FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

I think you've taken the hypothetical far beyond plausibility. If you think you need to drop 90% of a customer's traffic because of congestion internal to your network, something has already gone badly wrong. I don't think it's realistic to hypothesize that you have a functioning and profitable ISP that enforces strict priority of higher-paying customer traffic over lower tiers rather than proportional or equal allocation of available bandwidth.

But setting aside the question of whether anybody would sign up for such a shitty ISP, you don't suddenly need to throw out 90% of a customer's traffic unless you're suddenly hit by a DDoS that you can't mitigate in any saner fashion. Congestion that bad will build gradually, and you'll have plenty of RTTs to send congestion signals to your customers. If a customer is running an application that is so unresponsive to congestion signals that they end up using 10x the bandwidth your backhaul has available for them, then that customer can have no reasonable expectation that any other applications remain usable. Any sane video streaming service would have lowered the resolution and then dropped the connection entirely as the congestion developed and packet loss increased.

Ignoring even that, you still haven't come up with a situation that requires non-neutral traffic management. AQMs like Stochastic Fair BLUE and Cake will automatically identify the unresponsive flow(s) and probabilistically drop those packets at whatever rate is necessary to alleviate the congestion, converging on 100% drop probability as the flow continues to behave like a DoS, while well-behaved TCP-like flows are minimally impacted (aside from a degree of congestion signalling necessary to keep their total bandwidth usage within the limit of what's available). SFB and Cake don't care about where the traffic is going other than to identify what flow it belongs to. They don't care what kind of traffic it is, they just care about how it behaves. They're neutral algorithms, and they provide a reasonable solution to the unreasonable challenge you've posed.

I actually believe exactly the opposite, it was chance that you saw this post on HN and had the good faith to update the article, and I believe fostering a nice community on your own sites increases the odds of these kinds of events, and in the end improves reporting accuracy and quality (among plenty of other benefits).

>how much capital does it take to build a competitive ISP from scratch (keeping in mind that Google wasn't quite starting from scratch)?

It's significant, but it's often done in cities that don't have this regulation problem (see most high-density cities around the world with sane access to cabling tunnels). Or, if you take it to the extreme the other direction, look at all of the municipal fiber projects that end up working out. If a municipality can pay for it, certainly a company would be able to as well.

Laying fiber requires labor, but many of the service tunnels already exist so the only digging required is the last bit from the street to the customer's house.

There is an entire industry designed to help finance capital-intensive projects. Just because you can't do something with a text editor and a compiler in your basement doesn't mean it can't be done.

>but we are talking about a real natural monopoly

No we aren't. Trying to build up an ISP is 95% lobbying local governments. It's only 'natural' in the sense that it's a government created monopoly.

>much more resentment from their prospective customers

You wouldn't be pulling fiber to peoples' homes if they weren't already signing up (see the google fiber rollout mechanism).

>Given the choice, the customers would vastly prefer a local loop unbundling solution

Not if it means the best they can get is 5 mbps over cables that were laid to homes 20 years ago. If your city is filled with a bunch of NIMBYS, they are just as likely to vote down a bond or whatever it takes to raise money to lay in new fiber.

I wish we had a slow, but high bandwith alternative to the web in public hands. The problem is the infrastructure.. if there was a way to create a gnu add-hoc wifi network between every home hotspot - at least within a city, the web neutrality could be restored.

> The message I originally replied to said "End customers don't buy the dumb pipe directly."

But they do, and that's what they want to keep on doing. An Internet connection is by definition a dumb pipe. It's only when you start messing with it and prioritizing traffic that it becomes something else.

> And once an ISP starts trying to provide value above and beyond the pipe, all the same questions about neutrality come up again.

No, this is just a silly argument. Just because an ISP provider other services in addition to or on top of the Internet connection does not make nor any net neutrality issues. It is only when they start prioritizing stuff that there is an issue.

> What happened to "dumb pipe"? Both of these, especially the former, seem to contradict that.

Nothing. Seriously, this is how the Internet works and is supposed to work. You are supposed to interconnect networks, that's why it's called the Internet. Doh!

Just because somebody else has a shorter path to you than somebody else doesn't make it wrong or unfair.

> All the numbers I've seen suggested that raw bandwidth costs significantly more than ISPs charge for it, because consumer ISPs rarely expect 24/7 utilization of the full bandwidth, and likely also because they can provide some of the larger sources of content for free out of their own datacenter.

Well, it doesn't and it's not for the reasons you state. Wholesale bandwidth prices decrease by 30% on average year on year. Consumer prices are stagnant, or rising.

While it's true that consumers don't use their connection 24/7 (although some make a pretty good go at it), the ISPs could without much problem support that use case. Furthermore ISPs provide close to zero of the content consumers consume. All the content is coming from the content providers, either directly, via an IX or a local cache. The ISPs have nothing to do with it, they are just dumb pipes.