11 ms·

While I like the Internet being open, I don't like "net neutrality" extremism. 1) While I dislike monopoly carrier antics, I'm even more unhappy about the idea

• Keverw 10y ago
  Yeah, I do think more competition between providers would naturally solve a lot of these problems. There's to much politics involved, even for a company as big as Google. At&t for example suing in Louisville. The FCC and states should do something to help foster more competition and lowing the barrier to entry. http://www.recode.net/2016/2/26/11588286/google-fiber-swings-back-at-att-over-attempt-to-stonewall-google-in http://www.recode.net/2016/2/26/11588286/google-fiber-swings...
• 1_2__3 10y ago
  > the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs I have to admit I read that and I completely discount the rest of your comment. Nobody who actually believes in even the concept of sensible government regulation uses phrasing like this. I'm surprised you didn't call out "three letter agencies" too. And besides that I believe you're just trying to fool people too stupid to know what NN is when you say net neutrality "dictates network engineering standards". I don't think your comment is intellectually honest at all.
  • acalderaro 10y ago
    Ah, a member of the mythical "coastal liberal ideological vacuum," where anyone who brings up the slightest anti-government sentiment gets bombarded with ad hominem attacks and logical fallacies, instead of facts and reason. Is that because the coastal liberal is uneducated, or simply immature? If we generously assume the latter, it's important for you to know that the sort of thinking that let Trump win the white house is echoed in your entire comment. Congratulations! I've got to run, but in the meantime, perhaps you can educate yourself on some of the potential shortcomings associated with regulating the internet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Reduction_in_innovation_and_investments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Reduction_in_in... Edit: Oh look! Downvotes for observations. What an amazing display of irony.
    • wonder_er 10y ago
      I'm with you. I still feel a bit surprised at the cognitive dissonance required to support internet privacy (on one hand) and on the other, recommend having a government body regulate _the entire internet_. I wonder if this breakdown is at least in part between populations in the USA and everyone else. I've sat down with some pro-nn folks, honestly trying to understand how they reconcile the two, and have not made much progress.
      • ludston 10y ago
        I do not understand why there is cognitive dissonance here? NN gives users power. Privacy gives users power. There is no dissonance in wanting both of these things that have the same end. Are you suggesting that all government regulation is a violation of user privacy? (If so, I would suggest you share a different definition of privacy to most people)
      • orthecreedence 10y ago
        The government can say "all ships using a federally funded port must follow these docking procedures" without knowing what's in the ships, no? Does the solve the cognitive dissonance issue for you?
      • 10y ago
• acdha 10y ago
  Your first point isn't traditionally included in net neutrality – that belief, and everything about bureaucrats dictating standards was created out of whole cloth by the ISP lobbying effort. The core idea is only fairness: e.g. Comcast can't throttle or charge for connectivity based on your perceived ability to pay and their in-house service shouldn't get separate pricing. Similarly, zero-rating isn't usually considered a network neutrality problem as long as the option is open to everyone at the same pricing. It becomes anticompetitive if e.g. you're quoted twice what Comcast charges the company they have an interest in.
  • tetrep 10y ago
    > Similarly, zero-rating isn't usually considered a network neutrality problem as long as the option is open to everyone at the same pricing. That's still extremely anti-competitive. Incumbents are in an much better position to pay large sums of money to have relatively minor services stream for free. People will flock to those services and a small competitor will have no viable option of paying for the fees and remaining profitable. You might counter that with "get funding!" But I think the internet is amazing because of it's low barrier to entry. Blocking that might not prevent "disruption" from startups, but it sure as hell will prevent many people from casually trying things.
    • rdl 10y ago
      I think the natural consequence of zero rating or other benefits for "big" providers is an expansion of CDNs and other intermediaries to let a collection of small sites benefit from the infrastructure investment of others, in addition to consolidation (such as content providers running YouTube channels vs. their own video infrastructure).
    • acdha 10y ago
      It's less competitive but I think “extremely anti-competitive” is an overstatement: it might mean that when you talk competition to Comcast, Verizon, etc. you're talking about companies on the scale of Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. but those would be an option whereas without some sort of parity it'd be the choice between using your ISP's service or paying $200/month. I do agree that there's a public-good aspect to supporting Internet access but I think that's an even greater change to the current market, at least where most users are on wireless.
• bo1024 10y ago
  What do you mean by extremism? I view net neutrality as the requirement to treat all bits equally regardless of source, which is kind of a binary one. I think as long as we are talking about the hardware infrastructure, (2) is a fundamental problem that cannot be fixed by adding competition, because it shares some common features with utilities like water, electricity, etc (making me believe internet access ought to be treated more like a utility). Maybe a better solution is a national commitment to fund and build quality internet access infrastrcture for the entire country, then encourage competition among what flows over those wires. (Disclaimer: not an economist and do not have expertise on this subject.)
  • rsync 10y ago
    "What do you mean by extremism? I view net neutrality as the requirement to treat all bits equally regardless of source, which is kind of a binary one." It should be possible for me to build some kind of public network, somewhere, for some purpose ... and dictate bits/traffic any way I see fit. Now maybe I can't do that with CATV because common carrier. And maybe I can't do that with public spectrum because public resources. But there should be some way I can do that. Net neutrality extremism suggests that there should not be any way I can do that.
    • Arizhel 10y ago
      There shouldn't, unless you're wiling to be responsible for all the bits that pass through your network. So if one of your subscribers transfers some CP on your network, you need to automatically to go prison for life for that. Is that OK with you? Sounds good to me.
      • wonder_er 10y ago
        My default heuristic is "anytime someone uses "think of the children" as an argument for protection, they have chosen one of the slipperiest of slopes to stand upon." I doubt I'm the only one. I recommend picking a better argument than CP to defend net neutrality.
• pharrlax 10y ago
  >It should be a market decision, not a national government decision. That's all well and good where competitive markets exist, but in many places, they simply don't. Only 23% of American census blocks, for example, have more than 1 option for 25MBPS+ internet. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband-still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
  • rdl 10y ago
    Maybe the solution is to use exemption from NN as a carrot to encourage competition. "If there are two (or 3? or 4?) or more separate providers offering parity level of service to a property, all providers to that property are exempt from NN requirements for service to that property". If you combined that with allowing new entrant providers to not cover an entire geographic market, but just cherry pick the high density/high profit segments, you might get both broad NN and competition.
    • kuschku 10y ago
      That is a very great idea. In general, it solves the problem that underlies it all: unregulated private monopolies become anticompetitive. If you force private monopolies to be fair, or end their monopoly, you have a nice solution.
    • yulaow 10y ago
      They are just gonna create "children" companies, make a pseudo cartel with them, and charge whatever they want in the area. US antitrust law are a joke and totally useless. If you want to do something like that you should first _strongly_ improve your anti-trust legislation and really start breaking big companies (yes, also those bahamut banks) and put them in a real competitive position.
• guelo 10y ago
  > "net neutrality" extremism So the NN side are the extremists. Not the side that wants to radically change the way the internet has worked for 40 years. Not the side that wants to upend the most innovative segment of the economy in favor of dinausour monoplies, radically reshaping the foundations of billions of dollars in investment and billions more in created wealth. Those guys are "conservative" right?
  • bifrost 10y ago
    I think you misunderstand - NN is new, the internet worked fine on its own prior to it. NN is not a colloquial "neutrality" agreement, its a "lets force carriers to do things because we don't understand how it works". I've worked on the carrier side, on the last mile side and on the consumer side and I'm not a fan of most of the proposed legislation. We need to prevent anticompetitive practices, but thats about it.
    • guelo 10y ago
      I've worked in big ISPs, I know exactly how it works, and it's never to the benefit of the customers. Especially when there's zero competitive pressure.
      • MarkSummer 10y ago
        Out of curiosity (by someone who doesn't know exactly how it works), is there no way for society to go completely off-grid with respect to ISPs, like power customers do with solar panels? Couldn't we then people build an inexpensive wireless black box server/partial cache nodes that everybody owns (stronger ones or bridges for rural users), and that communicate as a smart distributive network - physically detached from the existing GIG and ISPs?
        • thatcat 10y ago
          Wireless doesn't scale. Municipal delivered internet is the feasible option, which Comcast has sought to prevent via regulations. The state should file antitrust charges and use the fines to erect new infrastructure that any ISP can lease, restoring competition.
• rybosome 10y ago
  > ...I'm even more unhappy about the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs. Why? Government bureaucrats dictate aviation engineering standards to airplane manufacturers, automobile engineering standards to car manufacturers, radio engineering standards to electronics manufacturers, and so on. These are generally good things: they ensure that citizens can have a reasonable expectation of safety and that resources are shared fairly. Even with better competition, the ISPs will still wield a tremendous amount of power - internet access is critical to modern, prosperous life, so demand will be quite inelastic regardless of what they do to consumers. Furthermore, lifting regulations that providers must service an entire market won't help the many consumers who are in single family homes. They'll be left to pay for the service of a monopoly (or a duopoly if they're lucky) who can now legally extort smaller content providers without the power and clout to negotiate better terms.
  • rdl 10y ago
    Your examples are all safety (including public safety), or shared-resources (radio spectrum). Fiber I lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, and no one's safety is impaired by prioritizing my on-network traffic over off-network traffic. A more direct analogy is government regulation of something like how food tastes or how entertaining TV shows are. There's some justification for regulating carriers who have an enforced monopoly in a region, but the problem is the monopolies are local government monopolies, and the regulation here would be national.
    • rybosome 10y ago
      > Your examples are all safety (including public safety), or shared-resources (radio spectrum). Fiber I lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, and no one's safety is impaired by prioritizing my on-network traffic over off-network traffic. That's true, sort of. The fiber you lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, but the internet as a whole IS. Mediating my access to it without reasonable alternatives removes my stake in a shared resource. > A more direct analogy is government regulation of something like how food tastes or how entertaining TV shows are. I'm trying to interpret this charitably, but I must admit that my initial reaction is "that's absolutely ridiculous". This strikes me as a lurid, sensationalist comparison designed to appeal to anger rather than logic. If I am missing an obvious logical connection then I'd love to hear it. If anything, I think a worst-case breakdown of net neutrality falls closer to having my personal choices regulated than government intervention does. It's not hard to imagine an example scenario where it is only profitable for my home to be serviced by an ISP which has political beliefs antithetical to mine. In such a case it would be perfectly legal for them to charge exorbitant rates to access this content, effectively controlling what I consume. > There's some justification for regulating carriers who have an enforced monopoly in a region, but the problem is the monopolies are local government monopolies, and the regulation here would be national. I think you're making this statement because of regulation requiring that providers service an entire market? I can't imagine how else to interpret the statement that "monopolies are local government monopolies", given that most people have a choice of one (two, if they're lucky) of {comcast, time warner, AT&T}. Simply lifting this regulation doesn't necessarily solve the problem - admittedly I'm speaking from a position of ignorance, but it strikes me as likely that there are many consumers to whom it isn't immensely profitable to provide service.
• thomasahle 10y ago
  > you can offer essentially unlimited traffic to users hitting the cache, and still provide more limited access to other stuff. I'd prefer high bandwidth everywhere, but that isn't always an option. If you are a small company trying to start an internet based business, I'm pretty sure you'd take "limited bandwidth for all" over "high bandwidth for the competition; limited bandwidth for me" anytime. That is also the best way to ensure the 'lower bound' for bandwidth is kept as high as possible.
• sleepyhead 10y ago
  "It should be a market decision, not a national government decision." Funny how you call other extremists. This is a pure ideological viewpoint that has proven to be wrong in how internet and telecommunications evolved. It was built on standards and it was built on national and international regulations. It's why you can take a phone used in Germany and use it in India. "3) Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for video services." What are you basing this on? Data is very cheap and cost has been decreasing rapidly the last years. If you can afford a device that can play internet video then you can afford the data. Having lived in Cambodia over a few years I have witnessed the extreme uptake in mobile phones in a developing country (a very poor one too). A GB of data is about one dollar. It's used by garment factory workers earning about $130/month. It's used by women selling their own produce at the market. We are seeing the same in Myanmar with mobile phones being used along nearly all income groups. It's really obnoxious to see Facebook and supporters making arguments of farmers earning a dollar a day when they try to introduce a closed network. Poor people got 99 problems and paying top dollars for watching a video online isn't one of them. Those who cannot afford data cannot afford a usable phone. If Facebook wants to help these people in India then there is a bunch of ways of doing so that doesn't lock people and countries into a walled garden from a tech giant.
  • ChefDenominator 10y ago
    If they don't like it, then they can use something else. Why assume they are stupid and unable to make decisions for themselves?
    • sleepyhead 10y ago
      You are touching on an important point here. Let me give you a comparison for clarity in these markets. In Cambodia now there is an extreme increase of pesticides usage. In the market the sellers will spray toxic liquid on produce during the day to keep them looking fresh. Farmers buy and use products they really have no clue about what is. Don't get my wrong; I'm not saying they should be going organic - correct use of pesticides have advantages for farming. But it's a country with extreme corruption and in practice no laws and regulations for this. This is resulting in a lot of problems for people consuming vegetables that aren't healthy to consume. And other issues. The suppliers turn a blind eye to this because all they see it increased sales. Consumers, and the general public, have limited knowledge. That doesn't mean they are stupid, however education is very much lacking. Though it should be noted there are a lot of stupid people everywhere as well (just look at any newspaper comment section). So regulations are important. Partly so because some markets are very difficult for an average consumers to gain full knowledge about. That's for example one of the reasons why we had a financial crisis some years back.
• jaredklewis 10y ago
  > The real problems with lack of NN are due to lack of competition in the access provider market. Focus on fixing that. Easier said than done. As with utilities like power, water, or gas, it's not exactly that easy to get multiple companies running infrastructure to every home. And to be clear, all of Americas Internet provider problems stem from the last mile monopolies, not the core infrastructure. I agree there is a lot of detrimental regulatory overhead, but I disagree that it is the primary hurdle. Last mile infastructure is not fluid. If the customer doesn't buy, it can't be sold to someone else and the builder is stuck with the bill. It's just too expensive to build and maintain for investors to want to enter in saturated markets. Actually, this is why I feel wireless networks need less regulation than wired ones. Radio spectrum is fluid and normal market marchanics are more at play.
• intended 10y ago
  >Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for video services. This is too insidious and must be killed Firstly - google offers free, complete internet via wifi at train stations in India. This solves multiple problems at once and actually makes an impact. (No last mile issues, at a major node where millions of people interact every day) Secondly - Zero rating as proposed in India, would allow for a small curated list, which of course would be done by Facebook. As zero rating stood, it was used by college kids who wanted free Facebook. Not by Kanta Bhen, in the middle of no where trying to find medical advice. Thirdly-importantly: Wikipedia is not the internet. Facebook is not the internet. Google is not the internet. These are fundamentally sites on the internet, and while hugely important to the English speaking world, the real value is the place where these things were made possible. And that is the internet. That is what India risks losing, at a time in its development when it's more prepared to make pong than it is to make candy crush. Sure, theres huge English speaking populations in the cities. But rural India speaks a whole menagerie of local languages, many of which don't share a common root language. So removing the chance for people to actually see that open, flat network, connecting everyone around the world is a massive short sighted loss.
• pcnix 10y ago
  Zero rating in India was never a move that helped anyone in India afford services, it was just designed to get them into a locked network that had access to nothing but Facebook. And it was very clear that India had no patience for that sort of thing with the way it went down. This is not the argument you make against net neutrality.
• inapis 10y ago
  1. Till an extent. Free markets are not always in the interest of consumers. 3. Terrible idea. No one wants FB to be the gatekeeper. And no its not the only way. Many state govts (especially Telangana) are rolling out programs to provide data access to poor people. Telangana in particular is laying out the fiber optic network statewide wherever the ground is being dug up for more critical infrastructure projects like water and gas. Your point stand only when the markets are ideal and utopian. Unfortunately it can only happen when the companies are not beholden to shareholder interests.
• BinaryWaves 10y ago
  Yet another person who views "the market" as the end all be all decision maker. Learn to think beyond money, the universe is much bigger than a pile of paper