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Net Neutrality - thoughts?

PhDeac said:
Another problem with the analogy is that governments widen roads all the time account for increased traffic a decade after the roadway was already overloaded.

The arguments against for simply questioning net neutrality seem very contrived.
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ApexDeac said:
I don't think torrents are a good comparison, because they utilize a swarm of streams (both directions from a client). Torrents speak more to the baseline utility of the internet than to the specific business/consumer issues that a Netflix brings up.

The main issue with Netflix (don't get me wrong, I love Netflix) is they drive a lot of one-way traffic, where the internet was built on bartering two way traffic with peers who mutually want to exchange traffic. The answer is for Netflix to locate a (large) server closer to the customers, but who pays for that infrastructure? Comcast wanted Netflix to. Netflix wanted Comcast to.

If Comcast eats that bill, then all of it's customers are paying to subsidize the Netflix subset of users. If Netflix pays for it, then it is harder for a future new internet business to get off the ground. Eventually it will boil down to two options:

1) ISPs need to eat the cost of that new, minimum level of service, which will raise everyone's bill (relative to where it is now). There is no longer an option for a non-Netflix level of service (since the government mandated equal access for content providers).
2) Netflix et al bear more of the cost of their delivery, and a cheap customer still has the option to buy lesser service that works with Netflix on a best-effort level.

I think comparing it to a stadium is still a good analogy. Cities wrestle with that all the time. The team could pay it's own freight, or the city can with the hope that it benefits everyone, including non sports fans. Sometimes the non sports fans have a problem with that.

You could even compare it to a la carte cable. Everyone is on board for that so they don't have to pay for anything but ESPN + HBO, but isn't forcing the cost of Netflix's infrastructure needs on everyone like imposing bundled channels?

I think it is hardly a no-brainer, and I'm wary of the whole "I'm from the government and I'm here to help" thing. Government granted monopolies tend to stagnate IMO. I don't think that option would have the outcome that people are looking for. Everyone can probably agree that a provider should not be able to penalize a particular source of content (the neutrality part), however who foots the bill for any given provider to provide sufficient service for any given content source is a lot dicier.

If we could sort out the last mile problem and have good competition there (with municipal players as well), then I think the rest would sort itself out. A provider hungry for users would be more willing to provide the best network for the lowest cost, even if that means putting in edge caches just for Netflix.
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Most of the technical stuff in this is really simply not correct. It's not worth going into. It's laughable to suggest the poor ISP's are "eating" anything or that a "non-Netflix level of service" would ever not be available. There's a reason Comcast can have some of the worst customer service ever measured, deliver substandard internet service, enjoy little to no competition and yet still rake in premium prices from their jailed customers. The problems described above were solved over a decade ago - add packet manipulation and data mining to a slow internet service (compared to capacity) and a captive customer base - all you need is a legal precedent so you can start abusing the monopoly on both sides instead of just soaking the consumer.

The stadium analogy makes no sense. Nobody's talking about public funding for a city-wide internet resource with equal cost to all that benefits some more than others. Beyond that, internet consumers with meager demands are not paying for services demanded by equally paying customers.

That post is just way, way off base.
 
DCDeac said:
There's a reason Comcast can have some of the worst customer service ever measured, deliver substandard internet service, enjoy little to no competition and yet still rake in premium prices from their jailed customers.
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That would be their monopoly in the last mile, no? Enable robust competition there, and the rest is sorted out for you. If some packet shaping happens that people don't like, and they have viable competition, they will move and the problem will be corrected.

DCDeac said:
The stadium analogy makes no sense. Nobody's talking about public funding for a city-wide internet resource with equal cost to all that benefits some more than others.
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You're taking it farther than I am. I'm not talking about public money either, just the concept of a larger group paying a higher price for something that a smaller group uses more, but may have broader benefit to the whole group. Those debates can be contentious, so having a set of rules dictated by the government could be a one size fits all answer.

I like most of what Obama had to say on it. I think the rub is this: "If the FCC appropriately forbears from the Title II regulations that are not needed to implement the principles above — principles that most ISPs have followed for years — it will help ensure new rules are consistent with incentives for further investment in the infrastructure of the Internet". Adding utility type regulation seems to me like it could have some downsides.

Also, his comments did not address the peering issues, which I was trying to point out in my post. He said no throttling, or blocking, but that was not the issue with Comcast/Netflix. This is what I mean

From http://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-end-slowdown/

"Much like Netflix’s ongoing standoff with Verizon FiOS, the drop in speeds wasn’t an issue of the ISP throttling or blocking service to Netflix. Rather, the ISPs were allowing for Netflix traffic to bottleneck at what’s known as “peering ports,” the connection between Netflix’s bandwidth provider and the ISPs.
Until recently, if peering ports became congested with downstream traffic, it was common practice for an ISP to temporarily open up new ports to maintain the flow of data. This was not a business arrangement; just something that had been done as a courtesy. ISPs would expect the bandwidth companies to do the same if there was a spike in upstream traffic. However, there is virtually no upstream traffic with Netflix, so the Comcasts and Verizons of the world claimed they were being taken advantage of."

AT&T has already announced they will hold off on their gigabit rollout until the rules are clarified.
 
1) Not talking about last mile. The whole reason this is happening is because net neutrality's current rules apply only to the last mile, hence the extortion payments from Netflix.

2) I explained why it has nothing to do with a mythical larger group paying for something smaller group uses. That's not happening. Nobody can point to where that is happening. Prices have nothing to do with that.

3) That is another article that skirts the tech for simplicity. But the key in that article that should be noted is that something every ISP did - routing traffic to their customers via simple, accepted technology whether they requested it form one source or 20 - was changed. By Comcast. And NOT by any other ISP's (at that point, now Verizon in a few areas) because Comcast is the most powerful ISP out there. Hard to explain how ridiculous it is to call that a "courtesy." If you have to use simplistic analogies, it'd be like a driver offering to bring you lunch for 20 people from 20 restaurants for a set price. Then you request 5 from the same place and 15 from different places. No problem, it's actually a little easier for him. Then you ask for 15 from one place and 5 from the other. No problem, but you raise your price since your customer really likes that restaurant and starts ordering every day. Then 10 more customers make the same shift and suddenly the driver's like - hey - this popular restaurant, even though it actually makes it much, much easier to pick up my deliveries AND I'm getting to charge more because people love it - I wonder if I can charge them too? I mean, I have a permit to be the only delivery truck in the area other than some kid on a bike so nobody can undercut me. Plus, whereas the driver has zero competition, there are a bunch of restaurants that had to fight for a decade to finally be successful and new restaurants are opening all the time. In fact the driver is thinking that he could make a food truck out of his truck and copy the restaurant's food. It'd be way shittier and would take forever and probably make people sick but $$$ so screw it.

There's so much wrong with that but you get the picture.

But even if that doesn't work for you, the reality of what's going on, at a ground level, really needs to be repeated. A router Comcast owns, one that is used to leverage interconnects fairly to distribute load across all bandwidth providers, stopped doing so. What's really great is in areas Netflix doesn't service, identically heavy bandwidth providers receive no such attention. Why? Because Comcast didn't hire engineers to review, isolate, and physically disable interconnect sharing on routers not targeted by Netflix bandwidth providers. I mean, think about that shit for a minute. "Oh, this thing that's working great as designed and making our paying customers really happy? Let's go break that, at great cost and effort, because we can leverage our protected monopoly to squeeze both sides for huge money."

Oh, and the "but why should Comcast/Verizon pay" stuff is also a joke. The hardware for this stuff is surprisingly small in number, so much so that capacity is a total non-issue. Netflix's primary bandwidth provider already offered to buy whatever additional interconnectors were required and give them to Verizon to provide for their clients. They were refused. It's a pointless gesture - neither side of the network is even at 50% capacity.
 
Does this affect my ability to watch free porn on the internet?
 
DCDeac said:
1) Not talking about last mile. The whole reason this is happening is because net neutrality's current rules apply only to the last mile, hence the extortion payments from Netflix.
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I think this has some good info.
http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/media-botching-coverage-netflix-comcast-deal-getting-basics-wrong.html?fb_action_ids=10203141218795374&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

I think we agree that (effective) monopolies in the last mile are bad. I just wonder if there was good competition there, where it intersects the consumer, then the rest would work itself out without any utility treatment. If I can choose between TWC, ATT Gigabit, Google Fiber, and a municipal option, then the price will be low and any upstream games could be punished in the market.

Utilities all have some kind of monopoly in play. If we could have multiple equivalent internet choices to the home, then it would negate the need for utility treatment. To be completely devils advocate, perhaps there is some future model where a provider offers a greatly reduced price for service that does lock out competitors. I wouldn't want it, but I would want the market to allow the choice, so long as that market really exists.
 
Then how do you get good competition? The game is set up now so may not be profitable for new competitors to enter a market. My neighborhood has an exclusive contract with TWC.
 
Could be. In 50 years people might talk about Musk in the same category as Edison and Salk and Gates and Jobs. He is bringing some serious game changing innovation to a lot of different fields.
 
Fantastic entrepreneurial activist and certainly someone who seems to understand the constantly evolving telecommunications market (in addition to obvious various other markets).
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Fantastic entrepreneurial activist and certainly someone who seems to understand the constantly evolving telecommunications market (in addition to obvious various other markets).
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PhDeac said:
Then how do you get good competition? The game is set up now so may not be profitable for new competitors to enter a market. My neighborhood has an exclusive contract with TWC.
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"One way to prevent this is through greater competition among ISPs...competition is a bigger issue than net neutrality. The internet has evolved, but the debate must evolve along with it.

If Comcast’s last-mile of cable connection was available to all competitors under the same terms that gave dial-up service providers access to all copper telephone networks back in the 1990s, we would have more ISPs in more geographical areas. Consumers could simply switch providers whenever Netflix or YouTube started to get choppy. And that would give Netflix and YouTube more leverage in their deals with the ISPs. At the moment, this option—where ISPs are treated as “common carriers”—is on the table, but it seems like a remote possibility. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Instead of railing against fast lanes, we should be pushing Washington to explore ideas like this that could actually promote competition among ISPs."

http://www.wired.com/2014/06/net_neutrality_missing/

Phone deregulation was a Reagan administration initiative, so conservatives should be on board with this type of solution unless, of course they're just paying lip service to Reagan-like open market principles and are really looking after capital interests.
 
ApexDeac said:
That would be their monopoly in the last mile, no? Enable robust competition there, and the rest is sorted out for you.
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The root of the problem is that you cannot enable robust competition for the last mile (or even worse, for wireless spectrum - which is a very limited commodity). It's a natural monopoly in most situations, and that's the entire purpose of what we call common carriers (the highway and rail systems are similar in this way if you want a comparison).

The IEEE SSIT wrote a good commentary on this a few months back: http://ieeessit.org/2014/03/23/net-neutrality-natural-monopolies-and-the-future-of-the-internet/
 
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