4 ms·

See https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20687903/net-neutrality-was-repealed-a-year-ago-whats-happened-since https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20687903/net-neutra

See https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20687903/net-neutrality-was-repealed-a-year-ago-whats-happened-since https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/9/20687903/net-neutrality-wa..., a mere year after the repeal. But I think it's really silly to to look at an industry with documented abuse in the absence of regulation and to essentially ignore that and say "but what about the abuses within this specific time period?" We know that under current broadband rules absent Net Neutrality, the abuses described above are legal. We've seen companies engage in those abuses. To the extent that the worst of that behavior is still illegal, it's only because individual states like California have picked up the fight, which broadband providers have fought fiercely to prevent. But there's no evidence that broadband providers wouldn't repeat the same behaviors given the opportunity. Broadband providers do engage in behavior today that would be in violation of Net Neutrality rules, particularly around video throttling and zero-rating. The ongoing fight over Net Neutrality and increased customer attention might be limiting that behavior, but if anything that's evidence that increased scrutiny is good for the market, not that it's unnecessary. Companies have in the absence of Net Neutrality, taken advantage of the lack of regulations about as much as was feasible for them to do so. There's a weird pattern on HN I'm noticing where people are holding a wild dog at bay with a stick, and other people are standing behind them saying, "I thought you said if we unleashed this dog it was going to maul us, you sure have egg on your face. See, there's no reason to leash the dog."

graphe 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_Protection_and_Net_Neutrality_Act_of_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P... Net neutrality was in place and didn't help actually.
- danShumway 3y ago
  Okay, walk me through this :) Your argument is that Net Neutrality isn't necessary, because consumers weren't abused to the degree that people were warned about once Net Neutrality was no longer in effect. Of course, companies have abused the market in Net Neutrality's absence, but you're only looking at abuses after 2018. And when confronted with abuses that happened after 2018, your response is to say that Net Neutrality post-2018... was still in effect. I'm not sure how you're expecting people to react to that kind of logic? But I don't think that asking "why weren't people abused in the absence of the law that was still being enforced?" comes across as quite as strong of an argument as you might be imagining. ---- I don't mean to be too snarky here, so to clarify and expand on the above: the existence of California's Net Neutrality laws are what people have been referring to when we talk about state-level regulations that kept the post-2018 landscape from getting as bad as it could have gotten. This is not a surprise, I literally brought up California's Net Neutrality rules in my comment above, and it's just kind of wild to me that you were apparently aware of them but didn't think to ask yourself whether or not they might have impacted the post-2018 commercial landscape. To go back to the dog analogy, people are fending off the wild dog with a stick, and you're over on the side saying, "see, the dog hasn't attacked anybody, we don't need to leash it", and then the dog bites a volunteer firefighter and your response is, "well, clearly the stick didn't help, so that's even more evidence that leashing the dog is a waste of time." :) You should of course be aware (having read through the link that you shared) that California was sued by both the industry and by the DOJ itself to try and repeal that law, so it seems fairly clear both that the industry viewed state-level NN as a constraint on its behavior and that the industry and administration of the time wanted those regulations to go away. It's reasonable to conclude that state-level interventions like California's helped curb industry abuse. Nevertheless, as the article I posted above points out: > When the Trump FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it didn’t just eliminate the prohibitions against blocking and throttling and paid prioritization. [..] it also gave away oversight over the broadband industry. The FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. That is the most important thing that happened on December 14th, 2017 when the FCC repealed the Open Internet Order. > [...] and the fire department had no place to go. They can’t go to the FCC because the FCC abdicated their authority over broadband. They wouldn’t go to the FTC because they take forever to adjudicate complaints. So if Verizon throttles your broadband, there’s nothing they can do about it. The repeal of Net Neutrality on the grounds that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate in this area effectively got rid of a broad class of federal regulation and recourse against abusive behavior; there was a rippling effect beyond just zero-rating or content-targeted throttling/blocking. So while California's Net Neutrality enforcement was a good thing for the country overall and did help to curb abuses for the country overall, it is still not a full substitute for the federal government doing its job regulating bad behavior and protecting consumers.
  - graphe 3y ago
    There weren't any benefits after net neutrality and it more like evil vs evil then big guy vs little guy. If your data is throttled or you have bad service you can get another one easily (NN will not help your dial up in the boonies, but the post NN starlink could even without NN). It was the largest user of data, Netflix fighting ISPs to force them to give it extra help. You'll have slower video without NN, and they'll prioritize streaming Netflix as much as everything else. Useless for me. I don't cheerlead for a video streaming service bullying ISPs. I don't have any love for ISPs either, but it's hard for me to see the fight as good vs evil anymore. The article you posted also isn't as clear cut. The firefighters didn't have unlimited data and ran out. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/verizons-throttling-fire-fighters-could-go-unpunished-because-fcc-repealed-open https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/verizons-throttling-fi... >The 2015 order, by reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the Federal Communications Act, would have likely made what happened with the fire department illegal. NN would not have helped. I found the relevant quote: > 2015 Open Internet Order =/= Net neutrality >Net neutrality doesn’t prevent cell service providers from lowering your speeds after you go over your limit. Net neutrality prevents them from discriminating against certain kinds of data.
    - danShumway 3y ago
      > There weren't any benefits after net neutrality So the abuses before Net Neutrality suddenly don't count? Discrimination against certain kinds of data is exactly what Net Neutrality prevented, and is the exact category of abuse that people point to when we talk about what Net Neutrality was originally designed to prevent. Net Neutrality was not only about Netflix. To be clear, while I have no love for Netflix, arguing that Netflix was bullying ISPs or fighting for extra consideration from ISPs rather than to be treated as a normal equal customer is pure revisionism. It is pure ISP propaganda. ISPs wanted the ability to discriminate against Netflix traffic. The fact that Netflix is itself a crummy company and could afford to pay changes nothing about that. It is unbelievable that Net Neutrality critics are now going to try to just reintroduce the argument that Netflix deserved to be throttled after it was so thoroughly and completely debunked leading up the 2015 rules. But even ignoring that entire conversation, Netflix was far from the only service that was throttled or discriminated against before Net Neutrality was put in place. Anticompetitive zero-rating of partner streaming platforms, blocking consumer activity such as tethered Internet except for certain applications -- there was a clear direction that the industry was headed. It was headed towards data discrimination. And if your argument is "NN was never really repealed, states had the same regulations", then I don't know what you're doing here also arguing that the repeal you don't believe happened wasn't a big deal. There's really no way to get around the fact that asking "what about the abuses after 2018" when according to you Net Neutrality was still effectively in-place at the state level post-2018 -- that is an incredibly disingenuous argument to make. ---- > NN would not have helped > 2015 Open Internet Order =/= Net neutrality The 2015 Open Internet Order was the basis for the new Net Neutrality rules, and a rejection of the 2015 Open Internet Order was why Net Neutrality was repealed. To argue that the two of them are completely separate misses the point of what anti-regulation advocates were arguing at the time and misses what the legal argument against Net Neutrality was: not merely that specifically Net Neutrality was unnecessarily, but that the FCC did not have the authority granted to it in the 2015 Open Internet Order. From the link that you yourself just posted above: > The FCC is Now Prohibited From Looking into the Practice of Throttling 4G Markets Services Down to Dial-up Speeds Despite Clear Public Safety Implications > [...] There Still Might be a Violation of the Net Neutrality Rules, But We Have No Agency to Investigate the Question. That was the point of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. It was to strip away federal oversight over the ISP industry. And I find "Net Neutrality was different" to be a particularly bad argument because the current reinstatement of Net Neutrality is also not just about Net Neutrality but about a re-acknowledgement of the FCC regulatory power, and the legal arguments are going to once again center around whether the FCC has the authority to regulate broadband. The two categories are intrinsically tied together, and people who are arguing "we don't need Net Neutrality" should be upfront that they are effectively also arguing for stripping FCC regulatory power in general, because that is the mechanism through which all of this conversation is happening. ---- > If your data is throttled or you have bad service you can get another one easily Just to quickly touch on this -- I almost didn't address this point at all because it's just so clearly wrong, and I feel like anyone reading these comments can just look around them and ask themselves if they feel like they're spoiled for choice in regards to ISPs. This is just not a convincing argument to make, readers know that the ISP market is not competitive. But it is worth addressing that this also misses one of the key points of Net Neutrality; that it is not just about consumer throttling, but also about anticompetitive effects on the Internet as a whole. For example, zero-rating is broadly speaking something that consumers like. But it's prohibited under Net Neutrality because it harms the market and makes the market less competitive and unfairly privileges ISP-partnered services. If you are a company getting throttled or blocked from entire swaths of your customer base on the decision of a middleperson, you can't actually just choose to get a different ISP. So again, the ISP market is not competitive, it's just very obviously not. But importantly, I do think readers should take away that Net Neutrality is about more than whether or not consumers can buy an Internet package that includes fast Netflix streaming,and that phrasing it this way is a large oversimplification of what the rules are designed to protect against.

graphe 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_Protection_and_Net_Neutrality_Act_of_2018 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P... Net neutrality was in place and didn't help actually.

danShumway 3y ago
Okay, walk me through this :) Your argument is that Net Neutrality isn't necessary, because consumers weren't abused to the degree that people were warned about once Net Neutrality was no longer in effect. Of course, companies have abused the market in Net Neutrality's absence, but you're only looking at abuses after 2018. And when confronted with abuses that happened after 2018, your response is to say that Net Neutrality post-2018... was still in effect. I'm not sure how you're expecting people to react to that kind of logic? But I don't think that asking "why weren't people abused in the absence of the law that was still being enforced?" comes across as quite as strong of an argument as you might be imagining. ---- I don't mean to be too snarky here, so to clarify and expand on the above: the existence of California's Net Neutrality laws are what people have been referring to when we talk about state-level regulations that kept the post-2018 landscape from getting as bad as it could have gotten. This is not a surprise, I literally brought up California's Net Neutrality rules in my comment above, and it's just kind of wild to me that you were apparently aware of them but didn't think to ask yourself whether or not they might have impacted the post-2018 commercial landscape. To go back to the dog analogy, people are fending off the wild dog with a stick, and you're over on the side saying, "see, the dog hasn't attacked anybody, we don't need to leash it", and then the dog bites a volunteer firefighter and your response is, "well, clearly the stick didn't help, so that's even more evidence that leashing the dog is a waste of time." :) You should of course be aware (having read through the link that you shared) that California was sued by both the industry and by the DOJ itself to try and repeal that law, so it seems fairly clear both that the industry viewed state-level NN as a constraint on its behavior and that the industry and administration of the time wanted those regulations to go away. It's reasonable to conclude that state-level interventions like California's helped curb industry abuse. Nevertheless, as the article I posted above points out: > When the Trump FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it didn’t just eliminate the prohibitions against blocking and throttling and paid prioritization. [..] it also gave away oversight over the broadband industry. The FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. That is the most important thing that happened on December 14th, 2017 when the FCC repealed the Open Internet Order. > [...] and the fire department had no place to go. They can’t go to the FCC because the FCC abdicated their authority over broadband. They wouldn’t go to the FTC because they take forever to adjudicate complaints. So if Verizon throttles your broadband, there’s nothing they can do about it. The repeal of Net Neutrality on the grounds that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate in this area effectively got rid of a broad class of federal regulation and recourse against abusive behavior; there was a rippling effect beyond just zero-rating or content-targeted throttling/blocking. So while California's Net Neutrality enforcement was a good thing for the country overall and did help to curb abuses for the country overall, it is still not a full substitute for the federal government doing its job regulating bad behavior and protecting consumers.
- graphe 3y ago
  There weren't any benefits after net neutrality and it more like evil vs evil then big guy vs little guy. If your data is throttled or you have bad service you can get another one easily (NN will not help your dial up in the boonies, but the post NN starlink could even without NN). It was the largest user of data, Netflix fighting ISPs to force them to give it extra help. You'll have slower video without NN, and they'll prioritize streaming Netflix as much as everything else. Useless for me. I don't cheerlead for a video streaming service bullying ISPs. I don't have any love for ISPs either, but it's hard for me to see the fight as good vs evil anymore. The article you posted also isn't as clear cut. The firefighters didn't have unlimited data and ran out. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/verizons-throttling-fire-fighters-could-go-unpunished-because-fcc-repealed-open https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/verizons-throttling-fi... >The 2015 order, by reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the Federal Communications Act, would have likely made what happened with the fire department illegal. NN would not have helped. I found the relevant quote: > 2015 Open Internet Order =/= Net neutrality >Net neutrality doesn’t prevent cell service providers from lowering your speeds after you go over your limit. Net neutrality prevents them from discriminating against certain kinds of data.
  - danShumway 3y ago
    > There weren't any benefits after net neutrality So the abuses before Net Neutrality suddenly don't count? Discrimination against certain kinds of data is exactly what Net Neutrality prevented, and is the exact category of abuse that people point to when we talk about what Net Neutrality was originally designed to prevent. Net Neutrality was not only about Netflix. To be clear, while I have no love for Netflix, arguing that Netflix was bullying ISPs or fighting for extra consideration from ISPs rather than to be treated as a normal equal customer is pure revisionism. It is pure ISP propaganda. ISPs wanted the ability to discriminate against Netflix traffic. The fact that Netflix is itself a crummy company and could afford to pay changes nothing about that. It is unbelievable that Net Neutrality critics are now going to try to just reintroduce the argument that Netflix deserved to be throttled after it was so thoroughly and completely debunked leading up the 2015 rules. But even ignoring that entire conversation, Netflix was far from the only service that was throttled or discriminated against before Net Neutrality was put in place. Anticompetitive zero-rating of partner streaming platforms, blocking consumer activity such as tethered Internet except for certain applications -- there was a clear direction that the industry was headed. It was headed towards data discrimination. And if your argument is "NN was never really repealed, states had the same regulations", then I don't know what you're doing here also arguing that the repeal you don't believe happened wasn't a big deal. There's really no way to get around the fact that asking "what about the abuses after 2018" when according to you Net Neutrality was still effectively in-place at the state level post-2018 -- that is an incredibly disingenuous argument to make. ---- > NN would not have helped > 2015 Open Internet Order =/= Net neutrality The 2015 Open Internet Order was the basis for the new Net Neutrality rules, and a rejection of the 2015 Open Internet Order was why Net Neutrality was repealed. To argue that the two of them are completely separate misses the point of what anti-regulation advocates were arguing at the time and misses what the legal argument against Net Neutrality was: not merely that specifically Net Neutrality was unnecessarily, but that the FCC did not have the authority granted to it in the 2015 Open Internet Order. From the link that you yourself just posted above: > The FCC is Now Prohibited From Looking into the Practice of Throttling 4G Markets Services Down to Dial-up Speeds Despite Clear Public Safety Implications > [...] There Still Might be a Violation of the Net Neutrality Rules, But We Have No Agency to Investigate the Question. That was the point of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. It was to strip away federal oversight over the ISP industry. And I find "Net Neutrality was different" to be a particularly bad argument because the current reinstatement of Net Neutrality is also not just about Net Neutrality but about a re-acknowledgement of the FCC regulatory power, and the legal arguments are going to once again center around whether the FCC has the authority to regulate broadband. The two categories are intrinsically tied together, and people who are arguing "we don't need Net Neutrality" should be upfront that they are effectively also arguing for stripping FCC regulatory power in general, because that is the mechanism through which all of this conversation is happening. ---- > If your data is throttled or you have bad service you can get another one easily Just to quickly touch on this -- I almost didn't address this point at all because it's just so clearly wrong, and I feel like anyone reading these comments can just look around them and ask themselves if they feel like they're spoiled for choice in regards to ISPs. This is just not a convincing argument to make, readers know that the ISP market is not competitive. But it is worth addressing that this also misses one of the key points of Net Neutrality; that it is not just about consumer throttling, but also about anticompetitive effects on the Internet as a whole. For example, zero-rating is broadly speaking something that consumers like. But it's prohibited under Net Neutrality because it harms the market and makes the market less competitive and unfairly privileges ISP-partnered services. If you are a company getting throttled or blocked from entire swaths of your customer base on the decision of a middleperson, you can't actually just choose to get a different ISP. So again, the ISP market is not competitive, it's just very obviously not. But importantly, I do think readers should take away that Net Neutrality is about more than whether or not consumers can buy an Internet package that includes fast Netflix streaming,and that phrasing it this way is a large oversimplification of what the rules are designed to protect against.