As a fiscally conservative technology person who got my first modem in 1985, I could simultaneously not be happier with how things turned out with the FCC and horrified how fellow conservatives seem to interpret it.
It is disheartening how much FUD is being spread by conservatives on the anti-NN side.
Why do you dismiss the anti-NN concerns as FUD? Conservatives are worried about what impact NN will have on infrastructure investment, and the fact that reclassification gets us one step closer to rate setting, etc, and other powers under Title II. Both concerns are more "real," more rooted in actual observable practice, than the specter raised by the pro-NN people of a tiered, pay-for-pay internet.
The incentive concern is real. What incentive will telecom companies have to build the wireline networks that enable next-generation of web services if they can't make enough money to justify the investment? The liberal response to this point is either myth or fantasy. Myth, in that they assume that wireline is insanely profitable, and that fat Verizon shareholders will just have to squeeze their belts a bit. In reality, the operating margin of Verizon's wireline division is 2-3%.[1] Fantasy, because they alternatively posit that municipal systems will take up the slack. How states and cities that are broke, crushed under liberal public union pension obligations, will pay for these municipal networks is up in the air.
The worry of further regulation is also real. Telecom is already a morass of regulation, largely to fulfill liberal concerns. For example, there is already rate-setting. Municipal governments require cable companies to offer basic cable at low regulated rates. Since it doesn't cost appreciably less to offer basic cable than more expensive packages, this sets an important constraint on the economics of the network. Huge amounts of wealth transfer from urban to rural areas are already baked into the system at the federal and state levels. And build-out restrictions, preventing upstart competitors from stealing away lucrative tracts of incumbants' service areas, are already stifling competition. The HN crowd acts like NN is being added on top of an otherwise pristine regulatory regime, but in reality it's just one more straw on a giant pile of hay.
None of this is FUD. The fact that these points are also raised by the telecom companies, who have a monetary interest in avoiding NN, does not make them FUD any more than the pro-NN points are FUD because they're raised by web-tech companies.
I'm not an ideologue. I'd be fine with, for example, the U.K. approach. But what that would mean, which most people on HN don't know, would be putting AT&T back together and letting them enjoy monopoly profits. Take a look at BT Openreach's financials sometime: http://www.digitallook.com/news/news-and-announcements/retai.... Their EBITDA margin is a staggering 45%, double that of Verizon wireline, significantly higher than Comcast's whole operation, and higher than AT&T and Verizon's wireless divisions.
> the fact that reclassification gets us one step closer to rate setting
As I've said elsewhere, this is indeed FUD. (I also disagree with most of the rest of what you say, but I agree that it's not FUD.)
The notion of "steps closer" to rate-setting makes little sense in the real-world regulatory environment. If today's FCC hadn't decided to reclassify broadband Internet service under Title II, this would do very little, perhaps nothing, to hold back a future Commission that wanted to impose a rate-setting regime. That future Commission, persuaded that rate-setting was a good idea, would simply open a proceeding to reclassify broadband internet service under Title II and impose a rate setting regime. The fact that broadband internet service was not already classified as a Title II service would be, at most, a very minor impediment given the tremendous deference the FCC is given in making such regulatory decisions. (For one thing, the reversal of a prior regulatory decision is subjected to no special scrutiny.) This would only require a single proceeding in which whatever reasoning the Commission had to support rate setting, would also be its support for Title II reclassification. And since one of the primary objections to Title II reclassification today is that it somehow raises the risk of rate setting, one can only imagine the resistance to actually imposing a rate-setting regime.
In other words, this is a classic slippery-slope argument. All the considerations that stop us from setting rates today will be present in the future. The minor administrative hassle of reclassifying broadband internet service under Title II, barely ranks as one of the impediments to imposing such a regime.
You're right on the legal issue, re: deference, but you're ignoring the political aspect. These proceedings are heavily contested, and it's often easier to push through a new regulatory direction in pieces rather than all at once. From a political standpoint, "reclassification + we promise to forebear" follows by a change in forbearance policy is going to be easier than "reclassification + rate setting" all in one go.
It's also not a slippery-slope argument. Rate setting is a part of Title II, whether or not the FCC says they will forebear. And it's part of Title II because there is a long history of rate-setting in telecom. I posit that it's very different to argue about the unprecedented direction a policy may lead (like the NN advocates are doing), and to argue that a policy will take us back to a place we've already been.
It is an argument that this is bad because of what might be done later based on it. That is exactly a slippery slope argument.
> Rate setting is a part of Title II, whether or not the FCC says they will forebear.
Rate setting is part of Title II, but if the FCC does forbear (not "say they will forbear") as part of the same regulatory package in which they find that retail broadband service is a Title II telecommunication service, the rate setting is expressly not part of this regulation package. Its a speculative thing that some future FCC might do, hence, a slippery slope argument. (And, its a speculative thing that a future FCC could do whether or not this FCC adopted Title II with forbearance on rate setting.)
OTOH, if the speculative future risk of rate setting is a real concern, I'm sure that many supporters of net neutrality would stand with you in lobbying Congress for a revision to Title II prohibiting, or at least establishing a long moratorium that can be reviewed later for a more permanent prohibition, FCC rate setting for retail broadband.
He said anti-NN were spreading a lot of FUD. I didn't see him say all anti-NN concerns were FUD.
And he's right about a lot of FUD from anti-NN people. Some claims I saw, largely from Republican official, Republican writers and radio/TV hosts, and random people whose affiliation was not stated but from their remarks about Obama being a communist, dirty liberal, or Muslim I think it is a safe bet that they are not moderates or liberals:
• You will have to apply for an expensive license from the FCC if you want to put up a website.
• The FCC will be regulating Google search results, Facebook's news feed, and the like.
• This helps the governments of North Korea, Syria, Iran, and China to oppress their people with their internet censorship, because now the US cannot pressure them for a free internet without appearing hypocritical because now we are imposing the same kind of controls on the internet in the US.
> What incentive will telecom companies have to build the wireline networks that enable next-generation of web services if they can't make enough money to justify the investment?
What money making opportunity, besides paid prioritization, does this remove?
> The fact that these points are also raised by the telecom companies [...]
By some telecom companies. T-Mobile and Sprint aren't having much of a problem with it. The rural broadband provider's trade group outright supports it and has long asked for Title II.
> I'm not an ideologue. I'd be fine with, for example, the U.K. approach. But what that would mean, which most people on HN don't know, would be putting AT&T back together and letting them enjoy monopoly profits.
What do you mean by the U.K. approach? The main aspect of their broadband approach that I'm aware of us the forced line sharing, but I don't see how that would require putting AT&T back together.
Question: wireless voice has been regulated under similar (but more extensive) Title II regulations for around 20 years. Why have the doom and gloom scenarios forecast for internet not already come to pass there? The carriers there have invested massively in their infrastructure under those rules.
> What do you mean by the U.K. approach? The main aspect of their broadband approach that I'm aware of us the forced line sharing, but I don't see how that would require putting AT&T back together.
BT Openreach is the successor to the government monopoly that built the phone lines, and still owns them. As a condition of privatization, they are required to lease the lines to competitors, but, and this is key, the prices for such leases are set using a "price cap" system which ensures they have an incentive to keep investing in the network: http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTFINANCIALSECTOR/Resour.... In practice, the price caps are set high enough that Openreach makes a lot of money. If you dig into the financials, they make way more than ATT and Verizon make on their wired networks, and about as much as they make on their wireless networks.
So no, it's not just "forced line sharing." It's about putting publicly-built infrastructure into a company that's insulated from competition, and regulating their prices in a way that ensures they are very profitable.
> Both concerns are more "real," more rooted in actual observable practice, than the specter raised by the pro-NN people of a tiered, pay-for-pay internet.
Blocking certain lawful services was actually done by major ISPs, and prohibiting lawful services and applications to retail customers is still policy of most ISPs (fixed and mobile.)
Likewise prioritization of content provided by ISPs affiliates (either same owner or paid prioritization of third party service) has been done, by both fixed and mobile ISPs.
So while the anti-NN concerns may be "real" in the sense of having a valid chain of reasoning supporting them, they are not more real than the pro-NN concerns which center around real, actual practices that exist in the status quo and have been seen in the period that NN has been debated.
"What incentive will telecom companies have to build the wireline networks that enable next-generation of web services if they can't make enough money to justify the investment?"
Regulation forcing them to build the networks or be heavily fined. Given their profit margins, I'm weeping...hold on...taking careful count...carry the seven...zero tears for them.
>What incentive will telecom companies have to build the wireline networks that enable next-generation of web services if they can't make enough money to justify the investment?
A 97% profit margin[0] on those very same services ought to be enough of an incentive for any business.
That article takes the $5,822 million in "high speed data" revenue on page 39, and subtracts the $175 million in cost of "high speed data" on page 42, and concludes that TWC's profit margin is 97%. The author ignores the other cost components in that chart. But read footnote (a): "Employee and other direct operating costs include costs directly associated with the delivery of the Company’s video, high-speed data, voice and other services to subscribers and the maintenance of the Company’s delivery systems." The "delivery system" is the wires that carry the video, data, and voice services, and the operating costs for that total $4.3 billion.
Even leaving aside that egregious error, that calculation excludes interest, depreciation, taxes, and all the other numbers that must be taken out to get to "profit margin."
Sunk costs are sunk. That $8 billion is non-recoverable through sales of the copies, says the economist.
But if you can expect to sell 102 million copies at that 99% profit margin, those profits will justify the R&D expenses.
If you can hire an actuary, they can come up with a way to factor the initial R&D cost into your per-unit calculations with a few reasonable assumptions, such that your quarterly reports look great. But if you want the board to understand enough to calculate the right bonus for you, it's best to keep the math simple, and sweep the necessary and nonrecoverable expenses into a different category.
See my comment above: the number isn't just a gross simplification, it's journalistic malpractice.
And the issue isn't whether the companies are struggling. Nobody feels bad for Comcast's CEO's kids. The issue is the incentives to build telecom infrastructure relative to other opportunities in the economy for the billions of dollars needed.
There's no free lunch. If the writing is on the wall for wireline profitability, companies like Comcast will take their capital and buy companies like NBC instead of investing in their network. If you make it illegal for them to do so, their shareholders will force them to do stock buybacks with their capital, then take that money and invest in whoever does buy NBC.
> If the writing is on the wall for wireline profitability, companies like Comcast will take their capital and buy companies like NBC instead of investing in their network.
Cable companies, like Comcast, did that with broadcast companies, like NBC, without net neutrality, so, not seeing the nexus to the immediate issue here.
It's not binary, right? That Comcast did that once is evidence that their playbook includes that tactic. The less lucrative it is to build out their network, the more they'll run the "buy content providers" play.
OTOH, neutrality limits the degree to which content providers are beholden to access providers, so it makes that play more expensive (and increases the relative value of content providers to other potential purchasers.) So, arguably, it makes that play less likely, not more.
If you make it illegal for them to do so, their shareholders will force them to do stock buybacks with their capital, then take that money and invest in whoever does buy NBC.
The cost to send a marginal bit on your ISP is essentially zero. This doesn't mean it's cheap to keep an ISP going.
The primary cost is that they have to keep building. My neighbors are going to want more and fatter Netflix streams all at the same time that my family wants them. That requiring increasing the maximum capacity at peak demand time.
"The primary cost is that they have to keep building [capacity]."
Demonstrably false. AT&T and Verizon stopped with the Great Recession. US Worst/Century never seriously played that game in the first place. Don't follow the cablecos much since I'm (just) outside of a city and only have non-U-verse 150 GB/month AT&T as an option, but don't a lot of them also cap in a variety of ways, including just peering congestion, especially since Netflix directly competes with them?
Unfortunately, I'm old enough to remember watching "We're the phone company, we don't have to care", and that hasn't changed much. Cablecos, I suppose we'll see.
Ah, yeah, I did leave out that they have some FiOS build out commitments in various cities like NYC, but from what I've read they are not putting money into anything else or anywhere else, see e.g. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/verizon-nears-the-en...
"I have been pretty consistent with this in the fact that we will spend more CapEx in the Wireless side and we will continue to curtail CapEx on the Wireline side. Some of that is because we are getting to the end of our committed build around FiOS, penetration is getting higher," Verizon CFO Fran Shammo said yesterday in the Q4 2014 call with investors.
Although maybe they're replacing DSLAMs as they become unmaintainable; AT&T is just moving hardware around (even pulling an old DSLAM out of a training facility), adding newer generation DSL here and there, and in many places where we supposize all the DSLAM slots are filled just refusing to supply new service.
I don't think this invalidates my argument about capacity, though. If you're not in a Verizon FiOS area, or worse, in one of the many states and territories they've sold, you're not getting more capacity out of your DSL line from them, right? They might, though, be putting in more backhaul to satisfy, and I've heard no reports of AT&T DSL suffering from saturated backhaul.
DSL providers are forced to let resellers (also known as competitors) use their networks. Cable providers get to capture the speed increases for themselves.
This is why people were afraid of the "let one company build the network, but everyone else gets to compete on it" plans. It might make all the networks look like the DSL networks.
And this meme that Internet speeds are staying flat is just plain wrong. Akamai's state of the internet report consistently shows average speeds increasing year-over-year in nearly every state in the US. ("Vermont was the only state across the
whole country to see a year-over-year decline in its average
connection speed—the cause of this decline has been discussed
in prior issues of the report.") For peak speeds, only Vermont and Oklahoma saw year-over-year losses.
>Both concerns are more "real," more rooted in actual observable practice, than the specter raised by the pro-NN people of a tiered, pay-for-pay internet.
You mean because neither of those have happened at all, and ISPs were already charging companies for pay-for-play? Its well documented that several ISPs were throttling Netflix for months before netflix folded and agreed to pay additional fees. That happened. thats real life. Thats more of a real concern than any of your hypotheticals.
>In reality, the operating margin of Verizon's wireline division is 2-3%.[1]
Nice cherry picking, meanwhile Comcast reports over 40% operating margin each year.
>Cable Communications Segment — Operating Costs and Expenses
We continue to focus on controlling the growth of expenses. Our operating margin (operating income before depreciation and amortization as a percentage of revenue) for 2011, 2010 and 2009 was 41.1%, 40.4% and 40.1%, respectively.[1]
So where was that lack of incentive again? because 40% operating margin sounds fantastic to me
>Since it doesn't cost appreciably less to offer basic cable than more expensive packages, this sets an important constraint on the economics of the network
Source? Do you know how much cable companies pay each cable channel to carry them? Are you qualified to evaluate the cost differential to the provider of basic cable vs other packages?
>And build-out restrictions, preventing upstart competitors from stealing away lucrative tracts of incumbents' service areas, are already stifling competition
I agree here, this is why google has been rolling out fiber in the way they have, they are finding municipalities willing to overlook buildout requirements
>The HN crowd acts like NN is being added on top of an otherwise pristine regulatory regime, but in reality it's just one more straw on a giant pile of hay.
I dont know where you got that opinion, I've seen little other than criticism of the current status quo.
>Verizon had a total of 4.8 million FiOS Internet and 4.2 million FiOS Video connections at year-end.
Its nearly a 50-50 split, not primarily internet as you suggest.
heres comcasts:
>As of December 31, 2011, our cable systems served 22.3 million video customers, 18.1 million high-speed Internet customers and 9.3 million voice customers and passed more than 52 million homes and businesses in 39 states and the District of Columbia.
and further:
>43% of the homes in the areas we serve subscribed to our video services ... 35% of the homes in the areas we serve subscribed to our high-speed Internet services
4.2:4.8::22.3:18.1
That doesnt seem, to me, to be an outrageous comparison.
Also as far as lucrative:
>Programming expenses, our largest operating expense, are the fees we pay to license the programming we distribute to our video customers.
Programming for cable, and not infrastructure or buildouts is their largest expense.
I hope i dont come across as combative here, to be honest talking with you on HN has taught me a lot about this very complex issue, and given me a lot to think about - i appreciate your civility
It's a well known fact that lots of HN people work in industries that have a wide spectrum of thoughts on NN. Nothing wrong with that.
We all have bias, but I want to hear the other side's argument (even as I strongly disagree) as long as it's not astroturfed or deceptive.
I worked at Verizon long ago, and anyone who's worked in a regulation-driven industry knows the difficulties in getting new tech out the door. I've seen solid technologies that ultimately died due to regulatory requirements.
The real argument here isn't over the network, but the services that sit on that network and who owns them. Network owners have been pushing to own both the network and the services, just like they owned wireline and POTS dialtone.
Networks saw the internet companies rise up on their networks, rival and ultimately dwarf them. That's a lot of crow to swallow.
If the network owners couldn't dominate the network and services, then they wanted to extract revenue from the service providers beyond connection fees. That's egregious behavior, akin to double taxation in my books.
So I think ultimately you will see network owners splitting and merging to compete with the traditional internet services. They will form up with the media companies and lots of shake ups will happen.
That's fine, I don't mind. As long as the playing field is on the level.
And that sucks, because I helped start an ISP in 1995 too, in the (original) Livingston Portmaster era, and left it in 1997 just after setting up default-free peering, and would have enjoyed discussing the issue with someone with similar experience.
But it is impossible to get around the grossly uncivil accusation you closed your comment out with.
I meant evidence of astroturfing, not evidence of bias. Everyone is biased.
Astroturfing implies pretending to be something you're not. An example—that we've seen more than once on HN—is people creating separate accounts to reply to themselves, object to their opponents, etc. That sort of thing undermines the community. And people should always email us when stuff going on in the threads doesn't feel right, because we can't read everything and we rely on you all to be the neighborhood watch.
But I don't see how any of this applies to rayiner. He isn't hiding or pretending. (Isn't that the reason those details were findable in the first place?) He just disagrees with most of us. As long one does so civilly, that doesn't undermine the community, it strengthens it.
Questions of astroturfing and abuse of the site are often matters of degree that depend on an account's history. For example, an account that has commented on a wide range of topics is different from an account that always comments on the same one. A throwaway account created to discuss a sensitive personal issue is different from serial throwaways created to break the site guidelines with impunity. And so on.
I feel like you guys need to re-weigh your priorities. Personally accusing someone of abuse and bad faith is the nuclear option. Even when you're right, it should never be used just to score an extra point or two in an argument. What you're not taking into account (but we have to) is the bomb-like damage caused by such accusations themselves. We can't allow that to become even a little bit of a precedent on HN. So except in extreme cases—which this is not—bringing out that artillery is a clear breach of the HN guidelines around civility. And I'm sorry for describing the "nuclear option" as "artillery".
Edit: this reminds me a bit of the rule in parliamentary systems where members are not allowed to call one another liars. Obviously that isn't because no one ever lies; it's to protect the institution, which could easily fall apart under pressure. It's a crossbeam, there for structural purposes. Participants have to abide by it, not for their opponents' sake but for the body as a whole. In practice it isn't a problem. They just have to make their points in another way, indeed a better way.
Your comment is deceptive. It cherry picks a quote from a comment who's entire point was "don't accuse people in public; if you have a real concern, mail hn@ycombinator.com".
You're writing as if the original comment wasn't right there for everyone to see. It says the opposite of what you're claiming it does about accusing people of being shills on HN threads.
Your fellow "conservatives" are mostly such in name only. They've been convinced that the Republican Party is the conservative party despite the fact that they're anything but, and they mold their positions to match. It's sad.
Conservatives in the US gov't manage to be incorrect about many objective things (AGW, evolution), so it's not too surprising that they manage to fuck up on subjective things, too (net neutrality, role of religion in gov't).
Even better, the rules will apply to wireless and wired broadband in the same way, so you don’t have to worry that your phone switching from Wi-Fi to a 4G network will suddenly cause apps not to work or websites to become inaccessible. Lots of people use mobile devices as their primary way of accessing the Internet, so applying net neutrality rules to both equally will help make sure there is “one Internet” for all.
Does this mean Apple cannot enforce "must use over wifi restrictions"? As it stands now, I can't use LTE to download large apps, media, or stream on the iPhone or iPad. Would the FCC have any authority to force Apple to change these restrictions?
There is less competition in smartphone OSes (2 dominant providers) than in most localities' high-speed internet (2 wired and 3+ wireless providers). So the same market-power rationales used for FCC regulation of ISPs could be used to justify strong federal regulation of the Apple & Google platforms.
There's a major difference in that I can easily use a non-dominant smartphone OS if I want to, but if some ISP doesn't cover my area, I can't use them no matter how much I might want to.
You're not necessarily wrong, but it's not quite the same.
Presumably it would apply only to your LTE carrier, not built-in device limitations. That is a very weird thing for Apple to build in to a phone/tablet though...
That to me sounds like a decision apple made to protect all users from some massive LTE bill. Most people are already very paranoid their phone is going to rack up some huge bill without them noticing.
I can't think of any other reason, but it should at least be optional, as it often is even at the app level - Spotify lets me choose whether to stream on 4G and even set a different quality setting. On Android, updates only happen automatically on wifi, but I can manually apply them on a data connection if I want.
Unless it's a customisation as part of some deal with the carriers. I understand that this sort of thing is common in the States.
Apple's philosophy is generally not to expose a setting when a good default will satisfy 90% of the users. For something like this, where most people should have it disabled (being clueless about app sizes and data uses) and some power users might enable it, but clueless people will enable it and then complain about it, Apple will typically not make it configurable.
Not that I agree with their position, but that seems to be their approach.
It might just be leftover from the early days of the iPhone, where AT&T, the original carrier of the iPhone in the states, complained about network congestion and bandwidth issues in highly populated areas.
I would think that AT&T may have asked Apple for some sort of limitation on non-essential services like this.
It's so careless users don't burn through their data plan in 3 minutes by downloading a multi gb app and movie. It's a safety net because the high majority of users do not have unlimited data plans. At least this is how I always interpreted this rule.
I don't think that is what that rule does. It is mainly to protect the user who downloads an app to still be able to use it if they are on wifi and 4G, even if the app maker didn't pay to have "special access" to the 4G network that month.
Is this something Apple actually controls or is it tied in with the carriers? I seem to recall my old grandfathered unlimited plan on Verizon letting me download anything when ever.
It seems to be a software limitation. On an iPhone, if you try to download a movie from the iTunes app, you'll be prompted to switch to wifi--the download won't proceed. It isn't tied to carrier, I think, but at the iOS level.
One of the immediate benefits for consumers is that companies can no longer block tethering apps on your phone or make you pay an additional fee for it. Sprint wanted me to pay an extra $30/mo when I was with them to be able to tether. Of course, I just rooted my phone and tethered anyway. (now I have Ting -- so much better)
You'll still be paying for this, except it will be through federal taxes for corporate subsidies instead of a bill, so you won't know the real price. Usually things you pay for indirectly are much more expensive than they would be if you paid for them directly, so you'll probably be paying more in the end.
Regulation has a history of locking in incumbents, and locking out potential future competitors. It will be much harder for challengers to enter the market now because of the increased cost of compliance, something only the big incumbents can afford. What's worse is that the costs for Title II companies will be subsidized by government. So they may appear to have low prices, at least for awhile, but the real price will be hidden in a nebulous cloud of federal taxes. You won't even really know how much you're actually paying due to price distortions caused by corporate welfare. It's sad that people have such a short term memory about these corporate welfare cons, and just fall in lockstep with the propaganda. This will be very bad for consumers in the long run.
Would you mind supporting your statement by explaining how this actually applies here? It comes across as generic anti-regulation-no-matter-what astroturfing, but would be more interesting if the details of your argument were fleshed out.
Maybe I can offer an example. I'm sure you will be able to poke technical holes in this, but let's say a company comes up with a new technology (i.e. not cable) that can handle small packets very efficiently in a small locality. It's super cheap to do this, and it's great for networking small communities. But, video traffic really slows down the network so it's filtered out and thus it can't effectively treat all data equally. Instead of being able to quickly start up and offer their services, first they have to register with the FCC. Then they have to pay an inspection fee, and account for yearly audit fees. Plus, even though their prices are cheap, they're not much cheaper than cable because all the cable infrastructure is subsidized by taxpayers so their prices appear to be less competitive. All these extra costs to comply with the regulations add up to the point where the capital needed to even start this business is way too high and way too risky, so this technology just won't even have a chance of existing. It is effectively crowded out by the heavily subsidized and protected cable telecoms.
For a real historical reference, take the railroads for example, where these types of regulations began. The railroad businesses got huge subsidies from the government in the form of land and tax breaks. This allowed the railroad companies to effectively cartelize the industry because it crowded out more decentralized forms of transportation like the small rail and networks of canal systems. Even though these localized, less capital intensive systems could have served people better than railroads, we'll never know it because of the opportunity cost of central planning: the railroads used the state to force the public to pay for and subsidize their infrastructure. These crowding out effects are the unseen consequences of regulation.
Big business has a long history of using the power of the state to impose regulatory barriers on future competitors as a way to preserve their monopoly power. It started with the railroads, continued through the Progressive Era, and continues today with policies like "Net Neutrality". And they always use the same public relations con, too, appealing to the common good and fairness to get public buy in. They say that these policies will protect the consumers, but really in the end these policies will protect big business from competition. This creates artificial scarcity and allows big business to charge consumers higher prices.
See my other post here [1] if you want a little more historical background on how this works.
Doesn't Team Internet include Cisco, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and IBM, and other tech companies who came out against the NN regulations that were passed yesterday? Or does Team Internet just include Tumblr and Etsy?
Well yeah, those were the companies that were lined up to build the infrastructure for the multi-tiered Internet. How could you expect them to take any other position?
While I feel it's clear that you are on the opposite side of this discussion from myself, I nevertheless would like to pose the following to you.
Proponents of this FCC Title II reclassification have argued that this action will not curtail investment in network infrastructure and that Internet bandwidth will continue to improve unimpeded. After all, if they do not argue that, they would concede one of the points presently being dismissed as FUD hawked by the anti-Title II people such as myself: that reclassification will reduce innovation and ultimately hurt end consumers in the long run.
So an underpinning assumption of pro-Title II is that investment in networks will continue unabated and network bandwidth will continue to increase in spite of Title II regulation. Why, then, are the hardware companies that stand to profit from this unimpeded continued investment concerned? Is it because the regulation will require them or their customers to disable support for IPv6 Quality of Service flags on packets? That seems like a fairly trivial configuration change. It seems more plausible that they fear their customers (ISPs and backbone providers) will see less incentive to upgrade to the next generation of network gear to continuously improve the aggregate performance of their network. After all, the hard part of network R&D is steadily increasing bandwidth/performance at prices the ISPs and backbone providers can afford. Implementing IPv6 QoS bits isn't going to show up as a significant line item in the R&D budget or Intel, IBM, Cisco, and Qualcomm.
So yes, these companies were lined up to build the bogeyman "multi-tiered" Internet, assuming such a thing was ever going to come to pass (aside: we'll never really know if such a thing might have ultimately been a boon for consumers, because we took away the opportunity for the market to experiment with that preemptively). But more importantly, these companies were and have been lined up to continuously build the always-evolving "next" generation of Internet network hardware, full stop. And for some reason they are worried that their profits are now in jeopardy.
I for one find that a bit alarming. I want network companies to get rich selling my ISP ultra high-performance network gear because that ultimately improves my bandwidth. I don't want to still be at 30 Mbps five or ten years from now. I don't want asynchronous connection speeds to persist through my lifetime. I want more hardware and network innovation, not less.
All that said, I don't suspect much of anything to happen in the next few years because network R&D isn't a fast-moving process in any event. But in five or ten years, we should be able to assess whether the pace of innovation has been curtailed. I worry that in 2020 I'll look back with a tinge of regret.
1. Allow network providers to continue to expand their network, while growing their own services on top of their own network which will compete with third party services. If those other services compete heavily with their own, they will enact tiers or reduce reliability so that their service is better/cheaper/etc.
2. Regulate network providers, while still allowing them to grow services on top of their own networks and allowing third party services to compete more fairly. Network expansion may be slowed due to the loss of service revenue, but new service business risk will be lowered as they won't be competing unequally with their own (or customer's) network providers.
We got into this mess because networks were classified as information services in the first place. We wouldn't allow the oil companies to own the car business, nor would we allow the electric companies to own the appliance business.
Why should we think this would work any different?
Utility companies get public access across the country to install their cables and pipes. They're using vast public resources. Customers often have few or no choices.
In my opinion, the only reasonable option is regulation. I don't typically like regulation, as I think it hurts small business. But the tradeoff here is that some business will be hurt, while many more businesses should flourish.
Option #1 sounds like what we have today, which for all of the spin does not seem to be that bad. I don't buy Netflix's stance of no culpability in network peering deals gone awry. My ISP (AT&T) blocked outbound port 25 as an anti-spam measure, but at my request removed that block. I have observed no other interference by my ISP in my daily use of the Internet. Aside from some buffering on Netflix, what exactly is the mainstream beef with the Internet today? It's way better than it was 5 years ago, which in turn was better than it was 10 years ago.
There has been a building fear of some coming changes, presumably related to implementation of Quality of Service on Internet packets. QoS was originally considered a good idea by many of us. Now we seem to be collectively convinced that it would certainly be used for evil. But we've not yet seen how that might play out. It looks like we maybe never will.
Option #2 sounds like new legislation and not Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.
Regulation is not always bad, but Title II is broad and current promises of forbearance should be taken with a heaping serving of salt. I feel that whatever rational or irrational fears were building, this was not an urgent matter despite what appears to be a massive amount of astroturfing by Netflix and its kin to spin the current Internet's tubes as ensnared at every opportunity by nefarious ISPs. I want a better ISP like anyone else, but Netflix is no angel here. Whenever a big business (e.g., Netflix) campaigns for the rules to change in order to smite its enemies—especially when painting it as a do or die, time-critical matter—my opinion of them is tainted.
Time and deliberation should have been taken to create the proper legislation for the situation at hand. The US has developed what I see as a dangerous and wrong-headed distaste for legislative deliberation, what with Congresses being labeled "do nothing" and frequent complaints of gridlock, as if those are bad things. They are in large part evidence of no consensus, which means subverting the legislative process is likely a mistake.
A great side-effect of deliberation in the legislative process is that the market sometimes creates a superior solution in the meantime. In many cases doing nothing and allowing things to find a way is precisely the right course of action.
> Regulation is not always bad, but Title II is broad and current promises of forbearance should be taken with a heaping serving of salt.
If they are part of the regulatory package, they are as concrete as the Title II classification itself. They aren't "promises", they either are or are not part of the regulation.
I view regulations like rules in sports. Good rules don't diminish the players efforts, they channel them away from maladaptive avenues into productive ones.
Forgive the extreme metaphor, but if you were suddenly allowed to uses weapons in a hockey game, certainly there would be a flurry of activity as new weapons and armourments are developed, and whoever built those products would benefit. But it would be a disaster for the players, and ultimately for the sport.
The Internet infrastructure relies heavily on cooperation, and what Comcast did to Netflix was essentially weaponizing that cooperation. We don't need to wait and see where this goes, because history is overflowing with examples of that tactic being toxic for the broader ecosystem. The Comcast/Netflix play was a success, and we know that a game where those kinds of plays succeed is a bad game, so they changed the rules. This is why you're not allowed to cross check in hockey - sure, it's competition (and competition is what sport is about), but that particular kind of competition leads down a bad road for everyone.
So to me, this ruling says "compete, innovate, but not in this space: this space is destructive". It doesn't address what I see as an equally large problem - lack of competition at the last mile - but that's for another ruling.
I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. And I too think the last mile problem is at least as interesting—I feel it's even more important.
My preference would be for something very light-touch at first since in my opinion we haven't seen much evidence of the weaponizing escalation you've illustrated in metaphor. We've seen Comcact and Netflix bring knives to what was expected to be a boxing match. In my opinion, the outcome was fine. Without the metaphor: the market worked it out. Given Comcast was in the middle, I assume many Comcast customers gave them a verbal lashing and some others actually voted with their wallet and switched to whatever the second option was for them (assuming they had a second option; see last mile problem). A few people may have even decided to stream video not from Netflix but rather Amazon Prime or other services.
Given Netflix's massive bandwidth needs, the metaphor is a bit more like Netflix's whole boxing team showed up to the boxing match, so Comcast's single boxer reached into his pocket and grabbed his knife. Then the Netflix team grabbed their knives (by way of drumming up the ire of their user community). And there was a bunch of blood spilled. But ultimately, I think this process is acceptable.
Going back a few messages, we had been talking about what can be taken away from hardware manufacturers expressing concern about this regulatory change. You had said of course they are concerned, for it is natural for them to worry that their next-generation hardware for a tiered-Internet is at risk of lower demand. My premise is that implementing a tiered-Internet (whatever that is) is not much of an engineering challenge at this point. I expect ongoing R&D for network hardware has been and continues to be principally about how do we make this stuff faster, cheaper, better because our customers (ISPs and backbone providers) always want faster, cheaper, better.
Now they are presumably worried their customers won't want faster, cheaper, better.
That gives me some concern. My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. But will it be only a little bit better? Maybe even pretty much just the same? Maybe I will be totally satisfied; I cannot predict the future.
But are these hardware vendors the canary in the coalmine? Or are they shills for Comcast and the other evil ISPs? I'm not sure, but they are definitely an integral part of making the Internet work so their opinion should not be so broadly rejected.
Right, so I agree that the engineering challenges aren't very great, but I would argue that little of the current infrastructure was designed with the ability to de-prioritize packets based on their origin, and so there'd be a pretty massive replacement of hardware in order.
I'd also argue the above as a more realistic attribution of motivation than that they're worried people will just want less Internet. I don't think the hardware companies are shills, or that they're evil, I just think they're myopically focused on their next product cycle.
The point you raise about the size disparity between Netflix and Comcast is precient, but I see it from the other direction - what would Comcast and their partners start doing to market entrants with this kind of strategy? If I'm Google and I've got a comfortable relationship with Comcast, what's to stop me from asking them, as part of a larger deal, to severely degrade or outright block new entrants that might threaten me? We've seen lots of companies do this (Microsoft and the various computer manufacturers (Compaq et al.) in the 90's comes immediately to mind).
The trouble with this scenario is that it takes a long time to notice anything is wrong, and so you don't get much market pushback. Then 10 years go by and you realize that no one's challenged the incumbents in a long time, and it's not because they're any good at what they do.
> My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present.
I don't think that's safe to say at all, considering it's been flatlined for so long:
Which is why I don't think the light-touch approach is warranted in general anymore. There's clearly big structural problems here. Having said that, I think we'd agree that the above chart is mostly a last-mile issue. The NN thing is more future-oriented, which is riskier, but also hopefully avoids a situation like the last mile issue where things are so entrenched that it's hard to imagine fixing it.
At this point, I don't have a whole lot to add. But I wanted to just reply to say it was a delight conversing this with you. Based on dragonwriter's note separately in this thread, I think I'll at least defer any further worries/comments here on the matter until we see the actual regulatory document.
> I would agree that some regulation is fine. I would have preferred specifically-crafted legislation for the modern Internet, and not application of a "forbeared" Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.
Why does the legislation as opposed to the regulation need to be specially crafted to the modern internet, especially if the existing provisions of Title II, including the regulatory flexibility provisions, provide an adequate basis regulation specially crafted to the modern internet?
Yeah, but they aren't cool like a car-sharing network.
This reminds me of the power grid discussion on HN, where the cool thing is hooking up independent solar arrays, and the boring thing is running the existing grid that we depend on for life. Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career.
People have abstracted away how much work it takes to keep society running. For the most part that is okay, because it gives them more time to specialize in their chosen field, but then they think because something has been abstracted away that it's easy to make some "minor change" without knowledge of the cost either in dollars or in lives.
> Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career.
Any home inverter that feeds power back to the utility is required by code to island itself when it detects a loss of utility power.
Also, I have a close friend who is a lineman, and has worked in every state between Illinois and New York. He says (over the beer we're having right now) that all lineman assume lines to be live, and they routinely perform service on hot lines without removing power.
Its not the newest fad we're after; we're excited by any prospect of the status quo shifting. History shows us technology getting cheaper and better at a constantly faster rate (I won't say exponential, but close enough). This is where the excitement comes from, perpetual destruction and creation with a higher quality of life the continual result.
"But now we face the really hard part: making sure the FCC doesn’t abuse its authority."
I just feel that the EFF didn't do a thorough check this time around.
Also, the decision was made at 10AM and they still haven't release the 200+ pages ruling document. It's most likely that this will head back to federal court and the process will get more complicated and lengthy before the dust settle.
> The "decision" made at 10AM was to adopt the rules that have been under public comment for months. If you haven't seen them yet, it's your own fault.
From what I've read, the 322 page document wasn't released as of 3 days ago [1]. I'm not sure about the claim that it still hasn't been released, but regardless - the rules weren't really available for public review before the vote.
It is disheartening how much FUD is being spread by conservatives on the anti-NN side.