231–240 of 388 posts
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Just for the curious, this isn't how every ISP in Indonesia is. Friends and I have had your standard sim cards which allows you to access any site freely.
So maybe these plans are serving a different market segment. Is there any reason to believe an ISP would get rid of all their regular offerings in favour of these site-specific plans?
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The reason why I and some other HN commenters (and L3 Communications) find this argument bizarre is because of the concept of transit traffic charges being applied to the last mile, which previously was not an industry practice. Comcast's customers are requesting the data; if Comcast were a second tier backbone, or an AS between two others, then it would make sense to charge for traffic, as it doesn't benefit. But th…
I think it makes sense because retail ISPs operate in a two-sided market. Comcast provides access to Internet services, which customers want and are willing to pay for. Similarly, Comcast provides access to customers, which the Internet companies who provide those services (and associated CDNs and transit providers) want and are willing to pay for. I don't think there's anything especially wrong with this business mo…
So, I put up a small SaaS that I want people to use. In your world, I now have to go knock on the door of all the ISPs out there to pay them for access to their customers?
Apparently, it's quite difficult to maintain net neutrality, yet its advantages to the average citizen seem enormous. Therefore, shouldn't we fix something else instead? Like the way these laws are established?
It's cultural. Both the people in charge and those who put them there worship the production of money. Policies are selected based on whatever provides maximum revenue without other considerations, with the belief that a thriving economy requires this strategy.
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> does that mean the ISP gets the automatic right to fuck over everyone left because they didn't move? The fact that they refuse to invest money they will never get back doesn't mean they want to "fuck you over". Have you ever thrown money out of the window just for fun? Well now you understand these ISPs' point of view. > Should water utility not be provided to them because they didn't move? If there's only one pers…
You don't need to maintain billion dollar installations for 5 people. For 5 people the annual cost of running a simple fiber installation can be well below a couple thousand dollars. I think you just have no idea what realistic costs an ISP actual has. The ISP equipment usually in deployment is incredibly low maintenance and cost. And then "piping the internet" to the customer is exactly 0 cost.
China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back. They do have a vibrant tech economy though. So they have their own Google (Baidu). They have their own Twitter (Weibo), WhatsApp(WeChat), Amazon(Tao Bao). So in the future of no net-neutrality, we'll see ISPs being value-added resellers of their own regionally partitioned versions of these…
For one, Chinese ISPs are state owned (China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Great Wall). They do not have much of a profit motive outside the typical corruption of people at the top. Even with these state owned ISPs there are multiple choices for each address as these companies share infrastructure. The sharing of infrastructure in itself is similar to local loop unbundling, which does not exist in the US.
Another thing is that the tech community thrives at the behest of the government. Every time something happens it is generally due to changes in party policy that shift favor between companies.
Partitioning services is also not necessarily good. For example, large American ISPs generally have regional monopolies if not duopolies. They also own TV channels and movie studios. What is to prevent them from offering packages of their own services that are zero rated while charging extra for others (say, Steam or a new streaming service)?
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>China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back. The UK does have net neutrality. The UK internet is still loosely censored. I understand that a monopoly might mean a non-neutral net could be privately censored, and therefore functionally similar, but this is a distinct issue from state censorship.
> The UK does have net neutrality. Do we have any protection of that? As best I know (which isn't much), UK net neutrality is more along the lines of a polite understanding than anything enshrined in law. (And it seems to be wobbling - cf. Three now offering you free data for Netflix/Spotify streaming, etc.)
Until an ISP starts preventing universal access nothing needs to be done, zero-rating (while bad for competition) does not do that.
A good question would be why aren't the competition petitioning the government to outright ban zero-rating? Current EU law has zero-rating loopholes, it'd be up to a post-brexit government to close them. Perhaps it's not popular with current ISPs and their customers? I don't think a large survey on net neutrality has been done in the UK.
China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back. They do have a vibrant tech economy though. So they have their own Google (Baidu). They have their own Twitter (Weibo), WhatsApp(WeChat), Amazon(Tao Bao). So in the future of no net-neutrality, we'll see ISPs being value-added resellers of their own regionally partitioned versions of these…
Comparing China to the US is a false equivalency. For one, Chinese ISPs are state owned (China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Great Wall). They do not have much of a profit motive outside the typical corruption of people at the top. Even with these state owned ISPs there are multiple choices for each address as these companies share infrastructure. The sharing of infrastructure in itself is similar to local loo…
I'll note that the FCC also regulates what can be said. Anyone remember when they investigated Stephen Colbert for his remarks on Trump?
Apparently, it's quite difficult to maintain net neutrality, yet its advantages to the average citizen seem enormous. Therefore, shouldn't we fix something else instead? Like the way these laws are established?
All last mile ISPs and wireless carriers are state-enforced oligopolies or monopolies. You can't build these things without some mix of federal, state, and local permission, and in many cases taxpayer funds helps subsidize the construction of these networks or tax breaks are provided.
Telecom is not a free market and never has been. Telecoms are not really private companies in any unfettered free market sense. They're closer to the status of majority-of-revenue government contractors like Lockheed or Raytheon. Add the revolving door they have with representatives and they're almost like state-owned industries.
Net neutrality is there to prevent a state-backed oligopoly from using its position to stifle competition in the free market. In other words it's a pro-free-market regulation that exists to protect the free market from interference by state monopolies.
I personally think it would be just as good to eliminate barriers to entry for broadband and wireless competition, but unfortunately on a pragmatic level (at least in the USA) this is orders of magnitude more difficult politically. So net neutrality is the best solution for now.
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You don't need to maintain billion dollar installations for 5 people. For 5 people the annual cost of running a simple fiber installation can be well below a couple thousand dollars. I think you just have no idea what realistic costs an ISP actual has. The ISP equipment usually in deployment is incredibly low maintenance and cost. And then "piping the internet" to the customer is exactly 0 cost.
We're talking clean water, electricity, internet and just about any other public utility, for 5 people. Like if I want to have fibre and all the other utilities here https://www.google.com/maps/@-16.2099526,-73.027656,8.94z , you think it would be cheap? If so I highly recommend starting your own business providing high quality infrastructure service as a service anywhere anytime :)
New infrastructure is a topic completely orthogonal to NN and has little to no influence in both directions.