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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

#121

Post by beowulfey »

dehrmann wrote: post #112
wrycoder wrote: post #2

> California's net neutrality law is similar to the federal rules repealed under former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. California prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic. It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers, bans paid data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating"), and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality prot…

> I don't understand how anyone could oppose this. Easy. If you operate a cell network, your bandwidth is extremely limited, so when it's congested, you throttle streaming video content so everything else is still fast. The same problems affect wired ISPs, but it's easier to run more fiber (often from a local office, not to homes) than to get more spectrum, install more towers, or create the next generation of wirele…

Operating costs for upgrading networks are obviously better served going into increasing net profits than actually building improved infrastructure. From a capitalist point of view it just makes good business sense to lobby for not having to upgrade the networks because people have no (or at least very few) competitors they could turn to as alternatives.

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

#122

Post by seanp2k2 »

fn-mote wrote: post #26
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the roads, we have a very rough estimate of the amount of the externalities of a given vehicle. On the Internet, we can have precise information on every bit of bandwidth consumed. Why not price the network equally for everyone?

> 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?

> Why not price the network equally for everyone?

Because settlement-free peering was a foundational piece of the internet until ISPs decided to ruin it: https://www.inap.com/blog/despite-comcast-netflix-deal-settl...

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

#123

Post by ddingus »

paxys wrote: post #29
bberenberg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the question becomes who should be charged for bandwidth. The ISPs in this case are arguing they want to charge a small subset of above normal bandwidth consuming services rather than the ISP customers.

That's simply ISPs seeing a lucrative revenue stream and wanting in on it. Let's put company size and market cap out of the picture and think of the network architecture. I set up a server in Romania. Someone from USA makes a request to it and gets a response. Can their ISP (Comcast or AT&T or whoever else) now send me a bill at the end of the month?

Seems similar to banks wanting to become investment banks. They saw all that shiny money...

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

#125

Post by seanp2k2 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #83
bombcar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The "American Way" for this is pretty simple to see: 1. the destination customer can pay themselves into a tier such as "never drop" 2. the source customer cannot That is, retain "money is power" for individuals but add a veneer of social respectability by denying Netflix etc. to just buy up the bandwidth.

The “American Way” of finding a good enough monopoly that one can afford to pay legislators to allow it to continue so long as taxpayers can be convinced that it’s not bad enough to favor a different candidate. Or, just get every candidate to support it! Then taxpayers have no choice and you win.

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

#126

Post by wmf »

charcircuit wrote: post #110
wmf wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how it works. It's more like each side pays for half. Some telcos, mostly in Europe, are trying to force through sender-pays settlement because it would make them money but that's fairly recent and I hope it doesn't go through.

>That's not how it works. It's more like each side pays for half. Buying internet transit typically works by paying something based on max(ingress, egress) * bandwidth cost where bandwidth is measured at the 95th percentile of utilization for a month.

Right; you don't just pay for egress. (It seems like your comments contradict each other but whatever.)

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

#127

Post by jcranmer »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #107
threatofrain wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO states' rights is a pretty nerdy issue if you take a step back and think about it. Very few people are such nerds.

That mostly because we've become accustomed to the federal government meddling in internal affairs more than it is supposed to. The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states.

> 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 other then-existing confederations. That the constitution was ratified meant that the people of the time agreed to disband a confederation and move to a federal state.

The primary difference between a federal state and a confederation is that in a federal state, both the federal government and constituent states have their own loci of authority and power, as opposed to a confederation (where the federal government exists at the behest of the states and derives all of its power from those states) or a unitary state (where the reverse is true). As the US was the first example of this kind of government, the US Constitution has several weird quirks that now seem anachronistic (e.g., the federal territory not having representation) that probably helped stabilize the government in its early years.

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 versus what you want to say that they intended, b) what makes you think that a government that made sense for the US 250 years ago would make equal sense today, and c) if you look up the history of treaty-making, you'll find that the first person to bin the original intended procedures of how the government would work was George Washington, barely a year into his first term in office.

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

#128

Post by thereisnospork »

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.

https://thehill.com/policy/technology/537874-biden-administr...

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

#129

Post by wtallis »

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…

> They can pay for better QoS, which will result in better QoS for their customers if they want.

Please, stop using QoS as a synonym for explicit prioritization. QoS strategies have advanced greatly since the 1990s, and the goal of providing better quality of service should not be used to defend obsolete non-neutral techniques. Net neutrality and QoS are not conflicting goals, and enforcing net neutrality is an excellent way to incentivize ISPs to transition to better QoS strategies.

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

#130

Post by everybodyknows »

gameman144 wrote: post #108
walrus01 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think that while this is definitely true of opportunistic politicians who will take any advantage they can, I don't this is actually true of most people who actually believe in states' rights as a real principle (as opposed to a politically malleable one). For instance, I have close family members who are strong free-market conservatives (to a pragmatic extent, not anarcho-capitalists or anything) who I consider to…

> people who actually believe in states' rights as a real principle ...

OP's implication was that such principled individuals exercise not much power in the real-world politics of our time.

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