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Counterexample: we had mostly unregulated (except for mandatory government survelliance boxes, billing software licensing, and a reasonably affordable license t

Counterexample: we had mostly unregulated (except for mandatory government survelliance boxes, billing software licensing, and a reasonably affordable license to provide telecommunication services if you have more than 1K subscribers or more than 2 years in business - but all of this wasn't particularly heavy) market in Russia and the competition had worked. From the subscriber perspective, it was a norm to have 5+ different options, that had actually competed on pricing, quality and features. Every year prices used to go down. Then, when they got real low (like 100-200 RUB - when it just didn't made sense to go lower), speeds and packages started to grow. And whenever one option did something wrong (like throttling P2P traffic) they started lose active userbase very fast. It really worked. Then things had changed. Last 5 years our Czar and his pet Duma noticed there is lack of regulation, so they started to write laws one after another. All sort of mandatory logging, censorship, peering policies (who can and who can't peer), extra licensing rules, UGC-related policies, etc etc - and, of course, all for the sake of subscribers' and national "security". Small ISPs died like it was a plague. Larger ones grow even larger - for obvious reasons. Various explanations are possible (and regulations here are mostly different from NN, just authoritarian government strengthening their hold), but here's what I'm absolutely certain of: not all regulation is good. At the very least, consider if you trust your government (and all future governments) with such powers. --- Full disclosure: I've worked for 10 years for an ISP in Russia. Haven't been to the U.S. so don't know how exactly things are there. Yet, have a preliminary/uneducated opinion that they should've either hold NN (as a sort of a kludge - but there is no competition) and think how they can add more competition (=choice), or abolish NN but only simultaneously deregulating things so new ISP startups can actually enter the market.

DiThi 9y ago
> and regulations here are mostly different from NN Not mostly, but totally. It costs very very little to comply with NN law, and protects the consumer. The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom. > or abolish NN but only simultaneously deregulating things so new ISP startups can actually enter the market. There's a lot of regulations that should be gone, but NN is not one of them.
- drdaeman 9y ago
  > The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom. Also, the problem is sometimes things work differently. For example, licensing/certifying billing system (not a recent thing, though) was meant to protect customers from broken accounting. In reality it primarily worked as providing "certified billing providers" a source of revenue. And billing failures were still not unheard of. Data storage requirements (recent set of policies) were sort of pro-customer, with the idea to help privacy of personal information. In reality, it doesn't do any much (except for the fact every form with personal data now has an extra mandatory "I agree" field) > It costs very very little to comply with NN law The recent edition (as I've briefly seen it) - yes, probably you're right. It fixes the issues I'm about to mention. The "customer traffic is sacred" edition I think there was once (unless I'm mistaken - maybe I read someone's incorrect interpretation, or some early edition that wasn't complete) - nope. Having a ton of hacks that analyze traffic and policy/route it differently - I believe is a norm for every ISP that respects their customers. Without that you have phone lines full of customers complaining that YouTube buffers every minute, their favorite MMO ping is crappy so they can't raid, VoIP calls drop, commodity WiFi access point fails because it's overloaded by torrents, etc etc. In an ideal world, everyone would correctly tag their packets, no one would try to abuse the system and so on. In reality, sometimes even quite nasty hacks are necessary just to make users happy. Heck, I'd admit - we even had to intercept DNS records once as a temporary measure. It was early 2010s, Google had some issues back then - some of YouTube servers were just slow and no amount of routing hacks (we tried to use every upstream) had helped. A great sin, but at least users were able to watch videos they wanted. And we had "don't mess with anything" option, directly in the self-service area. That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition - when consumers can switch providers literally in a matter of days if not hours, so providers deeply care about customer satisfaction. Otherwise it's just irrelevant, and I'm generally against useless regulations. Disclaimer (again): I've worked for an ISP so I'm probably biased. I try to debias myself (and I swear, I believe I write honestly), but still I can't be sure.
  - eropple 9y ago
    > That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition This is completely true. America, as it happens, loves its natural monopolies wherever it can get them, and so that's why this kludge is our best (and only) option.
drieddust 9y ago
Your first paragraph is exactly what happened here but with regulations in place. Local ISPs here provides 20Mbps symmetrical bandwidth for $10 per month and this cost is going down rapidly. I think problem with Russia is its pseudo democracy which makes doing these things very easy. We have a messy democracy but it seems to works somehow :) Might be OT but how does small ISPs operate in this market? Just as a last mile provider? I always thought they have to hook into one of the few backbone providers as only a handful of operators control the backbone worldwide due to requirements of heavy investment.
- drdaeman 9y ago
  OT: Last mile, yeah. I've worked in one startup ISP (forked from a large company but started from scratch; our CEO was an ex-CEO of the other telco). Started small, with just a few households, and gradually grew to cover almost the whole city except for some hard-to-reach areas and far suburbs (city's Veliky Novgorod, 200k population; 90km²/35mi² area; about 200km/125mi from St. Petersburg). There were also companies that had last mile fiber but offered other ISPs to use that fiber to provide actual Internet connectivity. I think it started that way because one larger ISP wanted to split into few smaller companies for tax purposes, but not sure. We (and other our competitors) bought upstream bandwidth from higher-tier providers and covered the city with our own fiber. I don't think anyone (except for one large telco that's now a part of Rostelekom) got or had tried to get their lines to an IX in e.g. St.Petersburg. There was some choice in higher-tier providers. We had 3 different uplinks and there were still at least pair of more options available that I've heard of. Maybe more, I don't know. Negotiating price downs ("hey, that other company said can give us a better offer") was quite common, I think I heard that every year or another. I've worked on software components (website, various network services, software network access servers), though and wasn't deep into peering agreements and physical network building stuff.

DiThi 9y ago

> and regulations here are mostly different from NN Not mostly, but totally. It costs very very little to comply with NN law, and protects the consumer. The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom. > or abolish NN but only simultaneously deregulating things so new ISP startups can actually enter the market. There's a lot of regulations that should be gone, but NN is not one of them.

drdaeman 9y ago
> The ones you mention sound more costly and attacks the consumer freedom. Also, the problem is sometimes things work differently. For example, licensing/certifying billing system (not a recent thing, though) was meant to protect customers from broken accounting. In reality it primarily worked as providing "certified billing providers" a source of revenue. And billing failures were still not unheard of. Data storage requirements (recent set of policies) were sort of pro-customer, with the idea to help privacy of personal information. In reality, it doesn't do any much (except for the fact every form with personal data now has an extra mandatory "I agree" field) > It costs very very little to comply with NN law The recent edition (as I've briefly seen it) - yes, probably you're right. It fixes the issues I'm about to mention. The "customer traffic is sacred" edition I think there was once (unless I'm mistaken - maybe I read someone's incorrect interpretation, or some early edition that wasn't complete) - nope. Having a ton of hacks that analyze traffic and policy/route it differently - I believe is a norm for every ISP that respects their customers. Without that you have phone lines full of customers complaining that YouTube buffers every minute, their favorite MMO ping is crappy so they can't raid, VoIP calls drop, commodity WiFi access point fails because it's overloaded by torrents, etc etc. In an ideal world, everyone would correctly tag their packets, no one would try to abuse the system and so on. In reality, sometimes even quite nasty hacks are necessary just to make users happy. Heck, I'd admit - we even had to intercept DNS records once as a temporary measure. It was early 2010s, Google had some issues back then - some of YouTube servers were just slow and no amount of routing hacks (we tried to use every upstream) had helped. A great sin, but at least users were able to watch videos they wanted. And we had "don't mess with anything" option, directly in the self-service area. That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition - when consumers can switch providers literally in a matter of days if not hours, so providers deeply care about customer satisfaction. Otherwise it's just irrelevant, and I'm generally against useless regulations. Disclaimer (again): I've worked for an ISP so I'm probably biased. I try to debias myself (and I swear, I believe I write honestly), but still I can't be sure.
- eropple 9y ago
  > That's actually why I believe NN is a sort of kludge, that only makes sense if there is no fair competition This is completely true. America, as it happens, loves its natural monopolies wherever it can get them, and so that's why this kludge is our best (and only) option.

drieddust 9y ago

Your first paragraph is exactly what happened here but with regulations in place. Local ISPs here provides 20Mbps symmetrical bandwidth for $10 per month and this cost is going down rapidly. I think problem with Russia is its pseudo democracy which makes doing these things very easy. We have a messy democracy but it seems to works somehow :) Might be OT but how does small ISPs operate in this market? Just as a last mile provider? I always thought they have to hook into one of the few backbone providers as only a handful of operators control the backbone worldwide due to requirements of heavy investment.

drdaeman 9y ago
OT: Last mile, yeah. I've worked in one startup ISP (forked from a large company but started from scratch; our CEO was an ex-CEO of the other telco). Started small, with just a few households, and gradually grew to cover almost the whole city except for some hard-to-reach areas and far suburbs (city's Veliky Novgorod, 200k population; 90km²/35mi² area; about 200km/125mi from St. Petersburg). There were also companies that had last mile fiber but offered other ISPs to use that fiber to provide actual Internet connectivity. I think it started that way because one larger ISP wanted to split into few smaller companies for tax purposes, but not sure. We (and other our competitors) bought upstream bandwidth from higher-tier providers and covered the city with our own fiber. I don't think anyone (except for one large telco that's now a part of Rostelekom) got or had tried to get their lines to an IX in e.g. St.Petersburg. There was some choice in higher-tier providers. We had 3 different uplinks and there were still at least pair of more options available that I've heard of. Maybe more, I don't know. Negotiating price downs ("hey, that other company said can give us a better offer") was quite common, I think I heard that every year or another. I've worked on software components (website, various network services, software network access servers), though and wasn't deep into peering agreements and physical network building stuff.