> It's unlikely popular and profitable services will be hindered by the lack of net neutrality.
Huh? Did you forget already that both Verizon and Comcast throttled services like Netflix? They both argued they should get a cut if they were going to carry the traffic to their customers. Now they're getting exactly what they wanted.
The point was to reply to a contention that "popular services will not be affected" with a counter example. Popular services certainly could have been squeezed by ISP, and in fact they were in the past, very notably.
So sure: Netflix maybe might not due to size and popularity. The next great thing will be, for sure.
On the other hand they partnered with Telekom (most popular ISP in Germany) for a service called "StreamOn". With that you can stream Netflix (and other partnered streaming sites) without affecting your monthly data cap.
German government regulation agency (Bundesnetzargentur) and the EU have their doubts that StreamOn is legal even in the current context. So by participating they are setting a statement.
It's like a vegetarian eating meat from factory farming every day.
This is a highly politicized topic but it's hard to find rational discussion.
If I built a network I would expect to be able to charge whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted in exchange for the use of my network.
Is the answer that taxpayers helped fund the network so now feel they deserve not to pay twice? How much of the current internet infrastructure is paid for by taxpayers vs private corporations?
Any good sources you'd suggest reading on the pros and cons of each side of the argument?
In the US the internet has become a utility. You can possibly live without it in the same way that you could possibly live without running water, but to be a functional and normal member of society you need access to it. It is used for everything from communication to shopping. Giving cable companies control over what people can/cannot see on the internet or how much websites cost to view allows them to extort any one that uses the internet to conduct or attract business.
Furthermore, the internet has now become a public meeting place. Many people communicate with each other solely through the internet and voice their opinions there. Giving cable companies the ability to legally prevent two IPs from communicating is akin to preventing mail between them.
Basically, because of the ways that the internet has come to be used and the basic expectation of privacy that people have when it comes to similar things such as mail, many people would consider it wrong to remove any semblance of privacy or fairness from the internet, which is what repealing net neutrality does.
These ISP companies use legal shenanigans, coupled with the unavoidably large startup costs of creating a new/competing ISP, to effectively run regional monopolies. Google kind of gave up their master plan for Fiber after they were litigated in multiple jurisdictions essentially over bullshit that they were legally within their right to do, such as use shared lines - and that was Google, which had a ton of cash to throw at the problem.
These monopolies aren't so bad by themselves; we have similar monopolies with power and water. But those are regulated so that their monopolies can't be blatantly abused. ISPs are trying to roll back regulations that, in the minds of pro-NN people, will allow them to abuse consumers using their monopolies.
The problem with what these network providers are doing is that they own both the lines and the content. For example, if your ISP is a shareholder in Hulu, they're going to charge way more for Netflix to stream than Hulu, so they can essentially use this new ruling in an anti-competitive manner.
I'm not sure what most of the anti-net neutrality side's supporting arguments are aside from the fact that the regulations are unfairly limiting ISP's abilities to make money. They will mention that these regulations are affecting the free market, but in my opinion other existing regulations are much worse about limiting the effects of the free market, except those would make it easier for ISPs to be competed against, not harder.
> I'm not sure what most of the anti-net neutrality side's supporting arguments are
My friend was a lawyer for an ISP and now works for the FCC (I promise she's a good person otherwise).
The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.
The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.
They're both decent arguments, and would totally make sense in a world where multiple ISPs could reach everyone's home.
> The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.
Hypotheticals can be checked by referring to other countries with different market structures.
Australia has a broader mix of ISPs and Telcos than the US, despite until the 90s being under the control of a single public system (Telecom), with a plurality of the current infrastructure owned by its privatised successor (Telstra).
They seem to do fine with net neutrality. Regular competition.
> The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.
Charging by bandwidth and usage is well settled.
The point is that the ISPs don't want to segment the consumer market. Too hard: there's competition, which as we know is unamerican because it makes business haaaard.
Instead they want to segment the provider market. Far fewer of them to negotiate and there's zero competition. You, the ISP, have at any point in time monopoly control over the consumer who is using your infrastructure. Providers have no other way to route traffic over the last mile.
Nobody mounts this kind of lobbying effort from the goodness of their hearts. They see a gigabuck in it.
>The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.
What? This logic is like saying, hey the only business model that should exist is one where we should only cater to those that pay the most (whether through ignorance or lack of options, etc).
>The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.
It's not fair that grandma is going to be even more duped by the limited offerings of news and media that these companies will tighten their grip on through this move. Also the pipe is just sitting there. It's not like Comcast is manufacturing electrons and packets that get consumed by users.
Ask your friend to study other countries internet situations.
I wouldn't call either of these "decent arguments" for forsaking net neutrality. They can both be solved by offering tiered pricing and data caps. For instance, grandma pays $10 a month for a Gb of data, Netflix Youtube kid pays $100 for unlimited. Same goes for small startup ISP.
> The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.
I find it hard to believe that the electrical grid, water, sewer, and natural gas systems all are able to make due but the poor ISPs rolling in cash can't.
Meanwhile, these same ISPs are working to make competition illegal or impossible.
This isn't an issue of providing better service. This is an issue of making more money by squeezing the customer every way they can while making recourse impossible.
'We cannot build a big enough network for Netflix' is nowhere near a top reason people cannot start an ISP.
Data caps and plans with different bandwidth is a working answer to the second problem.
Are you sure your friend is a good person? She sounds like a typical sellout hypocrite if that's her arguments.
It seems like a lot of the disagreement hinges on the fact that ISPs have a monopoly and many people cannot easily "vote with their wallet" if the ISP does something they don't like. I wonder if focusing on making it easier for competitive ISPs to start up would do more towards bridging the gap between the two sides.
I think a lot of the anti-NN crowd is based on a more philosophical argument, that if the ISP built the infrastructure then they own it and they should be able to charge $1 million per day for access if they want (they would obviously not do that because nobody would pay it)
I wonder what is the biggest impediment to setting up a legitimately competitive ISP? Presumably the (ostensibly wasteful) cost of duplicating the last-mile infrastructure?
As an aside, do you have more info on the legal challenges to google fiber?
Another obstacle is rights of way. You cannot just tear up streets and bury cables. And in practice, you also cannot build a cable network through private property either, because you inevitably will encounter some owners of real estate who don't care about your network and thus have no incentive you allow you to build through their property unless you pay them as much as you can, because that is what they are going to be asking for.
So, in practice, networks are built on public ground, or potentially using eminent domain. Neither of those should result in exclusive ownership of the market thus obtained.
> I wonder if focusing on making it easier for competitive ISPs to start up would do more towards bridging the gap between the two sides.
Fighting against properties of a service that make it a natural monopoly is usually not going to work as well as limiting the ability of the resulting monopoly to be leveraged. Either, of course, takes active regulation, and tends to be unpopular with both laissez-faire ideologues and the people holding the monopoly.
Because it is a natural monopoly, essentially due to the massive cost of building and maintaining a second last-mile network which would necessarily be underutilised. The costs of maintaining a last-mile network are essentially independent of the number of users (unless you let unused parts of the network go out of date/fall into disrepair, in which case you effectively don't have a second network anymore).
As such, it is always better to try and win over one more customer to increase revenue, even if that customer pays less than the cost of keeping their line in working order, both because the costs are mostly there anyway, and because it reduces the revenue of the competition, thus increasing the likelyhood that they will fail and thus make you have a monopoly again.
That's actually exactly the behaviour you see over and over when some smaller business (or larger business, for that matter, see Google Fiber) tries to build a network where the monopolistic incumbent so far didn't care to provide useful service. The moment that project is announced, you get really good and cheap connectivity from the incumbent. Given that they before didn't consider it to be a good investment, you can guess that they are doing it only to destroy the competition.
Also, the network operator that has the less-utilized network necessarily has to charge higher prices per user to cover their costs, which leads to a positive feedback of even less customers, leading to even higher prices, ...
Having two parallel last mile networks is effectively unstable. There is a reason why there aren't multiple water pipes and multiple electricity cables and multiple natural gas pipes in your house.
Imagine there's no Netflix yet. People are using the web, and ISPs are selling tiny-bandwidth plans. Along comes a streaming movie service and people love it.
All of a sudden, ISP customers are saying "I want more bandwidth and I'll pay more for it."
Can the ISP say, with a straight face, that Netflix is costing them money?
In many areas of the United States, there is only one ISP available. Part of this is due to the high cost of entry, but the ISPs also have a past filled with rather shady activity. Verizon was given federal money to expand their network, did a fraction of the work, and then used their influence to pocket the rest. Comcast will throw lawsuits at new ISPs in order to bankrupt them.
Because of this the ISPs already use their monopoly position to take as much money as possible via data caps and bandwidth. I believe Comcast is on record as saying data caps aren't needed, but no one can stop them. The reality is ISPs are some of the most greedy, unethical companies around that exploit their monopoly position for their bottom line. Either regulation needs to be in place or the government needs to incentivize and protect new ISPs.
They can do both with NN gone. Force the consumers to pay for different packages and lanes, and then force the services to pay for access to the subscribers.
Notice how almost none of the service areas intersect? Internet competitiveness in the US is measured by census zones, and they know that. So they carve up territory block by block, allowing them to be engage in "competition" without competing. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/isps-dont-want-t...)
1) Do you think it would be okay for a hardware store to price a shovel differently depending on what the customer wanted to dig?
2) The telcos never seem to reflect on the fact that the only reason people want broadband at all is because there are services that they want to access. So just by existing they're already getting their cut. It would be just as reasonable for Amazon and Netflix to ask Comcast for a cut of their revenue, since they're providing these attractive services that Comcast isn't paying a dime to provide.
I think hardware stores are maybe not the best comparison because if a hardware store was doing that then it would be pretty easy for a competitor to open a hardware store across the street and undercut the first on shovels and steal all the business.
I think this might be a better solution than a law that specifically mandates the price at which a hardware store can sell shovels, since I think that law would only address a very specific problem caused by a larger underlying issue.
I think the shovel case at least, when the market can sort something out then it's "better" to let it do so.
For Amazon/Netflix, at least on the surface, I would say that the ISP and the content provider can ask for whatever they want and whether or not they get it will be a function of how much each one needs the other. Perhaps ironically a very similar system to how internet peering currently works (the little guy pays the bigger guy for transit).
Building a network requires laying cables on other people’s private property.
Without the government giving them the right to do this they would never be able to negotiate with each individual land owner and networks would not be possible.
Wireless has the same problem: use of the airwaves, a public good no one can own. We issue licenses for them otherwise it would be a tragedy of the commons situation where no one would be able to successfully use them.
The internet (and most of its popular protocols) was invented and established due to public funding and released to the world for free.
So quite literally ISPs would not have a business whatsoever without free public assistance. As a result they owe us a lot more than the average business.
Something that seems to be forgotten in this day and age is that corporations exist at the pleasure of the citizens (aka taxpayers) because said corporations offer them things that are deemed to be net public goods. Why should you be allowed to build your network in our country in the first place? (Especially when we could do it ourselves at cost and not give you a percentage off the top?)
I think you're conflating a legal term with actual people, who do the existing, offering, and building. These people (who work under a legal entity with rights, protections, and regulations) pay taxes while they exchange their product or service for our dollars. The service can be anything people want or need. Grocery, clothing, book stores, bars, cafes, airlines... Ignore the "percentage off the top". Why is that a concern of yours? Do you not tip at restaurants or give to charity? Part of your gain can be someone else's. It's all voluntary in the free market.
Not only are you free to not to give money to these corporations, you are free to start your own non-profit service, with a similar legal structure. You have to appeal to investors' altruism rather than their self-interest. A big challenge, but not outside the realm of possibility depending on the market you 'd like to cater to.
Looking past the financing question, all (major) telecommunications networks are built via eminent domain, and as such must necessarily serve the public good.
Your argument would be valid if it were possible for alternate internet providers to pop up. However there isn't anything comparable to cable right now that you could call an alternative.
The problem is that the price you (as the ISP) choose to charge some new startup is not subject to competition.
That's because you're not charging your customers. You're selling them to that startup. The startup has no choice but to pay if they want to have a chance of reaching these potential customers.
That means ISPs will have to ability to milk every cent of value generated out of startups, limited only by their ability to measure it.
The normal mechanisms of a market don't kick in, because the customers will be unaware of what's happening. They're not going to change providers only because that provider is shaking down some startup they've never heard of.
Why should you get paid more because your users were streaming Netflix as opposed to doing anything else with the traffic?
You, as a network provider, are already peering with other network providers, and so you're getting paid for (and paying for) the bandwidth that's getting used. What you're after is an extra slice of the pie from Netflix.
In theory that makes sense but if you build a network and actively fight to prevent any one else from also running lines, thats where we have a problem.
the big companies will happily pay. for their money they are getting a promise that any potential competitor will have to climb over a wall before entering the ring.
the big companies just don't want to be the _only_ ones paying.
Huh? Did you forget already that both Verizon and Comcast throttled services like Netflix? They both argued they should get a cut if they were going to carry the traffic to their customers. Now they're getting exactly what they wanted.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz...
2. https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-com...