>"[T]here is a growing wariness among the BRICS countries that when their data traffic goes through hubs in Europe or the United States, it incurs a greater 'risk of potential interception...'"
I don't know how they square that given it goes though Russia, China, India etc... as if those three neither had snooping capability nor wanted to be able to snoop.
Also, while it may drive up the price a little, the idea the NSA won't be able to tap into worldwide internet just because the bits don't travel through the US is naive.
How is that a 'step in the right direction' for privacy?
The whole proposition is preposterous. Russia, India and China all are known to monitor their citizens comms as a matter of course. It's not even hidden or prefaced.
If anything, this makes it easier for those countries to intercept their own citizens' comms --which is probably their whole intent.
It has something to do with being flooded with American content and perspectives. You see, it's been understood here for some time what kind of effect media can have on a population. This seems to be something America is just coming to terms with, regarding organizations like Sinclair.
It's been Canada's struggle for some time to maintain an identity in the face of some kind of ideological imperialism. Manifest Destiny is still fresh on Canadian minds, and non-points like this implying some kind of tyranny are grossly mal-informed. Our CRTC who made that ruling is the same CRTC who is ensuring net neutrality and mandating performant broadband internet as a basic telecom service. Things the FCC just thought not worth protecting for Americans.
edit: To clarify myself a bit: This is an impassioned subject for me. I think the US is a great nation—but implying something nefarious about Canadians' attempt at self-preservation, while residing next to a federation like the US, is incomprehensible.
It's protecting the public that doesn't want to be protected. With the exception of a few Canadian shows and movies, Canadians can't get enough of US media.
One thing Canadians miss in the “CanCon means shitty TV” meme is that CanCon rules mean Canadian creative talent is cultivated. You don’t just become a great TV writer overnight. You write a lot of shitty TV until you get good at it. This is not unlike programming. Why do you think there are so many successful Canadians in Hollywood? A bunch got their start in productions that wouldn’t be around if not for CanCon. I mean for crying out loud, Drake, who is possibly one of the greatest cultural entrepreneurs of our time got his start on Degrassi. It’s not perfect by any means but Canadians tend to forget this aspect of the system whereby Canadian talent is cultivated, they go to the US to learn even more, then return to help educate the next generation of Canadian talent (eg Norman Jewison and the Canadian Film Centre)
You mean, Canada should mandate certain percentage of software be written in Canada too, and if your site or software product doesn't run X% of Canadian software, you should not be able to use it within Canada? Great idea, sure.
Nations need to think about strategic interests beyond the capitalist trope that motivates most of us.
It’s not in Canada’s national interest for Toronto to be a remote suburb of the US east coast. If and when relations between the two nations degrade, Canada needs to be able to continue functioning.
That’s the danger of the mercurial Trump administration. The random shit that speed out of the US is making everyone question everything.
> Nations need to think about strategic interests beyond the capitalist trope that motivates most of us.
So, are you agreeing with me that it'd be good for Canadian government to require software (or at least significant part of it) be made in Canada?
> If and when relations between the two nations degrade, Canada needs to be able to continue functioning.
Thus, Canada should build its own Linux, its own Windows, its own Google, its own Facebook, its own Amazon and so on... Just in case they ever have bad relationships with the US, you know. And since nobody would use those while US alternatives are available, it would make sense to ban Canadians from using US equivalents - for their own good. After all, this model is being used with great success in China.
> The random shit that speed out of the US is making everyone question everything.
I have read this phrase five times and still have no idea what do you mean. Is it wrong to question things? Is Trump making people question things they did not question before and somehow it is bad? Is Canada being hurt because people were not daring to question things before Trump and are questioning them now, and these things can not withstand questioning? Frankly, I am a bit lost here.
The Canadian government routinely enters into contracts with foreign companies with the requirement that those companies create Canadian jobs while executing the work under that contract. These cover a diverse range of industries from defence (e.g. Boeing) through technology (e.g. Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft). In this respect, CanCon isn't philosophically inconsistent with the government's other policies. Those that support CanCon would say it's a defence of Canadian culture at an existential level.
It's not dissimilar to the U.S. requiring that Toyota build cars in Alabama if it wants to keep selling to Americans. These things happen under the most business friendly governments and are expected to increase in the U.S. under President Trump's desired new regulations of private sector trade.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have Canadian-specific offerings operated in Canada and backed by actual Canadian employees that would be analogous to CanCon productions such as X-Files. There seems to be a misconception that CanCon means pure 100% offerings from the CBC. But that's not the case at all.
> routinely enters into contracts with foreign companies with the requirement that those companies create Canadian jobs while executing the work under that contract
Sure, for the price of government contract you can always find some things to do for some Canadians (and not that Canadians are bad at doing stuff, so they may be hired anyway, with or without this requirement, but since there is a special requirement, you could always ask for the special price...). Or invent them if needed. The funny thing is that any extra money spent on this requirement is taken from other Canadians...
> In this respect, CanCon isn't philosophically inconsistent with the government's other policies.
Oh, I'm not saying it's inconsistent with other policies. If anything, the tradition of "creating of jobs" (also known under the name of "broken window fallacy") is very popular among politicians of all kinds, and for a clear reason - the benefits of it are concentrated and easy to show, while the costs are distributed and easy to hide.
> Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have Canadian-specific offerings
The question is not whether Canada should allow Microsoft to open its office in Canada, but whether it should force it to do so under the threat of being excluded from the Canadian market and prohibiting Canadians from using Microsoft products. Some people apparently think it'd be a great idea.
> For example, here's a good take on many Canadian actors who were part of X-Files while it filmed in Vancouver
I know a lot of quality Canadian production and actors (see my other comment in this thread about Canadian shows). Which begs the question - apparently Canadians are doing fine even on the market as strong and competitive as US TV/movie scene. Despite the fact that CBC has no way to force any US network to show Canadian content, as far as I know - they willingly do so, and not once but quite frequently. So why there's a need to do the same on Canadian market - what makes one think Canadian companies can withstand competition with Hollywood on Hollywood's own soil, but would inevitably lose in Canada if only CBC didn't take regulatory measures to prevent it?
No, I have no strong opinion about this Canadian policy. All I said is that there is a legitimate rationale for the Canadian policy, and that Canada has a strategic interest to be more than just an American vassal with quaint accents.
Trump and the situation in the United States is different. We are a sort of economic empire — we industrialize culture and push it out everywhere. Kids in Africa know about the NBA and hip hop. People in China are super fans of the 90s TV show “Friends”.
I don't think my comment was claiming what should be done. I was merely explaining why such a popular meme of "CanCon sucks" is so widespread yet hasn't been fundamentally dismantled by any government of any political stripe.
short of the 10pm news and taxpayer-funded hockey, there is basically nothing on the CBC that isn't utterly derivative...and most of the dramas literally air to zero viewers...just admit it, it's all awful and you don't watch it either
I do watch it... Letterkenny is the the best thing on TV (well, CraveTV) right now in my opinion. CBC isn't the only studio producing Canadian content either.
I briefly checked your comment history... you sure have some negative things to say about Canada, huh?
I'm still interested in hearing you name some of these derivative shows that apparently make up the vast majority of Canadian television.
* CraveTV is from Bell Media, just to add context. And Letterkenny is one of my favourite new shows having grown up in an area far too similar in rural Ontario...
Unlike the USA, where all of our TV content is fresh and new.... like we have Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, Law & Order: LA, Law & Order: True Crime
There's a bunch of decent shows made in Canada - Continuum, Orphan Black, Haven, Flashpoint, Vikings... That's only those I've seen and pretty recent ones.
Canadian TV has made some iconic shows. I don't think any country has has a show like Kids in the Hall. Degrassi Jr High, Mr Dressup, Today's Special, Road to Avonlea, Being Erica, Street Legal, Beachcombers, Wok With Yan!, Babar, Trailer Park Boys, Edison Twins, The Tudors, Just Like Mom, North of 60, ENG, Flashpoint, Friendly Giant, My Secret Identity, Da Vinci’s Inquest, The Newsroom, You Can’t Do That on Television, Danger Bay, Traders, Fraggle Rock, Catwalk, Dear Aunt Agnes, Hammy the Hamster, The Littlest Hobo, Passe Partout, Polka Dot Door, The Green Forrest, Little Mosque on the Prairie, Corner Gas, Arctic Air. Show me something derivative in that list.
And thanks to Canadian patronage of the arts and media, creators of Fraggle Rock including poets Dennis Lee and B.P. Nichol played influential roles in productions of international acclaim like The Labyrinth and Dark Crystal. It certainly doesn't stop there.
Let's not forget Second City Toronto, Rick Mercer, and newer comedic hits like Fubar and Letterkenny.
The CBC is an incredible institution, you've clearly never heard their radio shows and free podcasts on a huge variety of subjects like science, art, music and informed news and political coverage, all without a corporate agenda, advertising or subversive means. For generations Canadians have grown up around the CBC: in many far north communities the CBC was often the only media available and to this day the CBC has huge popular support throughout the country.
Say what you will about the CRTC and Canadian content rule: trust me, it's contentious in Canada and the discussion has been had for decades. So by all means, it's fine to disagree.
The CBC is a whole different matter and you shouldn't neglect the power of an independent news and broadcast corporation in a democratic country and with a strong cultural and social connection.
It's what the PBS could be with more funding and more community buy-in.
> in reality it means paying taxes so the CBC can make a shitty Canadian version of Law And Order
I never understood this cheap attitude. If you broke down your tax bill maybe 10$/yr might be going to the CBC. What's the big deal?
Also, here's a perspective you might not have thought of. In my opinion, CBC should not be allowed to fund itself with advertising, and should be fully funded by tax dollars.
This would be good for private TV networks because it would free that ad revenue and make it available for the private networks to use.
Curious on the downvotes here, it's true your opinion doesn't matter when it comes to domestic regulation. It's why Quebec has dual-language laws, to limit the external influence of others and offer them protections. Hell, we have languages just now dying off that were replaced by a dominating English influence.
I'd rather watch Peter Mansbrige or Brad Griffen than Anderson Coopers face any day of the week.
That's all ok you see. Forcing culture is fine if it's our culture. But if an American says he supports USA, you can damn well be sure he's a "fucking American imperialist pig".
> I don't see other nations (trying to) force their culture, views and laws on everyone outside their nation.
British, Russian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Egyptian, Saudi, Chinese and French history would like a word with you.
The only difference between nations that do and don't push such, is their ability to: those that have been able to, without exception, have done so throughout recorded history.
If this weren't the case all we'd hear on air is American news, see only American shows. We'd have Anderson Cooper telling us what the Canadian perspective is on world events. We'd effectively be DOSed by the American perspective.
To say nothing of the francophones in Québec. They'd all be speaking English only by now, and tourists would go there like they go to New Orleans (which used to be 100% french) and say how wonderful the French 'influence' is in the region.
Yet even with the NN, Canadians still pay the highest Internet and mobile charges in the world! [0] They are more taxed than anyone and they still have severe bandwidth caps. Given how their market is ruled by very few large companies, NN is a moot point for them since they pay through the nose anyway. They have no competition and that's a bigger issue. Their politicians always like to pat themselves on the back and are trying to present Canadian situation as better than the US all the time. But the reality is not so clear cut.
If anything it makes it even worse, where prioritizing one type of data has an even bigger impact and can quickly cement the presence of companies such as facebook and obliterate any competitors.
> Ever tried to use video streaming services when your bandwidth is capped at 10 Gb per month?
That's the whole point. You can't. But hey, lucky for you your ISP has partnered up with netflix, and thus netflix streaming doesn't count towards that data cap. Awesome huh?
Most customers will think so. But in reality it's nothing but a death blow to all of netflix competitors.
The argument is that Net Neutrality is a regulatory device, thus hampers proper free market competition, hence prevents prices from properly going down.
To me Net Neutrality is a needed regulation that forces telco ops to compete on telco stuff. In that framework it's a free market competition and it does bring prices down as well as allows additional players to enter the game on ground unbiased by deep pocketed content production, which is a venue in direct conflict of interest with the telco (i.e be a pipe) side of things.
That's a false chain of reasoning. It's a regulatory device that prevents discrimination of service based on content and origin. It does not hamper free market competition, it protects human beings from monopolies and cartels and sets up the legal framework within which the free market is allowed to operate. Pretty much every industry has these regulations, and the market's doing just fine. You can't have an actually working free market without a regulatory oversight to act as feedback coupling. You need a dampening force, it just needs to be appropriate to the times, and net neutrality is appropriate to the now.
Agreed, I was merely outlining the opposite side argument in a very concise way so that it's immediately obvious how much broken it is.
> It does not hamper free market competition, it protects human beings from monopolies and cartels and sets up the legal framework within which the free market is allowed to operate.
This is precisely my opinion, as stated in my second paragraph.
The flaw in that argument is the idea that all regulation always significantly hampers free market competition.
That is so clearly not the case with this specific regulation, that your conclusion is total nonsense.
Net Neutrality is a term describing a necessary quality for the internet to have in order to be a free market.
Net Neutrality regulation is necessary because ISPs do not have competition to prevent them from breaking that.
Net Neutrality regulation requires ISPs to keep a few records, costing them a tiny amount, which is totally reasonable, and will not hamper the free market in any way.
> That is so clearly not the case with this specific regulation, that your conclusion is total nonsense.
Just to be clear, the first sentence is not my argument, and not my point of view at all: I was merely stating in a very clear way the (flawed) chain of reasoning people in favour of killing net neutrality put forward, which makes it all the more obvious how much nonsensical it is.
If you (re)read my second paragraph you will notice that it exactly states your last three sentences, and that we definitely agree.
Saying, "X is true; if you disagree, you're misinformed and should go inform yourself," isn't particularly productive. Obviously the parent is basing their opinion on different information than you, so to refute that opinion it would be helpful to prevent some evidence or reasoning.
That's the question isn't it. Ask someone what Net Neutrality is and they'll say "ISP's can't discriminate on data by source".
Ask them what it will do and it turns out that it will fix every problem you don't like about your ISP. They charge too much? Fixed. They throttle bittorrent? Fixed. Poor service? Fixed. Too slow? Too much latency?
And beauty of it is that when it's been effect for 20 years and I look around and all those things still happen ... well, imagine how bad it would have been without Net Neutrality.
Frankly I think for most people this is just a political chip. We want this because the other guys don't and vice versa. When we get this win we hurt the people who support so many other things that we don't like. The weird thing is that the logic of thought is perfectly reasonable.
> Frankly I think for most people this is just a political chip.
The only bandwagon I see is the one in opposition to net neutrality regulation. It's a bandwagon against any and all regulation, as if the word "regulation" suddenly makes something malicious.
The rest of us actually considered the details and implications, or trusted someone else who did.
$40/mo for unlimited LTE + calling is absolutely not the norm here in Ontario at least. I pay $40/mo with freedom for "unlimited" LTE but signal is iffy if you go to suburbs (works for me since i live and work in DT).
Check all the deals today, and every provider is giving $50/$60 per month for 10 gb data + unlimited calling.
Note that only Koodo and Freedom are offering this indefinitely. The other carriers' plans expire after 2 years. If trends continue it will be possible to find something at least as good by then, but no guarantees.
I just switched to Koodo from Fido, since Freedom isn't available on Vancouver Island.
In Florida, I pay $20/mo for 10mbps cable and it includes 5 cellphone lines w/ unlimited voice+text and 100mb mobile data... $12/month for each additional gb or $45 for unlimited data, shared among the 5 cellphones. https://www.xfinity.com/mobile/plan
To keep the $20/mo, I will have to call them after 1 year of service.
In Canada, isn't there a data cap on your fiber internet? I think I have 1tb/mo here for my cable internet.
"I will have to call them" ends after a few years. I got brickwalleded trying to renew my starter fees last time; they've raised rates so many times and don't care (and added data caps).
Depends on the carrier. I've always been able to add "unlimited usage" as an add-on (usually about $15). I'm currently on Videotron's 1Gbps package which is unlimited.
While this may be possible, I think you are drastically misrepresenting your own situation and the rest of Canada.
If you're phone plan is legit, I'd like to see what it is. My bet is that you're paying Rogers $40/month for some tiny amount of data over LTE[1].
Secondly, this is like saying "I live in a super rich suburb and never see homeless people around. Must not be an issue."
Now, I don't actually think that your intention was malicious, but come on. Vancouver is the rich suburb of Canada when it comes to anything.
Cheap fibre in Vancouver is more or less something you luck into by getting into a new and super expensive condo or hopping on an intro offer from Shaw or Telus.
Edit: I'd be so bold as to suggest that even while Vancouver does have some options for cheaper internet, the median cost per person would be notably higher than the rest of the country.
The good deals on fibre in Vancouver come from companies like Novus[1] that only serve the downtown core. Most of the city is stuck with Telus and Shaw.
Indeed. Though I didn't realize they only serve the downtown core. I lived in Burnaby, in a new condo development that was contractually locked in to Shaw for the entire building. Telus came in after, but I imagine things like that make it more difficult to compete as a smaller company.
This is a terrible case of anecdotal evidence, and you contribute absolutely nothing to actual sentiment of most Canadians. Most Canadians pay more than $85/mo for 5GB of data. Furthermore, I'm originally from Manitoba, where people are upset that our $48/mo 5GB plan is increasing next year to prices similar to other regions, because our local telecom service (MTS) has been bought out by Bell (one of the big 3). The only reason this cheap plan existed was because there was competition within our province, and now it has been sold to the highest bidder.
Several of the top carriers are running a promo right now that includes unlimited calling and 10GB of data for $60/month. It's literally the best publicly available plan I or anyone I've spoken to have heard of. Several people I know, including myself, have switched.
So, the wireless situation does finally seem to be getting better due to competition from new entrants like Wind/Freedom mobile. I've never heard of anything close to $40 for unlimited LTE + calling though. (Although I believe Freedom does throttle your connection rather than cutting you off when you hit their data cap; is that what you're referring to as "unlimited LTE"?)
All that Koodo has online is a message on their homepage: "You want gigs? We got gigs! Bring your own phone and get 10GB of data for $60/month. Details in store." - https://www.koodomobile.com/
I signed up for the plan today though and can confirm the details in that first link.
Wow, that's impressive, because Telus charges about $100/mo for fiber, and even something like Freedom Mobile charges $60 for "unlimited data" but only 8GB on LTE and everything after that on low speed. I don't know what magic packages you managed to arrange for yourself, but the rest of us sure as hell don't pay that litte.
"Given how their market is ruled by very few large companies, NN is a moot point"
Exactly the opposite is true. NN is most important when you have a market dominated by a few large companies!
In Europe, we don't have net neutrality. It's common to see plans marketed with free/unlimited data favouring specific services, such as Netflix.
But neutrality just isn't a big issue so long as there is plenty of competition among providers. If one company is giving slow speeds (or high charges) to your favourite services, you just switch. There's plenty of choices.
Surely the real issue in the US & Canada is the limited competition among monopolistic carriers and service providers. Net neutrality is just a smokescreen!
In Europe, we do have net neutrality. The EU wide legal framework has some big loopholes though, like allowing countries to decide whether they want to allow zero rating. And indeed, some countries did so.
I wouldn't call it a loophole. The EU framework does not try to include pricing at all. And indeed the practice of "zero rating" seems increasingly widespread.
It's not a case of opting out: member states would have to make their own, stricter rules if they wanted to ban zero rating.
Surely non-discriminatory pricing of services is a fundamental principle of net neutrality? Without it, you can't really say Europe has net neutrality at all.
Yes, the EU has healthy competition and is doing fine. But it does not have real net neutrality! See the posts/links above particularly with regard to "zero rating".
I personally don't think offering discount contracts for specific services violates NN. As long as services are all accesibile at all time at the same speed, that's NN.
Whether it's free Spotify streaming or free Spotify membership or free iPhone offered with your contract (Vodafone UK does all three) ... They're all the same and nothing to do with NN in my mind.
As long as all data streams the same at all time. Everything else is just marketing and sale offers.
Bundling (ie: "sign up and get service X free for 12 months") is one thing, and I'd agree that's outside the scope of net neutrality.
But zero rating (i.e.: "Service X data is free and does not count towards your data cap" is another. Discriminating by charging different rates for different data services isn't really much different to discriminating by prioritisation, in terms of the effect it has on the ability of rival services to compete.
Their politicians always like to pat themselves on the back and are trying to present Canadian situation as better than the US all the time. But the reality is not so clear cut.
It’s a shame so many people in Canada fall for it and let them get away with it meaning nothing changes.
Canadians end up paying the same in taxes if you add healthcare coverage costs in the US, and in the end you get a lot more bang for your tax bucks in Canada than in the US.
On NN, it’s even more important up there precisely since there’s little competition.
I’ve always wondered about this: does this include military spending? If half of our taxes go to military and many countries have little or no military, are Americans doing more with even less? Or are we just getting relatively more screwed?
There's no way around it: US healthcare realistically costs about twice as much as what comparable developed nations pay per capita.
That's a combination of a few things:
1) US wages are far higher than most developed nations (50% higher than Japan for example). People often want to blame eg big pharma for costs, or big insurance; in reality, those are only about 1/4 of the $1 trillion over-cost problem, the rest is over-consumption of services and very high wages in the health system (eg radiologists will make three to five times in the US what they do in France; nurses in the US make ~60% more than nurses in Germany).
2) US healthcare consumers consume far more healthcare services than in other developed nations. Americans are used to heavily abusing their healthcare. One of the biggest ways socialized systems bring down costs is by aggressively rationing care.
3) US health is quite poor at the median, thanks to diet and lifestyle in general. Some other nations like Britain have partially caught up to the US in obesity, but the US still leads. Combine mediocre health with a system in which the consumers over-consume healthcare services, and you get an explosion of cost. That cost spike happens to coincide almost perfectly with the ramp up in obesity in the US during the 1990s (the aging boomers also accelerated it).
4) US healthcare consumers have a big layer of separation between them and their healthcare costs. The majority never actually touch the real cost of their healthcare. They're getting their health coverage either through government programs, or through their employer. That has been a big cause of the healthcare cost inflation. The US has a badly structured government-market healthcare system today, that has few mechanisms to restrain costs well (either on the market side or the government side).
> Canadians end up paying the same in taxes if you add healthcare coverage costs in the US
The majority of Americans either get variations of 'free' healthcare (half the population) or get most or all their healthcare paid for by their job (3/4 of the other half).
To make an accurate comparison, you need to increase the median full-time pay in the US from $47,000 per year to about $58,000 per year, to build in the massive benefit of employer provided healthcare, which is excluded from US salary numbers.
There is competition in most markets, but people are lazy and stick with the incombent telcos and cable companies which slows the expansion of competitive players. I live in probably the most competitive market and I am paying 100 CAD/month for unlimited gigabit, unrestricted Internet.
Net neutrality has been critical because the incumbent players have usage caps, and have tried to offer bundled services that aren't metered. This was stopped by the CRTC, but it is exactly how regulation restricts anti-competitive activities.
It's all about the cables in rural Canada. We have decent offer in urban centers, but in Podunk, New Brunswick or whichever the snowbank you're stuck in you often have to rely on the only telco covering the area.
And for comparison, I live in one of the less competitive markets (Saskatchewan [SK])
Currently paying $90CAD for 25mbps down 2mbps up which is the fastest available plan from the only ISP with unlimited data
Ignoring satellite options there is one other ISP that can serve my house. The best plan from them is around $60CAD a month for 10mbps down and 1mbps up with 120gb of data.
For some context, I don't live in one of the two big cities of SK, but I'm not out on a farm or anything either so I think my experience is similar to most in SK that are not farmers or in Regina/Saskatoon (the two biggest cities in SK)
> Their politicians always like to pat themselves on the back and are trying to present Canadian situation as better than the US all the time.
Lol. This reminds me of their highly publicized welcoming of undocumented immigrants after Trump was elected. But, once that count crossed thousand, they just shut their border.
What NN has to do with "freedom of speech, equality and diversity"? The whole article sounds like a bunch of duckspeak, repeating slogans without almost any actual informational content.
Wait, no, I'm wrong, there's one: Canadian NAFTA negotiators have indicated that they support inclusion of a net neutrality provision within the agreement’s new digital trade chapter.
What this means? That Canada would require US to create certain regulations as a condition for signing NAFTA? Wouldn't it be kinda presuming - telling US which laws they have? I mean, Canada can have any regulations they want, NN or not, that's their business, but what this has to do with US and NAFTA?
I think the US is probably the most likely to require negotiating parties to change laws to benefit them, and because the US negotiates from a position of strength most countries have to bow down to it.
The argument is that your carrier can now block you from getting information relevant to your rights. So you may no longer be able to search for an abortion clinic, or newspapers that have negative articles about the government could be blocked, internet services in poor black neighborhoods may have their access to educational materials limited, etc. While I think that's an unlikely outcome, it would be devastating to free speech, equality, and diversity.
> The argument is that your carrier can now block you from getting information relevant to your rights
That's not an argument.
> So you may no longer be able to search for an abortion clinic, or newspapers that have negative articles about the government could be blocked, internet services in poor black neighborhoods may have their access to educational materials limited, etc.
None of these hypotheticals are being seriously contemplated as potential outcomes of the FCC relinquishing its Title II authority over ISPs. Let's focus on the likely outcomes, not the unlikely ones.
Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. are blocking controversial content all the time. Any major content hoster and social network does it. Cloudflare does it. Hosting providers do it. If it were serious concern now, which it hasn't been serious concern in 2016? Or 2014?
That's a flawed argument as the level of abstraction matters. We can route around FB and Google. Direct message each other through Signal, Telegram, or just setup our own email servers. We can't do that if the ISP inspects our packets and refuses to send them no matter how we send them.
What are you going to do when Comcast decides that hey let's charge $50 more for VPNs and another $4.99 for messaging apps (pre-approved of course)? What will you do when Signal or Telegram aren't on that list due to "security" concerns? What will you do if an ISP decides that all encrypted traffic is bad and decides to create whitelisted exceptions?
> We can't do that if the ISP inspects our packets and refuses to send them no matter how we send them.
VPN
> What are you going to do when Comcast decides that hey let's charge $50 more for VPNs
You can't charge "for VPNs" - VPN traffic is just encrypted traffic. Comcast can charge more for encrypted traffic, but that would be completely insane, ruinous for business and Comcast won't ever do it because that would be insane. And of course, it didn't do it until 2015, because it'd be insane. And if they were insane enough to do this, I'd just use AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile or whatever there would be around. Of course, I won't actually have to do any of that because Comcast is not going to do this insane thing.
> and another $4.99 for messaging apps (pre-approved of course)
Comcast doesn't approve apps, in fact Comcast has no idea what am I running and whether there are such thing as "apps" on the OS that I am running. But many mobile providers do provide free traffic for certain messaging apps. I've used it when traveling overseas, very useful to send my wife a message "I've landed, everything's fine" without having to pay for a whole daily internet package that I am not going to use. Of course, from NN point of view it is an outrage that must be banned. I fail to see why. And of course, 2015 regulations didn't prevent that from happening either.
> What will you do if an ISP decides that all encrypted traffic is bad
Wake up? Why invent scenarios that everybody knows would never happen? ISPs had 30 years until 2015 to do it, and we were fine. But now of course suddenly they all go crazy and start destroying their own business because they want $4.99 from you.
> Wake up? Why invent scenarios that everybody knows would never happen? ISPs had 30 years until 2015 to do it, and we were fine. But now of course suddenly they all go crazy and start destroying their own business because they want $4.99 from you.
Some form of the scenarios I've outlined have indeed happened in the past. From folks trying to ban competitor's emails to attempts to block specific applications and traffic types at every level. Also if China can block VPNs then I'm sure Comcast can figure it out too;
Here's a quick timeline;
"""
MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today. http://news.cnet.com/Telco-agrees-to-stop-blocking-VoIP-call...
COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/eff-tests-agree-ap-com...
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites. http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/
AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such “over-the-top” voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009. http://fortune.com/2009/04/03/group-asks-fcc-to-probe-iphone...
WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results. http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/10/04/05/phone-company-h...
MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon’s court challenge against the FCC’s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency’s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices. WillPostForFood↗
These are just some of the abuses that the FCC has interfered with and circumvented in the past.
As you say, all fixed without needing net neutrality.
> As you say, all fixed without needing net neutrality.
They were enforcing their policy of net neutrality. After the courts struck these regulatory options down, the FCC adopted the Title II order to continue enforcing net neutrality.
None of the examples you have brought has anything to do with blocking freedom of speech, etc. - except maybe TELUS case which happened in... the same Canada we now praising as being so much better than US?... But even this looks more like business dispute than anything else - though I agree that their actions were both stupid and despicable (and FCC couldn't do anything about it because FCC has no authority in Canada...)
Yes, ISPs have attempted to block apps like BitTorrent because they use tons of bandwidth and ISPs oversell bandwidth, it is a known thing. Has zero to do with freedom of speech. And, of course, they did it in secret for a very simple reason - once this is known, they got their asses kicked by both customers and FCC. Pre-2015.
AT&T case isn't even related to NN - Apple routinely blocks apps competing with their services, and NN has nothing to say about it. That's what you get for choosing closed garden ecosystem.
Summarily, I see a bunch of instances where ISPs blocked services which competed with their own or overtaxed their networks, and got a rebuke from FCC. One case where it looks like genuine attempt at suppressing speech, and it happened in Canada. But ok, I grant you this - instead of "no examples in 30 years" we can say "one example in 30 years". Maybe you could find more, and we could have an example of some stupid ISP trying it every 2 years or so and getting their hands slapped. Hardly a case for introducing sweeping new regulations, and hardly a case to predict collapse of the whole internet if the regulations return to "once every 2 years, hands slapped" situation? What would you think would have happened under 2015 regs anyway? Just the same - once per 2 years, somebody would try something and get their hands slapped. You already have it.
> Also if China can block VPNs then I'm sure Comcast can figure it out too;
Pol Pot figured how to kill millions with common hoes, and Stalin figured out how to put millions in gulags in Siberia. That's not the reason to proclaim Comcast would do the same. Would they try some shenanigans now and then, to gain upper hand competing against other ISPs or trying to adjust to new and creative usage of their networks? Surely they will. And if they try something shady, the same thing would happen that happened in 2005. BitTorrent is still alive, and so is Comcast. Somehow it worked out, despite it being 10 years before the light of Obama shined on all of us. I am sure we'll be fine in 2025 too, and Comcast won't take our freedom of speech and won't put any of us in gulag for using BitTorrent or Tor or VPN.
> Facebook, Twitter, Google, etc. are blocking controversial content all the time.
That's a concern, too, for many people, but edge provider censorship is a different problem (and much easier to work around) than censorship on the pipe connecting you to every edge provider.
Somehow those "many people" do not run around screaming "internet is doomed, dooooooomed I say! the end is nigh!" like they do about NN. Despite not having one single example where what the doom prophets predict and having many, many examples of "different problem" happening all the time.
> much easier to work around
Being banned by hosting providers, CDNs and Google is easy to work around? I wonder how you conclude it's easy?
> than censorship on the pipe connecting you to every edge provider.
Except there's no single instance of such censorship I've heard so far happening before 2015, and NN not being about censorship at all. And many, many cases of censorship happening on all major sites, which people just shrug off "well, it's a private site, what do you expect?"
The prohibition against blocking, etc., any lawful content or applications found in both the 2010 and 2015 regs is exactly about censorship, whether or not it is ideological.
The link you provided talks about censorship on forums etc. That happens on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. every day. ISPs no longer own most of the social media, but I'm not sure how the same kind of censorship is ok now (in fact, Congress just severely criticized Facebook and Twitter for doing not enough of it and allowing Russians to publish their opinions about US matters on these sites) but exactly the same censorship was not ok then? Cases of ISPs refusing hosting and other similar services are known and widely lauded. Of course, that was not because it was about censorship, but because Nazis were the ones being censored, but censorship as a principle has been accepted, and the question now is only who you can censor. And as you can know, there's no shortage of people who would declare everybody who doesn't agree with them literally Hitler and demand to censor them. Either we accept this is ok and the competition will take care of it, or we say the state must intervene and stop it - but we can't say both depending on how the company doing it is called.
" Let's focus on the likely outcomes, not the unlikely ones."
Ok. Porn, Facebook, Netflix, Wikipedia, and General informational browsing.
Facebook is likely to become more cemented in their social media spot. Good luck to the competition - Facebook doesn't count towards data limits. Now, this could go many ways, but we already have issues with this walled garden and folks getting all their news from here. I suspect it is reasonable that such a thing will become worse.
Wikipedia could easily be included, which doesn't have some of the scaryness of facebook being free from data caps. Netflix draws customers, and some will offer hulu instead. This could be good or bad.
But general information to verify things from facebook or wikipedia? Want to browse porn? Forum for that autoimmune disease you have? Now you are going against your plan, going to look at sites that don't especially work with your ISP. Not if you've gotten over your cap. Maybe you are just throttled? Yup, the doctor's office page won't load quickly enough for you to fill it out and neither will your bank's. Oops. Welcome to dial-up speeds on today's internet. There aren't enough people on some of these niche websites to matter to the near-monopoly you call an ISP so folks can't make enough of a stink to get it changed.
And that's really the point. It isn't so much that they will automatically do such things - but the fact that we are so powerless to stop it, when it really shouldn't matter to the ISP whether I watch 5 minutes of cat videos on Youtube or 5 minutes of porn. I don't trust the companies to do the "right" thing without minimally basic regulations outlining things.
> The argument is that your carrier can now block you from getting information relevant to your rights.
I have never heard of anything like that happening in the US before 2015. Could you give me some examples of this happening?
I've heard about Google and Facebook and Twitter blocking sites and content that they consider inacceptable, such as Russian media outlets associated with Russian government. I have also heard about some Nazi sites recently being essentially booted from the Internet by companies no longer wishing to be associated with such sites. All this happened while 2015 regulations were still in place, so apparently NN, at least as far as 2015 regulations go, is no barrier to this.
However, I have never heard about ISP blocking access to an abortion clinic (excepting parental control, etc. setups of course, which are usually done in more localized manner).
> internet services in poor black neighborhoods may have their access to educational materials limited
How? Any why anybody, at a time where one can lose his job just for questioning HR diversity policies, and be booted from air for having the same name as a Confederate general, would be crazy enough to do such an outrageously racist thing, even if this were possible (which it almost certainly won't be)?
> While I think that's an unlikely outcome, it would be devastating to free speech, equality, and diversity.
If it's unlikely outcome, why Canadian politicians talk about it so much and do not talk about more likely things? Rhetorical questions, of course, I know they are just blowing hot air and duckspeaking.
> I have never heard of anything like that happening in the US before 2015. Could you give me some examples of this happening?
Okay. Here's a quick timeline of related incidents where the ISP has modified someone's access to information - it includes an ISP blocking information about a labor strike against the company;
"""
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites. http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/
WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results. http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/10/04/05/phone-company-h...
PAXFIRE: In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person’s search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service’s results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/update-paxfire-and-sea...
Aren't they walking right into Trump's rhetoric is they want to subvert sovereignty? But then again, I'm sure we could comeback with something, something about Alberta sands being more carbon intensive or ecologically impactful than other sources of petroleum... Something about them wanting the KeystoneXL something something...
How is it impeded? It's like saying "free trade is impeded by Canadian trucks forced to pay for gas in US". No, it's not impeded - expecting to pay for services is not "impediment", nobody owes anybody to serve them for free, even to Canadians.
Paying for gas is a required, due to physical constraints.
Prioritization of local services over international services is a de facto tariff, and could easily fall under free trade. WTO has handled internet cases before.
Because they already paid for access, to their own ISPs. Their ISPs paid for access to backbone ISPs, which paid (through peering or peering + money) for access to other backbones. End-user ISPs pay the backbones for access, or (in the case of the large ones) may run their own backbone services. Either way the end-user ISP has been paid by their user for access to the backbone ISPs.
It's as though the Canadian trucks paid for their gas in Canada, and then get charged an import duty for it upon entering the US.
Forcing countries to regularize their trade laws with each other is.. kind of the entire point of a trade agreement. What even would a trade agreement that didn't impose laws on its participants be? "Let's be nice to each other and buy each other's stuff if we feel like it?"
"Let's buy each other's stuff if we feel like it" is a free trade agreement, not common historically. They tend to be very unpopular, so they do need to be formalized.
Trade agreements cover all kinds of things. Tariff rates, quantity of whatever that is allowed to be sold, where you're allowed to do it, most favored nation clauses...
Well, in that case it is certainly presumptuous from US side, and also bad - copyright system is broken enough in the US that spreading it around makes life only worse in other places.
I have a feeling this, along with gender, environmental, and other proposed clauses, is an attempt by Canada to make an opening bid that's unacceptable to the US, in hopes of using these items as bargaining chips in the negotiations.
I don't think it's going to work for them, but they're kind of in a desperate situation with the US having a lot less to lose if NAFTA falls apart and therefore almost all of the leverage. So Canada might as well try whatever they can.
If anybody knows how to deal with such tactics (for having used it himself countless times) it is Trump. But we'll see how it goes. It's unlikely US would ever say "yeah, we wanted to get rid of those regulations, but since Canadians asked us to have them, we can't now" but of course it never hurts to ask :)
The US negotiators are making all sorts of ridiculous demands that Canadians will never agree to. I think the Canadian strategy is to counter with their own set of politically infeasible demands, so that they have something to give up when they meet in the middle.
I’m not familiar with Canadian law, but we can take an illustrative example from US law. Say you want to stand in the town square with a sign and talk to anyone who will listen about Yemen, or Black Lives Matter, or Universal Basic Income. That is your right, and it’s protected by the First Amendment. Setting up a website where you write about your opinions is likewise protected. Eliminating net neutrality potentially makes it much harder for people’s voices to be heard, much like the city government suddenly converting all roads into toll roads for the duration of your protest. To me, silencing the voices of the people, or allowing them to speak but not to be heard, impinges on freedom of speech and assembly.
> Setting up a website where you write about your opinions is likewise protected. Eliminating net neutrality potentially makes it much harder for people’s voices to be heard
All the protections and net neutrality didn't help The Daily Stormer.
Net Neutrality helped The Daily Stormer alot. There are no known instances of any ISP, regional monopolies or not, throttling or censoring The Daily Stormer on behalf of the ISP's customers.
You might be dishonestly conflating NN into a recent event where The Daily Stormer couldn't find a web host or DNS registrar where inciting violence and terrorism was not prohibited by their terms of service.
Whether or not The Daily Stormer has a right to be hosted is a different debate, one that can only had in a world with Net Neutrality.
Canadian law allows for governmental content-based restrictions on hate speech. What's hate speech? The government knows it when it sees it. Hosting a nazi rally in Canada won't just have the rally shut down, you'll be criminally prosecuted.
An ISP is my the government. Under your scenario, Facebook should allow all lawful content.
A guy standing in the square is in a public square. That same guy could make a website but that doesn’t mean a private company is obliged to host it — that’s a violation of the owner of the private company’s free speech rights.
I am not saying anything about NN, but your example is flawed — everyone has a right to speech, but that right doesn’t imply a right to force others to transmit your message.
> Wouldn't it be kinda presuming - telling US which laws they have
Well the US tries to pull that shit all the time.
Anyway,
> but what this has to do with US and NAFTA
ensuring that the market you are agreeing to trade with has reasonably close standards to your own is critical. Otherwise you put yourself at a disadvantage.
Is that why there is a virtual monopoly on internet connections and mobile options in Canada, and why Canadians pay some of the highest rates in the world for connectivity? Is this why Canadians only have one central news source, is the CRTC a bastion of freedom now all of a sudden? They do such a great job controling television and radio, let's trust them with the internet.
This is exact what people don't realize would have happened in the US if net neutrality was kept in place. Classifying ISPs as title II would require them to apply for broadcasting licenses just like television and radio must do. What's the problem with that? Since they can't operate without a broadcasting license, the government can now threaten to revoke their license if they do not comply. The government would be able to strong arm these ISPs to remove anything they deemed as unfavorable content or propaganda (fake news?).
Nationalizing the internet is not what we want here. The FCC's main responsibility is to regulate interstate communication. The FTC's responsibility is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices, such as coercive monopoly. The FTC has much greater power to fight for consumer protections if the ISPs begin throttling, creating fast lanes, pricing tiers, etc.
The US's media machine has also consolidated, along with ISPs becoming content producers themselves and bordering monopoly status. The FCC just a few days ago announced they will work with the FTC to "return jurisdiction to the FTC to police the conduct of ISPs, including with respect to their privacy practices." [0]
Basically the FTC has more power to prevent and break up monopolies. By repealing net neutrality the FCC is saying they will hear consumers concerns and work with FTC to prevent ISPs from hurting consumers, because the FCC alone does not have the power to do that. It's also preventing the US government from forcing ISPs to comply by threatening to revoke their broadcasting license.
The FCC exempted ISPs from the arcane rules. Who would’ve sued to test that allowance? Verizon again?
Your first and second paragraphs are FUD. Your second paragraph is also nonsense because Title II isn’t nationalization. Ignoring the exemption, are companies operating under Title II nationalized? I don’t know where this kind of ignorance comes from. I see comments like this and can only assume it’s astroturfing or trolling but it has to be rebutted.
Any action against net neutrality is action against customers. There is no value in removing net neutrality regulation, and it will have no effect on competition.
Just because something can be described using the same noun does not give it the same meaning, value, or effect.
One (not "the") solution to this problem is competition. Since that competition does not exist, we resort to another solution.
> Any action against net neutrality is action against customers.
How did you reach that conclusion?
It's like saying "Any action against all-you-can-eat buffets is action against customers".
Do you believe in pay neutrality, search results neutrality, store catalog neutrality, journal opinion neutrality, etc?
How about Tesla making superchargers free to Tesla cars only?
The world is not neutral, and that's completely fine. I don't see why it should be different for ISPs. If lack of options is the problem then all of our focus should be put toward making the field more competitive, not solidify and demotivate existing monopolies by dictating their business model.
I'm sure Net Neutrality is motivated by good intentions, but I can't see any long-term benefits to it.
Net Neutrality itself is an ideal. It is distinct from any regulation enforcing it.
Net Neutrality means the internet itself is a free market.
> How did you reach that conclusion?
I haven't heard a single point to the contrary, and yes, I have asked several times in several places for one.
The only statements I have heard against net neutrality regulation are against its being regulation, and nothing else. The only parties with something to gain from a non-neutral internet are ISPs. That gain comes at the cost of abusing customers, to varying degrees.
Your original comment was lamenting the current lack of competition between ISPs. Can I take that to mean you believe in free markets?
Well, the internet itself is a market, and currently free (as in freedom) for the vast majority of its users. There are many obvious advantages to this. That freedom depends on users' ability to use it however they want to. Clearly any constraint on the use of the internet goes against that freedom.
For ISPs who want to increase profits rather than improve infrastructure, a non-neutral internet is clearly a way to do that, allowing for new sources of revenue, and the right to blame customers who use more bandwidth for "using the internet wrong", rather than themselves for not having built the necessary infrastructure.
Clearly, such actions are to the detriment of customers.
That brings us to the regulation part of Net Neutrality regulation.
Bad actors - in this case, ISPs who would rather abuse customers than help them - need a significant reason to do otherwise, usually financial.
There are two clear reasons we can give them:
1. A free market. With competition, customers can choose the provider to support, giving ISPs a financial reason not to abuse customers.
2. Regulation. If it is illegal to abuse customers, and that law is enforced, ISPs have a fiscal reason not to abuse customers.
Since we do not have a free market with competition between ISPs, the clear choice is regulation. If that point ever changes, I will be totally fine with removing the regulation, albeit my own (potentially unpopular) opinion.
Like any other Libertarian, I am very skeptical of regulation. Before I accept the notion of something being regulated, I am concerned with why it is needed, what alternatives there are, and what detriment that regulation will have.
So far, I have lined out why we need net neutrality regulation, what alternative there is, and why it is not currently viable, leaving me with what detriment the regulation itself will have.
After careful consideration, I cannot find any detriment to net neutrality regulation.
The idea that this specific regulation will hurt free market competition, which Ajit Pai claimed as his reason for removing the regulation, is not only nonsense: it is malicious.
> "It's clear that we need regulation until there is sufficient competition..."
I don't think it's as "clear" as you seem to think it is. What does seem to be a matter of historical fact is that the FCC has never been an organization which has had an interest in, or been able by fiat to, increase competition in the telecommunications industry. The US basically went for the entire 20th century with a heavily-regulated, government-enabled, monopolistic telecom network (AT&T, Verizon landline systems & DSL). The parts of the internet which have seen investment, growth, and improvement over the last 30 years? Yup, the unregulated, non-common-carrier networks (cable and fiber).
> "why get rid of regulation before competition exists?"
Because lowering barriers-of-entry into a market is exactly the best way to encourage competition in any industry. Before anyone starts an ISP (or any other business), they consider the costs of doing so vs. the expected payoff if they succeed. Regulatory compliance (especially FCC common-carrier compliance) is an added cost of doing business which absolutely could be enough to keep a business from starting up.
You don't need NN to get telcos to behave. When did Comcast lower their prices and up their speeds? When Google Fiber came to town. When did Google Fiber come to town? When they got the municipality to remove as many barriers-to-entry as they could
what if its always more profitable to provide internet packages rather than equal access bits-are-bits service. even with several providers can you guarantee that at least one of them will charge flat rate or per bit rather than by content?
the cost of regulatory compliance in this case isn't an additional fixed cost like .. properly disposing of waste products, but avoiding business models that constrain and restrict access.
an internet where my usage - outside the question of compensating for last mile infrastructure and transit fees with a reasonable profit - is curated by some product management group solely interested in extracting the maximum profit from me and upstream services I might be using, isn't really an internet at all but cable television.
and if we're just talking about cable television, I can probably learn to live without the wealth of internet entertainment options I have today..but if you hack off the long tail and undermine the general free exchange of information because it isn't sufficiently interesting from a business perspective to my regional provider, you've lost something quite substantial just so someone else can make a buck.
maybe I'm in the minority, but as much as I enjoy having gigabit access, I would take an unrestricted 1Mb over a carefully controlled 1Gb in a heartbeat.
> Regulatory compliance (especially FCC common-carrier compliance) is an added cost of doing business which absolutely could be enough to keep a business from starting up.
Have you calculated how much does that really cost? I'd say it's several orders of magnitude lower[0] than the consequence of other regulations that are the real cause there are no more ISPs.
The barrier to entry for new ISPs is usually regional incumbent pre-existing monopolies. While NN is _technically_ a regulation, it adds no cost to ISPs, especially startups. NN essentially prevents ISPs from buying/building extraneous hardware+software for the purpose of indexing origins of megabytes per customer for the purpose of double billing or throttling based on the ISPs contract with the content service provider (who already paid their ISP).
Generally regulation and competition are in opposition to one another. Regulations inhibit innovation. See Airline regulation.
That's not say regulations are a bad thing - how much innovation do you want in the handling of your food? But at the same time it's worth being aware the regulations are written slowly, tend to be inflexible and get written by people who are informed about the subject matter which is to say are incumbents with a vested interest in the status quo.
That's exactly what's happening. But the FCC does not have the power to do that because that falls under the jurisdiction of the FTC.
They announced this a few days ago [0]. NN would have nationalized the internet which is the opposite of what we want. But everyone is spreading FUD online and calling for title II clasification. We don't want the government controlling the internet. We want them preventing bad business practices that hurt consumers (i.e. break up monopolies). The FCC can't do that, but they can work with the FTC who can.
I don't see how NN would slow down breaking monopolies. The cost of complying with NN for new ISPs is negligible. And what do you mean by government "controlling" the internet? What are they deciding, exactly? As far as I know, it's just making sure that NN (the default state of computer networks) is preserved, by having them disclosing some data to the public.
I think this is a damaging perspective. Sure, it's not a bad goal, but I strongly disagree with the implication that we should drop the fight for net neutrality in return for a faint sliver of hope of some small progress.
As far as I can tell, the only effective way to break up ISP monopolies would be to force allowing any/all companies to share the wires to your house. As long as one company owns the physical wires and a competing service would have to physically lay down new, redundant infrastructure, there's no chance due to the costs involved.
And it will be difficult, painstaking, and incremental to pass those kinds of laws (probably starts at the state and local level). It will take years and years.
NN was a simple, single federal law that protected all Americans everywhere and was already in place. So while improved competition is a good long-term goal to shoot for, it should be complementary to NN, definitely not a replacement.
Sharing wires is not where the problem is. These days last mile can be very very cheap as long as there is no rent seeking anywhere or regulations denying open access to the infrastructure for the last mile. So what is needed is a law that exempts ISPs somehow from the decades of anti-competitive regulations, guarantees open access to the infrastructure, prevents monopolies and local authorities from rent seeking, denying or overpricing such access.
I don't know what issue this could possibly address. Canada's problem is access and sometimes lack of available competition, not neutrality. I'm in a place where two of the major ISPs serve, and I have a gigabit downlink for not a huge amount of money, but just a few blocks away it's possible you only have one (DSL-only) provider who will barely sell you 20mb/s for the same. All of this is basically complete historical accident relating to deployment of cable TV.
We have a tenth of the US population and are slightly larger in size. My province alone is twice the size of California with a population of one million people. Infrastructure is a gong show when it comes to profitability.
In my province many areas are served by one provider, simply because it is not profitable to run infrastructure out to these areas. Near more populated areas there is more competition and major providers however. Hell, the only reason they have connections in the first place is because the provider was run and funded by the provincial government.
That's why the tech industry thrived in the silicon valley and not in Canada. The lack of regulation made the internet what it is, if it was up to Canada we would still deliver bit and bites in punch cards delivered by union members with certificate to cary punch cards in a format approved by the government. I would leave net "neutrality" to the Canadians but would like to adopt their immigration policy if possible please.
Edit: Maxime Bernier, in his tweet, creates a false dichotomy between government regulation and more competition. Yes we need more competition, but no we don't need less regulation unless that regulation is a major contributor to getting started. Now granted, I don't know a lot about getting started in telecom, but I suspect there isn't legislation in place that actively discourages new players.
Sorry.. why is net neutrality even an issue? The moment a big operator tries to increase fees for faster speeds, customers will move to an operator that does not do those things. New technology will provide higher speeds at lower cost. So why does it matter to have net neutrality laws?
An problematic issue that tech might focus on would be to solve the problem of overconsumption of energy by cryptocurrencies.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadI don't know how they square that given it goes though Russia, China, India etc... as if those three neither had snooping capability nor wanted to be able to snoop.
The whole proposition is preposterous. Russia, India and China all are known to monitor their citizens comms as a matter of course. It's not even hidden or prefaced.
If anything, this makes it easier for those countries to intercept their own citizens' comms --which is probably their whole intent.
TBH, I am so disappointed with US government:
* Cannot take care of its own people
* Initiated wars and instability all over the world
* Cannot find the right leader
* Spying on anyone and everyone
What a fucked-up government...
It's been Canada's struggle for some time to maintain an identity in the face of some kind of ideological imperialism. Manifest Destiny is still fresh on Canadian minds, and non-points like this implying some kind of tyranny are grossly mal-informed. Our CRTC who made that ruling is the same CRTC who is ensuring net neutrality and mandating performant broadband internet as a basic telecom service. Things the FCC just thought not worth protecting for Americans.
edit: To clarify myself a bit: This is an impassioned subject for me. I think the US is a great nation—but implying something nefarious about Canadians' attempt at self-preservation, while residing next to a federation like the US, is incomprehensible.
But I bet it has played a role in the existence of some of the great Canadian shows of the last generation.
You mean, Canada should mandate certain percentage of software be written in Canada too, and if your site or software product doesn't run X% of Canadian software, you should not be able to use it within Canada? Great idea, sure.
It’s not in Canada’s national interest for Toronto to be a remote suburb of the US east coast. If and when relations between the two nations degrade, Canada needs to be able to continue functioning.
That’s the danger of the mercurial Trump administration. The random shit that speed out of the US is making everyone question everything.
So, are you agreeing with me that it'd be good for Canadian government to require software (or at least significant part of it) be made in Canada?
> If and when relations between the two nations degrade, Canada needs to be able to continue functioning.
Thus, Canada should build its own Linux, its own Windows, its own Google, its own Facebook, its own Amazon and so on... Just in case they ever have bad relationships with the US, you know. And since nobody would use those while US alternatives are available, it would make sense to ban Canadians from using US equivalents - for their own good. After all, this model is being used with great success in China.
> The random shit that speed out of the US is making everyone question everything.
I have read this phrase five times and still have no idea what do you mean. Is it wrong to question things? Is Trump making people question things they did not question before and somehow it is bad? Is Canada being hurt because people were not daring to question things before Trump and are questioning them now, and these things can not withstand questioning? Frankly, I am a bit lost here.
It's not dissimilar to the U.S. requiring that Toyota build cars in Alabama if it wants to keep selling to Americans. These things happen under the most business friendly governments and are expected to increase in the U.S. under President Trump's desired new regulations of private sector trade.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have Canadian-specific offerings operated in Canada and backed by actual Canadian employees that would be analogous to CanCon productions such as X-Files. There seems to be a misconception that CanCon means pure 100% offerings from the CBC. But that's not the case at all.
For example, here's a good take on many Canadian actors who were part of X-Files while it filmed in Vancouver. Actors ranging from Cancer Man to the Lone Gunmen were all Canadian. https://etcanada.com/photos/119349/the-x-files-canadian-conn...
Sure, for the price of government contract you can always find some things to do for some Canadians (and not that Canadians are bad at doing stuff, so they may be hired anyway, with or without this requirement, but since there is a special requirement, you could always ask for the special price...). Or invent them if needed. The funny thing is that any extra money spent on this requirement is taken from other Canadians...
> In this respect, CanCon isn't philosophically inconsistent with the government's other policies.
Oh, I'm not saying it's inconsistent with other policies. If anything, the tradition of "creating of jobs" (also known under the name of "broken window fallacy") is very popular among politicians of all kinds, and for a clear reason - the benefits of it are concentrated and easy to show, while the costs are distributed and easy to hide.
> Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have Canadian-specific offerings
The question is not whether Canada should allow Microsoft to open its office in Canada, but whether it should force it to do so under the threat of being excluded from the Canadian market and prohibiting Canadians from using Microsoft products. Some people apparently think it'd be a great idea.
> For example, here's a good take on many Canadian actors who were part of X-Files while it filmed in Vancouver
I know a lot of quality Canadian production and actors (see my other comment in this thread about Canadian shows). Which begs the question - apparently Canadians are doing fine even on the market as strong and competitive as US TV/movie scene. Despite the fact that CBC has no way to force any US network to show Canadian content, as far as I know - they willingly do so, and not once but quite frequently. So why there's a need to do the same on Canadian market - what makes one think Canadian companies can withstand competition with Hollywood on Hollywood's own soil, but would inevitably lose in Canada if only CBC didn't take regulatory measures to prevent it?
Trump and the situation in the United States is different. We are a sort of economic empire — we industrialize culture and push it out everywhere. Kids in Africa know about the NBA and hip hop. People in China are super fans of the 90s TV show “Friends”.
almost none of the "Canadian" content relates any national values...it is almost uniformly just garbage remakes of US shows
I briefly checked your comment history... you sure have some negative things to say about Canada, huh?
I'm still interested in hearing you name some of these derivative shows that apparently make up the vast majority of Canadian television.
Let's not forget Second City Toronto, Rick Mercer, and newer comedic hits like Fubar and Letterkenny.
Say what you will about the CRTC and Canadian content rule: trust me, it's contentious in Canada and the discussion has been had for decades. So by all means, it's fine to disagree.
The CBC is a whole different matter and you shouldn't neglect the power of an independent news and broadcast corporation in a democratic country and with a strong cultural and social connection.
It's what the PBS could be with more funding and more community buy-in.
I never understood this cheap attitude. If you broke down your tax bill maybe 10$/yr might be going to the CBC. What's the big deal?
Also, here's a perspective you might not have thought of. In my opinion, CBC should not be allowed to fund itself with advertising, and should be fully funded by tax dollars.
This would be good for private TV networks because it would free that ad revenue and make it available for the private networks to use.
As an American your opinion really doesn't matter here... it's American influence these laws were created to limit.
I'd rather watch Peter Mansbrige or Brad Griffen than Anderson Coopers face any day of the week.
Naturally, they play most of those songs during the night.
British, Russian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, Egyptian, Saudi, Chinese and French history would like a word with you.
The only difference between nations that do and don't push such, is their ability to: those that have been able to, without exception, have done so throughout recorded history.
If this weren't the case all we'd hear on air is American news, see only American shows. We'd have Anderson Cooper telling us what the Canadian perspective is on world events. We'd effectively be DOSed by the American perspective.
To say nothing of the francophones in Québec. They'd all be speaking English only by now, and tourists would go there like they go to New Orleans (which used to be 100% french) and say how wonderful the French 'influence' is in the region.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/how-canad...
If so, you are misunderstanding what Net Neutrality is.
Go read about it, as there is more than plenty, readily available on the subject.
If anything it makes it even worse, where prioritizing one type of data has an even bigger impact and can quickly cement the presence of companies such as facebook and obliterate any competitors.
Not At all? Are you sure? Ever tried to use video streaming services when your bandwidth is capped at 10 Gb per month?
> Ever tried to use video streaming services when your bandwidth is capped at 10 Gb per month?
That's the whole point. You can't. But hey, lucky for you your ISP has partnered up with netflix, and thus netflix streaming doesn't count towards that data cap. Awesome huh?
Most customers will think so. But in reality it's nothing but a death blow to all of netflix competitors.
To me Net Neutrality is a needed regulation that forces telco ops to compete on telco stuff. In that framework it's a free market competition and it does bring prices down as well as allows additional players to enter the game on ground unbiased by deep pocketed content production, which is a venue in direct conflict of interest with the telco (i.e be a pipe) side of things.
Agreed, I was merely outlining the opposite side argument in a very concise way so that it's immediately obvious how much broken it is.
> It does not hamper free market competition, it protects human beings from monopolies and cartels and sets up the legal framework within which the free market is allowed to operate.
This is precisely my opinion, as stated in my second paragraph.
That is so clearly not the case with this specific regulation, that your conclusion is total nonsense.
Net Neutrality is a term describing a necessary quality for the internet to have in order to be a free market.
Net Neutrality regulation is necessary because ISPs do not have competition to prevent them from breaking that.
Net Neutrality regulation requires ISPs to keep a few records, costing them a tiny amount, which is totally reasonable, and will not hamper the free market in any way.
Just to be clear, the first sentence is not my argument, and not my point of view at all: I was merely stating in a very clear way the (flawed) chain of reasoning people in favour of killing net neutrality put forward, which makes it all the more obvious how much nonsensical it is.
If you (re)read my second paragraph you will notice that it exactly states your last three sentences, and that we definitely agree.
Go read about it, as there is more than plenty, readily available on the subject.
The only cost associated with net neutrality regulation is a minimal bookkeeping one.
The only cost associated with net neutrality itself is the potential cost for consumers without it.
Ask them what it will do and it turns out that it will fix every problem you don't like about your ISP. They charge too much? Fixed. They throttle bittorrent? Fixed. Poor service? Fixed. Too slow? Too much latency?
And beauty of it is that when it's been effect for 20 years and I look around and all those things still happen ... well, imagine how bad it would have been without Net Neutrality.
Frankly I think for most people this is just a political chip. We want this because the other guys don't and vice versa. When we get this win we hurt the people who support so many other things that we don't like. The weird thing is that the logic of thought is perfectly reasonable.
The only bandwagon I see is the one in opposition to net neutrality regulation. It's a bandwagon against any and all regulation, as if the word "regulation" suddenly makes something malicious.
The rest of us actually considered the details and implications, or trusted someone else who did.
I lived in Florida and my net taxes, incl health insurance was the same
Check all the deals today, and every provider is giving $50/$60 per month for 10 gb data + unlimited calling.
I just switched to Koodo from Fido, since Freedom isn't available on Vancouver Island.
To keep the $20/mo, I will have to call them after 1 year of service.
In Canada, isn't there a data cap on your fiber internet? I think I have 1tb/mo here for my cable internet.
If you're phone plan is legit, I'd like to see what it is. My bet is that you're paying Rogers $40/month for some tiny amount of data over LTE[1].
Secondly, this is like saying "I live in a super rich suburb and never see homeless people around. Must not be an issue."
Now, I don't actually think that your intention was malicious, but come on. Vancouver is the rich suburb of Canada when it comes to anything.
Cheap fibre in Vancouver is more or less something you luck into by getting into a new and super expensive condo or hopping on an intro offer from Shaw or Telus.
[1] https://www.rogers.com/consumer/wireless/smartphone-plans?ip...
Edit: I'd be so bold as to suggest that even while Vancouver does have some options for cheaper internet, the median cost per person would be notably higher than the rest of the country.
[1] http://www.novusnow.ca/internet/
I live in an inexpensive building built in the 1980s
There are options, but many people don't know about them or are unwilling to do anything
So, the wireless situation does finally seem to be getting better due to competition from new entrants like Wind/Freedom mobile. I've never heard of anything close to $40 for unlimited LTE + calling though. (Although I believe Freedom does throttle your connection rather than cutting you off when you hit their data cap; is that what you're referring to as "unlimited LTE"?)
All that Koodo has online is a message on their homepage: "You want gigs? We got gigs! Bring your own phone and get 10GB of data for $60/month. Details in store." - https://www.koodomobile.com/
I signed up for the plan today though and can confirm the details in that first link.
Exactly the opposite is true. NN is most important when you have a market dominated by a few large companies!
In Europe, we don't have net neutrality. It's common to see plans marketed with free/unlimited data favouring specific services, such as Netflix.
But neutrality just isn't a big issue so long as there is plenty of competition among providers. If one company is giving slow speeds (or high charges) to your favourite services, you just switch. There's plenty of choices.
Surely the real issue in the US & Canada is the limited competition among monopolistic carriers and service providers. Net neutrality is just a smokescreen!
In Europe, we do have net neutrality. The EU wide legal framework has some big loopholes though, like allowing countries to decide whether they want to allow zero rating. And indeed, some countries did so.
See for example https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_law#European_... and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/27/eu-net-ne...
It's not a case of opting out: member states would have to make their own, stricter rules if they wanted to ban zero rating.
Surely non-discriminatory pricing of services is a fundamental principle of net neutrality? Without it, you can't really say Europe has net neutrality at all.
News to me. The EU most definitely has NN and healthy competition, it's doing fine.
Whether it's free Spotify streaming or free Spotify membership or free iPhone offered with your contract (Vodafone UK does all three) ... They're all the same and nothing to do with NN in my mind.
As long as all data streams the same at all time. Everything else is just marketing and sale offers.
But zero rating (i.e.: "Service X data is free and does not count towards your data cap" is another. Discriminating by charging different rates for different data services isn't really much different to discriminating by prioritisation, in terms of the effect it has on the ability of rival services to compete.
It’s a shame so many people in Canada fall for it and let them get away with it meaning nothing changes.
On NN, it’s even more important up there precisely since there’s little competition.
That's a combination of a few things:
1) US wages are far higher than most developed nations (50% higher than Japan for example). People often want to blame eg big pharma for costs, or big insurance; in reality, those are only about 1/4 of the $1 trillion over-cost problem, the rest is over-consumption of services and very high wages in the health system (eg radiologists will make three to five times in the US what they do in France; nurses in the US make ~60% more than nurses in Germany).
2) US healthcare consumers consume far more healthcare services than in other developed nations. Americans are used to heavily abusing their healthcare. One of the biggest ways socialized systems bring down costs is by aggressively rationing care.
3) US health is quite poor at the median, thanks to diet and lifestyle in general. Some other nations like Britain have partially caught up to the US in obesity, but the US still leads. Combine mediocre health with a system in which the consumers over-consume healthcare services, and you get an explosion of cost. That cost spike happens to coincide almost perfectly with the ramp up in obesity in the US during the 1990s (the aging boomers also accelerated it).
4) US healthcare consumers have a big layer of separation between them and their healthcare costs. The majority never actually touch the real cost of their healthcare. They're getting their health coverage either through government programs, or through their employer. That has been a big cause of the healthcare cost inflation. The US has a badly structured government-market healthcare system today, that has few mechanisms to restrain costs well (either on the market side or the government side).
The majority of Americans either get variations of 'free' healthcare (half the population) or get most or all their healthcare paid for by their job (3/4 of the other half).
To make an accurate comparison, you need to increase the median full-time pay in the US from $47,000 per year to about $58,000 per year, to build in the massive benefit of employer provided healthcare, which is excluded from US salary numbers.
Net neutrality has been critical because the incumbent players have usage caps, and have tried to offer bundled services that aren't metered. This was stopped by the CRTC, but it is exactly how regulation restricts anti-competitive activities.
https://www.beanfield.com/residential/ https://www.coextro.com/
Well, that's why. Competition drives prices down.
Currently paying $90CAD for 25mbps down 2mbps up which is the fastest available plan from the only ISP with unlimited data
Ignoring satellite options there is one other ISP that can serve my house. The best plan from them is around $60CAD a month for 10mbps down and 1mbps up with 120gb of data.
For some context, I don't live in one of the two big cities of SK, but I'm not out on a farm or anything either so I think my experience is similar to most in SK that are not farmers or in Regina/Saskatoon (the two biggest cities in SK)
Lol. This reminds me of their highly publicized welcoming of undocumented immigrants after Trump was elected. But, once that count crossed thousand, they just shut their border.
NN has never guaranteed you cheap internet, fast internet, or choice in internet.
Wait, no, I'm wrong, there's one: Canadian NAFTA negotiators have indicated that they support inclusion of a net neutrality provision within the agreement’s new digital trade chapter.
What this means? That Canada would require US to create certain regulations as a condition for signing NAFTA? Wouldn't it be kinda presuming - telling US which laws they have? I mean, Canada can have any regulations they want, NN or not, that's their business, but what this has to do with US and NAFTA?
That's not an argument.
> So you may no longer be able to search for an abortion clinic, or newspapers that have negative articles about the government could be blocked, internet services in poor black neighborhoods may have their access to educational materials limited, etc.
None of these hypotheticals are being seriously contemplated as potential outcomes of the FCC relinquishing its Title II authority over ISPs. Let's focus on the likely outcomes, not the unlikely ones.
Yes, an internet version of Verizon’s “controversial and unsavory” text message policy it's blocking of NARAL is definitely a serious concern.
What are you going to do when Comcast decides that hey let's charge $50 more for VPNs and another $4.99 for messaging apps (pre-approved of course)? What will you do when Signal or Telegram aren't on that list due to "security" concerns? What will you do if an ISP decides that all encrypted traffic is bad and decides to create whitelisted exceptions?
Where will you go then?
VPN
> What are you going to do when Comcast decides that hey let's charge $50 more for VPNs
You can't charge "for VPNs" - VPN traffic is just encrypted traffic. Comcast can charge more for encrypted traffic, but that would be completely insane, ruinous for business and Comcast won't ever do it because that would be insane. And of course, it didn't do it until 2015, because it'd be insane. And if they were insane enough to do this, I'd just use AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile or whatever there would be around. Of course, I won't actually have to do any of that because Comcast is not going to do this insane thing.
> and another $4.99 for messaging apps (pre-approved of course)
Comcast doesn't approve apps, in fact Comcast has no idea what am I running and whether there are such thing as "apps" on the OS that I am running. But many mobile providers do provide free traffic for certain messaging apps. I've used it when traveling overseas, very useful to send my wife a message "I've landed, everything's fine" without having to pay for a whole daily internet package that I am not going to use. Of course, from NN point of view it is an outrage that must be banned. I fail to see why. And of course, 2015 regulations didn't prevent that from happening either.
> What will you do if an ISP decides that all encrypted traffic is bad
Wake up? Why invent scenarios that everybody knows would never happen? ISPs had 30 years until 2015 to do it, and we were fine. But now of course suddenly they all go crazy and start destroying their own business because they want $4.99 from you.
Some form of the scenarios I've outlined have indeed happened in the past. From folks trying to ban competitor's emails to attempts to block specific applications and traffic types at every level. Also if China can block VPNs then I'm sure Comcast can figure it out too;
Here's a quick timeline;
"""
MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today. http://news.cnet.com/Telco-agrees-to-stop-blocking-VoIP-call...
COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/eff-tests-agree-ap-com...
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites. http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/
AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such “over-the-top” voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009. http://fortune.com/2009/04/03/group-asks-fcc-to-probe-iphone...
WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results. http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/10/04/05/phone-company-h...
MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon’s court challenge against the FCC’s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency’s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices. WillPostForFood ↗ These are just some of the abuses that the FCC has interfered with and circumvented in the past. todayiamme ↗ > As you say, all fixed without needing net neutrality. smsm42 ↗ None of the examples you have brought has anything to do with blocking freedom of speech, etc. - except maybe TELUS case which happened in... the same Canada we now praising as being so much better than US?... But even this looks more like business dispute than anything else - though I agree that their actions were both stupid and despicable (and FCC couldn't do anything about it because FCC has no authority in Canada...)
As you say, all fixed without needing net neutrality.
They were enforcing their policy of net neutrality. After the courts struck these regulatory options down, the FCC adopted the Title II order to continue enforcing net neutrality.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-netneutrality/u...
Yes, ISPs have attempted to block apps like BitTorrent because they use tons of bandwidth and ISPs oversell bandwidth, it is a known thing. Has zero to do with freedom of speech. And, of course, they did it in secret for a very simple reason - once this is known, they got their asses kicked by both customers and FCC. Pre-2015.
AT&T case isn't even related to NN - Apple routinely blocks apps competing with their services, and NN has nothing to say about it. That's what you get for choosing closed garden ecosystem.
Summarily, I see a bunch of instances where ISPs blocked services which competed with their own or overtaxed their networks, and got a rebuke from FCC. One case where it looks like genuine attempt at suppressing speech, and it happened in Canada. But ok, I grant you this - instead of "no examples in 30 years" we can say "one example in 30 years". Maybe you could find more, and we could have an example of some stupid ISP trying it every 2 years or so and getting their hands slapped. Hardly a case for introducing sweeping new regulations, and hardly a case to predict collapse of the whole internet if the regulations return to "once every 2 years, hands slapped" situation? What would you think would have happened under 2015 regs anyway? Just the same - once per 2 years, somebody would try something and get their hands slapped. You already have it.
> Also if China can block VPNs then I'm sure Comcast can figure it out too;
Pol Pot figured how to kill millions with common hoes, and Stalin figured out how to put millions in gulags in Siberia. That's not the reason to proclaim Comcast would do the same. Would they try some shenanigans now and then, to gain upper hand competing against other ISPs or trying to adjust to new and creative usage of their networks? Surely they will. And if they try something shady, the same thing would happen that happened in 2005. BitTorrent is still alive, and so is Comcast. Somehow it worked out, despite it being 10 years before the light of Obama shined on all of us. I am sure we'll be fine in 2025 too, and Comcast won't take our freedom of speech and won't put any of us in gulag for using BitTorrent or Tor or VPN.
That's a concern, too, for many people, but edge provider censorship is a different problem (and much easier to work around) than censorship on the pipe connecting you to every edge provider.
> much easier to work around
Being banned by hosting providers, CDNs and Google is easy to work around? I wonder how you conclude it's easy?
> than censorship on the pipe connecting you to every edge provider.
Except there's no single instance of such censorship I've heard so far happening before 2015, and NN not being about censorship at all. And many, many cases of censorship happening on all major sites, which people just shrug off "well, it's a private site, what do you expect?"
Yes, the people for whom edge provider censorship is a concern frequently do exactly that, and complain that regulatory intervention is necessary.
It's true that the people concerned about edge provider censorship and those concerned about access provider censorship are often different people.
> Except there's no single instance of such censorship I've heard so far happening before 2015
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/1998-...
> and NN not being about censorship at all.
The prohibition against blocking, etc., any lawful content or applications found in both the 2010 and 2015 regs is exactly about censorship, whether or not it is ideological.
Ok. Porn, Facebook, Netflix, Wikipedia, and General informational browsing.
Facebook is likely to become more cemented in their social media spot. Good luck to the competition - Facebook doesn't count towards data limits. Now, this could go many ways, but we already have issues with this walled garden and folks getting all their news from here. I suspect it is reasonable that such a thing will become worse.
Wikipedia could easily be included, which doesn't have some of the scaryness of facebook being free from data caps. Netflix draws customers, and some will offer hulu instead. This could be good or bad.
But general information to verify things from facebook or wikipedia? Want to browse porn? Forum for that autoimmune disease you have? Now you are going against your plan, going to look at sites that don't especially work with your ISP. Not if you've gotten over your cap. Maybe you are just throttled? Yup, the doctor's office page won't load quickly enough for you to fill it out and neither will your bank's. Oops. Welcome to dial-up speeds on today's internet. There aren't enough people on some of these niche websites to matter to the near-monopoly you call an ISP so folks can't make enough of a stink to get it changed.
And that's really the point. It isn't so much that they will automatically do such things - but the fact that we are so powerless to stop it, when it really shouldn't matter to the ISP whether I watch 5 minutes of cat videos on Youtube or 5 minutes of porn. I don't trust the companies to do the "right" thing without minimally basic regulations outlining things.
I have never heard of anything like that happening in the US before 2015. Could you give me some examples of this happening?
I've heard about Google and Facebook and Twitter blocking sites and content that they consider inacceptable, such as Russian media outlets associated with Russian government. I have also heard about some Nazi sites recently being essentially booted from the Internet by companies no longer wishing to be associated with such sites. All this happened while 2015 regulations were still in place, so apparently NN, at least as far as 2015 regulations go, is no barrier to this.
However, I have never heard about ISP blocking access to an abortion clinic (excepting parental control, etc. setups of course, which are usually done in more localized manner).
> internet services in poor black neighborhoods may have their access to educational materials limited
How? Any why anybody, at a time where one can lose his job just for questioning HR diversity policies, and be booted from air for having the same name as a Confederate general, would be crazy enough to do such an outrageously racist thing, even if this were possible (which it almost certainly won't be)?
> While I think that's an unlikely outcome, it would be devastating to free speech, equality, and diversity.
If it's unlikely outcome, why Canadian politicians talk about it so much and do not talk about more likely things? Rhetorical questions, of course, I know they are just blowing hot air and duckspeaking.
Okay. Here's a quick timeline of related incidents where the ISP has modified someone's access to information - it includes an ISP blocking information about a labor strike against the company;
"""
TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites. http://thetyee.ca/News/2005/08/04/TelusCensor/
WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results. http://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/10/04/05/phone-company-h...
PAXFIRE: In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person’s search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service’s results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/update-paxfire-and-sea...
- https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...
"""
I feel that these incidents establish a strong precedent and behavioral pattern that makes the expectation of a hands-off approach by ISPs irrational.
Treaties are powerful instruments, and require Senate confirmation. If approved, the US would be obliged to meet its treaty obligations.
Prioritization of local services over international services is a de facto tariff, and could easily fall under free trade. WTO has handled internet cases before.
It's as though the Canadian trucks paid for their gas in Canada, and then get charged an import duty for it upon entering the US.
Trade agreements cover all kinds of things. Tariff rates, quantity of whatever that is allowed to be sold, where you're allowed to do it, most favored nation clauses...
Unfortunately, this is commonplace, especially with the US on the "telling" end.[0]
[0] See international copyright law.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
Well, in that case it is certainly presumptuous from US side, and also bad - copyright system is broken enough in the US that spreading it around makes life only worse in other places.
I don't think it's going to work for them, but they're kind of in a desperate situation with the US having a lot less to lose if NAFTA falls apart and therefore almost all of the leverage. So Canada might as well try whatever they can.
This behaviour is largely the Canadian Liberal party appeasing its voter base through virtuous grand-standing over actual effectiveness.
I'm very uneasy about the fact that we've Trudeau at the bargaining table here.
All the protections and net neutrality didn't help The Daily Stormer.
You might be dishonestly conflating NN into a recent event where The Daily Stormer couldn't find a web host or DNS registrar where inciting violence and terrorism was not prohibited by their terms of service.
Whether or not The Daily Stormer has a right to be hosted is a different debate, one that can only had in a world with Net Neutrality.
A guy standing in the square is in a public square. That same guy could make a website but that doesn’t mean a private company is obliged to host it — that’s a violation of the owner of the private company’s free speech rights.
I am not saying anything about NN, but your example is flawed — everyone has a right to speech, but that right doesn’t imply a right to force others to transmit your message.
Well the US tries to pull that shit all the time.
Anyway,
> but what this has to do with US and NAFTA
ensuring that the market you are agreeing to trade with has reasonably close standards to your own is critical. Otherwise you put yourself at a disadvantage.
Nationalizing the internet is not what we want here. The FCC's main responsibility is to regulate interstate communication. The FTC's responsibility is the promotion of consumer protection and the elimination and prevention of anticompetitive business practices, such as coercive monopoly. The FTC has much greater power to fight for consumer protections if the ISPs begin throttling, creating fast lanes, pricing tiers, etc.
The US's media machine has also consolidated, along with ISPs becoming content producers themselves and bordering monopoly status. The FCC just a few days ago announced they will work with the FTC to "return jurisdiction to the FTC to police the conduct of ISPs, including with respect to their privacy practices." [0]
Basically the FTC has more power to prevent and break up monopolies. By repealing net neutrality the FCC is saying they will hear consumers concerns and work with FTC to prevent ISPs from hurting consumers, because the FCC alone does not have the power to do that. It's also preventing the US government from forcing ISPs to comply by threatening to revoke their broadcasting license.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/12/ftc-f...
The solution to most of problems is competition, not regulation.
Any action against net neutrality is action against customers. There is no value in removing net neutrality regulation, and it will have no effect on competition.
Just because something can be described using the same noun does not give it the same meaning, value, or effect.
One (not "the") solution to this problem is competition. Since that competition does not exist, we resort to another solution.
How did you reach that conclusion?
It's like saying "Any action against all-you-can-eat buffets is action against customers".
Do you believe in pay neutrality, search results neutrality, store catalog neutrality, journal opinion neutrality, etc?
How about Tesla making superchargers free to Tesla cars only?
The world is not neutral, and that's completely fine. I don't see why it should be different for ISPs. If lack of options is the problem then all of our focus should be put toward making the field more competitive, not solidify and demotivate existing monopolies by dictating their business model.
I'm sure Net Neutrality is motivated by good intentions, but I can't see any long-term benefits to it.
Net Neutrality means the internet itself is a free market.
> How did you reach that conclusion?
I haven't heard a single point to the contrary, and yes, I have asked several times in several places for one.
The only statements I have heard against net neutrality regulation are against its being regulation, and nothing else. The only parties with something to gain from a non-neutral internet are ISPs. That gain comes at the cost of abusing customers, to varying degrees.
Your original comment was lamenting the current lack of competition between ISPs. Can I take that to mean you believe in free markets?
Well, the internet itself is a market, and currently free (as in freedom) for the vast majority of its users. There are many obvious advantages to this. That freedom depends on users' ability to use it however they want to. Clearly any constraint on the use of the internet goes against that freedom.
For ISPs who want to increase profits rather than improve infrastructure, a non-neutral internet is clearly a way to do that, allowing for new sources of revenue, and the right to blame customers who use more bandwidth for "using the internet wrong", rather than themselves for not having built the necessary infrastructure.
Clearly, such actions are to the detriment of customers.
That brings us to the regulation part of Net Neutrality regulation.
Bad actors - in this case, ISPs who would rather abuse customers than help them - need a significant reason to do otherwise, usually financial.
There are two clear reasons we can give them:
1. A free market. With competition, customers can choose the provider to support, giving ISPs a financial reason not to abuse customers.
2. Regulation. If it is illegal to abuse customers, and that law is enforced, ISPs have a fiscal reason not to abuse customers.
Since we do not have a free market with competition between ISPs, the clear choice is regulation. If that point ever changes, I will be totally fine with removing the regulation, albeit my own (potentially unpopular) opinion.
Like any other Libertarian, I am very skeptical of regulation. Before I accept the notion of something being regulated, I am concerned with why it is needed, what alternatives there are, and what detriment that regulation will have.
So far, I have lined out why we need net neutrality regulation, what alternative there is, and why it is not currently viable, leaving me with what detriment the regulation itself will have.
After careful consideration, I cannot find any detriment to net neutrality regulation.
The idea that this specific regulation will hurt free market competition, which Ajit Pai claimed as his reason for removing the regulation, is not only nonsense: it is malicious.
It's clear that we need regulation until there is sufficient competition, so why get rid of regulation before competition exists?
I don't think it's as "clear" as you seem to think it is. What does seem to be a matter of historical fact is that the FCC has never been an organization which has had an interest in, or been able by fiat to, increase competition in the telecommunications industry. The US basically went for the entire 20th century with a heavily-regulated, government-enabled, monopolistic telecom network (AT&T, Verizon landline systems & DSL). The parts of the internet which have seen investment, growth, and improvement over the last 30 years? Yup, the unregulated, non-common-carrier networks (cable and fiber).
> "why get rid of regulation before competition exists?"
Because lowering barriers-of-entry into a market is exactly the best way to encourage competition in any industry. Before anyone starts an ISP (or any other business), they consider the costs of doing so vs. the expected payoff if they succeed. Regulatory compliance (especially FCC common-carrier compliance) is an added cost of doing business which absolutely could be enough to keep a business from starting up.
You don't need NN to get telcos to behave. When did Comcast lower their prices and up their speeds? When Google Fiber came to town. When did Google Fiber come to town? When they got the municipality to remove as many barriers-to-entry as they could
the cost of regulatory compliance in this case isn't an additional fixed cost like .. properly disposing of waste products, but avoiding business models that constrain and restrict access.
an internet where my usage - outside the question of compensating for last mile infrastructure and transit fees with a reasonable profit - is curated by some product management group solely interested in extracting the maximum profit from me and upstream services I might be using, isn't really an internet at all but cable television.
and if we're just talking about cable television, I can probably learn to live without the wealth of internet entertainment options I have today..but if you hack off the long tail and undermine the general free exchange of information because it isn't sufficiently interesting from a business perspective to my regional provider, you've lost something quite substantial just so someone else can make a buck.
maybe I'm in the minority, but as much as I enjoy having gigabit access, I would take an unrestricted 1Mb over a carefully controlled 1Gb in a heartbeat.
Have you calculated how much does that really cost? I'd say it's several orders of magnitude lower[0] than the consequence of other regulations that are the real cause there are no more ISPs.
[0] (response to a comment I made wrongly stating it doesn't cost a cent) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15891156
That's not say regulations are a bad thing - how much innovation do you want in the handling of your food? But at the same time it's worth being aware the regulations are written slowly, tend to be inflexible and get written by people who are informed about the subject matter which is to say are incumbents with a vested interest in the status quo.
They announced this a few days ago [0]. NN would have nationalized the internet which is the opposite of what we want. But everyone is spreading FUD online and calling for title II clasification. We don't want the government controlling the internet. We want them preventing bad business practices that hurt consumers (i.e. break up monopolies). The FCC can't do that, but they can work with the FTC who can.
[0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/12/ftc-f...
As far as I can tell, the only effective way to break up ISP monopolies would be to force allowing any/all companies to share the wires to your house. As long as one company owns the physical wires and a competing service would have to physically lay down new, redundant infrastructure, there's no chance due to the costs involved.
And it will be difficult, painstaking, and incremental to pass those kinds of laws (probably starts at the state and local level). It will take years and years.
NN was a simple, single federal law that protected all Americans everywhere and was already in place. So while improved competition is a good long-term goal to shoot for, it should be complementary to NN, definitely not a replacement.
In my province many areas are served by one provider, simply because it is not profitable to run infrastructure out to these areas. Near more populated areas there is more competition and major providers however. Hell, the only reason they have connections in the first place is because the provider was run and funded by the provincial government.
https://openmedia.org/en/ca
Edit: Maxime Bernier, in his tweet, creates a false dichotomy between government regulation and more competition. Yes we need more competition, but no we don't need less regulation unless that regulation is a major contributor to getting started. Now granted, I don't know a lot about getting started in telecom, but I suspect there isn't legislation in place that actively discourages new players.
An problematic issue that tech might focus on would be to solve the problem of overconsumption of energy by cryptocurrencies.