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Net neutrality

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Re: Net neutrality

#241

Post by sowhatquestion »

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…

> If you think universal access is important, and net neutrality is important, you have to be willing to publicly subsidize the construction of telecom infrastructure.

Indeed, why isn't anyone willing to take this logic as far as it should go? Publicly funded highways have facilitated trillions of dollars of economic activity. How much more growth could be enabled via publicly subsidized gigabit fiber?

Re: Net neutrality

#242

Post by vacri »

snitko wrote: post #74

I wonder. I wonder. I live in Russia and I have 2-3 very good providers on the block constantly competing with each other and offering better connection and prices. They would show up on time and connect you very fast. They fix things quickly (in my government maintained house, the basement once became filled with water after the rain, and the wires were damaged. Even though it wasn't their fault, the ISP came and fi…

Everything I see government touches is of low quality, whereas everything that's good in my country is private enterprise.

And yet the countries that are consistently in the top 5 or top 10 of most quality-of-life measures are those countries that are social democracies (generally scandanavia and aust/nz/canada), where the government puts its fingers in a lot of pies. If the things that your government touches is bad, then that's a problem with your government, not the awesomeness of the free market.

Out of curiosity, how well do your ISPs cater to rural users? People in urban centres are cheap to service, but spread-out rural users are quite expensive.

Re: Net neutrality

#243

Post by vacri »

snitko wrote: post #200
aninhumer wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it has to drop prices on the whole line of products of its own. Why? >And who's to guarantee another company C isn't going to use the situation, knowing full well company A cannot afford another round of predatory pricing? The competitiveness of a market depends on the costs of entering it. If the amount of capital needed to enter the market is significant, new entrants willing to risk that much will be much less fr…

> Why? Suppose you produce socks and another company does the same and tries to compete. You produce 1 million socks a month and another company only 10 thousand. You obviously can't just drop prices on 10 thousands socks of yours, because that would still allow your competitor to stay in business - since there is demand for the rest of 990k of socks at your high price, your competitor would simply grab another 10k o…

A company selling 1M units isn't threatened by a company selling 10k units. It might be threatened by a company selling 200k units, at which point the numbers are much closer - and there's also more payoff for eating the other company's pie.

Re: Net neutrality

#244

Post by aninhumer »

d357r0y3r wrote: post #230
aninhumer wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When a democratic government makes decisions, everyone gets an equal share in that choice. If the road gets built, it's because most people agree it will benefit them. When private enterprise makes decisions, those with more money get more choice. If a road gets built, it's because those with money agree it will benefit them. If a democracy starts letting the rich have more say, then it needs to be strengthened to re…

When a democratic government makes decisions, everyone gets an equal share in that choice. Isn't this an assumption? Perhaps if the system were such that every issue were up to a nation-wide popular vote, the statement would be true...not that such a system is a good idea. Some votes are worth infinitely more than others. That is to say, many votes are worth nothing. If you vote for the opposition party in a district…

I'm not going to deny that many existing democracies have been weakened, or were conceived too weak in the first place. My point is that the solution is to fix the democracy, not abolish the only thing that has any limiting power on the rich to exert their will.

Re: Net neutrality

#245

Post by lloeki »

njs12345 wrote: post #19

> I would love to see a world where the companies that own last-mile infrastructure are required to lease the lines to any ISP the end consumer wants; this would create a competitive market and mostly eliminate the problem. [2] This is pretty much how it works in the UK; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Openreach It does seem to work pretty well.. there are a wide variety of operators and prices are very low. If I ha…

Same here in France, both for copper lines — a.k.a "dégroupage" — and FTTH — a.k.a "mutualisation".

The first one was imposed to lift the monopoly of France Télécom (then the universal telecom public service, now Orange), while the second one was imposed not to repeat mistakes made when cable operators created local monopolies by negotiating cable installation at discounted prices with syndicated building owners or neighborhoods (Of course prices went through the roof once the monopoly was in place, and up again when one ended up buying them all).

Pragmatic result: I'm paying 35€/mo for 100Mb/50Mb (incl. TV/IP and landline/IP), due for an upgrade to 300Mb/100Mb.

Re: Net neutrality

#246

Post by codfrantic »

_archon_ wrote: post #162
ajb wrote: post #142

If you want competition, perhaps the simplest way of doing it might be for municipalities to provide universal service at layer -1: run an underground plastic pipe to each house from the street. That way it suddenly becomes cheap for multiple telcos to run fibre to each house, but the municipalities aren't doing anything with an ongoing technical burden which they might be bad at, or running an ongoing service which…

As I understand it, laying pipe is the fundamentally high cost of expanding or rebuilding a network. The cable itself has a non-negligible cost, but getting zoning and town permissions, securing land for junction cabinets, and digging through existing roads and around existing utilities is hugely expensive. What I don't understand is why any new neighborhood could be built without such underground conduit in place. I…

When my part of Amsterdam was built (1) all houses were provided with a phoneline (about 6 different providers), Cable (sadly only 1 provider) and Fiber (about 5 providers).

(1)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJburg

Re: Net neutrality

#247

Post by atmosx »

snitko wrote: post #225
shard972 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That actually seems like a harder senario to rationalise, that a corrupt oligarchy is providing more competition and better services than a free market. While Russia does have it's political elites and corruption (Like pretty much every other country) they aren't idiots, they have been on the other side of free markets and there are few there that know it's value.

People say US or EU are not corrupt or are less corrupt. That is a misrepresentation. They are equally corrupt in the higher levels (though they managed to convince people they are not). What happened there is consolidation. Thus if you want get things done, you have to spend more money lobbying at higher levels, because the lower level is scared of consequences. So a consolidation of corruption happened. In the US w…

> In the US when you want to win a court case, you spend money hiring top lawyers. In Russia you buy a judge. Results are the same.

That's an extremely dangerous oversimplification: It's a fact that getting a good lawyer will give you more chances. But buying the judge it's a totally different thing.

Re: Net neutrality

#248

Post by roguas »

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…

Your arguments suggest workarounds instead of a stable system. Libertarian mostly believe free market is a stable system, where things get evaluated very quickly and errors fixed without exception handling.

A good metaphor would be government trying to do try/catch all on entry point solving every little problem we have. While we should have explicit exceptions such as use of violence, fraud etc. We should not try to fix every little problem. When user enters data into a form, a password into the email field and an email into the password field. Sure you can make a change in code that would allow both cases. But now you have tons of other vulnerabilities exposed this very instant.

Thus. Neutrality means bandwidth cannot be manipulated by companies, well I remember 90s when we had LAN and private internet bandwidth shared with LAN. Bandwidth had to be chopped, http protocol had to get guaranteed bandwidth otherwise bunch of leechers would destroy vital internet access with their kazaaa, emule, napsters and what not. So Neutrality is not a necessity. While its not a big problem nowadays it was a problem back then and imposing this solution would have made it worse.

Universal access. Well I can easily argue that. There is a bunch of irresponsible people who build house in complete desserts. I know some people like that and they can that but society now has to fund them access to water, electricity and internet. I mean its their choosing. They can build their property closer to the city limits where they would get access to those for significantly less amount of money, they chose otherwise and they are free to do so. So should be I to not help them with their life choices. Problem only escalates as they start to demand shop/grocery access, leisure facilities, public transport etc. By making guarantees of those services we essentially lead to inefficient land usage.

Re: Net neutrality

#249

Post by snitko »

aninhumer wrote: post #227
snitko wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very good example of a difficult problem. The answer to it is not government. I always challenge myself and others with this: if you had a problem for which government seems like a very reasonable answer, can you design a better solution? And indeed, you can. In this example you have to realize that what government is selling to consumers is the service of preventing eventual rise in prices after the competition is w…

>Then this contract can be enforced by whichever private court and protection agency I hired And how they will enforce this contract? If it involves the threat of violence, how is it better than government? If it doesn't, how does it enforce your contract against the threat of violence? >It's logically impossible, because for a politician the economic incentives are always in the wrong place. Can you elaborate on thi…

>And how they will enforce this contract? If it involves the threat of violence, how is it better than government? If it doesn't, how does it enforce your contract against the threat of violence?

I would recommend, again, watching David Friedman's talk on the "Machinery Of Freedom", it's on Youtube. He's got excellent examples and explanations. It's 20 mins and totally worth it. In short. on the difference on it from government violence: when a contract is signed with by me and some entity, we both agree that out conflicts are going to be solved in such and such manner and in such and such courts. That is, if there is going to be some violence involved, we both know it from the beginning. With government, neither me, nor the company signed any contract with the government. The government just comes and starts interfering when it pleases.

>Can you elaborate on this? I would say democracy is the only structure we know of which has shown itself able to limit concentration of power.

You cannot know whether a politician is truly a good guy or if he's lying to you. The only way to know that is to give him power first. Notice how different the situation is with a businessman: a businessman should first produce something and convince you his product is good before you give him your money. If the product gets worse over time, everybody stops buying it and he goes out of business the next moment. Not so with a politician, who knows he's going to keep getting his salary at the very least, and hopefully bribes, for the next 4 years. A politician knows very well that his voters will keep paying taxes, whether or not they like what he does. That is because if they stop paying, they risk getting in trouble and will possibly go to jail. A businessman doesn't have that luxury. He cannot force you to pay, he can only convince you by offering something you genuinely want to buy. Of course a businessman can also lie to you, but unlike a politician, his lies is more easily discovered and you have the option to stop paying him immediately.

And so, the incentives for a politician are in the wrong place. If you can show me an exact mechanism how to reliably elect politicians who would ignore those incentives and do good instead of those incentives offering them a much more profitable thing to do, then I would gladly accept that. But simply saying “we should elect good people” is not a mechanism. It is an intention, and intentions are not results.

What's the alternative? Having no politicians and having only the market. On the market, you can decide to buy or stop buying things immediately with your own money.

Re: Net neutrality

#250

Post by exelius »

wtallis wrote: post #157
exelius wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telecom service is by its very nature a high-churn business: you lose approximately 20% of your customers every year. Churn happens for a lot of reasons: people move, competitors offer better deals, or people simply get rid of the service (but the "people move" one is actually probably the biggest). But because it's a high-churn business, you have to do brand marketing so that when people say "I need TV service. Who…

Total bullshit. People don't replace the wires in their yard every 5 years. Sure, they move (and immediately get replaced by new customers), and they sometimes opt out of the TV service and increasingly opt out of landline phone service, but the only "churn" that's relevant to this discussion is people switching between DSL and Cable, which wouldn't matter if we could get one set of neutral cables installed to get th…

If you have multiple ISPs selling connectivity over a carrier-neutral set of wires, they're going to be trying to poach each others' customers whenever they churn. Any business with high customer churn carries high marketing costs because the return on marketing is relatively good with 20% of the market up for grabs every year. With more players doing marketing in a zero-sum system, overall marketing spend is likely to rise, not decline.

All I'm saying is that the marketing costs wouldn't go away even if the big cable companies do: they would just be replaced by a dozen smaller companies doing the marketing, billing and connectivity. These smaller ISPs would just be taking each others' customers rather than customers jumping ship to DSL or some other last-mile tech.

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