Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s top digital policymaker • Hacker News Board

Re: Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s top digital policymaker

#61

Post by gojomo » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 7:20 PM UTC

lazaroclapp wrote: post #25

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd like to pay $3/month for my Netflix traffic to not count towards any caps. Is that allowed? No, because it's discriminating against non-Netflix traffic. But there is certainly nothing wrong with paying the market rate for all your traffic to not count towards any caps (i.e. an uncapped connection).

Basically, the whole principle of Net Neutrality (as I understand it without knowing the details of the U.S. law, much less the European one) is: you bill data in the last mile to the consumer and you are not allowed to charge them based on the semantics or origin of the data. You do not charge the provider at all, unless they are the direct ISP you are peering with. You can however, give the customer a fast lane and…

The problem occurs if I, an entrepreneur, want to solve the hospital's problem for them, and sell them a single connection that meets their application-specific needs. I'd set it up so that I could always meet their demands, and a sensible way to do that would be with app-specific routing rules. Also, to help make that peak, application-specific offering possible, it would likely help for me to sell other nearby connections that have much softer throughput/lag requirements – users who don't mind if the hospital's needs occasionally stall their YouTube/Netflix, because they're getting such a good deal most of the time on most of what they use.

NN regulations make such economically-sensible, mutually-beneficial business arrangements illegal. Everyone's got to buy the mandated, "neutral" service tiers – rather than other cheaper mixed-traffic-treatment formulas that could meet their needs.

Re: Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s top digital policymaker

#62

Post by Silhouette » Sat, Mar 07, 2015, 11:54 PM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #53

Silhouette wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not one [ISP] has the same "single provider at any cost" monopoly that phone companies had when the Title II telecom regulatory regime was designed. Isn't one of the major arguments for net neutrality that, at least in some parts of the world, the above situation is effectively what is happening today, and therefore the local ISP can effectively hold the entire community hostage?

Where that's true, antitrust action to create competition could make sense, or even perhaps specific regulations against abuses that actually happen. That is, focused on where choice is lacking, and tailored for particular abuses that are observed. But in the US, most people have 2 or more wired internet options and 3 or more wireless internet options. The feared abuses are almost entirely hypothetical-future-risks.…

I'm not in the US, so maybe I've got the wrong idea. However, based on numerous previous articles and discussions, I was under the impression that quite a high proportion of US households really did only have one wired ISP available, that the relatively small number of major ISPs operating in the US at all tended not to compete over territory in this respect, and that there had been significant legal games played to block attempts by both heavyweight competitors like Google and local initiatives to create alternative provision.

In other words, almost all the evidence I've seen as an outsider suggests that much of the US does not, in fact, have a functioning competitive market for residential high speed wired Internet access, but rather a complete monopoly whose single provider will furthermore spend a fortune on legal manoeuvres to defend that position if necessary. The net neutrality movement and efforts to classify Internet access as an essential service subject to regulation seem to be the first serious moves at national level to counter some of the resulting problems.

Re: Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s top digital policymaker

#63

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 6:36 AM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #58

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thank you for the clear, honest answer. So the great-grandparent post is misleading, and those in favor of government-enforced "net neutrality" do want to limit what I am "allowed to pay for as a consumer". Phrasing it like that is political maneuvering. There is nothing you cannot get. No application is made not possible by network neutrality. There are only some things which, if you get them, the ISP has to provi…

No, the regulations have made it illegal to purchase a service I might want to buy (or sell), instead requiring the purchase of a different "guaranteed neutral" service instead. This new federally-mandated kind of service, as it meets extra legal constraints and prevents certain kinds of side-payments from happening, is almost certainly going to be more expensive and available from a smaller set of fewer, larger prov…

The "guaranteed neutral" service is a superset of the other service. You're complaining that you can't buy something when the reality is that you can't not buy something, which is different.

> This new federally-mandated kind of service, as it meets extra legal constraints and prevents certain kinds of side-payments from happening, is almost certainly going to be more expensive and available from a smaller set of fewer, larger providers.

You're talking like there is some kind of vigorous competition going on at present which is going to be impeded. And the side payments you're talking about don't make things cost less, they interfere with competition in other markets that actually are competitive, which would ultimately make things cost more.

> Title II/common-carrier regulation does nothing to create new provider competition, but rather assumes that monopoly is the only possibility and cements it into place.

That's because it is. Utilities are natural monopolies. The duopoly that was created by accident when telephone and cable TV both merged into internet has been a disaster.

The bulk of a last mile ISP's costs are based on the area they offer service in rather than the number of customers they have. A strand of fiber costs the same amount to install and maintain whether it carries the traffic of 100 customers or 200. That means if you want to have two ISPs you would have to pay almost twice as much for internet service at the same level of ISP infrastructure investment and profits because each ISP would have to cover all the same costs with half as many customers. If you want to talk about what makes things cost more, it's trying to "create competition" in a natural monopoly market.

A utility isn't a natural monopoly because the government said so, it's a natural monopoly because adding competition makes prices go up.

Re: Net neutrality is a “Taliban-like issue”, says Europe’s top digital policymaker

#64

Post by AnthonyMouse » Sun, Mar 08, 2015, 7:26 AM UTC

gojomo wrote: post #61

lazaroclapp wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically, the whole principle of Net Neutrality (as I understand it without knowing the details of the U.S. law, much less the European one) is: you bill data in the last mile to the consumer and you are not allowed to charge them based on the semantics or origin of the data. You do not charge the provider at all, unless they are the direct ISP you are peering with. You can however, give the customer a fast lane and…

The problem occurs if I, an entrepreneur, want to solve the hospital's problem for them, and sell them a single connection that meets their application-specific needs. I'd set it up so that I could always meet their demands, and a sensible way to do that would be with app-specific routing rules. Also, to help make that peak, application-specific offering possible, it would likely help for me to sell other nearby conn…

I don't understand why you think the rules need to be application-specific or why you think the alternative would be more expensive.

If you want a high-bandwidth low-latency guaranteed-reliable fully-provisioned circuit then it's going to be expensive. Providing the same guarantees but only for a single application doesn't reduce the cost at all. If the customer is paying you to guarantee the delivery of packets, it doesn't cost you anything more if the customer then decides they're going to be YouTube packets rather than telemedicine packets. None of the things that cause that level of service to be expensive are application-specific so there is no savings to be had by treating applications differently.