The UK extensively regulates and censors Internet access. It's possible you can't get excited about it because you don't have a culture of a free Internet.

British providers have happily performed deep packet inspection in order to "prioritize" traffic with little to no resistance from the public. Britain just doesn't share this principle.

Yes and no. The market works in the UK. If you don't want a "hand holding" ISP that filters and DPIs your connection you have a range of good alternatives e.g. http://aa.net.uk/

The shittiest providers in the UK are usually the vertically integrated players (Sky, Virgin, BT) that optimise their business around selling bundles to consumers (TV, mobile, net and movie subs).

Fortunately, thanks to local loop unbundling providing a relatively level playing field, there are lots of "net only" providers that focus on delivering a technically strong, unadulterated connection to the internet for consumers that value that.

Bonus: VOIP is also really easy in the UK. When I lived there, I ported my landline number to http://www.voiptalk.org (which I still maintain now), had a 4G unlocked SIM from Virgin with virtually unlimited data and an 18MBit ADSL connection from Andrews & Arnold. All monthly contracts, no tie in. Total cost was ~£50/month iirc. Worked beautifully and felt very "free" (as in freedom) to me.

If we accept that neutrality regulation is unnecessary in the UK due to the effectiveness of the market that exists here, we should remember that this market itself exists because of other forms of regulation which have been imposed, including: the ease with which customers can switch ISPs, publishing official figures of the frequency of complaints about ISPs, the incumbent telco being required to provide wholesale internet access (with price controls) which can be resold by any company who wish to set themselves up as an ISP.

It seems to me to have done reasonably well at encouraging suppliers to compete on price, and on customer service quality (provided you don't take the ISP's word for it).

It hasn't been great at hastening the widespread availability of > 20Mbit broadband, and that is probably in part because of a particular technological and financial internet access model becoming somewhat entrenched, due to the very same regulation.

I tend to be of the opinion that net neutrality is a useful tactic where a functioning competitive market doesn't exist, and is beyond hope of being made to exist. Outside of that, I'm much less certain of how valuable it is.

(I'm not going to address the whole UK internet censorship and data logging thing, because it's orthogonal to the structure of the market. And also because it's really fucking depressing.)

Yes, I'd argue that the UK's approach to regulation may as well be network neutrality by another name. It's looser than the FCC's interpretation but the desired end result (from a consumer perspective) is very similar.

Re: UK internet censorship and data logging - agree not connected to this debate (and, yes, it's fucking depressing).

AA are also the only people I've found who'll let you port your mobile number to them for VOIP.

I remember getting a 3 sim card in the UK, going to erowid.org and getting a screen saying the site was blocked. If you wanted the block lifted, you'd have to go to a 3 store and present an ID to show you were over 18 (and I assume that ID would be forever associated with your account).

In many countries you cannot even buy a SIM card without providing an ID.

Welcome to India.

This is no issue with a VPN. My "real" number is registered with a VOIP provider, and I just buy a new SIM card from a vending machine at the airport with cash every so often. I'm not even trying to be particularly anonymous, it's just easy.

You'd also need to create new accounts for all your services each time, or any basic logging of access will trivially link your SIM, data provider's IP, your VPN, and your endpoint services. You only need to mess up once and your "anonymity" is compromised. In this instance it would be the IMEI of your phone, the tracking data used by advertisers and data miners to fingerprint your devices, and whatever services and accounts you use for email or social networking on your device.

Real anonymity is hard, and takes a level of paranoia not many can sustain without suffering mental health issues.

Can you give me an example of where my experience as an end-user in the UK is different from what it would be in the US? Currently in Thailand where there's noticeable censorship.

Net neutrality only helps consumers at a big scale in the long run. It's not really beneficial in a direct way for any individual in the short run. So suppressing net neutrality is not something that a lot of consumers are likely to punish. Though it's clearly better for everyone overall.

The situation is a bit like drug addiction. Obviously it's better for a person's health to not shoot heroin. But an addict will always find the immediate benefit of one more hit more compelling than the vague, long-term benefits of getting clean.

Telcos understand this dynamic, and they're trying to play up the short-term pleasure - by offering so-called "free data" - in order to distract people from the long-term harm and drum up support for suppressing net neutrality.

To be a little more explicit about why net neutrality is important in the long-term, it's to allow small companies to compete on the Internet. If Google or Facebook can pay for faster access than some new startup, they'll have an innate advantage over the startup. It increases the barrier to entry for companies on the Internet, all so ISPs can make a few extra bucks.

The problem in the US is that the people who are against consumer focused regulation have no problem with regulation that locks out competition.

UK has strong telco competition because of a strong local loop unbundling program (BT OpenReach), the US had that at one point (Telecom act of 1996), but the FCC progressively weakened it to the point that it only remains applied to phone lines served from a central office, which limits the number of serviceable users as well as the capacity of internet service. Since overbuilding is expensive very few areas have meaningful choices, so we're left with trying to regulate good service, instead of having poor service punished by the market.

As an Australian, me too. Kinda. Except in the opposite direction: I've never had net neutrality, and I'm not sure I care.

We've always had data-caps that would sound insane to those of you in the Americas or Europe, and we've always dealt with them by not having net neutrality.

As an example, I remember the first time coaxial cable Internet started becoming something that was really purchasable by a large number of residential users. The speed was 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up. The data limit for the month was 10GB. Extra data was available at the low low rate of 14c/MB (or $140/GB, for those who don't want to do the math). The provider, though, maintained a large private mirror of downloads that were "free" -- they didn't count towards your monthly cap. They mirrored things like patches for games, linux ISOs, and they had a fairly large shareware repository.

I couldn't get cable Internet at home -- they never ran the cable down my street -- so I was stuck on 28k dial-up. I would have killed for cable, data restrictions or not.

But that was back then. What about now?

Now? We have companies that deliver data over LTE who do similar-but-different things. I have a cellular plan with Optus (AKA Singtel), which is $80 a month. For that, I get 20GB worth of downloads, but I also get absolutely unlimited streaming of Netflix, and unlimited streaming from most of the popular music services (Spotify, Google Play, I Heart Radio, Apple Music, and maybe others I can't remember). I stream tens of gigabytes of video and audio every month, and I can do this because of the lack of net neutrality here. Some other provides on pre-paid services which typically have tiny data caps will provide "unlimited social media access" -- because that's how they draw in teens, what I assume is the most valuable market segment for pre-paid.

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that when a service becomes big enough that it's marketable to with free data, then one of the providers will pick up on it as a value-add. Something they can do that improves their service so they can grab more market share.

Some of you are probably going to argue that this is a symptom of a broken market, and I'm not sure that's the case. Networking in Australia is hard. We have 1/10th the population of the US in a country about the same physical size.

It's possible I'm really very wrong about how this all works. Maybe I'm naive and it's all really terrible and I should be upset. It's just hard to see from here how perfect net neutrality is an issue.

Historically, bandwidth in and out of Australia was super expensive, because there weren't that many undersea cables connecting it to the world; that's why Australian providers would run mirrors with uncapped access, but everything else had high usage fees; I would guess one of the conditions of getting a service zero-rated is connecting to the carrier in Australia, so the carrier isn't footing the international data bill. Likely many of these providers have local caching and serving, and may update their storage when undersea cables are off peak to reduce their own data costs. (OTOH, the undersea capacity has increased a lot, so it may not be as expensive as it once was)

I used to joke that the reason that Australian data-caps were so low is that they have to get all of the data over by boat.

The way I see things is that having an Internet service that is in high demand is simply incentive for ISPs to peer with you.

Netflix reportedly said (link below) that it regretted offering 'unmetered data' to Australian ISPs, because they feared it would have a chilling effect on the availability of other streaming services.

Their fears were unfounded: Stan & Presto are both available unmetered on certain ISPs. (Quickflix went out of business, but not because of ISP deals, but because they couldn't compete in library size and other major ways -- I suspect there's simply not room for three Australia-based streaming services to license enough content to keep themselves afloat.)

http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/netflix...

Just a head's up: Presto was owned by FoxTel, and was shut down this month.

Stan seems to be a good competitor, but that's only comparing it to the Australian Netflix library. I'm of the opinion that all competition has done is split the market, as they fight over the same set of exclusives.

I'll often browse US Netflix rather than switch between Aus Netflix and Stan to find a movie I've seen previously. US Netflix seems to have 90% of the missing content Stan offers over Aus Netflix.

Are any "value-add services" Australian-borne?

Yes. Australian Football is free to stream on certain LTE carriers, along with Netflix on Optus I get access to the ABC (national government-owned broadcaster) and Stan (an Australian streaming service much like Netflix, owned by Fairfax).

Home-broadband wise, here's a link to Telstra (Australia's largest telecomms company by a large margin) and their policies around free content on their residential "BigPond" ISP: https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/manage...

And a link to services available for 'free' on Internode (now owned by TPG, which is I think at this point Australia's second largest ISP) http://www.internode.on.net/residential/entertainment/unmete...

TPG themselves do free Netflix, although I'm not sure what else is unmetered.

Admittedly, I've only taken a cursory glance and so I may have missed something, but it seems to me that most of what's offered is either large corporations (Netflix, Xbox), or the Telecom network's own media arm.

That's nightmarish to me. 6 corporations owning 90%+ of media outlets in the US is already bordering corporatist dystopia.

Optus isn't unmetering Netflix because there's a shady backroom deal with Netflix to try to drive their viewership by sales of cellphones, Optus is unmetering Netflix because it's a tractable problem, they can QoS the traffic, and they can deliver a service that will hopefully attract more users.

If you don't happen to watch much Netflix, but another carrier offers a deal on something you do use? Switch! Or maybe you don't need the value-add services and just want an overall cheaper plan? You can do that, too! Porting to a different ISP or cellular carrier is a legally enforced right here. 99% of the population of Australia is able to switch at will to a number of different providers, and there's nothing like the regional monopolies that companies like TWC or Comcast have in the US.

There's huge, fundamental gaps in the way different continents provide Internet access. Maybe if there were no competition of ISPs at a local level in Australia, net neutrality would be a huge problem here. It isn't a problem here, though. I don't think it's something that the average Australian in the street has thought much about, and if you explained it to them they probably wouldn't understand what the big deal is. Despite the fact that we don't have net neutrality, the sky isn't falling, and Australian access to the Internet is basically as free-as-in-freedom as it is in the US.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, and the idea that ISPs must only ever be dumb pipes is one way to solve the problem of competition in the Internet provider space, but it's certainly not the only one.

And this is exactly why net neutrality is an enormous issue in the United States: Typically we only have one local broadband carrier. Two if you are exceptionally lucky. And the local ISP monopoly is often run by fucking Comcast or Time Warner Cable ("now called Spectrum"), two of the worst companies on this planet. Net neutrality is an enormous issue for Americans.

Hahahahaha, 6 media corporations? Six? I wish!

Name just one (in Australia) that isn't owned by Murdoch or Fairfax :P

The UK increasingly restricts net access to certain sites (piratebay ban), and the telcos are not competitive everywhere.

> that anything that's anticonsumer will get punished by the market

many large telcos are going the way of mobile networks, by tying you in with complex, one-sided contracts, salesmen-sold "bundles" etc.

How many inexpensive, short-term mobile contracts can you get? If internet contracts aren't there now, they will be soon.

Nobody's going to switch carriers because of free data. I think you're missing the point here

I have switched carriers several times in the last 15 years, usually for data or pricing reasons.

I'm not atypical. It's easy to switch in the UK, easy to port your number, and people have little carrier loyalty. Switching home broadband is more of a pain, but switching cell carriers (or, rather, "mobile providers") takes a phone call and a day of questionable connectivity and that's it.

If people are paying for data on one carrier, that another carrier is offering for free (for whatever reason), that can be a reason to switch; that's why T-Mobile is offering it. In the US, it's relatively simple to switch your cell phone service, and there are many choices: 4 mainstream national carriers, all of them have prepaid brands, and many MVNO options as well.

For home internet, if you have a choice, it's usually between only two companies with different technology, and often significantly different bandwidth options, there's not much room to compare on price, and very little room to compare on routing or terms of service.

My point was saying nobody is going to switch away from a carrier because that carrier is offering free data.

I think people are missing the point of the posted article, or maybe I am. As I understand it, the complaint is that giving free data for the incumbent tech giants' products gives them a distinct advantage in the marketplace over small / startup offerings which do not have deals for free data. This advantage means the "level playing field" of the internet frontier is dead.

Anecdotal (counter)evidence: in India, Reliance ("Jio") has been offering free (which is a first) 4G (I believe only one other carrier offers that) data for a few months now, ending March of this year. (I believe they're using this to both draw users and give people a taste of what a fast mobile data connection can be like as well as to work out teething problems. Nobody's a saint, etc.)