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Ajit Pai is right

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Re: Ajit Pai is right

#131

Post by Shank »

dominotw wrote: post #116
zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Hope I don't immediately get downvoted for this comment. Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers . That way we won't need an extra govt rule to protect neutrality and the market will solve this issue on its own? I live in a mid size indian city and we have about 8-10 providers ( not sure if they are just subcontractors or what).

> Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers

This is a USA-based response.

The answer largely comes down to how much infrastructure is required to move a new provider in and how there's little incentive to do so. If you want to look at real world examples of how providers get choked out, look at the Google Fiber deployment in Nashville.

Google pays contractors to move lines on poles so they can install their lines. The contractors are usually the same contractors that move lines for other companies, but they all require every other company to make adjustments to their own poles before Google can. There are thousands of poles and the incumbent providers have been intentionally dragging their feet to complete their end of the deal. What happened? Nashville passed "One Touch Make Ready." This let Google just do all of the moving in one go, but it was recently shot down due to a lawsuit from the incumbent ISPs.

The current incumbent providers in many areas will fight tooth and nail to prevent anyone from moving in "the easy way," which means the only way to let a competitor move in is through building out expensive networks on their own dollar. Since the margins aren't that great, nobody is incentivized to actually go through with tearing up streets or building new systems for delivery.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#132

Post by dominotw »

disantlor wrote: post #120
dominotw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope I don't immediately get downvoted for this comment. Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers . That way we won't need an extra govt rule to protect neutrality and the market will solve this issue on its own? I live in a mid size indian city and we have about 8-10 providers ( not sure if they are just subcontractors or what).

that's a good and totally fair point, but which should come first?

Maybe net neutrality 'rule' that expires in X yrs ? Review why comcast is the only game in town.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#133

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

cookiecaper wrote: post #105
j2kun wrote: post #15

> It is worth noting, by the way, that BitTorrent users were free-loaders, using massively more bandwidth than the vast majority of Comcast’s customers. I don't think that's how a service agreement works. If I'm paying for a certain bandwidth and latency, I should get that (to within reasonably improbable outages) if I use it 100% of the time or 1% of the time. If the ISP can't keep up, they should be penalized for i…

There's no free lunch. If you want to start metered home internet connections with overages akin to cellular data plans, keep pushing this argument. The old bandwidth-based pricing model has been inadequate for a long time. Net non-neutrality may be the only way to save it, which doesn't mean it's necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff. I think I'd rather have non-discriminatory metered billing than unlimited access to NB…

Well, yeah, of course neutral metered billing would be better than non-neutral "flat" billing, precisely because there is no free lunch. On average, the price should be the same anyway. And you can implement protection of customers against surprising bills without actual flat rates (allow them to go over the limit, but the next month they have to chose to either get a hard cap, or buy a larger package, for example).

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#134

Post by dboreham »

dominotw wrote: post #116
zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Hope I don't immediately get downvoted for this comment. Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers . That way we won't need an extra govt rule to protect neutrality and the market will solve this issue on its own? I live in a mid size indian city and we have about 8-10 providers ( not sure if they are just subcontractors or what).

We have only one or two providers because it is very costly to hang wire on poles all over town (or trench it under the street). Typically the only provider able to foot that bill is whatever company has been in the business of hanging wire around town for decades : either the phone company or the cable company. So in fact there are actually no new providers typically, just the old providers we had 30 years ago using their old wires for IP packets.

If you have 10 providers most likely they are not actually providing the physical service, just the routing of your traffic from whoever does own the wire onto the backbone. The UK has this model for example : the phone company owns all the wires (to a first approximation) but other providers market service and deploy routers in switching services. The phone company changes a row in a database to hook your house's DSL traffic up to whoever's backbone router.

The US does not have this model for Internet service : whoever owns the wire also owns the routing.

Under the 1996 telco act there was such a model (ILECs and so on) but it isn't common today I assume because the law changed or the telcos were allowed to complete with the ILECs once Internet service demand became sufficiently high to justify their entering the market.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#135

Post by lovehashbrowns »

dominotw wrote: post #116
zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Hope I don't immediately get downvoted for this comment. Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers . That way we won't need an extra govt rule to protect neutrality and the market will solve this issue on its own? I live in a mid size indian city and we have about 8-10 providers ( not sure if they are just subcontractors or what).

We can do both, you know? Net neutrality rules now, since we have practicality zero competition. We figure out what's happening with competition; typically it's awful legislation (that these ISPs lobbied for) that's at the local level, and high costs. The local legislation is being, slowly, pushed back. Google helped a bit in trying to get competition going.

We can drop the net neutrality legislature when it's clear that there is competition across the country. But not now. We need it. These companies are too entrenched to be trusted in any way shape or form.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#136

Post by masklinn »

dominotw wrote: post #116
zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Hope I don't immediately get downvoted for this comment. Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers . That way we won't need an extra govt rule to protect neutrality and the market will solve this issue on its own? I live in a mid size indian city and we have about 8-10 providers ( not sure if they are just subcontractors or what).

> Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers.

Because when ISPs got moved from Title II to Title I in 2005, it ended line-sharing requirements, which means entry into the market is extremely difficult (since you need to build your own physical network from scratch) and incumbents are free to grow as they please and "lobby"[0] against essentially their only threat: local public efforts (municipal broadband).

[0] nice wholesome word for plain corruption

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#137

Post by shmerl »

> Again, zero-rating is not explicitly a net-neutrality issue: T-Mobile treats all data the same, some data just doesn’t cost money.

False. Some data is not capped, while other is. So data is not treated the same. Q.E.D. Net neutrality means - either don't cap it, or cap it all. No preferential treatment. India for instance explicitly bans zero rating as part of Net neutrality laws.

> There is evidence that pre-existing regulation and antitrust law, along with media pressure, are effective at policing bad behavior

There is also tons of evidence of existing anti-trust laws doing nothing to stop monopolistic abuse. Data caps you brought above is an example in itself (mostly in case of Comcast and the like). Despite complaints and bad PR, Comcast pushes data caps on users, because they are monopolists and users have little choice but to comply. Where was anti-trust law to stop that?

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#138

Post by 0xfeba »

nickpp wrote: post #99
cptskippy wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you're failing to ask one very important question. Why was the rule put in place in 2015? Most regulations, like laws, are reactive in nature. If our existing laws and regulations were good enough then why would we need to elect new law makers? Why would we even need them at all? The fact is that people are constantly finding new and creative ways to exploit others and or…

For the same reason most regulations are made: to increase the government's power while pretending to protect you, but in fact increasing your dependence of said government.

Yes, damned that FDA and NHTSA for not letting me drink my raw milk while driving in a car without airbags. Clearly a power grab.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#139

Post by [deleted] »

Shank wrote: post #131
dominotw wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hope I don't immediately get downvoted for this comment. Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers . That way we won't need an extra govt rule to protect neutrality and the market will solve this issue on its own? I live in a mid size indian city and we have about 8-10 providers ( not sure if they are just subcontractors or what).

> Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers This is a USA-based response. The answer largely comes down to how much infrastructure is required to move a new provider in and how there's little incentive to do so. If you want to look at real world examples of how providers get choked out, look at the Google Fiber deployment in Nashville. Go…

[deleted]

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#140

Post by 0xfeba »

thehardsphere wrote: post #87
zbruhnke wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you missed is that internet providers started to realize they may be able to squeeze more money out of both consumers and large corporates a few years back and that began to change their thoughts about how to make more money with a largely unregulated industry and Net Neutrality was put in place to preserve the internet's ability to innovate. Let's not forget Ajit Pai was just a few years ago a corporate at…

How did they "realize" that, suddenly a couple years ago? I am not doubting you, I am genuinely confused. I mean, human greed is a constant, and the rules didn’t change from 1996-2015, yet during the same period you said that Wal-Mart would have paid to destroyed Amazon, Amazon became one of the most wealthy and powerful companies in the world. So... it must be something more than the rules, right? Greedy companies w…

> If Wal-Mart simply didn’t realize some trick in those days, what information would the Walton family need to take with them in their time machine to destroy Amazon from 1996-2015

That this internet thing will really take off.

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