4 ms·

Is there any evidence that this is taking place since it's been over 7 years since it's repeal? And that it's harming competition? I'm skeptical of introducing

by bko 2y ago

Is there any evidence that this is taking place since it's been over 7 years since it's repeal? And that it's harming competition? I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. If some regulatory agency is telling ISPs to allow legitimate content equally, it's not that much of a stretch to imagine they'll forbid "illegitimate" content. Think cheap fakes and other misinformation.

Analemma_ 2y ago
This is a difficult demand to meet, because (as many people have said) the main causalities of net neutrality are the companies and platforms which never get started because potential founders rationally calculate that they can’t compete with existing zero-rated services when ISPs play favorites. Lack of NN has massive opportunity costs for innovation, but these are difficult to quantify.
Hendrikto 2y ago
Yes we do have evidence. For example ISPs throttling specifically Netflix, and trying to extort money from them, when the customers already paid for the service. And continuing to do so, after Netflix offered to host middleboxes in their datacenters, to discredit their fake arguments. They are not doing that for service quality, but out of greed. We should have had comprehensive broadband and fiber in every home for decades, but ISPs would rather throttle you, and charge you more for worse service, rather than make overdue investments in infrastructure. Or ISPs not counting their own streaming services towards the data cap, but counting their competitors. Very anti competitive. We need net neutrality.
- bko 2y ago
  I don't exactly feel bad for Netflix, but can you provide a link? Let me see if I understand. ISPs are extorting Netflix. And Netflix is hosting middleboxes that improve quality, but they don't actually care about improving quality, they are greedy, by not wanting to be extorted by the ISPs? And we don't build out fiber because ISPs would rather throttle you and they can't do two things at once. But doesn't throttling and extorting companies like Netflix give them more revenue to build fiber? Or somehow the new fiber and customers they could get somehow prevents their ability to throttle? No offense but this is the typical unpersuasive argument for net neutrality I hear. It's just non-sensical and all over the place. It makes no logical sense. Maybe there's a better argument, but so much of what I hear is this and it leads me to believe that proponents are just rooting for a sports team. The equivalent of arguing with a ref after a call against your team.
  - bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
    The person you’re replying to was admittedly shortening the argument somewhat, so let’s expand it for you and anyone else that cares. You misread some fairly crucial points. ISPs care about something called “transit”. Transit is when you’re given a packet by someone that you connect to directly, but you don’t have a direct path to the destination, and need to go through some other entity to get there, such as another ISP. When you pay them for that (usually as a metered charge, or simply by size of the interconnect), this is called “buying transit”. When you connect that way, though, you can also agree with the other side that it’s mutually beneficial to just interconnect. After all, you might be giving them paths to destination they can’t get to directly. When you interconnect without payment (either way! There commonly are interconnects where only one side pays), that’s called peering. Internet ISPs exist on something called tiers. A tier 1, by actual definition, is an ISP that doesn’t pay anyone for transit because they peer with anyone. ISPs that only pay tier 1s for transit and peer with everyone they connect to that isn’t a tier 1 are called tier 2s, and so on. Transit is expensive so ISPs strive to be at a high tier and push as much data via peerings as possible. The best thing, of course, is when the ISP doesn’t have to go through an interconnect at all and can simply complete the full path on its own backbone, which is just smart use of assets you own. Netflix sends ISPs a lot of data. This can make the transit an ISP uses to get to Netflix quite expensive. Netflix also offers ISPs caches, which means that Netflix is telling ISPs that they are happy to take a box with a petabyte of storage, put their most popular programming on it, meet the ISP at some exchange point, and put an interface on that cache onto the ISPs network. Now the ISP can just use its backbone to serve Netflix streams available via that cache. Some ISPs have documented behavior of refusing to put a cache onto their network, instead asking Netflix to subvert or fund the transit cost. They don’t care about how good their customer’s Netflix experience is, they want to generate revenue. This is arguably greedy. ISPs also have a last mile issue. Backbone networks are typically quite good in the US, but there are capacity problems where the ISP meets actual customers. Some ISPs have a documented history of taking federal grants given to improve last mile networks and just not making those actual investments. This was particularly prevalent in the 2000s. Instead, they simply offer lower speeds or introduce data caps that let them throttle end users after certain thresholds, which reduces the overall load on their last mile networks
  - 2y ago
piva00 2y ago
> I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. Slippery slope fallacy. The most natural side-effect from lack of net neutrality is throttling, ISPs can throttle high-bandwidth applications and ask them to pay up, if competitors pay up they have an advantage so it forces everyone to pay up for access to non-throttled customers. Smaller companies/startups will be in absolute disadvantage. Now imagine throttling for almost any kind of application: game providers not paying for "premium access" get a 500ms delay, messaging apps not paying will have media delivery throttled (good luck sending a 20MiB video to your family when the ISP throttle it to 256kbps), it opens a new way for ISPs to monetise their networks, it opens a new way for bigger players to subjugate competition that doesn't have deep pockets. ISPs experimenting with throttling has already happened, when data caps were a bigger thing they also sold "partnerships" with apps that wouldn't be counted towards the data cap.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope. Netflix was the most obvious example. As well as ISPs benefiting their own streaming services over others (borderline censorship). And it can't really be contested by customers because many only have 2-3 choices in their area. If they all collude...
  - piva00 2y ago
    > it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope My slippery slope comment was about their jump to censorship being the end result, I completely agree with you as I said the same on the other paragraphs.

by bko 2y ago

Analemma_ 2y ago

This is a difficult demand to meet, because (as many people have said) the main causalities of net neutrality are the companies and platforms which never get started because potential founders rationally calculate that they can’t compete with existing zero-rated services when ISPs play favorites. Lack of NN has massive opportunity costs for innovation, but these are difficult to quantify.

Hendrikto 2y ago

Yes we do have evidence. For example ISPs throttling specifically Netflix, and trying to extort money from them, when the customers already paid for the service. And continuing to do so, after Netflix offered to host middleboxes in their datacenters, to discredit their fake arguments. They are not doing that for service quality, but out of greed. We should have had comprehensive broadband and fiber in every home for decades, but ISPs would rather throttle you, and charge you more for worse service, rather than make overdue investments in infrastructure. Or ISPs not counting their own streaming services towards the data cap, but counting their competitors. Very anti competitive. We need net neutrality.

bko 2y ago
I don't exactly feel bad for Netflix, but can you provide a link? Let me see if I understand. ISPs are extorting Netflix. And Netflix is hosting middleboxes that improve quality, but they don't actually care about improving quality, they are greedy, by not wanting to be extorted by the ISPs? And we don't build out fiber because ISPs would rather throttle you and they can't do two things at once. But doesn't throttling and extorting companies like Netflix give them more revenue to build fiber? Or somehow the new fiber and customers they could get somehow prevents their ability to throttle? No offense but this is the typical unpersuasive argument for net neutrality I hear. It's just non-sensical and all over the place. It makes no logical sense. Maybe there's a better argument, but so much of what I hear is this and it leads me to believe that proponents are just rooting for a sports team. The equivalent of arguing with a ref after a call against your team.
- bc569a80a344f9c 2y ago
  The person you’re replying to was admittedly shortening the argument somewhat, so let’s expand it for you and anyone else that cares. You misread some fairly crucial points. ISPs care about something called “transit”. Transit is when you’re given a packet by someone that you connect to directly, but you don’t have a direct path to the destination, and need to go through some other entity to get there, such as another ISP. When you pay them for that (usually as a metered charge, or simply by size of the interconnect), this is called “buying transit”. When you connect that way, though, you can also agree with the other side that it’s mutually beneficial to just interconnect. After all, you might be giving them paths to destination they can’t get to directly. When you interconnect without payment (either way! There commonly are interconnects where only one side pays), that’s called peering. Internet ISPs exist on something called tiers. A tier 1, by actual definition, is an ISP that doesn’t pay anyone for transit because they peer with anyone. ISPs that only pay tier 1s for transit and peer with everyone they connect to that isn’t a tier 1 are called tier 2s, and so on. Transit is expensive so ISPs strive to be at a high tier and push as much data via peerings as possible. The best thing, of course, is when the ISP doesn’t have to go through an interconnect at all and can simply complete the full path on its own backbone, which is just smart use of assets you own. Netflix sends ISPs a lot of data. This can make the transit an ISP uses to get to Netflix quite expensive. Netflix also offers ISPs caches, which means that Netflix is telling ISPs that they are happy to take a box with a petabyte of storage, put their most popular programming on it, meet the ISP at some exchange point, and put an interface on that cache onto the ISPs network. Now the ISP can just use its backbone to serve Netflix streams available via that cache. Some ISPs have documented behavior of refusing to put a cache onto their network, instead asking Netflix to subvert or fund the transit cost. They don’t care about how good their customer’s Netflix experience is, they want to generate revenue. This is arguably greedy. ISPs also have a last mile issue. Backbone networks are typically quite good in the US, but there are capacity problems where the ISP meets actual customers. Some ISPs have a documented history of taking federal grants given to improve last mile networks and just not making those actual investments. This was particularly prevalent in the 2000s. Instead, they simply offer lower speeds or introduce data caps that let them throttle end users after certain thresholds, which reduces the overall load on their last mile networks
- 2y ago

piva00 2y ago

> I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship. Slippery slope fallacy. The most natural side-effect from lack of net neutrality is throttling, ISPs can throttle high-bandwidth applications and ask them to pay up, if competitors pay up they have an advantage so it forces everyone to pay up for access to non-throttled customers. Smaller companies/startups will be in absolute disadvantage. Now imagine throttling for almost any kind of application: game providers not paying for "premium access" get a 500ms delay, messaging apps not paying will have media delivery throttled (good luck sending a 20MiB video to your family when the ISP throttle it to 256kbps), it opens a new way for ISPs to monetise their networks, it opens a new way for bigger players to subjugate competition that doesn't have deep pockets. ISPs experimenting with throttling has already happened, when data caps were a bigger thing they also sold "partnerships" with apps that wouldn't be counted towards the data cap.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope. Netflix was the most obvious example. As well as ISPs benefiting their own streaming services over others (borderline censorship). And it can't really be contested by customers because many only have 2-3 choices in their area. If they all collude...
- piva00 2y ago
  > it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope My slippery slope comment was about their jump to censorship being the end result, I completely agree with you as I said the same on the other paragraphs.