Pretty impressed with the negativity here. Just a year ago, I remember all the stories on HN with people lamenting that the FCC doesn't have the guts to regulate broadband as a utility under title II [1,2,3] (admittedly with a minority speaking against title II, most prominently rayiner, whose comments I generally look forward to for an interesting contrarian view).
Y Combinator even published an open letter[4]. Quoting:
Title II of the Communications Act seems the most appropriate way to properly define broadband ISPs to be offering telecommunications. Speaking on behalf of Y Combinator, I’m urging you to adopt such a rule.
And here we are. It seems to me that the community has always been complaining about the different FCC approaches on the subject, and in favor of title II, until the FCC yielded. Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with.
People that want FCC to classify ISPs as a utility got what they want, and are pretty secure that things won't change, so they stopped making noise. People that don't want it didn't got what they want, and are at the last moments they can do something before it's definitive, so they are making a LOT of noise.
Hmm, that's an interesting way of looking at it. What I fear is more accurate though is there's a certain subset of people who equate complaining and criticizing with critical thinking. These people are less concerned with what ultimately happens, so much as they are concerned with how they can signal their discontent. They are the pedants at the party, picking apart conversations until everyone around them slowly moves to other parts of the room.
The new FCC proposal is also similar to the Mozilla Foundation's proposal from a year ago: In the key to our argument, we then ask the FCC to designate remote delivery services as telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act.
The EFF is in favor: If the FCC is going to craft and enforce clear and limited neutrality rules, it must first do one important thing. The FCC must reverse its 2002 decision to treat broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” This is what’s known as Title II reclassification. According to the highest court to review the question, the rules that actually do what many of us want — such as forbidding discrimination against certain applications — require the FCC to treat access providers like “common carriers,” treatment that can only be applied to telecommunications services.
Google’s Austin Schlick (Director, Communications Law) says that Title II reclassification will help Google Fiber compete on a level playing field with cable and phone companies:
This is a huge step forward for net neutrality, and it's based directly on work by people in “our” communities (Y Combinator, web businesses, tech non-profits...) who care a lot about protecting and growing the internet.
I'd also add that there's at least a couple of suddenly-prolific "green" commenters here today... which is interesting (but definitely not conclusive) as to what exactly is going on.
Personally, I'd go from the assumption that suddenly-prolific "green" commenters have some special interest in the topic. These days -- since HN has become mainstream -- I'd lean towards astroturfing or some other monetary interest.
"Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes."
"Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with."
Smart people are less predictable than those they have been marketing to previously. The biggest downside to this decision comes from the following line:
"But Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, will advocate a light-touch approach to Title II, they say, shunning the more intrusive aspects of utility-style regulation, like meddling in pricing decisions."
To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs (which is not surprising), yet it seems they're claiming to do this for the benefit of the country. I'm not sure I believe that what benefits the massive ISP/entertainment conglomerates is by proxy beneficial to the rest of us. The state of the video broadcasting industry, for example, would be one piece of evidence to my skepticism of this theory. Over-the-top linear broadcasting via the internet has been possible, at least technically, for a long time now. And we have the bandwidth in this country to pull it off. The roadblock are the major cable companies who are making far too much money in their complete dominative ownership of the infrastructure to deliver video (currently), as they do not want to lose that business. So even if television stations wanted to move to deliver completely over the internet (and apps), they would not be able to due to contractual obligations. Plus, the cable companies have so much money they can literally buy out anyone who tries to compete with them. It's not enough of a monopoly to be illegal, because these companies don't own each other (yet), but there's definitely a lot of collusion and back-room deals happening.
So, while it's not surprising to me to find this little difference in the laws between electricity/gas/water delivery and internet service delivery, it does make me feel a bit sad inside. Because I know, deep down, this law is made for the Comcast/Cox/Charter's of the world, not the people who use the service. Again, we are reminded that the loudest voices in politics are that way because they are the richest.
That said, the idea is correct...the Internet should be a utility, something you definitely need to have but also need to pay for. It's the next logical step to allow the government to provide more services over the Web, which is cost-effective for them, a better experience for us, and ultimately makes the government a much cheaper beast to run. Almost everyone wants the government to cost less, especially with the debt we accrue every year as a country...
This is really the difference between a liberal and a libertarian. Liberals think that somehow the regulation will never be tainted by economic forces. Libertarians realize it is, and that the best regulation is the itchy feet of a free market where you can just choose to not do business with companies whose policies you don't like.
By the time the internet is destroyed by regulation, those advocating for its complete nationalization will have forgotten that their ideological brothers are the ones who advocated its destruction.
You have seen this happen recently with obamacare-- the government regulated the healthcare industry into the ground, and now nationalized health insurance as a "solution", which is already not working.
Thus we have the old cliche: If you're not a liberal when you're young you have no heart, if you're not a conservative when older, you have no brain.
Have a heart, protect rights, libertarians agree with you, but learn from the history. IT has never worked.
>You have seen this happen recently with obamacare-- the government regulated the healthcare industry into the ground, and now nationalized health insurance as a "solution", which is already not working.
Because single payer works really well in other countries and has done for years, a fact that libertarians like to sweep under the carpet.
Obamacare isn't about extra government regulation and it never was. It was about taking an existing oligopolistic market and making purchase mandatory in exchange for a couple of minor concessions.
>Have a heart, protect rights, libertarians agree with you, but learn from the history. IT has never worked.
Or Liberals believe that regulation tainted by economic forces is preferable to a free market in a society that already allows corporations to essentially ignore regulation by paying minuscule fines that pale in comparison to their daily profit. If consumers haven't already moved on from these corporations then maybe regulation is our only protection.
The idea that deregulation would suddenly allow good citizen corporations to destroy evil actors is laughable in most circumstances.
Economic and environmental collapse is the frequent Tragedy of the Commons consequence of unregulated human activity (markets)... Cannery Row, Easter Island, Silphium, Raphus cucullatus, extinction of N. American megafauna.
In other words, regulation is a necessary "evil" to make unsustainable behavior illegal.
> By the time the internet is destroyed by regulation
There's a huge difference between "the internet" and "the internet delivery business". There is no free market in the ISP business as it hasn't been a competitive market since the days of DSL.
> To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs (which is not surprising)
"Light-touch" is a buzzword at the FCC. It refers to not killing investment into the market with FDR-style regulation. There's very few economists who would come to the defense of government price controls.
> Over-the-top linear broadcasting via the internet has been possible, at least technically, for a long time now. And we have the bandwidth in this country to pull it off. The roadblock are the major cable companies who are making far too much money in their complete dominative ownership of the infrastructure to deliver video (currently), as they do not want to lose that business.
The cable companies certainly do not want to lose the video business, and it would be disastrous for everyone if they did. If you look at these companies' SEC filings, video service is what justifies building the pipes in the first place. E.g. Charter, the largest "pure cable company" runs a loss, but without video service it'd be losing $1 billion a year.[1] See also this analysis of Verizon's FiOS build-out: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/a-bear-speaks-why-v... (concluding that VZN won't make up their investment for any type of customer, but triple-play customers will come closest).
One of the two major political parties has a stronger interest in reducing government regulation across the board to give corporations greater scope, even if that means stronger monopolies. You don't have to assume paid shills to get this outcome.
I don't get it. Why would any party prefer monopoly to free market? Formally neither Republicans nor Democrats are against free market (and preferring monopoly is being against free market). Unless of course it's all about corruption and bribery. I.e. monopolists paying those parties to do their bidding which is a common problem these days. But that again brings us back to paid shills or bought bureaucrats in this case.
OK. I'm being downvoted presumably because I sound partisan or something, butyou don't have to assume that the people posting here are paid shills because their view is politically mainstream, lots of normal people have these views without being paid. That's all I'm saying. You don't have to assume that one view is astroturfed when there are plenty of people who will line up to defend it for free.
> you don't have to assume that the people posting here are paid shills because their view is politically mainstream
That's exactly my point. No mainstream (even partisan) view is supporting monopoly. Such views are normally expressed by corrupted politicians and paid shills. Or you are suggesting that supporting corruption is now mainstream or that some party now is officially against free market even without being corrupted?
> There is definitely a mainstream view supporting the media companies
Supporting companies against excessive regulations in general and supporting monopolies (i.e. preventing antitrust restrictions and supporting aticompetitive market capture) is not the same thing. The first should serve freeing the market. The second serves only reducing its freedom, nothing else.
Also, consider that exactly the same companies who are against enforcing Net neutrality are perfectly fine with the politicians which write for them state laws which ban competition. I.e. blatant excessive regulation, and very unhealthy one with that. Those are the same companies and politicians which at the same time scream about how bad regulation will be if Net neutrality will be enforced. Hypocrisy much? Or may be they simply are against regulation which weakens their monopoly and pro regulation which strengthens it?
As you can see it has nothing to do with partisan or "mainstream" views on regulation in general. It's about greedy monopolists and their bought corrupted bureaucrats. Who in their normal mind would voluntarily support such a thing?
It might be tinfoil, but it makes one wonder why a significant net neutrality opponent (Verizon) is considering purchasing the largest (monetary) proponent (AOL). Granted VZN and AOL had joint ventures previously, but sealing such a deal would have a chilling effect.
> People who recognize that the internet has been a free market for most of its existence?
Really? I didn't notice any freedom in places where the only choice are some colluded monopolistic ISPs which in addition write state laws which ban competition. It's not called a free market. It's the opposite of it. All that talk about the magic "invisible hand of the market" is a pile of trash when monopoly is in place and turns that hand into a suffocating iron grip.
LOL, it's even better than that, AFAIK. ARPANET was a (D)ARPA project that to my knowledge was started to have computers start interoperating with each other so researchers at universities could easily and generally transfer data and information with each other, e.g. research papers.
You may have noticed the 'start' bit. The reason it was 'starting' is because prior to that, corporations did NOT want you to have computers that could talk to each other. That would weaken their grip on the market and ability to lock you in; when no computers can talk to each other, and your business depends on computers from Corp X, this is good for them: you can't go to anyone else. Printers, sockets, none of these are interoperable - you rely on them for everything.
As far as I understand, this is exactly what companies like GE did in those days. ARPANET was completely against everything they wanted, because it meant consumers were freed from their lock in. You could mix and match computers (perhaps cheaper, not-GE ones) with your GE machines, and you weren't beholden to their whims (oh, you need a better mainframe? Gotta upgrade all your machines so they can talk to each other!) And it's unlikely the 'free market' would have ever bore out the same result, and if it did, it probably would have only happened decades later.
Of course, good luck explaining this shit to a libertarian-infested hellhole like HN: they all believe they're on the cusp of Gettin' Big Bucks, so they don't want a market that allows competition, or a government that regulates anything they do. They want one that allows them to strangle competition with no repercussions or limits - they're just about to make it big after all as Uber Millionaires, and why do you want to steal their money!???!!
Like said elsewhere, Americans believe themselves to be impovershed millionaires, so they don't want to limit their future greatness. And of course, to build on what Carlin said: this is a part of the 'American Dream' because you have to be asleep (or braindead) to believe in it.
> Of course, good luck explaining this shit to a libertarian-infested hellhole like HN: they all believe they're on the cusp of Gettin' Big Bucks, so they don't want a market that allows competition,
I'm not sure where you get this idea. Libertarians are pro competition, not anti. So they are actually quite negative towards monopolies and support their prevention.
You say this, but most Libertarians do not really give a fuck about competition, only that the government does not interfere with corporations in any way, and they get theirs (no matter the cost to anyone else). Despite the fact there is boundless amounts of evidence of companies using their influence to force monopolies or crush competition.
Oh, but Libertarians don't like that (allegedly). Well then, their answer is simple: But if you don't like that, just move! Don't support that company! Bootstrap harder! Externalities don't real! That'll show those big mean old companies (nevermind the fact you don't have the money or ability to move or go without services like the internet, making the point moot).
At the end of the day, having dealt with many of them here in Texas, most libertarians are just dumbass 20 something white male Republicans who want to smoke weed and end the Fed. They're a joke, but they're a joke that exist on this site in quite a plentiful manner, as you can see. They don't care about the monopolistic control most ISPs have over their customers in plenty of places in the US. They only care that Obama doesn't get all up in their internet; everything else be damned.
> but most Libertarians do not really give a fuck about competition, only that the government does not interfere with corporations in any way
No, libertarians are against excessive control over society, not necessarily corporations. I.e. if corporation is a monopoly, it itself gets excessive control over society, so as such libertarians support preventing monopolies. That's the logic behind it. I've never seen a libertarian who is supporting monopoly. It simply sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Former network engineer here who built these big networks in the 1990s. At MCI and UUNET we used to talk about all the services we would build to compete with GeoCities and AOL. If only we didn't have to face our peers every Wednesday at informal meetings in the DC area and tell them that we would favor our own traffic over theirs at our interconnects. The traffic and interconnects were growing so fast we couldn't stop open peering and risk "killing the goose that laid the golden egg."
Now things are different. Comcast is a content company propped up by a cable monopoly. Title II? Hell yeah. But no price controls. Whatever it takes to get us to have the residential bandwidth of, say, Estonia.
We had de facto net neutrality until Verizon successfully gutted it a year ago. The FCC is trying to maintain the free market that has existed. Verizon is trying to turn the internet into cable TV.
It shows how effective the huge marketing push has been: not just the ads which are showing up everywhere but the concern-troll op-eds and faux-libertarian blog posts sprouting up all over the place from ideologically-negotiable writers who are coincidentally all suddenly very concerned about the possibility of prices going up and lauding the hyper-competitive free market we currently enjoy.
A lot of tech people think they're too smart to fall for propaganda but there are other people making a lot of money proving you just have to find the right spin.
Bottom line is that net neutrality comes out of the desire for people to be able to access any site they want without penalties due to traffic shaping or other shenanigans.
The reason they are concerned is that the cable companies and to a lesser extent wireless and DSL companies are doing this.
And why do they have the power to do this? Why don't people just vote with their feet and switch to a competitor?
Because they are all monopolies.
Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees.
Every provider of POTS service to your houses and apartments is a regulated monopoly. And while they have to let DSL companies access the lines and long distance competition, the barriers to entry are still there, and the level of regulation is stifling making it hard to compete.
Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them. And while multiple bands were sold, only 3 max bands were sold for mobile in any metro area, reducing competition. (The government claimed that they had to reduce competition to boost the prices that the spectrum sold for-- probably true-- monopolies are very valuable!)
So, in response, these companies engage in rent seeking, to cover the massive taxes they pay to the federal government but also to maximize the value of the monopoly they paid so much to establish.
And as a result, people get mad at this rent seeking and demand net neutrality.
And what do they propose as a solution? Regulation! Treat it like a utility!
Well, I worked in the electric industry. Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a monopoly over its area.
People pay way too much for electricity in this country as a result. And we have a poor service level-- like the brownouts in California a decade ago that were created when regulations made it illegal to both make and sell electricity, literally prohibiting the provisioning of additional supply. (which naturally the left decided to characterize as "de-regualtion". How making it illegal to provide electricity by regulation is "de-regulation" I'll never know.)
Seeing a lot of green accounts? probably people who know their karma will be killed for daring to speak out against the leftist desire to regulate everything, despite the fact that, once again, regulation is the cause of the problem. (I consider granting a monopoly and prohibiting competition to be "Regulation", though an extreme form of course.)
Nothing better exemplifies the old saying "Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure" then the calls for more regulation to fix the problems of regulation.
Most people won't subject their karma to the onslaught of down votes that daring to take a non-leftist position results in on this site.
But sometimes you have to take a stand.
And really, it's just astounding that people talk about net neutrality and pretend like these aren't government granted monopolies. Such denial!
> Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees.
In no city is the cable company actually a "locally granted monopoly." Every franchise agreement I've seen points out that it's non-exclusive.
Technologists have a fundamental misconception that leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance and confused reasoning: that building wireline infrastructure is a lucrative business that companies can't wait to get into, and would were it not for "regulatory capture" and legal roadblocks. But it's not. It's a business with large up-front costs, expensive maintenance costs, expensive unionized workforces, etc.
> Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them
You're punning on the word "monopoly." Anyone who owns property has a "monopoly" over it. But that does not make them a monopoly. In most cities, you have 3-4 options for wireless service.
> Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a monopoly over its area.
Most electric utilities are monopolies, because it's illegal to deploy competing electrical service.
In urban areas running cables and getting customers is indeed lucrative, because by running a cable into a building you reach all its numerous tenants, and there are more on the same block. Unfortunately, USA have a lot of semi-country low-density areas where there are few takers, or even would be none if it were not for regulations requiring a cable company to cover their entire area.
The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two companies offering cable service. If they weren't you other companies would compete.
Regarding wireless, you don't seem to understand how the industry is structured. While it's true there are many brand names on the shelf in walmart, there are only 3 actual providers in a given metro region. Virgin, for instance, uses Sprints network, which is a combination of deals done with the owners of spectrum across the country.
> The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two companies offering cable service. If they weren't you other companies would compete.
Nope.[1] Exclusive franchise agreements are illegal under federal law since 1996. There is no competition because the business proposition sucks. The only sensible play in most places is to try and target a niche market of wealthy neighborhoods that'll pay for the triple play. That is prohibited under most franchise agreements.
Four nationwide competitors isn't a monopoly any more than Pepsi and Coke are, who own almost all soft drink brands.
OK, it was legal prior to 1996 (was it the Cable Television Consumer Protection and Competition Act of 1992?), and majority of cable systems were established in the 20-30 years prior to 1996. So if a cable company was granted a monopoly by the government, and if it is able to keep competitors out because they enjoy monopolistic market share, isn't the critique fair?
If I want build a network in Comcast territory, there are very "new" customers. I have to go through an extremely expensive build out, and convince customers to switch. Meanwhile, Comcast can undercut me on price because they have already have infrastructure paid for. They can offer $1 internet to people trying to leave until I run out of money.
So yes, you are right that providers aren't currently monopolies, but they exist in markets distorted by being monopolies in the past.
edit: note that the Comcast/Time Warner mega providers grew themselves by buying up all the small ex-monopolies across the country - they didn't build out against them.
Some municipalities limit the structure of the entity offering the service however (eg. cannot be substantially and exclusively owned by the ratepayers, or their agent(s)), however the FCC seems to be working on getting those restrictions thrown out.
"... cannot be substantially and exclusively owned by the ratepayers ..."
Does that sentence mean that it's illegal for a municipality to form co-ops, and then for example lay their own fiber and then share the costs equally?
> The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two companies offering cable service.
You and others keep writing that when it is demonstrably false. Witnesseth:
Wide Open West - A cable overbuilder that serves Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, and portions of Chicago right alongside the "incumbent" cable company.
Wave Broadband - Its coverage area overlaps with Comcast in some (high net worth) areas of Seattle.
RCN - An overbuilder--the first one, actually--that serves New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia.
You don't see many overbuilders because building a physical plant network is VERY EXPENSIVE. Verizon's former CEO lost his job to a board that saw how expensive the FiOS buildout was--even though it will return its costs 10 times through not having to maintain the old fiber--and how it dragged on quarterly earnings reports. Instead of spending all of this money, companies retreat to where they don't have to compete so they can soak as much cash as possible out of their existing assets.
Instead of arguing about what the franchise agreements must or must not say based on what you imagine must or must not happen in each case, why not read the franchise agreements? Would appear to be the simpler, more accurate approach.
>Every provider of POTS service to your houses and apartments is a regulated monopoly. And while they have to let DSL companies access the lines and long distance competition, the barriers to entry are still there, and the level of regulation is stifling making it hard to compete.
Not true and this isn't how this works. I work for a small, competitive provider of communications services, including POTS service. While we're regulated, we're hardly a monopoly. Yes, there are barriers to entry, but they are usually driven by cost and scale. In many cases it's regulation that permits competition!
> Every provider of POTS service to your houses and apartments is a regulated monopoly
While the owner of the infrastructure probably could be considered such, they are required - by those same regulations - to allow third parties to resell the service.
The major critique quoted here comes from David Farber of Carnegie-Mellon, who worries that classifying Internet access under Title II will allow it to be taxed.
If that's the worst thing you can think of, we're in good shape.
Internet access could always have been taxed... I'm not sure what in non-Title II classification would have stopped that. Congress can slap a tax on just about anything they'd like.
In fact, if you were to believe Comcast, there are already regulatory fees and taxes associated with my internet access (non-TV).
Spectrum auctions (the costs of which are passed on to the winning telco's customers) are not only a tax, they're a tax that gets marked-up by a private company before being collected.
Very skillful framing of spectrum auctions as a tax. Would love to see this view pushed more widely, as society would reap some serious benefits... primarily large swathes of unlicensed spectrum.
In a light-touch regulatory framework, this could lead to innovation leaps. If anyone is familiar with the economics of Coase (generally credited with devising the spectrum auction scheme), would love to read some good counter-points.
Thanks for the kind words. To be honest, this framing doesn't seem skillful at all. It seems screamingly obvious (at least to me). What I can't figure out is why this view should need so much pushing in the first place.
In his own words (along with ), I think his bigger objection is that it will stifle innovation.
The history of telecommunications regulation tells a sorry story of glacial decision-making focusing on yesterday’s problems, inhibition of innovation, and, worst of all, what economists call “rent-seeking”—businesses’ use of the regulatory process to put their competitors at a disadvantage.
Yes, because clearly one-or-two possibly-colluding ISPs in your particular area are driven existentially towards increasing the value for you, the customer. Get real.
Besides, there's very little innovation in the actual IP layer anymore -- though, perhaps you could point to some? It's basically (by sheer domination) not displacable at this point. Hence QUIC and such things which could probably be done (even) better at a lower layer, but which for all practical purposes are dead in the water if they don't function above IP. (In the case of QUIC at the IP/UDP layer.)
You are right, there is no competition without choice. That has nothing to do with net neutrality. If this was the "encourage more local competition" act, then Farber probably wouldn't be worrying.
Setting aside innovation at the IP level, has your internet access improved over the years? Even in the Verizon/Time Warner duopoly I'm stuck in, I've gone from 768kb DSL to 10mb cable, to 75mb fios. Companies are driven existentially towards profits. When that doesn't mean creating value for the customer, then you typically don't have to look far to find rent seeking, monopolies, and misguided regulation.
I feel like many of the most fervent net neutrality supporters don't know what it means, and just feel like it is going lower their cable bill. Rude awakening ahead.
> You are right, there is no competition without choice. That has nothing to do with net neutrality.
Well, except it does. It has everything to do with NN. If you can't choose your ISP unless said ISP has agreements with, oh I don't know, the WB or Netflix or HBO (or whatever) then the competition has been stifled, or in terms your sponsors might understand better: freedoms have been curtailed. So, in short: Stop trying to mislead people.
Choice means more providers to choose from. Net neutrality is about the content on the wire. If it reduces congestion between Netflix and Comcast, great. But it still means people choose between slow DSL and expensive Cable. What will help is a third, fourth, and fifth options, and this doesn't help.
You don't need to be angry about it, no one is astroturfing, and no one spat on your mom. - grab a cold danish beer and enjoy one of your 5 broadband providers. Wish I had either option.
I don't. Watching TV on the internet is a waste of time. However, for some reason, Netflix congestion is perceived as such big problem that the government is taking over the internet.
Why are there only one or two ISPs in your area? Because of regulation. Cable companies are government granted monopoly. The reason you don't have cable choice is that monopoly. Local phone service, similar thing, though regulations have opened up long distance access, only one company has the infrastructure. Wireless Broadband, similar thing, artificial scarcity created by regulation (spread spectrum would support hundreds of local services) and spectrum auctions literally selling regulated monopolies created out of thin air. And while they did offer multiple bands, they limited it to only 3 monopolies per a given area (and one company has the choice band while the other two have lesser bands.)
The only reason these companies have power to shape traffic is the federal and local governments have given them monopolies.
Your posts in this thread have had the woe-is-me scream of the right wing, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not being disingenuous when you're being wrong.
There aren't one or two ISPs because of regulation, there are one or two ISPs because the barries to entry are discouragingly high. It's fantastically, stupefyingly expensive to run that much cable. There's a reason we as a country have paid for so much of it.
Wireless broadband and satellite are inferior goods and don't replace hardline connections. Even so, you seem to have this curious idea that spectrum usage isn't rivalrous...which is not exactly borne out by reality.
> There aren't one or two ISPs because of regulation, there are one or two ISPs because the barries to entry are discouragingly high
Infrastructure and Internet service used to be separate businesses at one point, the barrier was created when infrastructure owners were allowed to kick the other ISPs out. I had dozens of ISP choices when I signed up for DSL in 1998.
We're talking about the US government regulating a US industry. You say you live outside the USA and you have lots of choice and therefore what I say is "bullshit"? Really? That's your only attempt at an argument? Especially after you talk about your one or two possibly colluding providers?
I think it's unfortunate that anti-intellectualiosm has become so prevalent that you feel comfortable with a post that consists of nothing more than the word "bullshit" and an assertion that I must be astroturfing. Labeling the argument without a counter argument and then labelling me.
Learn to read separate statements as separate. Oh, and I was only using my particular situation as an example from which, perhaps, the US could learn a little bit.
In my particular country of residence, industries (including ISPs) are regulated quite heavily, and I hope I might be forgiven for thinking that this might have something to do with the rampant lack of monopolies in the ISP sector (in my particular country).
(I readily acknowledge that my original post was perhaps a little hasty and inflammatory, but one gets tired of this shit.)
While I can still reply and in retrospect: I sort-of agree. The astroturfing comment was out-of-line. I'm not sure "bullshit" can be construed as a personal attack, but... reprimand accepted nonetheless.
That isn't the worst by a long shot. I'm all for net neutrality, but Title II classification for ISPs really worries me.
I was co-founder of a VOIP startup in 2003, and a significant percentage of our time and resources was spent dealing with how the service was going to be classified for purposes of the Telecom Act. A bunch of the states were wanting to regulate VOIP providers as telephone companies, the FCC was on the fence (the pulver / fwd decision wasn't out yet[1]). Almost everyone was advocating for VOIP to be classified as a interstate information service so that we could avoid the onerous outdated state-by-state telephone company regulations. We got what we wanted (VOIP classified as a information service), but then a few years later we ran into the problem of ISPs blocking/interfering/throttling VOIP connections. The FCC in its first net neutrality foray went after some of the companies (See e.g. Madison River[2]) for blocking VOIP. However, the interesting thing was they could only go after Madison River under their Title II authority because Madison River happened to be a DSL provider and subject to Title II authority. When they went after Comcast for Bitorrent blocking of course they lost[3].
If we had been subject to Title II and regulation as a telecommunications service almost all of the states had regulations they would have applied to us included such gems as:
* tariff filing
* price caps or approvals
* required interconnection with legacy carriers
* requirements to use legacy telecom protocols
* surcharges for stuff like E911, relay service, universal service, etc.
* obtain state approval before offering new services or products or discontinuing services or products
* obtain state approval before opening a new facility
* provide notice to the FCC and the state of network changes
* intercarrier compensation
* mandatory build outs (to offer service you have to offer service through all of area X)
* required the use of specific accounting methods and cost assignment and reporting rules that make the tax code look simple and friendly
* countless other stuff down to things like how much and what kind of UPS capacity we would have.
Do we really want to open the door for every ISP to have to get approval from some government agency before it can interconnect to another network, put in a switch or open a new POP? They might not do it now, but once the regulatory framework is in place, it always seems agencies are willing to enact a new regulation a lot quicker than they are willing to get rid of one.
As an aside one of the things the ISPs were publicly saying around that time was that they didn't have the technology to block or degrade VOIP even if they wanted to. Of course now this sounds absurd, but some policymakers were buying it. We actually traveled to DC and ended up demoing for several of the FCC commissioners how easy this would be to do (along with how hard it would be to detect) with a couple of lines of code. On one of these trips we ended up in an elevator with Kevin Martin [4] who was chairman at the time. He said his opinion was it was a mistake for the VOIP providers to race to get classified as an information provider to avoid the state regulation, taxes, etc., because it was going to end up permitting the ISPs to block/degrade the service. I don't know if I agree with him, but I see his point now. In the end VOIP providers ended up subject to a lot of the regulations anyway (as "interconnected VOIP providers"), but without the protections of Title II[5].
I think something does need to be done about net neutrality but I think the best solution is to encourage competition and more/smaller ISPs instead of giving the FCC carte blanche to regulate the Internet as a utility. Dane Jasper of sonic.net has laid it all out much better than I could[6]. It is essentially giving up and saying we are going to live with Internet access being run by monopolies like the power company. It puts us back to the Bell System in 1982, and that makes me sad.
>It is essentially giving up and saying we are going to live with Internet access being run by monopolies like the power company. It puts us back to the Bell System in 1982, and that makes me sad.
What do you think we have now? A robust ecosystem of carriers?
Also, your post sounds a lot like you don't want Title II because you'll have to comply with regulations and you don't like the current system because instead of complying with regulations you found a loop hole and then the ISPs found a loop hole to throttle you. This whole post sounds like why it's bad for you and provides no reason why it would be bad for the vast majority of people.
> What do you think we have now? A robust ecosystem of carriers?
No, not at all. I think we pretty much have a duopoly with the cable company (Comast+TW) and the phone company (AT&T) as the only realistic choices for the vast majority of consumers.
>Also, your post sounds a lot like you don't want Title II because you'll have to comply with regulations and you don't like the current system because instead of complying with regulations you found a loop hole and then the ISPs found a loop hole to throttle you. This whole post sounds like why it's bad for you and provides no reason why it would be bad for the vast majority of people.
If that is what it sounds like I'm sorry because that was not what I wanted to convey. I wanted to convey that Title II regulation may solve the net neutrality issue in the short term, but may set a framework and precedent that will subject all ISPs (and the Internet) to other harmful regulations which could ensure we never move beyond the duopoly we have now. Remember cable companies and AT&T are masters of guiding agency regulation and state laws (see for example the state laws banning municipal fiber projects). They are probably going to lose this round because of the public outcry and their outrageous behavior regarding net neutrality, but we should be very weary of what they will be able to do with the new regulatory framework.
I don't have anything to do with the VOIP company anymore, my only skin in the game is as a ISP customer whose only choices are Time Warner and AT&T for internet access, both of which offer what I consider crappy service and speeds.
Although I actually spent several months and a bit of money looking to put together a local fiber ISP in my area, but in the end shelved (or put on hold) the plans due to a (mostly state/municipal) regulatory environment that was heavily tilted in favor of incumbent companies who were cable cos or telcos.
As someone that has been waiting for GFiber because of the lack of Title II classification, I say bring on the Title II. They already abuse their classifications when possible anyways.
Sure, but their name does not give them the ability to do a good job, an unpopular position given that they seem to be saving us from pay to play Internet fast lanes etc.
Utilities are the state of being useful, profitable, or beneficial. Utilities in the US are typically public, so the internet is a public useful, profitable and beneficial utility.
A utility is a platform that is standard/common so that more useful platforms can be built on top of it. Utilities become part of the stack of economic production. A utility could be seen as an economic standard.
If wireless and radio are utilities then so is broadband and wired.
It delivers more than just bytes. It's communication in different forms for different purposes. On the other hand, when water is delivered it's the same water here or there.
As for the water, once delivered it is used for drinking, for washing, for cooling, for watering...but it travels, unmolested, as water being commonly carried.
"different forms for different purposes" -- no it's not, it's all bytes. The ISP should not care or know what the purpose of those bytes are. The same way the electric company doesn't care what I plug into my outlets.
I'm not sure if English isn't your first language, but many words have several meanings. For example "providing utility" means "to provide something of use" per this[1] definition:
Utility, or usefulness, is the (perceived) ability
of something to satisfy needs or wants.
You're being obtuse on purpose. The name of the organization is Federal Communications Commission. They have the authority to regulate all interstate communications by radio, television, wire, satellite, and cable. The Internet absolutely falls within their jurisdiction.
Yes, and the power to drive a car is the power to commit vehicular manslaughter. The question is not whether a driver can use this power to kill. It's whether they are actually using this power to kill.
Needless to say, not evey tax is destructive, just as not every driver is a deadly menace who needs to be gotten of the road a.s.a.p.
That's nonsensical. It all depends on the utility of the smoker. Cigarette taxes are, in theory at least, Pigouvian taxes in the sense that the goal is to reduce the harm caused by smoking. They accomplish this in two ways, first, by providing funds to deal with the associated medical costs and two, by reducing the number of people who choose to smoke.
Whether you agree with the assessed level of negative externalities or not (I don't, actually), the tax hasn't "destroyed" anything. Smoking still exists. Fewer people get sufficient utility from smoking to go on doing so, but that's the point of the tax in this case. Too many people were smoking previously due to market inefficiencies. Now the "correct" (again, I believe the externalities were lower than many people believe they were) number of people are smoking.
It's not that he's incorrect. It's that his observation is generalized to the point of being a useless distraction from this particular conversation. Had he indicated how the potentially destructive power of taxation is actually being used destructively and deliberately in this particular case, he'd have said something knowledgeable and interesting. But of course, that's not what happened.
No, bad. The federal government is no where near its smallest size and no one is happy with how they're executing. The last thing we need is to give them more money and power.
People are unhappy with partisan gridlock, not with the services government provides (i.e. people hate politicians but friggin' love Social Security and Medicare).
I see this argument a lot but it seems specious to me - though anyone can voluntarily overpay their taxes, the lack of a guarantee that other taxpayers will similarly be contributing more means that my personal overcontribution will be meaningless to everyone but me.
Can we maybe try cutting back on optional trillion-dollar wars instead, and see how that goes? Just as a temporary experiment? If it doesn't work out, you can always raise my taxes later.
When someone misuses their money, you shouldn't react by giving them even more. Really, is this such a radically-offensive position for me to take?
No of course not, and I'd like to see less tax money spent inefficiently as well. My point was simply that it's specious to tell any one advocate of increased taxation that they should just foot the bill out of their own private pocket. That's not the point of taxation.
What is the best way to answer people like that, then?
I think it's specious for him/her to ask other people to pay more money when the existing funds are being managed so badly. Clearly he/she wholeheartedly approves of the current Federal budget, but it's not valid to assume that the rest of us feel that way. It's just another case where people cut the government some slack that they'd never grant to a corporation.
At least you're admitting that you want more taxes so that everyone else is forced to pay for stuff you want. It's the nature of taxation, obviously, but it's so often hidden being euphemisms.
It's also theoretically the nature of democracy - people pool their assets and collectively decide what to do with them. Not every individual member is going to feel like they're paying in what they want or getting out of it what they want, and everyone's a critic. But where you say, "everyone else is forced to pay for stuff you want," I think the less belligerent statement of principle would be, "everyone collectively pays for what the majority decide on."
"Everyone collectively pays for what the majority decide on" is technically correct (assuming for the moment that budgetary issues actually correlate with the population's desires, and omitting for the moment people who pay no taxes), but it is phrased in a way that seems intended to obscure the fact that you as an individual are forced to pay regardless of both your acceptance of your government's policies and the institution of democracy itself.
To me, net neutrality is pretty much a red herring.
I have had good and bad internet service in my life. The least reliable was at my somewhat rural childhood home from TWC.
The best is my current connection from that most reviled of companies, Comcast. I have had no service interruptions, and I get a reliable 50Mbps at all times of day (I check regularly with speed tests and checking Torrent activity).
The reason my internet service (and customer service experience) has been so good here is that I have two viable alternative providers, a high speed DSL carrier offering similar speeds and rates in the city, and a local fiber provider (recently introduced 10Gbps connection - yes you are reading that correctly).
While I would prefer to have no rate limiting based on usage or content, I don't view this as some inalienable right. There is a price I'm willing to pay for that service, but there is also a price low enough where I'm happy to accept rate limiting. I'd like to have the choice.
The problem seems to be that the competition which gives me the service I'm happy with and the regulation regarding whether I am even allowed to reason about my preferences as in the above paragraph keep getting tied up with one another.
To me the biggest benefit comes from having multiple options in providers. A legal monopoly who can't do rate limiting can still give me awful service. Many providers who can rate limit will most likely give me service I'm happy with, even if the plan is rate limited.
The history of utility regulation is rife with cases of legally enforced monopolies.
Yes, of course if most American were as lucky as you, net neutrality wouldn't be an issue. But the reality is that most of us are under a monopoly.[1] And it will take years and billions of dollars in infrastructure to enable the kind of competition that you are already enjoying.
After suffering under Comcast's Netflix throttling last year, I don't want to hear utopian talk about encouraging competition. I want laws that fix the problem today by making those damn QoS firewall rules illegal. Of course I also want regulations and incentives to encourage broadband competition, but in the mean time net neutrality is a important stop gap.
The point of my post is not "Hooray for me!", but was to point out that my good service comes from competition, and that the focus on rate-limiting of net neutrality is just a red herring.
The thing with regulation is that it is pernicious, and once created becomes very difficult to get rid of.
Let's walk through a hypothetical: Rate-limiting becomes illegal today, and simultaneously some arbitrarily effective incentive is put in place that will provide opportunities for new entrants to the market within 5 years.
Now fast forward a few years. New entrants are trying to compete in the market place. One proven effective way to gain a foothold in a market with entrenched players is to offer a loss leader. Say a new firm figures out that it can gain a lot of customers with a specific strategy - a cheap plan that is very restrictive on total bandwidth, except for Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix. For a huge number of people this would be a great deal - limited bandwidth for most things, but unlimited for the services they use the most. Unfortunately for this potential entrant to the market, their most effective tool for displacing an entrenched competitor has been deemed illegal.
A regulation that solves a short term problem may limit our options in the future negatively.
If there must be regulation, I would prefer to see regulation that does not limit my choices. Given a low enough price, I would be very happy to have a throttled internet connection.
Again, my point in the parent was not to brag or say hooray for me. My point was that I have great service because I have choices. In proportion to the limits of my choices, there are limits to my happiness with the service.
I do not intend to speak for you, but I'd like to rephrase your sentiment - not to argue with you or your experience, but to put it in the context I am interpreting the situation in. You aren't upset because Comcast offers _a_ plan that throttles Netflix, rather you are upset that you did not choose that plan. While in the short term eliminating that choice may improve your situation (or maybe Comcast offers worse service or raises the price or otherwise adjusts its behavior in a way that makes you feel worse off), in the long term it is impossible to make people better off by reducing the options which they may consider.
> New entrants are trying to compete in the market place. One proven effective way to gain a foothold in a market with entrenched players is to offer a loss leader.
We could more than make up for this hypothetical disadvantage by regulating the big players to share their last mile infrastructure like we've done with cell towers and land lines. A MUCH bigger issue than ISPs startups is that the next Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix will never even get their chance because they can't compete on an Internet that doesn't offer net neutrality. Netflix paid off Comcast for their "high speed track". But no small startup could have afforded this extortion.
> The thing with regulation is that it is pernicious
Yes, regulations and big government suck. I get it. But how do you propose to fix the deeper problem that we're mostly all living under a monopoly? How long will this take?
> You aren't upset because Comcast offers _a_ plan that throttles Netflix, rather you are upset that you did not choose that plan.
Yes, I don't have a choice. Thanks again for the reminder. So what's you solution again? You remind me of my family in Florida calling to today to tell me how bad the snowstorm is outside my house. Wouldn't it be so much better if we all lived in Florida with multiple broadband ISPs to choice from?
First, offering an alternative solution is not a necessary component of arguing that a given proposal is objectively bad.
Here's an excerpt from another point in this thread:
>If regulation must occur, then I would prefer to see it happen in a manner that increases rather than decreases my choices. Forbidding a certain pricing strategy does not increase my choices. If regulation must occur, then I'd like to see something along the lines required sale of excess infrastructure capacity. This could happen in terms of utility pole access (the majority of which are not owned by telecoms to my understanding[0]), or through sale of excess bandwidth in an ISP's network.
This is definitely an "if" for me though. It seems that the majority of ISP monopolies we see grew out of the exclusive cable franchises offered by many (most?) municipalities when cable TV was becoming a thing. Since public rights of way were/are (depending on current status of these franchises) and pole access can be granted without adding new regulations, and permission from the city is all that's needed to bury wire, it would seem that these are the best first steps. If it turns out that the advantage granted to incumbents by their past franchises are too great (i.e. we do not see improvements in ISP service/quality), then the idea above of mandatory leasing of excess infrastructure capacity starts to make more sense.
First of all, I don't buy your argument that the proposal is bad. Your hypothetical situation where net neutrality could harm startups is so contrived it almost sounds like you are trolling. The odds of a future ISP competing by brokering a deal with the big content providers to undercut the established ISPs is never going to happen.
The government failed to protect most of us from living under a broadband monopoly. It's a bitter pill to swallow but the only solution is regulation. If you want to sunset net neutrality rules after 90% of Americans have a real broadband choice, fine. But until that day comes, internet startups and broadband customers alike need net neutrality regulations.
The government did indeed fail to protect most of us from living under a broadband monopoly. In most cases by municipal governments granting exclusive franchises to cable (television) providers who have become our ISPs. The solution to such an exclusive contract is not to prohibit rate-limiting, but to allow competitors to enter the market.
Access to utility poles, granting rights-of-way to lay wire, or if positive action must be taken, enforcing excess bandwidth leases all address the issue much better.
As I began the thread with, the rate-limiting argument that makes up the thrust of the argument of net neutrality is at best a red herring.
Edit: Also, I did not suggest in my hypothetical that a startup ISP would broker a deal with major web companies, only that they might offer free bandwidth to consumers for those services as a loss leader. I further did not intend to suggest that without rate-limiting we would see no ISP startups. I was suggesting that disallowing the practice removes one tool (out of multiple tools) that a new entrant could use to effectively compete with an incumbent. Removing effective tools of competition can hurt consumers.
I have yet to see a convincing argument that prohibiting rate-limiting will increase competition among ISP providers.
Further, I think it's fairly obvious what I think of our government's likelihood to get any regulation regarding ISPs right. I prefer to limit the surface area of potential mistakes.
Finally, I haven't seen evidence of significant rate-limiting in areas with multiple ISPs. If this is the case, then increased competition on its own gets us both what we see as the ideal solution, whereas making rate-limiting illegal only gets you part of the way to what you want.
I am using personal pronouns conversationally, not in belief that you and I are the only people with either of these positions.
And once this new company that limits everything that is not Facebook, Twitter and Netflix gains a large market share, how will any new company ever compete with Facebook, Twitter and Netflix?
How did HBO compete with NBC? How do we have any channels besides PBS for that matter?
How does any paid app compete with any free app?
Why do we have netbooks when a a Raspberry Pi costs $35 and (the 2 at least) can do everything most consumers do on a computer?
Your question carries with it the assumption that an ISP should be responsible for ensuring the success of application and website developers. Would you make the analagous argument that cable (television) providers have a responsibility to ensure high production values of television shows? Would you argue that a road-crew is responsible for the quality of your destination? These are all means of accessing something, and the content you get via the means of access need not be the purview of the provider of the means of access.
Furthermore, my hypothetical is only to show a possible consequence of limiting the bargaining choices of multiple firms in a market with competition.
To go a bit broader, your question makes it clear that we have very different views on net neutrality. I view rate-limiting as entirely neutral. There is a price at which I would be happy to accept a rate-limited connection. There is also a ceiling at which I would not choose a completely unthrottled connection. I would not like a rate-limited connection to be my only choice, but depending on price, I would also not like a completely unthrottled connection to be my only choice. Ultimately, though, my stance comes down to choice. I want more choice. By limiting the terms which I may legally choose to enter into a contract with a service provider, I am made worse off.
A closer analogy in the road-crew case would be a crew introducing obstructions to or closing lanes in roads that exit toward particular destinations, based on how much money the owners of businesses located at those destinations paid them. If the crew wanted to do their job and maintain the roads as the road conditions required, keeping their sights on the piece of infrastructure under their purview rather than butting into the logistically irrelevant question of the drivers' ultimate destinations, then sure, they shouldn't be responsible for the experiences at those destinations. But if they do butt in, one may certainly look askance at their business practices.
Indeed, to take the analogy even more literally, you'd practically be saying that it wasn't a certain governor's responsibility that drivers suffered from his decision to arbitrarily close bridge lanes as a political move.
To be fair, obviously roads are maintained by the government and thus form a monopoly, while you're arguing that these decisions can be positive only in the presence of competition. But I find it hard to see why such dysfunctional maintenance would be encouraged in any situation.
Thanks for at least engaging with this instead of downvoting with no response.
I would argue that you are putting a negative spin on the analogy, so I'll put the corresponding positive spin on it to balance out.
For the road crew, we expect them to give us ready access to the places we most want to go. Imagine a highway - we would judge it a poor highway indeed if there were no exits within 10 miles of a large city. Similarly we do not expect the highway crew to give us equal access to some rural area, even though someone might one day build a fine resort out there. We don't judge a road by how well it gives access to things not yet built, but how well it gets us to the places we want to go.
Using that spin, we should actively encourage ISPs to make paid fast lanes, akin to a tolled expressway, with preferential access to the most common web destinations.
I do not agree with that conclusion. What I do think is that focusing on whether or not a company is allowed to perform any sort of rate-limiting ignores the much bigger issue that competition has been historically stifled in the ISP sector. Many (most?) municipalities offered exclusive franchises to cable (television) providers which made competitive entry illegal. Those cable providers are now our locked-in ISPs. If we must have government action, it seems to me that the best course is to allow freer entry into the market - this looks like allowing competitors rights-of-way to lay wire, allowing access to utility poles (based on my recollection the majority are not owned by telecoms - I should be fact checked on that, though), and dissolving any exclusive franchise agreements. Rate-limiting, as I started this entire thread with, is just a red herring.
(Final pedantic point - road work is done by a multitude of private firms contracting for the government - it is monopsony not monopoly.)
The reason his analogy is more accurate then yours is because adding exits has a meaningful additional cost. Providing preferable service to certain sites is not building better networking infrastructure to those places, it is just worsening the existing service to everywhere else.
And then everybody would switch to this new and cheaper service. Then your website, which isn't on the list, wants a fast connection too. For a fee the ISP would gladly make your service faster. However, many could not afford this and would go out of business. This, ironically, would limit your "choice" on the other side.
No, those consumers who judge that that level of service is a better deal for them would switch.
To step back a bit, what I posited was only a hypothetical to show how such a choice might limit competition down the line.
To step back even further, your post makes it clear that we have an ideological difference here. I do not view rate-limiting as inherently bad. There is a ceiling above which I would not be willing to pay for a completely unthrottled connection. There also exists a price at which I would be happy to take a throttled connection.
My general preference would be for an unthrottled connection, but my preferences do not exist in a vacuum. The price difference where I would choose the throttled connection would have to be quite large, and the throttled vs unthrottled rates would also come into play.
Further, some of my favorite websites would not be much affected at all. This site, for example places a miniscule load on my connection and minimal data transfer in a month.
I don't generally frequent multimedia sites. I utilize an RSS reader for blogs, so that bandwidth is also fairly minimal (especially if I choose to omit images). Email is text for the most part. A website could compete very well with minimal bandwidth for any of these purposes.
Furthermore, you assume that the bandwidth would be throttled always, and I've gone along with that. There are other rate-limiting strategies that might be chosen. One might be a data transfer cap, beyond which the bandwidth is throttled. Another might be peak-hour throttling, in which case my late-night browsing would be unaffected (and I do a lot of that).
One plan that would be pretty tempting for me is unlimited Netflix and Pandora with a reasonable data cap (I haven't tracked my monthly transfer rates lately so couldn't say what would be reasonable here).
Further, I've not suggested that this be the only plan available. I merely suggested it (hypothetically) as a manner in which a new entrant might gain enough market share to establish itself as a player. The more ISPs there are, the more likely one is to offer service you like. The more you restrict the terms an ISP may offer, the harder it is for them to compete.
I hope this thought process helps clear up where I am coming from.
Finally, I ask whether you consider toll roads immoral, or whether you hold your cable (television) provider responsible for the (production/acting) quality of the television shows you watch, or if you want to stick up for HBO and how downtrodden it is by NBC? The provider of the means of access has no moral imperative to provide equal access to all content.
It's not a question of morality. What it boils down to is which side are you on. Do you care more about ISPs and their ability to do whatever they want in order to maximize their profits, or do you care more about the health of the ecosystem (Internet)?
In your hypothetical, if an ISP could come with an offering that would hurt the ecosystem (by favoring X against Y, and hence not allowing the Internet to be a leveled playing fields) but offer some savings for its customers then I would be against it. It's far more important to maintain a leveled playing field than save a few pennies here and there.
However, looking at other developed countries and their offerings, we can certainly conclude that what we get now is the worst of both worlds -- expensive monthly cost and throttling -- so there's plenty of room for improvement (cheaper service) while maintaining net neutrality.
I do absolutely agree with you that ISPs are in a poor state in the majority of the US. I think a lot can be done to improve it. I disagree strongly that net neutrality is the most important or most effective lever to push on.
As I have made clear, and as I think is fairly obvious to anyone who has moved between various ISP markets in this country, I believe that the quality of internet service is positively correlated with the number of providers in an area. I have cheap and reliable internet with three ISPs. None of the three throttle their connections in this market, and one has just introduced 10Gbps fiber to the home. The fiber provider is actively expanding, but even if you don't live on a street with access, you can get cheap reliable service from either of the remaining two.
I think it would be better for any individual in the US who cares about their internet access to move their markets in a direction from one ISP to more ISPs (like the area I live in) than to pass a law enforcing net neutrality and forbidding any kind of rate-limiting.
I do care about ISPs being able to offer me as many types of service as possible, and me being allowed to choose the service I prefer. Again, my general preference is for unlimited internet, but my preferences are bounded by costs. Another hypothetical: Suppose I am willing to pay $15 for internet access, and the only service an ISP is willing to offer at that price is throttled in some way (data cap, certain sites slower, whatever scheme). If you eliminate this as an option, then you have eliminated my access entirely, because $15 is my limit. In this way, marginal customers may be harmed by net neutrality.
I am not convinced by the argument that the internet will be ruined if some internet service contracts are rate-limited in some way. The biggest threat to the next (Google|Facebook|Twitter) is not any ISP, but (Google|Facebook|Twitter) existing and having a large network effect for its services. And to be honest I have not seen much more argument beyond this point. Even if I were to accept this argument, I think the pathetic internet connections that some people in the US have (there are people still on dialup and <5Mbps isn't that rare in rural areas based on my experience) would provide a bigger impediment to the-next-big-thing reaching all of its potential market than any rate-limiting. Multimedia content, especially, is awful on a slower connection. And no regulation of rate-limiting will do a thing to increase speed and reliability of networks - at absolute best it has 0 effect.
Forgive me if this is a misinterpretation, but you seem to jump from my hypothetical of _one_ ISP out of >1 in a market offering _a_ plan that is rate-limited in some way (what if it is just a data limit? This does not favor any portion of the web over another.) to there being no un-rate-limited service contracts available. I find this incredibly unlikely, primarily due to the huge unpopularity of rate-limited plans among a vocal minority of internet users.
Finally, I am quite confident that two ISPs fighting for my dollars are more likely to offer me something I want than two ISPs fighting for a favorable interpretation of some regulation.
I'm not arguing for less competition, far from it. If anything, the lack of competition is probably the main cause of the current situation.
However, net neutrality is the bare minimum. We should also advocate for more competition, just not at the expense of neutrality. Imagine we would let a grocery store lax the quality control on their products. They could sell more for cheaper, but the number of people who would get sick (or die) would increase. In a similar way, allowing ISPs to fiddle with throttling would have far negative effects for everybody. (it's not a direct analogy so please don't try to break it, that's not the point).
The $15 price range you mention is very doable, with much faster speeds than we currently have AND without having to compromise on neutrality. Our worldwide ranking is pretty depressing -- compared to what we could/should have. All these foreign ISPs are able to offer cheaper and faster connections without messing with neutrality. If ISPs must segment their offerings in any way then let them do it by speed (which they already do) or by how much data you can download/upload per month, but not by compromising net neutrality.
I think we'll just have to disagree on the actual import of rate-limiting. I do agree that competition is very important.
What I'll leave it with is this: prohibiting rate-limiting at best does nothing to increase competition among ISPs (I have not seen any arguments against this), whereas rate-limiting behavior is something I've never seen in a market with multiple viable ISP choices (by which I mean that dialup and satellite are not close enough to broadband to count). As I started this entire thread with, rate-limiting seems like a red herring.
There is a real problem with lack of choice, slow build out, etc... You are clearly affected, and want action, but what makes you think this is going to help? Net neutrality is great, but it isn't going to speed things up, it isn't going to increase competition. Arguably, it will slow them down as companies invest less in infrastructure because they perceive it as less profitable.
Unfortunately some things fall into the naturally monopoly category (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly). Figuring out what those are is an ongoing process. Government regulated industries get a bad rap these days - mostly because deregulation has been an ongoing fad for the last 30 years or so - but a lot of these have great track records. The California electricity crisis provides an instructive example of what kinds of effects deregulating an industry that was previously govt regulated can have - in short, significantly higher prices for badly degraded service [1]. Many of the proposed fixes are further govt intervention, but this time in the form of subsidies to businesses rather to incentivize necessary expansions rather than outright re-acquisition of the industry.
So in short, competition isn't necessarily always good and doesn't always produce better results. In addition, de-regulated industries aren't necessarily free from government intervention and are opened up to market manipulation and exploitation.
See siblings for thoughts on California. Deregulation can be done poorly or well. For a counter-anecdote, see the story of Southwest, an airline started with solely intrastate routes, which kept it from FAA regulation and allowed it to compete on price in a way that other airlines couldn't. It now carries the most domestic passengers[0], is highly rated for customer service, and has posted >40 straight profitable years (including the span of the most recent recession)[1]. FAA regulation was considered necessary due to the high fixed costs associated with operating an airline.
I am fully aware of the concept of a natural monopoly (econ major here), but the fact is that the majority of cable providers were granted exclusive franchises by municipalities. You may object to the source, but I am at work and don't have time to track down other support for this statement. Hopefully we can both accept the facts even if you object to the reasoning[3]. The article is talking about cable television, but since the incumbent ISPs are the same firms as the cable television providers, I hope you can agree that the analysis, regardless of your agreement or disagreement, is at least relevant.
Finally, there are many areas with multiple cable companies/ISPs (I live in one, and recently moved from an area where Verizon made a large FiOS investment and is competing very effectively with TWC - I do know that they've put a stop to expansion on FiOS). It is clearly possible to see competition in this area. The fact that many/most municipalities offered exclusive franchises and that we now see many monopolies in this area is only proof that many people _believed_ cable service to be a natural monopoly, not that it is. The fact that we see areas with competition in this sector is a strong piece of evidence that natural monopoly is not the case.
> Mostly because deregulation has been an ongoing fad for the last 30 years or so
Not all deregulation produced good results. On the contrary, a lot of it produced bad results, because it was often intended for selected interests and not for everyone.
Comcast is great on the surface and in the short term; good bandwidth, few outages.
The knife-twist comes when they decide to impose data limits with essentially punitive caps designed to quash competition, or dramatically "monetize" your accustomed use of their product.
I don't think that making them a utility is a great answer either; this opens the door to taxes that are disconnected from use and politicizing connections based on content. I think the long-term resolve to keep bandwidth competitive will be lost when governments see it as a cash cow (of course you don't mind another penny per gigabyte, because it pays for roads/schools/whatever).
A structure that encourages (or even requires) competition would be best, I think. Maybe neutrally administrate that last mile and share it between all parties (sorry, TWC and Comcast, you had your chance, now we've nationalized your build-out because you couldn't play fair).
Again, and not in a "hooray for me, sucks to be you" way, I have options to choose from. These options make it unlikely for Comcast to behave in that manner in my market. If they do, I may easily switch to another provider.
If they are forbidden from rate-limiting me, they still have many dimensions by which to potentially decrease my happiness with their service. If they are my only option and they are forbidden from rate-limiting me, then they are likely to change their behavior in a way I will not be happy about along one of those other axes.
If regulation must occur, then I would prefer to see it happen in a manner that increases rather than decreases my choices. Forbidding a certain pricing strategy does not increase my choices. If regulation must occur, then I'd like to see something along the lines required sale of excess infrastructure capacity. This could happen in terms of utility pole access (the majority of which are not owned by telecoms to my understanding[0]), or through sale of excess bandwidth in an ISP's network.
[0] This is based on my recollection of readings I have done in the past, no current links. The question then becomes if the poles are not owned by ISPs (in general - in some cases they are) then why can entrants to the market not lay their own lines? This would be viable in proportion to the size/density of the market.
Of course competition would be the best solution but in case you didn't know, infrastructure is massively expensive and that greatly limits the ability for a new comer to enter the market even on a regional level.
It is in every ISPs best interest to be the sole provider of service in an area because they will have a better adoption rate and thus remake their investment quicker. This is the whole basis behind Comcast's argument in favor of the Time Warner take over, they aren't reducing competition because they each have their own areas where they operate so they so don't compete in the first place.
Think about that for a minute, the CEO of the biggest ISP in America admitted that they do not compete with the second biggest ISP.
There is a finite amount of competition the infrastructure market can handle due to high costs of entry and diminishing returns on that high cost as more players enter the market in an area. There is a finite amount of customers an ISP can have in any given area, it may make sense to build out to a market if you are going to be the only provider but if you are going to be the second or third provider your customer base is going to be smaller and as you start cutting up the available customer base there is likely not enough there to spend the upfront costs of building the infrastructure if you aren't going to get the amount of customers you need to support it.
The ISPs are already monopolies regardless of net neutrality rules, net neutrality will just require a certain level of fairness in how they treat the traffic of the content that passes through them. I would support requiring ISPS to open their wires for lease by competitors but net neutrality seems like a great second option if that is politically unfeasible.
DSL speeds "similar" to 50mpbs? How similar? The fastest AT&T offers DSL is 6mbps (it's my only option). I thought that was a hard limit on the technology, but googling it produces varying results.
I do not feel dishonest calling 40Mbps similar to 50Mbps[0]. This is limited based on proximity to the provider. I live in Minneapolis proper, so this is an option for me. DSL can scale up to 1Gbps[1].
Nah, there's no real limit. It all depends on the longest distance between a sender and a receiver (there might be more than one on your last-mile) the quality of the cable and output power on the sending end. European cities seem to have settled one 15mbps as both standard and max, American ones seem to have settled on lower. The phoneline infrastructure was probably not as good.
Law does not operate in a vacuum because, in the end, it is closely tied to power - to fine, to jail, to sanction, to regulate and restrict - and that makes it scary when it becomes unhinged from a sense of principle in its application.
Is it wise, then, to grant unchecked, plenary power over the internet to the government in the name of trusting that those who currently exercise the F.C.C.'s power will exercise that power with self-imposed restraint? Lord Acton's dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely comes to mind in considering the implications of this step. Once we grant that the F.C.C. has open-ended authority to do what it wants with the internet, where is the formal protection against abuse and who will exercise it. Certainly the courts will not. The Telecommunications Act being relied upon here certainly grants the formal authority to do this. Those who passed that Act did so 80 years ago and never contemplated that it would be so applied. But the courts will say, it was for Congress to make the law and for the appointed agency to administer it within the bounds laid out by the legislature, and that means this exercise of authority will be upheld. But so too will any attempt by the F.C.C. to impose detailed regulations over pricing, usage, and all sorts of other areas that those who favor a free and open internet clearly do not desire. Once this step is taken, all formal protections against abuses of this type are gone. What, then, is the remaining form of protection. It is that we choose to trust those who exercise open-ended power to use "restraint." They assure us they would never change the way things are. They will never succumb to the power and influence of lobbyists. They will never exercise so vast a power that is given to them without checks for any corrupt motive. After all, governments worldwide and throughout history have demonstrated that they can be trusted with unchecked power without abusing their citizens. And so we can all rest easily knowing that our benign government is and will always remain in good hands and will always keeps its promise. After all, who needs the formal protections of the rule of law when you can give all over to the discretion of leaders who will be wielding the very powers whose potential abuse we all fear. So, for those who want net neutrality at any cost, the end justifies the means and any fear in principle of giving unchecked theoretical power to an unaccountable governmental agency goes out the window in pursuit of the immediate goal of net neutrality and in trusting current leaders who tell us that they really never intend to use all those unchecked powers. I truly hope that is so but I am very saddened that people never learn the lessons of history about what can happen when political leaders suddenly find themselves with vast amounts of unchecked power.
The free internet we know today will be utterly dependent on their good graces. I for one am not so sanguine as others about where this may lead.
Notably, in those countries where there are national blacklists of unapproved sites (including those with legal systems like the US, such as the UK and Australia), it is typically the local equivalent of the FCC that maintains and enforces the blacklist.
Except for the part where ISPs were regulated under Title II up until the late 90s.
>The free internet we know today will be utterly dependent on their good graces.
That may be the single most uneducated statement about Title II I've seen to date. What SPECIFICALLY in Title II allows the FCC to restrict what content the ISPs provide to the public? Hint: there isn't any language whatsoever giving them that ability.
We were? 90s ISPs regulated by Title II? What? No we weren't.
I started managing ISPs during the dialup era and played shepherd to a field of Livingston Portmasters. I migrated us to racks upon racks of Ascend boxes during the 56k modem wars. I set up ISDN PRIs and DS1 terminations. I turned up our DS3s and set up our first default-free peering. I left just before the DSLAMs went in.
At no point were we ever subject to Title II regulations. We priced however we wanted to price, we shaped traffic however we needed to (we virtually never did that).
DSL was covered under Title II until wireline ISPs in general were ruled as an "information service" rather than a "telecommunication service" by the FCC in 2005 in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in NCTA v. Brand X upholding the FCC's earlier (2002) declaratory ruling finding that Cable modem internet access was an "information service".
I'm lost. EnterAct/21stCenturyCable/RCN, the ISP I worked for --- starting as employee #2 --- wasn't subject to Title II, despite offering DSL service. Is it possible that this DSL ruling was a wrinkle that affected only ILECs? The ILECs were, of course, heavily regulated... hence the emergence of the CLEC market. The upthread comment did not say ILECs; they said "ISPs".
Sure, but we as the ISP were free to shape traffic, establish arbitrary fee structures, and charge for specific uses of the Internet despite the fact that we made use of Title II regulated phone company PRIs.
I'm not saying that Title II didn't exist in the 1990s. It just didn't govern ISPs.
As a libertarian who knows tech, I'm on the government's side here, although I'm grimacing while I'm supporting them. It's simply the lesser of two evils.
One thing to help clarify the debate if you're talking to somebody who opposes this move: do not confuse the issue of how the government should be treating utilities in general with whether or not the internet is a utility. We can have a grand old time debating the overreach of a regulatory statist society, but that has got jack squat to do with the issue at hand. Is the internet more like electricity, where you pay so much for a bucketful, and then you can do whatever you want with it? Or is it more like Star Wars, where George Lucas and Disney can charge us 17 times at 17 different rates for different versions of what is essentially the same thing? These are two different discussions to be had; do not let folks conflate them into one.
>As a libertarian who knows tech, I'm on the government's side here
That's an oxymoron.
The core reason internet service sucks for the vast majority of Americans is because state and local governments grant monopoly status to the ISP cartels. This move by the FCC does nothing to remedy that and consequently will not solve the problem. If they require higher "standard" of internet without doing away with the monopolies, for the vast majority of people this will only mean a higher bill.
>> Do you think there is any such thing as a natural monopoly?
> I am not aware of any.
I think, judging by your username (ancap), you are philosophically opposed to the concept, because the existence of natural monopolies would represent a failure of the pure free market capitalism you promote.
I doubt I will convince you, and I doubt anyone else here needs to be convinced that natural monopolies exist.
>> Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?
> No, otherwise the "natural monopoly" existed before the first company ever laid cables.
This simply does not make sense, which is further evidence that you're opposed to the concept. The high fixed costs of the laying of the cables relative to the small marginal cost of adding a new subscriber once cables have been laid is what creates a natural monopoly in this context. The massive economies of scale which are only available to the company which already has the cables laid make it infeasible for a new company to lay its own cables; that's how a natural monopoly is enforced.
Therefore, it's nonsense to imagine the monopoly existed before the cable was laid.
>I doubt I will convince you, and I doubt anyone else here needs to be convinced that natural monopolies exist.
You won't even try to provide an example? Perhaps it is not I who is "philosophically opposed to the concept".
>This simply does not make sense, which is further evidence that you're opposed to the concept. The high fixed costs of the laying of the cables relative to the small marginal cost of adding a new subscriber once cables have been laid is what creates a natural monopoly in this context. The massive economies of scale which are only available to the company which already has the cables laid make it infeasible for a new company to lay its own cables; that's how a natural monopoly is enforced.
You asked whether the cost of laying cables makes a company a monopoly. The question itself demonstrates "nonsense". If the cost of laying cables is an inhibiting factor for the first company, then it is also the inhibiting factor for any companies which follow. The cost of adding new subscribers is irrelevant. If the first company is not meeting the demands of the customer then the conditions are ripe for a competitor.
Well since we don't actually live in an anarcho-capitalist "utopia", governments tend to intervene sooner or later in dysfunctional markets. And I find that regardless of how bad things were beforehand, or how light the resulting regulation, the response from AnCaps is always "You touched it, you bought it!"
Nonetheless, the history of Standard Oil is a pretty compelling example of a natural monopoly.
>If the cost of laying cables is an inhibiting factor for the first company, then it is also the inhibiting factor for any companies which follow.
The difference is the potential ROI for each market entrant.
For the first company, the entry cost may be high, but since there'll be no competition, there's potential for decent profits.
The second company faces the same entry cost, but they also have to compete with the first company, so their potential profits are much lower.
As a result, those who might disrupt the market are much more likely to invest elsewhere.
>And I find that regardless of how bad things were beforehand, or how light the resulting regulation, the response from AnCaps is always "You touched it, you bought it!"
I'm not even sure what that means.
>Nonetheless, the history of Standard Oil is a pretty compelling example of a natural monopoly.
I'd wager that what you think you know about Standard Oil is probably mythical and not based on historical fact.
>For the first company, the entry cost may be high, but since there'll be no competition, there's potential for decent profits.
>The second company faces the same entry cost, but they also have to compete with the first company, so their potential profits are much lower.
And yet I know of cities which have half a dozen ISPs (none of them publicly owned). As I said previously if the existing company/ies are not satisfying customers, then there is room for competition. The second [or third, or fourth...] need not even compete on the same scale as the existing ISP[s]. A local entrepreneur seeing the need, could just wire up his neighborhood. I know of cases where this has happened.
There are no de jure ISP monopolies, but municipalities routinely demand franchise terms which only the incumbent provider could possibly satisfy (100% coverage, large up-front fees, etc).
This reminds me of how a military contracts are assigned: Write a spec of what you need, and have companies bid to meet it. Unfortunately, if a company gets a good connection, they can just have the spec drafted in such a way that only that company could meet it. And thus, corruption.
Setting aside the ultimate politics and ramifications of this, it is interesting (and kind of scary) to watch the fight between a non-elected bureaucracy and our elected house of representatives to regulate the internet.
Congress seems to be completely incapable of doing more than grandstanding, while the bureaucrats may wind up dramatically increasing their own power with a single stroke of their unelected pens.
It's no wonder we have many times more regulations than laws in this country... If I got to 'regulate' who I had power over on a regular basis, there are a lot of people who would suddenly find themselves inexplicably under Title Darren. Human nature.
It's worth noting that these "unelected bureaucrats" are nominated by a President for limited terms and confirmed by the Senate, and that all powers they have are bestowed upon them by Congress and can be revoked, and that their regulations have to fit within restrictions that are defined and may be revised by Congress.
It's certainly not pretty, but it's not unaccountable, and it seems to be moving things in the generally correct direction. We can hope, anyway.
(Note: I support the move. However I believe you may be overstating your case a bit.)
Accountable in what way? Based on either 1) Doing something so horrendous that would require direct Congressional intervention, which has never (?) happened before? 2) Waiting until a completely new Senate or president is elected, which is basically a 4-8 year cycle?
In theory all of these folks are accountable, sure, but in actuality the entire gimmick here is that the bureaucrats can make all the tough choices while Congress grandstands and makes speeches. That way the work gets done and there's nobody really to blame.
Some parts of that system are pretty good! Some parts are not. But it's only accountable in the strictest sense. There is only an infinitesimal chance that any citizen could have any influence at all over these types of machinations.
>> their regulations have to fit within restrictions that are defined and may be revised by Congress
This is only notionally true, and history is replete with examples of federal agencies declaring their own authority over things which were obviously not envisioned so. While congress could act to change that, they don't, so power collects.
and history is replete with examples of federal agencies declaring their own authority over things which were obviously not envisioned so
What about in this case? Would you argue the Title 2 declaration is within or not within the FCC's mandate? If you agree it is within the mandate, then bringing up unrelated assumptions of authority is not relevant.
That's because of (1) limited real choices (yay FPTP elections) and (2) most people are negative about Congress, but that's mostly about the members of Congress that don't represent them; people tend to have a lot higher support for their members of Congress (in both Houses) than for Congress as a whole.
Fwiw, the reason we have more regulations than laws is because Congress likes to enact laws dictating things in a somewhat general manner and delegates authority for implementing those concepts to experts. Naturally, the specific regulations are more numerous than the general guidance.
While there may be too many regulations, it's a red herring to claim that simply because there are more, this is a sign of dysfunction.
Yes yes, it would be terrible if US had actual consumer oriented regulation. Nothing says communism like $16 300Mbit Internet (http://giga-kablowka.pl this offering is possible directly because of tight regulation) in some ex soviet shithole of a country in middle/east Europe.
Except they were given the power of Title II by congress. And there's nobody that can tell you with a straight face that internet access shouldn't be subject to Title II regulations.
This is just a replay of the idiots who decided to deregulate the banking industry. "The regulations are working so well, we don't need them anymore!!11" Cable internet service and "next generation broadband" should've been classified as Title II out of the gate. The exemption was idiotic, and is playing out exactly as everyone said it would when it was first proposed. Consumers get less choice, and poorer service for a higher fee because of it.
I understand the desire to regulate the internet as a utility, but are they going to actually regulate it like a utility or are they going to call it a common carrier and then just make up a few BS rules that need to be followed.
I have a sinking feeling that all this will result in is a situation where monopolies are given out to the existing players and no one is forced to do anything to upgrade the existing service.
This isn't like a water utility where the product has little variance. Even now in the marketplace there is huge variance in the quality of the product I can buy ( I am one of the lucky few with choices of providers ). I have a feeling my area is just going to get given a blanket monopoly to Comcast and I will have to deal with a crappy connection forever with no hope of another company ever gaining traction to replace them.
I have a sinking feeling that all this will result in is a situation where monopolies are given out to the existing players and no one is forced to do anything to upgrade the existing service.
It's naive to think it would be anything but this. We like the Internet as it is today but for some reason we need to have the FCC control it in order to try to keep it the way it is.
Except we don't like the Internet we have today, where net neutrality is always teetering on an edge into an abyss of sponsored channels and provider blocking on a whim.
That, and we don't like how the major telecoms exploit us all for huge profits off the backs of decade old taxpayer funded infrastructure they got through political manipulation and now sit on for free money.
The golden age of Internet access was in the late 90s, when over-twisted pair dialup was still a thing but the regulations meant the wire runners had to license it out at fair rates, so you would get a hundred ISPs offering you service for dollars a month. But that could never scale, and we ended up with DSL and Cable Internet without any of that open market aspect where we are all taken advantage of for corporate profit.
That is not to say that Title II is anything good. It does not solve the central problem that ISPs have no incentive to improve the networks, all it does is compel fixed rate competition, which is only good for keeping us exactly where we are, when the technologies already exist to give us so much better.
Thats a seriously loaded question. The problem is the US is a really big place so in city's and their metro areas you get world class speeds ( 150Mbs is pretty common ) however in rural areas your stuck with maybe DSL and if not that then you can get satellite internet.
Thats the problem I see with classifying ISP's as a common carrier. Your not going to get 150Mbs everywhere your going to get 10 which means in the urban area's where you do have good access and some competition you will see stagnation ( forget 1Gbps in cities that are well above the average )
We like the way it is (or rather, the way it was 15 years ago), but the cat appears to be out of the bag. Comcast, Verizon, et. al. all have giant dying industries to support on the backs of our Internet access fees, and they are going to extract every penny of value from their local and regional monopolies.
I don't especially want the government involved, but doing nothing is not going to maintain the status quo. Destroying local monopolies that have sway over a global network is a much better move in my opinion.
That's exactly right. A utility implies a commodity item. Take the electric business for example, you might compete on price, but quality is never part of the equation. There isn't a "better" electricity. It's all the same. A phone line is a phone line. You can't pay more for a better quality phone line -- it facilitates phone calls. There aren't "faster" phone lines -- a phone call is a phone call. Obviously I am talking land lines here. Same with water. There aren't any water companies competing based on the fact that they provide Evian on tap. Even if you wanted to pay the price to have Evian on tap, it will never happen; water is water in terms of a utility. Making the Internet a utility will destroy competition because it commoditizes it.
I know that some percentage of the HN community seems to love government regulation and feels that capitalism is somehow evil, but te government has a long track record of being highly inefficient and mostly immune to market forces. If you don't like the drivers license office service, too bad, it's the only game in town; there's no incentive to improve it. I find it ironic that despite the Libertarian leanings of many of us here, there's some desire to implement more regulation, more restrictions and less competition. How does less competition improve anything? Without incentives, the market-driven pressure to make it faster and cheaper disappears.
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the consequences of regulating the Internet and presumably taxing it like a utility. There are significant unintended consequences.
It's not that capitalism is evil, it's that you have to make observations about some markets where capitalism is naturally working or failing.
The current state of broadband doesn't have any competition to destroy with regulation... last-mile internet should fall under a utility because it's already been tested in the market and there simply hasn't been any demonstration of competition because there is no direct financial incentive on the open market to overbuild on the last mile and compete.
One part of me hates this because the idea of our government dipping their hands into what has become the major source of information, entertainment, conducting business, etc. is quite scary. We all know their tendency to fuck things up because of politics, money, stupidity, or a combination of any and all of these.
On the other hand, I look at my other utilities and realize I have absolutely no complaints. Yeah, the power goes out from time to time, but that is just an inconvenience. As it stands, my internet is just as reliable as my power in terms of outages (not including the occasional speed fluctuation).
As long as it doesn't turn into a pay for use type deal and sticks with the current model of pay for bandwidth I suppose I'd be ok with this. There are just too many different moving parts for the cynical and rational parts of my brain to agree on.
Edit: Oh, and as long as censorship never becomes a thing.
It is literally NOT illegal. There are no laws censoring certain words on television in the United States, free air or otherwise. It is against FCC regulations and you can be fined though. All of the laws and rulings have to do with the FCC being able to enforce these regulations and levy fines for breaking them.
"It is a violation of federal law to air obscene programming at any time. It is also a violation of federal law to broadcast indecent or profane programming during certain hours."[0]
" In addition, a federal district court may impose fines and/or imprisonment for up to two years on those who are convicted of criminal violations of the law."[0] (Emphasis mine)
Right. I was thinking more in line with censorship of certain content. I honestly don't know where to make the comparison between profanity censorship on TV to any degree of censorship on the web.
You have no complaints about your utilities sure but when was the last time home phone for instance did anything new. Have you ever been excited about your power? I know I've been excited about my internet. Regulation just stands in the way of change.
If the pay-for-use you mean is "data caps", I think the reason a lot of people are fully against the idea is because historically they've been unreasonable. Like if your water was charged at a dollar a gallon. Because there's just one provider.
To continue the analogy, people had "unlimited" water before, and they might use 10, or 100, or 400 gallons in a month, they're not really sure. And then TWC applies a cap of 60 gallons and wants double the money if you want 100 gallons. If you hit 200 gallons before for some reason, forget it. No one in your area is offering you that.
So people said "what's this caps, screw caps, no more caps!" because they were crazy caps, and you couldn't just pay a roughly linear rate for more data.
Comcast used to have a 250GB cap, which is more reasonable. But it's flat, for all consumer tiers. And you can't pay less for 100GB or a bit more for 270GB.
And various companies at various times have had "unofficial" caps.
I think pay-per-gig-used could be reasonable, but I understand why many people are dead against it, so far it's only been a way to screw them.
Water, phone, and, to a lesser degree, electricity, are all reasonable for the average person to understand. A shower obviously uses more water than a tap, and when it's off it uses none. A phone costs me minutes while it's off the hook and doesn't when it isn't. And I know about how long a minute is. Turning on my computer, lights, or microwave costs electricity (although I may not have a great idea of how much, I can make decent guesses to the ratios).
But do even the most tech-savvy have a reasonable intuition for how much bandwidth a computer uses while idle with a given set of applications running? How much a game of StarCraft uses? How much streaming video costs? (The last one is a trick question - it can change dynamically depending on your downstream speed.) It's just unreasonable to ask people to make good decisions about these things.
Pay for use for water and electricity is good because the resources are finite, and you want to conserve them. The advantage of unlimited internet use is it promotes the creation of services that need more bandwidth.
There's a clear difference between these resources.
If you could use 100 times more electricity and water at the same cost (with no damage to the environment), would you? We might find uses for doing that, if those resources weren't relatively scarce.
If you give an average consumer a 10tb hard drive, will they use it all? Probably not even close. The amount of storage wasted by consumers is beyond epic, thrown away with the next system upgrade (someone want to count how much storage America has thrown away in the last decade?). That's the bandwidth context. We can keep boosting the amount of bandwidth for an exceptionally long time, at little additional cost over what the present infrastructure cost. You can go from 100mbps to 200mbps while not having to rebuild everything. Try doubling the output of or availability of water or electricity like that.
Put another way, bandwidth - like storage or processing power - is a hyper expanding resource; one in which we can even expand just by being clever while using most of the existing infrastructure. Water and electricity are nothing like that.
Humans could easily consume all the fresh water on this planet. We can expand storage, bandwidth and processing power to such an extent that we can never saturate the total capacity. In fact, in the first world, that has already mostly occurred for consumers with storage and processing power (and for the radical majority of all server side use cases). Will 99.99% of all web sites ever need a 1gbps pipe? Nope, and they also won't need 1tb of storage, or 64gb of ram, or a 16 core modern Xeon processor. Those sites will never have enough content to consume such resources, and certainly not in the next decade.
The waste is less, if you weight storage by performance or energy efficiency. Then, we're throwing away low-yield storage and replacing it with high-octane storage. The 'waste factor' becomes small.
Also consider most discarded storage is a fraction of the size of what it is replaced by. So the fraction of waste is always small (compared to its absolute value).
Right, and that's another way in which bandwidth, storage and processing power as resources have absolutely nothing in common with water or electricity. The ability to waste exponentially greater amounts each generation.
Do I need to watch a late night talk show at 1080 on YouTube instead of 720? No, it has only modest impact on my experience, but I do it anyway because there's no cost associated to doing so. I can freely waste vast amounts of bandwidth (or storage, or processing power) with minimum concern, rather than focusing on conservation.
My phone is another marvel in that regard. It costs $0.50 per year in electricity, about 1% to 2% of what my desktop PC consumes. I can waste my phone's resources freely with very minimum concerns for the environment, especially relative to most other things in my house or life that use electricity.
Water and electricity will never have these properties. It's unlikely the average person will ever be able to waste vast amounts of either without concern.
I'm not sure its meaningful to even talk about 'wasting bandwidth'. The cable is doing something all the time - whether or not your meaningful bits are travelling over the wire. So its imaginary to say 'now the cable is in use' and 'now the cable is being wasted' - its only a different state to a human mind, not to the universe.
At any given moment it is finite, but it is always expandable, and not a consumable resource.
Using more bandwidth helps push the expansion. If we had extremely high rates, and low caps, you'd never get things like video services, and bandwidth providers would never have incentive to expand the network. So the more use the better.
The same could be said for electricity, no? I should leave the lights on all the time to increase energy demand so they build more wind farms and solar plants?
Only if you ignore the consequences of recklessly burning fossil fuels, and are 100% sure wind and solar can replace it. So, no. But to be clear, I didn't say waste bandwidth to drive growth, I said unlimited bandwidth promotes growth of services that use bandwidth.
It's not bad for consumers but companies like Google and Netflix have a vested interest in keeping everyone away from that model because their own businesses rely on average joes moving large amounts of data. At this point they have so much PR leverage that usage-based pricing can't realistically happen.
That would be covered by net neutrality, wouldn't it? If all data has to be treated equally, that type of abuse wouldn't be possible regardless of whether you're paying by bandwidth or by usage.
> One part of me hates this because the idea of our government dipping their hands into what has become the major source of information, entertainment, conducting business, etc. is quite scary. We all know their tendency to fuck things up because of politics, money, stupidity, or a combination of any and all of these.
1. Who built the Internet, landlines and lobbied for electricity in the countryside in the 30's ?
2. Right, because politics, money and stupidity are nowhere to be found in the `private` world.
What a coincidence; I just posted this to my Facebook feed yesterday:
Dealing with ISPs (and mobile providers, for that matter) is a never-ending hell of time-sucking and abysmal customer service. Communications as a business has some unfortunate features that drive its pathologies. The overhead of the infrastructure is very high and the marginal cost for adding a customer is relatively low. When there's more than one option, there's very little practical difference to distinguish the competitors from each other. Whether it's wireless or wired, I suspect we're doomed to be subjected to this kind of bullshit until the businesses in question are treated and regulated as the basic utilities that they have become. I don't know anyone who's frustrated with their electrical or gas service.
Wait a second, every single negative you've described here can also be applied to other utilities who have been regulated under title II for as long as it's existed. They've yet to find a way to 'regulate' human decency and good customer service...
Title 2 will make it so other companies have a chance to exist on the government sponsored lines. Once Comcast sees its lifeblood spilling into the streets, Im betting their CS will be as sweet as pecan pie.
Title II regulation will not necessarily open up the copper wiring to your house to competitors. The FCC is expected to forebear a lot of the Title II rules, and that may well be one of them.
But what's the incentive? How many people want to start water companies? If it's highly regulated the margins will also disappear. It turns it into a commodity. It isn't like you can do any real innovation.
Title II can't force Comcast to share their lines. It can only force ILEC's to share their lines. So Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, and Frontier could be forced to unbundle.
> I don't know anyone who's frustrated with their electrical or gas service.
Only because they're not paying attention. Electric and water utilities are limping along with century-old plant in many cases. They have little incentive to invest in less-polluting or safer technologies, and not much capital dollars with which to do it.
Does anyone know if this would impact the issues we saw between Netflix, Level3 and Verizon? My understanding of the original issues with Netflix and Verizon was that the interconnect between Netflix's peering company (Level 3) and Verizon wasn't big enough to handle the bandwidth that Netflix was attempting to pump out.
In this case, Verizon was just refusing to upgrade that path and wanted to force Netflix to connect with them directly (get them to pay more money in some way.
Is that the general problem Netflix had with Verizon? If so, how would Title II help this situation? Does Title II require these various companies to maintain the interconnects between their networks and other companies out there?
The section of Title 2 that requires common carriers to publish their prices might extend to peering agreements. If so, it would totally shake up the current system of secret dealings and probably make it a lot harder for Verizon to pretend to be the victim.
I wish I had a link to review this but I don't think that's the case. As I recall, Netflix published data showing that there wasn't actually a bandwidth problem and they offered to upgrade the equipment. They've ended up paying Verizon which is what verizon was really after.
Level3 had a number of blog posts under the "open internet" category about their view of it. I believe this is the post where I gleaned the information from[0].
That's a peculiar choice of word for an article title. The FCC can't "regulate the Internet." The FCC can regulate service providers in the US in certain limited ways.
I wonder if autonomous local mesh networks and hyper local mesh networks which is essentially a network of networks would fall under the term "Internet" and under these regulations. That would certainly stop innovation on that front (?)
I get what they're trying to accomplish, we all want faster more reliable service, but as comparison is anyone 100% happy with their utility (power, water, etc)?
My tap water is clean and delicious and I have never, ever had a problem with it. I have never experienced an unscheduled service interruption with my water, and scheduled service interruptions are very rare and advertised well in advance.
My electricity is stable and reliable, and any power outages I've experienced have been brief, and exclusively due to exceptional weather events.
I'm also a Comcast customer, and I would say that I have some sort of partial or total service interruption (internet is completely gone, or set top box stops working) on average, once every other week or so. These outages are usually relatively brief (a few minutes), but at least once a year I lose one or both services for 6 hours or more. Plus the internet speed varies wildly from "high-end dialup modem" at the low end, to "significantly less than the advertised value" at the high end. Needless to say, I have never actually experienced the advertised speeds.
If I got the same service from my utilities as I did from Comcast, I would end up brushing my teeth with raw sewage about once a month, and trying to toast bread would occasionally cause a power dip that would brown-out every other outlet in my house. I probably wouldn't be able to shower some nights because the cold water pressure would be unusably low, and I would have to reset every clock in my house a couple times a month. The one similarity is that I would still be unable to shop around for better service, because Comcast is the only option in my area.
If you want a TLDR, it's that I would figuratively kill to get Internet service that's even just half as good as my utility service, because right now my internet service is much worse than that.
I had 3 great years of internet in San Francisco with Comcast. It basically was like those utilities: it was always there, around the promised speeds, with 0 outages that I noticed. Considering I work from home, and do all my codework over ssh, I could tell if there was a slowdown for even a few seconds.
Then at year 4, for whatever reason, it started to have issues. At least once per month.
How I miss those 3 blissful years when it Just Worked.
My experience in a suburban area is relatively similar. I wouldn't be surprised if what it really came down to was that people started streaming video from Netflix, Hulu etc... and simply put, the cable companies have less than zero incentive to optimize that experience.
Comparing Title II utilities to water and electricity is silly. How happy are you with your landline telephone and cable TV services? You know, the ones that everyone hates and is replacing with internet-carried alternatives?
My landline telephone is very satisfactory. I've never encountered any service disruptions with it. In fact, I can't think of a single time in my entire life where I've picked up the phone and not had a usable dialtone on the other end, or where I've placed a call (to another landline) and received a bad connection.
The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.
My problem with my landline is price ($35/mo to start) and features (practically non-existent, with huge premiums charged for useful things). The service effectively hasn't changed since the 1980s, while the prices have steadily risen.
I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.
> It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.
However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down.
Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year).
Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.
The landline option I had previously was serviced by my cable company. If my internet was out, so was my landline, despite it not being VOIP. At my previous residence, it was serviced by the local phone company, and ran through a multiplexing box which plugged into my house power. Both that option and my cable modem have battery backups which continue to function in a power outage, but once that's gone, no more service.
That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.
How are your download speeds over that landline phone? There's a difference between meeting a minimal level of service and actually delivering innovation, such as speed increases. How do you like your high definition phone calls? You don't have that yet? Crazy. I would thought the phone company would be trying to rush that out the door so as to be more competitive against all of the phone company competition out there.
I agree that it's a silly comparison; you should take that up with the post I replied to, which explicitly mentioned water and power and seemed to imply that my internet service would degrade to the same quality as those utilities (if only!)
When I had a landline telephone, I was completely happy with it. It was inexpensive and reliable, and if I was unsatisfied with my service I could choose from several other providers. I could use my own equipment with it, all of the consumer electronics were interoperable with any service provider, and I never had an outage (to my knowledge; I didn't get a lot of phone calls). I had a wide variety of options for dialup internet at the time, either through my phone provider or other competing providers. This was in a small town in northern Idaho, too, and it wasn't exactly known as a telecommunications hub or city of industry.
I am unhappy with my cable TV service, which is provided by the same company as my cable internet service. My cable provider is the only one in my area, and has no incentive to do anything other than take slightly more of my money every year in exchange for performing zero upgrades or service improvements.
This is just a single data point, but only one of the two companies I mention above is subject to Title II regulation currently, and it's coincidentally the one that I had a good experience with.
I don't know of anyone that has ever experienced any kind of technical problem with their landline telephone or cable TV services. Rather, you pretty much need a cell phone and (to a much lesser extent) a home internet connection to participate in society today, and the marginal utility from having a separate home line or a cable TV service in addition to those services is not enough to justify the cost for most people.
Why would a lack of service by an internet provider be comparable to a utility pumping sewage?
Shouldn't you be looking at water restrictions which the utilities blame on drought? This is the most similar type of event to the Comcast outage which you are describing. Both could have been prevented through better planning, capital expenditures, and forethought. If this is the comparison, both Comcast and many water providers fail, though the internet providers have gradually improving products, while the utilities do not (as far as I know). Most industries' products do not fall from the sky, yet they still manage to provide an adequate supply.
How about an internet provider injecting tracking scripts and advertisements into HTTP responses; an internet provider failing to respond correctly to DNS requests (so they can provide their own search engine on mistyped domains)? Both of these things have been done by ISPs - and recently.
I'd consider that comparable to a utility pumping sewage.
I'd consider that equivalent to a utility not chlorinating the supply, or having sediment issues; both are unexpected and undesired behaviors which can be corrected.
I do not understand the desire to compare problematic internet service to sewage-pumping through the potable water supply. Are you desperate for superlatives which will make the internet service providers look bad?
Do you understand what happens when DNS returns false negatives? It causes tons of shit to break. It's not a little bit of sediment. Maybe not sewage level catastrophe .. maybe "your water supply is contaminated for the foreseeable future. You can't drink it, not even boiling it will help, but you can continue to wash your clothes in it."
>Why would a lack of service by an internet provider be comparable to a utility pumping sewage?
I work partly from home and, while not quite "utility pumping sewage" level of crisis, a badly-timed internet blackout at my apartment can be a serious problem for the whole team.
Do you live in a jungle or something?
Everywhere I've ever lived, including California during the Enron scandal, power outages were an order of magnitude less common than (non-power-outage-related) internet outages.
In Santa Clara County, at my home with Sonic.net Legacy DSL (AT&T DSLAM + ATM/Sonic.net IP), in the past 10 years, I can only recall two internet outages. In one, the telephone was out as well (a fiber cut between the remote terminal and the central office), the most recent one started around the same time as a 30 minute power outage.
In contrast, I've had several 30 minute to 2 hour power outages, and lots of power outages lasting less than a minute.
On the other hand, a short internet outage would not necessarily be noticed, because there's not a big change in ambient noise when the internet fails, nor do i have to reset the time on my appliances.
My power outages here in Austin seem to be around a couple per year. I think my Internet outages (outside of those resulting from me not having power) are less frequent, though I don't have logs checking.
Now, my Internet being slow...that's not uncommon at all. I've also had them randomly charge me an extra $50 "by mistake", as well directly and repeatedly lying to me about what services/packages are available.
I'm in central Austin, and so ready for Google Fiber. My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, and Internet outages are quite common for them, easily exceeding power outages.
First off, that's not a pun; though it may qualify as some sort of base humor.
I'm not nitpicking, I just think the comparison doesn't make any sense unless one is trying to make Comcast out to be some sort of villain spewing sewage through everyone's taps. An internet outage is rightfully characterized as similar to a power outage or drought. The latter two are caused by poor planning and capital investments by power utilities, and the former is caused by similar behavior by the ISP. Both are fairly common.
Define "clean". It may be sanitary but most tap water in the US tastes (and smells) like swimming pool and has tons of other trace amounts of harmful substances in it like benzene, pesticides, styrene, trichloroethylene, pharmaceuticals, etc:
If you want "clean" water you need water from an aquifer (like Fiji) or water that goes through a reverse osmosis treatment process. Even then it's not going to be perfectly clean, but it'll be a hell of a lot better than the vast majority of tap water out there.
Those two links seem to contradict your point that tap water isn't "clean" since they point out that it is, in fact, very clean.
I come from a country where that is not the case and water had to be boiled before you could consume it. Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).
I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).
>Those two links seem to contradict your point that tap water isn't "clean" since they point out that it is, in fact, very clean.
If you actually read the links you would see that "clean" is simply defined by the EPA as "what we allow by law". And that there are many chemicals known to be harmful to humans that aren't regulated or monitored at all... not to mention the fact that tap water in many towns and cities across the US regularly has chemical levels that exceed the EPA's defined limits (and many scientists argue that these limits are too high as it is).
>I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).
There are several dispensers in my area that provide reverse osmosis (plus carbon) filtered water (water source is usually local tap water) and it costs about 25 cents a gallon or a dollar for 5 gallons. Most Walmarts have one, back by the beverage section.
It's also pretty easy to find inexpensive bottled water that's RO filtered, you just need to look on the bottle and it'll tell you where the water is from and how it is processed/filtered, if at all.
>Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).
> I get what they're trying to accomplish, we all want faster more reliable service, but as comparison is anyone 100% happy with their utility (power, water, etc)?
I am. My water is clean and I've never had an outage. My power is reasonably cheap and quite reliable. The state doesn't allow either one to raise rates exorbitantly from year to year, either, and despite that both have made major upgrades to their facilities in the last few years.
I'm surprised at how reliable utilities are in America. I was in a low income neighborhood in San Antonio during university, and had maybe 2 blackouts in 3 years.
The length of the blackout would probably need to be given to provide some perspective. 2 30 minute blackouts would be much easier to deal with than 1 3 day blackout.
We're missing a lot of context. San Antonio is in Texas, which means these could have been rolling blackouts, one of the last-ditch efforts employed by power companies during record summer temperature spikes (which translate to monumental load spikes in the form of A/C)
Or it could be weather related (like most outages), or a bad transformer, or a car running into a pole, or a ton of things...
So, you're right that we're missing a lot of context - including the duration. A 30 min outage due to an accident is very different from a 3 day outage due to a storm.
And like you said, AC can be a big drain on the grid during the summer.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure what the weather in San Antonio is like...)
Not very rainy. No hurricanes or blizzards. Very hot. Usually in a drought, and not to uncommonly 50+ days exceeding 100 Fahrenheit in a year.
(I'm in Austin, which is pretty close to San Antonio, but I see now is considerably hotter: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ewx/?n=100degreedays.htm ww.usclimatedata.com/climate/san-antonio/texas/united-states/ustx1200 )
this is a ridiculous comparison. You can't compare water, gas, and electrics to the likes of providing Internet. Gas, electric, water are either on or off. Internet connections come with tons of setup pitfalls. A bad DNS can make it appear your Internet is out in one way, while a broken cable inside the house can make it look broken another way and a virus on a computer is another.
It's just not a simple check and you're not going to find people to fix your internet with a proverbial wrench. When is the last time your water pipe had a virus? It will often taken digging into the problem with a fair bit of domain knowledge. And if Obama care (healthcare.gov) is any indication of the US Government's ability to manage or enact such things, I'd be worried too.
Every time this topic comes up, people like to try and compare it to the utilities services and you just can't.
The power grid is not simple. It's a highly complex system that requires constant monitoring and adjustment by power companies to ensure consistent delivery that's not much different than what an ISP should be doing.
A bad circuit breaker or wiring issues can make it look like problems that someone might blame on the grid, there are user-side config issues there too.
"And if Obama care (healthcare.gov) is any indication of the US Government's ability to manage or enact such things, I'd be worried too."
It would still be the ISPs responsibility to manage their issues, there's no isp.gov planned.
"It's not a utility unless you can clearly assign blame for all possible outages"?
Fuck no! My appliances' fuses might burn out, my home breakers might be tripped, and my neighbor might dig into a powerline, but electricity is still "a utility".
It's a style of business relationship, with the regulatory, legal, and social expectations that come with it. The technology (and failure modes) are secondary at best.
I can except down votes; I just know it's folks who don't know how an ISP works - sort of a personal indicator of how ill informed a lot of people are on how things really work.
I actually own two companies. One is an ISP and the other is a PCO (Private Cable Operator) where I provide Internet over DOCSIS along with CableTV. I also have had experience dealing with right of way like utilities for putting fiber in the ground, and public WIFI.
I promise you my support costs per man-hour are much higher than your electric company or water utility; not to mention a homeowner can do most troubleshooting their self. Any schmuck can flick a breaker and turn a wrench and at a minimum it can be explained over the phone what to look for or what to smell for.
but it's not so easy when you need to understand tools like Cisco routers, BGP filters, DNS (nslookup) outputs, some dude has a virus or, worst, a torrent... NAT, DNAT setup on some brain dead Linksys routers, the list goes on.
Supplying Internet to people is an endless battle of convincing them, at times, it's their machine. You just don't have this with utilities that are either on/off, flowing or not. Rolling a truck to investigate, I just don't find as many skilled IT people as you do plumbers and electricians and it cost more to train IT people too.
We have one property that is Section-8 housing (don't ask). We supply them CableTV along with Internet. Learned the hardware this was a mistake. You have the I know it all type who will yell at my techs. even has his own cable modem running Linux, you have the crybaby type who complains her internet is too slow and pleads for us to come fix her computer, then you have the old people who don't know how to turn on a computer. These issues don't exist with utility companies. You don't have to educate end users about how water flows through a pipe, or how to flip a circuit breaker...
See with utilities, it's not that hard to figure out what the customer is complaining about REALLY. With IT/Internet, you have things that can become problems for other people. Someone running a torrent in apartment 1B, for example, can cause someone in apartment 1A to call and say the Internet is out. Of course we have ways to track this, but the equipment is expensive and it cost considerably more to teach someone how to configure a Cisco router for traffic profiling, how to look at SNMP reports, MPLS bandwidth reports, etc...
Please tell me how gas, electric, or even water has a challenge nearly as close or as costly on a per/person basis?
The real answer is that you're assuming the wrong thing.
Yes, networks are complex and require skilled techs to keep running, but that's completely irrelevant to the F.C.C. classifying Internet access under Title II. ISPs will not have any notable new burdens regarding customer service/support/troubleshooting, but will have restrictions on being permitted to engage in a few predatory practices.
>even has his own cable modem running Linux, you have the crybaby type who complains her internet is too slow and pleads for us to come fix her computer, then you have the old people who don't know how to turn on a computer.
I've dealt extensivley with at least 7 ISPs in the US, and not a single one would even consider helping even a business customer troubleshoot their own equipment.
If you are supporting peoples privately owned equipment you are going WAY above and beyond what any service provider i have dealt with in the US is willing to do.
In my area, the cable provider is the only one that offers somewhat fast speeds. Whenever they overcharge me and I spend hours sorting it out (this has happened a few times) with them I wish I could switch, but DSL is just not fast enough for working remotely.
I don't have other options for all my other utilities, but so far they have overcharged me and screwed things up royally exactly zero times.
Sure you can- nothing stops you from installing your own power generation/water purification (assuming you own your home and don't have a Nazi township/HOA).
As in, better be damn happy with the speed you have now because you ain't going to get faster anytime soon. Well unless your lucky and someone politically connected on your street.
Going back to the days before cable, when high speed was whatever the regulated its a utility phone company decided I was allowed to have
There is no free lunch and regulation will just mean normalization at best, to the lowest allowed numbers. People below the allowed numbers will eventually be put on a schedule where their area will be upgraded, after meetings and such mostly all not public. You might get lucky and see movement in five years.
Where they really need to be acting is mobile data. This is where the real thievery is going on.
I am all for having no fast or slow lanes, but if regulation comes out dictating speeds you can guarantee the lowest allowed levels will be met with gusto
I get what you're saying, but living in rural Indiana I could say yes basically. Our water, gas and power companies here locally are coop non profits and the employees are residents (and users themselves). The whole experience dealing with these entities are night and day when compared to say Comcast or Verizon.
When I call the water company, I don't talk to some guy in India who has never heard of my state, let alone my city. When the power and water go out, the service isn't great but compared to my internet provider it would be a huge improvement. YMMV.
The statement was more in the direction that when it's a utility local people / municipality are responsible for the maintenance of that system, local people means that there is a far greater chance of getting local, mostly because there is someone local with _responsibility_ for keeping it working.
No, but part of the idea is that you will get small local providers again (like you did fifteen to twenty years ago), and five-man companies don't usually outsource tech support to India.
Before I got Google Fiber I was definitely happier with my water and electric than my service provider. Now I am probably actually still happier, but I don't have too many complaints about Google Fiber. I can't think of the last time I had an issue with my water! It's got 100% uptime.
The issue most here are not mentioning is the sad state of affairs of much of the US public infrastructure. I wonder how old the pipes running to your house are and how long ago they should have been upgraded? This is also a possibility if internet becomes a utility.
Well, it doesn't really matter how old the pipes are as long as they continue working and provide water that meets the EPA/state standards for health. The US public water system is, for all intents and purposes, a miracle that most people do not even think about. They just rely on it.
It's also your duty to replace the pipes leading up to your own house off of the mains in most cases, so I guess take it up with your landlord.
> Well, it doesn't really matter how old the pipes are as long as they continue working and provide water that meets the EPA/state standards for health.
Actually, it does. Water loss due to deteriorating infrastructure is becoming a significant issue as water supplies get strained. The EPA estimates that the average US water system loses 16% of their water during distribution, and about 75% of that can be prevented or recovered by maintaining and upgrading the systems.[1] Here in Texas this is a serious issue because our reservoirs are increasingly strained by population growth.
Do you remember the other day when the FCC changed the definition of broadband to 25/3? If they can continue to do that, we would no longer be beholden to the ISPs upgrading out of the goodness of their hearts. They would upgrade whenever their regulating agency told them they had to.
Uh, there's already a lot of network infrastructure that's the equivalent of "old pipes" that should have been upgraded long ago, at least in my area. I can't see why you'd expect this to make it any worse than it already is.
Depends on where you live, I suppose. I have zero problems with my ConEd power and whoever supplies my water, and I find the pricing pretty reasonable. My power supplier even offers different energy sources to use other than the standard one, which honestly blows my mind.
And then I call into Time Warner spend more time trying to get them to understand what I'm talking about than I've ever spent on the phone with my other utilities.
I also have generally positive experiences with power company employees. On the other hand:
i. I can't fire my power company, nor can I ever really expect to gain that ability.
ii. As nice and hardworking as the power company employees are, there's still only one main power run for the 1/8th of Oak Park that I live in, and any time a tree goes down in the alley along that run, or a squirrel detonates a transformer along it, I lose power for 6-8 hours. My block has a truly awful electric service uptime.
It's not poor customer service I worry about. It's a total lack of infrastructure investment.
> I can't fire my power company, nor can I ever really expect to gain that ability.
The same is true for many folks and Comcast or Time Warner - it's hardly unique to utilities. Here in Rochester, NY TWC is the only reasonable option for high-speed internet in most areas - the local phone company Frontier is crap, and the upstart fiber company is only in a few high-density spots thus far.
Meanwhile, your city and state governments can really give the power company a rough time if enough citizens are complaining.
Wait, you can't chose between different power companies in the US? Even in socialist Europe that isn't normally a problem. I can choose between at least a dozen different providers of electricity, and at least half a dozen providers of Internet and landline telephone access. And that's just in the rural parts of the country. Granted most of the infrastructure is centralized, but that doesn't stop competition on extending it.
Maybe the problem isn't whether Internet access should be regulated as a utility service but simply that utility services in the US are crap?
There are choices for service providers in many places in the US. However, there is one set of power lines, and I would presume that most power losses are due to the power line failures.
> ii. As nice and hardworking as the power company employees are, there's still only one main power run for the 1/8th of Oak Park that I live in, and any time a tree goes down in the alley along that run, or a squirrel detonates a transformer along it, I lose power for 6-8 hours. My block has a truly awful electric service uptime.
Is that power run an overhead ComEd hasn't/won't bury?
The FCC doesn't regulate power and water, what they're talking about is making to Telco regulation - AKA Title II. The same regulation that left the telephone system unchanged for near 50 years, and made it near-legal to get the cell system off the ground until dramatic changes were made.
I'm very torn on this - I want net neutrality, but I have zero faith in the ability of a bunch of unelected bureaucrats to write 10,000 pages of regulations that will make things better.
> is anyone 100% happy with their utility (power, water, etc)?
Yes, absolutely. My water is clean, potable and available with at least 99.99% uptime. Same goes for electricity, which is only slightly less reliable (down for a few hours in a major blizzard several years ago)
If my electricity were slightly cheaper, that'd be nice, but it's still less than half my cable/internet bill. Power is already deregulated here, so if I really cared, I could shop around for a cheaper rate, or for electricity generated from renewable sources.
The telcos in the US are uniformly obnoxious and offensive in their delight in advertising, fees, etc, and trying to rip me off in all sorts of ways. Without a doubt, if the City Internet & Federal Mobile Phone Service were as "just works" and "no marketing" as the septic system and the water system, it would be a measurable quality of life increase.
It's also worth contemplating if the brute fact of the matter is that public goods & natural monopolies (cable companies, cell towers perhaps) should be regulated as a utility. Particularly if the preferred mechanisms for interacting with a government in the US require/highly suggest the use of a computer or cell phone. If that assumption is being made (and it is), then it's not just a luxury, or even a popular service... it's becoming a common utility.
Agree with all of you, was just trying to gauge the difference.
The government regulates the utilities pretty tight, but there is also little to no room for competition in those spaces anymore either. Which is one thing that's improving service in Google Fiber markets.
I have power with 99.9% reliability and my water is usually pretty good quality. The only issues I've had with water (ever) is that recently there has been so much conservation in CA that the system wasn't designed to handle (ironic, no?).
I live in Washington state where it rains constantly, buy my water bill is about $200/month. Likewise, my power bill for a family of 5 is $400 per month. My power company still uses power poles to transmit electricity, like they have done is the 1800s. Meanwhile, we lost electricity for days during the last storm.
I argue that with competition, electric companies could innovate their distribution, ie bury the power lines, and the price of water would be cheaper.
The real solution to all this is more competition. Stop the states from suing cities to prevent them from implementing municipal fiber. Open up the field to companies like Google to come in and partner with cities who can provide the last mile, competing with businesses. Even libertarians should say, "well, a city is a large organization and a giant corporation is a large organization, and both are kind of monopolies at this point..."
Probably way too late to get noticed here, but while I think the THREAT of Title II might be useful to keep ISPs in line, it would be a pretty rash move to actually reclassify broadband.
The US has painfully little competition in most areas, there is no debate about that. But new technology has been fixing that, albeit slowly, via increasingly expansive and competitive 4G, Satellite, and even improvements in moving data across copper wires or existing phone lines (not going to get you 100mb service, but quite plausibly "good enough" that you can realistically threaten Comcast with quitting service.)
I don't want to get in a libertarian vs flame war, but the fact is, it is far easier to regulate than deregulate when it becomes unnecessary. If the non-competitive market we have now is an artifact of old technology and installation costs, it would be a mistake to set up a regulatory infastructure we won't be able to roll back.
Wheeler is apparently basing the 'light touch' Title II regulation on similar regulations applied to mobile video (but not mobile data). Does anyone have some examples of the applications of mobile video being so regulated (The YouTube app on my phone? Probably not?) the kinds of regulations imposed and what the results have been?
I think the radio analogy is spot on, and I really believe that the endgame to all this government interest may very well be the same sort of regulatory control that the FCC now imposes in radio stations and content via the [1] Communications Act of 1934.
This can easily been seen as a power grab by plutocrats who want to start filtering and controlling the money making and informational aspect of the web, and while I am, of course, speculating about this outcome, I think in general, it has been on the back burner for years.
You know, to protect the children and all that FUD.
To me there seems to be a distinct difference between actively broadcasting a signal(radio) and allowing access to those who request it(internet)
Radio works by beaming signals all over their coverage area. those signals are pushed to everyone.
Whereas, a website isn't just sending its html to every IP and port it can find, it waits for a request and responds accordingly.
This seems to be a fundamental distinction to me, but one that would likely be easily obscured by politicking and misinformation campaigns if that were the ultimate goal.
Interesting thought though, as we do see the UK beginning to move towards this more hands-on internet regulation all of a suddden
To me there seems to be a distinct difference between actively broadcasting a signal(radio) and allowing access to those who request it(internet)
Now, that's a very good point, but can't the very act of turning a radio dial be the 1930's equivalence of typing in a URI or clicking a link?
Wired magazine published an article in the 90's about the parallels between radio and the "new" internet, and it was filled with direct analogies between the two and how governments eventually took control and started regulating licenses and content, for the most part.
I am unable to find a link to that long article, but the ideas contained in it have stuck with me for a long time.
The FCC is able to regulate broadcast content because the courts found it constitutional due to the pervasive nature. Reclassification of ISPs does not affect the pervasiveness.
Contrarians... gotta love em. They keep the running Looney Tunes reverse-psychology joke going. Counter-cultures are no different than the trend-following cultures they try to polarize themselves from. I guess I shouldn't have been shocked into commenting on this one for the oddly negative responses from some, but I do believe that the formulation of that negativity demands some more research. Has the internet created a society full of contrarian trolls bent on using sheer will to overcomplicate simple subjects?
I am concerned about the implications for free speech. And I don't mean the freedom to say whatever I want as long as the FCC approves or that I don't piss off a large enough political constituency. If I start a blog to post pictures of Alah am I going to be shut down? What about forums that discuss illegal drug use? How long till the FBI, DEA, etc. petition the FCC to shut these sites down? What about sites like reddit that carry porn, post pictures of Alah AND discuss illegal drug use? I don't care about these sites but I do care about their right to run these forums and the participants right to discuss any issue openly, even socially unacceptable ideas.
Free speech is a political principle but people pay lip service to it because they don't understand it and how important it is to a free society. If FCC starts to regulate speech on the internet (i.e. actual censorship which only the government can practice) by defining acceptable content and shutting down websites for so-called "hate speech", requiring a government "blog" license, etc. then it is game over for our freedoms and the future of the country.
The HN title is wrong and misleading. The NYT headline is "In Net Neutrality Push, F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating Internet Service as a Utility".
That's a little different than "FCC regulating the Internet." ISPs provide internet endpoints to consumers. They should be utilities.
"Today, 55 percent of online traffic happens on smartphones and tablets, according to the F.C.C.." I did not know this, it's surprising for me. Mobile-first approaches makes a lot more sense now.
The net becomes a utility (and ISPs utility providers), and every breach, exploit, or unprotected private data leak becomes a terrorist action at prosecutorial discretion.
It depends on the area. In many places it's exactly a monopoly. And even if there is "choice" there is collusion between those options (for example to keep prices evenly high and not offering better service) which virtually makes it a monopoly anyway from the user's perspective.
Usually, I don't like making the 'slippery slope' argument, but it is quite appropriate here.
The dangers are real. We can allow nothing less than forcing IPSs to maintain complete neutrality on traffic type.
In your scenario, an ISP will determine that an organization is using their internet connection for this high-priority operation. The ISP then realizes that they can essentially extort the surgeon/hospital.
This is a mafia-like protection scam. "Don't want to pay up? Gee, it sure would be terrible if that internet connection of yours was to drop out at the wrong time."
Don't think this scenario is possible? I would argue it is probable.
You pay to guarantee availability. The urgency of netflix is not equivalent to a surgery. The netflix traffic is a threat to the surgery traffic.
The ISP doesn't extort- the customer pays for service guarantees. This is already what happens today in MPLS vpns.
Savvy technologists are going to demand guarantees that other tenants can't disrupt their service.
This is in no way a mafia-like protection scam. There is a certain allotment of bandwidth available at any given time at any given link. You can allow for reservations so that some tenants cannot encroach upon your guaranteed bandwidth for that link. This shit is already happening all the time on amazon aws, azure, google app engine, etc. These are not new concepts.
Mafia protection is- pay us or we take you down. What I'm describing is- you pay so that a netflix premier doesn't disrupt your service.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you can feel a service like cloudflare is not mafia-like protection.
In my scenario, the ISP purposely degrades the service unless you pay more. This isn't hypothetical as it has been proven they did/do to Netflix traffic.
Cloudflare isn't going to DDoS every site that doesn't sign up for their service.
The value of doing surgery successfully via the internet is high. Are you really that naive that you don't think ISPs will attempt to capture as much of that value as they possibly can?
Do you want to live in a world where an ISP determines the worth of your internet traffic and attempts to bill you based on the content, not the actual bandwidth used?
> You are subscribing to ad hominem attacks, without knowledge of how these services get built, paid for & capitalized upon.
Please. Your company provides a commodity. You are a utility and soon will be regulated as such. There is nothing special about what you do vs. ISPx ISPy or ISPz.
If our current model worked, we (the US) wouldn't have third-world quality internet at first world prices.
I am a pretty conservative guy, but in this case: enough is enough. You guys got greedy, and people are pissed.
1) Surgery-over-IP would be designed within the limitations of the existing infrastructure, which is more than capable of handling high resolution real-time video.
2) Surgery-over-IP would be useful mostly in areas that are unlikely to have reliable high speed internet access (poor countries, battlefields, etc.).
3) Netflix traffic is streamed to the customer using a strategy that tries to minimize the number of hops it has to take (i.e. content delivery network). This reduces congested links for something that would be a point-to-point application like remote surgery.
Really, Red Herring? It is not distracting, and in fact is not intended to be distracting. I argue that it is certainly uncomfortable for most technologists.
We are still at the very beginning of the Internet. With all the connected devices that are coming online, the nature of network traffic at a macro level is going to change. We really don't know where it's going to be tomorrow.
All of the pro-net-neutrality arguments seem to ultimately boil down to a desire to avoid a "buffering" toast on any video. The practical reality is that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Because "BUFFERING" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKcjQPVwfDk
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that taxation is necessary for surveillance.
What I'm proposing is that regulation is one way of legitimizing the role of surveillance. The government has a reason to be involved by virtue of the fact that it's made regulations.
I did a bad job in conveying that idea above. It's certainly possible my analysis is utterly incorrect as well.
Public safety and homeland security are primary functions of the FCC. When government decides to censor, surveil, or manipulate information in the future it seems likely it will be instrumented through the FCC as that relationship was used to do the same for radio and television in the past.
That will be a sad day. Internet technology still has a lot of room to improve before the government steps in and kills all market forces that encourage those improvements.
If you don't like your current service levels now, just wait until the government gets involved.
From all I have heard, places with better-regulated ISPs or even municipal broadband (gasp!) tend to have better service. You seem to be grinding a political axe rather than considering what the evidence says about the real-world effect of this particular change.
The simple fact is, getting approval to put your network somewhere is not only really expensive, but already heavily regulated, and this grants a de facto regional monopoly to companies like Comcast and Time-Warner in places where they have done so, because the startup costs of competing with them are unreasonably expensive and they can lobby to prevent competition. The market does not work efficiently in this particular area and no amount of idolizing market forces can change that.
>The simple fact is, getting approval to put your network somewhere is not only really expensive, but already heavily regulated
Very true. How does adding more regulation make things better? Are you telling me that the new FCC ruling will make all those existing regulatory problems go away? If so, that might help.
But if we agree the problem is regulation, I would hope we agree the solution can't be more regulation.
> Very true. How does adding more regulation make things better? Are you telling me that these new FCC ruling will make all those existing regulatory problems go away?
It could. For example, the FCC could force companies to lease their last-mile infrastructure out to competitors, which could add meaningful competition to the ISP space.
The devil will be in the details. How much is the price of the lease? Who determines that price? What then would be the motivation for upgrading the last mile infrastructure for the owners of it?
Most municipalities grant monopolies to cable providers based on the theory that it's the only way to get someone to build and maintain the cable infrastructure.
Granted monopolies do not allow for market forces...
Yet public infrastructure requires granted monopolies (i.e. government power). It would be impossible to acquire the necessary land rights and right-of-ways needed - having to contract with every land-owner to build anything would fail due to expense.
The ideal case would be the government owns the infrastructure, taxes (and use fees from bidding out access rights) pay for construction and/or maintenance, private companies to bid for the right to run services for the public.
>Most municipalities grant monopolies to cable providers based on the theory that it's the only way to get someone to build and maintain the cable infrastructure.
The theory is crap. It's a way to give away public infrastructure to campaign contributors. It's corruption: pure and simple, and it worked really, really well for Comcast.
When some municipalities tried to build their own cable system, Comcast sued.
Comcast is not a monopoly. This is the sort of misunderstanding that I'm talking about. AT&T was a monopoly and the USPO is still a first class mail monopoly.
I suspect Comcast is just the best option in your location and you're dissatisfied with it. Bummer for you, and I sincerely mean that.
When industries get regulated by the government they get "protected". Protected from upstarts with new and better technology, protected from cheaper alternatives, protected from dissatisfied customers, and generally protected from all market forces.
It is also playing with semantics to exclude DSL from the definition of broadband. 99% of people served by Comcast are also going to have a telco that can provide an admittedly slower, but still broadband, connection via DSL.
>I suspect Comcast is just the [only broadband] option in your location [due to their non-compete agreement with Time Warner and the city council not letting other service providers lay cables] and you're dissatisfied with it.
That's a bit more accurate. If somethings the only provider of a service, that's a monopoly. Plain and simple. There's no exceptions, there's no misunderstanding. The definition of broadband is 25/3, and Comcast is the only company offering that. There's no chance for upstarts with newer and better technology. There's no chance for cheaper alternatives. There's no chance of market forces. If you want to be an ISP in this city, you have to go through the city council who says no one but Comcast can lay cable and only utilies companies can use their utility poles. Guess what, if Comcast is Title II and everyone has access to their poles and conduits, well here comes the competition.
USPO is a first class mail monopoly because other players choose not to get in that game. Instead, even when you do ship via another carrier if that carrier deems your route to be too unprofitable they will give it to the post office because they cannot refuse. In fact, FedEx and UPS are the post office's biggest customers for this very reason.
Not true. It's impossible to truly compete at First Class Mail. The USPO(USPS) is a de-facto First Class mail monopoly because of the Private Express Statutes.
Yes, that damn government killing innovation. After all, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon invented the internet all on their own, why should the government get a say in how their networks are run? Can you imagine how horrible the internet would be if the government had been involved from the start?
The Internet as you know it? No it wasn't. Darpa created TCP/IP with the help of private contractors. Private companies like AOL made the Internet what it is today in the US.
Sorry, I know the Al Gore created the Internet for some people, but the it's just not how it went down.
Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf can recognize Al Gore's contribution to the creation of the Internet but you cannot? Without government involvement and investment, the global communications network might have started and ended at AOL.
It's easy now to forget what the internet was like even 20 years ago when things were just ramping up. There were huge government initiatives all around the world that made it viable for commercial ventures to use it.
HAHAHAHA AOL made the internet‽ AOL is the quintessential example of the closed, proprietary network that is not the internet until other forces made that change and then AOL disappeared.
While I understand what you are saying, please try to understand what I'm saying...which might be difficult because you probably didn't live through this era.
AOL was responsible for getting more Americans online than any other company. There wasn't a mailbox in the US that didn't get an AOL installation CD at least 2 times a year.
These weren't people "switching" providers, these were people thinking "what is this crap and why do I need it?". There was a day when no one knew why they should even go online and AOL sold them on the idea. So, while what you say is true, you don't seem to understand the context of the time.
Maybe you can think of it as the iphone of smart phones or the facebook of social networks. Closed systems typically make things easier for the masses to adopt.
The "Internet" as we know it was just a tiny corner of what AOL offered. And wasn't even originally part of the package. The Internet itself developed separately from AOL and eventually people wanted it more than they wanted anything AOL was offering. I'm not saying you don't have a valid point, about AOL bringing lots people online, but AOL had very little to do with the development of Internet.
This is hand wavey bullshit. I'm happy with my water and power companies. I hope my ISP dies in a fire. They're product is subpar, overpriced, and their customer service is predatory and combative.
Governments create and sustain markets in many cases. And in this case, the government created the entire foundation of the internet itself. The government involvement is the thing that made the internet exist.
That's what I'm worried about, you see all the news stories of the current ISPs magically improving once Google Fiber moves in.
Any 'utility' by government terms is highly regulated and has no market competition. Hell, they have to ask a judge before they can increase rates or change anything. Ha.
I realize HN is full of idealistic kids who never lived through the government taking control of something to "improve" it, so your down votes are forgiven.
Whether you're right or not, your point is shallow and tired. But I guess the "groundhog day" nature of HN resetting every discussion to zero every day encourages such comments.
Oh, they believe in it. They don't know how the market works, no, but they know they want to destroy it. Their goal is to stop progress, in the name of progress. It's not that they're aware of their goal - they're deliberately remaining ignorant in order to be able to support something so reprehensible.
No worries, plenty agree with you, but few fight the flood here on HN any longer. I never vote and rarely comment. The whole premise of comment voting is groupthink 3.0.
I cherish down-votes on HN, just like I cherish disagreeing with the idiocy that has plagued the progress of the US for decades, they'll keep swimming with the flow and wondering why things only get worse. It's like being the stern of the boat and wondering why wherever the country has been is shit, and looking at the bow as being to blame. You'll all get your turn at the bow of the ship, and I promise you it'll be far worse than your parents or grandparents.
Wait, doesn't calling the Internet a utility mean all data will be metered by the MB from now on? Or does that not apply here? If it does, wouldn't that give carriers exactly what they wanted - the ability to charge video providers much more than they would say a news website?
The idea behind the whole net neutrality movement was to have "all you can eat plans" where all data is treated the same. What if now we get the "all data is treated the same" part, but not the "all you can eat" one?
Another issue: government spying. I know the ISP's/carriers have given the government virtually everything they've asked for, including direct access to the cables for the plain-text data + the recent cookie tracking inserted into people's traffic, but some of them have refused to do much of it, like Sonic, and I think Google takes a similar approach, fighting for users' rights, even if Verizon and AT&T do not. So what does it mean now that the government classifies all Internet under Title 2. What can we expect in terms of surveillance? And does it make it much easier to force all ISP's to comply with certain surveillance requests?
> Wait, doesn't calling the Internet a utility mean all data will be metered by the MB from now on? Or does that not apply here?
No, it does not mean metered Internet, which is already increasingly common in the US - though usually in the form of x GB for $y, with $z/GB overages. This has actually become incredibly common. There isn't a single ISP in my state that doesn't have data caps with metered Internet thereafter, or, in the case of my ISP, mandatory upgrades (though even then, the most expensive plan has a cap of 1TB.)
> So what does it mean now that the government classifies all Internet under Title 2. What can we expect in terms of surveillance?
Phone calls aren't required to be metered and neither will be the Internet. But yes, metering is generally considered to be neutral, although not necessarily a good idea.
CALEA has existed for years and I haven't heard that Title II legalizes dragnet surveillance.
I think it helps to consider it a utility in the same way that the US system of roads and highways is “a utility” (information superhighway, you hoary old chestnut)
Y Combinator even published an open letter[4]. Quoting:
Title II of the Communications Act seems the most appropriate way to properly define broadband ISPs to be offering telecommunications. Speaking on behalf of Y Combinator, I’m urging you to adopt such a rule.
And here we are. It seems to me that the community has always been complaining about the different FCC approaches on the subject, and in favor of title II, until the FCC yielded. Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750036
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057634
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637147
[4] http://blog.ycombinator.com/y-combinator-has-filed-an-offici...