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'Netflix and Alphabet Will Need To Become ISPs, Fast' (techcrunch.com)
Following the recent official repeal of net neutrality and approval of AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner, an anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via TechCrunch, written by Danny Crichton. Crichton discusses the options Alphabet, Netflix and other video streaming services have on how to respond: For Alphabet, that will likely mean a redoubling of its commitment to Google Fiber. That service has been trumpeted since its debut, but has faced cutbacks in recent years in order to scale back its original ambitions. That has meant that cities like Atlanta, which have held out for the promise of cheap and reliable gigabit bandwidth, have been left in something of a lurch. Ultimately, Alphabet's strategic advantage against Comcast, AT&T and other massive ISPs is going to rest on a sort of mutually assured destruction. If Comcast throttles YouTube, then Alphabet can propose launching in a critical (read: lucrative) Comcast market. Further investment in Fiber, Project Fi or perhaps a 5G-centered wireless strategy will be required to give it to the leverage to bring those negotiations to a better outcome.
For Netflix, it is going to have to get into the connectivity game one way or the other. Contracts with carriers like Comcast and AT&T are going to be more challenging to negotiate in light of today's ruling and the additional power they have over throttling. Netflix does have some must-see shows, which gives it a bit of leverage, but so do the ISPs. They are going to have to do an end-run around the distributors to give them similar leverage to what Alphabet has up its sleeve. One interesting dynamic I could see forthcoming would be Alphabet creating strategic partnerships with companies like Netflix, Twitch and others to negotiate as a collective against ISPs. While all these services are at some level competitors, they also face an existential threat from these new, vertically merged ISPs. That might be the best of all worlds given the shit sandwich we have all been handed this week.
For Netflix, it is going to have to get into the connectivity game one way or the other. Contracts with carriers like Comcast and AT&T are going to be more challenging to negotiate in light of today's ruling and the additional power they have over throttling. Netflix does have some must-see shows, which gives it a bit of leverage, but so do the ISPs. They are going to have to do an end-run around the distributors to give them similar leverage to what Alphabet has up its sleeve. One interesting dynamic I could see forthcoming would be Alphabet creating strategic partnerships with companies like Netflix, Twitch and others to negotiate as a collective against ISPs. While all these services are at some level competitors, they also face an existential threat from these new, vertically merged ISPs. That might be the best of all worlds given the shit sandwich we have all been handed this week.
They were fine before the FCC neutrality regs a few years ago, and they will continue to be fine now under FTC control
[Cue the Jurassic Park Music]
Greed will find a way.
Despite almost every person in the world now having a common benefit for accessing a world-wide open information network - greed always find a way to add in barrier and costs wherever it can.
Greed finds a way to play groups against groups - so that large numbers in effect demand that everything become more expensive for little real benefit, other than some easily disprove set of things their leaders are saying unbacked by any science or reasoning.
Greed finds a way to find joy in cruelty a stronger motivator than any actual reason-based motivation - so that open trolling takes the place of any debate across most open forums.
Because greed fed by fear is self-reinforcing in a way that reason and actual self-interest aren't anymore.
Ryan Fenton
Haven't they learned the lesson of Modern American Capitalism(TM) yet? Crikey, for a tenth of the money they'd spend to start an ISP, they could just buy a few carefully chosen politicians and - voila!
Net Neutrality isn't dead, its just not being reinforced by the FCC, the FTC now owns it.
FTC will have to handle bad throttling practices by mega corps of Comcast and ATT.
Comcast offers unlimited for 50 extra a month, so they can cover that loss in the NFL/ESPN sports ball licenses...
Binge netflix all you want. I'm too busy watching twitch.
Because not every company that will get shafted by greedy ISPs will be able to just roll out their own nation-wide fiber network. Christ, spend 3 seconds thinking before you type.
Netflix and Alphabet will need to get involved with political campaigns fast!
Seriously, it's not a complex equation: promote the people that benefit you and bad mouth the ones that don't. While it may benefit me in this particular case, corporate involvement in politics still something that needs to be stopped.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Between Comcast and AT&T, they pretty much own the entirety of the Last Mile, and the only way anyone else gets to use those is if they lease them from them. Unless Google/Alphabet, Netflix, and whoever else wants to get into the infrastructure business, too, then they'll either be entirely denied by Comcast and AT&T, or they'll get price-gouged so much that there's no way they could be competitive. Then there's the problem of Comcast and AT&T having regulators and legislators more or less in their hip pockets; they'd use politics to prevent more infrastructure being built in the first place, and anything else they can get away with to stifle competition and ensure their monopolies. The problem is very far along and that asshole Pai has just made it that much worse starting now, it's a steep uphill battle from here-on out to reverse the damage and break the monopolies, if it's even possible to do. As I've said before, between this and so many other problems for the Internet in the world, we may be seeing the beginning of the end for the Internet so far as it being anything useful to anyone other than greedy corporations and nosy governments.
okay, say Alphabet does built out fiber. Now there's 3 big ISPs. What does Netflix do, if Alphabet doesn't partner with them? What does Hulu do? Crunchyroll? The next streaming startup, who didn't exist when Alphabet was signing up partners?
Oh, you sweet summer child. Bless your heart.
You are welcome on my lawn.
If Comcast throttles YouTube, then Alphabet can propose launching in a critical (read: lucrative) Comcast market.
You mean like Google did to Microsoft Office with Google Docs? Years later, that's still costing MS big-time.. way more than they'll ever make from Bing. Didn't cost Google much, but it sure put MS on notice.
There's lots more where that came from.
Slashdot is now apparently just siphoning off HN's front page, just about half a day late.
Might as well read HN (but never comment there, because their moderation system blows more goats than Reddit and Voat combined.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
People act like YouTube and Netflix don't already pay ludicrous amounts for their hosting. Any deals between them and an ISP is double dipping.
Seems to me that we, the consumer suckers, are the ones getting double-dipped. I was pretty clearly under the impression that I already pay for high-speed internet access, including YouTube, Netflix, ...
It is more likely you would get a situation like this;
Step 1
Alphabet threatens Comcast. Comcast board sees it's profits/share price going down which impacts their bonus. Board tells Alphabet to jump and charges them the maximum they can legally get away with then they take part of that money and hire lawyers(eg;community groups) to object to everything Alphabet does.
Step 2
After five or six more years (maybe ten) Alphabet looks like it is going to get somewhere so, before the profits go down, the old board members leave with their sterling reputations and fat pockets having raked it in from both sides for a decade.
Step 3
Alphabet is in the market! Yay! Unfortunately they have spend so much money that they need to keep their prices high to protect their investment.
Benefit to consumer....zero.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
Google Fiber is not coming to your neighborhood no matter how much you might wish it to be true, Danny Crichton.
#DeleteChrome
We know how AT&T handles this sort of thing with TV networks.
Next week, you'll go to Netflix.com and they'll start showing modal popups saying AT&T has decided to deny access to Netflix in a few weeks, and to call AT&T and let them know how you feel.
Three weeks later, you'll go to Netflix.com and get a certificate error: bad CNAME. Users who are idiots enough to click through the errors will see a marketing-crafted propaganda video about how Netflix has chosen not to share their content anymore with AT&T subscribers, and to call Netflix and let them know how you feel.
Invariably, this will occur right when some major season finale is supposed to air.
The Internet should be a utility. It should just be metered and paid for by the consumers, who should be able to freely change their caps. Who cares how they use the bandwidth they pay for?
The Netflix app is shipped on every new Comcast DVR. Seems like they have been negotiating fine.
Owning content might be a really bad business move for an ISP. It makes them competitors. Being an ISP with only customers/viewers is better. Everyone wants to be your buddy because you aren't a threat.
Have gnu, will travel.
How is ANY of that a shit sandwich for people that matter - we the consumers?
Alphabet buys Comcast and AT&T. Trump fires anyone who threatens to block the merger. Game fucking over.
Oh please. Any ISP that does not deliver Netflix well will continue to blame it on Netflix and comfortably expect 99% of their customers to believe it without so much as blinking an eye.
Net Neutrality could very well be the thing that ends America's tech dominance. Hosting Web hosting can now move off shore to locations where bandwidth is cheaper. It's going to look mighty tempting to host content in other countries.
Alphabet buys Comcast and AT&T. Trump fires anyone who threatens to block the merger. Game fucking over.
How is that game over?
It still would improve on the current situation, where both AT&T and Comcast suck horribly and are the only (single) options for most consumers across various markets. Or am I wrong to say that? How would an Alphabet takeover of either one not improve things for consumers immeasurably?
I mean, I was seriously considering moving to a Google Fiber (sorry, Alphabet Fiber) market. I can't tell you how delighted I would be to have Alphabet replace Comcast which is currently my ONLY real broadband choice.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everyone is worried that ISPs will start charging more money for faster content. So, Netflix should beat them to the punch. Netflix should create NIPP (Netflix ISP Partner Program), where partners pledge to not charge customers more money for decent bandwidth, and that they will not charge Netflix a premium transit fee to keep from slowing them down. ISPs that don't sign up for NIPP get videos to their IP space automatically downgraded to a lower quality. If it is impossible to get full resolution videos on Comcast, you can bet I'll be moving to AT&T Fiber, or Sonic, or somebody who is partnered with Netflix.
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
This merger is only the beginning of the end. Between this, Net Neutrality getting canned and the EU's broken mandates regarding the internet......
Yeah, it was fun while it lasted.
Now we'll have AT&T Net, Comcast Net, Verizon Net, and you can bet they absolutely do not want to talk to each other, or have their customers streaming content from their competitors.
Wish I could say I'm surprised, but I'm not, the ground work began for this with NN getting kicked to the curb. Now that the gloves are off, these big conglomerates can strangle the internet however they please.
The reason we need net neutrality to begin with is the telcos and cablecos leveraged government granted monopolies for their telephone/cable services and used them for their new internet service. They successfully prevented new ISPs from entering their markets by barring use of the infrastructure already in place and the new ISPs were barred from running their own by said government mandate. Had the government repealed the mandate to allow other entities to negotiate running their own cable perhaps your argument would be valid. But since the mandate is still in place and existing ISP companies are spending billions lobbying state governments to keep any competition out we end up here with content providers also being the gatekeepers to subscribers. We've already seen the result. Netflix offered to save AT&T millions of dollars by placing content delivery network (CDN) servers inside AT&T's network. This would have alleviated hundreds of terabytes of traffic through the backbone. AT&T refused for years and Netflix subscribers on AT&T (Verizon too) got buffering signals frequently. Then when enough AT&T customers complained about it AT&T told Netflix they could alleviate the buffering by paying AT&T a toll! Why? Because AT&T has their own PPV content they want to sell and Netflix is a competitor to that service. The Time Warner acquisition will only increase the animosity to third party content providers. AT&T's only real competition to their ISP is Comcast or Charter (Spectrum) depending on what market it is. Alphabet and any other company looking to become an ISP still has an uphill battle in the majority of US states with local municipalities going to war against state government to get permission to let them in.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Yes AC with the lifting of federal NN rules a lot more innovative network products and services can now be used.
No more having to stay on federal NN paper insulated wireline networks.
Communities all over the USA can now build their own networks. No more having to stay on a monopoly telco network due to NN federal rules.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
comcast can pull an ATT and block steaming on some plans just like how ATT blocked facetime on some data plans.
What Netflix DOES, my dear child, is play the three off against each other since it has the most desirable online resource in America, and any ISP that does not deliver it well is open to customers being poached by other ISP's (or even wireless carriers if they can deliver a decent base video quality).
Netflix might have the power to do this... smaller companies do NOT.
It's also a pretty big assumption that Alphabet/Google would compete with Comcast or Verizon everywhere. More likely they'll start gradually adding a market here and a market there like they were before. There will likely still be a large portion of Americans with only one "choice" of realistic ISP for a long time to come.
And if it weren't for regulatory capture at the local level eliminating competition that wouldn't even be an issue.
dateline 2019 Winter is coming but not for Comcast subs. Game of thrones season 8 is starting but comcast subs are unable to watch on tv or on hbo now and on comcast network going HBO.com just get pushed to some ATT website. ATT says it's about playing fair and that Comcast has been offered a deal.
Comcast says ATT is wants to have other NBC owned stuff as part of the HBO deal and We just want the deal to be about HBO like how it's been since 1972
Move?
I typically refrain from using explicatives and ad hominems on Slashdot but how fucking stupid are you? Are you literally a Russian troll or just acting like one? If moving was an option for everyone, we wouldn't be in this shit sandwich because people would just congregate in areas with more than one ISP choice and ISPs would have recognized years ago monopolies don't work.
And yet, monopolies do work, you shmuck, and here we are.
No, moving is not an option. Most people don't want to pick up and move just because their ISP is being a shitstain. There are typically bigger priorities than that. No, we will not guaranteed get a third ISP. And even if we did, the effect is making the entry to market for websites that much higher. Startups now have to start or join an ISP? Are you fucking kidding me?
AT&T buying Time Warner is one of the biggest shit sandwiches in the history of the Internet, aside from losing the battle on Net Neutrality. We're going from 2 ISPs in some areas to 1. At best we'll go back to 2. At worst, everyone involved, actors good and bad, now recognizes the cost of business in the new age: buddy up with an ISP or don't fucking bother trying.
If the Department of Justice was in any sort of functional order right now, this deal would have been laughed at on day 1 or the two companies involved would never have tried.
No need to mod down. It was intended as a joke.
The most effective option giving the longest benefits would actually be eliminating regulatory capture at the state level.
One minor correct, AT&T is not buying Time Warner the cable company. That already got bought by Charter and combined to form Spectrum. AT&T is buying Time Warner the content company (CNN, HBO, Warner Bros, etc.)
Look, Net Neutrality is the Law of the Land in CA, OR, WA, and a few other states.
They can just walk away from the unprofitable other states and let you freeze in the net dark.
All the profit is in the West.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
TFS says:
--
If Comcast throttles YouTube, then Alphabet can propose launching in a critical.
--
Alternatively, YouTube could display that fact, honestly, with text such as:
--
Comcast is degrading the quality of this video.
To speak to Comcast about that, call them at Call (866) 828-4407
For full quality YouTube videos, you can switch to LocalISP.net
--
Most of Comcast's customers use YouTube, so they'd get calls from a million customers within hours.
Because less incentive for net neutrality is bad. How you hope companies respond to less incentive is irrelevant to the point that regulation removes the requirement for hope. Net nuetrality good. Laws increasing good things good.
Couldn't Netflix create a VPN endpoint service for the streaming devices to connect to, and then access the Netflix content near the VPN? Comcast/AT&T won't know what is in the traffic to throttle it. Does Comcast/AT&T then begin to throttle or block endpoint IPs?
However some people might prefer cheaper but more restricted pipes, like the "social media package + wikipedia" for $20/mo instead of $60 for totally unrestricted internet.
Have you ever tried to use social media without being able to follow off-site links? Nobody wants this except the social media sites.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Fine. Let small companies either pay for their bandwidth or stop using so much. Let their investors raise more money or go out of business. If I as a consumer wish to have their content, I can choose to pay for it. What I DO NOT want is a socialist system which FORCES ME to pay for their business model.
That which is free is wasted. Should be taught in 3rd grade or at least econ 101.
Socialism is not forcing competition or having reasonable rules such as getting what you pay for.
I live in a country with net neutrality, it means I pay for X amount of data, 250 GBs in my case. How I use that data is up to me. I can watch cat videos all day from joes_cat_video.com or Netflix. Either way costs the same for both me and my ISP.
Why does it cost Americans more to stream 720 Netflix then the 8k video from joes?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Because in many places there is ONLY 1 ISP and they can do whatever they want. They will now double the price and half the speed, and then ask you for even more to get back what you already had.
What about my right to fire my guns anywhere and anytime I want? You may not need to get out of the way, since you can wear body armour or a tank suit, but I shouldn't have to look before shooting. Or stop even if I see you.
That is freedom. Or did you mean freedoms for you and not for me?
Disney is the eventual Netflix competitor. They've already announced pulling their content deals from Netflix to go it on their own. Comcast has already tried to buy Disney, perhaps in anticipation of the end of net neutrality. Now would be a very good time to revive that discussion. They could go from positioning to be a strong Netflix competitor to a position of dominance overnight.
Except for the part where last-mile cabling is a natural monopoly. Fix that, and then I'd agree with you.
They do pay for their bandwidth, just like everyone else on the internet. Net neutrality, when done right, says they shouldn't have to pay twice for bandwidth just because the isp's CEO's daughter got a bad review for her restaurant. That sort of favoritism has no place in a capitalist, competitive society.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Because if the increase means another wire run to every house, it will mean expensive service.
I am (slightly) hopeful that 5g will offer a low overhead deployment option for at least dense areas.
There's a company doing line of sight wireless in my city, but I don't think they'll make it, I have two spots within range, but blocked by trees, I'm willing to bet they only cover around 50% of their "covered" area (I'm not is an area so full of trees or low laying ground).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Because in many places there is ONLY 1 ISP and they can do whatever they want. They will now double the price and half the speed, and then ask you for even more to get back what you already had.
Many areas? Probably. It's a big country. But here's the kicker: 4G Wireless is "good enough" in many cases for a good video/OTT phone internet experience (and, let's face it, video is what consumers want here...). The vast majority of America that's not completely rural has reasonable competition for internet service when you add in wireless providers and maybe a MiFi device.
Is it as good as the cable vs DSL competition at par we had in the dot-com era? No, it's not. Is it good enough? Pretty much.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
I swear 95% of the arguments and complaints and "let's mess with the business model!" movements are complaints from Comcast customers about Comcast.
As a former ISP employee who doesn't live in a Comcast area, complaints about how your ISP's service sucks is not a persuasive argument for how the rest of the industry has to function. I'm really sorry, but if you have a problem with your cable monopoly, take it up with your local representatives to find a solution. Or switch services to something else.
Plenty of the rest of us think this is a workable solution for dealing with the fact that Netflix and Youtube can something comprise almost half of all domestic internet data traffic during peak periods. Running any size ISP isn't cheap, and your ISP horror story doesn't mandate changes everywhere else.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
As another has state, the last mile is a natural monopoly. And that would require the cities to own it and lease it out for any real competition to exist. Which we refuse to do even if the taxpayers fund it.
Also, much of that regulatory capture happens at the state level which is why you see cities and counties banned from running their own internet when the ISP's refuse to do their jobs and the national level where you have people trying to repeal Net Neutrality and strip away consumer protections.
You have to actually have the cities own that last mile or you won't have any real competition and you have to remove the state and national capture before you ever hope to do anything else at the local level.
If it's a natural monopoly, how come I have four different hard-wired ISP options (Cable, two fiber offerings, one DSL) at my suburban house? Did someone forget to send them all the memo?
It's typically only a monopoly if at some point the government prevented any competition to allow their favored choice to have all the customers. Nothing "natural" about that.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I was working with a Tier-1 service provider who negotiated a deal with Netflix where the provider paid Netflix in order to host a CDN in order to reduce cross Atlantic traffic. It was an easy choice. NetFlix would get rack space for their servers with direct attachments at 250 POPs around the world so they would no longer have to stream over the cross-atlantic and cross-pacific fibers. And Netflix was paid for the privilege.
Youtube is Google. Google has deals with service providers around the world to scratch each others backs. If you have 10,000 customers or more, Google will place caching servers in your network to reduce your uplink costs if you provide the racks, power, etc... If you're smaller than 10,000 customers, closer to 5,000 or so, you could probably negotiate to pay Google to put a few servers there. I think there are probably also circumstances where if you Google services like DNS, they'll pay you for your customer data.
Akamai has had deals like this for decades as well.
YouTube and NetFlix actually don't pay nearly as much for bandwidth as you'd think. In addition, Google has their own fibers (even across the oceans) for running their networks and providing caching.
To respond in kind: if it's not a natural monopoly, how do you not have dozens of choices? I have a choice of something like 50 ISPs.
Perhaps calling it a "naturally monopolistic market", or a "natural oligopoly" would be more to your taste. The point is that there's a high barrier to entry due to the costs of physically sticking cables in the ground, and getting rid of anti-competition regulation doesn't make those costs go away.
So, in other words, NN is gone and none of the bad things people were predicting have come to pass yet.
Wake me up when this isn't all much ado about nothing.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
A monopoly literally means one single option, hence "mono" in the word.
Every business has barriers to entry. Typically, regulatory capture by industry incumbents (which is what happens when a regulator like the FCC micro-manages what's allowed) increases barriers to entry in that industry. Comcast or whatever can afford to comply with whatever paperwork/weird rules the FCC comes up with. A single-guy sharing bandwidth with his neighbors can't hope to.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Well the post I responded to said, "What I DO NOT want is a socialist system which FORCES ME to pay for their business model. " in reference to Netflix, which seems to be a common idea that they're subsidizing Netflix.
As for the future, favouritism is very likely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
It's a disaster for consumers. You want to watch Netflix... ok get your service from this provider. You want to watch TV... get an extra service from that other provider. If you love TV bundles and having to buy a bunch of extra crap to see what you want, you're going to love this.
Strange that you have no cpmpetition in the US and here I amn living in the communist country (accoding to stuped Mericans) of Europe and have the option of several companies with several offers at several speeds.
I have real unlimeted and pay 40 EUR or so for 100M down and 30M up. There are cheaper and faster ones, but they will not be as unlimited.
And I live in one of the more expensive ones with not that many competition as others.
Stuped communists who do things for the people by the people.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I WISH I had 4. I've got 2. ATT (6mb DSL) or Comcast (not much better and I have NEVER had good dealings with Comcast). Same thing in the place I am living now and the place I just left just 7 miles away. BOTH within city limits. I know other people that have only 1 choice, Comcast. This being the 3rd largest city in the state.
Because not every company that will get shafted by greedy ISPs will be able to just roll out their own nation-wide fiber network
That doesn't make sense to roll out nation-wide fiber when you're just going to throttle it back to T1 speeds...
We'll make great pets
The reason why Google Fiber rollout did not happen as expected, and Alphabet eventually got tired of the whole thing is exactly because of the corporations they are supposed to be fighting against. Redoubling efforts won't do much because ISPs already win this game. And they were forcing the end of net neutrality with this in mind.
Just search back and read Google's statements on why Fiber didn't go as planned. You'll see articles and comments about ISPs blocking and delaying as much as possible access to infrastructure to lay down cables and whatnot.
The game for Netflix and Google to play here, like it or not, is to wait for ISPs to get even more greedy, unpopular, start using net neutrality to their own benefit, burn the house down, and only then start offering alternatives at a bigger cost which will enable using some different tech like 5G or something else.
Here is the problem. _I_ pay for bandwidth and I have every right to expect and demand that all of the traffic I request be delivered to me with the same priority. If my ISP is making it difficult to access any site because they are slowing down traffic from it's servers or speeding up traffic from someone else. I as a customer can should and will complain. Further, if I don't have a choice about ISP's it is time to make the ISP fight a million little anti-trust suits.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
You're replying to SuperKendall, a cursory glance at his posting history would have revealed that he has never, ever taken more than 2 second to think about anything.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Willfully obtuse.
Last Mile isn't a hard situation to understand. If Crapcast already has your area wired for cable, it means it has a huge edge over any would-be competitor as they can go on making money with their own wires while the competitor has to make a massive investment that wont pay off for years, at best. The other part your ignoring is the fact that market consolidation will naturally lead to buyouts and mergers, leaving you with less than a handfull of players in the end, anyway.
Three different types of wires, that's why.
You need to do more to defend this claim. You trot it out every time there's a story about network neutrality, but I haven't seen you make a thorough defense (maybe you have, and I've just missed it) and one is really called for here because this claim is not at all intuitive.
What you seem to be implying is that regulatory capture is the only barrier to competition, and that without this barrier a significant number of competitors will spring up out of nowhere with the hundreds of billions of dollars that it takes to create new last-mile networks. This, despite the fact that a third of Americans still have no broadband, thus no regulatory capture, and thus, according to you, no barrier to entry.
And that ignores the other problem that removing such regulation would create.
So... if you're going to just state this as though it were a given, I would like to see a little more backing it up.
Great, when do Americans get Net Neutrality?
I'm currently in the process of planning a move when my lease is up because I'm sick of the U-Verse monopoly. Maybe your view of the world is a bit dated.
Yes, and I'm sure your "communist" nation has vast regions of low population areas with competing local and national interests. Europeans are pretty clueless or myopic on this topic.
Well i think once you have one fiber ISP then everyone is forced to come up to speed. I believe i have 4 gigabit options (since I believe my zip has both comcast and centurylink fiber service) and I can get municipal fiber and also gigabit cable.
But if there's no real competition then the existing ISPs don't seem to care.
Netflix is entrenched and large enough that ISPs have to negotiate with them. If anything the loss of Net Neutrality will be a win for them as it'll create a further barrier for entry for new competitors in their space.
Losing NN will hurt the people that might try to unthrone netflix or google, it won't hurt netflix or google.
I'd love to see content monopolists like google
What content does Google have a monopoly on? Virtually everything they do is offered by one or more competitors in some form or another. In fact, the only thing I can think of is the Usenet archive they brought into Google Groups. Other than that... What?
It's a monopoly in my community: 1 choice for cable internet, 1 choice for DSL (which is about 40% of the speed of cable internet). Or, I suppose, you could go with a satellite. In short, it may not be a monopoly everywhere, but in many places, for all practical purposes, it is.
So, in other words, NN is gone and none of the bad things people were predicting have come to pass yet.
Wake me up when this isn't all much ado about nothing.
It's only been a few days. Give them some time to figure out the best way to squeeze the most money out of their captives...er...customers.
How is two low latency broadband options a monopoly?
So how about electrical utilities and powerline? They all already go where the customers are. Most utilities already have fiber for their smart-grids. And none of that regulatory crap that holds back everyone else.
In many places, there is indeed "regulatory crap" the holds back electric utilities from providing Internet service.
Because not every company that will get shafted by greedy ISPs will be able to just roll out their own nation-wide fiber network
That doesn't make sense to roll out nation-wide fiber when you're just going to throttle it back to T1 speeds...
Tell that to Comcast...
I think it was Comcast not AT&T that did that to Netflix, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was both.
horror vacui
When you care enough about it to vote on it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
For me, there are about three cable channels we use in my house, and only one that personally tune to. If that channel were likely to disappear because the company I pay to get it is going to stop carrying it, that's relevant to me. I would want to know of I was losing the one channel I watch.
What I just said may not be clear. One time I saw an ad like that. It was referencing losing a different channel. If I'm watching the History Channel, I probably don't care about whether OWN is available or not. So don't tell me "you could lose the Oprah Winfrey Network" with an ad on History.
On the other hand, if I'm watching History, I probably do care whether History is available. I do want to know in that case.
No, moving is not an option. Most people don't want to pick up and move just because their ISP is being a shitstain.
You Americans seem to confuse "ISP" with "last-mile provider".
The FCC should not have wasted their time with Net Neutrality (IMHO, it is over-reach), instead they should have fixed the 'my last-mile-provider-must-be-my-ISP' issue.
In many other countries, last-mile providers with any sort of significant market share in a specific geographic are required by law to allow other ISPs to offer the same services on their network with competitive prices for their 'wholesale' offerings (IOW, similar to their retail business' input costs from the wholesale business).
I think we tried that, and our supreme overlords faked a DDoS attack and bots entered fake posts. Color me skeptical on a clean vote coming through.
I'd be delighted to have more ISPs. My question is about how small content providers who are not ISPs handle the situation.
Netflix does have a pretty decent bargaining position. You have not addressed the smaller scale players, however, and I brought them up specifically because Netflix does have the advantage of an existing large following. Hulu has an existing following as well, but not as large; Crunchyroll smaller yet, and the hypothetical upcoming startup has of course none.
Whoops. Parent is me.
Wtf. This entire comment block is full of condescending assholes.
It’s down to local terminology. The US doesn’t have “local loop unbundling” like we had in the days of dial-up, where they shared infrastructure. Down to shit regulations and lobbying by the infrastructure companies. (Yes, I know, US lobbying is a crock of shit.) So the names got merged. The majority of our providers control the last mile and infrastructure thanks to shit regulations.
Wtf. This entire comment block is full of condescending assholes.
It’s down to local terminology. The US doesn’t have “local loop unbundling” like we had in the days of dial-up, where they shared infrastructure. Down to shit regulations and lobbying by the infrastructure companies. (Yes, I know, US lobbying is a crock of shit.) So the names got merged. The majority of our providers control the last mile and infrastructure thanks to shit regulations.
Our country doesn't have local-loop unbundling (I don't think it makes sense for us, it would just lead to cherry-picking of the most affluent areas leaving the incumbent as the only provider to many small towns resulting in their costs being higher etc.), but a layer-3 hand-over from the incumbent telco (for ADSL and FTTH/GPON) to ISPs. There are a number of independent FTTH providers, and most of them do layer-3 (e.g. VLANs for different providers), some layer-2 (L2TP-based) hand-over to ISPs. In fact, the retail arm of the incumbent telco offers ISP products on a number of these FTTH networks.
I am sure the FCC or FTC can require that there be competition in the ISP market (on any last-mile provider). I haven't seen anyone from the U.S. explain why this isn't technically feasible (it definitely is on ADSL/VDSL, GPON and ActiveEthernet, but maybe not on DOCSIS which I am not that familiar with). Addressing this would mean you could leave the market to resolve anything else that people wanted from Net Neutrality without artificial regulations that could hamper improvements.
It sounds like "natural oligopoly" would indeed be more to your taste then.
You're right that regulatory capture also tends to raise the barrier to entry, and that's obviously a problem, but let's not pretend that it's the only barrier to entry involved in doing last-mile telecommunications. You can fix the regulatory capture issue, but burying thousands of miles of fibre is still inherently going to be expensive -- that's the "natural" part (as opposed to the regulatory capture, which obviously isn't natural).
You do have it. I didn't explain it right. Local loop unbundling (LLU) is the idea that the company that controls the infrastructure cannot serve as a last-mile provider. One company lays down the fiber and leases it to someone else to run a service on.
It is perfectly technically feasible in the US. It's all just fucking politics because lobbying -- sorry, bribery -- is a huge thing (that, I assure you, most of the sane people utterly despise) that sways politicians because of fat fucking checks. (I shit you not, a large donor to the US Republican party literally said "pass this tax bill or we stop donating" during that tax bill fiasco that was in the US news late last year.) As I said, we had this concept back when the Internet was made up mostly of dial-up. Big phone companies here like AT&T and Verizon handled the phone systems and ISPs like America Online or Planet Pooch (a personal favorite) handled the "service" end of it.
This is the same country where, when Net Neutrality first popped up and LLU became a topic for a bit, some asshole companies said "that doesn't work for the US market". Of course it doesn't. You may lose some profit, you shitlord.
Two fuckups happened as the reign of dial-up ended. One, Internet over cable started to become a thing and the US law handling dial-up did not apply to cable. Fuck you, Bill Clinton, I believe. Two, companies lobbied -- bribed -- hard to keep it that way. Companies bought other companies. Basically colluded to stay out of each other's markets. (I ask you, how in all the fuck of the world does Comcast get to be San Francisco's only ISP and Verizon, basically, is New York City's only ISP? Both residential. I don't know if you've been to NYC but it's a big fucking market. Someone has to want a piece of that.)
The ISPs in the US fight hard to keep status quo, with:
* ISPs trying to shut down states' rights to create municipal providers (this is fucking outrageous in some cases)
* Fucking with laws to prevent pole access in areas where wires are still on top of poles
* Suing for some inane reason just to make it difficult to move in.
The only point I will concede to these shitstains is that the US is a large country with a lot of dead space and serving people up in mountains, for example, is a technical and fiscal challenge. You won't get a lot of profit serving so many people under X square miles. Ok. Let the government help out. And they do take government money meant for this kind of thing -- and fucking pocket it. New York City, if I remember right, is still involved in a lawsuit with Verizon for fucking them. Verizon disagrees. Assholes.
Count the number of curses in this statement and you'll understand the ire I have for the political party in the US largely responsible for this mess. It comes down to the power companies have over the US government, a term you may or may not be familiar with: regulatory capture. (Democrats aren't innocent but less to blame.)
(I've left out specific law names and program names because I forget the exact naming but I assure you if you were to research this you'll find real world examples of everything, sometimes multiple instances. I'm pulling articles from memory in the last 5-10 years.)
I forgot to mention. The current FCC is run by a huge asshole, Ajit Pai, who is basically pro-business and anti-consumer.
We in Montreal are getting fibre to the pole near the house and copper from there (about 300 feet copper).
We have virtually unlimited (300g/mo) downloads and a comparitively slow upload speed, making uploads unlimited. Still downloads are around 1.5 megabyte per second. Can't complain for $120/Mo internet and cable (40 unique channels, sports, multiple languages, dramma, netflixs, etc...).
And still we complain that $120/mo almost unlimited cable and internet is a lot of money.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Unfortunately 4G is really limited to the big city's. I service a lot of rural areas and am lucky to get 3G which is great for a phone call but horrible for data. Many places you get no phone service at all. Get away from the major cities in Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Texas and you will see just what I mean. Cable TV companies came into a lot of these small towns because they could easily sell TV to everyone and make money. Now that they are the only game in town they provide Internet for $150, $200, and in one place $350 a month.
You keep using that word, socialism. It does not mean whatever it is you think it means.
When I say, "care enough to vote on it," I mean, will you vote against your senator if he opposes net neutrality? The reality is most people don't care, and of the ones who do care, a good chunk oppose net neutrality (because they oppose regulation of all types).
The FCC request for comments wasn't an election, obviously.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Google has a monopoly on search, and thus detailed profiles of their users. Via their free Gmail, they have unique insights into people that Facebook would like a larger slice of. YouTube provides more... their browser and OS give them even more details.
But Facebook has a monopoly in certain content... theoretically. Every user has to give Facebook consent to use, in perpetuity, anything they upload, in order to use their platform. G+ did not do that, IIRC.
Videos, pics, STORIES (fact or fiction), random literature, etc... anything Facebook thinks they can profit from, they will.
Just like Amazon and their popup stores inside Whole Foods featuring new Kindles and the Echo. Uggg, no thanks. I'm not a cantaloupe and I'll not be buying them from you anymore...lost my appetite.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
That would be nice. We used to have a situation like that when phone lines were the main medium for connecting to an ISP, because of the history that the phone company shouldn't/couldn't restrict who you called, but when we moved to the higher speed stuff using cable tv lines, the "we own the wire and we don't have to let anyone else use it to serve our customers" attitude cropped up, and then got copied when the phone companies started making non-telephony data services available.
My distinction wasn't that some (many?) areas have a single reasonable provider and hence a local monopoly, it was that Internet access isn't a "natural monopoly".
Typically, at some point the government gave someone an exclusive and set them up to not have to compete. That's changed somewhat since they forced many local communities to loosen the rules, but we're still seeing the results of that head start in many places.
Eventually, if someone doesn't get in the way, we'll see technological innovation over time overcome that previous initial advantage.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
None of those things you've listed are Google monopolies.
There are numerous other options for search, email, video hosting,