13 ms·

Net neutrality is dying with a whimper

129 points by urahara 9y ago

metalliqaz 9y ago
The government's response to its constituents has been a flatline for many years now. I don't expect today's FCC to be any different. However, the battle will continue with some of the heavy hitters that have been so instrumental for creating real change: advocacy groups with good lawyers. (EFF, Fight For the Future, Public Knowledge, et al.) They will be the ones that really take the fight to the Pai-hole. It's an uphill battle, but probably our best hope. *edited for grammar and clarity
throwitlong 9y ago
Politicians will always be voted into office for something that looks important to people but politicians do not care the least. Then they silently implement what they really care about.
- hnal943 9y ago
  Or because Net Neutrality is not as popular in the society at large as it is in the SF headquarters of big tech companies.
honestoHeminway 9y ago
The mistake was for the internet to grow on the ISPs infrastructure in the first place. Now they will murder anything new by slowing it to a crawl. So to succeed, on must have superior compression- and/or a alternative infrastructure. Or- one could try to hijack the fastlanes.
- metalliqaz 9y ago
  Sufficient competition in the market would be enough. Unfortunately, the government has allowed total monopoly on fixed line broadband. They've done it in two ways: first through exclusivity contracts with companies such as Verizon, ATT, Cox, and Comcast. They give fat payments in the form of cash, tax breaks, and local monopolies in exchange for the companies to build out infrastructure. Second, they have allowed consolidation in the marketplace to a level that should never have even been considered. I agree that, long term, only a replacement infrastructure will be a viable solution. Unfortunately the only technology that currently has a chance is 4G/5G mobile service, and it is even more consumer-hostile. In the mean time, we need Net Neutrality.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I don't think it's realistic to expect free-market competitors to build out massive infrastructure to compete with each other. They wouldn't even serve large swathes of the country at all if they didn't have to.
    - graphitezepp 9y ago
      As someone who trends towards espousing free-market virtues but I have long sense accepted that do to the practical physical concerns of laying so much wire the only 'good' workable situation for running the internet is a centralized, probably gov anyone else is a rent seeker, body with strong net neutrality and privacy policy. But that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen.
    - metalliqaz 9y ago
      I agree. The gov dropped the ball by failing to build out the infrastructure itself, such that they were kept public utilities. They obviously didn't understand the importance that these networks would eventually have.
  - westbywest 9y ago
    A third way is the ~20 state governments who've subscribed to this model peddled by ALEC, barring municipalities from deploying infrastructure, on the grounds of preserving competition. Given the typical size of incumbent providers, this instead has the effect of preserving duo/monopoly, which critics argue is its intended purpose. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1908390-alec-model-muni-bband-legislation.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1908390-alec-model-m...
  - uncletammy 9y ago
    I also expect new infrastructure to be the most likely solution. I wouldn't expect it to be 4G/5G mobile service though. I always thought that the next infrastructure would be a series of wireless mesh networks. They are extremely censorship resistant and can operate on unlicensed frequencies which makes them resistant to centralized control. I've heard about projects like https://nycmesh.net https://nycmesh.net and http://guifi.net http://guifi.net that have sprung up even while the internet was fairly neutral. That leaves me hopeful that this type of project will quickly replace wired infrastructure if it quickly becomes needed. I'm nowhere close to an expert in this field so I would love to be corrected if I'm wrong about any of that. I would also love someone more informed than myself to talk about the current state of wireless mesh and/or 4G/5G mobile.
- larrydag 9y ago
  I'm for free markets and competition but I have to agree with you here. Like the US interstate road system the fixed line broadband, especially the big fiber pipes, probably needs to be taken over by a quasi-federal program similar to the Post Office. There seems to be too much of a monopoly or oligarchy collusion taken place. Broadband is not improving with competition currently.
  - hnal943 9y ago
    This is the first time I've seen someone hold up the Post Office as model that should be followed for anything. What makes you think that this model would be less monopolistic than the one we have today?
    - larrydag 9y ago
      I wouldn't call it an ideal model. It was used before for similar purposes of transporting data between long distances. You could argue whether it served its purpose or not. For its time the USPS did a good job of delivering on its intended objective until the free market created new and innovative ways to make it obsolete (email, Fed Ex, UPS, Paypal, etc.)
- uncletammy 9y ago
  I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I'd love to hear your opinion on what form the build-out of the internet should have taken. If not on ISPs infrastructure, then who's?
crispyambulance 9y ago
Net neutrality is dying because no one has been able to make a compelling case for it that can be understood by constituents, let alone politicians. There is one thing that just enough politicians do understand, however, and that's money. In their pockets. From ghouls who will profit handsomely when online access in the USA becomes effectively equivalent to shitty cable-tv service.
- avryhof 9y ago
  I can see that. Website packages, just like channel packages on cable. - You can get all the shopping sites, and your ISP's streaming service in the base package. - Third-party Music Sites with Music Extra. - Third-party Video Sites with Video Extra. Then there is the Several speed levels of the Unlimited plan starting at just $999/month. Personal blogs, websites and Open Source project sites will be restricted to the top 5%. Everyone else will have to just deal with canned media from the big corporations and ISPs.
  - nsxwolf 9y ago
    And the average consumer will think that sounds great. Especially when you throw in a few services that don't count against their data cap.
  - metalliqaz 9y ago
    Unfortunately, a future like that would even be preferable to what we will get, because that would be rejected by consumers. Instead, they will squeeze outside media and tech companies behind the scenes and will stifle competition (and innovation) out of view of the consumer.
  - syshum 9y ago
    No what you are going to see is Zero Rating with extreme Caps "Want 4K Content, Use HULU and it will not count toward your 1TB limit" "Want unlimited music, Our new Xfinity Music Service is now allows you to enjoy all the music you want with out worry about going over your data cap" Then ofcourse will be fast lanes "Tired of your 4K movie buffering, Try the new Xfintiy On Demand, Guaranteed not to buffer"
cmahler7 9y ago
Wouldn't getting rid of net neutrality actually be good for startups and smaller companies? People are effectively subsidizing the internet giants right now, if telecoms charged extra for them people would move on to different services? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's odd to see people banding together to defend Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. Although the companies on the other side are obviously scum as well.
- grive 9y ago
  How do you start a content company when competing against the subsidiaries of the tube owners then? They essentially have prime access to their internal market, and you will have to pay upfront to have a public. Why would they demand only the giants to pay? They have zero interest fostering competition against their own products.
- HillaryBriss 9y ago
  good point. are google's search results neutral?
- rpedroso 9y ago
  Suppose that we eliminate net neutrality. Further suppose that, in a few years, I start a video streaming service called "Notflix". Because ISPs are no longer required to be dumb pipes, they've started charging their customers a premium for access to video content. This is bad for Netflix, of course, because it cuts into their subscriber base. They crunch some numbers and come up with an amount they're willing to pay the ISPs to exclude their subscribers from this segmented pricing scheme. The ISPs accept this mutually beneficial deal, and everyone's happy, right? What about Notflix, though? We don't have the capital that Netflix has to pay into this protection racket, so our subscribers must choose between paying the ISP video premium + our subscription fee, or Netflix's subscription fee. That's an uphill battle and straightforwardly anti-competitive, but is also the precisely the promise of a world without net neutrality. I also disagree with your assessment that anybody is subsidizing internet giants. All those players pay for the bandwidth they consume to dump their data into the network. The end-user pays for the other end of the connection. Everything is being paid for, proportionally to the usage. The last-mile ISPs simply want to double-dip. Comcast thinks Netflix should pay both Level 3 AND Comcast for using the pipes, which fundamentally undermines the architecture of the internet.
hartator 9y ago
I don't see what this fuss is all about. If Facebook wants to offer cheaper Internet with their services prioritized, why not? Plus Internet is far from being neutral right now. Emails got deliver depending on your server IPs. CDNs already pay to be hosted by ISPs for a fast lane. Torrents don't reach the full capacity of your bandwidth. Etc. The case against government regulations for the Internet is easy to make: Easier to start an ISP, cheaper services for the end consumers, less government expenses to enforce all of that, etc.
- fredley 9y ago
  Because the fear is that the internet will become like TV: you can't buy access to 'TV', despite the fact there's no technical limitation. You have to buy packages, from different providers in order to get what you want. You have to sign up to hefty subscription packages with loads of bundled shite just to watch 7 hours of Game of Thrones. Currently you buy access to the internet, and that's all internet, at equal priority. You can connect to my little $6 VPS or raspberry pi as easily as you can to Google or Facebook. And that's a great thing. If I want to get my show on TV, I have to negotiate with different channels and studios to try and get it broadcast, anywhere. And even then it would probably be on some shitty channel with tiny viewership, interspersed with ads for medication and financial scams. On the internet I can publish on my own terms, and anybody else with an internet connection can view it, on my terms. Undermining net neutrality threatens this. In the UK some ISPs are providing 'free unlimited access to WhatsApp'. It's just the start of a road that leads to the default model changes from paying for internet access, to most people getting free 'internet', restricted to just those companies who pay the ISP instead to provide free access. This is a slippery slope: once it starts, it will continue until smaller sites are no longer visible to people without 'premium' internet - who will be a minority. This is bad.
  - splintercell 9y ago
    > Because the fear is that the internet will become like TV But I would rather take that than Internet becoming like TV, where govt can pass 'fairness doctrine' and other stuff, or restrict it significantly during war time. I'd rather trust economic incentives to keep Internet free than political incentives. If people are willing to pay for full coverage of the War, then even though govt is pressuring ISPs, it results in a losing prisoner's dilemma for ISPs (take for instance the popularity of Al Jazeera during Iraq War).
d--b 9y ago
Is there any hope that some new ISP gets created that does follow net neutrality? What's likely to happen to an ISP that doesn't play the fast/slow lane approach?
- mattnewton 9y ago
  If it were likely people would create new ISPs that could compete then net neutrality would be less of an issue for me, because the ISP would have less leverage. As it stands today in the US though that's exceedingly and increasingly unlikely.
- uncletammy 9y ago
  I would expect the major hurdle by any new ISP to be ownership of infrastructure. If anti-neutral firms own the poles, they are likely to put up one hell of a fight to keep them. That being said, it would make sense to me that scrapping neutrality might be the very thing needed to encourage Google to finish their fiber roll out across the US. Incumbent telecoms have incentive to restrict access to content. Google being an advertising company, has incentive to encourage the flow of content. Google owning the internet is probably way worse in the long run but it might just be a great short term solution to the neutrality problem.
  - Arubis 9y ago
    Screw poles. In sufficiently dense metro areas, microwave or similar is competitive on price and bandwidth. This is deeply unfair to less dense areas, though. Google Fiber is shiny and alluring, but there's other solutions for us urbanites. What I'd love to see, and would make a difference, is competition for last-mile delivery _outside_ of cities.
- anotherbrownguy 9y ago
  I would love to be corrected and there is a lot of disinformation, at least from one side, but here is my understanding of the issue: Let's say an ISP A wants to cover a small area with 1000 potential users. So, lets say they allocate 100gbps bandwidth for the market. So, they sell 100mbps internet to 1000 users. All of the users get 100mbps dedicated but it is expensive for them. Besides, not all users are using 100mbps all the time anyway. So, a competing ISP B could just allocate 10gbps (one-tenth of what other had) saving a lot of costs, and offer 100mbps at half the price with a condition that speeds could be lower at peak hours because if everyone is using full bandwidth (very unlikely), they will only get 1/10th of the advertised speeds (in practice, it's usually close to advertised speed most of the time). The ISP A is completely outpriced so they can either lower their prices or go out of business... and obviously they choose a similar strategy to be competitive. This has been the case for a long time. They have optimized it with dynamic contention ratios and the like but this is basically how it works. Anyone who needs dedicated bandwidth knows that prices for those for the same speeds are very expensive compared to regular internet. The problem with this is obviously "the problem users". Back in the days, they were the ones who would hog up maximum bandwidth most of the time using it for file sharing (seed/download all day long). In the above example, if 100 users use all the available bandwidth at all times, whole of the bandwidth is taken up all the time. So, during peak hours, when some of the other 900 joined in, the speeds were much slower than advertised. The ISPs noticed that file sharing was using most of the bandwidth, so if they blocked it, they could improve internet experience of everyone (except for the pirates, which made a small percentage of their customer base). This is what Comcast did in 2007 by blocking bittorrent traffic. The pirates however, who also happened to be the most active and knowledgable internet users, were not happy obviously. So, two lobbies filed a case against Comcast making it a freedom issue (see Comcast Corp. v. FCC) which got a huge attention from the most active and vocal pirates. This meant that ISPs could not differentiate between what kind of and how much traffic went through. This meant companies could offer services requiring very high bandwidth (eg. HD video streaming) and if the internet was slow, the ISPs would be the culprit (for advertising higher speeds than they were able to provide if a lot of users used such services). Obviously, at this point, the best option for ISPs is to make internet more expensive. However, they obviously want to expand the market and rise in price could mean many users may just drop the service. So, they are going for this another option... which would allow them to charge different rates for profitable high-bandwidth using services and hence the cost would be transferred to the providers of those services and not the end customers. Obviously, those service providers (Google, Netflix, Pornhub etc.) don't want the cost to come to them (which might mean that their users would drop if they priced their services higher or entire business models to fail), they'd rather it be transferred to end users. So, they are vehemently pushing the "internet freedom"/"net neutrality" narrative when it's definitely not. To answer your question, ISPs would be free to not use the fast/slow lane approach if they can be competitive with it.
rotten 9y ago
Non-neutral internet bandwidth packages will only be offered if there is profit to be made. Cell phone companies didn't give us free long distance out of the kindness of their heart - it was simply too expensive to administer the billing. So, the trick is to make non-neutral packages very expensive to maintain or support for the ISP's. How? By making it too hard for them to implement in a way that isn't easily subverted or disrupted. (And by simply not buying the premium packages in the first place.) Too few customers with too much maintenance and software and administrative overhead, and the companies will flee from this idea except in the cases where they are intentionally engaged in censorship of some sort.
- hnal943 9y ago
  I think competition was more responsible for free long distance than the cost of billing customers.
  - rotten 9y ago
    One of my friends was a software developer for the billing software for a cell provider, so I had some "inside scoop" in learning that...
unclesaamm 9y ago
This article buys way too much into the concept of "democratic efficiency", that "being heard" leads directly to government action, and therefore lack of action (or the wrong kind of action) is _caused by_ a lack of "being heard". This is so, so, so wrong, and is just further setting the stage for net neutrality to be repealed and for the blame to be cast at activists' feet. Net neutrality is one of the most popular policies in recent memory, and for it to be constantly assaulted by the same handful of large ISPs is a perfect encapsulation of why capitalism is failing our society. We're going to get tiered Internet not because the "Day of Action" was unsuccessful, but because there is no way that Ajit Pai would have satisfied himself with anything except a repeal of net neutrality. Do you really think he's going to sit there reading the comments, and think, "I have been wrong my entire career!" The issue at hand is clearly about a government that is utterly unresponsive to its people.
- ajross 9y ago
  Pai's immediate predecessor literally flipped his position on net neutrality, owing largely (at least as is commonly assumed) to political pressure from the White House, itself driven by clearly expressed sentiment among the democratic base. Absent the earlier burst of activism, it's unlikely the Obama administration would have cared enough to lean on Wheeler. That doesn't mean that it's going to work on Trump and Pai in the same way, but arguing that activism "doesn't work" based on this one data point is silly. It does work, sometimes. The details matter.
  - chestervonwinch 9y ago
    There's a number of studies showing how legislation doesn't represent the preferences of constituents. See for more info, represent.us or the Anti-corruption act [1]. The last net neutrality outcry was unique in that nearly every major internet-based company joined in the protest. I don't think I've ever seen that happen for any other issue before. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Corruption_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Corruption_Act
- godelski 9y ago
  I think with politics taking such a hard line position on reducing neutrality that we really have to just bypass the politics of it all together. If we look at history, it would suggest that this is the major way to avoid a lot of these issues (don't get me wrong, politics is definitely a catalyst). This has been true for GW, medicine, access to materials (water, food), etc. Because frankly throughout history it is common to have a > government that is utterly unresponsive to its people. But is there a way that we can make it near impossible to not have net neutrality? As far as I'm aware, there is no solution that doesn't allow for someone to obtain control. Fixing the human factor is difficult, but is there a clear way to bypass it?
longliveNN 9y ago
I work at BigCo and heard that we wanted to do more for the net neutrality day of action but were deterred due to getting "gentle reminders" from certain politicians and regulators from within the government about other avenues for potential consequences. Which makes me suspicious that the other BigCos were put into a similar position.
Something1234 9y ago
If this is so important to our industry, why are people in our industry helping to destroy net neutrality?
aphextron 9y ago
I think it is a growing sense of complete helplessness in American politics. Corporations and politicians will do as they wish, and we'll sit back and watch it on CNN. What can we possibly do? Yes, there will be protests and such. But as we've seen endlessly in this country, the money always wins. The slacktivism shown in this article exemplifies the state of complete cynicism we've reached as a society.
s73ver 9y ago
So question: Google, Facebook, Netflix, et al all say that Net Neutrality is extremely important to their business. Why are they not drowning legislators in lobbying and "campaign contributions" to make sure it stays? I mean, they have to be able to outspend the cable companies. And if the GOP position suddenly flip flops to be in favor of NN, it's not like any of their base will notice.
- MagnumOpus 9y ago
  Google and Facebook don't really care - they are big enough to be in the fast lane or zero-rated no matter what, and their startup competitors being killed is good for them. Netflix alone is just not big enough by itself to outspend the half-billion or so that the Media Big 6 and the Baby Bells spent on buying politicians, ads and spin.
payne92 9y ago
We may need to first live with some ISP shenanigans before everybody fully understands what network neutrality is about. A few years ago, I noticed that frontier was hijacking Google searches. A search bar search for "Amazon" went straight to amazon.com, complete with an affiliate id! I wrote a letter to the Frontier CEO, sent it via FedEx, and she called me directly within hours of receiving it. The gist of my letter was, "by behaving this way, you are bringing the debate on yourself." She was unaware her company was doing this and stopped the practice. This is a small example that's easily detectable externally (unlike internal network traffic shaping). But we may need to cycle through a few stories like this to cut through the rhetoric.
- mreome 9y ago
  My concern is that they won't make it so obvious though. If they simply install fast lanes and the big-players start paying, will the average internet user notice that the few small sites they visit load slower? Would it really be that much more obvious then traffic shaping?
drewmol 9y ago
After FCC rule change[1], it seems the Telco mafia is also seizing control of available wireless spectrum which could be viable for alternate ISP service/media broadcast options. Although I do think there's more productive utilization of this frequency spectrum than broadcasting digital video signals, unfortunately it looks like the same oligopoly will soon control all the terrestrial broadcast licenses[2][3], essentially owning the whole spectrum. Then I'd suspect they'll lobby to repurpose all of them for authenticated (subscription-based) wireless IP/data use[4]. [1]http://fortune.com/2017/04/20/fcc-broadcast-tv-station-ownership/ http://fortune.com/2017/04/20/fcc-broadcast-tv-station-owner... [2]https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/business/dealbook/tv-station-owners-rush-to-seize-on-relaxed-fcc-rules.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/business/dealbook/tv-s... [3]http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/comcast-nation/FCC-announces-results-of-spectrum-auction-Comcast-big-buyer-for-cell-phone.html http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/comcast-nation/FCC-announ... [4]http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/04/13/fccs-tv-airwaves-auction-drew-19-8-billion-led-by-t-mobile.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/04/13/fccs-tv-airwa...
pteredactyl 9y ago
Internet and consequently, ISPs, should be a public utility. Like water and electricity.
Fej 9y ago
The best way I have seen to describe net neutrality to laypeople was uttered by John Oliver: "preventing cable company fuckery". A good example: like the water company suddenly saying that you're not allowed to use your water to fill reusable water bottles, unless you pay a further monthly fee, but they do have a partnership with Dasani to deliver water bottles to your door for cheaper than the store price.
jd75 9y ago
Why would Ajit Pai care what we think? How much money have we given the GOP? What kushy job do we have lined up for him if he does what we want?

129 points by urahara 9y ago

The government's response to its constituents has been a flatline for many years now. I don't expect today's FCC to be any different. However, the battle will continue with some of the heavy hitters that have been so instrumental for creating real change: advocacy groups with good lawyers. (EFF, Fight For the Future, Public Knowledge, et al.) They will be the ones that really take the fight to the Pai-hole. It's an uphill battle, but probably our best hope. *edited for grammar and clarity

throwitlong 9y ago

Politicians will always be voted into office for something that looks important to people but politicians do not care the least. Then they silently implement what they really care about.

hnal943 9y ago
Or because Net Neutrality is not as popular in the society at large as it is in the SF headquarters of big tech companies.

honestoHeminway 9y ago

The mistake was for the internet to grow on the ISPs infrastructure in the first place. Now they will murder anything new by slowing it to a crawl. So to succeed, on must have superior compression- and/or a alternative infrastructure. Or- one could try to hijack the fastlanes.

metalliqaz 9y ago
Sufficient competition in the market would be enough. Unfortunately, the government has allowed total monopoly on fixed line broadband. They've done it in two ways: first through exclusivity contracts with companies such as Verizon, ATT, Cox, and Comcast. They give fat payments in the form of cash, tax breaks, and local monopolies in exchange for the companies to build out infrastructure. Second, they have allowed consolidation in the marketplace to a level that should never have even been considered. I agree that, long term, only a replacement infrastructure will be a viable solution. Unfortunately the only technology that currently has a chance is 4G/5G mobile service, and it is even more consumer-hostile. In the mean time, we need Net Neutrality.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  I don't think it's realistic to expect free-market competitors to build out massive infrastructure to compete with each other. They wouldn't even serve large swathes of the country at all if they didn't have to.
  - graphitezepp 9y ago
    As someone who trends towards espousing free-market virtues but I have long sense accepted that do to the practical physical concerns of laying so much wire the only 'good' workable situation for running the internet is a centralized, probably gov anyone else is a rent seeker, body with strong net neutrality and privacy policy. But that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen.
  - metalliqaz 9y ago
    I agree. The gov dropped the ball by failing to build out the infrastructure itself, such that they were kept public utilities. They obviously didn't understand the importance that these networks would eventually have.
- westbywest 9y ago
  A third way is the ~20 state governments who've subscribed to this model peddled by ALEC, barring municipalities from deploying infrastructure, on the grounds of preserving competition. Given the typical size of incumbent providers, this instead has the effect of preserving duo/monopoly, which critics argue is its intended purpose. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1908390-alec-model-muni-bband-legislation.html https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/1908390-alec-model-m...
- uncletammy 9y ago
  I also expect new infrastructure to be the most likely solution. I wouldn't expect it to be 4G/5G mobile service though. I always thought that the next infrastructure would be a series of wireless mesh networks. They are extremely censorship resistant and can operate on unlicensed frequencies which makes them resistant to centralized control. I've heard about projects like https://nycmesh.net https://nycmesh.net and http://guifi.net http://guifi.net that have sprung up even while the internet was fairly neutral. That leaves me hopeful that this type of project will quickly replace wired infrastructure if it quickly becomes needed. I'm nowhere close to an expert in this field so I would love to be corrected if I'm wrong about any of that. I would also love someone more informed than myself to talk about the current state of wireless mesh and/or 4G/5G mobile.
larrydag 9y ago
I'm for free markets and competition but I have to agree with you here. Like the US interstate road system the fixed line broadband, especially the big fiber pipes, probably needs to be taken over by a quasi-federal program similar to the Post Office. There seems to be too much of a monopoly or oligarchy collusion taken place. Broadband is not improving with competition currently.
- hnal943 9y ago
  This is the first time I've seen someone hold up the Post Office as model that should be followed for anything. What makes you think that this model would be less monopolistic than the one we have today?
  - larrydag 9y ago
    I wouldn't call it an ideal model. It was used before for similar purposes of transporting data between long distances. You could argue whether it served its purpose or not. For its time the USPS did a good job of delivering on its intended objective until the free market created new and innovative ways to make it obsolete (email, Fed Ex, UPS, Paypal, etc.)
uncletammy 9y ago
I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted. I'd love to hear your opinion on what form the build-out of the internet should have taken. If not on ISPs infrastructure, then who's?

crispyambulance 9y ago

Net neutrality is dying because no one has been able to make a compelling case for it that can be understood by constituents, let alone politicians. There is one thing that just enough politicians do understand, however, and that's money. In their pockets. From ghouls who will profit handsomely when online access in the USA becomes effectively equivalent to shitty cable-tv service.

avryhof 9y ago
I can see that. Website packages, just like channel packages on cable. - You can get all the shopping sites, and your ISP's streaming service in the base package. - Third-party Music Sites with Music Extra. - Third-party Video Sites with Video Extra. Then there is the Several speed levels of the Unlimited plan starting at just $999/month. Personal blogs, websites and Open Source project sites will be restricted to the top 5%. Everyone else will have to just deal with canned media from the big corporations and ISPs.
- nsxwolf 9y ago
  And the average consumer will think that sounds great. Especially when you throw in a few services that don't count against their data cap.
- metalliqaz 9y ago
  Unfortunately, a future like that would even be preferable to what we will get, because that would be rejected by consumers. Instead, they will squeeze outside media and tech companies behind the scenes and will stifle competition (and innovation) out of view of the consumer.
- syshum 9y ago
  No what you are going to see is Zero Rating with extreme Caps "Want 4K Content, Use HULU and it will not count toward your 1TB limit" "Want unlimited music, Our new Xfinity Music Service is now allows you to enjoy all the music you want with out worry about going over your data cap" Then ofcourse will be fast lanes "Tired of your 4K movie buffering, Try the new Xfintiy On Demand, Guaranteed not to buffer"

cmahler7 9y ago

Wouldn't getting rid of net neutrality actually be good for startups and smaller companies? People are effectively subsidizing the internet giants right now, if telecoms charged extra for them people would move on to different services? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's odd to see people banding together to defend Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. Although the companies on the other side are obviously scum as well.

grive 9y ago
How do you start a content company when competing against the subsidiaries of the tube owners then? They essentially have prime access to their internal market, and you will have to pay upfront to have a public. Why would they demand only the giants to pay? They have zero interest fostering competition against their own products.
HillaryBriss 9y ago
good point. are google's search results neutral?
rpedroso 9y ago
Suppose that we eliminate net neutrality. Further suppose that, in a few years, I start a video streaming service called "Notflix". Because ISPs are no longer required to be dumb pipes, they've started charging their customers a premium for access to video content. This is bad for Netflix, of course, because it cuts into their subscriber base. They crunch some numbers and come up with an amount they're willing to pay the ISPs to exclude their subscribers from this segmented pricing scheme. The ISPs accept this mutually beneficial deal, and everyone's happy, right? What about Notflix, though? We don't have the capital that Netflix has to pay into this protection racket, so our subscribers must choose between paying the ISP video premium + our subscription fee, or Netflix's subscription fee. That's an uphill battle and straightforwardly anti-competitive, but is also the precisely the promise of a world without net neutrality. I also disagree with your assessment that anybody is subsidizing internet giants. All those players pay for the bandwidth they consume to dump their data into the network. The end-user pays for the other end of the connection. Everything is being paid for, proportionally to the usage. The last-mile ISPs simply want to double-dip. Comcast thinks Netflix should pay both Level 3 AND Comcast for using the pipes, which fundamentally undermines the architecture of the internet.

hartator 9y ago

I don't see what this fuss is all about. If Facebook wants to offer cheaper Internet with their services prioritized, why not? Plus Internet is far from being neutral right now. Emails got deliver depending on your server IPs. CDNs already pay to be hosted by ISPs for a fast lane. Torrents don't reach the full capacity of your bandwidth. Etc. The case against government regulations for the Internet is easy to make: Easier to start an ISP, cheaper services for the end consumers, less government expenses to enforce all of that, etc.

fredley 9y ago
Because the fear is that the internet will become like TV: you can't buy access to 'TV', despite the fact there's no technical limitation. You have to buy packages, from different providers in order to get what you want. You have to sign up to hefty subscription packages with loads of bundled shite just to watch 7 hours of Game of Thrones. Currently you buy access to the internet, and that's all internet, at equal priority. You can connect to my little $6 VPS or raspberry pi as easily as you can to Google or Facebook. And that's a great thing. If I want to get my show on TV, I have to negotiate with different channels and studios to try and get it broadcast, anywhere. And even then it would probably be on some shitty channel with tiny viewership, interspersed with ads for medication and financial scams. On the internet I can publish on my own terms, and anybody else with an internet connection can view it, on my terms. Undermining net neutrality threatens this. In the UK some ISPs are providing 'free unlimited access to WhatsApp'. It's just the start of a road that leads to the default model changes from paying for internet access, to most people getting free 'internet', restricted to just those companies who pay the ISP instead to provide free access. This is a slippery slope: once it starts, it will continue until smaller sites are no longer visible to people without 'premium' internet - who will be a minority. This is bad.
- splintercell 9y ago
  > Because the fear is that the internet will become like TV But I would rather take that than Internet becoming like TV, where govt can pass 'fairness doctrine' and other stuff, or restrict it significantly during war time. I'd rather trust economic incentives to keep Internet free than political incentives. If people are willing to pay for full coverage of the War, then even though govt is pressuring ISPs, it results in a losing prisoner's dilemma for ISPs (take for instance the popularity of Al Jazeera during Iraq War).

d--b 9y ago

Is there any hope that some new ISP gets created that does follow net neutrality? What's likely to happen to an ISP that doesn't play the fast/slow lane approach?

mattnewton 9y ago
If it were likely people would create new ISPs that could compete then net neutrality would be less of an issue for me, because the ISP would have less leverage. As it stands today in the US though that's exceedingly and increasingly unlikely.
uncletammy 9y ago
I would expect the major hurdle by any new ISP to be ownership of infrastructure. If anti-neutral firms own the poles, they are likely to put up one hell of a fight to keep them. That being said, it would make sense to me that scrapping neutrality might be the very thing needed to encourage Google to finish their fiber roll out across the US. Incumbent telecoms have incentive to restrict access to content. Google being an advertising company, has incentive to encourage the flow of content. Google owning the internet is probably way worse in the long run but it might just be a great short term solution to the neutrality problem.
- Arubis 9y ago
  Screw poles. In sufficiently dense metro areas, microwave or similar is competitive on price and bandwidth. This is deeply unfair to less dense areas, though. Google Fiber is shiny and alluring, but there's other solutions for us urbanites. What I'd love to see, and would make a difference, is competition for last-mile delivery _outside_ of cities.
anotherbrownguy 9y ago
I would love to be corrected and there is a lot of disinformation, at least from one side, but here is my understanding of the issue: Let's say an ISP A wants to cover a small area with 1000 potential users. So, lets say they allocate 100gbps bandwidth for the market. So, they sell 100mbps internet to 1000 users. All of the users get 100mbps dedicated but it is expensive for them. Besides, not all users are using 100mbps all the time anyway. So, a competing ISP B could just allocate 10gbps (one-tenth of what other had) saving a lot of costs, and offer 100mbps at half the price with a condition that speeds could be lower at peak hours because if everyone is using full bandwidth (very unlikely), they will only get 1/10th of the advertised speeds (in practice, it's usually close to advertised speed most of the time). The ISP A is completely outpriced so they can either lower their prices or go out of business... and obviously they choose a similar strategy to be competitive. This has been the case for a long time. They have optimized it with dynamic contention ratios and the like but this is basically how it works. Anyone who needs dedicated bandwidth knows that prices for those for the same speeds are very expensive compared to regular internet. The problem with this is obviously "the problem users". Back in the days, they were the ones who would hog up maximum bandwidth most of the time using it for file sharing (seed/download all day long). In the above example, if 100 users use all the available bandwidth at all times, whole of the bandwidth is taken up all the time. So, during peak hours, when some of the other 900 joined in, the speeds were much slower than advertised. The ISPs noticed that file sharing was using most of the bandwidth, so if they blocked it, they could improve internet experience of everyone (except for the pirates, which made a small percentage of their customer base). This is what Comcast did in 2007 by blocking bittorrent traffic. The pirates however, who also happened to be the most active and knowledgable internet users, were not happy obviously. So, two lobbies filed a case against Comcast making it a freedom issue (see Comcast Corp. v. FCC) which got a huge attention from the most active and vocal pirates. This meant that ISPs could not differentiate between what kind of and how much traffic went through. This meant companies could offer services requiring very high bandwidth (eg. HD video streaming) and if the internet was slow, the ISPs would be the culprit (for advertising higher speeds than they were able to provide if a lot of users used such services). Obviously, at this point, the best option for ISPs is to make internet more expensive. However, they obviously want to expand the market and rise in price could mean many users may just drop the service. So, they are going for this another option... which would allow them to charge different rates for profitable high-bandwidth using services and hence the cost would be transferred to the providers of those services and not the end customers. Obviously, those service providers (Google, Netflix, Pornhub etc.) don't want the cost to come to them (which might mean that their users would drop if they priced their services higher or entire business models to fail), they'd rather it be transferred to end users. So, they are vehemently pushing the "internet freedom"/"net neutrality" narrative when it's definitely not. To answer your question, ISPs would be free to not use the fast/slow lane approach if they can be competitive with it.

rotten 9y ago

Non-neutral internet bandwidth packages will only be offered if there is profit to be made. Cell phone companies didn't give us free long distance out of the kindness of their heart - it was simply too expensive to administer the billing. So, the trick is to make non-neutral packages very expensive to maintain or support for the ISP's. How? By making it too hard for them to implement in a way that isn't easily subverted or disrupted. (And by simply not buying the premium packages in the first place.) Too few customers with too much maintenance and software and administrative overhead, and the companies will flee from this idea except in the cases where they are intentionally engaged in censorship of some sort.

hnal943 9y ago
I think competition was more responsible for free long distance than the cost of billing customers.
- rotten 9y ago
  One of my friends was a software developer for the billing software for a cell provider, so I had some "inside scoop" in learning that...

unclesaamm 9y ago

This article buys way too much into the concept of "democratic efficiency", that "being heard" leads directly to government action, and therefore lack of action (or the wrong kind of action) is _caused by_ a lack of "being heard". This is so, so, so wrong, and is just further setting the stage for net neutrality to be repealed and for the blame to be cast at activists' feet. Net neutrality is one of the most popular policies in recent memory, and for it to be constantly assaulted by the same handful of large ISPs is a perfect encapsulation of why capitalism is failing our society. We're going to get tiered Internet not because the "Day of Action" was unsuccessful, but because there is no way that Ajit Pai would have satisfied himself with anything except a repeal of net neutrality. Do you really think he's going to sit there reading the comments, and think, "I have been wrong my entire career!" The issue at hand is clearly about a government that is utterly unresponsive to its people.

ajross 9y ago
Pai's immediate predecessor literally flipped his position on net neutrality, owing largely (at least as is commonly assumed) to political pressure from the White House, itself driven by clearly expressed sentiment among the democratic base. Absent the earlier burst of activism, it's unlikely the Obama administration would have cared enough to lean on Wheeler. That doesn't mean that it's going to work on Trump and Pai in the same way, but arguing that activism "doesn't work" based on this one data point is silly. It does work, sometimes. The details matter.
- chestervonwinch 9y ago
  There's a number of studies showing how legislation doesn't represent the preferences of constituents. See for more info, represent.us or the Anti-corruption act [1]. The last net neutrality outcry was unique in that nearly every major internet-based company joined in the protest. I don't think I've ever seen that happen for any other issue before. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Corruption_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Anti-Corruption_Act
godelski 9y ago
I think with politics taking such a hard line position on reducing neutrality that we really have to just bypass the politics of it all together. If we look at history, it would suggest that this is the major way to avoid a lot of these issues (don't get me wrong, politics is definitely a catalyst). This has been true for GW, medicine, access to materials (water, food), etc. Because frankly throughout history it is common to have a > government that is utterly unresponsive to its people. But is there a way that we can make it near impossible to not have net neutrality? As far as I'm aware, there is no solution that doesn't allow for someone to obtain control. Fixing the human factor is difficult, but is there a clear way to bypass it?

longliveNN 9y ago

I work at BigCo and heard that we wanted to do more for the net neutrality day of action but were deterred due to getting "gentle reminders" from certain politicians and regulators from within the government about other avenues for potential consequences. Which makes me suspicious that the other BigCos were put into a similar position.

Something1234 9y ago

If this is so important to our industry, why are people in our industry helping to destroy net neutrality?

aphextron 9y ago

I think it is a growing sense of complete helplessness in American politics. Corporations and politicians will do as they wish, and we'll sit back and watch it on CNN. What can we possibly do? Yes, there will be protests and such. But as we've seen endlessly in this country, the money always wins. The slacktivism shown in this article exemplifies the state of complete cynicism we've reached as a society.

s73ver 9y ago

So question: Google, Facebook, Netflix, et al all say that Net Neutrality is extremely important to their business. Why are they not drowning legislators in lobbying and "campaign contributions" to make sure it stays? I mean, they have to be able to outspend the cable companies. And if the GOP position suddenly flip flops to be in favor of NN, it's not like any of their base will notice.

MagnumOpus 9y ago
Google and Facebook don't really care - they are big enough to be in the fast lane or zero-rated no matter what, and their startup competitors being killed is good for them. Netflix alone is just not big enough by itself to outspend the half-billion or so that the Media Big 6 and the Baby Bells spent on buying politicians, ads and spin.

payne92 9y ago

We may need to first live with some ISP shenanigans before everybody fully understands what network neutrality is about. A few years ago, I noticed that frontier was hijacking Google searches. A search bar search for "Amazon" went straight to amazon.com, complete with an affiliate id! I wrote a letter to the Frontier CEO, sent it via FedEx, and she called me directly within hours of receiving it. The gist of my letter was, "by behaving this way, you are bringing the debate on yourself." She was unaware her company was doing this and stopped the practice. This is a small example that's easily detectable externally (unlike internal network traffic shaping). But we may need to cycle through a few stories like this to cut through the rhetoric.

mreome 9y ago
My concern is that they won't make it so obvious though. If they simply install fast lanes and the big-players start paying, will the average internet user notice that the few small sites they visit load slower? Would it really be that much more obvious then traffic shaping?

drewmol 9y ago

After FCC rule change[1], it seems the Telco mafia is also seizing control of available wireless spectrum which could be viable for alternate ISP service/media broadcast options. Although I do think there's more productive utilization of this frequency spectrum than broadcasting digital video signals, unfortunately it looks like the same oligopoly will soon control all the terrestrial broadcast licenses[2][3], essentially owning the whole spectrum. Then I'd suspect they'll lobby to repurpose all of them for authenticated (subscription-based) wireless IP/data use[4]. [1]http://fortune.com/2017/04/20/fcc-broadcast-tv-station-ownership/ http://fortune.com/2017/04/20/fcc-broadcast-tv-station-owner... [2]https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/business/dealbook/tv-station-owners-rush-to-seize-on-relaxed-fcc-rules.html https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/business/dealbook/tv-s... [3]http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/comcast-nation/FCC-announces-results-of-spectrum-auction-Comcast-big-buyer-for-cell-phone.html http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/comcast-nation/FCC-announ... [4]http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/04/13/fccs-tv-airwaves-auction-drew-19-8-billion-led-by-t-mobile.html http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/04/13/fccs-tv-airwa...

pteredactyl 9y ago

Internet and consequently, ISPs, should be a public utility. Like water and electricity.

Fej 9y ago

The best way I have seen to describe net neutrality to laypeople was uttered by John Oliver: "preventing cable company fuckery". A good example: like the water company suddenly saying that you're not allowed to use your water to fill reusable water bottles, unless you pay a further monthly fee, but they do have a partnership with Dasani to deliver water bottles to your door for cheaper than the store price.

jd75 9y ago

Why would Ajit Pai care what we think? How much money have we given the GOP? What kushy job do we have lined up for him if he does what we want?