> Assuming you have 10mbit internet access for $N/month:
> * Paying +$20/m for 100mbit internet: OK
> * Paying +$20/m for 100mbit access to "Top 100 websites": Not OK
In your car comparison, it would be like :
Assuming you pay for a VW Golf $10000
* Paying +$200k for a Ferrari: OK
* Paying +$200k for a Lamborghini: OK
* Paying +$200k for a Ferrari but +$200k for an equivalent Lamborghini but with an added +$300k of fee just because the container ship company moving the car from Italy to the U.S. asked an extra $300k simply because the container is filled with Lamborghini instead of Ferrari: Not OK
Container companies would never do this because Lamborghini would simply put its containers on the container boat of a concurrent company, because there's competition. But for consumer-facing ISPs, there's plenty of documentation that shows that in many areas around the country, some ISPs have a monopoly, and so for many users, they cannot go to another ISP if they aren't satisfied with their only choice.
That's more like how the internet is in the USA: there are local monopolies restricting who you can go to for internet service, and now your ISP also wants to restrict what websites I go to (or with what speed). That's why this strikes as so objectionable.
It doesn't matter if you have a Ferrari or a Corolla - the streets don't care. Everyone can use the street and must follow the same laws.
If you have a Ferrari (gigabit internet), you bought the ability to accelerate quicker and go faster... But the same laws apply.
Biased internet is paying to have every light green and kick people off the road...
Anyone can use toll roads - it doesn't matter what car you drive, where you came from, or where you're going, the price is the same for everyone. Price per mile, flat rate, whatever - if it's non-discriminatory, it's neutral!
Non-neutrality is when a toll road charges more because of the car you drive, where you came from, what you're carrying, or where you're headed - or letting certain people jump the queue based on those criteria.
It's not OK to give a discount to BMW drivers because they drive a BMW. If BMW drivers are the only ones that can afford the price - that's OK. But if a Corolla driver comes along and pays the price, they better get exactly the same service.
(The analogy does break down at vehicle weight - cars can be long/short and heavy/light, packets are only long/short)
But that's also the part I don't really care about. I was objecting specifically to the original point that rich people shouldn't be able to buy better treatment.
couples together several axis of debate, rich people can buy better treatment in some areas but clearly not others.
Imagine some natural disaster, and everyone is being evacuated. The local convenience store is selling out of ice, as folks try to pack up enough food and stuff for their time away.
It comes down to the last bag of ice, and we've got two customers. A frat boy got in line first, wanting that ice to keep his beer cold. He takes the ice for $2 and leaves, happy.
The last guy is diabetic. He'd have willingly paid ten or even a hundred times that amount to keep his insulin fresh. But because the convenience store wants to keep pricing fair for everyone, the guy who REALLY needs the stuff wasn't able to signal the greater value he puts on the ice, and so the system fails him.
The ability to use pricing to communicate value, including the ability to substitute other goods or downstream value of goods incorporating a resource, is crucial to the functioning of the market. And the most obvious problem with socialism is that it attempts to forgo this information, making the decisions by fiat or by guess, when it's impossible to centralize the knowledge that pricing derives through an emergent distributed calculation.
Read more in Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society": http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html
At least in the USA, this is a solved problem.
The federal, state, and/or local government step in and provide disaster relief, including access to ice and/or medications.
And the diabetic gets to live without parting with his life savings for a cup of ice.
> through an emergent distributed calculation.
Diabetics are not electrons in a calculator.
There's a general pattern to both the argument you're making here and the argument you made about remote surgery. You're dreaming up a completely non-existent and totally hypothetical possible harm that the status quo already has exception handling mechanisms for, and providing it as a reason for ignoring much more systemic and plausible harms.
Yes, my examples were only intended as illustrations. But isn't that also the case with the topic under discussion, net neutrality? I mean, it is not the case that any carrier has unfairly shaped traffic to the extent that they're determining winners and losers, and innovation with new products becomes impossible. This fear is totally hypothetical as well.
the status quo already has exception handling mechanisms for, and providing it as a reason for ignoring much more systemic and plausible harms
I think you're falling victim to fundamental attribution error. It seems like you're damning your opponent for a particular problem, while excusing the same problems for your own team:
The federal, state, and/or local government step in and provide disaster relief, including access to ice and/or medications.
Yes, but the official channels have been frequently shown not to work. Consider Hurricane Katrina. The FEMA help was ... not so helpful, and much of the initial response was actually courtesy of WalMart. I recall one store manager, trying to help people in critical need of medication actually taking a bulldozer and knocking down a wall of the store to get at it.
The government contingencies didn't work. The private sector doesn't always work out either, but much of the time it does a better job. It's silly to pretend that the private sector cannot do it, and the government can be depended on with complete confidence.
But my example of ice in a disaster was all just one example to show the thought process. There are of course examples in plenty other places.
Regarding my example of remote surgery data transmission, the responses from other folks here regarding QoS protocols was pretty constructive. However, I'm left with the view that none of us fully understands how Net Neutrality affects (or doesn't affect) its usage.
TFA: "Censorship by ISPs is a serious problem. Comcast has throttled Netflix, AT&T blocked FaceTime, Time Warner Cable throttled the popular game League of Legends, and Verizon admitted it will introduce fast lanes for sites that pay-and slow lanes for everyone else-if the FCC lifts the rules. This hurts consumers and businesses large and small."
> to the extent that they're determining winners and losers
The saga goes something like this: NN has been the assumed default since at least the late 90's. ISPs recently started to seriously test that presumption. FCC stepped in, and here we are. The NN rule started in 2015, but has been the default behavior of ISPs for decades.
ISPs have been chomping at the bit to take advantage of their monopoly for decades. Comcast and Verizon are blatantly gearing up for this play, including via huge acquisitions.
The "wait until they really screw you" argument is an uncompelling call to non-action.
> This fear is totally hypothetical as well.
Again, no, it's not. ISPs are coming out and saying publicly "yes, we will do this".
> ...Hurricane Katrina... The government contingencies didn't work.
Counter-point: the literally thousands of well-handled hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes.
> The private sector doesn't always work out either, but much of the time it does a better job.
The private for-profit sector doesn't provide systematic disaster relief, anecdotes of charity whipped into a frenzy by mega-corp's PR firms aside. For-profit FEMA just Does. Not. Exist.
Here's a catalog of various forms of actual disaster relief provided after Katrina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina_disaster_rel...
Read -- actually read -- the overview of that article. Even when the government abjectly fails at disaster relief it still does several orders of magnitude more than private for-profit enterprises.
Katrina was a failure of early warning and evacuation protocols, not a failure of disaster response mechanisms.
Which makes sense -- aside from price gouging, there's no profit to be made on emergency response.
From Wikipedia: "The highway is noted for having a speed limit of at least 80 mph (130 km/h) along its tolled section. The 41-mile (66 km) section of the toll road between Mustang Ridge and Seguin has a posted speed limit of 85 mph (137 km/h), the highest posted speed limit in the United States."
They are also a little different because they are part of the network - your isp deals with peering with other ISPs, and some ISPs do charge more... That price is reflected in what the consumer and end host pay for service.