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Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. cannot do business without ISPs. Plus, you can always choo

Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. cannot do business without ISPs. Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. And no, I don't think the justice department can or will "do both". It's clear this admin is anti-net neutrality, catering to Comcast's whims.

duxup 7y ago
For whatever reason local telco monopolies seem as much tied to state and local setups that protect them and their access. I don't know how that would play out with a federal anti trust setup.
- notatoad 7y ago
  >For whatever reason It's pretty simple: as you say, they're local. Google and Amazon are the big evil corporations on the other side of the country, but Comcast has an office in your town, and your neighbour's son works for them. They're a significant provider of relatively well-paid low-skill jobs in every community in the country. It's incredibly difficult to come down on that.
  - duxup 7y ago
    Maybe, but I don't know if I buy that reason. It seems more like the actual interest in actually doing any anti trust stuff for any consumer type product just faded away mostly ...
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  I don‘t think states have ever been compelled by antitrust suits to change regulations; there is no state-level version of the WTO where one can sue about this. Remaking federal regulation to preempt states is laborious and fraught with difficulty; see Obamacare.
  - sk5t 7y ago
    And yet we have the interstate commerce clause, giving the fed a direct line to meddle freely in any matter whatsoever.
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      Most ISPs exist in multiple states. Divvying up local markets does not really prevent interstate competition or impact interstate commerce, or at least that hasn't been tested in court.
loudtieblahblah 7y ago
I use ProtonMail , standard notes, etesync, duckduckgo, Firefox, tresorit, wire/signal, lineageos on mobile and Linux on the desktop. I still can't entirely opt out of Google. And certainly can't opt out of their tracking. They are inescapable.
- Hydraulix989 7y ago
  I'm actually curious how Google is still tracking you with that entirely Google-less stack? (note: I don't work for Google)
  - solotronics 7y ago
    AdSense for one.
  - tedivm 7y ago
    The most obvious are Google Payments (from the merchant side), Google Analytics, Google Ads (doubleclick). Then there's street view cars collecting photos and wifi data, Google registry services siphoning up domain metadata, and of course any information someone else enters about you- if they save their contacts to google and it includes you, you're suddenly part of their graph. Then there's the direct cell phone tracking- > Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches. Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google.
    - inferiorhuman 7y ago
      Don't forget recaptcha.
      - jakear 7y ago
        This is the main inescapable one for me. I have uMatrix to block analytics and all that, but so many websites simply wont work without recaptcha. My solution lately has been to feed them junk data until they either give up on me or erroneously perceive my input as non-erroneous (not sure which it is). Takes some time, but to me it’s worth it. If we can get enough people doing this they might have to get rid of it all together. (Vastly unlikely, but a guy can dream, right?)
luckylion 7y ago
> Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. A customer can, a company cannot. Similarly to how a customer can choose another ISP, but Google cannot choose to just not to business with ISPs: if a business cannot be connected to their customers, that business cannot live.
- umanwizard 7y ago
  I do not think Google peers directly with every ISP in the world. Traffic can take multiple hops.
  - dmourati 7y ago
    No but they do have an open peering policy meaning they'll generally peer with anyone who wants to free of charge. https://peering.google.com/#/options/peering https://peering.google.com/#/options/peering https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/15169 https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/15169
  - luckylion 7y ago
    True, but they need to peer with ISPs directly or indirectly, they can't just not peer with anybody if they still want to be reachable.
- pfortuny 7y ago
  But you cannot opt out of being used by google when one of your friends has a gmail account.
mikedilger 7y ago
I agree that the ISP monopoly problem in the US is by far the bigger problem. The "last mile" should be owned and controlled by the government, for similar reasons why roads and power lines are. Then handfuls of ISPs would compete for the business of your household. Here in New Zealand that's exactly how it works. I can choose from at least 20 ISPs and net neutrality is a non-issue because free market competition drives the providers to give us what we want. Thus my stance on net-neutrality is neither for nor against. I think both stances are equally bad, and the root of the problem is ISP monopoly.
- vore 7y ago
  I don't understand how having free market competition solves the issue net neutrality is addressing here: what if each ISP has different deals with different internet content providers? Net neutrality prevents this kind of vertical balkanization in a way that the free market can't intrinsically address.
  - beatgammit 7y ago
    How so? If there's a market for net neutrality, and if there's sufficient competition, someone will provide a neutral option. It just needs to be cheap enough for a competitor to enter the market for that to happen.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      The capital required to build a competing network is immense. It will never happen, and there’s way more money in getting into the existing grift.
      - austhrow743 7y ago
        Did you not read the part about the government owning the physical infrastructure?
        7y ago
BurningFrog 7y ago
Prosecutions are not an ordered prioritized list. The legal system doesn't work like that. You can't use this defense at your traffic ticket hearing.
- izacus 7y ago
  Why aren't they though? What's the point of the justice system if they spend their limited processing capacity in actors that are less damaging to society?
  - rincebrain 7y ago
    It's a QoS problem - if you only scheduled processing by magnitude of alleged offense, people would optimize their behavior against the tradeoff between scale of offense and likelihood that they get to it in the queue before the statute of limitations expired, and then you end up needing to build a more complicated tiering system if you want anything below that threshold to be a rule followed at all. (Yes, people do this anyway at differing levels, from betting they won't get charged with jaywalking to betting prosecuting/defending companies won't show to small claims to ..., but purely ordering by alleged damages would give a much stronger guarantee of whether crimes actually got charged, and thus whether you could safely assume you'd get away with them.) Consider also: if you have a priority system with no disincentive to falsely inflating priority, then people will optimize for whatever matters to them getting done, e.g. finding ways to inflate the priority.
  - r3bl 7y ago
    > ...less damaging to society? Sorry for the nitpick, but this part really irks me. It could only be true if you define "society" as "people in the US". American ISPs target American citizens. Google targets pretty much everyone who uses the Internet, regardless of their country. Of course, it's understandable that the US justice system only targets people in the US, so I'm only being nitpicky because you've used the term "society" there. American ISPs, regardless of how shitty they might be, will never be more damaging to the society than a company that impacts the whole world.
- closeparen 7y ago
shmerl 7y ago
Agreed. ISP monopolies are so obnoxious, and they basically bought legislature in many states to prevent any meaningful competition. All this is amplified by them swallowing each other and huge media companies in billions sized deals.
onetimemanytime 7y ago
>>Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. cannot do business without ISPs. Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ? If so, I agree with you. If not, then... >>Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. Not as simple as you make it. Google for one is hurting competition and using their platform, mainly search, to do so. Different rules apply to companies with a certain market share. No one forced people to use Microsoft Windows either: Apple, Linux, or new companies could have invented many new OS-es.
- unityByFreedom 7y ago
  > Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ? No, ISPs favor their own services. See zero rating, > AT&T is openly advertising that cellular customers can stream the company’s DirecTV Now product without it counting against monthly data caps. Meanwhile, all of the competing video services like Sling TV, Paystation Vue, YouTube TV, Netflix or Amazon Prime count against AT&T data caps [1] [1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-the-old-net-neutrality-rules/ https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...
pishpash 7y ago
Comcast isn't holding anybody back from innovating. If anything, wireless carriers may break their monopoly suddenly. Google, just like old Microsoft, by a vertical monopoly from OS to applications, is actually already doing harm to competition and innovation. You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years. Imagine what small companies would be doing about security and privacy in search and browsers if Google didn't own that space completely. Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money.
- studentrob 7y ago
  > wireless carriers may break their monopoly suddenly. This sounds like Comcast's argument, which is that there is already sufficient competition due to wireless carriers. The fact is, a fixed line will always be faster. > You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years Sorry, but a lot has happened in the last 10 years, in terms of new languages, frameworks, and software. > Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money Are Google employees not free to do as they please now? If anything, they're being funded to go off and start their own companies. They're not enslaved by high salaries, lol. Quite the opposite.
mastazi 7y ago
I know that this is going on in the US so it's normal that your comment is from an American perspective, but: 1. It is nearly impossible to "choose to just no use Google". Tell me how long you can go without getting through reCaptcha or AMP for example (with AMP, often you don't even realise you're using it). 2. From what I hear, it seems that in the US many ISPs operate mostly in a situation of monopoly but this is rare in many other countries (with the exception of remote/rural areas). I know it's just anecdotal but I used to move frequently for work and I lived in many different countries in Europe/Asia/South America/Oceania and it never happened that I couldn't choose from at least a couple different broadband providers, except in one single case (village in a rural area in a South East Asian country).
- chronogram 7y ago
  Good to hear that about the second point. Here in the Netherlands it’s just one broadband provider per location, and I’ve heard similar stories from people in west Germany. So it’s good to know that it’s different for everywhere else.
  - Aaargh20318 7y ago
    > Here in the Netherlands it’s just one broadband provider per location No it isn't. I live in the Netherlands and I can choose from 13 different ISP's on fiber alone. Add to that cable (Ziggo) and another dozen or so ISP's on DSL. Not sure where you live in NL but in most places there is a LOT of choice. Even my parents who live in the middle of nowhere have several options including cable and fiber.
    - milankragujevic 7y ago
      Counter point, though not for Netherlands. I'm a big "ISP enthusiast", so it pains me to see that in my home country, Serbia, Telekom Srbija owns EVERY SINGLE phone line in the country, so any and all DSL goes through them. You can buy DSL from someone else, but it stills goes through their infrastructure, the "virtual" ISP just buys DSL access from Telekom. Not even actual line access, just routing. You still HAVE to pay for a LANDLINE to Telekom directly, which is 5€ per month. All other ISPs are either mobile broadband, WISP, or one single CDMA ISP that offers 128/32 Kbps Internet. Cable ISPs have hidden non-compete contracts so if you have SBB (owned by United Group), you don't have Radijus Vektor, Kopernikus, Masko, etc., because of the non-compete. By the way, main 2 plays on fixed broadband access are Telekom Srbija (Supernova, which owns almost all cable providers that aren't owned by SBB, mts (for ADSL and fiber)) and United Group (SBB and Beogrid, and others via Cable). Orion Telekom does fiber in a few % of apartment buildings in Belgrade and Novi Sad, Exe Net in Niš and Leskovac, and that is basically it. DSL is mostly up to 10/1 Mbps, a number of lucky people have 20/4 Mbps (upload is usually cut back to 2 Mbps) with VDSL, and a really tiny percentage have 50/8 Mbps VDSL and an even smaller number of people have 100+ Mbps with FTTH. Mobile broadband is limited to up to 200 GB with Vip mobile, and that is a fixed wireless package which is limited to one location. Their speeds are terrible in most urban areas, and it's mostly 800 MHz with 15 MHz channel in rural areas. 4G+ is rare. WISP (Fixed wireless over 802.11n or ac standard) is apsolutely atrocious, as is everywhere else in the world, with speeds reaching up to 20 Mbps except on dedicated links, mostly 10/2 Mbps for most users. CDMA deserves no mention, being literally unusuable, and only marginally better than dial-up. Fiber is extremely rare. Speeds are good, the most affordable ISP is Orion Telekom, but if you want TV, their TV offer is very poor (slow and low quality rebranded wholesale Android STB with a really bad Wowza headend which is overloaded and has poor bitrate leading to abysmal picture quality). Given that Fiber is not available to most people, DSL being slow and unreliable (up to 10 Mbps), CDMA useless, mobile broadband expensive and limited (often not available due to overloading of cell towers), the only actual posibility for (good) Internet for most people is Cable. And that is a shared medium that is oversold and bundled with CATV.
nabla9 7y ago
> you can always choose to This is too narrow understanding of monopoly power. Market failures happen even when there are multiple suppliers If some corporation gets into position where customer 'Can always choose' a option that provides less value for them and it's the monopoly power that provides the advantage (size and network effects) markets are not efficient anymore.
- studentrob 7y ago
  Google's products are free. That's not a monopoly.
  - nabla9 7y ago
    Google's sells advertising. The idea that two-sided market can't have market failures because one side gets free services is not very strong one.
    - studentrob 7y ago
      About the ad business, are businesses getting gouged by Google such that they need help from the government?
      - nabla9 7y ago
        Yes. There is evidence that Google and Facebook have monopoly power. Google has 80-90% market share in search and Facebook has similar market share in social media ads. Network externalities make it hard to compete with them. You can also make case about collusion between FB and Google emerging around 2010-2013. They have divided the markets and have stopped competing. It's hard to find evidence that it's intentional. It can be just understanding emerging from single meeting or natural development. Whatever the reason they seem to avoid direct competition.
  - anoncake 7y ago
    That doesn't even make sense. Not charging isn't part of the definition of a monopoly.
headsoup 7y ago
But aren't those monopolies mostly there because of the Government protectionism, not just market dominance? From most articles I see on them, they provide poor value and service, but the government generally gives them a huge amount of leniency and support.
tzs 7y ago
> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach: 1. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that. Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow states to do individually. 2. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory where it does not have competition. 3. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular networks. You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various services and show that they really are not comparable. I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region. Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions, would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can apply). Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to deal with via legislation.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? No. The ISPs’ argument for breaking neutrality is the tech giants’ capturing of the majority of the profit pie. With competition, those margins should decrease. That, in turn, makes fighting net neutrality less lucrative. Add on the fact that ISPs are more regulated, federally and at the state level (California can regulate Comcast in a way it can’t Google) and the more-imminent threat is revealed.
- studentrob 7y ago
  > ISPs are more regulated You must be joking. In the US, broadband ISPs are regional monopolies that can and do charge whatever they want while delivering lousy service. This happens while net neutrality is in place. Without net neutrality, ISPs are now free to make whatever deals they want with content providers, double dipping, and providing fewer options for consumers. AT&T is now offering uncapped access to their video services [1]. Without net neutrality, nothing stops them from throttling Netflix & charging Netflix money for "high speed access", thereby passing costs to the consumer. ISPs can profit more from their regional monopolies simply by forcing services like Netflix to pay more. Consumers will not benefit because the broadband ISP has no incentive to improve service or lower costs. They are regional monopolies. [1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-the-old-net-neutrality-rules/ https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
> Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. "You" are not Google's real customers, the advertisers are, and most of them most definitely cannot opt out of Google and remain viable.

duxup 7y ago

For whatever reason local telco monopolies seem as much tied to state and local setups that protect them and their access. I don't know how that would play out with a federal anti trust setup.

notatoad 7y ago
>For whatever reason It's pretty simple: as you say, they're local. Google and Amazon are the big evil corporations on the other side of the country, but Comcast has an office in your town, and your neighbour's son works for them. They're a significant provider of relatively well-paid low-skill jobs in every community in the country. It's incredibly difficult to come down on that.
- duxup 7y ago
  Maybe, but I don't know if I buy that reason. It seems more like the actual interest in actually doing any anti trust stuff for any consumer type product just faded away mostly ...
bobthepanda 7y ago
I don‘t think states have ever been compelled by antitrust suits to change regulations; there is no state-level version of the WTO where one can sue about this. Remaking federal regulation to preempt states is laborious and fraught with difficulty; see Obamacare.
- sk5t 7y ago
  And yet we have the interstate commerce clause, giving the fed a direct line to meddle freely in any matter whatsoever.
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    Most ISPs exist in multiple states. Divvying up local markets does not really prevent interstate competition or impact interstate commerce, or at least that hasn't been tested in court.

loudtieblahblah 7y ago

I use ProtonMail , standard notes, etesync, duckduckgo, Firefox, tresorit, wire/signal, lineageos on mobile and Linux on the desktop. I still can't entirely opt out of Google. And certainly can't opt out of their tracking. They are inescapable.

Hydraulix989 7y ago
I'm actually curious how Google is still tracking you with that entirely Google-less stack? (note: I don't work for Google)
- solotronics 7y ago
  AdSense for one.
- tedivm 7y ago
  The most obvious are Google Payments (from the merchant side), Google Analytics, Google Ads (doubleclick). Then there's street view cars collecting photos and wifi data, Google registry services siphoning up domain metadata, and of course any information someone else enters about you- if they save their contacts to google and it includes you, you're suddenly part of their graph. Then there's the direct cell phone tracking- > Investigators who spoke with The New York Times said they had not sent geofence warrants to companies other than Google, and Apple said it did not have the ability to perform those searches. Google would not provide details on Sensorvault, but Aaron Edens, an intelligence analyst with the sheriff’s office in San Mateo County, Calif., who has examined data from hundreds of phones, said most Android devices and some iPhones he had seen had this data available from Google.
  - inferiorhuman 7y ago
    Don't forget recaptcha.
    - jakear 7y ago
      This is the main inescapable one for me. I have uMatrix to block analytics and all that, but so many websites simply wont work without recaptcha. My solution lately has been to feed them junk data until they either give up on me or erroneously perceive my input as non-erroneous (not sure which it is). Takes some time, but to me it’s worth it. If we can get enough people doing this they might have to get rid of it all together. (Vastly unlikely, but a guy can dream, right?)

luckylion 7y ago

> Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. A customer can, a company cannot. Similarly to how a customer can choose another ISP, but Google cannot choose to just not to business with ISPs: if a business cannot be connected to their customers, that business cannot live.

umanwizard 7y ago
I do not think Google peers directly with every ISP in the world. Traffic can take multiple hops.
- dmourati 7y ago
  No but they do have an open peering policy meaning they'll generally peer with anyone who wants to free of charge. https://peering.google.com/#/options/peering https://peering.google.com/#/options/peering https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/15169 https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/15169
- luckylion 7y ago
  True, but they need to peer with ISPs directly or indirectly, they can't just not peer with anybody if they still want to be reachable.
pfortuny 7y ago
But you cannot opt out of being used by google when one of your friends has a gmail account.

mikedilger 7y ago

I agree that the ISP monopoly problem in the US is by far the bigger problem. The "last mile" should be owned and controlled by the government, for similar reasons why roads and power lines are. Then handfuls of ISPs would compete for the business of your household. Here in New Zealand that's exactly how it works. I can choose from at least 20 ISPs and net neutrality is a non-issue because free market competition drives the providers to give us what we want. Thus my stance on net-neutrality is neither for nor against. I think both stances are equally bad, and the root of the problem is ISP monopoly.

vore 7y ago
I don't understand how having free market competition solves the issue net neutrality is addressing here: what if each ISP has different deals with different internet content providers? Net neutrality prevents this kind of vertical balkanization in a way that the free market can't intrinsically address.
- beatgammit 7y ago
  How so? If there's a market for net neutrality, and if there's sufficient competition, someone will provide a neutral option. It just needs to be cheap enough for a competitor to enter the market for that to happen.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    The capital required to build a competing network is immense. It will never happen, and there’s way more money in getting into the existing grift.
    - austhrow743 7y ago
      Did you not read the part about the government owning the physical infrastructure?
      - 7y ago

BurningFrog 7y ago

Prosecutions are not an ordered prioritized list. The legal system doesn't work like that. You can't use this defense at your traffic ticket hearing.

izacus 7y ago
Why aren't they though? What's the point of the justice system if they spend their limited processing capacity in actors that are less damaging to society?
- rincebrain 7y ago
  It's a QoS problem - if you only scheduled processing by magnitude of alleged offense, people would optimize their behavior against the tradeoff between scale of offense and likelihood that they get to it in the queue before the statute of limitations expired, and then you end up needing to build a more complicated tiering system if you want anything below that threshold to be a rule followed at all. (Yes, people do this anyway at differing levels, from betting they won't get charged with jaywalking to betting prosecuting/defending companies won't show to small claims to ..., but purely ordering by alleged damages would give a much stronger guarantee of whether crimes actually got charged, and thus whether you could safely assume you'd get away with them.) Consider also: if you have a priority system with no disincentive to falsely inflating priority, then people will optimize for whatever matters to them getting done, e.g. finding ways to inflate the priority.
- r3bl 7y ago
  > ...less damaging to society? Sorry for the nitpick, but this part really irks me. It could only be true if you define "society" as "people in the US". American ISPs target American citizens. Google targets pretty much everyone who uses the Internet, regardless of their country. Of course, it's understandable that the US justice system only targets people in the US, so I'm only being nitpicky because you've used the term "society" there. American ISPs, regardless of how shitty they might be, will never be more damaging to the society than a company that impacts the whole world.
closeparen 7y ago

shmerl 7y ago

Agreed. ISP monopolies are so obnoxious, and they basically bought legislature in many states to prevent any meaningful competition. All this is amplified by them swallowing each other and huge media companies in billions sized deals.

onetimemanytime 7y ago

>>Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. cannot do business without ISPs. Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ? If so, I agree with you. If not, then... >>Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. Not as simple as you make it. Google for one is hurting competition and using their platform, mainly search, to do so. Different rules apply to companies with a certain market share. No one forced people to use Microsoft Windows either: Apple, Linux, or new companies could have invented many new OS-es.

unityByFreedom 7y ago
> Are ISPs favoring Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. ? No, ISPs favor their own services. See zero rating, > AT&T is openly advertising that cellular customers can stream the company’s DirecTV Now product without it counting against monthly data caps. Meanwhile, all of the competing video services like Sling TV, Paystation Vue, YouTube TV, Netflix or Amazon Prime count against AT&T data caps [1] [1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-the-old-net-neutrality-rules/ https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...

pishpash 7y ago

Comcast isn't holding anybody back from innovating. If anything, wireless carriers may break their monopoly suddenly. Google, just like old Microsoft, by a vertical monopoly from OS to applications, is actually already doing harm to competition and innovation. You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years. Imagine what small companies would be doing about security and privacy in search and browsers if Google didn't own that space completely. Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money.

studentrob 7y ago
> wireless carriers may break their monopoly suddenly. This sounds like Comcast's argument, which is that there is already sufficient competition due to wireless carriers. The fact is, a fixed line will always be faster. > You can feel the tech clock slow down in the last ten years Sorry, but a lot has happened in the last 10 years, in terms of new languages, frameworks, and software. > Imagine what the hordes of rest-and-vest half-working Google Ph.D.'s could be doing if they weren't hoarded by Google because of monopoly money Are Google employees not free to do as they please now? If anything, they're being funded to go off and start their own companies. They're not enslaved by high salaries, lol. Quite the opposite.

mastazi 7y ago

I know that this is going on in the US so it's normal that your comment is from an American perspective, but: 1. It is nearly impossible to "choose to just no use Google". Tell me how long you can go without getting through reCaptcha or AMP for example (with AMP, often you don't even realise you're using it). 2. From what I hear, it seems that in the US many ISPs operate mostly in a situation of monopoly but this is rare in many other countries (with the exception of remote/rural areas). I know it's just anecdotal but I used to move frequently for work and I lived in many different countries in Europe/Asia/South America/Oceania and it never happened that I couldn't choose from at least a couple different broadband providers, except in one single case (village in a rural area in a South East Asian country).

chronogram 7y ago
Good to hear that about the second point. Here in the Netherlands it’s just one broadband provider per location, and I’ve heard similar stories from people in west Germany. So it’s good to know that it’s different for everywhere else.
- Aaargh20318 7y ago
  > Here in the Netherlands it’s just one broadband provider per location No it isn't. I live in the Netherlands and I can choose from 13 different ISP's on fiber alone. Add to that cable (Ziggo) and another dozen or so ISP's on DSL. Not sure where you live in NL but in most places there is a LOT of choice. Even my parents who live in the middle of nowhere have several options including cable and fiber.
  - milankragujevic 7y ago
    Counter point, though not for Netherlands. I'm a big "ISP enthusiast", so it pains me to see that in my home country, Serbia, Telekom Srbija owns EVERY SINGLE phone line in the country, so any and all DSL goes through them. You can buy DSL from someone else, but it stills goes through their infrastructure, the "virtual" ISP just buys DSL access from Telekom. Not even actual line access, just routing. You still HAVE to pay for a LANDLINE to Telekom directly, which is 5€ per month. All other ISPs are either mobile broadband, WISP, or one single CDMA ISP that offers 128/32 Kbps Internet. Cable ISPs have hidden non-compete contracts so if you have SBB (owned by United Group), you don't have Radijus Vektor, Kopernikus, Masko, etc., because of the non-compete. By the way, main 2 plays on fixed broadband access are Telekom Srbija (Supernova, which owns almost all cable providers that aren't owned by SBB, mts (for ADSL and fiber)) and United Group (SBB and Beogrid, and others via Cable). Orion Telekom does fiber in a few % of apartment buildings in Belgrade and Novi Sad, Exe Net in Niš and Leskovac, and that is basically it. DSL is mostly up to 10/1 Mbps, a number of lucky people have 20/4 Mbps (upload is usually cut back to 2 Mbps) with VDSL, and a really tiny percentage have 50/8 Mbps VDSL and an even smaller number of people have 100+ Mbps with FTTH. Mobile broadband is limited to up to 200 GB with Vip mobile, and that is a fixed wireless package which is limited to one location. Their speeds are terrible in most urban areas, and it's mostly 800 MHz with 15 MHz channel in rural areas. 4G+ is rare. WISP (Fixed wireless over 802.11n or ac standard) is apsolutely atrocious, as is everywhere else in the world, with speeds reaching up to 20 Mbps except on dedicated links, mostly 10/2 Mbps for most users. CDMA deserves no mention, being literally unusuable, and only marginally better than dial-up. Fiber is extremely rare. Speeds are good, the most affordable ISP is Orion Telekom, but if you want TV, their TV offer is very poor (slow and low quality rebranded wholesale Android STB with a really bad Wowza headend which is overloaded and has poor bitrate leading to abysmal picture quality). Given that Fiber is not available to most people, DSL being slow and unreliable (up to 10 Mbps), CDMA useless, mobile broadband expensive and limited (often not available due to overloading of cell towers), the only actual posibility for (good) Internet for most people is Cable. And that is a shared medium that is oversold and bundled with CATV.

nabla9 7y ago

> you can always choose to This is too narrow understanding of monopoly power. Market failures happen even when there are multiple suppliers If some corporation gets into position where customer 'Can always choose' a option that provides less value for them and it's the monopoly power that provides the advantage (size and network effects) markets are not efficient anymore.

studentrob 7y ago
Google's products are free. That's not a monopoly.
- nabla9 7y ago
  Google's sells advertising. The idea that two-sided market can't have market failures because one side gets free services is not very strong one.
  - studentrob 7y ago
    About the ad business, are businesses getting gouged by Google such that they need help from the government?
    - nabla9 7y ago
      Yes. There is evidence that Google and Facebook have monopoly power. Google has 80-90% market share in search and Facebook has similar market share in social media ads. Network externalities make it hard to compete with them. You can also make case about collusion between FB and Google emerging around 2010-2013. They have divided the markets and have stopped competing. It's hard to find evidence that it's intentional. It can be just understanding emerging from single meeting or natural development. Whatever the reason they seem to avoid direct competition.
- anoncake 7y ago
  That doesn't even make sense. Not charging isn't part of the definition of a monopoly.

headsoup 7y ago

But aren't those monopolies mostly there because of the Government protectionism, not just market dominance? From most articles I see on them, they provide poor value and service, but the government generally gives them a huge amount of leniency and support.

tzs 7y ago

> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach: 1. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that. Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow states to do individually. 2. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory where it does not have competition. 3. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular networks. You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various services and show that they really are not comparable. I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region. Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions, would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can apply). Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to deal with via legislation.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first? No. The ISPs’ argument for breaking neutrality is the tech giants’ capturing of the majority of the profit pie. With competition, those margins should decrease. That, in turn, makes fighting net neutrality less lucrative. Add on the fact that ISPs are more regulated, federally and at the state level (California can regulate Comcast in a way it can’t Google) and the more-imminent threat is revealed.

studentrob 7y ago
> ISPs are more regulated You must be joking. In the US, broadband ISPs are regional monopolies that can and do charge whatever they want while delivering lousy service. This happens while net neutrality is in place. Without net neutrality, ISPs are now free to make whatever deals they want with content providers, double dipping, and providing fewer options for consumers. AT&T is now offering uncapped access to their video services [1]. Without net neutrality, nothing stops them from throttling Netflix & charging Netflix money for "high speed access", thereby passing costs to the consumer. ISPs can profit more from their regional monopolies simply by forcing services like Netflix to pay more. Consumers will not benefit because the broadband ISP has no incentive to improve service or lower costs. They are regional monopolies. [1] https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-the-old-net-neutrality-rules/ https://potsandpansbyccg.com/2019/02/13/isps-are-violating-t...

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

> Plus, you can always choose to just not use Google. "You" are not Google's real customers, the advertisers are, and most of them most definitely cannot opt out of Google and remain viable.