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AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

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Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#241

Post by dingo_bat »

Hasz wrote: post #238
dingo_bat wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's simply not possible for every New Yorker to dig up the sidewalk to lay fiber. That is what constitutes a natural monopoly. It's simply not possible for every reddit user to code up their own reddit. Why is this not a natural monopoly?

It’s very possible — the full source to an older version is on github. That aside, it might be a poor example and explanation on my part. Other than technical competency, there is nothing inherently stopping everyone from having a shitty one man version of reddit, independent of everyone else’s shitty one man reddit. For the New Yorker example, everyone must work together — if I cut my neighbors line putting mine in,…

> It’s very possible — the full source to an older version is on github.

What makes reddit "reddit" is the millions of users, not the code (which is open and very basic).

> there is nothing inherently stopping everyone from having a shitty one man version of reddit, independent of everyone else’s shitty one man reddit.

There is: usage. My one-person reddit is useless if you and 100 million other do not use it actively.

> For the New Yorker example, everyone must work together — if I cut my neighbors line putting mine in, there’s crosstalk etc, the whole thing falls apart.

Exactly, everyone must converge on a single reddit. There can be a very long tail of similar sites but none of those will come close to within an order of magnitude of reddit. They "fall apart" if everyone doesn't "work together".

> The point I am trying to make is that the ISP does one thing only

What would that thing be? To me it looks like they do several things. Digging up the neighborhood, installing fiber, installing routers and switches, operating the network, connecting to the internet via bgp, etc. And what has the number of things you do got to do with the issue of nn?

> Reddit does lots of things, but cooperation is not integral to those things. Granted, it wouldn’t be worth a whole lot, but that’s not the issue.

It's exactly the issue. It is technically possible for me and my neighbor to dig up our street and make a private network among ourselves. Is it in any way a substitute for internet? It isn't. Just like a shitty one-man reddit.

Of course this is applicable to facebook, youtube and other such service, not just reddit.

> As to the price discrimination point, Facebook/YT/reddit do not, as far as I'm aware, solid control of ad pricing, although I'm sure they would love to. Your ISP, however, exercises significant pricing controls, especially if they are the only game in town.

I didn't understand your point that's why didn't respond to it earlier. Care to explain again?

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#242

Post by thomastjeffery »

waterhouse wrote: post #234
thomastjeffery wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're answering a question I didn't pose. I am clearing up some points you seem to have misunderstood or glossed over. > > > "In short, the regulation is needed to protect against ISPs prioritizing their profits over their consumers" > > It's not encouraging to see that your broad, summary statement is nonsensical. > > A for-profit business firm prioritizes their profits over their consumers by definition. Since,…

> The first choice is not currently workable, since competition between ISPs is impractical. Could you explain why that is?

There are 6 ISPs that control the majority of the market for the entire US. Most Americans have only one ISP to choose from.

When a company like Comcast or Verizon owns, or owns the rights to the existing infrastructure, they can refuse to sell or lease that infrastructure to other businesses, thereby stifling competition.

That is the current state of affairs.

For a competing business to be successful, it needs infrastructure, most of which is currently controlled by 6 large companies who do not want competition, so competing businesses fail.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#243

Post by thomastjeffery »

thomasfortes wrote: post #236
waterhouse wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first choice is not currently workable, since competition between ISPs is impractical. Could you explain why that is?

Would you like to have 30 different companies digging your street to lay cables? Or 10 energy cables over your street because energy competition would be great? Even in a perfect world, infrastructure is a natural monopoly. The government could handle all the big scale infrastructure and let small players handle the last mile, but that's not the case and even if it was, people would still complain.

New businesses do not necessarily need to own the infrastructure. They just need bandwidth.

Competing businesses could even work together to improve existing infrastructure.

The problem is that existing monopolies do not dissipate without external pressure, because it is not to their benefit.

We have 6 monopolies now, and we need to actively break them up. Short of that, we need to regulate them.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#244

Post by joshamania »

What's the possibility of using the RICO statutes against these companies? I'm thinking of Comcast in particular. Recently they made a "mistake" by adding services to my cable bill that I had not ordered. They very quickly erased the charges when I complained, but if their excuse for why they were there in the first place was valid, they should have fought to keep the money if they were in the right. I believe this was done to keep anyone from complaining too vociferously. I believe this behavior is consistent and intentional.

Their behavior and attitude towards employees (anecdotal, I'll admit) seems very much like that of Bank of America concerning their recent accounts fraud scandal. I believe that Comcast either intentionally puts these charges on customers bills hoping they will not notice, especially on autopayment enabled accounts, or they pressure their employees so greatly that the employees are doing this themselves, like Bank of American claimed their employees did.

I think this type of pressure put on employees is known to Comcast executives to cause fraudulent charges and is the desired result of said pressure. The executives can then claim they knew nothing of said behavior and deny any wrongdoing. I understand such a case would be difficult to make, but I think many companies behave in this way and we need to start using bigger hammers to bring them back within the law.

I think RICO should also be applied to banks that repeatedly break the law, but that's perhaps another story.

Thoughts?

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#245

Post by nabakin »

Hi Eric! It's always great to interact with our politicians, so thanks for doing this AMA. Now onto my question.

About a week ago Republican FCC member Brendan Carr posted this https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/no-the-fcc-i... opinion piece to the Washington Post. It gives his view on why repealing title II is good and makes some interesting points. I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on it.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#246

Post by waterhouse »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #242
waterhouse wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first choice is not currently workable, since competition between ISPs is impractical. Could you explain why that is?

There are 6 ISPs that control the majority of the market for the entire US . Most Americans have only one ISP to choose from. When a company like Comcast or Verizon owns, or owns the rights to the existing infrastructure, they can refuse to sell or lease that infrastructure to other businesses, thereby stifling competition. That is the current state of affairs. For a competing business to be successful, it needs infr…

I guess there would be a couple of approaches. (1) would be for some companies (possibly a consortium thereof) to build new infrastructure. (2) would be to force companies to lease out their existing infrastructure indefinitely. (Er, "rights to"—does that describe cases where the local government owns the infrastructure, but one company has an exclusive contract to use it for N years? It seems that case could be addressed by letting the contract expire and then only agreeing to nonexclusive contracts thereafter.) The first option seems to require less extreme intervention, so let's consider that.

What are the obstacles to (1)? There's the complaint in a sibling thread about "digging up the street to put in more cables". I suspect that if homeowners were given the choice of putting up with that in exchange for substantially reduced costs and/or higher bandwidth, many would take it, possibly enough for majority votes if it's the city government that makes that choice. The other question would be, is it economically feasible? There are high fixed costs, and some maintenance, and in exchange I guess whoever owns the new infrastructure can charge the use of it to new, competing ISPs. It'd probably pay for itself over some time horizon, but is the return better than investing the money in something else? I don't know the numbers on that.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#247

Post by fvdessen »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #232
fvdessen wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Net Neutrality is like preventing the US Post office from providing express delivery as the extra speed comes at the expense of regular delivery and there is a risk that only big companies would be able to pay for the service.

Net Neutrality is like preventing the Post Office from limiting the amount of packages a business can deliver, or limiting the priority of that business's deliveries unless that business pays the Post Office a premium. The problem with that behavior is that there are some very large, wealthy businesses like Amazon who need to deliver a high volume of packages on time, so those businesses would be willing to pay a ver…

There is absolutely no difference between what you and I said. The Post Office does limit the priority of a business delivery unless that business pays a premium (express delivery).

The reason this doesn't goes terribly is that there is business competition between the Post Office and FedEx, DHL, etc.

The problem with the internet is not the lack of neutrality, it's the lack of competition between ISP.

And you assume that small businesses will be kept out. I see the exact opposite happening in Europe where net neutrality is more lax. Small startups are making agreements with ISPs to provide services that need a level of QoS that wouldn't be possible with net neutrality in place.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#248

Post by ___ab___ »

joshamania wrote: post #244

What's the possibility of using the RICO statutes against these companies? I'm thinking of Comcast in particular. Recently they made a "mistake" by adding services to my cable bill that I had not ordered. They very quickly erased the charges when I complained, but if their excuse for why they were there in the first place was valid, they should have fought to keep the money if they were in the right. I believe this w…

https://www.popehat.com/2016/06/14/lawsplainer-its-not-rico-...

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#249

Post by jlillyreed »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #243
thomasfortes wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you like to have 30 different companies digging your street to lay cables? Or 10 energy cables over your street because energy competition would be great? Even in a perfect world, infrastructure is a natural monopoly. The government could handle all the big scale infrastructure and let small players handle the last mile, but that's not the case and even if it was, people would still complain.

New businesses do not necessarily need to own the infrastructure. They just need bandwidth. Competing businesses could even work together to improve existing infrastructure. The problem is that existing monopolies do not dissipate without external pressure, because it is not to their benefit. We have 6 monopolies now, and we need to actively break them up. Short of that, we need to regulate them.

Existing businesses have many incentives to not give bandwidth on their infrastructure to their competition - especially at competitive prices

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#250

Post by carry_bit »

charleslmunger wrote: post #197
carry_bit wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is #2 a violation of NN, but #4 is not? Does it really matter if the video is transferred using IP on top of "internet" frequencies, or IP on top of "video" frequencies, or QAM on "video" frequencies?

In #2 the service is delivered over IP and the same last mile wires as other internet traffic. It's not "the internet", but it competes directly with the internet for last mile bandwidth, just like a Netflix or YouTube cache installed on the ISP's network. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/comca...

It directly competes for last mile bandwidth regardless--the frequencies on the coax can either be used for internet or a dedicated video service but not both.

Would you really require cable ISPs provide you an internet bandwidth of X and video bandwidth of Y instead of internet bandwidth of X+Y?

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