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FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

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Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#101

Post by zuminator »

jahabrewer wrote: post #74

Feel pretty jaded about this after reading Ben Thompson on Title II: https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/ Sidebar: I was 1000% pro-Title II last time this came up in 2015 and went through https://www.battleforthenet.com/ , I think to email my legislators. Fortunately, I used a tagged/aliased email address. That address has apparently gotten into the Democrats' "never lose this email" bin. I regu…

Thanks for that link but I'm having trouble parsing Ben Thompson's argument.He says that he's in favor of net neutrality but against this specific regulation.

Why?

Because...I think...at some point somebody fell for a fake tweet? Also because regulation is bad because of..completely unrelated example of regulatory excess involving restaurants in SF?

I mean, is he saying he's against any regulation of anything, now? Or just against Title II? I'm sure he can't seriously mean the former. But as to the latter, I honestly missed the part where he substantiates why Title II specifically is excessive.

Seriously, I think I clearly missed a crucial step in his argument.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#102

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

dfxm12 wrote: post #75
behringer wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yes as I understand it netflix is or has sent some ISPs "protection" money, specifically Comcast. https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t... If you value the internet at large, never get your service from Comcast.

Interesting as this talking about performance degradation and payments from netflix to comcast in Dec 2013-Jan 2014. Nextflix happened to raise prices of their service a few months later in Apr 2014...

It's a self-contained lesson in corporation taxation, I suppose.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#103

Post by shagmin »

pyuser583 wrote: post #11

Did any of the bad effects of not having net neutrality actually occur when it was gone? Did ISPs throttle competition? I haven’t seen any reports of this happening. I haven’t seen any studies showing this happening systematically. I’m woefully uninformed, so I really would like to hear more about this. What has been happening these past few years?

I think other comments have already answered this. But in the back of my mind I imagine if companies abused it much worse than they did, they would've gotten much more unwarranted attention, and it was already deeply hated amongst tech savvy people and ISPs are already some of the most hated companies in general. Taking advantage while they could have would have dug that hole yet even deeper and would only make it more likely that a law would be created sooner rather than later making it illegal, so it just wasn't worth the investment on any meaningful scale.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#104

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

kstrauser wrote: post #87
SllX wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States. Think about it: these are service plans offered through cables that already exist, and that cross defined borders right? But what all an ISP has to do to offer different service plans in California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona is to merely offer different terms to different p…

Users in California may download from a service in New York. Users in New York may download from a service in California. I suspect it would be more expensive than it's worth to have asymmetric infrastructure that would allow them to them to throttle the New Yorker without violating the law for the Californian. All that network management would require teams of engineers and specialized hardware, all for something th…

>50% of US GDP is in states that are almost certainly going to prevent traffic throttling: https://www.naruc.org/nrri/nrri-activities/net-neutrality-tr...

It's probably not worth it to add in a whole bunch of BS just to try to make a bit more money in maybe Fl and Tx.

Especially given the fact that it's not as straightforward as it seems - and legal consequences could easily outweigh any benefits.

On top of that, I'd be surprised if ISPs tried to throttle traffic even in Fl and Tx and people in those states didn't pressure their government to ban it as well.

Net neutrality is wildly popular with the public.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#105

Post by cheald »

I'm still broadly convinced that the whole net neutrality outcry back in 2017 was due to a fundamental misunderstanding of how peering works and misplaced anger due to the peering dispute between Cogent and Comcast (and Verizon, and I'm sure plenty of others).

None of the promised apocalypse materialized, because the marketing materials used to make the case for it were fundamentally wrong.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#106

Post by godelski »

SllX wrote: post #79
calgarymicro wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worth noting that California's net neutrality law[0] probably stymied most efforts by ISPs to start prioritizing traffic nationwide. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P...

What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States. Think about it: these are service plans offered through cables that already exist, and that cross defined borders right? But what all an ISP has to do to offer different service plans in California, Oregon, Nevada and Arizona is to merely offer different terms to different p…

> What I’ve never understood is the argument that what California does regulating ISPs could actually affect the service plans in 49 other States.

What I've never understood is the argument that what Europe does regarding privacy could actually affect the privacy of other countries.

Sure, some websites detect your location and apply different rules to you but a lot end up just following GDPR and apply it universally because it is easier and cheaper to do that than do a "means testing" and apply specific rules. Creating all those rulesets makes for an increasingly complex system, makes it more prone to error (which includes doing those banned actions within California and resulting in a lawsuit), and just is overall more expensive. Determining country origin is presumably a lot easier than determining state origin too. Not to mention that California is the most populous state and the biggest tech sector. Pretty much the argument is ISPs have bigger fish to fry when they're restricted from doing something to a large portion of their customers.

No one and nothing are truly independent. That's always been a lie being sold. Choices you make affect others and choices collectively made affect you. It's literally the definition of a society. On HN we have these discussions about Chrome's dominance allowing them to have control over how the internet is structured. We've had these discussion about Apple's dominance influencing right to repair. And so on. Monolithic forces are never going to be stopped by single player boycotting. My usage of Firefox for over a decade never did anything to dethrone Chrome and I never expected it would, but hey, it also can't happen without people like me. Just needs to happen at a larger scale.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#107

Post by patmorgan23 »

edmundsauto wrote: post #21
falcolas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have been many reports of ISPs overwriting ads and adding content to non-https content. Also bundled content on mobile providers not counting against caps, etc. Many also lie on speedtests, though I don't know if that counts.

How do they lie on speed tests? I thought that measured actual data throughput.

You do traffic shaping and prioritize speed test traffic.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#108

Post by jahabrewer »

zuminator wrote: post #101
jahabrewer wrote: post #74

Feel pretty jaded about this after reading Ben Thompson on Title II: https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/ Sidebar: I was 1000% pro-Title II last time this came up in 2015 and went through https://www.battleforthenet.com/ , I think to email my legislators. Fortunately, I used a tagged/aliased email address. That address has apparently gotten into the Democrats' "never lose this email" bin. I regu…

Thanks for that link but I'm having trouble parsing Ben Thompson's argument.He says that he's in favor of net neutrality but against this specific regulation. Why? Because...I think...at some point somebody fell for a fake tweet? Also because regulation is bad because of..completely unrelated example of regulatory excess involving restaurants in SF? I mean, is he saying he's against any regulation of anything, now? O…

You're right--I don't read a specific "here's the onerous parts of Title II" bit in that article. I think his argument is that:

1. The problems that supporters say net neutrality would fix are fictitious (the tweet), already handled (Comcast and bittorrent traffic), or not necessarily addressed by net neutrality (zero rating)

2. Title II classification entails much more regulation than net neutrality

3. Therefore applying Title II to ISPs will raise the barrier to entry for new entrants and not address the supposed harms

> at some point somebody fell for a fake tweet?

Not just "somebody"--the guy who coined the term "net neutrality" and advises the government.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#109

Post by criddell »

ericmay wrote: post #34
criddell wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm on TMobile in part because I got a free Netflix and MLB.tv. Is that an example?

Yea that's probably an example - those companies get preferential treatment on the network w.r.t traffic and so competitors have a harder time entering the market.

But if they simply give you a free subscription without any kind traffic shenanigans, it's not a net neutrality issue?

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#110

Post by r00fus »

bombcar wrote: post #96
rich_sasha wrote: post #82

Not an American: what is the non-libertarian public-facing argument against net neutrality? I'm sure its opponents say it's bad for the general public for some reason, and one of them might be some kind of "let market competition work it out" etc. If you discard that, what is left? There is probably also the argument that various businesses want this repealed, this is kind of clear.

In a simplistic view, net neutrality prohibits QoS bandwidth allocation. You can't prioritize video over Linux ISO downloads. In reality that would be solvable.

This is not true at all. What it means is that an ISP can't prioritize their own video service over say, Netflix. Or their own (perhaps ad-infested) download service vs a straight ISO download from a distro's site.
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