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Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

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Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say your idea has merit. How do you compete against competing services owned by ISPs? If your alternative is that ISP are prohibited from owning content producers, you're the only one pushing that plan. The only serious alternative being offered is that the invisible hand will deal with all the problems.

"How do you compete against competing services owned by ISPs?" Good question. I guess you wouldn't need to as long as the ISP market is competitive. You might go to another competitor and convince them your product is good or your product can help/augment the service they are currently providing. The invisible hand would be really interesting to watch there.

> I guess you wouldn't need to as long as the ISP market is competitive.

But it's not.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#132
post #59
post #23

I wasn't impressed with this article; it reads like fear mongering. More importantly, I don't think the fix is regulation, I think it's better privacy tech + increased competition via elimination of local monopolies. Do we really want to depend on government to enforce privacy on the Internet?

Competition is not the solution to all problems. That's like suggesting that we don't need laws against fraud in functional healthy markets. Removing monopolies would not fix the privacy issue either. However, it would probably eliminate the need for net neutrality. In the meantime, we need it. And we need to keep privacy laws in place until such time that technology makes it impossible for ISPs to discover any detai…

> Competition is not the solution to all problems.

Of course not. I didn't say or even imply as much.

> However, it would probably eliminate the need for net neutrality. In the meantime, we need it.

Maybe, but I think the importance people place on this is exaggerated. If you want it as a stopgap, fine. But let's not pretend that NN is going to seriously impact any of the issues discussed in this article.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#133
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All they'd do is offer other services as alternatives to the big dollar ones like YouTube. And they'd put data caps on competiting services, while allowing unlimited streaming of their own (we've already seen them do this). In markets with 1 or 2 viable ISPs, what is your solution?

> In markets with 1 or 2 viable ISPs, what is your solution? I watch about 1 hour of Youtube per month and about 5 hours of Netflix. Why should I subsidize people who watch 5 hours each day? Let's not pretend bandwidth is not a scarce resource. ISPs have to pay for upstream bandwidth. If they can affordably colocate systems to serve specific content at a fraction of the cost by eliminating upstream costs, why shouldn…

Because in your world the eventual outcome is that nearly all (commercial) content providers would be owned by ISPs.

Last mile infrastructure is a natural monopoly, and unless you do something to force companies to share it, they won't.

There are various ways to do this. What's your preference?

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#134

Net neutrality is fundamental to free speech. Without net neutrality, big companies could censor your voice and make it harder to speak up online. Net neutrality has been called the “First Amendment of the Internet.” Not just harder. Infinitely more dangerous. Probably the scariest implications for NN being gutted are those around loss of anonymity through the Internet. ISPs who are allowed to sell users' browsing hi…

"NN being gutted are those around loss of anonymity through the Internet."

How is that by necessity a bad thing? People aren't anonymous in every day life and their internet anonymity is mostly an illusion anyway. Big brother can almost always find out who did what if they want to.

" These "rollbacks" of regulations make it orders of magnitude easier for any entity in a corporation or organization to track down people who attempt to expose their illegal actions / skirting of laws"

It also makes it orders of magnitudes easier for anyone to find out about a coorportions illegal actions / skirting of laws.

I agree with most of your statements. But in the long run there really are a lot of benefits to a non-anonymous internet that can't be denied (just as there are a lot of problems as well). For instance, full access to health and medical data for research purposes would be a huge benefit for mankind and the sick people themselves just as that same access would necessitate a major rehaul of the ligislation concerning insurance companies.

I don't see how removing anonymity is inherently by its very nature a bad thing. It seems likely it would be like everything else, you'd need to legislate the legality of certain things given that all activity is non-anonymous, etc.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#135

Does anyone else find the internet market odd? Up until now net neutrality and other policies have given us the following: 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free. 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have…

[deleted]

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP. By giving them the power to selectively control what they're sending down the pipe, the monopoly problem will grow far far worse. Net neutrality is not the cause of the problems you listed, and removing it won't solve any of them.

> ISPs and utility companies are natural monopolies. When you move to a new location, you're stuck with the ISPs that service that location; often just 1 ISP. This is simply not true. With the wide availability of cellular service that provides broadband speeds pretty much everyone in the country has multiple choices of ISP.

Cell service is also highly monopolistic. It is honestly very strange we have 4 relatively competitive network operators in the US - it isn't a stable system to say the least, though, and it will almost always degenerate into two (and it almost did - for a while T-mobile and Sprint were non-competitive with AT&T and Verizon, and it took their complacency in the 3G->4G transition era to give the two underdogs a chance to reestablish themselves).

Fundamentally, though, nobody in the US can open a new cell phone operator now. The spectrum is bought and owned, the owners know how valuable it is, and owning light is a much scarcer and more valuable resource than any plot of land that billionaires are buying up in the present property investment bubble.

It is even worse than the ISP monopoly - ISPs are local monopolies. We have a national cartel of cell operators that can't face real competition because of a state guaranteed monopoly on radio waves. As is the nature of all business with guaranteed profits, eventually AT&T and Verizon will consume T-Mobile and Sprint, possibly even under this administration, where there will be much less anti-monopoly scrutiny, and then we will have two network operators controlling all the usable cellular bandwidth with no intent to let anyone else compete.

Just because we are in an... alright situation right now, doesn't guarantee that environment will persist forever. Cellular network operators are absolutely crooked and near guaranteed in a long enough time span to devolve into a duopoly, while we already have collusion between them today to screw over consumers.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#138
I am agnostic on net neutrality (ie. neither for nor against, just admitting my own lack of ability to assess its fallout).

I read a lot of sweeping, but hard to measure claims on its affects (such as in the linked article). Are there any concrete, measurable affects that anyone is willing to predict?

Examples might be:

* Average load times for the 1000 most popular webpages will decrease.

* There will be fewer internet startups over the next 5 years than the previous.

Edit: formatting

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#140

Net neutrality is fundamental to free speech. Without net neutrality, big companies could censor your voice and make it harder to speak up online. Net neutrality has been called the “First Amendment of the Internet.” Not just harder. Infinitely more dangerous. Probably the scariest implications for NN being gutted are those around loss of anonymity through the Internet. ISPs who are allowed to sell users' browsing hi…

I'm not American, so please correct me if I'm wrong but I have yet to see any proof of this whole 'sell your internet history' complaint that seems to be blatently copied by everyone without any research. The way I understand it is that ISPs can sell anonymized data from groups of users. Like: people who visit news.ycombinator.com generally also visit stackoverflow. I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual…

>I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual internet history if the website uses HTTPS.

Charge users extra fees for "premium service" unless they agree to let the ISP their traffic.

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