Live data from Hacker News

FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

theregister.co.uk

91–100 of 169 posts

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#91
post #88

Paid fast lanes are a bad idea, but I think 100% equality for all packets is just as bad or worse. Real time traffic should be prioritized over data transfers. Right now my video call gets clobbered when I download a file. It doesn’t have to be like that.

How should your ISP know? Diffserv might help, but I doubt some shitty application will set them.

They can tell right now. T-Mobile gives free data usage for video and music streaming, for instance.

You can either do traffic pattern analysis or just base it on what IPs they are connecting to.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#92
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How should your ISP know? Diffserv might help, but I doubt some shitty application will set them.

They can tell right now. T-Mobile gives free data usage for video and music streaming, for instance. You can either do traffic pattern analysis or just base it on what IPs they are connecting to.

That works great today, but it stifles innovation. If I roll out a new real-time service my users suffer shitty delayed service, until I get big enough to force them to prioritize me.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#93

It’s been over two years since Net Neutrality was repealed. I remember at the time there was a lot of talk about how the internet was going to be ruined by throttling, paid “fast lanes”, etc. Have any of these things happened? Or did that turn out to mostly be fear-mongering?

Counterargument: if ISPs were never going to do any of those things anyway, why did they want net neutrality repealed?

So they can start tracking your browsing and selling it to marketers.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixed wireless and LEO internet doesn't require last mile wiring. Your post, while accurate and informative, doesn't appear to have much to do with my question of wireless technologies enabling competition where wired ISPs now hold monopolies.

Fair point. I wasn't sure what LEO stands for (I guess low earth orbit satellites). Wireless competition is tough as well, because you have to purchase spectrum from the gov't. Maybe not all wireless technologies ??? I am not an expert on wireless. Still wired internet has advantages over the other technologies (stability and latency), so I am merely suggesting an effective way to compete on wired internet can help s…

Yep, and from information theory standpoint, wireless will never have anywhere near the same capacity as wired because of inherently worse channel characteristics (loss, dispersion, and interference)

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#95
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterargument: if ISPs were never going to do any of those things anyway, why did they want net neutrality repealed?

So they can start tracking your browsing and selling it to marketers.

Pretty sure that has nothing to do with net neutrality. They were doing that anyway.

Net neutrality and the move to "Internet everything" is an apocalyptic combination for ISPs, who are accustomed to selling overpriced cable bundles. If all your entertainment is on Netflix, they can't charge you $100/month for a TV package. With net neutrality gone, they can move that tax to Netflix instead.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people agree that the problems that net neutrality regulations try to solve are caused by local, unimpeachable telecom monopolies. The economics of having a bunch of competing infrastructure make no sense. As much as I generally dislike regulation, I welcomed Title II classification because regulations are an effective answer answer to an abusive monopoly. However, I think another overall approach would be j…

I disagree. Local loop un-bundling does not solve the problem. You are still back to the same situation. A single pipe can only handle so many providers, thus limit local competition to 2 or 3 providers. So either all will collude, or the one with the deeper pockets will under-price the other ones until they go out of business. (sure you can add more "regulation", but this just throwing duct tape on a broken system)…

> A single pipe can only handle so many providers

A single pipe can handle only so many customers. I don't see how it limits the number of providers?

There actually are countriess with such rules, and they seem to work well. The difficult part is the need to set some uniform price providers must pay for that "last mile" connection to their customer. I seem to remember something like $8/month in Germany. That's actually low enough, it would allow healthy competition even if you set wholesale price 50% higher than neccessary.

The same mechanism is used for competition among power and natural gas companies.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#97
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they can start tracking your browsing and selling it to marketers.

Pretty sure that has nothing to do with net neutrality. They were doing that anyway. Net neutrality and the move to "Internet everything" is an apocalyptic combination for ISPs, who are accustomed to selling overpriced cable bundles. If all your entertainment is on Netflix, they can't charge you $100/month for a TV package. With net neutrality gone, they can move that tax to Netflix instead.

Part of the common carrier designation is that you can't sell personally identifiable information you get from users on your network. They definitely weren't doing that before. Subsequently they've sworn up and down that they're not but there's no longer a legal bar from them doing so.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating traditional competition in local infrastructure is difficult if not impossible for several reasons - Last mile sections of the city will always have winner takes most (customers) situation, making the lines built by the other providers redundant and wasteful - There are only so many communication lines you can put on poles, and underground, before the people start complaining about ugliness, and never ending…

A lot of people agree that the problems that net neutrality regulations try to solve are caused by local, unimpeachable telecom monopolies. The economics of having a bunch of competing infrastructure make no sense. As much as I generally dislike regulation, I welcomed Title II classification because regulations are an effective answer answer to an abusive monopoly. However, I think another overall approach would be j…

Local loop unbundling still requires regulation forcing the wire to be neutral, so it's really a matter of who neutrality applies to.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are these fast lanes? I believe you of course, but how do I know these exist like you say?

Netflix is probably the most relatable case study on what fast lanes look like, because it is Netflix that pays whatever rate the teleco thinks it can insist on in order to install their CDN in your ISPs hub, that in many cases must compete with the exact same content the telco is now serving. (Side note: one more good reason for Netflix to be in the content creation game) Netflix gets to pay whatever rate to get pri…

That's not a scenario net neutrality regulation would affect. Larger companies will always have more resources, and with that they will have opportunities to invest in infrastructure and improve service that smaller competitors cannot match. There's a continuum from "choosing a more expensive cloud provider" to CDNs to these edge caches.

Re: FCC forced by court to ask the public again for feedback on net neutrality

#100
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure that has nothing to do with net neutrality. They were doing that anyway. Net neutrality and the move to "Internet everything" is an apocalyptic combination for ISPs, who are accustomed to selling overpriced cable bundles. If all your entertainment is on Netflix, they can't charge you $100/month for a TV package. With net neutrality gone, they can move that tax to Netflix instead.

Part of the common carrier designation is that you can't sell personally identifiable information you get from users on your network. They definitely weren't doing that before. Subsequently they've sworn up and down that they're not but there's no longer a legal bar from them doing so.

Ah gotcha. My point still partially stands, since they were free to sell anonymized and aggregated information previously.
Post reply on HN