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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

#521

Post by shmerl »

webXL wrote: post #500
shmerl wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Competition surely can help, but currently there is no competition in a lot of places. It's basically monopoly / oligopoly situation, with collusion and market division to boot. So increasing competition is a good goal, but it shouldn't block preventing mono…

> Competition surely can help, but currently there is no competition in a lot of places. Places with a lot of people? People who have been harmed by what NN is intending to fix? > Monopolists also created a lot of blockers that prevent increasing competition. Facilitated by government. If government was responsible in the first place, why not just undo what they did?

> Places with a lot of people?

It doesn't depend on numbers. Depends mostly whether there is some other ISPs besides the coax provider (which are the most widespread).

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

#522

Post by CamperBob2 »

bluetwo wrote: post #175
ghewgill wrote: post #89

For those who don't understand why net neutrality is important, it is worthwhile to read about the history of communications (telephone, radio, TV). There is an excellent book by Tim Wu called The Master Switch [0] which investigates the history of communications (with an American focus), describes how each industry start out open to all (farmers using fences for telephone, independent radio broadcasters), and each o…

And our mistake here is not finding a way to explain it that doesn't require reading a book.

Tell them the story of Almon Brown Strowger, the 19th-century undertaker whose business mysteriously took a nosedive when the local telephone company hired an operator who was related to a rival funeral director.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger

I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through purely technical means. Even if there's not a word of truth to it, it's a completely realistic description of what consumers can expect in a world without net neutrality. It can be considered a modern-day Aesop fable.

Once you've related the Strowger story, then you can speculate on how it might have unfolded if Ma Bell herself had owned the competing funeral home. That's basically where the Comcasts and Verizons of the world want to be.

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

#523

Post by wuliwong »

wavefunction wrote: post #413
wuliwong wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a strongly contrasting view of the history of radio in the United States [1]. [1] https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-propert...

Though this strongly contrasting view is not mainstream by any measure.

I think the Austrian school is considered legitimate school of economics though, right? It's not like these are amateur economists or anything.

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

#524

Post by jedberg »

opportune wrote: post #233
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…

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…

> I'm not sure what most of the anti-net neutrality side's supporting arguments are

My friend was a lawyer for an ISP and now works for the FCC (I promise she's a good person otherwise).

The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.

The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.

They're both decent arguments, and would totally make sense in a world where multiple ISPs could reach everyone's home.

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

#525

Post by aaronblohowiak »

barrkel wrote: post #297
nathan_long wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Connection fee + metered internet is fairest of all, and aligns incentives nicely. Of course, users don't like "pay for what you use" and want "all you can eat" plans which leads to... this stuff.

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

#526

Post by redler »

robotbikes wrote: post #486

The scary thing will be when internet providers use the same tactics as free to play click games where they will ramp up your speed to a certain site if you pay extra for a temporary speed boost. These sort of pay per view tactics and extortion over something that we all take for granted now is what I'm afraid of. If not outright blocking of traffic for certain protocols such as bit-torrent or VPN access. Not that th…

Given the freedom to do so, some ISP is almost certain to try something along these lines. This gutting of regulations will open up a vast world of new monetization strategies, from selling speed packs, to "earning" speed by watching certain TV channels or even shows, to DNS monkey business, to "shoshkeles", to video pre-rolls, to "quick start" that throttles after a few minutes of high speed for a service like Netflix or MLB -- then prompts for an upgrade...each approach to be precisely wrought in the forge of the outrage marketplace (such outrage itself often mitigated by these same measures, and by coordinated control of national and local broadcast news and newspapers). An actual market response to customer-hostile strategies is of lesser concern since churn is not a risk in many areas.

I wrote the following comment on a net neutrality thread here about nine months ago, and some of the feedback was that it's unlikely, dystopian, a little hyperbolic:

"The ISP then starts selling premium bundles on the customer side -- Platinum Service will include Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Apple (and get our bonus in-house streaming service at no extra charge!). Platinum-Plus, for another $14.95 per month plus fees, adds priority streams from your choice of up to three major sports content sources. And Platinum-Pro adds non-degraded VPN so you can work from home. Choice!"

This is going to happen.

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

#527

Post by rubicon33 »

marsrover wrote: post #494

The other day I was sitting at home with my family. My parents, two siblings and my grandma, who moved from Germany after WW2. My parents and siblings are sitting around talking about how Trump is going to save America. My brother mentions how a guy in town (also a Trump supporter) said he's a fascist. I'm sitting on the other side of the table and my grandma is looking down at her plate not saying anything. She's ab…

This tends to happen with striking regularity in societies when wealth begins to consolidate in the hands of a few and the middle class' buying power declines year after year.

Like a fever, it's a sign that our country is sick. If we let the fever take over it will kill us. If we treat the underlying problem we can survive. We MUST solve the problem of wealth disparity or mark my words - it will be our undoing.

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

#528

Post by LocalH »

rhino369 wrote: post #263
vast_majority wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The vast majority have some choice" I challenge this assertion -> please document it.

60% of the country has three providers of 10mpbs+ 90% has two providers of 10mpbs+. One of those is satellite, which sort of sucks, I'll grant you that. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...

10mbps isn't really useful nowadays. That's 10000kbps not including overhead. That's an absolute max of 1.25MiB per second, realistically if you get 1MiB you're doing well. Back that down a little bit to account for the inability to always reach peak bandwidth, say to 896kiB, and you start to see how you're very limited for common usage. Even web browsing is quite heavy nowadays.

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

#529

Post by rtx »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #522
bluetwo wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And our mistake here is not finding a way to explain it that doesn't require reading a book.

Tell them the story of Almon Brown Strowger, the 19th-century undertaker whose business mysteriously took a nosedive when the local telephone company hired an operator who was related to a rival funeral director. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through pure…

Would it be any different than YC promoting its companies here.

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

#530

Post by LocalH »

I find it funny how they have completely shed the notion that the Internet is an "information superhighway". What they wish to do is akin to having a middleman that charges you a different toll to use the same piece of road depending on your destination. Going to Walmart? That'll be $5. Going to the bar? That'll be $50. Going to the strip bar? That'll be $500.
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