Re:A list of ways to “Break the Internet” for the 48 hours b...
by deathanatos on Tuesday December 12, 2017 @09:25PM
(#15911529)
> what net neutrality was about
It is the idea that an ISP should not treat different data differently. Their job — what I am paying for — is to deliver data I transmit to the Internet, as efficiently as possible.
The only strong-ish argument that I've heard against net-neutrality is that "why shouldn't the ISPs be able to sell off the limited resource of bandwidth to the highest bidder? Does not offering higher-paying individuals result in a more efficient allocation of the resource? I would argue, no, because:
1. Most people don't have a choice about their ISP, and their ISP knows this. Most Americans have a single broadband Internet provider, that's it. The ISP has no competition to encourage setting a fair market price, because no fair market exists. (I think I would be much more inclined on most of these points if ISPs were not local monopolies.)
2. Allowing the ISP to price discriminate (by charging upstream content producers more for getting out of the slow lane) creates a barrier to new entrants to the market. One of the great things about the Internet today is that if someone invents, say, the next YouTube, Google, or Wikipedia, it is essentially on equal footing w/ the other services that exist today. Forcing new services that may be bandwidth intensive to pay up help lock in the established big players who can outbid the smaller fish. This is particularly dangerous in the example that an ISP could sell access to only a subset of the Internet: imagine a package that only allows access to Google, FB, and a handful of other sites. Competitors are now cut off from those customers. (This is not theoretical, either; there are examples of exactly this happening abroad.)
3. ISPs have repeatedly demonstrated that they would like to offer competing products to those offered by non-ISPs, and will abuse their monopolistic position to promote those products. (By offering them at higher speeds, not counting them towards data caps, etc.)
4. The incentives created by content producers paying for bandwidth are perverse: the ISP would get money, but would be disinclined to reinvest that in the local infrastructure. Doing so would increase the available supply of bandwidth, decreasing the price that it would fetch. American's ISP offerings already lag behind the rest of the world, in some cases, by an order of magnitude. This would not help.
It is the idea that an ISP should not treat different data differently. Their job — what I am paying for — is to deliver data I transmit to the Internet, as efficiently as possible.
The only strong-ish argument that I've heard against net-neutrality is that "why shouldn't the ISPs be able to sell off the limited resource of bandwidth to the highest bidder? Does not offering higher-paying individuals result in a more efficient allocation of the resource? I would argue, no, because:
1. Most people don't have a choice about their ISP, and their ISP knows this. Most Americans have a single broadband Internet provider, that's it. The ISP has no competition to encourage setting a fair market price, because no fair market exists. (I think I would be much more inclined on most of these points if ISPs were not local monopolies.)
2. Allowing the ISP to price discriminate (by charging upstream content producers more for getting out of the slow lane) creates a barrier to new entrants to the market. One of the great things about the Internet today is that if someone invents, say, the next YouTube, Google, or Wikipedia, it is essentially on equal footing w/ the other services that exist today. Forcing new services that may be bandwidth intensive to pay up help lock in the established big players who can outbid the smaller fish. This is particularly dangerous in the example that an ISP could sell access to only a subset of the Internet: imagine a package that only allows access to Google, FB, and a handful of other sites. Competitors are now cut off from those customers. (This is not theoretical, either; there are examples of exactly this happening abroad.)
3. ISPs have repeatedly demonstrated that they would like to offer competing products to those offered by non-ISPs, and will abuse their monopolistic position to promote those products. (By offering them at higher speeds, not counting them towards data caps, etc.)
4. The incentives created by content producers paying for bandwidth are perverse: the ISP would get money, but would be disinclined to reinvest that in the local infrastructure. Doing so would increase the available supply of bandwidth, decreasing the price that it would fetch. American's ISP offerings already lag behind the rest of the world, in some cases, by an order of magnitude. This would not help.