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From the article: "There is an alternative to [Spotify], in getting outside of it, but only if we have net neutrality. If they really fuck with net neutrality,

From the article: "There is an alternative to [Spotify], in getting outside of it, but only if we have net neutrality. If they really fuck with net neutrality, then I don’t know what independent musicians are going to do. Right now, you can go up on Bandcamp and you can put out your record, and they take their 15 percent cut, and you can make a fair amount of money selling a couple hundred CDs. You can do okay. But if that kind of freedom is taken away, then it’s going to be a really strange game." This is some bizarre logic that has filtered down into the general population - that if ISPs are allowed to prioritize traffic, it inevitably leads to people not being allowed to sell zip files of their band's music. It's a ridiculous conclusion to draw.

logn 11y ago
It depends how you interpret non-neutrality: 1. Laws written to allow different "lanes" of traffic, with protections that prohibit censorship and don't raise the bar of entry for websites. 2. Providers mostly have free reign to slow/stop any data that crosses their network and charge anyone however they want. Given Facebook's internet.org and similar "zero-rating" schemes, I'm not sure you can dismiss argument 2 so easily.
chrischen 11y ago
Spotify could make the argument that they are willing to provide free unlimited music streaming to impoverished Americans (as an altruistic act of course) by partnering with ISPs (of course Spotify will still serve ads to these users). They would pump their millions of dollars as a large player in the industry into this effort, and music listening becomes de-facto based on the Spotify platform because they've invested in a deal that would bring free music streaming to the masses of impoverished and (musically) underserved Americans. Smaller streaming services such as Bandcamp, with their selfish capitalistic intent on charging for their services directly, cannot compete with the pervasiveness and free-ness of Spotify services. People cannot fathom why they would pay to buy music when Spotify is so generously providing it for free (faster loading, free, and doesn't use up their data allotments!) included in their ISP plan. Far down in the future Spotify realizes they don't have to improve their services anymore. They realize "hey altruistic act we did is actually a great indirect way to pay to make our competitor's services worse, instead of investing in making our services better." By paying to prioritize their traffic at the network level, Spotify realized they can leverage their existing size, money, and power to simply hold down the competition at the ISP level rather than rise up above them in the product level.
mattlutze 11y ago
Or ISPs with a penchant for expansion can produce Spotify competitors (many mobile carriers already do have their own streaming music services) and favor those over competing services as included/complementary/whathaveyou services. It's not a particularly ridiculous end to walk out to, really. Once they have their service they don't need to do any favors for other music competitors, such as Bandcamp, unless those services "partner to provide a premium experience." In this fuzzy future, they need not block it, just make that traffic part of the basic pipeline that gets regularly and frustratingly throttled.
wpietri 11y ago
> It's a ridiculous conclusion to draw. Not really. My guess is you're young enough that you never had to deal with AT&T in their prime. Packet prioritization is the very beginning of what carriers would like to happen. But once they get it, each succeeding step gets easier. The basic view of a dominant carrier is that they should get a piece of everything that passes through their network. Everything. And because they're enormous, they really only want to deal with other enormous entities. It's most convenient for them to skim 30% of everything if they deal with just a few other players who are also monopoly or oligopoly players. Try to imagine what the Internet would be like if Ticketmaster were in charge. Or if you'd like to read the history, When Wizards Stay Up Late, an origin story of the Internet, gives some of the flavor of how much AT&T squeezed everything. Or you could look at the history of the answering machine. It was originally invented by AT&T, but they suppressed the invention out of fear that it would cut down on call revenue. [1] They fought tooth and nail against letting other companies sell them; it wasn't until 1956 you were even allowed to strap something to your phone [2], and they prevented people making electrical connections to the telephone network until 1968 [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_machine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_decision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory...
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  I'm pushing 40 and my mom was a lifelong GTE employee, and while I only vaguely remember pre-divestiture, I've heard all the stories - from both sides of the DMARC. Even if they want to, I don't believe it's possible for ISPs to exact Ma Bell level control over their services, for a number of reasons - the main ones being that the landscape is not a monopoly, and that while consumers might not care about their mobile carrier throttling Spotify or Netflix, they won't stand for being served with a completely locked-down web across the board. That's just not going to happen. I know I represent a minority position inside tech - of not supporting Net Neutrality - but I would support it if there were an actual monopoly, or if ISPs were rendering sites and services completely inaccessible, which they are not. Until then, it's just a slippery slope imo.
pjc50 11y ago
People like streaming, and without net neutrality providers can inject jitter and loss into all streaming services (even ones you've set up yourself on e.g. AWS) that haven't paid the protection money.
- brandonmenc 11y ago
  The argument was that a service like Bandcamp, where you sell file downloads, wouldn't exist - which is a stronger position than arguing that streaming wouldn't exist.
notatoad 11y ago
It's not a ridiculous conclusion, its reality. Theres a lot of people who will not pay for the internet if they can get Facebook, WhatsApp, wikipedia, and BBC for free. That's what internet.org is doing in India, and it will crush services like bandcamp that exist because of an open internet. Or t-mobile's free streaming plans - you pay for a couple hundred megs of data and your Spotify doesn't count towards that quota, so you can't download a bandcamp album because your plan doesn't allow for it. This isn't some crazy future we're imagining. This is the internet right now.
kevingadd 11y ago
Ridiculous other than that T-Mobile is doing it right now. http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html

logn 11y ago

It depends how you interpret non-neutrality: 1. Laws written to allow different "lanes" of traffic, with protections that prohibit censorship and don't raise the bar of entry for websites. 2. Providers mostly have free reign to slow/stop any data that crosses their network and charge anyone however they want. Given Facebook's internet.org and similar "zero-rating" schemes, I'm not sure you can dismiss argument 2 so easily.

chrischen 11y ago

Spotify could make the argument that they are willing to provide free unlimited music streaming to impoverished Americans (as an altruistic act of course) by partnering with ISPs (of course Spotify will still serve ads to these users). They would pump their millions of dollars as a large player in the industry into this effort, and music listening becomes de-facto based on the Spotify platform because they've invested in a deal that would bring free music streaming to the masses of impoverished and (musically) underserved Americans. Smaller streaming services such as Bandcamp, with their selfish capitalistic intent on charging for their services directly, cannot compete with the pervasiveness and free-ness of Spotify services. People cannot fathom why they would pay to buy music when Spotify is so generously providing it for free (faster loading, free, and doesn't use up their data allotments!) included in their ISP plan. Far down in the future Spotify realizes they don't have to improve their services anymore. They realize "hey altruistic act we did is actually a great indirect way to pay to make our competitor's services worse, instead of investing in making our services better." By paying to prioritize their traffic at the network level, Spotify realized they can leverage their existing size, money, and power to simply hold down the competition at the ISP level rather than rise up above them in the product level.

mattlutze 11y ago

Or ISPs with a penchant for expansion can produce Spotify competitors (many mobile carriers already do have their own streaming music services) and favor those over competing services as included/complementary/whathaveyou services. It's not a particularly ridiculous end to walk out to, really. Once they have their service they don't need to do any favors for other music competitors, such as Bandcamp, unless those services "partner to provide a premium experience." In this fuzzy future, they need not block it, just make that traffic part of the basic pipeline that gets regularly and frustratingly throttled.

wpietri 11y ago

> It's a ridiculous conclusion to draw. Not really. My guess is you're young enough that you never had to deal with AT&T in their prime. Packet prioritization is the very beginning of what carriers would like to happen. But once they get it, each succeeding step gets easier. The basic view of a dominant carrier is that they should get a piece of everything that passes through their network. Everything. And because they're enormous, they really only want to deal with other enormous entities. It's most convenient for them to skim 30% of everything if they deal with just a few other players who are also monopoly or oligopoly players. Try to imagine what the Internet would be like if Ticketmaster were in charge. Or if you'd like to read the history, When Wizards Stay Up Late, an origin story of the Internet, gives some of the flavor of how much AT&T squeezed everything. Or you could look at the history of the answering machine. It was originally invented by AT&T, but they suppressed the invention out of fear that it would cut down on call revenue. [1] They fought tooth and nail against letting other companies sell them; it wasn't until 1956 you were even allowed to strap something to your phone [2], and they prevented people making electrical connections to the telephone network until 1968 [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_machine [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_decision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory...

brandonmenc 11y ago
I'm pushing 40 and my mom was a lifelong GTE employee, and while I only vaguely remember pre-divestiture, I've heard all the stories - from both sides of the DMARC. Even if they want to, I don't believe it's possible for ISPs to exact Ma Bell level control over their services, for a number of reasons - the main ones being that the landscape is not a monopoly, and that while consumers might not care about their mobile carrier throttling Spotify or Netflix, they won't stand for being served with a completely locked-down web across the board. That's just not going to happen. I know I represent a minority position inside tech - of not supporting Net Neutrality - but I would support it if there were an actual monopoly, or if ISPs were rendering sites and services completely inaccessible, which they are not. Until then, it's just a slippery slope imo.

pjc50 11y ago

People like streaming, and without net neutrality providers can inject jitter and loss into all streaming services (even ones you've set up yourself on e.g. AWS) that haven't paid the protection money.

brandonmenc 11y ago
The argument was that a service like Bandcamp, where you sell file downloads, wouldn't exist - which is a stronger position than arguing that streaming wouldn't exist.

notatoad 11y ago

It's not a ridiculous conclusion, its reality. Theres a lot of people who will not pay for the internet if they can get Facebook, WhatsApp, wikipedia, and BBC for free. That's what internet.org is doing in India, and it will crush services like bandcamp that exist because of an open internet. Or t-mobile's free streaming plans - you pay for a couple hundred megs of data and your Spotify doesn't count towards that quota, so you can't download a bandcamp album because your plan doesn't allow for it. This isn't some crazy future we're imagining. This is the internet right now.

kevingadd 11y ago

Ridiculous other than that T-Mobile is doing it right now. http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html