7 ms·

I haven't noticed any negatives yet either (to my surprise). Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US. https://www

by Reedx 8y ago

I haven't noticed any negatives yet either (to my surprise). Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US. https://www.recode.net/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-faster-ookla https://www.recode.net/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafban...

fjabre 8y ago
So what? Is that fast by some global standard? I dont think the US is any gold standard for inet access. They gave the internet away to evil corp. There has been no good news since then, except maybe for this recent push by Dems. ISPs like verizon and att should be disbanded. Theyve proven to us once and for all they cant be trusted. We need national free highspeed inet.
- godzillabrennus 8y ago
  Nothing is free. It’d be taxpayer funded. I think a public option is great but it’d also be excellent to support smaller local ISP’s by forcing big telcos to sublet the last mile of coax and fiber to competitors.
post_below 8y ago
Some of the big cell companies have already instituted selective rate limiting on their unlimited plans (i.e. bandwidth limits on video streaming). Not that they didn't do it before, but they'd always say sorry and stop for a while when someone noticed. Likely they've already doubled down on demanding payment from companies like Netflix for not throttling them. They aren't going to rush it, they care about PR up to a point... But companies like Verizon and ATT will absolutely frog boil consumers, small businesses and innovators under the current laws... Their histories make that pretty clear.
pdonis 8y ago
> I haven't noticed any negatives yet either (to my surprise). That's because the legal battle isn't over yet. If you were planning to take advantage of no more net neutrality, would you do it while a legal challenge is pending? The last thing you'd want to do is give the opposition evidence in favor of their position.
takeda 8y ago
Really? You didn't notice large acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, pulling HBO and Cinemax out of Dish network (to encourage people to use streaming), jacking prices on DirecTV (acquired early by AT&T during previous administration), then providing capped internet access, and zero rating to HBO and Cinemax (again owned by AT&T)? And that just a single company. I'm especially mad, because I am a Dish customer and don't have HBO since November.
- kortilla 8y ago
  None of that is relevant to NN other than the zero rating (which is allowed on cell networks anyway where price per gb is relevant). That whole acquisition was entirely unaffected by net neutrality.
- rdtsc 8y ago
  Like a sibling comment pointed out already, how would have net neutrality prevented that? You're thinking they are merging because they planning to take advantage of anti-nn regulations better?
  - speedplane 8y ago
    > You're thinking they are merging because they planning to take advantage of anti-nn regulations better? Yes, of course. Why else would a communications company and a content company merge? It only makes sense if the can leverage each-others natural advantages. With strong NN regulations, AT&T would need to provide everyone with same opportunities they are providing Time Warner.
    - michaelt 8y ago
      Why else would a communications company and a content company merge? Ask MSNBC and AOL Time Warner :)
rjf72 8y ago
The argument in favor of deregulation of most things has some straight forward logic behind it. Imagine that some major player did begin to act badly. This would enable a competitor to offer a distinct value. Like the GP mentioned some predictions were things like e.g. Microsoft being able to pay Comcast to effectively disable Google search/products. That may be a legal possibility without regulation but it the Huffington Post 'analysis' seems to assume there are no consequences for actions. Google Fiber was a flop in large part because they could not meaningfully distinguish themselves from the competition. Imagine local monopolies start creating meaningfully poor experiences for internet users. They would not be monopolies for long! Some might argue that lower speeds for higher prices were creating "meaningfully poor experiences" for users, but I think there is one important distinction. Let's imagine an upstart competitor comes in and offers some perk, such as lower prices for higher speeds. And the local monopoly ends up matching these offers, as they did in the case of Google Fiber. Is this action perceived as a 'de-crippling' of their system, or as an upgrade of their system? In reality it's almost certainly the former, but in practice it's going to be perceived as the latter. That means they actually gain public props for anti-competitive behavior following what is effectively price-gouging. By contrast if some company is actively and outright blocking a site, then de-crippling would not be seen as an 'upgrade', but instead as what it is -- 'de-crippling.' And so it's likely that the competitor would be the one gaining the public props (and subscriptions). And in reality, it's possible that our incumbent monopoly might not even be able to de-cripple themselves due to a contract with e.g. Microsoft.
- Terr_ 8y ago
  > Imagine that some major player did begin to act badly. And it was easily detectable and your average consumer can figure out who to attribute it to. Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections? There are far subtler ways to be evil and maintain some plausible deniability against the average consumer, you don't need to sabotage every operation, just enough. Government lawsuits are partly about giving weight to the concept that something screwy is going on. > This would enable a competitor Like that competitor to Comcast, who rapidly -- oh, wait, that didn't pan out. Don't ignore barriers-to-entry, which are hugely significant in the ISP market. P.S.: In addition to the "direct intervention" side, there's also cases of spying and misusing privileged information. While that's on the decline due to increased HTTPS, the legal front is just as important as the technological one.
AnthonyMouse 8y ago
> Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US. This is within the "Moore's law applied to network hardware" range and is not unusual. It's also somewhat misleading because of how they're measuring (mean download speed), because customers have recently been abandoning DSL for (faster) cable. But if a 10Mbps DSL customer switches to 20Mbps cable, it shows up in the numbers as a 100% speed increase even if the cable network is no faster than it was before, or is faster than before but by significantly less than the 100% they're getting counted as. In other words, it's claiming the destruction of competition as a consumer benefit because the market share loss of the dying competitor brings up the average.
- Pristina 8y ago
  Damn. You need to get a job as a political think tank. You can contrive an explanation to support any world view.
  - jhanschoo 8y ago
    Is the parent comment's explanation misleading?
    - Pristina 8y ago
      your comment is confusing
      - Retra 8y ago
        You are confused, you mean.
- swebs 8y ago
  What makes you think it's competition that's dying. Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to more areas, so their previous DSL subscribers are now upgrading to fiber.
  - 8y ago
Pristina 8y ago
unsurprisingly, free market increases the quality of products available to the general consumers. who would have thunk?
- ykevinator 8y ago
  Utilities settle as oligopolies in free markets. When this happens, quasi governments take them over so that they are benevolent oligopolies. If you want Google and Facebook to have better bandwidth than your start-up just because they're big, then you should oppose net neutrality.
  - YinglingLight 8y ago
    Are you for treating Google and Facebook as Utilities, with all the Federal oversight that comes with it? Valid topic for debate.
- mikeash 8y ago
  We’re talking about internet access, not free markets.
rayiner 8y ago
It's illustrative to contrast Ookla's report (the source for the article above) for the U.S. versus the U.K. https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/ https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/ https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/#fixed U.S. mean download speeds are twice as fast as the U.K., and mean upload speeds are three times as fast. (The U.K. data is about 9 months older, but it's a helpful comparison nonetheless.)

by Reedx 8y ago

fjabre 8y ago

So what? Is that fast by some global standard? I dont think the US is any gold standard for inet access. They gave the internet away to evil corp. There has been no good news since then, except maybe for this recent push by Dems. ISPs like verizon and att should be disbanded. Theyve proven to us once and for all they cant be trusted. We need national free highspeed inet.

godzillabrennus 8y ago
Nothing is free. It’d be taxpayer funded. I think a public option is great but it’d also be excellent to support smaller local ISP’s by forcing big telcos to sublet the last mile of coax and fiber to competitors.

post_below 8y ago

Some of the big cell companies have already instituted selective rate limiting on their unlimited plans (i.e. bandwidth limits on video streaming). Not that they didn't do it before, but they'd always say sorry and stop for a while when someone noticed. Likely they've already doubled down on demanding payment from companies like Netflix for not throttling them. They aren't going to rush it, they care about PR up to a point... But companies like Verizon and ATT will absolutely frog boil consumers, small businesses and innovators under the current laws... Their histories make that pretty clear.

pdonis 8y ago

> I haven't noticed any negatives yet either (to my surprise). That's because the legal battle isn't over yet. If you were planning to take advantage of no more net neutrality, would you do it while a legal challenge is pending? The last thing you'd want to do is give the opposition evidence in favor of their position.

takeda 8y ago

Really? You didn't notice large acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, pulling HBO and Cinemax out of Dish network (to encourage people to use streaming), jacking prices on DirecTV (acquired early by AT&T during previous administration), then providing capped internet access, and zero rating to HBO and Cinemax (again owned by AT&T)? And that just a single company. I'm especially mad, because I am a Dish customer and don't have HBO since November.

kortilla 8y ago
None of that is relevant to NN other than the zero rating (which is allowed on cell networks anyway where price per gb is relevant). That whole acquisition was entirely unaffected by net neutrality.
rdtsc 8y ago
Like a sibling comment pointed out already, how would have net neutrality prevented that? You're thinking they are merging because they planning to take advantage of anti-nn regulations better?
- speedplane 8y ago
  > You're thinking they are merging because they planning to take advantage of anti-nn regulations better? Yes, of course. Why else would a communications company and a content company merge? It only makes sense if the can leverage each-others natural advantages. With strong NN regulations, AT&T would need to provide everyone with same opportunities they are providing Time Warner.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    Why else would a communications company and a content company merge? Ask MSNBC and AOL Time Warner :)

rjf72 8y ago

The argument in favor of deregulation of most things has some straight forward logic behind it. Imagine that some major player did begin to act badly. This would enable a competitor to offer a distinct value. Like the GP mentioned some predictions were things like e.g. Microsoft being able to pay Comcast to effectively disable Google search/products. That may be a legal possibility without regulation but it the Huffington Post 'analysis' seems to assume there are no consequences for actions. Google Fiber was a flop in large part because they could not meaningfully distinguish themselves from the competition. Imagine local monopolies start creating meaningfully poor experiences for internet users. They would not be monopolies for long! Some might argue that lower speeds for higher prices were creating "meaningfully poor experiences" for users, but I think there is one important distinction. Let's imagine an upstart competitor comes in and offers some perk, such as lower prices for higher speeds. And the local monopoly ends up matching these offers, as they did in the case of Google Fiber. Is this action perceived as a 'de-crippling' of their system, or as an upgrade of their system? In reality it's almost certainly the former, but in practice it's going to be perceived as the latter. That means they actually gain public props for anti-competitive behavior following what is effectively price-gouging. By contrast if some company is actively and outright blocking a site, then de-crippling would not be seen as an 'upgrade', but instead as what it is -- 'de-crippling.' And so it's likely that the competitor would be the one gaining the public props (and subscriptions). And in reality, it's possible that our incumbent monopoly might not even be able to de-cripple themselves due to a contract with e.g. Microsoft.

Terr_ 8y ago
> Imagine that some major player did begin to act badly. And it was easily detectable and your average consumer can figure out who to attribute it to. Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections? There are far subtler ways to be evil and maintain some plausible deniability against the average consumer, you don't need to sabotage every operation, just enough. Government lawsuits are partly about giving weight to the concept that something screwy is going on. > This would enable a competitor Like that competitor to Comcast, who rapidly -- oh, wait, that didn't pan out. Don't ignore barriers-to-entry, which are hugely significant in the ISP market. P.S.: In addition to the "direct intervention" side, there's also cases of spying and misusing privileged information. While that's on the decline due to increased HTTPS, the legal front is just as important as the technological one.

AnthonyMouse 8y ago

> Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US. This is within the "Moore's law applied to network hardware" range and is not unusual. It's also somewhat misleading because of how they're measuring (mean download speed), because customers have recently been abandoning DSL for (faster) cable. But if a 10Mbps DSL customer switches to 20Mbps cable, it shows up in the numbers as a 100% speed increase even if the cable network is no faster than it was before, or is faster than before but by significantly less than the 100% they're getting counted as. In other words, it's claiming the destruction of competition as a consumer benefit because the market share loss of the dying competitor brings up the average.

Pristina 8y ago
Damn. You need to get a job as a political think tank. You can contrive an explanation to support any world view.
- jhanschoo 8y ago
  Is the parent comment's explanation misleading?
  - Pristina 8y ago
    your comment is confusing
    - Retra 8y ago
      You are confused, you mean.
swebs 8y ago
What makes you think it's competition that's dying. Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to more areas, so their previous DSL subscribers are now upgrading to fiber.
- 8y ago

Pristina 8y ago

unsurprisingly, free market increases the quality of products available to the general consumers. who would have thunk?

ykevinator 8y ago
Utilities settle as oligopolies in free markets. When this happens, quasi governments take them over so that they are benevolent oligopolies. If you want Google and Facebook to have better bandwidth than your start-up just because they're big, then you should oppose net neutrality.
- YinglingLight 8y ago
  Are you for treating Google and Facebook as Utilities, with all the Federal oversight that comes with it? Valid topic for debate.
mikeash 8y ago
We’re talking about internet access, not free markets.

rayiner 8y ago

It's illustrative to contrast Ookla's report (the source for the article above) for the U.S. versus the U.K. https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/ https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/ https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/#fixed U.S. mean download speeds are twice as fast as the U.K., and mean upload speeds are three times as fast. (The U.K. data is about 9 months older, but it's a helpful comparison nonetheless.)