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I consider everybody here very smart. In many cases smarter than myself. Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has sh

by pvnick 13y ago

I consider everybody here very smart. In many cases smarter than myself. Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? Seriously, I can't get over the dissonance here. If it's such a shitty idea, let consumers decide. Google Fiber et al will just eat the major telecoms' lunch sooner or later anyway. It may just take a little longer, but we'll avoid the possibility of letting the government crush Internet innovation forever.

dkuntz2 13y ago
Who would you have enforce net neutrality?
- ewillbefull 13y ago
  The only thing that needs to be enforced is anti-trust law. Monopolies are what give ISPs the ability, and perhaps the incentive, to filter and editorialize the Internet. The FTC should be involved in defending consumers against those behaviors. Net neutrality arises naturally. It didn't need enforcement 30 years ago. In some contexts, like exotic network protocols, it may not even make sense. I wouldn't care much if it was a limited authority granted to the FCC, but they are claiming an authority which is limitless in scope and using net neutrality as an excuse to exercise it.
  - dkuntz2 13y ago
    I suppose using it as a claim for unlimited authority isn't a good situation, but I don't know if I see breaking net neutrality as being a trust. Considering where the term anti-trust came from, ISPs who block certain sites without customer consent aren't really being monopolistic in nature. Which makes, to me, defending net neutrality a separate issue than breaking trusts and monopolies...
  - wpietri 13y ago
    Wait, 30 years ago? Actually, net neutrality needed substantial government help. The parallel at the time is the long distance market. Read about the history of Sprint, MCI, and the like. And it goes back further. At one point, you weren't even allowed to connect your own phone to the network, let alone an answering machine; AT&T claimed it was too dangerous. So you had to rent everything from Ma Bell. It wasn't until the Carterphone case in 1968, where the FCC told AT&T to knock it off, that you saw things get better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_decision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_... As much as I would like anti-trust law to help here, you don't need collusion or a monopoly to ruin net neutrality. As long as you have an oligopoly, which is the general state of the US residential ISP market, then that's plenty. As we see in the article as soon as one ISP starts a shakedown, the other big ones will try the same thing.
aragot 13y ago
Ehm, but Google Fiber doesn't respect net neutrality, see multiple posts on HN about them forbidding servers on the network...
- blhack 13y ago
  That has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Forbidding servers on their network is a completely rational stance for them to take. Do you also get upset at "all-you-can-eat" buffets when they don't let you fill a barrel full of food to take home and eat later?
  - aragot 13y ago
    How can they distinguish personal vs pro servers? They have to inspect the contents, which to me seems related to net neutrality. The comparison should rather be "Do you get upset at buffets when they don't let you have the main dish after dessert?" They use content inspection to increase their revenue.
    - cmircea 13y ago
      Bandwidth and number of incoming connections.
  - belorn 13y ago
    I do get upset if the commercial say "up to 20 different kind of food, and all-you-can-eat", but during lunch rush it is just a couple of carrots that looks half moldy. One aspect of net neutrality is advertizement laws and clear communication between the commercial entity and the consumer. A restaurant can't just say that "its up to!" and give you a carrot when you paid $50 for a buffet, complaining that their capacity to make food is full. If the network connection Google want to sell has direct limitation to them, Google should be legally bound to make sure the consumer is aware before a contract is signed. That is normally a basic consumer protection law in most markets, and the ISP market is just lagging behind.
    - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
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blhack 13y ago
Because the telcos are currently enjoying a "natural monopoly". The cost of entry to become a telco is so high, that normal competitive forces do not apply. In situations like this, one role of government is to regulate these natural monopolies to protect citizens. One such regulation, for instance, is that the power company cannot shut off your power in the middle of winter in Minnesota without fulfilling some pretty stringent criteria.
- fleitz 13y ago
  Telecom isn't a natural monopoly, it's a government sponsored cartel.
  - jjoonathan 13y ago
    While you are correct that telcos currently enjoy a certain degree of regulatory capture, they are also natural monopolies/oligopolies in the sense that competitors have an astronomical barrier to entry. It's tempting but naive to think that all we need to do in order to see the market right itself is to eliminate existing regulations. What we actually need to do is to change regulations to encourage competition, both by eliminating explicit monopoly rights and by mandating and/or price-controlling B2B bandwidth/traffic sales so that incumbents can't kill new entrants without beating them on a level playing field. Forcing telcos to act like "dumb pipes" is one type of regulation that forces them to compete against each other (otherwise they just lump their market power with media providers until they are once again too big to challenge).
    - argumentum 13y ago
      > .. by eliminating explicit monopoly rights and by mandating and/or price-controlling B2B bandwidth/traffic sales ... Are you willing to try the former before the latter? If so, I don't think we're far off .. I'm not an absolutist, if there is a compelling case after the artificial constraints are removed, then I might consider state intervention as a last resort. But not before giving the free market a fair shot.
joseflavio 13y ago
The problem is that telecom is already a heavy regulated area (for historical and technical reasons). Besides this, connecting to your competitor network is going to be always a rigged game, just a handful of players will connect between them, that leads to monopoly... So I think it is virtually impossible to setup your own new company... I live in France and it is quite interesting to see the raise of the provider Free.fr, quite impressive how they defied all other big companies... (Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this ISP). edit: typos.
- troebr 13y ago
  I used to live in France, DSL providers are a joke here. Verizon advertised $30 for single play (no phone, no television). In the end they added "fees" and taxes (what those are not included?), the price was $56 per month. The router is as shitty as it gets too. Now I moved and for $55 I have cable with optimum and it's way better. Still more expensive than Free, and still no tv/phone included.
- zobzu 13y ago
  Free has traffic shaping for anything going through their peering, but in particular apple and google. Good luck using youtube via free's peering. it's nearly impossible. I don't know many people on free.fr that use youtube at all, because it's too terribly slow (1min load for 3s of video?). It's barely acceptable for things like google play downloads. Their peering isn't net neutral at all.
  - joseflavio 13y ago
    I think I dont notice because I use VPN all the time.
  - xxpor 13y ago
    Why does Google continue to peer with them then? The whole point of peering vs. transit is that two networks will connect for free to each other to get better service.
raverbashing 13y ago
How's the 'invisible hand' working for healthcare again? I'm very against government regulation, but something it's necessary.
- cheald 13y ago
  That's a rather poor example - healthcare is an exceptionally heavily-regulated industry. There's an argument to be made that many of the ills in the industry are a result of over-regulation.
  - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
    That an argument can be made doesn't imply it's a good one, or that anybody should pay it any heed. Most of the ills in the health industry stem from the fact that providers--insurers and direct providers alike--have a profit motive rather than a "provide healthcare" motive, because their market is entirely captive and literally without any (real) choice.
    - jessaustin 13y ago
      Most tire shops have a profit motive rather than a "provide tires" motive. It's true that tire customers aren't "captive", but I don't understand which sense of that word you mean to apply in a relevant way to health care consumers.
      - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
        You don't understand how health care consumers are captive? Health care is literally something human beings cannot live without. The quality and cost of the care is far less important than its availability, because it's literally a matter of being healthy and surviving, or becoming or continuing to be ill, deteriorating and then dying. Healthcare consumers, in other words, don't have real choices in where and how they obtain care. This isn't the case with tires (or almost any other non-essential good or service).
  - 13y ago
djur 13y ago
Consumers don't have the flexibility to decide if they're dealing with only a small number of sellers working in collusion. The cost of entry into this market is astronomically high -- even Google, with all its money and all the dark fiber it snapped up, hasn't established a foothold yet. Setting up telecommunications networks is expensive and legally complex, and the resources involved are extremely limited. The likelihood of a functioning free market in this space is essentially nil. In the absence of a functioning free market, the government is the only entity with the authority to apply regulations for the benefit of the citizenry.
- ewillbefull 13y ago
  The distinguishing factor should be how the government protects net neutrality. Should the FCC have a limitless authority to regulate the Internet, which they happen to apply to net neutrality for now? Or should the FTC have authority to bring suits against monopolistic ISPs to discourage these behaviors?
deleted 13y ago
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hayksaakian 13y ago
Your argument is that the free market will favor ISPs that support/don't oppose net-neutrality. I argue that most people won't care about their "choice" (air quotes, because most people can't pick from more than 2 ISPs) of ISP until it's too late. Already you have ISPs throttling access to streaming video sites (netflix, youtube, twitch) with little to no REAL blowback. With the barriers to entry as high as they are, there's no way for a competitor to succeed in the market solely on the basis of being net-neutral. Google Fiber, in markets where it's available, has led to competitors reducing prices and offering better service. However, there's no word of change regarding net neutrality.
- dippyskoodlez 13y ago
  >Google Fiber, in markets where it's available, has led to competitors reducing prices and offering better service. However, there's no word of change regarding net neutrality. As a KC resident, TWC has not yet reduced my internet costs or increased speeds.
  - hayksaakian 13y ago
    I'll say my only knowledge of this was anecdotal (from others) I can say first hand, that if you call your ISP and say "I'm switching to X service at $Y for Zmbps" you can get your bill reduced.
    - dippyskoodlez 13y ago
      The only other option is U-verse which is more expensive for the same speed or they don't even offer the same speed. Calling the ISP and threatening them only works if you can find someone with the power to do so(and hope they don't note your account for trying it again, later..), and assumes they hold true to their word on your next bill. I was primarily refuting your "causes isps to lower their prices" because Google fiber has done NOTHING for TWC's marketing. It's still the same terrible prices.
      - hayksaakian 13y ago
anonymousab 13y ago
Sure. And if industry collusion is such a shitty practice, just let the consumers decide.
kaonashi 13y ago
The only entity capable of governing, is government in some form or another.
zobzu 13y ago
i current have 2 choices at my place in the US for internet: comcast cable and comast DSL. Not sure how i'm getting the choice to use a "net neutrality compliant" ISP if comcast decides i can't reach site Z or Y.
smithzvk 13y ago
> If it's such a shitty idea, let consumers decide. If you leave it up to the prisoners, they will both rat each other out resulting in the worst possible outcome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma). Assuming that consumers will decide what is best for the whole of society is simply incorrect. "Internet innovation" is very much one of those big picture goals where I think some community planning (e.g. government intervention) would help the outcome.
- FrankenPC 13y ago
  Brilliant. If a solution appears over-simplified, it probably is. Like a reverse razor.
- rhizome 13y ago
  You might also look at Braess' Paradox[1], which while often applied to traffic planning, tells us that a network of nodes that choose their options selfishly will not result in improved performance when expanding that network (increase in number of possible choices). 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
  - Sambdala 13y ago
    Braess' Paradox "states that adding extra capacity to a network when the moving entities selfishly choose their route, can in some cases reduce overall performance. This is because the Nash equilibrium of such a system is not necessarily optimal." Also, isn't the internet itself more or less a "a network [where] the moving entities selfishly choose their route"?
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      >Also, isn't the internet itself more or less a "a network [where] the moving entities selfishly choose their route"? The moving entities? No, the routers make choices; it's equivalent to the road telling you which turns to take. In the example scenario the router at 'start' could evenly distribute the entities for optimal performance.
bowlofpetunias 13y ago
Consumers don't decide shit. Consumers are people that buy stuff, nothing more. The people that decide are called citizens or "voters". (Also, Google is probably one of the worst examples imaginable for arguing the market should make such decisions.)
- burntsushi 13y ago
  Who decided that the automobile would replace the horse and buggy for most modes of personal transportation? Consumers.
  - grannyg00se 13y ago
    Early horseless carriages didn't sell well, if at all. Consumers weren't making the decision to replace the horse and carriage. Continuous innovation and industry and government did that. Not until the choice is taken away do consumers (appear to) make a change. We could all be driving electric cars right now if consumers were making real choices. But we won't see a great number of electrics selling until they become so good that the gasoline car is practically taken off of the table as a viable choice. You can then credit the change to the consumers, but it's really much greater forces at work behind the scenes making it happen.
    - burntsushi 13y ago
      If consumers wanted to continue using the horse-and-buggy, they would have continued to buy it. But they didn't. The desired the automobile. I'm not sure how the notion that "consumers don't decide anything" can really hold water. Consumers are literally the people who allocate their resources to particular goods. In some cases, external forces remove or enforce particular choices. But I don't know how this implies that consumers can't decide anything.
    - Nick_C 13y ago
      > Early horseless carriages didn't sell well Exactly. Henry Ford paid his workers very well, not out of altruism because he was the one of the most unaltruistic people you can think of, but because he wanted them to be able to afford his car. They would become mobile advertisements of his new technology. In that, they were much like the Google Glassers are today.
johnpmayer 13y ago
Some of us believe that broadband should be considered a public utility, in which case it is appropriate to subject providers to these regulations.
coldtea 13y ago
>I consider everybody here very smart. In many cases smarter than myself. Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? Because it's not a technology issue, it's a business fairness issue. You know, the same way we let the government handle contracts. >Seriously, I can't get over the dissonance here. If it's such a shitty idea, let consumers decide. One's the genie is in the corporate box, there will be no turning back. The consumer cannot decide if he is not even provided with an alternative -- or if any alternative is more expensive. Like you couldn't decide about carrier-locked phones all those years. You either push for fairness to be regulated in law, or let the 4-5 top players divide the pie as they like. >Google Fiber et al will just eat the major telecoms' lunch sooner or later anyway. And who told you that Google WONT take advantage of crashing net neutrality itself?
baddox 13y ago
> Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? I think the key is the false assumption that this is how the origins and advancement of political authority works. This net neutrality issue is much easier to explain with a model of political authority that treats it as something the ruling class takes by force. Social contract theory was just the best thing Enlightenment thinkers could come up with to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced upon realizing that the existence of governments was a plain violation of their new ideas about natural rights.
wissler 13y ago
Because telcos are in bed with government. We don't really have a free market, it is virtually illegal to compete with the telcos. Some cities have tried and have been sued over it. Yes the free market should decide, but we just don't have one. Net neutrality is an imperfect remedy at best, but letting the telcos run wild with artificial privilege isn't the answer either.
amarv1n 13y ago
We regulate car safety even though there is some competition among car companies. If competition did not lead to net neutrality, then we should still mandate it. Also, it's true, as others have noted, that competition among ISPs won't be enough to ensure net neutrality because there can't be enough competition (either through regulatory capture or natural monopoly economics). However, even if there were competition, competing ISPs have the economic incentive to discriminate. The economic modeling is available in the work of Barbara van Schewick (she wrote an amazing, and dense, book on net neutrality). So competition would not necessarily solve the issue, as it does not solve things like car safety (or safe housing). I'm a huge fan of free markets, but there are market failures requiring some government intervention in the form of contract law, property law and its exemptions, and regulation in specific situations.
- jwallaceparker 13y ago
  > I'm a huge fan of free markets, but there are market failures requiring some government intervention in the form of contract law, property law and its exemptions, and regulation in specific situations. I agree that contract and property law need to be enforced - this is a vital component of a free market. But I don't consider that regulation or intervention. What are the "specific situations" that demand regulation?
  - amarv1n 13y ago
    property law is definitely a form of regulation. go to a country without regulation, like afghanistan, and you'll see no property law :) there's an entire semester in law school on the intricacies of property law, including fee simple, easements, etc., because property law doesn't come from heaven, it's made by men to regulate our affairs. beyond that, of course, there's regulation of restaurants, securities regulation, regulation of wireless spectrum regarding interference, regulation of satellite orbital slots, regulation of food safety, of drugs, of the legal profession, of the medical profession, etc. often for safety, often because of factors like information asymmetries or high transaction costs. Joseph Stiglitz's writings might interest you on the topic, the stuff he won a Nobel for.
wpietri 13y ago
You should go read about the history of the Internet. AT&T was a major barrier to early efforts in creating the Internet. See, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674 http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848326... In my view, the breakup of the Bell System laid the groundwork for the Internet to thrive. For that matter, read about the origins of antitrust law. Monopolies and oligopolies neutralize the market's usual power to straighten things out. Giant companies aren't generally interested in innovation; they're interested in dominance. (See The Innovator's Dilemma for more on the economics of why.) If it makes you feel any better, it's not like the FCC's going to go around kicking down telco doors and inspecting routers. Proof of net neutrality failures will come from us, the nerds. As individuals, measuring our own networks, and as the techies at innovative companies, going public when telcos try to discriminate against them.
- sounds 13y ago
  I plan on doing this. I'm actually excited for the day when I get to nail Verizon for discriminating against my business. (I wish I were youtube.) Here's what I plan to do, and please tell me what you would think if you saw this: "Hi, Verizon customer! We've detected that Verizon is hurting your speeds to reach us, while favoring access to _____ (competitor). Click on this link to see some other internet service providers in your area. If you'd like to file a complaint with the FCC, click here. If you'd like to get a refund, this link has instructions. If you'd like to join a class action suit, a discussion is occuring at this link." We'll of course not list competitors where there are none. Proportional to your popularity, it might even be possible to hurt Verizon's bottom line. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-youtube-buffers-the-secret-deals-that-make-and-break-online-video/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-yo... says you may have Net Neutrality issues already if you are subscribed to: • Verizon • Comcast • Time Warner Cable • Deutsche Telecom, Orange, Telefónica
shmerl 13y ago
> why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? Because we have no free market in the ISP business. It's close to a sick monopoly, or to cartels which agree on fixing high prices. If the government won't reign it, who will?
rayiner 13y ago
At least part of it is that tech companies benefit from net neutrality in the fight against the telcos. Its really to the advantage of distributors like Google or Netflix if net connections are dumb commoditized pipes. That allows them to extract a larger share of the revenue from any given customer. Unsurprisingly, distributors don't want telcos to be able to differentiate their services by partnering with distributors. This is one of the two key dynamics in the tech industry. The other is distributors versus content companies. When Amazon streams you a movie made by NBC/Universal over pipes built by Verizon, Amazon is positioned antagonistically to these other companies in wanting to extract the largest share of the total you're willing to pay for the whole package. Net neutrality helps them do this, and so does weaker copyright protections, among other things.
- ericd 13y ago
  Who does the telcos' "differentiating" their internet services help, other than the shareholders of the telcos? That bit of rent seeking behavior would have large negative impacts on everyone else. Why should we let telcos begin charging for no commensurate improvement in their end of the bargain after they've been granted local monopolies across the country? Internet service looks like a utility, quacks like a utility, it should be treated like a utility.
Spooky23 13y ago
The government isn't completely inept. They execute policy decisions quite well. IMO, the US government correctly concluded that the Bell Monopoly was initially in the best interest of the nation, as it accelerated universal phone service. Later, with a lot of prodding, they reversed that policy and unleashed the telecom competition that helped bring us the last 30 years of innovation. The problem is that the telephone companies are essentially rebuilding the old AT&T through merger, and wants to pillage the consumers of telecom services once again. They are doing this by declaring that the FCC can only regulate voice, defined as legacy TDM/POTS lines and related technology. Simultaneously, they are moving in state legislatures and congress to eliminate the requirement to provide universal POTS service. I've worked in a large enterprise where the network teams became too politically powerful (essentially becoming a troll under the bridge instead of a service provider) and basically put the organization out of business by making it either impossible or too expensive to get anything done. Empowering phone companies without a short, tight leash would be doing the same thing to our nation. Powerful network owners are the most dangerous people in technology.
mrgriscom 13y ago
To me it just seems self-evident that monopoly telcos should be required to treat all traffic equally. That's what it means to be a common carrier. Imagine if you called your favorite pizza place to order a pizza and the phone said 'we'll be connecting you in 30 seconds, or press 1 to be connected to a Verizon Preferred Partner Pizza Parlor immediately...'. It seem ridiculous for the phone company to be allowed to do that, so why would we ever tolerate it for an ISP?
SkyMarshal 13y ago
Net Neutrality is how the internet has operated since its beginning. It's not "giving" the government or anyone else anything new, just preserving a very successful status quo. It's the telco's and the anti-NN crowd that want to change that, not the other way around, despite their dissembling. If you want the internet to remain a level playing field for everyone, as it has been since day 1, from bootstrapped startups to giants like Google and Microsoft, support Net Neutrality.
smsm42 13y ago
Well, because obviously if something is wrong in the world, giving a bunch of professional liars selected by people 10% of which disagree on whether it exists and how to fix it and 90% of which do not understand the problem and vote on the looks of the guy and the fact he wears the colors of the team their granddad rooted for - giving such setup maximum power seems like a brilliant idea. If that doesn't fix the problem, what else would? It's like somebody being wrong on the internet, only you can feel you did something about it. Like empowered somebody who doesn't know how to fix it and has abysmal track record in fixing hundreds of other things, to do whatever it takes to fix it. That can't ever go wrong, can it? And we can be sure we can totally trust them with this power and they won't think about usurping this and taking it way beyond original purpose and trying to control everything everywhere. It's not like we're living through the wave of revelations showing how far the government can go subverting privacy, undermining security and expanding its powers in very short time. It's not like we have an agency that has an official logo of globe-encompassing octopus on top of the slogan "Nothing is beyond our reach". Calling for more control of the internet for those people would be indeed a bit myopic. But that's not what is going on here, right?
atmosx 13y ago
Hm, practically we don't get a choice and by we I mean the tech-community. We're less than 10% of the voting population in ANY country.
mcgwiz 13y ago
Amen. I would argue that it's not even clear how the market would respond to this, and yet the pro-neutrality camp paint a picture of corporate apocalypse. This seems reasonable to me: Neutrality rules are repealed. Some ISPs begin discriminating against certain publishers that do not pay up, but can use the payments to subsidize reductions in cost of consumer access. The "multitudes" of neutrality proponents begin demanding undiscriminated connections, calling for boycotts, switching to providers that offer such connections. Neutrality activists develop tools to compare and publicize connection rates to different publishers through different ISPs. Small-time providers form associations to raise awareness of the issue as well. Ethical marketing comes into play as some ISPs and some big publishers reject connection rate differentiation. Some ISPs that also own publishing properties are caught or implied to be preferring their own content over competitors, drawing political attention. In some areas, net neutrality laws (not just "rules") are passed, which is a draw for startups. Meanwhile, many who had no home connectivity in the past are now able to afford the "subsidized/sponsored" service level. What irks me about the middle-class idealogues raising a fuss about this now is that they arbitrarily draw the line of equality around big corporations, with little attention given to the fact that service is tiered at all. If it doesn't make sense for small publishers to be penalized for not ponying up, it should make even less sense for certain individuals in society to be penalized for not being able to afford anything more than dial-up or basic DSL. Going further, it should be more appalling that the most financially under-resourced can't even afford the most basic service level, and live without any internet participation. Instead, they prefer corporations to carry the costs of keeping the level field artificially level, while doing nothing to help those below them have the same level of access they do.

by pvnick 13y ago

dkuntz2 13y ago

Who would you have enforce net neutrality?

ewillbefull 13y ago
The only thing that needs to be enforced is anti-trust law. Monopolies are what give ISPs the ability, and perhaps the incentive, to filter and editorialize the Internet. The FTC should be involved in defending consumers against those behaviors. Net neutrality arises naturally. It didn't need enforcement 30 years ago. In some contexts, like exotic network protocols, it may not even make sense. I wouldn't care much if it was a limited authority granted to the FCC, but they are claiming an authority which is limitless in scope and using net neutrality as an excuse to exercise it.
- dkuntz2 13y ago
  I suppose using it as a claim for unlimited authority isn't a good situation, but I don't know if I see breaking net neutrality as being a trust. Considering where the term anti-trust came from, ISPs who block certain sites without customer consent aren't really being monopolistic in nature. Which makes, to me, defending net neutrality a separate issue than breaking trusts and monopolies...
- wpietri 13y ago
  Wait, 30 years ago? Actually, net neutrality needed substantial government help. The parallel at the time is the long distance market. Read about the history of Sprint, MCI, and the like. And it goes back further. At one point, you weren't even allowed to connect your own phone to the network, let alone an answering machine; AT&T claimed it was too dangerous. So you had to rent everything from Ma Bell. It wasn't until the Carterphone case in 1968, where the FCC told AT&T to knock it off, that you saw things get better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_decision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_... As much as I would like anti-trust law to help here, you don't need collusion or a monopoly to ruin net neutrality. As long as you have an oligopoly, which is the general state of the US residential ISP market, then that's plenty. As we see in the article as soon as one ISP starts a shakedown, the other big ones will try the same thing.

aragot 13y ago

Ehm, but Google Fiber doesn't respect net neutrality, see multiple posts on HN about them forbidding servers on the network...

blhack 13y ago
That has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Forbidding servers on their network is a completely rational stance for them to take. Do you also get upset at "all-you-can-eat" buffets when they don't let you fill a barrel full of food to take home and eat later?
- aragot 13y ago
  How can they distinguish personal vs pro servers? They have to inspect the contents, which to me seems related to net neutrality. The comparison should rather be "Do you get upset at buffets when they don't let you have the main dish after dessert?" They use content inspection to increase their revenue.
  - cmircea 13y ago
    Bandwidth and number of incoming connections.
- belorn 13y ago
  I do get upset if the commercial say "up to 20 different kind of food, and all-you-can-eat", but during lunch rush it is just a couple of carrots that looks half moldy. One aspect of net neutrality is advertizement laws and clear communication between the commercial entity and the consumer. A restaurant can't just say that "its up to!" and give you a carrot when you paid $50 for a buffet, complaining that their capacity to make food is full. If the network connection Google want to sell has direct limitation to them, Google should be legally bound to make sure the consumer is aware before a contract is signed. That is normally a basic consumer protection law in most markets, and the ISP market is just lagging behind.
  - 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

blhack 13y ago

Because the telcos are currently enjoying a "natural monopoly". The cost of entry to become a telco is so high, that normal competitive forces do not apply. In situations like this, one role of government is to regulate these natural monopolies to protect citizens. One such regulation, for instance, is that the power company cannot shut off your power in the middle of winter in Minnesota without fulfilling some pretty stringent criteria.

fleitz 13y ago
Telecom isn't a natural monopoly, it's a government sponsored cartel.
- jjoonathan 13y ago
  While you are correct that telcos currently enjoy a certain degree of regulatory capture, they are also natural monopolies/oligopolies in the sense that competitors have an astronomical barrier to entry. It's tempting but naive to think that all we need to do in order to see the market right itself is to eliminate existing regulations. What we actually need to do is to change regulations to encourage competition, both by eliminating explicit monopoly rights and by mandating and/or price-controlling B2B bandwidth/traffic sales so that incumbents can't kill new entrants without beating them on a level playing field. Forcing telcos to act like "dumb pipes" is one type of regulation that forces them to compete against each other (otherwise they just lump their market power with media providers until they are once again too big to challenge).
  - argumentum 13y ago
    > .. by eliminating explicit monopoly rights and by mandating and/or price-controlling B2B bandwidth/traffic sales ... Are you willing to try the former before the latter? If so, I don't think we're far off .. I'm not an absolutist, if there is a compelling case after the artificial constraints are removed, then I might consider state intervention as a last resort. But not before giving the free market a fair shot.

joseflavio 13y ago

The problem is that telecom is already a heavy regulated area (for historical and technical reasons). Besides this, connecting to your competitor network is going to be always a rigged game, just a handful of players will connect between them, that leads to monopoly... So I think it is virtually impossible to setup your own new company... I live in France and it is quite interesting to see the raise of the provider Free.fr, quite impressive how they defied all other big companies... (Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with this ISP). edit: typos.

troebr 13y ago
I used to live in France, DSL providers are a joke here. Verizon advertised $30 for single play (no phone, no television). In the end they added "fees" and taxes (what those are not included?), the price was $56 per month. The router is as shitty as it gets too. Now I moved and for $55 I have cable with optimum and it's way better. Still more expensive than Free, and still no tv/phone included.
zobzu 13y ago
Free has traffic shaping for anything going through their peering, but in particular apple and google. Good luck using youtube via free's peering. it's nearly impossible. I don't know many people on free.fr that use youtube at all, because it's too terribly slow (1min load for 3s of video?). It's barely acceptable for things like google play downloads. Their peering isn't net neutral at all.
- joseflavio 13y ago
  I think I dont notice because I use VPN all the time.
- xxpor 13y ago
  Why does Google continue to peer with them then? The whole point of peering vs. transit is that two networks will connect for free to each other to get better service.

raverbashing 13y ago

How's the 'invisible hand' working for healthcare again? I'm very against government regulation, but something it's necessary.

cheald 13y ago
That's a rather poor example - healthcare is an exceptionally heavily-regulated industry. There's an argument to be made that many of the ills in the industry are a result of over-regulation.
- Iftheshoefits 13y ago
  That an argument can be made doesn't imply it's a good one, or that anybody should pay it any heed. Most of the ills in the health industry stem from the fact that providers--insurers and direct providers alike--have a profit motive rather than a "provide healthcare" motive, because their market is entirely captive and literally without any (real) choice.
  - jessaustin 13y ago
    Most tire shops have a profit motive rather than a "provide tires" motive. It's true that tire customers aren't "captive", but I don't understand which sense of that word you mean to apply in a relevant way to health care consumers.
    - Iftheshoefits 13y ago
      You don't understand how health care consumers are captive? Health care is literally something human beings cannot live without. The quality and cost of the care is far less important than its availability, because it's literally a matter of being healthy and surviving, or becoming or continuing to be ill, deteriorating and then dying. Healthcare consumers, in other words, don't have real choices in where and how they obtain care. This isn't the case with tires (or almost any other non-essential good or service).
- 13y ago

djur 13y ago

Consumers don't have the flexibility to decide if they're dealing with only a small number of sellers working in collusion. The cost of entry into this market is astronomically high -- even Google, with all its money and all the dark fiber it snapped up, hasn't established a foothold yet. Setting up telecommunications networks is expensive and legally complex, and the resources involved are extremely limited. The likelihood of a functioning free market in this space is essentially nil. In the absence of a functioning free market, the government is the only entity with the authority to apply regulations for the benefit of the citizenry.

ewillbefull 13y ago
The distinguishing factor should be how the government protects net neutrality. Should the FCC have a limitless authority to regulate the Internet, which they happen to apply to net neutrality for now? Or should the FTC have authority to bring suits against monopolistic ISPs to discourage these behaviors?

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

hayksaakian 13y ago

Your argument is that the free market will favor ISPs that support/don't oppose net-neutrality. I argue that most people won't care about their "choice" (air quotes, because most people can't pick from more than 2 ISPs) of ISP until it's too late. Already you have ISPs throttling access to streaming video sites (netflix, youtube, twitch) with little to no REAL blowback. With the barriers to entry as high as they are, there's no way for a competitor to succeed in the market solely on the basis of being net-neutral. Google Fiber, in markets where it's available, has led to competitors reducing prices and offering better service. However, there's no word of change regarding net neutrality.

dippyskoodlez 13y ago
>Google Fiber, in markets where it's available, has led to competitors reducing prices and offering better service. However, there's no word of change regarding net neutrality. As a KC resident, TWC has not yet reduced my internet costs or increased speeds.
- hayksaakian 13y ago
  I'll say my only knowledge of this was anecdotal (from others) I can say first hand, that if you call your ISP and say "I'm switching to X service at $Y for Zmbps" you can get your bill reduced.
  - dippyskoodlez 13y ago
    The only other option is U-verse which is more expensive for the same speed or they don't even offer the same speed. Calling the ISP and threatening them only works if you can find someone with the power to do so(and hope they don't note your account for trying it again, later..), and assumes they hold true to their word on your next bill. I was primarily refuting your "causes isps to lower their prices" because Google fiber has done NOTHING for TWC's marketing. It's still the same terrible prices.
    - hayksaakian 13y ago

anonymousab 13y ago

Sure. And if industry collusion is such a shitty practice, just let the consumers decide.

kaonashi 13y ago

The only entity capable of governing, is government in some form or another.

zobzu 13y ago

i current have 2 choices at my place in the US for internet: comcast cable and comast DSL. Not sure how i'm getting the choice to use a "net neutrality compliant" ISP if comcast decides i can't reach site Z or Y.

smithzvk 13y ago

> If it's such a shitty idea, let consumers decide. If you leave it up to the prisoners, they will both rat each other out resulting in the worst possible outcome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma). Assuming that consumers will decide what is best for the whole of society is simply incorrect. "Internet innovation" is very much one of those big picture goals where I think some community planning (e.g. government intervention) would help the outcome.

FrankenPC 13y ago
Brilliant. If a solution appears over-simplified, it probably is. Like a reverse razor.
rhizome 13y ago
You might also look at Braess' Paradox[1], which while often applied to traffic planning, tells us that a network of nodes that choose their options selfishly will not result in improved performance when expanding that network (increase in number of possible choices). 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox
- Sambdala 13y ago
  Braess' Paradox "states that adding extra capacity to a network when the moving entities selfishly choose their route, can in some cases reduce overall performance. This is because the Nash equilibrium of such a system is not necessarily optimal." Also, isn't the internet itself more or less a "a network [where] the moving entities selfishly choose their route"?
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    >Also, isn't the internet itself more or less a "a network [where] the moving entities selfishly choose their route"? The moving entities? No, the routers make choices; it's equivalent to the road telling you which turns to take. In the example scenario the router at 'start' could evenly distribute the entities for optimal performance.

bowlofpetunias 13y ago

Consumers don't decide shit. Consumers are people that buy stuff, nothing more. The people that decide are called citizens or "voters". (Also, Google is probably one of the worst examples imaginable for arguing the market should make such decisions.)

burntsushi 13y ago
Who decided that the automobile would replace the horse and buggy for most modes of personal transportation? Consumers.
- grannyg00se 13y ago
  Early horseless carriages didn't sell well, if at all. Consumers weren't making the decision to replace the horse and carriage. Continuous innovation and industry and government did that. Not until the choice is taken away do consumers (appear to) make a change. We could all be driving electric cars right now if consumers were making real choices. But we won't see a great number of electrics selling until they become so good that the gasoline car is practically taken off of the table as a viable choice. You can then credit the change to the consumers, but it's really much greater forces at work behind the scenes making it happen.
  - burntsushi 13y ago
    If consumers wanted to continue using the horse-and-buggy, they would have continued to buy it. But they didn't. The desired the automobile. I'm not sure how the notion that "consumers don't decide anything" can really hold water. Consumers are literally the people who allocate their resources to particular goods. In some cases, external forces remove or enforce particular choices. But I don't know how this implies that consumers can't decide anything.
  - Nick_C 13y ago
    > Early horseless carriages didn't sell well Exactly. Henry Ford paid his workers very well, not out of altruism because he was the one of the most unaltruistic people you can think of, but because he wanted them to be able to afford his car. They would become mobile advertisements of his new technology. In that, they were much like the Google Glassers are today.

johnpmayer 13y ago

Some of us believe that broadband should be considered a public utility, in which case it is appropriate to subject providers to these regulations.

coldtea 13y ago

>I consider everybody here very smart. In many cases smarter than myself. Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? Because it's not a technology issue, it's a business fairness issue. You know, the same way we let the government handle contracts. >Seriously, I can't get over the dissonance here. If it's such a shitty idea, let consumers decide. One's the genie is in the corporate box, there will be no turning back. The consumer cannot decide if he is not even provided with an alternative -- or if any alternative is more expensive. Like you couldn't decide about carrier-locked phones all those years. You either push for fairness to be regulated in law, or let the 4-5 top players divide the pie as they like. >Google Fiber et al will just eat the major telecoms' lunch sooner or later anyway. And who told you that Google WONT take advantage of crashing net neutrality itself?

baddox 13y ago

> Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? I think the key is the false assumption that this is how the origins and advancement of political authority works. This net neutrality issue is much easier to explain with a model of political authority that treats it as something the ruling class takes by force. Social contract theory was just the best thing Enlightenment thinkers could come up with to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced upon realizing that the existence of governments was a plain violation of their new ideas about natural rights.

wissler 13y ago

Because telcos are in bed with government. We don't really have a free market, it is virtually illegal to compete with the telcos. Some cities have tried and have been sued over it. Yes the free market should decide, but we just don't have one. Net neutrality is an imperfect remedy at best, but letting the telcos run wild with artificial privilege isn't the answer either.

amarv1n 13y ago

We regulate car safety even though there is some competition among car companies. If competition did not lead to net neutrality, then we should still mandate it. Also, it's true, as others have noted, that competition among ISPs won't be enough to ensure net neutrality because there can't be enough competition (either through regulatory capture or natural monopoly economics). However, even if there were competition, competing ISPs have the economic incentive to discriminate. The economic modeling is available in the work of Barbara van Schewick (she wrote an amazing, and dense, book on net neutrality). So competition would not necessarily solve the issue, as it does not solve things like car safety (or safe housing). I'm a huge fan of free markets, but there are market failures requiring some government intervention in the form of contract law, property law and its exemptions, and regulation in specific situations.

jwallaceparker 13y ago
> I'm a huge fan of free markets, but there are market failures requiring some government intervention in the form of contract law, property law and its exemptions, and regulation in specific situations. I agree that contract and property law need to be enforced - this is a vital component of a free market. But I don't consider that regulation or intervention. What are the "specific situations" that demand regulation?
- amarv1n 13y ago
  property law is definitely a form of regulation. go to a country without regulation, like afghanistan, and you'll see no property law :) there's an entire semester in law school on the intricacies of property law, including fee simple, easements, etc., because property law doesn't come from heaven, it's made by men to regulate our affairs. beyond that, of course, there's regulation of restaurants, securities regulation, regulation of wireless spectrum regarding interference, regulation of satellite orbital slots, regulation of food safety, of drugs, of the legal profession, of the medical profession, etc. often for safety, often because of factors like information asymmetries or high transaction costs. Joseph Stiglitz's writings might interest you on the topic, the stuff he won a Nobel for.

wpietri 13y ago

You should go read about the history of the Internet. AT&T was a major barrier to early efforts in creating the Internet. See, e.g., http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/0684832674 http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up-Late/dp/06848326... In my view, the breakup of the Bell System laid the groundwork for the Internet to thrive. For that matter, read about the origins of antitrust law. Monopolies and oligopolies neutralize the market's usual power to straighten things out. Giant companies aren't generally interested in innovation; they're interested in dominance. (See The Innovator's Dilemma for more on the economics of why.) If it makes you feel any better, it's not like the FCC's going to go around kicking down telco doors and inspecting routers. Proof of net neutrality failures will come from us, the nerds. As individuals, measuring our own networks, and as the techies at innovative companies, going public when telcos try to discriminate against them.

sounds 13y ago
I plan on doing this. I'm actually excited for the day when I get to nail Verizon for discriminating against my business. (I wish I were youtube.) Here's what I plan to do, and please tell me what you would think if you saw this: "Hi, Verizon customer! We've detected that Verizon is hurting your speeds to reach us, while favoring access to _____ (competitor). Click on this link to see some other internet service providers in your area. If you'd like to file a complaint with the FCC, click here. If you'd like to get a refund, this link has instructions. If you'd like to join a class action suit, a discussion is occuring at this link." We'll of course not list competitors where there are none. Proportional to your popularity, it might even be possible to hurt Verizon's bottom line. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-youtube-buffers-the-secret-deals-that-make-and-break-online-video/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/why-yo... says you may have Net Neutrality issues already if you are subscribed to: • Verizon • Comcast • Time Warner Cable • Deutsche Telecom, Orange, Telefónica

shmerl 13y ago

> why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? Because we have no free market in the ISP business. It's close to a sick monopoly, or to cartels which agree on fixing high prices. If the government won't reign it, who will?

rayiner 13y ago

At least part of it is that tech companies benefit from net neutrality in the fight against the telcos. Its really to the advantage of distributors like Google or Netflix if net connections are dumb commoditized pipes. That allows them to extract a larger share of the revenue from any given customer. Unsurprisingly, distributors don't want telcos to be able to differentiate their services by partnering with distributors. This is one of the two key dynamics in the tech industry. The other is distributors versus content companies. When Amazon streams you a movie made by NBC/Universal over pipes built by Verizon, Amazon is positioned antagonistically to these other companies in wanting to extract the largest share of the total you're willing to pay for the whole package. Net neutrality helps them do this, and so does weaker copyright protections, among other things.

ericd 13y ago
Who does the telcos' "differentiating" their internet services help, other than the shareholders of the telcos? That bit of rent seeking behavior would have large negative impacts on everyone else. Why should we let telcos begin charging for no commensurate improvement in their end of the bargain after they've been granted local monopolies across the country? Internet service looks like a utility, quacks like a utility, it should be treated like a utility.

Spooky23 13y ago

The government isn't completely inept. They execute policy decisions quite well. IMO, the US government correctly concluded that the Bell Monopoly was initially in the best interest of the nation, as it accelerated universal phone service. Later, with a lot of prodding, they reversed that policy and unleashed the telecom competition that helped bring us the last 30 years of innovation. The problem is that the telephone companies are essentially rebuilding the old AT&T through merger, and wants to pillage the consumers of telecom services once again. They are doing this by declaring that the FCC can only regulate voice, defined as legacy TDM/POTS lines and related technology. Simultaneously, they are moving in state legislatures and congress to eliminate the requirement to provide universal POTS service. I've worked in a large enterprise where the network teams became too politically powerful (essentially becoming a troll under the bridge instead of a service provider) and basically put the organization out of business by making it either impossible or too expensive to get anything done. Empowering phone companies without a short, tight leash would be doing the same thing to our nation. Powerful network owners are the most dangerous people in technology.

mrgriscom 13y ago

To me it just seems self-evident that monopoly telcos should be required to treat all traffic equally. That's what it means to be a common carrier. Imagine if you called your favorite pizza place to order a pizza and the phone said 'we'll be connecting you in 30 seconds, or press 1 to be connected to a Verizon Preferred Partner Pizza Parlor immediately...'. It seem ridiculous for the phone company to be allowed to do that, so why would we ever tolerate it for an ISP?

SkyMarshal 13y ago

Net Neutrality is how the internet has operated since its beginning. It's not "giving" the government or anyone else anything new, just preserving a very successful status quo. It's the telco's and the anti-NN crowd that want to change that, not the other way around, despite their dissembling. If you want the internet to remain a level playing field for everyone, as it has been since day 1, from bootstrapped startups to giants like Google and Microsoft, support Net Neutrality.

smsm42 13y ago

Well, because obviously if something is wrong in the world, giving a bunch of professional liars selected by people 10% of which disagree on whether it exists and how to fix it and 90% of which do not understand the problem and vote on the looks of the guy and the fact he wears the colors of the team their granddad rooted for - giving such setup maximum power seems like a brilliant idea. If that doesn't fix the problem, what else would? It's like somebody being wrong on the internet, only you can feel you did something about it. Like empowered somebody who doesn't know how to fix it and has abysmal track record in fixing hundreds of other things, to do whatever it takes to fix it. That can't ever go wrong, can it? And we can be sure we can totally trust them with this power and they won't think about usurping this and taking it way beyond original purpose and trying to control everything everywhere. It's not like we're living through the wave of revelations showing how far the government can go subverting privacy, undermining security and expanding its powers in very short time. It's not like we have an agency that has an official logo of globe-encompassing octopus on top of the slogan "Nothing is beyond our reach". Calling for more control of the internet for those people would be indeed a bit myopic. But that's not what is going on here, right?

atmosx 13y ago

Hm, practically we don't get a choice and by we I mean the tech-community. We're less than 10% of the voting population in ANY country.

mcgwiz 13y ago

Amen. I would argue that it's not even clear how the market would respond to this, and yet the pro-neutrality camp paint a picture of corporate apocalypse. This seems reasonable to me: Neutrality rules are repealed. Some ISPs begin discriminating against certain publishers that do not pay up, but can use the payments to subsidize reductions in cost of consumer access. The "multitudes" of neutrality proponents begin demanding undiscriminated connections, calling for boycotts, switching to providers that offer such connections. Neutrality activists develop tools to compare and publicize connection rates to different publishers through different ISPs. Small-time providers form associations to raise awareness of the issue as well. Ethical marketing comes into play as some ISPs and some big publishers reject connection rate differentiation. Some ISPs that also own publishing properties are caught or implied to be preferring their own content over competitors, drawing political attention. In some areas, net neutrality laws (not just "rules") are passed, which is a draw for startups. Meanwhile, many who had no home connectivity in the past are now able to afford the "subsidized/sponsored" service level. What irks me about the middle-class idealogues raising a fuss about this now is that they arbitrarily draw the line of equality around big corporations, with little attention given to the fact that service is tiered at all. If it doesn't make sense for small publishers to be penalized for not ponying up, it should make even less sense for certain individuals in society to be penalized for not being able to afford anything more than dial-up or basic DSL. Going further, it should be more appalling that the most financially under-resourced can't even afford the most basic service level, and live without any internet participation. Instead, they prefer corporations to carry the costs of keeping the level field artificially level, while doing nothing to help those below them have the same level of access they do.