairness act’ that censored content? The stringent standards on content that made traditional TV channels so safe and boring? The ‘one-size-fits-all’ model that gave us bland TV and radio programming that became dominated by a few large networks and fed us a constant stream of pablum? The justification for all those intrusions was that they were using public airwaves and therefore the government had a right to control content.
Aren’t you even a little worried that under a public utility model the government will decide that any packets coming from YouPorn. com must be thrown in the trash? Or that a conservative government might decide that ‘radical’ left-wing programming is against the public interest and require that it be treated punitively? Are you not worried at all that if quality drops and investment slows down the government will start subsidizing the industry with tax money, and exercising control over what gets built and where?
These debates are always biased towards the government solution because the assumption is always that business will take every advantage to screw over customers if left alone, while the government solution will always work exactly as advertised and never be perverted into something else or lead to more regulation. The reality is almost the opposite - in a competitive market companies are driven towards maximum quality and value in their products, and the lowest profits that justify their investment, while government regulation has a history of spinning out of control or being captured by the people it is supposed to protect us from.
But for most consumers, electricity really is a commodity. It doesn’t matter what source it comes from. But if you are a business and need guaranteed capacity at various parts of the day, expect to pay more.
So you are willing to have a premium price for streaming services as opposed to web content? You have no problem paying more for a low-latency connection?
How do you deal with the situation where one provider of a unique servce (say, the first company to offer a true virtual reality world) requires extremely low latency. If the ISPs can only offer a generic low latency service that any provider can use, why would the first company pay to have it developed? And why would the ISP pay to have it developed when there’s only one provider who has a service that would use it?
Oh, so even though Netflix may require additional resources to get their content to you in usable form (without stuttering), they should be charged no more than any other internet service?
If we had passed a ‘mail neutrality’ law in 1960, mandating that every letter had to be delivered to you in the same amount of time for the same price, would we have a Federal Express today? Do you think the quality of mail delivery today would be better or worse?
Now we’re getting somewhere. With enough competition, all of these problems go away. If Netflix wants a better connection for streaming of 4K movies, it can negotiate with an ISP to provide it. If you as a consumer don’t want to pay for the premium service, find another ISP. If an ISP starts blocking Amazon because Barnes and Noble paid them to do so, move to another ISP.
Good regulation should make it easy to move between ISPs, should prevent ISP’s from ‘locking you in’ by doing things like bundling their internet service with their phone service, etc. Let’s ensure that there are lots of different ways to get on the net, and that the market is competitive. That’s really all we need unless a specific problem arises (like collusion) that needs to be dealt with.
They get a partial subsidy for certain losses for one year (if they underestimate premiums) and a partial tax (if they overestimate), because they are pricing for an entirely new market and would otherwise play it too conservatively with a big risk premium. Describing that as a corporate giveaway is ludicrous.
Yes. The consumer should pay for the resources they consume as transparently as possible.
The “chicken and the egg” problem happens with or without net neutrality.
With net neutrality: why should the ISP upgrade its infrastructure if there’s no high-bandwidth, low-latency content that’d give a reason for users to buy the upgraded service?
Without net neutrality: why should the ISP upgrade its infrastructure if there’s no content providers willing to pay extra to get their high-bandwidth, low-latency content to the users?
And in both cases: why should anyone develop high-bandwidth, low-latency content when ISPs’ infrastructure can’t support it?
Netflix will have to pay its own ISP for whatever resources it uses on their end. And my ISP should be charging me for the resources that I use on my end.
Translating net neutrality into postal terms,
Net neutrality: the sender pays for whatever delivery speed they want. Receiver gets the package at the speed paid for by the sender.
No net neutrality: the sender pays for whatever delivery speed they want. The delivery service can charge different amounts based on who’s sending it, irrespective of distance. The receiver might be charged extra by the delivery service as well.
Both cases: FedEx and UPS represent breaking up the previous letter-delivery monopoly. We needed that no matter what pricing structure letter delivery takes.
No disagreement from me. I’d simply prefer a source-neutral pricing structure, where the user pays for the services they want, rather than the ISP hiding the true costs by charging someone else for the user’s resource use.
And, Sam, it fills odd trying to convince you that a more transparent market is better.
I think if your service requires significant violations of the laws of physics, you have bigger problems than net neutrality. A back-of-the-envelope calculation I did a few years back when I had people complaining about a 60ms ping time between East Coast and West Coast data centers was that a pure, straight-line speed-of-light-in-fiber shot between the two data centers was somewhere on the order of 40ms. Given that the paths were not straight, minute processing at routers and switches along the way, etc, 60ms was about the best we can expect.
That’s an internal customer, where we want to give them the best possible experience. So your “needs 15ms to function” service really needs work.
And note that many of the Net Neutrality proposals do not necessarily mean the end of QoS.
And I still don’t understand how your proposals solve the problems either. You want to take dark fiber away from companies who own it now and sell it to other companies–great for the moment, but who is ever going to run new fiber after that?
There will be various snips in my quote - I actually ran into the board’s post length limit.
Maybe, but I think you’re sort of lumping in unrelated arguments. We can argue neutrality as its own issue.
Before I start, I want to ask - do you think the internet, as it has existed, has been wildly successful? One of the greatest sources of innovation man has ever devised? One of the demonstrators of the value of a free market?
Because I feel like in an alternate universe where net neutrality wasn’t the default policy of the internet, and it was being proposed after it was established, you’d be ranting against how much of a failure the neutral internet would’ve been. That one regulation would’ve invalidated it, and it would’ve never took off, etc. And yet, it seems clear to me that a neutral internet - that is, the internet as it has existed until very recently - has been a wild success beyond anyone’s imagination.
Because, to be clear, that’s what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about keeping the internet as it has been - free, open, neutral, anyone can spread information, anyone else can seek any information. Hysteria (not yours) about neutrality being “government takeover” of internet and such is propoganda by ISPs. Those fighting for neutrality are those who are fighting to keep the internet how it has always been. And I want to establish that we both agree that it has been amazing.
I’m not sure I understand exactly what’s being proposed. When the phone system was deregulated, that was also under title 2 of the telecom act, right? The common carrier model - forcing the infrastructure owner to provide a lease to competitors to use the same lines, came out of this, as I understand it. And it did a lot to drive competition and drive down prices particularly in the long distance markets. If we’re talking about that, that’s significantly different than to, say, how water is delivered as a public utility.
Even if it’s the latter case, I’m not sure you can immediately say it’s nuts. It’s not as if the public utility model is a disaster in all cases. We have nearly free, safe, ubiquitous water across the US, quietly providing an essential service almost entirely without fail. I’ve become quite weary over the years with “government cannot possibly do anything right” libertarian extremists who simply ignore such examples of successfully working systems and pretends we’re living in a constant unmitigated disaster. I’m not saying that describes you, and I’m not saying that being a utility is required for internet to be neutral (it isn’t, and hasn’t been), I’m just saying that I’m not willing to accept the idea as a philosophical assumption that a public infrastructure/utility based internet is an awful idea. That said, I don’t think it’s necessary - neutrality can easily be enforced by regulation.
This is true in the hypothetical. In the practical, the average internet latency for common tasks is consistently coming down over time in my experience - and as someone who’s been an internet gamer for 20 years now, I’m pretty sensitive to it. Sending a piece of information across the continent and back - in the US - takes less than a tenth of a second for a home user contacting a server in a datacenter. The speed of light over that sort of distance alone is going to take somewhere around 40 milliseconds, if I’m not misplacing a zero when I calculate that, and so we’re talking about another 40-60ms to account for all of the routers having to evaluate the traffic to send it along its way, routing paths that aren’t geographically a straight line between the two destinations, any sort of congestion, etc. Could we shave 10-20ms off that? Probably. But for most purposes internet latency is already extremely low, and has trended towards getting lower.
So I want to emphasize while you’re right and traffic shaping could have benefits, these are relatively minor in the current scheme of things. We have amazing speeds even without it, and the gain you’d get from reshaping the traffic is likely fairly minimal (10-20ms is difficult to perceive).
Because opening up the ISPs to control how they treat different sorts of data have a much larger downside than the potential upside they get from benevolent traffic shaping.
You assume that new services will spur the development of new infrastructure. That’s not what we’ve actually seen in practice. Comcast’s “fast lane” proposals are named that because it suggests that they’re out there building up new high-speed lanes for premium customers and content providers. But that’s not an accurate picture of the situation. Rather, they were slowing down and putting non-premium traffic last. Rather than elevating premium traffic to actual fast lanes, it would be more accurate to say that non-premium traffic was getting moved to slow lanes. This is the easier, cheaper route for them to take - they can get content providers to bribe them and customers to pay more for what had previously been the default service under neutrality, and for those who refuse, they get slow-laned. If they allow the traffic at all.
Neutrality has been the regulation on the industry for the entire history of the internet. It has briefly been disturbed for legal reasons, and we’re wondering if we should re-assert it. This isn’t a new set of regulations - it is simply resetting to what had been the normal state of affairs.
We may be talking past each other. I’m only going so far as to advocate for essentially keeping the internet as it was, and resisting attempts from the big telecom players to have more control over how they treat data. You seem to be more generally arguing against the idea of the internet as a public utility, which is tangential to what I’m trying to argue, and is not a necessary component in the neutrality debate.
The difference is that I think the internet has thrived exactly because it has been neutral, and that has been a necessary part of its growth. And that the big telecom companies have been amongst the worst actors of any business in the US. I could give you a list of comcast horror stories all day if you’re interested. It’s not at all a hypothetical that they would use this new power in a consumer-unfriendly way, and I think the downsides would outweigh the upsides by a massive amount.
I’m also arguing more from the practical, and you’re arguing more from the philosophical. It’s much easier to say “okay, let’s just tear down hundreds or thousands of regulations at all levels of government to free up competition among ISPs, and let’s assume that there are waiting entities out there with enough capital and interest to instantly bring up competitive infrastructure networks, and let’s assume that they can do this in a prompt and cost effective manner despite the massive public/private complications of easement rights, and the difficulty and speed at which one can build out a country-wide network of land lines. And lets further assume that this is easy enough that there won’t simply be 2 or 3 big players, all of whom could try to control your data in a consumer-unfriendly way, but that at any time, anyone else could jump into the game with their own infrastructure and provide the service people want”
In comparison, “let’s keep the internet how it always has been, and re-assert the regulation that forces telecom companies to treat traffic equally” is a much less dramatic, much more practical and viable solution.
Your solution essentially requires all components to work - components that aren’t even in the discussion right now, let alone likely to come to fruition. If you’re arguing from the philosophical, this is easy. Just say “this is how it should be, let’s let a wizard do it.” But in practice, what it means is you’ll say “yes, telecoms should be able to inspect your data and prioritize or reject it as they see fit, and then we should also have regulations making it easier for others to compete in the market so that you can find another telecom provider…” but what actually will happen is we’ll get to “telecoms can inspect your data and treat it as they wish” and it all stops there. The odds that your proposal is a viable option at this juncture are very slim. The odds that comcast and time warner can gain the power they need to control the internet for most people in the US as they see fit is a much more realistic prospect. It is, in fact, what’s going on right now. It has to be proactively defeated.
So I get it. You’re saying “1. Let’s let ISPs do whatever they want, because 2. if there’s a lot more competition, market forces will dictate they behave” - but what if (1). has a 99% chance of happening, but (2). has a <1% chance of happening? Now you’ve just given what is nearly a monopoly over an essential service carte blanche to abuse as they wish. And the thing with this current debate is that only (1) is really on the table.
Oh, I agree generally with this statement. But this is already entrenched in the telecom world. How do you propose, on a purely practical level, that we create a system in which it’s easy for a new player to make entry into the current market? How do you curtail the huge influence of the current telecom industry?
Google is pushing their fiber basically as a demonstrator of the evils of the other ISPs. But even as a large, wealthy business with lots of lobbyists and power within the telecom industry, with positive public opinion (about a billion times better than comcast), they’re still only making very small scale demonstrations. They have to fight an uphill battle against the entrenched telecoms and the (mostly local and state) governments that cater to them. Google isn’t seriously considering becoming a big player in the ISP business, and if they don’t think it’s a practical option, who would?
I think a large chunk of our disagreement is pretty much you saying something like “sure, you can let telecom companies do whatever they want to you, because in a perfect world, we’d have lots of competition and bad businesses would lose customers and new ones would spring up to cater to them”, but you fail to realize that “let telecom companies do whatever they want” is the only option on the table right now. And not only does it lead to the second part of your statement, it likely precludes it.
On the other hand, I’m taking a much more practical approach. The system is firmly entrenched as it is. While we should strive to fix that, allowing the current industry to adopt anti-consumer practices and abuses because of a hypothetical perfect world set of competition that’s very unlikely to exist.
By all means, I’m open to tearing down the barriers to new competition. I would love for every person in the US to have 4+ viable choices for an internet provider. But allowing the current telecoms that have a near-monopoly to censor or slow down the internet however they see fit is not step 1 to this end result.
Or to say it another way - how about we work on allowing competition, and then once we have a real functional competitive market, we could consider easing up on regulations which prevent entrenched entities from controlling who’s allowed to access what information? Because doing it in the other order is obviously ripe for abuse.
Again, there doesn’t have to be a “maze” of network neutrality rules. We can simply go back to what has been working all along. Thriving, even.
Cars are a much more competitive market because it’s easy for a manufacturer to ship cars across the country. We have a dozen different companies selling cars in every city. There’s real, viable competition in that arena.
It’s not so easy with huge public infrastructures like fiber optic lines and cable networks. Those don’t only have to exist at a dealership, they have to be dug in across the country, go to every home, cross countless public and private lands.
I feel as though if we were discussing removing regulations on water delivery infrastructure, you’d say “sure, someone might end up poisoning a million people as a result of trying save a buck, but then they could just get another water provider!” - it would be a pretty convoluted solution to have different companies with separate infrastructures all trying to bring water to someone’s home, in the hopes that market forces would drive everyone to the ones that didn’t poison them, when we could simply say “hey, this regulation says you’re not allowed to have poisoned water”
I’m not saying the internet has to be a public utility, but the current model of using public easement rights on public and private lands to deliver connections directly to everyone’s home and business is a whole lot more like electrical and water utilities than it is selling cars. It’s orders of magnitude harder for a new ISP to pop up and connect a region than it is for Honda to build a dealership in your town or Tesla to sell you cars via mail order.
I agree, this is a problem. I suspect that having multiple redundant infrastructures for every ISP is a poor investment as a society. What if we literally had hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber lines dug up 5 feet away from already existing ones in the name of allowing every competitor to have their own infrastructure? It would be a great waste of societal resources. It would be as if we all had to choose which power plant we did business with, and every power plant had to have their own power transmission lines going to every neighborhood.
If anything, we’d see a common carrier model, like with phone lines. That might be an actual practical solution to potential competition amongst ISPs offering different services.
In the US? Why do you think? Because it hasn’t been legal until very recently. You do understand that in the US - and practically, in most of the world, since they follow the US’ lead on this - that the internet has been neutral. You’re not legally allowed to throttle in that manner.
If you’re asking why they’re not doing it since the neutrality rules are overturned - they don’t want to show the full force of their abuse all at once when the public eye is on the issue and we’re considering regulation. They’ll lay low, perhaps make a few small changes here and there, and gradually boil the frogs.
Because in practice, that’s unlikely to be how it happens. It would be free for them to simply delay Sony’s traffic so that it’s at a competitive disadvantage to Microsoft’s. No new infrastructure needed, they pocket the $200m. Why not simply do that?
Come on. Do you really need to make your point in such a hyperbolic, inflammatory way? And do you really want to imply that the internet, as it has existed, is some great dystopian socialist failure?
This sounds pretty childish. And it’s a poor analogy. Since the internet is an infrastructure, rather than the end product, the better analogy would be that the poor have to pull over to the side of the road to allow the rich to drive by them.
And again, the real world proves you wrong. You act as though a neutral internet would’ve flounded and failed to thrive. Except that a neutral internet existed and flourished. All of those amazing advances in telecoms that have happened over the last 30 years? Those all happened under a neutral internet. If a neutral internet is the socialist dystopia you try to convince us of, why did it spur on all of the innovations that you counter-factually insist that it couldn’t have?
If your position says “if the government mandated neutrality on the internet, there would be no incentive for innovation, and it would not flourish” then you can safely say that your philosophy is at odds with reality and therefore should be thrown away, or at least revised.
ISPs have not been able provide services of the sort that you say are required for innovation, and yet we’ve had quite a lot of innovation.
And besides all that, ISPs can compete on things like the speed of the service they provide, bandwidth caps or the lack of, potentially on latency because of the efficiency of their internal network or the degree to which they’re connected to internet backbones. They can price these services into different tiers. They still have incentive to create bigger, better networks. They just can’t do so by deciding some data is more premium than others, or that you can’t have access to some data at all.
I would like the barriers to entry for an ISP to be lowered, which is what I think you’re trying to say, but as you actually said it, no. I don’t want Amazon to have to build their own internet in order for customers to be able to reach them. A thousand competing little internets, all with different and limited access to information? It’s both a waste of a society’s resources and far inferior to the consumer.
If you’re seriously offering the choice between “Comcast can’t block Amazon” and “Comcast can block Amazon, but Amazon can create their own internet if they want to”, I’ll take the former every time.
Again you’re conjuring up a boogeyman that hasn’t existed. You say that if the government regulates neutrality, then the government can regulate content. Says who? We have evidence that runs contrary to this - the government has already regulated neutrality through the internet’s history, and it has not regulated content. If it tries, that’s a separate issue entirely from neutrality and obviously should be fought vigorously.
Absolutely. But that’s not really what’s on the table, and that can be fought as the time comes. And that is a valid concern, with things like SOPA. But the thing is - arguing for neutrality is arguing against such things. If anything, saying that ISPs can inspect each packet and decide what to do with it makes your sort of filtering more likely, or at least more precedented. Neutrality precludes any filtering of that type.
Except that the history of the internet proves exactly the opposite. The government regulation of neutrality is what allowed it to thrive, and attempts to limit the awesome freedom of the internet have come from established big telecom players. You’re so committed to your philosophical assumption that the government always does wrong that you’re unable to see when it has done right.
In a perfect world, with lots of competition, all this “deregulation” might make sense. But as you can see in the article I linked, 75% of Americans have two or less providers.
But again, what this is really about, REALLY: ISP’s are selling their content as cable or satellite. But Netflix and similar content websites are allowing people to get content online. The ISP’s could compete online and offer content too, but they’ve resisted. They don’t want to undercut their cable TV subscriptions by offering the same shit online (and having to compete in price with the likes of Netflix and others). This would almost guarantee the end of Cable TV and Satellite TV, subscriptions which cost on average around $100.00 per month.
All the other utopian BS about “the competiton will create a better product” and such is a smokescreen. This is about the ISP’s saving their lucrative cable and satellite subscriptions by controlling the cost of content online. All the other arguments are a smokescreen.