The most convincing argument IMO is that it hurts people's internet access by sniffling innovation. It happened in India when Facebook tried to provide free "basic internet" access to poor rural Indians [1]. It was blocked on the ground of net neutrality since although it would provide access to very useful sites (weather, news, wikipedia, and yes, facebook), it was a sort of walled garden. Considering the alternative of no internet access or limited internet access, I think most people would agree that basic internet could have been a life saver to these people.
The other strong argument against net neutrality is that it's a trojan horse for internet regulation. When you have a legal framework for a regulatory body to tell and ISP you have to provide equal aaccess to "legitimate" content, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider that the natural extension of this is to tell the ISP they must block all "illegitimate" content
I think their walled-garden approach, if it received an overwhelmingly positive or at least unquestioned reception, would have set an even more dangerous precedent.
Governments don't (AFAIK) set up internet services as social welfare for the poor in other countries. Facebook doesn't have any borders. Unless they're actively told to keep their rabid growth in check, they will just keep going.
Nothing directly against Facebook here, but I definitely think it's better that the poor and uneducated throughout the world are not normalized into a Facebook(TM) world of knowledge. We've seen what's happened with a much milder and more open situation in the United States (and elsewhere) quite recently.
I disagree. The argument isn't sound anywhere.
For an ISP to limit its users to a subset of the internet causes several problems:
1. It forces users to use one set of services. That means a user with Facebook-only internet has no hope of avoiding Facebook and its abhorrent data-collection.
2. It prevents competition. Google+ would be unable to compete, since it does not exist on Facebook internet.
3. It stifles free software. The vast majority of free software projects have little to no budget. If they must pay for competitive bandwidth, they face an uphill battle against proprietary products produced by wealthy corporations.
4. It favors centralized networking. If all of your users are constrained to a subset of the web, that likely means they cannot connect directly to each other. This totally rules out mesh networking, bittorrent, private voip, etc. On a non-neutral web, users will be constrained in their ability to run there own servers. This is already a problem with many ISPs disallowing public IP addresses.
> Key findings include the following: 10 percent of all Americans (34 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps service. 39 percent of rural Americans (23 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps. By contrast, only 4 percent of urban Americans lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps broadband.
Majority do have broadband access but it’s still a problem for some
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progr...
In other words, I want to be convinced that:
1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introduced 2 years ago; how did we get along before that?
2) This problem can be solved by this regulation (not all regulation achieves its goals, and sometimes it is even counter productive).
3) Regulation is the best/only solution for this problem (what other solutions to the problem described in 1 have been proposed, and why are they not suitable)
I think serious answers to these types will be far more convincing than the typical simplified arguments along the lines of "What if comcast creates a competitor to netflix and prioritizes its own streaming service".
TL;DR: I think some libertarians are not so much against regulation as they are skeptical of it, and are willing to be convinced that certain regulations are good, on a case-by-case basis.
Similarly, this post also doesn't read as the beginning of a debate or a discussion; it reads as the end of one. All three of your demands taken together imply "Net Neutrality doesn't matter. If any regulation is not perfect then we should get rid of it", which is both a ludicrous position to hold on NN, and a facet of "I am against all regulation" which the intro supposedly distanced itself from.
An appeal to reason is all well-and-good, but using it as a sandwich for an obvious Nirvana fallacy, makes your points impossible to swallow.
Also I don't think it's fair to say that since I'm not convinced by what you consider reasonable answers therefore I'm the one who is wrong, instead of entertaining the possibility that those answers are not as convincing as you think, to someone who isn't already convinced.
1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introduced 2 years ago; how did we get along before that?
Yes, there is a problem here. ISPs have already started overstepping the bounds by extorting money from Netflix. T-mobile has a plan out right now that gives you unlimited Netflix, but rate limits everything else. This is a violation of the principles of Net Neutrality.
Yes, there is a problem.
There wasn't much of one before, because the ISPs were very careful not to upset the balance. In the past five years though, they've started seeing what they can get away with. Net Neutrality regulation is a response to the ISPs testing the waters.
2) This problem can be solved by this regulation (not all regulation achieves its goals, and sometimes it is even counter productive).
Probably. It's fairly easy to say "all ISPs have to treat all packets the same." Then have yearly audits of internal routing infrastructure.
3) Regulation is the best/only solution for this problem (what other solutions to the problem described in 1 have been proposed, and why are they not suitable)
I don't believe regulation IS the best solution. Not so much because the regulation itself is bad, but because each set of people who get into power have a different idea of what the regulations should look like, so it ping-pongs back and forth ad-infinitum.
I think the best solution is for towns to build municipal fiber that competes with existing ISPs. The infrastructure could be rented out to local ISPs who compete on the publicly-owned lines. If Comcast wants to charge people out the ass for shitty service that rate limits (or hell, censors) certain websites, go for it...but there are 20 other local companies who give faster speeds for cheaper prices that support Net Neutrality.
The problem is, Comcast generally stops this kind of market competition from happening via propaganda campaigns and jamming through state laws that prohibit it. A municipality entering the market is still a free-market competition, so it should be an option supported by libertarians.
Many (including myself) have for years thought that this wasn't a problem. How did we get along before this?
But there are dozens of cases before NN was codified, where ISPs were blocking and slowing down traffic. One of the most high profile was how Comcast was slowing down Netflix in the NY Metro Area.
After the rules went into place, Netflix speeds just magically increased, and Comcast said it was a coincidence. Uh huh, sure.
there was a technical reason for the performance improvement; netflix started peering with Comcast: http://www.businessinsider.com/paid-peering-explained-2014-2
but let's consider the world where the pipes stayed the same size; suddenly the lawyers say you have to stop shaping Netflix traffic (shaping means randomly dropping TCP traffic in order to signal to both ends that congestion exists in the network and they should slow down sending). Lack of shaping means congestion and slowness for all content traversing the same pipe, not just the heaviest users. So people watching Netflix get a slightly better quality and less buffering, but it takes 10 seconds to load any website traversing that pipe.
In fact, if net neutrality regulation creates additional compliance costs it might actually reduce competition by increasing the barriers to entry for new ISPs.
2. I think most people would agree that the Internet should generally remain a level playing field for all businesses.
However, it's not clear that net neutrality regulation is necessary to maintain such a level playing field. It wasn't necessary in the past. Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination, which net neutrality regulation might unjustly prohibit.
The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
There are short-term consumer benefits, in my country we have zero-rated services, where browsing certain sites costs no data. However this completely undermines the concept of the free market. Any competitor to the zero-rated service has a massive hurdle to overcome, either competing with free, or paying the ISP to have the same deal applied to their service.
And there are also cases of abuse. Mobile operators began charging roughly $2 per MB of data for any VOIP traffic, forcing consumers to use standard calls.
By refusing to subject ISPs to regulations, we subject the Internet to the whims of the ISPs.
How could this possibly be zero? If a town's ISP has a bandwidth of 100Gb/s and has a demand of 200Gb/s by their customers, they can:
- prioritize certain bits such as live streaming that can't be slown down without degrading user experience, unlike text (current solution)
- slow down everything as forced by FCC's Net Neutrality (which would make live streaming unwatchable)
- invest in bigger infrastructure and pass the cost down to consumers (which is not zero cost as you claim)
So there you go. Another fun fact, for anyone that has lived through the 80's and 90's, the FCC censored TV and radio to hell with list of words, topics and images that could not be used on public broadcasting as it was considered to be public utility. If the FCC considers the internet public utility in order to impose Net Neutrality, they will be granted the same power as they were on tv. If you think twitter censorship sucks, wait for what's coming when Trump or another administration decides to impose similar rules through the FCC with the excuse that it's now a public utility and that using bad words (against politicians or else) at a certain hour is bad for kids. Don't forget that the boss of the FCC is nominated by Trump. People love asking the government for more regulations even though they always end up paying a high price for it. Just be careful what you ask for is all I'm saying.
IMO, if you're selling more than you can provide, you're already doing it wrong...
It's not acceptable to prioritize some content over another when having the appropriate infrastructure would solve the problem.
> invest in bigger infrastructure and pass the cost down to consumers (which is not zero cost as you claim)
People will be paying for the product anyway, I don't see anything wrong with charging the cost of production/maintenance + profits (altough I suspect their profits might way higher than they should, and not being used to improve the ISP's as they should. I do not live in US though), that's what most other sellers around the world do and I really believe it's the most appropriate model.
Have you ever thought that many people are fine with the deal they're currently getting and don't have the money to pay for more? Maybe that's great for rich people, but for lower income folks, the way ISPs optimize bandwidth right now is fine, they've probably done tons of testing to make it the less noticeable possible while providing the best prices for their customers (market at work). Forcing high bandwidth for all people even those that don't care will leave people out of internet connection at all as they won't be able to pay at all. So people won't be able to pay anymore but at least your principles will be respected, sounds like the classical case of unintended consequences of leftists policies that always end up hurting the poorest while giving good conscience and a good deal to the rich. Not a big fan of that kind of things personally.
My ISP is the only game in town for me, and they know that. They have zero incentive to lower prices or raise quality.
You should maybe also remind yourself that some people are not in the position to move around the country. You should not equate your own capabilities in life with those of others.
After living years in Syria and then in Peru, I can say that small towns folks most likely to leave to big cities are not the ones that are well off but the poorest one on the contrary in order to find a job to sustain them. So yeah, I would say it's mostly rich people that can afford to stay in small towns, the rest move to bigger places where there is more chance in finding people willing to invest in them even for low skill workers.
Suggesting that the situation in Syria and Peru is the same as in the US is also rather disingenuous. It is with high probability not.
And even if it was so, does that mean the ISP gets the automatic right to fuck over everyone left because they didn't move? Does that right extend to other things? Should water utility not be provided to them because they didn't move?
The fact that they refuse to invest money they will never get back doesn't mean they want to "fuck you over". Have you ever thrown money out of the window just for fun? Well now you understand these ISPs' point of view.
> Should water utility not be provided to them because they didn't move?
If there's only one person left in town, should a billion dollar installation still be maintained for that one person? What if it's 5 people or a couple of hundreds? Isn't it selfish too to demand a whole billion service industry (internet, water etc) to invest and work just for you and run their business as a loss just because you refuse to move? Western countries are running with trillions of dollars in debts because of these kinds of "investments", not sure if this is sustainable (surely hope so but doubt it). I would personally love to live in the middle of nowhere in beautiful Peru with high speed internet, clean water and top infrastructure, I would never demand anyone to pay for it for me however.
The ISP equipment usually in deployment is incredibly low maintenance and cost. And then "piping the internet" to the customer is exactly 0 cost.
New infrastructure is a topic completely orthogonal to NN and has little to no influence in both directions.
Net neutrality is simply tha concept of treating access to the network (in this example the ISP and the greater internet it connects to) where it does not prioritize one set of bits and simultaneously and purposefully (and typically for the exchange of money) slow down access to something else.
Bandwidth management, or the idea of prioritizing on the fly to ensure quality service, does not inheritantly violate those principals. What does is if the video people paid th ISP money for faster bits and to slow down competitors and/or the ISP slowing down competitors to promote its own services.
Notice it also has no legal framework for specific types of access or information, simply that the pipe should be neutral and non-interfered. In fact, net neutrality laws can help improve privacy and gives more standing for companies to fight back against gov surveillance
If my ISP is hitting peak throughput at 8pm on monday night, it makes sense for high priority traffic to pay for priority (streaming, telephony, etc), while low priority traffic (bittorrnet, dropbox updates, etc) slow down because they are unwilling to pay.
I don't think outright blocking is justified or even purposeful slowing down (rather than speeding other stuff up). But i don't think treating everything the same is economically justified.
Your argument is usually what I tell people when they ask about NN. It's a lot more complicated than treating every packet equal because at capacity networks want to manage bandwidth.
You could also think of it this way, why should the general user be required to subsidize a heavy BitTorrent user's traffic? Now maybe ISPs shouldn't oversell in the first place, but the operating state of a network is congestion.
Your argument is very moderate and is not NN, but it's close. I would tend to agree and prefer what you describe: content neutral bandwidth management. But that's pretty much an oxymoron.
This has the effect of enforcing net neutrality, which is why everyone is in favour of it. However it also gives the FCC the power to censor content, like they did with television and radio in the past.
Where in the network neutrality order did the FCC impose censorship on the Internet?
No, that's not how business work. If customers are not happy with a service they can shop elsewhere. The business is not forced by government to improve its infrastructure, just by customers pressure. The fact that some places only have one ISP is because government over-regulate right to pass and install fiber.
> Where in the network neutrality order did the FCC impose censorship on the Internet?
Once you turn the internet into a public utility, it gives the power to the FCC to censor it anyway it wants, just like TV or radio. Of course it won't be done overnight. Just wait for a big nazi/antifa/pedophile/terrorist internet scandal that would lead to a tragic death, than people will rush in a bill that says "sorry folks but we can't allow people to publish anything they want, think of the children" just like they did with public broadcasting on tv and radio. Making the internet a public utility is a requirement to pass these censorship laws, it's a first step. Censorship always happens in small steps. Think of the patriot act, if you give the government the power to take your rights away, they eventually will. Although to be fair they already have that power, but this will basically give them even more justification and power.
For much of the US, that isn't the case with ISPs.
Limiting how many companies can dig up the streets is a good thing. Imagine if every delivery company wanted to pave a road to your house.
Where the government screwed up is not making the last mile common to all ISPs.
If you follow a bit about what happened the past 100 years of new government agencies rules is that they have _always_ yes, _always_ grown into thousands and thousands of regulations each year. But yeah, I'm sure this time it won't happen...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-0MCZ3FJXJJs/UA7zeOEIanI/AAAAAAAAFl...
Well, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#United_States this rule Pai wants to repeal only took effect in 2015:
"On 26 February 2015, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) ruled in favor of net neutrality by reclassifying broadband access as a telecommunications service and thus applying Title II (common carrier) of the Communications Act of 1934 as well as section 706 of the Telecommunications act of 1996[92] to Internet service providers.[93][94][95][96][97][98] On 12 March 2015, the FCC released the specific details of its new net neutrality rule.[99][100][101] And on 13 April 2015, the FCC published the final rule on its new regulations.[102][103] The rule took effect on June 12, 2015."
A core design principle of the Internet since the beginning has been the "end-to-end principle", which was that the job of the network was to distribute the bits between end points. FCC rules concerning network data go back to the 1960s.
The FCC began rule-making on network neutrality in the mid-2000s, in direct response to various ISPs blocking traffic.
Where in the network neutrality order did the FCC impose censorship on the Internet?
Yes it is.
> It wasn't necessary in the past.
There have been abuses already. I don't expect ISPs will dive into full-blown abuse immediately, but they will ease their way into it.
> Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination
Could you give an example, because I certainly can't think of any.
> The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
Absolutely! That is exactly the problem I was trying to express. To abolish net neutrality while the market is in this state is clearly a bad idea.
Abolishing net neutrality will not do anything to promote a competition, so it's important that we start finding things that will.
Agreed, but net neutrality regulation never claimed it would. The concept of net neutrality accepts the fact that we do not (and cannot) have a free, competitive market for internet access, and tries to ensure that incumbents do not engage in anti-consumer practices that they wouldn't be able to do _if_ it were possible to have sufficient competition.
> 2. I think most people would agree that the Internet should generally remain a level playing field for all businesses.
> However, it's not clear that net neutrality regulation is necessary to maintain such a level playing field.
It's not, but no one seems to have any better ideas. Simply ditching net neutrality is nearly guaranteed to erode that level playing field. I'd be happy to entertain other ideas to maintain it, but no one seems to be presenting those, and the FCC is removing something useful without proposing an effective replacement (or any replacement at all, for that matter).
> It wasn't necessary in the past.
Wasn't it? Isn't the current net neutrality regulation a direct response to anti-consumer behavior by ISPs?
> Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination, which net neutrality regulation might unjustly prohibit.
The only benefit I can think of is short-term "lock-in" type behavior: stuff like Spotify streaming not counting toward your data cap. All that does is make Spotify more enticing and get users locked in, all due to an entirely synthetic advantage.
While this provides a short-term benefit to the customer, it provides long-term negatives as Spotify's competitors are forced out of the market, and new upstart competitors don't stand a chance.
Uncapped streaming is a fairly minor thing they could do (some streaming services already do this, and I'm pissed they're able to get away with it) and likely wouldn't hurt competitors enough to kill them, but unwinding net neutrality regulations would allow them to engage in crippling anti-competitive behavior, like making deals with ISPs to charge _their_ customers more for access to other streaming services.
> The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
We can't. It is absolutely not in the public's interest to allow just anyone to dig up roadsides and bury cable, and radio spectrum is too scarce a resource to allow robust competition. Do you have any ideas as to how to get around that?
Realistically how much more of an issue will this be than it is now? In the UK, mobile providers already offer 6-month Spotify/Netflix/whatever subscriptions as a sweetner with your contract, which seems like the same issue to me but in a non-technological sense. New upstarts don't have the money nor the brand recognition to make that happen.
Netflix has become a part of the Collective consciousness, arguably on a similar level to googling something. Even with all the net neutrality laws in the world behind them I pitty the upstart who think they can go up against the current big players in the market (which includes content studios) and win. Spotify can't be said to have the same sort of recognition but Apple Music probably can, owing to it being featured on every iPhone and iTunes installation. New upstarts can't afford to release a smartphone to push their services, either.
It's capitalism. ISPs love short-term customer benefits, because the customers love them too. Once their customer base are fed up with their free Spotify sub, the ISP will have had 12 months to come up with the next thing. And so it will continue in theory until we all have huge data caps as standard anyway so none of this will matter. And then somebody will come up with a way to double the size of Netflix streaming video for a few more pixels and then we start again.
Yes you can. Have the municipality be the one responsible for running fiber from reaidences to common access points. The the ISPs all have equal access and you can change ISPs very easy.
But again, politics and encumbent ISPs will prevent this.
I believe much of the opposition to it on my side of the aisle is based on the flawed assumption that any policy instituted during the Obama administration was a bad policy.
My preference would be that Congress passed legislation making net neutrality the law of the land, but in the absence of that, Title 2 classification with FCC forbearance is better than nothing.
The fringe refuses to see the massive risk of not supporting net neutrality by government.
In their minds, any form of goverment is evil, and if it didn’t exist, we’d all live in paradise, free from chemtrails and tax sheets.
After going through these arguments and others linked here, I can safely say it's all excuses and handwaves; a thin veneer over an anarachist misanthropy.
Which isn’t too different from other conspiracy circles actually.
But yeah it might be nice to make it just work well, without any respect for and to whom or what. All that matter is how. It should work well, how do we do that?
Some cities are deciding to build their own infra. Good. Now if only they'd explicitly adopt their surrounding rural areas and include them in the program. Because this same FCC is dropping the subsidies for rural internet and telephone.
That's just a silly argument.
If we are going there, let's first have the ISPs vacate all public rights of way and return all government subsidies.
Many do argue that the FCC shouldn't have the authority to regulate the internet, and often argue that idea to subtly change the subject.
If someone argues to abolish something, they should either argue in favor of a replacement, or argue that that thing should not exist at all. Unfortunately, I haven't heard even a flawed version of either argument.
Another faux argument I hear is the classic, "I am libertarian, and therefore must be against regulation of any form, and you can't change my mind." Obviously, that isn't an argument at all, and abusing libertarian ideology to look like an argument like that is seriously disappointing to any serious thoughtful libertarian, such as myself. This problem isn't specific to libertarianism either, but it is very popular in that community.
The core tenet to every position (not argument) I have heard against net neutrality is simply a position against regulation. The problem is that in the United States, we need to regulate ISPs, for several reasons:
1. There isn't enough competition: There are 6 ISPs in the US that control the majority of the market, and the majority of Americans are left with only one choice for >20mbit internet.
2. Net Neutrality is necessary to cultivate a free market of businesses that use the internet. Without net neutrality, the already centralized market of ISPs would cultivate centralized markets for each type of business that uses the internet.
TL;DR It is totally reasonable to be wary of regulation, or of the implementation of regulation. It may even be reasonable to consider net neutrality to be worthless or unnecessary in a truly free market, that has real competition between ISPs, but that isn't today's reality, so we would need to tackle that problem first.