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Reason: How To Break the Internet (in a Bad Way)
Widespread public sentiment favors the FCC's move to impose rules intended to establish "net neutrality"; an anonymous reader writes with a skeptical viewpoint: "No decent person," write Geoffrey Manne and Ben Sperry in a special issue of Reason, "should be *for* net neutrality." Across the board, the authors write, letting the FCC dictate ISP business practices will result in everything they say they're trying to avoid. For instance, one of the best ways to route around a big firm's brand recognition is to buy special treatment in the form of promotions, product placement and the like (payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre). That will almost certainly be forbidden under the FCC's version of neutrality.
Reason(tm) is the reason I do not call myself a libertarian.
So showing nude pics of Kim Kardashian's hippo-like posterior qualifies as "a good way?"
Even if the claims are perfectly valid and correct, this writing will just entrench people harder, not switch their point of view.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I don't want ANYONE buying promotions into my IP stream! I want my ISP to do their freaking job and shift packets from the source to me, without molestation and without interest or undue visibility into the contents.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
"(payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre)" It's difficult to take someone's opinions about net neturality seriously when they don't understand the difference between broadcast media and on-demand media.
Wrong level of abstraction. The constraint is imposed on ISPs not web service providers.
At some point, conservatives and libertarians abandoned their ideas of economic liberty and free markets in favor of corporatism.
For all their talk about the value of the individual, they worship the collective.
And even if it is broken, like the claim, that is less worse than the anarchy that the Republicans are proposing. We need more control of the Internet in order to enforce fairness. Republicans are always droning on about equal opportunity, but that isn't what we need. We need equal outcome. FCC control of the Internet is the first step towards that.
Descending to using literal blackmail to get around Comcast's behavior? It would be at least slightly respectable if they stuck to libertarian ideals like contract law or public shaming, but I guess since those have already failed...
Payola was and is a clearly illegal practice. If corporations are choosing to perpetrate something like payola and say its "because of net neutrality", that would be their rationalization for having broken the law, rather than evidence of a bad law. If there were no payola in radio, God forbid, then DJs would themselves have to choose music based on how cool or groovy or mellifluous it is, rather than on who was kicking them back the most.
This is absolutely bollocks. This article should've never even hit the frontpage of Slashdot. "stuff that's mediocre at best. news for trolls. slashdot."
The observable behavior of the anti-net neutrality companies speaks very clearly for the reason to have net neutrality rules.
It seems everyone pointed at the Comcast/Netflix deal as the lynchpin of why FCC's "net neutrality" needed to be passed. What were the actual results of that debacle? A private company paid a bunch of money to another private company and users got better video streaming performance.
And by the way, it's highly skewed, back-room-negotiated regulations (like the ones used to pass NN) that keep smaller players from being able to compete against Comcast-type goliaths in local markets.
Congratulations on handing the well-meaning folks at the Federal government control of the internet, which was doing just fine. Now here's your prize:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-broadband-fees-20150409-story.html#page=1
"Now, I doubt any of you would prefer a rolled up newspaper as a weapon against a dictator or a criminal intruder."
Center for Research on Innovation & Entrepreneurship
was the center's original name. Just FYI.
I read parts of their document, and if you want to know all of the absolutely broken shit that the act is going to prevent, they've laid it all out for you.
This paper was very carefully written, no where in it will you find the term 'wired' or 'cable' unless they're specifcally talking about the transmission technology.
According to the authors, I have access to multiple providers of 10Mbit+ internet. According to me, I have access to 1 provider of wired 10Mbit+ internet, unless I want to pay AT&T for a business-class circuit which would cost a pretty penny because the closest business that (probably) has an equivalent circuit from AT&T (or whomever) is most of a mile away. So, I could pay AT&T $10G+ for installation and then pay monthly for service if I really needed it...
The fear of our internet becoming like that provided by Smart and Globe in the Philippines, where every other month there is a special payola deal where visiting Facebook or using Viber or whatever does not count against your quotas. It's not like these things we fear don't already exist out there in the wild...
Keep in mind Reason.com is funded by the Brother Koch, and is an extremely libertarian rag. So...ya. You might want to invest in a LOT of salt in this article. Okay?
Is TFA like the summary? What does ISP-level net neutrality have to do with promotions and product placement? The whole REASON (yeah, feeble attempt at a pun) there is a discussion about net neutrality is that ISPs should ONLY do the transferring of packets, regardless of what they are, since that is what we are paying them for. Should they be allowed to inject promotions and ads somehow? WHY? HOW?
The summary then goes on mentioning something about rock and roll that is even more irrelevant... Unless the summary is completely wrong of course and TFA is an insightful diatribe...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
So they're saying we can either let companies define how the internet should run/work or let the government decide how the internet should run/work. But since either way, you have someone deciding, you should choose us instead of someone else?
Couldn't I make the same rationale about facism? "Look, I know you don't like us trying to take over and enforcing facism. But if you're petitioning your government to be against facism, that's just having a small group of people decide what's better for everyone, which is already facism. So you might as well accept our facism."
Come to think of it, I could probably use the same rationale for being blackmailed, being taken hostage...
please... let me sleep... a little more... yay, no longer annonmyous coward.
Isn't the whole point of net neutrality about not having to route around "major labels", who are in a position to throw their money at ISPs to keep the competition down (ie. on the lower tiers)?
When anything can be viewed/consumed without extra cost, and as long as information can be shared freely, all your business depends on is the actual customer value of your business. I can see why that would be scary to some.
If lack of competition is the disease and we use regulation to mask the symptoms, won't we end up with more regulation while the disease persists?
"Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use regulation.'
Now, they have two problems."
(With apologies to D. Tilbrook)
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
1) net neutrality is pushed by a coalition of commies and rent-seeking aristocrats, so you should be against it
2) no one in government understands the Internet, so whatever they do will be wrong
3) even if you are a commie, you should know that the market always responds to what the consumers want in spite of corporations attempts at anti-competive practices, so we can trust the ISPs to always do what is best for us
one of the best ways to route around a big firm's brand recognition is to buy special treatment in the form of promotions, product placement and the like (payola, after all, is how rock and roll circumvented major label contempt for the genre)
Promotions and product placement are not shoving unsolicited third-party ads into Google or throttling Netflix, they are buying ads from Google or getting characters in movies to use the promoted brand. If you happen to see a movie on Netflix in which the characters are talking about a show on Hulu, you'll know it works (and works well).
This has nothing to do with net neutrality, which is a far better tool at doing the opposite; a big player like Netflix can pay the ransom and get special treatment, a up-and-coming startup video streaming service can't pony up the resources to do that, but perhaps they can get a celebrity to name-drop their brand in an ad-libbed line of a hot movie.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
No, we supported the FCC action because the ISPs left us no choice.
Ideally, I wouldn't want the government to get involved. However, the ISPs have a monopoly on wired, broadband Internet access (duopoly in some areas). If you want wired, broadband Internet access, you need to take what BIG_CABLE_ISP will give you. If communities aren't served by BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, they can't form their own broadband efforts because said big companies will lobby state legislators to ban these efforts as "bad for competition." (As in, should they ever decide to expand into these areas, they would actually have competition and that's bad.)
This still wouldn't have been enough to support FCC action, but the ISPs got greedy. They saw Google, Netflix, and others making money online and thought "people are using our connections to buy stuff so why doesn't some of that money go to us?!!!" (Completely ignoring that some does in the form of ISP service bills.) They tried to charge companies extra to reach customers via "fast lanes" lest their data be regulated to an unusable slow lane.
In a perfect world, customers could just vote with their wallets and switch ISPs, but they couldn't due to the monopoly situation above. So the FCC stepped in. First, they instituted extremely weak rules that would basically allow the ISPs to do whatever they wanted. Verizon took offense to there being even weak rules and sued. They won, but the courts told the FCC "if you want to do this, you need to use Title II." So in winning, Verizon actually lost.
In short, we didn't want to go to the FCC. We just wanted things to operate the way they always had been operating. But the ISPs' greed forced action and then Verizon's greed forced stronger action.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
bad writers paid by bad people to promulgate bad policies to screw almost everybody. that is the billionnaires trying to take back the plantations from the 99%.
if you read that fishwrap, do exactly the opposite.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Whenever I read “John Nobody claims that Net Neutrality is the root of all evil”, I try to find out who John Nobody is. Usually, I find out he is a corporate-style person with absolutely no clue about how the Internet works. Do I dare generalize? After all, all economists are convinced that with enough investment when energy will become too expensive, companies will be able to overcome the first and second principles of thermodynamics. Nothing new under the sun.
The problem (as you recognize) is that the administration is trying to go about this unilaterally. Obama is still acting like it's 2009 with his "I won" mentality. But what one President can order, the next can change.
Instead, the executive branch and the legislative branch should agree on what the law should be and make it so; unfortunately there has been no effort to reach any kind of compromise.
This is article is full of so much bullshit it's hard to know where to start tearing into it.
This guy seems to think that data transfer between servers and my computer is the same as managing the backbone pipeline the data runs on. It's like suggesting that there should be no traffic laws aside from "don't hurt people" and it would just all work out. Billionaire Bill buys up all the roadways in my local town and starts charging Walmart a fee to allow people to drive into their parking lot? no problem! Free market will suss out Billionaire Bill if people really don't like it, they'll vote with their dollars! If it comes down to it, no one's making those poor people drive cars, we'll all just walk like god intended! Take that Billionaire Bill!
Fucking bullshit
as long as i can still install viruses using chatbutton.com, i'm fine either way.
Use my SEOChat.com and ChatButton.com services so i can install viruses on your users' computers!
If there was "free market" we would not need net neutrality. There would be competition if I don't like one ISP's policies I have 10 other low latency, high bandwidth, reliable, with unrestricted services to choice to chose from. In truth most of the country is lucky if they have one choice that is not limited in one of those requirements. I had to load balance the two main ISP in my area to get something close to being an internet connection. What I can get has barely changed in 15 years. So 20 years without net neutrality has gotten us nowhere.
From TFA:
"The end-users are consumers, whose consumption preferences ultimately determine the value of content. ISPs interact directly with consumers by selling the high-speed connections that allow their customers to access content."
This is a gross misconception of the way the internet was originally designed, and the way it should be viewed. The internet is NOT client-server, the internet is Peer-to-Peer.
The numbskulls on teh Interwebs just want more bandwidth, faster, for less. They supported the FCC action because they're idiots, just like gruber said they were.
Since the extant option was less bandwidth, slower, for more, this was the better choice.
Or did uncle Koch tell you something different?
Did it occur to any of the geniuses associated with this article that if ISPs could pick and choose what content they wish to prioritize, Reason might be charged to have their message delivered in a timely fashion?
The primary reason there is usually only a very small number of ISP's that serve a particular area is simple, and it doesn't involve tin foil hats or conspiracy theories. It is that building broadband infrastructure is fucking expensive. Everything from the hardware, to the permits, but especially the construction. In order for any company to be able to offer service at a price that has any chance of attracting customers, it needs to have a lot of customers in the area it builds out to. The more companies that are in the mix, the fewer customers each has, and the more they much charge to break even, which results in even fewer customers ... rinse, lather, repeat. It's a vicious cycle and quite simply it's an industry that doesn't lend itself to a business model with dozens of small choices putting paper flyers under people's windshield wipers and giving away toasters. It's the same reason you don't have a dozen companies all building railroad tracks alongside of each other, or stringing up multiple power lines to everyone's home. In an extraordinarily capital intensive business, that approach just can't work.
I looked up bootleggers and baptists, and find it likely he used that term because it sounds scary to the uninformed.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleggers_and_Baptists
He cherry picked the scariest out of all the stakeholders and then accuses net neutrality proponents of scaremongering. Projection or pot calling the kettle black, I'm not sure which.
He claims that "net neutrality" was coined by a lawyer, of all things, in 2003, but I seem to remember it being mentioned before that. Anybody else seem to think they heard it before then too?
I went to Sperry's twitter page.
The amount of Libertarian derp is stunning.
Didn't bother with the other author.
Title II is in effect because the ISPs decided to not play nice with their customers. If everyone liked Comcast, for example, instead of calling it the absolute worst company in customer service, we would never be here.
The days of the mom-and-pop ISP with direct personal service and "organic growth" of the Internet has been over for more than a decade. And what has taken their places are large customer-fucking entities with abysmal customer service and that absolutely refuse to upgrade infrastructure but instead put caps on use to deal with the demand. And for that they demand ever higher payment. This is after we threw billions at them to install last-mile fiber that they never installed, but instead handed out to the shareholders.
In the People's Libertarian Paradise of Concord, NH, we have exactly *two* "broadband" providers, both of which suck massively, one of which doesn't even offer broadband as currently defined (=>25Mbps). Comcast and Fairpoint (unfairpoint, fairly bad point, etc)
That's why we are here. This is "why we can't have nice things."
Screw both of these guys and Reason magazine too. If not outright corporate shills, they are at least useful idiots.
Quislings come in all forms.
--
BMO
>FCC
>control the internet
>the internet is now a US possession?
Ahm.. is not payola illegal and one of the major reasons cited for corruption and anti-competitive behavior within the music industry which gives us our limited consumer choice and lock in?
There is also the minor issue that music is an optional cultural consumption, while internet access is a core piece of our infrastructure which no modern business can operate without?
The internet not being beholden to ISP business practices.
ISPs are, and should be treated as, conduits of data which has nothing at all to do with their damned business practices.
Or, you know, supported by corporate ass kissers who would have us believe that whatever the fuck corporations want is somehow good for us, when it's only good for corporations.
But the net neutrality movement has had less to do with class struggle than with the familiar delusion of technocrats everywhere: that government can "design" a better future if only it pulls the right levers.
Ah, here goes more bullshit and antigovernment everyone-but-me-is-elitist crap which suggests that preventing companies from acting like douchebags is crippling to companies who want to be douchebags.
Look, this is libertarian economic drivel which says corporate rent-seeking assholes should be able to extort a cut of someone because they have a successful product, and that it is really important for ISPs to be able to spy on your content to maximize their ad revenue.
Yes, because we don't want a fucking internet where you have to be kicking up some payola to some greedy asshole who did nothing other than say "nice innovation you have there, shame if something happened to it".
You know what needs to change? Companies who sell the newest stuff as if they really have it, refuse to invest in upgrading their infrastructure to keep it relevant, and then piss and moan when their outdated business model of "do nothing and keep charging more" proves to be useless.
This whole article is written by a corporate apologist who is changing the definitions of "innovation" and "stale business model" to make it sound like encumbant ISPs who are too lazy/cheap to be able to to charge a toll (in the form of payola or blocking traffic) so they can piggy back on the success of companies who actually make stuff.
This is entirely about saying "we should be able to gouge NetFlix, because they've come up with something cool and we haven't".
This is arguing for the right to be a parasite middleman, by companies who are otherwise collapsing under their own crushing weight of incompetence, laziness, and the feeling of being entitled to revenue they do not generate.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The proposed Title II regulations shut down fast lanes, but does nothing about other forms of preferential treatment. Data cap exclusions are one example. ISPs offer big bandwidth services (like Netflix and Spotify) deals that would make their data not count against bandwidth caps. If you are a Comcast customer and rent a movie from their video service, it won't count against your bandwidth cap, but watch the same movie through Hulu and it will.
So you rely on people and politicians that are in the back pocket of any corporation that's paying, who have pretty much no clue when it comes too all things internet, WHO would sell their family for a buck, to trust to come up with rules that are for the consumers that they care little about and would like to steal the rights from because they think that's "more secure"?
While we are at it, why don't we put crackheads in charge of ridding the US of crack houses too?
They have been required to provide phone service, spread the cost. Fine, I want to live in the boondocks I can still have a phone, good thanks for that. I just can only hope it will translate to data access so I don't have to live in a tiny ass overpriced crap hole of an abode and still be guaranteed I can get a usable connection anywhere. Force them to run the wires needed to get everywhere for anyone like a phone and treat a packet like a closed sealed USPS letter. Thats it, stop there.
What is/isn't under a banner of net-neutrality will determine whether or not it is a good regulation.
I've met people who think net neutrality should mean ISPs can't throttle anything. Well jeez, have these people ever tried to manage a network?
Then there's people who think the ISPs are just making money with data caps and surcharges. Often times, these are the same group of people.
Well one way or another, you have to manage your network. Either impose extra costs on users, or you as the ISP do it for them.
Myself, I prefer the unlimited use. You might pay more for a bigger pipe (25 mbps versus say 10 mbps), but in both cases you can use it as much as you life.
As long as the ISPs are using throttling in a 'fair' way, that is good. Maybe require them to publish their throttling rules. Things that could be anti-competitive could be taken to court.
Or have simple rules, like they can only throttle a users overall speed. So maybe if you use too much, you get your entire bandwidth reduced to 1 mbps or have your packet priority lowered... whatever
And you might not want to prevent big users/network from working together. Not in an anti-competitive way, but in a way that keeps the network functioning better. Again as long as these deals are public and are available for all players for a fair price. Whether that is co-locating servers, being able to label packets with certain priorities when congestion happens...
Regulating a network is complex, but it has been done before, like regulating rail network and making sure it is open and fair access for all rail companies that want to use the tracks.
At one time, there WERE multiple tracks - one for each railroad.
Then they started shareing, and the expense dropped.
And if broadband infrastructure was so expensive, why all the lobbying efforts to get it outlawed?
1. All ISP bills have a fee which is suppose to go to building out to those low population areas, so the dense areas subsidize the less dense. The ISPs don't do this still, using your stated reasons. So, obviously those fees aren't working so they should be stripped from bills, or the companies are not using the money correctly and should be slapped. This is their slap.
2. Companies like AT&T have been given huge tax breaks under the understanding that they would further expand their networks, to improve internet access. They pocketed the money and did nothing. This is another thing they deserve to be slapped over.
3. Previously we had a system setup, where a large company like Bellsouth ran the cables, and they also provided their own internet service. They were required by law to allow smaller companies to sublet their lines at cost. Remember the days of Earthlink, AOL, and others in the late 90s? That was then. The rules had changed and so those companies could no longer compete killing them off. The government and the rest of the system understand how to make laws to deal with a single line, with multiple competitors. I wonder what got them to make those changes.
Where the heck do you get that idea from? The fake polls?
The FCC could have restricted the corporations with one or two pages. Congress could have done so by a law with one or two pages. 400 Pages is what we got. A vast majority that I have talked to did not want corporatiosn to control the internet but did not want the government to do it EITHER.
I do not recognize the FCC's claim to authority and will activly fight against them. In fact, we no longer recognize their claim over airwaves either, and we will not hesitate to use the airwaves in order to establish the Mesh Internet 3.
"The primary reason there is usually only a very small number of ISP's that serve a particular area is simple, and it doesn't involve tin foil hats or conspiracy theories. It is that building broadband infrastructure is fucking expensive. Everything from the hardware, to the permits, but especially the construction."
Humm... probably that's the first time something like that has happened ever before.
Let's see... The reason there are a very small number of truck transportation companies is because building highways for the trucks is damn expensive.
Hey, this gives me an idea! What if cabling and services on top like Internet access get managed by different entities!? What if we consider cabling a basic infrastructure just like roads and let them be publicly managed and subsidized by the services on top of them?
This still wouldn't have been enough to support FCC action, but the ISPs got greedy. They saw Google, Netflix, and others making money online and thought "people are using our connections to buy stuff so why doesn't some of that money go to us?!!!" (Completely ignoring that some does in the form of ISP service bills.) They tried to charge companies extra to reach customers via "fast lanes" lest their data be regulated to an unusable slow lane.
Can you point out what part of their 400-page report would have fixed this?
Because it doesn't.
"Net Neutrality" has changed from the "end-to-end principle" to "whatever particular people have with their Internet, regardless of the actual cause". And shocker: FCC did little to nothing except add ability to micro-manage networks.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
The article is full of colorful language about network neutrality advocates, but also some sound reasoning that is unfortunately based on technical misunderstandings or misinformation. Once you look past the mischaracterizations (it's a political piece, after all - you speak to your audience and insult everyone who disagrees with you before you even consider making a point!), it's actually not that bad. There are lots of items in it that I'd like to respond to, as if I could fix the author's misunderstandings, but I'll just pick a one:
The more good content that providers make available, the more consumers will demand access to sites and apps, and the more ISPs will invest in the infrastructure to facilitate delivery.
That's what we want, but that isn't what is happening. The ISPs have little economic incentive to invest in infrastructure since they are mostly monopolies. That's why Comcast chose, instead of upgrading their bandwidth when customers started watching Netflix, to pressure Netflix into co-locating servers within Comcast's network. They only could do that because they are a monopoly. Comcast customers could not choose to switch to another provider, and Netflix cannot choose to route around Comcast.
One would think that after 10 years of political teeth-gnashing, regulatory rule making, and relentless litigating, there would by now be a strong economic case for net neutrality—a clear record of harmful practices and agreements embodying the types of behavior that only regulation can pre-empt. But there isn't.
This sounds like someone citing their ignorance on a topic as evidence that something didn't happen. In general, the authors need to recognize that: :-) Clearly they never had to dial-up to Prodigy to see one "web site" and then use Compuserve to see another one, then dial AOL to email someone else.
- ISPs are tied to cable/telecom monopolies.
- ISPs can't pick different "business models" without impacting individuals' free speech.
- We learned these lessons from what came before the internet.
- We've had real issues without Network Neutrality.
It will be interesting to see how "broken" the internet is in 10 years. Usually those predicting doom and gloom fade away. We shall see, eh?
Ever read a cell phone provider's terms and conditions? It probably says no you can't actually talk to anyone for as long as you like. That up to 4G speeds? Any data at whatever speed you happen to get counts toward that, and I had to file a complaint to find out that with MetroPCS, you are capped at 2G speeds which is about 128kbps, or nearly twice the speed of the fastest dial-up. With MetroPCS, I even had trouble viewing the terms and conditions a number of times because they didn't make the page right.
We no longer recognize the authority of the courts. They had their chance to do the right and legal thing for many years, but now echo with the voice of Roland Freisler.
Obama and the FCC promoted "Net Neutrality", but it was not the same Net Neutrality everybody thought they were getting. Instead, the FCC and Obama came up with their own plan and gave it the same name "Net Neutrality".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WHoqsRuxU
I agree that the FCC's rules aren't going to stop all abuses. They are a good start and should stop much of the "Internet companies are using our pipes for free so we need to charge them" talk. (Hint: Internet companies pay their OWN ISPs for bandwidth. They aren't sneaking into their neighbor's house and plugging a network cord into their neighbor's router.) The FCC should definite focus a close eye on data caps - especially when they are used by monopoly cable ISPs to negatively impact Internet video so that users will be more likely to use the cable companies' TV offerings.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
In short, we didn't want to go to the FCC. We just wanted things to operate the way they always had been operating. But the ISPs' greed forced action and then Verizon's greed forced stronger action.
A very reasoned response. Internet access has no resemblance to a free market, at least not like Hayek, Friedman, Mille for any of the other great Chicago gang would define it. The incumbents want to use regulators to maintain their market dominance and eliminate real competition, something another Chicago guy wrote about as well. Open up the last mile to real competition and then you can argue that ISPs should be allowed to charge providers for faster service. However, as long a they maintain a monopoly or duopoly position then regulation is appropriate to ensure everyone gets the same treatment.
The problem underlying this fight is the big ISPs are realizing the connection will be the valuable piece in the future, and not merely a profitable Haddon to there cable business. As Apple, Amazon, Netflix et. al. chip away at the core cable business they (the cable companies / ISP) are looking for ways to protect revenue steams. Preventing others from entering the ISP space is critical to maintaining that revenue stream; and why they are willing to spend big dollars on lawyers, lobbyists and campaign contributions to do so.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The article misses one point in it's analogy to paying for promotion: who's being paid. When I pay a store for special placement, I'm paying the store for special placement of my stuff on it's shelves. That's fine, it's the store's shelves and they're free to handle them however they choose. But suppose that, instead of placement on the store's shelves, I'm paying the store for special placement in the customer's pantry? Once I pay the store they'll send people to customer's homes to put my products front and center in the customer's pantry even if the customer didn't buy them and if that leaves the customer without enough space for what they did buy then tough luck, what the store put there is locked down so only the store can move it and they won't. That's not fine. It's not the stores shelves, and nobody's paying the customer for special placement on their shelves.
Ah, but the argument might be that it's not the customer's line, it belongs to the ISP. If so, then exactly what is that bill the customer's being sent every month for then? We already have situations like this. If I'm renting an apartment the landlord still holds the title to it but it's my apartment as long as I'm paying the rent and the landlord isn't free to just do anything to it he pleases any time he pleases. If I'm making payments on a car loan the bank holds title to the car but it's still my car and as long as I'm making the payments the bank can't just come in and borrow it any time they please or have it repainted to a color they like or anything like that. In the same way, the customer's paying for Internet access and as long as they pay the bill every month it's their Internet access and the ISP doesn't have an unrestricted right to decide how chunks of it must be used (unless, as with the boxes that disable a car if payments aren't made on time, it's made completely clear up front that this is being done and why and it serves a reasonable purpose (use of that box after a payment has been missed is one thing, but if the finance company tries to claim a right to use them when they think a payment might be missed soon (even though payments are still current) the courts would reject that as unreasonable even if the contract tried to allow it).
Shill.
Bad outcomes for people is the disease. Lack of competition can often lead to bad things, sure. But the goal is not a society with lots of competition for the sake of competition. The goal is for good things to happen to people, and it is a contingent fact that competition can often help with that.
If we can have good outcomes for people without changing the level of competition, who the heck are you to say "no, see, this is actually bad because it doesn't have enough competition, which is the *real* disease."
Regulation is needed to enforce a level playing field. Without regulation, you get a winner-takes-all effect.
No need to say anything more.
Socialist! SOCIALIST!
I suspect most of the people who are most concerned about net neutrality are going to live to deeply, deeply regret the Internet being put under an almost 100 year old Communications Act.
I want my ISP to do their freaking job and shift packets from the source to me, without molestation and without interest
So why then did you ever want the government, also responsible for phone tapping anyone they like, to have anything to do with your internet?
The way you wanted it was HOW IT WORKED. Now that is not the case. Good luck with that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I agree that the FCC's rules aren't going to stop all abuses. They are a good start...
This right here is the problem with progressive world views.
.... NEVER has a progressive said "We are done!" or asked "Maybe we went too far?"
When a progressive gets what they want its still only "a good start" and "not enough"
Even when completely ignorant of the specific issues of a specific "problem", this leads to one wondering how much of their "justification" is just self-serving "spin."
In the case of "Net Neutrality" the justification was 100% spin. The Netflix excuse is rife with hypocrisy, as when Netflix was using Cogent it was Level 3 that Netflix claimed was evil, but now that Netflix uses Level 3 its someone else thats evil. The fact is that Netflix goes with the cheapest ISP they can but that decision has consequences.
Netflix saves a ton of money with their ISP choice and you Net Neutrality goons have been tricked into pushng the consequences of that savings directly onto your own ISP, which means directly onto you. Thats great for Netflix customers... socializing Netflixs costs onto their neighbors that arent Netflix customers...
"His name was James Damore."
Whoever put together their web site forgot the tag. Otherwise it is hard to explain how a site calling itself "Reason" so blatantly demonstrates complete lack of the stuff.
1. Pick a problem, any problem.
2. Claim it can be solved with laissez faire capitalism and will be worsened with any form of government intervention.
3. Ignore any evidence to the contrary.
In this article, the author acts as though the threat of data discrimination from cable and phone companies is fantastical speculation. But it's already happened, and so many times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... In most markets, people only have one or two choices for a broadband connection, so they can't vote with their dollars effectively to resolve the problem. Much as I enjoy the elegance of free market principles, the Invisible Hand is not gonna fix this one.
"No decent person," write Geoffrey Manne and Ben Sperry in a special issue of Reason, "should be *for* net neutrality."
No decent person? You might want to try not insulting people if you're trying to win them round to your point of view.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
would you be willing to bet against these guys not being paid lobbyists for Comcast?
NON-PROFIT NON-PARTISAN think tanks don't earn their money for salt on the bread by submitting stories to Reason.
They depend on generous sugar daddies to fund their thinktankery.
Comcast has a vast network of lobbyists.
Thyey clearlyt hate net neutrality, and you can bet your sweet ass that it has nothing to do with th e"fear of breaking the internet", and everything to do with not wanting government at all to regulate thewir business, just as Wall street don't want SEC to regulate them, or the oil companies not wanting the EPA to regulate them.
Corporations since the dawn of industry ALWAYS claimed that they don't want regulations, that they are good guys that can self-regulate, and that the invisible hand of the market will make everything OK.
We KNOW that if Comcast was to control the internet, it would very soon look like someone invented broadcast TV anno 1955.
Comcast would want to block skype, netflix, pandora etc. They want the option to start cutting off or hamnstringing third party services in order to better place their own service. They would love to play highway robbers or "toll gate" bandits extracting a toll for users.
They want the content providers to share ad or royalties revenue with them. And they want more flexibility to charge for "premium" content, under the giuse of quality of service. And who know what else they want around the corner. Maybe we wont really know what they want until they have a near monopoly so that they can start gouging folks with no alternative provider to escape to.
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
All sides are probably wrong. I'm not going to defend the stupidity of this particular libertarian / article / position (or summary of it anyway). However I think I can defend the mindset of no regulation or less regulation is best. None of us should really want net neutrality. Rather the problem is the power of the communications industry and capitalist system in general. Of course the corporate interests are going to lobby for laws that favor them and the largest will lobby for laws that entrench there market position. That's exactly what happened in the 1980s when cable was being rolled out. Local municipalities caved into this demand and granted monopolies to companies who would roll out cable. As its near impossible to compete with entrenched monopolies additional regulations only help keep those few companies that remain entrenched. It's impossible to compete.
What we probably need to do is eliminate the regulations and laws that make it difficult for small companies wanting to enter the market. Make it cheap and easy to roll out new. Cut the bureaucratic red tape and reduce the startup costs by 2/3. Then all of a sudden you've got competition. That might not solve the problem in its entirety mind you as we do need massive entities who are able to criss-cross the country. However combined with equal access laws to infrastructure, less regulation (ie easier or fewer permits, etc), and ensuring entities which cross boarders must provide non-discriminatory pricing (ie if you charge 10x as much for a smaller entity to connect) than we should begin to see some resemblance of a free market.
We need a free market in internet provision, not some government regulations.
To institute a free market, we need to unbundle the local loop.
That's about it.
Complete waste of time even reading the shit - one would ask how it got posted here, if the answer wasn't obvious.
We know there will be! We'll make sure of it!
A libertarian will argue the government created these monopolies in the 1st place.
Sounds like you were busy proving the grand-parents point, and without any trace of irony.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Always has been. That's why everybody can use it.
You should thank god it's not owned by the EU, China or Russia.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
If lack of competition is the disease and we use regulation to mask the symptoms, won't we end up with more regulation while the disease persists?
"Whenever faced with a problem, some people say `Lets use regulation.'
Now, they have two problems."
(With apologies to D. Tilbrook)
No, because we already have a precedent with Ole Ma Bell when they had a monopoly on phone service in this country. If you were alive and cognizant in the 1970s or earlier you should know this! The government tried to regulate the bastards and then they finally ordered them split up. What we're seeing now is similar in the ISP business. All the little guys are getting gobbled up by the big guys and soon there will be just one big monopoly left. The FCC is trying to prevent that AT&T-style monopoly from taking place again in a different sector that they have control over.
Regulation is not a cure all, but it is a step that needs to be taken when bad or even illegal business practices start affecting an entire industry. If that doesn't end up working, and a monopoly is formed, then things get even more medieval and rightfully so! These are all acts of a kind of diplomacy that the government uses with businesses to PROTECT the people of this country from getting screwed. Frankly ,these measures should have been made law a decade ago. It would have prevented the regional monopolies that we have now and made for better overall Internet service for everyone concerned.
New startups don't have much money, since they haven't made it yet. Established successful businesses have gobs of money. So....who can afford to pay the ISP more for traffic promotion? The established business, obviously. The author's point is precisely backwards...non-neutrality will *never* favor startups, it will *always* be used to erect barriers-to-entry and prevent the invisible hand from benefiting consumers.
History has proven that antitrust laws are insanely expensive to enforce. As such, they are basically worthless. We need something that has the same effect but actually works. In the domain of Internet access, that something is net neutrality regulation.
The author is either confused or deceptive. In either case, he is wrong.
Hey, this gives me an idea! What if cabling and services on top like Internet access get managed by different entities!? What if we consider cabling a basic infrastructure just like roads and let them be publicly managed and subsidized by the services on top of them?
'Cuz the idiot neocons and libertarians would call that Socialist, and by their narrow definition, that's bad. Some things should be owned and operated by the government and infrastructure (roads, power lines, telecommunication lines, etc.) should be for sure to prevent this kind of nonsense we're seeing from thieving bastards that just want to rip people off and give them the bare minimum quality service.
So you say that Netflix as a company shouldn't try to get the best deal they can they can when signing with an ISP? Interesting theory...
Any ISP signing a contract with Netflix should realize what a bandwidth hog Netflix is. If that incurs extra costs for the ISP it's THEIR problem. If someone downstream throttles Netflix because users on that ISP uses a lot of bandwidth it's still not Netflix problem, the users ISP has oversold their available bandwidth.
It's a fact that the internet provider market in the US lacks competition and is more or less monopolistic or duopolist with hints of cartel agreements. When a market is dysfunctional in that way someone has to step in and sort the mess out since it's obvious the market wasn't interested in fixing it.
And by the tone in your post you rather have a dysfunctional internet provider market that abuse and gouges it's customers every day than some weak regulation that will at least try to fix the worst problems.
And FYI, it's because of progressive world views that we have a modern society but you are welcome to stay in the past while moaning about the progressives wanting progress (because without progress things stagnate).
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
That's how DSL service works in the UK. BT runs all the phone lines, but they don't run the internet service on top: You can choose from many ISPs, including another division of BT.
Our cable service works much like the US though: Following a series of mergers, there's only one cable service left in the entire coutry, Virgin Media. They do offer a pretty good service though, at least for now.
Everything from the hardware, to the permits, but especially the construction.
Local level lobbying also plays a big role.
My neighborhood is split between 2 cities: About 70% is in the first city and the other 30% is on the other. I live in the "other city". My neighborhood was originally wired by the cable company serving the "other city", Year later, another cable company comes along. The first city get completely wired - including its side of my neighborhood. The incremental cost to include my side of of the neighborhood would have been small at the time as all the needed crew, equipment and supplies were in the neighborhood. But the "other city" utilities board [1] caved to the original cable company's demand to not let the new company in - not even the quarter square mile section of my neighborhood that is in the "other city". Yes, everyone in my section of the neighborhood wrote both the utilities board and the city counsel asking that the new company be allowed to wire our part of the neighborhood. But we were just "a few dozen households" vs a huge corporate enterprise. (At the time, the new company had no plans involving other areas on the borders of the "other city", so the other residents didn't care.)
---
[1] Utilities board because they have control over the installation and use of the "utility poles" that carry power, phone and cable TV lines. In theory, the city counsel could have overruled, but that would have been unlikely even if the incumbent cable company wasn't also lobbying them.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I could make a similar criticism of the libertarians: Whenever some minimal level of regulation proves ineffective, they don't ask what can be done to fix the regulation: They just declare that this shows no regulation can be justified and call for repeal.
The argument, and the Payola example, boil down to this: the way to prevent people from censoring your content is to pay them not to.
Counterargument: the way to prevent people from censoring your content is to make it illegal to do so, rather than buying in to their extortion racket.
Payola worked because the station owners controlled what got broadcast. But that's not how an open communications network is supposed to work.
While I haven't read the FCC's version of net neutrality, The Netherlands has had net neutrality for several years. In the meaning that an ISP cannot prioritize traffic, or block traffic, or pay for (faster) access to a specific service. With very few exceptions. You can let people pay for faster speed and download caps are allowed.
This has not caused any problems, at all. Internet access is still fast and affordable. fiber/cable/dsl do not have usage caps. ISPs have not gone bankrupt.
What the ISPs want is the equivalent of buying a Cisco brand ethernet switch, wondering why the speed is only 10Mb/s for some of devices plugged into it compared to others, only to find out that if you're not using 'devices made by Cisco or Cisco's partner companies' that the flow of data through the switch will be limited to 10Mb/s instead of the full 1Gb/s the switch is rated for. You'd return it to where you bought it and demand a full refund, wouldn't you? There is no sane Universe where anything other than Net Neutrality makes sense, unless these ISPs want to provide the connection and equipment for FREE to everyone, which is like 'free lunch' if you get my drift. We are PAYING for the connection, we demand to GET the connection, unfettered, not filtered, not slowed or accelerated for anyone, anywhere, for any reason. Them, them, fuck them, and fuck these 'Reason' idiots, too, they need to STFU and GTFO, stop shilling for Crapcast and whoever else.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
If communities aren't served by BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, they can't form their own broadband efforts because said big companies will lobby state legislators to ban these efforts as "bad for competition."
Yes, government funded cable service is a direct competition with private companies. How is that not obvious?
What is NOT prevented is the formation of a private company to provide that ISP service. Do you know why this isn't happening? Because it isn't profitable. It can only be "profitable" if the government steps in and uses taxpayer dollars to fund it. Government doesn't need to care about profit, they can do it for "free". I.e., using tax money. Involuntary subscribers. And when government can offer services at below cost, how can any private company compete? You think it is fair for that to happen?
In a perfect world, customers could just vote with their wallets and switch ISPs, but they couldn't due to the monopoly situation above.
And no company is smart enough to take advantage of all the disaffected subscribers to the awful BIG_COMPANY by trying to provide service to them? Seems like an easy chunk of money to pick up. Walk into an area, give better cable service at faster rates and you'll have people beating a path to your door.
In short, we didn't want to go to the FCC. We just wanted things to operate the way they always had been operating.
Given that the FCC net neutrality rules have NOTHING to do with breaking up defacto monopolies and nothing to do with peering congestion and are not limited to the BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, it is a bit hard to accept this claim.
libertarians' fundamental thesis seems to be that anything that doesn't harm others freedom's and rights should be allowed. This is a fantastic belief, but in practice there are a lot of things you can do as an individual that can adversely affect society, and end up being regulated. If there is some stupid law on the books prohibiting practice 'X', it is quite likely that at one time someone was doing that very thing and that pissed off enough people that a law got passed.
On one hand, government trying to predict what sort of behaviors will need to be regulated seems like a bad idea, because you are asking some of the dumbest people on the planet (politicians) to try to predict the future. I generally like the idea of a reactive government, that only trys to fix things that actually become problems, so I would lean toward the libertarian model.
But, given the nature of corporations, I can saw with 100% confidence that if we do not pass laws forcing a level playing field, we will have all sorts of problems. The Internet to these people is nothing more than a brand new resource to be exploited in the most efficient way possible. Mind you, this isn't because the companies involved are corrupt, evil entities. This is simply because that is what capitalism encourages. Barring additional regulation, the most profitable company is the one most ruthlessly efficient at creating and selling a product. Nothing about capatialisim is geared toward what is good for the whole of society, just what makes money.
An intellectually honest libertarian will be willing to recognize that libertarianism is a utopian ideal (like most 'isims'), and that reality requires quite a lot of rules to keep the 1% of the world who are total assholes from screwing things up for the other 99%. This article seems to be written by idealists who don't live in the real world.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Hey, this gives me an idea! What if cabling and services on top like Internet access get managed by different entities!?
What exactly would that change? Do you think that separating them will magically create competition?
Let's see, right now TWC owns the cable and TWC provides internet. Tomorrow, TWC-A owns the cable, and TWC-B owns the internet. TWC-A leases the cable to TWC-B. TWC-A's costs are the same as TWC's costs to maintain the cable. TWC-B's costs are the same as TWC's costs to run the service on top of the cable. Total is the same.
Ah so maybe a new company comes in and says "We want to provide that service instead of TWC-A. Lease us the lines!" Quiz: Is NewCo going to *underbid* TWC-B, or *outbid* TWC-B in order to lease the lines instead? Answer: outbid, which means they pay more, and TWC-A makes a higher profit. NewCo then passes on those costs to the consumer, who gets absolutely no say in the matter.
It won't be like the highways, I can tell you that. Fedex uses the highways, but so do I, and at minimal cost. Will that happen in your network world? Nope. Fibers will be leased by huge companies that pay millions (or billions if this is a nationwide vision) for the privilege.
What if we consider cabling a basic infrastructure just like roads and let them be publicly managed and subsidized by the services on top of them?
In that case, the basic infrastructure will become insanely expensive and it will be in a constant budget crisis. Money raised from network fees will be diverted to the state's general fund to pay for completely unrelated things. Taxes will be raised and bonds issued periodically to cover the "shortfall." Look at the water and sewer systems of pretty much every municipality in the country.
Even ignoring the obvious and inevitable mismanagement of the infrastructure, replacing TWC-A with CityA changes nothing. Someone's going to bid on the lines. Someone's going to win. That person will pay a higher cost than the loser. That higher cost will be passed on.
And to top it all off, there's still no incentive on *anyone's* behalf to upgrade the network. Say your system happened 20 years ago. It's all copper. Why would CityA say, "Hey guys, let's just randomly upgrade everyone to fiber! We'll raise taxes to do it because people love higher taxes. Or we'll pass on the cost to TWC-B and raise everyone's bill." I mean what's the difference? If governments really cared they could do that today anyway by doing things like "Hi Time Warner, we're not renewing your monopoly franchise agreement in the city unless you upgrade to at least 100mbps on your lowest tier." Guess what... they don't do that.
I have it on good authority that if you type "google" into Google you can break the Internet.
So you say that Netflix as a company shouldn't try to get the best deal they can they can when signing with an ISP? Interesting theory...
I don't see him saying that. Not at all.
Any ISP signing a contract with Netflix should realize what a bandwidth hog Netflix is. If that incurs extra costs for the ISP it's THEIR problem.
No argument there. If Netflix buys services from Level 3, then Level 3 is on the hook to provide that service.
But Netflix did not buy service from Comcast. It's the peering that is congested, not the internal Level 3 network.
... the users ISP has oversold their available bandwidth.
Do you not realize what it would cost to provide 100% service to everyone at the same time? It would require a huge investment in capacity that would be underutilized most of the time. The cost of service would skyrocket for no apparent benefit.
This isn't a new concept. There was never one dialtone generator for each subscriber telephone line, there was a set number based on statistical usage patterns. There was never one step-by-step switch for every phone line, there were a fixed number based on statistical use patterns. (And when BBSs/dialup ISPs became so popular it skewed that pattern to more and longer calls consuming switch capacity. That's why telcos tried to get "data line" service as an extra cost feature, so they could pay for the added switching capacity necessary to support the new pattern.)
And sometimes, if you tried to make a long distance call during heavy use (like on Mother's Day) you got a busy signal. Not because Mom was talking to one of your siblings, but because there were no long distance circuits available.
And you think that 100% capacity should be the goal? I'd rather pay less and get some congestion at peak periods, thanks. You see, we're seeing the exact same pattern in ISP service that we saw when BBSs/dialup hit the wireline. Systems designed for expected use patterns are being overloaded because more people are getting more data for longer times. I didn't want to pay a "data line" charge then, I don't want to pay a "my neighbor wants Netflix" fee, either.
It's a fact that the internet provider market in the US lacks competition and is more or less monopolistic or duopolist with hints of cartel agreements.
I keep asking, nobody has given me an answer. What ISP has been granted a monopoly? What two ISPs have been granted a duopoly? If you are unhappy with your cable-wired internet service, what stops you from starting your own ISP and providing better/faster/cheaper service? Hint: it isn't the government.
Yeah, the existing cable companies are evil for agreeing not to compete directly. Unfortunately, you cannot legislate that they must enter a market where they don't want to. You CAN use legal remedies if they have contractually agreed to service an area and they haven't. But if there is an area where there is no service, grab the opportunity for huge profits by creating your own cable company and providing it. Someone would have done that -- if they could make a profit. It isn't the government stopping them, it's simple economics.
Tiering is only meaningful when offered capacity exceeds available capacity. It's that simple, because tiering can not increase the physical capacity of the link.
Tiers "virtualize" multiple flows of traffic on the same network link, not unlike HOV lanes on a highway system. Therefore, with fixed capacity, If you add capacity to one group of flows on a link, the others get less, just like if a common use lane is converted to an HOV lane.
Here's how tiering would solve a capacity problem:
1. A link has congestion
2. One customer pays more to reduce their congestion -- aka a higher tier of service
3. The provider increases that customer's capacity allocation, and as a result *all* others see reduced capacity.
4. The provider gets more revenue from the same scarce resource.
Allowing this kind of behavior creates winners and losers. The provider and the customer that moves up the tier hierarchy wins. All other customers lose. The growth of the network asset loses (that is it sees no growth).
Here's the same problem solved with some sane net neutrality rule in place:
1. A link has congestion
2. One customer pays more to reduce their congestion -- aka more capacity at the same common per-unit rate
3. The network provider expands the physical capacity, creating unused capacity available for sale.
4. The network provider offers some of this capacity to customer A for an incremental fee.
This behavior has no losers. But, the network provider wins a bit less because its costs have also increased along with its revenue. And the network asset wins. It has grown in capacity, with new equipment possibly replacing old, etc.
Which of the two approaches foster healthier results? It's a no-brainer, I think, if you set aside bias.
Why a net neutrality "rule"? Simple. Businesses need rules of the game just like people do. Every industry has its rules, this isn't anything new.
Could there be a bad net neutrality rule? Sure! But that is the next problem to solve *after* we conclude that tiered service on the net is not a healthy choice.
The primary reason there is usually only a very small number of ISP's that serve a particular area is simple, and it doesn't involve tin foil hats or conspiracy theories. It is that building broadband infrastructure is fucking expensive. Everything from the hardware, to the permits, but especially the construction.
The problem with that theory is that I was actually alive and paying attention when the local monopolies were created...and your argument is EXACTLY the argument made by the various cable companies to get the government to GRANT them a monopoly in the various local areas. What nobody in government thought about (and if you tried to say it, you were called a crackpot) was, if cable was a natural monopoly, why did they need the government to grant them a monopoly? Wouldn't the company that did the best just end up with a monopoly?
Except that isn't what happened. What happened was that local municipalities were allowed to grant local monopolies for cable service. Then once every area where it was profitable to offer cable service had cable service, the big players began buying up everyone else. It didn't matter that they had lousy service, they had a monopoly, and the local municipalities discovered that they no longer had any leverage because they could no longer take the franchise for the local area back and give it to someone else because there was no one else.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Back when you primarily got internet access via the phone lines, say, in the late 90s to early 2000s, how was the market for internet service? Maybe this is just me, but I remember a ton of different providers, all trying to offer better service/better prices/etc. Why was that? Well, by that point, phone service was mandated to be unbundled by the FCC, meaning that you could get phone service from anyone, and in turn, could use that to get internet service from a large number of people.
Now, what was the regulatory regime that was under? I think it was called... Title II?
Why the hell do we have an "article" that just quotes an anonymous coward who is unclear on every concept related to the internet?
What the hell is wrong with Slashdot and Dice?
That would be a good example, except for the fact that Ole Ma Bell had a monopoly because the Federal government decided back in the day that it was easier to regulate one large company than many small ones. So, yes, Internet service is following the model laid down by phone service. First, the Federal government encourages a monopoly to come into existence (Ole Ma Bell, back in the day, the big ISPs today). Then it uses that monopoly to justify regulations over that service. Several decades down the road, the monopoly starts to obstruct advances which everyone wants, so the government breaks up the monopoly (only to allow it to reconstruct itself in another form). I will never see that happen to the ISPs.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The incremental cost to include my side of of the neighborhood would have been small at the time as all the needed crew, equipment and supplies were in the neighborhood. But the "other city" utilities board [1] caved to the original cable company's demand to not let the new company in - not even the quarter square mile section of my neighborhood that is in the "other city".
So they kept from granting a franchise to a company that had no other plan than cherry-picking your neighborhood. You wanted them to cherry-pick you, but I can bet that the rest of the people in that city did not care. You weren't "a few dozen vs. a large corporation", you were a few dozen vs. everyone else in the city. Why should they be happy about it? If they want another company to come in and this franchise was granted, then there would already be two companies serving the same area and a third would have even less economic justification for trying to get a franchise.
The existing company has a contractual agreement to provide service to the entire city. Since most cable franchise ordinances were based on models from other places, it is unquestionably the case that your city was prohibited from granting a franchise to another company unless the terms were essentially the same as any existing franchise. The new company had no reason to agree to serve an already served area, did they? Why would they agree to serve an entire city and face legal consequences from not doing that in exchange for a few dozen more subs?
Well, yes. And no.
If you wish to use the field of Medicine as your metaphor, then let's continue in that vein (ha!). Medicine treats chronic disease all the time. By definition a chronic disease is something that we don't understand, or we understand it but have no curative treatment for. Regardless, symptomatic treatment of chronic diseases is entirely respectable and not considered "masking" the symptoms. We treat conditions like high blood pressure all the time, but it's perpetual treatment. Would we like a cure? Hell ya, but in the absence of a cure you do the best you can.
What's the relevance to Title II and ISP's?
Many citizens like myself believe that prescriptions like "more competition" are either naive demands for that which cannot be delivered, or cynical stalling tactics. In an ideal world yes, more competition is the answer. However the carrier problem is that of giant companies comfortable with their ologopoly positions. They fight all efforts to introduce more competition.
"Deregulate!" the Competitionists often cry. That would not introduce much competition into the current marketplace. It would mainly unleash what little control we have over the ISP majors.
Another approach would be to force corporate breakups, much like what was done with AT&T/Bell years ago. Except look what happened there. The RBOC's have been steadily reassembling into a NewBell, through many rounds of M&A activity.
If you want better behaviour from internet providers, on any timescale less than decades, you are stuck with regulatory steps. Title II classification achieves something for consumers now.
Netflix was more than willing to provide all those ISPs with CDN hosting so that all the content could have been served from within the ISPs own datacenters.
And the ISPs were willing to lease real estate in their datacenters at a typical rate for colo real estate.
The fact is that Netflix goes with the cheapest ISP they can
Ah, so you're saying that the problem is market economics? Will market liberalism save us from market economics?
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
So their complaint is that Title II is being abused...... so fix Title II. Don't complain when the FCC includes a new form of communication (Yes, it takes 20 years for government to comprehend most things) in a law intended to govern communications systems. I hate government regulation more than the average person but there are definitely areas where it is needed. A lack of regulation in the electronic communications field would be a nightmare, telephone poles filled with cables (or conversely a lack of choice) and useless airwaves due to interference. ISP's should do no more than move bits of data from the internet backbone to their customers, its obvious that they can't do this with super-cookies, spiking webpages with advertisements and extorting money out of content providers for "fast" lanes being just a few of their recent transgressions.
You're either democrat or repubican, which makes you a huge niggertarian
There are plenty of billionaires who will pay to distribute Reason's pseudo-intellectual bullshit to the masses.
I and not American but I like the Jeffersonian ideals that are part of the underpinning of the US Constitution/ DoI, even if Americans themselves seem to have forgotten all about those. It seems to me though that "Libertarian" in the US has come to mean "against control getting in the way of making more money" ie it's been appropriated by economic Conservatism? Just like New Labor became code for Old Conservative in the UK, and in most aspects, a Democrat-led administration in the US is indiscernible from a Republican-led administration. We're being had with these brands folks.
That isn't libertarianism, and anyway there's a lot of different flavors of Libertarian; that fact never seems to get acknowledged in these discussions. I'm not sure if I'm a left-leaning Libertarian or a libertarian-leaning Socialist (the former I think), but this particular article from Reason seems like bollocks. Not all of their articles are this bad, however. They spoke out in criticism of child abuse hysteria iirc.
"an anonymous reader writes", it's Bennett Haselton isn't it?
... I always look for the implied values.
Well here it did not take long: Under reason.com it reads 'Free minds, free MARKETS'. So in our case it is not an abstract objective reason, but a reason used as a tool to serve the free market value/ideology.
I think that's the first time a tl;dr was longer than the original.
Also, calling a self-proclaimed caliphate "anarchic" is rather disingenuous.
Small firms can still get around big firms through paid promotion. Example: give website visitors a reason to visit your website, like a coupon to your store or discounts for regular online visitors or shoppers. What they cannot do under net neutrality is pay off the ISP to slow down or even block visitors to competing websites. Big firms would be the ones paying off ISPs anyway because they have so much more money to spend than smaller firms do.
Think about how promotions worked before the Internet. No big company in the old days, say Sears, could legally pay off the post office to delay or even block catalogs mailed by small mom and pop stores which directly competed against Sears. Net neutrality just brings the same guarantees of fairness to ISPs which the postal service already had long before the Internet was born.
Slashdot: BS articles like this one should not appear here. It is one thing to have a difference in opinion; it is quite another thing to flat out lie.
I'm all for it. As a matter of fact, it makes my decision easy. I won't even have to read the proposed rules.
i think this is the first time I've ever seen payola cited as totally the way something should work.
Creating an ISP is a huge investment. You need to physically lay out wire to each subscriber's house which in the beginning might mean laying a lot of wire just to reach one or two houses in scattered areas. If you wanted to compete with Google, you would just need to write a better search engine and then get people to use it. Tricky, perhaps, but doable. You wouldn't need to "wire" each person to your new search engine. Competing with the big ISPs, however, would mean outlaying a huge investment. Then, you'd get into situations where the companies either didn't give you access to their poles (like AT&T did to Google Fiber in Austin) or can tie you up in litigation until you are bankrupt. (They can afford to sue a small ISP for a few years. Let's see a small ISP survive while battling Comcast in court, though.)
ISPs should be treated like natural monopolies. If you can have competition, great. However, the companies need to be closely watched for signs that they are abusing their monopoly power.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Sadly, since they control the ISP space, they are also realizing that they can protect themselves against Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc by instituting bandwidth caps. If you have a 250GB cap, you can only watch so much Internet video before you need to pay overage fees. Then you can either keep paying the overage fees (giving money to the ISP) or switch to traditional TV (likely giving money to the TV service that the ISP owns). Win-win for them. Lose-lose for consumers.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.