Read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/10/26...
If becoming a successful ISP is too difficult for Google... then who is going to be able to do it? Who is going to provide the competition to the monopolies of Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner?
In a system where preventing a monopoly (and ensuring consumer protection) through competition isn't possible, then that's where regulation is needed.
If you feel there is a better way, I'd be interested to hear about it.
EDIT: See my response about the possibility of Municipal Broadband here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15925827
"The two specific items to be voted on Thursday include a plan to make it easier for broadband providers to charge other businesses higher prices to connect to the main arteries of their networks." - From a pre-vote article. The vote passed. It includes a link to the document. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/technology/ajit%2Dpai%2Df...
Ok, so assuming the monopolies aren't just going to let you steal away their business by creating a municipal ISP that uses their lines... You could try and lay your own lines to get around this. However, that's the exact problem Google ran into. Google required cities pass ordinances that allowed them to move Comcast/AT&T lines on the utility poles so that Google could add their own, but the existing ISPs sued saying that the cities did not have the right and won in court. This means Google had to wait for Comcast techs to come out and move the lines for each and every pole, a process which could take months and the ISPs were dragging out just to make Google's life miserable. This battle over the utility poles is something you can research.
So, assuming we're not better than Google, and that laying new lines will be a regulation nightmare, we're left with the option of renting the existing ISP's lines... of which I already stated I don't think would work either because the same anti-regulation mentality that caused the FCC to deregulate NN has also caused them to deregulate pricing protections for business peering.
Based on my limited knowledge of the ISP market, there's significant barrier of entry in each area for a new ISP or even an existing one like AT&T or Wave G.
No that's inaccurate. Title II reclassification happened in 2015. Verizon Netflix "throttling" (controversial what actually happened there) happened in 2017.
What happened in 2014 was not throttling in the last mile, which is what the 2015 Title II re-classification protects against, so this would've been legal even without the repeal (and more importantly did not meaningfully contribute to Title II classification, like parent is implying). What happened in 2017 probably wasn't either, but could more reasonably be construed that way because it was all happening inside of Verizon's network.
The Netflix Verizon case illustrates what makes Net Neutrality law so difficult to describe in technical terms. Verizon was not slowing down netflix packets, netflix was so big that it fully saturated multiple links. You can argue about what this implies for the peering agreements that are setup, but regardless this area is simply not something that net neutrality covers. Net neutrality says the last mile needs to treat all content it receives the same way. If the congestion is further up the network, NN has nothing to do with it.
This is a common inaccurate argument I have seen pushed by the telcos to justify repeal.
There are many well-documented cases of how the "big 4" ISPs were increasingly blocking, redirecting (Charter's DNS redirection), interfering (injecting javascript and/or ads) and throttling traffic to internet services (Netflix) from their networks before the Title II reclassification of 2015.
All these abuses happened during a small window of a couple years between the previous FCC's Net Neutrality regulations were thrown out by the courts and 2015, when the Title II reclassification happened.
From 2010-2014 similar rules to the 2015 rules were in place, citing a different statutory basis; these ruled were struck down in 2014, with the court pointing to Title II, be basis of the 2015 rules, as the available statutory basis for the kind of rules adopted in 2010.
From 2014-2015 there were no open internet rules in place, but the industry was operating in awareness that he FCC majority was drafting new rules with similar objectives.
And FCC net neutrality policy existed from 2004-2010, working on yet a different mechanism, which was struck down by the courts in 2010.
And before that, things get complicated, because even though there was no net neutrality policy for broadband in general, there was also very little broadband of any kind, and what there was often, for much of the pre-2004 period, fell under different regulatory regimes based on the underlying technology (cable as cable, DSL under telephone related rules.)
So, perhaps none of the pre-2015 regulatory states were a disaster, but repealing the 2015 order doesn't returns us to any of those states, or even to a condition where the law would allow the FCC to reimplement them. In fact, it gets us farther from any of the 2004-2015 states than the 2015-2017 state was.
In late 2014, a court case declared the method they were enforcing didn't fall under the scope of their powers, but strongly suggested, while noting that the ISPs could and would be a danger to the internet if left to their own devices, that they had other means to enact the same regulations.
The other means was Title II classification.
Pre-2015, the FCC still had regulations to enforce net neutrality, just different ones. It was active in punishing ISPs for violating neutrality under those provisions. Verizon managed to get a court to say that those regulations were inappropriate, but the court also pointed out that if ISPs were regulated under Title II, then the FCC would have the power to set the regulations that had been de facto in place for the past decade. The FCC under Tom Wheeler immediately did just that.
The problem with this vote is that it removes all protections without replacing them with anything else. All we have now is "yeah, the FTC might look at it if it's egregious... also the ISPs promise really hard to behave themselves." It's not just that the FCC has removed the rules (although that's still incredibly important), it's that they've totally abdicated their position as the regulatory body for telecommunications.
It's something in completely its own category of nefariousness because they could be as anticompetitive as they want, and the market could not solve it.
That's because the injured party isn't their customers, who could take their business elsewhere, or at least loudly complain on the internet (if they have any).
It's someone not part to the ISP<->customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They're going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs' customers. And there's no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they've never heard about.
The result could be ISPs capturing almost every cent of value created by new startups. We will also have a fractured internet, because small companies will have to negotiate contracts with every single ISP. Also want to reach those 500,000 people in eastern Montana? That'll cost you $2,000 per week.
Anyone not living on the US coasts, and people in other countries, will constantly run into "HTTP Error 469: go suck a bag of.."
So why don't the results you predict occur in those industries? No one worries about grocery stores capturing all of the excess value from farmers because grocers have plenty of competition. No one worries about postage carriers refusing to deliver their goods because the government has promised to provide that service as a public good for a small fee.
It seems like you could solve your concerns by increasing competition among ISPs or by increasing the number of government run ISPs. I think this is still a "there's only two ISPs where I live and they both offer the same deals" type of problem.
You are paying a fee: for your side of the Internet connection.
Can you make the same argument about a telephone? Should business be able to call their customers and their customers them without having to worry about who has which phone provider? Should the business have to pay the customer's provider?
Factor in the way that corporations have been operating over the last decades (shareholder value is the number 1 priority) and you really do have a recipe for disaster for the consumer and small businesses.
Few providers abused the privileges they had, because of some combination of uncertainty about backlash, historical precedent, and lack of organization and understanding.
The answer is, of course, yes. But people like to think in terms of black and white, ingroup and outgroup, friend and enemy. The public is now thoroughly convinced not only that the reclassification had the intended effects (and it's not clear that's the case), but that reinstating the reclassification is the only way to address the issue. Anyone who says anything against this norm will be hounded until they shut up.
I talk with a number of Americans (especially on Freenode and over mailinglists) whose only options are satellite (which explains partly why they're still on IRC) or installing their own point to point radio network. All the current rules mean is that their only available ISP has to tell them explicitly that they'll be sabotaging BitTorrent traffic. Leased highway conduit space or leased dark fiber, and a loosening of (other, more administratively significant) regulations would have an outsize impact on the cost of the last miles of radio and/or fiber backhaul, instead of just adding pages to the subscriber agreement.
The internet regulatory state before 2015 was pretty much a disaster. The early internet was de-facto neutral with a bizarro patchwork of idiosyncratic local regulations (see the quote "the internet treats censorship as damage") and a general distaste from network operators for wide-area multicast (with good reason). Neutrality became an issue with major commercialization and particularly when internet services began to compete directly with non-internet services like TV and phones.
"As detailed in the survey below, nearly every operator places limits on “commercial” use, sometimes including limits on Virtual Private Networks, as well as limits on acting as a server. Why might an operator put such a restriction on usage? Doing so obviously makes the service less attractive to consumers who might want to act in a commercial way, even in a fairly casual manner.
"The simple answer is price discrimination. That this is the case is not just intuition, but can be confirmed by company policy. As evidence we can consider Comcast’s reply in 2001 to a user who had complained about the ban on VPN usage on Comcast’s network:
"Thank you for your message. High traffic telecommuting while utilizing a VPN can adversely affect the condition of the network while disrupting the connection of our regular residential subscribers.
"To accommodate the needs of our customers who do choose to operate VPN, Comcast offers the Comcast @Home Professional product. @Home Pro is designed to meet the needs of the ever growing population of small office/home office customers and telecommuters that need to take advantage of protocols such as VPN. This product will cost $95 per month, and afford you with standards which differ from the standard residential product.
"If you’re interested in upgrading . . . ."
-- https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863 [2003]
(Other examples available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S..., https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/net-neutrality-violations-hi..., and https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...).
Sometimes network providers got in trouble with their restrictions. Sometimes they were changed via customer and public pressure. Sometimes the complaints went to the government, usually the FCC. Sometimes they were addressed there, sometimes they weren't. Some providers were prevented from restrictions by agreements with the FCC, some weren't. Sometimes, something you wanted to do was impeded by your ISP or an upstream provider. Sometimes you could pay more to avoid the impediment, sometimes you couldn't. Sometimes you could change providers to avoid the restrictions. Usually not, though. (Strike that; try "Essentially always not.")
Increasing competition is a dandy idea, and it was the primary argument at the time. Unfortunately, there are two ways to do it, mostly: force utility-infrastructure plant operators (the phone network, the cable TV network, whatever) to be neutral with regards to actual service providers (which sort of worked for long-distance telephone providers, I guess), or to destroy all of the streets in America by laying more cables. Again.
Competition hasn't worked before in the US, and I'm unaware of anywhere in the world where it has worked.