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ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

arstechnica.com

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Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#141

Post by vlunkr »

kodah wrote: post #134
jmyeet wrote: post #46

The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either. Weird . The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world…

> The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. In most places it's pretty crap too. Many places have no competition. Some providers are in clear breach of contract in not providing customers service as they promised to do. People say this, but we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas. It mostly benefited cities. I would like to see a version…

Net neutrality isn't really related to end-user Internet speed. It's just about ensuring that all traffic is treated and billed equally.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#142

Post by d110af5ccf »

bombcar wrote: post #43
fn-mote wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not price the network equally for everyone? It's not clear what this means. I guess in the context it means everyone pays the same unit rate per amount of data transferred? I think there's more subtlety than this. I pay more for a 100MBit connection than a 10MBit connection, and also pay more for the data transferred over those connections? Are they allowed to charge higher speed customers a lower unit rate?

The question comes into play at the edges - when your ISPs upstream connection is filled what happens? Can they selectively drop packets or do they have to drop them randomly? And can you pay to be in a “never drop my packets” group?

> Can they selectively drop packets

Absolutely not. That practice should literally be illegal.

> or do they have to drop them randomly?

Yes. This is the only reasonable approach.

> And can you pay to be in a “never drop my packets” group?

No. That should be illegal to offer.

If the ISP's network is incapable of meeting their customer's demands during peak hours and they oversubscribed themselves so badly that they're contemplating such tactics then they ran their business dishonestly. They fraudulently made promises that they were incapable of delivering on and got caught. They need to fix their network or go out of business. And possibly should face legal consequences for their behavior.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#143

Post by Karrot_Kream »

d110af5ccf wrote: post #139
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your general point (a lack of competition is why they can get away with double-charging for traffic), though this feels like a theoretical concern as of yet. But you're conflating different ISPs with different types of anti-competitive behavior. Prioritizing non-streaming-service (e.g. throttling Netflix at prime time) packets could, for example, help a regional ISP stay competitive. That's different tha…

> Prioritizing non-streaming-service (e.g. throttling Netflix at prime time) packets could, for example, help a regional ISP stay competitive. No. There are lots of things companies could theoretically do to be more competitive. That doesn't mean those things are good or should be legal. > That's different than the anti-competitive behavior the big ISPs engage in when ... Actually I think the two are tightly coupled.…

I'm not disagreeing with you, just trying to steelman the argument properly and separate out two different issues. IMO there's room for the FTC to have an "unreasonable use" penalty but otherwise mandate net neutrality. It has to come from the FTC so we need to actually properly regulate telecoms.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#144

Post by d110af5ccf »

throw0101a wrote: post #74
kibwen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are reasonable arguments to be made for allowing infrastructure providers to limit the ability of bad actors to consume extreme amounts of resources before they tragedy-of-the-commons the whole shebang for everyone else. But any such system has to acknowledge that qualifying as infrastructure means that society relies on it to function, which means that demand for the infrastructure is, at the low end, inelasti…

> There are reasonable arguments to be made for allowing infrastructure providers to limit the ability of bad actors to consume extreme amounts of resources before they tragedy-of-the-commons the whole shebang for everyone else. Except the "bad actors" are the ISP's customer . It's they who are asking for the bits to be sent. It's the ISP job to deliver the bits their customers requested . The streaming services are…

From GP: "extreme amounts of resources"

"Extreme" here meaning ... the connection bandwidth that was explicitly paid for? Except for the fine print where the ISP notified the customer that they were going to horribly oversubscribe things. It amounts to fraud as far as I'm concerned.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#145

Post by d110af5ccf »

jollybean wrote: post #119
monkeywork wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If Netflix wants more bandwidth with lower latency, fine, they can pay for that. Why should Netflix pay for this? They aren't the one choosing to send traffic onto that network, the ISPs CLIENTS are. The ISP shouldn't have any ability to charge Netflix for actions their clients are taking - and they should have to treat all traffic that a client asks for equally. Can you imagine an electric company trying to get som…

Netflix pays for connectivity just like consumers do. They can pay for better QoS, which will result in better QoS for their customers if they want. Or their customers can, or both. "Can you imagine an electric company trying to get some sort of fee from Samsung because they sell a lot of electronics that people use in their houses..." That analogy doesn't work because Samsung, in that case, has nothing to do with th…

> Netflix pays for connectivity just like consumers do.

Yes, Netfix pays their ISP. They should never need to pay the customer's ISP. Peering should be cost neutral. ISPs shouldn't be allowed to double dip.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#146

Post by [deleted] »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #9

Can someone explain a technical issue I see with net neutrality? From a network engineering perspective, it seems sensible to me that CDN servers are located as close as possible to end users. So I assume that implies residing in whatever data centers the ISPs use at their edge. Is there some way to get the networking-efficiency benefits of those colo arrangements while still having net neutrality?

[deleted]

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#147

Post by alborzb »

temp8964 wrote: post #111
walrus01 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nearly every prominent conservative politician of the past ten years has come out publicly against "net neutrality". Particularly when a state like California sets its own regulations. And yet these are the very same people who will vigorously defend the rights of other states to pass laws that directly contradict Supreme Court decisions, or pre-existing Federal laws.

Quoted post unavailable.

Just to backup the source the other commentor provided, here's 3 more "prominent conservatives" as you wanted - The Republican attorneys general of Texas, Arkansas, and Nebraska want for the federal repeal of net neutrality to preempt states from enacting their own net neutrality rules -- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/fcc-quest-to-kil...

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#148

Post by d110af5ccf »

kodah wrote: post #134
jmyeet wrote: post #46

The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either. Weird . The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world…

> The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. In most places it's pretty crap too. Many places have no competition. Some providers are in clear breach of contract in not providing customers service as they promised to do. People say this, but we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas. It mostly benefited cities. I would like to see a version…

> we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas

The issue there isn't net neutrality but rather open access. Countries with affordable internet generally have open access requirements for network operators.

Net neutrality is a separate issue to do with ISPs attempting to double dip, leveraging a large customer base in order to do so.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#149

Post by [deleted] »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #9

Can someone explain a technical issue I see with net neutrality? From a network engineering perspective, it seems sensible to me that CDN servers are located as close as possible to end users. So I assume that implies residing in whatever data centers the ISPs use at their edge. Is there some way to get the networking-efficiency benefits of those colo arrangements while still having net neutrality?

[deleted]

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#150

Post by salawat »

kelnos wrote: post #138
jcranmer wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states. Actually, not really. The EU is, in political science terms, a confederation (to the degree that it's a state and not a supranational organization in the first place). The constitution envisioned the US as a federal state (the first one ever), in explicit contradistinction to the confederation that preceded it, as well as o…

> Arguments that center on what the Founding Fathers actually intended for the country fall flat for me because a) how do you know what they actually intended I think it's further than that: regardless what they intended , it's very easy to see the opposing views of the Federalists and Anti-Federalists via their respective Papers. It's pretty clear that some of the founders wanted a strong central government, and som…

The thing people forget though, is that fight continues to this very day, and it is with We The People that the right to determine and change where that balance sits. Frankly, I think the Federal Government is just aggregating greater and greater degrees of power over time, and becoming a political sledgehammer reached for out of expedience.
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