Unpopular opinion: I was pro net neutrality - but I wouldn't have noticed it had been repealed if I was not so plugged into the debate. What has changed for other folks that you can tell? This was 'the sky is falling' level of concern and to be frank I think it was totally overblown.
AFAIK almost every major mobile provider throttles video on unlimited plans. I'm also seeing restrictions and throttling when phones are tethered. More ISPs are experimenting with data caps now. We haven't seen the big scary "pay $10 for Netflix access" posters come true, but I think otherwise this has basically gone as predicted? Net neutrality was about whether ISPs could adjust speed/charges/caps on the basis of content type, and they do that right now.
AT&T set up a "sponsored data" program in 2020 where companies paid to not have their apps count against data usage. They exempted their own property HBO Max, essentially for free since they're paying themselves. That was a big part of what the net neutrality debate was about: ISPs setting up schemes that favored established players by making them pay for customer access, and the fear that this would make it harder for indie upstarts to enter the market. In 2021 AT&T ended that program, but are still continuing to exempt HBO Max, which is an even worse situation because not only are they leveraging their power as a mobile provider to give their video service a leg up, there's not even a way to pay now to be treated equally on their network.
It's not a wasteland, but... I'm not sure what to say. Are people here happy with the direction that ISPs are going right now? I'm not. We have less competition, more ISPs are vertically integrating content and buying content producers, the 5G rollout has been largely disappointing, and there doesn't seem to be any indication that any of this stuff is changing.
I guess there haven't been a ton of sexy consequences that are obvious to every consumer, but companies are definitely experimenting with the stuff that would have been regulated under net neutrality. People warned about privileging content, and companies privilege content now.
The lack of real consequences really robs credibility from the next big internet cause (that might really need it).
What has happened has played out on a really small scale and it's effect is mildly frustrating to meh. Attributing the lackluster 5G rollout to the repeal net neutrality seems really tenuous. I am not deeply familiar but it seems like their are other confounding factors such as the China/us relationship, the weird 5g paranoia, covid, and the overall sickly state of telcom that has existed since the payphone era.
All in all I and many other citizens have bigger fish to fry. Jabbering my friends about net neutrality was a big waste of time and energy. I feel burned and embarrassed.
Not OP but I’d like to say that the real consequences from a big, multifaceted subject, be it government policy, the direction of a large institution, war, aren’t readily apparent until a decade or more later.
I’ll use Google as an example. In 2010 they were generally seen as one of the “good” companies. They seemed more supportive of open source, such as developing android, they were going into new business niches where incumbent companies had once dominated, such as with google docs competing with Microsoft office. The promoted less tacky advertising, discouraging flashy banner ads in favor of plain text, And they had free email. Google certainly had its critics back then, but a lot of the criticisms was more abstract, such as its ad based business model, and relationship with China before they left.
Now Google has many more critics and many reasons to dislike the company. The company was successful because of its focus on engineering and revenue from ads. What made it successful is leading to its downfall. You have small business owners claiming it commits anticompetitive behavior with ads and search; antitrust regulators are looking at the company. Google has terrible customer service, with paying customers, shutting down access for unknown reasons and provides no avenue for remedy. Android has become a walled garden because of its play store and no cellphone manufacturer is going to develop its own version of android because of fear that they will lose access to googles android. The company comes up with shiny new products only to cancel development and support two years later when it hasn’t been an explosive success.
I remember in 2012 talking to group project partners at university about “bubbling” where google would tailor your search results based on tracking. I was laughed at by one of my partners because the consequences seemed trivial. That practice in conjunction with social media enabled the ability for people to live in their own media environment, separate from others. That has since had a profound impact on our politics.
I suspect in 5 more years, once the telecoms, their lawyers and business development people fully realize what they can do with peoples growing dependence on the Internet, will we really see the consequences of no net neutrality.
Large companies act slowly. Net neutrality isn't about what they can get away with today, but a culture shift they can create over decades. Just because the effect happens on a timeline longer than a few years does not mean it doesn't exist. If you're feeling "burned", that has more to do with your friends' receptiveness to your presentation than with the topic itself.
FWIW with a similar standard of needing to see immediate effects, there would be absolutely no point discussing climate change. And actually that dismissal could be applied to most political topics.
HBO Max is not a really small-scale thing. AT&T is one of the largest ISPs in the nation, and anyone who's looked at the direction that consolidation goes in scenarios like this where giant companies start favoring their content -- anyone who looks at the historical trends there should be worried. Amazon didn't fundamentally break the Ebook market in 3 years but there were clear warning signs.
This is an issue that has had very predictable consequences, that has resulted in mergers that have observably made US Internet worse, and that is following the historical trends of vertical integration and market squeezing that you see in traditional anticompetitive environments. It's about as big of an issue as most other free-market/competition problems that the US is struggling with.
But all of that is small scale if you have bigger fish to fry like a global pandemic, or a resurgence of white nationalism, or widespread political corruption, or genocide in China, or a public war on voting rights. I'll concede, today in 2021, net neutrality is not currently the biggest issue that the US is facing. Honestly, there is no market issue in the US that compares to that stuff: not right to repair, not net neutrality, not DMCA takedowns on Twitch, not tech consolidation, not Oracle trying to copyright APIs, not Bitcoin energy usage.
But there was a little bit of naivety back when net neutrality was a big deal. We didn't know that we were going to spend an entire year watching half a million people die. That doesn't mean that net neutrality wasn't a big deal or that it hasn't had tangible effects. The US Internet market is really bad, and there's every indication that it's going to get worse.
But sure, US ISPs are not going to kill half a million people in a single year. If that's the threshold for what is a real issue, then there's almost no tech-topic that qualifies as a real issue. But nothing about the scale of problem is different. It's just that we're more aware now of how much of the US is just fundamentally broken.
> AT&T set up a "sponsored data" program in 2020 where companies paid to not have their apps count against data usage. They exempted their own property HBO Max, essentially for free since they're paying themselves.
Apple is doing the same on the App Store when they are taking a cut of every payment inside an app.
Name one innovation that occurred because of Net Neutrality repeal? That was the other side's argument -- that Net Neutrality hindered innovation.
The last four years, I've seen nothing but stagnation in the industry, except for perhaps what telecoms like to call "5G", which may have technological advances, but is more of a marketing buzzword. There are still data caps on home connections for literally no reason at all, except as a cash grab. There are still considerably high prices for access. There are still regional monopolies. There is still very little competition, when comparing apples to apples in offered bandwidth. We got flooded with zero-rating services during this time which in and of itself stifles competition. And with this pandemic, it became crystal clear just how vital the internet is, especially as it relates to our kids and their education.
Net Neutrality was on the FCC books for, what, 18 months tops? It had little time to do anything that it was meant, and it really belongs in legislation [1] and not at the mercy of a changing administration.
Average internet speeds are up substantially since repeal. It is up over 300% in fact, and is now 12th globally according to Ookla. Even higher if you remove tiny dense countries like Liechtenstein.
You should at least attempt to make some kind of argument that there's real causation here and not merely correlation.
Also, aren't most of Ookla's speed test results biased by testing against servers the ISP has given preferential placement to inside their network, rather than using a diverse set of servers on the public internet? (I'll admit, it's been years since I last cared to look at an Ookla speed test, so I'm not sure if their default server selection strategy has changed.)
> In fact, this is the EFF's prime argument for Net Neutrality. [1]
As far as I can see, your link does not support your assertion. I think you're completely mischaracterizing the primary argument for Net Neutrality.
I have never seen anyone assert that without Net Neutrality, speeds would go down or stagnate in general. I have only seen proponents claim that without Net Neutrality, speeds would be selectively reduced or left stagnant.
And the burden of proof is very much on you to demonstrate that lifting Net Neutrality regulations is responsible for speeds increasing, and not other factors such as pressure from Google Fiber and declining costs for DOCSIS 3.0 equipment and advances in WiFi that made it possible for most consumers to actually use download speeds in excess of 100Mbps.
(Also, we should assess the health of the ISP market a bit more carefully. Increasing download speeds don't tell the whole story. How have the major incumbent ISPs done at increasing upload speeds in recent years. How prevalent are data caps, and are they increasing from year to year?)
It didn't exist for long, it isn't needed and is just another way for the government to get more control of the internet. Let's wait till there is a problem before we try to fix it.
There are numerous problems. Comcast packet shaping in the late aughts. Zero-rated services. Lack of competition. Regional monopolies. High prices due to monopolies. Data caps. Downgraded service due to going over data caps.
But I suppose none of that matters when it may involve the government having to step in and actually protect consumers -- and protect what has become a basic human right. I do wonder if the AT&T breakup in 1983 would actually occur in this current ignorant political climate, had it been offset by 40 years in the future.
Legislation is notoriously slow, and the companies that'd profit would (and did) lobby against fixing it. It's almost always cheaper to prevent a problem than treat it after it festers.
What is the problem with net neutrality//regulation? What did repealing it fix? The shift to WFH has highlighted how essential internet access in the modern world - it should be regulated like all other essential utilities.
For most residential users, Comcast and Time Warner are de facto government. It's fallacious to invoke some hypothetically distinct threat of "government control" when that control is already here and deploying DPI gear.
A baseless claim. Others already provided counterexamples. Without net neutrality, things could deteriorate extremely quickly if the changes appeared likely to be profitable.
> is just another way for the government to get more control of the internet
This statement doesn't even make sense. These aren't KYC regulations or building permits we're talking about here. They just make it illegal to charge for preferential treatment. We've had common carrier laws since forever. The fact that ISPs are exempt is an aberration.
>>> It hasn't been that long. Big companies are smart enough to move slowly
The implication is that ISPs are intentionally slowing the adoption of exploitative policies in order to avoid drawing negative attention while politically vulnerable.
Not at all. Extending the benefit of the doubt is essential to society functioning well. Assuming the worst without clear cause just escalates things needlessly and poisons relationships.
That doesn't mean you have to be a sucker though. It's quite clear in context that ISPs would love to abuse a lack of net neutrality if they could get away with it. There's literally a video from years ago of an AT&T executive talking about it.
Perhaps, but every time I see that tired saying trotted out, the context is in groups that have not earned, or worse, have a history of malice that does not justify the benefit of the doubt
Seriously, all I said was that - they know better than to rip the bandaid off at once. People would be irate if everything they wanted was magically made manifest.
That's just common sense. Net-neutrality - from the many other comments has already been enacting incrementally small but bad changes for internet/broadband/streaming platforms and esp. in terms of monopolistic control.
It's similar to how 24/7 media took over propagandazing and polarizing the country - all media from Fox to CNN. It started with repealing the Fairness Doctrine which required all viewpoints to be expressed.
Then came the Telecommunications Act which was supposed to open the market to more and new radio station ownership; instead, it created an opportunity for a media monopoly.
You saw American media go from hundreds of owners to 6 or 7 companies owning 99% of media via radio, tv, etc.
At least with more diversity of ownership there wasn't the ability for CEO's to completely control a narrative whether it's Turner, Murdoch, Comcast, Sinclair Broadcasting, etc.
It took 25 years for media to bring us to this point, it wasn't an overnight thing. Laws become reality, companies pick at the edges to see what they can get away with, they pick some more, eventually they take as much as they can get away with and control their foothold.
I don't see how this is conspiracy, it's just facts about capitalism.
While the issue became relatively quiet after the Ajit Pai led rollbacks, there appears to have been significant developments on a state-by-state basis. Depending on where you reside, you may have some form of net neutrality provision, even if it's not enforced at the federal level:
You don’t criminalize behavior because it will happen, but because it could. Net neutrality prevents companies from doing harmful things, like installing data caps and providing preferential treatment to certain data. Those things don’t have to happen, and maybe aren’t happening because the companies think they’d get bad PR. But they could happen, and that’s why you regulate to prevent them.
Perhaps the big kerfuffle was overblown, or perhaps it instead slowed down the plans that companies had (since it was now a provable PR nightmare post-kerfuffle). We don’t have enough data to decide that. We do know that companies are currently allowed to act in anti-consumer fashion.
I think one could argue that there hasn't really been a regulatory opening for any serious moves against net neutrality in the home broadband market. The FCC repealed the Obama-era rules in June 2018. Comcast/Xfinity was still under merger conditions binding it to net neutrality principles until that September, and had to make a show of assuring the FCC it wouldn't make any anticompetitive moves to avoid having the conditions extended. Charter/Spectrum remains under merger conditions forbidding data caps, which would be needed if they wanted to bill for data unequally, until 2023. So two of the major players with the most to gain haven't been in a position to try mobile-style throttling, and even if other companies considered it there was a possibility (now a reality) that around the time they finished rolling out any change there could be a new administration hostile to their plans and happy to use an already unpopular cable company as a villain.
Those things have inertia. Net neutrality, like freedom of speech, doesn't lead to great changes overnight, but, I guess, big ones on the long run. Like diet and exercise.
I feel the same way. I kinda feel like big tech duped me into buying into the FUD about net neutrality. I was a huge supporter of it and thought when Trump came into office the net would get segmented up. When it didn't happen I felt like I was taken for a ride.
It's an extremely useful FUD for large monopolies, since they can create their own infrastructure and cut ahead of smaller businesses that will be trampled by NN regulations. It's an easy pitch because they make it sound 'democratic', but from an engineering perspective it's absolutely nuts.
> but from an engineering perspective it's absolutely nuts.
Net Neutrality regulations would seem to only prohibit unnecessarily complex network infrastructure, and require you to instead stick with the simpler, saner configurations that aren't discriminatory or punitive. So what exactly do you find to be "absolutely nuts" about Net Neutrality from an engineering perspective?
They had tried to push through the same thing a few years earlier but it earned the name "Internet kill switch."
Net Neutrality is just the same thing with better PR. Government enforcement of net neutrality inherently includes an internet kill switch.
So I'm not OP but that's what's nuts: You can't build a "net neutrality" enforcement mechanism without inherently giving the government a whole lot of power over the internet.
> Government enforcement of net neutrality inherently includes an internet kill switch.
> You can't build a "net neutrality" enforcement mechanism without inherently giving the government a whole lot of power over the internet.
In other markets, it is not considered a government overreach for there to be regulations and enforcement mechanisms preventing extortion and anti-competitive practices. How do you justify characterizing the same kind of consumer protections applied to the internet as "a whole lot of power"? Do you use terms like "kill switch" to describe every situation where the government can get an injunction to stop a business from doing something bad?
Or are you saying that the the internet should be a special exception to the otherwise-ordinary government powers to regulate commerce?
Hypothetical extortion and anti-competitive practices. As plenty in this topic pointed out, it was repealed and nobody really noticed. The arguments for it basically boil down to "ISPs are bad and this will hurt them."
It's a completely absurd argument. The government is taking someone to the dance. The dance is the consumer losing rights and power on the most important communication medium ever. And people on the internet are really, really passionate about how the government should take Google and not Comcast. How terrible it would be if Comcast went to the dance!
I generally agree with speeders getting tickets. But a camera system that gives everyone a ticket every time they speed is a different thing. Automating government power is something you do carefully and only with very good reason. And yes, I would call something like that a speeding kill switch, an over-application of ordinary powers the government already has through automation.
Was it in the same way as Obamacare “earned the name” “Obama’s death panels”? It says more about who gave the name than whatever they are trying to describe.
Oh? What exactly are these onerous regulations that small businesses can't comply with, that are part of net neutrality? I can think of precisely none, help me out?
Private custom infrastructure that can be specialized for purpose, while the ISPs maintain a monopoly and simply serve unspecialized, lowest common denominator traffic - no room for competitors to differentiate.
That is the real issue to tackle: find better ways to make meaningful competition in a region possible, that can offer genuinely different specializations (e.g. High media upload vs. Slow but regular text browsing vs. Real-time gaming).
Net neutrality never meant your ISP would not charge you more for higher speeds to your home. It never meant your ISP would not charge you for pulling more data than some cap, and it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type or data caps.
Those things were never what net neutrality was about.
Net neutrality was about ISPs providing differential pricing or services based on data originator. For example, you ISP charging Netflix extra for every byte from Netflix carried over their circuits, on the threat of blocking or throttling those packets. "Nice place you got here, shame if something was to happen to it. Me and they boys will be around Thursdays to collect."
Most of the fall-out from a lack of network neutrality was hidden behind higher fees for your streaming services. Those fees are unlikely to come down as a result of the restoration of net neutrality because they can instead be added to the streaming service's bottom line. You're not going to notice the rollback even though the loss of net neutrality probably resulted in billions of dollars being taken from the consumer's pockets into various corporate coffers. The market could bear it and the only change is whose pockets it goes in to.
> it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type [...]
Accurately classifying traffic as video streaming vs bulk downloads, or gaming vs VoIP, etc. is a technological impossibility. Any scheme to do so is trivially defeated by things like VPNs and at best devolves to a cat and mouse game with ever-more draconian deep packet inspection. A good Net Neutrality regulatory regime must prohibit ISPs from being lazy and only prioritizing the most popular VoIP protocols and services they know about, which means in practice that Net Neutrality has to go all the way to prohibiting discrimination based on content type.
If ISPs want to throttle, they have to do it on the basis of actual traffic patterns. If you want to deprioritize heavy traffic flows, you have to identify them based on the observed pattern of sending lots of large packets, rather than classifying it based on the notion that a certain port number means a certain kind of traffic.
Discriminating on the origin of the packet does not require any kind of deep inspection since the originator is in IP metadata. Net neutrality means not discriminating on the originator of the packet, not the content.
Repeating your assertion does not make it true. Net Neutrality has always included an aspect of not discriminating for or against certain protocols, because giving preference to specific protocols has the effect of giving preference to the incumbent services that are using those protocols and dissuading innovation and the development of alternatives.
Net Neutrality is about ISPs being neutral and not influencing the market for services offered over the net. Since ISPs can unfairly influence the market using techniques beyond just inspecting packet origins and destinations, Net Neutrality has to cover those techniques too.
it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type
it actually means that. net neutrality means isp does not get to discriminate packets. if you have 1G bandwidth you are free to use it for any packet you want
That is not what net neutrality meant. It has always meant that a carrier could not discriminate based on the origin of the packet, not the content of the packet.
The only way to have real net neutrality is via publicly-owned communications infrastructure. Otherwise the issue is just going to be ping-ponged every <political cycle> years. It can't be won in Washington. We need municipal fiber networks and radio towers.
good governance keeps slowly happening. health care has slowly gotten better, with pre-existing conditions no longer making it impossible to get health care, and, it's going to be chaos for a while, but healthcare providers having to declare prices up front (recent).
the clock is not so easily turned back on progress, in many cases.
that said, i 100% think municipalities should compete to be the best environment they can. providing municipal connectivity is an obvious, straightforward path to allowing regions to increase their competitiveness. this weird system of demanding that over-charging, weirdly controlling, rent-seeking frequently-monopolistic middlemen the are the soul providers of a base human right (connectivity) has been some weird cult shit with ever weirder overtones of control to it.
worth also remembering that it was the supreme court that decided, effectively, that all the hard long fought for work to demand net-neutrality & unbundling could be ignored for cable & fiber[1], specifically because the court believed the case being made that fiber would never get rolled out unless a monopoly was guaranteed. that... has not turned out well at all, in the last decade plus since that absurd ignorant farce of a ruling. this ruling ended competitive local exchange carriers for everything but dsl, and is widely regarded as a dumbfuck move. bad court, you really screwed up the ability for competition to happen quite thoroughly. things seem so bad that municipal communication infrastructure feels like the only possible viable option, given how egregiously badly communication infrastructure has been bungled & monopolized across the US in the wake of this granted right-to-have-no-competition.
Reed Hastings talked about net neutrality in his interview about blitz scaling: if cable companies can slow Netflix down and ask for as much money as they want, it could have destroyed Netflix.
Netflix is far from innocent. Remember when they totally ignored existing peering agreements and tried to force Verizon to pay for upgrades to pipes that were overloaded because of their traffic?
Netflix is a freeloader. Peering agreements, which by the way have been around for decades, state clearly that nobody pays as long as the pipe is used equally. Netflix's bandwidth providers sent way more than they received and refused to cough up for upgrades.
Aside from "Verizon bad because big ISP", they were in the right. You want a fat pipe because of your obnoxiously bandwidth heavy service, pay for it.
> Remember when they totally ignored existing peering agreements and tried to force Verizon to pay for upgrades to pipes that were overloaded because of their traffic?
I recall Netflix's ISP offering to pay the entire cost of the upgrades at at least one of the overloaded peering points. And I recall Verizon trying to mislead the public about where the congestion was occurring (it mostly wasn't internal to their networks, but was at the interconnects to Netflix's ISP).
> Peering agreements, which by the way have been around for decades, state clearly that nobody pays as long as the pipe is used equally. Netflix's bandwidth providers sent way more than they received and refused to cough up for upgrades.
Verizon and other residential ISPs built out their networks in such a way that it was not possible for traffic to be at all close to symmetric. If Netflix had added code to their site to generate artificial upload traffic, it wouldn't have been possible for that to match the download traffic. Why should those last-mile residential ISPs get to use traffic asymmetry as an excuse when they're at least as responsible for breaking the traditions that applied to peering between transit providers?
From what I gathered about discussions on net neutrality it helps some big providers (streaming video, etc.) to get bigger profits because this traffic could not be handled separately from the rest. I really don't see why to sponsor these people on everyone else's money.
E.g. in Russia there is no net neutrality as far as I can tell. So my mobile plan has separate components for video, music, and social networks. It's not that I have to buy them all: I have universal access capped at 4GB, but if I buy e.g. "unlimited video", then the traffic from the selected provides (YouTube, etc.) won't count toward that limit. I myself am totally happy with this setup because I don't use any of that (and working form home hardly ever reach the 4GB cap itself), which keeps my mobile bill pretty low.
My understanding is that if we had net neutrality then there wouldn't be any such discrimination and I would have to buy just some universal "Internet" and the price of that would have to be averaged between me and the avid YouTube and Instagram users. Why is this supposed to be beneficial?
Because it means that a new video hosting or photo stream service has the same network access as the established players.
It's already insanely difficult to beat the network effect of an existing social media website, now imagine if Newstagram counted against your 4GB limit but Instagram didn't...
If the discrimination was based on content, eg by MIME type, that would be fair, but it wouldn't be technically enforceable under HTTPS (and easily bypassed anyway).
Then again, why is that even needed? Why does the premium package have to be "unlimited video" and not "unlimited gigabytes [wherever you download it from]"? Does it cost your ISP any less to transport hours of 4K Netflix than hours of 4K illegal streaming sites?
Your cheap 4GB package would be unaffected anyway, net neutrality determines what you can buy at the higher tiers.
> My understanding is that if we had net neutrality then there wouldn't be any such discrimination and I would have to buy just some universal "Internet" and the price of that would have to be averaged between me and the avid YouTube and Instagram users.
Of course not. Net Neutrality does not prevent ISPs from charging per GB. It does prevent them from offering an "unlimited video" option that only actually covers their hand-picked selection of video providers, most of whom will have been extorted to be included on the approved list.
I heard that Google somehow receives some enormous “subsidies” on its Internet ads traffic (internally, across Internet backbone?). And that this is somehow related to the Net Neutrality laws. Can somebody explain how it works, or is it an urban myth?
> No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—
> (A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
Doing something like throttling your competitor's video streaming traffic while zero-rating your own is pretty hard to cast as a good-faith action, especially if it's done on the basis of where the traffic is originating instead of based on the content. And I'm not sure mere throttling or deprioritization is enough to qualify as an attempt to "restrict access to or availability of material". So I don't see how section 230 can give protection to ISPs that want to discriminate against certain classes of traffic.
