'Net neutrality... Where to now?

Great Debates
61

Why?

No, seriously. Are you aware of the reasons regulations are asked for? Can you present examples of not just instances where regulations were too stifling(like Sam incorrectly attempted), but also instances where they were required for the benefit of the consumer? Are you aware of the history of this industry and the specific dangers of completely unregulated behavior? Are you aware of past examples of unregulated behavior and what happens? Or is this just an stubborn opinion that’s been fed to you and you don’t actually understand it?

Saying “All regulations on business are bad” is a completely ignorant position, literally NO better than saying “Everything should be controlled by the government in a Communist Utopia.”

62

This is just more nonsense. You don’t just get to declare that people’s arguments have been refuted. You actually have to provide evidence.

Refute these assertions with facts please:

  1. When the airlines were deregulated, competition increased, ticket prices decreased, safety went up, and access to remote communities was not adversely affected and in some cases got better. These are all the opposite results of what opponents of deregulation predicted would happen.

In another thread, I documented this very carefully. Feel free to search for ‘airline deregulation’ and I’m sure you’ll find it.

  1. When the railroads were deregulated, freight efficiency increased, rail’s market share of intercity freight increased by 20%, and the cost of rail freight decreased.

  2. The deregulation of trucking led to more competition, lower prices, more availability of trucking services and a healthier industry.

In fact, the World Bank has studied the effect of trucking deregulation in many countries, and came to the following conclusions:

Cite.

In the U.S., trucking deregulation resulted in savings of $300 million to $500 million per year.

In fact, there are common patterns to industry deregulation. After deregulation of highly controlled industries, you almost always see gains in efficiency, new investments in infrastructure, a lowering of prices, and an increase in competition.

The internet is almost wholly unregulated, and we’ve already seen this - massive competition in all areas, downward pressure on prices, increased access, and a tremendous amount of innovation. But because some people are afraid of anything the government isn’t actively managing, they want to turn the internet into another dreary regulated quasi-public industry.

Am I aware of it? I’ve been part of it from the beginning. I ran one of the first ISPs in the country. I was running remote terminals connected to university mainframes in the 1970’s. I wrote and sold network communication software in the 1980’s and ran a small ISP. I ran a popular public web site in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, and today I work in software engineering writing among other things remote client applications for automation that connect over the internet.

Perhaps you could enlighten me on the specific dangers of the completely unregulated internet. It’s been around as a commercial entity for 20 years now, so I’m sure you’ll have no problem listed actual real-world examples of how the unregulated internet has been a disaster. You’d think 20 years would be enough time for these problems to surface.

Why don’t you drop the common slurs about my not being able to understand these things? I understand them just fine. I just don’t agree with you.

I know you were answering someone else, but make sure you understand that this is not MY position. I don’t believe in anarchy - I think government has a positive role to play. But it’s a role it should only play as a last resort, when all other options have been tried, and when it can be demonstrated that it can do the job it claims to do. Net Neutrality simply doesn’t meet those requirements. Not yet, anyway.

63

That particular post wasn’t directed at you, Sam. Though I find many of your reasonings and examples horribly flawed(and I’m a bit busy at the moment so I can’t get into how), you do provide reasons and examples, and they are often at least arguably useful.

I specifically didn’t address trucking in my post because I know very little about it, but I can believe that in certain cases less regulation is a good thing, so I’ll give you that one and assume you’re correct, concerning the trucking industry.

64

You alluded to the fact that my claim of damages from over-regulation was incorrect. I just showed that it wasn’t. And I’m not just talking about the trucking industry - the same pattern emerges in EVERY industry that has been deregulated. There’s plenty of evidence that over time heavily regulated industries become inefficient, competition is squashed, and the industries capture the regulators to their own benefit. There’s no reason to assume that regulating ISPs would avoid the same kind of result.

What should also give you pause is that in every case, the arguments for regulating industries were the same arguments you’re making now - that they were too important to be left to the vagaries of the free market, that they were dominated by large interests that would screw consumers, that monopolies would arise, etc.

And when these industries were deregulated, people in favor of regulation made the same arguments. For example, opponents of airline regulation said that if the airlines were deregulated they would abandon the small communities that were unprofitable and focus on the big, high traffic routes where the high profit was. They claimed that ‘cutthroat competition’ would lead to reductions in safety and airliners would be dropping out of the sky. They said that the big carriers would push all the competitors out of the market and form monopolies.

None of that happened. In fact, the opposite happened. And that’s because markets are generally self-regulating, and can be much harsher task masters than government regulators. Now, this isn’t always the case, and government should be ready to act when there is clear evidence that a market is not functioning for whatever reason. But that’s simply not the case for the internet right now - it’s highly competitive, there is widespread access, and even the ISPs who have created technical monopolies or been granted monopoly power over cable and telephone lines are facing increased competition from wireless and vendors like Google rolling out their own fiber networks.

There’s simply no evidence right now that regulation is needed. There are a handful of questionable cases and one or two worrying trends that need watching, but nothing that rises to the level that warrants the federal government getting its foot in the door of internet regulation.

I can give you an example of regulatory capture on the internet already, actually. Online gambling. There was a huge growth market a few years ago in online poker in particular. It was squashed by the U.S. government. The pressure for squashing came from Harry Reid and others who were backed by traditional casinos which were seeing their high-profit poker businesses threatened by the internet. So they demagogued the issue, claimed that families were being destroyed and that widespread gambling addiction was a big problem. The bill gained support, and passed. It made criminals out of law-abiding people just creating their own businesses.

Now, several years later, Harry Reid is sponsoring a new bill - to allow online poker. The bill has a little rider in it that gives Nevada Casinos a 2-year monopoly on online poker, during which time it can grab all the market share, work out monopolistic deals with credit card companies and online payment services, and build up their web sites.

Think about that - the government wiped out a perfectly viable industry, then once the new players were driven out of the market (and in some cases charged with crimes), the government did an about-face and opened up the industry again - but only to the cronies who had been bankrolling the powerful politicians in charge of pushing the bills.

This kind of corruption and use of regulation for powerful interests is as old as government. It’s incredibly dangerous. Other examples include the DMCA, copyright extensions, and other laws that have been passed to favor the big political contributors in the entertainment industry.

Before you assume that Net Neutrality regulation is purely about the consumer, you might want to look into the backgrounds of the politicians pushing it and see where their campaign contributions come from.

65

Uh… actually, I didn’t allude to the fact, I outright stated you were wrong. I said in some cases, over-regulation could result in damages, but that at the same time, NO regulation was bad, and in some cases too much deregulation was, in fact, harmful. I only need to provide a single example to refute this claim. I chose the railway, for though they were harmed at one point by overregulation, they were unregulated for 150 years before that, and with poor consequences, which utterly disproved your statement that they’d been regulated from the beginning.

Furthermore, for my single example, I present: The current financial situation which was brought down in a large part due to loosening of regulations that were put in place as a result of the last meltdown. This isn’t hard to grasp. You’re claiming EVERY industry was aided by deregulation, when that’s just plain not true. At best you can claim that EVERY industry saw increased profits in the short-term after deregulation, which isn’t even close to the same thing(and I’m not sure about the truth of that, either)

66

Now you’re claiming I said things I never said. I never said that railroads were regulated right from the beginning.

You’ve also changed the goalposts - now you’re saying that if you can find one example where regulation was needed or whether government improved things with regulation, you win the argument. But in fact, I never once argued against regulation in general. I actually conceded multiple times in this debate that regulation was sometimes needed to keep markets functioning properly, and in fact I suggested very specific regulations that might be needed.

And for someone who likes to throw around accusations of ignorance, you sure are making a lot of claims about the railroads that make it clear that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. For example, your claim that railroads had 150 years without regulation. The Interstate Commerce Act was signed in 1887. Unless you think the railroad industry existed in the U.S. in 1737, you’d be off by a fair bit - about 100 years, actually. The first railroads started operations in the late 1820’s in the U.S. The first land grants for major rail line construction didn’t happen until the 1850’s, and the transcontinental railroad system wasn’t approved for construction until the 1860’s.

So rather than 150 years of laissez-faire railroad operation, the major railroads only really engaged in major operations for 15-20 years before the government began heavily regulating them.

What is true is that the railroads relied on land grants from the government to be able to build their tracks, and as a result they had a technical monopoly on competition. It became financially unfeasible for other railroads to compete with the original land-grant railroads because land for tracks was too expensive. It was this flaw in the market that caused government to get involved with the ICC - and even with this obvious market failure at the time, the government still managed to screw up the railroad system so badly that popular pressure led to the abolition of the ICC and the deregulation of railroads.

67

I think you are using the word neutrality weirdly. As far as I’m concerned, it has essentially the same meaning as the word free in free market. It means that everyone has an equal opportunity to compete with everyone else.

I don’t have a problem with QOS, as long as that’s the real reason. I have a problem with one business being able to decide which web site (i.e. business) gets preferred traffic.

But, from what I understand, it seems this bill does provide for that. So I can’t understand why people are claiming it’s a defeat for net neutrality.

I don’t even really have a problem with the Bittorrent thing. The technology will just move on to something else, just like it did when Napster died. And, anyways, Bittorrent (and all other P2P paradigms) has been limited for ages because upload bandwidth is almost always such a pitiful fraction of download bandwidth.

And I seriously doubt we’ll ever move back to a tiered paradigm exclusively. The trend in everything, for as long as I’ve been alive, has been to move away from that paradigm. As the costs decrease, it becomes less useful to look at the individual, and instead look at the average.

68

What is your opinion on categorizing ISPs (owners/controllers of the “tubes”) as common carriers?

IMO, no, Comcast should not charge extra. However, as you note, consumer grade service is specifically not business grade; Holiday Inn gets what they pay for, including the slow-downs, crappy tech support, and connectivity outages.

It can’t be that easy, can it?

69

This is great – you can refresh (and/or correct) my memory. In the mid-late '90s (call it the Clinton years), a form of net neutrality was instituted by the FCC, forcing the phone company to open its lines, thus allowing ISPs to resell bandwidth. That’s when I remember actual competition taking place; small ISPs proliferated (I remember using Earthlink for a bit, then opting for a local shop), prices dropped, and the combination of available services/options expanded. I also recall the phone company fulfilling its role as a corporation against neutrality – my local ISP had to sue to gain access to the hardware “closet”, the phone company would take days to respond to their connection problems, etc.

Then Bush was elected and the rules changed – and I don’t mean to make this partisan, but different administrations set different policy, and this really is how I remember it. Pretty suddenly, the local ISPs were disappearing and we (the American public) ended up with basically cable or the phone company as ISP options, whichever happened to be available in a particular area. In fact, there were court cases in which municipalities that wanted to set up communal service were barred from doing so – telecomm corporations saw to that; let’s call it deregulatory capture. I also recall Vonage having legal issues…no way the phone company was quietly going to let competition go unchallenged.

So, my questions are: does my memory serve me correctly? If so, what does that say about regulation and/or network neutrality? Did we – again, the American public – get a better or worse deal during the deregulation of the Bush years?

70

If you’re talking about the Bell breakup, then yes that opened the door to competition. But that was again a case of deregulation, as Ma Bell was a government-mandated monopoly. Bell was broken up into multiple providers that were allowed to compete with each other for telephone service.

And yes, in the beginning there were a lot more small ISPs. But in my opnion, what decimated them was not a change in regulations, but the fact that those early ISPs were providing services that just couldn’t compete against the kind of speeds the cable companies could provide.

In my case, customers were forced to log in by phone through either the Compuserve network or directly to our multi-line hub. So they were getting data throughput no better than 1920 kbps, and often worse. And it was a more expensive option - we had to charge by the hour to make it profitable. As soon as ADSL and cable became available, we were instantly obsolete.

Note that I’m in Canada, and Canadian ISPs weren’t affected by any laws George W. Bush passed. But Canada’s ISP industry went in exactly the same direction as the U.S’s - in the early days, lots of independent ISPs, with the market eventually wiping them out in favor of the major carriers.

71

I think making ISPs common carriers would be a terrible idea. It would allow the government to regulate prices, among other things. That would kill investment.

The argument for common carriage is usually applied to technical monopolies. And in a few places, you could argue that there are technical monopolies of ISPs due to the general superiority of cable modem service and the lack of multiple cable providers. But there is growing competition from wireless, advanced ADSL solutions, etc. In some large markets there is already plenty of competition. Declaring ISPs common carriers would kill the competition that already exists. It would also give the government the rationale for wide-ranging regulation.

72

I haven’t yet read your previous post, so I’ll get back to that. But aren’t phone companies still considered common carriers at this point? If so, does the government regulate the phone companies’ prices? If the government doesn’t regulate the phone companies’ prices, then I don’t understand your post.

Perhaps I’m misusing the term “common carrier”. Clearly, it’s a technical term and I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m using colloquially. Do you have a good (that is, accurate) definition (a link is great, I’m not trying to waste your time).

Or maybe we’re using “ISP” differently. I just feel like we’re talking past one another somewhere here…

73

No, that was in the mid-to-late 80s. I’m talking specifically about the policy requiring phone companies to grant hardware access to ISPs (mid-to-late 90s). My google-fu is weak; the appropriate terms are escaping me at the moment. I’ll try some more…later, as other things are pulling me away.

Ah, yes, I forgot you’re Canadian. Still, good to have your input, even without direct experience.

74

Turns out that adding “FCC” to my searches made the results a bit more relevant. It seems as though I was thinking of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, specifically:

Of course, TCA’96 was a sweeping overhaul of policy (first since '34), so there’s tons there with which I’m not familiar, and thus I’m correspondingly not qualified to comment. But, as far as I can tell, I did remember correctly about the Bush years and the shift in policy. Besides the way Powell ran the FCC, there were various attempts at revising/updating TCA’96 (which are also beyond my commenting qualifications).

However, IMHO, the crux of net neutrality is located in the classification set up in TCA’96 (e.g., telco vs. information service), which has been argued for a long time now (as illustrated in this ArsTechnica thread from 2003, for instance).

The TCA’96 (and its classification scheme) is currently in force – that is, the internet is already regulated – so the net neutrality issue is not a matter of not regulating. Rather, it’s a matter of: how well does current regulation support the American public’s interests (and should it be changed)?