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Net neutrality

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Net neutrality

#131

Post by NoPiece »

tehwebguy wrote: post #104
NoPiece wrote: post #83

This is not the case for the “last mile”. Consumers often can only buy Internet access from a single provider; there is no choice. This is often asserted, but not true. According to the FCC, 97% of consumers have access to at least 2 broadband providers. 67% of people have access to at least 2 providers at 10mbps. Here is the graph from the FCC: http://i.imgur.com/xhn1YCF.png and the original source doc: http://trans…

The "last mile" argument is true, your numbers don't disprove it because they don't represent a percentage of consumers with said broadband options. The report's title is: Percentages of Households Located in Census Tracts Where Providers Report Residential Fixed-Location Connections of Various Speeds as of December 31, 2012 If the census tract where a household is located has access to 2+ broadband providers it sati…

Yes it seems possible that they could be overestimating, but it is the most thorough report I have seen. And if their sample set is large enough, they should have accounted for it. Do you have any actual data that shows different numbers?

Re: Net neutrality

#132

Post by kaonashi »

snitko wrote: post #128
kaonashi wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering our government created the internet in the first place, I'm not sure that's a long-term winning strategy.

I disagree with that statement. People created internet. As well as built roads and educated children. Individuals do that. The only question is, how are they financed. If those activities are financed using tax money, it's called "government". Then, the question we should ask ourselves, would people still invent awesome things and build roads and educate their children without government funding? Would they, maybe,…

> If those activities are financed using tax money, it's called "government".

Taxes don't finance US government expenditure; they create demand for the currency.

> Then, the question we should ask ourselves, would people still invent awesome things and build roads and educate their children without government funding

Government provides the coordination required to accomplish these things. The private sector is notoriously horrible at coordination between competing actors.

Re: Net neutrality

#133

Post by ender7 »

rayiner wrote: post #67

I don't see how a normally libertarian-leaning group of people have embraced regulation rather than deregulation as to this issue. Why do local ISP markets tend towards monopoly, even though it has been illegal since 1992 to grant local cable monopolies? Two words: universal access. It's the same principle that led municipalities to grant taxicab monopolies, of the kind that stifle companies like Uber today. The idea…

First, regulations regarding universal access have little in common with net neutrality regulations except that both are simply examples of regulation. A person might support one but not the other without crossing some logical event horizon.

Secondly, it's not clear that the implied solution in your comment ("more competition") would lead to firmer protections for net neutrality. Any changes to open the market to competition would take many years to come to fruition while current ISPs would jump at the chance to discriminate traffic immediately. By the time competition arrived, it is likely that the idea of traffic discrimination (and extortion) would have become so standard and endemic that it would no longer be a point of competition for these new competitors (especially true given how hard it is to explain net neutrality to laypersons).

It's for these reasons that I support both strengthening net neutrality regulation and loosening universal access restrictions (although, to be honest, I would rather have a government ISP with a universal access responsibility, similar to USPS).

Re: Net neutrality

#134

Post by vram22 »

harpastum wrote: post #115
snitko wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. The solution is not go full retard, it seems, but to stop doing wrong things. Whatever you do, you don't ever introduce new regulation. Don't introduce more opportunities for government bureaucrats to feed from. Because if you do, it's gonna lead to worse and more expensive things for the consumer.

I understand your point, and I don't want to derail this thread into a discussion on language. However, saying that introducing more governmental regulation is going "full retard" (even if the idea behind it is actually true) is reductive and detracts from your point. This is not an issue of political correctness. Saying "not go full shit-head" falls into the same category. Please treat your opposition with respect,…

Funny :-)

Guessing, but I think snitko may have actually meant "full retard" in the sense of "retard" meaning to slow down or apply the brakes, rather than meaning "dumb" or "mentally retarded".

Re: Net neutrality

#135

Post by snitko »

kaonashi wrote: post #132
snitko wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with that statement. People created internet. As well as built roads and educated children. Individuals do that. The only question is, how are they financed. If those activities are financed using tax money, it's called "government". Then, the question we should ask ourselves, would people still invent awesome things and build roads and educate their children without government funding? Would they, maybe,…

> If those activities are financed using tax money, it's called "government". Taxes don't finance US government expenditure; they create demand for the currency. > Then, the question we should ask ourselves, would people still invent awesome things and build roads and educate their children without government funding Government provides the coordination required to accomplish these things. The private sector is notor…

> The private sector is notoriously horrible at coordination between competing actors.

This must be why I can never get my luggage handled flying two or more airlines or why I can never use my cellphone in another country connecting to another operator's network. Can you give me some examples where the private sector is actually bad at coordination?

Re: Net neutrality

#136

Post by jbooth »

rayiner wrote: post #125
dragonwriter wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Silicon Valley talks a lot about the problems with the telecom industry, but why does nobody want to actually invest money building telecom infrastructure? The incumbent--descendants of local/regional/national monopoly telephone or cable--providers have little competitive pressure to do so, and other people face intrinsic (largely non-regulatory, except to the extent that real property rights are "regulatory", thou…

But don't telcos face the same issue: enormous capital costs with limited prospects for attractive returns? E.g. FiOS is profitable, but the margins have been quite disappointing to shareholders. Indeed, observers have been skeptical about the value proposition of FiOS since the beginning: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/a-bear-speaks-why-v... . Note that this article was written in 2008. As of 2014, Verizon…

Nobody's asking them to build this stuff out for free. I'm cutting a check north of $100 to Verizon every month, last I checked. And that IS them capturing some of the money generated by services running on their infrastructure.

If they're not getting enough money to continue building, first off, I find that hard to believe, second off, they should just charge more to consumers, either additional $/month or an additional fee per GB.

Orrrrrr we could have a crazy system where they manage 50,000 unpublicized relationships with different websites, charge them, pay the people to manage those relationships, and the websites charge more to consumers, hiding the pricing information about network connectivity in the process. That sounds way more 'free market', not to mention more efficient.

What's so anti-competitive and backward thinking about "I pay you $ for bytes, cough up the bytes"?

Re: Net neutrality

#137

Post by rdl »

DSL competition/local loop unbundling did seem to work pretty well, after a rough few years.

I wonder technically how hard it would be to do this with DOCSIS 3, by having channels per competing ISP. There would be a relatively small limit to the number of cable ISPs which could be overlaid on the infrastructure (5?), but that would still be preferable to what we have today.

Re: Net neutrality

#138

Post by eglover »

I hate this debate. It's mostly politics and buzzwords with 0 cost/benefit analysis. Google already buys last mile access and if people keep acting like profits don't already come from customer choice they're going to end up with slow socialized internet and you'll never see 4k video. Net neutrality helps competition... In what world? That's like saying public schools increase competition in education.

Re: Net neutrality

#139

Post by ripter »

rayiner wrote: post #67

I don't see how a normally libertarian-leaning group of people have embraced regulation rather than deregulation as to this issue. Why do local ISP markets tend towards monopoly, even though it has been illegal since 1992 to grant local cable monopolies? Two words: universal access. It's the same principle that led municipalities to grant taxicab monopolies, of the kind that stifle companies like Uber today. The idea…

Then how do you explain the smaller ISPs like Monkeybrains, Sonic, and Astound? They don't provide Universal access.

Neither does Comcast and AT&T. I've lived in several areas where they won't provide service.

Re: Net neutrality

#140

Post by njs12345 »

rayiner wrote: post #67

I don't see how a normally libertarian-leaning group of people have embraced regulation rather than deregulation as to this issue. Why do local ISP markets tend towards monopoly, even though it has been illegal since 1992 to grant local cable monopolies? Two words: universal access. It's the same principle that led municipalities to grant taxicab monopolies, of the kind that stifle companies like Uber today. The idea…

I don't know about the Openreach comparison being completely invalid - Openreach was only created in 2006, 12 years after BT was fully privatised.

Is there a reason why the FCC couldn't provide a similiar regulatory climate in the US? Even with subsidies if required?

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