Who do you treat more favorably, people who just happen to pay you a collective amount of around $200,000 or people that yell at you but otherwise effectively can't do anything to stop or even discourage you? Yeah, I bet ISPs accidentally signed checks to politicians without intending for it to cause them to be treated favorably, just out of the good of their heart.
Dropping the sarcasm now, because it's obnoxious, but honestly, it's silly to pretend nobody knows what's going on here. Frankly though singling out ISPs here is silly, I'm sure most big businesses do exactly this same thing and we all let it happen so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I despise McConnell, but I think it's just as plausible that he genuinely believes that net neutrality goes against his ideology (free market, low regulation) and Comcast et. al. make their donations because his ideology futhers their desired outcomes, as opposed to donating to bring him to their side.
I would assume the problem is that for the consumers, even if they are a larger group - it’s way more expensive to collect the same amount of money to lobby for the opposite.
So obviously it’s way easier to hold an extremely narrow point of view because it’s so easy to get campaign money for it.
If it is really just because of money, why can't companies supporting net neutrality donate to him and other senators to get the law passed in the Senate? There are way more companies can do this than a few ISPs, and they have tons of money. Your simplistic view does not hold water.
Many of the companies that are "pro net neutrality" or at least are incentivized to support it have many, many, many other concerns for lobbying, legislation, and budget. Engaging in a race to the bottom over a single issue is probably not a strategy that people are willing to take.
ISPs on the other hand have few other issues quite as important.
It's true that ISPs may have fewer issues, but there are just too few of them. On the other hand, there are way more "pro net neutrality" companies and net neutrality is not the least important issue for them.
The big tech companies most affected by this law actually don't care too much about it, because it disproportionally hurts startups that are competing with them or will compete with them in the future.
Netflix, Google/YouTube, Amazon/Twitch etc. will be able to afford to pay ISPs extra for the fast lanes.
Startups and companies that could never take off because of appearing slow to their potential users cannot afford lobbyists and political donations.
I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers from, but according to Open Secrets, in 2018 a Democrat was top receiver from Comcast. McConnell is fairly low on this list. Can you share your source?
I'm guessing it also comes from opensecrets. Not sure why the two views of data are in apparent disagreement, but when you look at what McConnell received from Comcast instead of what Comcast gave, the number does indeed jump to just under $100k: https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/contributors...
I would have expected him to just rush it to the floor without debate so it could be voted down. Either way there was never a chance this legislation was going to make it through the Senate. There was a definite feel of "you can go back to eating the paste now House, the big boys of the Senate know what is best."
Funny that you put all these “issues” in quotes. Gave me a smile. :) Because as we know: Government spending is growing at an unprecedented rate under current POTUS, and corporate welfare is alive and well.
That doesn't really ring true. If they were actually in favor of those things then they would also be eliminating build-out requirements and other regulations so that it would be easier to start a small ISP with e.g. 500 customers in one section of town, without having to raise enough capital to cover an entire region or being sued into bankruptcy by the incumbents under existing laws.
Negative. People who support net neutrality do not know what net neutrality really is.
Net neutrality is a push by the big corporations to avoid having to pay for the pipeline they use. Google, Netflix, and the like that use huge amounts of bandwidth. You are witnessing rent seeking 101, the corporations on one side are trying to get regulations to help themselves.
Companies that use large amounts of bandwidth pay for all of it. They pay the full cost of bringing that traffic to a peering exchange. Comcast isn't going to pick it up for free from Google Headquarters.
Carrying the traffic from the peering exchange to the end customer is what the end customer is paying the ISP for. Charging for that again is double dipping, using the leverage created by the last mile monopoly to charge for what has already been paid for.
Net neutrality is a requirement to give no special treatment to any kind of network traffic. Am I right on #1?
I must say that my impression of the issue is totally opposite, because to me the idea of net neutrality makes no technical sense whatsoever. There's a multitude of reasons one might want to shape the traffic.
The Republican party typically has been the party which favors the interests of businesses; governmental regulation of various industries (expensive and needless interference from their perspective) is anathema to them. Well, a law forbidding any of the various things protested under the banner of Net Neutrality does amount of the terrible bugaboo of Regulation. Therefore, It Must Be Stopped.
This is a bit of an oversimplification and the principles behind it are a bit more nuanced than presented here (regulatory capture is a thing and it can suck), but it's a good first approximation.
It's bad for business. You do have to remember that a lot of movers n' shakers (Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Broadcom, IBM, and a slew of other companies that have a product other than advertising/user data and need hardware and support to keep expanding to stay afloat) see net neutrality as a large threat, so politicians that are opposed to it are in good company in terms of corporate donors.
Please, could someone more knowledgeable explain to me. I have used computers since mid 1980s. Started with Atari 800XL. I have used Internet since mid or late 1990s. So first thing: please forget what the name of the Act is. Forget it. Not Net Neutrality. Let's call it "Act ABC". I know, ridicilous, but I want you to look at the issue... hmmm... in neutral manner. I remember the Internet that the ABC Act is supposed to protect us from. Internet in which you pay for the data used. I used a modem and was paying for my time online. So websites that took forever to load or didn't employ caching (looking at you youtube without cashing just streaming, but wth). This was muchmuch more diverse internet. That was the internet that forced p2p sharing and p2p platforms. Non-existent now because the current system where you don't pay for the data privilleges big oligopolies, big corporations that have the most data. Google (with its subsidaries), Facebook, Twitter are like what 70% of the internet now? Why? How is that good? I want my crazy websites back. I want diversity. I want copyrighted streaming to be kicked in the stomach. I want competition. I don't want Google, Facebook and Twitter monopolizing the internet. Look, ISPs have never censored the content. Google, Facebook, Twitter do it all the time. On the one hand they say, oh we're platform. On the other they edit content. So which one is it? Obviously you can't have both at the same time.
Paying for data would disrupt Google, i.e. it would kill youtube (owned by google) overnight or at least far reaching changes in it. Facebook also, spending 3-4 hours a day on it, and paying ? Noow, wouldn't it be better to spend 20 minutes there and then browse for other locations? Just to spend your expensive online time more wisely. With free cost of bytes send developers, and I'm sorry to say it, I'm a developer too though, can be lazy. No optimization what-so-ever. Building websites to make sure they are small, load fast, put important content up-front, don't waste users time... now how this could be bad?
Net Neutrality is the step in the future. Future of Googles, Twitters and Facebooks, Amazons, 3-4 oligopolies taking all traffic, killing all the innovation and competition in the process. This isn't the future I hoped for. I hoped for neevr ending 1990s internet. With dozens of websites I visited regularly. And these dozens changing every year too. Future of the internet looks so regulated now. The last step will be the Government taking over, or rather regulating, FANG. This is death of the innovation for this Industry.
And make no mistake: if Republicans won't pass Net Neutrality then Democrats will surely do it. But still they seem to recognize the same problem, Ms. Elizabeth Warren wants to break-down Google, Twitter, Facebook into smaller competing companies -- employing anti-trust laws against them via Department of Justice action. So I think we see the problem on both sides of the aisle. The thing is that solving the problem of big corporations governing the Internet like their own turf might be better done via making time on the internet or data sent paid again. Just seems more natural than taking Judical action against the offenders.
I agree that metering Internet access would cause far-reaching changes but I don't think we can predict what those would be. It could easily make the Internet much worse. And of course everyone hates it: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html
We accept metering for electricity and water because human intuitions still apply; this isn't the case for data. Two Web pages that appear similar could have vastly different transfer sizes. I'm reminded of the criticism of Xanadu that said "imagine an odometer that's taking money out of your pocket; now imagine it turning really fast".
First, thanks for writing this post. I find it very hard to understand because you don't say what you think net neturality is. It sounds very different from mine.
My definition is roughly "price you pay only depends on how much data you want and how fast you want it, not what that data is or who it comes from."
So metering the internet is totally in line with net neutrality, as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others. In fact, this definition pretty much fits everything you say is good and avoids everything you say is bad. But you seem to say net neutrality does the opposite. Now I don't know the details of this exact bill but can you explain what you think it's doing and how that relates to your post.
There's a significant group of people adjacent to and overlapping with net neutrality advocates who are opposed to any form of bandwidth metering. https://stopthecap.com/
This is largely because metering is a precursor to network neutrality violations.
The vast majority of an ISP's costs are independent of usage. The actual incremental bandwidth cost is below $1/TB of transfer and is constantly declining. And if that's what they were charging, probably nobody would care. But if that's what they were charging then they would probably make less doing the charging than it costs to do the accounting. Also, customers hate metering in general and will happily pay $5/month extra to not have to worry about it even when their actual metered bill would only have averaged $1/month extra, which across all customers more than pays for that one guy who pays the extra $5/month and then uses $100 worth.
But that isn't why metering is imposed, and those aren't the prices charged. Because the point of metering is to exempt things from it, as a way to favor those things. If you have to pay $10/GB of transfer for Netflix but not for cable TV, advantage cable TV. If it wasn't for that, metering wouldn't be used on wired connections.
The key in your last statement: "as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others."
But they will and do. Bandwidth caps and overage charges are a key way corporations like Comcast put fear uncertainty and doubt on watching things like Netflix. What if you go over? You can't with their Cable TV offering, but you can with Netflix, a competitor to Comcast.
What you will see is the corporations, and their proxies, will scream about the inability to "innovate". What they mean is the inability to find new ways to discriminate and double-dip.
They explicitly do NOT want a water bill system, when they can charge you much much more for water that comes out of the bathroom faucet than the garden hose.
I don't know why you think people aren't paying for data. I pay for data every time I pay my cable/internet bill, and every time I pay my cell phone bill. Both even refer to what I'm purchasing as "data", unlimited data in the case of broadband, capped 5gb/month in the case of my cell plan.
What you describe from the early internet days is simply the transition from data plans that charged by units of time instead of a flat fee.
You seem to be extremely confused about what Net Neutrality even is. It has nothing to do with whether you pay for data or not.
Yes, Google and Facebook being so large is concerning, but it has nothing to do with this subject.
If anything, the entrenched players are helped by a lack of Net Neutrality. Say Facebook makes a payment to ISPs and suddenly all it's competitor websites are unreliable and slow to load.
Do you think you should be charged the same for charging a Macbook as for just turning on some lights, just because they use "the same" amount of elecricity? We figure if you can afford a Macbook you can afford to pay a little more! That's all. We just want the right to discriminate based on what you'll use electricity for, as opposed to how much of it. Electricity neutrality would remove our ability to do so. -your electrical company.
Genuine question: has the end of net neutrality had any bad effects so far? I remember a lot of doom being prophesied regarding the end of net neutrality, and then I remember it ending, and then I don’t really remember hearing about it again until just now.
This net neutrality is far from it when Google, Amazon, etc have their own private networks to which net neutrality rules don't apply. If carriers are prevented from offering differentiated services, which are required for next Gen products like self driving cars, video games in the cloud, Tele presence, and even just reliable video conferencing, then the only companies that will be able to offer these services will be the ones with existing multi billion private networks. Or you have to run your business on aws or gce and pay them 10X and they get all the profit. The only way a true competitor could get started is if they can buy the network service they need from an independent carrier. The fcc is right on this and Google is full of bs.
Network neutrality applies to last mile providers like Comcast and Verizon, and only to the extent that one of the endpoints is one of their last mile customers.
You're talking about transit providers like Cogent and Level 3, which it doesn't apply to any more than it does to Google.
It also applies to Google to the extent that they have Google Fiber last mile customers.
It's true that GCE and AWS have expensive bandwidth prices, but then buy from someone else. It's not as if they have no effective competition, unlike Comcast.
Correct, but suppose one company has hundreds of edge's to their private network very close to the last mile and they run 10-20% of all internet traffic going across that last mile. If you are Google or Amazon and push a lot of low priority streaming bandwidth, a neutral last mile dedicates a lot of capacity to you, so when you prioritize high value data on your own network that priority ends up applying to the last mile as well.
The only way a new company without a massive nationwide network could compete with Google or Amazon is if they could pay a carrier for prioritized service. If you prevent the carriers from offering prioritized service then you are reducing competition because Google and Amazon can and do offer this.
Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional telcos. They are already vertically integrated hardware/software/media/everything companies. If some innovative startup builds a killer product that requires their network to function then they will either buy it, or create their own competitive product and kill it.
AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are relatively small companies now and they are in direct competition with Google and Amazon on many fronts, including this one. The Google version of net-neutrality is nothing more than an attempt to stifle what little competition they have left.
> The only way a new company without a massive nationwide network could compete with Google or Amazon is if they could pay a carrier for prioritized service. If you prevent the carriers from offering prioritized service then you are reducing competition because Google and Amazon can and do offer this.
You're confusing two different things. The reason companies build networks with many edges is the speed of light. If the server is in California and the customer is in New York, you're looking at about 100ms of round trip latency, because physics. Putting a server in the Northeast can get the RTT to that customer down to around 20ms. There is nothing the ISP can do about this; if the server is thousands of miles away, you can't change the speed of light. (Another reason to do that is then you don't need as much long-distance fiber capacity, but that's a cost savings and doesn't really affect performance one way or the other.)
Moreover, small customers with latency-sensitive applications can do the same thing as Google and Amazon -- use a CDN. There are multiple competitive CDNs with edges all over the place that will cache your content closer to your users.
By contrast, if the ISP's network isn't exceeding capacity, ISP prioritization does nothing. A well-provisioned network forwards 100% of packets immediately. There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.
Now suppose you want paid prioritization. The first thing you've done is encourage the ISPs to underprovision their networks sufficiently to cause significant congestion, because they can't charge to relieve congestion if there isn't any. So yay, now the ISP purposely saturates their uplink and the default type of network connection you get is one with 90ms of bufferbloat and significant packet loss, that way they can charge extra to make it the way it should have been to begin with.
Now you can pay the ISP to put it back the way it was. But that isn't any advantage over Google or Amazon because they can do the same thing, only they can negotiate a better price than you because they're bigger. (They still don't like it because they'd rather not pay monopoly rents to Comcast at all than have to pay $X even if smaller competitors have to pay $2X.)
The only thing paid prioritization gets the little guy is a bill from the ISP -- from every ISP -- and a correspondingly even more competitive disadvantage against larger competitors with more leverage. Along with more transaction costs, because good luck negotiating as a small business with every ISP everywhere.
> Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional telcos.
Google and Amazon are not monopolists in this context at all. Google has a dominant position in search and Amazon has a dominant position in online retail, but that has very little to do with networks or data centers. They have no monopolies there -- they compete with each other, along with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, the ISPs themselves and a zillion different smaller providers.
both things are true. having edge nodes cuts latency between the client and edge, but it also allows priority for longer distances if you have a private network connecting your edges.
> There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.
Prioritization is absolutely required for any safety critical application (remote control in a bunch of different fields). No matter how over-provisioned a network is it can always be flooded, and for a safety critical applications that is unacceptable.
For the high value applications of the future guaranteed low latency delivery is an absolute requirement. You cannot get that with "net neutrality" rules.
The only reason to impose rules that make next gen applications impossible on public networks is to decrease competition for private networks.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 163 ms ] threadhttps://thehill.com/homenews/senate/438133-mcconnell-net-neu...
Dropping the sarcasm now, because it's obnoxious, but honestly, it's silly to pretend nobody knows what's going on here. Frankly though singling out ISPs here is silly, I'm sure most big businesses do exactly this same thing and we all let it happen so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So obviously it’s way easier to hold an extremely narrow point of view because it’s so easy to get campaign money for it.
Against net neutrality is not "an extremely narrow point of view".
ISPs on the other hand have few other issues quite as important.
Netflix, Google/YouTube, Amazon/Twitch etc. will be able to afford to pay ISPs extra for the fast lanes.
Startups and companies that could never take off because of appearing slow to their potential users cannot afford lobbyists and political donations.
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000461&ty...
This is less ideology and more corruption.
1. Don't know what net-neutrality really is
2. Are against it because their "team" is against it.
3. Or are getting paid to oppose it
Net neutrality is a push by the big corporations to avoid having to pay for the pipeline they use. Google, Netflix, and the like that use huge amounts of bandwidth. You are witnessing rent seeking 101, the corporations on one side are trying to get regulations to help themselves.
Carrying the traffic from the peering exchange to the end customer is what the end customer is paying the ISP for. Charging for that again is double dipping, using the leverage created by the last mile monopoly to charge for what has already been paid for.
I must say that my impression of the issue is totally opposite, because to me the idea of net neutrality makes no technical sense whatsoever. There's a multitude of reasons one might want to shape the traffic.
This is a bit of an oversimplification and the principles behind it are a bit more nuanced than presented here (regulatory capture is a thing and it can suck), but it's a good first approximation.
If anyone is interested in getting into the weeds, this conversation gave me a more nuanced view on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKD-lBrZ_Gg
Paying for data would disrupt Google, i.e. it would kill youtube (owned by google) overnight or at least far reaching changes in it. Facebook also, spending 3-4 hours a day on it, and paying ? Noow, wouldn't it be better to spend 20 minutes there and then browse for other locations? Just to spend your expensive online time more wisely. With free cost of bytes send developers, and I'm sorry to say it, I'm a developer too though, can be lazy. No optimization what-so-ever. Building websites to make sure they are small, load fast, put important content up-front, don't waste users time... now how this could be bad?
Net Neutrality is the step in the future. Future of Googles, Twitters and Facebooks, Amazons, 3-4 oligopolies taking all traffic, killing all the innovation and competition in the process. This isn't the future I hoped for. I hoped for neevr ending 1990s internet. With dozens of websites I visited regularly. And these dozens changing every year too. Future of the internet looks so regulated now. The last step will be the Government taking over, or rather regulating, FANG. This is death of the innovation for this Industry.
And make no mistake: if Republicans won't pass Net Neutrality then Democrats will surely do it. But still they seem to recognize the same problem, Ms. Elizabeth Warren wants to break-down Google, Twitter, Facebook into smaller competing companies -- employing anti-trust laws against them via Department of Justice action. So I think we see the problem on both sides of the aisle. The thing is that solving the problem of big corporations governing the Internet like their own turf might be better done via making time on the internet or data sent paid again. Just seems more natural than taking Judical action against the offenders.
We accept metering for electricity and water because human intuitions still apply; this isn't the case for data. Two Web pages that appear similar could have vastly different transfer sizes. I'm reminded of the criticism of Xanadu that said "imagine an odometer that's taking money out of your pocket; now imagine it turning really fast".
My definition is roughly "price you pay only depends on how much data you want and how fast you want it, not what that data is or who it comes from."
So metering the internet is totally in line with net neutrality, as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others. In fact, this definition pretty much fits everything you say is good and avoids everything you say is bad. But you seem to say net neutrality does the opposite. Now I don't know the details of this exact bill but can you explain what you think it's doing and how that relates to your post.
The vast majority of an ISP's costs are independent of usage. The actual incremental bandwidth cost is below $1/TB of transfer and is constantly declining. And if that's what they were charging, probably nobody would care. But if that's what they were charging then they would probably make less doing the charging than it costs to do the accounting. Also, customers hate metering in general and will happily pay $5/month extra to not have to worry about it even when their actual metered bill would only have averaged $1/month extra, which across all customers more than pays for that one guy who pays the extra $5/month and then uses $100 worth.
But that isn't why metering is imposed, and those aren't the prices charged. Because the point of metering is to exempt things from it, as a way to favor those things. If you have to pay $10/GB of transfer for Netflix but not for cable TV, advantage cable TV. If it wasn't for that, metering wouldn't be used on wired connections.
But they will and do. Bandwidth caps and overage charges are a key way corporations like Comcast put fear uncertainty and doubt on watching things like Netflix. What if you go over? You can't with their Cable TV offering, but you can with Netflix, a competitor to Comcast.
What you will see is the corporations, and their proxies, will scream about the inability to "innovate". What they mean is the inability to find new ways to discriminate and double-dip.
They explicitly do NOT want a water bill system, when they can charge you much much more for water that comes out of the bathroom faucet than the garden hose.
What you describe from the early internet days is simply the transition from data plans that charged by units of time instead of a flat fee.
Yes, Google and Facebook being so large is concerning, but it has nothing to do with this subject.
If anything, the entrenched players are helped by a lack of Net Neutrality. Say Facebook makes a payment to ISPs and suddenly all it's competitor websites are unreliable and slow to load.
You're talking about transit providers like Cogent and Level 3, which it doesn't apply to any more than it does to Google.
It also applies to Google to the extent that they have Google Fiber last mile customers.
It's true that GCE and AWS have expensive bandwidth prices, but then buy from someone else. It's not as if they have no effective competition, unlike Comcast.
The only way a new company without a massive nationwide network could compete with Google or Amazon is if they could pay a carrier for prioritized service. If you prevent the carriers from offering prioritized service then you are reducing competition because Google and Amazon can and do offer this.
Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional telcos. They are already vertically integrated hardware/software/media/everything companies. If some innovative startup builds a killer product that requires their network to function then they will either buy it, or create their own competitive product and kill it.
AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are relatively small companies now and they are in direct competition with Google and Amazon on many fronts, including this one. The Google version of net-neutrality is nothing more than an attempt to stifle what little competition they have left.
You're confusing two different things. The reason companies build networks with many edges is the speed of light. If the server is in California and the customer is in New York, you're looking at about 100ms of round trip latency, because physics. Putting a server in the Northeast can get the RTT to that customer down to around 20ms. There is nothing the ISP can do about this; if the server is thousands of miles away, you can't change the speed of light. (Another reason to do that is then you don't need as much long-distance fiber capacity, but that's a cost savings and doesn't really affect performance one way or the other.)
Moreover, small customers with latency-sensitive applications can do the same thing as Google and Amazon -- use a CDN. There are multiple competitive CDNs with edges all over the place that will cache your content closer to your users.
By contrast, if the ISP's network isn't exceeding capacity, ISP prioritization does nothing. A well-provisioned network forwards 100% of packets immediately. There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.
Now suppose you want paid prioritization. The first thing you've done is encourage the ISPs to underprovision their networks sufficiently to cause significant congestion, because they can't charge to relieve congestion if there isn't any. So yay, now the ISP purposely saturates their uplink and the default type of network connection you get is one with 90ms of bufferbloat and significant packet loss, that way they can charge extra to make it the way it should have been to begin with.
Now you can pay the ISP to put it back the way it was. But that isn't any advantage over Google or Amazon because they can do the same thing, only they can negotiate a better price than you because they're bigger. (They still don't like it because they'd rather not pay monopoly rents to Comcast at all than have to pay $X even if smaller competitors have to pay $2X.)
The only thing paid prioritization gets the little guy is a bill from the ISP -- from every ISP -- and a correspondingly even more competitive disadvantage against larger competitors with more leverage. Along with more transaction costs, because good luck negotiating as a small business with every ISP everywhere.
> Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional telcos.
Google and Amazon are not monopolists in this context at all. Google has a dominant position in search and Amazon has a dominant position in online retail, but that has very little to do with networks or data centers. They have no monopolies there -- they compete with each other, along with Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, the ISPs themselves and a zillion different smaller providers.
both things are true. having edge nodes cuts latency between the client and edge, but it also allows priority for longer distances if you have a private network connecting your edges.
> There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.
Prioritization is absolutely required for any safety critical application (remote control in a bunch of different fields). No matter how over-provisioned a network is it can always be flooded, and for a safety critical applications that is unacceptable.
For the high value applications of the future guaranteed low latency delivery is an absolute requirement. You cannot get that with "net neutrality" rules.
The only reason to impose rules that make next gen applications impossible on public networks is to decrease competition for private networks.