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Does anyone else find the internet market odd? Up until now net neutrality and other policies have given us the following: 1. Massive monopolies which essentia

Does anyone else find the internet market odd? Up until now net neutrality and other policies have given us the following: 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free. 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country. 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million). I think there's still a lot of potential to open up new markets with different policies that would make the internet a much better place for both consumers and entrepreneurs - especially the small guys. I'm just not 100% sure maintaining net-neutrality is the best way to help the little guy and bolster innovation. Anyone have any ideas how we could alleviate some of the above mentioned problems? EDIT: another question :) If net-neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the tech monopolies maintaining their power position then why do they all support it? [https://internetassociation.org/ https://internetassociation.org/]

and0 9y ago
Net neutrality has nothing to do with why we have monopolies, and is something we absolutely need in response to those monopolies.
learc83 9y ago
Please tell me how allowing ISPs to to steer consumers towards services owned by them via preferential treatment of their data helps small businesses.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
liveoneggs 9y ago
The internet is the greatest barrier-lowering device to starting a business ever conceived. You can, using just your skills and barely any money, compete with google and facebook this afternoon! (google and amazon will even give you a month to try for free) Your chances at winning are pretty low, but eventually someone will do it.
- zepto 9y ago
  This makes no sense. Using just your skills and barely any money, you cannot acquire a corpus of decades of historical searches and click data nor can you employ the thousands of human raters, both of which Google uses to make the search algorithm work. Please stop spreading this misleading idea.
  - nannePOPI 9y ago
    And why you should get something without work. Also nobody forces me or you to use google. It is a free choice, if a better search engine comes up we can use it and nobody forbids you to use other search engine or any site. With net neutrality you are free. Without net neutrality you are bound to the services of the friends of the ISP. You have cable tv 2.0 no more freedom
    - zepto 9y ago
      Net neutrality is a prerequisite for competition, agreed. However a better search engine cannot 'just come up', because Google is the result of billions of dollars of investment over more than 2 decades using data that is not publicly available. Stop pretending otherwise.
      - kortex 9y ago
        What would you rather compete against? 1. Conglomo with 2 decades of competitive advantage 2. Conglomo with 2 decades of competitive advantage and the ability to pay ISPs for preferential treatment?
        zepto 9y ago
        Have I argued otherwise? I am simply asking people to stop claiming that Google can be easily competed against with minimal resources if you are just clever. It's simply false. Competing against google is a red herring when it comes to net neutrality. Net neutrality hurts new products that don't compete against Google. It is barely relevant to competing against Google because the other barriers are so high.
an_account 9y ago
1) happens naturally in most markets. Without net-neutrality I believe that it would be harder for these companies to be dethroned if something better came along. 2) I think will only continue to be true for a short period of time. With products like Netflix and amazon, and with traditional television channels like HBO and ESPN starting to charge for streaming online, I think consumer attitude will shift as they realize that it's worth paying for content on the internet. 3) I'm skeptical is actually true and I'm skeptical that it's bad if true. 4) for most internet products the barrier of entry is smaller. You're only looking at one company. Compare to a company like Boeing, where it would take hundereds of millions to compete.
- marknutter 9y ago
  > 1) happens naturally in most markets. Without net-neutrality I believe that it would be harder for these companies to be dethroned if something better came along. In what way would it be harder for them to be dethroned exactly?
  - Jtsummers 9y ago
    Remove net neutrality or any semblance of it. ISPs now control who has access to their customers. Big businesses (Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft) can afford these costs. DuckDuckGo cannot. Wikipedia cannot. Startup #9 cannot. Yeah, sure, the data maybe still gets through. But now it's getting through at a reduced rate and (potentially) lower quality of service. This prevents new businesses from being able to enter into many markets. Having to establish peering arrangements with many ISPs individually instead of just with the few that they directly use. Want an alternative to AWS/Azure? Good luck, not only do they need the physical infrastructure for hosting, they now need individual peering arrangements with many ISPs to provide the same QoS.
    - marknutter 9y ago
      So why wasn't this a problem for the 30+ years we had no NN rules in place?
shallot_router 9y ago
ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP. By giving them the power to selectively control what they're sending down the pipe, the monopoly problem will grow far far worse. Net neutrality is not the cause of the problems you listed, and removing it won't solve any of them.
- marknutter 9y ago
  > ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP. This is simply not true. With the wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds pretty much everyone in the country has multiple choices of ISP.
  - Maken 9y ago
    How many of those companies actually have their own network and aren't subcontracting from one of the top companies?
    - marknutter 9y ago
      Most of them have their own network, and only in very remote locations do they have to subcontract on top of other companies.
      - forgotmysn 9y ago
        You're almost correct! The truth is actually the complete inverse of your statement.
  - cygx 9y ago
    How competitive are they with regard to latency, speed and pricing?
    - 9y ago
epicide 9y ago
Your argument plays out like a textbook example of treating correlation as causation.
kakarot 9y ago
Allowing existing internet companies to make deals with service providers concerning the preference of their data streams over others is the surest way to RAISE the barrier to entry for small businesses.
jimktrains2 9y ago
> 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) Many years ago your list wouldn't have included facebook, it would have included myspace. If FB was required to make a deal with every ISP in the US, do you think they would have been able to grow? Ditto for Google and Amazon. > 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free. I don't see how this is the fault of net neutrality. In fact, it's completely unrelated. We can have net neutrality and pay for content, many people do, viz Hulu, Netflix, iTunes Store, &c. > 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country. I have no idea what you mean or how this is related. > 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million). It's easier to do that than it is to make a deal with every ISP in the US. I really have no idea how this isn't doublethink.
- jfaucett 9y ago
  " If FB was required to make a deal with every ISP in the US, do you think they would have been able to grow" It would be much more difficult obviously. But it would also have been much more difficult for myspace in the first place and if they got too big the the gov't could easily split them up. There might be many such companies providing facebook-like services in such a scenario. Maybe not, but its not something I've heard anyone discuss. "I don't see how this is the fault of net neutrality. In fact, it's completely unrelated" I don't know if that's a fact. If ISPs could charge for particular services, consumers might be more aware that in order to get a certain service like translation or search or ordering a pizza they need to pay some % per month for it making them more apt to purchase other services. Again I don't know if this would be the case but its something I'd like to see someone look into. "It's easier to do that than it is to make a deal with every ISP in the US". Why would I necessarily need to make a deal with every ISP. For most products I think you probably don't really care or need to be everywhere in the USA especially when starting out.
  - learc83 9y ago
Maken 9y ago
Net neutrality just makes internet services a free market, which does not avoid monopolies but makes competition possible. The alternative is a captive market, which actively imposes monopolies. Also, net neutrality is about consumers not being monitored by ISPs.
grandalf 9y ago
People miss the detail that it's those big players that want net neutrality because it lets them essentially have a captive last mile infrastructure that requires no investment on their part.
- learc83 9y ago
  Infrastructure which everyone else has access to. Without net neutrality that isn't guaranteed. It's difficult to compete with Google. But imagine competiting with an ISP owned version of Google who owns the last mile to all their customers.
  - grandalf 9y ago
    > Infrastructure which everyone else has access to. Unless you think ISPs will simply block off many hosts, this is likely hyperbole. More likely, certain services would be charged tolls upstream and others would be promoted with discounts.
    - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
      > More likely, certain services would be charged tolls upstream Any service that competes with an ISP's service > others would be promoted with discounts. An ISP's or their partner's service. When you have at most 3 but usually only 2 choices for an ISP in a local market, how do you think this will benefit anyone ither than them? My only two choices are comcast and at&t DSL. I live in a dense, wealthy area where people would definitely pay for faster internet in a very large city, but the fastest speed i can get is 60 MBps for $80/month. These two companies are not known for innovation or treating their customers well. Comcast is regularly voted the worst company in America because of its terrible service. Nn removal will add additional costs on trying to get your service noticed since they can arbitrarily put you in the slow lane. How will you be able to compete with an ISP in this landscape?
      - grandalf 9y ago
        Both of your comments will require a bit more in-depth a response. I will do so later on today. Enjoying the discussion.
sleepingeights 9y ago
Net neutrality simply means that all content is treated equally by the ISPs, backbones, etc... As for the massive monopolies, that was born of US businesses. US tech monopolies are not original. Monopolies are a traditional form of how the US does its business. Just because the founders and their employees where shorts and shirts instead of suits, it was sold as "radical and new" when it was in fact the same old game. Now that these major monopolies have established a significant foothold, they find it in their interest to remove net-neutrality to prevent anything disruptive from occurring to their bottom-line.
baublet 9y ago
Net neutrality has only existed since 2015. It's vital because it halted a bunch of attempts by cable companies to shake down businesses (small and large) and their potential customers for extra money for prime access to pipes. Dismantling net neutrality won't open up new markets. It will make cable companies the gateways to those markets, and essentially cripple innovation the same way cable companies crippled television by having an iron grip on channels, packaging, and all the other nonsense we deal with today in cable TV.
panglott 9y ago
When all the capital flows to small companies that strive to become monopolies, it's no surprise that a market dominated by near-monopolies is what you get. Some of these are natural monopolies, or just large companies with a moat of network effects. It has little to do with net neutrality.
the_greyd 9y ago
95% of tech? I agree that we already have monopolies, but I vehemently disagree on net neutrality being one of the causes. In a system without net neutrality, the already established companies or monopolies would gain even more power than they have right now.
lordCarbonFiber 9y ago
I like how you say "massive monopolies" then list 5 companies (all competition one way or another) and an etc. That sounds like a healthy market. Also in what world does giving ISPs complete control of which services can even function on the internet help the "little guy"? You'll just replace the relatively healthy tech market with a 0 innovation series of walled gardens managed by each megacorp ISP-MediaCompany union.
- sixothree 9y ago
  I think this person is here to spread FUD and waste our time.
tmaly 9y ago
This whole debate reminds me of an older issue with the ownership of airwaves that was debated in newsletter titled "The Property Status of Airwaves" back in 1964
noobermin 9y ago
You merely iterated history, how does NN actually result in any of what you just said?
Adverblessly 9y ago
1) Without net neutrality, Facebook can simply pay your cellular internet provider to block all messaging apps but WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (does that still exist?). Then their (as you put it) 95% monopoly can permanently increase to 100%. The only way to compete would be to either outpay Facebook (good luck!) or start your own cellular company (good luck!). In fact, the massive monopolies can already pay for better internet speed for their services by paying for better (physical) access to the ISPs network. 2) I'm not sure what causality you are implying here. Is it that if websites were forced to pay off ISPs they would have no choice but to charge users for content, and users would in turn get used to it? 3) Without net neutrality there is room for exactly one app - the ISP provided app, since everything else is blocked. Currently there are people in my country (which is dominated by WhatsApp) that are using Telegram, Signal and Line, so it seems like there is some competition to the giants (and many people abandoned WhatsApp when it was bought by Facebook). You can imagine what would happen if Facebook was allowed to pay off local ISPs to block everything else (and since "everyone uses WhatsApp anyway" you can bet they'll all agree to it). 4) As shown above, net neutrality reduces the barrier of entering into the market because without it there is the additional barrier of paying off the ISPs to allow access to your service. Therefore, I suggest that the best course of action we have right now to alleviate these problems is to strengthen net neutrality :)
- rocqua 9y ago
  > Without net neutrality, Facebook can simply pay your cellular internet provider to block all messaging apps but WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (does that still exist?). Then their (as you put it) 95% monopoly can permanently increase to 100%. It makes much more sense for FB to pay ISPs to make access to WhatsApp and Messenger free. That way the ISP doesn't have to deal with the angry backlash.
- shawn-butler 9y ago
  1) And violate several components of the antitrust laws in the US? You might want to check out the following guide https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a... especially the "supply chain" portion. You next comment "paying higher rates for better speed" is generally considered competition and lowers overall costs. I find most of the "net neutrality" arguments highly specious and circular.
yk 9y ago
I don't think this has anything to do with net neutrality and much more with the absence of geographic barriers. > 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) Facebook and Microsoft are able to leverage network effects. A social network were your friends aren't is not very good independent of the features, similar with Microsoft and the available software. I dont't think, that there is an effect from net neutrality at play here. > 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free. This is mostly about the absence of a good micro-payment system, plus the internet forces in many relevant areas everybody to compete with free. (The free newspaper is just a click away, same with youtube etc.) > 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country. Is that the case? In cases were you can leverage scale effects certainly, Google has the largest database of websites and as a result the best search engine. Similar for facebook. However, is the relevant metric youtube or is the relevant metric number of people who can live from youtube. Same with Amazon market place and ebay. (Not really arguing either way, I am not really sure what the answer is.) > 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million). Compare that to the barriers of entry for a shipyard or hardware manufacturing. > I think there's still a lot of potential to open up new markets with different policies that would make the internet a much better place for both consumers and entrepreneurs - especially the small guys. I'm just not 100% sure maintaining net-neutrality is the best way to help the little guy and bolster innovation. Anyone have any ideas how we could alleviate some of the above mentioned problems? Yes, however no net neutrality should benefit the large guys. I can put a video on my server, but I can certainly not negotiate with all the ISPs that they should deliver my video. So in the absence of net neutrality youtube has an additional lever to compete against me. I don't really see any scenario where absence of net neutrality benefits the upstart competition instead of the incumbent. However, the platforms we see today look in many ways more similar to either infrastructure or states than to competition, so an rather interesting question is, how does one ensure that they are not evil. (To borrow an old Google slogan.)
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jasonkostempski 9y ago
"If net-neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the tech monopolies maintaining their power position then why do they all support it?" By your definition, they're not monopolies, they're just big companies, they're all competing with each other and the occasional new-comer.
manigandham 9y ago
Monopolies are natural in markets. Networks effects from marketshare and efficiencies of scale lead to this. Net neutrality helps everyone, especially the smaller companies, by making sure there is free and equal access to customers and other companies without being charged, profiled or otherwise blocked based on who you are or how much you pay.
zanny 9y ago
The Internet is the product of several economic effects, which explain all your points: * The cost to enter the market is effectively nothing. * The opportunity cost to switch new services is, again, nothing (change the URL). * The opportunity cost to switch established services is not nothing (network effects, all friends are on Facebook, etc). * The cost to acquire network effects is not nothing. The later effects have nothing to do with the Internet. In any economy where window shopping options is free and competing is free, then whoever owns the collective opinion on your product domain is going to get a winner take all situation. Capitalism in general is like this - the more of a market you control, the more easily you can displace the competition through your own influence. That is why you get many natural monopolies. Consumers expect web based content to be free because the marginal costs of their usage is effectively nothing (the per-user costs of running a server with a billion users requires many zeroes). Websites, and digital information in general, are non-scarce resources. Once made, making copies costs nothing. That is a much bigger rabbit hole though, and is generalized into broader problems of cognitive dissonance in people trying to put scarcity into non-scarce resources. The only way to make the Internet - or more specifically, tcp/ip and http - more small guy friendly is to promote browsers to make content discovery easier at the browser level. Otherwise people will go to the silos they are familiar with / the ones they are told about. Google et al fight for net neutrality because getting rid of it only makes ISPs richer at the cost of consumers and website hosts. The only possible state of being without net neutrality is paid bribes for service - Comcast will demand huge sums of money from Google et al or will throttle their services so their customers stop using them and use their own in-home products instead. And given the opportunity ISPs won't be some charity giving small business free rides - they will slow down or cripple the Internet for everyone except those who pay. The customers Google wants are a captive audience of major ISPs - without competition in the ISP market, and without net neutrality, every website operator needs to prostate themselves to the demands of ISPs to have their websites reach their audience, and the customers have no say in that relationship because they don't have a choice in ISP.
rocqua 9y ago
These points are the result of a fully efficient global market, combined with network effects. The first makes it possible for anyone to be almost perfect in finding and using the best service in any field. The second makes it so that more users makes a service better. I'd argue that this has led to overall better services, though at the cost of centralized powers.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
I do generally remain in support of net neutrality, but your point about the big tech monopolies supporting it is still worth discussing. If ISPs could charge web sites for fast lane treatment and such, Google, Netflix etc. would have the largest bills to pay. They'll argue it as a moral point to drum up grassroots support, but in reality its just a business item for them. If the roles were reversed they'd push for the policy that let them charge other companies more.
SkyMarshal 9y ago
>1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) >3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country. I'm not sure either of these have anything to do with any particular policies, rather than just the nature of all maturing industries. Consolidation is always the tendency as an industry matures. Some policies try to slow or mitigate it, for example as Federal restrictions on radio station ownership did until the Telecom Act of 1996 ended that [1]. But the natural endstate of any complex system is increasing concentration of critical resources of the system into fewer hands. 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million). What exactly are the barriers to entry for search? Unlike social networks where reconstructing a social graph comparable to Facebook's is a major barrier to entry, what's to keep consumer eyeballs from just using another search engine as their default? Not much network effect there, seems habit and laziness are the only real barriers, but as far as barriers go those are the easiest for a competitor to break through. For example, I use DuckDuckGo for mine, and it's fine in all but a few edge cases. [1]:https://futureofmusic.org/sites/default/files/FMCradiostudy06.pdf https://futureofmusic.org/sites/default/files/FMCradiostudy0...
kortex 9y ago
> Up until now net neutrality and other policies have given us the following Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because NN was in place, does not give hardly any information how the events you describe would have played out.
takeda 9y ago
Looking what you write, I think you misunderstand what NN does. The monopolies you mentioned have very little to do with NN. Someone already gave example how Facebook replaced MySpace, similarly Google, replaced Yahoo, AltaVista etc, I suppose Amazon did not replace anything, but started e-commerce (and currently creating other markets, like cloud computing), but it is getting higher and higher competition. Apple and Microsoft existed before Internet and are just using their old position to leverage their existence, but the fact they face competition. > EDIT: another question :) If net-neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the tech monopolies maintaining their power position then why do they all support it? [https://internetassociation.org/ https://internetassociation.org/] Simple, because it expands powers of existing monopolies making them relevant. Perfect example is Netflix. They providing service to stream movies. They pay also pay large amounts of money for Internet access and ability to send content to their users. On the other side users similarly are paying for Internet access to be able to receive the content. You would think it's double paying (and it kind of is), but it's normal, why users should subsidize Netflix costs or why Netflix should pay for users' access (since they are not only using Netflix) they just pay for their access to the network. But, regional ISPs (in this case Comcast) started having "problems" where packets from Netflix were dropped, because "Netflix was sending too much data to them", ignoring the fact that that data Netflix was sending was requested by ISP's users who were already paying ISP to do one thing and do it well (i.e. deliver data they requested). Things were kind of bad for the users (and users couldn't also switch their provider because at most they only had just another option which was equally as bad), until Netflix reached deal with Comcast where they pay Comcast to deliver the content (something that Comcast users are already paying for). Net neutrality is trying to make sure this kind of manipulation is not allowed. The thing with Netflix already happened but could easily be translated to other companies. For example (I'm borrowing it from here [1], I think you should watch it it explains the core issue very well IMO) Microsoft could pay so Bing has always fast access at cost of Google. Don't you want as a user to not have any company dictate you what you can access or not? Similarly those Internet companies also don't want to pay extra on top of what they already are paying. That's their interest. The only companies who would benefit from lack of NN are handful companies that deliver Internet to end users (especially companies like Comcast, TimeWarner/Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon etc) and lack of NN would give them huge power to bully anyone else. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak
cLeEOGPw 9y ago
Not sure if shill or it's your genuine thoughts. But following your logic, power plants should charge depending on what you use your electricity for, water company should charge depending on where you put your water, grocery stores should charge depending on what (they think) you do with the food, etc. Net neutrality is a slippery slope to total corporate control of every aspect of life, internet being just the beginning. This is a wet dream of all the shareholders of all ISPs and all other service providers. Non-neutral web is against everyone's interest, even if it would boost the profit margin of some ISPs in short term.

and0 9y ago

Net neutrality has nothing to do with why we have monopolies, and is something we absolutely need in response to those monopolies.

learc83 9y ago

Please tell me how allowing ISPs to to steer consumers towards services owned by them via preferential treatment of their data helps small businesses.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

liveoneggs 9y ago

The internet is the greatest barrier-lowering device to starting a business ever conceived. You can, using just your skills and barely any money, compete with google and facebook this afternoon! (google and amazon will even give you a month to try for free) Your chances at winning are pretty low, but eventually someone will do it.

zepto 9y ago
This makes no sense. Using just your skills and barely any money, you cannot acquire a corpus of decades of historical searches and click data nor can you employ the thousands of human raters, both of which Google uses to make the search algorithm work. Please stop spreading this misleading idea.
- nannePOPI 9y ago
  And why you should get something without work. Also nobody forces me or you to use google. It is a free choice, if a better search engine comes up we can use it and nobody forbids you to use other search engine or any site. With net neutrality you are free. Without net neutrality you are bound to the services of the friends of the ISP. You have cable tv 2.0 no more freedom
  - zepto 9y ago
    Net neutrality is a prerequisite for competition, agreed. However a better search engine cannot 'just come up', because Google is the result of billions of dollars of investment over more than 2 decades using data that is not publicly available. Stop pretending otherwise.
    - kortex 9y ago
      What would you rather compete against? 1. Conglomo with 2 decades of competitive advantage 2. Conglomo with 2 decades of competitive advantage and the ability to pay ISPs for preferential treatment?
      - zepto 9y ago
        Have I argued otherwise? I am simply asking people to stop claiming that Google can be easily competed against with minimal resources if you are just clever. It's simply false. Competing against google is a red herring when it comes to net neutrality. Net neutrality hurts new products that don't compete against Google. It is barely relevant to competing against Google because the other barriers are so high.

an_account 9y ago

1) happens naturally in most markets. Without net-neutrality I believe that it would be harder for these companies to be dethroned if something better came along. 2) I think will only continue to be true for a short period of time. With products like Netflix and amazon, and with traditional television channels like HBO and ESPN starting to charge for streaming online, I think consumer attitude will shift as they realize that it's worth paying for content on the internet. 3) I'm skeptical is actually true and I'm skeptical that it's bad if true. 4) for most internet products the barrier of entry is smaller. You're only looking at one company. Compare to a company like Boeing, where it would take hundereds of millions to compete.

marknutter 9y ago
> 1) happens naturally in most markets. Without net-neutrality I believe that it would be harder for these companies to be dethroned if something better came along. In what way would it be harder for them to be dethroned exactly?
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  Remove net neutrality or any semblance of it. ISPs now control who has access to their customers. Big businesses (Netflix, Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft) can afford these costs. DuckDuckGo cannot. Wikipedia cannot. Startup #9 cannot. Yeah, sure, the data maybe still gets through. But now it's getting through at a reduced rate and (potentially) lower quality of service. This prevents new businesses from being able to enter into many markets. Having to establish peering arrangements with many ISPs individually instead of just with the few that they directly use. Want an alternative to AWS/Azure? Good luck, not only do they need the physical infrastructure for hosting, they now need individual peering arrangements with many ISPs to provide the same QoS.
  - marknutter 9y ago
    So why wasn't this a problem for the 30+ years we had no NN rules in place?

shallot_router 9y ago

ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP. By giving them the power to selectively control what they're sending down the pipe, the monopoly problem will grow far far worse. Net neutrality is not the cause of the problems you listed, and removing it won't solve any of them.

marknutter 9y ago
> ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP. This is simply not true. With the wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds pretty much everyone in the country has multiple choices of ISP.
- Maken 9y ago
  How many of those companies actually have their own network and aren't subcontracting from one of the top companies?
  - marknutter 9y ago
    Most of them have their own network, and only in very remote locations do they have to subcontract on top of other companies.
    - forgotmysn 9y ago
      You're almost correct! The truth is actually the complete inverse of your statement.
- cygx 9y ago
  How competitive are they with regard to latency, speed and pricing?
  - 9y ago

epicide 9y ago

Your argument plays out like a textbook example of treating correlation as causation.

kakarot 9y ago

Allowing existing internet companies to make deals with service providers concerning the preference of their data streams over others is the surest way to RAISE the barrier to entry for small businesses.

jimktrains2 9y ago

> 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) Many years ago your list wouldn't have included facebook, it would have included myspace. If FB was required to make a deal with every ISP in the US, do you think they would have been able to grow? Ditto for Google and Amazon. > 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free. I don't see how this is the fault of net neutrality. In fact, it's completely unrelated. We can have net neutrality and pay for content, many people do, viz Hulu, Netflix, iTunes Store, &c. > 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country. I have no idea what you mean or how this is related. > 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million). It's easier to do that than it is to make a deal with every ISP in the US. I really have no idea how this isn't doublethink.

jfaucett 9y ago
" If FB was required to make a deal with every ISP in the US, do you think they would have been able to grow" It would be much more difficult obviously. But it would also have been much more difficult for myspace in the first place and if they got too big the the gov't could easily split them up. There might be many such companies providing facebook-like services in such a scenario. Maybe not, but its not something I've heard anyone discuss. "I don't see how this is the fault of net neutrality. In fact, it's completely unrelated" I don't know if that's a fact. If ISPs could charge for particular services, consumers might be more aware that in order to get a certain service like translation or search or ordering a pizza they need to pay some % per month for it making them more apt to purchase other services. Again I don't know if this would be the case but its something I'd like to see someone look into. "It's easier to do that than it is to make a deal with every ISP in the US". Why would I necessarily need to make a deal with every ISP. For most products I think you probably don't really care or need to be everywhere in the USA especially when starting out.
- learc83 9y ago

Maken 9y ago

Net neutrality just makes internet services a free market, which does not avoid monopolies but makes competition possible. The alternative is a captive market, which actively imposes monopolies. Also, net neutrality is about consumers not being monitored by ISPs.

grandalf 9y ago

People miss the detail that it's those big players that want net neutrality because it lets them essentially have a captive last mile infrastructure that requires no investment on their part.

learc83 9y ago
Infrastructure which everyone else has access to. Without net neutrality that isn't guaranteed. It's difficult to compete with Google. But imagine competiting with an ISP owned version of Google who owns the last mile to all their customers.
- grandalf 9y ago
  > Infrastructure which everyone else has access to. Unless you think ISPs will simply block off many hosts, this is likely hyperbole. More likely, certain services would be charged tolls upstream and others would be promoted with discounts.
  - FullMtlAlcoholc 9y ago
    > More likely, certain services would be charged tolls upstream Any service that competes with an ISP's service > others would be promoted with discounts. An ISP's or their partner's service. When you have at most 3 but usually only 2 choices for an ISP in a local market, how do you think this will benefit anyone ither than them? My only two choices are comcast and at&t DSL. I live in a dense, wealthy area where people would definitely pay for faster internet in a very large city, but the fastest speed i can get is 60 MBps for $80/month. These two companies are not known for innovation or treating their customers well. Comcast is regularly voted the worst company in America because of its terrible service. Nn removal will add additional costs on trying to get your service noticed since they can arbitrarily put you in the slow lane. How will you be able to compete with an ISP in this landscape?
    - grandalf 9y ago
      Both of your comments will require a bit more in-depth a response. I will do so later on today. Enjoying the discussion.

sleepingeights 9y ago

Net neutrality simply means that all content is treated equally by the ISPs, backbones, etc... As for the massive monopolies, that was born of US businesses. US tech monopolies are not original. Monopolies are a traditional form of how the US does its business. Just because the founders and their employees where shorts and shirts instead of suits, it was sold as "radical and new" when it was in fact the same old game. Now that these major monopolies have established a significant foothold, they find it in their interest to remove net-neutrality to prevent anything disruptive from occurring to their bottom-line.

baublet 9y ago

Net neutrality has only existed since 2015. It's vital because it halted a bunch of attempts by cable companies to shake down businesses (small and large) and their potential customers for extra money for prime access to pipes. Dismantling net neutrality won't open up new markets. It will make cable companies the gateways to those markets, and essentially cripple innovation the same way cable companies crippled television by having an iron grip on channels, packaging, and all the other nonsense we deal with today in cable TV.

panglott 9y ago

When all the capital flows to small companies that strive to become monopolies, it's no surprise that a market dominated by near-monopolies is what you get. Some of these are natural monopolies, or just large companies with a moat of network effects. It has little to do with net neutrality.

the_greyd 9y ago

95% of tech? I agree that we already have monopolies, but I vehemently disagree on net neutrality being one of the causes. In a system without net neutrality, the already established companies or monopolies would gain even more power than they have right now.

lordCarbonFiber 9y ago

I like how you say "massive monopolies" then list 5 companies (all competition one way or another) and an etc. That sounds like a healthy market. Also in what world does giving ISPs complete control of which services can even function on the internet help the "little guy"? You'll just replace the relatively healthy tech market with a 0 innovation series of walled gardens managed by each megacorp ISP-MediaCompany union.

sixothree 9y ago
I think this person is here to spread FUD and waste our time.

tmaly 9y ago

This whole debate reminds me of an older issue with the ownership of airwaves that was debated in newsletter titled "The Property Status of Airwaves" back in 1964

noobermin 9y ago

You merely iterated history, how does NN actually result in any of what you just said?

Adverblessly 9y ago

1) Without net neutrality, Facebook can simply pay your cellular internet provider to block all messaging apps but WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (does that still exist?). Then their (as you put it) 95% monopoly can permanently increase to 100%. The only way to compete would be to either outpay Facebook (good luck!) or start your own cellular company (good luck!). In fact, the massive monopolies can already pay for better internet speed for their services by paying for better (physical) access to the ISPs network. 2) I'm not sure what causality you are implying here. Is it that if websites were forced to pay off ISPs they would have no choice but to charge users for content, and users would in turn get used to it? 3) Without net neutrality there is room for exactly one app - the ISP provided app, since everything else is blocked. Currently there are people in my country (which is dominated by WhatsApp) that are using Telegram, Signal and Line, so it seems like there is some competition to the giants (and many people abandoned WhatsApp when it was bought by Facebook). You can imagine what would happen if Facebook was allowed to pay off local ISPs to block everything else (and since "everyone uses WhatsApp anyway" you can bet they'll all agree to it). 4) As shown above, net neutrality reduces the barrier of entering into the market because without it there is the additional barrier of paying off the ISPs to allow access to your service. Therefore, I suggest that the best course of action we have right now to alleviate these problems is to strengthen net neutrality :)

rocqua 9y ago
> Without net neutrality, Facebook can simply pay your cellular internet provider to block all messaging apps but WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (does that still exist?). Then their (as you put it) 95% monopoly can permanently increase to 100%. It makes much more sense for FB to pay ISPs to make access to WhatsApp and Messenger free. That way the ISP doesn't have to deal with the angry backlash.
shawn-butler 9y ago
1) And violate several components of the antitrust laws in the US? You might want to check out the following guide https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a... especially the "supply chain" portion. You next comment "paying higher rates for better speed" is generally considered competition and lowers overall costs. I find most of the "net neutrality" arguments highly specious and circular.

yk 9y ago

I don't think this has anything to do with net neutrality and much more with the absence of geographic barriers. > 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) Facebook and Microsoft are able to leverage network effects. A social network were your friends aren't is not very good independent of the features, similar with Microsoft and the available software. I dont't think, that there is an effect from net neutrality at play here. > 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free. This is mostly about the absence of a good micro-payment system, plus the internet forces in many relevant areas everybody to compete with free. (The free newspaper is just a click away, same with youtube etc.) > 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country. Is that the case? In cases were you can leverage scale effects certainly, Google has the largest database of websites and as a result the best search engine. Similar for facebook. However, is the relevant metric youtube or is the relevant metric number of people who can live from youtube. Same with Amazon market place and ebay. (Not really arguing either way, I am not really sure what the answer is.) > 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million). Compare that to the barriers of entry for a shipyard or hardware manufacturing. > I think there's still a lot of potential to open up new markets with different policies that would make the internet a much better place for both consumers and entrepreneurs - especially the small guys. I'm just not 100% sure maintaining net-neutrality is the best way to help the little guy and bolster innovation. Anyone have any ideas how we could alleviate some of the above mentioned problems? Yes, however no net neutrality should benefit the large guys. I can put a video on my server, but I can certainly not negotiate with all the ISPs that they should deliver my video. So in the absence of net neutrality youtube has an additional lever to compete against me. I don't really see any scenario where absence of net neutrality benefits the upstart competition instead of the incumbent. However, the platforms we see today look in many ways more similar to either infrastructure or states than to competition, so an rather interesting question is, how does one ensure that they are not evil. (To borrow an old Google slogan.)

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

jasonkostempski 9y ago

"If net-neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the tech monopolies maintaining their power position then why do they all support it?" By your definition, they're not monopolies, they're just big companies, they're all competing with each other and the occasional new-comer.

manigandham 9y ago

Monopolies are natural in markets. Networks effects from marketshare and efficiencies of scale lead to this. Net neutrality helps everyone, especially the smaller companies, by making sure there is free and equal access to customers and other companies without being charged, profiled or otherwise blocked based on who you are or how much you pay.

zanny 9y ago

The Internet is the product of several economic effects, which explain all your points: * The cost to enter the market is effectively nothing. * The opportunity cost to switch new services is, again, nothing (change the URL). * The opportunity cost to switch established services is not nothing (network effects, all friends are on Facebook, etc). * The cost to acquire network effects is not nothing. The later effects have nothing to do with the Internet. In any economy where window shopping options is free and competing is free, then whoever owns the collective opinion on your product domain is going to get a winner take all situation. Capitalism in general is like this - the more of a market you control, the more easily you can displace the competition through your own influence. That is why you get many natural monopolies. Consumers expect web based content to be free because the marginal costs of their usage is effectively nothing (the per-user costs of running a server with a billion users requires many zeroes). Websites, and digital information in general, are non-scarce resources. Once made, making copies costs nothing. That is a much bigger rabbit hole though, and is generalized into broader problems of cognitive dissonance in people trying to put scarcity into non-scarce resources. The only way to make the Internet - or more specifically, tcp/ip and http - more small guy friendly is to promote browsers to make content discovery easier at the browser level. Otherwise people will go to the silos they are familiar with / the ones they are told about. Google et al fight for net neutrality because getting rid of it only makes ISPs richer at the cost of consumers and website hosts. The only possible state of being without net neutrality is paid bribes for service - Comcast will demand huge sums of money from Google et al or will throttle their services so their customers stop using them and use their own in-home products instead. And given the opportunity ISPs won't be some charity giving small business free rides - they will slow down or cripple the Internet for everyone except those who pay. The customers Google wants are a captive audience of major ISPs - without competition in the ISP market, and without net neutrality, every website operator needs to prostate themselves to the demands of ISPs to have their websites reach their audience, and the customers have no say in that relationship because they don't have a choice in ISP.

rocqua 9y ago

These points are the result of a fully efficient global market, combined with network effects. The first makes it possible for anyone to be almost perfect in finding and using the best service in any field. The second makes it so that more users makes a service better. I'd argue that this has led to overall better services, though at the cost of centralized powers.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

I do generally remain in support of net neutrality, but your point about the big tech monopolies supporting it is still worth discussing. If ISPs could charge web sites for fast lane treatment and such, Google, Netflix etc. would have the largest bills to pay. They'll argue it as a moral point to drum up grassroots support, but in reality its just a business item for them. If the roles were reversed they'd push for the policy that let them charge other companies more.

SkyMarshal 9y ago

>1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) >3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country. I'm not sure either of these have anything to do with any particular policies, rather than just the nature of all maturing industries. Consolidation is always the tendency as an industry matures. Some policies try to slow or mitigate it, for example as Federal restrictions on radio station ownership did until the Telecom Act of 1996 ended that [1]. But the natural endstate of any complex system is increasing concentration of critical resources of the system into fewer hands. 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million). What exactly are the barriers to entry for search? Unlike social networks where reconstructing a social graph comparable to Facebook's is a major barrier to entry, what's to keep consumer eyeballs from just using another search engine as their default? Not much network effect there, seems habit and laziness are the only real barriers, but as far as barriers go those are the easiest for a competitor to break through. For example, I use DuckDuckGo for mine, and it's fine in all but a few edge cases. [1]:https://futureofmusic.org/sites/default/files/FMCradiostudy06.pdf https://futureofmusic.org/sites/default/files/FMCradiostudy0...

kortex 9y ago

> Up until now net neutrality and other policies have given us the following Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because NN was in place, does not give hardly any information how the events you describe would have played out.

takeda 9y ago

Looking what you write, I think you misunderstand what NN does. The monopolies you mentioned have very little to do with NN. Someone already gave example how Facebook replaced MySpace, similarly Google, replaced Yahoo, AltaVista etc, I suppose Amazon did not replace anything, but started e-commerce (and currently creating other markets, like cloud computing), but it is getting higher and higher competition. Apple and Microsoft existed before Internet and are just using their old position to leverage their existence, but the fact they face competition. > EDIT: another question :) If net-neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the tech monopolies maintaining their power position then why do they all support it? [https://internetassociation.org/ https://internetassociation.org/] Simple, because it expands powers of existing monopolies making them relevant. Perfect example is Netflix. They providing service to stream movies. They pay also pay large amounts of money for Internet access and ability to send content to their users. On the other side users similarly are paying for Internet access to be able to receive the content. You would think it's double paying (and it kind of is), but it's normal, why users should subsidize Netflix costs or why Netflix should pay for users' access (since they are not only using Netflix) they just pay for their access to the network. But, regional ISPs (in this case Comcast) started having "problems" where packets from Netflix were dropped, because "Netflix was sending too much data to them", ignoring the fact that that data Netflix was sending was requested by ISP's users who were already paying ISP to do one thing and do it well (i.e. deliver data they requested). Things were kind of bad for the users (and users couldn't also switch their provider because at most they only had just another option which was equally as bad), until Netflix reached deal with Comcast where they pay Comcast to deliver the content (something that Comcast users are already paying for). Net neutrality is trying to make sure this kind of manipulation is not allowed. The thing with Netflix already happened but could easily be translated to other companies. For example (I'm borrowing it from here [1], I think you should watch it it explains the core issue very well IMO) Microsoft could pay so Bing has always fast access at cost of Google. Don't you want as a user to not have any company dictate you what you can access or not? Similarly those Internet companies also don't want to pay extra on top of what they already are paying. That's their interest. The only companies who would benefit from lack of NN are handful companies that deliver Internet to end users (especially companies like Comcast, TimeWarner/Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon etc) and lack of NN would give them huge power to bully anyone else. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak

cLeEOGPw 9y ago

Not sure if shill or it's your genuine thoughts. But following your logic, power plants should charge depending on what you use your electricity for, water company should charge depending on where you put your water, grocery stores should charge depending on what (they think) you do with the food, etc. Net neutrality is a slippery slope to total corporate control of every aspect of life, internet being just the beginning. This is a wet dream of all the shareholders of all ISPs and all other service providers. Non-neutral web is against everyone's interest, even if it would boost the profit margin of some ISPs in short term.