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FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

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Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#291

Post by reefoctopus »

agotterer wrote: post #260

While this is disappointing news and I think it will take years before it gets better. My prediction is that this won't last. When the mobile internet was first getting it's roots most of the American mobile providers offered unlimited bandwidth. Once the network become constrained and consumers started overloading the networks with streaming content the industry moved to tiered bandwidth plans. Years later a few com…

I can change my cellphone provider, but there is only one ISP in my area. Competition doesn’t bring down prices when there is none.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#292

Post by cat199 »

Samis2001 wrote: post #272
orthecreedence wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net Neutrality being repealed is a symptom of the telecoms owning all the infrastructure. I'm not sure how things work in the UK, but if you guys have publicly-owned/municipal internet infrastructure, then I wouldn't worry about Net Neutrality. If your infrastructure is owned by a few big companies like in the US, then my recommendation would be to start fighting for public control. As far as helping people in the US…

It's not publicly owned but the market is way less dysfunctional than in the US - aside from the few fiber & cable ISPs, a single phone line allows you to choose from a reasonably broad selection of ISPs.

the business culture also doesn't treat 'society itself' as some form of economic externality to be factored out of any potential equation..

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#293

Post by marcosdumay »

nathan_long wrote: post #259
dzdt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about if Comcast charges Netflix more to be able to access you? [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/12/comcastlevel3/

The argument that Netflix needs to pay Comcast is absurd. Why are people buying high-bandwidth plans from ISPs? Because they want to use services like Netflix . Netflix is not costing ISPs money, it's giving them something to sell . Imagine that taxi drivers want to charge the airport for overwhelming them with passengers and you'll see the absurdity.

It's completely absurd. Yet, it is the one high impact case that actually happened in real life and led to the FCC imposing neutrality onto the ISPs.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#294

Post by artorias »

komali2 wrote: post #274
rubicon33 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If you like your cable company" I've never once, in my entire life, heard anyone say they like Comcast.

As a petty exercise in malicious revenge, I would call Comcast support on my morning commute, every day, for about a month. It started out because I had a legitimate issue with speed and I decided to just call until my speeds were what I was paying for (not that I ever expected to get them). It turns out my region was always routed to the same office somewhere in India. So I guess I became kind of a known entity ther…

This story got a laugh out of me, good show.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#295

Post by Pilfer »

Individualist wrote: post #139
pneill wrote: post #32

Maybe I'm lone dissenter, but I don't understand the push back on this. People who read hacker news should be among the elite technologist, do we really all believe that every packet should be treated the same? Should an E911 call or tele-surgery packets really be treated the same as Netflix? Net neutrality forces the ISP to do that and that seems like madness to me.

"...'selfish routing' approach has a price of anarchy that’s a mere 4/3. That is, a free-for-all is only 33% worse than perfect top-down coordination." - Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster. Not to mention the cost of having to monitor traffic and the additional charge to do so on the consumer in comparison to the "anarchic" TCP model…

>So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster

On average, yes, but in the event where a malicious attacker completely DoSes the network with packets, the prioritized packets would be more than 33% faster than average.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#296

Post by mediocrejoker »

shanusmagnus wrote: post #232
mediocrejoker wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the actual reason they shouldn't? This is a highly politicized topic but it's hard to find rational discussion. If I built a network I would expect to be able to charge whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted in exchange for the use of my network. Is the answer that taxpayers helped fund the network so now feel they deserve not to pay twice? How much of the current internet infrastructure is paid for by taxpay…

1) Do you think it would be okay for a hardware store to price a shovel differently depending on what the customer wanted to dig? 2) The telcos never seem to reflect on the fact that the only reason people want broadband at all is because there are services that they want to access. So just by existing they're already getting their cut. It would be just as reasonable for Amazon and Netflix to ask Comcast for a cut of…

I think hardware stores are maybe not the best comparison because if a hardware store was doing that then it would be pretty easy for a competitor to open a hardware store across the street and undercut the first on shovels and steal all the business.

I think this might be a better solution than a law that specifically mandates the price at which a hardware store can sell shovels, since I think that law would only address a very specific problem caused by a larger underlying issue.

I think the shovel case at least, when the market can sort something out then it's "better" to let it do so.

For Amazon/Netflix, at least on the surface, I would say that the ISP and the content provider can ask for whatever they want and whether or not they get it will be a function of how much each one needs the other. Perhaps ironically a very similar system to how internet peering currently works (the little guy pays the bigger guy for transit).

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#297

Post by barrkel »

nathan_long wrote: post #259
dzdt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about if Comcast charges Netflix more to be able to access you? [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/12/comcastlevel3/

The argument that Netflix needs to pay Comcast is absurd. Why are people buying high-bandwidth plans from ISPs? Because they want to use services like Netflix . Netflix is not costing ISPs money, it's giving them something to sell . Imagine that taxi drivers want to charge the airport for overwhelming them with passengers and you'll see the absurdity.

Comcast is like the road, not taxis; the last mile is where all the expense is in consumer internet. And congestion charging is a legitimate thing.

Why should Granny have to pay more on her internet connection to subsidize your Netflix addiction? Because equal pay for equal access is that: a subsidy from light users to heavy users.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#298

Post by cat199 »

jquery wrote: post #216
the_cat_kittles wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

are you a paid troll? what good comes from selective throttling?

Please don’t call people shills on HN. That’s very rude. Selective throttling has worked great to make my t-mobile mobile data usage seamlessly switch between email, websites, and video on an “unlimited” plan. They even doe sample my videos to 480p to save bandwidth unless I vpn. So there’s one non-trolly example of innovation that has made my life better that net neutrality would prevent. I do not buy the doomsday s…

> We started with AOL internet and moved to a freer internet over time, all without net neutrality.

no, we started with 'the real internet' and then AOL showed up.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#299

Post by jermaustin1 »

rhino369 wrote: post #255
vel0city wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only a little over 50% of households have at least 2 high-speed internet choices[0]. I wouldn't call that the "vast majority". [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...

25mbps is an arbitrary limit that leaves out ATT and Century links ADSL2+ service, which is fine for most uses.

You will have a hard time streaming Netflix/Hulu/VOD on anything < 25mbps.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#300

Post by dragonwriter »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #275
opportune wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These ISP companies use legal shenanigans, coupled with the unavoidably large startup costs of creating a new/competing ISP, to effectively run regional monopolies. Google kind of gave up their master plan for Fiber after they were litigated in multiple jurisdictions essentially over bullshit that they were legally within their right to do, such as use shared lines - and that was Google, which had a ton of cash to th…

Thanks for the detailed reply. It seems like a lot of the disagreement hinges on the fact that ISPs have a monopoly and many people cannot easily "vote with their wallet" if the ISP does something they don't like. I wonder if focusing on making it easier for competitive ISPs to start up would do more towards bridging the gap between the two sides. I think a lot of the anti-NN crowd is based on a more philosophical ar…

> I wonder if focusing on making it easier for competitive ISPs to start up would do more towards bridging the gap between the two sides.

Fighting against properties of a service that make it a natural monopoly is usually not going to work as well as limiting the ability of the resulting monopoly to be leveraged. Either, of course, takes active regulation, and tends to be unpopular with both laissez-faire ideologues and the people holding the monopoly.

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