The problem is who decides what packages get priority and which don’t?
Without net neutrality Comcast and their ilk will decide for you (or by your analogy USPS will decide which packages get to you fast and which don’t so for the USPS advertisers who pay them a fee will get their junk mail delivered ASAP…birthday card from your mom can be allowed to cool its heels for a few weeks).
Thing is, I contract for a data pipe of a given speed with my ISP. They do not get to decide that some data should be throttled. Data is data…it’s all ones and zeroes to them and it doesn’t matter if it comes from Netflix or a video my mom sent me.
With net neutrality your contract will look different. You will get promised different speed pipes depending on where the data comes from.
Thing is, we do not even need to speculate that this is what will happen because it already has happened. Mexico has no new neutrality laws. Here’s what their service offerings look like.
What’s more it is not as is the ISP are struggling. Far from it. They are making great money. Killing net neutrality is nothing more than a cash grab that only benefits them. There is absolutely NO rationale that net neutrality is needed except to make them more money.
I’m absolutely in favor of a careful change in regulations. Fully reversing net neutrality with no plan in place to regulate ISPs would be much worse than keeping net neutrality.
However, that doesn’t mean that I think net neutrality is the best possible set of regulations.
I’m not sure what you’re asking here. Do you think that it’s not technically possible to support different quality of service for different packets? Do you think that the person on the other end of the call won’t have contracted for similar service? Clearly you think some part of this isn’t workable, but I’m not sure which part; could you clarify your question?
You mean “without any regulation Comcast and their ilk will decide”. Again, I’m totally in favor of regulation. I just think that the set of regulations encapsulated in “net neutrality” is overly restrictive and suboptimal.
Who decides which postal packages get priority shipping? The people doing the shipping. Do we need Mail Neutrality so that all packages must have the same delivery guarantees, regardless of contents? No. We simply need postal regulations that require transparency and reasonable prices at a variety of different shipping speeds.
Well, video from Netflix and video from your mom presumably have very similar requirements to be good. Too low a bitrate or too high latency and video looks like shit.
But if some of the data is video from Netflix, and some of the data is your nightly cloud backup, of course it should matter. Because the actual usage constraints on those bits is very different.
But, why do you have to contract for a single pipe of a single speed? Why not contract for a small pipe at high speed and a larger pipe at lower latency/availability? Think of it as congestion pricing for the internet.
I believe you meant “without” in this sentence, so I’m going to respond that way. If I’m wrong, please correct me.
Yes, and I’m fine with that, as long as there are reasonable regulations for a baseline. As long as ISPs are required to offer a reasonably-priced go-anywhere pipe, they can also offer more restrictive or content-provider subsidized pipes for special uses.
Going back to the shipping analogy (it really is a good one). It’s fine if Amazon contracts with shipping companies to get better rates for shipping boxes to me than I can get a la carte from the post office. It’s obviously not fine if the shipping companies extort money by delaying or destroying packages, but you can prevent the latter while allowing the former.
It seems like there’s a lot of the fallacy of the excluded middle in these conversations. Either we have every regulation that makes up the bundle called “net neutrality”, or we have no regulations whatsoever and ISPs engage in shitty anti-competitive behavior. But those aren’t the only options. You can and should have regulations. I just think that some of the regulations that make up net neutrality are not good ones.
The value of transporting bits depends on the bits. Designing a regulatory framework in which it’s not possible to have different transport speeds/capacities/etc. for different types of bits is inefficient.
I’m saying that you paying for a service from your ISP does not mean that the people on the other end of your skype connection or cloud backup will have the same service, or even want it. For instance “I’m going to pay my ISP for a 1Gig connection so I can download my favorite porn faster!” but your porn server only has a 10 Meg connection. Your 1Gig connection is wasted. Doesn’t translate to the other end. People who DO want that get dedicated links.
You don’t need an analogy. Just answer this: Would you be okay with Comcast charging you more money to stream Netflix than to stream Comcast’s own video offerings?
I’m not sure what problem you think you are trying to solve.
Is the internet breaking down to over use?
Are ISPs going out of business because they cannot charge what they need to?
For your postal analogy remember your ISP represents the last mile. Amazon (or whoever is shipping you a package) has already made a deal with carriers to move their packages to their customers. In your analogy Amazon would deliver your package to a local delivery service who will take the package the last few miles to your house.
You have contracted with this local delivery service. They promise to deliver up to 10 boxes/month within 12 hours of receiving the package from wherever.
Now you want the local delivery service to decide that if Amazon doesn’t pay extra a delay will be inserted into the system. You get the box withing 36 hours now if the fee isn’t paid.
Thing is, everyone has made deals for a given service. The local delivery guy is now trying to extort the upstream shippers. And the upstream shipper is screwed because the local delivery service has a monopoly on deliveries in your area.
We have net neutrality today and it works just fine. Has since it all started. Why you think it needs to be tinkered with and made more complex is beyond me.
“Okay” is a bit vague. I’d probably seek out a different ISP if they did that to me, as would many of Comcast’s customers I imagine. but I don’t think it should be illegal for Comcast to do so.
This is a common refrain that I hear. It’s not true in my individual circumstances in Utah. There are 3 or 4 ISPs in my area that I can choose from, aside from cell phone providers. Is my experience an exception though? How many of you only have a single ISP servicing your area?
Ok, that’s fine. That’s kinda how it is today, right? Except I don’t have the flexibility to assign services that can use the high bandwidth to a high bandwidth lane, and services that don’t need it to a low bandwidth one.
This issue (which is an issue, though not that much of one in my opinion) seems orthogonal to the question of whether it’s reasonable to allow multiple tiers of service to be sold to a single customer.
Yes, in some cases.
I would not be ok with Comcast jacking up the price of Netflix traffic, but I’m fine with Comcast reducing the price of traffic to their own offerings (or companies that partner with them).
The problem is inefficient use of the existing network and inefficient pricing. I described it in a previous post this way:
Wait, two sentences ago, you said that I have a contract for them to deliver within 12 hours. Why do we need general regulations that apply to all boxes everywhere for them to meet the service we already contracted for?
And also, why does my contract with them have to be for 10 boxes/month, each within 12 hours? Would it be reasonable to have a contract for 3 deliveries per month with multiple boxes, delivered within 4 hours? What if I wanted 2 boxes per month within 1 hour, but the other 8 boxes within 48 hours?
What if I have the 10 boxes/month within 12 hours, but I want to buy something that I need right away? What if the seller is willing to pay the delivery service extra to get it to me within 2 hours. They should be prevented from doing so, and the only way I can get that box faster is by going to the delivery service and paying a bunch extra to upgrade all 10 of my boxes every month to 2 hour delivery?
Do you not see how this flexibility might both benefit me and the delivery service?
I live in Chicago and there are technically many choices but in practice there are two choices for residential internet: Comcast and RCN. If you want to count subpar DSL service your options expand a bit.
Thing is they are not very competitive. You’d think RCN would fall over itself offering better service and distinguishing themselves from the much maligned Comcast but they don’t. They quietly sit there offering very similar packages to what Comcast offers so it is not much of a choice.
Additionally, many apartment buildings (of which there are plenty) will contract with an ISP so tenants have to take what is on offer. I just moved into a hi-rise and they told me Comcast was it.
Given that I pay by the month, not by the byte, I’m getting kind of confused by the idea of Comcast reducing the price for their own offerings. How exactly would that occur? What if I don’t watch either Netflix or Comcast one month, do I get a refund?
The people who do pay incrementally are the content providers. Which means that they’re the ones who will be extorted if net neutrality is abolished. And it will be very much a “Nice service you’re operating. How much is it worth to you for it to keep working correctly?” kind of deal. Possibly with a dash of “I don’t like liberals. CNN = 404 not found! Ha!” for spice.
Actually, you DO have that flexibility. You order two different services from your ISP. Then you use your own equipment to prioritize your traffic to the different bandwidth “lanes”
I would imagine that ISPs would start to offer services like they do for cable. Basic internet package, doesn’t come with access to Netflix or ITunes. Pay an additional amount per month to get access to those services.
Short answer - yeah, most places in the US have, at best, broad-band service from two of the big cable companies- Comcast, Spectrum, ATT Uverse, or the like. Lots of places only have one broad-band service provider. About 30% of the US still lacks any broad-band service at all in the 25Mbps download/3Mbps upload speed range (this is the speed that the FCC has pegged as the standard for what can be advertised as broad band).
See here:
Not coincidentally, companies like Comcast are famous for their lousy customer service. Not needing to compete for customers is why they don’t have to care about satisfaction.
You’ve asked this a few times, but you don’t seem to like my answer, which is that the regulations are more restrictive than they need to be, and that excess restriction leads to inefficiency. Inefficiency means that customers pay more for services they don’t need, and that we end up building more network infrastructure than is necessary, since in order to make Netflix fast, we also have to make nightly backups fast. Those are all real costs.
I’m not sure I buy the idea that my proposed set of regulations is more complex. It’s not like the existing set of regulations is the single phrase “net neutrality”, and mine would be “net neutrality, except for [list of exceptions]”
The existing set of regulations is a big long list of things that must be done, or cannot be done, etc.
If we take that list and, say, remove a rule about not allowing content providers to pay connectivity fees now we have a shorter list. Seems less complex to me.
Certainly, removing all of the net neutrality regulations (as bad an idea as that would be) would make for a much less complex regulatory scheme. How does removing some of them make for a more complex one?
I don’t believe that I do (though I could be wrong).
I can order more expensive service from my ISP, but they don’t actually guarantee a higher speed. They simply make a best effort attempt to give me that speed. But of course they oversell their network capacity, which means that we effectively all get crappy, slow, high latency internet sometimes, based on the current network usage.
But, let’s imagine that I could actually do this. I have to set up my own routers and deal with a bunch of technical nonsense. I could do that, but it’s probably not worth my time. So, since I could do this with lots of effort, why is it not ok for the ISP to do it for me?
I have no problem with regulations that prohibit ISPs from blocking services, or from degrading data to them.
Now I’m confused. You suggested that I could do the thing I want by buying two separate tiers of service from my ISP. But if the above issue is a problem, then I obviously can’t.
Well, no. I support many of its provisions. But not the ones that I’ve explicitly pointed out I think are unnecessarily restrictive.
Do you understand that “net neutrality” is a name that describes a whole bunch of concepts bundled together, and that you can agree with some of them without agreeing with all of them?
You are right, i keep getting “direct links” entered into my head, since that’s what I’m used to. But yeah, you are right.
Your ISP can provide you with a low latency link to the Internet right now if they wanted to. Net neutrality doesn’t prevent that. But they won’t because they don’t control the entire link between you and whoever you are connecting to. You will complain that you are paying for a low latency link but your Skype sessions are still all fucked up. And they will say “Sorry, we don’t guarantee latency rates after your traffic leaves our network” And you will be mad. That’s why they don’t do it.
What other “provisions” of net neutrality do you disagree with?
The one where network endpoints can’t pay for customers access to them.
This is a contentious issue in (particularly) developing countries (where internet access is very expensive compared to average incomes). Facebook comes in and makes a deal with ISPs that people can go to Facebook for free (while paying normal rates for other data). The argument is that this gives Facebook an unfair advantage, since people will do all their internetting through Facebook.
And that argument is true (to a point). It definitely gives Facebook an advantage. I just don’t see it as an advantage that needs to be regulated away. And, as much as I’d love to see Facebook die in a fire, it also prevents things like free Wikipedia access to everyone (which is a thing Wikipedia was trying to do but got shut down by net neutrality proponents in some places)
Free shipping gives Amazon an advantage, and I’m ok with that. It seems very comparable to me. If some website wants to get more users by paying for their data, ok. As long as there’s still a reasonable option to pay your own way to go everywhere, I don’t care if there’s a subsidized option to go to specific sites.
Net neutrality is pretty simple as regulations go. Basically treat each data packet the same giving no preference to one over another. Seems straightforward enough to me and it is what ISPs have been doing since the beginning of the internet so not like this is a problem or expensive to implement. Indeed, prioritizing packets will be the more onerous task.
And while you keep going on about efficiency you have not shown that the system is broken and needs this efficiency. Again, the system has been working fine till now. Not seeing how your efficiencies will improve things for me, the end user.
And the ISPs can already do things to move some traffic to lower traffic times such as instituting a data cap and then making the times between (say) midnight and 6a not count against your data allotment. People would then start moving their backups to the night or downloading games or whatever.
A more likely scenario is one Comcast already tried to implement. It goes like this:
Change pricing structure so each tier has total data download limits (say 5gb per month up to 100gb per months)
Then exempt Xfinity streaming service from those limits.
Now, you can pay Netflix\Hulu\Amazon for 9.99 a month each and only get 6 hours of streaming video in HD, or you can pay 24.99 to Comcast and get unlimited video.
Or you can go more extreme and just decide that you will not carry Netflix at all.
Even if you take out the conflict of ISPs directly competing with other online content providers it is still a problem. I hope you are happy with the current companies that provide content, because having to pay your own connection and data fees, but gateway fees for every ISP will introduce huge barriers to entry. New media providers will be shut out of the market. Innovation and competition will bake a big hit.
