One of the biggest arguments I remember being made back when net neutrality was a hot topic was that ISPs would bundle and sell specific websites as tiered plans. Infographics like this one [1] were shared widely. Has this happened in the US? I’ve definitely seen ISPs start to apply data caps and throttling, but haven’t seen the aforementioned packaging (at least with the major ISPs). I ask because this is one of the easy arguments that got many of my less technical friends and family to understand the risks. But if it never happened, they might start to think it’s just a scare tactic and be less interested in vocally supporting it this time around.
We have gotten it, but with services not websites. Mobile providers will sell you an "Unlimited" data plan that throttles everything after 25GB a month. Streaming Spotify and Apple Music won't count against that soft data cap. Streaming other music services will count against it. Video streaming over YouTube, Netflix, etc is capped at 480p levels. If you pay an additional monthly fee, you get upgraded to "Unlimited Plus" which will increase your soft cap to 40GB a month and your video streaming quality to 1080p. It'll also bundle in Netflix's basic level and give you 6 months of Apple+ for "free".
In a more potent example, AT&T did a similar thing with streaming TV service, but they only exempted their own TV service. Using Hulu? Data cap. Fubo? Data cap. AT&T TV Now? Highest quality, no cap.
My understanding of the previous NN rules was the exempted mobile anyway bec they called it necessary network management to ensure a smooth experience for everyone. So unless they also change that (which is unlikely) these rules won’t really fix or change anything, except possibly introduce regulations that will either a) push some polical agenda, or b) create a higher regulatory burden for small players and prevent new entrants.
Didn’t arbitrary data caps start back in the day when torrenting was a big problem? The ISPs started cutting people off because only piracy could explain such heavy usage. That was in the early 00’s iirc, prior to the net neutrality debate.
> That was in the early 00’s iirc, prior to the net neutrality debate.
Net neutrality as a policy concept was first specifically named in 2003, in direct response to actions beginning to occur at the time, and the FCC chair at the time adopted four network freedom principles that are the core of net neutrality as guiding principles (at the time for case-by-case action without general regulation) in 2004; the first action in which they were put into practice was 2005.
The regulatory debate kicked off in earnest in 2010 when the FCC lost a court case over its non-regulatory application of the principles against Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking.
That was the guise to justify the caps but Comcast was setting caps around the data usage of someone streaming Netflix. The overage charges were ridiculous as well, if you used 2x your data cap it would cost you 100x your regular bill.
I had some Nest cameras in addition to Streaming and ended up taking them down because I kept going over.
In Australia my first broadband internet connection worked like that - though when you went over, your bandwidth was heavily throttled until the end of the month unless you upgraded your plan for the month.
As inconvenient as it is, honestly I think data caps are fair pricing. The load difference between a light internet user and a heavy user is orders of magnitude of capacity for the ISP to deal with. Having a flat price for internet sounds similar to having flat price for electricity or water - where your grandma (who turns off all the light switches whenever she leaves a room) would pay the same for electricity as a frat house mining bitcoin in the cupboard.
Sure, customers pay for speed. But residential internet is overprovisioned based on 'reasonable' usage patterns. Thats a good thing - internet would be much more expensive, or forced to be much slower otherwise.
> Having a flat price for internet sounds similar to having flat price for electricity or water - where your grandma (who turns off all the light switches whenever she leaves a room) would pay the same for electricity as a frat house mining bitcoin in the cupboard.
The difference is that to provide you with more electricity, the power company has to burn more natural gas, and pay more for that. When a data network is at less than 100% capacity, higher usage doesn't cost anything, the extra capacity is just lost. So to begin with, data caps that count traffic during off-peak hours are a pure scam; there is no reason for anyone to conserve bandwidth then.
Then you have the on-peak hours. Now, there are different ways to handle this. One is to set pricing that will deter usage, the other is to share the capacity. So you have a 1Gbps fiber connection but the uplink is oversubscribed and during peak hours you each get 800Mbps. People generally prefer this to paying more.
But some people want to have the 1Gbps per second all the time, so they should prefer metered billing, right? Still no. What you have instead is business service. If you want to be sure you have 1Gbps all the time, you pay a higher monthly fee and then get a higher class of service so that you do. Now the lower cost connection gets 1Gbps for 80% of the day and 500Mbps during peak hours -- which is a completely reasonable trade off for your grandma because she gets to save money and 500Mbps is still plenty enough. Whereas if you have some important need to always have the full speed, you can pay more and get it.
There is never any reason to meter it, and some pretty good reasons not to. It screws the people who actually need the guarantee if the metered pricing is ever insufficient to keep the network below 100% capacity. It also makes inefficient use of available capacity, because then you need to keep the network below 100% capacity, but that results in wasted capacity. And, of course, it creates a perverse incentive for the ISP when they can exempt their own services from the cap.
wow - go read up on oversubscription; you might get a better idea about how networks work. The idea that any provider has 100% back end capacity for the full bandwidth of every node connection is beyond laughable.
Though sometimes they do. Do you think the unmetered connection a data center buys is oversubscribed by their ISP? They pay for it not to be, and then they use the full capacity. It's still not metered.
Sonic charges you $30/month for gigabit and $50/month for 10gigabit if I recall correctly. No data caps. These prices are similar to what fiber costs in Europe (or at least France).
Data caps are not fair pricing in a competitive environment but it seems that way when you have a duopoly of competition that collude on plans, pricing, and messaging.
A duopoly? Wow, that sounds sweet. I have one cable company, and a phone company that gave up even offering Internet in my area at all. That phone company is AT&T.
PS: I live in a built-up suburb in a large metro area where the cities are all touching, not in the sticks.
Yeah, but most of those extra charges are because the FCC has failed to classify broadband as Title II. Because pure broadband hasn't been Title II, pure broadband providers have zero rights to get on utility poles.
So Sonic bundles in a voice line that no one uses - but that gives Sonic the right to get onto poles (owned by incumbents) at fair prices, and they can complain to the state and feds if they don't get that.
If we'd gotten classification right from the start (looking at you Michael Powell), that kind of chicanery would be unneccessary.
Still I'm paying $75 a month, fees and taxes included, for a 10Gbps symmetrical connection with no data cap. Happiest I've ever been with a broadband connection.
Voice Federal Subscriber Line Charge Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 6.50
Voice Federal Universal Service Fund Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 2.62
Voice California 911 Emergency Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.30
Voice Oakland Utility Users Tax - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.46
Voice California Public Utility Commission User Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08
Voice FCC Interstate Telecom Service Provider Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.04
Property Tax Allotment Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.64
Voice Regulatory Recovery Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.29
Fiber Phone Service - 5103800838 - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.00
Fiber - Fusion 10Gbps - STI-0555086-8 59.99
Fiber Information - STI-0555086-8 - Data $49.99 Voice $10.00 0.00
Voice California 988 Suicide Prevention Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08
Voice California Public Purpose Program Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.11
The rub is that ISPs, at least in the US, do not charge a fair rate for data and under provision the service because it can compete with their other service offerings. Consumption is a huge problem until you subscribe to their triple play packages, all IP based, then it magically goes away.
A 1 gigabit connection represents 384 Terrabytes of data over a month.
You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree.
The question is what is excessive? 50%? 10%? For me it is 0.4% without up charges.
Additionally on the topic of costs bandwidth is by definition free. Pretty much everybody is okay with $0/gb pricing for network traffic.
Capacity costs money. How much capacity does an excessive data user consume? Certainly not 10x as you surmise, they are only one user.
Just look at their pricing for the answer, I can pay 50% more for unlimited data which means it costs them at most 50% more (certainly less since this is a scheme to earn more revenue).
On the topic of provisioning residential is hugely under provisioned as a cost cutting measure. This isn't all bad as there is never a time where everyone wants all their bandwidth. But blaming slow downs on high bandwidth users is silly when no one bothers to track capacity in these situations.
The reality is they just throttle you to keep bandwidth evenly split during high traffic time (as they should, everyone should share the bottlenecked line equally). Which resolved any capacity problems as much as they care to.
Bandwidth caps have always been a charge that isn't technically a charge and nothing more.
> You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree.
If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally...
Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can avoid any penalties and/or animosity. Network bandwidth is by its very nature a commodity whose demand will only increase into the future, after all, and some people are "getting there first". They shouldn't be chastised as troublemakers or gluttonous or whatever.
I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. If another user is using 40gb per month, it seems unfair to me that both users should pay the same amount of money for their connections.
The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the cost of connection is fixed. But some of it isn’t. The ISP at some point needs to upgrade their network links to handle the extra bandwidth going through their network. And I think it’s reasonable the person who’s using all that bandwidth pay more for the upgrade than people who aren’t using the bandwidth.
The nice thing about having a financial model around bandwidth is we don’t need judgemental words like “excessive” and “gluttonous”. You just pay for what you need. Simple as that.
I don't mind paying for bandwidth. I mind paying well in excess of 1,000x what that bandwidth costs.
Peering costs are effectively zero and so your costs are hardware to peer and bandwidth to the site. They already split bandwidth so we will consider that unimportant for this discussion.
You have a 10 Gb connection to a peer and that connection costs around $10k and lasts 5 years give or take.
So given a per year rate of $2k and 10% maximum utilization the entire bandwidth cost is ~$200/year.
Since that is 4.6 Petabytes that means it costs 4 cents per Terabyte of bandwidth.
Sure I could be off by a bit but an order of magnitude puts it at 40 cents per Terabyte.
Now let's compare Cox's price of $10/50 GB or $200 per Terabyte.
Even inflating the costs by 10x you are looking at 99.8% profit margin on bandwidth fees.
> I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow.
Subscription fees should be set to cover the costs of bandwidth. Right now ISPs want to advertise unlimited service for a certain (already excessive) price and then complain when users actually use the service they're paying for as advertised. They've changed their ads many times over the years as a result of being called out for their word games (see for example https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-d...)
If the ISP has a reasonably capable network the few users who are using tons of bandwidth will be more than made up for by the majority of users who barely use the service at all (the check email/weather/facebook/sports scores crowd)
That's still a clear motivator, considering that "piracy" via bittorrent directly competes with the streaming services that pay for preferential bandwidth allocation.
No, it's not. Cutting back each user's allotment temporarily during times of congestion is necessary, but otherwise there's no technical reason to throttle, let alone choose one particular kind of app.
If radio spectrum is so scarce, how are Mobile and Verizon selling unlimited 5g home internet service?
Additionally, 5G is closer to wifi than anything else. They're putting a lot more access points with shorter range around closer to homes. And it does become congested during high traffic times.
That's an ideal example of the limitation. A single tower with a wide range can't handle the same volume of devices in the area. So by using 5G it's just closer and closer to home, with fewer people using it at each point.
No question that it solves the last mile problem for these companies though. It's a lot easier to run fiber to an access point at the edge of your neighborhood than it is to run it to every house in that neighborhood.
Eh, I'd argue it's still a business decision. It's still possible to find "true unlimited" data plans with some companies. I've got one with Cricket Wireless.
They do mess with your data connection though[0]. For instance, they automatically downgrade video and appear to compress images "on your behalf"[0] regardless of what plan you're on.
I'm somewhat dubious on the idea that their Cricket More plan is actually unlimited, but I'm pressed for time and can't read their more dense terms of service around the plan, but I'm assuming they have a congestion clause buried in there, despite what the linked FAQ claims
I know how they do that with video, but how do they extra compress images when most traffic is https?
It works with video because all video sites automatically adjust quality based on throughput so they just figure out when you’re streaming video and then throttle. But most websites don’t automatically change image quality based on throughput and pages load more quickly and are harder to shape…
No idea, however from the linked page, they say they do:
>Cricket compresses all images that are embedded in web pages in either of two industry standard formats (JPEG and GIF), regardless of the source or content of the web page or the application used to view it. Cricket strives to compress web page images to provide a high quality user experience where the average consumer should not notice a difference between the source image and the compressed image.
The only way is if there’s some cooperation between the site and ISP where the site knows to apply extra compression for the ISPs address range. Otherwise I don’t see how that could work (and also trivially bypassed when on VPN or even something like Apple Private Relay although the latter may still tunnel through some kind of mobile ISP info - not sure)
It's unlimited but throttled during peak usage so that the primary network customers get priority. I think cricket wireless is an MNVO, see the drawbacks of an MNVO here:
Let's take the null hypothesis that these incentives push all video streaming to Apple+. The total bandwidth hasn't changed, all that's happened is that is it's only streamed over Apple+ now. How does this help with their spectrum constraints?
T-Mobile USA has a pretty user friendly version of this on many/most of its plans.
If a music streaming service participates to label its traffic, that data is zero rated for eligible users.
If a video streaming service participates to label its traffic and limit bandwidth (advertising says 480p, but I think it's really a bitrate cap), then data is zero rated for eligible users. On plans with a high speed data cap, users can opt out of the bandwidth limiting and get potentially higher quality streaming (depending on network conditions) but the data usage will be charged against the cap.
There's no charge for providers to participate.
I don't know how zero-rating music streaming helps with spectrum; that's probably more of an inducement to use data, but music streaming is low bandwidth, and maybe there's some magic to accumulate those packets and send as a batch rather than one at a time and therefore save some framing bandwidth.
For video it's clearly a bandwidth thing. If you can reduce to the target, that's good for their spectrum management, so you get a carrot. Also, it encourages bandwidth sensitive streaming (which many services were already doing), so that if the conditions are poor for a particular user/cell, video bandwidth will be responsive and reduce automatically.
So are you trying to sell the ability to graph who has seen what? Because that's essentially what that scheme does. No more dumb pipes, you're handing over tons of business recod based metadata out to ISP's to inevitably monetize, which, oh, coincidentally, waives any expectation of privacy legally speaking between the endpoints given our current judicial attitude toward Third Party Doctrine.
No. While it's certainly easiest to identify video streaming if the content is served in the clear, it's also possible to mark streams as video without making the content (or its identifiers) available. If everything is limited to 1.5 Mbps, you're just letting the carrier know who is watching something; but it's not hard to guess that someone is watching something based on the origin of traffic and other signs: if you download a short burst of data from Netflix CDN, you're probably running the fast.com speed test; if it's about 40 minutes of sustained data transfer, you probably watched a TV episode, if it's more like 2 hours, it was likely a movie, etc.
There's a benefit to the video providers, the carrier, and users, if this is done in a reasonable way. And I think T-Mobile's approach is the most reasonable way I've seen (at least from what's been said publicly)
"If you are a streaming service provider click here[1], send us an email and we'll get back to you to begin the process. T-Mobile will review all submissions to ensure identification of video stream and technical requirements, including optimization for mobile viewing."
They do have a requirement that "Only lawful and licensed video content is eligible for the offering" And that you be capable of making the stream identifiable as video content and do adaptive bitrate streaming (target of 1.5 Mbps)
The only public documentation for service providers I found was in the consumer faq [2] under "I’m a streaming service provider – how do I learn more?"
It's quite probable that they won't engage with a home media server, because you're operating under fair use rather than an explicit license, or because there's too many individual home media servers and some home media servers serve media that's unlicensed and also not within the scope of fair user. But it doesn't hurt to ask and see what you get back.
Alternately, a paper from 2016 [3], suggests you could make your content available in a form that appears to be one of the supported services, and likely get mischaracterized as that service and have your data zero-rated as a result. Not sure if anyone is still running video over http in 2016, but it's worth a try. It should be apparent if it works, as when it does, T-Mobile will limit streaming bandwidth to 1.5 Mbps.
Hello, Finland here. I have a true unlimited phone plan. Unlimited texts, unlimited calls, 200Mbit/s of bandwidth with unlimited data. 27€ per month. Yes, the bandwidth is capped, but getting 200 megs is possible most of the time, it's really more of an exception to not get the full speed. Sometimes some cells can become congested, but that's really rare.
There are about 70 cities in the world with a larger population than the whole of country of Finland - so maybe there is a representativeness challenge in this comparison.
Error correction, packet broadcasting per node, dynamic load rebalancing... the real world costs of any network increase proportional to the square of the nodes.
Playing devil’s advocate here. But why is it so controversial that not all the traffic is the same. It is much easier for an ISP to serve Spotify very efficiently if they patterns, data centers and even have some private links in place with Spotify. The issue I have with it is they should not be calling it unlimited.
How do carriers supposedly cap streaming quality? As long as the data is encrypted, isn't it impossible for the carrier to tell what quality a video is?
I'm limited to standard definition streaming, yet can stream 1080p just fine on mobile data.
It's worse for competition, yeah. If I want to start a music streaming service, I'm evaluated not on the quality of my service but the fact that I don't have a deal in place with these carriers.
If it's technically feasible not to limit the bandwidth for some services, it's technically feasible to at least reduce the throttling for everyone.
2) We're not in the NN system as it was repealed so the implicit idea in your post that the current system is from NN is false.
3) We wouldn't need NN though if we actually had anti-trust enforcement; zero-rating is a monopolistic practice. It's akin to having preferential treatment on rail lines so consumers can't get other's goods as easily.
well i guess everybody is entitled to their own opinion but i personally prefer the one that lets me use more data even though ideally i would be able to use more data for any online service and not just some of them.
>We're not in the NN system as it was repealed so the implicit idea in your post that the current system is from NN is false.
I definitely did not say the "current system" is from NN, and neither did the OP i was replying to.
"pre-NN" system is having a datacap where any additional bandwidth usage beyond that datacap is throttled or outright denied.
"current system" is having a datacap but certain services are not counted towards that datacap, and all other services are throttled or outright denied once the datacap is exceeded.
>We wouldn't need NN though if we actually had anti-trust enforcement; zero-rating is a monopolistic practice. It's akin to having preferential treatment on rail lines so consumers can't get other's goods as easily.
rail lines are not equivalent to ISP zero-rating.
Datacaps are a policy adopted by ISPs of treating bandwidth as a consumable resource when it is in fact not a consumable resource. Datacaps are idiotic and arbitrary[1] but they predate the FCC's decision to repeal net neutrality by at least half a decade.
Offering an exception to a datacap for a given service would be akin to the train being able to carry additional cargo beyond its capacity with no increased fuel consumption or inertia but only for a specific class of cargo.
[1] if ISPs actually cared about their stated goal of reducing network congestion then they would weight traffic based on overall network congestion so that consumers are incentivized to download more data during non-peak hours but i digress.
One problem is that it's anti-competitive in the sense that a new video streaming service cannot compete because an ISP will charge extra to use them but not for (eg.) Netflix.
> Bandwidth is finite and if you have a little more money, you should be able to pay for it.
That's fine, but there's a difference between paying for bandwidth and having different rates for bandwidth depending on the destination.
>We have gotten it, but with services not websites.
Misinformation.
Under all previously proposed NN rules, throttling is always allowed for network congestion and mobile actually does have a legitimate network congestion issue.
I personally would rather T-Mobile make a promise about the speeds for the first 25GB rather than say "UNLIMITED*" and make that asterisk any time they feel like it.
Likewise, they could always make allow-lists in throttling, they just couldn't make block-lists.
Nothing in your example would be better under NN rules as actually defined.
You didn't address anything after the first two sentences.
> Streaming Spotify and Apple Music won't count against that soft data cap. Streaming other music services will count against it. Video streaming over YouTube, Netflix, etc is capped at 480p levels. If you pay an additional monthly fee, you get upgraded to "Unlimited Plus" which will increase your soft cap to 40GB a month and your video streaming quality to 1080p. It'll also bundle in Netflix's basic level and give you 6 months of Apple+ for "free".
What they are saying is, even in times of low/no congestion, select services are not being counted against a consumer's data cap.
There's a difference between throttling with the network is at capacity, and throttling youtube at 480p because you offer a different service. Or just simply throttling video.
This doesn't have anything to do with the repeal of the FCC's net neutrality. You can see from the appeals court case[1], page 16 and 17, that mobile networks were exempt from the anti-discrimination rules:
> The anti-discrimination rule applied only to fixed broadband. Id. According to the Commission, mobile broadband warranted different treatment because, among other things, “the mobile ecosystem is experiencing very rapid innovation and change,”
I have to agree with the other posts. The disaster scenarios we were told would happen didn't happen. Now people are pointing to things completely unconnected to the repeal of net neutrality as evidence that it caused problems.
I uncritically trusted the claims of activists when the debate first started, but in the years since I've begun to feel foolish for doing so. It seems clear a lot of them are peddling misinformation. This whole thing has lead me to question some of the extreme doomsday scenarios people are pushing in other areas as well.
How is that remotely the same thing? The infographic above and others clearly claim that ISPs will be blocking services then requiring you to pay for them separately.
Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality").
Isn't it just shifting the goal posts after the original claims of NN campaigners were discredited and never materialized in any remote fashion after NN was abolished?
Let us not forget that net neutrality campaigning was primarily pushed by Netflix, who refused to pay Verizon for infrastructure upgrades as per industry standard going back decades.
The standard is that the disproportionate data user pays to upgrade the ports, equipment and/or line infrastructure. This is absolutely fair. A parallel is electricity capacity for homes and businesses, if you require more electricity than the local street infrastructure can provide you pay the power company to upgrade it to accommodate you. Only fair, the heavy users pay.
The movement carried water for deadbeat corpos. Netflix wanted to saturate internet links and balked at paying Verizon for new switches and pipes -- so they got their subscribers to complain.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality
What, in your perspective, is the difference between "I'll charge you more for A than for B" and "I'll charge you less for B than A"? Or a difference between "Charging more for a 'website' such as Yahoo" vs "Charging less for a 'service' such as Netflix"?
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Further, all the utility analogies you provide feel inapplicable to the point of being disingenuous. The "Heavy users pay" is "I need a bigger pipe" and is the segregation of internet service tiers by bandwidth ($10 for 100mbps, $100 for 1gps, or whatever). The "I will then, on top of that, charge you extra for arbitrary content that I don't produce, and you will have no choice as I have an effective government approved monopoly", has limited parallel that I'm aware of.
A person using more electricity will pay more. A person needing more bandwidth will pay more. Those are valid analogies in my mind. Other shenanigans such as IPSs blocking certain websites, injecting ads or weird stuff into your pages, asking more money for certain websites (or less money for other, which is equivalent), imposing their own DNS, spying on you, etc, are fairly unique to this industry I think.
>The "I will then, on top of that, charge you extra for arbitrary content that I don't produce, and you will have no choice as I have an effective government approved monopoly", has limited parallel that I'm aware of.
It has limited parallel because it's nuts. It'd be like BMW/Toyota/whoever charging you an extra monthly fee if you want to drive your car to work and otherwise the car just refuses to go there. For a slightly closer analogy, the car would be leased rather than owned, but it's an extra clause in addition to the mileage limit.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality").
UPS doesn't care if it is a Nike shirt or a Gucci shirt in a box, They just deliver the box where it is meant to go. Why should it be any different for an ISP?
> UPS doesn't care if it is a Nike shirt or a Gucci shirt in a box, They just deliver the box where it is meant to go. Why should it be any different for an ISP?
While I like NN there is a strict different between an ISP and UPS because of the digital/physical realm.
When UPS delivers a Nike shirt they have to deliver that specific shirt to that specific person. An ISP needent deliver a specific shirt that originated from Nike Factory to that specific person; they can give a "locally" stored copied of the shirt. This means that the ISP could locally store say the top 4 million songs and so the expense of delivering those songs is practically zero while transporting a song from LA to NYC covers significantly more miles of fiber.
My privacy is my own. The ISP does not have a right whatsoever to determine whether it has content I want. The content that the ISP has is tainted specifically because it's not the exact content that I wanted. It's not the same bitrate, it's not the same quality, it's not the same lack-of-advertisements, and it's not the same guarantee of privacy.
It's not particularly enlightening to point out that two things in an analogy are different – if they weren't, the analogy would be useless. "An apple is like an apple." Okay.
An ISP that wishes to store a "local copy" of t-shirts or songs, in order to make more money, can store a Nike t-shirt just as easily as a Gucci t-shirt, and can store a Nikki Minaj song just as easily as a Gucci Mane song. Thus, nothing actually blocks the ISP from treating the two equally.
Alternatively, the ISP can store nothing, and just be a basic ISP. Nobody is forcing them to store anything, much less do so preferentially depending on brand. And if they personally choose to, to make more money, it's their responsibility to make sure they don't differentiate between brands, because that violates net neutrality.
They do, big shippers pay less because they cost less to support and UPS makes it up in volume. Pirateship.com takes advantage of that discounted volume rate, compare their prices to the ones on UPS’s website.
Of course they do, its just invisible to the consumer. It is way cheaper for amazon to ship something via UPS than it is for you, because Amazon and UPS have negotiated contracts in place.
Which is a specialty service offering set up and agreed upon by buyer and seller of the service using the dumb pipe.
So, opt-in versus required. Net neutrality certainly allows special pipes and protocols to be set up where desired, if you desire to stretch the analogy beyond its intent.
UPS cares if you are shipping something that is a physical or legal hazard for them, because they are responsible for the safety of their employees, facilities, and the other packages.
If you can make a reasonable argument that one kind of data or another creates a meaningful hazard for the pipe that carries it, please do.
I just think this analogy sounds like someone who has never actually shipped something. There are many rules for shipping—-it is silly to say that UPS just takes the box and ships it without a care. UPS cares if the content is fragile, illegal, dangerous to ship, overweight, alive, high value, perishable, tobacco, magnetic.. the list goes on and on.
You are not in the right on this one. Your argument is drifting far away from what net neutrality even is.
UPS does not care what what they're carrying unless it shits or explodes. Anything meeting most of your criteria, they simply will not ship in the first place. Net neutrality specifically mitigates rent-seeking behavior, implying if UPS knew there was something expensive in the box, they'd shake you down for more money to ship it. The only time they do this is in handling hazmat.
They sort of do this in reverse though when it comes to damage claims. They'll first try to find a reason not to pay out, but once they know what's in the box, they angle to reimburse you the least possible amount of money for it. I can't tell you how many times we would lose/destroy priceless stuff like a signed baseball from some World Series and write a check...for the $3 it cost to buy a new baseball (TBF, especially with prototypes/historical artifacts, many such claims are dog-ate-my-homework fraudulent).
Here's an actual case: a container ship carrying designer leather products from Italy took on water and a claim was made for $100k worth of retail losses. We were never going to pay that, since there's no guaranteeing any amount of it would have sold at that price, and anybody that makes money from loss is either profiteering or committing fraud (see: coffin ship). The most we would have paid out was at the price the factory sold it to the designer for ($2-$10 per diem), but IIRC we denied it since no damage was reported along the way. They didn't insure anything, on paper $100k worth of product was lost, and they didn't give a shit-- in reality they lost $2k in drop-shipped crap stamped with an expensive logo. Designer goods are inherently worthless.
Net neutrality is, quite literally, treating all packets of data the same, not caring about what type of data it is. An analogy that says it’s like UPS, because UPS will ship any box and it doesnt care about what’s in it, is a bad analogy because UPS will gladly refuse to ship many things—-it DOES care what’s in the box.
They care about own safety, not about the service segmentation here. If the packets themselves could be dangerous for some reason (for example exploits for the core routing hardware), of course net neutral ISPs would drop them too.
>Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality,
Excluding some services from bandwidth cap is perhaps slightly less extreme than throttling specific services, which is itself less extreme than blocking those services outright. All are violations of net neutrality. The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.
> The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.
They do that.
If your plan has, say, a 1 TB cap with no services that are exempt from the data cap you can pick any 1 TB from any mix of services you want without hitting your cap.
If your plan has 1 TB cap but say Netflix is exempt from the cap you can still pick the exact same 1 TB from the exact same mix of services without hitting your cap.
A 1TB cap really hides the issue. Let's reflect on the impact with a more restrictive cap, say, 10GB.
If my ISP gives me 10GB from any service that isn't big_video_streamer but unlimited data from big_video_streamer it's immediately obvious that while they're not 'deciding' how I use their connectivity they're definitely 'coercing' me into going with big_video_streamer if I want to stream videos, which isn't their job as - ideally - a neutral conduit for traffic.
That's obviously and blatantly them putting their thumb on the scale. It'd be like if Burger King were to pay car manufacturers to make it so that the second half of the gas tank only works for driving to Burger King drive-throughs. That's not how cars should work and ISPs shouldn't pull the same kind of shit.
A closer analogy would be that its like if you go through a Burger King drive-through they also give you gas to bring your tank back up to what it was when you started on your trip to Burger King.
You said that "The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it".
My point is that if you have paid for a fixed amount of data per month, and you are going to use under that amount when you decide entirely on your own how to use it, then whether or not the ISP also gives you some free data with usage restrictions doesn't change that.
If your ISP does not have any exemptions and then adds some and you miss the announcement you would never even notice, except maybe if you track your usage throughout the month to make sure you aren't going to go over and you notice they are reporting lower usage than you expect.
Yes, it is putting a thumb on the scale, but I don't see how this is really different than any of the other ways companies often give free access to third party products to try to make the company more attractive to customers.
That may be anticompetitive, but if so it should be dealt with under antitrust. Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.
> The infographic above and others clearly claim that ISPs will be blocking services then requiring you to pay for them separately.
Exempting your own and partner services from a data cap that effectively limits use of other services is functionally the same thing, but with only one package available that is mandatory for purchase.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality,
IIRC, it would have on generally violated the most recent set of US net neutrality regulations and violates the broad principles articulated for net neutrality, whether or not it violates specific regulatory franeworks existing in Europe.
Netflix pays their upstream ISP to saturate the link they pay for.
Why should Verizon, Comcast and others demand payment from Netflix?
They are connecting customers to the internet, and should be peered to IXs that can feed what their customers need. Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network to lighten the burden on their IX uplink.
It will get untenable if every random ISP charges each content provider.
That's not what happened. Netflix pays their bandwidth middleman, and their bandwidth middleman subsequently refused to pay for upgrades for the massive usage of their customer.
Netflix should have either demanded their middleman pay, moved to a different middleman, or offered to sign an agreement with the companies directly.
Let's put it another way. Let's say Netflix's bandwidth middleman hosts both Netflix and a critical telehealth operator. Should Verizon shake down or throttle the telehealth service, potentially putting health at risk, in order to prop up entertainment content streams for a deadbeat company? Of course only Netflix gets throttled, they're degrading the rest of the internet and not paying for upgrades.
Netflix being able to degrade the internet for other services traversing the same lines while refusing to pay (again, industry standard) is greed.
>Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network
We don't want to pay, but give us free rack space to solve this problem?
Netflix shouldn't pay their ISP and some other ISP to deliver traffic. That's unreasonable.
But if Netflix connects directly to Verizon, Comcast, etc, it's not inheriently unreasonable for Netflix to pay for that connection. Verizon, Comcast and many other telcos and cablecos are national transit ISPs as well as residential ISPs, and paying a transit ISP to get packets to the ISP's customers (and peers) is totally normal.
If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in New York, they're using Comcast as a transit network. If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in Los Angeles, they're not, and getting the traffic between their house and the IX in Los Angeles is what Comcast is charging their own customers for.
What other transit ISP gives you a discount because the traffic is local?
Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
Traditional wired telephone networks are almost always caller pays (although cellphones in the US are caller pays toll, callee pays for wireless segment), but IP networking has always been both end points pay. It's not some new thing Comcast (or whoever) invented in 2006 or whenever.
If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection. Maybe a bit less cost for 'paid peering' vs a full transit connection.
In the old days of dial-up, all you needed to start an ISP was two T1s, one for your uplink, one for your modem pool. Once you got a little bigger, you'd look to see what content networks you could peer with to reduce your transit budget. After the move to broadband which has a bias towards only two, maybe three companies running wires to homes, and the FCCs abandonment of mandatory line sharing from the telecom act of 1996, we run into the situation where there's a handful of residential ISPs nationwide, and they almost all run transit networks, and there's no longer an economic incentive for them to peer with content networks --- they can justify peering with most other transit ISPs, so there's no cost savings from peering; and they have no competitive need to offer better service.
The solution isn't mandating 'neutral treatment', it's mandating competitive local access markets via mandatory line sharing[1], and splitting up the national transit business from the last-mile business, ala 1984 AT&T.
[1] But with tighter regulations, so that incumbents can't cross-subsidize retail prices to be lower than wholesale pricing as was common in the early 2000s before mandatory line sharing ended; building out new wiring where line sharing was infeasible was another common loophole. It'd be way more competitive if the wiring providers weren't permitted to offer retail services, but that might be a bit too meddlesome.
> What other transit ISP gives you a discount because the traffic is local?
You don't need transit for local traffic, the destination network is already in the same IX as you are. Transit is the thing that carries traffic from one IX to the others.
> Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
If you and your customer are both in the same IX you don't use a transit ISP at all.
> If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection.
Paying Cogent (or Comcast) to carry traffic from one IX to another is normal; otherwise you would need to run your own fiber or have a presence in the other IX and it allows you to avoid that cost.
But if you do have a presence in the other IX, what are you paying them for? It's just a monopoly rent because they control the only network path to their residential customers.
Zero rating has been banned in the EU because two court rulings found that zero rating's economic discrimination was just as bad as technical discrimination.
You can't find or subscribe to a zero rating plan in the EU any more.
Except in Portugal where the equivalent of the FCC has so little power the telecoms do what they want without any fear.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality
Erm... Exempting a service's traffic from a restriction is the literal textbook definition of 'against net neutrality'
Weird misinformation here.
Just to clarify for the benefit of the audience:
Net Neutrality is when a carrier treats all data packets as equal, without regard to origin, destination, or provider.
I believe 'fair' QoS is exempted (you're allowed to prioritise low-latency traffic such as VOIP) but only if you throw all VOIP packets into the same 'high priority' queue regardless of software, provider, destination, etc.
If you charge on a per-byte basis but exempt some traffic from those charges, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.
If you have a data cap but exempt some traffic from that cap, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.
The sky was supposed to fall if net neutrality were abrogated, and IME, that hasn't happened. The only change I (and people I know) witnessed was throttling once broad data limits were exceeded, which IIRC wasn't what was at stake, and which I for one didn't object to, i.e., that people would have to pay for what they use. In short, I have not seen bandwidth or pricing weaponized at all to target specific businesses other than for morally objectionable content. Maybe my awareness is limited - I can't confirm that!
The sky was supposed to fall if net neutrality were abrogated, and IME, that hasn't happened.
ISPs aren't run by complete idiots. They knew this current switch back was a likely possibility. If they had rushed to implement service tiers, it would have given even more ammunition to the net neutrality debate.
Now they can say "See we had a chance for a few years to do it and didn't, so we need to pass laws to make sure net neutrality is illegal to protect our freedom." They'll pay some politicians to push something like the "Internet Freedom Act" and then they'll be good to go.
And how long do you expect your timeline to playout on? It's been more than 6 years now, and we're talking about corporations that regularly have difficulty seeing beyond next quarter, and have absolutely no qualms pissing off the entire world if it means another buck. Why wouldn't they have rushed to enact the new laws immediately under an FCC political establishment that would have been favorable to such?
It seems to me that simple market economics offers a compelling alternative. The more they screw the customer, the more room there is for new or existing competitor, be that something like Starlink or one of the many micro-ISPs being able to grow a bit. You need to create some economic model where these tiers are both profitable and don't expose you to a reasonable fear of competition. That seems quite difficult to do.
This is just not true. There is no competition. Cities have Comcast or Spectrum; they don't have both. #3 and #4 in Wireless just merged. It is literally T-mobile, Verizon, or AT&T. Where would the consumers go to? They all do the exact same thing. And once one competitor makes the switch, they all will, since they all make more money. This literally happened when T-mobile sold streaming as an addon package [0] or when AT&T zero rated DirecTV on their wireless plans.
The only reason the internet hasn't gotten significantly worse is because we DID have net neutrality for a while, and they knew it would come back once Democrats had a majority on the FCC.
It's not gotten worse strictly because California passed a very strong net neutrality law and the telcos were hoping the legal system would kill that so they could do whatever they pleased.
> Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously in January 2022 that California's net neutrality law may continue to be enforced and cannot be overridden by the FCC as, current as of the decision, Internet services were classified as information services
There is precedent of this happening in countries without Net Neutrality laws such as the Philippines, where ISPs have zero-rating agreements with operators of popular websites, which effectively cements the position of incumbents.
There are 2 'net neutrality' items in play and are conflated and team lines drawn up ages ago.
One is the double charging of services. Buy service XYZ on the internet then the ISP says 'hey you buy or special package or ABC is throttled'. That is the one most people think of when they hear net neutrality. Or 'we have not cut a deal with XYZ no data for you'.
Then there is the 'stop the cap' ones. Where 'hey here is a nice unlimited service except when you use more than X data then its not'. 'want more data pay for more on top of your "unlimited" plan'.
Then instead of passing laws to do it right they pretzelled the existing laws. Made some up and said yep thats good. Each "side" of the argument has had control of both houses and the presidential. Yet none of them got it done. Instead we are going to end up with more rubish and no real laws. Just made up interpretations that can change on a whim.
This can't really be used to defend the abrogation of net neutrality, the sky might still fall, the only thing holding it up is how it's perceived in focus groups and that there is still some competition in the ISP market
The two are not set in stone
Give it a few years of throttling youtube to 480p if you don't have a premium plan and regular consumers will get used to more
At one of my previous places, AT&T offered FTTN, but only if you used their router. The router somehow managed to break next-level NAT, so there was no way to use FTTN without giving AT&T access to your LAN. That violates California's network neutrality laws that prohibit discriminating against certain devices (though so does every single cell carrier plan that prohibits tethering, or swapping a phone with a tablet or a 5G dongle).
The cell phone companies around here also all have some form of blurring video for some streaming providers, and bundling subscriptions to other video providers.
Comcast definitely weaponized data caps with absurd overage fees, and also didn't invest in backend network infrastructure until they were under 3MBps average video streaming speeds on their 100MBps plans.
> Comcast definitely weaponized data caps with absurd overage fees, and also didn't invest in backend network infrastructure until they were under 3MBps average video streaming speeds on their 100MBps plans.
This is almost certainly related to Comcast's handoffs to content providers, and not their backend which had plenty of capacity for commercial customers.
They instead hit consumers with data caps which you either pay overages against, or they had you sign up for additional add on which was, on average, $20-$30 more a month increase in your bill, for the same traffic, under net neutrality terms, that would not have cost more, because this would not be allowed.
I've seen the margins ISPs make on these connections, and they went from acceptable but good to absurd, its not like they were starved by net neutrality either.
The sky can’t fall, it’s not really physically possible. Also, maybe isps backed off for now, who’s to say this won’t change in the future? Shareholder value trumps all, you know
I seem to recall seeing it more a few years ago but there were definitely "Unlimited whatsapp" etc. style deals around. Maybe it's less relevant as data has gotten cheap enough so as to be a non-issue for most people.
NN rules didn’t (and likely won’t) affect mobile carriers due to the limited nature of wireless spectrum, the FCC views throttling and data prioritization as a necessary evil.
This is not true. FCC net neutrality rules apply to mobile carriers.
So do the ones in California Europe India and Canada.
There is leewway for a reasonable ment, but those measures can only be used temporarily during times of congestion and have to be as application agnostic as possible
If that is the case, then 100% of cell carriers are in violation of the law.
If you know of a counterexample I'd like to hear it. In particular, California network neutrality says they can't discriminate against services or devices.
Complying with the law would imply that any 5G plan could work with any 5G device, so people could use their $10/month tablet add on plans for home broadband and laptops / tethering.
Similarly no company would be offering bundles or degrading streaming bandwidth on a per-service basis.
For what it's worth, Comcast is also obviously in violation of the above rules, as are the AT&T business 5G terms of service (which specifically say you can't use the service for residential services, such as streaming video, but you can use it for things like video conferencing.)
It could just be that the law is not being enforced.
ISPs are offering 'Netflix-included' or discounted Disney+ plans. I don't know how they account for downloads from these services but the bundling is definitely happening.
Data caps (and services being excluded from them) are different though, aren't they? IIRC these were already happening before net neutrality rules were removed.
It’s about different data caps for different services. It’s favoring one service over another. Especially when many of those services are owned by the same company that owns the ISP, it’s completely anti-competitive.
When your new high bandwidth service counts against a customer’s data cap, but your Comcast owned competitor’s data doesn’t, how are you supposed to fairly compete?
Data caps existed, but exempting services from specific ones it the problem. Especially when it becomes "pay us to get your service excluded from the caps".
When a zero-rating agreement
is successfully negotiated between ISPs and website operators, they share a list of IP ranges with the ISP, and any traffic towards these IPs are excluded from the consumer’s data cap.
ISPs have already gotten around anti-data cap laws by locating content servers within their network and only charging caps for data that travels outside their network.
Unless you can show examples of these servcices avoiding datacaps? And even then, in this case it's very likely that allow-lists were OK under NN, just not block-lists.
That comes with exclusive content, though - not the same thing at all as what the NN acolytes were warning us would happen if common carrier status was lost. The goal-post shifting is not admirable. We were told there would be the end of the free web, and we're almost 6 years out. Time to admit that the evidence suggests this was fear mongering, and not grasp at straws.
Because it kept them under the FCC's thumb as common carriers, forcing them into inefficiencies to comply with regulations. There's a ton of stuff I want the govt. more involved with on the internet: data privacy, clamping down on CSAM, section 230 issues... forcing ISPs to take a total hands off approach to every traffic source on their pipes? That wasn't one of them.
NN harmed ISPs' incentive to innovate. I have since gotten faster speeds at cheaper prices. What would the NN crowd say if they had gotten their way, something vague about evil corporations and their profits?
> I have since gotten faster speeds at cheaper prices. What would the NN crowd say if they had gotten their way
Probably nothing because you would still get faster speeds at cheaper prices just like you had for the decades prior even though the regulatory environment was more strict. Without supporting evidence you might as well be claiming that the rooster crowing causes the sun to rise.
Which specific inefficiencies would they be forced into as common carriers? Would they be ones I'd notice as a customer, or merely vague "reduced incentive to innovate"?
Isn't the US still dead last among developed countries at "faster speeds at cheaper prices"?
Places with common carrier setups do much better on average, as do US ISP's that focus on building out networks instead of spying on users and regulating traffic content.
> forcing ISPs to take a total hands off approach to every traffic source on their pipes? That wasn't one of them.
Verizon FIOS back in like 2014-2018 was in a constant pissing match with Netflix over who would pay for peering. Netflix wanted to pay for their half, and have Verizon pay for their half. Verizon wanted Netflix to pay not only the real costs of both sides, but a huge fee to offset "excess traffic". When Netflix (and Google, etc) decided to not pay, multi-megabyte speeds dropped to a few kilobytes a second. Hopping on a VPN to route the traffic around Verizon got speeds back to normal.
ISPs should be forced to peer with whoever wants to pay for peering.
A concern from ISPs is that they will lose the ability to shape and prioritize traffic, something that is often necessary.
A concern from consumers is that services will be restricted or rendered unusable by throttling selectively driving customers away from services.
A concern from Service Providers is that they will have to make deals with ISPs to ensure quality of service.
They're valid concerns on all sides and without Net Neutrality we've seen service restrictions, though they're advertised as benefits (e.g. free OTT messaging on flights from certain providers). We've also seen ISPs bully providers like Netflix into paying to deliver traffic their customers are paying to access (double dipping). It hasn't been the doom and gloom that was hyped but has definitely impacted services.
Under net neutrality I expect we'll see a degradation of cellular services or forced consent agreements as WISPs will not be allowed to downgrade or shape traffic otherwise.
It cuts both ways and I will be surprised if it makes much difference.
Shaping and prioritizing traffic can be done in a service-agnostic way, so the sorts of shaping they can make money off of are never "necessary."
The anti-network neutrality thing is just a money grab.
Here's a good-enough traffic shaping algorithm:
Each user gets their traffic put into two queues. High bandwidth flows go into a the low priority queues. Low bandwidth (video conferencing, interactive) flows go into the high priority queue. You round robin between all the users' queues at the local node level. If the trunk line is saturated by a few users, then their queues will be long, causing their flows to backpressure. Everyone else's queues will have ~ 1 packet in them, leading to no backpressure and negligible latency.
It's extremely difficult to do better than the solution I just sketched. It is stateless, and it is also very easy to approximate in hardware. It even handles the "I want to torrent and VOIP at the same time" problem.
There are more complex aspects of net neutrality beyond "companies can't make consumers pay a Facebook surcharge".
One that I remember in detail is interconnect fees. Some companies like Netflix operate at such a scale that they're constrained by physical reality as much as network policies. So to provide good service, it's often necessary to deploy additional physical connections between the ISP and the Netflix CDN.
Separately, such connections are widespread foundations of the Internet itself. In that context they're typically settlement-free, with providers on both sides working cooperatively to get the bits where users want them. For Netflix, providers typically require a fee to interconnect, because they wouldn't otherwise want to accept the maintenance costs of this link which serves no purpose other than providing Netflix.
So Netflix pays a fee that other organizations with an interconnect don't have to pay. Is that a net neutrality violation? Netflix argues yes - they say it's just a backdoor to discriminate against Netflix traffic. But you can see why ISPs would be concerned about a rule that they can't charge random CDNs for plugging in stuff to their servers.
So, you are saying some unverified tiny ISP bad marketing decision in Portugal in 2015 or earlier (that image is old) should be used to direct policy for the entire united states regardless of the reality of the actual practices?
That is exactly what sensationalized propaganda looks like in this case. You are doing it right now.
To say that this thing that actually happened didn't actually happen would also be propaganda. Every statement has bias. I'm just pointing out that this isn't a joke image, it's a real image.
It happens on airplanes and paid WiFi. Some allow free browsing of certain sites and charge for full access. Some airlines charge more for streaming access. Some provide basic messaging on a low priced tier.
It's more insidious than simply bundling together access to certain websites. The main way that ISPs extract $$ out of content providers is by charging the content providers to peer to their network. If there isn't a recurring peering agreement in place, the ISP will let the content provider's peering interface overload which drives service quality down. Of course, the ISP ensures /their/ content provider is always on an interface with plenty of bandwidth to spare.
Sure, but the argument kind of loses merit, no? I remember the entire collective internet having site wide shutdowns, urging users to write to congress, etc. It was an extensive campaign that looped in many non technical folks to a very technical topic. You can only cry wolf like that a few times. If a similar campaign were to launch again, I’m almost certain it would fail to get the same mainstream support, especially because the “sky is falling” arguments made last time never came true (or at least not in the ways claimed). Lost credibility is hard to regain for the next time there truly is an existential crisis.
No it doesn’t lose merit because the fight isn’t over. It’s not like all major ISPs are going to immediately ramp up to 11; even if they wanted to make that blunder while people are still clearly educated about the issue and paying attention, negotiating payments for services exempt from traffic shaping is a long b2b sales cycle that has only started. They are going to slowly boil the frog after watching the others get away with more in their region.
Okay. Net neutrality died and ISPs didn’t immediately turn the internet in to subscriptions to different cloud providers.
The fact is that they CAN, and to be so deliriously ignorant as to believe that “it didn’t happen yet, so it will never happen” is just… what is happening here?
Is this thread just ChatGPT bots?
Regardless of if Microsoft, google, Amazon and ISPs have not yet managed to cooperate in to cable style subscriptions to what parts of the internet you get, we are WAY better off enshrining to law that they cannot do it.
> Okay. Net neutrality died and ISPs didn’t immediately turn the internet in to subscriptions to different cloud providers.
It didn't die, it temporarily stopped being the federal rule with the clear likelihood that it would be restored with the next Democratic administration and with a number of states adopting NN regulations.
>The fact is that they CAN, and to be so deliriously ignorant as to believe that “it didn’t happen yet, so it will never happen” is just… what is happening here?
What is happening here is see you are disingenuously misrepresenting the opinion of those who disagree with you, and then dehumanizing them by comparing them to robots. Both of these are gross and should stop.
The actual argument is something like this:
1. ISPs are profit seeking monopolists who will do anything to increase their profits (axiomatic, at least on HN)
2. ISPs have had the opportunity to "turn the Internet into subscriptions for different cloud providers" in the United States for not just the last six years, but rather throughout most of the life of the Internet.
3. Despite ample opportunity (especially for mobile carriers who were exempted from most of the requirements), they have never taken the steps to do so.
4. Therefore, it is likely they have decided that this kind of extreme siloing is not in the best interests of their profits.
It's not too hard to imagine why point four would be true;
- Most users are loyal to products, not companies. Most use products that are owned by or hosted on entities that compete with each other. This would severely complicate any kind of negotiation between the ISP and provider of the services.
- The result would be a product that is confusing from a customer standpoint. Nobody knows whether the product they interact with is hosted on Azure or GCP or AWS.
- Managing it sounds like a logistical nightmare (so, expensive).
- It opens a new venue for competition (which contradicts point 1) that a competitor automatically wins by virtue of simply doing nothing.
- It's almost certainly sure to result in expensive legal involvement from interests with the money to make the process painful.
- Even if every prior issue did not exist, this concept is legislatively contentious. As in, the rules are likely to change in four years. The rules also are different state by state.
Putting myself in the shoes of the CEO of the most greedy ISP imaginable, I don't see how this siloing idea is going to make my company enough money to make all of that worth it. It seems like a great way to fail to show quarterly growth, which is the last thing I want in my position
> ISPs have had the opportunity to "turn the Internet into subscriptions for different cloud providers" in the United States for not just the last six years, but rather throughout most of the life of the Internet.
The FCC was acting under net neutrality principles in broadband actions starting in 2004, when its initial non-regulatory enforcement approach became legally problematic, it immediately turned to regulation around the principles (the most recent to be repealed was the last if series of regulatory packages, with lawsuits over the orevious ones each shaping the next one.) And by the time the last repeal was finalized state level NN regulations were already coming into play, as well as the clear likelihood that federal rules would be restored with the next Democratic-majority FCC.
Aside from maybe the period between the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the FCC articulation of net neutrality principles as a guiding rule for case-by-case action in 2004, I’m not sure what time you are talking about, there hasn’t been any period where there was a clear, stable situation where it amde any sense to make long-term decisions to structure business in a way that had a major conflict with neutrality.
This is largely correct, though I would add that prior to 2004 nearly all broadband was delivered over telephone wire. That made it Title II.
The first real net neutrality enforcement action was when FCC chairman Michael Powell under George w bush stopped Madison River from blocking a VoIP provider. Powell used Title II.
It took about a month from complaints to action because the FCC had clear authority.
That's why an agency needs clear authority.
If the FTC would have had to act, it would have taken 2 years and the FTC would have had to approve him that that provider had some sort of monopoly power.
People were screwed, but not like this. ISP's mostly put the screws to streaming services. Just point them to Netflix's price hikes shortly after they felt the effects of NN getting repealed in ~2019, or the constant back and forth between Verizon and Netflix.
Mobile customers didn't get away scot free though. This did enable mobile service providers to offer more tiered plans, which on average raised prices on worse service via caps and throttled speeds. Some people may still be "grandfathered" in to old unlimited plans, but a lot of people either paid more, got worse service, or both.
No, nothing of that sort has happened in the US because the rules for NN haven't changed. It was a created internet hype machine to push more new restrictive rules by acting like chicken little and shouting that the sky was falling.
They don’t upgrade their interconnects with other residential ISPs which is making it hard for decentralized alternatives to displace the big cloud based vendors.
I’m with you, but “bundling” sites like cable companies bundle channels is not even a correct analogy. Doing so would fundamentally break the internet as we know it and I am pretty certain the site owners wouldn’t like it either, since it could break ad-delivery. It would be a complicated mess that the ISPs would have to backpedal on. The simpler solution is just to change more money for everything and throttle, though I suppose they could create app-only access like what you’re describing (basically no direct access to port 80 via normal browsers). Or, recreate the glory days of something like AOL.
Instead, we’re going to do is further entrench local monopolies, since only the large guys will be able to afford to comply with regulation.
You literally can’t force corporate Americas to act beneficial to their consumers of incentives are misaligned. It takes literal FDA-levels of regulation to accomplish that, and even that has failures while generally making the entire process expensive while consolidating things down to just a few market players.
How does this cause a compliance burden? It's banning the deployment of optional technologies.
If anything, this will help small players, since it prevents big ISPs from using their market leverage to negotiate favorable terms with service providers, and doing that levels the playing field.
For instance, there was a time when you could only get high resolution Netflix through large ISPs, since they'd forced Netflix to sign some CDN deal by messing with transit pricing.
> You literally can’t force corporate Americas to act beneficial to their consumers of incentives are misaligned. It takes literal FDA-levels of regulation to accomplish that,
"Literal FDA-levels of regulation" demonstrably does not accomplish that. The FDA was fine with what the Sacklers/Purdue Pharma were doing; lawsuits filed by states and others got something (not enough) done about it, but the FDA and their regulations were no help.
For the most part it, it's successful, but often times it isn't (which was my point!) We can take the FAA and 787-MAX as another example! Mostly successful, but still not really 100%
Like many government regulations, it has a great name, "Net Neutrality," which, when it is actually implemented, will do much more than make the 'Net neutral.
Maybe, at first, it will have something to do with "you can't throttle Web services," but it will morph into "you MUST throttle this particular Web service, it spreads disinformation, which makes the Net less neutral."
It is what always happens. It is more reliable than gravity.
The most typical way this is done is through selective enforcement. You create rules that most of anybody can be argued to be breaking, but only enforce it for individuals or organizations that you have an issue with. With net neutrality it's pretty easy to see how this would happen. The previous net neutrality rules, under Tom Wheeler, included a carveout for nearly all rules under anything that could be justified as "reasonable network management."
This carveout is necessary due to the nature of network management, but it creates an interesting scenario. That term was used literally dozens of times, but also defined absolutely nowhere. This now gives politicians the ability to interpret it, as they see fit. For a company that runs afoul of the powers that be, suddenly it's a standard that can't be met. For those in favor, anything can be accepted as "reasonable network management."
And this is how corruption and tyranny typically works works. The cases of a somebody going completely rogue, or a politician doing something after being handed golden bars or a bag of cash - do still happen. But, by and large, the system is big enough, and complex enough, that if somebody with enough power wants to screw somebody - they can do it legally. And if somebody protests inequitable or unfair treatment, just call it a whataboutism.
I am always surprised when somebody finds this a novel take. This sort of corruption is older than Boss Tweed. But I guess every generation has to relearn the same lessons.
It's all about risk vs reward for both parties. If a cop pulls you over for a speeding ticket, trying to bribe him is a high risk option that could suddenly see you facing felony charges to try to get out of a low cost ticket. And similarly for the officer. You're not going to pay more than the ticket in the bribe, certainly not much more, so it's negligible, and accepting it could completely destroy his livelihood if found out.
On occasion it still does happen, but it tends to be because the mutual risk/reward ratios are changed. One of the most common bribes cops are found taking is sexual stuff. That may have a much higher value for the officer than the bribe price would, and a much lower risk for the briber since they can be overtly flirtatious without ever making it clear (from the point of view of a criminal prosecution) they're offering to exchange some sexual favor for a way out.
By contrast in the government scenario the risk for both parties is effectively zero since much will go on without a single word even needing to be said. When various government agencies were pressuring Twitter to censor all sorts of things, they never made a single overt threat - yet they simultaneously spoke both threateningly and demandingly. It's the same sort of relationship. The people making the "requests" of Twitter had a million ways of going after Twitter, or the people in charge of it, and Twitter knew this. So they played ball. Even if you got access to every single email, you wouldn't be able to prosecute anybody over it. It was all completely legal, which creates a near infinite risk:reward ratio.
A lot of people in these comments are making the case that removing net neutrality didn’t do much harm, so why bother bringing it back. Let me make the counterclaim.
The argument against net neutrality is that it might stifle innovation. Well, we had net neutrality for many years and innovation didn’t seem all that stifled. Hence, what’s the harm in bringing it back?
Wait -- I'm genuinely curious -- does that mean that data-throttling plans from mobile providers do not exist in California? All the plans I see (in New York) say things like "unlimited but video will be SD instead of HD" which seems a frank violation of the principle of net neutrality (not to mention a bit of a technical marvel).
Are these plans legal in California, or is the California law not sufficiently specific to rein in this kind of thing?
We are tired of the fear mongering and propaganda. We have seen the internet work just fine with and without net neutrality - its a micro-optimization as far as I am concerned.
Political capital is limited. Instead of wasting it rehashing this bandaid, why not campaign for something like municipal internet that would fundamentally solve the problems of ISPs?
If you believed the scare tactics at the time, losing net neutrality literally threatened the end of the internet as we know it. But my internet has worked the same before, during, and after net neutrality. I really don't get what all the fuss is about.
However, if you really do believe this is a civilization defining piece of regulation, Why leave it to the FCC? It seems like people on both sides are happy to leave this super duper important decision to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats. Everyone loves executive overreach when its their side that does it I guess.
Why did the mega providers so desperately want net neutrality to die? Why did so many lobbyists work to kill it?
"I really don't get what all the fuss is about."
This is a bit like the Y2K bug. There was a huge amount of noise and fear-mongering, and millions of developers spent an enormous amount of time fixing code and preparing systems. Y2K came and suddenly everyone is sure it was all just drama for nothing. What was the fuss about?
The massive amount of "scare tactics" made it a mainstream conversation. The images of tiered internet were spread far and wide and it put everyone on alert. We can't A:B universes, but I suspect that if net neutrality was quietly axed and no one noticed or cared, we would absolutely have had services very much like the worst-case images imagined.
>Why did the mega providers so desperately want net neutrality to die? Why did so many lobbyists work to kill it?
because they want more leverage in their negotiations with netflix, amazon, google, spotify etc. That's all it boils down to, how much one major corporation has to pay another major corporation.
There's a reason why they're only pushing for neutrality on the ISPs, if they were actually concerned about large corporations abusing their control over critical online infrastructure they'd be pushing to regulate other classes of "service providers" like google, amazon, cloudflare, etc.
> if they were actually concerned about large corporations abusing their control over critical online infrastructure they'd be pushing to regulate other classes of "service providers" like google, amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Many of the people who are pushing for net neutrality are also pushing for this. It's such an easy strawman counterpoint to just say "If people really cared about educating children, why are they only pushing for better schools? They should also be pushing for better in-home care and childhood nutrition!" ... um, they are?
You might be and if so then I'm glad you are, but in my post above I was specifically referring to all the large silicon valley corporations pushing for NN.
As for the legislation in the OP, they're not trying to accomplish that and TBH I really doubt the democrats[1] even want it to go further than the ISPs because they've been the beneficiaries of policies at companies like AWS that have deplatformed right-wing organizations[2].
[1] by which i mean the democrats that actually wield institutional authority in the american government, not every DNC party-member in general
[2] not that i agree with the organizations that are being deplatformed but there is a principle at stake.
The argument is not that the internet would suddenly die, it’s that it would get chopped up and rebundled a-La cable tv. And we’re seeing isps give preferential treatment to services that pay them, just not instantly and only that because it’s been only 2 years (edit: comment below points out it’s been 5), business sales cycles are long and they aren’t stupid enough to immediately turn the heat up to 11 while the frog is still paying attention.
Apologies idk where I got the 2 years from. But I still feel like this too short a time period to claim the experiment is run , especially when several states like California[0] have their own net neutrality laws since 2018. I feel it’s kinda like saying that we don’t need federal emissions standards because the sky hasn’t fallen without them (but they are in major markets like California).
> But my internet has worked the same before, during, and after net neutrality. I really don't get what all the fuss is about.
Mine didn't. Verizon blackmailed Netflix and Google repeatedly for access to their network. YouTube and Netflix were unusuable for FIOS customers until they came to an agreement where Netflix gave piles of cash to Verizon.
A lot of these comments reflect never having lived in a rural or underserved area.
Like most services in life, if you live a relatively upper class life in a competitive market, things like net neutrality are probably not gonna be very loud on your radar.
I work closely with an ISP in my field. It seems to me that the biggest threat to customer choice is independent ISP's being able to provide service through the building out of the cable infrastructure, at least in northern California. Most municipalities have a grandfathered in cable network from ATT and Comcast, because of this they have been recently dictating how and when ISP can deploy their service.
Because of the democrat to republican administration change in the past, the rules have changed regarding line sharing and infrastructure build out. In many cases, the big players, who were previously prevented from interfering with other ISP's build-out, are now able to actively make it more difficult (costly) for independent ISP's from expanding their network.
If this continues, its going to put smaller ISP's out of business. So IMHO, this is more important that forcing the big players to play by the net neutrality rules in regards to throttling services, Id go so far as to say they are using that as red herring to distract people from the real problem. If there is no competition, you don't have anywhere to go when an ISP suddenly decides to do something that is anti-competitive.
BUT We owe it to ourselves to go and look at all the fearmongering they were putting out about ending net neutrality and figuring out why it didn’t come to pass.
And hopefully learning from that for future policy debates.
I don't know why I have to keep explaining the history of this. What people call "Net Neutrality" is just how the internet (and ARPANET before it) had always worked. No one had contemplated it working in any other way.
Then Verizon came along and started blocking well-known VPN ports unless you paid for a "business" account. The FCC responded with "Net Neutrality" saying no, you can't just decide to block certain protocols, websites, or services for monetary reasons. QoS should be enforced when requested by clients or for technical reasons (eg VoIP), not to create class tiers to squeeze both customers and the services they use for money on both ends. If you want more money raise your price of service.
If you think the bean counters at the big telco and cable companies aren't excited by the idea of charging you extra to use a VPN, a VoIP phone, and hitting the top 100 websites on the back end then I don't know what to tell you. Absent any legal barriers they can and they eventually will. Most people don't have meaningful competition so you'll take what daddy Comcast deigns to offer you or you can go back to 2Mbps ADSL.
It’s only been a few years. I don’t think we owe our selves to call all experiments at such a short time frame. People are acting like this is some chemical reaction they should be able to observe in an afternoon instead of something slow and pernicious like large American businesses when they know they are being watched.
Can we apply the same argument of time and precedence? Machine guns were legal for new purchase in the USA from their invention in 1892 to 1986. That's 94 years of precedent so, if a couple years of "no chemical reaction" is the gauge, I bet we could roll into and back on a lot of things, right?
Does no one else remember Reddit and Google running dial-up looking gifs of their logos to show how evil the ending of NN would be? Yea... we got a worse internet alright but it definitely wasn't because images load slowly.
That is not correct at all. The internet developed with "net neutrality" because that's how ARPANET and later the internet had always worked. Peering agreements developed based on symmetrical traffic loads and providers regularly upgraded links as needed.
NN was originally imposed by the FCC because Verizon started blocking VPNs, requiring customers to pay for a "business" plan if they wanted VPN support. That was the first wide-scale break with internet tradition and it rightly freaked a lot of people out.
Because the context is relevant here. Net neutrality is not some government over-reach. It was a specific reaction to a captive telco trying to fundamentally change how the internet works by having an intermediary convert certain packet traffic into a "premium" service.
The only reason net neutrality wasn't already law or part of the peering or ARIN contracts to even be on the internet at all was that no one could imagine that ISPs would become monopoly/dualopolies that might try to block traffic to extract extra rents from from both their existing paying customers and the owners of the servers their customers wanted to connect with.
In retrospect it should have been part of the contract to get a netblock from one of the NRO organizations (like ARIN) that such conduct is prohibited.
And before anyone raises a straw man: the policy could have been clear that traffic-shaping for fairness, QoS, network health, or even non-service-specific transfer caps was allowed.
In some ways how ISPs handle transfer caps is similar: their stated reasoning is garbage. The cap does nothing to discourage high use during peak periods and punishes customers who do bulk transfers at midnight when the ISP's network has plenty of capacity. The real purpose of caps is to extract more rent for doing nothing.
The ILEC and Cable ISPs look back on the $1/minute long distance telephone days of Ma Bell with sparkles in their eyes. Funny for a service that entirely depends on the government giving them free access to my and your property for right-of-way.
Semi-unrelated, on bundling: about 20-25 years ago, there were a bunch of these tiny hyper-local ISPs in Russia that would wire up several adjacent flat blocks with a LAN, get an internet uplink and start signing customers within those flat blocks (your only other option at that time was dial-up). The uplink was probably expensive and so they charged per Gb (or had a very low cap) but... "a free local share with terabytes of warez, mp3s, movies and porn is included in your base fee!". I think it might have even been in the official ads, in a slightly less blatant form.
The first pure-fiber ISP in Italy effectively had the same for many, many years. Because speeds were so good between their customers but still slow towards the wider internet (this was the early '00s), they effectively closed both eyes as people established mega-shares with all sorts of goodness.
I think they eventually cracked down on it, but it went on for at least a decade.
A quick question... If everywhere else on the internet you went to was extremely liberal / progressive / whatever... And then you came here to see older and more professional people with different opinions that were some conservative, but most more moderate, and many still very liberal... How would you know if you were the center point or an outlier?
It's probably not now that they've had to deal with it. Instead the web of business relationships they've had to build and the constant capital they have to spend creates a moat around incumbent players in the video space like Netflix.
I fully support net neutrality. Those who oppose it, like former FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai, are really just bowing to ISPs who want to charge companies like Netflix and Google for "pushing" data onto their networks.
But net neutrality isn't actually what we need. What we need is municipal broadband. The major ISPs in the US are objectively awful. The best Internet access in the US are in places with municipal broadband eg Chattanooga.
A good start would be regulating ISPs as a utility.
Good luck to them. I'm tired of all this prioritization, bundled services not counting against data caps, and using angry e-mails to make Tier-1 providers null-route websites.
I'd rather they focus on universal broadband access:
1) Set a minimum 1th percentile download and upload speeds and 99th percentile RTTs, bucketed in 1 minute intervals over a 30 day period. If an ISP falls below that for more than 1% of customers, then they automatically lose any right of way exclusivity that they hold, and also are broken into a common carrier and retail group.
2) If a telco is not meeting the universal access requirements in an area, then their networks are automatically transferred to a telco that is meeting the requirements. The receiving telco must hold the infrastructure until it meets SLAs for 10 years. If all the local telcos fail, then ownership reverts to a locally-owned (no more than 100K subscribers) co-ops.
At my previous job I worked on a digital campaign protesting the repeal of Net Neutrality[0].
It was a nice technical challenge to save (and render) those millions of leaflets. More about the project here[1]
On this site, I'm not sure it makes much of a difference. Shockingly to me, someone else in this thread writes how this is a conservative site... Well that guy must have a wildly different perspective from me!
As SV_BubbleTime said, that is nonsense no matter how often the claim is repeated.
I'll give two more examples. Voter ID is uncontroversial everywhere in Europe and Canada. Formerly government-run postal services have long since been privatized almost everywhere in Europe, while no one advocates doing so with the USPS (despite the TDS-driven hysteria over the so-called sabotaging of same in 2020).
Economically, maybe, but not really. I think Europe is a lot better about hiding their corporate interests than the USA, but I think it's still largely capitalism-for-real behind the socialism-for-show. I can't think of how that statement is true, unless you look at things USA Left wants that they are unable to get, then saying they're conservative because they didn't get them. Like socialized healthcare.
What part are Democrats conservative over Europeans liberals? Healthcare, no I don't think so. Immigration? No. Guns? No. Free speech? No. Low taxes and small government? No. Abortion? lol no. Democrats in the USA were so up in arms over a 15 week limit in Missippi that they took it to the Supreme Court and lost Roe v Wade, but most of Europe is happily swimming along with 12 week bans.
So, maybe I just don't see it, but I hear this line all the time from progressives that are frustrated at Democrats for not doing all the hard left things they want. What am I missing? USA Democrats aren't conservative because they have a conservative party that opposes them.
What are USA Democrats so conservative at in their actual actions and desires?
This is good, but it's so obvious this was a super low priority thing for the Democrats. It's been almost three years since they took power, and they let the FCC sit in an Ajit Pai-inspired limbo for most of that time. They hit a roadblock and just stopped for years instead of adapting.
> It's been almost three years since they took power, and they let the FCC sit in an Ajit Pai-inspired limbo for most of that time.
There ought to be a name for this fallacy, like "alternating dictatorship single color lump-government."
Pretty much from day-one the Biden administration was trying to get a new FCC member to the understaffed commission, however with the slimmest possible 51-49 Senate majority it only takes one "blue dog" Democrat (or one heavily reliant on industry donations) to block it all. [0] That state of affairs continued until the latest attempt finally passed this month. [1]
Correction: "From day-one" is inaccurate, while there may have been informal legislator negotiations before, the formal nomination process for the seat vacated by Ajit Pai started in 10-2021 rather than 01-2021.
> Pretty much from day-one the Biden administration was trying to get a new FCC member to the understaffed commission, however with the slimmest possible 51-49 Senate majority it only takes one "blue dog" Democrat (or one heavily reliant on industry donations) to block it all. [0]
They nominated the same person, over and over, who failed to get nominated each time. The failure is totally their fault if they nominate someone who can't get confirmed.
They should have learned to count votes and nominate someone who could get enough.
> That state of affairs continued until the latest attempt finally passed this month. [1]
When they finally nominated someone different, someone who could get confirmed.
> When did they stop? Gigi Sohn was nominated in 2021 and was repeatedly renominated until she withdrew this year.
Exactly there. Instead of renominating her to perpetual failure, they should have nominated someone else. When they finally did the work to find another candidate, they actually got results. That should have happened years ago.
But it didn't and that either means they're insane (as in doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result) or the just don't care that much.
Net neutrality is gone, so why is the internet mostly the same (to people with money to spare for higher bandwidth tiers which are just as overpriced as the lower tiers)? Because STATES (Washington, Oregon, and California) passed net neutrality laws to partially compensate for the lack of regulation from the top [1].
But in the first place, net neutrality does nothing about affordability [2], subsidy fraud + corruption [3], deceptive pricing [4], and regulatory capture [5]. Net neutrality would be a relatively minor consequence of a competitive internet service market. In other words, net neutrality is a necessary outcome and nothing close to a sufficient condition.
Seems like the headline is misleading. The FCC is a tool of political will. Some politicians who will determine future FCC rule-making wish to reinstate net neutrality.
Seems like this back and forth could go on for some time. It would probably be better to come up with a solution that can supported across changes in control.
Given the discussion here it isn’t clear to me what the middle ground might be other than some scorched earth. Maybe net neutrality for consumer benefit only on a non discriminatory basis?
For example, a MVNO could not penalize any Internet traffic but they could offer a no capacity cap service as long as any other comparable service had the same access. Such a setup would probably be cause for a large number of lawyer billable hours which will make lawyers in both sides happy.
Provided network neutrality is limited to banning 'bundling' - meaning some services do not count against a data cap but others do - I think it's an unqualified good. If it goes beyond that, it gets stickier for wireless operators - because of the shared access medium inherent to wireless, you must do much more in the way of network optimization than you would on a wireline operator.
I'd be much more comfortable with treating information services as common carriers, which has an existing regulatory and interpretive framework to decide what that means - most of which can be directly applied to information services (internet access).
I get this is a somewhat unpopular opinion, but I don't trust the courts to decide cases which are highly technical in nature.
all good news but at this point I'd prefer if they can turn cable providers like my own Altice / Optimum into public utilities so I don't have to pay $110/month for 100 mpbs with zero alternatives, when my uncle in Wisconsin has 300 mpbs for less money.
These sorts of bills aren't necessary if you create an environment that provides enough competition. A lot of areas are getting more ISP's coming in and laying fiber which is forcing the big companies like ATT and Spectrum to compete. Imo the government stepping in is just another instance of them refusing to use the tools at their disposal to break up monopolies and instead inserting themselves into a position that gives them more power over the internet. As usual they create problems and then come up with MORE laws to fix the problems they've created, which inevitably leads to more issues down the road.
It really seems unnecessary at this point. Now that we have satellite based internet and 4G/5G are legit competitors to regular wire based ISPs it just seems that the market has solved this by itself. Sure, Comcast _could_ still start doing prioritization. But honestly I’d be a lot more worried about how Google/Meta/Microsoft are using your data for GenAI.
> It really seems unnecessary at this point. Now that we have satellite based internet and 4G/5G are legit competitors to regular wire based ISPs
None of those things compete with wireline, on either performance or price.
Satellite internet is 2x-10x more expensive and requires expensive equipment. It has significant lag and greatly reduced upload.
5G speeds exist in small, limited zones. Cellular internet in general is slower, comes with tiny to small data caps, is more expensive, has more lag and reduced upload.
Here's what meaningful competition looks like. Next month I'll be able to choose from several fiber ISPs.
Backstory: We currently have one cable provider. Following the recent broadband funding, my neighborhood was just trenched for fiber. It's an open infrastructure and any ISP that wants to sell service to us - can.
This is how DSL used to work back in the late 90s-early aughts, until ISP lobbyists paid for enough elections to get those mandates unwound.
I actually get badass 5G speeds in the middle of nowhere rural Alabama with T-Mobile, the only issue is it being a CGNAT preventing me from playing most PS3 games online.
If you're lucky enough to live near an updated and uncongested tower, then yeah.
The same thing happened for my parents in rural Utah, just with FTTH instead. Unfortunately for them, they are overcharged enough that it's probably worth it at this point to switch to 5G.
You can always trust politicians to do the exact opposite of their claim. For example: inflation reduction act, affordable health care act, voting rights act 2023. The propaganda is strong with net neutrality. It is just another play for more government control over information.
Would you mind explaining specifically how the FCC's intention to add net neutrality rules again (actually Chairwoman Rosenworcel's intention, and dubious in mettle [1]) would give the government "control over information"? Additionally, would you mind describing what you mean by "government control over information"?
A required condition of net neutrality is that the ISPs be considered common carriers once again. Common carriers are an exception to the legal paradigm of compelled speech. So the most you can say is that the government would be disallowing the ISPs from engaging in money-motivated censorship. If that falls under your idea of "government control over information" then you would be correct (but only pointlessly correct in my opinion).
> Isn't it vastly more important to ensure free speech on the internet than the speed of your netflix stream
If they can slow down your Netflix stream, they can also impair others' access to your self-hosted blog. I can't think of a more direct, fundamental threat to free speech than that. It's the same as the power company turning off service to your printing press.
Who's "they"? Every ISP collaborating together to censor specific websites? Highly doubt that ever happens. Plus, companies like Starlink have made that practically impossible. Add in 5g internet options and I can't see how that could be practical. All of that has been added in the past 3-5 years too.
Then contrary to what you originally claimed, there's no free speech issues on the internet right now,
Unless you're talking about having your "free speech" on whatever site or service you want. That's not free speech. It's more like communism.
> Highly doubt that ever happens
It would be a serious free speech violation. Best to make it illegal so it never does. If you're censored on literally all social media you can still host your own website or IRC server. If ISPs start censoring you it's game over.
Even one ISP slowing down specific websites by a bit would be very bad. Slowness tends to decrease traffic, and people would almost never notice. And then add in the fact that it's so difficult to change ISPs: spend an hour on the phone with the cancellation department, schedule an installation for the new service yada yada yada.
You should know a lot of the people you are asking that good question to, and the very people pushing for NN again are the people that saw no issue with the past 4-5 years because "the right people" were being censored.
In a more steelman argument, you could probably discuss that another form of censorship could always come in the form of a tier that only includes "approved sources" or throttling anyone deemed as "misinformation".
This feels a bit like arguing over the arrangement of the furniture as the house burns. The web is a hot mess of garbage SEO, ads, incendiary clickbait, and political echochambers. THIS is the thing that warrants fixing first?
I don't see the point of NN as long as the only "service providers" it applies to are the ones implementing layers <= 3. The main threat to online freedom is that corporate America can collude together to remove you from the internet entirely if you piss them off. See parler, 8chan, kiwifarms etc; not that i think any of those sites is particularly worth defending but there's a principle at stake which is that this can happen to anybody.
And with NN being championed by a lot of the same services that cut off the above-mentioned it seems less like something meant to preserve the freedom of the Internet and more like something meant to keep one group of corporations in control of it.
Side note: the Blocked and Reported podcast looked deeply into the allegations that led to that that site being initially shut down and they concluded they were bogus.
HE was refusing to provide internet connectivity to Kiwi Farms's host, that's a different thing than net neutrality. They're not interfering with traffic even though the EFF puts it that way, they're dropping a customer.
A "neutral" ISP can't refuse to get that host's packets if they transit through their network (including delivering the packets to the ISP's end users), but they can absolutely refuse to do business with anyone, including Kiwi Farms or Kiwi Farms's host or Kiwi Farms's host's host.
> It was always a con. A regulation had been in place since 2015, they repealed it in 2017, it never mattered.
This sounds like one of the pregurgitated anti-neutrality mantra. Specifically, the one that ignores the many growing trends (caps, prioritization, purposeful peering congestion) before neutrality and how those trends mostly paused when neutrality was passed.
It also ignores what ISPs know - that not every administration has full-throated support for anti-consumer practices. That is, not every admin will provide the cover ISPs need to get consumers used to increasing mistreatment.
Better to keep the pause on consumer harms in place until a friendlier environment can be secured for the long term.
Meanwhile it's still safe screw consumers on other fronts. One is further entrenching ISP monopoly/duopoly positions by having lobbyists write state anti-munibroadband laws for paid legislators to pass.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/%2B_Smar...