The actual statements are available here https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-addresses-unnecessary-accou...

This article went through several revisions as I did research so the original opening couple paragraphs and links got lost in the shuffle. I've added the link back in.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/13/shouts-and-murmurations/

See here on HN, lots of insightful comments from anon accounts. What do you get from FB comments section - spam from bots and subjective blabla. Please suggest to your higher up to add a proper comment section.

The sad fact is, this is yet another grim attack on net neutrality by nefarious agents who see the web as something to be dominated and bent to their will exclusivley for political and economic gain.

Like it or not, the work we do is going to become highly politicised. Are we ready for this? Do we have the moral fortitude to resist the influence that fuzzy, sloppy, and emotive politics seeks to have on our discussions?

I think back to how we handled the Brendan Eich debacle. I (regretfully) came down on the punitive side of that argument. And I participated in that debate with a level of anger and vitriol that embarrasses me now. But whichever side you took, there's no doubt that for a brief moment we were deeply divided. The Brendan Eich story was a flash in the pan compared to what is about to happen.

Should we engage in political debate, or should we avoid it? Can we buck the trend and participate in political debate in way that doesn't tear us apart, or should we ignore it as it happens around us and impacts upon our lives and work? Or is there a path between the extremes, where we can be neither ignorant to our political leanings nor beholden to them?

I don't dare offer any advice on how we should prepare ourselves for what is about to come, I just hope we can all think about how we hope to respond before it happens.

One thing I will say though, being someone prone to highly emotional reactions in all aspects of my life; developing software in teams has taught me the value of "strong opinions, weakly held".

Eventually that changed as the culture shifted to enabling and succeeding in startups. A lot of the meta culture and crowd is now many steps away from the old hacker roots and far closer to the entrepreneur /wanterpreneur group.

This latter group really isn't in it to get into a political battle, and it makes no sense to get involved in a waste of time. As a result achieving critical mass, or uniting people under political oriented architectures won't happen soon enough.

Maybe it's time to head back to /. ?

Yes and no. The question/answer is of degrees.

I can't point to a categorical set of submissions/comments to provide you with some perfect bouquet of HN circa 2008 vs 2012 or such.

Essentially it started out more as hackers figuring out how to hack becoming entrepreneurs or making things work - to entrepreneurs or startup founder babies figuring out what to do. So HN was more geeky initially, and the techie perspective of what startups are doing.

Now it's slightly more towards the startup side looking at the tech perspective.

This is all relative. If you compared HN crowd to the WSJ and it's consumers, this site would be far and ahead a site of techies talking tech stuff.

I hope this helps, because this is making a risky argument since it's subjective.

---------

Part of this is covered by basic theory of websites - initially a site has a simple good or utility, (information, expertise) and attracts only people in the know. They come to discuss their field.

Eventually, if the knowledge allows people to get ahead, your culture shifts, as more people come to the site. Your experts to normal concentration shifts. PG has a good article on this, he identifies what he calls midbrow arguments.

I bet it's more focused on geeky interests and less focused on entrepreneurial topics than it was originally. Longtime readers might sense that it's more dumbed down or diluted now, but I suspect that's really just those longtime readers themselves getting more knowledgeable over the years, and HN seeming less revelatory than it did in the past. :)

Example: it seems like everyone I know used to read Slashdot but stopped at some point when they realized how much the discussion quality had deteriorated. What's funny is how different people's timelines are. I thought Slashdot was a great resource in 1998 but felt like the quality of the comments had descended to mostly garbage by 2001. I know other people who are way smarter than me (but a few years younger) who will swear that Slashdot was awesome in 2003 when they started reading it, but lament its downfall circa 2008 or something. The biggest factor in an individual's Slashdot timeline seems to be, they loved it when they were younger, less mature, and less knowledgable, then as they got older and more experienced they started getting annoyed by it. But really, Slashdot's demographics didn't change nearly as much as they did.

Forum history and human behavior on the web is my hobby subject.

In this case I'm not saying it's become smarter or less earth shattering. I'm saying that the average focus has shifted, as a cultural shift in the community which come so here.

> Front page stories from today so far, ordered by time spent there.

> To see other days, add a day to the above URL in yyyy-mm-dd format. Example: front?day=2016-06-20.

But not to find out what HN was like initially (which was the GP's concern); try a date before 2014-11-11 and you get "We don't have this data before 2014-11-11."

Then it became some kind of political football and people were divided up on how to respond to it.

The attack comes on several levels, all of which are dependent on having at least some website/newsite which is willing to repeat your claims.

Your audience can be broken into 3 buckets (several more, but 3 is enough for a demonstration)

1) The first bucket is non-experts but intelligent. Tie them down in various plausible sounding arguments, primarily designed to appeal to people who dont't know the subject, but can make out logical sounding arguments. These people become your rank and file who serve to sound convincing and tie up experts

2) Experts - With your rank and file, tie up all people who know the subject, or increasingly develop methods to keep them distant from actual contact with people. Over simplify their arguments and try and engage Experts in the arena of PR.

3) Everyone else - show that experts are out of touch, or just lie, advertise the benefits and leave out the risks. Point out that experts are currently in debate and cant settle on the benefits (thanks to your hard work).

The general 3 steps to spreading FUD

But I think we should try to remember and go back to the fact that essentially nobody likes what the ISPs want to do at all. If we could find a more agreeable way to address it and not let it get twisted to further other agendas, I think most people could agree that it needs to be stopped.

This is dealt with by PR, advertising and focus groups.

We've spent the last decades proving that there is no soul and no ethics to be found here. Just sleazy after the fact rationalization. Morally bankruptcy extends all the way into the design of software. We abuse the unearned trust of users that have no option but to come to us for tools. And devour our own when they stray too far from the fashionable perspectives.

The end of net neutrality makes us face the possibility of someone doing to us what we did to the nobodies: forcing ourselves into the middle of their day-to-day business and instead of just facilitating what they want to do, finding every single way to extract money from that privileged position.

Like the man who worries about the possibility of his country becoming a police state to distract himself from the fact it already is, we debate topics as if our little slice of the world hasn't already been hollowed out. Even if we don't like that Eich was run out of town, the fact it happened feeds the lie we tell ourselves: that we have the ability spot actual wrongdoing and act meaningfully to stop it.

The system didn't need anything more out of Eich, so he can be disappeared over $1k to Prop 8. Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg have overseen the destruction of privacy as a human value, but they're fine and nobody cares all that much about losing it. The system needed privacy to go.

In 50, 100, 200+ years, when people look back at our time now, who do you think will be seen as more malicous? Eich or Zuck? How long until golden boys of tech turn out like Christopher Columbus? A reductionist and simplistic fairy tale about his amazing contribution to our history has eventually swung. Now all you see are people that continue to "bust myths" about this monster, long after everyone has stopped believing them.

Can I ask why? I know many sober, moral and analytic people who got themselves quite riled up and (in my eyes) burned an accused man before the facts were all in. I understand why any angry crowd saturating a company's dial-in board would make any employer say "I don't know what's right or wrong - but you are a costly employee to keep on!" To me, that seems like the opposite of justice-seeking behavior.

But, I've been told, that my views on these things are too blinkered, and I'd like hearing it from your perspective (esp. now that you've calmed down!)

In the tech community I see people rising up against any kind of movement against net neutrality. And I do not want to see it erode. But I worry that by becoming averse to any reversal, any compromise, the communities stance will eventually be so politicized that it is just another part of the unreasonable and ultra biased political landscape that grinds progress to a halt.

But for the last 30 years, both the left and the right (for both good and bad reasons) have been tearing down the very idea of legitimate elite authority, whether it's from politicians, academics, or anyone else. Who today has the moral standing to make reasonable compromises that everyone would accept?

There also exist groups whose sole purpose is to make gun ownership infeasible for the vast majority of Americans. Given this, I don't believe their position is unreasonable - the threat to their values and culture is very real.

Taken on its own and rationally, the net neutrality issue is much less amenable to producing a permanent stalemate than gun control. Existing political factions can incorporate positions on net neutrality into their existing political stalemate, but outside of such a context it's pretty easy to see that holes in net neutrality like the one here are absurd—why should smaller monopolies have more leeway to abuse their customers than large monopolies?

Not really. I think that's just your bias for net neutrality showing through.

In my opinion, because of the way internet providers have been allowed legal monopolies, net neutrality is going to be required for fair internet access as the ability for the market to determine winners and compete has been taken away by politics.

But if I was the owner of the pipes themselves? I'm not so sure I'd see it the same way. Try to think about it from another perspective. If you owned something that cost a lot of money to install that connects multiple houses together and then, years later, the government stepped in and explained how you could or could not make money off of it because everyone wants to use it, I'm not so sure you'd feel very positive about it.

Granted it's an imperfect analogy but just trying to show you that even when you think an issue is lopsided, it may not be and it can be difficult to let go of as many BIASes.

Who cares what the corporate owners feel? They're custodians of infrastructure that was built with substantial government assistance; they knew there would be strings attached, even if they expected in the near term to stay a step or two ahead of the regulators. They have every right to be disappointed when the government does its job and restrains their greed, but that disappointment has no bearing on what actually makes for good public policy. Those corporate owners you pity are taking actions that harm the public interest. The government is not solely responsible for creating the situation that requires a choice between making Comcast execs feel bad or letting Comcast wreak havoc on the Internet's economics. Comcast et al. are trying to expand the scope of their power over the utility infrastructure they manage; net neutrality regulation isn't about disallowing anything that the ISPs have a long-established history of doing, so don't imply that the government is pulling the rug out from under their existing business model.

Net neutrality is a lopsided issue. That doesn't mean that the clear right answer is a win-win situation all around. Every issue the government faces could hypothetically be dealt with in a manner that greatly enriches a chosen few, but the existence of those alternatives does not establish their validity or suitability for accomplishing the government's purpose of promoting the general welfare. If you want to call my position biased, you can't stop at merely pointing out that my preferred solution would be less than perfect for somebody, because that's true of every possible solution.

So what you're saying is that because they agreed to X terms from the government that they should have always expected for the government, later on, to add additional terms to it even in cases where they may not have accepted government assistance? You do realize there are some companies and situations in which infrastructure was entirely laid with little or no government assistance, right? I'm not saying that's common (as far as I understand it isn't) but those people paid a considerable amount of money to do that likely without expecting the government to step in and tell them what they can and cannot do with it.

You seem to have side-stepped my original point, however as I never wanted to argue which side is correct or who's side has merits. In your point of view the argument is lopsided and it's just black and white. What my respond should have shown you is that it isn't clearly black and white.

You would be better for it to try and see both side's point of view instead of completely dismissing one because "who cares what the corporate owners feel".

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

In this instance the other side is largely a tiny fraction of the population. It would be like if the other side of the gun control argument was gun manufacturers instead of millions of Americans who own guns.

This issue is lopsided in that destroying net neutrality would harm almost everyone to benefit a few thousand people.

>In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him,

It's easy to understand the goals of for-profit corporations. They exist to maximize profit. There is nothing else to understand. They will support any legislation that will increase their profit and oppose any legislation that will reduce it.

You're correct but it's irrelevant. A smaller representation does NOT make an issue lopsided in justification.

This is all highly contextual and will only lead to further, circular arguments.

> This issue is lopsided in that destroying net neutrality would harm almost everyone to benefit a few thousand people[...]It's easy to understand the goals of for-profit corporations. They exist to maximize profit. There is nothing else to understand. They will support any legislation that will increase their profit and oppose any legislation that will reduce it.

This isn't true. There are many people, not part of the corporations that are constantly referred to, that also do not want net neutrality as it gives the government control over vital, information sharing infrastructure. Remember Prism?

Not only do I see the issue as not lop sided but I see each point as being a series of trade offs. I do not see an outcome that is great for everyone in any of the available directions.

The issue is lopsided in terms of cost benefit analysis. Nothing more. The benefits to the shareholders and employees of a few corporations are vastly outweighed by the detriment to the rest of society.

Regulations change and companies have to adapt. The risk of changing regulations is part of the cost of doing business. Sure we should try minimize onerous regulation, but often there is no other viable alternative.

A hypothetical situation to illustrate this point:

A company buys land from a local government with permission to use it as a mercury disposal site. 40 years later the federal government passes a law that no new mercury can be dumped within 10 miles of a town of more than 10k people. The company has to close down the site. Sucks for the company. The owner thinks it's not fair, but the cost benefit analysis wasn't even close. In the end I'm not terribly concerned that the people affected by the disposal site weren't empathetic to the owner's plight.

>This isn't true. There are many people, not part of the corporations that are constantly referred to, that also do not want net neutrality as it gives the government control over vital, information sharing infrastructure. Remember Prism?

How does making it illegal for ISPs to favor traffic from some sources over others enable the government to take control over information sharing infrastructure?

Do fair housing laws give the government control over vital shelter providing infrastructure?

This is just a Republican talking point. There is no innate reason that net neutrality regulation should harm individual privacy. Net neutrality doesn't mean government take over of the internet.

We're arguing past each other (I had already addressed this but I digress).

> How does making it illegal for ISPs to favor traffic from some sources over others enable the government to take control over information sharing infrastructure?

Never said it would enable the government to "take control over information sharing infrastructure". Net neutrality govern by the FCC gives them powers over the internet itself that can affect not just our country but other countries as well.

This is a common talking point by the EFF folks regarding pros and cons of net neutrality.

And you completely failed to do so. All you showed was that there exists somebody who doesn't want net neutrality. You didn't even show whether they have any non-selfish reasons for that opinion. You showed the existence of opposition, not the existence of reasonable or viable opposition.

The merits of a side's arguments must be considered when judging whether an issue is largely one-sided, because it is always possible to construct unreasonable arguments against something.

I'd like to know roughly what you would consider to be sufficient justification for calling a politicized issue one-sided with respect to its public policy soundness.

That shows it isn't black and white. You can't have a group of people who has differing opinions than yours and simply write them off. There are various ways of weighing ones position. Maybe it ends up being morally wrong for a large amount of people but that still does not make it "black and white".

Very, very, very little of life is actually black and white. When you show an inability to see something from another perspective you will fail ever convincing them of your side.

> You didn't even show whether they have any non-selfish reasons for that opinion[...]You showed the existence of opposition, not the existence of reasonable or viable opposition.

Irrelevant. To many on the other side your point may not be reasonable or viable. Does that mean they are equally able to say the issue is "black and white" in their favor? No.

> I'd like to know roughly what you would consider to be sufficient justification for calling a politicized issue one-sided with respect to its public policy soundness.

I'm not sure I would call many if any issues one-sided. That's just not how life works and is incredibly rare.

What if someone wants to start an ISP, and charge less for a lower QoS band? Is that legalized extortion?

(Not to say it would be a good idea, I agree that it is a slippery slope)

Let's say we need to drop packets from my lower tier. We'd prefer to keep a good experience for those customers if possible, so it would arguably be preferable to drop lower utility packets rather than grind everyone in that tier to a halt.

If 90% of the packets were coming from streaming video, the ISP could drop them all without affecting that tier's ability to access their bank accounts.

That is really the crux of the issue, because it is very close to reality.

But setting aside the question of whether anybody would sign up for such a shitty ISP, you don't suddenly need to throw out 90% of a customer's traffic unless you're suddenly hit by a DDoS that you can't mitigate in any saner fashion. Congestion that bad will build gradually, and you'll have plenty of RTTs to send congestion signals to your customers. If a customer is running an application that is so unresponsive to congestion signals that they end up using 10x the bandwidth your backhaul has available for them, then that customer can have no reasonable expectation that any other applications remain usable. Any sane video streaming service would have lowered the resolution and then dropped the connection entirely as the congestion developed and packet loss increased.

Ignoring even that, you still haven't come up with a situation that requires non-neutral traffic management. AQMs like Stochastic Fair BLUE and Cake will automatically identify the unresponsive flow(s) and probabilistically drop those packets at whatever rate is necessary to alleviate the congestion, converging on 100% drop probability as the flow continues to behave like a DoS, while well-behaved TCP-like flows are minimally impacted (aside from a degree of congestion signalling necessary to keep their total bandwidth usage within the limit of what's available). SFB and Cake don't care about where the traffic is going other than to identify what flow it belongs to. They don't care what kind of traffic it is, they just care about how it behaves. They're neutral algorithms, and they provide a reasonable solution to the unreasonable challenge you've posed.

The ISP cannot fully rely on all parties behaving well, unfortunately. The question is: Can the ISP drop packets from this low priced tier that it knows are likely video streaming, even well behaved video streaming, over other packets? Is that acceptable, or "legalized extortion"?

Obviously it would selectively drop DOS traffic first, as you mentioned, but we are past that point.

Such a policy is not necessary for the ISP to deliver good quality of service. Content-neutral traffic management is good enough, and often better than poorly-designed discriminatory traffic management policies. There's no real upside to permitting ISPs to engage in this kind of discrimination.

What you aren't allowed to do is treat traffic of the same variety differently depending on whether the endpoint paid you money.

The people being extorted aren't even your customers they are people who want to do business with your customers.

That's certainly not what it's about. Business charge people all of the time based on what they think the customer will pay, regardless of what it costs them (see most "limited edition" versions of games, DVDs, etc).

The reason net neutrality is important is because many ISPs are effectively monopolies so there is no competition to keep them in check.

in short: it's against the internet itself...

is the internet biased?

I think the issue is rather like a court case: sure, there are 2 litigants, but in the end one is determined to be "correct" and the other loses...

if a famous data scientist publishes a research paper and I stand up naked on my desk and shout "peanut butter sandwiches!" at the top of my lungs, the peer review committee has no obligation to include my response in the process surrounding the review of said paper.

If a doctor or car mechanic gives a diagnosis in the field of their expertise, their opinion will be given more weight than if I ask a passerby their opinion on my illness or automobile.... i could go on and on making examples where 2 or more "sides" may appear wishing representation and where they don't necessarily warrant/merit it.

one has no obligation to represent litigants as holding an equal stature in validity, it's the a-priori presumption of the possibility of such that allows people to initially listen and nod, before one makes them aware of how bat-poo crazy one is, lol

This is definitely the most unique argument I've heard in favor of net neutrality

But the two get muddled quite a bit.. and what happened between Verizon and Netflix is an outright shame, but I can kind of see both sides regardless of where I stand personally. The trouble is where to draw the line, and what lines to draw from a legal standpoint.

Drawing only from what I got from the article, they're only requiring these companies to be more transparent to their customers, and I'm all for that. I think the 100k customer break was probably reasonable, but even the 250k break won't affect the really big players in the space.

My bigger fear is where individual states are legislating against local communities/cities offering broadband.

You've been misled. Filtering isn't necessary. If a user is contributing to congestion on an oversubscribed line, you can drop some of their packets to reduce their usage to a fair share, without having to single out any specific types of traffic. ISPs don't have to be non-neutral in order to keep their service running. This is true at any scale, which is why having an exception for smaller ISPs is completely unjustified and is nothing but a foot in the door for those who would dismantle net neutrality entirely. Raising the pointless threshold is just a step toward that anti-consumer goal.

Neutrality doesn't prohibit charging for utilization.

This is about ISPs having unfair power to manipulate a market that isn't even part of their core business. Traffic carriers shouldn't have control over the competitive landscape for content providers.

Traffic shaping of saturated links sounds like a waste of time and resources when it's so much easier to just upgrade the hardware. It's cheaper too! It also happens to be the fucking purpose of the ISP (to provide adequate bandwidth for their customers).

Think of how much it costs to pay people to manage an incredibly complicated traffic ruleset--not to mention the massively increased CPU overhead--versus a one-time hardware purchase.

What you're talking about is either an ISP that's dying and can't afford to upgrade their shit or a greedy evil monster that simply wants to extract more profit from existing infrastructure in the most obtuse and invasive way possible.

This is a very naive comment. For anything other than a dedicated "business class" circuit with hard performance guarantees, speculation and shaping is involved in delivering the end product.

The alternative to a connection with a SLA guarantee is a best effort connection, not discriminatory traffic shaping. Underprovisioning part of your network doesn't require you to show favoritism to certain traffic—the normal way to cope with larger than expected usage is to just start dropping packets where there's congestion. That doesn't imply or require traffic shaping.

And lo and behold, that's what ISP's have always offered to consumers. There's a reason connections are always advertised as "up to 50Mbps" instead of "50 Mbps", hell, even my "business" connection with the local cable company has absolutely no guarantee beyond "we'll have someone out to repair your service within 4 hours".

Another possibility: as a major ISP nears network capacity, they can implicitly (or explicitly, depending on law) solicit revenue streams from Youtube and many others for "priority access" to their somewhat- or completely-captive customer base. Eventually, secondary tiers are created to efficiently segment the content market -- a priority plan conveniently sized for every budget. Those who can't or won't pay fall into an ever decreasing performance category as the priority slices are snatched up.

The ISP then starts selling premium bundles on the customer side -- Platinum Service will include Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Apple (and get our bonus in-house streaming service at no extra charge!). Platinum-Plus, for another $14.95 per month plus fees, adds priority streams from your choice of up to three major sports content sources. And Platinum-Pro adds non-degraded VPN so you can work from home. Choice!

The ISP is monetizing the fact that they're NOT adding capacity. Eventually they can choose to take the hit to their numbers and make that investment, but they'll do so within the now-normal tiered framework -- offering new capacity and premium deals at the top of the stack, rather than letting the bottom free-ride into better service.

http://web.archive.org/web/20160405105037/http://blog.level3...

Both networks had plenty of capacity internally; the bottleneck was a single router at each interconnect location which Verizon refused to upgrade.

Don't you mean the heavily regulated market we have now that prevents new ISPs from easily servicing customers? The entire reason ISPs can behave like this is because customers realistically have no alternatives.

Look at how Comcast behaved in markets where Google Fiber showed up. They often increased bandwidth and reduced prices effective immediately to try to keep customers. An 'unfettered market' would be one where an ISP doesn't have to spend years negotiating with city councils just to get the privilege to put fiber in utility tunnels where local cable companies already have it.

Google, who has enough cash to pay for nearly half of the entire Comcast company, was not able to rollout fiber to the area because of government regulations.

Why do you think they started in Kansas City of all places? It wasn't because they thought that was the strongest market for fiber in the country. It was because they actually convinced the government to let them bring fiber to peoples' homes.

>Government intervention akin to local loop unbundling would be necessary to create a freely competitive market where one will not naturally develop.

While this would make it even cheaper to get into the market, there is no proof that a market wouldn't develop if the government wasn't already intervening to make it so difficult to build networks.

Local governments aren't completely undemocratic. If the local government is hesitant to let corporations start digging up the streets and yards, it's likely that the residents are similarly hesitant to invite that sort of disruption. How many people are actually eager to have a second gigabit-capable cable buried through their yard? Whether or not the federal government intervenes, there will always be barriers to an upstart ISP. Yes, with all local restrictions usurped, a company as large as Google can certainly deploy new infrastructure to select markets where there's sufficient demand for a more reasonable alternative to the incumbent ISP. But that's still a far cry from a functioning competitive market. Who would fund construction of a third set of cables, or the sixth? Even with local restrictions removed, how much capital does it take to build a competitive ISP from scratch (keeping in mind that Google wasn't quite starting from scratch)?

In the most pedantic sense, there's obviously no proof that a functioning competitive marketplace would develop, but we are talking about a real natural monopoly, and that means something. Building last-mile infrastructure is very expensive. Each new competitor faces much worse prospects for recouping their initial investment, much more resentment from their prospective customers, and the incumbent(s) can always undercut you at the drop of a hat. Given the choice, the customers would vastly prefer a local loop unbundling solution—it doesn't have the high costs of building redundant infrastructure, it doesn't make a mess of the town, and it leads to the same end result of diverse choices for services.

It's significant, but it's often done in cities that don't have this regulation problem (see most high-density cities around the world with sane access to cabling tunnels). Or, if you take it to the extreme the other direction, look at all of the municipal fiber projects that end up working out. If a municipality can pay for it, certainly a company would be able to as well.

Laying fiber requires labor, but many of the service tunnels already exist so the only digging required is the last bit from the street to the customer's house.

There is an entire industry designed to help finance capital-intensive projects. Just because you can't do something with a text editor and a compiler in your basement doesn't mean it can't be done.

>but we are talking about a real natural monopoly

No we aren't. Trying to build up an ISP is 95% lobbying local governments. It's only 'natural' in the sense that it's a government created monopoly.

>much more resentment from their prospective customers

You wouldn't be pulling fiber to peoples' homes if they weren't already signing up (see the google fiber rollout mechanism).

>Given the choice, the customers would vastly prefer a local loop unbundling solution

Not if it means the best they can get is 5 mbps over cables that were laid to homes 20 years ago. If your city is filled with a bunch of NIMBYS, they are just as likely to vote down a bond or whatever it takes to raise money to lay in new fiber.

"We throttle speeds to several streaming services. Pay only 5$ a month to get unlimited Spotify and YouTube"

I don't care whether YouTube directly builds out backbone capacity or whether they outsource that to Level 3.

Incumbent last-mile providers enjoy a privileged position that gives them unfair bargaining power over end users. They should not be allowed to decide which content providers and applications get to have a successful business model. If anybody gets to pick winners and losers like that, it should be a democratically elected government, but it would be far better to just prohibit last-mile providers from imposing unfair artificial limits or costs.

If T-Mobile wants to make a deal with YouTube to provide a subsidized video streaming service with dedicated bandwidth to guarantee a certain level of video quality, then that service should be billed and provisioned separately from their common-carrier Internet and phone services. If they want this YouTube streaming service to be wireless, then they should have to acquire a separate spectrum license from the FCC and convince the FCC why a dedicated YouTube service deserves a slice of the public's limited RF spectrum when there are other video providers on the public Internet that would be disadvantaged.

Isn't it the proper authority of the FTC or DOJ to enforce anticompetitive behavior? Do we need the FCC also dipping in to impose penalties on firms who may have already spent a lot of money in the spectrum auction?

What privileges does winning the spectrum auction permit companies?

To your last point, what if T-Mobile showed that by following its preferred QoS scheme it actually transferred more information over its last mile link?

Economic incentives typically reward the highly efficient use of a resource. Being able to get an extra bushel of corn from an acre of land is one example, as is being able to get an extra Megabyte of data over a pipe each hour.

In the case of residential bandwidth packages, the metric for how effectively an ISP is maximizing the available resource should simply be its own competitive choices. Should T-Mobile sacrifice $1M in profit each month simply so that any customers who happen to be using an obscure protocol can get slightly better service?

It seems that Net Neutrality is akin to the government forcing corn farms to plant 25% of their fields with different crops, just in case anyone wants to buy them, and to force those farmers to offer them for sale even if they don't believe anyone wants to buy them.

I think if we want to go down the path of the fine-grained allocation of the spectrum as a public good, there would be large scale, sweeping changes that we'd make. Why should we waste spectrum broadcasting over-the-air TV in 1080i? Why should soap operas be broadcast in full quality or even broadcast at all? Why should anyone have LTE bandwidth when some people can't afford 2G?

That is very obviously not even close to being the right metric. All you need to do is find the one customer with their laptop tethered and running Backblaze or bittorrent, and give him all the bandwidth. Don't bother slicing up the airtime to serve other customers, because that'll just reduce the total data rate.

> Should T-Mobile sacrifice $1M in profit each month simply so that any customers who happen to be using an obscure protocol can get slightly better service?

Yes, unless they're prepared to stop advertising it as an Internet connection. If they're all allowed to be an "Internet service provider" that is really just a HTTP(s) service provider, then we're shutting out any invention that isn't well-suited to what T-Mobile can double-charge for—any P2P application, incompatible but superior successors like QUIC, and more specialized protocols like SCTP. Technologies that are obscure today could be lucrative and more resource-efficient next year, if allowed to blossom.

That half of it isn't the problem, and I doubt anyone would argue against reasonable things that make it easier for a provider to increase their network capacity.

The problem is what it does to YouTube's competitors: they now suffer because YT can afford to ask T-Mobile to make their traffic more important.

But simply by virtue of YouTube's market share, an economic incentive exists to install backbone links that help route YouTube's traffic (as opposed to others'). In other words, if two backbone links might be installed, the one whose outcome makes access to Youtube more reliable is more likely to be installed than one that makes unknown startup's service more reliable.

In other words, network topology adapts to traffic demand (albeit more slowly than traffic shaping).

A fair traffic management policy would allow for YouTube users to consume bandwidth in exact proportion to their share of overall demand for bandwidth. Traffic shaping on top of that could only have the effect of meaning that a YouTube user will get more bandwidth than their Netflix-using neighbor even if they're both paying for the same service and both content providers have CDN nodes at the same local peering point. That's not adapting to demand, that's artificially distorting the market.

I think this statement is in effect a straw man, since the relevant consideration for QoS is the timing of consuming that bandwidth.

If you mean instantaneous bandwidth, then you are saying that both Youtube customers and Netflix customers should be able to use a circuit that they primarily use for watching video to also be equally optimized for real time protocols.

If you argue that a VOIP customer should be able to place a call with the absolute minimal latency the network can provide, even if it means that video content will (on average) buffer for an extra second, that is not an example of a fair system, just one that is extremely friendly to VOIP.

Why shouldn't someone be able to start a Skype competitor that offers latency characteristics for audio calls that rivals POTS latency? As it stands, Skype unusable for low latency coms both because of protocol/codec design and typical network characteristics.

So, I think that unless you enthrone modern "typical" characteristics as ideal then it's hard to argue that imposing restrictions of what shaping approaches can and should be utilized is somehow qualitatively neutral, rather than simply benefitting incumbent interests.

> If you argue that a VOIP customer should be able to place a call with the absolute minimal latency the network can provide, even if it means that video content will (on average) buffer for an extra second, that is not an example of a fair system, just one that is extremely friendly to VOIP."

That's the real straw man. The current state of the art for QoS is active queue management that both increases effective link utilization and reduces latency to a point that VoIP is usable, as compared with naive FIFO queuing with tail drops when the queues are full. That's why I said QoS isn't a zero-sum game. In the real world, you don't actually have to choose between throughput and latency; both can be good enough for what people normally want to do. VoIP traffic doesn't cost enough bandwidth to have a significant impact on Netflix video quality, and firing up a Netflix stream doesn't have to produce queuing latencies that make VoIP unusable. And none of this requires any traffic shaping rules that deliberately identify what's video or VoIP—that's an objective criteria for "neutral" that doesn't force ISPs to use naive sub-optimal traffic management.

True, so why is net neutrality necessary then? Do you think ISPs are making this possible out of the goodness of their hearts?

I'd argue that their profit motive has made this happen because it's what consumers demand, and the internet (protocols and services) has changed rapidly enough that entrenched patterns have not really emerged.

But the current situation, where they sell "up to" whatever the last mile will sustain and then don't ever upgrade backbones, don't add interconnects, that particular fraud can not go on. A market doesn't work when vendors can sell you a product, lock you in and face no repercussions when they don't deliver even 10%.

Traffic shaping has always been essential. Bandwidth has never been infinite, and there's always been latency vs. bandwidth tradeoffs that need to be managed.

Dropping packets has always been necessary. Traffic shaping has never been necessary, and modern fair AQM algorithms are a net win to both throughput and latency relative to the most commonly deployed congestion management strategies, so that latency vs bandwidth tradeoff is far more illusory than you think.

I mean, I never experienced anything like that but geniunely curious if it is a thing (Might be possible in AWS lambda etc.)

At this point its blatant monopolistic anti-consumerism.

And then there's "Comcast allowed to bundle internal video streaming platform with bandwidth in order to compete against Netflix"

It's completely trivial for the FCC to allow the former and clamp down hard on the latter.

For example, Apple has so far been allowed to bundle Apple apps with phones, forbid any competing apps, and require developers to distribute apps through the App Store.

Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if satellite and wireless Internet were offered as evidence of sufficient competition in the market.

What everyone is worried about is that ISPs will threaten to "shape" Netflix traffic unless Netflix pay them - straightforward extortion. Or zero-rate Facebook traffic while counting use of independent non-Facebook news sources against users' quotas.

The way ISPs will extract money is by nominally creating a two -tiered network. The lower tier will be the default tier. All external traffic will be routed over it by default. Entities like NetFlix will be able to pay the ISP to have their traffic routed over higher tier. The higher tier will have better latency, will be charged against an end-users throughput meter at a discounted rate, or both.

It will be a form of hidden price discrimination and thus a form of hidden tax on the market. price discrimination is usually a good thing, and even a hidden tax isn't per se bad. The reason this is bad is it will allow the ISPs to extract far more wealth from the Internet than they would ever add by improved and cheaper service.

A free market requires transparency in pricing between Alice and Bob. If Mallory can insert herself between Alice and Bob, she can obscure pricing signals. That means Bob will have a more difficult time assessing the worth of services provided him by Mallory and Alice. That also implies he'll have trouble assessing the value proposition of competitors to Alice and Mallory.

Comcast may try to extort money from Netflix, but alot of people assume that in the long-run Netflix would benefit from the tactic. They have a huge first-mover advantage. Comcast would never be able to provide a service like Netflix as well as Netflix does. The result will be that while Comcast may extract profits from Netflix, Netflix and other incumbents will have less competition and in the long-term might even benefit relative to net neutrality. Comcast will effectively provide a moat for Netflix and other incumbents in the form of higher barrier to market entrance for startups, as the incumbents will pay an effectively cheaper per-byte rate (much cheaper than in a net neutrality world) given their huge volume. Furthermore, incumbents will be a cash-cow to the ISPs, creating significant incentive to be hostile to competitors.

The losers will be consumers, prospective competitors, and overall technological and market vibrancy. But all of this will, again, be largely hidden. The solution is simple, obvious, fair, well-understood, but stark, especially in the context of a conservative narrative about regulation. It also has tons of precedent going back hundreds of years in terms of the legal and economic study of common carriers. The end-to-end principle of networks is conceptually related, too. The malady will be an obscure low-grade fever that saps value and weakens competitiveness, but will largely go ignored over time, after which people will wonder why the pace of innovation slowed down so much.

It seems a lot of people are invested in muddying the difference.

QoS refers to packet shaping by type of content.

If anything, it would be the reverse.. HTTP and TCP (which doesn't care if its packets arrive out of order) getting deprioritized in the face of streaming content (which does). That kind of blows your restriction away. QoS under heavy load is the difference between everybody getting to use their apps and one or two people getting to use their apps.

Thing is, there's no successful ISP in the world that has enough capacity to service maximum bandwidth from all of their customers at the same time. There's always going to be a fudge factor worked in, and QoS to help out when that goes wrong.

But you're still missing the main point, which is that good QoS doesn't need rules that single out and privilege or deprioritize any specific classes of traffic. Discrimination rulesets are obsolete. A network with good AQM at points of potential congestion will support full bandwidth utilization with sufficiently low latency for applications like VoIP and gaming, which can coexist alongside video streaming and bulk file transfers. QoS can be both effective and neutral with respect to content type and transport and destination.

Bad obsolete QoS shouldn't be used as an argument against net neutrality regulations. If it happens that net neutrality regulations both prohibit unfair business practices and require ISPs to fix broken congestion management, that's a good thing.

In a dollar-shaped traffic paradigm, you might slow down traffic even when your link is 3/4 empty, in order to maximize profits.

I don't think very many of the net-neutrality zealots have much technical understanding of internetworking or how ISP business models work.

Anything other than a dedicated, business class circuit has a lot of shaping and speculation baked in. This is why "residential" bandwidth is so much cheaper than dedicated.

One commenter last time this came up mentioned that the best practice for residential bandwidth providers is to have 50% headroom. As QoS algorithms get better, and traffic patterns are better understood, the amount of headroom ISPs need to buy will decrease, or it will get cheaper (as upstream providers arbitrage into a peak / off-peak (expected vs unexpected) model.

The thing we need to preserve about ISP incentives is that there should always be an incentive to improve network quality.

However for networks, quality is in the eye of the beholder. If your customers want to download 4K movies, maybe 1000ms of latency is not a big deal.

But if they want to do remote screen sharing or gaming (where even small latency is noticeable) then 1000ms latency would cause the ISP to go out of business.

The technical aspect of this that many people miss is that the same piece of cable can support very different traffic patterns (often but not always) AT THE EXPENSE OF other ones. Net neutrality seemingly advocates having lawyers and politicians come up with the "correct" shaping for all traffic, with no knowledge of what an ISP's customers want to use the circuit for, and no knowledge of what protocols might become popular next year.

Net Neutrality advocates want politicians and lawyers to effectively force ISPs to support a QoS that is closer to some unspecified ideal which those pols and lawyers have no idea about. They are simply being pressured/hired to do something they are clueless about, which helps some businesses and hurts others.

Google wants net neutrality because all service providers prefer that others bear the cost of delivering their content to end users. All content providers would generally agree.

But last mile providers would disagree, because they are faced with spikes in demand and growing/shrinking user-bases and are fighting not just against the price of bandwidth but the technological limits imposed by cable modems, LTE, etc. They would rather not have added constraints placed upon them (which will add costs).

While someday it may be necessary to prevent predatory QoS schemes from being imposed, there is not an adequate level of sophistication in regulators to trust them to create wise regulation in this area.

QoS isn't always a zero-sum game. Even non-interactive HTTP downloads benefit from reduced queuing latency, because TCP congestion control is more accurate when it gets timely feedback. On the flip side, explicit rules to never drop packets matching a certain signature often produces a negative sum game, and one that is easily abused.

True, I didn't mean to imply that. Just that if you have a network cable the QoS can be used in a lot of different ways to maximize the amount of information going over the cable, and that not all optimization schemes can be used at the same time.

Google network neutrality then come back.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_500_telephone#Ownership_...

Armchair technologists read an article about net neutrality on arstechnica and think it's black and white. News flash - telecom and ISP's have been shaping traffic since the beginning! You think NetFlix has high quality video on shitty connections because they are nice? Wrong! They pay for the privilege.[0]

I say, let the free market decide. The history of telecom is beyond insane. If you actually care about this stuff maybe you should learn more. This book is pretty esoteric but it gives the true history https://www.amazon.com/Great-Telecom-Meltdown-Fred-Goldstein...

[0]https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304834704579401...

This doesn't seem that arduous to me. The article estimates regulatory compliance will only take 6.8 hours.

>I say, let the free market decide.

Is that not the point of this regulation? It provides more information to consumers so they are better able to decide. Free markets only work when there is transparency about what is being bought and sold.

>I am involved with 2 MVNO's that have been trying to merge for over a year...

This has nothing to do with the regulatory rollback in the article.

>Armchair technologists...

We can discuss without getting bent out of shape.

How do you imagine there would be competition in, say, fibre? A bunch of companies all running their own last mile? That's incredibly inefficient.

Also, nobody advocating for "treating telecom like a utility" is actually advocating for that. Try looking up the cost of a county water/sewer hookup sometime. It's not free, and your $50/month water bill doesn't pay for it. I'm paying off a $30,000 bill to get "public utility" water and sewer access. That's pretty typical.

If we required every house builder to pay thousands of dollars up front to install fiber people would be frothing at the mouth.

Also, fiber would probably be pretty cheap once the infrastructure was already in place. A single phase overhead power line is often provided for free to new homes and underground service runs about $3.50/foot so I imagine fiber would be similarly cheap.

http://www.lincoln-twp.org/forms%20policies/New%20Water%20Co...

$2,520 is what they charge for water; not sure what it is for wastewater - they may not have a public sewer system - but it's about $3,500 where I live. It used to be $150 (seriously, not a typo) and people got really upset when they raised it by a few thousand dollars all at once a few years ago.

I guess it's not a very densely-populated area and the state is surrounded by water so that might explain why it's so cheap.

https://arstechnica.com/business/2015/08/how-a-small-city-of...

Assuming the city can get a 4% bond, and depreciates the asset over 20 years, about $27 of that $40 goes just to depreciation and interest.

That cost is actually fairly typical. What isn't typical is an 83% uptake rate. Average for municipal providers is about 54%, and average for private FTTH providers like Verizon is 30-35%. If your uptake rate is 35% instead of 83%, your monthly cost in depreciation and interest alone jumps to $64. That's before the cost of bandwidth, maintenance, customer service, etc., which typically eats up about half the monthly bill.

The only reason you could connect "any lawful device" after 1968 was because of the FCC "Carterphone" rulemaking.

In its absence, Ma Bell would have kept forced leasing of standard phones as long as possible. Perhaps I'm misunderstand you (or missing sarcasm?).

Isn't more competition among providers what we want? Shouldn't we be doing everything we can – even if it's saving 6.8 hours per year in regulatory compliance – to help these smaller guys be able to take on these horrible behemoths like AT&T and Comcast?

Ajit Pai's FCC will be better for business, incumbent businesses like Comcast, AT&T, or Verizon, who'd rather not actually pay for network engineers, sysadmins, or software developers, and just sit there raking in cash, without owing anything to the communities they're in.

Reduced-cost access for people that can't afford it was the first thing on the chopping block, as well as for schools and libraries. Next up is net neutrality; this is undoubtedly the first move of many on this front.

In other news today, laws subjecting ISPs like Comcast and AT&T to get permission from you, before sharing browsing history, location, and other sensitive data. Don't be fooled, Ajit Pai's FCC is a friend to big business.

What I've noticed is that almost every FCC decision since Pai took over has been spun as weakening net neutrality, which I think is incorrect and unfair.

A positive decision is one that removes regulation or protects us from the government.

A negative decision is one that adds regulation or protects incumbents in the industry.

We can disagree on that, but we probably agree on the bigger issue: keeping a free and open internet. I want that as much as you probably do, I just don't believe government should play the role of guardian of the internet.

I see this specific decision as positive because it removes one more (albeit small) hurdle from competitors entering the market. Believe it or not, but all of this regulation protects the AT&Ts and Comcasts because they already have the infrastructure to comply. But a small, scrappy startup? It's hard enough building a quality service, but even harder when you have to devote a large chunk of time and money to even qualifying to play.

This is then kind of thing you see in authoritarian states and rather chilling.

In this case, I personally came to the comments to say exactly what the top comment said: This is raising the subscriber compliance limit from 100k to 250k. Nothing to see here. No "threat" to net neutrality at all, except if you're trying to sensationalize it.

I'm more worried about net neutrality when it's giant companies like Verizon or Comcast. Not so much about the compliance of smaller companies, who:

1. Aren't big enough fish to cause the kinds of problems with product adoption that most of the net neutrality worst-case scenarios depict.

2. Aren't big enough to cut the deals with larger content suppliers that net neutrality is trying to prevent.

3. Frequently are barely able to survive at those scales, so the extra regulatory burden isn't actually worth cutting into their meager profits.

I am certainly not a shill, nor spreading propaganda for any one or any industry. I'm a software developer who works in a completely unrelated industry to telecom.

Look, we probably agree on the primary issue here: to maintain a free and open internet. I dislike the AT&Ts and Comcasts as most do here, and I choose not to do business with them.

Where we likely disagree is how to maintain a free and open internet. I don't believe the government should play that role, as they often (in my opinion) push for more and more control once their foot is in the door. That's not what I want.

> This is then kind of thing you see in authoritarian states and rather chilling.

No, actually, throwing labels like "shill" and "propaganda" at someone to discredit them and squelch their desire to speak freely is what you find in authoritarian states.

Every time I post an opinion that goes against the net neutrality norm, I'm accused of being an agent of the FCC or telecom industry.

Can I not hold an opinion that differs from the norm? I posted (in my opinion) a question to provoke thought and discussion in a completely non-trolling, non-harassing, non-toxic way.

> To overthrow or destroy (a government or an established order or authority).

Note the part in parenthesis, which is exactly why I chose the name for my site. I do not like the FCC, nor government in general.

How does that square with my original comment? In my view, one less government regulation is a step in the right direction. I want government to stop forcing itself into the role of regulator of the internet.

You’re attacking person, not argument, and rather ineffectively.

EDIT: Okay, you meant someone else. Still, calling someone with almost 10 year active account a shill requires more evidence than this. Stick to the facts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13565023

The reason I have a 43 day post history is because that's how long my site of the same name has been in existence. I've been a long-time reader of HN and commented (albeit rarely) under my own name for many years.

The reason many of my comments and submissions have been net neutrality related is because it's exactly the type of topic that my site deals with: technology and freedom. In addition to privacy, free speech & censorship, cryptocurrency & blockchain, etc.

I find this “shillcalling” very annoying, but I understand where it’s coming from. If you look at Reddit, for example, it has been an entire two weeks of constant “Bill Gates is great” posts. Astroturfing is out of control.

At the same time it makes discussion impossible. I have myself been called a “shill” on several occasions now (not here), just by disagreeing with the narrative slightly. Any dissent is now seen with suspicion which just pushes everyone more and more to the extremes.

Since you made a post about machine learning assisted moderation, I am wondering if you thought about how ML could be used to bring back discussion to a neutral, or at least merit-based scoring?

It seems everyone wants to apply ML to the content itself (like Perspective), but wouldn’t it be more effective to instead use ML to assign weight to the ratings? For every topic there must exist a subset of people that can judge it by its merit, without immediately succumbing to their biases. It seems if you could identify that subset of users, and weight their scoring more (and that subset might be different per topic), then it should be possible to avoid the usual traps of popularity-based scoring systems, including astroturfing and vote manipulation.

What do you think?

Only at some levels. Physical last-mile connectivity is a natural monopoly; we shouldn't want more than one trench along each driveway. If an ISP has a local monopoly that only covers one city rather than a whole state, that doesn't change the dynamics of what's fair to their users.

You share a loop with the whole neighborhood.

I've heard people claim it is possible, but I'm not really sure how.

Phone companies just need to invest in putting the DSL modems closer to the households, say at the neighborhood cabinet rather than the switching station. A literal mile is too far. VDSL2 can do 100Mb/s in each direction at 500 meters, and there's no bandwidth contention with your neighbor. And VDSL2 is extremely mature, hardly the state of the art. By comparison, at the office I pay $450/month for dedicated 100Mb/s fiber service from Cogent. And the POTS infrastructure is just about as reliable--which is to say, very reliable.

I live in San Francisco, which is already extremely dense. AT&T owns the POTS system, but they refuse to put in the investment. My switching station is almost 2 miles away. I finally got fiber from Sonic.net. They're investing in hanging fiber over much of the westerner half of the city at a time when AT&T is hemming and hawing about upgrading their cabinets. And interestingly, my fiber service runs straight to that switching station 2 miles away.

The only reason cable dominates is because the phone companies aren't interested in competing. AT&T and Verizon own a huge amount of the POTS infrastructure, but are entirely focused on mobile and cable. It's a ridiculous state of affairs having so much infrastructure managed by the same oligopoly. When I cancelled Comcast and told them I was only paying $40/month for Gigabit fiber there was a long pause--he was absolutely incredulous. Was it a promo price, he asked. (No.) He knew there was no chance of retaining me as a customer.

The dedicated last hop bandwidth of DSL sounds nice, but in practice the shared nature of DOCSIS usually isn't a problem and when it is the solution is no more expensive or invasive than what DSL requires up front for every neighborhood.

I agree DOCSIS has been good enough. But with the shift to services like Hulu and NetFlix I would argue that it's nearing a threshold. And even if it weren't, I bet if a telephone company had somebody as highly motivated as Elon Musk, they'd be able to eat their local cable company's lunch.

The cable company has always had the most bang for the buck. It's something like 60Mb down at about $1/Mb. The phone company is the underdog that gets you from under the thumb of the cable company at a lower speed. It's something like 25Mb down at about $1.50/Mb. Satellites are basically a last resort. I can't recall speeds, but it's abysmally slow at a high price. That's nothing new though.

The local ISP is something that I've always wanted to go with, but they never have the speeds. It's always some form of ADSL capped at around ~15Mb down and ~1.4Mb up somewhere between $1 to $1.50/Mb down.

Your two real choices are cable or phone company, and if you go with the phone company, you pay more for less while still under the stranglehold of a large carrier.

So yes, I could choose to use AT&T, but I would be getting substantially worse service. All cities should be investing in building out infrastructure themselves, as it would increase the desire for companies and people to live and work where they have better connectivity.

SF is flush right now, which makes it particularly outrageous that it doesn't invest in infrastructure. But SF's behavior also tells you how cities got so deeply in debt with nothing to show for it.

E.g. in Maryland, nothing precludes Baltimore from building its own broadband network. It just has no money. Ditto Chicago, or New York. The laws applying to Philadelphia or anywhere in California shouldn't really stop construction either.

The NIMBY is strong in San Francisco. Apparently, even the imposition of the above-ground junction boxes are too much for people here, and so, once again, "We are why we can't have nice things."

Even — if not especially — in a place like San Francisco.

My choices, where I live, are Comcast and DSL (I'm just out of LoS for Monkeybrains). So I give Sonic money every month for a pretty hideous dollar:bandwidth ratio, comparatively, because that's still better than Comcast, in my book.

I say this every time and no one has ever been able to answer: how is a simple "don't prioritize traffic" some kind of competition-killing regulation, and how would removing it actually create competition anyway?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with, for instance, a content provider handing an ISP a box that sits on their network, mirrors/caches content, and serves it up to that ISP's customers. That helps the content provider, the ISP, and the ISP's customers. And I don't think the majority of "net neutrality" advocates want to break that.

When people talk about "net neutrality", the problems they have in mind tend to look like either an ISP extorting content providers to extract extra revenue, or an ISP giving their own first-party services an advantage by deliberately degrading third-party services. For instance, see Comcast and Netflix.

But even then, how do you draw a bright line between "deliberately degrading", "not giving an advantage to", and "not doing anything to address bandwidth problems when they arise"? (Comcast could claim the latter regarding Netflix, even though it seems obvious what it means when they don't arrange additional bandwidth on those saturated links.) What if the ISP provides the CDN infrastructure, rather than the content provider? What if the ISP contracts with a third-party CDN?

How would you suggest writing a regulation that doesn't break CDNs and similar, and that can tell the difference between "deliberately hurting" and "not helping"? How will that regulation adapt when people come up with new ideas to make the web faster?

(One angle I could imagine working: limiting the ability of one company or family of companies to run both an ISP and network services via that ISP. Still hard to write something robust, though.)

...until the ISP decides to charge a large amount of money for the ability to do that, and then under-provision their peering links so that there is no other way to have adequate performance.

But there is a simple way to fix that. Require last mile ISPs to do free peering with anyone who has traffic for their last mile customers. If you bring traffic directly to their local central office, they have to take it and deliver it up to the speed that they've sold to their customers.

Then they can offer all the CDN service they like, which people will use as long as they're charging market rates but decline and rely on peering (and install their CDN equipment across the street) if they try to charge monopoly prices.

The latter is the primary problem here.

> Require last mile ISPs to do free peering with anyone who has traffic for their last mile customers.

What does "last mile ISP" mean here? DSL is no longer competitive, and most implementations of cable and fiber have no separation between "infrastructure provider" and "bandwidth provider".

> If you bring traffic directly to their local central office, they have to take it and deliver it up to the speed that they've sold to their customers.

What if their central office isn't connected to anyone else directly, because they get all their bandwidth and peering from one or more of the major backbones? Presumably they can say "go to those backbones", rather than having to start making peering arrangements with individual services.

> but decline and rely on peering (and install their CDN equipment across the street) if they try to charge monopoly prices

What if their central office doesn't have an "across the street" where you can put servers? Or what if they don't have a "central office", period?

All legal matters are complicated, but we're a modern society full of a lot of bright people and "free market lol ISPs get to be highway robbers now" doesn't seem like the best we can do.

I also disagree with the notion that inconveniencing some billionaires is less moral than hurting millions of consumers and setting a horrible precedent, so: regulate the shit out of them. If poor people can bootstrap huge medical bills then ISPs can handle some simple regulation.

e: you didn't make that point about prioritizing rich over poor etc, that was directed more broadly at net neutrality opponents

I think the fundamental problem here is that in most locations we don't have a market at all, free or otherwise. We're looking at all these restrictions in an effort to work around the fundamental problem of "people have little to no choice in ISPs". If you're going to have one ISP in an area and regulate its behavior heavily, you might as well just have the government run it. (Note: that's not a recommendation.)

I'd be entirely in favor of solving the problem by saying "last-mile infrastructure (from customers all the way to the nearest meet-me room) is a public utility, all ISPs have to remain separate from the last-mile infrastructure". If the average customer had a choice of half a dozen or more ISPs, none of these problems would arise, because any ISP stupid enough to make services deliberately worse would get dropped in favor of ISPs that don't. ISPs could then compete on everything from services provided, customer service, neutrality, geek-friendliness, IPv6 availability, CDNs/mirrors, or anything else they think people want.

Why do you think turning ISPs into dumb pipes only would not fix most, if not all, problems?

The reason we have all these problems is that the ISPs do not want to be dumb pipes only.

Dumb pipes don't come with email addresses.

Dumb pipes serve YouTube more slowly, and might not have the capacity for HD/4K video. (Look at what server the video comes from; if you're on a major ISP, the server name likely has your ISP's name in it.)

Dumb pipes serve Netflix more slowly.

Dumb pipes can't hold as many customers.

Dumb pipes might not get as many customers.

Dumb pipes cost more.

Personally, I'd like a dumb pipe only as far as the nearest major datacenter, and then quite a lot of smarts in that datacenter. I don't just want a raw connection to a major bandwidth provider, though.

See also the last paragraph of my previous reply: I'd be in favor of separating out the "dumb pipe" as a utility, and then having ISPs operate independently from that. I think that would solve the majority of the problems.

Yes, they do. That's exactly what they want. A dumb pipe that transports their bits and nothing more.

I'm omitting your list about dumb pipes, as nothing you write has anything to do with dumb pipes and is all completely wrong.

> Personally, I'd like a dumb pipe only as far as the nearest major datacenter, and then quite a lot of smarts in that datacenter. I don't just want a raw connection to a major bandwidth provider, though.

Hate to disappoint you, but there are no smarts in any ISP datacenter. It's just a big router and some interconnects. Raw bandwidth is all you get, if you are lucky.

> See also the last paragraph of my previous reply: I'd be in favor of separating out the "dumb pipe" as a utility, and then having ISPs operate independently from that. I think that would solve the majority of the problems.

It's not that simple, there are a lot of implementation details that matter. Do you want local loop unbundling, bitstream access or only resale?

> Do you want local loop unbundling, bitstream access or only resale?

In an ideal world? A form of local loop unbundling, with a not-for-profit entity running/maintaining the local fiber, and umpteen ISPs readily available to handle termination and routing at the other end.

Really? How many definitions are there?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_pipe http://www.hyperorg.com/misc/stupidnet.html

> In an ideal world? A form of local loop unbundling, with a not-for-profit entity running/maintaining the local fiber, and umpteen ISPs readily available to handle termination and routing at the other end.

That's nice. Now you've either locked out small/unsophisticated ISPs/network users who can't or can't afford to light the fiber or increased cost and/or complexity by requiring an additional service provider on top of the dark fiber provider to provide bitstream, retail and other transport services. Also excellent choice for finger pointing when these two actors donit get along.

Neither do rack servers. End customers don't buy the dumb pipe directly.

> Dumb pipes can't hold as many customers.

The same fiber can transfer the same amount of traffic.

> Dumb pipes cost more.

Cost more than paying monopoly prices for services?

> I'd be in favor of separating out the "dumb pipe" as a utility, and then having ISPs operate independently from that. I think that would solve the majority of the problems.

Sure it would. But it has to be one or the other. Would Comcast rather have network neutrality or divest its ISP/TV business?

Of course; they buy it from ISPs, and now you have the same problem again.

> The same fiber can transfer the same amount of traffic.

It doesn't matter how much your fiber can transfer if the arrangements at the meet-me room can't get you that much content for a price you want to pay.

> Cost more than paying monopoly prices for services?

For the same bandwidth? Yes. Raw bandwidth costs more than a plan from an ISP offering that much bandwidth.

> Would Comcast rather have network neutrality or divest its ISP/TV business?

I don't want a single choice of ISP, whether that ISP has agreed to network neutrality restrictions or to divest any particular services. I'd like a dozen ISPs to choose from, and then the rest stops causing a problem.

What problem?

> It doesn't matter how much your fiber can transfer if the arrangements at the meet-me room can't get you that much content for a price you want to pay.

So free isn't enough for you?

You can pretty much get as much content as you want, if you have the customer demand for it.

Join an IX and you'll get as much content as you want for free for the cost of the port. If you got serious content demand, do a private interconnect and get the content for the price of a crossconnect. There are facilities with no recurring costs for crossconnects. Need a shitload of content? The content providers will send you a CDN node to you, for free.

In summary, your your statement is provably false.

> Raw bandwidth costs more than a plan from an ISP offering that much bandwidth.

You obviously never bought wholesale bandwidth. Wholesale IP transit is 20 cents or less per Mbps. IX peering is cheaper than that. Private interconnects, again cheaper.

I don't see ISPs offering 100M connections for $20 or less.

Again, your statement is provably false.

But they do, and that's what they want to keep on doing. An Internet connection is by definition a dumb pipe. It's only when you start messing with it and prioritizing traffic that it becomes something else.

> And once an ISP starts trying to provide value above and beyond the pipe, all the same questions about neutrality come up again.

No, this is just a silly argument. Just because an ISP provider other services in addition to or on top of the Internet connection does not make nor any net neutrality issues. It is only when they start prioritizing stuff that there is an issue.

> What happened to "dumb pipe"? Both of these, especially the former, seem to contradict that.

Nothing. Seriously, this is how the Internet works and is supposed to work. You are supposed to interconnect networks, that's why it's called the Internet. Doh!

Just because somebody else has a shorter path to you than somebody else doesn't make it wrong or unfair.

> All the numbers I've seen suggested that raw bandwidth costs significantly more than ISPs charge for it, because consumer ISPs rarely expect 24/7 utilization of the full bandwidth, and likely also because they can provide some of the larger sources of content for free out of their own datacenter.

Well, it doesn't and it's not for the reasons you state. Wholesale bandwidth prices decrease by 30% on average year on year. Consumer prices are stagnant, or rising.

While it's true that consumers don't use their connection 24/7 (although some make a pretty good go at it), the ISPs could without much problem support that use case. Furthermore ISPs provide close to zero of the content consumers consume. All the content is coming from the content providers, either directly, via an IX or a local cache. The ISPs have nothing to do with it, they are just dumb pipes.

It means you control a physical data wire that goes into more than a thousand residential buildings.

> DSL is no longer competitive, and most implementations of cable and fiber have no separation between "infrastructure provider" and "bandwidth provider".

You're the last mile ISP if you're the infrastructure provider regardless of whether you're also the bandwidth provider.

> What if their central office isn't connected to anyone else directly, because they get all their bandwidth and peering from one or more of the major backbones? Presumably they can say "go to those backbones", rather than having to start making peering arrangements with individual services.

Outside of megaplayers like Netflix and Google who are effectively Tier 1 networks unto themselves, the backbones and CDNs are the people who use the free peering. Some website like Yelp or Expedia doesn't want to peer with ISPs or run a CDN, they want to pay Akamai et al to take care of that.

> What if their central office doesn't have an "across the street" where you can put servers?

You can put them wherever you want to. Nobody stops you from putting all your servers for the whole world in one city, or having regional hubs, or doing whatever you want. That's your network, not the last mile ISP's. Level 3 can run fiber from an office 200 miles away if they think that's worth it over buying closer office space.

> Or what if they don't have a "central office", period?

Then where do they normally peer with other networks or operate CDN hardware?

This is simply incorrect. CDNs are not prioritized on any ISP network. CDNs work because they have a shorter route to the end user, not because they have a higher priority.

ISPs should not and do not apply QoS in their core for VoIP or anything else when it's part of generic Internet traffic. It's the end users responsibility to QoS police VoIP or other traffic on their WAN interface. The ISP just shifts the bits.

Not privatizing traffic does not break CDNs nor customer QoS. Neither of these things have anything to do with net neutrality.

> But even then, how do you draw a bright line between "deliberately degrading", "not giving an advantage to", and "not doing anything to address bandwidth problems when they arise"?

It's pretty obvious how you draw that bright line. Don't prioritize and don't congest interfaces.

> How would you suggest writing a regulation that doesn't break CDNs and similar, and that can tell the difference between "deliberately hurting" and "not helping"?

Easy. As I already wrote, forbid prioritizing and saturation of network interconnects.

> How will that regulation adapt when people come up with new ideas to make the web faster?

It does not need to when done right, as explained above.

> One angle I could imagine working: limiting the ability of one company or family of companies to run both an ISP and network services via that ISP. Still hard to write something robust, though.)

Nothing hard about it. It's called functional separation and it's a widely applied remedy to the anticompetitive nature of telecom markets in other countries.

So, anyone who can successfully define what they're doing as "not prioritizing" can entirely sidestep any regulation you have in mind.

Putting a server in the ISP's datacenter is a common approach. Traffic to those servers doesn't have to go over any external peering links.

> ISPs should not and do not apply QoS in their core

Many do. As one simple example, look at the ISPs that accelerate the first N bytes of connections, to prioritize interactive requests over bulk transfers/downloads. Other ISPs apply more sophisticated approaches.

> It's pretty obvious how you draw that bright line. Don't prioritize and don't congest interfaces.

> forbid prioritizing and saturation of network interconnects

So, receive and deliver all traffic, regardless of available capacity or financial constraints? Provision every part of the network so it can handle all the traffic passing over any other part, because they're not allowed to limit bandwidth in any way at any point?

A saturated interconnect might mean "we're trying to screw Netflix", or it might mean "we can't afford it right now" (either because they're a small ISP and don't have the money, or because they're spending it on something their customers want more).

This argument makes no sense. Colocating a CDN node has nothing to do with prioritization. Nobody is fiddling with any QoS settings.

> Putting a server in the ISP's datacenter is a common approach. Traffic to those servers doesn't have to go over any external peering links.

What is your point?

> As one simple example, look at the ISPs that accelerate the first N bytes of connections, to prioritize interactive requests over bulk transfers/downloads.

This is an incorrect characterization of PowerBoost. PowerBoost uncaps your DOCSIS connection temporarily to take advantage of any momentarily free spare capacity. This is not prioritization, it's getting a free tier upgrade temporarily.

> Other ISPs apply more sophisticated approaches.

Such as?

> So, receive and deliver all traffic, regardless of available capacity or financial constraints?

Don't be silly. As long as the ISP provides whatever speed tier they sold to the consumer all is good and well. If they cannot do that then they are shortchanging the consumer and should be penalized for that.

> Provision every part of the network so it can handle all the traffic passing over any other part, because they're not allowed to limit bandwidth in any way at any point?

Yes, to the extent required to provide the service they sold.

> A saturated interconnect might mean "we're trying to screw Netflix", or it might mean "we can't afford it right now" (either because they're a small ISP and don't have the money, or because they're spending it on something their customers want more).

If you saturate your interconnect you fail at ISPing. There is no excuse. Interconnect capacity is cheap and plentiful.

I think the CDN fix could be built right into net-neutrality laws: If you're going to support that functionality then also do it equally to any CDN that is also willing to foot the bill and/or meets certain criteria. For example, don't only let Netflix's smaller competitors let that box sit on your network.

(No, this regulation wouldn't be burdensome either.)

QoS is something I'm unfamiliar with when it comes to ISPs. I personally wouldn't be offended if some small % of bandwidth was dedicated to services consumers and businesses use that require priority, such as VoIP. As long as that applied to all VoIP services and apps equally, though I'm not sure how you would be able to tell.

The only fair way to do this is to use port numbers and protocols and endpoint IP addresses only for the purpose of telling which packets belong to which traffic flow or customer. For deciding which flows get priority, you should look only at the actual pattern of traffic: sparse low-rate flows should be assumed to be interactive, in the same manner that your operating system's CPU scheduler assumes that processes with intermittent load are more latency-sensitive than long-running sustained loads. To see how this kind of packet scheduling works in the real world, look at the fq_codel and cake queue disciplines in Linux. The former has become the default for many Linux distributions and is used by some of the more modern commercial wireless routers.

This will have the side effect that my ssh session will get the same preferential treatment as your VoIP, unless I'm using it to tunnel rsync.

Defining "willing to foot the bill and/or meets certain criteria" would still require very careful drafting to avoid breaking things, though.

A problem with simplifying the problem to "prioritizing traffic" when engaging with laypeople is that opponents of net-neutrality can set-up a strawman argument presenting NN as "treating gaming and porn traffic the same as vital 911 and emergency services traffic on the Internet!" (i.e. conflating NN with QoS), or arguing it's only fair that popular services pay for the extra data transfer they use (that's what peering agreements are for and is unrelated to NN), or worse: proclaiming NN will enable child pornography: https://thenextweb.com/us/2010/08/19/riaa-speaks-out-against... - we should call it what it is: anti-economic rent-seeking behavior on the part of the monopolistic audience gatekeepers.

I believe NN is an example of a "good" regulation necessary to enable free markets - I'd wager the majority of genuine (non-astroturf) NN opponents take the stance in the sincere belief that Government 'interference and regulation' should not impact ISPs' internal business practices - so you should frame it as something "that enables free-markets and increases competition which is better for the consumer and industry" (and avoid the R-word)

Mostly I think NN is fighting the last war. NN proponents continually assert there is no competition for wired Internet and, therefore, it must be regulated. I think looking at wired Internet defines much too narrow a market. As wireless proliferates, it will become increasingly important, and competition in wireless is alive and well. The recent reignition of wars over "unlimited" data underscores this.

I am reminded of the zeal to regulate or break up Microsoft. I was one of those zealots. Of course, then mobile changed everything, and now it doesn't matter so much that Microsoft has a monopoly on Windows PCs.

If I were Comcast I'd be scared, and legitimately so. The wireless players have access to most American consumers. Each cable operator only has access to the homes that get its wire--a small fraction of the market available to a wireless company. We're better off with vibrant cable operators who can compete with wireless however they see best. If that means zero rating or non-neutral networks, OK.

Further, I am struck by the arrogance of the belief that the government knows best how to regulate this market. Looking back I think it's absurd that I wanted government to break MS into "browser co." and "OS co." The market took care of this problem and now Windows users proactively install Chrome. I think that in a few short years, the drive to regulate the Internet will look like similar folly.

So in short I see no problem here to solve and I do not think government should get involved.

Ignoring the laws of physics tends to make for bad public policy.

Wireless will never be able to compete against wired services. This disparity will only grow over time, not shrink. There are only two ways for wireless providers to substantially increase the speed of their offerings: by acquiring more spectrum, or by increasing spectrum re-use by shrinking cell size. Since all the good spectrum is in use, acquiring more means using spectrum that is inherently more limited in coverage. Thus, both strategies boil down to deploying more wired infrastructure.

No worse than the belief that companies, in natural monopoly, will act in the best interests of consumers either. There are many places in the world where the government does work well and in the best interests of their populations - I'm disappointed the "government is inherently bad" meme is so well-entrenched in the USA.

There's a difference there, but like most arguments on the internet, the nuance tends to get lost in the retelling.

Regarding net neutrality, if memory serves correctly, it was but a few short weeks after the passage of NN that somebody was wanting to leverage the FCC's new powers to censor ISIS off of the internet. Wheeler, being a good guy, connoted that they didn't have that authority, and that even if it could be construed that they did, he was disinclined to exert it and give credence to the argument that they did have that power.

All of that was done basically in "the right way", but given the wild swings in administration changes, who's to say that some other head of the FCC wouldn't have been inclined to leverage the power that they might now have for exactly that reason? Are we sure that the courts would agree that NN doesn't give the FCC the right to censor individual websites? Are we sure that the courts of tomorrow won't?

Yes, I know that this is a slippery slope argument, and I understand the inherent pitfalls therein, but that doesn't change the fact that power can be used maliciously, and for some of us, the question of whether or not the problem is worth potentially sacrificing much larger swaths of the first amendment falls differently than for others. I personally don't fault any individual for whichever way they've decided, as there are possible curtilages of free speech on either side of the coin, but I'd like us to agree that being suspicious of vesting power unto an agency otherwise wholly unaccountable to the public is perhaps not the dumbest thing that Americans do.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/17...

Also, wireless is not really competition for home internet. Try cancelling your home internet service and relying solely on one of the wireless carriers and see how far you'll get. The latency, bandwidth and reliability of wireless are much worse than wired networks. The wireless carriers simply don't have the spectrum to provision the same capacity that people routinely use on their home internet connections. With the move to unlimited data plans the only solution will have is severely throttling the traffic of people that actually try to use a substantial amount of data.

I know that Cox has some kind of "low speed, low price" offering, that I believe is under $30/month - but they kinda hide it on their site; I think you have to explicitly call and ask for it. See here (scroll near the bottom):

https://www.cox.com/aboutus/policies/speeds-and-data-plans.h...

Note the "Starter Package", then note the package one level up ("Essential"). If you click on the link next to the "Starter Package" for pricing, you will be taken to another page - where the lowest shown tier is for the "Essential Package". But I'm pretty sure you can get the "Starter Package" if you call first.

There's also this for low-income families:

http://connect2compete.org/cox/

The only way for that ARPU to drop considerably is if a new player enters the market that can significantly undercut the existing players, because none of the existing players are willing to see that number drop by half or more. I don't believe such a new entrant will materialize anytime soon due to the high barriers to entry. I suspect the cost of building and operating a wireless network in the US is too high to support a carrier operating on a fraction of the ARPU.

Governments did intervene against Microsoft, so I'm not sure the market gets all the credit for the fix.

Now it's the reverse. In the dawn of a new technological age, people want to shackle the old technology rather than deregulate it.

My economic philosophy is no religion; the government regulates the distribution of wireless spectrum and I have no objection to that, nor do I object to the regulation of wireline operators in exchange for their use of public rights-of-way. But this regulation should be measured and the minimum amount necessary. Net neutrality regulations are far beyond minimal.

So please continue on with demonstrating where what I have said is provably incorrect?

The problem is: they don't.

There are 4 main wireless providers in the US (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint), the vast majority (if not all) of the other carriers are MVNOs that run on top of the Big 4's infrastructure. The problem is AT&T is also a major wired provider (U-Verse), as is Verizon. Only T-Mobile and Sprint have no horizontal-business interests in wired networks - but incidentally note that T-Mobile and Sprint also have the smallest service coverage areas compared to AT&T and Verizon - in some parts of the country AT&T is your only real option for wireless service, and AT&T has no compunction with simultaneously selling you a $100/mo wireless plan with a low data limit, a $65/mo DirecTV plan, and $70/mo U-verse wired home Internet plan - where they would gladly throttle Netflix to entice you to watch your DirecTV service instead. The invisible-hand-of-the-market cannot solve this problem because of the sheer start-up costs of physical infrastructure needed to set-up a competing wired (or even wireless!) Internet service - and as we've seen with Google Fiber and municipal Internet services the incumbents quickly drop their prices to prevent these newly competing services from becoming established, if not being completely obstructionist as we see with Comcast holding coax poles ransom. This is why we need to classify last-mile Internet access as a regulated public utility, not as a captive market for rent-seeking companies.

So in your example, at least, I don't see how competition from the wireless industry will budge wired services in consumers' interests, but instead corral us all into a much worse position.

Netflix could approach Provider B and say, "Hey, how about we pay you to remove the data cap on Netflix traffic?". All of a sudden Provider B can advertise that their customers can watch all the Netflix they want with no buffering! People will jump ship and leave Provider A for Provider B, thus "creating competition".

Disclaimer: I personally think the internet should be treated as a public utility, but the above scenario is (probably) what anti-net neutrality proponents believe.

Video is not the problem. Congestion is, whether or not video is part of the traffic contributing to the congestion. Congestion can be managed reasonably without discriminating against video, and even if an ISP wants to discriminate against video (eg. due to having a conflict of interest in the form of a separate video delivery service) the ISP should still want robust congestion management in place to handle growing volumes of non-video traffic.

I think it's more realistic to assume they'd differentiate through better service, faster speeds, higher/no caps, etc. That's what we want and are willing to pay for.

But even if they weren't open and transparent, wouldn't technologists like ourselves push to find the limits and publish them online? We can hold them accountable just as well without piling on more regulation.

>But even if they weren't open and transparent, wouldn't technologists like ourselves push to find the limits and publish them online? We can hold them accountable just as well without piling on more regulation.

Or we could just make the company itself spend time equivalent to less than 1 work day of 1 individual and get all the data... "Piling on regulation" makes it sound as if this is incredibly burdensome which it's not. It's basically zero work from the perspective of the company.

I'd like to say that I'm basically always in support of forcing companies to publish more consumer-relevant information. Remember that the perfectly-competitive model requires that consumers have perfect information. More information means more informed choices means more quality competition.

Why should who I choose to do business with effect my rights?