20 ms·

Net neutrality

497 points by austenallred 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
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- niels_olson 12y ago
  you must be more of an insider than I am. When did Y Combinator become a fan of Wheeler?
natmaster 12y ago
The structural reason is the government itself. There is no free market. There are no checks and balances from consumers. Telecom is a government enabled monopoly, and now you're seeing the dangers of consolidating power into a few corrupt men http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/wake-up-internet-time-to_b_5207303.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/wake-up-internet-t...
justizin 12y ago
Thank You.
hezakia1 12y ago
"I have met with the Chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, and I believe he is a good actor that wants to do the right thing. But he is fighting against very powerful lobbyists and large companies that want to disrupt the freedom of the Internet." "Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry" -Wikipedia Really? Somehow I doubt that he has turned a full 180 and is now trying to protect the internet against people in his former occupation.
- btilly 12y ago
  Rule of thumb. Assume people are operating fairly until proven otherwise. If you meet someone and treat them as a good actor, it becomes easier for them to BE one. Truth is he is probably a politician. He will do whatever he thinks is going to get him the most support. So if you can convince him that is going against his former friends, he will do that. (180 flips in policy are very common in politicians.)
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  - webmaven 12y ago
    Yes. AssumeGoodFaith: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith
- rhino369 12y ago
  1) Lobbyists are hired guns not true believers or activists. There is no reason to believe he is still beholden to them or something. 2) He worked for cable in until 1984. Cable wasn't even operating in internet then. 3) Most of his tenure when he was a cellular and internet lobbyist was in trying to get more spectrum for wireless use.
- mikeyouse 12y ago
  Instead of making the lazy connection that he used to be a lobbyist and he must still keep those views, why don't you read some of the stuff he's written over the years, or look at some of the companies he's backed to see if you think he's still beholden to the cable companies? Read this article from Wheeler about SOPA, written long before he was at the FCC: http://www.mobilemusings.net/2012/02/how-sop-was-undone-by-sopa-political.html http://www.mobilemusings.net/2012/02/how-sop-was-undone-by-s... > Backed by Hollywood and others whose business model requires controlled scarcity of product, SOPA in many ways echoed the cable fight of 40 years earlier. The policy matter is not whether copyright holders should receive recompense for their products (they should), but whether legislation to protect that right is aircover to perpetuate old practices at the expense of new networks. There is no doubt there are honest-to-God Web pirates operating in China, Russia, and elsewhere who are stealing copyrighted product. These pirates should be stopped. But SOPA’s effort to accomplish this – which also just happened to strengthen the hand of content companies in other regards – applied concepts more applicable to the command and control networks of yesterday than to the open access networks of today. The result was an unparalleled protest and a political train wreck. Does that sound like some mustache-twirling lobbyist-in-disguise? Or his thinking about net neutrality from 2009: > So, in a world where spectrum licensees are unwilling to part with their assignments and the spectrum agency wants to help while at the same time increasing demand, why isn’t net neutrality an opportunity for the wireless industry? Viewing the current spectrum and net neutrality issues holistically rather than in isolation just might be an opportunity for both the wireless industry and the Administration. > President Obama campaigned on his support for net neutrality. Thus, it should come as no surprise that his FCC chairman has moved promptly on the matter, or that a Democrat-controlled commission is likely to adopt it. How it is implemented thus becomes more important than whether it exists. Rules that recognize the unique characteristics of a spectrum-based service and allow for reasonable network management would seem to be more important than the philosophical debate over whether there should be rules at all. Similarly, a rule that allows for variable pricing is an opportunity for wireless carriers to change the revenue paradigm at a time when revenue per megabyte is in a freefall. http://www.mobilemusings.net/2009/11/net-neutrality-and-spectrum-quest.html http://www.mobilemusings.net/2009/11/net-neutrality-and-spec...
- deleted 12y ago
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mkx 12y ago
Direct link to the proceeding on the fcc website: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display (Proceeding #14-28 here: http://www.fcc.gov/comments http://www.fcc.gov/comments)
- cyorir 12y ago
  I'd love to see someone scrape all of these comments (since they're provided in convenient tabular form, might as well!) and analyze them to see if there is any interesting data to be seen. Just browsing through a couple, some people give one-liners but a few comments are all-out, nearly essays. I assume the FCC doesn't read all of these. Do they just use a program to analyze these comments, and gauge overall content?
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bmelton 12y ago
I've been fairly on the fence regarding net neutrality, and this article turned me around on the issue. Previously, it was nearly impossible for me to reconcile a valid reason for regulating the telcos. It's their pipes, they should be able to route it however they want. And aside from that, we've never had net neutrality -- there's no ISP I've ever used that allows unfettered upstream access to port 80 from my home, for example. That was, up til now, my belief, which I understand is not a popular one. That said, the final paragraph actually hit home with me. "As long as consumers don’t have freedom of choice, last-mile traffic discrimination should be per se illegal." If the game is already rigged, then the players should have to play by the same rules. Edit: s/traffic/pipes/g
- angersock 12y ago
  "It's their traffic, they should be able to route it however they want" It's their pipes, not their traffic. A minor distinction, but an important one. :)
  - bmelton 12y ago
    You are 100% correct. I'll edit.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  there's no ISP I've ever used that allows unfettered upstream access to port 80 from my home, for example. Back in the day, I used to subscribe to Sprint's wireless cable equivalent. It had a range of 30 miles from the base station, and provided cable-equivalent speeds (for the day; the upstream was very slow by today's standards). Notably, they also provided a static IP address and unfettered access to ports 25 and 80, so I ran my own personal web and mail servers. As you realize in your last two lines, if we had more competition, ISPs might still block ports by default for consumer safety, but provide a no-cost, no-hassle option to unblock them.
- Fgnfyhrtbtd 12y ago
  The claim that the infrastructure is theirs is pretty dubious. Sure, they may be the ones making money hand over fist on the pipes, but we US taxpayers invested $200 billion for them to build out that infrastructure. We paid for the pipes that they are profiting off of and now mismanaging.
Touche 12y ago
> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem. Devil's advocate, why would any company want to be the infrastructure-owning company then? Aren't they in the worst spot?
- JetSpiegel 12y ago
  Not if it's the government.
- niels_olson 12y ago
  Not really. With the burden of regulation also comes the impossibility of going out of business.
- asadotzler 12y ago
  Why would any company want to sell electricity or water? This is not a new problem. Let's stop pretending it is.
  - twoodfin 12y ago
    You don't demand CAGR of 20% or more of your electricity or water supply.
  - rhino369 12y ago
    It's not a new problem, but the history of telecoms show exactly why it's a bad solution. Do you really want to go back to the days of AT&T controlling everything? Do you want a local PUC deciding how fast your internet should and how much it should cost? Do you want them deciding that 5 dollars more a month isn't worth tripling the speed? It works for power and water because the infrastructure doesn't turn over very fast. If you had your way in the late 1900's we'd all be on ASDL right now.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    The electricity and water systems, while definitely needing upkeep, don't need to prepare for a doubling of usage every few years. Edit Plus, the electric company definitely does some kind of demand shaping: shutting off AC compressors on a rolling, as-needed basis. In water emergencies the water company will declare which days I can water the lawn or wash my car. "Utility" isn't synonymous with "totally dumb pipe."
blakerson 12y ago
When you submit a comment, don't forget to click the text link "Confirm" or else your comment will be lost. It's easy to miss since the screen looks like a post-submission confirmation.
the_watcher 12y ago
The wireless v. home internet is a great thing to point out. It's the exact same companies, but operating with less of a monopoly.
- jusben1369 12y ago
  I now get about 30down/20 up at my house with LTE from ATT and pay for and get 15/5 with ATT U-Verse. 6 months ago we paid maybe $160 per month for two phones and 2 GB per month download. Now it's $160 per month for 4 phones and 10GB. So it seems to me that, when I factor in the cost savings of $50 per month of shutting down cable internet, won't I be happy to soon spend $200 to $250 per month with ATT LTE to get 30/20 and say 100GB per month?
joelhaus 12y ago
Really interested in hearing more about sama's meeting with Wheeler... Did he discuss concerns about putting new rules in place that would not withstand court challenge (i.e. the "commercially reasonable" standard)? Any additional creative ways to help him push Title II classification beyond commenting and contacting congress? Also, you describe a last-mile competitive scenario that is very similar to the energy deregulation that recently occurred in New Jersey. I think it has produced pretty good results for customers. Here's a good/concise explanation of how they did it: http://www.njelectricity.org/about-electric-choice/ http://www.njelectricity.org/about-electric-choice/
njs12345 12y ago
> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem. [2] This is pretty much how it works in the UK; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach It does seem to work pretty well.. there are a wide variety of operators and prices are very low. If I had to pick out common criticisms, Openreach can take their time if you have to deal with them directly (getting a line installed in a new office or apartment can take a few weeks), and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so.
- alex_duf 12y ago
  That's also how it works in France.
- danielweber 12y ago
  I've been led to believe (by conversations here on HN as well as elsewhere) that DSL in the US is operating under that regime -- the phone companies are required to lease them out, so you can have 5 different providers all selling you DSL over the same wires. But DSL bandwidths strongly lag behind cable modem bandwidths because the people laying the wire have no desire to upgrade for the benefit of their competitors. How much truth is there to this?
  - exelius 12y ago
    DSL in the US used to operate that way until it failed spectacularly due to the reasons you mention and the FCC reclassified DSL as an information service.
    - bitJericho 12y ago
      I don't know when that happened, but when I had DSL about, oh 6 years ago, they practically begged me to sign up with MSN. I think they got a commission for it. I chose just to go straight with the company who owned the equipment, my phone company.
kokey 12y ago
There is a lot about the wording of this that I really like. It clearly acknowledges the real cause of the problem, which is basically locally rigged markets, and actually suggests a solution that won't simply help entrench the incumbents through increased regulation similar to price and quality fixing.
zoba 12y ago
Folks: If you go here: http://www.fcc.gov/comments http://www.fcc.gov/comments and click 14-28 ("Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet"), it will take you to a form where you can submit your comments.
- jonahx 12y ago
  In order to post comments, you have to make your name and address available on the site publicly? Am I understanding that correctly?
  - danielweber 12y ago
    In general submitting comments on a government action is completely visible to everyone. As a favor to a colleague I once did some data-analysis for public comments. She just shipped me everyone's data. I asked if that was legal and was told that she was required to give it to anyone who asks. This feels weird for a web-comment BBS, but it's totally normal for the government requesting comments on policy.
  - zoba 12y ago
    Yeah, looks that way. Putting my name on protecting the internet is something I'm proud to do. Putting my address down is a bit obnoxious though - I doubt they're going to do any verification on these.
    - loumf 12y ago
      They don't have to. If anyone wants to, they could verify it. I helped support an effort to find evidence of astroturfing an FCC request for comment. Having this data enabled us to do that work. Knowing that the data could be verified is supposed to be a deterrent to acting in bad faith. Later, one could do the verification if they doubted the comments were genuine. Given the amount of tech power behind keeping net-neutrality, we should want the process to be as open as possible, so we could verify it ourselves.
      - 12y ago
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
Forced leasing of the last mile nor any kind of actual competition doesn't solve the problem, and the US wireless market is far from healthy. Half of this article is still free-market wishful thinking. The Netherlands, where there are plenty of ISP's to choose from, made Net Neutrality law exactly because the mobile providers "magically" nearly simultaneously announced plans for breaking net neutrality. (And after net neutrality became law, they all decided to raise their data prices.) In a market with a limited number of players (and there will always be a limited number of players, regardless of regulation), it's way too easy to form informal cartels. A free market doesn't mean we magically don't need consumer protection or civil rights. Also "wireless Internet is good"? All mobile services in the US are overpriced, suck balls and generally exploit the lack of regulation in a way that would see consumers in most other countries revolt.
orblivion 12y ago
I'll try not to be an overbearing libertarian here talking about how this is all the government's fault. It's not 100% clear to me and somebody else has that covered. But I do want to put one concept out there as food for thought. The FCC's mission statement (amended in 1996) is the following: "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges." Net Neutrality seems to fit within the spirit of this mission statement. And yet the FCC is also in the business of censoring nipples. Do you want to risk the FCC to be in the business of censoring nipples on the Internet? I can already anticipate what people will say when that day comes. "Look, the government isn't perfect, we don't have to dismantle it, We the People just have to vote somebody into office who will speak for us and implement reasonable standards.". Ok, so when was the last time that happened to your satisfaction? Do you really want to risk having this kind of future on the prospect that reasonable people will be voted into office? This is one reasons libertarians and certain conservatives fight tooth and nail against every increase in the scope of government, no matter how reasonable it may seem. I'm more interested in the future of mesh networking, or any number of things we haven't even thought of, to work around this sort of thing.
- markkat 12y ago
  To play devil's advocate, Apple also censors nipples. Both can change their stance on nipples. Like private companies, representative governments do respond to popular opinion, the avenues of applying pressure are just different. Government and corporations each have certain advantages and faults by design. I'd prefer a public road and a private car, to a private road and a public car.
- CodeMage 12y ago
  So if the current implementation of democracy is broken, the solution is to completely abolish government?
cs702 12y ago
I agree, there's no real competition for the "last mile." (If there were real competition, ISPs would be trampling over each other to deliver the best Netflix experience and bragging about it in their advertising campaigns!) Requiring the incumbent mono/duopolistic last-mile ISPs to lease their lines may improve the situation, but I'm not as sure as Sam Altman that it would bring about real competition, because of the difficulties inherent in enforcing "fair, transparent leasing." Incumbents surely would find lots of clever ways to game any leasing scheme imposed by the FCC while technically "complying" with it. I expect it would be better for US consumers than the status quo, though.
- Retric 12y ago
  One option would be to prevent any company from operating a last mile AND selling it to retail customers. Honestly, what I find most striking is how bad cable boxes are simply because there is no completion.
  - MBCook 12y ago
    Recently, due to their (Comcast's) own stupidity, I ended up having a couple of visits from Comcast techs trying to fix an issue. Every single one was wowed by my TiVo. Just seeing how fast it was to respond (which has never been a TiVo strong suit) and how reasonable the interface was amazed them. That's pathetic.
    - JTon 12y ago
      Why bother attacking the comcast techs? These guys are just trying to make a living. The real problems come from well above
      - MBCook 12y ago
        Sorry, I meant due to Comcast's stupidity, not the techs. The two techs I worked with were very nice and clearly frustrated with their inability to help me at times due odd barriers in the way Comcast has things setup, stupid hoops to jump through. I've edited my comment.
rayiner 12y ago
I don't see how a normally libertarian-leaning group of people have embraced regulation rather than deregulation as to this issue. Why do local ISP markets tend towards monopoly, even though it has been illegal since 1992 to grant local cable monopolies? Two words: universal access. It's the same principle that led municipalities to grant taxicab monopolies, of the kind that stifle companies like Uber today. The idea is that in a free market, providers would only focus on the profitable parts of the city, leaving the lower-income areas without service. Universal access is why it's impossible to "disrupt" the market for local internet. A new entrant can't just come into the market and pick off the most desirable customers or the ones that are cheapest to service. They have to be prepared to service everyone, even many customers who can only be served at a loss, in order to be allowed to operate at all. Additional regulation in this space isn't going to eliminate the underlying problem, it will just make infrastructure construction a more unattractive business and decrease investment. There is no free lunch. You can have: neutrality, universal access, or a mostly privately-funded telecom infrastructure, but you only get to pick two. If you think universal access is important, and net neutrality is important, you have to be willing to publicly subsidize the construction of telecom infrastructure. PS. Some folks have mentioned BT OpenReach, but it's important to understand what did and did not happen there. First, BT was originally a government-owned corporation before it was privatized, so the government was in a position to set the terms of the privatization. Second, the government used a fairly generous "RPI - X" price cap to certain of BT's services. Between monopoly pricing power and a relatively generous price cap, BT made very healthy returns on investment. See: http://www.academia.edu/3399930/LESSONS_OF_PRIVATISATION_IN_THE_UK http://www.academia.edu/3399930/LESSONS_OF_PRIVATISATION_IN_... (p. 28-9). In the U.S., unbundled DSL was a failure. First, it got caught up in litigation because the infrastructure was never public at any point. Second, it was an almost pure losing proposition for the telecom companies. The FCC mandated a not-very-generous cost-based price control (TELRIC), which made further investments in DSL infrastructure unattractive.
- Retric 12y ago
  I don't see how internet is any less a natural monopoly than electricity. Picture a residential street with 100 completely separate fiber optic networks vs 10 vs 1, now which seems more efficient. It's not like everyone connects to a different Hacker News.
Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago
I've seen solutions where connection provider and Internet service provider aren't same entity. If connection provider connects customers to POP where there are several Internet provders, it makes it trivial to switch service provider. I've also always avoided deals where Internet operator owns cabling. It's much better that those are separated. There was a free offer for fiber connectivity. I refused it, ordered own fibers and now it's possible to choose provider quite freely. Because switching provider doesn't prevent using the same fiber with them.
snitko 12y ago
I wonder. I wonder. I live in Russia and I have 2-3 very good providers on the block constantly competing with each other and offering better connection and prices. They would show up on time and connect you very fast. They fix things quickly (in my government maintained house, the basement once became filled with water after the rain, and the wires were damaged. Even though it wasn't their fault, the ISP came and fixed it the same day). I pay about $120 a year for my internet. It's faster than anything I saw when in the US. And that's in Russia, that authoritarian backward country. Do you know why I pay so little? That's because we have the free-est goddamn ISP market, government hasn't been interfering with it (it's starting to, though). Everything I see government touches is of low quality, whereas everything that's good in my country is private enterprise. And yet, you claim free market fails. Dear american internet users. The only reason you have what you have - shitty speeds and near monopolies - is BECAUSE you have government sticking its nose where it shouldn't (I'd say, it shouldn't stick its nose anywhere, but that's another story). Comcast is the second largest lobbyist in Washington. And still you want to fix the problem by introducing more of the same, that is more regulation and more government, whereas the only way to fix things is to not allow governmental interference in the first place. You can't blame evil Comcast. Why? Because if not them, someone else would lobby and win. If you can lobby, you have to or you're gone.
- gress 12y ago
  How do ISPs gain the rights to dig up the streets in Russia?
  - ahomescu1 12y ago
    Don't know about Russia, but in Romania they didn't dig (or at least not until recently). Most of the ISPs would run their cables between utility poles, trees and buildings directly. This created messes like [1] and [2], but it was cheap. I think back in 2012 Parliament passed a law forcing all ISPs and cable companies to bury the cables. 1 - http://s.wsj.net/media/050710pow14_J_20100506172349.jpg http://s.wsj.net/media/050710pow14_J_20100506172349.jpg 2 - http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6142/6205357944_8056b01e05_m.jpg http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6142/6205357944_8056b01e05_m....
- 12y ago
sacheendra 12y ago
The petroleum industry seems to know how to balance fairness with profit making. ISPs need to learn some lessons from them instead of making decisions which hurt the platform itself in the long run. If all ISPs become like this, people will be very willing to move to an alternative that becomes available. This will just make them more vulnerable to 'disruption'.
whistlecrackers 12y ago
The author of this article -- like most others who write on the topic -- fails to understand that the lack of competition is not due to a "market failure". Rather, it is due to government intervention that allows only a few -- or a single -- provider in an area.
- saucetenuto 12y ago
  From the article: > Municipalities, often for good reason, gave these edge providers a monopoly (the bad kind of monopoly where consumers can’t choose to leave) and often used tax dollars to fund the development. Your guess about the author was mistaken.
  - whistlecrackers 12y ago
    The opening paragraph indicates otherwise. It's not very well-written.
NoPiece 12y ago
This is not the case for the “last mile”. Consumers often can only buy Internet access from a single provider; there is no choice. This is often asserted, but not true. According to the FCC, 97% of consumers have access to at least 2 broadband providers. 67% of people have access to at least 2 providers at 10mbps. Here is the graph from the FCC: http://i.imgur.com/xhn1YCF.png http://i.imgur.com/xhn1YCF.png and the original source doc: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2013/db1224/DOC-324884A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2013...
- driverdan 12y ago
  In most places it's still a duopoly, the choice between DSL from the single telephone company or cable internet from the single cable provider. It's just as bad as a monopoly.
  - rhino369 12y ago
    Duopolies are not just as bad as a monopoly. Duopolies might not create perfect competition, but it normally produces pretty good competition. AMD/Intel, Visa/Mastercard, Airbus/Boeing, etc. all have stiff competition. And your local telecom and cable company are engaged in pretty stiff competition. At least Verizon and Comcast are where I'm at.
- tehwebguy 12y ago
  The "last mile" argument is true, your numbers don't disprove it because they don't represent a percentage of consumers with said broadband options. The report's title is: Percentages of Households Located in Census Tracts Where Providers Report Residential Fixed-Location Connections of Various Speeds as of December 31, 2012 If the census tract where a household is located has access to 2+ broadband providers it satisfies this test, even if the household itself has access to less than 2. An entire tract that includes 2 cable companies that offer 10+ mbps but only offer exclusive service to locations would still satisfy this test even though 0 of the residences have access to 2+ services.
  - 12y ago
deleted 12y ago
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- deleted 12y ago
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staunch 12y ago
What if everyone physically helped? I bet 100 million adults could dig up their streets and lay fiber in a weekend if we made it a point of national pride. Okay, a few power lines would come down and water pipes would burst. If you planned it well and let cities organize volunteers I think you could just maybe pull it off.
rdl 12y ago
DSL competition/local loop unbundling did seem to work pretty well, after a rough few years. I wonder technically how hard it would be to do this with DOCSIS 3, by having channels per competing ISP. There would be a relatively small limit to the number of cable ISPs which could be overlaid on the infrastructure (5?), but that would still be preferable to what we have today.
eglover 12y ago
I hate this debate. It's mostly politics and buzzwords with 0 cost/benefit analysis. Google already buys last mile access and if people keep acting like profits don't already come from customer choice they're going to end up with slow socialized internet and you'll never see 4k video. Net neutrality helps competition... In what world? That's like saying public schools increase competition in education.
jusben1369 12y ago
This feels very much like the kind of thing Marc Andreessen would complain about. Whatever the original good intent government created a monopoly or duopoly in many markets for cable companies. So now we have a lack of competition. Now we need more government regulation on top of the regulation in place to fix the original problem. It seems to me that sites like NetFlix are artificially cheap because they're subsidized by all websites and end users paying into the internet access pool and that artifical cheapness results in? Higher usage which in turn drags down the overall performance of ISP's.
ajb 12y ago
If you want competition, perhaps the simplest way of doing it might be for municipalities to provide universal service at layer -1: run an underground plastic pipe to each house from the street. That way it suddenly becomes cheap for multiple telcos to run fibre to each house, but the municipalities aren't doing anything with an ongoing technical burden which they might be bad at, or running an ongoing service which might be subject to some kind of capture. Of course, this assumes that laying a pipe isn't drastically more expensive than fibre, which I don't know.
- _archon_ 12y ago
  As I understand it, laying pipe is the fundamentally high cost of expanding or rebuilding a network. The cable itself has a non-negligible cost, but getting zoning and town permissions, securing land for junction cabinets, and digging through existing roads and around existing utilities is hugely expensive. What I don't understand is why any new neighborhood could be built without such underground conduit in place. If they're going in for water, sewer, power, etc. then it should be trivial to pop in an additional tube for "future connections."
  - kansface 12y ago
    Cities do this, eg San Francisco, but the pipe is mostly unused.
  - codfrantic 12y ago
    When my part of Amsterdam was built (1) all houses were provided with a phoneline (about 6 different providers), Cable (sadly only 1 provider) and Fiber (about 5 providers). (1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJburg
- kansface 12y ago
  Its not a matter of expense in many cases. Municipalities have agreements that span years with cable providers enforcing their local monopolies in exchange for kickbacks and universal access. It is impossible to compete in these markets with any amount of money.
caster_cp 12y ago
I know this may end up seeming a pretty useless comment, but I cannot miss the opportunity of recommending a VERY good book about this subject, by the guy who coined the term net neutrality: http://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Switch-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Switch-Information-Empires/... The book analyses monopolies in information businesses, since Western Union, going through Bell and proceding all along to the era of Google and Apple. The end of the book is filled with very good insight on the subject. If this is a topic that interests you as much as it interests me, you should get yourself a copy of this.
geekam 12y ago
Honest question from a non-citizen about this line "But he is fighting against very powerful lobbyists..." I do not understand lobbying? Is it a euphemism about bribing a bunch of politicians? If yes, then why isn't it illegal? If no, then can someone please throw some light on it. I was not born here in the US so I am always confused by what "powerful lobbyists" can do to deter someone like the chairman of FCC who can literally make the rules (right?).
- tootie 12y ago
  Lobbyists lobby. All that means is that they share their opinions with government officials. Money need not be involved. When people complain about lobbying it's usually in the context of corporate-sponsored lobbyists who are paid to push their agenda and are spending money. Money can't be paid as an outright bribe (I'm sure it happens, but is pretty rare) but rather in the form of campaign contributions, or occasionally in direct political advertising. Recent Supreme Court rulings have really removed any restrictions on how much can be spent by independent political groups even if they are 100% sponsored by corporations or trade groups or whoever. Wheeler is an appointed leader of an executive branch agency, meaning that he has no campaign fund. Funds can be directed to Congressional campaign funds and Congress can in turn put pressure on his agency (the FCC) to either defund them or rewrite their authority, or to sue them for whatever perceived breach of their existing authority. Theoretically, there is no way a lobbyist can directly influence him.
- icehawk219 12y ago
  Lobbying in its purest form is supposed to be a way for people to have a voice in their government. Anyone in this country can ring up, or write, or email, their representative and push for an issue they feel strongly about. Likewise they can also make campaign contributions to the representatives, or candidates, they like and want to see in office. And the two can very easily be tied together: "I'm donating to your campaign because ...". If you keep it that simple it's a pretty good idea and is one that I think most people can get behind. However in our modern world it really is just blatant bribery. Because corporations and rich individuals are able to donate such vast amounts that they are the only ones people care about. Take a look at how much money is spent during election cycles and it's obscene how many millions are poured into running for office. All that money has to come from somewhere. Say, for arguments sake, you must raise at least $5m to have a chance of winning an election but you think you can only raise about $2m from small donations (individuals) and then a few companies come along offering you nice big money bags if you agree to support their causes. Who do you care most about?
endlessvoid94 12y ago
I went to the fcc.gov website but couldn't figure out how to "file in support". Any tips?
atlantageek 12y ago
How about this. The speed rating that you advertise for your cable modem (or dsl) service should be the slowest download rate on the last mile. In other words if the best I can get is 10mbps from the MSO headend and netflix should be able to prove this then that is what should be advertised. Consumers should get money back when customer service fails.
NickWarner775 12y ago
What we should put on priority is city wide wireless internet capabilities. I think there are some early versions of this in some states but it would be very useful if it were more widely used.
pdkl95 12y ago
In this debate, a lot of people - especially those discussing "paying per GB" - that seem to be missing a key issue. Sometimes this is intentional, but I suspect that is a fairly small minority. The central problem: trying to apply the concept of money and economics to packets doesn't work, because money and economics are tools for handling scarce resources, while the major benefit of the modern "digital age" is that you can copy those bits without a per-copy cost[1]. As bits are not scarce, "pay per GB" becomes a case of applying to wrong tool or trying to solve the wrong problem. Observing that the infinite scalability of bits isn't leading to free high-speed internet for everybody, a better question is: which resources really are scarce? These are the costs that billing should be based upon. With networking, those costs are things like creating the network hardware, installing it, and maintaining that hardware. The first two are a one-time cost. We usually distribute that kind of high-variance, unpredictable cost into "monthly payments" in a variety of industries, and tthe maintenance costs are inherently a "per-unit-time" cost as well. This includes the expensive routers that you need to have anyway to be able to tolerate variations in usage[2]. At no point does the contents ("number of packets") enter into this as a cost. A common rebuttal to the idea of usage not being a cost is to point out the problem of saturation and how an oversubscribed line would the ISP to make expensive upgrades. This problem does exist, and should be part of the billing... because it is a problem about bandwidth, not bits. You don't get to keep billing someone indefinitely for a one-time cost. Attempting to do make up costs like that would be rent-seeking[3]. Various ISPs have shown that billing for a given amount of bandwidth (at some defined defined guarantee of service) can easily be profitable. [1] Electricity costs are not relevant, and are often not relevant anyway in physical layers where you have to send an empty carrier if there is no data. Most of the rest of the "costs" are associated with using those bits (see: CMOS), which is addressed above. [2] The specific amount of tolerance required being defined by the guarantees (sometimes with SLA) offered by the ISP. [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking
- rlpb 12y ago
  To add to this, 95 percentile billing seems to work very well in the UK. But since this isn't useful to an individual end user, this requires the last-mile provider to be required to resell wholesale access under 95 percentile billing, and for multiple ISPs to compete buy under this cost structure and resell to consumers under price structures that work better for them. This works very well in the UK. We have no "net neutrality" problem as a result. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing#95th_percentile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing#95th_percenti...
dnautics 12y ago
so why don't we fix the real issue and disallow municipalities to create monopolized last-mile infrastructure?
AnthonyMouse 12y ago
> Unpaid prioritization is sometimes necessary; if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to stream 4k video, something is going to get prioritized. I don't understand where people get this impression. If there is not enough capacity in the network then yes, some packets have to be dropped, but there is no cause for the ISP to be looking at what kind of packets they are. Building a network where this is considered necessarily is inherently defective because the ISP cannot possibly even know what every kind of packet contains. The only sensible algorithm for ISPs to use is to drop the packets of the users currently transferring the most data. This actually does the right thing in the large majority of cases. If you're using VoIP, your packets don't get dropped because VoIP is not very bandwidth intensive. If you're doing some bulk transfer at full bore then your transfer slows down because you're transferring more data than anybody else. If you're streaming video then you're fine as long as the bitrate is less than what the ISP can currently provide to each active user, and if it isn't then you're screwed in any event. The alternative is begging for gamesmanship. You can easily make a bulk transfer look like a hundred VoIP streams. Especially with P2P. Building a network where cheaters get ahead and innocent but unrecognized protocols get downgraded is completely unreasonable. You can't cheat an algorithm which is completely fair to all protocols.
gameguy43 12y ago
Not Sam's (and pg's) usual style of super-pithy and easy-to-read writing. Did this get rushed out the door?
vog 12y ago
> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem This is not enough. In Germany we already do have that situation, and the big leader (German Telekom, who own the vast majority of cables) just leases them for bad conditions. For example, their own customers got "real" flatrates while leasing competitors got only traffic-based contracts, so when they sell flatrates they have big trouble with traffic-intensive customers. (In the last year, the situation became more complicated, but that's another topic). We should go one step further and require a complete separation of infrastructure providers, ISPs and content providers. That is, a company who owns cables should only lease them to ISPs and should not be allowed to play ISP itself. Also, the ISPs should not be allowed offer content themselves. (Also, the owner of the infrastructure (cables) should probably not be a company at all, but that's another topic and not important here, as long as the separation works.) As a bad analogy, a company who sells cars should not own the streets.

Net neutrality

497 points by austenallred 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

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niels_olson 12y ago
you must be more of an insider than I am. When did Y Combinator become a fan of Wheeler?

natmaster 12y ago

The structural reason is the government itself. There is no free market. There are no checks and balances from consumers. Telecom is a government enabled monopoly, and now you're seeing the dangers of consolidating power into a few corrupt men http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/wake-up-internet-time-to_b_5207303.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-aaron/wake-up-internet-t...

justizin 12y ago

Thank You.

hezakia1 12y ago

"I have met with the Chairman of the FCC, Tom Wheeler, and I believe he is a good actor that wants to do the right thing. But he is fighting against very powerful lobbyists and large companies that want to disrupt the freedom of the Internet." "Prior to working at the FCC, Wheeler worked as a venture capitalist and lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry" -Wikipedia Really? Somehow I doubt that he has turned a full 180 and is now trying to protect the internet against people in his former occupation.

btilly 12y ago
Rule of thumb. Assume people are operating fairly until proven otherwise. If you meet someone and treat them as a good actor, it becomes easier for them to BE one. Truth is he is probably a politician. He will do whatever he thinks is going to get him the most support. So if you can convince him that is going against his former friends, he will do that. (180 flips in policy are very common in politicians.)
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- webmaven 12y ago
  Yes. AssumeGoodFaith: http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/AssumeGoodFaith
rhino369 12y ago
1) Lobbyists are hired guns not true believers or activists. There is no reason to believe he is still beholden to them or something. 2) He worked for cable in until 1984. Cable wasn't even operating in internet then. 3) Most of his tenure when he was a cellular and internet lobbyist was in trying to get more spectrum for wireless use.
mikeyouse 12y ago
Instead of making the lazy connection that he used to be a lobbyist and he must still keep those views, why don't you read some of the stuff he's written over the years, or look at some of the companies he's backed to see if you think he's still beholden to the cable companies? Read this article from Wheeler about SOPA, written long before he was at the FCC: http://www.mobilemusings.net/2012/02/how-sop-was-undone-by-sopa-political.html http://www.mobilemusings.net/2012/02/how-sop-was-undone-by-s... > Backed by Hollywood and others whose business model requires controlled scarcity of product, SOPA in many ways echoed the cable fight of 40 years earlier. The policy matter is not whether copyright holders should receive recompense for their products (they should), but whether legislation to protect that right is aircover to perpetuate old practices at the expense of new networks. There is no doubt there are honest-to-God Web pirates operating in China, Russia, and elsewhere who are stealing copyrighted product. These pirates should be stopped. But SOPA’s effort to accomplish this – which also just happened to strengthen the hand of content companies in other regards – applied concepts more applicable to the command and control networks of yesterday than to the open access networks of today. The result was an unparalleled protest and a political train wreck. Does that sound like some mustache-twirling lobbyist-in-disguise? Or his thinking about net neutrality from 2009: > So, in a world where spectrum licensees are unwilling to part with their assignments and the spectrum agency wants to help while at the same time increasing demand, why isn’t net neutrality an opportunity for the wireless industry? Viewing the current spectrum and net neutrality issues holistically rather than in isolation just might be an opportunity for both the wireless industry and the Administration. > President Obama campaigned on his support for net neutrality. Thus, it should come as no surprise that his FCC chairman has moved promptly on the matter, or that a Democrat-controlled commission is likely to adopt it. How it is implemented thus becomes more important than whether it exists. Rules that recognize the unique characteristics of a spectrum-based service and allow for reasonable network management would seem to be more important than the philosophical debate over whether there should be rules at all. Similarly, a rule that allows for variable pricing is an opportunity for wireless carriers to change the revenue paradigm at a time when revenue per megabyte is in a freefall. http://www.mobilemusings.net/2009/11/net-neutrality-and-spectrum-quest.html http://www.mobilemusings.net/2009/11/net-neutrality-and-spec...
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

mkx 12y ago

Direct link to the proceeding on the fcc website: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/display (Proceeding #14-28 here: http://www.fcc.gov/comments http://www.fcc.gov/comments)

cyorir 12y ago
I'd love to see someone scrape all of these comments (since they're provided in convenient tabular form, might as well!) and analyze them to see if there is any interesting data to be seen. Just browsing through a couple, some people give one-liners but a few comments are all-out, nearly essays. I assume the FCC doesn't read all of these. Do they just use a program to analyze these comments, and gauge overall content?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

bmelton 12y ago

I've been fairly on the fence regarding net neutrality, and this article turned me around on the issue. Previously, it was nearly impossible for me to reconcile a valid reason for regulating the telcos. It's their pipes, they should be able to route it however they want. And aside from that, we've never had net neutrality -- there's no ISP I've ever used that allows unfettered upstream access to port 80 from my home, for example. That was, up til now, my belief, which I understand is not a popular one. That said, the final paragraph actually hit home with me. "As long as consumers don’t have freedom of choice, last-mile traffic discrimination should be per se illegal." If the game is already rigged, then the players should have to play by the same rules. Edit: s/traffic/pipes/g

angersock 12y ago
"It's their traffic, they should be able to route it however they want" It's their pipes, not their traffic. A minor distinction, but an important one. :)
- bmelton 12y ago
  You are 100% correct. I'll edit.
nitrogen 12y ago
there's no ISP I've ever used that allows unfettered upstream access to port 80 from my home, for example. Back in the day, I used to subscribe to Sprint's wireless cable equivalent. It had a range of 30 miles from the base station, and provided cable-equivalent speeds (for the day; the upstream was very slow by today's standards). Notably, they also provided a static IP address and unfettered access to ports 25 and 80, so I ran my own personal web and mail servers. As you realize in your last two lines, if we had more competition, ISPs might still block ports by default for consumer safety, but provide a no-cost, no-hassle option to unblock them.
Fgnfyhrtbtd 12y ago
The claim that the infrastructure is theirs is pretty dubious. Sure, they may be the ones making money hand over fist on the pipes, but we US taxpayers invested $200 billion for them to build out that infrastructure. We paid for the pipes that they are profiting off of and now mismanaging.

Touche 12y ago

> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem. Devil's advocate, why would any company want to be the infrastructure-owning company then? Aren't they in the worst spot?

JetSpiegel 12y ago
Not if it's the government.
niels_olson 12y ago
Not really. With the burden of regulation also comes the impossibility of going out of business.
asadotzler 12y ago
Why would any company want to sell electricity or water? This is not a new problem. Let's stop pretending it is.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  You don't demand CAGR of 20% or more of your electricity or water supply.
- rhino369 12y ago
  It's not a new problem, but the history of telecoms show exactly why it's a bad solution. Do you really want to go back to the days of AT&T controlling everything? Do you want a local PUC deciding how fast your internet should and how much it should cost? Do you want them deciding that 5 dollars more a month isn't worth tripling the speed? It works for power and water because the infrastructure doesn't turn over very fast. If you had your way in the late 1900's we'd all be on ASDL right now.
- danielweber 12y ago
  The electricity and water systems, while definitely needing upkeep, don't need to prepare for a doubling of usage every few years. Edit Plus, the electric company definitely does some kind of demand shaping: shutting off AC compressors on a rolling, as-needed basis. In water emergencies the water company will declare which days I can water the lawn or wash my car. "Utility" isn't synonymous with "totally dumb pipe."

blakerson 12y ago

When you submit a comment, don't forget to click the text link "Confirm" or else your comment will be lost. It's easy to miss since the screen looks like a post-submission confirmation.

the_watcher 12y ago

The wireless v. home internet is a great thing to point out. It's the exact same companies, but operating with less of a monopoly.

jusben1369 12y ago
I now get about 30down/20 up at my house with LTE from ATT and pay for and get 15/5 with ATT U-Verse. 6 months ago we paid maybe $160 per month for two phones and 2 GB per month download. Now it's $160 per month for 4 phones and 10GB. So it seems to me that, when I factor in the cost savings of $50 per month of shutting down cable internet, won't I be happy to soon spend $200 to $250 per month with ATT LTE to get 30/20 and say 100GB per month?

joelhaus 12y ago

Really interested in hearing more about sama's meeting with Wheeler... Did he discuss concerns about putting new rules in place that would not withstand court challenge (i.e. the "commercially reasonable" standard)? Any additional creative ways to help him push Title II classification beyond commenting and contacting congress? Also, you describe a last-mile competitive scenario that is very similar to the energy deregulation that recently occurred in New Jersey. I think it has produced pretty good results for customers. Here's a good/concise explanation of how they did it: http://www.njelectricity.org/about-electric-choice/ http://www.njelectricity.org/about-electric-choice/

njs12345 12y ago

> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem. [2] This is pretty much how it works in the UK; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach It does seem to work pretty well.. there are a wide variety of operators and prices are very low. If I had to pick out common criticisms, Openreach can take their time if you have to deal with them directly (getting a line installed in a new office or apartment can take a few weeks), and there seems to be very limited innovation in the last mile - even in London it's hard to get more than 20mbps, and many people in rural areas are stuck with a crappy DSL line at 2mbps or so.

alex_duf 12y ago
That's also how it works in France.
danielweber 12y ago
I've been led to believe (by conversations here on HN as well as elsewhere) that DSL in the US is operating under that regime -- the phone companies are required to lease them out, so you can have 5 different providers all selling you DSL over the same wires. But DSL bandwidths strongly lag behind cable modem bandwidths because the people laying the wire have no desire to upgrade for the benefit of their competitors. How much truth is there to this?
- exelius 12y ago
  DSL in the US used to operate that way until it failed spectacularly due to the reasons you mention and the FCC reclassified DSL as an information service.
  - bitJericho 12y ago
    I don't know when that happened, but when I had DSL about, oh 6 years ago, they practically begged me to sign up with MSN. I think they got a commission for it. I chose just to go straight with the company who owned the equipment, my phone company.

kokey 12y ago

There is a lot about the wording of this that I really like. It clearly acknowledges the real cause of the problem, which is basically locally rigged markets, and actually suggests a solution that won't simply help entrench the incumbents through increased regulation similar to price and quality fixing.

zoba 12y ago

Folks: If you go here: http://www.fcc.gov/comments http://www.fcc.gov/comments and click 14-28 ("Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet"), it will take you to a form where you can submit your comments.

jonahx 12y ago
In order to post comments, you have to make your name and address available on the site publicly? Am I understanding that correctly?
- danielweber 12y ago
  In general submitting comments on a government action is completely visible to everyone. As a favor to a colleague I once did some data-analysis for public comments. She just shipped me everyone's data. I asked if that was legal and was told that she was required to give it to anyone who asks. This feels weird for a web-comment BBS, but it's totally normal for the government requesting comments on policy.
- zoba 12y ago
  Yeah, looks that way. Putting my name on protecting the internet is something I'm proud to do. Putting my address down is a bit obnoxious though - I doubt they're going to do any verification on these.
  - loumf 12y ago
    They don't have to. If anyone wants to, they could verify it. I helped support an effort to find evidence of astroturfing an FCC request for comment. Having this data enabled us to do that work. Knowing that the data could be verified is supposed to be a deterrent to acting in bad faith. Later, one could do the verification if they doubted the comments were genuine. Given the amount of tech power behind keeping net-neutrality, we should want the process to be as open as possible, so we could verify it ourselves.
    - 12y ago

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

Forced leasing of the last mile nor any kind of actual competition doesn't solve the problem, and the US wireless market is far from healthy. Half of this article is still free-market wishful thinking. The Netherlands, where there are plenty of ISP's to choose from, made Net Neutrality law exactly because the mobile providers "magically" nearly simultaneously announced plans for breaking net neutrality. (And after net neutrality became law, they all decided to raise their data prices.) In a market with a limited number of players (and there will always be a limited number of players, regardless of regulation), it's way too easy to form informal cartels. A free market doesn't mean we magically don't need consumer protection or civil rights. Also "wireless Internet is good"? All mobile services in the US are overpriced, suck balls and generally exploit the lack of regulation in a way that would see consumers in most other countries revolt.

orblivion 12y ago

I'll try not to be an overbearing libertarian here talking about how this is all the government's fault. It's not 100% clear to me and somebody else has that covered. But I do want to put one concept out there as food for thought. The FCC's mission statement (amended in 1996) is the following: "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges." Net Neutrality seems to fit within the spirit of this mission statement. And yet the FCC is also in the business of censoring nipples. Do you want to risk the FCC to be in the business of censoring nipples on the Internet? I can already anticipate what people will say when that day comes. "Look, the government isn't perfect, we don't have to dismantle it, We the People just have to vote somebody into office who will speak for us and implement reasonable standards.". Ok, so when was the last time that happened to your satisfaction? Do you really want to risk having this kind of future on the prospect that reasonable people will be voted into office? This is one reasons libertarians and certain conservatives fight tooth and nail against every increase in the scope of government, no matter how reasonable it may seem. I'm more interested in the future of mesh networking, or any number of things we haven't even thought of, to work around this sort of thing.

markkat 12y ago
To play devil's advocate, Apple also censors nipples. Both can change their stance on nipples. Like private companies, representative governments do respond to popular opinion, the avenues of applying pressure are just different. Government and corporations each have certain advantages and faults by design. I'd prefer a public road and a private car, to a private road and a public car.
CodeMage 12y ago
So if the current implementation of democracy is broken, the solution is to completely abolish government?

cs702 12y ago

I agree, there's no real competition for the "last mile." (If there were real competition, ISPs would be trampling over each other to deliver the best Netflix experience and bragging about it in their advertising campaigns!) Requiring the incumbent mono/duopolistic last-mile ISPs to lease their lines may improve the situation, but I'm not as sure as Sam Altman that it would bring about real competition, because of the difficulties inherent in enforcing "fair, transparent leasing." Incumbents surely would find lots of clever ways to game any leasing scheme imposed by the FCC while technically "complying" with it. I expect it would be better for US consumers than the status quo, though.

Retric 12y ago
One option would be to prevent any company from operating a last mile AND selling it to retail customers. Honestly, what I find most striking is how bad cable boxes are simply because there is no completion.
- MBCook 12y ago
  Recently, due to their (Comcast's) own stupidity, I ended up having a couple of visits from Comcast techs trying to fix an issue. Every single one was wowed by my TiVo. Just seeing how fast it was to respond (which has never been a TiVo strong suit) and how reasonable the interface was amazed them. That's pathetic.
  - JTon 12y ago
    Why bother attacking the comcast techs? These guys are just trying to make a living. The real problems come from well above
    - MBCook 12y ago
      Sorry, I meant due to Comcast's stupidity, not the techs. The two techs I worked with were very nice and clearly frustrated with their inability to help me at times due odd barriers in the way Comcast has things setup, stupid hoops to jump through. I've edited my comment.

rayiner 12y ago

I don't see how a normally libertarian-leaning group of people have embraced regulation rather than deregulation as to this issue. Why do local ISP markets tend towards monopoly, even though it has been illegal since 1992 to grant local cable monopolies? Two words: universal access. It's the same principle that led municipalities to grant taxicab monopolies, of the kind that stifle companies like Uber today. The idea is that in a free market, providers would only focus on the profitable parts of the city, leaving the lower-income areas without service. Universal access is why it's impossible to "disrupt" the market for local internet. A new entrant can't just come into the market and pick off the most desirable customers or the ones that are cheapest to service. They have to be prepared to service everyone, even many customers who can only be served at a loss, in order to be allowed to operate at all. Additional regulation in this space isn't going to eliminate the underlying problem, it will just make infrastructure construction a more unattractive business and decrease investment. There is no free lunch. You can have: neutrality, universal access, or a mostly privately-funded telecom infrastructure, but you only get to pick two. If you think universal access is important, and net neutrality is important, you have to be willing to publicly subsidize the construction of telecom infrastructure. PS. Some folks have mentioned BT OpenReach, but it's important to understand what did and did not happen there. First, BT was originally a government-owned corporation before it was privatized, so the government was in a position to set the terms of the privatization. Second, the government used a fairly generous "RPI - X" price cap to certain of BT's services. Between monopoly pricing power and a relatively generous price cap, BT made very healthy returns on investment. See: http://www.academia.edu/3399930/LESSONS_OF_PRIVATISATION_IN_THE_UK http://www.academia.edu/3399930/LESSONS_OF_PRIVATISATION_IN_... (p. 28-9). In the U.S., unbundled DSL was a failure. First, it got caught up in litigation because the infrastructure was never public at any point. Second, it was an almost pure losing proposition for the telecom companies. The FCC mandated a not-very-generous cost-based price control (TELRIC), which made further investments in DSL infrastructure unattractive.

Retric 12y ago
I don't see how internet is any less a natural monopoly than electricity. Picture a residential street with 100 completely separate fiber optic networks vs 10 vs 1, now which seems more efficient. It's not like everyone connects to a different Hacker News.

Sami_Lehtinen 12y ago

I've seen solutions where connection provider and Internet service provider aren't same entity. If connection provider connects customers to POP where there are several Internet provders, it makes it trivial to switch service provider. I've also always avoided deals where Internet operator owns cabling. It's much better that those are separated. There was a free offer for fiber connectivity. I refused it, ordered own fibers and now it's possible to choose provider quite freely. Because switching provider doesn't prevent using the same fiber with them.

snitko 12y ago

I wonder. I wonder. I live in Russia and I have 2-3 very good providers on the block constantly competing with each other and offering better connection and prices. They would show up on time and connect you very fast. They fix things quickly (in my government maintained house, the basement once became filled with water after the rain, and the wires were damaged. Even though it wasn't their fault, the ISP came and fixed it the same day). I pay about $120 a year for my internet. It's faster than anything I saw when in the US. And that's in Russia, that authoritarian backward country. Do you know why I pay so little? That's because we have the free-est goddamn ISP market, government hasn't been interfering with it (it's starting to, though). Everything I see government touches is of low quality, whereas everything that's good in my country is private enterprise. And yet, you claim free market fails. Dear american internet users. The only reason you have what you have - shitty speeds and near monopolies - is BECAUSE you have government sticking its nose where it shouldn't (I'd say, it shouldn't stick its nose anywhere, but that's another story). Comcast is the second largest lobbyist in Washington. And still you want to fix the problem by introducing more of the same, that is more regulation and more government, whereas the only way to fix things is to not allow governmental interference in the first place. You can't blame evil Comcast. Why? Because if not them, someone else would lobby and win. If you can lobby, you have to or you're gone.

gress 12y ago
How do ISPs gain the rights to dig up the streets in Russia?
- ahomescu1 12y ago
  Don't know about Russia, but in Romania they didn't dig (or at least not until recently). Most of the ISPs would run their cables between utility poles, trees and buildings directly. This created messes like [1] and [2], but it was cheap. I think back in 2012 Parliament passed a law forcing all ISPs and cable companies to bury the cables. 1 - http://s.wsj.net/media/050710pow14_J_20100506172349.jpg http://s.wsj.net/media/050710pow14_J_20100506172349.jpg 2 - http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6142/6205357944_8056b01e05_m.jpg http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6142/6205357944_8056b01e05_m....
12y ago

sacheendra 12y ago

The petroleum industry seems to know how to balance fairness with profit making. ISPs need to learn some lessons from them instead of making decisions which hurt the platform itself in the long run. If all ISPs become like this, people will be very willing to move to an alternative that becomes available. This will just make them more vulnerable to 'disruption'.

whistlecrackers 12y ago

The author of this article -- like most others who write on the topic -- fails to understand that the lack of competition is not due to a "market failure". Rather, it is due to government intervention that allows only a few -- or a single -- provider in an area.

saucetenuto 12y ago
From the article: > Municipalities, often for good reason, gave these edge providers a monopoly (the bad kind of monopoly where consumers can’t choose to leave) and often used tax dollars to fund the development. Your guess about the author was mistaken.
- whistlecrackers 12y ago
  The opening paragraph indicates otherwise. It's not very well-written.

NoPiece 12y ago

This is not the case for the “last mile”. Consumers often can only buy Internet access from a single provider; there is no choice. This is often asserted, but not true. According to the FCC, 97% of consumers have access to at least 2 broadband providers. 67% of people have access to at least 2 providers at 10mbps. Here is the graph from the FCC: http://i.imgur.com/xhn1YCF.png http://i.imgur.com/xhn1YCF.png and the original source doc: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2013/db1224/DOC-324884A1.pdf http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2013...

driverdan 12y ago
In most places it's still a duopoly, the choice between DSL from the single telephone company or cable internet from the single cable provider. It's just as bad as a monopoly.
- rhino369 12y ago
  Duopolies are not just as bad as a monopoly. Duopolies might not create perfect competition, but it normally produces pretty good competition. AMD/Intel, Visa/Mastercard, Airbus/Boeing, etc. all have stiff competition. And your local telecom and cable company are engaged in pretty stiff competition. At least Verizon and Comcast are where I'm at.
tehwebguy 12y ago
The "last mile" argument is true, your numbers don't disprove it because they don't represent a percentage of consumers with said broadband options. The report's title is: Percentages of Households Located in Census Tracts Where Providers Report Residential Fixed-Location Connections of Various Speeds as of December 31, 2012 If the census tract where a household is located has access to 2+ broadband providers it satisfies this test, even if the household itself has access to less than 2. An entire tract that includes 2 cable companies that offer 10+ mbps but only offer exclusive service to locations would still satisfy this test even though 0 of the residences have access to 2+ services.
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staunch 12y ago

What if everyone physically helped? I bet 100 million adults could dig up their streets and lay fiber in a weekend if we made it a point of national pride. Okay, a few power lines would come down and water pipes would burst. If you planned it well and let cities organize volunteers I think you could just maybe pull it off.

rdl 12y ago

DSL competition/local loop unbundling did seem to work pretty well, after a rough few years. I wonder technically how hard it would be to do this with DOCSIS 3, by having channels per competing ISP. There would be a relatively small limit to the number of cable ISPs which could be overlaid on the infrastructure (5?), but that would still be preferable to what we have today.

eglover 12y ago

I hate this debate. It's mostly politics and buzzwords with 0 cost/benefit analysis. Google already buys last mile access and if people keep acting like profits don't already come from customer choice they're going to end up with slow socialized internet and you'll never see 4k video. Net neutrality helps competition... In what world? That's like saying public schools increase competition in education.

jusben1369 12y ago

This feels very much like the kind of thing Marc Andreessen would complain about. Whatever the original good intent government created a monopoly or duopoly in many markets for cable companies. So now we have a lack of competition. Now we need more government regulation on top of the regulation in place to fix the original problem. It seems to me that sites like NetFlix are artificially cheap because they're subsidized by all websites and end users paying into the internet access pool and that artifical cheapness results in? Higher usage which in turn drags down the overall performance of ISP's.

ajb 12y ago

If you want competition, perhaps the simplest way of doing it might be for municipalities to provide universal service at layer -1: run an underground plastic pipe to each house from the street. That way it suddenly becomes cheap for multiple telcos to run fibre to each house, but the municipalities aren't doing anything with an ongoing technical burden which they might be bad at, or running an ongoing service which might be subject to some kind of capture. Of course, this assumes that laying a pipe isn't drastically more expensive than fibre, which I don't know.

_archon_ 12y ago
As I understand it, laying pipe is the fundamentally high cost of expanding or rebuilding a network. The cable itself has a non-negligible cost, but getting zoning and town permissions, securing land for junction cabinets, and digging through existing roads and around existing utilities is hugely expensive. What I don't understand is why any new neighborhood could be built without such underground conduit in place. If they're going in for water, sewer, power, etc. then it should be trivial to pop in an additional tube for "future connections."
- kansface 12y ago
  Cities do this, eg San Francisco, but the pipe is mostly unused.
- codfrantic 12y ago
  When my part of Amsterdam was built (1) all houses were provided with a phoneline (about 6 different providers), Cable (sadly only 1 provider) and Fiber (about 5 providers). (1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJburg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJburg
kansface 12y ago
Its not a matter of expense in many cases. Municipalities have agreements that span years with cable providers enforcing their local monopolies in exchange for kickbacks and universal access. It is impossible to compete in these markets with any amount of money.

caster_cp 12y ago

I know this may end up seeming a pretty useless comment, but I cannot miss the opportunity of recommending a VERY good book about this subject, by the guy who coined the term net neutrality: http://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Switch-Information-Empires/dp/0307390993/ http://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Switch-Information-Empires/... The book analyses monopolies in information businesses, since Western Union, going through Bell and proceding all along to the era of Google and Apple. The end of the book is filled with very good insight on the subject. If this is a topic that interests you as much as it interests me, you should get yourself a copy of this.

geekam 12y ago

Honest question from a non-citizen about this line "But he is fighting against very powerful lobbyists..." I do not understand lobbying? Is it a euphemism about bribing a bunch of politicians? If yes, then why isn't it illegal? If no, then can someone please throw some light on it. I was not born here in the US so I am always confused by what "powerful lobbyists" can do to deter someone like the chairman of FCC who can literally make the rules (right?).

tootie 12y ago
Lobbyists lobby. All that means is that they share their opinions with government officials. Money need not be involved. When people complain about lobbying it's usually in the context of corporate-sponsored lobbyists who are paid to push their agenda and are spending money. Money can't be paid as an outright bribe (I'm sure it happens, but is pretty rare) but rather in the form of campaign contributions, or occasionally in direct political advertising. Recent Supreme Court rulings have really removed any restrictions on how much can be spent by independent political groups even if they are 100% sponsored by corporations or trade groups or whoever. Wheeler is an appointed leader of an executive branch agency, meaning that he has no campaign fund. Funds can be directed to Congressional campaign funds and Congress can in turn put pressure on his agency (the FCC) to either defund them or rewrite their authority, or to sue them for whatever perceived breach of their existing authority. Theoretically, there is no way a lobbyist can directly influence him.
icehawk219 12y ago
Lobbying in its purest form is supposed to be a way for people to have a voice in their government. Anyone in this country can ring up, or write, or email, their representative and push for an issue they feel strongly about. Likewise they can also make campaign contributions to the representatives, or candidates, they like and want to see in office. And the two can very easily be tied together: "I'm donating to your campaign because ...". If you keep it that simple it's a pretty good idea and is one that I think most people can get behind. However in our modern world it really is just blatant bribery. Because corporations and rich individuals are able to donate such vast amounts that they are the only ones people care about. Take a look at how much money is spent during election cycles and it's obscene how many millions are poured into running for office. All that money has to come from somewhere. Say, for arguments sake, you must raise at least $5m to have a chance of winning an election but you think you can only raise about $2m from small donations (individuals) and then a few companies come along offering you nice big money bags if you agree to support their causes. Who do you care most about?

endlessvoid94 12y ago

I went to the fcc.gov website but couldn't figure out how to "file in support". Any tips?

atlantageek 12y ago

How about this. The speed rating that you advertise for your cable modem (or dsl) service should be the slowest download rate on the last mile. In other words if the best I can get is 10mbps from the MSO headend and netflix should be able to prove this then that is what should be advertised. Consumers should get money back when customer service fails.

NickWarner775 12y ago

What we should put on priority is city wide wireless internet capabilities. I think there are some early versions of this in some states but it would be very useful if it were more widely used.

pdkl95 12y ago

In this debate, a lot of people - especially those discussing "paying per GB" - that seem to be missing a key issue. Sometimes this is intentional, but I suspect that is a fairly small minority. The central problem: trying to apply the concept of money and economics to packets doesn't work, because money and economics are tools for handling scarce resources, while the major benefit of the modern "digital age" is that you can copy those bits without a per-copy cost[1]. As bits are not scarce, "pay per GB" becomes a case of applying to wrong tool or trying to solve the wrong problem. Observing that the infinite scalability of bits isn't leading to free high-speed internet for everybody, a better question is: which resources really are scarce? These are the costs that billing should be based upon. With networking, those costs are things like creating the network hardware, installing it, and maintaining that hardware. The first two are a one-time cost. We usually distribute that kind of high-variance, unpredictable cost into "monthly payments" in a variety of industries, and tthe maintenance costs are inherently a "per-unit-time" cost as well. This includes the expensive routers that you need to have anyway to be able to tolerate variations in usage[2]. At no point does the contents ("number of packets") enter into this as a cost. A common rebuttal to the idea of usage not being a cost is to point out the problem of saturation and how an oversubscribed line would the ISP to make expensive upgrades. This problem does exist, and should be part of the billing... because it is a problem about bandwidth, not bits. You don't get to keep billing someone indefinitely for a one-time cost. Attempting to do make up costs like that would be rent-seeking[3]. Various ISPs have shown that billing for a given amount of bandwidth (at some defined defined guarantee of service) can easily be profitable. [1] Electricity costs are not relevant, and are often not relevant anyway in physical layers where you have to send an empty carrier if there is no data. Most of the rest of the "costs" are associated with using those bits (see: CMOS), which is addressed above. [2] The specific amount of tolerance required being defined by the guarantees (sometimes with SLA) offered by the ISP. [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_seeking

rlpb 12y ago
To add to this, 95 percentile billing seems to work very well in the UK. But since this isn't useful to an individual end user, this requires the last-mile provider to be required to resell wholesale access under 95 percentile billing, and for multiple ISPs to compete buy under this cost structure and resell to consumers under price structures that work better for them. This works very well in the UK. We have no "net neutrality" problem as a result. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing#95th_percentile http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing#95th_percenti...

dnautics 12y ago

so why don't we fix the real issue and disallow municipalities to create monopolized last-mile infrastructure?

AnthonyMouse 12y ago

> Unpaid prioritization is sometimes necessary; if everyone in a neighborhood is trying to stream 4k video, something is going to get prioritized. I don't understand where people get this impression. If there is not enough capacity in the network then yes, some packets have to be dropped, but there is no cause for the ISP to be looking at what kind of packets they are. Building a network where this is considered necessarily is inherently defective because the ISP cannot possibly even know what every kind of packet contains. The only sensible algorithm for ISPs to use is to drop the packets of the users currently transferring the most data. This actually does the right thing in the large majority of cases. If you're using VoIP, your packets don't get dropped because VoIP is not very bandwidth intensive. If you're doing some bulk transfer at full bore then your transfer slows down because you're transferring more data than anybody else. If you're streaming video then you're fine as long as the bitrate is less than what the ISP can currently provide to each active user, and if it isn't then you're screwed in any event. The alternative is begging for gamesmanship. You can easily make a bulk transfer look like a hundred VoIP streams. Especially with P2P. Building a network where cheaters get ahead and innocent but unrecognized protocols get downgraded is completely unreasonable. You can't cheat an algorithm which is completely fair to all protocols.

gameguy43 12y ago

Not Sam's (and pg's) usual style of super-pithy and easy-to-read writing. Did this get rushed out the door?

vog 12y ago

> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem This is not enough. In Germany we already do have that situation, and the big leader (German Telekom, who own the vast majority of cables) just leases them for bad conditions. For example, their own customers got "real" flatrates while leasing competitors got only traffic-based contracts, so when they sell flatrates they have big trouble with traffic-intensive customers. (In the last year, the situation became more complicated, but that's another topic). We should go one step further and require a complete separation of infrastructure providers, ISPs and content providers. That is, a company who owns cables should only lease them to ISPs and should not be allowed to play ISP itself. Also, the ISPs should not be allowed offer content themselves. (Also, the owner of the infrastructure (cables) should probably not be a company at all, but that's another topic and not important here, as long as the separation works.) As a bad analogy, a company who sells cars should not own the streets.