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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

#421

Post by nitrogen »

dmix wrote: post #361
shmerl wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Oliver found a good way to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.

> The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all. This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It w…

Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either.

Facebook. India. So-called free basics.

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

#422

Post by deusofnull »

milofeynman wrote: post #412
dmix wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all. This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It w…

I see your profile says "data scientist in training" I would love for you to use some of your training to supply your post with actual data or sources. Everything I see reported disagrees with so many of your assumptions. Like your unstated assumption of some sort of fair and competitive market where they will lose money if they don't treat their customers right. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06…

Wait but I thought the free market operated in good faith and not by brutally cutting corners on service, monopolizing, and lobbying government for preferential treatment?

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

#423

Post by BinaryIdiot »

dmix wrote: post #403
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this will incentivize every nerd in your area to create an ISP to offer unfiltered internet Uh, how do you think these "nerds" are going to provide broadband? It's highly capital intensive to lay cabling so you're either going to piggyback off of someone like Comcast (who is going to charge you a lot) or you're going to piggyback off of someone's wireless which is also very expensive.

> you're either going to piggyback off of someone like Comcast That was the solution in Canada to generate competition, as the laying of cables was subsidized already, it was never a free market, as I'm sure the telecom industry in the US was hardly a free market... not sure why it's such a crazy idea. Why not focus on creating the basis for competition instead of centrally managing the intricacies of business... whi…

> not sure why it's such a crazy idea.

It's not a _crazy_ idea (many have proposed such an idea) it's just not _possible_ in the United States in most areas.

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

#424

Post by lovehashbrowns »

rhino369 wrote: post #363
jermaustin1 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Should get you to 720p.

I tried that. It really doesn't, especially when there's congestion. I've had to go down to 240p on Youtube before, especially if I was trying to do something else in the background, e.g. watch Youtube while doing homework, watch Youtube while browsing Reddit/news/any other website with giant JS/CSS/media files/ads.

I was primarily a student then, and trying to skip around in Youtube/online video lectures was an insanely frustrating experience.

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

#425

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #333
dragonwriter wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I would think either strategy would be unpopular with the monopoly-holders. Why do you say it's more difficult? It seems like it would be more sustainable in the long run even if it's more difficult up front.

Because it is a natural monopoly, essentially due to the massive cost of building and maintaining a second last-mile network which would necessarily be underutilised. The costs of maintaining a last-mile network are essentially independent of the number of users (unless you let unused parts of the network go out of date/fall into disrepair, in which case you effectively don't have a second network anymore).

As such, it is always better to try and win over one more customer to increase revenue, even if that customer pays less than the cost of keeping their line in working order, both because the costs are mostly there anyway, and because it reduces the revenue of the competition, thus increasing the likelyhood that they will fail and thus make you have a monopoly again.

That's actually exactly the behaviour you see over and over when some smaller business (or larger business, for that matter, see Google Fiber) tries to build a network where the monopolistic incumbent so far didn't care to provide useful service. The moment that project is announced, you get really good and cheap connectivity from the incumbent. Given that they before didn't consider it to be a good investment, you can guess that they are doing it only to destroy the competition.

Also, the network operator that has the less-utilized network necessarily has to charge higher prices per user to cover their costs, which leads to a positive feedback of even less customers, leading to even higher prices, ...

Having two parallel last mile networks is effectively unstable. There is a reason why there aren't multiple water pipes and multiple electricity cables and multiple natural gas pipes in your house.

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

#426

Post by Lev1a »

rhino369 wrote: post #363
jermaustin1 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Should get you to 720p.

In a day and age where most of the TVs and monitors sold right now are 1080p and up, 720p is not an acceptable maximum resolution for streaming anymore.

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

#427

Post by prklmn »

dmix wrote: post #361
shmerl wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Oliver found a good way to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.

> The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all. This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It w…

>>But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all.

Charge internet companies for access to subscribers. Charge subscribers to access certain websites. It's a simple model.

>>No ISP for the ~15yr timeframe before the FTC regulation was passed a few years ago had ever offered such an arrangement.

Again, not true. https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/24/5541916/netflix-deal-with... https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/16010766/verizon-netflix-...

>>Plenty of ISPs have repeatedly said they have zero intention of doing it either (including a few this year). Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either.

Why would you ever trust an ISP? If they were not going to take advantage of this new opportunity, then they should be fine with having the regulation stay in place. Also, wireless carriers which are in many ways analogous to ISPs already have started preying on consumers using this model https://imgur.com/yYobj7x

>>This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It wouldn't take much market research to see it's a terrible idea.

Market research and public opinion don't matter when you have no competition and have numerous state laws written for protection.

>>This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, and obvious lack of business sense, has always been a far larger counter-balance to this idea. Plus the huge technical challenge of filtering at the ISP level... this would be a huge boon for encryption and VPNs as well.

Again, there is little to no competition in most markets.

>>So I'm a bit confused why this is generating so much FUD over such a highly hypothetical and hand wavy scenario... as if the only thing stopping them from doing it was this three year old regulation.

It's not hypothetical at all, see above links. It's a big deal because it will ultimately be a huge wealth transfer away from consumers. You're not by chance Ajit Pai, are you?

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

#428

Post by CodeWriter23 »

Sacho wrote: post #328
jandrese wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not hard to imagine 15 years ago Google is a new player on the scene but has a lot of trouble getting traction because their links are being constantly saturated and they have no money to pay the ISP ransoms to provide decent service. We could still be using Altavista today.

You mean 15 years ago when NN didn't exist? Or 10 years ago? Or 5 years ago? Or 3 years ago? How did Google/Facebook/Netflix even make it when ISPs had all the way up to 2015 to ransom them?

Fifteen years ago Net Neutrality was the de facto policy. Nobody would dare block a site or have paid prioritization because it would topple numerous peering agreement Apple carts, and consumers had actually competitive choices between access providers.

It didn’t become necessary to “make it official” until the consumer access industry was consolidated, giving rise to the idea of “hey, we know our consumers are paying for the entire operation and netting us a healthy profit already, so where can we get even more profit?”

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

#429

Post by outsidetheparty »

dmix wrote: post #392
skywhopper wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that most people have access to more than one ISP (they don't), or that statements by ISPs about what they intend to do or not do are truthful (they aren't). Specifically statements promising they would never do anything that would break net neutrality rules, while arguing against the imposition of net neutrality rules, would not make sense. Why oppose something you have no intention of doing?

My counter point does not depend entirely on competition. That is merely one counter-balance available to much of the country who have more than one ISP available, of the many I mentioned (technical, marketing, business model). Why not create regulation in response to real scenarios that have actually happened instead of hypothetical ones that are already have plenty of other drawbacks?

Have you forgotten the whole controversy about Verizon throttling Netflix back in July? This is a real scenario that has actually happened.

http://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-netflix-youtube-throt...

Your other points hold up equally poorly: there are no unsolved technical hurdles in throttling or blocking specific sites or services -- as evidenced by the fact that they can and have already done so. As for "marketing" and "business model" and it being an "unpopular idea", these again fall back to the issue of consumer choice: in an effective monopoly, it doesn't matter a whit whether the populace dislikes the idea. It's not like Comcast is winning any popularity contests as it is.

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

#430

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

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…

Another obstacle is rights of way. You cannot just tear up streets and bury cables. And in practice, you also cannot build a cable network through private property either, because you inevitably will encounter some owners of real estate who don't care about your network and thus have no incentive you allow you to build through their property unless you pay them as much as you can, because that is what they are going to be asking for.

So, in practice, networks are built on public ground, or potentially using eminent domain. Neither of those should result in exclusive ownership of the market thus obtained.

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