If net neutrality falls, what happens next?
This is one of those things that we're just going to have to wait and see about, but I can't get the question out of my mind - if the FCC chooses to back the ISPs, what happens next?
Is a hacktivist group, deciding that the internet shouldn't be turned against it's users, going to DDoS the root DNS servers? Is everybody going to just hold their breaths, and continue with business as usual? Will a significant number of developers jump ship?
What do you think?
61 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadOne idea would be to make a browser that can 'leech' off sites that paid for fast lanes. Say, you store your data onto Google Drive, Facebook, etc and the browser will load the actual content off of these services and present it as if it were its own unique web site, stripping off all of the host site's branding. I won't say that's necessarily ethical, but it does feel like an inevitable consequence if things ever got really bad.
You'd probably gain web hosts that advertise having peering deals for all of their hosted sites, so you just pay more money to host on them and your users "magically" get faster service.
VPNs would likely play in a lot. I'm not sure how businesses would tolerate their required secure connections being throttled in the extreme.
I wonder if a VPN service provider could pay for a fast connection to your ISP, giving you a link around it? Perhaps instead of Netflix at 100% speed, $tinywebsite at 20% speed, this could give you 70% speed across the board by connecting you with a neutral backbone.
Besides that, competition is artificially stifled by government sponsored monopolies - but competing ISPs like it that way. It makes new markets difficult but on the up side, makes price collusion easy (and the threat of competition non-existent).
Like it or not, the fight is on the beaches of the FCC, and we don't get to move the front lines willy-nilly in this fight.
As far as I can see the lack of competition happens mainly in the last mile part. There are myriads of community-run ISPs that specifically target this area around the world; the best example I know is the FFDN (http://www.ffdn.org/). I've listened to many conf made by Benjamin Bayart, ex-president of the association that started this movement. The key idea behind running your own ISP (at least in France) are:
- It's easy. A few forms to fill and you're official.
- It's cheap. Expect less than 100 euros
- All it really requires is involvement. People wanting to commit to it for more than the next 6 months.
Technically they absolutely depend on big names' network for transiting data. But the end point is their own; there can be competition if you want to. Plus, the big names would like to create differentiation on the end points, but they actually don't care as much about that when you're your own ISP and peer/transit through them.
The main reason it's "easy" in France (and UK, and other places) is that the big name's network are required by law to let you use the end point. That exists in the US on the phone lines (legacy telephone regulations). But not on anything else (no cable or fiber).
So unless you want to pour all of your time and energy into offering flaky, slow, unreliable internet over 100-year-old copper lines, with speeds below 6mb and minor outages daily, your out of luck re-using any lines in the US.
That difference alone suddenly makes it not remotely easy or cheap.
To deploy internet at a reasonable price, you have to start an entire fiber construction company, and local political lobbying firm, simultaneously, just to get a single customer.
We're talking a barrier to entry of at least 1 to 2 million dollars, to wire a neighborhood, just to get your first customer signed up. Customers who've been conditioned to pay no more than $80/month for internet access.
That cost is actually not expensive compared to typical municipal projects. But it's way more than you'll ever get funding for, to chase, unless you are already extremely wealthy from some other business / family history / etc.
Venture firms would rather fund one thousand new Instagrams than pour money into anything remotely resembling a utility business.
The main way around that cost barrier is to deploy "bad" technology, like wireless. That can be done on a shoestring budget. It works really well in places where there is zero density (rural, exurbs). But it's not the future, it's legacy deployment, with legacy problems and legacy speeds. The nicest microwave radios you can buy only barely match the speeds and reliability of the cheapest fiber deployment.
So, if your in any sort of reasonably-sized city, you'd be stupid to not roll out fiber from the start. And to do that, your looking at millions of dollars of cost.
No one will ever fund that. (I've tried -- countless times). Typically, only selfie-sharing iPhone apps can generate investment like that.
This is why most people in the US are pushing for "common carrier". Because no one here believes a honest business will ever deploy a modern network on any large scale, so the best we can hope for is an upgrade from 100-year-old phone lines, to 40-year-old cable lines.
The regulations are on the books, and through the mid-2000s UNE-P was a somewhat-viable business model. However, the ILECs figured out that they can sabotage the fulfillment process with no repercussions. When your new customers can't get their service actually started, and the only thing you can tell them is "Verizon is being mean to us", you're not long for the business. That's why the only remaining CLECs are "facilities-based", i.e. they don't use the UNE-P program.
This is why I'm not so hopeful for a similar program on the data side. I've seen the kind of bullshit the incumbents pull, and I greatly doubt the FCC will ever prevent that. I don't think investors are dumb enough to fall for the 1996 bait-and-switch again, so any effective program like this would have to include strong structural protections for competitive ISPs. My understanding is that the most effective such programs in Europe have done that, e.g. forbidding the network owner from selling to retail customers.
Sabotaging fulfillment is yet another problem in re-using lines, which is another reason folks aren't in a rush to reuse lines in the US.
I was aware that building your own fiber network can be extremely expensive (though there are tales of villages doing it, such as this one [0], because noone is willing to come to them. Yes, that case is special in that it's extremely rural), but I didn't know that you couldn't even use telephone lines because they're unreliable.
[0] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bui...
That's the current state of the art, but maintaining that decrepitude has taken a decade of FCC foot-dragging on white spaces and other "cognitive" radio applications. We are nowhere near physical limits of spectrum bandwidth, and radio engineers of the future will laugh at our aversion to innovation in this space.
I think the best thing that could happen for competition and choice in data connection would be for radio regulation to be taken away from FCC and given to a less political organization like NIST.
Luckily, you don't have to. Just nationalise the last mile (and maybe some more infrastructure like the DSLAMs, I'm not sure), and have ISPs lease it. And don't offer bulk prices.
That way, barrier to entry drop, there are less advantages to being big, and the environment is less prone to monopolies.
The idea is simple: let free market and competition run wild where they actually work, and let the state have the inevitable monopolies.
You don't create new networks, you have the gov/FCC require that the owners of current networks license the last mile connections to any and all other ISPs, opening up consumer choice in the last mile [1]. Your ISP giving you fast lane/slow lanes and you don't like it? Choose another. That last-mile monopoly really needs to get solved first, then we can re-evaluate after a couple years whether Title II reclassification is necessary.
[1]:http://blog.samaltman.com/net-neutrality
shrug
"Major telecommunications companies are spending millions lobbying the U.S. congress to make the Internet into a private network. In political lingo this means abandoning what is called "Net Neutrality". In common sense terms it's about the government withdrawing our right to Internet Freedom, it's about the Death of The Internet."
There's always a lot of doom and gloom talk about what evil US telecoms companies will do if regulation is not enforced to quality fix internet service in one particular country with less than 20% of the world's internet users on it.
The real problem is lack of competition at an urban level in the US. It's a specific problem, quality fixing is not the solution, it will entrench the incumbents. It's not even a new problem, the equivalent of the local loop for broadband has to be unbundled to fix this.
That doesn't mean people don't care. But markets work on a short cycle and don't consider long-term ramifications. People don't make decisions based on the long-term effect of their choices.
Only a blind-faith market ideologue would suggest that net neutrality regulations are a bad thing.
I'm a Canadian, I left a major ISP for one of the smaller competing ISPs because they were offering unlimited bandwidth. Now, 2 years later that major ISP has caught on and is now offering better high end plans than the smaller competitor I was using. Looks like that might change when new plans come out with the competitor, but... point is, competition helps. At least in the case of high-bandwidth consumers.
This simple change made me go from feeling like my ISP options were terrible, to having 4+ completely acceptable ISP options in a matter of a few years.
Anecdotal, sure, but I think freeing up the lines to competitors is beneficial with or without additional net neutrality legislation. While it might not be the only solution, people having only 1 choice of ISP in any given area certainly hurts. Having an option that doesn't have motives for slowing down service to certain sites basically kills this entire issue.
Public praises the lower bills, talk shows argue incessantly, and nobody grasps either the tech or the economics: the price of the discount is that large tech/infra companies no longer have to worry about competition, and can levy arbitrary entry fees.
Gradually the big companies open up walled app stores that let you run your internet applications within their parameters, rules, and fees. Since this is the only way to reach anyone, smaller upstarts/devlopers grudgingly accept the new way of things, until the whole shenanigan is disrupted by a little guy meeting an unmet, undervalued need out of left field.
And the cycle repeats.
If, as a startup, I can't reach any customers anymore, why even take that risk and start a company? Why, as a VC / angel, would I want to invest in companies that are more or less destined to lose out (Internet based businesses). I think it'll have a huge negative impact on businesses, especially new Internet based businesses and this will lead to less innovation and less startups. It all depends how severe things get, but since there's really nothing to stop ISPs from charging businesses and customers whatever they want, I wouldn't be surprised if the current tech/Internet boom slowly fades away as company after company finds that it's just not worth trying to compete.
For me, the value in Google, and partly in Facebook, is primarily in other sites they link to. Am I an exception? Or is the point, you might need those others occasionally, but you only need the main few to be fast?
I don't think US cable companies make a tier system for websites. It doesn't make sense. All the non-media traffic isn't much that worth the discrimination. Most of the un-neutrality will be in cellular networks and media delivery.
In the UK Three used to sell these bundles of data where you got YouTube and some others free or as extra bundles, it was all a bit weird and not very net neutral. In our market I don't really see the lack of net neutrality as an actual issue for consumers, but we do have fierce competition. I do think things would be very different in a world with neither net neutrality nor competition.
Quality of service will remain, at worst, as it currently is, and no one will notice a difference.
Netflix et al. will continue to host cache devices with ISPs, torrents will still work, video chat will still work, and chances are no startup will ever be forced to pay ISPs to deliver their packets.
No one will ever be presented with the option to purchase a "Social Media/Streaming/whatever Internet Package," but maybe they'll be offered the option to upgrade to a more explicit SLA with bandwidth/latency guarantees.
Maybe some kids will DDoS an ISP or two, but the effect will be nil.
That's my prediction.
Exactly. Where there's competition, ISPs won't be able to keep their market share with a restricted service. And in areas without competition, they will gouge you one way or another regardless.
Consequently, Youtube is pretty slow on this ISP.
> France's telecoms watchdog has cleared one of the country's largest ISPs of throttling YouTube.
http://www.zdnet.com/isp-free-cleared-of-throttling-youtube-...
some other sites are slow as well albeit its not as bad as google sites, such as facebook and apple (incl. app store, software updates etc.)
Its been gradually worse and worse over the years, and now im switching away from that ISP in a month. its unbearable.
The US already has so-called evil socialist government regulation, to an extreme. The US economy, including the telecom sector, is among the most regulated on earth. Per dollar of GDP, nobody passes more economic regulations each decade than the US Government.
The US Government has been in control of the telecom infrastructure when it comes to regulating it, for decades. Their incompetence at setting up a functional environment is a huge part of the problem. They've been screwing it up when it comes to ISPs for 20 years.
'Evil socialist government regulation' isn't helping Canada or Australia either. And exactly like in those instances the problem is really bad regulation, not lack of regulation.
The US has faster average internet speeds than: France, UK, China, Italy, Australia, Canada, Brazil, India, Norway, Russia, Taiwan, Germany, Finland, Israel, Austria, and so on.
In fact, there are no large countries by population above the US in speeds other than Japan and South Korea (both of which are generally far beyond everyone else). Most of the fast countries are tiny in population: Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, Hong Kong, etc. - and even then, the US isn't drastically behind them.
e.g. ISPs like CBS or AOL?
So the future looks a lot like the past: ABC, CBS and NBC with a smattering of a few others, e.g. Google.
It will likely lead to a massive decline in American supremecy.
"If net neutrality fails"
-- "net neutrality" -- you probably mean the currently popular version of this, which is "don't let ISPs create fast and slow lanes, and charge for the fast lanes." Or, even less precisely, "Don't let ISPs slow down the Internet."
The problem with this is, the FCC is actually not proposing to let ISPs create "slow lanes". It is proposing to allow ISPs to charge fees for better quality of service, not to degrade the service that's already provided. In fact the proposals quite specifically forbid this.
-- "if ... fails"
The problem with this is, net neutrality is not in effect now. And has not been at all in history, except for a brief period before the courts shot it down (because the FCC was overstepping its authority). And, nothing like the "fast/slow lanes" version of the predicted net-neutrality-copalypse has happened.
So to say "what if net neutrality fails" has it exactly backwards. We already know what the no-net-neutrality world looks like, we are in it now. The real question is, what if it succeeds? What will happen then?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_for_our_time
That is a meaningless distinction.
There is absolutely no difference between "creating a slow lane" and "charging for better quality of service, not to degrade the service already provided". Therefore, it doesn't matter if the FCC "specifically forbids this."
If "fast lanes" are allowed at all, all lanes will be "slow lanes" by default. It doesn't matter if the FCC "forbids" slow lanes, since every lane is a slow lane already, so technically the FCC's rule wasn't broken.
This is how it works today. Every lane is a slow lane on Comcast, by default, unless you pay them for a "fast lane".
> "Fast/slow lanes hasn't happened yet"
Yes, it has. Are you in the US? Have you ever attempted to load Netflix or YouTube on a Comcast or Verizon connection in the past year? There's slow lanes everywhere.
The only difference is the prediction -- we predicted Comcast would make us pick between slow and fast lanes, like cable packages. (like http://aattp.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/neutrality.jpg). Turns out they instead went to individual websites and CDN's and made them pick the slow/fast lanes. But it's the same problem.
There's no coincidence Netflix suddenly works after paying an extortion fee to Comcast. Thats the number 1 example of the "fast lane" scenario playing out already. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/after-...
Don't sweat the small stuff.