I feel like the USA is focusing on the wrong thing with net neutrality. The core problem is that individual ISPs have total monopolies on infrastructure (or at least on the better infrastructure) in a lot of areas, and so can do all the anti consumer bullshit they want without repercussions.
Enforcing net neutrality is just treating a symptom of the monopoly. Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.
Competition itself can't protect against net neutrality violations, because even small-marketshare ISPs can break your startup's product for some customers.
Almost none of these customers will ever even learn that the failure is the ISP's fault. And even if they do, who will switch ISPs just to use some not-yet-proven product by a new startup?
Meanwhile your competitor's product will work well, either because they were too big to mess with or because they paid whatever the ISP was demanding. Maybe you should too!
This is why Europe needed net neutrality rules, and actually passed stronger rules than the U.S., even though the system you describe was prevalent there. Amusingly, before the rules existed, the increased competition in Europe had actually led to more net neutrality violations there (specifically, blocking or throttling things like VOIP and BitTorrent) because ISPs in that competitive landscape were under more pressure to cut costs!
My source on this is Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, who is a leading expert on net neutrality policy and whose work informed both the U.S. and E.U. rules.
For example, which video conferencing solution would you choose: the one that always works for everyone you invite, or the one that works only for 90% of the people you invite, because the other 10% are on an ISP that blocks it? You'd be under a lot of pressure to choose the solution that you know will just work for everyone.
The ISP doesn't need to be anything close to a monopoly to get leverage for extortion and (in the process) mess up competition at the application layer.
Yes, we need more competition, but we still need net neutrality rules.
Competition improves prices and service. Net neutrality rules protect competition at the application layer, and they ensure that ISPs are really competing on how good they are at moving data, not just on how good they can get at shaking down the application layer.
If there is competition, which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites? And if enough people selects the latter, and assuming blocking small percentage of site doesn't give big monetary gain to the ISP, there is no reason for ISP to behave the way you said in the example.
Free market principles do not apply when the switching costs are non-trivial and information asymmetry makes it difficult for the consumer to know what’s really going on.
Nobody is gonna complain about their ISP when the conversation is simply this: “Aw, shucks, [startup-product] doesn’t work, at least [established-product] works everywhere. The new thing is probably crap anyway.”
We need common sense regulation in this space, not what we have now. What we have now is Google fiber being told to pound sand all over the country even though they offered to pay for everything when laying down a separate, competing fiber network. Why were they rebuffed? Verizon/Att has the local gov. wrapped up. Let’s break THAT gov-enforced monopoly.
It's in some cases not even a choice. ISP service in the US is to my understanding also tied up in regional availability (it's less of an issue in Europe since afaict infrastructure is just... better in Europe, but even in Europe you have regions where the choices are between shit and slightly worse smelling shit; hence why net neutrality still matters here), and many of the more rural areas just have a single provider so your only choice to change ISP is to... move location. Which is frankly absurd.
The result is that said provider is basically running a regional monopoly, but this doesn't get regulated against because the total ISP market isn't monopolized.
I’ll be the first to talk about market failures but the mere existence of friction does mean markets stop working. There’s some amount of friction with every market interaction. There is absolutely a market failing when it comes to ISPs but it’s not really friction that’s the issue, switching ISPs in an area where you actually have options is a few phone calls and scheduling a time for someone to do your wiring.
Now if every store in a 100 mile radius only had Coke, then switching to Pepsi just got a lot harder despite the two products being literal drop-in replacements for one another.
Switching to pepsi is easier as it is a single dimensional change. Switching ISP will have a multitude of effects. Most unknown (how reliable is the new one? will they give me hidden extra charges? what are their TOS? are they blocking XYZ service I need down the road? do they spy on DNS traffic?)
and so on. Let alone a decent amount of time on the phone organising it and potentially some early exit penalties.
> which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites?
Some non negligible percentage of people might choose the one that only works with most websites, due to some other reason, such as they have reduced prices.
That non-negligible amount of people on this other service, could still be leveraged by that ISP to strongarm websites.
And that business model produces market concentration.
An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up. The services are over a barrel and pay, after which the ISP's users don't see slowdowns and have no reason to switch. Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users. Smaller ISPs don't have as much leverage to extract the danegeld so they can't compete.
It makes perfect sense to prohibit that business model as an antitrust measure.
> An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up.
Yeah, we’ve already seen this in the Comcast/Netflix debacle and Deutche Telekom vs the world. In fact a lot of large incumbents do this.
> Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users.
If things were even so rosy. The shakedown money is used for larger profits and monopoly positions to get more users.
My assumption was that ISP couldn't get big cost saving by restricting some sites. I think this assumption is valid as by definition the websites that consumes most of the data are popular sites, and I don't think ISP would touch that due to reputational harm. And banning few of the tail end of the sites wouldn't allow ISPs to reduce the cost by any margin.
Which ISP would you pick, the one that works with every conferencing system, or the one that deliberately blocks some of those conferencing systems in the small markets where they have a monopoly? Second question: which market segment does a typical ISP care more about, the small markets where they have a monopoly, or the large markets where they compete?
> Which ISP would you pick, the one that works with every conferencing system, or the one that deliberately blocks some of those conferencing systems in the small markets where they have a monopoly?
They don't block the conferencing systems in the regions where they have an ISP monopoly, they block them for all their users because they have a monopoly on the network path to those users. The conferencing system needs to be able to reach 100% of its own customers' users or they'll be bleeding customers faster than the ISP does, so they blink first and pay, after which the ISP's customers have no reason to switch because the conferencing system is working.
Which ISP does that? My subtext is that ISPs don't block things like this, because even though they have regional monopolies in small markets, they make a large fraction of their profits in large markets where they have to compete.
But another issue is that if it isn't banned, it can happen in private. The ISP doesn't need to actually throttle the target's traffic if it can credibly threaten to and force them into a contract with an NDA, and they have the incentive to require that when their demands are unpopular, so we have no way to know how widespread it is.
> Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.
Yes, and the problem in the US has been that every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISPs, and since the ISPs have much deeper pockets, the suits never get to the point where they could drive meaningful change with a ruling against the ISPs. That's a big reason why net neutrality has been pushed in the US: because it's the best that can be done given that a better fix has failed.
I’m surprised none of the good states, like maybe NY or one of the New England states, hasn’t decided to help out in this sort of situation. Couldn’t the state say “we’ll step in to do the defense, for our municipalities.”
> It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level.
You mean the levels that produced all the sweetheart deals the ISPs currently have? The ISP monopolies are products of state and federal (mostly state) intervention in the name of supposedly necessary things like "enabling internet access".
No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. Then some politician needs to get elected and sells the public on a not possible idea of muni internet.
Sort of like Biden canceling student debt by executive order when the constitution says congress has the power of the purse. You can assign the blame to Biden, Republican AGs, the Supreme Court, or the authors of the constitution. Doesn’t make much difference, so long as the issue is correctly understood. A day in court makes sense.
> No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition.
There was a contract between every municipality and ISP with an explicit term that the municipality couldn't finance a competitor? That seems unlikely.
I’d advise not saying “the USA” in conversations like this, but being more specific and saying “US activists” or “US policymakers”. The former are probably who you are referring to, the latter are who people are generally referring to when they say “the USA” in international policy discussions, but US policymakers are deeply divided on this issue and most either don’t have a strong opinion or are actually against net neutrality.
Monstrous behavior. Society needs some safeguards. Letting old incumnents do what they want forever is an filthy disgraceful low place to be, especially for such a core utility. Living under this degrading pro-monopoly regulatory environment has been a major heartbreak of my life, and the people who should be doing something to protect one of our most prized embodiments of democracy- our ability to communicate with each other- keep making the situation worse.
Absolute travesty. Humanity getting beatten in the face with a stick by shitty corporations forever. The FCC backing them up. I dont even know if it's possible to get these decisions changed.
In New Zealand we have a national fibre network covering about 90% of the population. That was built by four private entities to a set of minimum specifications and with some government subsidies. These companies are not allowed to sell retail services, must offer wholesale access to all ISPs, and have their wholesale pricing regulated.
Im very into the idea of the state competing to create accessible affordable baselines, and letting everyone else compete openly in trying to make money.
If government wants to do that by contacting out a bunch of the effort, ok!
Government trying to insure good baselines, not just regulatorily, but actually doing the work & owning the system (again even if contacted) feels like it's ever more necessary step to keep a healthy society.
India's Unified Payment Gateway (UPI) is also created and managed by government. Private players are free to use the service and build products around it. It worked really well. Though I am more inclined to give more credit to people who built and maintaining it rather than to some model. Like ISRO and Delhi Metro, its a miracle since India's stultifying beurocracy has a well deserved reputation.
The question is, where does the government get the capital? If it's from taxpayers, their service has an asymmetric advantage and can drive out private competitors even if it's poorly managed, which is highly inefficient and results in a de facto government monopoly.
But it could work pretty well if it's funded by bonds it has to pay back out of subscription fees and a default causes everyone involved to be fired.
Your second thought sounds like a good idea. Let's have another competitor (government) funded by private entities via debt equity (bonds) which is paid back by customer receipts (profits) where failure equals unemployment. Actually, this is starting to sound like a business, but with more steps and the power to pass laws affecting its own operating environment. What's the advantage to having the government be the competitor?
It is an asymmetric advantage, but they're different games. The governent should be competing to help people, not make money.
Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.
If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.
> It is an asymmetric advantage, but they're different games. The governent should be competing to help people, not make money.
They're two independent things. If a different management style would produce a public benefit then do it without access to the taxing power. If using tax money to subsidize some service is in the public interest (spoiler alert: it rarely is) then the subsidy should go to anyone providing that service.
> Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.
Which is the problem -- because then they're no longer competing, and it's the competition on equal terms that keeps them honest. If they're actually helping people then people should have no trouble voluntarily choosing their unsubsidized offering. Without that they're just an unregulated monopoly susceptible to inefficiency and corruption.
> If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.
Charters where funding only goes to the politically connected are effectively corruption, and whoever is getting fat off the cash will exert their influence to make sure no one capable of doing it more efficiently can get access to the funding. Charters where funding goes to anyone who signs up to provide the service are effectively tax credits.
Median internet speeds is a terrible metric when comparing infrastructure because it effectively only measures the cheapest to deploy urban populations internet speeds which is basically meaningless now days. 50 Mbps or 500 Mbps all are basically running on the same back haul which is why things fell apart during the pandemic when people tried to actually use their hypothetical home bandwidth.
Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.
Median, mean and mode are all going to be pretty misleading if you're trying to work out if people outside of densely populated areas can get decent speeds.
You probably need to measure lower percentiles to get an idea of how bad it can get.
It’s a valid point, on the other hand average is much worse. 1 person at 1GBps makes up for huge numbers of people at 1.5Mbps vs 20 Mbps.
Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.
The numbers got high enough the differences don’t really matter much, and the distribution is really wide.
Suppose you were looking at countries median car top speed. Fining one countries median is 150 MPH vs 156 just don’t tell you much when you can’t drive that speed on public roads. Or in internet terms Netflix etc isn’t sending 8k stream let alone multiple 8k streams.
On the other hand many internet connections can’t handle a single 4k or even 1080p stream so percentage of connections over X threshold is more impactful.
Not everyone signs up to the highest speed tiers, but generally speaking 90% of the country has access to 1 gigabit fibre and some areas also have 4 or 8 gigabit fibre infrastructure.
You would not know if when you visit there. I stayed a month there and travelled all over. Internet was trash everywhere I went. I visited places that had time limits and data caps under 1gb. Even staying in AirBnBs that share internet with the owners, almost nobody had a good connection. I had one good place in an apartment in the core of Wellington where the internet was fine.
Yeah - to get a decent idea you'd need to measure $/mbps as well as measuring average speed. And measure best available rather than what people have opted for personally.
E.g.
* Country/ISP A has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $50/month.
* Country/ISP B has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $90/month.
In country A a lot more people are going to opt for 1 gigabit - it's way cheaper and still good enough - therefore their average speed stat is going to be lower even though the actual options are strictly better than in country B.
I mean, having the government own the infrastructure is the ultimate extent of regulation, and strictly a superset of regulating net neutrality specifically. Surely the infrastructure is by far the most expensive part of an ISP, so this is basically just saying “because internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly, we’ll have the government be the only ISP.” I guess other countries set it up so that private companies are technically “the ISPs,” but what do they actually do?
Honestly this is a problem that was solved 40 years ago with the breakup of AT&T: the Equal Access mandate.... and it worked right up until institutional capture ensured that it didn't.
Now here we are 40 years later and AT&T has virtually reassembled itself and the Equal Access laws have been completely obliterated. I wonder if there's a correlation?
It's not just the US, Europe saw a need for net neutrality rules and has them. The problems of infrastructure monopolies and the problems of ISPs messing with certain service providers are not completely the same sets of problems.
I am currently denied mail service by my local post master because when my mother was in this house (and I was in prison) and dying of cancer she could not get to the mailboxes (at the end of the street and requiring crossing the street using curbs with no handicap ramps) in a timely enough manner. She had the nerve to appeal her mail service being turned off, and so now the post master has a personal grudge with my family. So yes, having government control of essential services is scary to me.
There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works if you define “democratic” as “one person one vote”. Because of gerrymandering, the electoral college, 2 Senators per state etc, you have less voting power if you live in California than if you live in Nebraska.
Besides, a government run by the “majority” tends to trample on the rights of the minority. I don’t just mean racial minorities. I mean anyone who holds minority viewpoints.
No thank you. I live in a small mountain town in the Pacific North West and I have the choice of high speed cable and multiple fiber providers up to 1Gb. I do not want a non-responsive government entity/goverment observer over everything.
I did 5 years in federal prison and was a jailhouse lawyer, I know reality. Doesn't mean I need to volunteer to expand that. But you just give up and give in, that's your right.
Personally I relate to the American route of the last 200 years and believe in limited government power (you know, the same government power that abused it's authority when it gave out monopiles on communication infrastructure. I don't see how it's abusing power should result in...giving it more power?????). I posted above about how my house is denied US mail delivery because when my mother was dying of cancer she couldn't get to the mailbox in a timely manner and she dared appeal. Petty tyrants gonna tyrant and there are limited battles one person can fight.
Back when net neutrality was a big deal, there wasn’t nearly as much competition between ISPs. Now that cell data has improved and Starlink has launched, there is a floor on how bad a wired ISP can be.
Unfortunately, the solution that comes up to fix bad government policies is more government policies.
The intentions is usually good, but the consequences are always bad.
Wireless tech should help mitigate the natural monopoly that crops up when it’s difficult to build physical infrastructure to someone’s home.
Though it would be nice if multiple companies were allowed to lay fiber. It seems existing govt regulation prevents that, thereby creating the monopoly people complain of.
Tell that to Google fiber who got stonewalled on multiple cities even after they offered to pay for everything, front to back. It’s regulation causing the monopoly.
Enforcing net neutrality is just treating a symptom of the monopoly. Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.