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Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

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Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#21

Post by [deleted] »

wavefunction wrote: post #19
alberth wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>" It's why major roads aren't owned by private companies" In the US, many major roads are owned by private companies like Cintra [1] to give one example, and they charge tolls [2] on those roads. It's become common practice in many US states that any new highway construction must have a toll on it and then the state sells the road to a private company. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cintra [2] http://en.wikipedia…

>>It's become common practice in many US states I think it's unfortunately down to the incessant anti-tax rhetoric in the US. It's a lot easier to get a private company to finance a toll-road with a concession agreement than it is to pass bond measures or increase taxes.

[deleted]

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#22

Post by Patrick_Devine »

wmf wrote: post #13
Patrick_Devine wrote: post #5

We could ultimately replace our internet infrastructure with something more distributed which makes it difficult for ISPs to determine what traffic they're carrying. Ultimately traffic analysis works right now because the ISPs can detect where the traffic is coming from. In a more distributed internet, that wouldn't be the case. If all packets are encrypted, it would also make it harder to snoop and shape traffic tha…

Hiding the source or destination of traffic (which is one of the major things ISPs want to discriminate on) requires onion routing which will make things ~2x slower and more expensive. If we end up in a situation where a significant fraction of Internet traffic is being onion routed I would consider that a massive failure.

I actually wasn't trying to suggest onion routing, but a more peer-to-peer distributed internet, similar to the way bit torrent works. If a CDN was spread across multiple sites instead of concentrated at one place (ala S3), it would be very difficult for an ISP to track.

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#23

Post by crazy1van »

wavefunction wrote: post #19
alberth wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>" It's why major roads aren't owned by private companies" In the US, many major roads are owned by private companies like Cintra [1] to give one example, and they charge tolls [2] on those roads. It's become common practice in many US states that any new highway construction must have a toll on it and then the state sells the road to a private company. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cintra [2] http://en.wikipedia…

>>It's become common practice in many US states I think it's unfortunately down to the incessant anti-tax rhetoric in the US. It's a lot easier to get a private company to finance a toll-road with a concession agreement than it is to pass bond measures or increase taxes.

I don't follow this logic. Toll roads allow the people who want to use a road to pay for it. Tax-funded roads take taxes from all the district's citizens to pay for roads that only some will use. Great if you use that road. Not so great if you don't.

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#24

Post by bdb »

crazy1van wrote: post #20
pbreit wrote: post #11

I don't know how Marc squares his free markets love with his presence at the table being substantially enabled by the government (internet + UIUC + NCSA). Surely people have not forgotten what it was like pre-neutrality (Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie, AOL, et al)?

I don't really understand the fear. The Compuserves and Prodigys of the world died because they weren't open and it didn't take a government dictate to kill them.

Openness won in the early iterations of online services in part because there was a neutral medium over which you were able to connect to your choice of service: the PSTN.

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#25

Post by lhc- »

twoodfin wrote: post #10
protomyth wrote: post #2

What is the technical definition of net neutrality? I look at a lot of these articles and they seem to imply people are using the same term for multiple things.

Indeed. You can imagine pretty expansive definitions, and whatever definition you come up with can create potentially undesirable incentives. I don't know whether Comcast is using IP to deliver their video-on-demand services to your cable box, but let's assume they are. That IP bandwidth is above and beyond whatever you're paying for as a "broadband" connection, but that's just accounting: It's all packets in the end…

Im not sure how the second case incentivizes them to build out their networks either. They have barely done that for the last decade or so (consider how expensive and slow internet access in the US is compared to much of the first world), so I'm not sure why they would start now that they have even more control.

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#26

Post by nostromo »

alberth wrote: post #15
john_b wrote: post #6

The major providers like to pretend that they're in a wonderful competitive market where, if only they were allowed to discriminate on traffic more, there would be more competition, prices would be lowered, and investment in infrastructure would grow due to the competition. This is a nice rosy view of things, but it's just not accurate. They're de facto infrastructure builders, and for their efforts they want a monop…

>>" It's why major roads aren't owned by private companies" In the US, many major roads are owned by private companies like Cintra [1] to give one example, and they charge tolls [2] on those roads. It's become common practice in many US states that any new highway construction must have a toll on it and then the state sells the road to a private company. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cintra [2] http://en.wikipedia…

This is actually a great illustration of the reason we have common carrier laws in the US.

Should we allow Cintra to let you go 100MPH instead of 70MPH if you pay a higher toll on the Indiana Toll Road? Maybe every 10MPH is an additional $1. Or maybe Cintra knows that Tesla drivers are rich, so their tolls could be set 10x higher than a Kia's toll. Or maybe people with Illinois license plates are on average more wealthy than people with Ohio plates, so they can pay more too...

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#27

Post by elehack »

lhc- wrote: post #25
twoodfin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. You can imagine pretty expansive definitions, and whatever definition you come up with can create potentially undesirable incentives. I don't know whether Comcast is using IP to deliver their video-on-demand services to your cable box, but let's assume they are. That IP bandwidth is above and beyond whatever you're paying for as a "broadband" connection, but that's just accounting: It's all packets in the end…

Im not sure how the second case incentivizes them to build out their networks either. They have barely done that for the last decade or so (consider how expensive and slow internet access in the US is compared to much of the first world), so I'm not sure why they would start now that they have even more control.

Because it improves the quality of delivery of their service (e.g. video-on-demand). The Internet user won't notice the improvement - their Internet speed would remain the same, by metering - but the actual pipe improves so they can deliver more/better video (and reap the profits from it).

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#28

Post by Jtsummers »

alberth wrote: post #15
john_b wrote: post #6

The major providers like to pretend that they're in a wonderful competitive market where, if only they were allowed to discriminate on traffic more, there would be more competition, prices would be lowered, and investment in infrastructure would grow due to the competition. This is a nice rosy view of things, but it's just not accurate. They're de facto infrastructure builders, and for their efforts they want a monop…

>>" It's why major roads aren't owned by private companies" In the US, many major roads are owned by private companies like Cintra [1] to give one example, and they charge tolls [2] on those roads. It's become common practice in many US states that any new highway construction must have a toll on it and then the state sells the road to a private company. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cintra [2] http://en.wikipedia…

Looking up the numbers it's still a tiny, tiny minority of roads in the US. Cintra's worldwide holdings are ~1% of the total length of major highways in the US. Significant, but not all in the US. And many toll roads are publicly owned. Or under private contract for X years so the taxpayers didn't have to take out a bond or front $Y million for the project.

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#29

Post by sowhatquestion »

crazy1van wrote: post #23
wavefunction wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>It's become common practice in many US states I think it's unfortunately down to the incessant anti-tax rhetoric in the US. It's a lot easier to get a private company to finance a toll-road with a concession agreement than it is to pass bond measures or increase taxes.

I don't follow this logic. Toll roads allow the people who want to use a road to pay for it. Tax-funded roads take taxes from all the district's citizens to pay for roads that only some will use. Great if you use that road. Not so great if you don't.

This is insane. By this logic, public goods don't exist. Tax-funded fire departments are great if your house catches fire, not so great if it doesn't, etc.

Re: Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

#30

Post by Jtsummers »

sowhatquestion wrote: post #29
crazy1van wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow this logic. Toll roads allow the people who want to use a road to pay for it. Tax-funded roads take taxes from all the district's citizens to pay for roads that only some will use. Great if you use that road. Not so great if you don't.

This is insane. By this logic, public goods don't exist. Tax-funded fire departments are great if your house catches fire, not so great if it doesn't, etc.

Indeed. I have no children, why should I pay taxes to educate other people's kids? Just because they're our future laborers working on and within our common economy to keep things going after I've left the workforce.
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