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Bloomberg Op-Ed: The Internet 'Already Lost Its Neutrality' (japantimes.co.jp)
An anonymous reader quotes a new Bloomberg opinion piece on net neutrality:
The internet will be filled today with denunciations of this move, threats of a dark future in which our access to content will be controlled by a few powerful companies. And sure, that may happen. But in fact, it may already have happened, led not by ISPs, but by the very companies that were fighting so hard for net neutrality... Our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear and read.
In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day... The fact that these firms were able to cement their power at the moment when regulators were most focused on keeping the internet open tells you just how difficult it is to get that sort of regulation right; while you are looking hard at one danger, an equally large one may be creeping up just outside the range of your peripheral vision.
In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day... The fact that these firms were able to cement their power at the moment when regulators were most focused on keeping the internet open tells you just how difficult it is to get that sort of regulation right; while you are looking hard at one danger, an equally large one may be creeping up just outside the range of your peripheral vision.
Love,
Rich Assholes with Business Interests
Only retarded idiots ever thought the Internet was neutral in terms of opinion. The fight over Net Neutrality is something completely different.
Thank you for posting the Bloomberg piece. There are those of us who have been arguing that this is not some high-brow good v. evil debate, but a genuine disagreement on account of economics.
Tons of people here are rightly skeptical of Google, Facebook, at al, but saw nothing suspicious about those companies being the LEADING proponents of net neutrality. Why would these companies, so often duplicitous and manipulative, be coming on so strong for net neutrality? Not out of the goodness of their hearts.
Yeah, Big Telecom is not your friend, but neither is Big Tech. The question is, what is more conducive to freedom? Is it allowing free competition, or is it in allowing politically-connected firms to set the agenda? I choose to side with the former, and that is why I favor repealing net neutrality. Much more needs to be done, like abolishing all these public utility laws so that smaller startups can challenge Big Telecom, but this is a step in the right direction.
Companies like Google and Facebook have Loony-tunes power: everyone uses them because everyone uses them. If tomorrow everyone starts using Bing (hey, it could happen...), Google vanishes in a puff of indifference. (kind of like the coyote who doesn't fall until he looks down).
Verizon has power because they own the poles, and the lines, and the trenches. If tomorrow everyone decides to use a different ISP...uhhh...no. You got nowhere to go. And if Verizon starts adding tracking headers to your HTTP requests, and null-routing domains that they don't like, and null-routing domains who haven't paid them enough, and forging RST packets to kill your torrents, and injecting ads into your web pages, and, and, and....you still got nowhere to go. That's backhoe power. That's why we need net neutrality.
Relating the evils of Google and Facebook with ISPs is a deliberate attempt to mislead. It's not remotely an equal comparison, at most it's a different problem, and all I hear is "hey, look over there!" The debate about what these companies should be allowed to do is important, but irrelevant to this discussion.
Net Neutrality was compromised significantly in its brief existence, that is a fact, but the response should have been extreme and powerful, from the legal to the not-yet-legal. The first attempt to get around net neutrality should have seen every single anti-competitive law in the united states eliminated: any company or municipality that wishes to build out broadband cannot be opposed. If they persist, then tax money should be used to build competing services. Finally, if they do not cease and desist, their board and senior executives should be arrested and the company assets seized. That is the level of hostility that we should be insisting upon for these (and any other) monopoly. Either play nice and make some money, or go to jail.
Instead they have bought the government and its regulation body. I look forward to people showing up to their buildings with torches and pitchforks (or the modern day equivalents) to express their "empathy".
I don't know why people keep trying to mix things up, but that's not the point of fighting for net neutrality. It's not about making Internet services more "neutral" or anything like that.
It's not about keeping the situation great (which it already isn't), it's about not making it worse.
And let's be honest here. One thing is people choosing to use Google instead of Bing, DuckDuckGo, *gasp* Yahoo and a few others that are out there (I personally use DuckDuckGo as default). One thing is people using Facebook instead of several social networks that showed up over the years or you know, none. One thing is people choosing Gmail instead of ProtonMail, a local webserver, among others. One thing is people using Facebook Messenger for convenience instead of some different service like Viber, Signal and others. There's choice. If people don't take them, that's their problem. We don't really need to discuss here on Slashdot how using these services can be bad, I think most people here knows about this. But it's still people's choice to use them, be it for convenience, familiarity, ease of use, or just because everyone around them are using it.
Yes, Google and Facebook have an effective hold in several areas that makes them close to monopolies, but there's still choice and competition. People can't deny that. For the vast majority of americans, there is NO option to one or two ISPs where they live. None. Ziltch. Nada. Nothing. The alternative is not using the Internet, and this is all Net Neutrality is about. Access to it has become a basic need, which is why there needs to be some regulation to it.
When you as a costumer don't have any choice, that's a true monopoly. And since there is no option, without any sort of regulation of course given time they will only get worse in nick and dime schemes, in tiered plans, in forcing their own brands and services to costumers while making it hard for anyone else to compete and whatnot.
Because that's exactly what they do. That's why they have been lobbying for such a long time to kill Net Neutrality once and for all.
It also doesn't mean that they didn't do this in the past, ISPs always finds a way to profit more over their clients. It just means that now they have no regulation to prevent them from doing anything, and that it'll become even easier for abusive practices to pass.
This is like arguing Amazon is non-neutral. Sure it is. It's slowly killing all alternatives. People are flocking to shop there for all sorts of reasons, and they are effectively closing down smaller competing stores and services. But it's something people are choosing for themselves. Amazon doesn't hire goons to beat you up if you go to the local market, they aren't making you sign a contract that you'll only shop there for a year if you buy one product, they aren't saying you can only use their mass storage servers in order to make an account there. There are limits as to what they can do, and this is what Net Neutrality is about. Having at least some limits on what ISPs can do. The more you give in, the worse it'll become.
Funny. Lots of families have lots of weirdos. But seriously, e-mail still works. You can always throw in a hyperlink to your non-mainstream-hosted blog or if you aren't the type to formulate long thoughts, microblog (pump.io?)
I've witnessed both the downfall of Google being a great search engine for my tastes, and duckduckgo rising to the challenge. DDG wasn't a sufficient replacement in the early days, but lately it seems quite fine to me. I only use Google on the rare occasions when I want to track down a torrent for a tv show that weather interfered with my OTA DTV linux general computer based DVR recording correctly. Just to make a political point.
Google's and Facebook's collection of eyeballs comprise an entirely different issue than ISPs being able to relegate the non-wealthy to low-bandwidth (or no-bandwidth) corners of the web.
Right now, you can choose to be Facebook and/or Google eyeballs, but there are other options of various and sundry nature out there that offer interesting content. Facebook and Google are impotent to stop that; all you have to do is find a link, and there the site will be. That link could be anywhere — while you may indeed find it on Google or Facebook, you can also find it other places.
Allowing bandwidth to be prioritized (or outright taken over) by wealthy interests can silence the other sources of information. That's a new problem, and it's not the same as, or even a version of, the old problem.
Bloomberg is being disingenuous here. Or stupid. You choose.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
While cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear and read.
That is neither here nor there. This has absolutely nothing to do with how many users a Web site has. Neither Google nor Facebook has a single iota of the kind of power wielded by the corrupt (*)oply ISP's; not even a whisper of a fragment.
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* equals Mono, Duo, Olig; as appropriate.
Beware of gaslighting with this op-ed. The article reads to me as if to say, you haven't had net neutrality for a while now so don't complain when it officially goes away and you can't miss what you've lived without. So please quit pressuring Congress to intervene; you'll never notice a change when net neutrality disappears.
As others have pointed out, the article isn't really about something net neutrality will address. The problems with Facebook, Google, spying, and computer control via proprietary software are real problems that need to be dealt with. But net neutrality is about a different issue. Net neutrality is a necessary but insufficient (in itself) quality of network service. I don't want an ISP discriminating for me what other computers my computers are allowed to trade packets with, nor will the absence of net neutrality be fixed by charging me more for an Internet connection. I understand that ISPs in their power and rent-seeking will see this situation differently, but it's critical not to give businesses primacy. People need power to speak freely and be heard, not routed into yet another class system.
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