The voters elected a Republican government. That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine. Anybody who told you that lobbying the FCC was going to make a difference here was, whether they meant to or not, selling a bill of goods.
As someone who respects but mostly profoundly disagrees with principled Republican laissez-faire regulatory strategy (at least, once we got past 1991 or so), it is more than a little aggravating to see us as a community winding ourselves in knots over market-based regulation of telecom at the same time as the (largely unprincipled) Republican congress is putting the finishing strokes --- literally in ball-point pen --- on a catastrophically stupid tax bill that threatens universal access to health insurance, not just for those dependent on Medicare but on startup founders as well.
If you care deeply about this issue, stop pretending like filling out forms and putting banners ads is going to persuade Republican regulators to act like Democrats. "Net Neutrality" isn't my personal issue --- I worked at ISPs, have backbone engineer friends, and candidly: I think this issue is silly. But if it's yours... sigh... fine.
But do it right: get out there, to your nearest seriously threatened D districts or to the nearest plausibly flippable R district (the suburbs are great for this), open up your damn wallets, and donate.
The FCC may very well be right that it's not their job to impose our dream portfolio of rules on Verizon (certainly, a lot of the rules people are claiming NN provided were fanciful). It doesn't matter how dreamlike the rules are: Congress can almost certainly enact a law, which the FCC can't revoke.
But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back.
"That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine."
That is not why this is shocking. This proceeding is shocking because the legal basis for this change is dependent on a false statements about the technology involved. It goes beyond just, "Republicans prefer deregulation," or, "Republicans favor market-based approaches." There is plenty of room and a general need for debates about what policy approaches are best, but there is no room for debate about the answer to technical questions.
Engineers and researchers submitted hundreds of comments to the FCC trying to correct the falsehoods presented in the NPRM. The FCC did not simply ignore those comments. The draft rules specifically cite those comments and totally dismiss them as "not persuasive." Only commentary from ISPs was "persuasive" in this proceeding, and the ISPs omitted facts that were inconvenient for them (the point of public commentary is in part to fill in the omissions that lobbyists would obviously make).
Sorry, but I do not buy the "what do you expect from Republicans" argument. I expect Republicans to be pro-markets, even pro-big-business; I expect Republicans to favor deregulation. It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation. It is one thing to interpret facts -- for example, the draft rules interpret the fact that edge services can be accessed via ISP networks as ISPs providing a capability to their customers, which is bizarre but within the bounds as far as policy debates go. To simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.
Yes, I expect the party of deregulation to base its policy goals on facts, as interpreted through the lens of a pro-business/pro-markets approach, and not some convenient fantasy.
>It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation
Your entire premise can be rebutted with the policies around climate change. If something as catastrophic and irreversible as climate change can be subject to partisan nonsense, twisting of facts and delegitimization of experts; what makes anyone think that Net Neutrality would be looked upon with logic, facts, and reason.
I personally lean towards preserving NN.
I hope at some point we can return to some semblance of governance based on facts, logic, and pragmatism rather than ideology.
> I expect Republicans to be pro-markets, even pro-big-business; I expect Republicans to favor deregulation. It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation. It is one thing to interpret facts... to simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.
From where I sit, the particular observation you're making about how policy has been treated when it comes to Net Neutrality issues looks exactly like how the Republican party behaves generally. Whether it's about net neutrality, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, climate change, stimulative effects of tax policy, health care -- it sure looks like many Republican positions are primarily arrived at and founded in the profit and power aspirations of a narrow constituency rather than observation and study, and that "deregulation" and "market-based" approaches are primarily invoked as tools or even just fig leaves where they appear useful.
Net Neutrality just happens to be one example where the audience here is predominately familiar enough with the relevant practical issues that it's easy to see.
>That is not why this is shocking. This proceeding is shocking because the legal basis for this change is dependent on a false statements about the technology involved. It goes beyond just, "Republicans prefer deregulation," or, "Republicans favor market-based approaches." There is plenty of room and a general need for debates about what policy approaches are best, but there is no room for debate about the answer to technical questions.
Haha. Try working in education or, gasp, environmental science, if you think that the contestability of simple facts is shocking.
What I expect from republicans is the opposite of evidence based policy making. None of their policies are supported or motivated by evidence. Pick one from taxes to gun control to sex education.
The party of deregulation cannot base its policy goals on facts, by definition. Because the idea that regulations and government intervention are universally bad and all sectors should be deregulated is a dogma that has been disproven by facts many times. So any party with that ideology goes against facts.
For example, in healthcare, it's more than proven by countless studies that countries that provide universal healthcare not only provide better healthcare by almost any metric, but also spend much less in it than e.g. the US. So anyone that defends the broad idea that government intervention is bad goes against facts, period (as does someone that defends the idea that it's always good, of course - the only position compatible with facts is that some sectors may need more regulation and some may need less, on a case-by-case basis, with some individual cases arguable).
So what you are saying is that the republican party in its current form is unvotable. I agree. Even people holding dear republican aligned beliefs should take note and realize that the party is not able to act aligned with their own interest.
I guess partisanship might simply be a huge problem because democrats can‘t recognize republicans as republicans any more - still because there are only 2 relevant parties - republicans don‘t see an alternative to the GOP and still go for the „in theory better aligned“ party. That should give any American pause to think and highlight the importance of choice when it comes to politics. Why not create a new republican party?
> To simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.
That makes it sound like you can sue the FCC for not meeting their legal obligations here. Is that viable?
That's a silly expectation for a party that denies science whenever it's inconvenient. Climate change, the war on drugs, abortion, and more are all examples of this. This is the party of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, yet somehow you expect them to treat the Internet differently?
Whether there are mistakes in the official documents doesn't change anything about the policy. They weren't persuaded because they didn't receive a persuasive argument about why net neutrality is supposed to help. That doesn't mean they weren't persuaded that some of the "facts" were wrong, it means that they weren't persuaded in terms of opinions. The arguments of the ISP are obviously biased and that should surprise nobody. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the same thing about tech companies. Is e.g. Netflix unbiased when the net neutrality question pretty much came up in regards to Netflix? You would have to be insane to claim that Netflix (or Google, or Facebook, or Reddit) aren't supporting this (at least to some extent) for the sake of increasing their own profit margins.
The Right is arguing for a free market economy and decreased regulation not because they are "going against the facts." There is no fact stating that "net neutrality is necessary for the world to function" or "internet is a human right" or whatever. All of these things are opinions. You have the opinion that net neutrality is needed, but there is no fact backing that statement.
> It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions
Here's what you're missing: they don't oppose net neutrality because of what the ISPs said about it. They oppose it because it is a regulation that limits the free market. There is no fact or fiction to this opinion, it's like saying "because there's facts to show that speech can hurt people, free speech should be restricted." I agree that speech can hurt someone, but I disagree that it should be restricted. Does that mean I'm fighting the facts here?
1. voters did not elect a Republican government. Gerrymandering has given Republicans wins in many places where Democrats would have won in any other universe. Likely rigged electronic voting machines that have no audit trail have given Republicans votes they would not have had. *Targeted voter suppression campaigns have prevented people from voting who would have tipped the scales in favor of Democrats.
2. Republicans (and many Democrats) do not "under-regulate". They regulate in favor of paying corporations. Those regulations are not all typical visible regulations; many are special provisions or loopholes. That is not laissez-faire.
3. Since you re-iterate, I re-iterate. Republicans are not a party of deregulation. They are a party that supports monopolistic, bully-capitalist behaviors.
The only real solution for the US is that it suffer a slow decline in global and economic relevance until it becomes desperate for a change in behavior. Only then will the shit be flushed out of the government and campaign finance rules put in place to prevent another corrupt government that serves a very limited few people at the cost of 330million others.
> 1. voters did not elect a Republican government. Gerrymandering has given Republicans wins in many places where Democrats would have won in any other universe. Likely rigged electronic voting machines that have no audit trail have given Republicans votes they would not have had. *Targeted voter suppression campaigns have prevented people from voting who would have tipped the scales in favor of Democrats.
Regardless of the other points, _millions_ of voters selected Republican. Fixing gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter turn out, etc, doesn't change the fact that of those who did vote, picked republican. Fixing those issues may change the _result_ of the election but it won't change millions of people's individual minds.
Millions picked this government and I would guess the primary reason is abortion law as this party seems to like laws that favor corporations over people.
>Targeted voter suppression campaigns have prevented people from voting who would have tipped the scales in favor of Democrats.
And the Democrats have spun reasonable measures, such as requiring some sort of identification to vote, as "suppression", possibly so those who aren't citizens can vote. Who cheats more? Who knows.
The low-hanging fruit for the Democrats is, however:
1) Prioritize lower/middle class economic concerns over progressive identity politics
2) Push the DNC not to scuttle candidates, like Bernie, that people don't universally loathe
If those two things get done, the Democrats have a good chance going forward. Otherwise, who knows.
If you believe that gerrymandering renders the election of Congressional representatives moot, what on Earth could possibly be the point of lobbying the FCC? They're two steps removed from accountability in that analysis.
"The purest form of insanity is to leave everything the same and the same time hope that things will change." -Albert Einstein.
I mean, to be frank, I think that both major parties are playing a role in this illusion that you, the voter, have control over the government without grabbing pitchforks and heading to their office in your preferred form of communication. We live in a country where you can decide your own fate. You can work for what you want, no one will stop you. The government seems to have forgot what "govern" means. They get their hands into things they shouldn't be in, and then make the every-man look like a criminal. Why do we continue to rely on a capitalistic fascist society? One that pays us in non-backed currency as well. This is literally alchemy and everyone buys into their bullshit.
> But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back.
What I'm bitter about is that my vote, as a californian, is worth a tiny fraction of a vote in a swing state. Republican lawmakers have zero incentive to care about me, and red states are overrepresented in congress in relation to their small population.
The American people from a popular vote standpoint didn't want any of this, but they can be safety ignored by people who are abusing a flawed system. The voices of individual Californians count for very little unless they have money that they can spend on PACs and political campaigns. How is that democratic?
Republicans aren't pushing deregulation of the internet to make swing states happy. They are pushing for deregulation because that's what several billionaire campaign contributors want them to do.
That makes no sense. If california voters did anything other than voted for the candidate with the D next to their name, not everyone would assume their massive pile of votes will always go Democrat. California voters matter way more than any swing state, it's just so predictably one-sided that nobody bothers to waste time there.
The same thing would happen in a pure democracy. No candidates would spend time placating any large population centers that consistently vote one way. LA/SF/NYC issues would be irrelevant because everyone will just pick the D each time anyway so it will still come down to appealing to groups that might change their minds.
That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies
Holding it as "under regulating" seems like it's falling for the doublespeak. It is also Republican governments at every level that are almost universally responsible for the (over) regulations that led to the current monopolies of providers in most areas (often a single `choice'). If a city or region or even second party looks to install alternative feeds, overwhelmingly opposition comes from Republican governments, and there is already threats that this federal government will prevent States from passing their own rules on this (it would be too obvious if red states lived in a shitstorm while blue states lived in the modern world). It is profoundly corrupt.
I'm not trying to be partisan, but the Republican party in the US are the voice of a oligarchy. This FCC decision is the perfect example of it -- something they are profoundly incapable of building the slightest justification for, and that can only possibly benefit already overwhelming providers.
>I'm not trying to be partisan, but the Republican party in the US are the voice of a oligarchy. This FCC decision is the perfect example of it -- something they are profoundly incapable of building the slightest justification for, and that can only possibly benefit already overwhelming providers.
Net neutrality is 100%, unequivocally favorable for every tech company (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Microsoft, etc.). Are you sure the Democratic party is not the "voice of the oligarchy" here? You say that Republicans are incapable of building justification for this decision, but it fits exactly to the pillars of the Republican party -- deregulation, a free market economy, and a small government. Their argument is that NN is unnecessary regulation that limits the free market and oversteps the boundaries of a reasonable government. You may disagree with this, but that argument is a subjective one and not an objective one. It may benefit the providers but it also hurts the tech monopolies (which is why they oppose it so adamantly... unless you really think that Alphabet, inc. is on the side that opposes big businesses).
This is hilariously naive. You're essentially pointing fingers and laughing at people who you esteem to be less intelligent than yourself while making pretty absurd statements that have little to no basis in actual fact
For instance the original, and probably fatal, blow to net neutrality was the 1996 Telecommunications act that was passed mainly to encourage "wire to wire competition", which has since become a total farce. In exchange for this absurd concept we not only gave the telecoms huge tax cuts (nominally so they could expand infrastructure) that they then directly plowed into dividends, share buybacks, and bonuses, we also allowed the sale of wireless spectrums (another public good). But most importantly we enshrined local monopolies into law. Almost every single fight we've had for net neutrality since then has stemmed from this legislation. Guess who signed it into law? Bill Clinton, a democrat. And while the Senate and House both had Republican majorities the bill was passed with largely bipartisan support (less than 20% of the Senate and less than 5% of the house voted against it) and heavy support from the Clinton administration.
But lets say you don't buy that, lets take a look at the current political climate. The largest recipients of telecom dollars in the Senate have been overwhelmingly Democrats (it's about 50/50 over the past 8 years in the House), the telecoms have extremely influential Democrats in their pocket like Nancy Pelosi (who laughably claimed that the ISPs would save us from the Republican bill to allow ISPs to sell your internet traffic history), and even ex-Obama administrators are largely applauding today's ruling. Don't for a second think you or anyone else is somehow above this just because you identify with a certain tribe.
Also it's pretty odd that you think name dropping engineering friends means you have an informed opinion on this extremely non-technical matter, as if an RF engineer would have an informed opinion on the intricacies of economic repercussions of spectrum auctions.
But you do have one very good point, elections have consequences. Vote out anyone who takes a dime from telecoms, ISPs, interconnect providers, or even tech companies. The issue here is not ideological, it is monetary. Corporate influence has completely taken over our political system and regardless of party we are helpless to stop it until we take a principled stand and refuse to vote for the representative who's trying to sell us to the highest bidder simply because they wear the same color shirt as the people we associate with.
Yes, people are quick to forget that Obama's FCC was not anxious to implement these rules and did not do so until the very end of Obama's term, presumably because they knew it wouldn't hold up very long and by getting it done in the administration's final gasp, they could keep it as a feather in their political cap and pass the burden of "net neutrality repeal" onto the next guy.
Interestingly, amidst the jokes about Tom Wheeler leaving babies to the dingos, I don't recall much of a lament over the "consequences" of electing Obama. It wasn't until after this point that Wheeler reversed course, likely after the party realized this issue had teeth with one of their important constituencies. This "you asked for it" anti-Republican line is pure opportunism.
Don’t relocate. Stay in your damn house. Go talk to the people who are actually running in those districts. If you can write them even the cost of a ps4, they want to hear from you.
In particular for Democrats running against entrenched Republicans, these people aren’t evil corporate fat cats. They own restaurants, teach high school, are small-town mayors, or nurses. They need help to compete. The DNC is not going to help candidates who don’t show viability on their own.
NOW is the time to get involved, before the primaries.
I like how you think donating to politicians is the answer. Money in politics is why we're in the situation we're in. Those with insufficient money to donate should be heard as well as those with money. The system needs a change. It can happen peacefully or not. Seems to be going in the not direction.
I personally find the whole donating money to politicians thing in the US mind bending. I’m from a country where no ordinary people donate to politicians and everyone is doing just fine (we don’t have the party that we’d like, but throwing money at them won’t fix that).
Yes, I think the biggest take away of this is to push the fact that republican legislators did not listen to their constituents. At all. They did not put their constituents first. At all. The chairman actually talked about consumers working with the FCC to enforce regulations as a bad thing.
I do not agree. I believe Republican voters do not in fact want the government extensively regulating the Internet. It is very difficult to argue in 2017 that the Republican party is the party of a pragmatic, consumer-protected regulatory state. The Republicans believe that the market will take better care of Internet users than any regulatory agency. On this one issue, it's possible they're even right.
Actually the voters elected a Democrat. The electoral college elected the Republican.
Not your issue? I've followed your account for years. This is exactly your issue, and everyone in this community's issue.
Without the Internet you have no chance of fighting against things like the new tax bill. It takes away your voice. It takes away all of our voices.
This might not be 'your' issue, but make no mistake, it is more important than all of the issues you mention, in that without a free and open Internet, your free speech is essentially gone, and that severely handicaps any efforts to organize and protest against the other issues you talk about.
How ever did society function without the Internet? Were all leaders just dictators leading up to the 90s? It's hyperbolic crap like claiming this is the very foundation of free speech that leads people with opposing views to disengage, leave you to your echo chamber, and then surprise you when they pass regulation that represents their views.
FALSE. The voters were sidelined by both old (electoral college) and new (mechanically-assisted gerrymandering) methods. Just look at Texas:
"The redistricting had a revolutionary effect. Today, the Texas delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives includes twenty-five Republicans and eleven Democrats—a far more conservative profile than the political demography of the state. The Austin metropolitan area, the heart of the Texas left, was divvied up into six congressional districts, with city residents a minority in each. All but one of these districts are now held by Republicans. I’m currently represented by Roger Williams, a conservative automobile dealer from Weatherford, two hundred miles north of Austin."
Republicans have used these tools to cook up an unprecedented constitutional challenge to our republic. MULTIPLE suits are presently being heard by the Supreme Court regarding their shenanigans.
> FALSE. The voters were sidelined by both old (electoral college) and new (mechanically-assisted gerrymandering) methods.
More of them voted, for the House of Representatives, for Republicans than for any other party.
It's true that the actual representation of Republicans is outsized for that vote, and gerrymandering played a role, but they also got more votes. (And an outright majority voted for anti-NN parties.)
Good point on the Presidency, though (but even there, it's a hairs breadth either way on whether pro- or anti-NN candidates got a majority of votes.)
I agree with your points in broad strokes, so please don't think I'm being argumentative when I point out one quibble I have with your post:
The lack of Net Neutrality is not an example of "market-based regulation."
Although government regulation can, for better or worse, hamper the operation of a free market, that isn't the case here. The point of Net Neutrality is to keep Internet infrastructure free from being feudalized. A feudal government where massive policy changes impacting people's everyday lives are decided by power players and their arcane web of alliances is still a government, and it is definitely not one conducive to a free market.
Anyone who favors free markets cannot oppose Net Neutrality. It would be like opposing antitrust laws and claiming to be free market.
Voters != Electoral College. It's an important distinction because this particular issue is very clearly a national issue (and even a global one). And yet at a national level the one person one vote principle does not apply to U.S. presidential elections. Some people's vote counts more than others in this system even though it should not count more on this issue.
Unquestionably elections have consequences, but do not say we (voters/citizens/individuals) voted for this person or party or policy outcome. The Electoral College that did that. This president didn't get a majority of the votes, and much more relevant is he didn't even get a plurality of the votes.
This was an unpopular administration from day one by definition. It could have tried to grow its base. It hasn't. There's no national mandate for this policy change. Could the administration have supported stronger competition law while also deregulating net neutrality? Sure. But it didn't try to make this case at all.
> The FCC may very well be right that it's not their job to impose our dream portfolio of rules on Verizon (certainly, a lot of the rules people are claiming NN provided were fanciful)
That^ Too many people are trying to shove things that are covered by antitrust into net neutrality. This makes it a much harder sell.
I'm convinced many Republicans could be convinced to support net neutrality if it didn't have that extra baggage attached.
Keep it to:
1. No blocking of legal content,
2. No throttling of legal content,
3. Must deliver the speed and bandwidth that the customer pays for.
Many Republicans do support those principles, today. They simply believe that the FCC doesn't need to impose Title II regulations on ISPs to accomplish it. For instance: the Republican component of the FCC strongly believes it's already unlawful to block legal content to consolidate and exploit ISP market positions, and that the FTC already has the power to enforce that regulation.
For those in California, Josh Butner (D) is trying to flip Duncan Hunter (R)'s seat. This is the same Duncan Hunter Jr who basically rolled into the seat when his dad, Duncan Hunter, Sr, rolled out. Voters never even noticed. This is the same Duncan Hunter who vaped in Congress and spent something like $1300 of his campaign funds on Steam games.
Josh is a retired Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander. Spent 23 years in the Navy including combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, raised his family in Jamul, and continues to serve on the local school board.
Go help Josh. https://joshbutnerforcongress.com/
Not the majority though, as far as I understand, they won even though they don't have a majority of the voters, just a majority of the districts. Or something along those lines which simply confuses (and amazes) us non-US residents.
I'm also a bit impressed / curious about how much power the President has; he appoints FCC the chairman, and that chairman ends up taking these sort of decisions? Sounds a lot like something that the legislative branch should pick up, not [transitively] the executive one.
Not precisely. The proportion of people who voted in a gerrymandered electoral system with potentially widespread voter suppression produced a preponderance of Republican legislators and an outcome of the electoral college that produced a Republican president. I'm not sure that this qualifies as an "elected" government.
Those same gerrymandered districts and electoral college elected Democrat Congresses and a Democrat president for the last 8 years. To suggest that it's completely rigged when they lose the following election is absurd. This coming from someone who also hates the current outcome, but come on now. If the Democrats ran someone who most of the country didn't hate, they would have won easily. If they hadn't fought themselves in the primary and nominated a much better candidate, they would have won.
We've had this same electoral college in place for a long time, and everyone knew the rules ahead of time. It certainly has flaws, and you can argue a popular vote would be better, but it is the system we have and everyone knew it going into the election. It absolutely qualifies as an elected government.
I completely agree the tax bill is also terrible. but this conversation started around the FCC NN rules and due to _lack_ of competition anything we have is better than this form of deregulation. I'm happy to entertain a _separate_ conversation about the tax bill but I feel like you are saying because that is so much worse that NN does not matter... I believe that way of communicating is very dangerous because it can be applied to anything and everything. for example ISPs being able to store/mine and sell data on their users which was another law passed this year and caused me to donate to the eff.
my point is, I do not think you comment contributes to NN fairly by correlating the tax law as more important, I believe they are both very important.
> it is more than a little aggravating to see us as a community winding ourselves in knots over market-based regulation of telecom at the same time as the (largely unprincipled) Republican congress is putting the finishing strokes --- literally in ball-point pen --- on a catastrophically stupid tax bill that threatens universal access to health insurance, not just for those dependent on Medicare but on startup founders as well.
Yeah. It was nice to see people coming together to fight for net neutrality, but it would have been nicer to see some of that energy and excitement used to fight something that will actually kill people.
This is not republican vs democrates. It's simply corporate donor money at work. You might remember that FCC tried exact same thing during Obama administration as well and they had to turn back because of huge backlash. This time I think backlash wasn't super aggressive and Trump administration thinks they can get away with anything as long as they are tough on border and other party is weak on border.
> The voters elected a Republican government. That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine.
Even less surprising as the GOP has been opposing Title II all along, and a GOP FCC is how ISPs got moved to Title I in the first place.
True, but net neutrality is also broadly popular. Granted, they won't lose any votes but I know several staunch conservatives who are pissed about losing NN. I don't know if they are pissed enough to change their voting habits though and thats probably the real problem.
The Electors elected a Republican government. The voters elected a Democrat by 2,868,691 votes and there was Russian meddling on top of even that. Associating any popular mandate with that is shear nonsense.
I’ve seen no proof of Russian meddling that had any provable effect on the election. Only theoretical.
Second do you have ANY idea how many elections the US has “meddled” in? Let alone how many leaders we have literally overthrown?? Get some perspective. If you don’t like other nations pissing in our oatmeal I seriously suggest we stop pissing, shitting, and vomiting in theirs. Golden rule and all. Let the booing begin.
Republicans don't support deregulation per se. That's just the cover story. Republicans just support big business, that's it. If regulations make businesses better? Why the hell not?
If you're going to make blatant conspiratorial statements about the motivations of nearly half of the US population you are going to need to back that up with evidence.
That would be the biggest 'cover story' in the history of humanity
Obama was required to appoint a Republican to the commission per the rule whereby the agency's commissioner seats must be split between the parties, with the tie breaking seat going to the party in control of the presidency.
Following these rules, when a Republican seat opened on the commission, Obama asked Mitch McConnell for an recommendation, and he suggested Pai. When Trump took over, Obama's FCC chairman Wheeler left the position, and Trump put Pai in his place, and replaced his former seat with another Republican, Brendan Carr.
Your statement is factually right, however the only way someone can treat this statement is by assuming you are trying to refute the OPs republican claims. Since I can't downvote you, ill just include an explanation for others on why this comment holds no merit.
Ajit was appointed to the chair under Trump (Republican). Ajit was a recommendation from Republican minority lead (at the time) Mcconnell. Ajit has (to my knowledge) always been a republican member of US FCC.
This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies. If there was competition in this space, then there would be incentive to improve the infrastructure and Internet speeds. However, ISP's kill competition by making legal arrangements with local governments to only do business with them, and by cutting competitors' cables. Since we have no way to guarantee reasonable speeds to small time websites now, we should pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in this space. Comcast didn't realize it, but net neutrality was their own safety net.
I've been thinking this over for the past couple months, because I was pretty sure this would be the outcome - that we would lose our net neutrality protection.
So let's play out the worse case - Comcast, AT&T etc wait out the shitstorm and then start throttling traffic and packaging the internet, releasing cable-esque "plans."
Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs? I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this? Do I need to be incorporated to do it? What would it take to start a new ISP with the premise "unthrottled, unmonitored traffic, charged by the gigabyte - an internet utility service"?
As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to "plug into" it or whatever?
Hmm. I should see if there's some "How the Internet Works: for Dummies" book.
> As a private citizen, can I (snip) just lay a super long fiber cable straight to (the internet).
Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It's actually really easy to do :
1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.
2) Run fiber cable from there to your customers. (You can also use wireless gear instead for a WISP. I don't like this approach, it's very 1990s despite all the newer better gear, but it's much cheaper than fiber and if your careful it can work out OK)
3) Setup some light network management.
Some cities / municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service.
The land between you and your customers is owned. You'll need space in public property (or 'right of way') to connect to them. This also varies based on city/county/state/local laws, but in Michigan there are somewhat decent rules around this. (Set rates for underground conduit access or utility pole access, rules about what can/can't be blocked, etc).
The only real roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire. In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50/month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your very first customer is somewhere north of $50k/each, and prices don't become reasonable until your in the thousands.
In most areas, the only thing you really need to start an ISP is (1) Lots of money, and (2) perseverance. There's not really any rules that prevent it, and the regulations aren't unreasonable. But the upfront cost is so high, it rules out basically any honest person from having the chance to do it.
No, it isn't. I live in NYC. I have access to exactly one broadband provider. So, if Spectrum starts blocking Vonage because they want you to pay for their VoIP instead (ISPs in the US have done this in the past), I'll have to drop Vonage and use Spectrum's VoIP. Repeat for blocking P2P, Google Wallet, Facetime, Netflix, etc (all of which have previous incidents in the US).
> As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to "plug into" it or whatever?
You'll have to buy transit from someone, which will most likely be terminated at a neutral internet exchange / data center. You'll pay the transit provider (e.g. Hurricane Electric) for the bandwidth, and monthly fees to the data center for colocation and the cross-connect.
To get that transit back to a point of presence from where you'll branch out service to end users, you'll either have to bury your own fiber (very expensive - tens of thousands of $ per mile even in rural areas not to mention maintenance costs), lease fiber through someone else (e.g. Zayo) (also very expensive), or use wireless backhauls (cheaper but wireless comes with its own set of headaches).
Also you'll have to get a CCNA yourself or pay someone to manage your network since a carrier network is nothing like a home network.
Now by the time you get service back to your point of presence, you'll have to figure out how to get it to people. Burying fiber is extremely expensive, no way around it. Fixed wireless is a simpler option but getting a line of sight to the customer isn't always feasible, and you'll never have the bandwidth of fiber.
That's assuming people even want it. Out in a semi-rural area there may not be much competition, but the population density is so low putting up a tower or burying fiber may not be viable. In any city you're likely to have cable or DSL companies already there, with a price point that may be difficult to convince people to switch. Most people won't care about philosophical arguments about net neutrality, or be willing to pay a lot more for higher speeds.
In my opinion your best bet is to rally a coalition of people in your area to petition the municipality to bury the fiber and provide it as a utility. If you're uncomfortable with the gov't being an ISP, there is a very interesting model where the city provides an open access network which lets private ISPs plug in as virtual network layers, letting customers easily switch providers: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...
> As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it?
I'm sure you can, the issue is do you have a couple million $ in your bank account to do this?
This is essentially how cable worked in the beginning[0]. In lots of rural areas, it is still the case that communities band together into co-operatives to provide power, cable, and broadband[1].
> I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this?
Fwiw, a group called Toronto Meshnet [1] was investigating the opportunity for a community mesh project (which lacks incorporation and know-how of how to run an ISP) to partner with a non-profit ISP [2] (that lacks capacity, constantly gets shut out of the last-mile to new condo developments, but understands the ISP side) to have mesh accommodate the last-mile into homes.[3]
I think they're in a slow-down phase right now as they didn't get funding, but I imagine there's legs in this approach, and they'll ramp up again :)
In San Francisco there's local ISP called MonkeyBrains that uses microwave tech to create a wireless network in the city. They put a receiver on top of your apartment/building and then run cat5 or use existing cable. It's pretty awesome and fast. So it can be done. I'm hopeful that people will be inspired to create their own local ISP in light of the new rules.
Mostly what you need is a lot of money and a legal team. There are some government granted monopolies in certain municipalities, but by and large I understand it's just a money problem. The incumbents have tons of established infrastructure; you're starting from scratch.
Along the same lines, curious, what if it was a WiFi mesh network connected to a gateway node. You could bridge cities/regions by gateway. Inspiration stemming from Havana’s 50mi mesh intranet.
There are currently small operations that offer wireless broadband by putting the receiving equipment on your roof (sometimes they give you a discount if you serve as a repeater) and they purchase wireless data from larger companies' cell towers.
Building a mesh network* is a much cheaper, more realistic alternative.
Also, with regard to your point about "starting an ISP", I don't know the legalities and IANAL, but NYC Mesh goes out of their way to state that they _are not_ an ISP - there's probably a reason for that.
I sent a message to our mayor, to which he responded, regarding muni fiber... It seems the best way to approach it is via a public-private partnership - meaning, we (the residents of our 50,000+ city in SoCal) pay for the buildout, own the fiber infrastructure that should be good for at least 3-5 decades, while someone like Cox, GFiber or whomever provides billing/maintenance/operations.... that way it's a win win and the city doesn't have to get involved in becoming a full blown ISP.
In his response he said the topic's been brought up before. If I get his and the council's blessing, the next thing is to hit the ground and get probably 3000-5000 signatures and put this up on a ballot in 2018 November to see how the city feels. I'm optimistic however cause I've been hearing multiple complaints, on-goingly about bad service from ISPs (and we have Cox here, and I don't think they're that bad as opposed to Comcast) and probably a pet peeve is data caps... Sure, we've 1TB caps which is plenty, but w/advent of 4k TV and IPTV ... that may be very low.
Here's to hope that in a few years we all have FTTH where I live (crossing my fingers!)
> Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs?
It is, on the city level. Some created municipal broadband, and showed crooked monopolists and their paid shills to the door. To be clear - Comcast and their ilk fear municipal broadband way more than net neutrality rules. So expect fierce opposition, especially attempts to bribe local legislature to write laws forbidding or obstructing municipal networks.
> As a private citizen, can I ... just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it?
The other responses offer far more technical details than I can, and probably also a better long-term strategy, but here's a small thing you can do right now: knock on your neighbor's door, and offer a six-pack of good beer and half his internet bill in exchange for his WiFi password. If he says yes, cancel your service. Say you are moving to Bhutan and becoming a monk to make their "customer retention specialists" go away.
From my apartment in a fairly spread-out "city," I can see about ten wireless networks, half with a pretty good signal. I can only imagine what things are like in SF/NY, where techies are stacked on top of each other like dogs in a no-kill shelter.
It's quite expensive to start a fiber network. You might want to consider using wireless with a mesh network. In Detroit there's an organization that has become the leader:
In Detroit it's not real high speed because they're using foundation money to provide basic access, but there's no reason I know of that it couldn't be.
Here's more information on the mesh network in Detroit:
Back when the last mile was a real problem, people got pretty inventive with using directional antennas to establish links over vast distances using unlicensed spectrum, which as far as I know is totally legal still.
Depends on where you live. Every city has different laws about how to run cable underneath the ground. The first cost you pay is figuring out where everyone's cables are. The second cost you pay is convincing the city to let you do it. The third cost you pay is doing the digging.
If you spin it off as a service to your block, then it might be possible...?
IMO the way to go if the ISP monopolies start getting unreasonable is to start single-issue voting for free municipal broadband. Possibly also run a campaign or grassroots organization for it as well. Comcast can't screw with you if nobody is using Comcast.
Besides the costs, getting all those easements takes a lot of time, and often legal work. This is why crowdsourcing fiber hasn't taken off, it's a nice idea but you'll go through a ton of money on permits and legal filings before you buy a single spool of cable.
The more likely next step is not cable-esque plans. It is ISPs shaking down Internet companies to try to get huge sums of money at the source.
As such, what you'll see as a consumer is just higher prices from _other_ companies, as they're forced to pay for access to bandwidth which you paid for.
This also means that most people won't understand the problem, and won't get upset with the correct people.
This is a travesty, akin to if every appliance manufacturer had to pay a recurring tribute to the electric company.
But hey... at least the Libertarians are all quite excited.
The "last mile" is a utility, and by its very nature will always result in monopolistic control.
It is impractical and irrational to wire up a home to multiple ISPs with their own fiber channels. Each channel could cost tens of thousands to install.
Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels. The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it. The ISP is responsible for everything that happens from the exchange upon up (inc. pricing, support, peerage agreements, interconnects, etc).
This way you can still choose Comcast if you wish but may also have several local ISPs competing for your business. When you choose to change no engineer needs to come to your house, they just plug and unplug you at the exchange.
This is done quite successfully in other countries around the world, like New Zealand where we mainly have one infrastructure provider (selected and monitored by the Government), who must offer fair and standard pricing to any ISP who wants to add value to the network.
As a result, we have many ISP options throughout the country and competition between providers is high.
> The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it.
What incentive does a non-profit have to invest the billions of dollars required to do these things? If you use public dollars to do it: what do you think happens when investment into upgrading from GPON to NGPON2 is competing for taxpayer dollars with roads and schools? I can't imagine that anyone in say San Francisco would rather have SFMTA running their internet than Comcast.
That has been tried in a few places, and I'm not sure that it has succeeded anywhere. Municipal fiber was laid where I used to live in Provo, UT and it had huge funding problems. ISPs could compete, but all the value is in the last mile not in the gateway.
Eventually Google bought it out, but the city had to increase taxes to help pay for the current bond, and was looking at more bonds to pay for it before Google stepped in.
> The "last mile" is a utility, and by its very nature will always result in monopolistic control.
This is THE central point. Everyone saying that they would be OK with the latest FCC regs if there were only more competition need to consider this. In what bizarro world would anyone actually want ISPs competing for the last mile?
I think that would be a good value proposition for a city that does not already prefer one ISP over another. Interesting idea to spin something like this up.
> Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels.
That's an interesting idea, kinda like Interac for telecom. From what I hear, Interac has a bit of an issue with being fairly closed to new peering agreements, so I wonder how that could be solved for the telco space, maybe constitute the maintenance corporation to be open to bids from new ISPs.
Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels. The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it.
Yes, that's called "government".
We do that with roads and mail, we can do the same with communications.
Even if you avoid the last mile cluster F*, you still need to rent physical space to ISPs for setting up their network equipment. With multiple ISPs, its not clear who should "own" the space. I doubt individual homeowners want to deal with that headache.
cars cost "tens of thousands" yet personal automobile ownership has been feasible and has a huge positive impact on the economy. If that 10-90K ballpark cost estimate is accurate then accessing the information superhighway could be a similar situation.
I'm always surprised that folks on here don't think about the future of last mile connectivity being wireless, instead of wired. Next generation wireless networks (5G) are poised to have broadband like speeds, faster latency, and high bandwidth. Wireless operators have been pretty explicit in that their plan to get into the home broadband game. These networks are a few years away from a broad roll out, AT&T is starting next year. I predict there will soon be much more competition in the home broadband game and much of these net neutrality debates will seem pretty silly. Other cities like Boston already have a wireless broadband provider and are moving in this direction.
Wireless is inherent issues that fiber and copper does not.
1. Wireless is burst not pure data streams, latency issues.
2. High probability of interference.
3. High probability of collisions, wireless spectra bouncing off one another and objects, requiring multiple transmissions.
Big difference between Wireless and Wired / Fiber. Pokeman GO event in IL is a prime example of inherent issues.
So we shouldn't worry about the monopoly because it should "go away soon". How does that make any sense? You know, these same companies started out as multi-decade cable monopolies before they were providing monopolized internet service. You really think that will change? If it wasn't for the DoJ blocking mergers 90% of the country would already have a single internet provider.
Wireless internet for everyone will never be realistic. There's a theoretical limit to how much data you can send wirelessly, the "Shannon limit". On many bands we're already close to it, 90% of "5G" is just about using the rest of our bands more effectively. Once we're using all the frequency bands that penetrate far enough to be useful theres nothing you can do in increase wireless bandwidth. Theres more hope with satellites and narrow beams but these technologies are a decade away. 5G isn't going to do anything noticeable to ISP competition and I think you need to do more research on how 5G works if you think otherwise
As a Webpass customer in Boston, you really hit the nail on the head. More than twice the speeds of Comcast's best offering at less than half the price, better reliability and none of the bullshit - no outages, no slowdowns, no rate hikes, no forced modem upgrades, no shitty customer service, just 500Mbps up/down for $45 a month.
Why would wireless lead to more competition? Wireless spectrum is monopolized in much the same way that the right to lay fiber/wiring is. FCC auctions sell exclusive use of the spectrum to these companies for billions of dollars. The switch to wireless would be nothing more than a chance for these companies to save on the expense of physical infrastructure, not a way to increase competition. Unless you're suggesting that high speed internet could be delivered on unlicensed bands, we'd just be trading one monopoly/duopoly situation for another, and likely with the same obstinate companies that we currently lament having to depend on for internet service.
The best hope for competition in the home broadband market is municipal ownership of last-mile infrastructure. We need to lay last-mile fiber and it needs to be owned by the public, though network maintenance can be contracted out.
Because wireless spectrum is finite. Anyone who's been on LTE since it started rolling out can tell you how degraded the network has become since more people came on to it.
I agree, to some extent, but I'm not sure if wireless will ever be able to give me gigabit speed with sub 10ms latency. If that's possible, then I'm ready to sign up right now!
I totally agree. Who cares if the worst case scenario is tiered pricing, as long as their is REAL competition, a competitor can come along and say "we offer it all for one flat fee because our infrastructure is better." Boom, done. These municipal exclusion deals are the real problem.
I also think this is going to backfire and bite the telco's in the ass if they try to roll out tiers. The legislative outcry when joe schmo is affected could become so deafening that congress will be likely be forced to get up off their ass and intervene which is exactly what they don't want. If they were smart they would only go after the Netflix and Face-books of the world and leave the consumer out of it.
Can you imagine the 2020 campaign slogan of "Donald Trump ruined the internet." Ignoring this issue was stupid but I don't think they thought this through.
But going after Netflix, for instance, will result in a price increase for the consumer, no? When Netflix's costs for bandwidth go up, they are going to pass that cost on to you.
There's a microwave based ISP in SF called Monkeybrains. From their about us page:
"Monkeybrains is primarily a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider). What this means is Monkeybrains uses microwave technology to create a wireless network covering much of San Francisco. We deliver internet service to individual locations by placing an antenna on the roof. This antenna picks up an encrypted wireless signal from one of our network access points which can be found on over 1000 buildings city-wide.
From the roof, we run a Cat5 Ethernet wire either to the unit, telecom closet, or the property's Ethernet patch panel. We are happy to comply with any building wiring guidelines or work with the building's riser company if required."
Los Angeles is too big for that over the entire area but parts of LA like North Hollywood could become an opportunity to setup a microwave wireless ISP that covers an entire neighborhood in LA like North Hollywood or Santa Monica.
I live in SF and I used to use Monkeybrains, but I switched to Comcast about 12 months ago. It felt like using MB was taking the moral high road, but there are some things that a wired connection just does better. MB would have very spotty signal during rainy days. A few of us play competitive games (eg Overwatch) and MB had too many latency spikes.
> This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies.
It would still be a problem for startup companies. If TimeWarner gives exclusive preferential pricing to Vimeo and Verizon gives exclusive preference to YouTube, your video-streaming startup still has an extra uphill battle even if there is competition among the established players.
Hopefully when sanity takes office, we don't repeal the changes in net neutrality, but rather repeal the laws that created these insane corporate monopolies in the first place!
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are de facto monopolies and we don't do anything to improve competition in that space either. Ironically they were the leading advocates of net neutrality. We should also pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in their space as well. In the meantime, we are back to the status quo that was present in 2015.
This is incorrect on several points. Most importantly, the idea that this move returns to some "deregulated" 2015 is a myth and has been refuted so many times throughout the net neutrality discussion. The short version is that NN has always been roughly in place and has been enforced with legal action by regulators for many years prior to 2015.
ISPs, like power network companies, and road and rail network operators, are natural monopolies. There is no theoretical or practical reason to believe that free markets are the appropriate tool to organize them.
It would still be a problem. Maybe if one of those providers is benevolent enough to have a sanely priced "package" that promises to treat all data neutrally there'd be a shot, but I think greed would prevent that from lasting if things start moving away from neutrality.
When I emailed my Senator this was essentially his response. Whether genuine or not he said he wants to see a permanent solution that creates more competition. Who knows if he's being truthful but it is an argument I've seen for a long term solution.
If a Senator says he wants to see something as an alternative to a concrete option that exists (either as status quo policy under threat or a concrete proposal under debate) he's making excuses for not supporting the thing you care about.
If a Senator says he's actively working on something and points you to specific legislation he sponsors or supports, well, that might also be political theater, but it's at least possible that there is real substance behind it.
5G networks could very well change that. Right now people rely on LAN, however it's very possible that with the growth of 5G people will just use over the air internet rather than having their own setups everywhere they go.
Not being sarcastic, but is this honestly better? There are only a few major cell providers that can roll out 5G, so it seems to me that instead of Comcast-TW-Cox we would have ATT-Verizon-Tmo.
I guess it would be easier to set up municipal ISPs, since minimal wiring would be needed. But the lack of real competition in the cell market seems to indicate that the problems are pretty similar for small startups.
What's special about 5GHz? What about 700MHz-2100MHz?
Even with its high latency, packet loss, data caps, etc, LTE internet fits the need of a huge segment of casual internet users and has been doing so for some time now.
Comcast and TWC did that literally all the time.
I can't back this up with a specific website link, but I have anecdotal evidence. When they tried to merge a couple of years ago a Comcast exec said in one interview that the move wouldn't affect consumers and isn't something intended to incite "anticompetitive" behavior because TWC and Comcast already do not compete.
Ever noticed how a city is EITHER a Comcast or TWC city, and not both?
This. I wish something was done about the regulations that are de-facto monopolizing franchise agreements and such at a city level for telecom services. Not much better in Canada either.
If Comcast re-enable Sandvine and start tinkering with P2P and VPN traffic, will that be enough to start the conversations around anti-trust? Or is there already a precedent?
Local governments have been legally prohibited from making exclusive ISP franchise agreements for quite a while now. IMHO the only thing really preventing local competition is the economic aspects of laying multiple physical wires to residences giving the setup strong natural monopoly conditions.
Source? Every single city I've lived in has such an agreement. One cable provider, one phone(DSL) provider. There might be smaller, internet only companies.
For power users on websites like HN and reddit, this might seem true. But if you take a step back and realize that the large majority of Americans don't use the internet like you do, and maybe never will use the internet like you do, I think this argument holds far less water.
Consider that it's estimated that 13% of Americans don't use the internet-- at all, for anything, ever.[1] Think about how many people probably exclusively use their $60/mo cable internet to use Facebook, read news websites, and send emails. They don't use Netflix, they don't watch YouTube, they only do what they know and they're happy with it. Is it accurate to say that someone with these needs has no choice in their ISP?
Where I am right now, in the middle of central Wisconsin surrounded by acres of farm fields in every direction, I have fiber all the way to my house. In addition, there is reliable LTE coverage on multiple carriers. There's also satellite internet. For the average internet user as of 2017, I really think it's inaccurate to imply that consumers lack choice.
What you're really saying is that there's no competition in the very high end segment of consumer ISPs. And I'd agree with that, there is little choice when it comes to a provider that is willing to offer you a highspeed DOCSIS plan without a data cap, or fiber internet, etc. Most homes probably only have one provider that meets the needs of power users.
And to that I say, "tough shit!" If you're an outlier as a consumer, you're going to pay through the nose for it and you're not going to have a ton of choice. It's not some giant conspiracy to milk consumers dry, it's a matter of business. ISPs don't want to invest billions into infrastructure that some trivial portion of their consumer market really would utilize. It would be fiscally irresponsible to spend all that money for such little return. If posing it that way doesn't appeal you, let me put it another way: it would be bad for the long term growth of the internet to spend all that money to appease a small portion of internet users. That money is better saved and spent later.
You might say, "Consumers will certainly desire faster internet as years pass, so it's an investment they'll have to make eventually, and the taxpayer has subsidized this expansion, so they should be doing it now, anyway."
I believe you'd be wrong to say that. ISPs shouldn't be obligated to be spending money now if they're meeting the majority of needs of their customers. I know online it maybe doesn't seem that way with all the "Comcast-are-Nazis memes", but it's just a matter of overlap between poweruser segment with high bandwidth requirements also being active on the social media you frequent. Elsewhere on the internet, there's a majority of casual internet users who are not coming close to being meaningfully impacted by technical limitations of their connection.
If you're interested in stable growth of the internet as time goes on, you should root for them to save their money now so they can spend it later when demand from the average consumer catches up. Doing anything else would mean spending a lot of money on infrastructure that sits unused, that is antiquated by the time people want it. Think of China and their crumbling empty cities, let's not make the same sort of mistake with internet infrastructure.
These are just the top links in the search results, not cherry picked at all. You seem to be extrapolating from your experience with ISP choice. I've lived in supposedly very high-tech American cities with only one choice of ISP over 2Mbps. Compare US prices and service to places like Scandanavia. What's the difference? Over here ISPs can extract a much larger fraction of value while providing smaller total value (worse service). This is a natural result of lightly-regulated monopolies and oligopolies. It doesn't mean that their choices not to invest are somehow best for the long-term growth of the internet, in any way shape or form. Their monetary incentives are not aligned with long-term growth of the Internet.
The reason ISPs are monopolies is because if they were unregulated, you'd have a thousand phone lines outside of everyone's house, from every single private phone network provider. You'd have a bunch of phones in everyone's houses, one for each network.
An unregulated ISP market is a safety hazard and ugly. Because of these issues, government eventually decided that only one phone company can serve each house, forcing a monopoly situation because of that. But that monopoly has to allow every other network access to that line so that callers can call anywhere. This is the origin of net neutrality.
You're never going to go back to the situation where you have a thousand different lines to everyone's houses, so you're better off regulating them properly with net neutrality.
Unpopular opinion: Title II is not a great solution to Net Neutrality. The only thing I disklike is there isn't a better option already in place.
I would rather see the FTC address EULAs. If a company says, "we may from time-to-time limit your bandwidth" I think they should be on the hook to produce a report every month when and why they limited you. This is not much different than the report you get from your investments, or your cell phone carrier report when you place a call or send a text message.
Limiting bandwidth is one thing. My local Cable company is proish-NN (they have publicly stated that they have no plans to implement prioritization even if the FCC passed this vote), they still impose data caps and network management practices on consumer plans. While I hate these practices (hence paying extra for a business connection), that's not what the NN issue is about.
Comcast refused to upgrade their peering connections to the networks used by Netflix (Level3 I believe was one of them?) to extort money from them. Netflix doesn't get service from Comcast, yet Comcast decided it could charge them to get access to their customers.
The internet is built upon no-fee exchanges between Tier 1 providers, but since Comcast (and some others like CenturyLink, Verizon, AT&T) is both a consumer ISP AND a major transit provider they try to make arguments like "you're sending us more traffic than we send you, this isn't fair" even though their customers are the ones requesting the data. It's total bullshit, and they will milk this for everything it's worth.
Comcast isn't a Tier 1 provider. Cogent, the netflix ISP at issue, claims to be, but that is very debatable. The internet isn't built on two T2 or T3 providers doing no-fee exchanges.
As with any other system where a product is delivered over someone else's product, a negotiation will take place, money will change hands, and business will resume. That's normal.
Google and Netflix wanted to implement rules prohibiting a perfectly normal transaction in business because it would cost them money, and framed it as the public good. I'm entirely okay with the two giants having to pay more, it provides Google and Netflix's competitors additional room to breathe and innovate.
> Title II is not a great solution to Net Neutrality. The only thing I disklike is there isn't a better option already in place.
Sure. But it was an attainable solution, which is much better than no solution at all. It's not like Pai is going to find some other way to protect NN.
I think Title II is a fine solution (why shouldn't internet be a utility?). There are a ridiculous amount of people in these comments that are trying to thread the needle between "I support NN," but saying "it is fine that they reversed Title-II classification" (which I guess is their cool contrarian point of view, but functionally tripe)
You'll get the "vote with your wallet" speech. Which for most people, and like myself, your only other option in order to do just that is to buy an LTE wifi or get satellite internet.
There was a discussion about all this during NPR's Morning Edition.
The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration. And this should be a model for regulation of the ISPs going forward.
Except that the world was quite different in 1996. You actually had a lot of competition with ISPs, because most people were doing dialup. If I didn't like AOL, I could just switch to Prodigy (yes, I know), or one of the local ISPs. That was easy.
People like me can and did switch ISPs on a regular basis. In my case, looking for a reliable Net News feed.
Compared to today, where there is only one (or if you are lucky) two ISPs for the area. You don't have a choice, so these ISPs are defacto monopolies.
The reasons given for repeal are just wrong, and this is a transparent attempt by the big ISPs to make more money, without benefit to the average citizen or even the other Internet companies which made the Internet awesome to begin with.
It does remind me a bit of the trickle down economics. They are making it sound like that the only thing holding them back from massive innovation is profits lost to regulations and as soon as we get rid of those the floodgates will open - but they never do. The ISPs are going to use that money to consolidate their power, buy more companies that depend on their infrastructure and shovel money back to their shareholders and drive their stock price up. This is exactly what is going to happen with the tax bill (and is already happening due to the expectation of a tax bill), we're being sold that companies have been right on the cusp of increasing wages and hiring if it weren't for those pesky taxes they had to pay. When the jobs and wages don't come, they'll blame something else and down the road they'll take away another important thing, like labor protections or something. And we'll fall for it (collectively), its like a mystery box or something, we can't resist the idea of the free market as this chained beast that just has to be released and it will solve everything with no oversight or maintenance.
This is exactly what is going to happen with the tax bill (and is already happening due to the expectation of a tax bill), we're being sold that companies have been right on the cusp of increasing wages and hiring if it weren't for those pesky taxes they had to pay.
Exactly.
I know business. Extra profits are extra profits. Wages won't rise unless there is a labor supply shortage.
> The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration
Of course, the web was a few years old and the internet was just becoming used by the general public. Pointing to the state of broadband regulation in 1996 is kind of like pointing to the state of automobile safety regulation in 1912.
Verizon fought against those loose regulations and won. IIRC, a judge on that case said (I'm paraphrasing) that the Obama-era FTC couldn't use legally achieve what it was attempting to under those rules, but might (wink and a nudge) under Title-II.
Slowly but surely, our open internet will get choked. This is just one step in horrible path that will lead to our largest corporations controlling almost everything in our lives with very little competition.
I am blaming the tech giants for this ruling. They are the only ones with enough power to challenge this horrible ruling and they sat idle and watched it happen.
They may have given lip service to net neutrality, but their lack of enthusiasm and almost zero effort speaks volumes on their true opinions.
Microsoft crossed over to the dark side a long time ago.
Now, Google, Apple, Facebook join them in completely abandoning the ethos upon which the companies were founded.
I have been skeptical of their true intentions for years, and facebook has probably been corrupt since day one, but I thought if they were able to keep net neutrality, then I would think there was a chance for them.
No longer. They are gone. Truly sad day for the world.
Seriously, silicon valley playing the role of "poor ole me" content provider that's "with the people" trying to defeat the big bad telecoms was completely absurd. I mean good lord, I am supposed to believe GOOG and APPL and FB and AMZN couldn't match lobbying efforts? Please.
The other absurd thing is people worried about Netflix, which as far back as I could remember is a big reason why this whole debate started in the first place. How about, if you want to watch TV, get TV. Leave the internet to information that doesn't have an alternative.
They were fine with Uber operating in an unregulated manner while dominating highly regulated competition. Soon I wont be able to hail a cab in Manhattan and we will all be crying about muh monopolies again.
All you needed to know about GOOG was the fact that it ever crossed their minds to make their motto "Don't be evil."
Hopefully there is opportunity to return to decentralization with the blockchain and projects like Substratum.
> Seriously, silicon valley playing the role of "poor ole me" content provider that's "with the people" trying to defeat the big bad telecoms was completely absurd. I mean good lord, I am supposed to believe GOOG and APPL and FB and AMZN couldn't match lobbying efforts? Please.
What's not clear is how much money Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix put into firing up the keep net neutrality campaign, but I'd assume there was quite a significant war chest available, judging by the size of the outcry. There were "viral" vids showing up on Reddit for example where the channel looked a lot like it was run by a think tank or similar.
"By a 3-2 vote, the FCC concluded that Comcast monitored the content of its customers' internet connections and selectively blocked peer-to-peer connections in violation of network neutrality rules. The selective blocking of file sharing traffic interfered with users' rights to access the internet and to use applications of their choice, the commission said."
Net neutrality has been the status quo since the start of the internet. First from the threat of regulation, then from Title I, then from Title II after Verizon's lawsuit.
Net Neutrality is the default position, so in a sense has always existed from the inception of the internet. Only within the last 10 years have telcoms begun a series of intentional efforts to begin throttling, and manipulating traffic in a way that falls outside of the bounds of Net Neutrality.
Common response on HN for the past two months has been nothing short of hyperbolic. "The world will end if NN is repealed".
Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse.
I have no reason to believe this is "the beginning of the end" of anything. Life will carry on as normal.
Disproportionate reactions (like HN is doing right now) is not good for anyone. Take a step back from politics. Take a deep breath. Take a walk outside. This isn't the end of the world.
The ACA was actually a conservative plan that is actually good for people. In some sense, you could argue that everybody agreed with it until it became a partisan issue.
NN is also good for people and also has bipartisan support (from constituents) but just got repealed. Yes, the sky won't fall but it is now a little darker.
Depends on how you spin it. Yes it was a conservative plan originally. The reasoning went something like:
"Too many poor people are showing up to hospitals without health insurance and getting treated for free, driving up the cost for everyone else. We need to FORCE them to buy health insurance or else there is a penalty!"
Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got. Change the way you talk about it, sprinkle in a couple keywords like "affordable", mix in some coverage for pre-existing conditions, and suddenly its more palatable to liberals.
I totally agree with you. I believe group polarization [0] causes forums on the internet such as this one to exaggerate how bad something is going to be and this is one of those times. My biggest concern is if something actually world-ending were to be about to happen it would be sort of hard to tell by reading Reddit and Hackernews. Because the users of those collectively dial the alarm severity up to "catastrophic" several times per year, and it is a case of crying wolf almost every time.
That's not an argument, that's bulverism. How about you explain why repealing Net Neutrality is necessary in the first place? Who actually benefits from it?
Just to make sure I understand, conservatives said that it would be a disaster if the ACA signed into law?
Assuming that is what you meant: just because that was not true doesn't mean that NN is not important. Granted, there is some fear mongering and worst-case thinking going on, but in the end I think that there is valid reasoning behind NN fears, just like the claims about the ACA were provably exaggerated at the time.
This kind of reminds me how the Iraq war is being used to sow distrust of the intelligence services now. Because there were mistakes made during a republican administration that was hell-bent to go to war in Iraq, we shouldn't trust them now when there is immense agreement about the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.
The pro-NN crowd have turned this complex debate over an imperfect policy to a good-versus-evil battle over flipping a single legal switch and Ajit Pai is completely fueling that.
The hyperbole around NN on here and reddit has been annoying. My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like.
I do think the market for ISPs has failed. Regulatory patching won't always be able to stay up to date. The government should make it easier to start an ISP.
> My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like.
Like what? You do realize that we're all paying $1 more a month for Netflix because Comcast decided to go "rent seeking" and throttled their traffic until they paid up? Our Netflix bills were increased shortly after. You're being fucked by anti-NN, whether you realize it or not.
You can just add it to all the other hyper insane responses going around in the US right now, including:
- Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously finally.
- Tax cuts are going to destroy the country and impoverish the middle class. In fact, the middle class will see their already staggeringly low taxes go even lower. The lower US corporate income tax rate will finally make the US more competitive with dozens of other major economies, including Britain, Ireland, China, Canada, Sweden, Finland, etc.
- Hillary lost because of Russian collusion with Trump. Over a year later, zero evidence of any of that. The only election tampering that looks to have gone on, is high ranking FBI agents & officials that were looking to throw the election in favor of Hillary. The fact is, Hillary lost because she took voters in the blue wall states for granted and refused to aggressively court them as advisers close to her recommended. It was educated white women that threw the election in Trump's favor.
- Trump wants to be a fascist dictator. No, there's zero evidence of that sort of behavior. He's a jerk, he may be a mediocre President, there's absolutely no indication he can or is in the position to seize more power. He is wildly unpopular both among the majority of polled voters and his own party (which he only joined to run for President). The odds are pretty good he's a one term President, and that one term will deliver the Senate to Democrats and rebalance things in DC.
- Trump's environmental policies are going to get us all killed and make global climate change dramatically worse. No, the few policies he has rolled back from the Obama era, will not in fact do anything meaningful as it relates to global climate change or harming the environment in the US. The dramatic shift from coal to natural gas, will continue to reduce CO2 emissions in the US, and the gradualy move to solar, wind and electric vehicles will continue with or without Trump.
- "Zero evidence of any of that" is a completely ridiculous thing to say. Get out of your bubble. Try to see the world from the other POV, there are many pieces of evidence that point in this direction. If you step back from moment-to-moment politics and try to look at what's already publicly known, from a historical perspective, it's already an unbelievable scandal.
- I don't think he consciously wants to be a fascist dictator, but it's again completely ridiculous for you to say there's "zero evidence of that sort of behavior". He does many things that point in that direction, if only you look. And, concretely, he's destroying norms that keep us not-fascist, barriers are being torn down right now. That degrades our system and populace and will make it easier for future people to transgress further.
- I don't know enough about what regulations he's rolled back. But dropping out of the Paris agreement and simply not taking action for the next four years have a significant impact.
It's not failing. North America is fine; people still want to move from other places to our place. Let's not be drastic. Let's sit down and listen and be calm.
> Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse.
(You need to find better people to listen to.)
And when things get bad, what do you expect that will look like? Mad Max-style desert hellscapes?
No: It'll look pretty much like now. Except things will be a little worse. You'll have less money. Less freedom. You'll find yourself making a few more trade-offs and concessions than you were before. Harder work. Less money. And you'll wonder why there's a small ruling class that seems to get all of the gains of society. You'll wonder why things never ever seem to break in your direction anymore. Always towards them.
Oh, and fun fact:
Much of the country is already in this position. Especially in minority communities. You just happen to not be feeling it. But make no mistake that that is the future the Republican Party has envisioned for this country and is currently enacting piece by piece. Breaking net neutrality -- something that will affect the poor and downcast of society much more than it will affect you or I -- is just a piece of the puzzle.
Repealing NN benefits the Telecom companies and the large content companies (ie. Disney).
We know the telecom companies were dumping money into the republican party to repeal NN, but I think if the Democrats were in power then Content companies would be dumping money into them. The dems just have the option of playing as sheep because they don't have enough voting power anyway.
I'm cynical that either party cares that much about the public and think that pointing fingers just allows the elites to continue their games.
Then, shortly after Netflix agreed to pay Comcast's extortion money, they had to raise rates by $1 a month. So, we're all paying extortion money to Comcast. Learn some recent history before you form an opinion.
ACA was a mechanism for private insurers to grow their market share with the side effect of increasing coverage and saving lives.
NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce.
Not completely applies and oranges, but if you don't think this is very very bad, you're not thinking.
> NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce.
This has been asked a few times but never fully answered, can someone explain why this vote in particular is a problem? I understand net neutrality and I am all for it, but there was considerable public doubt before reclassification that this was the proper way to go about it. It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster. Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing competition among ISPs? The major problem in all the pre-2015 net neutrality issues was that people often did not have any other ISP to use if their current ISP introduced a policy that was anti-consumer.
Except it was a disaster. The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix. There's no reason to suspect they won't go back to it as soon as they can.
If there was ISP competition then a Verizon customer could switch ISPs if they disagreed with the throttling of Netflix. I would compare it to wireless which never had these net neutrality rules. Is wireless a disaster? It seems like mobile plans are constantly including more data at faster speeds at a cheaper price. Some (all?) of the carriers have various anti-net neutrality policies but consumers at least have the option to pick which set of policies they are willing to agree with.
> The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix.
No that's inaccurate. Title II reclassification happened in 2015. Verizon Netflix "throttling" (controversial what actually happened there) happened in 2017.
> It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.
This is a common inaccurate argument I have seen pushed by the telcos to justify repeal.
There are many well-documented cases of how the "big 4" ISPs were increasingly blocking, redirecting (Charter's DNS redirection), interfering (injecting javascript and/or ads) and throttling traffic to internet services (Netflix) from their networks before the Title II reclassification of 2015.
All these abuses happened during a small window of a couple years between the previous FCC's Net Neutrality regulations were thrown out by the courts and 2015, when the Title II reclassification happened.
It's not that the state of the internet pre-2015 was a disaster but, prior to the 2015 reclassification, we were already starting to see abuses of net neutrality. When ISP's and telecoms started to block VoIP traffic because it cut into their phone services, it was unprecedented because no one had really prioritized data based on the content up until that point. Once that started happening and more companies caught on to it, it became a point of contention. While the 2015 reclassification wasn't a perfect solution, it did encapsulate the gist of the argument by saying that, like phone calls, we can't prioritize data based on content.
> It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.
From 2010-2014 similar rules to the 2015 rules were in place, citing a different statutory basis; these ruled were struck down in 2014, with the court pointing to Title II, be basis of the 2015 rules, as the available statutory basis for the kind of rules adopted in 2010.
From 2014-2015 there were no open internet rules in place, but the industry was operating in awareness that he FCC majority was drafting new rules with similar objectives.
And FCC net neutrality policy existed from 2004-2010, working on yet a different mechanism, which was struck down by the courts in 2010.
And before that, things get complicated, because even though there was no net neutrality policy for broadband in general, there was also very little broadband of any kind, and what there was often, for much of the pre-2004 period, fell under different regulatory regimes based on the underlying technology (cable as cable, DSL under telephone related rules.)
So, perhaps none of the pre-2015 regulatory states were a disaster, but repealing the 2015 order doesn't returns us to any of those states, or even to a condition where the law would allow the FCC to reimplement them. In fact, it gets us farther from any of the 2004-2015 states than the 2015-2017 state was.
Pre 2015, the FCC was enforcing NN through other means.
In late 2014, a court case declared the method they were enforcing didn't fall under the scope of their powers, but strongly suggested, while noting that the ISPs could and would be a danger to the internet if left to their own devices, that they had other means to enact the same regulations.
There were net neutrality regulations before 2015! The idea that neutrality is this novel thing invented during the Obama administration is as toxic as it is ridiculously false.
Pre-2015, the FCC still had regulations to enforce net neutrality, just different ones. It was active in punishing ISPs for violating neutrality under those provisions. Verizon managed to get a court to say that those regulations were inappropriate, but the court also pointed out that if ISPs were regulated under Title II, then the FCC would have the power to set the regulations that had been de facto in place for the past decade. The FCC under Tom Wheeler immediately did just that.
The problem with this vote is that it removes all protections without replacing them with anything else. All we have now is "yeah, the FTC might look at it if it's egregious... also the ISPs promise really hard to behave themselves." It's not just that the FCC has removed the rules (although that's still incredibly important), it's that they've totally abdicated their position as the regulatory body for telecommunications.
The fear of Non-Net-Neutrality goes far beyond the usual "there's only two ISPs where I life and they both offer the same deals".
It's something in completely its own category of nefariousness because they could be as anticompetitive as they want, and the market could not solve it.
That's because the injured party isn't their customers, who could take their business elsewhere, or at least loudly complain on the internet (if they have any).
It's someone not part to the ISP<->customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They're going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs' customers. And there's no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they've never heard about.
The result could be ISPs capturing almost every cent of value created by new startups. We will also have a fractured internet, because small companies will have to negotiate contracts with every single ISP. Also want to reach those 500,000 people in eastern Montana? That'll cost you $2,000 per week.
Anyone not living on the US coasts, and people in other countries, will constantly run into "HTTP Error 469: go suck a bag of.."
This doesn't appear to be a problem in any other industry. If I am a farmer, I don't have some inalienable right to have my produce on the shelves of the local grocery store. If am selling widgets through a catalog, I don't have some inalienable right to have my catalogs delivered to customers without paying a fee.
So why don't the results you predict occur in those industries? No one worries about grocery stores capturing all of the excess value from farmers because grocers have plenty of competition. No one worries about postage carriers refusing to deliver their goods because the government has promised to provide that service as a public good for a small fee.
It seems like you could solve your concerns by increasing competition among ISPs or by increasing the number of government run ISPs. I think this is still a "there's only two ISPs where I live and they both offer the same deals" type of problem.
Don't forget that ISP's have been buying up media companies and vice versa, this hasn't always been the case. We now have a situation where huge amounts of media have moved from traditional networks (cable, UHF, satellite etc) to the internet. This makes it incredibly appetizing to own the networks being used and offers a huge financial incentive to prioritize your own goods over others.
Factor in the way that corporations have been operating over the last decades (shareholder value is the number 1 priority) and you really do have a recipe for disaster for the consumer and small businesses.
It's more of an issue now just because our usage of the internet has become increasingly fundamental to day-to-day life. It was, of course, already on this trajectory pre-2015, but corporate and government understanding of the internet was still very much in its infancy.
Few providers abused the privileges they had, because of some combination of uncertainty about backlash, historical precedent, and lack of organization and understanding.
There definitely is a competition problem. Without net neutrality, you will be even more screwed as a consumer when your only good ISP decides to offer you bullshit media packages with fast SNAPCHATZORZ access. Sure net neutrality doesn't help the fact that there just isn't enough competition, but it has the potential to make things a lot worse.
> Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing competition among ISPs?
The answer is, of course, yes. But people like to think in terms of black and white, ingroup and outgroup, friend and enemy. The public is now thoroughly convinced not only that the reclassification had the intended effects (and it's not clear that's the case), but that reinstating the reclassification is the only way to address the issue. Anyone who says anything against this norm will be hounded until they shut up.
Actually, the public has been convinced that regulation on ISPs is a good thing, and that repealing that regulation without replacing it with anything is a bad thing. And I think that's a pretty fair thing to think.
"It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster."
The internet regulatory state before 2015 was pretty much a disaster. The early internet was de-facto neutral with a bizarro patchwork of idiosyncratic local regulations (see the quote "the internet treats censorship as damage") and a general distaste from network operators for wide-area multicast (with good reason). Neutrality became an issue with major commercialization and particularly when internet services began to compete directly with non-internet services like TV and phones.
"As detailed in the survey below, nearly every operator places
limits on “commercial” use, sometimes including limits on Virtual
Private Networks, as well as limits on acting as a server. Why
might an operator put such a restriction on usage? Doing so
obviously makes the service less attractive to consumers who
might want to act in a commercial way, even in a fairly casual
manner.
"The simple answer is price discrimination. That this is the
case is not just intuition, but can be confirmed by company policy.
As evidence we can consider Comcast’s reply in 2001 to a user
who had complained about the ban on VPN usage on Comcast’s
network:
"Thank you for your message.
High traffic telecommuting while utilizing a VPN can
adversely affect the condition of the network while disrupting
the connection of our regular residential subscribers.
"To accommodate the needs of our customers who do
choose to operate VPN, Comcast offers the Comcast @Home
Professional product. @Home Pro is designed to meet the
needs of the ever growing population of small office/home
office customers and telecommuters that need to take
advantage of protocols such as VPN. This product will cost
$95 per month, and afford you with standards which differ from the standard residential product.
Sometimes network providers got in trouble with their restrictions. Sometimes they were changed via customer and public pressure. Sometimes the complaints went to the government, usually the FCC. Sometimes they were addressed there, sometimes they weren't. Some providers were prevented from restrictions by agreements with the FCC, some weren't. Sometimes, something you wanted to do was impeded by your ISP or an upstream provider. Sometimes you could pay more to avoid the impediment, sometimes you couldn't. Sometimes you could change providers to avoid the restrictions. Usually not, though. (Strike that; try "Essentially always not.")
Increasing competition is a dandy idea, and it was the primary argument at the time. Unfortunately, there are two ways to do it, mostly: force utility-infrastructure plant operators (the phone network, the cable TV network, whatever) to be neutral with regards to actual service providers (which sort of worked for long-distance telephone providers, I guess), or to destroy all of the streets in America by laying more cables. Again.
Competition hasn't worked before in the US, and I'm unaware of anywhere in the world where it has worked.
Net neutrality was a band-aid from the start for a larger problem that was unaddressed. ISP's, big telecom, etc. are/were committing acts that are illegal under existing law. For example, they were blocking certain sites/services that were competing with their own. That's a clear cut felony of restraint of trade. And possible other felonies related to monopolistic and anti-competitive practices.
The correct solution to this was to put the people responsible for approving those actions in jail for those crimes. But we didn't do that. Instead, we got net neutrality. The Rule of Law continues to be ignored in the US and with net neutrality the offending companies were simply forced to wine and dine us with a fancy dinner before deciding to fuck us whenever they wanted.
Readit News
As someone who respects but mostly profoundly disagrees with principled Republican laissez-faire regulatory strategy (at least, once we got past 1991 or so), it is more than a little aggravating to see us as a community winding ourselves in knots over market-based regulation of telecom at the same time as the (largely unprincipled) Republican congress is putting the finishing strokes --- literally in ball-point pen --- on a catastrophically stupid tax bill that threatens universal access to health insurance, not just for those dependent on Medicare but on startup founders as well.
If you care deeply about this issue, stop pretending like filling out forms and putting banners ads is going to persuade Republican regulators to act like Democrats. "Net Neutrality" isn't my personal issue --- I worked at ISPs, have backbone engineer friends, and candidly: I think this issue is silly. But if it's yours... sigh... fine.
But do it right: get out there, to your nearest seriously threatened D districts or to the nearest plausibly flippable R district (the suburbs are great for this), open up your damn wallets, and donate.
The FCC may very well be right that it's not their job to impose our dream portfolio of rules on Verizon (certainly, a lot of the rules people are claiming NN provided were fanciful). It doesn't matter how dreamlike the rules are: Congress can almost certainly enact a law, which the FCC can't revoke.
But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back.
That is not why this is shocking. This proceeding is shocking because the legal basis for this change is dependent on a false statements about the technology involved. It goes beyond just, "Republicans prefer deregulation," or, "Republicans favor market-based approaches." There is plenty of room and a general need for debates about what policy approaches are best, but there is no room for debate about the answer to technical questions.
Engineers and researchers submitted hundreds of comments to the FCC trying to correct the falsehoods presented in the NPRM. The FCC did not simply ignore those comments. The draft rules specifically cite those comments and totally dismiss them as "not persuasive." Only commentary from ISPs was "persuasive" in this proceeding, and the ISPs omitted facts that were inconvenient for them (the point of public commentary is in part to fill in the omissions that lobbyists would obviously make).
Sorry, but I do not buy the "what do you expect from Republicans" argument. I expect Republicans to be pro-markets, even pro-big-business; I expect Republicans to favor deregulation. It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation. It is one thing to interpret facts -- for example, the draft rules interpret the fact that edge services can be accessed via ISP networks as ISPs providing a capability to their customers, which is bizarre but within the bounds as far as policy debates go. To simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.
Yes, I expect the party of deregulation to base its policy goals on facts, as interpreted through the lens of a pro-business/pro-markets approach, and not some convenient fantasy.
Your entire premise can be rebutted with the policies around climate change. If something as catastrophic and irreversible as climate change can be subject to partisan nonsense, twisting of facts and delegitimization of experts; what makes anyone think that Net Neutrality would be looked upon with logic, facts, and reason.
I personally lean towards preserving NN.
I hope at some point we can return to some semblance of governance based on facts, logic, and pragmatism rather than ideology.
From where I sit, the particular observation you're making about how policy has been treated when it comes to Net Neutrality issues looks exactly like how the Republican party behaves generally. Whether it's about net neutrality, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, climate change, stimulative effects of tax policy, health care -- it sure looks like many Republican positions are primarily arrived at and founded in the profit and power aspirations of a narrow constituency rather than observation and study, and that "deregulation" and "market-based" approaches are primarily invoked as tools or even just fig leaves where they appear useful.
Net Neutrality just happens to be one example where the audience here is predominately familiar enough with the relevant practical issues that it's easy to see.
Haha. Try working in education or, gasp, environmental science, if you think that the contestability of simple facts is shocking.
Disclaimer: I am a canadian citizen.
What I expect from republicans is the opposite of evidence based policy making. None of their policies are supported or motivated by evidence. Pick one from taxes to gun control to sex education.
For example, in healthcare, it's more than proven by countless studies that countries that provide universal healthcare not only provide better healthcare by almost any metric, but also spend much less in it than e.g. the US. So anyone that defends the broad idea that government intervention is bad goes against facts, period (as does someone that defends the idea that it's always good, of course - the only position compatible with facts is that some sectors may need more regulation and some may need less, on a case-by-case basis, with some individual cases arguable).
I guess partisanship might simply be a huge problem because democrats can‘t recognize republicans as republicans any more - still because there are only 2 relevant parties - republicans don‘t see an alternative to the GOP and still go for the „in theory better aligned“ party. That should give any American pause to think and highlight the importance of choice when it comes to politics. Why not create a new republican party?
That makes it sound like you can sue the FCC for not meeting their legal obligations here. Is that viable?
The Right is arguing for a free market economy and decreased regulation not because they are "going against the facts." There is no fact stating that "net neutrality is necessary for the world to function" or "internet is a human right" or whatever. All of these things are opinions. You have the opinion that net neutrality is needed, but there is no fact backing that statement.
> It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions
Here's what you're missing: they don't oppose net neutrality because of what the ISPs said about it. They oppose it because it is a regulation that limits the free market. There is no fact or fiction to this opinion, it's like saying "because there's facts to show that speech can hurt people, free speech should be restricted." I agree that speech can hurt someone, but I disagree that it should be restricted. Does that mean I'm fighting the facts here?
2. Republicans (and many Democrats) do not "under-regulate". They regulate in favor of paying corporations. Those regulations are not all typical visible regulations; many are special provisions or loopholes. That is not laissez-faire.
3. Since you re-iterate, I re-iterate. Republicans are not a party of deregulation. They are a party that supports monopolistic, bully-capitalist behaviors.
The only real solution for the US is that it suffer a slow decline in global and economic relevance until it becomes desperate for a change in behavior. Only then will the shit be flushed out of the government and campaign finance rules put in place to prevent another corrupt government that serves a very limited few people at the cost of 330million others.
Regardless of the other points, _millions_ of voters selected Republican. Fixing gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter turn out, etc, doesn't change the fact that of those who did vote, picked republican. Fixing those issues may change the _result_ of the election but it won't change millions of people's individual minds.
Millions picked this government and I would guess the primary reason is abortion law as this party seems to like laws that favor corporations over people.
And the Democrats have spun reasonable measures, such as requiring some sort of identification to vote, as "suppression", possibly so those who aren't citizens can vote. Who cheats more? Who knows.
The low-hanging fruit for the Democrats is, however:
1) Prioritize lower/middle class economic concerns over progressive identity politics
2) Push the DNC not to scuttle candidates, like Bernie, that people don't universally loathe
If those two things get done, the Democrats have a good chance going forward. Otherwise, who knows.
Is there any reasonable source for this other than wishful thinking and denial?
I mean, to be frank, I think that both major parties are playing a role in this illusion that you, the voter, have control over the government without grabbing pitchforks and heading to their office in your preferred form of communication. We live in a country where you can decide your own fate. You can work for what you want, no one will stop you. The government seems to have forgot what "govern" means. They get their hands into things they shouldn't be in, and then make the every-man look like a criminal. Why do we continue to rely on a capitalistic fascist society? One that pays us in non-backed currency as well. This is literally alchemy and everyone buys into their bullshit.
Dead Comment
What I'm bitter about is that my vote, as a californian, is worth a tiny fraction of a vote in a swing state. Republican lawmakers have zero incentive to care about me, and red states are overrepresented in congress in relation to their small population.
The American people from a popular vote standpoint didn't want any of this, but they can be safety ignored by people who are abusing a flawed system. The voices of individual Californians count for very little unless they have money that they can spend on PACs and political campaigns. How is that democratic?
The same thing would happen in a pure democracy. No candidates would spend time placating any large population centers that consistently vote one way. LA/SF/NYC issues would be irrelevant because everyone will just pick the D each time anyway so it will still come down to appealing to groups that might change their minds.
And? Surely with the money flowing through California you can actually afford multiple providers and in doing so ensure competition.
Holding it as "under regulating" seems like it's falling for the doublespeak. It is also Republican governments at every level that are almost universally responsible for the (over) regulations that led to the current monopolies of providers in most areas (often a single `choice'). If a city or region or even second party looks to install alternative feeds, overwhelmingly opposition comes from Republican governments, and there is already threats that this federal government will prevent States from passing their own rules on this (it would be too obvious if red states lived in a shitstorm while blue states lived in the modern world). It is profoundly corrupt.
I'm not trying to be partisan, but the Republican party in the US are the voice of a oligarchy. This FCC decision is the perfect example of it -- something they are profoundly incapable of building the slightest justification for, and that can only possibly benefit already overwhelming providers.
Net neutrality is 100%, unequivocally favorable for every tech company (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Microsoft, etc.). Are you sure the Democratic party is not the "voice of the oligarchy" here? You say that Republicans are incapable of building justification for this decision, but it fits exactly to the pillars of the Republican party -- deregulation, a free market economy, and a small government. Their argument is that NN is unnecessary regulation that limits the free market and oversteps the boundaries of a reasonable government. You may disagree with this, but that argument is a subjective one and not an objective one. It may benefit the providers but it also hurts the tech monopolies (which is why they oppose it so adamantly... unless you really think that Alphabet, inc. is on the side that opposes big businesses).
For instance the original, and probably fatal, blow to net neutrality was the 1996 Telecommunications act that was passed mainly to encourage "wire to wire competition", which has since become a total farce. In exchange for this absurd concept we not only gave the telecoms huge tax cuts (nominally so they could expand infrastructure) that they then directly plowed into dividends, share buybacks, and bonuses, we also allowed the sale of wireless spectrums (another public good). But most importantly we enshrined local monopolies into law. Almost every single fight we've had for net neutrality since then has stemmed from this legislation. Guess who signed it into law? Bill Clinton, a democrat. And while the Senate and House both had Republican majorities the bill was passed with largely bipartisan support (less than 20% of the Senate and less than 5% of the house voted against it) and heavy support from the Clinton administration.
But lets say you don't buy that, lets take a look at the current political climate. The largest recipients of telecom dollars in the Senate have been overwhelmingly Democrats (it's about 50/50 over the past 8 years in the House), the telecoms have extremely influential Democrats in their pocket like Nancy Pelosi (who laughably claimed that the ISPs would save us from the Republican bill to allow ISPs to sell your internet traffic history), and even ex-Obama administrators are largely applauding today's ruling. Don't for a second think you or anyone else is somehow above this just because you identify with a certain tribe.
Also it's pretty odd that you think name dropping engineering friends means you have an informed opinion on this extremely non-technical matter, as if an RF engineer would have an informed opinion on the intricacies of economic repercussions of spectrum auctions.
But you do have one very good point, elections have consequences. Vote out anyone who takes a dime from telecoms, ISPs, interconnect providers, or even tech companies. The issue here is not ideological, it is monetary. Corporate influence has completely taken over our political system and regardless of party we are helpless to stop it until we take a principled stand and refuse to vote for the representative who's trying to sell us to the highest bidder simply because they wear the same color shirt as the people we associate with.
Interestingly, amidst the jokes about Tom Wheeler leaving babies to the dingos, I don't recall much of a lament over the "consequences" of electing Obama. It wasn't until after this point that Wheeler reversed course, likely after the party realized this issue had teeth with one of their important constituencies. This "you asked for it" anti-Republican line is pure opportunism.
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A well written response, but I choke on salt when I read this sort of call to action.
The house has been slowly and surely gerrymandering the country into hereditary fiefdoms for their parties.
And if the solution is to relocate to "to the nearest plausibly flippable R district" then we're really saying that money is the real power.
Today's decision is a black eye for the concept of self-governance.
In particular for Democrats running against entrenched Republicans, these people aren’t evil corporate fat cats. They own restaurants, teach high school, are small-town mayors, or nurses. They need help to compete. The DNC is not going to help candidates who don’t show viability on their own.
NOW is the time to get involved, before the primaries.
Not your issue? I've followed your account for years. This is exactly your issue, and everyone in this community's issue.
Without the Internet you have no chance of fighting against things like the new tax bill. It takes away your voice. It takes away all of our voices.
This might not be 'your' issue, but make no mistake, it is more important than all of the issues you mention, in that without a free and open Internet, your free speech is essentially gone, and that severely handicaps any efforts to organize and protest against the other issues you talk about.
You mean 48.2% of 58% of eligible voters elected a Democrat. You can slice it many ways but the electoral college is all that matters.
FALSE. The voters were sidelined by both old (electoral college) and new (mechanically-assisted gerrymandering) methods. Just look at Texas:
"The redistricting had a revolutionary effect. Today, the Texas delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives includes twenty-five Republicans and eleven Democrats—a far more conservative profile than the political demography of the state. The Austin metropolitan area, the heart of the Texas left, was divvied up into six congressional districts, with city residents a minority in each. All but one of these districts are now held by Republicans. I’m currently represented by Roger Williams, a conservative automobile dealer from Weatherford, two hundred miles north of Austin."
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/americas-futur...
Republicans have used these tools to cook up an unprecedented constitutional challenge to our republic. MULTIPLE suits are presently being heard by the Supreme Court regarding their shenanigans.
More of them voted, for the House of Representatives, for Republicans than for any other party.
It's true that the actual representation of Republicans is outsized for that vote, and gerrymandering played a role, but they also got more votes. (And an outright majority voted for anti-NN parties.)
Good point on the Presidency, though (but even there, it's a hairs breadth either way on whether pro- or anti-NN candidates got a majority of votes.)
The lack of Net Neutrality is not an example of "market-based regulation."
Although government regulation can, for better or worse, hamper the operation of a free market, that isn't the case here. The point of Net Neutrality is to keep Internet infrastructure free from being feudalized. A feudal government where massive policy changes impacting people's everyday lives are decided by power players and their arcane web of alliances is still a government, and it is definitely not one conducive to a free market.
Anyone who favors free markets cannot oppose Net Neutrality. It would be like opposing antitrust laws and claiming to be free market.
Your content is theirs, and their policy is your law.
Unquestionably elections have consequences, but do not say we (voters/citizens/individuals) voted for this person or party or policy outcome. The Electoral College that did that. This president didn't get a majority of the votes, and much more relevant is he didn't even get a plurality of the votes.
This was an unpopular administration from day one by definition. It could have tried to grow its base. It hasn't. There's no national mandate for this policy change. Could the administration have supported stronger competition law while also deregulating net neutrality? Sure. But it didn't try to make this case at all.
That^ Too many people are trying to shove things that are covered by antitrust into net neutrality. This makes it a much harder sell.
I'm convinced many Republicans could be convinced to support net neutrality if it didn't have that extra baggage attached.
Keep it to:
1. No blocking of legal content,
2. No throttling of legal content,
3. Must deliver the speed and bandwidth that the customer pays for.
Second, the last Republican president and FCC commissioner, Michael Powell, defended and enforced net neutrality. So this wasn't a given.
Josh is a retired Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander. Spent 23 years in the Navy including combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, raised his family in Jamul, and continues to serve on the local school board. Go help Josh. https://joshbutnerforcongress.com/
Not the majority though, as far as I understand, they won even though they don't have a majority of the voters, just a majority of the districts. Or something along those lines which simply confuses (and amazes) us non-US residents.
I'm also a bit impressed / curious about how much power the President has; he appoints FCC the chairman, and that chairman ends up taking these sort of decisions? Sounds a lot like something that the legislative branch should pick up, not [transitively] the executive one.
Or am I missing something?
Not precisely. The proportion of people who voted in a gerrymandered electoral system with potentially widespread voter suppression produced a preponderance of Republican legislators and an outcome of the electoral college that produced a Republican president. I'm not sure that this qualifies as an "elected" government.
We've had this same electoral college in place for a long time, and everyone knew the rules ahead of time. It certainly has flaws, and you can argue a popular vote would be better, but it is the system we have and everyone knew it going into the election. It absolutely qualifies as an elected government.
I completely agree the tax bill is also terrible. but this conversation started around the FCC NN rules and due to _lack_ of competition anything we have is better than this form of deregulation. I'm happy to entertain a _separate_ conversation about the tax bill but I feel like you are saying because that is so much worse that NN does not matter... I believe that way of communicating is very dangerous because it can be applied to anything and everything. for example ISPs being able to store/mine and sell data on their users which was another law passed this year and caused me to donate to the eff.
my point is, I do not think you comment contributes to NN fairly by correlating the tax law as more important, I believe they are both very important.
Yeah. It was nice to see people coming together to fight for net neutrality, but it would have been nicer to see some of that energy and excitement used to fight something that will actually kill people.
Even less surprising as the GOP has been opposing Title II all along, and a GOP FCC is how ISPs got moved to Title I in the first place.
Why is it silly?
The majority actually didn't. But election system is skewed.
The Electors elected a Republican government. The voters elected a Democrat by 2,868,691 votes and there was Russian meddling on top of even that. Associating any popular mandate with that is shear nonsense.
Second do you have ANY idea how many elections the US has “meddled” in? Let alone how many leaders we have literally overthrown?? Get some perspective. If you don’t like other nations pissing in our oatmeal I seriously suggest we stop pissing, shitting, and vomiting in theirs. Golden rule and all. Let the booing begin.
That would be the biggest 'cover story' in the history of humanity
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Obama was required to appoint a Republican to the commission per the rule whereby the agency's commissioner seats must be split between the parties, with the tie breaking seat going to the party in control of the presidency.
Following these rules, when a Republican seat opened on the commission, Obama asked Mitch McConnell for an recommendation, and he suggested Pai. When Trump took over, Obama's FCC chairman Wheeler left the position, and Trump put Pai in his place, and replaced his former seat with another Republican, Brendan Carr.
Ajit was appointed to the chair under Trump (Republican). Ajit was a recommendation from Republican minority lead (at the time) Mcconnell. Ajit has (to my knowledge) always been a republican member of US FCC.
So let's play out the worse case - Comcast, AT&T etc wait out the shitstorm and then start throttling traffic and packaging the internet, releasing cable-esque "plans."
Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs? I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this? Do I need to be incorporated to do it? What would it take to start a new ISP with the premise "unthrottled, unmonitored traffic, charged by the gigabyte - an internet utility service"?
As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to "plug into" it or whatever?
Hmm. I should see if there's some "How the Internet Works: for Dummies" book.
Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It's actually really easy to do :
1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.
2) Run fiber cable from there to your customers. (You can also use wireless gear instead for a WISP. I don't like this approach, it's very 1990s despite all the newer better gear, but it's much cheaper than fiber and if your careful it can work out OK)
3) Setup some light network management.
Some cities / municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service.
The land between you and your customers is owned. You'll need space in public property (or 'right of way') to connect to them. This also varies based on city/county/state/local laws, but in Michigan there are somewhat decent rules around this. (Set rates for underground conduit access or utility pole access, rules about what can/can't be blocked, etc).
The only real roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire. In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50/month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your very first customer is somewhere north of $50k/each, and prices don't become reasonable until your in the thousands.
In most areas, the only thing you really need to start an ISP is (1) Lots of money, and (2) perseverance. There's not really any rules that prevent it, and the regulations aren't unreasonable. But the upfront cost is so high, it rules out basically any honest person from having the chance to do it.
You'll have to buy transit from someone, which will most likely be terminated at a neutral internet exchange / data center. You'll pay the transit provider (e.g. Hurricane Electric) for the bandwidth, and monthly fees to the data center for colocation and the cross-connect.
To get that transit back to a point of presence from where you'll branch out service to end users, you'll either have to bury your own fiber (very expensive - tens of thousands of $ per mile even in rural areas not to mention maintenance costs), lease fiber through someone else (e.g. Zayo) (also very expensive), or use wireless backhauls (cheaper but wireless comes with its own set of headaches).
Also you'll have to get a CCNA yourself or pay someone to manage your network since a carrier network is nothing like a home network.
Now by the time you get service back to your point of presence, you'll have to figure out how to get it to people. Burying fiber is extremely expensive, no way around it. Fixed wireless is a simpler option but getting a line of sight to the customer isn't always feasible, and you'll never have the bandwidth of fiber.
That's assuming people even want it. Out in a semi-rural area there may not be much competition, but the population density is so low putting up a tower or burying fiber may not be viable. In any city you're likely to have cable or DSL companies already there, with a price point that may be difficult to convince people to switch. Most people won't care about philosophical arguments about net neutrality, or be willing to pay a lot more for higher speeds.
In my opinion your best bet is to rally a coalition of people in your area to petition the municipality to bury the fiber and provide it as a utility. If you're uncomfortable with the gov't being an ISP, there is a very interesting model where the city provides an open access network which lets private ISPs plug in as virtual network layers, letting customers easily switch providers: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...
I'm sure you can, the issue is do you have a couple million $ in your bank account to do this?
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_television#History_in_th...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative
Fwiw, a group called Toronto Meshnet [1] was investigating the opportunity for a community mesh project (which lacks incorporation and know-how of how to run an ISP) to partner with a non-profit ISP [2] (that lacks capacity, constantly gets shut out of the last-mile to new condo developments, but understands the ISP side) to have mesh accommodate the last-mile into homes.[3]
I think they're in a slow-down phase right now as they didn't get funding, but I imagine there's legs in this approach, and they'll ramp up again :)
[1] https://tomesh.net/ [2] http://www.torfree.net/ [3] https://github.com/tomeshnet/documents/tree/master/meeting_n... -
There are currently small operations that offer wireless broadband by putting the receiving equipment on your roof (sometimes they give you a discount if you serve as a repeater) and they purchase wireless data from larger companies' cell towers.
Also, with regard to your point about "starting an ISP", I don't know the legalities and IANAL, but NYC Mesh goes out of their way to state that they _are not_ an ISP - there's probably a reason for that.
- https://nycmesh.net
- https://www.alliedmedia.org/dctp
In his response he said the topic's been brought up before. If I get his and the council's blessing, the next thing is to hit the ground and get probably 3000-5000 signatures and put this up on a ballot in 2018 November to see how the city feels. I'm optimistic however cause I've been hearing multiple complaints, on-goingly about bad service from ISPs (and we have Cox here, and I don't think they're that bad as opposed to Comcast) and probably a pet peeve is data caps... Sure, we've 1TB caps which is plenty, but w/advent of 4k TV and IPTV ... that may be very low.
Here's to hope that in a few years we all have FTTH where I live (crossing my fingers!)
It is, on the city level. Some created municipal broadband, and showed crooked monopolists and their paid shills to the door. To be clear - Comcast and their ilk fear municipal broadband way more than net neutrality rules. So expect fierce opposition, especially attempts to bribe local legislature to write laws forbidding or obstructing municipal networks.
The other responses offer far more technical details than I can, and probably also a better long-term strategy, but here's a small thing you can do right now: knock on your neighbor's door, and offer a six-pack of good beer and half his internet bill in exchange for his WiFi password. If he says yes, cancel your service. Say you are moving to Bhutan and becoming a monk to make their "customer retention specialists" go away.
From my apartment in a fairly spread-out "city," I can see about ten wireless networks, half with a pretty good signal. I can only imagine what things are like in SF/NY, where techies are stacked on top of each other like dogs in a no-kill shelter.
https://www.alliedmedia.org/dctp
In Detroit it's not real high speed because they're using foundation money to provide basic access, but there's no reason I know of that it couldn't be.
Here's more information on the mesh network in Detroit:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kz3xyz/detroit-me...
Here's a Cringely blog from 2001-ish:
https://web.archive.org/web/20011215000823/http://www.pbs.or...
As best I can tell they are not even municipal. Merely a cooperative owned by a big chunk of the town. At least last I heard.
If you spin it off as a service to your block, then it might be possible...?
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As such, what you'll see as a consumer is just higher prices from _other_ companies, as they're forced to pay for access to bandwidth which you paid for.
This also means that most people won't understand the problem, and won't get upset with the correct people.
This is a travesty, akin to if every appliance manufacturer had to pay a recurring tribute to the electric company.
But hey... at least the Libertarians are all quite excited.
EDIT: OK I suggested sharing a T1 but apparently that hasn't been a good deal since the 90's.
It is impractical and irrational to wire up a home to multiple ISPs with their own fiber channels. Each channel could cost tens of thousands to install.
Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels. The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it. The ISP is responsible for everything that happens from the exchange upon up (inc. pricing, support, peerage agreements, interconnects, etc).
This way you can still choose Comcast if you wish but may also have several local ISPs competing for your business. When you choose to change no engineer needs to come to your house, they just plug and unplug you at the exchange.
This is done quite successfully in other countries around the world, like New Zealand where we mainly have one infrastructure provider (selected and monitored by the Government), who must offer fair and standard pricing to any ISP who wants to add value to the network.
As a result, we have many ISP options throughout the country and competition between providers is high.
What incentive does a non-profit have to invest the billions of dollars required to do these things? If you use public dollars to do it: what do you think happens when investment into upgrading from GPON to NGPON2 is competing for taxpayer dollars with roads and schools? I can't imagine that anyone in say San Francisco would rather have SFMTA running their internet than Comcast.
Eventually Google bought it out, but the city had to increase taxes to help pay for the current bond, and was looking at more bonds to pay for it before Google stepped in.
This is THE central point. Everyone saying that they would be OK with the latest FCC regs if there were only more competition need to consider this. In what bizarro world would anyone actually want ISPs competing for the last mile?
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That's an interesting idea, kinda like Interac for telecom. From what I hear, Interac has a bit of an issue with being fairly closed to new peering agreements, so I wonder how that could be solved for the telco space, maybe constitute the maintenance corporation to be open to bids from new ISPs.
Yes, that's called "government".
We do that with roads and mail, we can do the same with communications.
1. Wireless is burst not pure data streams, latency issues. 2. High probability of interference. 3. High probability of collisions, wireless spectra bouncing off one another and objects, requiring multiple transmissions.
Big difference between Wireless and Wired / Fiber. Pokeman GO event in IL is a prime example of inherent issues.
Wireless internet for everyone will never be realistic. There's a theoretical limit to how much data you can send wirelessly, the "Shannon limit". On many bands we're already close to it, 90% of "5G" is just about using the rest of our bands more effectively. Once we're using all the frequency bands that penetrate far enough to be useful theres nothing you can do in increase wireless bandwidth. Theres more hope with satellites and narrow beams but these technologies are a decade away. 5G isn't going to do anything noticeable to ISP competition and I think you need to do more research on how 5G works if you think otherwise
The best hope for competition in the home broadband market is municipal ownership of last-mile infrastructure. We need to lay last-mile fiber and it needs to be owned by the public, though network maintenance can be contracted out.
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Many people have and have tried, wireless last mile has been attempted hundreds of time since 2005 (and the end of mandatory line-sharing).
I also think this is going to backfire and bite the telco's in the ass if they try to roll out tiers. The legislative outcry when joe schmo is affected could become so deafening that congress will be likely be forced to get up off their ass and intervene which is exactly what they don't want. If they were smart they would only go after the Netflix and Face-books of the world and leave the consumer out of it.
Can you imagine the 2020 campaign slogan of "Donald Trump ruined the internet." Ignoring this issue was stupid but I don't think they thought this through.
Then they can say to some degree of truth say that bringing net neutrality back would force them to raise prices.
"Monkeybrains is primarily a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider). What this means is Monkeybrains uses microwave technology to create a wireless network covering much of San Francisco. We deliver internet service to individual locations by placing an antenna on the roof. This antenna picks up an encrypted wireless signal from one of our network access points which can be found on over 1000 buildings city-wide.
From the roof, we run a Cat5 Ethernet wire either to the unit, telecom closet, or the property's Ethernet patch panel. We are happy to comply with any building wiring guidelines or work with the building's riser company if required."
https://www.monkeybrains.net/how-it-works
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a1...
They are pretty responsive in terms of customer service.
*Don't work for Monkeybrains but my company uses their service.
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It would still be a problem for startup companies. If TimeWarner gives exclusive preferential pricing to Vimeo and Verizon gives exclusive preference to YouTube, your video-streaming startup still has an extra uphill battle even if there is competition among the established players.
Hopefully when sanity takes office, we don't repeal the changes in net neutrality, but rather repeal the laws that created these insane corporate monopolies in the first place!
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If a Senator says he's actively working on something and points you to specific legislation he sponsors or supports, well, that might also be political theater, but it's at least possible that there is real substance behind it.
I guess it would be easier to set up municipal ISPs, since minimal wiring would be needed. But the lack of real competition in the cell market seems to indicate that the problems are pretty similar for small startups.
Even with its high latency, packet loss, data caps, etc, LTE internet fits the need of a huge segment of casual internet users and has been doing so for some time now.
And even if they weren't monopolies, they would probably collude.
Telcos in some countries, for example agree to not market services in each other's territories.
Seems like this should read "local governments monopolize ISPs." ISPs have no other access to this arrangement.
Consider that it's estimated that 13% of Americans don't use the internet-- at all, for anything, ever.[1] Think about how many people probably exclusively use their $60/mo cable internet to use Facebook, read news websites, and send emails. They don't use Netflix, they don't watch YouTube, they only do what they know and they're happy with it. Is it accurate to say that someone with these needs has no choice in their ISP?
Where I am right now, in the middle of central Wisconsin surrounded by acres of farm fields in every direction, I have fiber all the way to my house. In addition, there is reliable LTE coverage on multiple carriers. There's also satellite internet. For the average internet user as of 2017, I really think it's inaccurate to imply that consumers lack choice.
What you're really saying is that there's no competition in the very high end segment of consumer ISPs. And I'd agree with that, there is little choice when it comes to a provider that is willing to offer you a highspeed DOCSIS plan without a data cap, or fiber internet, etc. Most homes probably only have one provider that meets the needs of power users.
And to that I say, "tough shit!" If you're an outlier as a consumer, you're going to pay through the nose for it and you're not going to have a ton of choice. It's not some giant conspiracy to milk consumers dry, it's a matter of business. ISPs don't want to invest billions into infrastructure that some trivial portion of their consumer market really would utilize. It would be fiscally irresponsible to spend all that money for such little return. If posing it that way doesn't appeal you, let me put it another way: it would be bad for the long term growth of the internet to spend all that money to appease a small portion of internet users. That money is better saved and spent later.
You might say, "Consumers will certainly desire faster internet as years pass, so it's an investment they'll have to make eventually, and the taxpayer has subsidized this expansion, so they should be doing it now, anyway."
I believe you'd be wrong to say that. ISPs shouldn't be obligated to be spending money now if they're meeting the majority of needs of their customers. I know online it maybe doesn't seem that way with all the "Comcast-are-Nazis memes", but it's just a matter of overlap between poweruser segment with high bandwidth requirements also being active on the social media you frequent. Elsewhere on the internet, there's a majority of casual internet users who are not coming close to being meaningfully impacted by technical limitations of their connection.
If you're interested in stable growth of the internet as time goes on, you should root for them to save their money now so they can spend it later when demand from the average consumer catches up. Doing anything else would mean spending a lot of money on infrastructure that sits unused, that is antiquated by the time people want it. Think of China and their crumbling empty cities, let's not make the same sort of mistake with internet infrastructure.
[1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/07/some-america...
55% of Americans watched Netflix in the last year. http://www.businessinsider.com/percent-of-americans-who-watc...
98% of Americans think internet speeds need to be improved. https://tech.co/americans-internet-speeds-improving-2017-06
Roughly 50% are 'satisfied' with their home internet speeds but this is according to the FCC, which has lied to me a lot recently. https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-298516A1.p...
[2015] Satisfaction with cable tv and internet falls to 7-year low, making them the worst industries. http://www.businessinsider.com/satisfaction-with-cable-and-i...
These are just the top links in the search results, not cherry picked at all. You seem to be extrapolating from your experience with ISP choice. I've lived in supposedly very high-tech American cities with only one choice of ISP over 2Mbps. Compare US prices and service to places like Scandanavia. What's the difference? Over here ISPs can extract a much larger fraction of value while providing smaller total value (worse service). This is a natural result of lightly-regulated monopolies and oligopolies. It doesn't mean that their choices not to invest are somehow best for the long-term growth of the internet, in any way shape or form. Their monetary incentives are not aligned with long-term growth of the Internet.
They might not for the majority of the time, but they certainly do use the internet like you and I do.
Were this not the case, "googling" would not have become such a common word.
This is what it looked like before the FCC: https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--FfVBroP...
An unregulated ISP market is a safety hazard and ugly. Because of these issues, government eventually decided that only one phone company can serve each house, forcing a monopoly situation because of that. But that monopoly has to allow every other network access to that line so that callers can call anywhere. This is the origin of net neutrality.
You're never going to go back to the situation where you have a thousand different lines to everyone's houses, so you're better off regulating them properly with net neutrality.
I would rather see the FTC address EULAs. If a company says, "we may from time-to-time limit your bandwidth" I think they should be on the hook to produce a report every month when and why they limited you. This is not much different than the report you get from your investments, or your cell phone carrier report when you place a call or send a text message.
Comcast refused to upgrade their peering connections to the networks used by Netflix (Level3 I believe was one of them?) to extort money from them. Netflix doesn't get service from Comcast, yet Comcast decided it could charge them to get access to their customers.
The internet is built upon no-fee exchanges between Tier 1 providers, but since Comcast (and some others like CenturyLink, Verizon, AT&T) is both a consumer ISP AND a major transit provider they try to make arguments like "you're sending us more traffic than we send you, this isn't fair" even though their customers are the ones requesting the data. It's total bullshit, and they will milk this for everything it's worth.
Net Neutrality doesn't prevent peering disputes.
Google and Netflix wanted to implement rules prohibiting a perfectly normal transaction in business because it would cost them money, and framed it as the public good. I'm entirely okay with the two giants having to pay more, it provides Google and Netflix's competitors additional room to breathe and innovate.
Sure. But it was an attainable solution, which is much better than no solution at all. It's not like Pai is going to find some other way to protect NN.
Do you have a compelling reason why? Tittle II worked fantastically for phone calls. I see zero reason why it wouldn't work for internet as well.
If I get a report from my ISP outlining how they throttled me, how am I supposed to act on that information?
Also, why not leave the Title II designation in place until a better solution is agreed upon and finalized?
The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration. And this should be a model for regulation of the ISPs going forward.
Except that the world was quite different in 1996. You actually had a lot of competition with ISPs, because most people were doing dialup. If I didn't like AOL, I could just switch to Prodigy (yes, I know), or one of the local ISPs. That was easy.
People like me can and did switch ISPs on a regular basis. In my case, looking for a reliable Net News feed.
Compared to today, where there is only one (or if you are lucky) two ISPs for the area. You don't have a choice, so these ISPs are defacto monopolies.
The reasons given for repeal are just wrong, and this is a transparent attempt by the big ISPs to make more money, without benefit to the average citizen or even the other Internet companies which made the Internet awesome to begin with.
Exactly.
I know business. Extra profits are extra profits. Wages won't rise unless there is a labor supply shortage.
Of course, the web was a few years old and the internet was just becoming used by the general public. Pointing to the state of broadband regulation in 1996 is kind of like pointing to the state of automobile safety regulation in 1912.
Any chance this repeal lead to more ISPs? Ajit Pai mentioned it would in interviews, but I don't know enough to say whether that had any merit.
I am blaming the tech giants for this ruling. They are the only ones with enough power to challenge this horrible ruling and they sat idle and watched it happen.
They may have given lip service to net neutrality, but their lack of enthusiasm and almost zero effort speaks volumes on their true opinions.
Microsoft crossed over to the dark side a long time ago.
Now, Google, Apple, Facebook join them in completely abandoning the ethos upon which the companies were founded.
I have been skeptical of their true intentions for years, and facebook has probably been corrupt since day one, but I thought if they were able to keep net neutrality, then I would think there was a chance for them.
No longer. They are gone. Truly sad day for the world.
The other absurd thing is people worried about Netflix, which as far back as I could remember is a big reason why this whole debate started in the first place. How about, if you want to watch TV, get TV. Leave the internet to information that doesn't have an alternative.
They were fine with Uber operating in an unregulated manner while dominating highly regulated competition. Soon I wont be able to hail a cab in Manhattan and we will all be crying about muh monopolies again.
All you needed to know about GOOG was the fact that it ever crossed their minds to make their motto "Don't be evil."
Hopefully there is opportunity to return to decentralization with the blockchain and projects like Substratum.
What's not clear is how much money Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix put into firing up the keep net neutrality campaign, but I'd assume there was quite a significant war chest available, judging by the size of the outcry. There were "viral" vids showing up on Reddit for example where the channel looked a lot like it was run by a think tank or similar.
Thanks for this valuable and insightful contribution.
Net neutrality didn't exist in 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015.
https://www.wired.com/2008/09/comcast-disclos-2/
"By a 3-2 vote, the FCC concluded that Comcast monitored the content of its customers' internet connections and selectively blocked peer-to-peer connections in violation of network neutrality rules. The selective blocking of file sharing traffic interfered with users' rights to access the internet and to use applications of their choice, the commission said."
Net neutrality has been the status quo since the start of the internet. First from the threat of regulation, then from Title I, then from Title II after Verizon's lawsuit.
It's been there far longer than you think, just in different forms. It's changed as the internet has.
Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse.
I have no reason to believe this is "the beginning of the end" of anything. Life will carry on as normal.
Disproportionate reactions (like HN is doing right now) is not good for anyone. Take a step back from politics. Take a deep breath. Take a walk outside. This isn't the end of the world.
NN is also good for people and also has bipartisan support (from constituents) but just got repealed. Yes, the sky won't fall but it is now a little darker.
"Too many poor people are showing up to hospitals without health insurance and getting treated for free, driving up the cost for everyone else. We need to FORCE them to buy health insurance or else there is a penalty!"
Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got. Change the way you talk about it, sprinkle in a couple keywords like "affordable", mix in some coverage for pre-existing conditions, and suddenly its more palatable to liberals.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
Assuming that is what you meant: just because that was not true doesn't mean that NN is not important. Granted, there is some fear mongering and worst-case thinking going on, but in the end I think that there is valid reasoning behind NN fears, just like the claims about the ACA were provably exaggerated at the time.
This kind of reminds me how the Iraq war is being used to sow distrust of the intelligence services now. Because there were mistakes made during a republican administration that was hell-bent to go to war in Iraq, we shouldn't trust them now when there is immense agreement about the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.
The pro-NN crowd have turned this complex debate over an imperfect policy to a good-versus-evil battle over flipping a single legal switch and Ajit Pai is completely fueling that.
I do think the market for ISPs has failed. Regulatory patching won't always be able to stay up to date. The government should make it easier to start an ISP.
Like what? You do realize that we're all paying $1 more a month for Netflix because Comcast decided to go "rent seeking" and throttled their traffic until they paid up? Our Netflix bills were increased shortly after. You're being fucked by anti-NN, whether you realize it or not.
What happens when they start doing things you don't like?
- Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously finally.
- Tax cuts are going to destroy the country and impoverish the middle class. In fact, the middle class will see their already staggeringly low taxes go even lower. The lower US corporate income tax rate will finally make the US more competitive with dozens of other major economies, including Britain, Ireland, China, Canada, Sweden, Finland, etc.
- Hillary lost because of Russian collusion with Trump. Over a year later, zero evidence of any of that. The only election tampering that looks to have gone on, is high ranking FBI agents & officials that were looking to throw the election in favor of Hillary. The fact is, Hillary lost because she took voters in the blue wall states for granted and refused to aggressively court them as advisers close to her recommended. It was educated white women that threw the election in Trump's favor.
- Trump wants to be a fascist dictator. No, there's zero evidence of that sort of behavior. He's a jerk, he may be a mediocre President, there's absolutely no indication he can or is in the position to seize more power. He is wildly unpopular both among the majority of polled voters and his own party (which he only joined to run for President). The odds are pretty good he's a one term President, and that one term will deliver the Senate to Democrats and rebalance things in DC.
- Trump's environmental policies are going to get us all killed and make global climate change dramatically worse. No, the few policies he has rolled back from the Obama era, will not in fact do anything meaningful as it relates to global climate change or harming the environment in the US. The dramatic shift from coal to natural gas, will continue to reduce CO2 emissions in the US, and the gradualy move to solar, wind and electric vehicles will continue with or without Trump.
- Don't know enough about tax cuts.
- "Zero evidence of any of that" is a completely ridiculous thing to say. Get out of your bubble. Try to see the world from the other POV, there are many pieces of evidence that point in this direction. If you step back from moment-to-moment politics and try to look at what's already publicly known, from a historical perspective, it's already an unbelievable scandal.
- I don't think he consciously wants to be a fascist dictator, but it's again completely ridiculous for you to say there's "zero evidence of that sort of behavior". He does many things that point in that direction, if only you look. And, concretely, he's destroying norms that keep us not-fascist, barriers are being torn down right now. That degrades our system and populace and will make it easier for future people to transgress further.
- I don't know enough about what regulations he's rolled back. But dropping out of the Paris agreement and simply not taking action for the next four years have a significant impact.
That's actually quite probable, because:
- both countries are openly hostile towards each other
- both have leaders that are mentally unstable and unpredictable.
Also, USA is the world empire AKA superpower.
Dead Comment
(You need to find better people to listen to.)
And when things get bad, what do you expect that will look like? Mad Max-style desert hellscapes?
No: It'll look pretty much like now. Except things will be a little worse. You'll have less money. Less freedom. You'll find yourself making a few more trade-offs and concessions than you were before. Harder work. Less money. And you'll wonder why there's a small ruling class that seems to get all of the gains of society. You'll wonder why things never ever seem to break in your direction anymore. Always towards them.
Oh, and fun fact:
Much of the country is already in this position. Especially in minority communities. You just happen to not be feeling it. But make no mistake that that is the future the Republican Party has envisioned for this country and is currently enacting piece by piece. Breaking net neutrality -- something that will affect the poor and downcast of society much more than it will affect you or I -- is just a piece of the puzzle.
Deleted Comment
We know the telecom companies were dumping money into the republican party to repeal NN, but I think if the Democrats were in power then Content companies would be dumping money into them. The dems just have the option of playing as sheep because they don't have enough voting power anyway.
I'm cynical that either party cares that much about the public and think that pointing fingers just allows the elites to continue their games.
Dead Comment
Then, shortly after Netflix agreed to pay Comcast's extortion money, they had to raise rates by $1 a month. So, we're all paying extortion money to Comcast. Learn some recent history before you form an opinion.
NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce.
Not completely applies and oranges, but if you don't think this is very very bad, you're not thinking.
Um, what? That's literally the opposite of NN.
No that's inaccurate. Title II reclassification happened in 2015. Verizon Netflix "throttling" (controversial what actually happened there) happened in 2017.
This is a common inaccurate argument I have seen pushed by the telcos to justify repeal.
There are many well-documented cases of how the "big 4" ISPs were increasingly blocking, redirecting (Charter's DNS redirection), interfering (injecting javascript and/or ads) and throttling traffic to internet services (Netflix) from their networks before the Title II reclassification of 2015.
All these abuses happened during a small window of a couple years between the previous FCC's Net Neutrality regulations were thrown out by the courts and 2015, when the Title II reclassification happened.
From 2010-2014 similar rules to the 2015 rules were in place, citing a different statutory basis; these ruled were struck down in 2014, with the court pointing to Title II, be basis of the 2015 rules, as the available statutory basis for the kind of rules adopted in 2010.
From 2014-2015 there were no open internet rules in place, but the industry was operating in awareness that he FCC majority was drafting new rules with similar objectives.
And FCC net neutrality policy existed from 2004-2010, working on yet a different mechanism, which was struck down by the courts in 2010.
And before that, things get complicated, because even though there was no net neutrality policy for broadband in general, there was also very little broadband of any kind, and what there was often, for much of the pre-2004 period, fell under different regulatory regimes based on the underlying technology (cable as cable, DSL under telephone related rules.)
So, perhaps none of the pre-2015 regulatory states were a disaster, but repealing the 2015 order doesn't returns us to any of those states, or even to a condition where the law would allow the FCC to reimplement them. In fact, it gets us farther from any of the 2004-2015 states than the 2015-2017 state was.
In late 2014, a court case declared the method they were enforcing didn't fall under the scope of their powers, but strongly suggested, while noting that the ISPs could and would be a danger to the internet if left to their own devices, that they had other means to enact the same regulations.
The other means was Title II classification.
Pre-2015, the FCC still had regulations to enforce net neutrality, just different ones. It was active in punishing ISPs for violating neutrality under those provisions. Verizon managed to get a court to say that those regulations were inappropriate, but the court also pointed out that if ISPs were regulated under Title II, then the FCC would have the power to set the regulations that had been de facto in place for the past decade. The FCC under Tom Wheeler immediately did just that.
The problem with this vote is that it removes all protections without replacing them with anything else. All we have now is "yeah, the FTC might look at it if it's egregious... also the ISPs promise really hard to behave themselves." It's not just that the FCC has removed the rules (although that's still incredibly important), it's that they've totally abdicated their position as the regulatory body for telecommunications.
It's something in completely its own category of nefariousness because they could be as anticompetitive as they want, and the market could not solve it.
That's because the injured party isn't their customers, who could take their business elsewhere, or at least loudly complain on the internet (if they have any).
It's someone not part to the ISP<->customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They're going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs' customers. And there's no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they've never heard about.
The result could be ISPs capturing almost every cent of value created by new startups. We will also have a fractured internet, because small companies will have to negotiate contracts with every single ISP. Also want to reach those 500,000 people in eastern Montana? That'll cost you $2,000 per week.
Anyone not living on the US coasts, and people in other countries, will constantly run into "HTTP Error 469: go suck a bag of.."
So why don't the results you predict occur in those industries? No one worries about grocery stores capturing all of the excess value from farmers because grocers have plenty of competition. No one worries about postage carriers refusing to deliver their goods because the government has promised to provide that service as a public good for a small fee.
It seems like you could solve your concerns by increasing competition among ISPs or by increasing the number of government run ISPs. I think this is still a "there's only two ISPs where I live and they both offer the same deals" type of problem.
Factor in the way that corporations have been operating over the last decades (shareholder value is the number 1 priority) and you really do have a recipe for disaster for the consumer and small businesses.
Few providers abused the privileges they had, because of some combination of uncertainty about backlash, historical precedent, and lack of organization and understanding.
The answer is, of course, yes. But people like to think in terms of black and white, ingroup and outgroup, friend and enemy. The public is now thoroughly convinced not only that the reclassification had the intended effects (and it's not clear that's the case), but that reinstating the reclassification is the only way to address the issue. Anyone who says anything against this norm will be hounded until they shut up.
The internet regulatory state before 2015 was pretty much a disaster. The early internet was de-facto neutral with a bizarro patchwork of idiosyncratic local regulations (see the quote "the internet treats censorship as damage") and a general distaste from network operators for wide-area multicast (with good reason). Neutrality became an issue with major commercialization and particularly when internet services began to compete directly with non-internet services like TV and phones.
"As detailed in the survey below, nearly every operator places limits on “commercial” use, sometimes including limits on Virtual Private Networks, as well as limits on acting as a server. Why might an operator put such a restriction on usage? Doing so obviously makes the service less attractive to consumers who might want to act in a commercial way, even in a fairly casual manner.
"The simple answer is price discrimination. That this is the case is not just intuition, but can be confirmed by company policy. As evidence we can consider Comcast’s reply in 2001 to a user who had complained about the ban on VPN usage on Comcast’s network:
"Thank you for your message. High traffic telecommuting while utilizing a VPN can adversely affect the condition of the network while disrupting the connection of our regular residential subscribers.
"To accommodate the needs of our customers who do choose to operate VPN, Comcast offers the Comcast @Home Professional product. @Home Pro is designed to meet the needs of the ever growing population of small office/home office customers and telecommuters that need to take advantage of protocols such as VPN. This product will cost $95 per month, and afford you with standards which differ from the standard residential product.
"If you’re interested in upgrading . . . ."
-- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863 [2003]
(Other examples available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S..., https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/net-neutrality-violations-hi..., and https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...).
Sometimes network providers got in trouble with their restrictions. Sometimes they were changed via customer and public pressure. Sometimes the complaints went to the government, usually the FCC. Sometimes they were addressed there, sometimes they weren't. Some providers were prevented from restrictions by agreements with the FCC, some weren't. Sometimes, something you wanted to do was impeded by your ISP or an upstream provider. Sometimes you could pay more to avoid the impediment, sometimes you couldn't. Sometimes you could change providers to avoid the restrictions. Usually not, though. (Strike that; try "Essentially always not.")
Increasing competition is a dandy idea, and it was the primary argument at the time. Unfortunately, there are two ways to do it, mostly: force utility-infrastructure plant operators (the phone network, the cable TV network, whatever) to be neutral with regards to actual service providers (which sort of worked for long-distance telephone providers, I guess), or to destroy all of the streets in America by laying more cables. Again.
Competition hasn't worked before in the US, and I'm unaware of anywhere in the world where it has worked.
The correct solution to this was to put the people responsible for approving those actions in jail for those crimes. But we didn't do that. Instead, we got net neutrality. The Rule of Law continues to be ignored in the US and with net neutrality the offending companies were simply forced to wine and dine us with a fancy dinner before deciding to fuck us whenever they wanted.