Demand for Youtube and FB are so high and ubiquitous that pretty much any ISP will immediately cave in.
Comcast is the most disliked company in the USA. Guess what happens when G runs a banner under each search or Youtube video mentioning that performance is bad because Comcast is blocking things, here's Brian Roberts's phone number?
Nothing because consumers typically have a choice of 1 or maybe 2 ISPs? You said it yourself, Comcast is already the most disliked company in the US - they'd have nothing to lose by blocking YouTube - or worse, making it so slow that Google begins to lose viewership.
It's really clear. Democrats: This is the customer's information. Republicans: This is the ISP's equipment, and therefore anything on it is fair game for the equipment owner to use however they want, deny service to whoever they want, for any reason they want.
So distilled down what you end up with is a classist system where privacy in infrastructure isn't a right, it's something you pay for: Rich people are better, they get more rights, because they can afford to buy those rights.
There is a bill in Congress now to strip away the rules the FCC passed last year that prevent ISPs from selling your browsing history and other personal information without your permission.
In the House, here is the list of sponsors:
Rep. Flores, Bill [R-TX-17], Rep. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN-7], Rep. Olson, Pete [R-TX-22], Rep. Lance, Leonard [R-NJ-7], Rep. Scalise, Steve [R-LA-1], Rep. Latta, Robert E. [R-OH-5], Rep. Guthrie, Brett [R-KY-2], Rep. Kinzinger, Adam [R-IL-16], Rep. Johnson, Bill [R-OH-6], Rep. Long, Billy [R-MO-7], Rep. Brooks, Susan W. [R-IN-5], Rep. Walters, Mimi [R-CA-45], Rep. Cramer, Kevin [R-ND-At Large], Rep. Collins, Chris [R-NY-27], Rep. Costello, Ryan A. [R-PA-6], Rep. Bilirakis, Gus M. [R-FL-12], Rep. Shimkus, John [R-IL-15].
In the Senate, here is the list of sponsors:
John Barrasso (R-WY.), Jeff Flake (R-AZ.), Roy Blunt (R-MO.), John Boozman (R-AR.), Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV.), Thad Cochran (R-MS), John Cornyn (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Dean Heller (R-NV), James Inhofe (R-OK), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Mike Lee (R-UT), Rand Paul (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), John Thune (R-SD), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Jerry Moran (R-KS).
Note that all 17 sponsoring Representatives and all 24 sponsoring Senators are Republican.
They do on the FCC, for the whole time since net neutrality and internet privacy have become an issue. Congress is a little fuzzier but mostly along the same lines.
In the electorate it might be blurrier, but clearly the distribution of views of the relevant politicians shows that the people who cross lines on the above description and who prioritize the issue when it comes to voting aren't that numerous.
Not sure what you mean by that, you mean the breakdown of Republicans vs Democrats at the FCC?
Ajit Pai opposes any sort of regulation that prescribes or proscribes specific activity under Title II, and Republicans in Congress likewise prefer ISP regulation under the far weaker rules in Title I, rather than Title II. And he opposes subsidies favored by the Connect America Fund in reducing the disparity in broadband performance between urban and rural areas, and also the Lifeline program which makes it more affordable. Last year Lifeline was expanded, and Pai becomes chairman and blocks it as one off his first acts. These are night and day differences. It's fairly binary.
It's forcing free market ponies on what is a deeply monopolistic and anti-competitive market. Anytime there's meaningful competition you see conglomeration or market exit. It's absolutely a philosophy of "if you can't afford access or performance, the free market says go F yourself, and we aren't going to regulate an alternative outcome to that".
Except that the tone of your post implies:
Republicans="evil rich people" Democrats="good folks looking out for the average Joe"
I don't believe it is anywhere near that simple. It was not at all clear to me that your original post was referring to FCC regulators alone. It would have been better if that would have been explicitly stated at the outset.
Unequivocally today's Republicans are heavily weighted, not exclusive, toward classism. It is a good and proper thing that there are rich, middle, and poor. People are different, egalitarianism is P.C. nonsense, and the classes should be preserved. People aren't equal. Better people have more wealth, wealth gives them goods and services like privacy, and even better justice because they can afford better lawyers. There are very few true rights, in this neo-feudal ideology. That is what explains the policies, including that of the new FCC.
Evil? No. I don't believe in anything supernatural. And far be it from me to imply anything. I see this as objective fact. Tone isn't required.
This isn't the Republican party of the 1920's or even the 1950's where we had massive subsidies for certain kinds of public infrastructure associated with having a civil society: telephone service was subsidized, obviously roads heavily subsidized, and the postal service was subsidized in these rural areas. There was simply no other way to level the playing field. They, and Democrats, built massive amounts of infrastructure.
And like any aristocracy, Republican policies will favor established players. Netflix is now a player, and they are paying for better access. Now, this game only gets enhanced, which will act as a barrier to entry to future competitors. It's bad for free market folks, and it's bad for fair minded civil society folks, because it isn't either of those things. This is finders keepers, losers weepers. It's a party largely about classism.
And Democrats largely provide the veneer of opposition, but really that's specious. But like any crotchety old man with poor hearing, sometimes they get the message and we're not all just left eating cake.
The problem is the Democrats do the same thing just on different issues.
Republicans are in the pocket of oil companies, ISPs, agribusiness and defense contractors. Democrats are in the pocket of Hollywood, lawyers, HMOs, public sector unions and, let's face it, tech companies. They're both in the pocket of Wall St.
The idea that one of them is overall worse rather than worse for a specific industry is belied by the fact that they each get ~50% of the votes.
The problem is sometimes, like with Network Neutrality, there are objectively worse and objectively better overall alternatives, but those alternatives line up across party lines. So when the Republicans get in they try to destroy network neutrality and when the Democrats get in they try to pass SOPA and negotiate the TPP.
The key is to recognize that candidates matter more than parties. Zoe Lofgren and Diane Feinstein are both California Democrats, but what a difference.
If it weren't, they'd have halled in Steve King from Iowa into the House an expelled him for what he said over the weekend. People are Americans because of shared values, not this illiberal bloodline nonsense espoused by King and the ignorant redneck wing, or the inheritance and primogeniture wing. They smiled and said nothing over birtherism either, they took the wins.
By your logic, the FCC should regulate a conversation two people were having in person just by virtue of them being on public land. Yet the FCC does not. The FCC also does not regulate the signs on the sides of buildings, even though light is reflected from them to public airspace.
1. They also have been given the power to provide censorship of public spectrums as well because some idiots deemed swear words to be scary.
It's the exact same situation with net neutrality. If an ISP decides to give traffic from some hosts higher priority than my traffic, then that other traffic is interfering with my communications in the exact same way as an antenna that transmits a 50 GW signal on nearly all frequencies.
> By your logic, the FCC should regulate a conversation two people were having in person just by virtue of them being on public land. Yet the FCC does not. The FCC also does not regulate the signs on the sides of buildings, even though light is reflected from them to public airspace.
It's not that the government must regulate everything that happens in the public sphere. The government should regulate things if it's for the good of everyone (or most everyone), and if those things happen in the public sphere, then it has legitimacy to do it.
So, to address your examples, the FCC should regulate that conversation if those people are so loud that no one else in the city can speak, and it should regulate a sign on the side of a building if it emits such intense light that things in its path catch fire.
You're paying the ISP to carry your traffic under the conditions in your private agreement with them. When someone spews radio frequencies, you don't have a private agreement with them that permits them to do so. If radio frequency interference was opt-in only, the FCC wouldn't need to exist.
Demand for Youtube and FB are so high and ubiquitous that
pretty much any ISP will immediately cave in.
I utterly fucking loathe Comcast, and yet they get thousands of my dollars because of an unspoken of oligopoly among ISPs that has grown out of the tacit agreement to not enter in to each others fiefs.
TLDR: I hedged the possibility of oligopolistic/monopolistic pricing practices of a company that I cannot avoid by assuming that such predatory pricing practices will benefit their stockholders.
Their standard rates in my area have doubled since I bought the stock. The stock price has tripled. I wish this experiment had ended differently, with me realizing that Comcast wasn't so bad after all, and selling the stock at cost.
1: https://medium.com/@nicklum/how-my-hatred-of-comcast-drove-m...
I've used Sonic many different times throughout SF and while their support guys have been great, any and all problems I've had were usually a result of the copper. And AT&T couldn't care less.
Currently I have 50Mbps FTTN service from Sonic and it's rock solid. It's never been down in the few years I've had it. It does, however, still use AT&T infrastructure. But this is the only time I've used Sonic over AT&T and been pretty happy with it.
Oh how I've pleaded with them to bring fiber here. I remember when they announced that Berkeley was on the shortlist about 5 years ago.
Now, I'm in Cincinnati and have excellent fiber service from Cincinnati Bell, so it's possible to have good quality from the incumbent carrier.
Due to the regulatory moat that the Carriers have built up over the years (including spectrum rights) it's at least a 10 year battle to loosen their stranglehold at all, and that becomes a fascinating war if indeed content can be prioritized. Such a battle would be not unlike battles of the past, but at a larger scale.
Do you remember what it was like to load apps onto phones before the iPhone broke the carrier app lock?
The size of those transit and/or internal networks is really not at issue here. In discussions about vertical integration and monopoly power, what matters is the last mile - of which they have almost zero.
The ISP filters the banner before it reaches the customer, and replaces it with their own message (or just advertising from someone who has paid the ISP.)
I suspect there are already niche ISPs out there that cater to the content-blocking impulses of certain customers by doing deep-packet inspection and firewalling at the gateway.
Unfortunately I don't think this is totally true, e.g. in many places in the USA (even large cities and tech hubs), consumers only have one ISP option fast enough to stream YouTube.
They can pay. Start-ups, hobbyists, and non-profits can't.
* Local municipalities own the last mile, making ISP competition have less of a natural monopoly.
* Cities add regulations that don't require universal coverage which results in more competition over profitable locations. Poor or underserved areas could be subsidized in other ways if that was the goal.
* ISPs charges a toll to all the big companies, which makes installing lines more profitable, which increases competition and results in faster more available networks overall.
Net neutrality might be the best option on the balance, but talking about the alternatives as though there isn't a whole wide world full of ISPs that have different regulatory structures and different incentives is just silly to me.
And there is a whole world of working ISP models - which America specifically chooses to ignore and instead follows it's usual free market/competitive religion.
Your ISPs are playing your country like a fiddle. I have personally taken notes and look for firms making the same moves as them as it is an excellent signal of market weakness and, political backing and weak regulators.
I mean, your guys hid post codes in bids for territory during auctions, so that they wouldn't have to compete.
American ISPs are in the business of making money with the least amount of outlay. Buy telecom stock, because looking at the disarray even places like HN, is clear who is going to be winning.
By the by - google/tech firms- will never buy an ISP, they aren't interested in a single business in America which is not their core competency. Instead ~~they will let NN fall,~~ edit: it is in their interest to, collude/pay ISPs their price and use their deeper moats to purchase other firms or services at even better prices than they can afford now.
> * Cities add regulations that don't require universal coverage which results in more competition over profitable locations. Poor or underserved areas could be subsidized in other ways if that was the goal.
The problem with these solutions isn't that they can't work, it's that they take time to implement. So first you have to do it, and then we can revisit network neutrality after you're done and there is actually vigorous competition. Doing it the other way around doesn't work, not least because it's all too easy to claim you're going to do something to create competition and then not actually do it well or at all.
> * ISPs charges a toll to all the big companies, which makes installing lines more profitable, which increases competition and results in faster more available networks overall.
That would never actually happen. It doesn't matter how profitable an ISP is, you haven't done anything to address the natural monopoly, which means that as soon as there is any real competition all the margins disappear. The second competitor knows that ahead of time and doesn't bother to make the investment, so the market remains a monopoly but now there are monopoly tolls.
Do you know of academic/scholarly articles or books on this topic?
Net neutrality strikes me as a topic with a lot more scope for disagreement on both goals and policy than the hardcore pro net-neutrality crowd admits. It's somehow taken as an article of faith that a non-market solution would be best, even as we're living in a time with more last-mile competition than ever before (due to wireless).
Further, I don't see the Internet as a "public good". RF spectrum is a public good; it exists in a purely physical sense, and can be used by anyone, any time, anywhere. Internet infrastructure takes massive capital investment over many years, as well as ongoing expensive maintenance, and there's no reason someone shouldn't earn a reasonable rate of return on that invested capital.
It's not taken as an article of faith: we have decades of evidence showing what private players do. It's always same stuff that hurts consumers. They get as much territory as possible. They ensure through cut-throat competition, consolidation, and lobbying that there's little competition. Then they keep speed, innovation, and customer service as low as they can with prices as high as the market will sustain. This goes back to MA Bell.
Then, some pro-consumer regulations and billions in broadband subsidies made things better for a time. They also started upping their speed in areas where utilities or Google deployed high speed. As in, they could do it whole time but all big players chose to gouge customers instead. Obviously, one scheme works and one doesnt.
It wouldn't be good for Google, but this seems as likely as an ISP beating SpaceX to the moon. It's hard enough to get an ISP to provide internet service most of the time.