> Why does this matter to me or anyone? Will it affect anything? There's two sides to this: Net Neutrality, and the mechanisms through which we get Net Neutral

> Why does this matter to me or anyone? Will it affect anything? There's two sides to this: Net Neutrality, and the mechanisms through which we get Net Neutrality. To tackle the latter first, this will give the FCC more regulatory power over the ISP market in general, which is in great need of regulation. Some of the improvements that are not strictly related to Net Neutrality but are related to the FCC's ability to regulate are issues like price transparency (https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels), as well as classifications of what minimum speeds can and can't be advertised as broadband (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/broadband-speed-guide https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/broadband-speed-guide). These are both sorely needed regulations; ISP advertising is pretty awful right now, hidden fees are so common that they're basically a joke. And minimum speeds for broadband classification play right into that -- both because it will force ISPs not to deceptively market subpar services, and because broadband classification plays heavily into ISP-exclusive contracts that get struck with individual cities where ISPs will promise to wire certain parts of the city or to bring broadband access, will renege on those deals, and then will sue or push back at efforts to hold them accountable. The second is much less obvious but plays heavily into the reason why the modern ISP market is so uncompetitive today. Improving that situation would be great. Moving on to the Net Neutrality side of things though: > The antidote to net neutrality seems to be more ISPs A competitive market would help in a lot of ways, yes, and dismantling ISP monopolies via open access to wiring, one-touch-make-ready laws, etc... is important and should be something that we focus on. However, Net Neutrality is also about increasing competition on the Internet itself. A highly competitive ISP market where you launch a streaming service to compete with Youtube and then need to negotiate with every ISP to keep it from getting throttled puts you at an unfair competitive disadvantage. Think of it this way: I want to get rid of Google monopolies in the browser, I want us to have lots of web browsers to choose from. However, if all of those browsers decided that they weren't going to load websites unless they were paid or were going to throttle websites that didn't pay -- the fact that I can switch to Firefox as a user doesn't change that it would be anticomptetitive for Chrome to demand websites pay them to help reach customers. And this isn't a tortured analogy, it's somewhat direct to what was happening in the mobile market. T-Mobile in particular was famous for zero-rating its own services and making it so that its partner services didn't cost data. So of course that creates a less competitive Internet; it privileges T-Mobile's streaming/entertainment services by literally making it more expensive to access other services and by degrading their quality and speed. But of course, that's just degrading experience. If you want to look at the end game, look at the proposals Facebook had for India with Facebook Basic's which was genuinely an Internet package that would only work with a subset of websites including Facebook. Facebook pitched this as a way to ramp up ISP production in India. The Indian government pitched it as a way to monopolize a fledgling market and to cement Facebook's dominance as a social network within India permanently, and they shut down Facebook Basics hard -- using Net Neutrality as the justification. I would argue that a competitive Internet is better for consumers, although admittedly you might not always directly see the benefits instantaneously. But I would also argue that before the 2015 rules, the Internet was headed in a direction that (while not as flashy as some of the doomsday predictions) was not that far off of them. We were headed towards data discrimination and Internet tiers, and the fact that we haven't seen those is down to the fact that consumers banded together and showed collective outrage in the form of encouraging this kind of regulation, then the fact that Net Neutrality was passed and this regulation barred ISPs from continuing in that direction, and then the fact that after it was repealed, somewhere in the neighborhood or 5-7 states passed their own versions of Net Neutrality that continued to block ISPs from going in that direction. There's no reason to believe that without persistent activism and regulation efforts that we would be where we are today. As far as I'm concerned, Net Neutrality was extremely successful, and while it's regrettable that the situation with ISPs is still a giant mess and while the repeal was an unfortunate setback, it still even in that limited form moved the Internet in an extremely positive direction. ---- > as if firefighters not buying unlimited data and expecting to get unlimited data under fires is normal. It's emotional marketing. Safety issues are emotional, but that doesn't mean they're not valid. It's emotional because the situation is egregious. The consequence of firefighters getting their data throttled unexpectedly during a statewide crisis is that people literally die. Now, if there was nothing deceptive or egregious going on and the government was just asking for charity, that would be something. But Verizon is not guiltless here, the deceptive part of Verizon's marketing is that the firefighting crew thought they were buying unlimited data because the regulations around throttling and marketing for "unlimited" are very lax. The drop in their speeds came as a surprise event to them in the middle of a crisis. Having minimum speeds for unlimited data makes sense because otherwise companies can market unlimited data that is in practice fully limited because after a threshold is met it becomes unusably slow. When I talk about throttling here, I'm talking about dial-up speeds. My assertion would be, if a company markets its services as unlimited, and then in the middle of a crises says, "well, by unlimited we didn't mean unlimited Internet at usable speeds" and then they sit back and kind of wink and say "guess you should cut a deal with us, after all this is an emergency, don't be petty peoples lives are at risk" -- to me that's a clear public safety issue, I don't think companies should be in a position to so directly exploit emergencies. The Internet is critical infrastructure for society and if companies nickling and diming people means that our Internet isn't reliable and that it falls over randomly during crises, that will (and did) have consequences for public health. ---- > I'm not against net neutrality, but it seems like making a law to prevent juices from being sold as more than 70% distilled water, yet the market is already passed that part and uses real fruit juice concentrate and regular water. It was useful then, and after it was repealed nothing bad happened and the firefighter case was a bad case. This is what I'm getting in my comments above: if your position is that Net Neutrality was on the books post-2018 in California and would have stopped a real Net Neutrality violation, then you're not really in a position to claim that the market has passed that point. It doesn't make sense for you to claim that Net Neutrality is unnecessary and as evidence to point to a period of time where by your own admission, Net Neutrality was being enforced. If you want to talk about what a world looks like with no Net Neutrality regulation, look at the period of time where there was neither federal nor state regulation. And what you'll see if you look at that period of time is egregious violations that seemed to be trending worse leading up to the introduction of Net Neutrality. You can even go further back into history and look at Title II classification around phone services, which when introduced arguably sparked one of the largest periods of innovation in Internet history. And you brought up the California laws yourself; I don't understand where you think the evidence is that the market ever self-corrected itself around Net Neutrality. The market was regulated away from an abusive behavior and then aggressively lobbied to get rid of the regulations, and then when states introduced their own regulations they got together with the federal government and started aggressively suing to remove the state regulations. What part of that is evidence of a self-correcting market? If you take a cookie jar away from a toddler and you put it on the top of the fridge, and then you watch the toddler spend the next 2 hours trying to climb the fridge to reach the cookie jar, would you be convinced if the toddler then came to you and said, "see, it's been 2 hours and I haven't touched the cookies, so you can put them on the counter again, you can trust me"? ISPs are like the toddler. Since the introduction of Net Neutrality they have done nothing but expend enormous resources trying to get rid of the regulation. If they now want to say the regulation isn't needed... well, it's just not convincing because I just watched them try to climb the fridge for 2 hours. ---- The other thing I'll bring up once again is that there is no version of this where the FCC loses just the ability to regulate Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality was dropped by the federal government under the assertion that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate broadband. And I just don't think anyone would find it convincing to look at the current state of the ISP market and to argue that regulation isn't needed. I mean, you talk about competition, a federal one-touch-make-ready rule or requirements around interoperability or price transparency would be great for competition; we live in a world today where ISPs sue municipalities and indie upstarts for trying to compete with them and blatantly advertise deceptive prices for their services. 5G and Starlink are not on their own enough to counter that. If you want that behavior countered at a federal level, then the federal government has to be able to regulate ISPs and call them out for things like deceptive advertising or anticompetitive privileging of their own services.