15 ms·

The implications of the end of net neutrality

110 points by kawera 10y ago

gregmac 10y ago
> And while the FCC currently supports some regulation, it still allows zero-rating, which many critics believe violates net neutrality. > Eliminating regulations essentially means ISPs can continue charging consumers for access to the internet while simultaneously charging institutions for prioritized access to those customers. This means any organization without deep enough pockets to pay an ISP’s ransom will load much slower than those with ties to ISPs. Zero-rating may actually lead to a much more dire but subtle future: it's impossible to start a new service because you can't afford to have your content zero-rated (let alone do it at every ISP). If zero-rating increases, data caps can be lowered without a lot of consumer complaint. The lower the caps get, the more necessary it is to be zero-rated if you want consumers to use your service. The really bad part of this is there isn't any need to have fair pricing. Companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google can all negotiate lower rates than a new startup because of their volume. Worse, the ISP's own zero-rated services automatically get a pricing advantage because they don't have to pay to be zero-rated.
- bdrool 10y ago
  This is the end of innovation on the internet, and the beginning of a few large, highly-entrenched incumbents with high barriers to entry. Unless your application is unusually low-bandwidth, you won't be able to compete, and that's the way the big players will want it. In less than 30 years, we'll have gone from a completely wild-west open internet to a totally locked-up playing field. It was fun while it lasted, I suppose...
  - imh 10y ago
    Innovation could still happen in countries with net neutrality.
    - sounds 10y ago
      "The Internet...well, as much of it as only requires transit within Estonia" would be a poor simulacrum of the whole. I actually agree that it's going to be a county-by-country battle. Also, Estonia in fact has some of the best ISP service. Yet the point of the internet is that nobody should care where you are, _especially_ whether you are in a G8 country.
      - leereeves 10y ago
        Why only Estonia? Is net neutrality in danger in the rest of the EU?
        thirdsun 10y ago
        You bet it is. I'm pretty sure that european providers are watching very closely and are trying to figure out how to make something similar work over here. It's always easier to argue if there's a precedent.
        onli 10y ago
        Yes. In Germany for example. Deutsche Telekom openly advocates against net neutrality, https://www.telekom.com/en/company/management-unplugged/details/net-neutrality--finding-consensus-in-the-minefield-362382 https://www.telekom.com/en/company/management-unplugged/deta..., and already practiced (don't know whether they still do that) zero rating to boost their offerings, and some partners like Spotify. Politicians wanted to end net neutrality, see http://www.dw.com/en/german-parliamentarians-tackle-net-neutrality/a-16900369 http://www.dw.com/en/german-parliamentarians-tackle-net-neut.... The last EU regulations protect net neutrality, but afaik there still are loopholes.
ultrahate 10y ago
I think yall are on the wrong side of this. Benefits of the free market vanish once regulations begin. If comcast wants to charge by the hour, let 'em try. How long until some guy creates the same product for 1/100 the price? Scarcity being the key point here. You don't have a RIGHT to use the internet, that's why it works in the first place as a commodity of sorts. I want the market to destroy comcast, Google fiber, etc. No more megacorp ISPs. I'd love to see the FCC dissolved entirely, tbh. We're not helpless, if like a meshnet initiative r we got some real big faces behind it, we'd have a gov-proof Internet in no time.
- lukeadams 10y ago
  I understand the sentiment, but doesn't it sound much more reasonable to have strictly enforced net neutrality (or consumer protection policy X), than it does to assume the "free market will take care of it someday"? These megacorps have a stranglehold on large swaths of the States – they won't allow challengers without a fight.
  - ultrahate 10y ago
    Well actually I'd say that I just explained exactly why that's a bad idea. No business is too big for consumers to choose to destroy. Yahoo is a good case in point. People chose, Yahoo was killed. The free market could do it overnight tonight, if people chose to. I get the feeling there's a lot of uninformed people who think the free market is some boogie man voodoo science that someone made up, but it's all black and white in reality. The core forces of markets are very well understood for the past... Oh about 400+ years. "wouldn't it be better to just let the govt strictly enforce arbitrary rules with zero checks and balances from people who actually have to experience it?" No.
    - lukeadams 10y ago
      I agree with you that unchecked enforcement of rules by the government is a negative. But perhaps you would agree with me that net neutrality, and perhaps more broadly the FCC, are not in an "unchecked" state. Like I said in my original comment though: I don't disagree with you entirely; I understand that the free market in most cases does correct itself. It just seems that there is a certain balance required for free-market correction, which if upset, allows for unchecked behavior by private companies. I suppose a better articulation is as follows: the free market, when working correctly, allows me to choose with my wallet. I literally can't do that in my city, unless you mean to say that spending thousands to millions to construct my own ISP is a reasonable alternative to true competition. At least from a consumer perspective? My point was that net neutrality would solve this specific issue in a top down manner, removing the need for people in cities across the country to "take matters into their own hands". It seems that you are suggesting that free market forces are capable of correcting all imbalances? (not 100% sure your position)
lend000 10y ago
It would be nice if there was more focus on how to make our regulatory landscape more competitive to enable new ISP competition and innovation, instead of worrying about the lack of a particular regulation (which wouldn't be a big deal if there was more competition/consumer choice in telecoms). Can anyone with expertise on the subject shed some light on the kinds of zoning changes, regulatory changes, and/or 'open infrastructure' policies that established cities could take to make it easier for smaller entities to build their own Internet infrastructure around public land? I'm not convinced it's such a difficult problem to allow Internet providers to compete at close to the same level as other industries.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  Here's the rundown. The cost of providing last mile internet service is dominated by fixed costs, meaning costs that are the same regardless of whether you serve 10 or 20 customers on a particular street, and regardless of how much data those customers transfer. These costs are not small; creating the capacity to serve a million households will cost north of a billion dollars. There are some policies that can knock that cost down some. The best one is to require conduit to be installed in the road anywhere it doesn't exist when road service is done. We should enact this policy. It will save us a lot of money. But it's hard to get passed because the cost is in current-year tax dollars to install conduit and the benefit is in much lower long-term costs for power distribution and telecommunications. And it "only" lowers costs, it doesn't change the competitive dynamic. The nature of the problem is this. If you have one telecommunications company then you have one piece of fiber in the ground, and when some idiot with a backhoe cuts the fiber, they need to send a truck out to fix it. If you have three competitors then there are three pieces of fiber, all next to each other, owned by different companies, all get cut at once, so you need three trucks. If you have ten competitors you need ten trucks. Most of the costs of operating last mile infrastructure share this horrible scalability. Meanwhile if you have ten competitors then each competitor has 1/10th as many customers, so the cost per customer is ten times as high. This is why last mile telecommunications is called a natural monopoly -- having a single provider will give you half the cost of having even two. So that is the source of the problem, how do we fix it? The answer is to isolate the natural monopoly to the fullest extent possible. Let it be a monopoly but let it be nothing else. Some entity (the government, a nonprofit, Comcast) owns the fiber in the ground but they do nothing else. They don't offer retail internet service, they don't offer TV service, their only job is to maintain the physical infrastructure and lease wholesale capacity to third party providers at uniform rates. Then you have plenty of competition, because anyone can lease capacity and offer service, no one has any undue advantage over the others because the rates are uniform and published, and the monopoly provider can't give any advantage to its own over-the-top offerings because it doesn't have any.
nickthemagicman 10y ago
Telecom is not a free market and ending net neutrality in no way benefits the free market. There are serious monopolys in telecom all the way down to the actual fiber in the ground... So ending net neutrality is not making the internet more free market...its just giving control of the internet to the companies with established hardware monopolys. It's that simple. Just like other public utilities like electricity and plumbing there's only so much room for infrastructure so the companies with that infrastructure in place have a monopoly. It's as far from free market as it gets. Google fiber couldn't compete because of local regulations for laying wire and hardware and the massive barriers of entry involved that established carriers overcame a half century ago before there were so many barriers. When a company like GOOGLE couldnt make fiber happen you know something seriously stinks in telecom land. To truly establish free market internet, you need to end any ADDITIONAL regulations keeping the Googles and the Elons from laying their own cables and hardware and break up the major telecom monopolies or regulate internet like a utility..not JUST end net neutrality.
- danjoc 10y ago
  >you need to end any ADDITIONAL regulations Isn't that what the new administration promises? Deregulation and ending net neutrality. I don't like monopolies either, but it's not like Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon don't have them. They have all the patents in the world to bludgeon telecom operators to death if those operators tried to start their own competing social networks or search engines.
  - nickthemagicman 10y ago
    I disagree. Theres no monopolies on ad revenue or search? Anyways, 'the free market' is usually just an excuse for politicians to justify favoritsm to certain groups and has nothing to do with actually working to make markets free and healthy.
    - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
      There is this (which Google licensed from Yahoo/Overture/Go): https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361 https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361 and then there are the patents filed by Friendster, that Facebook later acquired: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/05/facebook-friendster-patents https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/05/faceb...
skywhopper 10y ago
Basically if you wish the Internet were more like cable TV, then the end of net neutrality is for you.
CurtMonash 10y ago
People consistently ignore the middle course, which is to allow a market for differentiated quality of service, zero-rating, whatever -- but to regulate that market as to what can be offered in it. The point would be that large companies couldn't get quantity discounts with which they can blow away small ones. It's legitimate to suggest that remote/waldoed surgery needs superb data delivery guarantees, or that providers of ad-heavy contents should be allowed to pay for the data their users consume. But it's also legitimate to ensure that a small entertainment provider has a chance in bidding against the large ones. There's been a low-volume discussion of all this on my blogs for many years. http://www.dbms2.com/2014/05/14/solve-the-network-neutrality-dilemma-and-make-money-too/ http://www.dbms2.com/2014/05/14/solve-the-network-neutrality... is pretty much the latest.
- AnthonyMouse 10y ago
  The middle course is an illusion. Look at your examples: > remote/waldoed surgery needs superb data delivery guarantees It isn't a question of bandwidth or latency, the problem is that life-critical systems need hardware-level redundancy that mass market networks just don't have. Some drunk crashes into the pole at the end of your street and your internet goes down in the middle of surgery because there is only one path. This is why the hospitals that do this sort of thing have redundant dedicated physical connections on both ends. There is no other reliable way to do it. But network neutrality has nothing to do with that sort of dedicated physical point to point connection. > providers of ad-heavy contents should be allowed to pay for the data their users consume Nobody actually wants to do that. If ad providers actually cared about customer bandwidth charges they would spend more than the obviously-zero-if-not-somehow-negative amount of time they currently spend on optimizing their ads for resource consumption. The entire thing is a sham. Nobody wants to subsidize data. The ISPs raise data rates but zero-rate their own offerings to push customers away from their competitors, then go back to their competitors with their hand out and demand money to reestablish the level playing field. Or worse, charge a toll to get on the high side of the unleveled playing field. If this wasn't the case then there would be no need to involve the ISP in the transaction. If advertisers wanted to give away their profits to users then they could just pay the users directly. Some have tried this and given up, because it's ridiculous. Users would much rather have more/better journalism or services or whatever thing the ads are supporting than some tiny subsidy which is nothing more than a pittance at the level of an individual user. The only reason ISPs are involved is that they can charge $PROHIBITIVE_PRICE for data to end customers but $MONOPOLY_PRICE to content producers and it's only by getting this "discount" that it makes any sense for the content producer to engage in the transaction. The only result compared to the situation where this is prohibited is a harmful transfer of resources from high-competition content producers to low-competition ISPs.
harshreality 10y ago
Vi Hart recap of Net Neutrality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxMyTwmu_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxMyTwmu_M The first 5 minutes are conceptual background and explanation, while the last 6 minutes move on to the 2014-era politics of net neutrality. It's my favorite net neutrality summary for (IMO) naïve people who think net-neutrality stifles innovation.
mncharity 10y ago
I remember in the early 1990's, IETF leadership burning lots of time flying to Washington, to explain the importance of common carriage and network neutrality for the infant Internet. It wasn't clear it would be allowed to survive. The telcos wanted it dead. Monopoly ITT crippled it throughout the Caribbean. But it flourished. And even when neutrality wasn't law, it hovered as a threat - don't get too sociopathic, or there will be crackdown. And here we are, a human generation later. Still fighting the telcos, and still struggling to educate an ignorant Washington. Let me make a prediction for the next quarter century, and for 2040... we continue.
sergioocon 10y ago
There are alternatives to that would allow Telcos to profit without compromising net neutrality, but are more complicated because they imply cultural changes. For instance, deploying content systems inside the network would reduce bottlenecks and improve latency, and you don't need to mess with the rest of the traffic to do so. Net neutrality is there because we don't want telcos to differentiate traffic based on their value, but based on value for the customer, and that changes faster than commercial agreements. However, that means changing business models and creating value for users and content creators, unless today, not only providing the network, but a real service on top. With the end of net neutrality, small companies (that can start without that close to the home content distribution up to a certain traffic), would not be able to compete with the established ones, so innovation will be hindered (unless we all want faster horses)
jcadam 10y ago
Hey man, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes... But on a more serious note, given this new environment if one were say, developing/bootstrapping a B2B SaaS would it make sense to prioritize developing/selling a self-hosted(e.g., "enterprise") version of the product over a "cloud-based" offering? Or, perhaps the major cloud-based IaaS/PaaS providers like AWS might negotiate with all of the bridge trolls themselves (on behalf of their customers), and just pass down the costs via higher rates to all of their subscribers?
- jackmott 10y ago
  The series of tubes analogy was pretty sound. Hell, it is even literally true now.
gm-conspiracy 10y ago
Am I correct in assuming this is only a US problem? I am curious what the landscape will look like in the next decade, as "data" prices increase, while local storage continues to plummet. It reminds me of "Exit Strategy" by Douglas Rushkoff, where it discusses vertical brand integration.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Am I correct in assuming this is only a US problem? Yes and no. The direct effect is on US consumers, but because of how much of the money made from internet content and online services is from US consumers, it likely has a very significant indirect effect on global competition.
woah 10y ago
Can someone explain to me why edge servers do not have all of the terrible effects of non-net-neutrality? ISPs install edge servers that result in faster service for content from some providers. Maybe they charge for them. Maybe they also charge for a leased line from the content provider's data center. They can of course do this for their own content as a way of utilizing their monopoly power. Why hasn't the sky fallen already?
- forgottenpass 10y ago
  Because, generally speaking, the end users currently have an internet connection with the capacity and (relative lack of) traffic discrimination to pull that content over the internet. If the boxes collocated at an ISP broke today, the data would flow to users from distant data centers. All that would happen is the ISP and the content provider might end up paying a little more in network costs. The edge servers in the ISP network would only have the same non-network-neutrality effects if the ISP offered a string-and-soup-can connection to the internet that could not support the service. The fear is - as it's always been - the ISP's ability to make a remote service effectively unavailable to their customers.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
I, like much of Silicon Valley, make more money with strongly-enforced net neutrality. I try to remove those blinders from time to time and think from the other side. Could an oscillation between hard and soft net neutrality b better than NN "always on"? Let me explain. Strongly-enforced NN earns those using the pipes (including those not yet founded) more. Weakly-enforced NN earns those owning the pipes (including those not yet laid) more. When returns to content creators are low, you get incumbency--no Netflix or Spotify. When returns to pipe owners are low, you also get incumbency. No Google Fiber or SpaceX satellite Internet [1]. (Another solution is weak-form NN on new (and utilized) capacity. After some time, that incentive would phase out to strong-form NN. Like patent protection.) Corollary: is a pro-NN ISP something consumers would pay more for? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation
gm-conspiracy 10y ago
I do not welcome the new Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy oligopoly. Also, how will this affect mobile app-developers that rely on a server backend? Will this drastically curtail mobile app development?
at-fates-hands 10y ago
Basically this whole argument comes down to two viewpoints: 1) If you believe in Net Neutrality, then you believe the government will be a good and objective manager of the internet. 2) If you believe nearly everything the government touches it fucks up and cannot be trusted to manage anything, let alone something as open and free as the internet, then you're against Net Neutrality.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  I can use a strawman argument too: 1) If you are against Net Neutrality, then you believe Comcast will be a good and objective manager of the internet. 2) If you believe nearly everything Comcast touches it fucks up and cannot be trusted to manage anything, let alone something as open and free as the internet, then you are for Net Neutrality.

110 points by kawera 10y ago

> And while the FCC currently supports some regulation, it still allows zero-rating, which many critics believe violates net neutrality. > Eliminating regulations essentially means ISPs can continue charging consumers for access to the internet while simultaneously charging institutions for prioritized access to those customers. This means any organization without deep enough pockets to pay an ISP’s ransom will load much slower than those with ties to ISPs. Zero-rating may actually lead to a much more dire but subtle future: it's impossible to start a new service because you can't afford to have your content zero-rated (let alone do it at every ISP). If zero-rating increases, data caps can be lowered without a lot of consumer complaint. The lower the caps get, the more necessary it is to be zero-rated if you want consumers to use your service. The really bad part of this is there isn't any need to have fair pricing. Companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Google can all negotiate lower rates than a new startup because of their volume. Worse, the ISP's own zero-rated services automatically get a pricing advantage because they don't have to pay to be zero-rated.

bdrool 10y ago
This is the end of innovation on the internet, and the beginning of a few large, highly-entrenched incumbents with high barriers to entry. Unless your application is unusually low-bandwidth, you won't be able to compete, and that's the way the big players will want it. In less than 30 years, we'll have gone from a completely wild-west open internet to a totally locked-up playing field. It was fun while it lasted, I suppose...
- imh 10y ago
  Innovation could still happen in countries with net neutrality.
  - sounds 10y ago
    "The Internet...well, as much of it as only requires transit within Estonia" would be a poor simulacrum of the whole. I actually agree that it's going to be a county-by-country battle. Also, Estonia in fact has some of the best ISP service. Yet the point of the internet is that nobody should care where you are, _especially_ whether you are in a G8 country.
    - leereeves 10y ago
      Why only Estonia? Is net neutrality in danger in the rest of the EU?
      - thirdsun 10y ago
        You bet it is. I'm pretty sure that european providers are watching very closely and are trying to figure out how to make something similar work over here. It's always easier to argue if there's a precedent.
      - onli 10y ago
        Yes. In Germany for example. Deutsche Telekom openly advocates against net neutrality, https://www.telekom.com/en/company/management-unplugged/details/net-neutrality--finding-consensus-in-the-minefield-362382 https://www.telekom.com/en/company/management-unplugged/deta..., and already practiced (don't know whether they still do that) zero rating to boost their offerings, and some partners like Spotify. Politicians wanted to end net neutrality, see http://www.dw.com/en/german-parliamentarians-tackle-net-neutrality/a-16900369 http://www.dw.com/en/german-parliamentarians-tackle-net-neut.... The last EU regulations protect net neutrality, but afaik there still are loopholes.

ultrahate 10y ago

I think yall are on the wrong side of this. Benefits of the free market vanish once regulations begin. If comcast wants to charge by the hour, let 'em try. How long until some guy creates the same product for 1/100 the price? Scarcity being the key point here. You don't have a RIGHT to use the internet, that's why it works in the first place as a commodity of sorts. I want the market to destroy comcast, Google fiber, etc. No more megacorp ISPs. I'd love to see the FCC dissolved entirely, tbh. We're not helpless, if like a meshnet initiative r we got some real big faces behind it, we'd have a gov-proof Internet in no time.

lukeadams 10y ago
I understand the sentiment, but doesn't it sound much more reasonable to have strictly enforced net neutrality (or consumer protection policy X), than it does to assume the "free market will take care of it someday"? These megacorps have a stranglehold on large swaths of the States – they won't allow challengers without a fight.
- ultrahate 10y ago
  Well actually I'd say that I just explained exactly why that's a bad idea. No business is too big for consumers to choose to destroy. Yahoo is a good case in point. People chose, Yahoo was killed. The free market could do it overnight tonight, if people chose to. I get the feeling there's a lot of uninformed people who think the free market is some boogie man voodoo science that someone made up, but it's all black and white in reality. The core forces of markets are very well understood for the past... Oh about 400+ years. "wouldn't it be better to just let the govt strictly enforce arbitrary rules with zero checks and balances from people who actually have to experience it?" No.
  - lukeadams 10y ago
    I agree with you that unchecked enforcement of rules by the government is a negative. But perhaps you would agree with me that net neutrality, and perhaps more broadly the FCC, are not in an "unchecked" state. Like I said in my original comment though: I don't disagree with you entirely; I understand that the free market in most cases does correct itself. It just seems that there is a certain balance required for free-market correction, which if upset, allows for unchecked behavior by private companies. I suppose a better articulation is as follows: the free market, when working correctly, allows me to choose with my wallet. I literally can't do that in my city, unless you mean to say that spending thousands to millions to construct my own ISP is a reasonable alternative to true competition. At least from a consumer perspective? My point was that net neutrality would solve this specific issue in a top down manner, removing the need for people in cities across the country to "take matters into their own hands". It seems that you are suggesting that free market forces are capable of correcting all imbalances? (not 100% sure your position)

lend000 10y ago

It would be nice if there was more focus on how to make our regulatory landscape more competitive to enable new ISP competition and innovation, instead of worrying about the lack of a particular regulation (which wouldn't be a big deal if there was more competition/consumer choice in telecoms). Can anyone with expertise on the subject shed some light on the kinds of zoning changes, regulatory changes, and/or 'open infrastructure' policies that established cities could take to make it easier for smaller entities to build their own Internet infrastructure around public land? I'm not convinced it's such a difficult problem to allow Internet providers to compete at close to the same level as other industries.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
Here's the rundown. The cost of providing last mile internet service is dominated by fixed costs, meaning costs that are the same regardless of whether you serve 10 or 20 customers on a particular street, and regardless of how much data those customers transfer. These costs are not small; creating the capacity to serve a million households will cost north of a billion dollars. There are some policies that can knock that cost down some. The best one is to require conduit to be installed in the road anywhere it doesn't exist when road service is done. We should enact this policy. It will save us a lot of money. But it's hard to get passed because the cost is in current-year tax dollars to install conduit and the benefit is in much lower long-term costs for power distribution and telecommunications. And it "only" lowers costs, it doesn't change the competitive dynamic. The nature of the problem is this. If you have one telecommunications company then you have one piece of fiber in the ground, and when some idiot with a backhoe cuts the fiber, they need to send a truck out to fix it. If you have three competitors then there are three pieces of fiber, all next to each other, owned by different companies, all get cut at once, so you need three trucks. If you have ten competitors you need ten trucks. Most of the costs of operating last mile infrastructure share this horrible scalability. Meanwhile if you have ten competitors then each competitor has 1/10th as many customers, so the cost per customer is ten times as high. This is why last mile telecommunications is called a natural monopoly -- having a single provider will give you half the cost of having even two. So that is the source of the problem, how do we fix it? The answer is to isolate the natural monopoly to the fullest extent possible. Let it be a monopoly but let it be nothing else. Some entity (the government, a nonprofit, Comcast) owns the fiber in the ground but they do nothing else. They don't offer retail internet service, they don't offer TV service, their only job is to maintain the physical infrastructure and lease wholesale capacity to third party providers at uniform rates. Then you have plenty of competition, because anyone can lease capacity and offer service, no one has any undue advantage over the others because the rates are uniform and published, and the monopoly provider can't give any advantage to its own over-the-top offerings because it doesn't have any.

nickthemagicman 10y ago

Telecom is not a free market and ending net neutrality in no way benefits the free market. There are serious monopolys in telecom all the way down to the actual fiber in the ground... So ending net neutrality is not making the internet more free market...its just giving control of the internet to the companies with established hardware monopolys. It's that simple. Just like other public utilities like electricity and plumbing there's only so much room for infrastructure so the companies with that infrastructure in place have a monopoly. It's as far from free market as it gets. Google fiber couldn't compete because of local regulations for laying wire and hardware and the massive barriers of entry involved that established carriers overcame a half century ago before there were so many barriers. When a company like GOOGLE couldnt make fiber happen you know something seriously stinks in telecom land. To truly establish free market internet, you need to end any ADDITIONAL regulations keeping the Googles and the Elons from laying their own cables and hardware and break up the major telecom monopolies or regulate internet like a utility..not JUST end net neutrality.

danjoc 10y ago
>you need to end any ADDITIONAL regulations Isn't that what the new administration promises? Deregulation and ending net neutrality. I don't like monopolies either, but it's not like Google/Apple/Facebook/Amazon don't have them. They have all the patents in the world to bludgeon telecom operators to death if those operators tried to start their own competing social networks or search engines.
- nickthemagicman 10y ago
  I disagree. Theres no monopolies on ad revenue or search? Anyways, 'the free market' is usually just an excuse for politicians to justify favoritsm to certain groups and has nothing to do with actually working to make markets free and healthy.
  - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
    There is this (which Google licensed from Yahoo/Overture/Go): https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361 https://www.google.com/patents/US6269361 and then there are the patents filed by Friendster, that Facebook later acquired: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/05/facebook-friendster-patents https://www.theguardian.com/technology/pda/2010/aug/05/faceb...

skywhopper 10y ago

Basically if you wish the Internet were more like cable TV, then the end of net neutrality is for you.

CurtMonash 10y ago

People consistently ignore the middle course, which is to allow a market for differentiated quality of service, zero-rating, whatever -- but to regulate that market as to what can be offered in it. The point would be that large companies couldn't get quantity discounts with which they can blow away small ones. It's legitimate to suggest that remote/waldoed surgery needs superb data delivery guarantees, or that providers of ad-heavy contents should be allowed to pay for the data their users consume. But it's also legitimate to ensure that a small entertainment provider has a chance in bidding against the large ones. There's been a low-volume discussion of all this on my blogs for many years. http://www.dbms2.com/2014/05/14/solve-the-network-neutrality-dilemma-and-make-money-too/ http://www.dbms2.com/2014/05/14/solve-the-network-neutrality... is pretty much the latest.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
The middle course is an illusion. Look at your examples: > remote/waldoed surgery needs superb data delivery guarantees It isn't a question of bandwidth or latency, the problem is that life-critical systems need hardware-level redundancy that mass market networks just don't have. Some drunk crashes into the pole at the end of your street and your internet goes down in the middle of surgery because there is only one path. This is why the hospitals that do this sort of thing have redundant dedicated physical connections on both ends. There is no other reliable way to do it. But network neutrality has nothing to do with that sort of dedicated physical point to point connection. > providers of ad-heavy contents should be allowed to pay for the data their users consume Nobody actually wants to do that. If ad providers actually cared about customer bandwidth charges they would spend more than the obviously-zero-if-not-somehow-negative amount of time they currently spend on optimizing their ads for resource consumption. The entire thing is a sham. Nobody wants to subsidize data. The ISPs raise data rates but zero-rate their own offerings to push customers away from their competitors, then go back to their competitors with their hand out and demand money to reestablish the level playing field. Or worse, charge a toll to get on the high side of the unleveled playing field. If this wasn't the case then there would be no need to involve the ISP in the transaction. If advertisers wanted to give away their profits to users then they could just pay the users directly. Some have tried this and given up, because it's ridiculous. Users would much rather have more/better journalism or services or whatever thing the ads are supporting than some tiny subsidy which is nothing more than a pittance at the level of an individual user. The only reason ISPs are involved is that they can charge $PROHIBITIVE_PRICE for data to end customers but $MONOPOLY_PRICE to content producers and it's only by getting this "discount" that it makes any sense for the content producer to engage in the transaction. The only result compared to the situation where this is prohibited is a harmful transfer of resources from high-competition content producers to low-competition ISPs.

harshreality 10y ago

Vi Hart recap of Net Neutrality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxMyTwmu_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxMyTwmu_M The first 5 minutes are conceptual background and explanation, while the last 6 minutes move on to the 2014-era politics of net neutrality. It's my favorite net neutrality summary for (IMO) naïve people who think net-neutrality stifles innovation.

mncharity 10y ago

I remember in the early 1990's, IETF leadership burning lots of time flying to Washington, to explain the importance of common carriage and network neutrality for the infant Internet. It wasn't clear it would be allowed to survive. The telcos wanted it dead. Monopoly ITT crippled it throughout the Caribbean. But it flourished. And even when neutrality wasn't law, it hovered as a threat - don't get too sociopathic, or there will be crackdown. And here we are, a human generation later. Still fighting the telcos, and still struggling to educate an ignorant Washington. Let me make a prediction for the next quarter century, and for 2040... we continue.

sergioocon 10y ago

There are alternatives to that would allow Telcos to profit without compromising net neutrality, but are more complicated because they imply cultural changes. For instance, deploying content systems inside the network would reduce bottlenecks and improve latency, and you don't need to mess with the rest of the traffic to do so. Net neutrality is there because we don't want telcos to differentiate traffic based on their value, but based on value for the customer, and that changes faster than commercial agreements. However, that means changing business models and creating value for users and content creators, unless today, not only providing the network, but a real service on top. With the end of net neutrality, small companies (that can start without that close to the home content distribution up to a certain traffic), would not be able to compete with the established ones, so innovation will be hindered (unless we all want faster horses)

jcadam 10y ago

Hey man, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes... But on a more serious note, given this new environment if one were say, developing/bootstrapping a B2B SaaS would it make sense to prioritize developing/selling a self-hosted(e.g., "enterprise") version of the product over a "cloud-based" offering? Or, perhaps the major cloud-based IaaS/PaaS providers like AWS might negotiate with all of the bridge trolls themselves (on behalf of their customers), and just pass down the costs via higher rates to all of their subscribers?

jackmott 10y ago
The series of tubes analogy was pretty sound. Hell, it is even literally true now.

gm-conspiracy 10y ago

Am I correct in assuming this is only a US problem? I am curious what the landscape will look like in the next decade, as "data" prices increase, while local storage continues to plummet. It reminds me of "Exit Strategy" by Douglas Rushkoff, where it discusses vertical brand integration.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Am I correct in assuming this is only a US problem? Yes and no. The direct effect is on US consumers, but because of how much of the money made from internet content and online services is from US consumers, it likely has a very significant indirect effect on global competition.

woah 10y ago

Can someone explain to me why edge servers do not have all of the terrible effects of non-net-neutrality? ISPs install edge servers that result in faster service for content from some providers. Maybe they charge for them. Maybe they also charge for a leased line from the content provider's data center. They can of course do this for their own content as a way of utilizing their monopoly power. Why hasn't the sky fallen already?

forgottenpass 10y ago
Because, generally speaking, the end users currently have an internet connection with the capacity and (relative lack of) traffic discrimination to pull that content over the internet. If the boxes collocated at an ISP broke today, the data would flow to users from distant data centers. All that would happen is the ISP and the content provider might end up paying a little more in network costs. The edge servers in the ISP network would only have the same non-network-neutrality effects if the ISP offered a string-and-soup-can connection to the internet that could not support the service. The fear is - as it's always been - the ISP's ability to make a remote service effectively unavailable to their customers.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

I, like much of Silicon Valley, make more money with strongly-enforced net neutrality. I try to remove those blinders from time to time and think from the other side. Could an oscillation between hard and soft net neutrality b better than NN "always on"? Let me explain. Strongly-enforced NN earns those using the pipes (including those not yet founded) more. Weakly-enforced NN earns those owning the pipes (including those not yet laid) more. When returns to content creators are low, you get incumbency--no Netflix or Spotify. When returns to pipe owners are low, you also get incumbency. No Google Fiber or SpaceX satellite Internet [1]. (Another solution is weak-form NN on new (and utilized) capacity. After some time, that incentive would phase out to strong-form NN. Like patent protection.) Corollary: is a pro-NN ISP something consumers would pay more for? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation

gm-conspiracy 10y ago

I do not welcome the new Compuserve, AOL, and Prodigy oligopoly. Also, how will this affect mobile app-developers that rely on a server backend? Will this drastically curtail mobile app development?

at-fates-hands 10y ago

Basically this whole argument comes down to two viewpoints: 1) If you believe in Net Neutrality, then you believe the government will be a good and objective manager of the internet. 2) If you believe nearly everything the government touches it fucks up and cannot be trusted to manage anything, let alone something as open and free as the internet, then you're against Net Neutrality.

TheCoelacanth 10y ago
I can use a strawman argument too: 1) If you are against Net Neutrality, then you believe Comcast will be a good and objective manager of the internet. 2) If you believe nearly everything Comcast touches it fucks up and cannot be trusted to manage anything, let alone something as open and free as the internet, then you are for Net Neutrality.