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Whilst I completely think net neutrality should be enshrined in law, I do wonder whether "the market" will ensure it is always available. If you have a choice

Whilst I completely think net neutrality should be enshrined in law, I do wonder whether "the market" will ensure it is always available. If you have a choice of two ISPs and one of them is net neutral, the other is not, which one are you going to choose? If you are not able to choose your provider, you have a monopoly issue - the way to deal with that might be net neutrality for now, but you really need to break the monopoly irrespective of that. Some consumers may be ill-informed. I think if plans are explicit, that's actually going to cause pause for thought and consumers will educate themselves: there is some evidence of this younger consumers at least and the choices they're making (e.g. Facebook is dying off with < 30 year olds). For me the really scary option is when your ISP is preferring traffic for a major incumbent and limiting traffic to a new competitor and not making that explicitly clear to you. At that point you don't get to make an informed choice of ISP, you don't get consumer education calling out there are options, and you don't get shifts in the market. That's the really dangerous one we need to be wary of, IMHO.

mikeash 9y ago
I agree that net neutrality becomes much less important if there's real competition between ISPs. But for most of the US, there isn't. Monopolies and non-competitive duopolies are common. Yes, this should be fixed, but it's really, really hard, far harder than regulating neutrality.
- Thisisdense 9y ago
  No such thing in Portugal as well
- BoorishBears 9y ago
  Getting blanket downvotes for going against the hivemind so nevermind.
  - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
    In other words: They have not used it for anything more than trying to kill their competition? Well, nothing to worry about then!
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      What? Where did I say something about killing competition?
      - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition.
        will_hughes 9y ago
        > What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition. That's not the only scenario for zero-rating. Not too long ago, getting international backhaul in Australia was absurdly expensive. So various smaller ISPs joined IXs, and then offered customers plans which had a certain amount of quota for your usual traffic, but traffic which was routed via an IX was zero-rated. This included game servers, FTP mirrors, usenet, and various internet radio services. This is technically against net neutrality, but I don't see this as being a bad thing for anyone involved.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Well, what I meant was zero-rating of services, which is what this discussion is about (rather than based on actual operational costs). And actually, arguably, that is not necessarily against net neutrality. Net neutrality ultimately is about whether anyone can send traffic to the ISP's customers under the same, non-monopolistic, conditions. As such, making a geographic distinction isn't really that much of a problem, if it is not used to also implement other distinctions. The question is: Could anyone who would have wanted to send traffic to those customers bought transit on the open market at market rates in order to deliver traffic to within the reach of the zero rating? It's a problem if you can buy special interconnects from the ISP in order to have your traffic zero-rated. It's not really a problem if the ISP says "any traffic delivered to this exchange (that is well-connected to many competing transit providers) is zero-rated".
  - mikeash 9y ago
    What's complex about it? ISPs should be dumb pipes. They shouldn't care what you use them for any more than the electric company does. Seems pretty black-and-white to me.
    - BoorishBears 9y ago
      And I disagree, because the average consumer would not want to pay for what it would cost if the ISPs priced that into their fees. There’s no need for an ISP to throttle, they could just charge consumers the exact cost to build out as much capacity as they need. But that cost would raise rates to one that consumers don’t want to pay. To me this is about idealism meaning the real world. In a perfect would I’d love for ISPs to be dumb pipes, but even in your example, Electricity companies don’t charge you like a dumb pipe and offer time of use pricing, pricing based on zones, discounts or rebates based on energy efficiency. Likewise different sites generate enormously different costs on the ISPs side, and consumers are benefiting from ISPs balancing being a dumb pipe, with not charging the consumers the price of a pipe that can carry every type of load at every time at perfect speeds.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        Most ISPs are currently dumb pipes. The net neutrality fight is to keep them that way. The average consumer is paying for what it would cost, given that ISPs generally turn a profit.
        BoorishBears 9y ago
        I don’t know any ISP that doesn’t have some degree of throttling, and zero rating is becoming more and more common
        mikeash 9y ago
        Throttling has nothing to do with net neutrality, unless it's targeted at specific services.
c3534l 9y ago
That's what Comcast did in Canada. I think they have net neutrality now, though.
sytelus 9y ago
No, "markets would work it out" argument doesn't work here. ISPs are monopolized businesses in USA. There are only so many cables you can lay out and only so many players who have capital to invest all that money. When one player succeeds in this game they buy off appropriate amount of politicians to close doors for others. All the ISP "choices" in USA you see is just an illusion where some re-sellers re-brands exact same bandwidth under their fancy names and ads.
- adventured 9y ago
  > When one player succeeds in this game they buy off appropriate amount of politicians to close doors for others. Then what you're talking about is not a market at all. You're directly saying several times over that the problem is the lack of any semblance of a market, that the government is the specific problem. Besides that, reasonably speaking, there are not only so many cables you can lay in the ground. That infrastructure non-problem has had an extraordinarily simple fix for decades: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/nationwide-fiber-proposed-law-could-add-broadband-to-road-projects/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/natio...
chiaro 9y ago
This is accurate. Net neutrality is a band-aid on an open wound. This is not to say that net neutrality should be done away with - stopping a bad thing from getting worse is, after all, what band-aids are for. The problem is the wound itself. There is no where in the US where Comcast and Charter are competing. In fact, when you filter down to functional internet providers (10Mbps+) very few places have any choice at all. This is an effective monopolization, made possible through explicit cartelization. And where there is no open wound, the market does work, and net neutrality isn't really an issue. Australia, for example, legislates that any owner of the infrastructure must lend it to other providers at a set price. Where a lack of net neutrality is kept in check there by the market, a similar lack of would only be used in the US to achieve greater price granularity/discrimination at the expense of the consumer.
forapurpose 9y ago
> If you have a choice of two ISPs and one of them is net neutral, the other is not, which one are you going to choose? I strongly favor net neutrality, but personally my decision depends on price and other factors too. For example, I always can pay for a $400/month for a net-neutral private T1 line with 1.4 Mbps, but probably I won't. As for others: Few end users understand the technical basics required to grasp net neutrality, few are aware of the net neutrality issue, and fewer still understand the principle of freedom-as-in-speech and can grasp its impact. I've had many people ask me for advice on ISPs; not one ever asked about net neutrality. To function, the market relies on educated consumers with access to information; that's not the case here, just like consumers can't choose between airline safety measures. Regardless, few ISP markets have more than 2 vendors and no vendor offers this sort of thing - can you name one ISP of any size that offers net neutrality? The barrier to entry is too high for a newcomer to break in and sell it, even if there was demand.
smnrchrds 9y ago
It is absolutely conceivable that even in a non-monopolized market, net-neutral options would die or go on life support. Because people value price above all else, ISPs can reduce their prices well below their competitors by asking for payment from large incumbents (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) to prioritize their traffic and slow down their competitors. When the choice is between 20$ a month with high-speed access to most of the brands you already know, and 200$ a month for high-speed access to all websites, which one do you think will win. Gym business is not exactly a monopoly. Yet almost all gyms have opted to make their patrons sign long-term membership contracts with auto-renewal that are almost impossible to cancel. Getting out of gym membership is only marginally easier than renouncing Scientology (OK, I am exaggerating a bit). Gyms are designed to discourage working out and necessitate payment [1]. Why don't we have ethical upfront gyms? There are some, but they are way more expensive and most people are not close enough to one to justify a membership. The market has spoken and it has spoken wrong. Same with Walmart's destruction of local businesses and the ever-shrinking legroom in airlines. Market values price above all else. Unless net-neutral ISPs can manage to be cheaper than Facebook-subsidized ISPs, they will die rather soon. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/12/17/371463435/episode-590-the-planet-money-workout http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/12/17/371463435/episo...
Feniks 9y ago
"Whilst I completely think net neutrality should be enshrined in law" Oh it was. Then the European court over ruled it thanks to powerful lobbying.

mikeash 9y ago

I agree that net neutrality becomes much less important if there's real competition between ISPs. But for most of the US, there isn't. Monopolies and non-competitive duopolies are common. Yes, this should be fixed, but it's really, really hard, far harder than regulating neutrality.

Thisisdense 9y ago
No such thing in Portugal as well
BoorishBears 9y ago
Getting blanket downvotes for going against the hivemind so nevermind.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
  In other words: They have not used it for anything more than trying to kill their competition? Well, nothing to worry about then!
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    What? Where did I say something about killing competition?
    - zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
      What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition.
      - will_hughes 9y ago
        > What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition. That's not the only scenario for zero-rating. Not too long ago, getting international backhaul in Australia was absurdly expensive. So various smaller ISPs joined IXs, and then offered customers plans which had a certain amount of quota for your usual traffic, but traffic which was routed via an IX was zero-rated. This included game servers, FTP mirrors, usenet, and various internet radio services. This is technically against net neutrality, but I don't see this as being a bad thing for anyone involved.
        zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
        Well, what I meant was zero-rating of services, which is what this discussion is about (rather than based on actual operational costs). And actually, arguably, that is not necessarily against net neutrality. Net neutrality ultimately is about whether anyone can send traffic to the ISP's customers under the same, non-monopolistic, conditions. As such, making a geographic distinction isn't really that much of a problem, if it is not used to also implement other distinctions. The question is: Could anyone who would have wanted to send traffic to those customers bought transit on the open market at market rates in order to deliver traffic to within the reach of the zero rating? It's a problem if you can buy special interconnects from the ISP in order to have your traffic zero-rated. It's not really a problem if the ISP says "any traffic delivered to this exchange (that is well-connected to many competing transit providers) is zero-rated".
- mikeash 9y ago
  What's complex about it? ISPs should be dumb pipes. They shouldn't care what you use them for any more than the electric company does. Seems pretty black-and-white to me.
  - BoorishBears 9y ago
    And I disagree, because the average consumer would not want to pay for what it would cost if the ISPs priced that into their fees. There’s no need for an ISP to throttle, they could just charge consumers the exact cost to build out as much capacity as they need. But that cost would raise rates to one that consumers don’t want to pay. To me this is about idealism meaning the real world. In a perfect would I’d love for ISPs to be dumb pipes, but even in your example, Electricity companies don’t charge you like a dumb pipe and offer time of use pricing, pricing based on zones, discounts or rebates based on energy efficiency. Likewise different sites generate enormously different costs on the ISPs side, and consumers are benefiting from ISPs balancing being a dumb pipe, with not charging the consumers the price of a pipe that can carry every type of load at every time at perfect speeds.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Most ISPs are currently dumb pipes. The net neutrality fight is to keep them that way. The average consumer is paying for what it would cost, given that ISPs generally turn a profit.
      - BoorishBears 9y ago
        I don’t know any ISP that doesn’t have some degree of throttling, and zero rating is becoming more and more common
        mikeash 9y ago
        Throttling has nothing to do with net neutrality, unless it's targeted at specific services.

c3534l 9y ago

That's what Comcast did in Canada. I think they have net neutrality now, though.

sytelus 9y ago

No, "markets would work it out" argument doesn't work here. ISPs are monopolized businesses in USA. There are only so many cables you can lay out and only so many players who have capital to invest all that money. When one player succeeds in this game they buy off appropriate amount of politicians to close doors for others. All the ISP "choices" in USA you see is just an illusion where some re-sellers re-brands exact same bandwidth under their fancy names and ads.

adventured 9y ago
> When one player succeeds in this game they buy off appropriate amount of politicians to close doors for others. Then what you're talking about is not a market at all. You're directly saying several times over that the problem is the lack of any semblance of a market, that the government is the specific problem. Besides that, reasonably speaking, there are not only so many cables you can lay in the ground. That infrastructure non-problem has had an extraordinarily simple fix for decades: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/nationwide-fiber-proposed-law-could-add-broadband-to-road-projects/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/natio...

chiaro 9y ago

This is accurate. Net neutrality is a band-aid on an open wound. This is not to say that net neutrality should be done away with - stopping a bad thing from getting worse is, after all, what band-aids are for. The problem is the wound itself. There is no where in the US where Comcast and Charter are competing. In fact, when you filter down to functional internet providers (10Mbps+) very few places have any choice at all. This is an effective monopolization, made possible through explicit cartelization. And where there is no open wound, the market does work, and net neutrality isn't really an issue. Australia, for example, legislates that any owner of the infrastructure must lend it to other providers at a set price. Where a lack of net neutrality is kept in check there by the market, a similar lack of would only be used in the US to achieve greater price granularity/discrimination at the expense of the consumer.

forapurpose 9y ago

> If you have a choice of two ISPs and one of them is net neutral, the other is not, which one are you going to choose? I strongly favor net neutrality, but personally my decision depends on price and other factors too. For example, I always can pay for a $400/month for a net-neutral private T1 line with 1.4 Mbps, but probably I won't. As for others: Few end users understand the technical basics required to grasp net neutrality, few are aware of the net neutrality issue, and fewer still understand the principle of freedom-as-in-speech and can grasp its impact. I've had many people ask me for advice on ISPs; not one ever asked about net neutrality. To function, the market relies on educated consumers with access to information; that's not the case here, just like consumers can't choose between airline safety measures. Regardless, few ISP markets have more than 2 vendors and no vendor offers this sort of thing - can you name one ISP of any size that offers net neutrality? The barrier to entry is too high for a newcomer to break in and sell it, even if there was demand.

smnrchrds 9y ago

It is absolutely conceivable that even in a non-monopolized market, net-neutral options would die or go on life support. Because people value price above all else, ISPs can reduce their prices well below their competitors by asking for payment from large incumbents (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) to prioritize their traffic and slow down their competitors. When the choice is between 20$ a month with high-speed access to most of the brands you already know, and 200$ a month for high-speed access to all websites, which one do you think will win. Gym business is not exactly a monopoly. Yet almost all gyms have opted to make their patrons sign long-term membership contracts with auto-renewal that are almost impossible to cancel. Getting out of gym membership is only marginally easier than renouncing Scientology (OK, I am exaggerating a bit). Gyms are designed to discourage working out and necessitate payment [1]. Why don't we have ethical upfront gyms? There are some, but they are way more expensive and most people are not close enough to one to justify a membership. The market has spoken and it has spoken wrong. Same with Walmart's destruction of local businesses and the ever-shrinking legroom in airlines. Market values price above all else. Unless net-neutral ISPs can manage to be cheaper than Facebook-subsidized ISPs, they will die rather soon. [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/12/17/371463435/episode-590-the-planet-money-workout http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/12/17/371463435/episo...

Feniks 9y ago

"Whilst I completely think net neutrality should be enshrined in law" Oh it was. Then the European court over ruled it thanks to powerful lobbying.