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There really isn't a sound argument against net neutrality. Many do argue that the FCC shouldn't have the authority to regulate the internet, and often argue t

There really isn't a sound argument against net neutrality. Many do argue that the FCC shouldn't have the authority to regulate the internet, and often argue that idea to subtly change the subject. If someone argues to abolish something, they should either argue in favor of a replacement, or argue that that thing should not exist at all. Unfortunately, I haven't heard even a flawed version of either argument. Another faux argument I hear is the classic, "I am libertarian, and therefore must be against regulation of any form, and you can't change my mind." Obviously, that isn't an argument at all, and abusing libertarian ideology to look like an argument like that is seriously disappointing to any serious thoughtful libertarian, such as myself. This problem isn't specific to libertarianism either, but it is very popular in that community. The core tenet to every position (not argument) I have heard against net neutrality is simply a position against regulation. The problem is that in the United States, we need to regulate ISPs, for several reasons: 1. There isn't enough competition: There are 6 ISPs in the US that control the majority of the market, and the majority of Americans are left with only one choice for >20mbit internet. 2. Net Neutrality is necessary to cultivate a free market of businesses that use the internet. Without net neutrality, the already centralized market of ISPs would cultivate centralized markets for each type of business that uses the internet. TL;DR It is totally reasonable to be wary of regulation, or of the implementation of regulation. It may even be reasonable to consider net neutrality to be worthless or unnecessary in a truly free market, that has real competition between ISPs, but that isn't today's reality, so we would need to tackle that problem first.

rtx 9y ago
If we want something for the public good, it should be publically funded.
- cmurf 9y ago
  It pretty much was: ARPANET. And the instigator for all computers was the need to more quickly compute nuclear warhead trajectories, in real time, to make it possible, as well as efficient, to murder as many fellow humans as possible while also defending against the same by an opponent. But yeah it might be nice to make it just work well, without any respect for and to whom or what. All that matter is how. It should work well, how do we do that? Some cities are deciding to build their own infra. Good. Now if only they'd explicitly adopt their surrounding rural areas and include them in the program. Because this same FCC is dropping the subsidies for rural internet and telephone.
- neuterlize 9y ago
  > If we want something for the public good, it should be publically funded. That's just a silly argument. If we are going there, let's first have the ISPs vacate all public rights of way and return all government subsidies.
  - rtx 9y ago
    They don't have to vacate anything, public should buy them outright. Yes after deducting the subsidy amount.
    - neuterlize 9y ago
      With what money and what political capital?
      - rtx 9y ago
        Public money and honesty.
        kelnos 9y ago
        I wish we lived in a fantasy world where we had both of those things in abundance, but unfortunately we live in the real world.
djellybeans 9y ago
The problem is most libertarians can't actually focus on winnable issues like the ones you describe because the fringe of the party spends its time yelling about how taxes are theft, stripping on stage, and promoting secession. The fringe refuses to see the massive risk of not supporting net neutrality by government.
19guid 9y ago
1. Even if it prevents some of the worst abuses by incumbents, net neutrality regulation isn't going to create more competition. In fact, if net neutrality regulation creates additional compliance costs it might actually reduce competition by increasing the barriers to entry for new ISPs. 2. I think most people would agree that the Internet should generally remain a level playing field for all businesses. However, it's not clear that net neutrality regulation is necessary to maintain such a level playing field. It wasn't necessary in the past. Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination, which net neutrality regulation might unjustly prohibit. The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
- DarqWebster 9y ago
  Except in this case the regulation is saying that the ISP must just carry bits. It's not forcing the ISP to do something to be compliant, it's forcing the ISP to not do something. So the costs of compliance are low, if not zero. There are short-term consumer benefits, in my country we have zero-rated services, where browsing certain sites costs no data. However this completely undermines the concept of the free market. Any competitor to the zero-rated service has a massive hurdle to overcome, either competing with free, or paying the ISP to have the same deal applied to their service. And there are also cases of abuse. Mobile operators began charging roughly $2 per MB of data for any VOIP traffic, forcing consumers to use standard calls. By refusing to subject ISPs to regulations, we subject the Internet to the whims of the ISPs.
  - patrickaljord 9y ago
    > So the costs of compliance are low, if not zero. How could this possibly be zero? If a town's ISP has a bandwidth of 100Gb/s and has a demand of 200Gb/s by their customers, they can: - prioritize certain bits such as live streaming that can't be slown down without degrading user experience, unlike text (current solution) - slow down everything as forced by FCC's Net Neutrality (which would make live streaming unwatchable) - invest in bigger infrastructure and pass the cost down to consumers (which is not zero cost as you claim) So there you go. Another fun fact, for anyone that has lived through the 80's and 90's, the FCC censored TV and radio to hell with list of words, topics and images that could not be used on public broadcasting as it was considered to be public utility. If the FCC considers the internet public utility in order to impose Net Neutrality, they will be granted the same power as they were on tv. If you think twitter censorship sucks, wait for what's coming when Trump or another administration decides to impose similar rules through the FCC with the excuse that it's now a public utility and that using bad words (against politicians or else) at a certain hour is bad for kids. Don't forget that the boss of the FCC is nominated by Trump. People love asking the government for more regulations even though they always end up paying a high price for it. Just be careful what you ask for is all I'm saying.
bnjms 9y ago
Something I never see considered is that markets exist in a context. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that as a rule of thumb regulation should be eliminated and that competition is good. Both towards improving consumers lives. But it isn't reasonable to assume these two tenets are always aligned or to take them as ends unto themselves.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  It's a fallacy that some writers have called "economism". Basically amounts to blind adherence to Econ 101 principles. There's a whole book on it, I think you can find it https://www.economism.net https://www.economism.net
klokoman 9y ago
Honestly when I see other libertarians speaking against net neutrality I suffer a lot. Good to see at least there is one other that understands the pro-nn arguments
- symfoniq 9y ago
  I'm generally pretty conservative, and I support net neutrality. I believe much of the opposition to it on my side of the aisle is based on the flawed assumption that any policy instituted during the Obama administration was a bad policy. My preference would be that Congress passed legislation making net neutrality the law of the land, but in the absence of that, Title 2 classification with FCC forbearance is better than nothing.
bko 9y ago
There are arguments against net neutrality. Check out the NoNetNeutrality subreddit if you're curious [0]. The most convincing argument IMO is that it hurts people's internet access by sniffling innovation. It happened in India when Facebook tried to provide free "basic internet" access to poor rural Indians [1]. It was blocked on the ground of net neutrality since although it would provide access to very useful sites (weather, news, wikipedia, and yes, facebook), it was a sort of walled garden. Considering the alternative of no internet access or limited internet access, I think most people would agree that basic internet could have been a life saver to these people. The other strong argument against net neutrality is that it's a trojan horse for internet regulation. When you have a legal framework for a regulatory body to tell and ISP you have to provide equal aaccess to "legitimate" content, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider that the natural extension of this is to tell the ISP they must block all "illegitimate" content [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoNetNeutrality/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoNetNeutrality/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics
- leadingthenet 9y ago
  No, I don’t agree. It’s great that it failed.
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    I agree. The first thing I did when I heard about the limitations was question Facebook's intentions there. I think their walled-garden approach, if it received an overwhelmingly positive or at least unquestioned reception, would have set an even more dangerous precedent. Governments don't (AFAIK) set up internet services as social welfare for the poor in other countries. Facebook doesn't have any borders. Unless they're actively told to keep their rabid growth in check, they will just keep going. Nothing directly against Facebook here, but I definitely think it's better that the poor and uneducated throughout the world are not normalized into a Facebook(TM) world of knowledge. We've seen what's happened with a much milder and more open situation in the United States (and elsewhere) quite recently.
- goda90 9y ago
mediocrejoker 9y ago
I think there is a more nuanced libertarian argument that you haven't mentioned, and that is not so much "I am against all regulation" as much as "I think regulation is generally bad for efficiency and/or disagree with it on moral grounds so I want to be convinced why it is necessary." In other words, I want to be convinced that: 1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introduced 2 years ago; how did we get along before that? 2) This problem can be solved by this regulation (not all regulation achieves its goals, and sometimes it is even counter productive). 3) Regulation is the best/only solution for this problem (what other solutions to the problem described in 1 have been proposed, and why are they not suitable) I think serious answers to these types will be far more convincing than the typical simplified arguments along the lines of "What if comcast creates a competitor to netflix and prioritizes its own streaming service". TL;DR: I think some libertarians are not so much against regulation as they are skeptical of it, and are willing to be convinced that certain regulations are good, on a case-by-case basis.
- atonse 9y ago
  You're right, a lot of this is an education problem. Many (including myself) have for years thought that this wasn't a problem. How did we get along before this? But there are dozens of cases before NN was codified, where ISPs were blocking and slowing down traffic. One of the most high profile was how Comcast was slowing down Netflix in the NY Metro Area. After the rules went into place, Netflix speeds just magically increased, and Comcast said it was a coincidence. Uh huh, sure.
  - jerkstate 9y ago
    > magically increased there was a technical reason for the performance improvement; netflix started peering with Comcast: http://www.businessinsider.com/paid-peering-explained-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/paid-peering-explained-2014-2 but let's consider the world where the pipes stayed the same size; suddenly the lawyers say you have to stop shaping Netflix traffic (shaping means randomly dropping TCP traffic in order to signal to both ends that congestion exists in the network and they should slow down sending). Lack of shaping means congestion and slowness for all content traversing the same pipe, not just the heaviest users. So people watching Netflix get a slightly better quality and less buffering, but it takes 10 seconds to load any website traversing that pipe.
hitekker 9y ago
Agreed. Serious opposition to net neutrality is premised upon a reflexive, blinding hatred of government. In their minds, any form of goverment is evil, and if it didn’t exist, we’d all live in paradise, free from chemtrails and tax sheets. After going through these arguments and others linked here, I can safely say it's all excuses and handwaves; a thin veneer over an anarachist misanthropy. Which isn’t too different from other conspiracy circles actually.

rtx 9y ago

If we want something for the public good, it should be publically funded.

cmurf 9y ago
It pretty much was: ARPANET. And the instigator for all computers was the need to more quickly compute nuclear warhead trajectories, in real time, to make it possible, as well as efficient, to murder as many fellow humans as possible while also defending against the same by an opponent. But yeah it might be nice to make it just work well, without any respect for and to whom or what. All that matter is how. It should work well, how do we do that? Some cities are deciding to build their own infra. Good. Now if only they'd explicitly adopt their surrounding rural areas and include them in the program. Because this same FCC is dropping the subsidies for rural internet and telephone.
neuterlize 9y ago
> If we want something for the public good, it should be publically funded. That's just a silly argument. If we are going there, let's first have the ISPs vacate all public rights of way and return all government subsidies.
- rtx 9y ago
  They don't have to vacate anything, public should buy them outright. Yes after deducting the subsidy amount.
  - neuterlize 9y ago
    With what money and what political capital?
    - rtx 9y ago
      Public money and honesty.
      - kelnos 9y ago
        I wish we lived in a fantasy world where we had both of those things in abundance, but unfortunately we live in the real world.

djellybeans 9y ago

The problem is most libertarians can't actually focus on winnable issues like the ones you describe because the fringe of the party spends its time yelling about how taxes are theft, stripping on stage, and promoting secession. The fringe refuses to see the massive risk of not supporting net neutrality by government.

19guid 9y ago

1. Even if it prevents some of the worst abuses by incumbents, net neutrality regulation isn't going to create more competition. In fact, if net neutrality regulation creates additional compliance costs it might actually reduce competition by increasing the barriers to entry for new ISPs. 2. I think most people would agree that the Internet should generally remain a level playing field for all businesses. However, it's not clear that net neutrality regulation is necessary to maintain such a level playing field. It wasn't necessary in the past. Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination, which net neutrality regulation might unjustly prohibit. The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.

DarqWebster 9y ago
Except in this case the regulation is saying that the ISP must just carry bits. It's not forcing the ISP to do something to be compliant, it's forcing the ISP to not do something. So the costs of compliance are low, if not zero. There are short-term consumer benefits, in my country we have zero-rated services, where browsing certain sites costs no data. However this completely undermines the concept of the free market. Any competitor to the zero-rated service has a massive hurdle to overcome, either competing with free, or paying the ISP to have the same deal applied to their service. And there are also cases of abuse. Mobile operators began charging roughly $2 per MB of data for any VOIP traffic, forcing consumers to use standard calls. By refusing to subject ISPs to regulations, we subject the Internet to the whims of the ISPs.
- patrickaljord 9y ago
  > So the costs of compliance are low, if not zero. How could this possibly be zero? If a town's ISP has a bandwidth of 100Gb/s and has a demand of 200Gb/s by their customers, they can: - prioritize certain bits such as live streaming that can't be slown down without degrading user experience, unlike text (current solution) - slow down everything as forced by FCC's Net Neutrality (which would make live streaming unwatchable) - invest in bigger infrastructure and pass the cost down to consumers (which is not zero cost as you claim) So there you go. Another fun fact, for anyone that has lived through the 80's and 90's, the FCC censored TV and radio to hell with list of words, topics and images that could not be used on public broadcasting as it was considered to be public utility. If the FCC considers the internet public utility in order to impose Net Neutrality, they will be granted the same power as they were on tv. If you think twitter censorship sucks, wait for what's coming when Trump or another administration decides to impose similar rules through the FCC with the excuse that it's now a public utility and that using bad words (against politicians or else) at a certain hour is bad for kids. Don't forget that the boss of the FCC is nominated by Trump. People love asking the government for more regulations even though they always end up paying a high price for it. Just be careful what you ask for is all I'm saying.

bnjms 9y ago

Something I never see considered is that markets exist in a context. It's perfectly reasonable to believe that as a rule of thumb regulation should be eliminated and that competition is good. Both towards improving consumers lives. But it isn't reasonable to assume these two tenets are always aligned or to take them as ends unto themselves.

nerdponx 9y ago
It's a fallacy that some writers have called "economism". Basically amounts to blind adherence to Econ 101 principles. There's a whole book on it, I think you can find it https://www.economism.net https://www.economism.net

klokoman 9y ago

Honestly when I see other libertarians speaking against net neutrality I suffer a lot. Good to see at least there is one other that understands the pro-nn arguments

symfoniq 9y ago
I'm generally pretty conservative, and I support net neutrality. I believe much of the opposition to it on my side of the aisle is based on the flawed assumption that any policy instituted during the Obama administration was a bad policy. My preference would be that Congress passed legislation making net neutrality the law of the land, but in the absence of that, Title 2 classification with FCC forbearance is better than nothing.

bko 9y ago

There are arguments against net neutrality. Check out the NoNetNeutrality subreddit if you're curious [0]. The most convincing argument IMO is that it hurts people's internet access by sniffling innovation. It happened in India when Facebook tried to provide free "basic internet" access to poor rural Indians [1]. It was blocked on the ground of net neutrality since although it would provide access to very useful sites (weather, news, wikipedia, and yes, facebook), it was a sort of walled garden. Considering the alternative of no internet access or limited internet access, I think most people would agree that basic internet could have been a life saver to these people. The other strong argument against net neutrality is that it's a trojan horse for internet regulation. When you have a legal framework for a regulatory body to tell and ISP you have to provide equal aaccess to "legitimate" content, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider that the natural extension of this is to tell the ISP they must block all "illegitimate" content [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoNetNeutrality/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NoNetNeutrality/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics

leadingthenet 9y ago
No, I don’t agree. It’s great that it failed.
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  I agree. The first thing I did when I heard about the limitations was question Facebook's intentions there. I think their walled-garden approach, if it received an overwhelmingly positive or at least unquestioned reception, would have set an even more dangerous precedent. Governments don't (AFAIK) set up internet services as social welfare for the poor in other countries. Facebook doesn't have any borders. Unless they're actively told to keep their rabid growth in check, they will just keep going. Nothing directly against Facebook here, but I definitely think it's better that the poor and uneducated throughout the world are not normalized into a Facebook(TM) world of knowledge. We've seen what's happened with a much milder and more open situation in the United States (and elsewhere) quite recently.
goda90 9y ago

mediocrejoker 9y ago

I think there is a more nuanced libertarian argument that you haven't mentioned, and that is not so much "I am against all regulation" as much as "I think regulation is generally bad for efficiency and/or disagree with it on moral grounds so I want to be convinced why it is necessary." In other words, I want to be convinced that: 1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introduced 2 years ago; how did we get along before that? 2) This problem can be solved by this regulation (not all regulation achieves its goals, and sometimes it is even counter productive). 3) Regulation is the best/only solution for this problem (what other solutions to the problem described in 1 have been proposed, and why are they not suitable) I think serious answers to these types will be far more convincing than the typical simplified arguments along the lines of "What if comcast creates a competitor to netflix and prioritizes its own streaming service". TL;DR: I think some libertarians are not so much against regulation as they are skeptical of it, and are willing to be convinced that certain regulations are good, on a case-by-case basis.

atonse 9y ago
You're right, a lot of this is an education problem. Many (including myself) have for years thought that this wasn't a problem. How did we get along before this? But there are dozens of cases before NN was codified, where ISPs were blocking and slowing down traffic. One of the most high profile was how Comcast was slowing down Netflix in the NY Metro Area. After the rules went into place, Netflix speeds just magically increased, and Comcast said it was a coincidence. Uh huh, sure.
- jerkstate 9y ago
  > magically increased there was a technical reason for the performance improvement; netflix started peering with Comcast: http://www.businessinsider.com/paid-peering-explained-2014-2 http://www.businessinsider.com/paid-peering-explained-2014-2 but let's consider the world where the pipes stayed the same size; suddenly the lawyers say you have to stop shaping Netflix traffic (shaping means randomly dropping TCP traffic in order to signal to both ends that congestion exists in the network and they should slow down sending). Lack of shaping means congestion and slowness for all content traversing the same pipe, not just the heaviest users. So people watching Netflix get a slightly better quality and less buffering, but it takes 10 seconds to load any website traversing that pipe.

hitekker 9y ago

Agreed. Serious opposition to net neutrality is premised upon a reflexive, blinding hatred of government. In their minds, any form of goverment is evil, and if it didn’t exist, we’d all live in paradise, free from chemtrails and tax sheets. After going through these arguments and others linked here, I can safely say it's all excuses and handwaves; a thin veneer over an anarachist misanthropy. Which isn’t too different from other conspiracy circles actually.