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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.
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.
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.
The observable behavior of the anti-net neutrality companies speaks very clearly for the reason to have net neutrality rules.
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.
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?
#3 is what mystifies me about the libertarian mindset. They believe that everything the government does will fail in one way or another (in spite of evidence that it doesn't always screw up and sometimes produces positive net outcomes) yet they think that private industry is universally benevolent and will always do what the consumer wants in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
I just don't get the disconnect from reality there.
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.
So, you know that's not how it worked, right? Comcast told Netflix: "We want you to give us money." Netflix said: "That's what your customers are for, and they're paying you." Comcast said: "Fine, then we'll SLOW YOU DOWN." - they then proceeded to actually throttle (decrease) Netflix' bandwidth. Customers through Comcast said: "Netflix, why you suck so bad? Your service sucks!" and started to go to Amazon Prime instead. Netflix went: "Well, that's lame. Comcast, can't you restore us to normal?" Comcast said "Haha, that's funny, no." Netflix finally went: "Fine, we'll give you an absurd amount of money, so we don't lose more customers." Comcast said "Okay" and RESTORED THE ORIGINAL CONNECTIONS. You can see this on visual network speed graphs.
Their philosophy, like so many others, completely dismisses human greed from the equation and as such, fail to work in the real world. Human greed killed Communism (why should I work hard if I never see the benefit?). Human greed killed unregulated capitalism (why shouldn't I monopolize the market at the expense of everyone else?).
Very few people are really entirely altruistic. I know I'm not one of them. Not by a long shot. And that's why, even if it's flawed sometimes, we really do need government regulation.
"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?
Clearly, the authors of the paper feel that payola, corruption, and a lack of competition are good things.
Which is kind of the problem with articles from reason.com, which is so droolingly and un-flinchingly geared to a particular kind of fantasy economics as to make it something bordering on religious dogma.
Those who believe it are 100% convinced that it is perfect, complete, and any disagreement with it is heresy.
In fact, as someone who got over the flavor of the Ayn Rand koolaid and saw it for what it was, that's pretty much how it works. It's irrational, it defies both logic and evidence, totally ignores human nature ... but somehow it's holy fucking writ.
But you just keep acting like the other guy is beneath contempt and loudly saying things like "ah, but you would say that because you're a leftist who hasn't yet realized governments are tyranny, and our fictonal free market will solve all problems."
There is really nothing more irrational than someone defending this kind of crap.
This is the base of Rand Paul, which means they've drank so damned much of the koolaid there simply is no alternative, and they'll just go apoplectic trying to use their circular logic to defend it.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Personally, I'd really rather have a competitive marketplace, where I could take it into my own hands and say, "If you won't provide me what I need, I will go to your competitors." In the current environment, they will just say, "What competitors?"
Since we don't have a competitive marketplace, we get regulation instead. This upsets some people. I am not one of them.
www.wavefront-av.com
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.
Removing regulations would do nothing to remove the immense cost to compete with the regional monopolies. In fact, in a completely unregulated economy that was unconcerned with anti-trust and monopolizing markets, I'm pretty sure that more of these mega ISPs would merge with one another. So instead of having four or five big ISPs nation wide, you'd have one or two.
The same convergence already happened in the phone industry, before they broke up Bell. Then Bell started to reassemble itself. In this particular space, the free market has been proven to move towards consolidation, for the benefit of big corporations and the detriment of their customers. Creating new competition seems to require government intervention.
So I guess you're pointing out that libertarians *think* they have a solution, but ignoring the fact that their solution has zero chance of working in the real world.
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.