Dissenting opinion: I dont think net neutrality is a good policy. Very light users(news) are effectively subsidizing super heavy users(netflix). NN is just popular because it was removed not because it's a good policy.
I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping. This gives an incentive to companies to give you faster speed and provide levels of speed/ping that people would be willing to pay extra for.
Something like:
Browsing tier: .1c/GB 1mb/s 500ms ping guaranteed
Video tier: .3c/GB 100 mb/s 100ms ping, 99.9% packet delivery
Video conferencing tier: 100 mb/s 50ms ping, no packet loss
etc... Don't focus on numbers but rather the idea.
I don't think you have a correct definition of what net neutrality, as a policy, is. See below.
> I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping.
This is perfectly consistent with net neutrality.
What is not consistent with net neutrality is pricing the same GB/speed/uptime/ping differently, depending on which endpoint the traffic is coming from/going to. That is what net neutrality regulation prevents, and all that it prevents.
The EFF seems to have changed its definition of NN and now includes throttling in it as their press release for the recent Verizon tiff when they throttled a fire department.
They are being really inconsistent in their definition, saying that the repeal of NN allowed the throttling to happen. I guess that isn't technically saying it falls under NN if you twist your head enough, but is certainly is conflating the two issues.
The EFF's press release was not referring to net neutrality as a general concept, it was specifically talking about concrete language in the 2015 Open Internet Order.
> you can search for throttling to see what the rule would have banned
I did. It bans throttling based on content. It does not ban throttling based on going over the usage cap in the plan you paid for, which is what Verizon did to the Santa Clara fire department.
You're right, I thought "on the basis of Internet service" meant your ISP service, but it actually means some other service that you're using the internet to access.
On page 52: 122. Because our no-throttling rule addresses instances in which a broadband provider targets particular content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices, it does not address a practice of slowing down an end user’s connection to the Internet based on a choice made by the end user. For instance, a broadband provider may offer a data plan in which a subscriber receives a set amount of data at one speed tier and any remaining data at a lower tier. If the Commission were concerned about the particulars of a data plan, it could review it under the no-unreasonable interference/disadvantage standard. In contrast, if a broadband provider degraded the delivery of a particular application (e.g., a disfavored VoIP service) or class of application (e.g., all VoIP applications), it would violate the bright-line no-throttling rule. We note that user-selected data plans with reduced speeds must comply with our transparency rule, such that the limitations of the plan are clearly and accurately communicated to the subscriber.
I assume that's the one you are commenting on, if not, feel free to post a link as the EFF has been putting out a lot of communications lately. :-)
I agree with you that the EFF's communication here is muddled. The point I would focus on in the actual incident (the Santa Clara fire department being throttled) is this one:
"Within the documents submitted by Santa Clara, it appears to be some confusion as to what exactly was Verizon selling to the fire department. Twice the public safety officials asserted they thought they were buying an unlimited plan and twice they discovered during the emergency they did not."
In other words, to me the key issue here is not throttling, but whether customers understand what they are buying. (As the article notes, it might not be Verizon's fault if there was a misunderstanding; that would need to be investigated.) If you buy a plan that says you get throttled after a certain usage point, that's what you bought; I don't see how that is inconsistent with NN since the throttling doesn't depend on what sites you go to. But the EFF then argues this:
"The FCC, however, could have proactively addressed this problem in the future and establish a federal rule applicable in all fifty states that ISPs are not allowed to throttle public safety services during emergencies. The FCC under its Title II authority could even go so far and categorically say it is illegal to try to upsell public safety agencies, or anyone, wireless plans during official emergencies as a matter of public safety. The agency would have good arguments as to why to set these rules, and thanks to Verizon, the evidence to demonstrate that threats to health and life are at stake in the absence of such rules. But the Restoring Internet Freedom Order abandoned those powers, so right now in America, firefighters don’t have a government agency they can turn to for help."
To me this is a different issue from NN, since the whole basis of the argument is that public safety agencies should be treated differently from other customers. I don't disagree with that argument, but I don't think it falls under NN either.
Having speed tiers isn't what people typically refer to when saying throttling. Throttling is "you used 100gb so we're halving the speed you purchased"
I believe in the Verizon case at issue, one of the issues was whether the apparent confusion was a result of a failure of transparency, which was an element of both the 2015 and 2010 Open Internet (aka, “net neutrality”) orders from the FCC, though a separate issue from net neutrality as that is usually understood.
This predicates meaningful access to the internet on your socioeconomic status, further entrenching extant divisions. Educational material is increasingly being delivered in video form. What happens, e.g., to poor families have to choose between paying the electric bill, or buying food, or buying enough download capacity that their kid can learn?
But that's not even the real issue. The big problem with a non-neutral internet is the barrier to entry imposed on non-incumbent players. Netflix has the money (and customer base) to absorb any "pay to play" costs imposed by the end-user's ISP.
Whiz-Bang Startup Streaming Service doesn't, unless they take more funding, meaning the people who created the thing own less of it, and all of that additional money goes to the incumbent ISPs.
I submit that this is an intentional outcome of the policy.
I think everyone can agree with you on the "per GB front". NN does nothing to prohibit data plans which cap at some GB limit. The issue is, the carrier shouldn't get to decide the weight of different GBs. It's about all bytes over the network being equal. If you use the internet mostly for news, you can always opt for a smaller data plan. I don't see how you get forced to pay for someone whose content is of different nature.
Yup. And (especially) since government is gatekeeping who gets to be an ISP, it has a responsibility to ensure providers focus on providing a useful service rather than using the junction as strategic chokepoint.
Netflix is not a user. The end customer is. Flipping this on its head, so that it sounds like the "super heavy users" are the businesses, is an anti-net-neutrality talking point. Don't fall for it.
Businesses such as Netflix enter peering arrangements to build out network infrastructure and server farms close to where the customer demand is. It's customers who are driving this, because the ISPs would lose them otherwise.
Uh... what? Net Neutrality doesn't prevent ISPs from charging different rates for different speeds. They did that during the existence of the rule.
It prevents ISPs from charging you based on which sites you can access. Without NN an ISP can charge you $5/month extra if you want to access Hacker News, $10/month to access Netflix, and an extra $20/month to access Netflix at speeds that aren't effectively crippled. It can flat out refuse to serve you a website.
I've always wondered if it would be more fair to only pay for UPLOAD. Download all you want, but pay for everything you upload.
It always seemed to me the best of both worlds. Those torrenting and serving large amounts of data (Netflix, etc) would be paying, and they're also responsible for the amounts of traffic as well.
Selling per GB is an absolutely horrible idea because that’s not how networks work. ISPs have conjured this concept from nowhere solely as a way to get people to pay more money.
Bandwidth is data transfer over time, and there is no “bucket of data” that gets depleted when you transfer data. It’s not gas or water or something that you drain out the more you use.
Time is divided into time slots and that time is going to pass whether you put something in the packet or not. If that time slot was empty, it is wasted and you can never get it back. So you really want to be able to use all time slots as much as you can.
But ISPs want to be able to advertise fast speeds that make them look impressive, though they don’t want to you actually be able to use it because then they have to upgrade their pipes. So they play these tricks where they can claim you have fast speeds but then this magical bucket of data gets depleted every time you use it.
While I'm sure ISP execs are all mustache-twirling villains, what they're doing is not absurd, it's essentially the same as selling a burstable connection with a certain average bandwidth (the cap divided by one month gives a data transfer over time).
And the reality is that, as a customer who loads a 5MB site and then spends 2-3m reading it, I much prefer this model than if they sold me a smaller fixed data transfer over time.
That networks don't work like this is rather irrelevant, because it's a shared pipe. If they sold be a data transfer over time (say, guaranteed 256kps), that would be wasteful, because I couldn't take advantage of the higher speeds when other customers weren't using it too. A well-managed burstable connection is a much more efficient use of the resource.
> Dissenting opinion: I dont think net neutrality is a good policy. Very light users(news) are effectively subsidizing super heavy users(netflix).
Net neutrality does not prohibit charging by volume of usage, if anything, the inability to do backdoor (and possibly third-party) charges based on kind of usage and remote edge provider interacted with encourages direct usage-based charges.
> I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping.
Well, at least on the first two axes that is both possible and consistent with net neutrality. Charging by ping is problematic: ping to what endpoint?
Netflix already pays for their Internet connection. I already pay for mine. Why should Comcast et al be allowed to seek yet more rent between two parties who are already paying customers?
Aren't free-market capitalism and net neutrality inherently at odds with each other? My general understanding of HN culture is that it is generally capitalist and generally pro net neutrality. Could someone who finds themselves in both of these general categories explain their position?
> Aren't free-market capitalism and net neutrality inherently at odds with each other?
Strictly speaking, yes. But free-market capitalism is also inherently at odds with ISPs having monopolies based on geographical area, which is the case for most of the US. Net neutrality regulation is an attempt to address the obvious issues with that, given the fact that the ISP monopolies are not going to go away any time soon. In other words, in an ideal free market, yes, net neutrality regulation would not exist; but we don't have anything close to an ideal free market in Internet access.
ISPs are not operating in a pure market. They have been granted billions of dollars in subsidies over the years, and in many places are/were also granted monopolies because communities don’t want wires being run by multiple companies. After all the benefits they have been given, now they want to turn around and cry “free market” and that they should not be regulated.
It's also not possible to operate in a completely unregulated free market when your industry relies on a finite amount of space in the ground to lay fiber or airwaves to transmit on. There's a very limited amount of competition that can operate when a city has to approve someone digging up the roads every time a new company pops up.
> There's a very limited amount of competition that can operate when a city has to approve someone digging up the roads every time a new company pops up.
The solution to this is for the actual physical infrastructure that requires digging up roads to be owned by the city (or other local entity), so it only has to be put into place once, when the city is built; and for competing ISPs to either lease, say, fiber bandwidth from the city, or get a permit to pull their own cabling through already existing underground tunnels.
The problem is that every municipality that has tried this solution has been sued into oblivion by the ISPs, who want to prevent open competition by any means necessary.
The basic gist is that net neutrality wouldn't be necessary if ISPs weren't defacto monopolies.
Because there is such limited competition in the broadband ISP space (most people only have one choice!) the free market can't work to drive down prices.
"Free market" is about freedom to enter, participate in, and exit the market. So things like monopolies and artificial barriers to entry are anti-free market.
Net neutrality is policing specific legal vs illegal behaviors, similarly to environmental protection laws. A "free market" doesn't really (at least not publicly) allow illegal services, because the action itself is illegal, both inside and outside the market offerings, so it is relatively orthogonal.
Certainly the maximization of profit (which has little to do with free market operations, but more of lock-in) would be helped if they were freely allowed to pursue any illegal activity in the name of profit. But it is the realm of the government, not the market, to decide what should be illegal for everybody including market participants, to mitigate predatory actions and destructive externalities.
I describe it as "free as in GPL, not as in BSD". My ideal free market has enough regulation to prevent it from being owned by an oligopoly, so that the market itself is a free ground for experimentation and new business. I'm not a fan of markets that are free for the first, biggest players to corrupt and destroy.
High ISP competition would be preferable. But that's not going to be possible anytime soon until all state monopolies are removed (by law). Until then, net neutrality is needed to keep the internet fair in a market full of local monopolies/national oligopolies hell-bent on squeezing as much money as possible from their customers - even with illegal tactics like adding hidden charges to their bills.
But even if there was a highly competitive ISP market, some ground rules would still be needed to ensure that the large players don't mess with the small players somehow, just maybe not as strict.
> But that's not going to be possible anytime soon until all state monopolies are removed (by law).
With perfect competition you still have the problem that a large amount of capital investment is required (making it impractical to challenge established companies) and ISPs from a pure profit motive have little incentive to serve less densely populated areas. The theory behind granting the monopoly is that in exchange they have to serve everyone and submit to more vigorous regulation.
> a large amount of capital investment is required (making it impractical to challenge established companies)
Not if the capital investment is made, as it should be, by individual localities who want to own Internet infrastructure, or at least the capital intensive portion of it, that they then lease to ISPs. But ISPs sue localities who try this.
I mean, why not go a step further and just run it as a municipal service at that point? Don't really see the point to adding a middleman to skim money off the top when the taxpayers have done the hard part for them.
> why not go a step further and just run it as a municipal service at that point?
If you mean, run the basic fiber (or whatever broadband hardware the municipality puts in) bandwidth supply as a municipal service, and let competing service providers rent bandwidth, that is exactly what various municipalities have tried (and been sued for by the big ISPs).
If you mean, have the municipality be an actual ISP, I think some have tried that (and been sued by the big ISPs); but I'm not that actual ISP services are a natural municipal service the way the basic high speed hardware/right of way is.
There's no such thing as perfect, natural free-market capitalism; government creates the conditions in which something called a "free market" can exist. Additionally, Internet service providers enjoy a monopoly in most regions they operate in, making the typical nostrums about the Invisible Hand even less convincing than usual.
There is a long (although slowly being forgotten) history of vigorous regulation of the market used in the US to maintain competition and avoid a situation where a handful of large trusts control the entire economy. Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it? Because that's the way we're headed.
> government creates the conditions in which something called a "free market" can exist
No, it doesn't. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Such a market is much more likely to exist in the absence of government regulation.
> Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it?
You mean the days when Standard Oil obtained a de facto monopoly by selling oil cheaper than any competitor, and thereby saving us, the customers, lots of money? At least until the government stepped in and messed things up?
(For an even more egregious example, look up what happened to Alcoa Aluminum.)
There is no such thing as a "free market". What "capitalists" really want is "strong competition", not "free markets". The "free market" zealots think they are capitalists, but they really end up promoting a rentier economy where monopolists abuse state power to create perpetual advantages that benefit themselves but harm consumers in terms of higher costs, fewer options, etc.
The problem with internet services is that the infrastructure required creates a natural monopoly (ex: running fiber optic cables to each persons house), and there is a lot of regulation in many markets that ISPs are granted de facto monopoly power by the state itself in exchange for a guarantee of universal access for everyone in a given area, even if those customers are unprofitable/too expensive to service. If there was no monopoly at the ISP level, natural or otherwise, then there would be no need for net neutrality, as consumers would be able to choose alternatives and ISPs would compete on value. Net neutrality is an anti-monopolist regulation.
Capitalism is great when it's many companies competing. That's the kind of capitalism I support. Capitalism isn't so great when a highly in demand market is largely geographically controlled by very few, with that control also being largely governmentally involved because part of its product is now essential infrastructure.
There are thresholds for when how markets operate starts to have effects that have sizeable socioeconomic effects. I don't think it's hyperbole to claim that the Internet is now an essential part of U.S. commerce with itself and the world. Whenever we talk about physical commerce, like stores or driving to work, we generally agree we need some form of government oversight and regulation so that the commerce can keep flowing.
For example if a highway has a wreck it can prevent millions of dollars being earned all across the board. This is in part why we have road safety standards, and standards for the vehicles that can be on it.
I think the internet is similiar in some ways. We now use it for work in lots of places. For government applications, and to buy and sell a significant amount of goods. Entertainment is included as services and goods.
When we consider commerce flowing freely we have to also consider the real bottlenecks to it in relation to monopalistic control. Is netflix's bandwidth actually a significant stress for Comcasts networks? If it is, is it because netflix's bandwidth is inherently too large for what Comcast can realistically afford, or is it because Comcast does not want to innovate and/or improve their infrastructure?
I was surprised when I found you can get a 1Gb/s dedicated line through Cogent or Hurricane Electric for about $150. This is transit network that has very low latency, and they're much smaller companies than U.S. ISP's. Residential internet is not dedicated, it's shared. I don't have the data on how much is actually used but I highly suspect only about 1/20th is used by most people overall, if not less.
I think as it stands right now, it's ISP's lack of competition leading to lack of effort to provide a good product. Given their position and lack of effort they are the ones who are actually hurting free commerce.
If they are hurting free commerce then what should be done about it? Well, as I originally stated, ISP's are in the business of infrastructure. You don't have realistic alternatives that do allow that commerce (In this case, bandwidth). So, do we just ignore commerce for the country being limited, or do we force the hand?
I think forcing the hand is a bandaid, but a true solution, competition, is much further out of reach. Any time anti-monopalization is brought up you get the same notions of 'free market' saying no, when monopalization puts down free markets.
> Aren't free-market capitalism and net neutrality inherently at odds with each other?
Yes, but laissez-faire capitalism has been largely abandoned in favor of mixed market economies in the developed world for the better part of a century.
> My general understanding of HN culture is that it is generally capitalist
HN does not have a strong consensus on my economics. There is definitely a return-to-the-gilded-age faction, sure, but they aren't alone.
I'm all in favor of healthy, competitive free markets with reasonable assurances to protect consumers and control for externalities. Basically your boilerplate I-took-some-econ-courses-in-college mentality.
The problem is only in very large cities is there any internet competition, information asymmetry and deceptive advertising practices harm consumers, and having free and open access to information is in societies best interests.
Capitalism requires that everyone play by the same rules, that those rules be fair, and that there be competition and alternatives. Without net neutrality, a single corporation can dictate to an unprecedented degree what information you have access to for any purpose whatsoever with no recourse. This isn't because they're in the business of generating information, but because they put themselves between the producer and the consumer. It's not any different from the anti-competitive practices of the robber-baron era where Standard Oil owned the rail roads, then priced out competition from transporting their oil to gain a monopoly. We know from the past behavior and the current behavior of ISPs in other countries that the reason they want to end net neutrality is so that they can price out and block YouTube to gain a monopoly on video services, or to do the same to any other area they want, simultaneously making more money and the world worse off because of it.
I love businesses. But when Standard Oil charges certain companies one rate for train fare and themselves a different one, or when Bell charges you extra fees to connect to non-Bell telephones (or blocks them entirely), then you have a market failure and the government needs to step in and break up those companies and force them to be competitive. Without competitive markets, you don't have capitalism, you have feudalism.
Once Musk is ready with his satellites, there should really be a concerted crowdfunded option where an internet backbone is also launched and put into a non-profit public trust.
Then, it should be an issue where leaders in the state and federal level are backed by the people and to make the incumbents like Comcast and their ilk back off and negate any moves to kill it off. Because we all know they will try and do just that through lobbying to protect their oligopoly.
This should really be a free market issue. I truly believe that one day, technology will be at a tipping point that bandwidth will be free.
Much like solar in the beginning, expensive to produce and not really producing a bang for buck. But now, it's a completely different picture.
I can't wait until telecoms companies are consigned to history.
Has latency and congestion in satellites been resolved? Last time I used one the latency was 1200ms end to end. Gaming was impossible. SSH, even using mosh, was painful. Most interactive websites were not usable. For watching low res videos it was ok. If this has changed, that would be great. I am tired of comcast's duopoly.
The Starlink satellites are in a very low orbit that decays relatively quickly, and so is only feasible with a large constellation of very cheap nodes that wasn't possible before. The high latencies are to geostationary communications satellites, which are vastly farther away. Starlink latency should only be 25 - 50 ms.
Steerable phased-array base station antennas make Elon’s LEO network possible. Latency is all about the speed of light. Existng networks use geosynchronous orbit, because existung base stations have fixed aim. Elon’s LEO satellites will be as low as 300km versus the 35,000km to geosynchronous orbit.
Latency may actually be better than fiber for long haul access, because routing will take place between satellites. The speed of light in vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in a fiber (which of course we use terrestrially)
I would love to see how they handle the multiplexing and routing of so many high speed links by many people, while only using the power that a satellite can maintain.
I am very much looking forward to this. This would solve several problems for me.
As others have pointed out, LEO satellites solve the latency problem. Why then was this not done before? Because LEO satellites move. You can't use a fixed antenna for LEO; you have to track the satellite. This means you have to use a motorized antenna (cumbersome and expensive and generally impractical) or use a phased array antenna with no moving parts. Only recently has the technology for phased array antennas become cheap enough for average consumers. So the delay in fixing the problem was mostly the fault of antenna technology rather than satellite technology.
Postscript: Iridium is LEO and doesn't require a fancy antenna. How come? Iridium is designed for voice; throughput is a few kbits/second. That's way too slow for modern internet. For mbit/sec speeds, you need a higher signal-to-noise ratio and an omni antenna like Iridium's won't cut it. You have to track the satellite.
>(a) It shall be unlawful for a fixed Internet service provider,
I assume this means 'not mobile'
>(1) Blocking lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.
California will outlaw ISPs providing network level ad blocking services.
>(6) Zero-rating some Internet content, applications, services, or devices in a category of Internet content, applications, services, or devices, but not the entire category.
California will make T-Mobile Binge On type service illegal for cable providers to offer.
>(b) It shall be unlawful for a mobile Internet service provider, insofar as the provider is engaged in providing mobile broadband Internet access service, to engage in any of the activities described in paragraphs (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), and (9) of subdivision (a).
> California will make T-Mobile Binge On type service illegal for cable providers to offer.
Hopefully, yes.
> And the will outlaw T-Mobile Binge On too.
Hopefully, yes.
In the short term, I like those services. Hey, free streaming video! But in the enlightened self interest long term, I don't want my ISP deciding which services I can plausibly use. Imagine Verizon offered zero-rated Netflix, "but since you don't need all that expensive per-gigabyte data like our competitors try to sell you, we'll give you 2GB of data for free with your plan, but unlimited access to our wide variety of paid sponsors!"
62 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 106 ms ] threadI think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping. This gives an incentive to companies to give you faster speed and provide levels of speed/ping that people would be willing to pay extra for.
Something like: Browsing tier: .1c/GB 1mb/s 500ms ping guaranteed Video tier: .3c/GB 100 mb/s 100ms ping, 99.9% packet delivery Video conferencing tier: 100 mb/s 50ms ping, no packet loss
etc... Don't focus on numbers but rather the idea.
I don't think you have a correct definition of what net neutrality, as a policy, is. See below.
> I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping.
This is perfectly consistent with net neutrality.
What is not consistent with net neutrality is pricing the same GB/speed/uptime/ping differently, depending on which endpoint the traffic is coming from/going to. That is what net neutrality regulation prevents, and all that it prevents.
The EFF seems to have changed its definition of NN and now includes throttling in it as their press release for the recent Verizon tiff when they throttled a fire department.
They are being really inconsistent in their definition, saying that the repeal of NN allowed the throttling to happen. I guess that isn't technically saying it falls under NN if you twist your head enough, but is certainly is conflating the two issues.
There's too much to quote here, but you can search for throttling to see what the rule would have banned: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-releases-open-internet-orde...
I did. It bans throttling based on content. It does not ban throttling based on going over the usage cap in the plan you paid for, which is what Verizon did to the Santa Clara fire department.
On page 52: 122. Because our no-throttling rule addresses instances in which a broadband provider targets particular content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices, it does not address a practice of slowing down an end user’s connection to the Internet based on a choice made by the end user. For instance, a broadband provider may offer a data plan in which a subscriber receives a set amount of data at one speed tier and any remaining data at a lower tier. If the Commission were concerned about the particulars of a data plan, it could review it under the no-unreasonable interference/disadvantage standard. In contrast, if a broadband provider degraded the delivery of a particular application (e.g., a disfavored VoIP service) or class of application (e.g., all VoIP applications), it would violate the bright-line no-throttling rule. We note that user-selected data plans with reduced speeds must comply with our transparency rule, such that the limitations of the plan are clearly and accurately communicated to the subscriber.
Sorry.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/verizons-throttling-fi...
I assume that's the one you are commenting on, if not, feel free to post a link as the EFF has been putting out a lot of communications lately. :-)
I agree with you that the EFF's communication here is muddled. The point I would focus on in the actual incident (the Santa Clara fire department being throttled) is this one:
"Within the documents submitted by Santa Clara, it appears to be some confusion as to what exactly was Verizon selling to the fire department. Twice the public safety officials asserted they thought they were buying an unlimited plan and twice they discovered during the emergency they did not."
In other words, to me the key issue here is not throttling, but whether customers understand what they are buying. (As the article notes, it might not be Verizon's fault if there was a misunderstanding; that would need to be investigated.) If you buy a plan that says you get throttled after a certain usage point, that's what you bought; I don't see how that is inconsistent with NN since the throttling doesn't depend on what sites you go to. But the EFF then argues this:
"The FCC, however, could have proactively addressed this problem in the future and establish a federal rule applicable in all fifty states that ISPs are not allowed to throttle public safety services during emergencies. The FCC under its Title II authority could even go so far and categorically say it is illegal to try to upsell public safety agencies, or anyone, wireless plans during official emergencies as a matter of public safety. The agency would have good arguments as to why to set these rules, and thanks to Verizon, the evidence to demonstrate that threats to health and life are at stake in the absence of such rules. But the Restoring Internet Freedom Order abandoned those powers, so right now in America, firefighters don’t have a government agency they can turn to for help."
To me this is a different issue from NN, since the whole basis of the argument is that public safety agencies should be treated differently from other customers. I don't disagree with that argument, but I don't think it falls under NN either.
This predicates meaningful access to the internet on your socioeconomic status, further entrenching extant divisions. Educational material is increasingly being delivered in video form. What happens, e.g., to poor families have to choose between paying the electric bill, or buying food, or buying enough download capacity that their kid can learn?
But that's not even the real issue. The big problem with a non-neutral internet is the barrier to entry imposed on non-incumbent players. Netflix has the money (and customer base) to absorb any "pay to play" costs imposed by the end-user's ISP.
Whiz-Bang Startup Streaming Service doesn't, unless they take more funding, meaning the people who created the thing own less of it, and all of that additional money goes to the incumbent ISPs.
I submit that this is an intentional outcome of the policy.
Businesses such as Netflix enter peering arrangements to build out network infrastructure and server farms close to where the customer demand is. It's customers who are driving this, because the ISPs would lose them otherwise.
It prevents ISPs from charging you based on which sites you can access. Without NN an ISP can charge you $5/month extra if you want to access Hacker News, $10/month to access Netflix, and an extra $20/month to access Netflix at speeds that aren't effectively crippled. It can flat out refuse to serve you a website.
It always seemed to me the best of both worlds. Those torrenting and serving large amounts of data (Netflix, etc) would be paying, and they're also responsible for the amounts of traffic as well.
Bandwidth is data transfer over time, and there is no “bucket of data” that gets depleted when you transfer data. It’s not gas or water or something that you drain out the more you use.
Time is divided into time slots and that time is going to pass whether you put something in the packet or not. If that time slot was empty, it is wasted and you can never get it back. So you really want to be able to use all time slots as much as you can.
But ISPs want to be able to advertise fast speeds that make them look impressive, though they don’t want to you actually be able to use it because then they have to upgrade their pipes. So they play these tricks where they can claim you have fast speeds but then this magical bucket of data gets depleted every time you use it.
And the reality is that, as a customer who loads a 5MB site and then spends 2-3m reading it, I much prefer this model than if they sold me a smaller fixed data transfer over time.
That networks don't work like this is rather irrelevant, because it's a shared pipe. If they sold be a data transfer over time (say, guaranteed 256kps), that would be wasteful, because I couldn't take advantage of the higher speeds when other customers weren't using it too. A well-managed burstable connection is a much more efficient use of the resource.
Correct. I agree with most of your post.
> If that time slot was empty, it is wasted and you can never get it back. So you really want to be able to use all time slots as much as you can.
Yes. And you don't get that by having everybody with their foot down on the download pedal all the time.
Speed oversubscription is a thing, because a lot of the time people are using a trickle down of data, in some other periods they're using more.
NN is important and a byte from Netflix shouldn't be treated differently from a byte from some other site.
But I think having people differentiated by the amount of data they use per month (or at least having a big tier limit) could be something ""ok"".
Net neutrality does not prohibit charging by volume of usage, if anything, the inability to do backdoor (and possibly third-party) charges based on kind of usage and remote edge provider interacted with encourages direct usage-based charges.
> I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping.
Well, at least on the first two axes that is both possible and consistent with net neutrality. Charging by ping is problematic: ping to what endpoint?
Strictly speaking, yes. But free-market capitalism is also inherently at odds with ISPs having monopolies based on geographical area, which is the case for most of the US. Net neutrality regulation is an attempt to address the obvious issues with that, given the fact that the ISP monopolies are not going to go away any time soon. In other words, in an ideal free market, yes, net neutrality regulation would not exist; but we don't have anything close to an ideal free market in Internet access.
The solution to this is for the actual physical infrastructure that requires digging up roads to be owned by the city (or other local entity), so it only has to be put into place once, when the city is built; and for competing ISPs to either lease, say, fiber bandwidth from the city, or get a permit to pull their own cabling through already existing underground tunnels.
The problem is that every municipality that has tried this solution has been sued into oblivion by the ISPs, who want to prevent open competition by any means necessary.
Because there is such limited competition in the broadband ISP space (most people only have one choice!) the free market can't work to drive down prices.
Net neutrality is policing specific legal vs illegal behaviors, similarly to environmental protection laws. A "free market" doesn't really (at least not publicly) allow illegal services, because the action itself is illegal, both inside and outside the market offerings, so it is relatively orthogonal.
Certainly the maximization of profit (which has little to do with free market operations, but more of lock-in) would be helped if they were freely allowed to pursue any illegal activity in the name of profit. But it is the realm of the government, not the market, to decide what should be illegal for everybody including market participants, to mitigate predatory actions and destructive externalities.
But even if there was a highly competitive ISP market, some ground rules would still be needed to ensure that the large players don't mess with the small players somehow, just maybe not as strict.
With perfect competition you still have the problem that a large amount of capital investment is required (making it impractical to challenge established companies) and ISPs from a pure profit motive have little incentive to serve less densely populated areas. The theory behind granting the monopoly is that in exchange they have to serve everyone and submit to more vigorous regulation.
Not if the capital investment is made, as it should be, by individual localities who want to own Internet infrastructure, or at least the capital intensive portion of it, that they then lease to ISPs. But ISPs sue localities who try this.
If you mean, run the basic fiber (or whatever broadband hardware the municipality puts in) bandwidth supply as a municipal service, and let competing service providers rent bandwidth, that is exactly what various municipalities have tried (and been sued for by the big ISPs).
If you mean, have the municipality be an actual ISP, I think some have tried that (and been sued by the big ISPs); but I'm not that actual ISP services are a natural municipal service the way the basic high speed hardware/right of way is.
There is a long (although slowly being forgotten) history of vigorous regulation of the market used in the US to maintain competition and avoid a situation where a handful of large trusts control the entire economy. Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it? Because that's the way we're headed.
No, it doesn't. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Such a market is much more likely to exist in the absence of government regulation.
> Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it?
You mean the days when Standard Oil obtained a de facto monopoly by selling oil cheaper than any competitor, and thereby saving us, the customers, lots of money? At least until the government stepped in and messed things up?
(For an even more egregious example, look up what happened to Alcoa Aluminum.)
The problem with internet services is that the infrastructure required creates a natural monopoly (ex: running fiber optic cables to each persons house), and there is a lot of regulation in many markets that ISPs are granted de facto monopoly power by the state itself in exchange for a guarantee of universal access for everyone in a given area, even if those customers are unprofitable/too expensive to service. If there was no monopoly at the ISP level, natural or otherwise, then there would be no need for net neutrality, as consumers would be able to choose alternatives and ISPs would compete on value. Net neutrality is an anti-monopolist regulation.
There are thresholds for when how markets operate starts to have effects that have sizeable socioeconomic effects. I don't think it's hyperbole to claim that the Internet is now an essential part of U.S. commerce with itself and the world. Whenever we talk about physical commerce, like stores or driving to work, we generally agree we need some form of government oversight and regulation so that the commerce can keep flowing.
For example if a highway has a wreck it can prevent millions of dollars being earned all across the board. This is in part why we have road safety standards, and standards for the vehicles that can be on it.
I think the internet is similiar in some ways. We now use it for work in lots of places. For government applications, and to buy and sell a significant amount of goods. Entertainment is included as services and goods.
When we consider commerce flowing freely we have to also consider the real bottlenecks to it in relation to monopalistic control. Is netflix's bandwidth actually a significant stress for Comcasts networks? If it is, is it because netflix's bandwidth is inherently too large for what Comcast can realistically afford, or is it because Comcast does not want to innovate and/or improve their infrastructure?
I was surprised when I found you can get a 1Gb/s dedicated line through Cogent or Hurricane Electric for about $150. This is transit network that has very low latency, and they're much smaller companies than U.S. ISP's. Residential internet is not dedicated, it's shared. I don't have the data on how much is actually used but I highly suspect only about 1/20th is used by most people overall, if not less.
I think as it stands right now, it's ISP's lack of competition leading to lack of effort to provide a good product. Given their position and lack of effort they are the ones who are actually hurting free commerce.
If they are hurting free commerce then what should be done about it? Well, as I originally stated, ISP's are in the business of infrastructure. You don't have realistic alternatives that do allow that commerce (In this case, bandwidth). So, do we just ignore commerce for the country being limited, or do we force the hand?
I think forcing the hand is a bandaid, but a true solution, competition, is much further out of reach. Any time anti-monopalization is brought up you get the same notions of 'free market' saying no, when monopalization puts down free markets.
Yes, but laissez-faire capitalism has been largely abandoned in favor of mixed market economies in the developed world for the better part of a century.
> My general understanding of HN culture is that it is generally capitalist
HN does not have a strong consensus on my economics. There is definitely a return-to-the-gilded-age faction, sure, but they aren't alone.
The problem is only in very large cities is there any internet competition, information asymmetry and deceptive advertising practices harm consumers, and having free and open access to information is in societies best interests.
Capitalism requires that everyone play by the same rules, that those rules be fair, and that there be competition and alternatives. Without net neutrality, a single corporation can dictate to an unprecedented degree what information you have access to for any purpose whatsoever with no recourse. This isn't because they're in the business of generating information, but because they put themselves between the producer and the consumer. It's not any different from the anti-competitive practices of the robber-baron era where Standard Oil owned the rail roads, then priced out competition from transporting their oil to gain a monopoly. We know from the past behavior and the current behavior of ISPs in other countries that the reason they want to end net neutrality is so that they can price out and block YouTube to gain a monopoly on video services, or to do the same to any other area they want, simultaneously making more money and the world worse off because of it.
I love businesses. But when Standard Oil charges certain companies one rate for train fare and themselves a different one, or when Bell charges you extra fees to connect to non-Bell telephones (or blocks them entirely), then you have a market failure and the government needs to step in and break up those companies and force them to be competitive. Without competitive markets, you don't have capitalism, you have feudalism.
This is part of their problem. They get the increased tax/regulation frustration as a minor cost to their goal of cable-ifiying the Internet.
Then, it should be an issue where leaders in the state and federal level are backed by the people and to make the incumbents like Comcast and their ilk back off and negate any moves to kill it off. Because we all know they will try and do just that through lobbying to protect their oligopoly.
This should really be a free market issue. I truly believe that one day, technology will be at a tipping point that bandwidth will be free.
Much like solar in the beginning, expensive to produce and not really producing a bang for buck. But now, it's a completely different picture.
I can't wait until telecoms companies are consigned to history.
SpaceX plan to use orbits at around 1110 km - 1325 km.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Earth_orbit
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space...
Latency may actually be better than fiber for long haul access, because routing will take place between satellites. The speed of light in vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in a fiber (which of course we use terrestrially)
https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/elon-musk-quietly-plans-to...
EDIT: More details here on p2p, encryption, etc
http://www.alphr.com/space/1008632/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Starlink...
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/807fns/elon_mus...
I am very much looking forward to this. This would solve several problems for me.
Postscript: Iridium is LEO and doesn't require a fancy antenna. How come? Iridium is designed for voice; throughput is a few kbits/second. That's way too slow for modern internet. For mbit/sec speeds, you need a higher signal-to-noise ratio and an omni antenna like Iridium's won't cut it. You have to track the satellite.
I assume this means 'not mobile'
>(1) Blocking lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.
California will outlaw ISPs providing network level ad blocking services.
>(6) Zero-rating some Internet content, applications, services, or devices in a category of Internet content, applications, services, or devices, but not the entire category.
California will make T-Mobile Binge On type service illegal for cable providers to offer.
>(b) It shall be unlawful for a mobile Internet service provider, insofar as the provider is engaged in providing mobile broadband Internet access service, to engage in any of the activities described in paragraphs (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), and (9) of subdivision (a).
And the will outlaw T-Mobile Binge On too.
Submitted without opinionated commentary.
Hopefully, yes.
> And the will outlaw T-Mobile Binge On too.
Hopefully, yes.
In the short term, I like those services. Hey, free streaming video! But in the enlightened self interest long term, I don't want my ISP deciding which services I can plausibly use. Imagine Verizon offered zero-rated Netflix, "but since you don't need all that expensive per-gigabyte data like our competitors try to sell you, we'll give you 2GB of data for free with your plan, but unlimited access to our wide variety of paid sponsors!"