FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks • Hacker News Board

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#211

Post by wahern » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:08 AM UTC

wtallis wrote: post #168

wahern wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

POTS still has alot of life left in it. It just hasn't seen any investment. Long-term it could handle greater overall capacity given each household has a physically dedicated line to an aggregation point. Phone companies just need to invest in putting the DSL modems closer to the households, say at the neighborhood cabinet rather than the switching station. A literal mile is too far. VDSL2 can do 100Mb/s in each dire…

VDSL2 is great for the areas where most of the customers are already close enough to benefit. But outside of urban areas, you're still proposing almost the same degree of disruption to the neighborhood as a full fiber deployment. Instead of digging up the road and my yard and putting new cables into my house, you're now merely digging up the road and putting new boxes in every fifth yard. And all to offer downstream…

The vast majority of Americans live in neighborhoods far more dense than that, even deep in the suburbs. I can't find the figures for America, but according to this presentation 100% of Europeans live within 500 meters of their distribution cabinet: http://www.wik.org/fileadmin/Konferenzbeitraege/2007/VDSL-Co...

I agree DOCSIS has been good enough. But with the shift to services like Hulu and NetFlix I would argue that it's nearing a threshold. And even if it weren't, I bet if a telephone company had somebody as highly motivated as Elon Musk, they'd be able to eat their local cable company's lunch.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#212

Post by wtallis » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:09 AM UTC

brightball wrote: post #89

and0 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ^ I say this every time and no one has ever been able to answer: how is a simple "don't prioritize traffic" some kind of competition-killing regulation, and how would removing it actually create competition anyway?

Just to take a stab at answering it: What if a company wanted to offer 2 networks for customers: 1 in which they tell you they'll shape the network traffic to ensure consistent performance for all non-video traffic and another in which they tell it's completely unshaped? It would be interesting to see the two side by side as actual consumer choices. If I'm buying for an office, for example, I'd take the shaped-kill-t…

Any such ISP would be lying to their customers with a false dichotomy. The smart way of shaping network traffic to ensure consistent performance for all non-video traffic would have the side effect of ensuring consistent performance for all video traffic, up to the limit of the ISP having oversubscribed their lines—and that limit obviously still exists for non-video uses too.

Video is not the problem. Congestion is, whether or not video is part of the traffic contributing to the congestion. Congestion can be managed reasonably without discriminating against video, and even if an ISP wants to discriminate against video (eg. due to having a conflict of interest in the form of a separate video delivery service) the ISP should still want robust congestion management in place to handle growing volumes of non-video traffic.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#213

Post by rayiner » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:09 AM UTC

bumblebeard wrote: post #141

rayiner wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, just like sewers: http://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/atlanta-area-st... . Also, nobody advocating for "treating telecom like a utility" is actually advocating for that. Try looking up the cost of a county water/sewer hookup sometime. It's not free, and your $50/month water bill doesn't pay for it. I'm paying off a $30,000 bill to get "public utility" water and sewer access. That's pretty typical. If we…

$30,000 seems like a lot unless you live in a very rural area. Where I live in Michigan it's $1,410 for a hookup within 500 feet of a road. Why is it so expensive where you are? Also, fiber would probably be pretty cheap once the infrastructure was already in place. A single phase overhead power line is often provided for free to new homes and underground service runs about $3.50/foot so I imagine fiber would be simi…

Where in Michigan? Here's the fee schedule in my county: http://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits/.... Fairfax County, where my parents live is similarly expensive: about $25,000 for a smallish house.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#214

Post by smallnamespace » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

morgzilla wrote: post #207

I can see how a bit of outrage about this is how the NRA got to the place it is today. This by itself isn't that meaningful, but anything can be politicized, turn public opinion and gain momentum. That's why the NRA's position is to say NO to any kind of gun regulation, because they know that's how you ensure guns are made available and gun culture is for sure secure. In the tech community I see people rising up agai…

The thing about democracy based on mass mobilization of different interest groups is that no negotiation or compromise is possible, because leaderless groups are incapable of doing anything so complex. Compromises only happen person to person between strong leaders or between small groups of elites that both groups accept -- "Only Nixon could go to China".

But for the last 30 years, both the left and the right (for both good and bad reasons) have been tearing down the very idea of legitimate elite authority, whether it's from politicians, academics, or anyone else. Who today has the moral standing to make reasonable compromises that everyone would accept?

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#215

Post by wtallis » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:12 AM UTC

beatpanda wrote: post #23

How long until access to the open internet costs extra?

If you want a publicly accessible IP address without an ISP-imposed firewall blocking incoming connections on at least some ports, then it already costs extra, and has for a long time. For the most part, we're already getting just WWW (client not server) access plus a handful of other approved services. What we're facing in the future is difficulty even getting unrestrained access to the whole WWW.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#216

Post by wtallis » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:16 AM UTC

boona wrote: post #198

TheGRS wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how federal deregulations would help cities install more fiber, are there any federal regulations that would impede them? I always thought the issue was more around infrastructure monopolies in each city. Its not like new fiber companies can just lay their own lines down, they need to work through the city to get permission to put new lines in or share existing lines.

Hmm, that's a good question. It's not clear to me at what level of government the most stifling regulations are. I had also read that they wanted to offer phone services for free, but they dropped those due to the incredibly high regulations in that field as well. https://www.cnet.com/news/google-to-government-let-us-build-...

That article shows Google wanting new regulations imposed in some areas (forcing local governments and utilities to accommodate Google), but not wanting relief from net neutrality regulations.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#217

Post by leereeves » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:27 AM UTC

jerkstate wrote: post #37

throwaway729 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So there's "internetworking, peering and transit contract negotiation", etc. And then there's "Comcast allowed to bundle internal video streaming platform with bandwidth in order to compete against Netflix" It's completely trivial for the FCC to allow the former and clamp down hard on the latter.

Eisenach wrote some papers on using existing antitrust laws rather than NN laws to punish anticompetitive behavior, which I think is reasonable. Apply the laws we already have, don't make new laws that prevent reasonable behavior.

Antitrust laws may not prevent bundling and other anti-competitive behavior.

For example, Apple has so far been allowed to bundle Apple apps with phones, forbid any competing apps, and require developers to distribute apps through the App Store.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#218

Post by wtallis » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:34 AM UTC

morgzilla wrote: post #207

I can see how a bit of outrage about this is how the NRA got to the place it is today. This by itself isn't that meaningful, but anything can be politicized, turn public opinion and gain momentum. That's why the NRA's position is to say NO to any kind of gun regulation, because they know that's how you ensure guns are made available and gun culture is for sure secure. In the tech community I see people rising up agai…

There are pros and cons to gun ownership; it both contributes to and harms the public good. Net neutrality is a more lopsided issue—the arguments against net neutrality are all about legalizing extortion and promoting a tragedy of the commons, or else they're non-specific arguments against regulation of any kind.

Taken on its own and rationally, the net neutrality issue is much less amenable to producing a permanent stalemate than gun control. Existing political factions can incorporate positions on net neutrality into their existing political stalemate, but outside of such a context it's pretty easy to see that holes in net neutrality like the one here are absurd—why should smaller monopolies have more leeway to abuse their customers than large monopolies?

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#219

Post by redler » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:36 AM UTC

grandalf wrote: post #201

redler wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Youtube makes a deal with T-Mobile to keep videos playing longer (before packets start dropping) in exchange for money. This money might allow T-Mobile to invest in other parts of its infrastructure. Another possibility: as a major ISP nears network capacity, they can implicitly (or explicitly, depending on law) solicit revenue streams from Youtube and many others for "priority access" to their somewhat- or com…

You are describing a content lock-in dystopia. Yes, this would be anticompetitive (and appropriately addressed by the FTC or DOJ, not the FCC) and it is among the more unlikely scenarios.

Sure, I'm painting a picture to illustrate the point. But reductio ad absurdum can be a useful way to explore the problem. I don't think there's anything in my scenario that's beyond the pale. We could get there by degrees in an aggressively unfettered market.

Re: FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

#220

Post by cstejerean » Sat, Feb 25, 2017, 1:41 AM UTC

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #176

massysett wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireless is not for everyone--not yet. However, many people do not use a lot of bandwidth and they may find wireless to be quite adequate. As wireless bandwidth goes up in quality and down in price, people might truly start to "cut the cord". Twenty years ago you could substitute "cellular" for "wireless" and "landline" for "home internet" and make the same claims. No one dreamed people would eliminate land phones ba…

A strange thing I've noticed about telecoms in the US is that prices never fall - instead consumers just get more value and are constantly upsold higher-value offerings - this is not a bad thing in itself, but whereas in the UK and most of Europe I can get a a few gigs of 4G/LTE data for my phone for about €10 - something you'd have to pay $50+ for in the USA. The same goes for home internet - the cheapest non-promot…

Because the business model of the carriers is built on a fairly high ARPU of about $45-55. They need to protect that average revenue per user, so they don't really care what they sell you as long as they get the revenue. At first it was voice minutes. Then as those got cheaper more of the money was made on domestic roaming and long-distance charges. Then those went away and they replaced them with SMS charges. Then revenue shifted to data. At this point data makes up about 60% of the revenue, and I suspect this number will only continue to rise.

The only way for that ARPU to drop considerably is if a new player enters the market that can significantly undercut the existing players, because none of the existing players are willing to see that number drop by half or more. I don't believe such a new entrant will materialize anytime soon due to the high barriers to entry. I suspect the cost of building and operating a wireless network in the US is too high to support a carrier operating on a fraction of the ARPU.