Now ISPs are effectively digital rail lines and with the repeal of net neutrality they can decide who wins and loses in every other industry that requires the internet. The exact same arguments apply, and the fact that the ISPs are already in the content market in many places and have been caught throttling competitors, shows that they are ready to abuse this position immediately
Edit:added emphasis to first paragraph
The US broke up AT&T, American Standard Oil, US Steel and several others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_United_States_antit...
Galloway has a great talk about why we should break up big tech, because that's how capitalism is suppose to work.
I agree that you two don't disagree.
Regarding the matter, I think it's a fair comparison. Sure, there's some virtuality to data traffic as opposed to physical shipping for example, but there's always a physical dimension there as well. Free markets and competition never fully works where there's limited resources (in this case, the space and availability of network infrastructure). In addition, physical infrastructure can be blocked by competitors in many different ways, hindering new players trying to compete.
The ISPs are allowed to charge more for different service tiers under the 2015 rules, and under the earlier 2010 rules. They regularly do so. Most offer multiple tiers differentiated by speed and/or data volume and/or quality of service guarantees.
What the rules are trying to deal with is the following scenario.
You and I are both end users on the same ISP. We've signed up for the same tier, along with numerous other people.
Consumer ISP plans are almost always oversold, so if too many customers at once try to use their plan to its full capacity there is may temporarily be slower speeds, higher latency, or increased packet loss. The ISPs keep track of how often this happens, and if it happens too often they are supposed to increase their network capacity.
If you and I have similar internet use habits in terms of the kind of things we do and when we do them, then the periods of congestion hit is about equally on average. One night maybe your Netflix movie has some problems, and my Amazon Prime Video movie is fine. Another night, maybe it is the other way around.
To reduce extraneous variables, let's assume that the Netflix servers that server your movies and the Amazon servers that serve my movies happen to be in the same city, and are connected to the same backbone provider, and let's assume that you and I are neighbors, so that your Netflix packets and my Amazon packets are going over the same infrastructure except at the very ends of the routes.
Now suppose our ISP talks to Amazon and says "If you pay us, we'll make sure that when we are congested and have to slow down or drop packets, we'll slow or drop Amazon Prime Video packets last". Amazon agrees.
Even though you and I are on the exact same tier, and paying the exact same amount to our mutual ISP, now I have fine movie nights every night of the week, and you get slowdowns and dropouts.
That's what the rule is trying to stop.
Even without state intervention, utility companies tend to become local monopolies, duopolies, or non-competitive oligopolies because of the high barriers to entry. This makes it difficult for startups to compete with the incumbents.
In this case, legislation is much more effective at handling the second-tier consequences of utility companies (e.g. the natural tendency away from competition) than handling the problem itself (the high barriers to entry)
It raises the problem of the state controlling Internet. But 1. They already can pass laws to outlaw some parts of the Internet if they want to and 2. ISPs are so big I'm not sure them controlling Internet is more reassuring.
This is just a suggestion. I didn't process all the implications.
Some cities and counties have tried this and were immediately sued by the incumbent operators. Cable and Telco have multidecade long contracts with local municipalities. Having a government just up and attempt to start doing their own thing is arguably a breach of contract/illegal.
Comcast et al. sued Longmont, CO up the road from me when they first started their municipal internet, and tried to get the state senate to retroactively change the law in their favor. Luckily that didn't go anywhere.
Sure, I agree. But the choice we're facing right now is between "solving second-tier consequences" and "solving literally nothing".
Breaking the local monopolies held by ISPs isn't currently on the table - Congress largely isn't interested, and more importantly Pai's FCC has repeatedly refused to enforce the laws we do have. In fact, the situation is widely getting worse as ISPs lobby for bans on municipal internet.
There are arguments about how we should solve the main problem here - telecoms, like utilities, are arguably a natural monopoly situation. But until we make progress on that, the net neutrality question is simply "do we give even more power and profit to an abusive monopoly?"
It's the same reason we don't use separate networks of water or electricity. Internet really is the same thing, there are exactly 2 things that matter (assuming it's working) bandwidth and latency though you can easily degrade service via network design etc.
Unfortunately, this results in monopolies which means either public utilities or wasting capital on redundant networks. Globally you see a wide range of approaches to the problem, the US seems to be basing things off of it's healthcare system aka mixing public funds with private enterprise.
ISP's spend a lot of money lobbying congress to make sure that problem never gets tackled.
If we wanted real competition, we would have to do what they do in the UK and other places; force ISPs to sell access to their fiber, and require shared access to utility poles and access points.
If we don't do that, we aren't going to get real competition; it is not economically feasible (in most places) for a new ISP to run cable/fiber to every subscribers house (the 'last mile'). In addition, this is economically inefficient - if multiple companies run fiber to a house, all but one would be unused at any given time (since a single house is most likely only going to subscribe to one ISP at a time).
So basically we have two choices - force ISPs to share infrastructure or enforce net neutrality. If we can't even muster the political will to enforce net neutrality, what do you think the odds are that we could enforce shared infrastructure?
If you can shop for ISPs as easily as picking which store to pick up that gallon of milk from the 30 convenience stores, groceries, or international markets on your commute home... we wouldn't be having this discussion.
OR how about we attack them directly because it's obvious that they have malicious intentions.
Probably for the same reason why there are so few cable TV providers. Artificial monopolies caused by restrictions on laying cable in residential areas.
So its #comcast4Lyfe for me :\?
Also I am wondering whats stopping comcast from increasing the price by 500% tomorrow. How does the pricing work if they are just monopolies.
City granted monopolies. Here's how your plan would work.
>Comcast increases prices 500% (we'll ignore everyone cancelling their service).
>People complain to the city, and they realize the city contracts that allowed them to do this were voted for by the politicians.
>All public officials get replaced next election. Comcast contracts get nulled and they lose their monopoly.
The key to raising prices is to do it slowly enough that only a small number of people are angry at any one moment. You raise prices, then wait till anger fatigue sets in, then raise them somewhere else.
Besides, the web that I grew up loving has been long dead because of self-imposed censorship or being required to be in the good graces of Cloudfare. There are incredible services available today, but people have forgotten what the wild west age was like. There used to be simple web pages with amazing content, ran by one or two guys. I use to follow this amazing blog (before blog was even a thing) of a guy who was convinced the government was controlling his mind with microwaves. There used to be endlessly fascinating destinations. I'm just disappointed people haven't gone back underground with things like IRC as I assumed they would.
Right now all content producers are roughly in the same position: it’s equally easy/hard for them to get the same amounts of data to the consumer. Once you make it possible to put some producers before others, the wealthiest producers will use whatever means possible to be the chosen ones. In other words, Facebook will do their first and last to be free & fast everywhere. Given the last few years of experience with big players, I don’t think that’s a good idea.
If ISPs were able to charge for this (they want to), Netflix would have to pay a lot more for this sort of premium placement, giving smaller players much more room to compete financially. (i.e., if Netflix's cost to provide this best-in-class service they currently get for free is much higher, either it's more financially viable for small companies to pay for the same service, or they'll be able to offer video on demand cheaper than Netflix does)
This sounds like you're claiming that greater barriers to entry make it easier for smaller firms. In economics I think the opposite is generally accepted as true.
We've already seen that ISPs will abuse peering to charge for non-premium placement. And they'll charge that to smaller players too. So the end result is that Netflix will still get colocated, while smaller players are even worse off because they're paying extra for peering.
How do they "strongarm" them?
What’s to say that Netflix won’t strongarm ISPs after the NN repeal? No ISP wants to be the ISP that doesn’t have good Netflix support anymore, given their popularity and clout.
I beg your pardon?
So, today we'd have to repeal these monopolies, and then new companies would have to run all new infrastructure, or somehow get the incumbents to allow new companies to use their infrastructure, which is unlikely.
Frankly, new highspeed wired ISPs are highly unlikely, what we'll probably see is wireless because it's more economical to install.
Personally, I think there's a ton of possibilities for non-neutral Internet service. For instance, arguably, you could sell single-purpose wireless connections for some types of devices, say an IoT device, which has predictable data usage patterns, potentially subsidized by an IoT vendor. But with net neutrality, it'd likely be illegal to prevent someone from popping that SIM card in their phone and streaming Netflix with it.
Right now, the choice for home users tends to be "low speed" or "high speed". Unfortunately, that means low usage users like my grandma, either have to pay as much as I do for Internet, or have slow-as-frozen-molasses Internet access. Whereas if she could pay for a plan that didn't work with Netflix and YouTube, but was delivered at high speed, she'd be all set since she doesn't use streaming video.
"The estimated cost of wiring a fiber network like Google Fiber into a major American city is $1 billion."
Which is being scaled back and on indefinite hold for future expansion?
First of all, building out competing telco networks is nearly impossible. Look at the failure of Google Fiber and Verizon FiOS as examples.
Second, the issue is mostly about how telcos are now the gatekeepers of the entire internet. They now decide if it's an even playing field for everybody, or not. They can now say "Hey if you want to have high speed access to our customers, you have to pay us." and that means that if I want to start up say, a competitor to Youtube, I need a lot more money to do it. I can't just build a platform, I now also have to pay the networks.
And before you say "That seems fair, you're using their networks." Keep in mind the customers are already paying for those networks. So the telcos are double dipping. More than that, since we already know they reap huge profits just off of customers alone before they are able to levy these new fees against services as well.
This is a huge blow to the internet, and historians will look back at this as the point where innovation online began to stagnate and the internet calcified and began to decline.
Vendors should be able to charge whatever they want for aspects of 'Quality of Service'.
However, they should not be able to arbitrarily single out customers.
If there is a lack of competition then this can create a systematic collusion problem among vendors, i.e. they all know to charge really high for specific scenarios because it's better to do that then get in a price war with competitors.
This is why aspects of critical infrastructure in many nations are nationalized or heavily regulated: the 'power lines' in Ontario are managed by the government (single point of access) but power generation is 'privatized' and 'competitive'. (Not really, but it's supposed to be.
To really play the devil's advocate, one might argue that there is really no 'net neutrality' in things like social and search because of the incredible incumbency that Google and FB has, and that they are in almost unassailable positions, moreover, they have considerably more power to leverage their de-facto monopolies into other ares.
It's Google's strategy to basically commoditize everything around them (browser, maps, email, mobile OS) to protect their core business.
I worked for BlackBerry and left just before the deluge - one could make the argument that Google's giveaway of Android is a massive subsidy from one layer of the business to another that ultimately hurt competition by putting many other vendors out of business. It's not unfeasible they may knock out Apple some day. This would be viewed as anti-competitive were it to be done in any other industry really.
As a historical note: remember that Standard Oil did not get it's power from making great deals - they bought up railroads and charged competitors a tiny bit more for moving their own, which caused competitors to struggle. Then Standard bought them up one by one. So it was a railroad monopoly (single point of access for transport) that enabled a much bigger monopoly in Oil, a commodity.
So yes, we should Net Neutrality for sure, but we should be equally as vigilant in looking at 'monopolies' in other parts of the value chain, specifically those that use that power to creep into other parts of the value chain.