I think a big mistake was too many major net neutrality advocates in the US tried to bundle too many things under the "net neutrality" label.
Net neutrality should have been this, and only this:
> If an ISP customer has a plan that purports to give the customer B bytes of data per month and a data transfer speed of S bits/second, then
> 1. The ISP will not limit (unless legally required to) what sites the customer can use those B bytes per month with, and
> 2. The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion.
If the ISP does that, they satisfy net neutrality. If they also give you access to their own services without counting that against your B bytes, or make deals to give you access to certain sites without it counting against your B bytes, that may be anti-competitive but as long as you still get your B bytes at S bits/second it would not be a net neutrality violation.
If it is anti-competitive it should be dealt with through the large body of law that had been extensively developed for more than 100 years to deal with such things: antitrust law. Trying to shove a subset of antitrust law into net neutrality just because a particular behavior that might be anti-competitive happens to involve in internet service makes no sense.
My country's net neutrality law seems to be a great blueprint, and something that can be easily understood. No need for all the "bytes" and "throttling" terminology:
"ARTICLE 56. - Network Neutrality. Each user shall be guaranteed the right to access, use, send, receive or offer any content, application, service or protocol through the Internet without any type of restriction, discrimination, distinction, blocking, interference, hindrance or degradation.
a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any content, application, service or protocol except by court order or explicit request of the user.
b) Fix the price of Internet access by virtue of the contents, services, protocols or applications to be used or offered through the respective contracts.
c) Arbitrarily limit the right of a user to use any hardware or software to access the Internet, as long as they do not damage or harm the network."
3. Some sort of device /software you can install to do stuff like you can do to an electrical network like overload and circuit breaker bypass? Can those things be done to a fiber network? Beyond congestion, what'd the worst you can do to a ISP?
Then the regulator will take them to court and case law will disambiguate the boundaries. Counterintuitively it’s the very prescriptive laws that allow companies to more easily come up with loopholes because legislators can’t possibly conceive of every scenario in advance, whereas the vague laws allow the courts to decide each new situation case by case as it arises.
> Counterintuitively it’s the very prescriptive laws that allow companies to more easily come up with loopholes because legislators can’t possibly conceive of every scenario in advance, whereas the vague laws allow the courts to decide each new situation case by case as it arises.
If the law uses the words "purposely harm the network" instead of "harm the network" then it's harder to claim it applies to services that e.g. increase congestion by sending a lot of legitimate data. Being clearer narrows the scope of the excuses their lawyers can emit.
I'm not sure it should just be 3! ISPs should be held responsible (and able to) selectively block DDoS traffic originating from their customers. Especially with the proliferation of symmetric gigabit+ connections...
Last mile ISPs are the wrong place to do anything like that. The middle of the network is no place for traffic mangling because it already requires state of the art equipment to transfer that much data whatsoever, much less do packet inspection on it to try to guess what's a DDoS and what's just a lot of real traffic, and then get it wrong and block legitimate flows or new applications.
What's needed is a way for recipient endpoints to tell upstream networks that they (temporarily) don't want traffic from particular sources. But that requires a new network protocol, not some arbitrary policy judgement on the part of random ISPs.
>> too many major net neutrality advocates in the US tried to bundle too many things under the "net neutrality"
This is the folly and downfall of all social causes and political movements. Take any subject that gain political power and inevitably other movements will attempt to latch on to it diluting the message, expanding the focus, and in the end destroying the support.
One common one I see here is the anti-ICE or anti-car crowd trying to combine EVs with better housing so people wouldn't have to drive everywhere.
It'd be a lot easier to for people to start supporting, e.g. markets closer to home, if it wasn't conflate with (1) the push for EVs, (2) the push to reduce emissions vis renewable energy.
I can support pedestrian-trips without it all being about the EV evolution or about some vague altruistic goal about less emissions. Make it more about my health (more walking), neighborness (seeing people around you that live next to you), convenience (I don't need to drive 15 minutes for a gallon of milk) and cost (may not need 2 cars or even any cars evebtually).
I live car-free, formerly in a very hilly city, now in a flat city. I can tell you 100%, the problems I have day to day are not because of the hills or lack thereof. how did I solve this seemingly omnipotent, insurmountable problem of HILLS? I bought an ebike.
what you're calling "wildly detached from reality" .. crazy insane, unworkable things like, building safe bike lanes, and designing streets to lower the speed of cars, and having houses close to local businesses so you can do normal stuff without a car .. uniformly where those things are implemented, my life is better, and where they aren't implemented, my life is worse. I can literally feel my mood rising and falling as I go to and from the different areas of the city with people-centric infra vs car-centric infra.
my quality of life varies in direct inverse proportion to how much I have to deal with fast-moving car traffic. which one of us is "detached from reality" again?
The detachment from reality is believing that everyone wants to, or would be better off living the style of life you do.
Local Shops, people centric, walking and biking none of those things appeal to me.
I want large shops where I can buy 2 weeks of provisions, and possibly even lumber for my next home improvement project all in one stop, and not have to go to a store again for weeks.
I do not have the desire to walk, or bike, or ebike... and even if I did the vast many months of the year when it is below freezing and ice covered surfaces would make that dangerous.
When I do have to venture into the more "people centric" i.e walkable areas of my city I can literally feel my mood falling as I know I will have to hunt for parking and then walk many blocks to my destination.
It's great that you have plentiful choices that suit your lifestyle. The anti-car crowd does not. The urban/biking lifestyle is illegal in most of the US. Where it is legal, cars are still over-accommodated with large urban boulevards, generous on-street parking, multiple highways cutting through downtown, and a general belief that innocent people being killed or injured by drivers "just happens sometimes, it's so sad".
illegal as in, it is substantially illegal for anyone to alter the built environment to make it more walkable/bikeable -- be it landowners or the local government. because of strict zoning/planning regulations, outdated road design manuals, parking requirements, etc. car-dependency is encoded into law, in the sense that the system is set up so that the default outcome always results in car-friendly development, while any attempt at pedestrian- or cycle-friendly development is subject to arbitrary delays, legal challenges, and needs discretionary exemptions. example: it has been known for decades that Dutch-style intersections[1] are safer than status quo designs, but until very recently it was an odyssey to get one built in the UK or the US, because the transportation authorities have not-invented-here syndrome and won't listen to empirical evidence from abroad (which undermines the claim of traffic engineering to be a scientific discipline). hell, sometimes they'll insist on a "pilot study" even when a design has been a success elsewhere in the same country! but building a junction with inadequate pedestrian and cyclist amenities is easy, so long as it meets safety standards for motorists.
another example: the law says you need to build X amount of car parking spaces in a development, but demands no amenities for cycle storage. or, this[2] disgusting litany of regulatory excuses for why a pedestrian crossing outside a school wasn't allowed be made safer, because nothing can be allowed to reduce traffic speed.
furthermore, in some places the law as written really does de facto criminalize safe cycling. for instance, requiring that cyclists never stray out of the bike lane, even when it contains dangerous obstructions[3]. or, traffic lights that don't detect cyclists, so the lights stay red forever, so it's impossible to proceed without either breaking the law or waiting for a car to come up behind you and trigger the sensor. there are many cases like this -- the law doesn't literally say "you can't cycle", but following the law rules out cycling in any safe and practical sense.
and then there's the absurd fake crime of "jaywalking" ...
If someone's using phrases like "wildly detached from reality" and transparent strawman arguments, they're not looking for honest discussion or to become more informed on the topic. They've calcified their opinion and engaging them is a waste of your time.
It's not quite that simple. A too-niche cause won't likely receive sufficient support, so it probably needs to absorb just the right amount of adjacent causes.
When you frame net neutrality as "users pay the same for all network traffic" people love it and when you frame it as "Facebook cannot subsidize your mobile data usage on Facebook" people hate it even though those mean the exact same thing.
What started the whole net neutrality discussion in the late oughts was Netflix wanting to run its own fiber to Comcast so Comcast users wouldn't have to pay for data used watching Netflix. That's what this has been about: companies that want eyeballs subsidizing those eyeballs' data when using their services.
yea, and next thing carriers want 'subsidizing' from every content provider and internet (as tech ppl know it) is relegated to an unmaintained dirt road.
Legislating for the difference between genuine QoS traffic management, and traffic shaping because the ISP mis-sold what little peering bandwidth they have (or have extracted a bribe from a competitor of a service being artificially throttled, or both), is difficult to do in few words.
i'd say it's impossible without heavily regulating network layout and peering agreements by wich point we could probably do away with commercial isp's altogether
The mistake in this situation is not following the money. Whenever dealing with anticompetitive behavior, you also need to address the rules etc that allows it.
> The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion.
IMO, this is not specific enough. The ISP should also not be able to give “bonus speed” to certain companies or sites. Otherwise the goal will just be to set a standard that’s above the normal speed, and use bonus speed as your artificial barrier to entry.
Net Neutrality advocates were always going after the wrong solution. They never focused on the root of the problem, local competition. Specifying a quality ISP service in a dynamic market over a long period of time is a hopeless endeavor.
If you fix the root issue (competitive market), like the EU did with local loop unbundling, or voiding local govt issuing monopoly contracts to ISPs, then you don't need to try and specify a bare minimum for internet access.
The other thing naive leftists don't realize is complex regulation always favors corporations over consumers. Sure you may get a headline "win" in year 1, but by year 10 history has shown regulatory capture will set in. The rules will be so complex, the FUD will be so thick, consumer interests will not be protected. The lobbyists love complex regulation.
This makes absolutely no sense in the context of the actual real-life NN debate. The proposed national NN regulation existed to supersede the fact that the federal government can't force states/cities/towns to unbundle their loops and get local govts out of the exclusivity contracts they signed. That kind of reform is a stretch goal while in the mean time you can pass a law that obviates the major pain point for everyone instantly.
You're right about complex positive-rights regulations but the proposed NN regulation was a small set of restrictions on what ISPs aren't allowed to do. Once the various execs cry it out over lost future profits the regulation costs nothing and turns internet service into a known quantity you can purchase from anyone who offers it and know what you're getting.
your response presumes that lobbying / citizen action can only happen at the federal level, which is not true (in fact citizen movements are at a large disadvantage in big $$ federal politics). NORML and the marijuana effort shows that local/state can be very effective in actually get results in policy change.
I also believe that the "federalization" of all issues is bad for the country and bad for culture. It makes everything super high stakes, and doesn't allow for the country to have a range of options to match citizen policy preferences. There are very, very few issues 350M+ people have strong policy alignment on. The rest of the issues should be sorted out at the state & local level. Going federal on every issue just increases the concentration of power in our society.
The net neutrally rules are actually not intrusive. They don't require ISP's to do something, just refrain from complicating something.
Wheres local loop unbundling, etc., is extremely intrusive in terms of telling businesses what they must do, and then courts handling lots of practical and legal requirements to make it work, with respect to many different build outs of varying costs, local laws, etc.
It does make me happy to think that every local monopoly or duopoly is getting new competition from Starlink, and potentially other low orbit satellite constellations.
I disagree. Throttling concerns the actual operation of the network. Zero-rating concerns prices and billing.
The former involves things that are specific to networks so it makes sense to have network specific regulations to cover them. There's nothing really network specific about the kind of concerns people raise over zero-rating so there isn't a need to handle them different than we handle pricing and billing concerns in everything else.
I'm reading this as a difference between US and European style laws. It's my observation that Europe creates tighter legal frameworks with fewer loopholes. The US always seems to target specific bad behaviors and then acts surprised when corporations exploit the swiss cheese loopholes.
Previously disagreeable behaviors suddenly look acceptable because they were not specifically made banned when new legislation was passed. By allowing zero rating, ISP's could craft plans where you get "packages" of sites and then anything not under a subscription falls into a more austere X bytes at S speed bucket. Yes, they're doing that yet but such a thing could happen by not specifically stopping it in advance.
I feel like the USA is focusing on the wrong thing with net neutrality. The core problem is that individual ISPs have total monopolies on infrastructure (or at least on the better infrastructure) in a lot of areas, and so can do all the anti consumer bullshit they want without repercussions.
Enforcing net neutrality is just treating a symptom of the monopoly. Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.
Competition itself can't protect against net neutrality violations, because even small-marketshare ISPs can break your startup's product for some customers.
Almost none of these customers will ever even learn that the failure is the ISP's fault. And even if they do, who will switch ISPs just to use some not-yet-proven product by a new startup?
Meanwhile your competitor's product will work well, either because they were too big to mess with or because they paid whatever the ISP was demanding. Maybe you should too!
This is why Europe needed net neutrality rules, and actually passed stronger rules than the U.S., even though the system you describe was prevalent there. Amusingly, before the rules existed, the increased competition in Europe had actually led to more net neutrality violations there (specifically, blocking or throttling things like VOIP and BitTorrent) because ISPs in that competitive landscape were under more pressure to cut costs!
My source on this is Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, who is a leading expert on net neutrality policy and whose work informed both the U.S. and E.U. rules.
For example, which video conferencing solution would you choose: the one that always works for everyone you invite, or the one that works only for 90% of the people you invite, because the other 10% are on an ISP that blocks it? You'd be under a lot of pressure to choose the solution that you know will just work for everyone.
The ISP doesn't need to be anything close to a monopoly to get leverage for extortion and (in the process) mess up competition at the application layer.
Yes, we need more competition, but we still need net neutrality rules.
Competition improves prices and service. Net neutrality rules protect competition at the application layer, and they ensure that ISPs are really competing on how good they are at moving data, not just on how good they can get at shaking down the application layer.
If there is competition, which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites? And if enough people selects the latter, and assuming blocking small percentage of site doesn't give big monetary gain to the ISP, there is no reason for ISP to behave the way you said in the example.
Free market principles do not apply when the switching costs are non-trivial and information asymmetry makes it difficult for the consumer to know what’s really going on.
Nobody is gonna complain about their ISP when the conversation is simply this: “Aw, shucks, [startup-product] doesn’t work, at least [established-product] works everywhere. The new thing is probably crap anyway.”
We need common sense regulation in this space, not what we have now. What we have now is Google fiber being told to pound sand all over the country even though they offered to pay for everything when laying down a separate, competing fiber network. Why were they rebuffed? Verizon/Att has the local gov. wrapped up. Let’s break THAT gov-enforced monopoly.
It's in some cases not even a choice. ISP service in the US is to my understanding also tied up in regional availability (it's less of an issue in Europe since afaict infrastructure is just... better in Europe, but even in Europe you have regions where the choices are between shit and slightly worse smelling shit; hence why net neutrality still matters here), and many of the more rural areas just have a single provider so your only choice to change ISP is to... move location. Which is frankly absurd.
The result is that said provider is basically running a regional monopoly, but this doesn't get regulated against because the total ISP market isn't monopolized.
I’ll be the first to talk about market failures but the mere existence of friction does mean markets stop working. There’s some amount of friction with every market interaction. There is absolutely a market failing when it comes to ISPs but it’s not really friction that’s the issue, switching ISPs in an area where you actually have options is a few phone calls and scheduling a time for someone to do your wiring.
Now if every store in a 100 mile radius only had Coke, then switching to Pepsi just got a lot harder despite the two products being literal drop-in replacements for one another.
Switching to pepsi is easier as it is a single dimensional change. Switching ISP will have a multitude of effects. Most unknown (how reliable is the new one? will they give me hidden extra charges? what are their TOS? are they blocking XYZ service I need down the road? do they spy on DNS traffic?)
and so on. Let alone a decent amount of time on the phone organising it and potentially some early exit penalties.
> which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites?
Some non negligible percentage of people might choose the one that only works with most websites, due to some other reason, such as they have reduced prices.
That non-negligible amount of people on this other service, could still be leveraged by that ISP to strongarm websites.
And that business model produces market concentration.
An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up. The services are over a barrel and pay, after which the ISP's users don't see slowdowns and have no reason to switch. Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users. Smaller ISPs don't have as much leverage to extract the danegeld so they can't compete.
It makes perfect sense to prohibit that business model as an antitrust measure.
> An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up.
Yeah, we’ve already seen this in the Comcast/Netflix debacle and Deutche Telekom vs the world. In fact a lot of large incumbents do this.
> Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users.
If things were even so rosy. The shakedown money is used for larger profits and monopoly positions to get more users.
My assumption was that ISP couldn't get big cost saving by restricting some sites. I think this assumption is valid as by definition the websites that consumes most of the data are popular sites, and I don't think ISP would touch that due to reputational harm. And banning few of the tail end of the sites wouldn't allow ISPs to reduce the cost by any margin.
Which ISP would you pick, the one that works with every conferencing system, or the one that deliberately blocks some of those conferencing systems in the small markets where they have a monopoly? Second question: which market segment does a typical ISP care more about, the small markets where they have a monopoly, or the large markets where they compete?
> Which ISP would you pick, the one that works with every conferencing system, or the one that deliberately blocks some of those conferencing systems in the small markets where they have a monopoly?
They don't block the conferencing systems in the regions where they have an ISP monopoly, they block them for all their users because they have a monopoly on the network path to those users. The conferencing system needs to be able to reach 100% of its own customers' users or they'll be bleeding customers faster than the ISP does, so they blink first and pay, after which the ISP's customers have no reason to switch because the conferencing system is working.
Which ISP does that? My subtext is that ISPs don't block things like this, because even though they have regional monopolies in small markets, they make a large fraction of their profits in large markets where they have to compete.
But another issue is that if it isn't banned, it can happen in private. The ISP doesn't need to actually throttle the target's traffic if it can credibly threaten to and force them into a contract with an NDA, and they have the incentive to require that when their demands are unpopular, so we have no way to know how widespread it is.
> Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.
Yes, and the problem in the US has been that every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISPs, and since the ISPs have much deeper pockets, the suits never get to the point where they could drive meaningful change with a ruling against the ISPs. That's a big reason why net neutrality has been pushed in the US: because it's the best that can be done given that a better fix has failed.
I’m surprised none of the good states, like maybe NY or one of the New England states, hasn’t decided to help out in this sort of situation. Couldn’t the state say “we’ll step in to do the defense, for our municipalities.”
> It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level.
You mean the levels that produced all the sweetheart deals the ISPs currently have? The ISP monopolies are products of state and federal (mostly state) intervention in the name of supposedly necessary things like "enabling internet access".
No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. Then some politician needs to get elected and sells the public on a not possible idea of muni internet.
Sort of like Biden canceling student debt by executive order when the constitution says congress has the power of the purse. You can assign the blame to Biden, Republican AGs, the Supreme Court, or the authors of the constitution. Doesn’t make much difference, so long as the issue is correctly understood. A day in court makes sense.
> No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition.
There was a contract between every municipality and ISP with an explicit term that the municipality couldn't finance a competitor? That seems unlikely.
I’d advise not saying “the USA” in conversations like this, but being more specific and saying “US activists” or “US policymakers”. The former are probably who you are referring to, the latter are who people are generally referring to when they say “the USA” in international policy discussions, but US policymakers are deeply divided on this issue and most either don’t have a strong opinion or are actually against net neutrality.
Monstrous behavior. Society needs some safeguards. Letting old incumnents do what they want forever is an filthy disgraceful low place to be, especially for such a core utility. Living under this degrading pro-monopoly regulatory environment has been a major heartbreak of my life, and the people who should be doing something to protect one of our most prized embodiments of democracy- our ability to communicate with each other- keep making the situation worse.
Absolute travesty. Humanity getting beatten in the face with a stick by shitty corporations forever. The FCC backing them up. I dont even know if it's possible to get these decisions changed.
In New Zealand we have a national fibre network covering about 90% of the population. That was built by four private entities to a set of minimum specifications and with some government subsidies. These companies are not allowed to sell retail services, must offer wholesale access to all ISPs, and have their wholesale pricing regulated.
Im very into the idea of the state competing to create accessible affordable baselines, and letting everyone else compete openly in trying to make money.
If government wants to do that by contacting out a bunch of the effort, ok!
Government trying to insure good baselines, not just regulatorily, but actually doing the work & owning the system (again even if contacted) feels like it's ever more necessary step to keep a healthy society.
India's Unified Payment Gateway (UPI) is also created and managed by government. Private players are free to use the service and build products around it. It worked really well. Though I am more inclined to give more credit to people who built and maintaining it rather than to some model. Like ISRO and Delhi Metro, its a miracle since India's stultifying beurocracy has a well deserved reputation.
The question is, where does the government get the capital? If it's from taxpayers, their service has an asymmetric advantage and can drive out private competitors even if it's poorly managed, which is highly inefficient and results in a de facto government monopoly.
But it could work pretty well if it's funded by bonds it has to pay back out of subscription fees and a default causes everyone involved to be fired.
Your second thought sounds like a good idea. Let's have another competitor (government) funded by private entities via debt equity (bonds) which is paid back by customer receipts (profits) where failure equals unemployment. Actually, this is starting to sound like a business, but with more steps and the power to pass laws affecting its own operating environment. What's the advantage to having the government be the competitor?
It is an asymmetric advantage, but they're different games. The governent should be competing to help people, not make money.
Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.
If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.
> It is an asymmetric advantage, but they're different games. The governent should be competing to help people, not make money.
They're two independent things. If a different management style would produce a public benefit then do it without access to the taxing power. If using tax money to subsidize some service is in the public interest (spoiler alert: it rarely is) then the subsidy should go to anyone providing that service.
> Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.
Which is the problem -- because then they're no longer competing, and it's the competition on equal terms that keeps them honest. If they're actually helping people then people should have no trouble voluntarily choosing their unsubsidized offering. Without that they're just an unregulated monopoly susceptible to inefficiency and corruption.
> If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.
Charters where funding only goes to the politically connected are effectively corruption, and whoever is getting fat off the cash will exert their influence to make sure no one capable of doing it more efficiently can get access to the funding. Charters where funding goes to anyone who signs up to provide the service are effectively tax credits.
Median internet speeds is a terrible metric when comparing infrastructure because it effectively only measures the cheapest to deploy urban populations internet speeds which is basically meaningless now days. 50 Mbps or 500 Mbps all are basically running on the same back haul which is why things fell apart during the pandemic when people tried to actually use their hypothetical home bandwidth.
Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.
Median, mean and mode are all going to be pretty misleading if you're trying to work out if people outside of densely populated areas can get decent speeds.
You probably need to measure lower percentiles to get an idea of how bad it can get.
It’s a valid point, on the other hand average is much worse. 1 person at 1GBps makes up for huge numbers of people at 1.5Mbps vs 20 Mbps.
Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.
The numbers got high enough the differences don’t really matter much, and the distribution is really wide.
Suppose you were looking at countries median car top speed. Fining one countries median is 150 MPH vs 156 just don’t tell you much when you can’t drive that speed on public roads. Or in internet terms Netflix etc isn’t sending 8k stream let alone multiple 8k streams.
On the other hand many internet connections can’t handle a single 4k or even 1080p stream so percentage of connections over X threshold is more impactful.
Not everyone signs up to the highest speed tiers, but generally speaking 90% of the country has access to 1 gigabit fibre and some areas also have 4 or 8 gigabit fibre infrastructure.
You would not know if when you visit there. I stayed a month there and travelled all over. Internet was trash everywhere I went. I visited places that had time limits and data caps under 1gb. Even staying in AirBnBs that share internet with the owners, almost nobody had a good connection. I had one good place in an apartment in the core of Wellington where the internet was fine.
Yeah - to get a decent idea you'd need to measure $/mbps as well as measuring average speed. And measure best available rather than what people have opted for personally.
E.g.
* Country/ISP A has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $50/month.
* Country/ISP B has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $90/month.
In country A a lot more people are going to opt for 1 gigabit - it's way cheaper and still good enough - therefore their average speed stat is going to be lower even though the actual options are strictly better than in country B.
I mean, having the government own the infrastructure is the ultimate extent of regulation, and strictly a superset of regulating net neutrality specifically. Surely the infrastructure is by far the most expensive part of an ISP, so this is basically just saying “because internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly, we’ll have the government be the only ISP.” I guess other countries set it up so that private companies are technically “the ISPs,” but what do they actually do?
Honestly this is a problem that was solved 40 years ago with the breakup of AT&T: the Equal Access mandate.... and it worked right up until institutional capture ensured that it didn't.
Now here we are 40 years later and AT&T has virtually reassembled itself and the Equal Access laws have been completely obliterated. I wonder if there's a correlation?
It's not just the US, Europe saw a need for net neutrality rules and has them. The problems of infrastructure monopolies and the problems of ISPs messing with certain service providers are not completely the same sets of problems.
I am currently denied mail service by my local post master because when my mother was in this house (and I was in prison) and dying of cancer she could not get to the mailboxes (at the end of the street and requiring crossing the street using curbs with no handicap ramps) in a timely enough manner. She had the nerve to appeal her mail service being turned off, and so now the post master has a personal grudge with my family. So yes, having government control of essential services is scary to me.
There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works if you define “democratic” as “one person one vote”. Because of gerrymandering, the electoral college, 2 Senators per state etc, you have less voting power if you live in California than if you live in Nebraska.
Besides, a government run by the “majority” tends to trample on the rights of the minority. I don’t just mean racial minorities. I mean anyone who holds minority viewpoints.
No thank you. I live in a small mountain town in the Pacific North West and I have the choice of high speed cable and multiple fiber providers up to 1Gb. I do not want a non-responsive government entity/goverment observer over everything.
I did 5 years in federal prison and was a jailhouse lawyer, I know reality. Doesn't mean I need to volunteer to expand that. But you just give up and give in, that's your right.
Personally I relate to the American route of the last 200 years and believe in limited government power (you know, the same government power that abused it's authority when it gave out monopiles on communication infrastructure. I don't see how it's abusing power should result in...giving it more power?????). I posted above about how my house is denied US mail delivery because when my mother was dying of cancer she couldn't get to the mailbox in a timely manner and she dared appeal. Petty tyrants gonna tyrant and there are limited battles one person can fight.
Back when net neutrality was a big deal, there wasn’t nearly as much competition between ISPs. Now that cell data has improved and Starlink has launched, there is a floor on how bad a wired ISP can be.
Unfortunately, the solution that comes up to fix bad government policies is more government policies.
The intentions is usually good, but the consequences are always bad.
Wireless tech should help mitigate the natural monopoly that crops up when it’s difficult to build physical infrastructure to someone’s home.
Though it would be nice if multiple companies were allowed to lay fiber. It seems existing govt regulation prevents that, thereby creating the monopoly people complain of.
Tell that to Google fiber who got stonewalled on multiple cities even after they offered to pay for everything, front to back. It’s regulation causing the monopoly.
IMO it was the hyperbole/reality cycle that is common in many politicized issues.
Many, and arguably the vast majority, of political issues are built upon extremes of hyperbole. Support this, or oppose this, or the world will end - or something not far from it. And so when some meaningful change does occur on any such topic, and the hyperbole does not play out, the issue tends to more or less die. The ending of net neutrality was supposed to create something like a borderline unusable internet. In reality once it did end [1] and had more or less no impact, the hyperbole obviously proved unjustified. I feel obligated to cite my statement that it ended since I find many don't even realize the US no longer has any notion of net neutrality.
IMO net neutrality is inherently and obviously desirable. So I think the moral of the story is more to focus on realistic outcomes, consequences, and justifications for issues. Appealing to hyperbole is a great way to emphasize and grow your cause in the short-run, but absolutely destroy it in the long-run. It feels analogous to how MBAs run companies: optimizing for next quarter, in exchange for long-term implosion.
The question is who it's actually desirable for. Neutrality, people are realizing, favors nobody because it means incubating causes you disagree with. And the metagame politically for both companies and activists has shifted towards subverting safe spaces for your opposition. Whether it's a commercial 'safe space' or a political 'safe space' is irrelevant. In either case people have come to prefer being able to go on the offensive and that means removing anything that might impede that.
Yes, but the majority of current activists want purity tests and circular firing squads. I've seen more cypher punks in board rooms of billion dollar companies in the past 5 years than I have on reddit or hn.
The opinion that no number should be illegal gets thrown out the window when you talk about an image. This used to be as common as AOL email addresses 20 years ago.
> net neutrality is inherently and obviously desirable.
I disagree. The impact of NN regulations on investment decisions by network providers is a key factor in the NN debate.
Market experiments show that broadband regulation substantially impacts network growth – negatively. To highlight a few that originated the NN regulatory process….
- In 2008, the FCC attempted to sanction Comcast for degrading certain peer-to-peer services used by its broadband subscribers, but the attempt was rebuffed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
- Comcast claimed that it was managing its network to limit congestion and protect the great bulk of its customers from traffic generated by a few. The FCC saw the country's largest cable-system operator as blocking Web videos to stop its customers from cannibalizing the operator's video-on-demand revenues, but no evidence was presented to support this proposition. Managing a network to limit congestion, seeking to protect the majority of customers from traffic generated by a few, if true, would “preserve a free and open Internet,” not undermine it.
- AOL's business structure violated “end-to-end,” and it was criticized as a “walled garden” that stifled consumer choice, application innovation, and Internet development. But the end of integrated ISPs, not only AOL but CompuServe, Prodigy, @Home, and many others, came from unregulated competitive forces as efficiencies rendered by the integrated ISP faded.
- The mobile marketplace disrupted fixed-network dominance, revolutionized economies in the developing world, and brought an array of lifestyle changes that brought enormous improvements in industrial efficiency, public safety, social networking, and health services.
- Traditionally, mobile devices have been tightly tied to a particular mobile network, and customers had to purchase the handset that was associated with the network, and vice versa. Mobile carriers exercised a fair degree of vertical integration, maintaining broad control over the devices and applications that accessed their systems.
New "gardens" both walled and unfenced have recently upended the traditional "walled gardens," and killer wireless applications arose from handset innovations and the platforms organized around them.
NN regulations may suppress anticompetitive conduct, but may also slow infrastructure growth and alter capital flows.
I still remember watching Ajit Pai explain why he didn't want net neutrality at an interview he gave in San Francisco. [0] He was obviously trying to stay on the good side of Verizon, ATT, etc. but his argument against net neutrality never made any sense. I think Tom Wheeler had it right. [1]
EDIT: Previous mistake in parent that was corrected leads to this
I'm a little confused about the implication that Verizon and AT&T have merged (they haven't). AT&T acquired some spectrum from Verizon back in 2013 [1], and there have been various cases of customer-base horse trading between them, but these two merging at a corporate level would be a massive news story, and it strains credulity to imagine the top two wireless providers merging without being struck down by the FTC for antitrust. Maybe you could shed some light on what you mean?
Tom Wheeler did indeed have it way more right than Ajit Pai, though.
This was before AT&T purchased Time Warner, but as of 2022 they spun off WarnerMedia by selling it to Discovery, so they just want to be an ISP and not a big media company. This was also before Verizon bought all of Yahoo and later sold it.
That was the beauty of it. You had the chairman of the FCC right out there talking pure stuff and nonsense, with everyone mostly carrying on as if anything he said made actual sense. Very disorienting time that was.
I have yet to talk to someone who thinks differently. I am still convinced that the call for public opinion, which had a strong grassroots effort online to support net neutrality, was in some way tampered by the FCC. They used it as justification for killing Net Neutrality. It blows my mind that there still has not been an investigation after all of these years. It was the most blatant corruption I've seen in my lifetime.
I haven't followed the specifics closely, but I thought it finally came out, through some office or court, that the FCC had, in fact most definitely tampered with a major public "vote" concerning Net Neutrality.
I don't have the particulars here, but recall it was something that was very obvious when it happened, but took some years to prove.
The biggest conspiracy theory is that the government cares about you, or is responsive to public opinion. There is no evidence supporting this outlandish theory.
Precisely. Everyone knew he was a Verizon/ATT corposhill. There have been a bunch of more corrupt appointments, but he was a standout for anyone who paid attention to any news about technology.
I used to REALLY care about net neutrality. Growing up in California, especially in high school and college, it was probably the number one thing politically that I cared about. All the other political issues I felt were too complicated with too much history for me to feel strongly about, but net neutrality I really understood and felt strongly about.
Growing up and moving to SV, I eventually just stopped caring. Data caps and mediocre bandwidth were good enough for me, I was too tired and concerned with building a life. Now I live in a city with Google Fiber and have amazingly fast internet with no data caps, and I have a newfound gratitude for good, unbiased internet.
The spirit of net neutrality isn't about caps or bad bandwidth per se. It's about a couple of small groups getting to choose what content you do or don't see, and at which speeds, completely arbitrarily based on whatever the underlying goal is.
It's one thing to have algorithms for assuaging populations or disseminating cycles of information per an order or a routine. That's great. It's another thing entirely when Joe Schmoe over there at some crusty ISP is going to slow down your internet because they don't like that you're researching how to build a competitor ISP on Youtube.
Information must flow freely and be neutrally accessible by all. Networks must be built and maintained for this purpose, so that information moves at the flow that is maximally supported by hardware.
Right now some networks are artificially constrained for no real reason.
> It's about a couple of small groups getting to choose what content you do or don't see
See I think this is a big part of why this died out. The boogeyman NN was to save us from was corporate censorship, which is now widely regarded - in particular by formerly energetic NN advocates - as a good thing.
Is that a concern that has caused significant problems in reality? Because in the same spirit, internet search, advertising, and social networking all have a far bigger influence on what people do and don't see an one that they actually exercise in reality and employ to influence the political opinions of the population to advance the agenda of the owners and operators of these corporations.
Yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap between people who care about both. I think both are real concerns, but it seems like most of the noise was just astroturfed political wrangling.
I'm not asking why it could be bad, or even necessarily a single isolated case where it has happened. I'm asking about significant problems that have actually been caused by it.
When far bigger actual abuses in censoring and limiting and influencing speech and opinion on the internet are overlooked or even cheered on by many of the people who were advocating for net neutrality, I kind of question the purity and motives behind it, certainly for those people they are not motivated by any ideals of freedom.
Not that it's necessarily a bad policy to have, but so might thousands of different policies and regulations that limit private enterprise so I'm much more sympathetic to regulation that is designed to solve observed problems. Hence my question about whether it solved any real problems (or caused any since its repeal).
You are correct that it was a lot of astroturfed political wrangling. But the visionaries back then were correct to worry about it. If you were to project current trends out 100 years from now, one could conceive of a future where these platforms are much more powerful and the politically correct of the future subjugate everyone else by stunting their intellectual development via administrations of cheap content at higher speeds or higher recommendation frequency than the quality stuff, simply because you hate someone's religion or color or sexuality or view and wish to reduce their viability.
It may not be a problem now, but if the platform power goes up then so does the risk that we need to have these systems being built now.
It does. Imagine if Netflix bandwidth were prioritized over an upcoming new company called Disney+. Netflix would cost $18/month and you still would have no choice.
For the record, Netflix for this very reason was an antagonist to net neutrality
It does what? I asked if it has caused actual problems, not imaginary ones.
I'm aware of some of the hypotheticals. Just curious about yours though, what's happening there? Netflix paid ISPs to prioritize their traffic over other video traffic, rendering Disney+ unusable? What would prevent Disney+ paying the ISPs as well if they wanted to be a competitive video streaming service? That seems like it would allow choice.
It might also capture some of the externalities that high bandwidth users impose on non-video users by having the ISP get some more money from them.
I think it ended up turning out that after everyone watched everything on Netflix, and the price was double what it used to be, everyone cancelled their subs. So it didn't really even matter if Netflix installs servers at Comcast and Charter because D+ will still get its customers.
That only matters for video. If it's low bandwidth it doesn't matter. South Koreans don't even have loading online, and they are a very censored society. It's a non issue.
It would be so nice to have net neutrality as the biggest problem these days, rather than deadly diseases, proxy war between nuclear superpowers, political/cultural derangement on all sides, kids brains rotted by social media...
When it comes to net neutrality itself, folks also got to understand that services they take for granted wouldn't exist without sophisticated traffic management. There is a Netflix box inside the ISP data center that streams video to subscribers without going through the Internet. Without it, no streaming HD video for you, no infrastructure to provide it at that scale exists. What if you are a startup that is not Netflix? Good question, but the answer is not as obvious as a slogan and at the moment there are far more urgent matters to lose sleep about.
From what I remember neutrality was poorly explained to the public by people with in a somewhat deceptive way trying to slam dunk sell the issue. So the average person ended up thinking they were opposing unrelated things like vanilla peering agreements or even residential bandwidth caps. Many totally misunderstood the real issue and promptly looked like fools when they tried to talk about it. Perhaps this was all done on purpose to poison-pill the issue right out of the gate. Taking a page out of the CIA/FBI's playbooks.
I think it would be more accurate to say that the debate was completely muddied by big tech corporations who obviously had a very specific agenda that had little to do with the grievances that the average joe had with their ISP.
Now, that agenda wasn't bad at all, but it was very hard to explain or to get people to care about it as-is. So what we got instead was a very... innacurate debate and a discussion that was centered around the (deserved) dislike for ISPs. Which obviously played in favor of big tech.
I'm not saying there was a big conspiracy by big tech against the poor ISPs, just that there was obviously a heavy PR push that took advantage of the mood around ISPs (comcast very bad!) once the debate started. What was more of a business dispute turned into yet another "very important and urgent current event/crisis." Net neutrality is still important, though, but I'm not sure the general population would've been very empathetic towards what could be seen as massive tech corporations not wanting to pay for their utilization.
We are starting to see the effects of this. Individual ISPs can cause huge disruptions by dropping packets that pass through them. This was done to kiwifarms recently where middle ISPs would simply drop the packet and break the connection despite not being the user or the hosters isp. Simply a relay.
You can't just throw out buzzwords and accuse and convict people of crimes though. Not even if you really really really don't like them. If the legal system rules that their actions are criminal and rules that they should be disconnected from the internet, that's a different matter. ISPs shouldn't unilaterally get to decide what people paying for their service can read or say.
My cynical narrative is that as progressive activists came to embrace social media censorship as a mechanism to win political battles, the underlying advocacy not having ISPs meddle with the internet became harder to square with enthusiastic advocacy for censorship at the layer of the internet's actual communication applications (or basic service layer, eg. Cloudflare.) "ISPs must not oppress us, but it's fine when social media platforms do it" probably lacks mass appeal.
Political polarization has been increasing in the US[1], so it is entirely expected that both sides are more interested in taking steps that most disparage the other. Neutral policies that benefit both sides are not helpful in this atmosphere, and are expediently left out.
People who say “political polarization has increased” seem to forget about that whole segregation and Jim Crow era. It’s not like it’s ancient history. My still living parents grew up with much worse “polarization”
And the desire for social media censorship goes way beyond biased recommendation engines. Based on the reaction to Musk's "zero recommendation score" proposal for hateful content, just messing around with recommendation algorithms but not going further (ie. banning the content itself from being viewed by anyone) means the fascists win.
This is absolutely untrue about 70+ million people in the US[1].
It's also functionally untrue for most of us who have a choice between 1-3 large companies. I live in a major US city, and my options are Comcast or AT&T. We don't even have Starlink yet.
When 3-4 companies control nearly 100% of the market, there isn't any real choice. It's easy for them all to just be terrible.
3-4 companies isn't a monopoly. Even if there's one company people are free to move. And broadband internet competes with mobile internet.
This may sound somewhat glib, but it's also glib to say that a person whose friends all primarily interact on say Facebook is not subject to comparable market power from Facebook.
3-4 companies in a market can exist and still have 1 company be a monopoly. There’s also the issue of renters not having the ability to switch carriers because their landlords won’t let an alternate ISP install in their building. Then, if you want anything resembling high speed internet, your options are even more limited. Only 25% of zip codes in cities have more than 1 provider that provides >25mbps. So, companies can still behave like monopolies even if there’s more than 1 ISP in their region.
> Last I checked Twitter was under the total control of a right wing troll. Zuckerberg isn't exactly a leftist
You didn't read the post you were responding to closely enough.
The original post was not about who controls which social media website. Instead, it was about whether or not individual people support social media companies censoring whatever they heck they want, and comparing that to supporting ISPs censoring whatever the heck they want.
It should be obviously true that progressives, and democrats these days are more in favor of social media companies controlling their platform, compared to, say, a decade ago.
"its a private company, it can do what it wants!" Is almost a catchphrase now, of democrat-aligned people on any of these topics, theses days.
>It should be obviously true that progressives, and democrats these days are more in favor of social media companies controlling their platform, compared to, say, a decade ago.
> I would appreciate some evidence for this claim.
The evidence would be any time someone complains about censorship done by social media platforms, and the response is "Its a private company it can do what it wants!".
Surely, you aren't going to pretend that you haven't heard people say this line, over and over and over again, in these discussions before?
To the extent progressives actually said that, it was mocking the hypocrisy of conservatives who purport to be pro-business and “anti-regulation”, demonstrating they’re only anti-regulation when it’s convenient. Surely the joke wasn’t that difficult to understand…
To the extent progressives believed it, they believe people should have the right to censor hate speech, and if it’s carried out by private companies rather than the government, all the better, because the government is hogtied by the first amendment.
> Surely the joke wasn’t that difficult to understand…
It started as a joke, and then became something that people actually believed.
You can test this out by simply asking progressives if they think that private social media companies should be regulated in what they are allowed to moderate, or if instead they should be allowed to censor or moderate however they want, or is instead "A private company, it can do what it wants!".
People worry about Net Neutrality because it was a fantastically successful astroturfing campaign by internet media companies. No similar campaign against FOSTA-SESTA succeeded.
Fracking is bad for the environment. Balancing 'the United States and Earth will not become inhabitable to humans within 500 years' with 'our oil companies want cheaper product and less overhead' is a pretty big challenge, but it's safe to say that Russia is more interested in short-term gains than the US is (and is a large part in why the US is pushing EV adoption).
This is also why everyone is on about "protecting Section 230" today as well. The primary benefactors are large tech companies, but it's reframed and marketed as being key to the internet by a ton of well-funded lobbyists.
No, this seems misguided. Section 230 protects the small Mastodon instance I'm on in the same way it protects Twitter. My instance is pretty well-moderated, but if you know the background of section 230... if you're an operator of a mid-sized Mastodon instance, how certain are you that nobody's posted anything that a modern-day Stratton Oakmont might come after you for absent section 230? I'd hazard a guess and say not very certain at all.
Because the small mastodon instance does not have any assets behind it or make any profits that make it worth filing a law suit, and because there are many small mastodon instances, any legal campaign would have to go against many small operators with no assets or profits to seize, and thus nothing to gain.
Decades of legal battles between the MPAA/RIAA and unlicensed content distributors demonstrate this very well. The media monopolies never won anything against small operators and gave up (except for public relations stunts) and were only ever able to force large companies into paying them royalties.
Section 230 only protects large companies, not small operators. Small operators can be taken out by a SLAPP lawsuit irregardless of the law if it is really in someone's interest to do so.
> No, this seems misguided. Section 230 protects the small Mastodon instance I'm on in the same way it protects Twitter.
If you are willing to be even slightly clever you will figure out that this is an easily solvable problem.
Just do what the EU did, or Texas did, and remove/modify section 230 protections only for very large social media companies, defined as have literally 10s of millions of users.
That way, the small platforms are protected, and the large ones that are the problem actors, have to change.
Problem solved.
No need to worry about this straw man position of "look how bad things would be if we do the dumb thing and didn't implement the easy to figure solution that solves most of the complaints!".
It would've also protected Prodigy Services if it existed at the time of this lawsuit[0]. Congress created 230 because they don't want service hosts being sued for millions for cultivating UGC on the internet (which, in turn, enabled the US to head up the boom of the internet economy), it's just that over time consumers chose big social media instead of random forums (and Reddit became the place to go for interest-base discussion).
I'm indeed well aware the only case defense that 230 stans have is a 28 year old case that predates most people understanding the basic concepts of the Internet. :)
The fact there's only a single badly litigated case that is obsolete as heck to justify a law that got Trump elected and has a death toll in the hundreds is a great example of how little real justification 230 has.
B: no moderation; they let anything and everything go so that they become a service provider and thus aren't considered to be editorializing or approving the content people post
It's safe to say that 230 being gone would require every single website with UGC to choose between the two options. If you think it could be revised instead, feel free to suggest such.
While it is correct that large tech companies are benefited by Section 230, there can be things that mutually benefit both users and companies; and making companies liable for UGC would only have the effect of making it another form of cable TV where a select handful of people get to make content for the rest of us to consume. It is definitely a far cry from the democratization of content generation that we have today, where a nobody could make content and have a realistic chance of becoming recognized widely.
The articles posted on HN discussing this very topic bring this up, so reading them is worthwhile instead of simply dismissing the entire thing as “big tech bad.”
I am actually incredibly widely versed in the Section 230 discourse. Literally all of the sources trace back to Google-funded "authorities", which can't back their argument with any meaningful legal concepts.
The entire pitch for 230 is a wild astroturf project. And as a recent non-American pointed out, it's paper thin when you realize no other country has an equivalent immunity law, and all of them allow user generated content.
A comedic example is the claim I've seen that Mastodon servers can't survive without Section 230, but the largest one is in Germany, where no such blanket immunity exists.
I mean, having intermediary liability (as you would absent section 230) doesn't mean you're immediately forced to shut down. Prodigy had been around for just over 10 years before the Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co. ruling, after all.
It does however mean that if you do get sued over third party content on your site, you will probably lose, which is an expensive possibility for any small site operator.
I can't speak for everyone, and I'm not particularly familiar with FOSTA-SESTA (I'm not from the US). But one possible rationale for differentiating between these two is that the covid restrictions were temporary, whereas FOSTA-SESTA seems like a permanent law.
I think they were maybe more referring to the logic that "if it saves even one life" that was prevalent early during the pandemic. Which I guess could be applied to FOSTA? I'm not sure, though.
>Net neutrality went away and as far as I can tell, nothing changed.
It was always a scam. Revoking a mandate in 2017 that had been imposed in [drum roll, please] 2015 was never going to Destroy the Internet(TM), contrary to the claims by all those Reddit subreddits that "went dark" in protest. In retrospect it was, in large part, yet another example of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
It's pretty hard to be pro-"safety" on things like social media, news, AI, etc., and then turn around and say with a straight face that infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to be moderated.
I long for the net neutrality times when we were still sane.
How so? That's like saying you shouldn't be able to drive if you like country music (no offense to country music). Infrastructure enables the freedom of association on the internet just as driving enables your freedom of association based on your physical location, so the people that make that infrastructure probably shouldn't be able to say which websites you can and can't visit.
> It's pretty hard to be pro-"safety" on things like social media, news, AI, etc., and then turn around and say with a straight face that infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to be moderated.
It's only hard if you're willfully ignoring the distinction people are making, which is that ISPs are "dumb pipes" operating in a government-sanctioned oligopoly. Just like broadcast networks, the privilege of using a limited public resource (underground cabling, bandwidth, whatever) comes with regulations.
Social media, on the other hand, isn't borrowing a finite resource from taxpayers. It's a fungible resource and can exist in a competitive environment, which we've seen with the rise of TikTok and everyone else's blatant copying of TikTok.
And most importantly, no one is forcing them to censor themselves. They're bowing to protests and market forces. Libertarians are always whining about how there isn't enough competition, and then they whine when the invisible hand makes a decision they don't like.
I detect a certain decline in almost all activism: You can spend years fighting any issue, but the other side will have too much money, too much patience, and even if, by some miracle, you eke out a temporary victory, you know that the same forces you oppose will rapidly regroup and launch a whole new assault, and you'll have to start fighting it again from square one.
In addition to that, you have to work harder than every just to live. The energy gets sucked out of you, and it becomes harder than ever to sustain a fight you know you'll be lucky to win. No wonder people burn out, and simply give up. Everyone has their limits.
It might also have dwindled because there actually has been meaningful and in my eyes good legislation introduced. Both the EU net neutrality proposition and the California one is very similar and very reasonable imo. I might be in minority around here but I am not for hard line net neutrality - which to me is when you don't think any different kinds of nets / qos can exist.
As far as I understand both the laws I referenced earlier makes it possible for an ISP to sell different QoS and innovate on that axis. What the laws forbid is for them to provide that service in a non-competitative way. So they have to offer that option to everyone and in a open way. This to me is the real problem and why net neutrality becomes a necessity in some cases if this is not followed (behaviors like throttling specific sites while boosting own sites for example).
I live in a non-net-neutral country. People really seem to like the fact that Meta is willing to subsidize their data costs for using Facebook, IG, and Whatsapp.
It turned out that most people actually enjoy the benefits of net non-neutrality. All my friends with T-Mobile rave about how streaming Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc. don’t count against their data caps, which is diametrically opposite to net neutrality.
I went with T-Mobile precisely because they stood with net neutrality when it was first on the chopping block. They are now, by far, the worst offender. The battle is long over, and completely and utterly lost.
The US doesn't have a problem with net neutrality, they have a problem with monopolies.
as you all know, net neutrality means that all traffic is given equal access. but that is an obscure concept to anyone outside of tech. What consumers want is fast cheap & reliable broadband(that they can actually buy).
In Europe, if your ISP is shite, then you change ISP to a better one. This has driven down the price of broadband, and with some cash injections from governments, increased the speed from 512k to at least 20meg in most places(with most suburban places having access to 500meg).
Not only that, but ISPs bundle "free" access to things like netflix, which doesn't count against a cap (if you have one).
In the US, if you're lucky you have a choice of two ISPs. They are both shite, and both don't bother competing, apart from being more and more shite to you. Despite the FCC's bundling rules, there is no practical way to operate a virtual ISP on resold copper/fibre/coax.
So if I was to create a new campaign, it wouldn't be for net neutrality, it would be called "American Competitive Internet" with some nonsense about making america better by going back to what made it strong: competition. Then enforce reasonable resale rates, so that virtual ISPs can be a thing. second I would enforce rules that mean you can only charge for transit, not peering (with caveats)
In Germany one can change the ISP (only if the one you have is not the only one available though), but I have yet to see an ISP actually measuring the things that often are important for me: A reliable connection. No ping spikes, no drop in throughput. Constant quality. I can live with half the throughput, if only I had at least some guarantees about my connection's stability and latencies. I would gladly pay 5-10 euro more per month for such guarantees.
So yeah, you can ISP hop, but might be hopping for a long time or in circles, until you get better than 3rd world country Internet connection.
What I think is important in looking at the difference in treatment between “big tech” and telecom firms is the political expedience. Not to sound too much like a Mayhew acolyte, it can’t be denied that most legislators have their primary focus on reelection. It comes as a priority before efficacy of legislation.
To the voters, telecom companies have always been a priced in annoyance. Additionally, their services aren’t differentiated so although they’re annoying with pricing, the average voter doesn’t see them as quite so pervasive. You pay, you forget. They’re all mildly frustrating to deal with but un-noteworthy .
Big tech on the other hand is in your face. I don’t see my telecom but you can be rest assured I see Microsoft, Facebook, etc on a daily basis.
This means that a congressman fighting telecom is taking a stand against an amorphous blob that we forget about after our monthly bill. Conversely a congressman fighting big tech is a valiant warrior fighting greed and corruption.
I’m sure people here have different views due to a grasp of the nuances but the sad truth is that most of america isn’t all too aware. Big Tech just seems scarier.
Telecom wealth is also pretty evenly distributed nationally because at the end of the day all the money is tied up in the infrastructure that's installed across the nation. They gotta pay someone in Kansas to install fiber in Kansas.
Tech wealth is far more concentrated and it's concentrated among the "very wealthy" and the "coastal elites". Both of those groups are pretty unpopular outside their own bubbles right now.
That further tips the scales in favor politicians targeting tech.
What makes anyone think Net Neutrality is less of a pressing issue? Frankly, nowadays, it's even moreso of an issue than ever before!
Do you:
Ever find yourself wondering if you need to upgrade to a "business" plan to host that service?
Ever wonder why it seems one type of traffic ends up running into more problems than others?
Wonder why the local network infrastructure always seems to be woefully inadequate for any type of ambitious use?
All of that comes from a staunch lack of Net Neutrality. Dumb pipes, as many as possible, connecting everyone to everyone else. No QoS segmentation. no fast-lanes. No zero-rating. No nudging people toward one set of endpoints over another. No inspecting the bloody packet; just routing.
Unfortunately; we don't see that, because ISP's are way better at fee extraction and exec/lobbyist enrichment than actually getting bloody wire laid, maintained, and packets routed through the AS anymore.
If it's gotten quiet, it's probably because people are still trying to absorb/learn the implications/principles behind user hostile network topology resulting from exploitative business models.
There's a cell/mobile service over here that's advertised as "Unlimited Social Media". So customers get limited data but "Social Media" data is unlimited. Exactly what they define as "Social Media", I don't know. (Does my blog count?)
That's a curious business model. Why does an Internet Service Provider want to prioritise one particular class of website?
Probably because social media use is easy to model and a relatively tight distribution, from a bandwidth perspective. The more targeted your pricing tiers, the more you can compete on price without taking a beating from top talkers.
Nobody wants to service the top residential users because they cause way more traffic and trouble, but it's probably hard to fire individual customers in most places. It's like zoning in that way. Nobody cares if I have chickens in my backyard, but it's illegal because 15 years ago someone's neighbor had 20 chickens and a few roosters, and the neighbor got a law passed rather than resolving it with the neighbor.
Activists really tried to push too much crap into the pile of "net neutrality."
There were at least a few different issues in the NN bundle:
1 against preferred ISP access
2 against content-based ISP restrictions
3 against charges to upstream content providers based on traffic
4 against paid prioritization
5 no change to the current peering models
Most of it was IMO total bullshit. Having worked with ISPs, I can tell you that they have no real interest in being content police, prioritizing specific services, at least in the US.
Their real interest for ISPs was making large sources of traffic pay.
This is going to conspiracy theory land, but IMO a large part of NN was the content providers (YT, google, facebook, etc) manipulating the public into supporting some bullshit law that prevented them from having to pay ISPs for the downstream traffic they generate. And it's a lot of traffic...and billions of dollars in advertising revenue.
All of that was wrapped up in the typical "call to freedom" that is the equivalent of "it's for the kids."
Basically the internet geeks have sold out. The moment DRM meant that the money was going to the techies (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) and not the music companies, we were like “what problems”?
The only one who didn’t is RMS but we all laughed at him. He’s one of the only real principled geeks left today.
The DRM fight died the day the EFF, Cory Doctorow, Mozilla and other supposed champions of open data formats kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec, this also killed off the idea of NPAPI browser plugins.
Plugins were originally meant for exactly this sort of use - to display proprietary data within a browser by handing it off to another application - Flash and Java were the most popular but there were also media player plugins for DRMed media (both VLC & Windows Media Player for example, had browser plugins).
I literally came out of retirement to rejoin EFF and fight DRM at the W3C. I managed to get the W3C membership to reject DRM twice, only to be overruled by the executive (the W3C's constitution allows for the director to treat votes as advisory). It was the only time in W3C history that anything remotely like this happened. In the end, EFF publicly resigned from the W3C over it:
Obviously, I failed. But I did nothing else for four years but fight DRM at the W3C. I wrote op-eds. I personally telephoned every single W3C member's rep to talk to them about this - many times. I published hundreds of articles. I did radio interviews. Podcasts. We organized an in-person protest and picketed a W3C event.
There was never a "day when EFF, Cory Doctorow...kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec."
I was a net neutrality supporter, but as the article mentions the feared changes haven't materialized. Also, I moved into a condo in a large city where I have three options for gigabit speeds. If one provider decides to implement a customer hostile policy, I will switch.
> Net Neutrality can easily be ignored during the pandemic and recession, which does makes sense, people were in a health crisis and now in an economic one.
As a counterexample, in 2020 here in Mexico our telecom regulator tried to deregulate net neutrality and there was enough backlash for the draft to be amended to be mostly pro net neutrality (except for zero rating which is still allowed). [1]
I still agree with OP though, I haven't really thought about the topic for the last couple of years.
California's net neutrality law bars ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes as of 2021. Fast internet is $50/month from several providers in the state.
For the average person, Net Neutrality with respect to Big Telecom is mostly about contract disputes between multi-billion dollar corporations. Because of the common carrier laws, most people are worried about being censored by their telecom.
With Big Tech, there is worry about censorship. A big example is how any discussion of the lab leak was censored as a conspiracy theory.
Ok, let me put it to you another way: Comcast could block Truth Social tomorrow or demand Twitter provide a Trump-free version of its site. There is no regulation against it and no recourse for Comcast customers in most of their service areas. They are just as much gatekeepers as big tech is and this whole "net neutrality vs. big tech regulation" thing is a false dichotomy.
"The leopards aren't eating my face RIGHT NOW" is not an argument.
The recent Peter Eckersley memorial made this fresh in my mind. It was a beautiful collection of many of the net neutrality activists at the Internet Archive building in SF, and gave me renewed hope that the world still cares about this and the people who fight for it.
It's simple: Americans have the political attention span of a fruit fly. Of course, it doesn't help when both parties decry everything besides puppies and apple pie to be the end of America as we know it, and the news media amplify it so that they can sell more advertising.
Net neutrality is one of those peacetime aspirations that simply does not matter as much as the ongoing culture war, climate crisis, political stability crisis, economic crisis, pandemic aftermath, and the literal (hot/shooting) war in Ukraine.
The center has eroded to the point where net neutrality only matters to many people if it has an impact on one of the above.
Yet any appeal to one side of the above issues will serve to alienate the other. This means that you can't really get enough oxygen in the room to shout over the shouty people already shouting about the above.
I bet you dimes to dollars that other center/administrative issues are similarly affected.
Not spitting on the floor also is less important than a lot of other things.
But it is so simple and considered baseline behavior so I would still support yelling at you if you spit at the floor even while the war is still ongoing an we haven't stopped the attackers.
Same goes for net neutrality: there is even less effort needed. I mean: complying with the rules is as simple as not introducing a number of rules or devices in your network setup.
No argument here. I believe that a loss of NN will have tragic, avoidable, predictable outcomes. It is, as you say, not a high-effort policy, so an argument-from-undue-difficulty would not support its dissolution.
That said, you don't seem to be interacting with my claim -- I'm not saying net neutrality is unimportant, I'm saying it's undervalued right now. Because of the wars/permacrises.
I think upon closer read you'll find our views are relatively aligned.
It’s hard to imagine in 2023 4chan, reddit and wikipedia all turning dark because of net neutrality. It feels like “we used to care about that?” issue.
I lean more toward the libertarian/conservative part of the political spectrum, but net neutrality is an issue where the conservatives/republicans got it wrong. Somehow they felt that it was analogous to the "equal time doctrine", which it never has been. In some ways companies such as CloudFlare have solved part of the problem, but issues such as the anti-competitive throttling of competing services by ISPs still need to be addressed. We also still have the problem of media monopolies often being the only available consumer "Internet" service providers, but the "Internet" they provide is often highly monitored, filtered, and shaped.
I think it is maybe not an accident that this blog post is deleted from Reddit's official blog, but it happened. It happened in Verizon HQ's congressional district too, where their funded representative lost his seat shortly after. I don't post on this as some great authority, it was purely luck and we were small businesses that could articulate why net neutrality was important at the time.
Fast forward to today, far less independent sites like his exist, his is gone now. He went to work for a hosting company that seems to be pivoting away from serving small business as they were acquired by a large enterprise firm. This is the concern of someone who pays for hosting, we are used to paying a quota or port, but at our size we rarely have to consider peering and transit costs. Our main concern has been 'channelization' of the net, where plans get sold with only access to major providers.
I think on the consumer side, net neutrality terminology has to be worded carefully because back then calls were still mostly a circuit routed thing. We now have good enough networks where everything is IP data and voice must be prioritized to maintain quality of service. I prefer the current reality on most plans where data is de-prioritized after heavy use works better than the old throttle to a certain speed restrictions. Allows radios to get into lower power states quicker and access resources when it's available.
Last mile for everything is the main problem out here, Blightspeed/Centurylink is the copper 1.5mbit DSL provider and there's Comcast cable which has no incentive to price compete unless choosing the wireless route (Which is ultimately what I did). I am wary of advocating changing the regulations from where they are currently because we've already witnessed fallout from Section 230 modifications. In any case it's been a weird time the mostly the past 5 years or so, and I think it's hard to motivate people to care on net neutrality when there's so many other related issues that seem more pressing and a whole new adult generation hasn't really experienced the internet as a ton of small websites/companies/projects, they use apps. It's a hard sell.
The whole point is to not charge users twice for both the volume AND the rate of flow.
It's not hot button because there is no FCC chair. If the dems seat a chair, regardless of who it is, that would allow grassroots campaigns to reactivate.
Under Trump, I believe broadband ISPs were implementing data caps, and they backed off on that after Biden was elected. And some telecoms offer zero rated content. It's far more common overseas for telecoms and content providers to partner in providing access, so you get places like the Philippines where Facebook basically is the internet.
> Comcast extends delay on debuting data caps in the Northeast
> Following a multi-month suspension of its usage-based policy during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, Comcast restored and updated its data usage policies in July 2020, raising the monthly limit to 1.2 terabytes – 200 gigabytes more than the 1TB limit that was in place prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Under the revised data plan, residential broadband customers who exceed 1.2TB of data per month are charged $10 for each additional bucket of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 per month (Comcast's maximum data overage charge prior to the pandemic was $200). Comcast also sells a standalone unlimited data option that costs an additional $30 per month.
I'm saying we've been with several ISP's and if any one had stopped offering unlimited access, we would have switched to a new ISP. We did switch from Spectrum to AT&T Fiber to get faster speeds up and down but otherwise Spectrum's speeds were fine and we mostly didn't have issues with them.
That’s not representative. Comcast was very actively experimenting with data caps and overage fees. And there were no very good alternatives in our area, it was them or glorified DSL.
I have seen a pattern in "Activism". Since such activities are largely conducted by people generally on the "left" or associated with the Democratic Party almost all activism declines (not gone but much much lower) when democrats are in power nationally.
I suspect now that one chamber of the congress is republican controlled we will see a slight increase in activism, and if Republicans take the presidency in 2024 a huge jump in activism, or if they take both the house and Senate
While conservatives / republicans will get out for protests the number of issues that will spark that is very much more limited... namely 2, abortion and guns. Outside of that you likely will not see a conservative protest / political activism. In contrast there are 100' or 1000's of issues on the left that will spark protests.
I gave money to Free Press Action years ago to fight for net neutrality. I’ve been absolutely shocked by recent emails from them asking to give them money to pressure companies from not allowing certain individuals on their platforms.
Or their complaints that Elon Musk wont restrict certain speech.
That's not how it works. And Comcast has no reason to care about Web 3. Web 3 isn't a threat to big ISPs. It is a threat to some aspects of ad revenue business models though.
And it will be competition for cloud service providers. Consider it a public web-scale cloud provider that is eventually just going to be a really cheap public compute layer for anyone who wants to deploy some random little utility or concept without having to go through private interests to do it.
If Web 3 isn't an alternative to big ISPs, then it has nothing to do with net neutrality. If it is an alternative which can save net neutrality, then it is a threat and will be blocked if it gets big enough.
Not sure about the alternative to ad revenue either, as the first site you linked to was illegally storing tracking cookies without even an opt out.
Finally, nothing whatsoever suggests that blockchains could ever compete with cloud providers on price. Everything about running a program on Ethereum for example is much more complex and requires much more CPU than running it on an EC2 instance.
There are open standards for browsers to communicate with software deployed in web 3, regardless of what an isp would care about doing. For an ISP to fiddle with that goes far beyond sneaking around net neutrality as a principle. It would entail blatant violations of existing laws. In broad daylight.
Not to mention it would accelerate the adoption of Starlink and other alternatives, as well as community-deployed mesh networks that are already covering cities in the United States of America as we speak. And this hardware will get cheaper and better with time and be deployed at larger and larger scales.
It is not in any way illegal for an ISP to block or throttle access to a certain hostname or IP it doesn't like, now that Net Neutrality is dead in the USA.
Also, there is no reason to think that Starlink (even if it could ever hope to have the capacity to compete with broadband and fiber at the national level, which it can't) wouldn't also become censorius. Musk is notoriously censorius of any competitor or detractor, so all it takes is him souring on Web 3 for it to become banned from Starlink. ATT and others at least care more about the money than any personal grudges of their CEOs.
Net neutrality was fraudulently put forth by Internet giants and the activist organizations they fund as an issue of free speech. It put the most censorious platforms on the face of the Earth in the ridiculous position that if they were made to pay their own bandwidth bills, it would lead to content censorship and the inability of Americans to freely express political ideas.
As Ajit Pai's FCC Ruling stated:
>This consensus is among the reasons that there is scant evidence that end users, under different legal frameworks, have been prevented by blocking or throttling from accessing the content of their choosing. It also is among the reasons why providers have voluntarily abided by no-blocking practices even during periods where they were not legally required to do so. As to free expression in particular, we note that none of the actual incidents discussed in the Title II Order squarely implicated free speech. If anything, recent evidence suggests that hosting services, social media platforms, edge providers, and other providers of virtual Internet infrastructure are more likely to block content on viewpoint grounds.
This statement included a footnote specifically noting the unilateral suspension of The Daily Stormer.
Of course, "net neutrality" was struck down, YouTube was made to pay their bandwidth bills, and absolutely nothing changed at all. The corporate censors went on with their work of suspending everything that was bigoted, and then most Trump supporters, and then prominent Bernie supporters during the primaries, and then people who talked about the risks of experimental vaccines. They continue this regime of censorship up to this very day, but they have to pay for transit in places that it is limited.
It was an absolutely absurd fraud that went on for years, but the game is over. Why would anyone pretend that Net Neutrality means anything other than a cheaper bandwidth bill for Google at this point?
net neutrality was sold to the public as anti-censorship, when really it had nothing to do with free speech. the author of the post seems to have a more developed understanding that it's really about increasing bargaining power of media companies (specifically big bandwidth users like streaming video) and decreasing the bargaining power of telecoms, but most do not understand this.
the difference is that now most of those activists are pro-censorship, as long as the censorship is what they like, and those same big media companies are able to enact that type of censorship. as far as I can tell, that's really it. most people never really understood net neutrality.
It's basically Newcastle coal roads all over again, with the competition from the canal haulers upsetting the rentier sector. The only real solution is the same as with the roads: no limitations on access, and if congestion is an issue, use the tax revenues to broaden to the roads to handle the increase in traffic. The government manages the roads, but if they need to buy material (steel, or fiber), then submit competitive contracts to the private sector.
Of course, wannabe fascists and the like will try to control the flow of information for their own reasons, nothing new about that either.
I think part of the reason that net neutrality advocacy has been neutered is because a lot of the advocates don’t like the idea of tech platforms being beholden to common carrier status and if the FCC can go after ISP and force them to act as dumb pipes then many see twitter/Facebook/YouTube as next. And the types of people who want ISPs to be seen as dumb pipes are generally very against free speech (because they worry that most people aren’t as smart as them and thus while they (the advocates) are above being brainwashed, the rest of the netizens aren’t and will succumb to fascism).
> because they worry that most people aren’t as smart as them and thus while they (the advocates) are above being brainwashed, the rest of the netizens aren’t and will succumb to fascism
I used to think this, but then I realized that algorithmic radicalization is not a bug that social media companies are working to fix. It is a feature. Social media does not work without an algorithm hyper-focusing your feed onto the most extreme bullshit takes.
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Net neutrality should have been this, and only this:
> If an ISP customer has a plan that purports to give the customer B bytes of data per month and a data transfer speed of S bits/second, then
> 1. The ISP will not limit (unless legally required to) what sites the customer can use those B bytes per month with, and
> 2. The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion.
If the ISP does that, they satisfy net neutrality. If they also give you access to their own services without counting that against your B bytes, or make deals to give you access to certain sites without it counting against your B bytes, that may be anti-competitive but as long as you still get your B bytes at S bits/second it would not be a net neutrality violation.
If it is anti-competitive it should be dealt with through the large body of law that had been extensively developed for more than 100 years to deal with such things: antitrust law. Trying to shove a subset of antitrust law into net neutrality just because a particular behavior that might be anti-competitive happens to involve in internet service makes no sense.