> Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US.
This is within the "Moore's law applied to network hardware" range and is not unusual.
It's also somewhat misleading because of how they're measuring (mean download speed), because customers have recently been abandoning DSL for (faster) cable. But if a 10Mbps DSL customer switches to 20Mbps cable, it shows up in the numbers as a 100% speed increase even if the cable network is no faster than it was before, or is faster than before but by significantly less than the 100% they're getting counted as.
In other words, it's claiming the destruction of competition as a consumer benefit because the market share loss of the dying competitor brings up the average.
What makes you think it's competition that's dying. Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to more areas, so their previous DSL subscribers are now upgrading to fiber.
Citation on Fios expansion? AFAIK, they've been holding steady with their existing mid-atlantic footprint (DC, Maryland, Delaware, PA, NJ, NY), and sold off everything else to Frontier in 2015. I believe their reasoning was that they could offer 4G to areas currently served by aging DSL lines, so there was no reason to upset the shareholders by spending money on physical infrastructure for fiber expansion.
> I haven't noticed any negatives yet either (to my surprise).
That's because the legal battle isn't over yet. If you were planning to take advantage of no more net neutrality, would you do it while a legal challenge is pending? The last thing you'd want to do is give the opposition evidence in favor of their position.
Really? You didn't notice large acquisition of Time Warner by AT&T, pulling HBO and Cinemax out of Dish network (to encourage people to use streaming), jacking prices on DirecTV (acquired early by AT&T during previous administration), then providing capped internet access, and zero rating to HBO and Cinemax (again owned by AT&T)?
And that just a single company.
I'm especially mad, because I am a Dish customer and don't have HBO since November.
Like a sibling comment pointed out already, how would have net neutrality prevented that? You're thinking they are merging because they planning to take advantage of anti-nn regulations better?
> You're thinking they are merging because they planning to take advantage of anti-nn regulations better?
Yes, of course. Why else would a communications company and a content company merge? It only makes sense if the can leverage each-others natural advantages. With strong NN regulations, AT&T would need to provide everyone with same opportunities they are providing Time Warner.
None of that is relevant to NN other than the zero rating (which is allowed on cell networks anyway where price per gb is relevant). That whole acquisition was entirely unaffected by net neutrality.
Some of the big cell companies have already instituted selective rate limiting on their unlimited plans (i.e. bandwidth limits on video streaming).
Not that they didn't do it before, but they'd always say sorry and stop for a while when someone noticed.
Likely they've already doubled down on demanding payment from companies like Netflix for not throttling them.
They aren't going to rush it, they care about PR up to a point... But companies like Verizon and ATT will absolutely frog boil consumers, small businesses and innovators under the current laws... Their histories make that pretty clear.
U.S. mean download speeds are twice as fast as the U.K., and mean upload speeds are three times as fast. (The U.K. data is about 9 months older, but it's a helpful comparison nonetheless.)
I think a public option is great but it’d also be excellent to support smaller local ISP’s by forcing big telcos to sublet the last mile of coax and fiber to competitors.
The argument in favor of deregulation of most things has some straight forward logic behind it. Imagine that some major player did begin to act badly. This would enable a competitor to offer a distinct value. Like the GP mentioned some predictions were things like e.g. Microsoft being able to pay Comcast to effectively disable Google search/products. That may be a legal possibility without regulation but it the Huffington Post 'analysis' seems to assume there are no consequences for actions. Google Fiber was a flop in large part because they could not meaningfully distinguish themselves from the competition. Imagine local monopolies start creating meaningfully poor experiences for internet users. They would not be monopolies for long!
Some might argue that lower speeds for higher prices were creating "meaningfully poor experiences" for users, but I think there is one important distinction. Let's imagine an upstart competitor comes in and offers some perk, such as lower prices for higher speeds. And the local monopoly ends up matching these offers, as they did in the case of Google Fiber. Is this action perceived as a 'de-crippling' of their system, or as an upgrade of their system? In reality it's almost certainly the former, but in practice it's going to be perceived as the latter. That means they actually gain public props for anti-competitive behavior following what is effectively price-gouging.
By contrast if some company is actively and outright blocking a site, then de-crippling would not be seen as an 'upgrade', but instead as what it is -- 'de-crippling.' And so it's likely that the competitor would be the one gaining the public props (and subscriptions). And in reality, it's possible that our incumbent monopoly might not even be able to de-cripple themselves due to a contract with e.g. Microsoft.
> Imagine that some major player did begin to act badly.
And it was easily detectable and your average consumer can figure out who to attribute it to. Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections?
There are far subtler ways to be evil and maintain some plausible deniability against the average consumer, you don't need to sabotage every operation, just enough. Government lawsuits are partly about giving weight to the concept that something screwy is going on.
> This would enable a competitor
Like that competitor to Comcast, who rapidly -- oh, wait, that didn't pan out. Don't ignore barriers-to-entry, which are hugely significant in the ISP market.
P.S.: In addition to the "direct intervention" side, there's also cases of spying and misusing privileged information. While that's on the decline due to increased HTTPS, the legal front is just as important as the technological one.
> Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections?
Probably easier to pull that style of thing in under existing fraud legislation than tie it to anything net-specific.
Even if there is no objective test, it is reasonably easy to make that sort of lie illegal. Free markets rely on companies being honest about what they sell, and I expect there would be pretty broad support for a law that says companies can't lie about what their products are (if there isn't such a law already).
If Comcast wasn't making it clear that they were sabotaging BitTorrent, that should be illigal by virtue of them willfully accepting money while not providing the service.
I think you're ignoring some very basic aspects of the ISP business and taking entirely the wrong lessons away from Google Fiber.
There is no cheap way to enter many/most/all of these markets. This isn't a world of cheap VC cash, because there is no chance of winning a lottery. Google of all people couldn't make this make sense. Sure, they would have had a better pitch if they were competing with incumbants who did things like block Google Search. Except it's even more trivial to unblock Google Search than it is to offer better service. This gets worse when you consider the possibility of not outright blocking, but intentionally slowing services.
So yeah. If Google couldn't make Google Fiber work, there is no way any new competitor is going to spring out of nowhere. The reality of the competition hasn't changed - incumbants are at a massive advantage even compared to most incumbants. Infrastructure is a massive barrier to newcomers, and any competitive aspects that can be used to differentiate one offer from another can be trivially and immediately matched by the incumbants. And in practice most all of the offers are difficult or impossible to really compare to each other in pratice, so most consumers have to rely mainly on the marketing materials and subjective experiences.
And again I've left out a whole other side of the issue, namely the relationships between ISPs and services.
This is just an awful system to rely on tradional markets. It uses expensive infrastructure, and the products are indifferentiable in any meaningful way over any period of time.
Google built a hugely successful Operating System ( Android ), Web browser ( Chrome ) etc because it was important to them that nobody won these platforms. If someone had monopoly control, they could squeeze Google for a lot of money through Traffic Acquisition Costs. Google currently pays potentially 100s of millions of dollars to Mozilla
The same applies to ISPs. Why do you think they are pushing for net neutrality ? Do you think it is out of the goodness of their hearts ? Without net neutrality Google might invest billions into building out a global, fast Internet infrastructure. They may have no choice but to do it, because it is strategic for them to own the entire ad delivery pipeline ( Computers/Phones/Tablets, Operating Systems, ISPs )
> Google built a hugely successful Operating System ( Android ), Web browser ( Chrome ) etc because it was important to them that nobody won these platforms.
Or was it important to them that they win? They certainly seem to have with Chrome at least. Does any company intentionally enter a space just to compete? Would google rather not absolutely win in the infrastructure as well?
I think it was important to them that someone else did not win. Winning it themselves was probably a bonus
> Would google rather not absolutely win in the infrastructure as well?
Probably, but it is up to it's competitors to try and prevent that.
If Google has no competitive advantage because of their other businesses it should not be a problem. But if it competes unfairly, fair competition laws should be applied
Either way, the customers could stand to benefit from increased investment
Again I'd emphasize one point you made here: "And in practice most all of the offers are difficult or impossible to really compare to each other in practice, so most consumers have to rely mainly on the marketing materials and subjective experiences." This is arguably the single most important factor here. When companies are incapable of meaningfully distinguishing themselves, you're going to trend towards monopoly because there is no way for competitors to offer a compelling argument for their product. They can try to compete on price/performance but in most industries, certainly including telecoms, economy of scale means this is a losing battle.
Let's now imagine Comcast blocks Google due to payment from e.g. Bing. First off it's entirely possible that Comcast could not unblock Google even if they wanted to, since this would undoubtedly be breach of contract with Microsoft. But more importantly, this is something that would be perceived as a actively malicious action by the customer. They see the company is engaging in unreasonable behavior at the behest of third parties that visibly and meaningfully worsens their experience relative to other ISPs. Our critical point from above is no longer true!
This offers an opening for new competitors even if Comcast is able to unblock Google, because of the newfound ability for customers to compare services in practice. Compare this to slow speeds or high prices. These are not going to be seen as actively malicious and so the incumbent monopoly matching a competitor's prices is something that will be seen as a positive for the incumbent monopoly, as opposed to a non-negative.
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So see how barriers to entry are not the fundamental problem here we can go reductio ad absurdum. Imagine we take something with very few barriers to entry - selling burgers. But let's apply so many rules and regulations that burgers become effectively identical -- same meat, same ingredients, same cooking, same standards of quality/freshness, same spices, etc, etc. You'd rapidly trend towards monopoly once again simply because the only way companies could compete would be on price and factors outside of the burger itself. But the biggest burger company would be capable of making burgers cheaper, faster, and more rapidly than anybody else - which means they would 'win', or be able to win if necessary, on every single competitive factor. In essence they become impossible to compete against and in simply trying to ensure high standards, you have created a monopoly.
“Imagine local monopolies start creating meaningfully poor experiences for internet users. They would not be monopolies for long!”
I don’t have to imagine it. I lived it for years. As the “for years” part hints, it persisted. I moved out of that place years ago but from what I hear it’s still like that.
You have a nice theory but it doesn’t seem to match the real world.
Utilities settle as oligopolies in free markets. When this happens, quasi governments take them over so that they are benevolent oligopolies. If you want Google and Facebook to have better bandwidth than your start-up just because they're big, then you should oppose net neutrality.
Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US.
https://www.recode.net/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafban...