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> 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 on

by 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.

by DiThi 9y ago

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.