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We don't have net neutrality, we have competition. That is the key point, net nuetrality is a moot point because if an ISP were to do something like charge for

We don't have net neutrality, we have competition. That is the key point, net nuetrality is a moot point because if an ISP were to do something like charge for iplayer (BBC catchup service) which was mooted a few years ago, they'd all move to a different ISP. Because we have for the moment a roughly open market. There are parts that are controlled by a monopoly, but thats the people who provide the last mile infrastructure. They have strict regulations saying that they must charge a fixed price for rental of the infrastructure with no obligations other than to pay for the last mile. (they can choose to be a pure virtual operator, just skinning the service, or almost entirely run its own infra, save the last bit of copper) Also, the people that run the last mile monopoly are not the people providing backhaul. That is mostly an open market too. More open than the last mile copper at least. Linx/lonap are all coops, where you pay a membership fee, and the cost of powering your equipment, any interconnect arrangements are up to you and your peers. In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality. what america needs is competition, and the seperation of last mile, ISPs and backhaul. None of which you are going to get in present times.

croon 9y ago
Slight clarification: We have an open market explicitly because we have tight last-mile regulation. If we didn't we'd all have local monopolies. I don't know specifically where you are, but it's true in most of Europe.
- philjohn 9y ago
  We do have one local monopoly, KCOM in Hull.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Some of Europe has tighter last mile regulation, but it’s not necessarily better. Take France, for example. France applies unbundling to copper telephone lines and fiber, but not cable. It subsidises fiber backhaul for DSL. Overall, it’s got similar fiber deployment to the US (about 10%) but overall much slower speeds (according to Akamai, 11 Mbps average in France versus 19 Mbps in the US). But there is lots of ISP competition in DSL, like there was in the US in the early 2000s. But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition. Is this better?
  - croon 9y ago
    > But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition. > Is this better? That's a red herring. By your own admission this isn't caused by LLUB but by misguided subsidization. It's a deliberate choice of poor example in a pool of much better options.
    - rayiner 9y ago
      It’s a direct byproduct of LLU. LLU eliminates market price signals over the most expensive part of the infrastructure.[1] That requires governments to exercise tremendous discipline in setting the wholesale price. It’s politically popular to set the price too low, but that kills investment. France tried to compensate for that through subsidies. But those, predictably, killed the unsubsidized competition. [1] You obviously can’t let the monopoly that owns the loop freely set the wholesale price of the loop.
      - croon 9y ago
        > Government rate setting is such a bad idea, that our oligopolies might be better. (The US has faster internet than all the big European countries: the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.) And it's slower than Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and many others. You can't blanket claim that LLU and rate setting is bad simply by ignoring examples where they work much better than the alternative. Edit: You might also want to include consumer prices with that comparison. I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.
        rayiner 9y ago
        (Sorry for the intervening edit.) Here's Akamai's list of countries with the fastest broadband: 1 South Korea 28.6 2 Norway 23.5 3 Sweden 22.5 4 Hong Kong 21.9 5 Switzerland 21.7 6 Finland 20.5 7 Singapore 20.3 8 Japan 20.2 9 Denmark 20.1 10 United States 18.7 Our presence on this list is remarkable. If you were listing countries with the best of some other kind of infrastructure, say subways, we wouldn't even be sniffing the top 10. Nobody would look at the fact that Sweden or Denmark managed to have good subways and say "well, obviously we can do that too!" And we already know we would do a bad job implementing LLU: it was in the 1996 telecom act, and the FCC set rates too low and killed DSL in the process. Also, it's not clear what LLU has achieved in a place like say Denmark: https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publikation/bilag_-_analysis_of_market_structures_in_the_danish_broadband_markets_-_august_2014_-_wik.pdf https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publi.... 60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system? > I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month. Where I live, I only have two choices for fiber, but 100/100 is $40/month, gigabit is $70-80, and two-gigabit is $150/month. Also: did you or a previous homeowner pay a one-time fee to build the fiber to your house? In the U.S., the ISP usually eats the up-front cost and recovers it in the monthly charge. Finally, U.S. prices include implicit cross subsidies (to build fiber or cable in poorer neighborhoods) that Swedish prices do not.
radiowave 9y ago
Excellent summary of the UK situation. It's worth noting that the reason we (arguably) don't need regulation in the form of net neutrality is because we have regulation in a form that promotes competition. So it's a question of where to regulate, not whether.
DiThi 9y ago
America needs to be able to create "virtual" ISPs with full and equal access to internet. Until then, the NN law is needed.
- KaiserPro 9y ago
  But that's the problem. NN laws are barking up the wrong tree, because your ISPs control not only the last mile, planning, backhaul _and_ exchanges, they can easily demand things not possible in the UK. Take the netflix outage in LA. Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did. Now, in a normal open market, other ISPs would step in and say "look at us, we don't throttle" and customers would switch over, making it financially impossible to throttle popular services. But you can't do that in the US as all but the most dense markets are a one ISP town. In the UK that sort of action is suicide, the ISP would either arrange for more peering at LINX or LONAP, or better yet arrange some edge caching (open connect in netflix parlance) nearer the customers to cut down on bandwidth sloshing around the backbone (which is expensive) We don't have NN laws in the UK, which means that mobile providers like 3 (three.co.uk) can say that watching netflix doesn't use your metered bandwidth. so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.
  - Goronmon 9y ago
    so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market. Why not both?
    - alien_at_work 9y ago
      How I dispise this meme. If you have real competition you don't need or want NN regulation. Monopolies are the problem and NN is a sub-optimal solution precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated. If you switched the UK from a it's current competitive landscape to a monopolistic one you'd be getting greif from customers and all the businesses that would be shut out. In the US, you're only getting greif from customers and since they're not funding your next campaign you can just ignore them.
Toboe 9y ago
Just for clarification: >In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality. Do you have no net neutrality (ISPs do un-neutral stuff) or Do you have no net neutrality regulation (the Government doesn't stop ISPs from un-neutral stuff), but get nn through competition?

croon 9y ago

Slight clarification: We have an open market explicitly because we have tight last-mile regulation. If we didn't we'd all have local monopolies. I don't know specifically where you are, but it's true in most of Europe.

philjohn 9y ago
We do have one local monopoly, KCOM in Hull.
rayiner 9y ago
Some of Europe has tighter last mile regulation, but it’s not necessarily better. Take France, for example. France applies unbundling to copper telephone lines and fiber, but not cable. It subsidises fiber backhaul for DSL. Overall, it’s got similar fiber deployment to the US (about 10%) but overall much slower speeds (according to Akamai, 11 Mbps average in France versus 19 Mbps in the US). But there is lots of ISP competition in DSL, like there was in the US in the early 2000s. But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition. Is this better?
- croon 9y ago
  > But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed competition. > Is this better? That's a red herring. By your own admission this isn't caused by LLUB but by misguided subsidization. It's a deliberate choice of poor example in a pool of much better options.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    It’s a direct byproduct of LLU. LLU eliminates market price signals over the most expensive part of the infrastructure.[1] That requires governments to exercise tremendous discipline in setting the wholesale price. It’s politically popular to set the price too low, but that kills investment. France tried to compensate for that through subsidies. But those, predictably, killed the unsubsidized competition. [1] You obviously can’t let the monopoly that owns the loop freely set the wholesale price of the loop.
    - croon 9y ago
      > Government rate setting is such a bad idea, that our oligopolies might be better. (The US has faster internet than all the big European countries: the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.) And it's slower than Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and many others. You can't blanket claim that LLU and rate setting is bad simply by ignoring examples where they work much better than the alternative. Edit: You might also want to include consumer prices with that comparison. I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.
      - rayiner 9y ago
        (Sorry for the intervening edit.) Here's Akamai's list of countries with the fastest broadband: 1 South Korea 28.6 2 Norway 23.5 3 Sweden 22.5 4 Hong Kong 21.9 5 Switzerland 21.7 6 Finland 20.5 7 Singapore 20.3 8 Japan 20.2 9 Denmark 20.1 10 United States 18.7 Our presence on this list is remarkable. If you were listing countries with the best of some other kind of infrastructure, say subways, we wouldn't even be sniffing the top 10. Nobody would look at the fact that Sweden or Denmark managed to have good subways and say "well, obviously we can do that too!" And we already know we would do a bad job implementing LLU: it was in the 1996 telecom act, and the FCC set rates too low and killed DSL in the process. Also, it's not clear what LLU has achieved in a place like say Denmark: https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publikation/bilag_-_analysis_of_market_structures_in_the_danish_broadband_markets_-_august_2014_-_wik.pdf https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publi.... 60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system? > I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month. Where I live, I only have two choices for fiber, but 100/100 is $40/month, gigabit is $70-80, and two-gigabit is $150/month. Also: did you or a previous homeowner pay a one-time fee to build the fiber to your house? In the U.S., the ISP usually eats the up-front cost and recovers it in the monthly charge. Finally, U.S. prices include implicit cross subsidies (to build fiber or cable in poorer neighborhoods) that Swedish prices do not.

radiowave 9y ago

Excellent summary of the UK situation. It's worth noting that the reason we (arguably) don't need regulation in the form of net neutrality is because we have regulation in a form that promotes competition. So it's a question of where to regulate, not whether.

DiThi 9y ago

America needs to be able to create "virtual" ISPs with full and equal access to internet. Until then, the NN law is needed.

KaiserPro 9y ago
But that's the problem. NN laws are barking up the wrong tree, because your ISPs control not only the last mile, planning, backhaul _and_ exchanges, they can easily demand things not possible in the UK. Take the netflix outage in LA. Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did. Now, in a normal open market, other ISPs would step in and say "look at us, we don't throttle" and customers would switch over, making it financially impossible to throttle popular services. But you can't do that in the US as all but the most dense markets are a one ISP town. In the UK that sort of action is suicide, the ISP would either arrange for more peering at LINX or LONAP, or better yet arrange some edge caching (open connect in netflix parlance) nearer the customers to cut down on bandwidth sloshing around the backbone (which is expensive) We don't have NN laws in the UK, which means that mobile providers like 3 (three.co.uk) can say that watching netflix doesn't use your metered bandwidth. so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.
- Goronmon 9y ago
  so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market. Why not both?
  - alien_at_work 9y ago
    How I dispise this meme. If you have real competition you don't need or want NN regulation. Monopolies are the problem and NN is a sub-optimal solution precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated. If you switched the UK from a it's current competitive landscape to a monopolistic one you'd be getting greif from customers and all the businesses that would be shut out. In the US, you're only getting greif from customers and since they're not funding your next campaign you can just ignore them.

Toboe 9y ago

Just for clarification: >In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality. Do you have no net neutrality (ISPs do un-neutral stuff) or Do you have no net neutrality regulation (the Government doesn't stop ISPs from un-neutral stuff), but get nn through competition?