9 ms·

Reinstating Net Neutrality in the US

100 points by elorant 6y ago

bhawks 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: I was pro net neutrality - but I wouldn't have noticed it had been repealed if I was not so plugged into the debate. What has changed for other folks that you can tell? This was 'the sky is falling' level of concern and to be frank I think it was totally overblown.
- kadoban 6y ago
  It hasn't been that long. Big companies are smart enough to move slowly so as to avoid causing too many waves.
  - bcherny 6y ago
    > Don’t attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.
    - kadoban 6y ago
      Not sure I follow. What action or lack-thereof are we trying to attribute?
      - d110af5ccf 6y ago
        >>>> wouldn't have noticed ... What has changed >>> It hasn't been that long. Big companies are smart enough to move slowly The implication is that ISPs are intentionally slowing the adoption of exploitative policies in order to avoid drawing negative attention while politically vulnerable.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      Worst saying ever
      - d110af5ccf 6y ago
        Not at all. Extending the benefit of the doubt is essential to society functioning well. Assuming the worst without clear cause just escalates things needlessly and poisons relationships. That doesn't mean you have to be a sucker though. It's quite clear in context that ISPs would love to abuse a lack of net neutrality if they could get away with it. There's literally a video from years ago of an AT&T executive talking about it.
        imwillofficial 6y ago
        Perhaps, but every time I see that tired saying trotted out, the context is in groups that have not earned, or worse, have a history of malice that does not justify the benefit of the doubt
  - dantheman 6y ago
    It didn't exist for long, it isn't needed and is just another way for the government to get more control of the internet. Let's wait till there is a problem before we try to fix it.
    - ulkesh 6y ago
      There are numerous problems. Comcast packet shaping in the late aughts. Zero-rated services. Lack of competition. Regional monopolies. High prices due to monopolies. Data caps. Downgraded service due to going over data caps. But I suppose none of that matters when it may involve the government having to step in and actually protect consumers -- and protect what has become a basic human right. I do wonder if the AT&T breakup in 1983 would actually occur in this current ignorant political climate, had it been offset by 40 years in the future.
      - imwillofficial 6y ago
        None of which are fixed
    - DistractionRect 6y ago
      Legislation is notoriously slow, and the companies that'd profit would (and did) lobby against fixing it. It's almost always cheaper to prevent a problem than treat it after it festers. What is the problem with net neutrality//regulation? What did repealing it fix? The shift to WFH has highlighted how essential internet access in the modern world - it should be regulated like all other essential utilities.
    - d110af5ccf 6y ago
      > it isn't needed A baseless claim. Others already provided counterexamples. Without net neutrality, things could deteriorate extremely quickly if the changes appeared likely to be profitable. > is just another way for the government to get more control of the internet This statement doesn't even make sense. These aren't KYC regulations or building permits we're talking about here. They just make it illegal to charge for preferential treatment. We've had common carrier laws since forever. The fact that ISPs are exempt is an aberration.
  - gremlinsinc 6y ago
    This! Boil the frog slowly and it'll never even know it's boiling. Businesses and politicians are nothing if not methodical, patient, and incremental. Bit by bit they'll rip away competitional freedoms.
    - bhawks 6y ago
      Saying things like this makes people think you're a paranoid tin foil hat carrying conspiracy theorist. Extraordinary claims require evidence and so far that evidence is not compelling to get normal people to care.
      - gremlinsinc 6y ago
        Seriously, all I said was that - they know better than to rip the bandaid off at once. People would be irate if everything they wanted was magically made manifest. That's just common sense. Net-neutrality - from the many other comments has already been enacting incrementally small but bad changes for internet/broadband/streaming platforms and esp. in terms of monopolistic control. It's similar to how 24/7 media took over propagandazing and polarizing the country - all media from Fox to CNN. It started with repealing the Fairness Doctrine which required all viewpoints to be expressed. Then came the Telecommunications Act which was supposed to open the market to more and new radio station ownership; instead, it created an opportunity for a media monopoly. You saw American media go from hundreds of owners to 6 or 7 companies owning 99% of media via radio, tv, etc. At least with more diversity of ownership there wasn't the ability for CEO's to completely control a narrative whether it's Turner, Murdoch, Comcast, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc. It took 25 years for media to bring us to this point, it wasn't an overnight thing. Laws become reality, companies pick at the edges to see what they can get away with, they pick some more, eventually they take as much as they can get away with and control their foothold. I don't see how this is conspiracy, it's just facts about capitalism.
- mimikatz 6y ago
  I feel the same way. I kinda feel like big tech duped me into buying into the FUD about net neutrality. I was a huge supporter of it and thought when Trump came into office the net would get segmented up. When it didn't happen I felt like I was taken for a ride.
  - NDizzle 6y ago
    You were. It's okay. Please learn from that experience.
    - toiletfuneral 6y ago
      hail corporate
  - Fellshard 6y ago
    It's an extremely useful FUD for large monopolies, since they can create their own infrastructure and cut ahead of smaller businesses that will be trampled by NN regulations. It's an easy pitch because they make it sound 'democratic', but from an engineering perspective it's absolutely nuts.
    - kadoban 6y ago
      Oh? What exactly are these onerous regulations that small businesses can't comply with, that are part of net neutrality? I can think of precisely none, help me out?
      - Fellshard 6y ago
        Private custom infrastructure that can be specialized for purpose, while the ISPs maintain a monopoly and simply serve unspecialized, lowest common denominator traffic - no room for competitors to differentiate. That is the real issue to tackle: find better ways to make meaningful competition in a region possible, that can offer genuinely different specializations (e.g. High media upload vs. Slow but regular text browsing vs. Real-time gaming).
    - 6y ago
- ulkesh 6y ago
  Name one innovation that occurred because of Net Neutrality repeal? That was the other side's argument -- that Net Neutrality hindered innovation. The last four years, I've seen nothing but stagnation in the industry, except for perhaps what telecoms like to call "5G", which may have technological advances, but is more of a marketing buzzword. There are still data caps on home connections for literally no reason at all, except as a cash grab. There are still considerably high prices for access. There are still regional monopolies. There is still very little competition, when comparing apples to apples in offered bandwidth. We got flooded with zero-rating services during this time which in and of itself stifles competition. And with this pandemic, it became crystal clear just how vital the internet is, especially as it relates to our kids and their education. Net Neutrality was on the FCC books for, what, 18 months tops? It had little time to do anything that it was meant, and it really belongs in legislation [1] and not at the mercy of a changing administration. [1] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2019/net-neutrality-legislation-a-framework-for-consensus/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2019/net-neutr...
  - 0xy 6y ago
    Average internet speeds are up substantially since repeal. It is up over 300% in fact, and is now 12th globally according to Ookla. Even higher if you remove tiny dense countries like Liechtenstein. That's innovation.
    - wtallis 6y ago
      You should at least attempt to make some kind of argument that there's real causation here and not merely correlation. Also, aren't most of Ookla's speed test results biased by testing against servers the ISP has given preferential placement to inside their network, rather than using a diverse set of servers on the public internet? (I'll admit, it's been years since I last cared to look at an Ookla speed test, so I'm not sure if their default server selection strategy has changed.)
      - 0xy 6y ago
        Is your argument that substantial speed increases are not innovation, or that the original arguments for Net Neutrality were totally incorrect? Because NN campaigners said speeds would go down or stagnate. In fact, this is the EFF's prime argument for Net Neutrality. [1] It has been proven absolutely false. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-attack-free-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...
- ShroudedNight 6y ago
  While the issue became relatively quiet after the Ajit Pai led rollbacks, there appears to have been significant developments on a state-by-state basis. Depending on where you reside, you may have some form of net neutrality provision, even if it's not enforced at the federal level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
- danShumway 6y ago
  AFAIK almost every major mobile provider throttles video on unlimited plans. I'm also seeing restrictions and throttling when phones are tethered. More ISPs are experimenting with data caps now. We haven't seen the big scary "pay $10 for Netflix access" posters come true, but I think otherwise this has basically gone as predicted? Net neutrality was about whether ISPs could adjust speed/charges/caps on the basis of content type, and they do that right now. AT&T set up a "sponsored data" program in 2020 where companies paid to not have their apps count against data usage. They exempted their own property HBO Max, essentially for free since they're paying themselves. That was a big part of what the net neutrality debate was about: ISPs setting up schemes that favored established players by making them pay for customer access, and the fear that this would make it harder for indie upstarts to enter the market. In 2021 AT&T ended that program, but are still continuing to exempt HBO Max, which is an even worse situation because not only are they leveraging their power as a mobile provider to give their video service a leg up, there's not even a way to pay now to be treated equally on their network. It's not a wasteland, but... I'm not sure what to say. Are people here happy with the direction that ISPs are going right now? I'm not. We have less competition, more ISPs are vertically integrating content and buying content producers, the 5G rollout has been largely disappointing, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that any of this stuff is changing. I guess there haven't been a ton of sexy consequences that are obvious to every consumer, but companies are definitely experimenting with the stuff that would have been regulated under net neutrality. People warned about privileging content, and companies privilege content now.
  - bhawks 6y ago
    The lack of real consequences really robs credibility from the next big internet cause (that might really need it). What has happened has played out on a really small scale and it's effect is mildly frustrating to meh. Attributing the lackluster 5G rollout to the repeal net neutrality seems really tenuous. I am not deeply familiar but it seems like their are other confounding factors such as the China/us relationship, the weird 5g paranoia, covid, and the overall sickly state of telcom that has existed since the payphone era. All in all I and many other citizens have bigger fish to fry. Jabbering my friends about net neutrality was a big waste of time and energy. I feel burned and embarrassed.
- BiteCode_dev 6y ago
  Those things have inertia. Net neutrality, like freedom of speech, doesn't lead to great changes overnight, but, I guess, big ones on the long run. Like diet and exercise.
- resfirestar 6y ago
  I think one could argue that there hasn't really been a regulatory opening for any serious moves against net neutrality in the home broadband market. The FCC repealed the Obama-era rules in June 2018. Comcast/Xfinity was still under merger conditions binding it to net neutrality principles until that September, and had to make a show of assuring the FCC it wouldn't make any anticompetitive moves to avoid having the conditions extended. Charter/Spectrum remains under merger conditions forbidding data caps, which would be needed if they wanted to bill for data unequally, until 2023. So two of the major players with the most to gain haven't been in a position to try mobile-style throttling, and even if other companies considered it there was a possibility (now a reality) that around the time they finished rolling out any change there could be a new administration hostile to their plans and happy to use an already unpopular cable company as a villain.
- Black101 6y ago
  I haven't noticed a change, but it is not a bad thing to implement because I could see it being abused...
- Olreich 6y ago
  You don’t criminalize behavior because it will happen, but because it could. Net neutrality prevents companies from doing harmful things, like installing data caps and providing preferential treatment to certain data. Those things don’t have to happen, and maybe aren’t happening because the companies think they’d get bad PR. But they could happen, and that’s why you regulate to prevent them. Perhaps the big kerfuffle was overblown, or perhaps it instead slowed down the plans that companies had (since it was now a provable PR nightmare post-kerfuffle). We don’t have enough data to decide that. We do know that companies are currently allowed to act in anti-consumer fashion.
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  archive.is and archive.today does not resolve on some connections.
EdSharkey 6y ago
Oh, I'm sorry, was your ox gored or something? Which is it, do we need net neutrality or do we need more than deplatforming? Shall we have access for all or access for you and the people you like? Shall we surrender all the power to big tech or bust the trusts? You're giving me whiplash. Get your shit together.
- kadoban 6y ago
  None of that has anything to do with net neutrality.
- Can_Not 6y ago
  > Which is it, do we need net neutrality or do we need more than deplatforming? Net Neutrality. This post is about Net Neutrality.
orthecreedence 6y ago
The only way to have real net neutrality is via publicly-owned communications infrastructure. Otherwise the issue is just going to be ping-ponged every <political cycle> years. It can't be won in Washington. We need municipal fiber networks and radio towers.
- rektide 6y ago
  i'm not as politically nihilistic as this. good governance keeps slowly happening. health care has slowly gotten better, with pre-existing conditions no longer making it impossible to get health care, and, it's going to be chaos for a while, but healthcare providers having to declare prices up front (recent). the clock is not so easily turned back on progress, in many cases. that said, i 100% think municipalities should compete to be the best environment they can. providing municipal connectivity is an obvious, straightforward path to allowing regions to increase their competitiveness. this weird system of demanding that over-charging, weirdly controlling, rent-seeking frequently-monopolistic middlemen the are the soul providers of a base human right (connectivity) has been some weird cult shit with ever weirder overtones of control to it. worth also remembering that it was the supreme court that decided, effectively, that all the hard long fought for work to demand net-neutrality & unbundling could be ignored for cable & fiber[1], specifically because the court believed the case being made that fiber would never get rolled out unless a monopoly was guaranteed. that... has not turned out well at all, in the last decade plus since that absurd ignorant farce of a ruling. this ruling ended competitive local exchange carriers for everything but dsl, and is widely regarded as a dumbfuck move. bad court, you really screwed up the ability for competition to happen quite thoroughly. things seem so bad that municipal communication infrastructure feels like the only possible viable option, given how egregiously badly communication infrastructure has been bungled & monopolized across the US in the wake of this granted right-to-have-no-competition. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v._FCC_(2002) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....
- 0xy 6y ago
  Local councils are often more incompetent/bloated/corrupt than big companies and the federal government are.
Proven 6y ago
They have nothing else to do with he donation money they get. If I cared I'd know where to complain on my own. Of course the whole concept is nothing but a bunch of nonsense.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
xiphias2 6y ago
Reed Hastings talked about net neutrality in his interview about blitz scaling: if cable companies can slow Netflix down and ask for as much money as they want, it could have destroyed Netflix.
- 0xy 6y ago
  Netflix is far from innocent. Remember when they totally ignored existing peering agreements and tried to force Verizon to pay for upgrades to pipes that were overloaded because of their traffic? Netflix is a freeloader. Peering agreements, which by the way have been around for decades, state clearly that nobody pays as long as the pipe is used equally. Netflix's bandwidth providers sent way more than they received and refused to cough up for upgrades. Aside from "Verizon bad because big ISP", they were in the right. You want a fat pipe because of your obnoxiously bandwidth heavy service, pay for it.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    > Remember when they totally ignored existing peering agreements and tried to force Verizon to pay for upgrades to pipes that were overloaded because of their traffic? I recall Netflix's ISP offering to pay the entire cost of the upgrades at at least one of the overloaded peering points. And I recall Verizon trying to mislead the public about where the congestion was occurring (it mostly wasn't internal to their networks, but was at the interconnects to Netflix's ISP). > Peering agreements, which by the way have been around for decades, state clearly that nobody pays as long as the pipe is used equally. Netflix's bandwidth providers sent way more than they received and refused to cough up for upgrades. Verizon and other residential ISPs built out their networks in such a way that it was not possible for traffic to be at all close to symmetric. If Netflix had added code to their site to generate artificial upload traffic, it wouldn't have been possible for that to match the download traffic. Why should those last-mile residential ISPs get to use traffic asymmetry as an excuse when they're at least as responsible for breaking the traditions that applied to peering between transit providers?
chroem- 6y ago
Would recent precedents around section 230 and the sanctity of corporate speech give ISPs a legal workaround here?
- wtallis 6y ago
  The relevant bit of section 230 is probably: > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or Doing something like throttling your competitor's video streaming traffic while zero-rating your own is pretty hard to cast as a good-faith action, especially if it's done on the basis of where the traffic is originating instead of based on the content. And I'm not sure mere throttling or deprioritization is enough to qualify as an attempt to "restrict access to or availability of material". So I don't see how section 230 can give protection to ISPs that want to discriminate against certain classes of traffic.
Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago
From what I gathered about discussions on net neutrality it helps some big providers (streaming video, etc.) to get bigger profits because this traffic could not be handled separately from the rest. I really don't see why to sponsor these people on everyone else's money. E.g. in Russia there is no net neutrality as far as I can tell. So my mobile plan has separate components for video, music, and social networks. It's not that I have to buy them all: I have universal access capped at 4GB, but if I buy e.g. "unlimited video", then the traffic from the selected provides (YouTube, etc.) won't count toward that limit. I myself am totally happy with this setup because I don't use any of that (and working form home hardly ever reach the 4GB cap itself), which keeps my mobile bill pretty low. My understanding is that if we had net neutrality then there wouldn't be any such discrimination and I would have to buy just some universal "Internet" and the price of that would have to be averaged between me and the avid YouTube and Instagram users. Why is this supposed to be beneficial?
- wtallis 6y ago
  > My understanding is that if we had net neutrality then there wouldn't be any such discrimination and I would have to buy just some universal "Internet" and the price of that would have to be averaged between me and the avid YouTube and Instagram users. Of course not. Net Neutrality does not prevent ISPs from charging per GB. It does prevent them from offering an "unlimited video" option that only actually covers their hand-picked selection of video providers, most of whom will have been extorted to be included on the approved list.
- piaste 6y ago
  > Why is this supposed to be beneficial? Because it means that a new video hosting or photo stream service has the same network access as the established players. It's already insanely difficult to beat the network effect of an existing social media website, now imagine if Newstagram counted against your 4GB limit but Instagram didn't... If the discrimination was based on content, eg by MIME type, that would be fair, but it wouldn't be technically enforceable under HTTPS (and easily bypassed anyway). Then again, why is that even needed? Why does the premium package have to be "unlimited video" and not "unlimited gigabytes [wherever you download it from]"? Does it cost your ISP any less to transport hours of 4K Netflix than hours of 4K illegal streaming sites? Your cheap 4GB package would be unaffected anyway, net neutrality determines what you can buy at the higher tiers.
bregma 6y ago
Net neutrality never meant your ISP would not charge you more for higher speeds to your home. It never meant your ISP would not charge you for pulling more data than some cap, and it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type or data caps. Those things were never what net neutrality was about. Net neutrality was about ISPs providing differential pricing or services based on data originator. For example, you ISP charging Netflix extra for every byte from Netflix carried over their circuits, on the threat of blocking or throttling those packets. "Nice place you got here, shame if something was to happen to it. Me and they boys will be around Thursdays to collect." Most of the fall-out from a lack of network neutrality was hidden behind higher fees for your streaming services. Those fees are unlikely to come down as a result of the restoration of net neutrality because they can instead be added to the streaming service's bottom line. You're not going to notice the rollback even though the loss of net neutrality probably resulted in billions of dollars being taken from the consumer's pockets into various corporate coffers. The market could bear it and the only change is whose pockets it goes in to.
- slim 6y ago
  it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type it actually means that. net neutrality means isp does not get to discriminate packets. if you have 1G bandwidth you are free to use it for any packet you want
  - bregma 6y ago
    That is not what net neutrality meant. It has always meant that a carrier could not discriminate based on the origin of the packet, not the content of the packet.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type [...] Accurately classifying traffic as video streaming vs bulk downloads, or gaming vs VoIP, etc. is a technological impossibility. Any scheme to do so is trivially defeated by things like VPNs and at best devolves to a cat and mouse game with ever-more draconian deep packet inspection. A good Net Neutrality regulatory regime must prohibit ISPs from being lazy and only prioritizing the most popular VoIP protocols and services they know about, which means in practice that Net Neutrality has to go all the way to prohibiting discrimination based on content type. If ISPs want to throttle, they have to do it on the basis of actual traffic patterns. If you want to deprioritize heavy traffic flows, you have to identify them based on the observed pattern of sending lots of large packets, rather than classifying it based on the notion that a certain port number means a certain kind of traffic.
g42gregory 6y ago
I heard that Google somehow receives some enormous “subsidies” on its Internet ads traffic (internally, across Internet backbone?). And that this is somehow related to the Net Neutrality laws. Can somebody explain how it works, or is it an urban myth?

100 points by elorant 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: I was pro net neutrality - but I wouldn't have noticed it had been repealed if I was not so plugged into the debate. What has changed for other folks that you can tell? This was 'the sky is falling' level of concern and to be frank I think it was totally overblown.

kadoban 6y ago
It hasn't been that long. Big companies are smart enough to move slowly so as to avoid causing too many waves.
- bcherny 6y ago
  > Don’t attribute to malice that which you can attribute to incompetence.
  - kadoban 6y ago
    Not sure I follow. What action or lack-thereof are we trying to attribute?
    - d110af5ccf 6y ago
      >>>> wouldn't have noticed ... What has changed >>> It hasn't been that long. Big companies are smart enough to move slowly The implication is that ISPs are intentionally slowing the adoption of exploitative policies in order to avoid drawing negative attention while politically vulnerable.
  - imwillofficial 6y ago
    Worst saying ever
    - d110af5ccf 6y ago
      Not at all. Extending the benefit of the doubt is essential to society functioning well. Assuming the worst without clear cause just escalates things needlessly and poisons relationships. That doesn't mean you have to be a sucker though. It's quite clear in context that ISPs would love to abuse a lack of net neutrality if they could get away with it. There's literally a video from years ago of an AT&T executive talking about it.
      - imwillofficial 6y ago
        Perhaps, but every time I see that tired saying trotted out, the context is in groups that have not earned, or worse, have a history of malice that does not justify the benefit of the doubt
- dantheman 6y ago
  It didn't exist for long, it isn't needed and is just another way for the government to get more control of the internet. Let's wait till there is a problem before we try to fix it.
  - ulkesh 6y ago
    There are numerous problems. Comcast packet shaping in the late aughts. Zero-rated services. Lack of competition. Regional monopolies. High prices due to monopolies. Data caps. Downgraded service due to going over data caps. But I suppose none of that matters when it may involve the government having to step in and actually protect consumers -- and protect what has become a basic human right. I do wonder if the AT&T breakup in 1983 would actually occur in this current ignorant political climate, had it been offset by 40 years in the future.
    - imwillofficial 6y ago
      None of which are fixed
  - DistractionRect 6y ago
    Legislation is notoriously slow, and the companies that'd profit would (and did) lobby against fixing it. It's almost always cheaper to prevent a problem than treat it after it festers. What is the problem with net neutrality//regulation? What did repealing it fix? The shift to WFH has highlighted how essential internet access in the modern world - it should be regulated like all other essential utilities.
  - d110af5ccf 6y ago
    > it isn't needed A baseless claim. Others already provided counterexamples. Without net neutrality, things could deteriorate extremely quickly if the changes appeared likely to be profitable. > is just another way for the government to get more control of the internet This statement doesn't even make sense. These aren't KYC regulations or building permits we're talking about here. They just make it illegal to charge for preferential treatment. We've had common carrier laws since forever. The fact that ISPs are exempt is an aberration.
- gremlinsinc 6y ago
  This! Boil the frog slowly and it'll never even know it's boiling. Businesses and politicians are nothing if not methodical, patient, and incremental. Bit by bit they'll rip away competitional freedoms.
  - bhawks 6y ago
    Saying things like this makes people think you're a paranoid tin foil hat carrying conspiracy theorist. Extraordinary claims require evidence and so far that evidence is not compelling to get normal people to care.
    - gremlinsinc 6y ago
      Seriously, all I said was that - they know better than to rip the bandaid off at once. People would be irate if everything they wanted was magically made manifest. That's just common sense. Net-neutrality - from the many other comments has already been enacting incrementally small but bad changes for internet/broadband/streaming platforms and esp. in terms of monopolistic control. It's similar to how 24/7 media took over propagandazing and polarizing the country - all media from Fox to CNN. It started with repealing the Fairness Doctrine which required all viewpoints to be expressed. Then came the Telecommunications Act which was supposed to open the market to more and new radio station ownership; instead, it created an opportunity for a media monopoly. You saw American media go from hundreds of owners to 6 or 7 companies owning 99% of media via radio, tv, etc. At least with more diversity of ownership there wasn't the ability for CEO's to completely control a narrative whether it's Turner, Murdoch, Comcast, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc. It took 25 years for media to bring us to this point, it wasn't an overnight thing. Laws become reality, companies pick at the edges to see what they can get away with, they pick some more, eventually they take as much as they can get away with and control their foothold. I don't see how this is conspiracy, it's just facts about capitalism.
mimikatz 6y ago
I feel the same way. I kinda feel like big tech duped me into buying into the FUD about net neutrality. I was a huge supporter of it and thought when Trump came into office the net would get segmented up. When it didn't happen I felt like I was taken for a ride.
- NDizzle 6y ago
  You were. It's okay. Please learn from that experience.
  - toiletfuneral 6y ago
    hail corporate
- Fellshard 6y ago
  It's an extremely useful FUD for large monopolies, since they can create their own infrastructure and cut ahead of smaller businesses that will be trampled by NN regulations. It's an easy pitch because they make it sound 'democratic', but from an engineering perspective it's absolutely nuts.
  - kadoban 6y ago
    Oh? What exactly are these onerous regulations that small businesses can't comply with, that are part of net neutrality? I can think of precisely none, help me out?
    - Fellshard 6y ago
      Private custom infrastructure that can be specialized for purpose, while the ISPs maintain a monopoly and simply serve unspecialized, lowest common denominator traffic - no room for competitors to differentiate. That is the real issue to tackle: find better ways to make meaningful competition in a region possible, that can offer genuinely different specializations (e.g. High media upload vs. Slow but regular text browsing vs. Real-time gaming).
  - 6y ago
ulkesh 6y ago
Name one innovation that occurred because of Net Neutrality repeal? That was the other side's argument -- that Net Neutrality hindered innovation. The last four years, I've seen nothing but stagnation in the industry, except for perhaps what telecoms like to call "5G", which may have technological advances, but is more of a marketing buzzword. There are still data caps on home connections for literally no reason at all, except as a cash grab. There are still considerably high prices for access. There are still regional monopolies. There is still very little competition, when comparing apples to apples in offered bandwidth. We got flooded with zero-rating services during this time which in and of itself stifles competition. And with this pandemic, it became crystal clear just how vital the internet is, especially as it relates to our kids and their education. Net Neutrality was on the FCC books for, what, 18 months tops? It had little time to do anything that it was meant, and it really belongs in legislation [1] and not at the mercy of a changing administration. [1] https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2019/net-neutrality-legislation-a-framework-for-consensus/ https://www.internetsociety.org/resources/doc/2019/net-neutr...
- 0xy 6y ago
  Average internet speeds are up substantially since repeal. It is up over 300% in fact, and is now 12th globally according to Ookla. Even higher if you remove tiny dense countries like Liechtenstein. That's innovation.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    You should at least attempt to make some kind of argument that there's real causation here and not merely correlation. Also, aren't most of Ookla's speed test results biased by testing against servers the ISP has given preferential placement to inside their network, rather than using a diverse set of servers on the public internet? (I'll admit, it's been years since I last cared to look at an Ookla speed test, so I'm not sure if their default server selection strategy has changed.)
    - 0xy 6y ago
      Is your argument that substantial speed increases are not innovation, or that the original arguments for Net Neutrality were totally incorrect? Because NN campaigners said speeds would go down or stagnate. In fact, this is the EFF's prime argument for Net Neutrality. [1] It has been proven absolutely false. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-attack-free-speech https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/06/attack-net-neutrality-...
ShroudedNight 6y ago
While the issue became relatively quiet after the Ajit Pai led rollbacks, there appears to have been significant developments on a state-by-state basis. Depending on where you reside, you may have some form of net neutrality provision, even if it's not enforced at the federal level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
danShumway 6y ago
AFAIK almost every major mobile provider throttles video on unlimited plans. I'm also seeing restrictions and throttling when phones are tethered. More ISPs are experimenting with data caps now. We haven't seen the big scary "pay $10 for Netflix access" posters come true, but I think otherwise this has basically gone as predicted? Net neutrality was about whether ISPs could adjust speed/charges/caps on the basis of content type, and they do that right now. AT&T set up a "sponsored data" program in 2020 where companies paid to not have their apps count against data usage. They exempted their own property HBO Max, essentially for free since they're paying themselves. That was a big part of what the net neutrality debate was about: ISPs setting up schemes that favored established players by making them pay for customer access, and the fear that this would make it harder for indie upstarts to enter the market. In 2021 AT&T ended that program, but are still continuing to exempt HBO Max, which is an even worse situation because not only are they leveraging their power as a mobile provider to give their video service a leg up, there's not even a way to pay now to be treated equally on their network. It's not a wasteland, but... I'm not sure what to say. Are people here happy with the direction that ISPs are going right now? I'm not. We have less competition, more ISPs are vertically integrating content and buying content producers, the 5G rollout has been largely disappointing, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that any of this stuff is changing. I guess there haven't been a ton of sexy consequences that are obvious to every consumer, but companies are definitely experimenting with the stuff that would have been regulated under net neutrality. People warned about privileging content, and companies privilege content now.
- bhawks 6y ago
  The lack of real consequences really robs credibility from the next big internet cause (that might really need it). What has happened has played out on a really small scale and it's effect is mildly frustrating to meh. Attributing the lackluster 5G rollout to the repeal net neutrality seems really tenuous. I am not deeply familiar but it seems like their are other confounding factors such as the China/us relationship, the weird 5g paranoia, covid, and the overall sickly state of telcom that has existed since the payphone era. All in all I and many other citizens have bigger fish to fry. Jabbering my friends about net neutrality was a big waste of time and energy. I feel burned and embarrassed.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
Those things have inertia. Net neutrality, like freedom of speech, doesn't lead to great changes overnight, but, I guess, big ones on the long run. Like diet and exercise.
resfirestar 6y ago
I think one could argue that there hasn't really been a regulatory opening for any serious moves against net neutrality in the home broadband market. The FCC repealed the Obama-era rules in June 2018. Comcast/Xfinity was still under merger conditions binding it to net neutrality principles until that September, and had to make a show of assuring the FCC it wouldn't make any anticompetitive moves to avoid having the conditions extended. Charter/Spectrum remains under merger conditions forbidding data caps, which would be needed if they wanted to bill for data unequally, until 2023. So two of the major players with the most to gain haven't been in a position to try mobile-style throttling, and even if other companies considered it there was a possibility (now a reality) that around the time they finished rolling out any change there could be a new administration hostile to their plans and happy to use an already unpopular cable company as a villain.
Black101 6y ago
I haven't noticed a change, but it is not a bad thing to implement because I could see it being abused...
Olreich 6y ago
You don’t criminalize behavior because it will happen, but because it could. Net neutrality prevents companies from doing harmful things, like installing data caps and providing preferential treatment to certain data. Those things don’t have to happen, and maybe aren’t happening because the companies think they’d get bad PR. But they could happen, and that’s why you regulate to prevent them. Perhaps the big kerfuffle was overblown, or perhaps it instead slowed down the plans that companies had (since it was now a provable PR nightmare post-kerfuffle). We don’t have enough data to decide that. We do know that companies are currently allowed to act in anti-consumer fashion.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
archive.is and archive.today does not resolve on some connections.

EdSharkey 6y ago

Oh, I'm sorry, was your ox gored or something? Which is it, do we need net neutrality or do we need more than deplatforming? Shall we have access for all or access for you and the people you like? Shall we surrender all the power to big tech or bust the trusts? You're giving me whiplash. Get your shit together.

kadoban 6y ago
None of that has anything to do with net neutrality.
Can_Not 6y ago
> Which is it, do we need net neutrality or do we need more than deplatforming? Net Neutrality. This post is about Net Neutrality.

orthecreedence 6y ago

The only way to have real net neutrality is via publicly-owned communications infrastructure. Otherwise the issue is just going to be ping-ponged every <political cycle> years. It can't be won in Washington. We need municipal fiber networks and radio towers.

rektide 6y ago
i'm not as politically nihilistic as this. good governance keeps slowly happening. health care has slowly gotten better, with pre-existing conditions no longer making it impossible to get health care, and, it's going to be chaos for a while, but healthcare providers having to declare prices up front (recent). the clock is not so easily turned back on progress, in many cases. that said, i 100% think municipalities should compete to be the best environment they can. providing municipal connectivity is an obvious, straightforward path to allowing regions to increase their competitiveness. this weird system of demanding that over-charging, weirdly controlling, rent-seeking frequently-monopolistic middlemen the are the soul providers of a base human right (connectivity) has been some weird cult shit with ever weirder overtones of control to it. worth also remembering that it was the supreme court that decided, effectively, that all the hard long fought for work to demand net-neutrality & unbundling could be ignored for cable & fiber[1], specifically because the court believed the case being made that fiber would never get rolled out unless a monopoly was guaranteed. that... has not turned out well at all, in the last decade plus since that absurd ignorant farce of a ruling. this ruling ended competitive local exchange carriers for everything but dsl, and is widely regarded as a dumbfuck move. bad court, you really screwed up the ability for competition to happen quite thoroughly. things seem so bad that municipal communication infrastructure feels like the only possible viable option, given how egregiously badly communication infrastructure has been bungled & monopolized across the US in the wake of this granted right-to-have-no-competition. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v._FCC_(2002) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....
0xy 6y ago
Local councils are often more incompetent/bloated/corrupt than big companies and the federal government are.

Proven 6y ago

They have nothing else to do with he donation money they get. If I cared I'd know where to complain on my own. Of course the whole concept is nothing but a bunch of nonsense.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

xiphias2 6y ago

Reed Hastings talked about net neutrality in his interview about blitz scaling: if cable companies can slow Netflix down and ask for as much money as they want, it could have destroyed Netflix.

0xy 6y ago
Netflix is far from innocent. Remember when they totally ignored existing peering agreements and tried to force Verizon to pay for upgrades to pipes that were overloaded because of their traffic? Netflix is a freeloader. Peering agreements, which by the way have been around for decades, state clearly that nobody pays as long as the pipe is used equally. Netflix's bandwidth providers sent way more than they received and refused to cough up for upgrades. Aside from "Verizon bad because big ISP", they were in the right. You want a fat pipe because of your obnoxiously bandwidth heavy service, pay for it.
- wtallis 6y ago
  > Remember when they totally ignored existing peering agreements and tried to force Verizon to pay for upgrades to pipes that were overloaded because of their traffic? I recall Netflix's ISP offering to pay the entire cost of the upgrades at at least one of the overloaded peering points. And I recall Verizon trying to mislead the public about where the congestion was occurring (it mostly wasn't internal to their networks, but was at the interconnects to Netflix's ISP). > Peering agreements, which by the way have been around for decades, state clearly that nobody pays as long as the pipe is used equally. Netflix's bandwidth providers sent way more than they received and refused to cough up for upgrades. Verizon and other residential ISPs built out their networks in such a way that it was not possible for traffic to be at all close to symmetric. If Netflix had added code to their site to generate artificial upload traffic, it wouldn't have been possible for that to match the download traffic. Why should those last-mile residential ISPs get to use traffic asymmetry as an excuse when they're at least as responsible for breaking the traditions that applied to peering between transit providers?

chroem- 6y ago

Would recent precedents around section 230 and the sanctity of corporate speech give ISPs a legal workaround here?

wtallis 6y ago
The relevant bit of section 230 is probably: > No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of— > (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or Doing something like throttling your competitor's video streaming traffic while zero-rating your own is pretty hard to cast as a good-faith action, especially if it's done on the basis of where the traffic is originating instead of based on the content. And I'm not sure mere throttling or deprioritization is enough to qualify as an attempt to "restrict access to or availability of material". So I don't see how section 230 can give protection to ISPs that want to discriminate against certain classes of traffic.

Mikhail_Edoshin 6y ago

From what I gathered about discussions on net neutrality it helps some big providers (streaming video, etc.) to get bigger profits because this traffic could not be handled separately from the rest. I really don't see why to sponsor these people on everyone else's money. E.g. in Russia there is no net neutrality as far as I can tell. So my mobile plan has separate components for video, music, and social networks. It's not that I have to buy them all: I have universal access capped at 4GB, but if I buy e.g. "unlimited video", then the traffic from the selected provides (YouTube, etc.) won't count toward that limit. I myself am totally happy with this setup because I don't use any of that (and working form home hardly ever reach the 4GB cap itself), which keeps my mobile bill pretty low. My understanding is that if we had net neutrality then there wouldn't be any such discrimination and I would have to buy just some universal "Internet" and the price of that would have to be averaged between me and the avid YouTube and Instagram users. Why is this supposed to be beneficial?

wtallis 6y ago
> My understanding is that if we had net neutrality then there wouldn't be any such discrimination and I would have to buy just some universal "Internet" and the price of that would have to be averaged between me and the avid YouTube and Instagram users. Of course not. Net Neutrality does not prevent ISPs from charging per GB. It does prevent them from offering an "unlimited video" option that only actually covers their hand-picked selection of video providers, most of whom will have been extorted to be included on the approved list.
piaste 6y ago
> Why is this supposed to be beneficial? Because it means that a new video hosting or photo stream service has the same network access as the established players. It's already insanely difficult to beat the network effect of an existing social media website, now imagine if Newstagram counted against your 4GB limit but Instagram didn't... If the discrimination was based on content, eg by MIME type, that would be fair, but it wouldn't be technically enforceable under HTTPS (and easily bypassed anyway). Then again, why is that even needed? Why does the premium package have to be "unlimited video" and not "unlimited gigabytes [wherever you download it from]"? Does it cost your ISP any less to transport hours of 4K Netflix than hours of 4K illegal streaming sites? Your cheap 4GB package would be unaffected anyway, net neutrality determines what you can buy at the higher tiers.

bregma 6y ago

Net neutrality never meant your ISP would not charge you more for higher speeds to your home. It never meant your ISP would not charge you for pulling more data than some cap, and it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type or data caps. Those things were never what net neutrality was about. Net neutrality was about ISPs providing differential pricing or services based on data originator. For example, you ISP charging Netflix extra for every byte from Netflix carried over their circuits, on the threat of blocking or throttling those packets. "Nice place you got here, shame if something was to happen to it. Me and they boys will be around Thursdays to collect." Most of the fall-out from a lack of network neutrality was hidden behind higher fees for your streaming services. Those fees are unlikely to come down as a result of the restoration of net neutrality because they can instead be added to the streaming service's bottom line. You're not going to notice the rollback even though the loss of net neutrality probably resulted in billions of dollars being taken from the consumer's pockets into various corporate coffers. The market could bear it and the only change is whose pockets it goes in to.

slim 6y ago
it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type it actually means that. net neutrality means isp does not get to discriminate packets. if you have 1G bandwidth you are free to use it for any packet you want
- bregma 6y ago
  That is not what net neutrality meant. It has always meant that a carrier could not discriminate based on the origin of the packet, not the content of the packet.
wtallis 6y ago
> it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type [...] Accurately classifying traffic as video streaming vs bulk downloads, or gaming vs VoIP, etc. is a technological impossibility. Any scheme to do so is trivially defeated by things like VPNs and at best devolves to a cat and mouse game with ever-more draconian deep packet inspection. A good Net Neutrality regulatory regime must prohibit ISPs from being lazy and only prioritizing the most popular VoIP protocols and services they know about, which means in practice that Net Neutrality has to go all the way to prohibiting discrimination based on content type. If ISPs want to throttle, they have to do it on the basis of actual traffic patterns. If you want to deprioritize heavy traffic flows, you have to identify them based on the observed pattern of sending lots of large packets, rather than classifying it based on the notion that a certain port number means a certain kind of traffic.

g42gregory 6y ago

I heard that Google somehow receives some enormous “subsidies” on its Internet ads traffic (internally, across Internet backbone?). And that this is somehow related to the Net Neutrality laws. Can somebody explain how it works, or is it an urban myth?