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Like anything, the devil is in the details. And, like anything, I tend to have a strong directional preference for neutrality but consider religious adherence s

Like anything, the devil is in the details. And, like anything, I tend to have a strong directional preference for neutrality but consider religious adherence suboptimal (nb: suboptimality can still be the best of all politically feasible worlds). There are at least two ways that an "it depends" answer can make a lot of sense. The first reason I could support violating net neutrality is related to the purpose and nature of the discrimination. For example, should ISPs be allowed to differentiate based on the type of data? There's a reasonable rationale for answering "yes" -- e.g., to prioritize video-conferencing traffic over entertainment platforms during the 9-5 work day. Or to strictly prioritize the provisioning of essential services (eg education or tele-health). Something like that could be pretty reasonable in places with limited bandwidth. However, actually implementing this would probably require -- or at least be made substantially easier by -- discriminating based upon the source of the data. The important point is not necessarily the mechanism, but rather the intent and a good-faith effective effort to keep things fair and underpinned by public-good policy objectives. The second reason I could support violating net neutrality is related to the structure of the market. Consider a world where ISPs were just overlays on separately owned networks -- with the underlying infra owner (perhaps gov) required to be neutral toward intermediary ISPs including in the last mile!. This is how electrical utilities work in some states. I think getting rid of consumer-facing net neutrality regs would make a lot more sense in this case. If there's always a vanilla neutral network access option, and if all competitors pay the same for use of the wires, then why shouldn't Consumer Facing Provider Co. be allowed to eg partner with Netflix to place a small data center at the edge and save on upstream bandwidth? Seems reasonable. The reason I am directionally supportive of net neutrality in the USA is because I have absolutely zero trust in the structure of the market or the good will of the actors within that market.

wahern 6y ago
> The important point is not necessarily the mechanism, but rather the intent and a good-faith effective effort to keep things fair and underpinned by public-good policy objectives. Regulatory bureaucracies, especially in the United States because of our political and legal norms, can't be expected to police intent and good-faith. Like many other dilemmas you have to squarely answer the question: is this particular policy on the whole preferable despite the negative consequences? In better times a secondary question might be: can we address the negative consequences by directly supplementing functional gaps with a government program? Though, our track record isn't that great in that regard, so our decisions, especially at the Federal level, should probably simply turn on the first question alone--taking as a given that the negative consequences won't be mitigated. I really don't get the opposition to net neutrality. The negative consequences and market impact are minimal, especially considering that it's a relatively clear and simple rule; the type of rule that has a long political and legal history of application. And the hypocrisy on the conservative side blows my mind since they began proposing the imposition of user content neutrality on social media platforms. Even if I agreed with that in principle, there's no way the benefit exceeds the negative consequences. Net neutrality, which can help foster the emergence of alternative platforms, is an obvious alternative as one of the easiest ways to mitigate the rise of monolithic walled gardens is to ensure cost equity at the infrastructure level. I think repealing Section 230 should be on the table, too. That's a more fraught discussion, but abstractly it's similar to net neutrality in promoting an arms-length relationship between content creators and network infrastructure providers (to the extent content platforms can be considered infrastructure providers, which is the implicit assumption by those pissed at Twitter and Facebook for censoring "free speech"). I suspect repealing Section 230 would foster the re-emergence of open hosting platforms. Section 230 was never needed to make Usenet, BBSs, or online journalism viable; it was only necessary to make models like Twitter or, especially, Facebook scalable.
- throwawaygh 6y ago
  >> The important point is not necessarily the mechanism, but rather the intent and a good-faith effective effort to keep things fair and underpinned by public-good policy objectives. > Regulatory bureaucracies, especially in the United States because of our political and legal norms, can't be expected to police intent and good-faith. Someone should tell the FTC and SEC ;-) BTW, I generally agree with the rest of your post. But it's really not that hard to imagine a world where ISPs are mostly municipal departments or non-government organizations that aren't profit-motivated and generally 99.9% of the time act in good faith. Like, IDK. Look at HAM radio or most gov-run community centers or lots of open source projects or 100s of other examples. It's possible for non-profit-motive to produce good outcomes. And in that world where ISPs are just these little pieces of local and regional bureaucracy -- like the county community center or public works departments -- you can imagine all sorts of reasons why a net neutrality rule isn't necessary, and where isolated violations of net neutrality effectively achieve this or that goal. Eg a city with limited upstream bandwidth blocking Netflix during the day so that it can offer free broadband to every student during a pandemic without increasing any expenses or laying any new fiber. I think the extreme pessimism about the possibility of non-market-actors actually doing things competently is mostly manufactured bullshit, and manufactured by the exact people you're complaining about.
  - wahern 6y ago
    > Someone should tell the FTC and SEC I concede your point regarding the FTC, and to modern consumer protection regulatory systems in general (though I have other problems with those). But the SEC is an exemplar of how our politics cripples agencies which can only function well by peeking behind the curtain, so to speak. The SEC has neither the resources nor mandate to match the power of the industry it regulates, which is why it mostly just goes around issuing the financial industry equivalent of parking tickets. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) would be another great example, but it barely even got off the ground before it was almost completely neutered. Beyond the FTC, most consumer protection regulation successes have been at the state level. The IRS is a good example, especially of the dynamic in evolution. It has to walk a fine line between applying consistent, clear rules and catching tax avoidance schemes by looking to the underlying substance of financial schemes rather than just the mechanics. And for the past couple of decades it's increasingly struggled to do that effectively, though mostly for political rather than legal reasons (taxation is one of the few areas where courts still accept intrusive, individualized examination by regulatory agencies as a matter of course).

wahern 6y ago

> The important point is not necessarily the mechanism, but rather the intent and a good-faith effective effort to keep things fair and underpinned by public-good policy objectives. Regulatory bureaucracies, especially in the United States because of our political and legal norms, can't be expected to police intent and good-faith. Like many other dilemmas you have to squarely answer the question: is this particular policy on the whole preferable despite the negative consequences? In better times a secondary question might be: can we address the negative consequences by directly supplementing functional gaps with a government program? Though, our track record isn't that great in that regard, so our decisions, especially at the Federal level, should probably simply turn on the first question alone--taking as a given that the negative consequences won't be mitigated. I really don't get the opposition to net neutrality. The negative consequences and market impact are minimal, especially considering that it's a relatively clear and simple rule; the type of rule that has a long political and legal history of application. And the hypocrisy on the conservative side blows my mind since they began proposing the imposition of user content neutrality on social media platforms. Even if I agreed with that in principle, there's no way the benefit exceeds the negative consequences. Net neutrality, which can help foster the emergence of alternative platforms, is an obvious alternative as one of the easiest ways to mitigate the rise of monolithic walled gardens is to ensure cost equity at the infrastructure level. I think repealing Section 230 should be on the table, too. That's a more fraught discussion, but abstractly it's similar to net neutrality in promoting an arms-length relationship between content creators and network infrastructure providers (to the extent content platforms can be considered infrastructure providers, which is the implicit assumption by those pissed at Twitter and Facebook for censoring "free speech"). I suspect repealing Section 230 would foster the re-emergence of open hosting platforms. Section 230 was never needed to make Usenet, BBSs, or online journalism viable; it was only necessary to make models like Twitter or, especially, Facebook scalable.

throwawaygh 6y ago
>> The important point is not necessarily the mechanism, but rather the intent and a good-faith effective effort to keep things fair and underpinned by public-good policy objectives. > Regulatory bureaucracies, especially in the United States because of our political and legal norms, can't be expected to police intent and good-faith. Someone should tell the FTC and SEC ;-) BTW, I generally agree with the rest of your post. But it's really not that hard to imagine a world where ISPs are mostly municipal departments or non-government organizations that aren't profit-motivated and generally 99.9% of the time act in good faith. Like, IDK. Look at HAM radio or most gov-run community centers or lots of open source projects or 100s of other examples. It's possible for non-profit-motive to produce good outcomes. And in that world where ISPs are just these little pieces of local and regional bureaucracy -- like the county community center or public works departments -- you can imagine all sorts of reasons why a net neutrality rule isn't necessary, and where isolated violations of net neutrality effectively achieve this or that goal. Eg a city with limited upstream bandwidth blocking Netflix during the day so that it can offer free broadband to every student during a pandemic without increasing any expenses or laying any new fiber. I think the extreme pessimism about the possibility of non-market-actors actually doing things competently is mostly manufactured bullshit, and manufactured by the exact people you're complaining about.
- wahern 6y ago
  > Someone should tell the FTC and SEC I concede your point regarding the FTC, and to modern consumer protection regulatory systems in general (though I have other problems with those). But the SEC is an exemplar of how our politics cripples agencies which can only function well by peeking behind the curtain, so to speak. The SEC has neither the resources nor mandate to match the power of the industry it regulates, which is why it mostly just goes around issuing the financial industry equivalent of parking tickets. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) would be another great example, but it barely even got off the ground before it was almost completely neutered. Beyond the FTC, most consumer protection regulation successes have been at the state level. The IRS is a good example, especially of the dynamic in evolution. It has to walk a fine line between applying consistent, clear rules and catching tax avoidance schemes by looking to the underlying substance of financial schemes rather than just the mechanics. And for the past couple of decades it's increasingly struggled to do that effectively, though mostly for political rather than legal reasons (taxation is one of the few areas where courts still accept intrusive, individualized examination by regulatory agencies as a matter of course).