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This idea is the problem with net neutrality. The reason people support net neutrality is that ISPs are monopolies even more so than Google, Facebook, etc and

This idea is the problem with net neutrality. The reason people support net neutrality is that ISPs are monopolies even more so than Google, Facebook, etc and we understand that monopolies are unfair, corrupt, renters, etc. Therefore it easy to be blinded into supporting rules that purport to punish ISPs, even if the rule itself is illogical and loaded for unintended consequences. Reasonable people can oppose Net Neutrality for the economic illogicality of an enterprise not being allowed to negotiate prices with its customers. What people want is laws punishing monopoly ISPs. No one cares if Google has to pay a fraction of their ad revenue to help pay for serving them bloated ad data they didn't even ask for.

matt4077 9y ago
> [..] economic illogicality of an enterprise not being allowed to negotiate prices with its customers. See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers. And you're assuming peoples' motives in the face of these people telling you that you're wrong: I actually don't have grudge with my local ISP. What is scaring me shitless is a future where the internet is just Cable TV, and where the chance to have an idea and get it out there essentially unhindered is dead, because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target. This isn't about google. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt. The large fish will be the last to ever pay. This is about the business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small. No customer will ever complain if their ISP blocks your new idea, because they will never know about it.
- benlorenzetti 9y ago
  > See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers. In every willing exchange of data, both the transmitter and receiver are the ISPs' customer. > And you're assuming peoples' motives ... because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target. > ...Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt. > This is about business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small. This argument is clearly all about our mistrust of monopolies. You clearly don't trust ISPs as a whole, presumably because there is naturally no competition. If you and I don't know a small site exists yet, how is the ISP gonna know? And small businesses aren't going to be targets, for the same reason the IRS doesn't target the small fish with its big guns. Setting the economics aside, if one is worried about ISPs ability to target free speech by surcharging a particular site, then how is getting the federal government more involved the answer?
- seanp2k2 9y ago
  http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-deals-that-mean-you-have-to-wait-for-youtube-947766871/amp http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-deals-that-mean-you-have-to-wa... The big fish already do pay because ISPs hold their customers hostage. They've "opened new revenue channels" by realizing that they can just pay a small amount for lobbying efforts so FCC and friends will leave them alone to make a larger amount from content sources.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - benlorenzetti 9y ago
    Thanks for finding this. This is exactly the point, we can reduce lobbying corruption by scrapping such economics-defying rules. This is completely orthogonal to real anti-trust legislation against the hardwired ISPs, which both parties seem to be incapable of. Net Neutrality didn't officially exist for the first 3 decades of the Internet; I never thought making it official policy fixed a big enough problem to make it worth the cost. A lot of data volume coming out of Google and Facebook are profitable ad images we didn't specifically request. Why shouldn't our ISPs be able charge them for this data? End user bills could fall as low as $0! But the mechanism for doing so has to be blunt and "discriminatory": you can't realistically tell what percentage of data from a domain is of a particular type nor can you keep track of, and contact, every tiny data serving domain out there.
AmIFirstToThink 9y ago
Internet traffic changes hands between ISPs and backbone carriers before reaching destination. What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements? If someone from Malaysia accesses your site, you would have to have agreement in place for the entire route. Or think other way, anyone can start extorting money from site owners at any point in time. It's bad for you as a end customer. It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.
- benlorenzetti 9y ago
  > What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements? If ISPs were not dominated by federal-government-originated monopolies, then our traffic would have a variety of routes available to it, found by a breadth first search of ISP switches and DNS services, with tolls (effectively) charged at each step of the cheapest path. When possible, market forces are always a better solution than government force. If an ISP in Hawaii has no local servers for [big advertising-data company 1] and the cheapest route for that data is more expensive than [company 2 with Hawaii server], it should be legal for the ISP to negotiate directly with to subsidize the cost of using [domain 1] for its end consumers. What is bad for the end customer is this federal/private monopoly control of ISPs. If cities, regional government entities, and private backbone viaducts controlled ISPs we wouldn't need net neutrality legislation and more importantly the president would have less legal clubs with which to beat ISPs who refuse any government demands. Net neutrality is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The root problem is these large private monopolies that are under the thumb of, and also lobby federal officials. > It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal. This is not the closest analogy. One possible analogy is like a gas station defraying the cost of the toll road, in exchange for the right to be built on prime land. Another closer analogy would be like the toll booth on the road charging you extra if you are coming from the bank driving a branded, armored cash truck, which has a quantitatively, provably large value derived from getting from point A to point B. Is this behavior morally ok? I think the answer has to be yes otherwise how can we justify any level of regressive taxation for public services? Indeed how could people trade effectively without taking into account the other parties' interest? Not sure which analogy is closer to your intent, but to reason honestly by analogy we should get as close as possible to the same situation.

matt4077 9y ago

> [..] economic illogicality of an enterprise not being allowed to negotiate prices with its customers. See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers. And you're assuming peoples' motives in the face of these people telling you that you're wrong: I actually don't have grudge with my local ISP. What is scaring me shitless is a future where the internet is just Cable TV, and where the chance to have an idea and get it out there essentially unhindered is dead, because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target. This isn't about google. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt. The large fish will be the last to ever pay. This is about the business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small. No customer will ever complain if their ISP blocks your new idea, because they will never know about it.

benlorenzetti 9y ago
> See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers. In every willing exchange of data, both the transmitter and receiver are the ISPs' customer. > And you're assuming peoples' motives ... because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target. > ...Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt. > This is about business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small. This argument is clearly all about our mistrust of monopolies. You clearly don't trust ISPs as a whole, presumably because there is naturally no competition. If you and I don't know a small site exists yet, how is the ISP gonna know? And small businesses aren't going to be targets, for the same reason the IRS doesn't target the small fish with its big guns. Setting the economics aside, if one is worried about ISPs ability to target free speech by surcharging a particular site, then how is getting the federal government more involved the answer?
seanp2k2 9y ago
http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-deals-that-mean-you-have-to-wait-for-youtube-947766871/amp http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-deals-that-mean-you-have-to-wa... The big fish already do pay because ISPs hold their customers hostage. They've "opened new revenue channels" by realizing that they can just pay a small amount for lobbying efforts so FCC and friends will leave them alone to make a larger amount from content sources.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- benlorenzetti 9y ago
  Thanks for finding this. This is exactly the point, we can reduce lobbying corruption by scrapping such economics-defying rules. This is completely orthogonal to real anti-trust legislation against the hardwired ISPs, which both parties seem to be incapable of. Net Neutrality didn't officially exist for the first 3 decades of the Internet; I never thought making it official policy fixed a big enough problem to make it worth the cost. A lot of data volume coming out of Google and Facebook are profitable ad images we didn't specifically request. Why shouldn't our ISPs be able charge them for this data? End user bills could fall as low as $0! But the mechanism for doing so has to be blunt and "discriminatory": you can't realistically tell what percentage of data from a domain is of a particular type nor can you keep track of, and contact, every tiny data serving domain out there.

AmIFirstToThink 9y ago

Internet traffic changes hands between ISPs and backbone carriers before reaching destination. What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements? If someone from Malaysia accesses your site, you would have to have agreement in place for the entire route. Or think other way, anyone can start extorting money from site owners at any point in time. It's bad for you as a end customer. It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.

benlorenzetti 9y ago
> What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements? If ISPs were not dominated by federal-government-originated monopolies, then our traffic would have a variety of routes available to it, found by a breadth first search of ISP switches and DNS services, with tolls (effectively) charged at each step of the cheapest path. When possible, market forces are always a better solution than government force. If an ISP in Hawaii has no local servers for [big advertising-data company 1] and the cheapest route for that data is more expensive than [company 2 with Hawaii server], it should be legal for the ISP to negotiate directly with to subsidize the cost of using [domain 1] for its end consumers. What is bad for the end customer is this federal/private monopoly control of ISPs. If cities, regional government entities, and private backbone viaducts controlled ISPs we wouldn't need net neutrality legislation and more importantly the president would have less legal clubs with which to beat ISPs who refuse any government demands. Net neutrality is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The root problem is these large private monopolies that are under the thumb of, and also lobby federal officials. > It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal. This is not the closest analogy. One possible analogy is like a gas station defraying the cost of the toll road, in exchange for the right to be built on prime land. Another closer analogy would be like the toll booth on the road charging you extra if you are coming from the bank driving a branded, armored cash truck, which has a quantitatively, provably large value derived from getting from point A to point B. Is this behavior morally ok? I think the answer has to be yes otherwise how can we justify any level of regressive taxation for public services? Indeed how could people trade effectively without taking into account the other parties' interest? Not sure which analogy is closer to your intent, but to reason honestly by analogy we should get as close as possible to the same situation.