Electrons are commoditized and generic - and they don't suffer from prioritization issues except during brown-outs/black-outs. When you receive a stream of bits you are routing very specific non-generic packets via various network interconnects from very specific content providers. The routing and interconnect/bandwidth costs will vary significantly depending on the content provider, content type, and consumer usage.

It's my understanding that the ISPs want to rescind the 2015 NN rules so they can offer premium guaranteed/prioritized QoS for specific content types from premium partner providers (e.g. real-time applications such as medical/security devices, VoIP, video conferencing, and streaming audio/video). You can't do this with electrons.

Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)

> You can't do this with electrons.

Huh?! yes, you absolutely can.

We happen to mostly use photons these days, but I'm having a really hard time seeing why this distinction between "you can only use the electron for x,y,z" and "you can only use the photon for x,y,z" is anything but completely arbitrary.

If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations? Thats... rather confusing.

Or, more succinctly, "you can't microwave Netflix(R)-brand Popcorn with bits"

This is certainly true as well. But we've seen with T-Mobile's zero-rating that it's faster and cheaper to acquire/retain new customers through partnering and network management. To your point, and to compete with Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, I believe T-Mobile announced a TV-related acquisition today.

> Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)

Hospitals are already being addressed, as you say, with dedicated lines and VPNs. I'm referring to the millions of device endpoints sitting on consumer-grade (NN limited) wired/wireless networks. Rescinding NN will allow the ISPs to sell premium prioritized QoS to medical and security services companies who can bundle access to their customers. I'm not sure how this will play out in practice though.

> You can't do this with electrons.

The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis. On the contrary, electricity is generic and is (ideally) sourced on a lowest cost basis and QoS is strictly determined on a supply/demand dimension.

> If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations?

I'm not advocating against NN. I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate. I'm also pointing out that the ISPs want to offer premium Qos and, yes, their own content offerings.

I'm very skeptical. This doesn't sound necessary, or in some cases even very smart. An extremely niche use case.

If you want to see what death of NN will mean in practice, look at what companies were willing to do in order to test NN regulations in the past. Hint: it's not prioritizing medical traffic.

> The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis.

The 2015 order may or may not be the best implementation of net neutrality. But I think it's entirely reasonable to have a regulation that says "you can't change what you charge / how you behave based on who is on the other end of the line, but you can -- in a pricing-agnostic way -- prioritize/shape traffic".

> I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate.

I'm still not convinced.

You can equally make the argument that in a brown-out, electricity companies should be able to prioritize consumer-grade medical devices and so on.

The only difference is that it's easier to implement this prioritization.

"because we can" is a really poor justification for doing something.

This is actually allowed under current net neutrality rules. As an ISP I can use QoS to make VoIP more reliable, for example. What I can't do is make one specific VoIP provider more reliable than another. If that's the argument that large ISPs are making then they're not being truthful.

I have worked at small ISPs for the last 15 years or so and worked on systems that did these things. FWIW I strongly support net neutrality and I'm especially annoyed with any rhetoric that suggests net neutrality is bad for small ISPs. It's really not.

Removing net neutrality allows ISPs to make deals with VoIP providers (or anyone, really) so that their VoIP always works the best (or even so other VoIP services work poorly or not at all.)

Really, ISPs don't want to just be a utility. Imagine if instead of having to charge for service provided, they could have large companies like Netflix and Hulu bid for the exclusive privilege among video providers to not be throttled; the profits would start raining in without having to even innovate on actual product or service provided. How wonderful.

As a customer that is not my problem. If I have been sold a 10MB line which has unlimited data then the company doesn't get to complain when I use all of what has been sold to me, the source of the traffic is completely irrelevant.

The issue is that ISPs oversubscribe residential connections massively (say a contention ratio of 50:1) and have done for years, this is now biting them in the ass with high bandwith apps like video streaming becoming the norm.

This doesn't need to be fixed by destroying net neutrality and shaping traffic that they don't get paid for from both ends (the subscriber and content provider), it needs to be fixed by fixing their packages.

But hey, when you can get paid both ways who cares if you're fucking over both parties?

Packets delivered to the ISP at an exchange are equally free. Noone is asking for access providers to collect packets in asia and move them to their customer in the US for free. All this is about is that if I pay a transit provider to move my packets from asia to the US, then the access ISP in the US doesn't get to charge me for actually delivering the packet to their customer, or prioritize someone else's packets over mine. There is nothing wrong with ISPs engineering traffic to be delivered to them via the closest exchange possible, they just don't get to abuse their monopoly over their subscriber's line.

> Bits routed to other networks cost money and are a cost center. With last mile speeds increasing but backbone data rates not dropping fast enough it can be a real problem. People who torrent or run bitcoin full nodes are probably costing ISPs large amounts of money.

Which is solved by discriminating between services how?

If outbound traffic is expensive, you have to charge for outbound traffic, not make youtube free (or whatever).

There is nothing wrong with traffic to on-premises hosted servers being free--if everyone can host servers there under the exact same conditions. The problem is an abuse of a monopoly position, not charging based on costs.

I don't think the ISP's problem (opportunity) resides in the scenario you're describing. The problem is the top .0001% of Internet destinations congest the ISP generic network interconnects. Hence, these larger vendors (Netflix, Akamai, Cloudflare, Amazon, Google, Apple, etc) either pay the ISP for direct network peering or server hosting to sustain acceptable performance. However, this typically leaves the cost of growing internal network backbone capacity on the ISP. I believe the scenario you are describing would allow ISPs to offset this capital cost to both the big content providers and the biggest consumers.

> Which is solved by discriminating between services how?

The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session. As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis. However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.

I really don't understand what your point is ... how does avoding load on the internal backbone leave which costs of growing the backbone to the ISP?!

> The point about torrents and bitcoin is that these applications are particularly burdensome on routers because of the amount of connection requests as compared to a fairly manageable HTTP or RTSP session.

Uh? How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!

> As I mentioned above, server co-location and direct network peering is already a thing that many larger ISPs offer on a non-discriminatory basis.

Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.

> However, most new businesses will piggyback on existing cloud hosting (AWS/Google/Azure) or CDN (Akamai/Google/Cloudfront) arrangements.

Which isn't necessarily that bad, as long as there is competition among CDNs. A CDN ultimately is just a different kind of transit provider.

I didn't say anything about avoiding load. They don't want to raise capital to build their own backbone - so they want to pass off the cost to the largest traffic sources (Netflix etc) and largest traffic destinations (most oactive consumers).

> How is the number of connection requests relevant to a router?!

More connection requests means more CPU usage on a router. More open connections means more RAM usage.

> Non-discriminatory is no enough, it has to be free or at cost. They are a monopoly, and as such non-discriminatory is still a monopolistic price.

Non-discriminatory means they offer all content providers the same prices. Now if you're saying that they can overcharge because there's no competition, then I agree. This is a problem in the short term. But if I understand Pai's logic, this gap in the market will spur competition (and solutions) to emerge through innovation. I'm skeptical about this logic but cautiously optimistic.

I grant you that this is not a satisfying answer when you only have one shitty ISP option like Comcast and there's no hope fore a competitor in the short term. But given the growth of fixed residential wireless and new spectrum like White Spaces it's possible that a Comcast/Verizon would be doing more damage to their own brand (and content offerings) in the long term by mistreating their customers.

The actual cost to the ISP of a customer using 100% of their connection the whole month is not very large. If only a small minority do that then the amortized cost per customer is negligible. If everyone starts to do that then the ISP is still fine as long as they price plans appropriately -- a 100Mbit plan costs more than a 20Mbit plan.

Bandwidth caps are ridiculous. It's like saying some people drive more than others so to reduce traffic congestion, after you've driven more than 500 miles in a month you can only drive 8MPH for the rest of the month. What kind of sense does that make unless you have some weird agenda like getting people to take a "free" bus which happens to only travel directly to your own store?

In theory they could charge more for higher usage, except that if they charged their actual cost for additional bandwidth then it would be so close to zero as to make little difference, e.g. an extra $5/month for full 24/7 usage. Passing traffic is really not that expensive. The cost of getting and maintaining a wire into your house to begin with absolutely dwarfs it.

There is no ignoring them, they're just small relative to an ISP's other costs.

It costs millions of dollars to lay and maintain cable. You have to dig up the road. The equipment gets damaged by weather and bad drivers and idiots with backhoes and has to be repaired on a regular basis. You have to staff a call center to provide customer support, pay for all the advertising these companies do, bill customers, process payments, handle delinquent debts, hire a bunch of lawyers, pay all your technical staff to maintain the network, pay rent and utilities, etc. etc.

That's what your monthly bill pays for. Not one of those things costs a penny less if you can convince people to transfer less data. The only thing that changes is that the ISP has to upgrade a switch to one with more or faster ports, which is a fixed cost of tens of dollars per customer per upgrade cycle, and in many cases it happens regardless of usage because the existing equipment has reached end of life or newer equipment uses less power. The added cost is a tiny fraction of the bill. Make it twice as big and it's still negligible.

If net neutrality goes away ISPs not only will be able to tell what you are doing, but they will charge you more for it too. You can always try to use a VPN but nothing is stopping ISPs from charging x100 times the normal rate for VPN traffic or telling your von provider that they need to cough up if they don't want their traffic slowed.

All of this might even be acceptable if ISPs were just in the internet business. Companies would bid up for use of the internet the same way that Google is pulling some of the best engineers by paying triple what a small business in the Midwest would pay even though they both need software engineers.

Unfortunately ISPs are also in other industries like content, and they are going to be incentivized to nuke their competitors. Since the US apparently has no concept of enforcing anti trust laws anymore, ISPs can just slowly chip their way into other internet based businesses. They can either get into industries themselves or they can blackmail industry leaders to stay faster than competitors. That will lead to both increased prices for consumers as companies pass on their costs, as well as a lack of any competition because there's now a giant wall of ISP fees to overcome for any startup to try and compete with.

> ...or if you connect your smart thermostat to their API

In a way, this sounds like a car insurance company lowering your rates for keeping their sensor device in your car.

Comcast is getting into the home automation/security/IoT business too - ISPs haven't been profitable for decades, which explains why they (1) keep squeezing their existing customer base for more money, and (2) keep expanding into new - possibly unrelated - markets like stadium ownership. Anything to avoid lowering the dividend price.

Wow. That would be nuts - Since when? this is America, where ARPU is measured in its native currency of the dollar without a conversion cost, in a nation where they have some of the worst competitive landscape, subsidized roll out, and yet incomplete roll out of infrastructure.

And they are still not profitable ?

Sorry, for the request for a source, since it may come across rude- but I’m damn surprised. I evens recall most telecom operators being positive about their growth and numbers overall.

Perhaps the parent poster is right and America would be much better off with nationalized internet infrastructure.

So for example pharma rates of return would be irrelevant.

Saw that chart - that’s exactly why you never use a chart like that, it’s effectively prejudicial without context.

So from the get to it’s not comparable to other industries.

A specific weakness of your argument - Your position holds for a certain kind of investor but has nothing to do with running a business of building a business- nothing to do with Operations.

The risk profiles and returns on telecom are known, and so investors in it know what they are getting.

So telcos can raise debt, with maturity and interest rates suitable for them.

And financiers spread risk. If black stone doesn’t want to invest in telecom, some other firm or telecom focused fund will invest.

At the end of the day, there are only so many above average or average returns you can get per billion of dollars - so people invest in multiple industries.

And when they invest - they examine (comp/compare) the firms against the others in their market.

I know because i saw the models and the comps.

Mostly not true. In rural areas, telcos receive subsidies. Those subsidies are paid for with taxes on telecom services. Telcos based primarily in urban/suburban areas bear a net tax, not a subsidy. Telcos pay for both spectrum and rights of way, such as rental charges on utility poles.

> The risk profiles and returns on telecom are known, and so investors in it know what they are getting.

We’re in an environment right now where a huge segment of telco revenues, for video, could evaporate due to cord cutting. The percentage of high income households which have cut wireline service entirely (in favor of wireless) has grown from 6% to 15%. People have been reluctant to switch from cable to faster technologies like fiber, with FiOS struggling to clear 40% uptake rates. Investing in a telco today (or a wireline project specifically) is not like investing in a electric or water utility (or the phone company back in the day)—there is real risk.

-----

>mostly not true

Mostly not true is 1 for a binary yes and no scenario. The question at play was the comparability of telecom to other industries.

The fact of subsidies, spectrum, and right of way make this is a non comp, which make the chart being shown irrelevant.

If you truly believe that a simple industry ROIC comparison makes a difference, explain how that makes an iota of impact to AT&T or Comcast in terms of their Capex decisions.

Are they going to pull up their wires tomorrow and go all in and become Google?

Will they Not invest in capex at all? Or Seek money from the markets?

They will - and the markets will ask a known set of questions:

Are The revenue streams for pharma, or movies, or insurance of the same periodicity as telecom? What are the running costs, manpower costs?

How cyclical or not is telecom? What are the operating margins? What is net profit or EBITDA?

How much return on capital can they expect for the next 4 years, or 10 or 20? Or forever?

This is not an argument I am having with you. I am telling you, that industry comparisons are done within the same industry.

For the same reason that when buying microwaves, you don't look at refrigerators.

Each market has their own forms, issues, strengths and weaknesses.

ALL investors at the level where a capex influencing financial investment arises, are aware of this.

----

As for the risk - its risk, not uncertainty.

Its pretty much a line item on multiple excel sheets all around wallstreet.

It will influence number of users by 10% over the next 15 years,

which will turn into an ARPU of X for these years.

This will in turn turn into revenue for that period, which will be then reduced down to an expected value of the firm today.

Hell, the expected rate of interest, could easily have a greater impact on the share price and risk of a telecom firm than cord cutters.

---

Its very hard not to invest in such an industry which obviously has so many things going for it that it can persist in this manner.

Here this chart should help-

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203642/forecast-for-the-...

I'll see if I can find similar numbers for Wireline, but the pattern will be the same.

American Telecoms get huge ARPUs from their subscribers.

America has abysmmal internet for the nation that created the modern telecom firm, and created the internet.

The firms are massive rent seeking entities in many respects, and are now consolidating to reduce competition further.

When google fibre enters their territory, they manage to lay cable, despite delaying it for years otherwise.

So no, people will always invest or look to own American telecom, because American consumers are great at giving money out.

Our local road infrastructure and our highway road infrastructure are both largely government-operated. Many local and municipal governments operate their own ISPs. Yet people illogically fear their government more than their ISP.

We need to fix antitrust. Of course, one of the biggest sponsors of every net neutrality-supporting website on the Internet (Google) doesn't want to fix antitrust. This is why net neutrality regulations are carefully designed not to apply to tech companies, and why things like the old ISP privacy rules that were repealed solely targeted ISPs. (When states tried to reimplement those privacy rules, but including tech companies, Google, obviously, came out strongly against them.)

Which is why Comcast slowing a competitor is a mortal sin, but Google's websites not working on Firefox (or them outright blocking Amazon devices) is no big deal, legislatively.

Let's get the FTC back to what it was built for: Breaking up companies like Ma Bell and El Goog.

Because they're not even remotely similar?

My isp is not the same as a host I connect to. They're not even possible to compare.

I'm buying the infrastructure to communicate from one, and the other does, well, does anything.

Should anyone that uses the telephone to do business, even exclusively, be a Title I carrier? No, that would be absurd because they don't sell telecommunication.

> If a company is using their monopoly, be it a network or a service or a platform, to do anticompetitive things that violate the law and hurt consumers, how are they different?

I mean, I could ask you the same about standard oil and Microsoft. How are they different? They both abused their monopoly.

> Why do ISPs need special regulations that DON'T apply to other types of monopolies

The same reason we grant phone, electric, water, sewer, and natural gas companies the same types of monopolistic leeway in exchange for some additional regulations: infrastructure is expensive and takes up space. It's difficult to have multiple of any of these providers in the same geographic market. How many water lines can you run in a street? Sure, we can run many phone and isp lines, but it becomes extremely messy and leads to other issues that eventually led to the types of regulations in exchange for monopoly were discussing. This isn't a new problem.

Now, I'm not saying Google shouldn't be subject to antitrust law. I'm saying Google doesn't sell me telecommunication services and therefore it doesn't makes sense to regulate it as one. (Project Fi and Google Fiber both fall under their respective FCC regulations.)

What's the difference between Comcast blocking say, video content it doesn't like, and YouTube doing the same?

> I mean, I could ask you the same about standard oil and Microsoft. How are they different? They both abused their monopoly.

This is my point: I don't see why we need specific laws carved out for ISPs, as opposed to laws that do equally apply to Standard Oil and Microsoft.

The regulations that are being repealed don't solve the problem. They're extremely narrowly designed to regulate a couple businesses by an agency who's job isn't policing business practices, but what those businesses are doing that needs to be regulated is already supposed to be regulated a different way: Anticompetitive practices are already illegal, and we need to enforce those rules. This is an FTC and DOJ problem, not an FCC problem.

You had me here. No they cannot. Google is not selling telecommunication services. Should the Butterball turkey hotline be regulated as a telecommunication provider? No, no they shouldn't. Just because they use phones to do business does not mean they ate a telecommunication provider.

Now, there are a couple things leading to your confusion, I think.

Right now net neutrality is tied to Title II, which gives the isps some leeway in antitrust issues in exchange for more regulation. If you would like to discuss that issue, I'm all for it. However, Google is not a telecommunication provider and net neutrality doesn't need to be tied to Title II. (However, Congress would need to step in at that point.)

So, if your point is why are we granting ISPs any monopoly privileges via Title II (which doesn't happen in quite a direct way), I refer you to why telephones, electric, gas, water, and sewer are regulated as utilities, that is given a monopoly in exchange for tighter regulations.

Why not just let the FTC go after companies (telecommunications or otherwise) when they misbehave?

Because we're discussing regulations that only apply to telecommunication providers?

I have never said antitrust laws shouldn't be enforced. In fact, I believe net neutrality is important even if we had a bustling isp sector.

Net neutrality is also not an issue because of local monopolies, although they make the issue more visible.

So, until you convince me that Telecommunication regulations should apply to companies that aren't providing telecommunication, I don't understand your point. Specially that data cannot be modified or throttled based upon content or destination.

I'll continue to agree with you that antitrust laws. I'm not sure what your argument is.

Why should a platform like YouTube be permitted to make judgment calls on how to handle content on it's services, but ISPs can't make judgment calls on how to handle content on theirs?

You haven't given a single reason for why telecommunications companies are different.

Moreover, even without any antitrust issues, the number of ISPs, especially in rural areas will always be limited by start up costs. In cities it'll always be limited by space on lines poles or conduits underground.

I guess until you convince me phone operators shouldn't be regulated as common carriers, you won't convince me isps shouldn't.

If phone companies blocked you from the Butterball hotline because they support another turkey company, that would be what's known as an "anticompetitive business practice". Now, if you removed the special exemption telecoms get, the FTC would fine them for that, and tell them they can't do it.

In the same way, if ISPs were to prioritize their own video services or block a competitor's, that would also be against antitrust law, and the FTC could fine them for it. Hilariously, the common carrier designation actually prevents this from happening.

At the risk of aggravating the moderators, to ask this a third time what is so special about telecommunications companies, that, unlike other monopolies, need a whole different form of regulation?

I mean, you could ask the same thing about electric utilities. What's special is that as a society, we've decided that we don't want dozens and dozens of companies running infrastructure through public land. We grant some private companies space, for rent, but that also comes with the burdens of public process. In more space-constrained areas like telephone poles, streets, and conduits, it's often better to have a small number of companies utilize the space, but at the cost of additional regulations.

Electric, gas, phone, and water companies have captive audiences, but at the same time need the PUC to approve rate increases and are required to meet certain performance guidelines.

I'll also ask for the third time: Why should ISPs be different than the phone company?

For the record, I didn't address your "space-constrained areas like telephone poles and conduits" before because neither is remotely space-constrained (especially in the fiber age), and this is a complete red herring.

As long as they own the physical network they should be a utility

But what if big companies subsidize my packets to/from them? Will that not make internet cheaper for me?

Cable and satellite TV customers pay more than $9.00 per month for ESPN networks whether they watch them or not

http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-satellite-tv-sub-fees-e...

The non-cynical view is the under NN you are paying for the huge amount of Netflix traffic whether you're a subscriber or not. When that cost is passed to the subscribers directly it's better for everyone, no? For subscribers it's probably a mild hike but but non-subscribers get a discount.

Today, you can make a new facebook competitor that will run just as fast as facebook.com. You just have to rent some servers and write some software. Without net neutrality, that might no longer be the case.

And even if they did, it wouldn't make the internet cheaper for you - it'd make it "not more expensive". Getting rid of net neutrality will give ISPs and such more tools to make the internet more expensive.

(Again, playing devil's advocate)

For $59.99 a month:

- Get Facebook, Google, Netflix at 100 Mbps max.

- Any other traffic is limited to 5 Mbps max.

Watching Hulu, or Amazon Video for instance would be limited at 5 Mbps max.

But in that case your own VPN would also fall in the second category, so even if you tried to watch Hulu via VPN, you'd still get only 5 Mbps max. (And you'd be then stupid to watch Netflix through your VPN since it would also be at 5 Mbps max instead of 100 Mbps max.)

The average consumer unfortunately has little to care about net neutrality. But in the long term it will hurt the tech economy as they have all risen from net neutrality.

Erm ... so, if users want to access non-approved "partners", that's way more expensive ... but that does not affect accessibility? If you really think that, you simply fell for their psychological trick. It's simply irrelevant whether the accessibility is limited technically or economically, as one is always convertible into the other (if they limited access technically, you could still restore access by offering them enough money).

That's simply not true. BingeOn is hurting the consumer. T-Mobile could just as well simply add x GB of traffic per month to their plans that you could use with any services you want, that would result in the same costs for them, and avoid the discrimination. But instead they manipulate their customers into assuming incorrectly that BingeOn is somehow a free gift from T-Mobile, to get them to form an opinion that is against their own interest. It's nothing but deception.

First, the free data is slower than what you get normally. Second, the program is supposedly open for anyone to join.

If BingeOn was the worst impingement on net neutrality, we'd be in a pretty good place.

Except it (a) isn't, and (b) even if it theoretically were, the model of having to follow the rules of every ISP on the planet to fall under their respective zero-rating plan, or even just the overhead of coordinating with them doesn't scale, and thus is inherently only an option for large companies. Being accessible globally via IP is a matter of renting a small virtual server for a few bucks a month. Being zero-rated by thousands of ISPs is a major undertaking.

And also, obviously, that ideal is completely unrealistic: Either the ISP gets to look into the video stream to verify that it is indeed video, which would be awful, or what you in effect end up with is a flat rate for "medium bit rate connections", which would be fine, but absolutely not what any of those ISPs want.

Nothing stops them from throttling VPN connections, or even all encrypted traffic. Read up on The great firewall of China and how it really does stop VPN connections. Further, it's much easier for ISP's to block stuff because the first hop for every connection you make is through them.

In Wireshark, normally you'll see flurries of variable-sized traffic across 53 then either 80 or 443. But for a VPN, you just see a constant flow of boring packets over 500.

Why doesn't China's national firewall block port 500? Possibly because it would also block the personal VPNs of the leadership of the Chinese government.

(Edits for clarity)

Even beyond the FCC backing this sort of business now, what other part of the government would care to stop that? The only other parts in charge of anything touching on communication technologies are all law enforcement and they are already explicitly stated that they want access to all encrypted communications

These new startup's customers' packets can be deprioritized by the customers' ISPs unless the new startup pays a bribe.

The bribe that existing big players (Facebook, Netflix) need to pay will be significantly less (or even zero) because of the leverage of their large customer base and brand recognition. The ISP may face blowback from its users for degrading service to those existing players. The fledgling startup doesn't have this leverage, so the ISP can extort it.

The VPN's ISP or the content provider's ISP or any transit provider in the middle could throttle between the VPN service and the content provider, but there is far, far more competition among ISP's suitable for server farms and transit providers than there is among residential ISP's so they are much less likely to be able to get away unreasonable throttling.

Likely the outcome would be "we couldn't identify this traffic as one of our approved providers, so we used the lower of the rates we offer."

e: the second bit of that was to compare to the plan offered by a peer comment, with e.g. netflix, youtube served at higher rates and the rest at lower. So you would never see the higher rates.

Yes, you can beat this, but it is inaccurate to characterize it as being completely unstoppable.

In Germany, two operators (T-Mobile and Vodafone) offer special "passes" for different services. These do not count against your monthly quota (if you use up all your data, you will be limited to about 64 kbit/s).

So, yes, you can use a VPN, but this will count against your data cap. While, if you use the services they choose for you, you basically get "free" extra data.

Ten minutes of Googling shows nothing about running servers from my home being illegal.

How would they know you're hosting a server? I mean, practically speaking a server is just a computer you leave running 24/7.

Please could you provide some evidence of your statement, otherwise I don't think it's quite true.

https://austinenergy.com/ae/residential/rates

https://austinenergy.com/ae/commercial/rates

Son, what?

It is not illegal anywhere to run a computer as a server. In fact a computer that serves data, is a server. If you've ever hosted a file on your computer or sent one, you're a server. Ever had a Facebook messenger call or uploaded a picture, you're a server.

Geeeez.

Commercial use in this general sense is relatively flat throughout the day with little use during night, whereas the residential load profile has peaks in the morning and in the evening with little use late at night and during working hours--it's simply a profile of the average load of a typical household throughout the day vs. the profile of the average load of a "typical business".

Of course, this "typical business" mostly matches offices and retail, industrial users usually have different load profiles, or, for that matter, no real load profile at all, in the sense that they pay based on peak power, not based on energy used, which in effect is an incentive to keep the power profile as flat as possible. Though deviations from that are possible in the form of load shedding, for example, where the utility company can remotely switch off some machinery in the factory to reduce load during peak demand times in exchange for cheaper electricity (this is typically employed with stuff like heating or cooling where it's easy to build your system in such a way that hour long interruptions here and there simply don't matter--your cold storage will stay cool enough even if you stop actively cooling it for an hour, for example).

The overall point is: The utility company doesn't really care what you use the energy for. They don't care whether you produce luxury cars or cheap gadgets. If you are willing to have the lighting in your offices switched off remotely during peak load times, they will happily sell you such a contract for your office building. If you insist on operating your aluminum smelter 24/7, you can have that, though it's going to be expensive. What they care about is the load on their grid and generation facilities, not what you use the energy for.

That's quite a stretch. You, the server hosting customer who pays for internet access, aren't "exceeding the allowed access". Your website visitors are accessing your server. If there's a thundering herd, the ISP is allowed to protect it's network accessibility (IIRC Comcast did this and the FCC lost a lawsuit against them[1] afterwords).

Typically ISPs care more that you are actually abusing the expected bandwidth of your connection (thus deteriorating service quality for your neighbors and eating into your ISP's profits), not that you are running a server at all. Every time you have to open a pinhole in your home router, you are "running a server" of a sort.

I'm an advocate for the principles of Net Neutrality and to clarify the vagueness of CFAA, but I don't have a clue how to implement them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC

I think it does? Port 25 is only blocked if you don't pay for the premium service of having it opened. It's very much similar a case of the ISP deciding that it would rather you have a client (toaster) than a mail server (refrigerator) and charging you accordingly.

I am paying the (very high per-mbit) premium of using them instead of, e.g., Comcast, but that's, at best, tangential to port 25.

EDIT: phrasing.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Are you suggesting it is incorrect that many ISPs block port 25?

> My comment was an existence proof against 'dataflow's assertion that "Port 25 is only blocked if you don't pay for the premium service of having it opened."

You got my statement entirely backwards. I said port 25 is blocked only if you don't pay for it to be opened. This is logically equivalent to "if port 25 is blocked, then you can pay for it to be opened". In other words, your payment is a sufficient condition for it to be opened, but it's not necessary because not every ISP will have blocked it in the first place. (You missed the word "only" in my sentence.)

Regardless, I think port blocking is orthogonal to Net Neutrality, and that it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. That is, specifically: it's about prioritization not blocking.

> Regardless, I think port blocking is orthogonal to Net Neutrality, and that it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. That is, specifically: it's about prioritization not blocking.

I'm sorry, so are you saying that as a consumer you would consider it net-neutral if they blocked everything except Facebook unless you paid an additional fee, as opposed to merely de-prioritizing that traffic? You're fine with blocking but not with prioritization?!

...and you think I was mischaracterizing your comment?

No-one I've ever seen on the Anti-NN side is talking about blocking either content or traffic. That would be antithetical to the narrative that doing away with it is a "freedom" issue, and which has somehow been spun into the crazy notion that NN entails censorship. They're talking about prioritizing — or, rather, de-prioritizing — content whose provider doesn't pay for a fast-lane.

Bringing blocking into the discussion distracts from the actual issue. To then double down on that and make the utterly unsubstantiated leap to inferring that I might somehow be okay with blocking content but not prioritizing it — when I specifically said "I think port blocking is orthogonal to Net Neutrality", never mind that this entire sub-thread was about blocking ports, not content — is fatuously specious.

If that's the kind of discourse you have to offer, I'm done here.

EDIT: phrasing.

The point I've been trying (and apparently failing) to make is that this is an email port that is being blocked and sold as a premium feature. In other words, ISPs are deciding that it is OK for you to use your internet service for browsing, but not for hosting email, unless you pay extra. Just like your power company deciding it's OK to let you have a toaster, but not a fridge (even if the fridge draws less power than the toaster [yes, I realize in reality it's probably the other way around, but a fridge is more like a server...]), unless you pay extra. And this is something people are okay with, and which they vehemently deny to be a net-neutrality concern.

Okay, fine. So far, I'll swallow this.

But at the same time, people are freaking out about a whole variety of scenarios, a pretty significant and frequently-repeated one of which is the idea that their ISP might decide "you should pay $X for social networking, $Y for videos, $Z for VPN", etc. when net neutrality is repealed. They very clearly see those as net neutrality issues and are vehemently against them.

So, to recap: blocking email and making it a "premium" feature is perfectly OK and not a net-neutrality issue, but doing the exact same thing with VPNs or pretty much anything else is a net-neutrality issue.

To me, these two positions are blatantly contradictory. It means people are either overreacting about the whole thing and the fears are baseless, or otherwise have incoherent & inconsistent positions on what the entire concept of net neutrality they're advocating for even is. Which would not be surprising, considering that the question of "what is net neutrality?" was one of the top questions here, which, in light of all this, I was very glad to see.

If people object to idea of their ISP choosing what kind of traffic they can transmit, then the ship sailed away from beneath their noses long before anyone noticed it, and it's clear that the subsequent "net neutrality" rules didn't bring it back. If, on the other hand, they're okay with the idea, then they need to examine and correct the inconsistencies in their positions (perhaps through the addition of more nuance rather than emotion in their discussions) and stop spreading all the "If this rule is repealed then your ISP will charge $5 for social media, $15 for email, and $999999 for VPN!!" FUD.

Yes, you can make a case that it is.

But the OP was accurate: NN is mostly about pay-to-play prioritization of content.

Their jobs is to pass me the bits I asked for, no more, no less.

How would you feel if Fedex opened your packages and looked inside? If Safeway added sugar to some of your purchases to "make them taste better"?

But yeah, I agree that this is not what we want.

As a user, I would prefer if my video calls are the highest priority, whereas I wouldn't care if my YouTube videos downloaded in batches in the background, as long as I didn't encounter buffering.

Why is it better to give all the power to the ISP? You're losing your ability to choose if what you need isn't included in a pack.

There's a counterargument to this that you should just be able to purchase a dedicated/guaranteed 1 gb/s, and I can buy that idea, but currently, that kind of thing is really expensive (and I expect that there's a dirty little secret that the service provider will still use "your" bandwidth if you aren't).

"Content-aware" isn't really what's required. You can get decent QoS by just putting CoDel on every buffer, so that congestion doesn't lead to unreasonable latency. Your latency-sensitive traffic will still get its share of packet drops in proportion to how much bandwidth it's using, but the end result will be that your latency-sensitive traffic won't be affected by congestion as much as the high bandwidth bulk file transfers that are causing most of the congestion.

If you want to go further to protect the latency-sensitive traffic from packet drops in the event of congestion, you can upgrade from codel to fq_codel. Then the traffic flows that are using most of the bandwidth will get the packet drops first, and your low-rate latency sensitive traffic will be unaffected until it's taking up your fair share of bandwidth.

None of that requires being explicitly content-aware. Traffic flows on port 80 get treated with the same rules as traffic flows on port 500. UDP flows get the same rules as TCP flows (except that your UDP traffic almost certainly doesn't support ECN). Flows originating from Netflix get the same treatment as flows originating from Windows Update. And it all works well for the users, while being content-blind in every way except for deciding which packets are related to each other.

Not only does it work well, but it almost always works better than any manually-crafted QoS ruleset that singles out certain ports and protocols and endpoints and applications. Those rulesets are inherently fragile and riddled with corner cases, and require expert maintenance to keep up with changing usage patterns.

Essentially, I believe such a scheme would break down if you had, for example, 4N bandwith, 3 users using an average of N, with the ability to buffer, and one user using an average of N but fluctuating by +- .5N, and without the ability to buffer. I don't think the scheme you described would work in such a case, but an "intelligent" provider could give everyone in this situation a "perfect" experience.

Granted, I'm not sure how realistic what I just described is, but still.

Are you referring to buffering in the endpoint, as for video streaming? The buffers I was referring to are the queues in the network itself. Properly managed queues can absorb bursts of traffic but will otherwise maintain a steady state of minimal buffer occupancy, so packets spend minimal time waiting in the buffer even when the line is running at full capacity. Even when a user is experiencing packet drops as a congestion signal, the packets that make it through the bottleneck will do so without undue delay.

If I understand your hypothetical correctly, user number 4 has higher latency sensitivity than users 1-3, but they're all trying to use at least their full fair share of the bandwidth. Furthermore, users 1-3 are transferring at a fairly steady rate, indicating that their traffic is being managed by a relatively intelligent endpoint that is using something like TCP BBR.

Depending on the timescale of user 4's traffic volume fluctuations, his experience may differ. Short bursts of traffic will get buffered, and so the tail end of the burst may experience a few milliseconds of delay (and also induce a few milliseconds of delay on the neighbors' traffic), but if the burst is large enough that it would monopolize the line for tens of milliseconds, packets will start getting dropped as a congestion signal, and user 4 will experience most of those drops. On a long time scale of seconds, if user 4 is still trying to use more than his fair share of bandwidth in spite of having had enough time for congestion signals to make a round trip, then user 4's packets are going to get dropped as much as necessary to keep them under control, because user 4's traffic is behaving badly.

In the real world, Netflix-style video streaming tends to be fairly well-behaved, dropping to lower resolutions in response to congestion. It is also fairly latency-tolerant because of client-side buffering. Interactive videoconferencing is more latency sensitive but has similar congestion response and is almost as loss-tolerant. Video games, DNS lookups, and early-stage connection handshakes are all relatively unresponsive to congestion signals and very latency-sensitive. But because those are almost never the traffic flows that are using the most bandwidth, they're never first in line to be dropped in the event of congestion and they usually are the first packets to be forwarded by a fq_codel style traffic manager.

The definition above was far stronger than this assertion, hence my comment.

But, per my other comment [1], NN seems to be used in a much stronger sense than that, which covers any arrangement whereby you can pay more for a dedicated pipe.

To extend your electric company example:

Let's say that the mains actually had two pipes (type A and B) bundled together and you could branch off of one or the other to set up a power outlet. Further, in times of brownouts/undercapacity, type A would keep the same voltage, whatever, while type B would die out.

What if the electric company charged more for every type A connection you wanted? That doesn't seem like it's obviously a bad thing, since there are legit usages where you might want the steadier power and be willing to pay for it. It's certainly not on the level of charging by what is plugged into the outlet.

Edit: Also, type A is equivalent (in some sense) to running your own generator that just services your demand. Surely that can't be evil?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15910272

In the no net neutrality example, the person on the other end pays their ISP to make their end faster and then they also get contacted by my ISP who asks them to pay to make my end faster when talking to them.

So instead of agreeing with my own ISP on how fast I need my traffic to be, my ISP cuts me out of the loop and goes and talks to some third party to decide how fast to make my traffic.

But NN advocates (as best I can tell) want it to go further, and prohibit

A) the other end voluntarily subsidizing my end on the condition that the funds be used for pipes that they (having partially paid for) have privileged access to.

How is that any worse than the paying for a bigger chunk of the ISP's pipes? And it seems economically equivalent to:

B) A content provider P subsidizing a mobile data network's increased capacity on the condition that P's transmissions not count toward customers' limits.

(I know B drives many people mad as a NN violation, while other advocates are like, "nah, cell data is okay.")

Furthermore, B only seems to differ in degree from:

C) An ISP spending customer money to interface with content provider P's system for replicating P's content within the ISP's network [1] so that access to P's content is faster an less expensive -- instead of spending that same money to make the network faster for all customers and all remote servers.

(Case C is like B, but where the "subsidy" is the expense of making Open Connect-like systems work.)

And yet, everyone seems fine with C.

If it seems like I'm nitpicking, let me step back and look at the big picture: NN looks like a bundle of good ideas ("don't artificially throttle specific sites"), married to a bunch of economically dubious hate for (the equivalent of) toll roads and desire that there be no downsides to higher usage -- the classic motte-and-bailey[2].

[1] For example, Netflix's Open Connect: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

[2] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Motte_and_bailey

> married to a bunch of economically dubious hate for (the equivalent of) toll roads and desire that there be no downsides to higher usage

I have never seen a net neutrality proposal that includes something that prevents higher charges for higher usage (except when mis-attributing usage, e.g. saying that Netflix uses an excessive amount of consumer ISPs' bandwidth, which is not the case, the people watching Netflix might be overusing their ISP's bandwidth, but Netflix is not using the ISP's bandwidth at all). This is a complete straw-man argument.

But what's the difference between those and C? Or between those and me building a dedicated line straight to my favorite server, just for us? Or are you really against Netflix's OpenConnect as a NN violation?

>I have never seen a net neutrality proposal that includes something that prevents higher charges for higher usage. ...This is a complete straw-man argument.

From a very quick search:

"Net Neutrality is one of only a few tools available to the FCC to keep ISPs in check. Banning data caps and zero rating schemes would be another great way to protect consumers from Wall Street’s insatiable demand for companies to extract more revenue from consumers."[1]

There -- a major advocacy group (stopthecap.com/tag/net-neutrality/) equating net neutrality with a ban on data caps (a species of charging for usage). [2] The fact that you are too smart to make the argument doesn't mean others aren't, nor that it isn't polluting the discussion, nor that I can't legitimately object to NN if it's read so broadly.

[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:t2UetpS...

[2] That's on top of the ever-present poster who thinks NN will keep their ISP from throttling their constant bittorrent streams in favor of granny's occasional emails.

Most data caps are of the type where you pay a flat fee for a fixed amount of data and then pay an outrageously high punitive fee for overages that is vastly out of proportion with the amount you are paying for the data below the cap. In other instances your speeds get dramatically throttled after reaching the cap or are completely cut off if you go over the cap too often. I think that should be outlawed.

Those aren't good faith attempts to charge people for what they are using; they are attempts to shut down heavy users, often because the ISPs are also in the cable TV business which competes with streaming video that is responsible for heavy data usage.

A good faith attempt to charge heavy data users fairly for their use would probably look something like the billing models used for electricity.

>A good faith attempt to charge heavy data users fairly for their use would probably look something like the billing models used for electricity.

It's not "very different", it's one way of charging higher users more. And the fact that it's a bad way doesn't mean the NN crowd supports the good way either! They object to the electricity model on the grounds that "bandwidth isn't scarce[1]" and that high users should be just as capable of crowding out low users during peak times, that there shouldn't be any downside to higher usage.

[1] in the true-enough sense of "the relevant scarce parameter is not how much you download in total, but how much of the flow of the pipe you are using at any given moment".

This actually happens (in some sense). If you want tons and tons of electrical juice, you pay more for it in 1-phase, 2-phase, 3-phase options.

(I am not a power engineer, but I live in a warehouse with 2-phase power which we "need" & use for welding, running expensive equipment, etc...)