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Personally I would rather have a healthy competitive landscape than NN, but I’ll take the latter in a pinch.

jmyeet 5y ago
Net neutrality has real impacts. It wasn't that many years ago where weirdly Netflix was basically unusable on FIOS. And of course it worked like a dream over a VPN. Verizon had minimal peering with Netflix to extract fees for "pushing" data and because Netflix competed with their cable TV business. Competition is a trickier issue because in most cases overbuilds make little economic sense. The best situation is probably municipal fiber (who builds and maintains it) and retail ISPs rent that infrastructure to provide services. But instead the US incentivized cable network builds in a terrible way: by providing franchises. The ISPs would pay the city for a monopoly, basically. Cities got addicted to this income and were allies in opposing competition as a result.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I'm sure NN could be helpful, I'm just saying I would rather fix the root cause. There's a lot of problems with the ISP monopoly that NN can't address, for example, the relatively high costs for shitty service.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
If ISPs could do anything to the Internet content their subscribers requested, including block it, zero-rate it, or modify it, how many ISPs would a competitive landscape need in order to guarantee there is at least one that performs no blocking at all? I doubt poles could physically handle the number of lines to ISPs that are needed to guarantee this.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  Probably not very many--few ISPs would throttle if their customers could easily switch to the single ISP who doesn't throttle. We also don't need to approach this as a theoretical problem: much of the world has ISP competition and they don't seem to have these problems. Further still, throttling Netflix is just one of many problems that derive from lack of ISP competition. High prices for generally shitty service is at least as big of a problem, and NN can't to do much to help there. I'm not opposed to net neutrality, I just care more about fixing the anti-competitive stuff. If we can do both, all the better.

Net neutrality has real impacts. It wasn't that many years ago where weirdly Netflix was basically unusable on FIOS. And of course it worked like a dream over a VPN. Verizon had minimal peering with Netflix to extract fees for "pushing" data and because Netflix competed with their cable TV business. Competition is a trickier issue because in most cases overbuilds make little economic sense. The best situation is probably municipal fiber (who builds and maintains it) and retail ISPs rent that infrastructure to provide services. But instead the US incentivized cable network builds in a terrible way: by providing franchises. The ISPs would pay the city for a monopoly, basically. Cities got addicted to this income and were allies in opposing competition as a result.

throwaway894345 5y ago
I'm sure NN could be helpful, I'm just saying I would rather fix the root cause. There's a lot of problems with the ISP monopoly that NN can't address, for example, the relatively high costs for shitty service.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

If ISPs could do anything to the Internet content their subscribers requested, including block it, zero-rate it, or modify it, how many ISPs would a competitive landscape need in order to guarantee there is at least one that performs no blocking at all? I doubt poles could physically handle the number of lines to ISPs that are needed to guarantee this.

throwaway894345 5y ago
Probably not very many--few ISPs would throttle if their customers could easily switch to the single ISP who doesn't throttle. We also don't need to approach this as a theoretical problem: much of the world has ISP competition and they don't seem to have these problems. Further still, throttling Netflix is just one of many problems that derive from lack of ISP competition. High prices for generally shitty service is at least as big of a problem, and NN can't to do much to help there. I'm not opposed to net neutrality, I just care more about fixing the anti-competitive stuff. If we can do both, all the better.