They would.
The issue is that competition alone wouldn't fix it, because there is an information deficit. Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors. And since this is always bad -- it's anti-competitive in the market for over-the-top services, so this is an anti-trust rule -- it should be prohibited regardless of whether there is competition in the ISP market. Because you need it in order to preserve competition in the markets for other services.
Don't assume that people only pick these plans because they're uninformed.
> And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email
It seems unlikely that there are anywhere close to as many of the latter as the former
I'd be much happier if the government regulations gave me information to make an informed decision rather than forced a decision on me.
Suppose Facebook doesn't want anyone using their competitors, so they subsidize the cost on some ISPs that then block their competitors. The customers of those ISPs are 15% of the market, and they know the other competitors are blocked, but they want the discount. Then the other 85% of people have to use Facebook in order to communicate with anyone on one of those ISPs, and social networks have a network effect, so now everybody is stuck on Facebook even if they don't use one of those ISPs, because they know somebody who does. This is anti-competitive and so an anti-trust problem.
I'd rather have choice and transparency and see if the situation you've described arises. It sounds completely unrealistic to me and we don't have to make laws and regulations cover every single edge case right away, they can be modified as we go.
You've failed to understand the example. Nobody would have to change ISPs to use Facebook because Facebook paid off the ISPs for some form of exclusivity. It is Facebook's competitors who would struggle wity user acquisition because not only do you have to convince users to change ISPs to use your competing platform, but you have to convince all your frienda and family to switch too if you wanna be able to call them.
> It sounds completely unrealistic
You are incredibly naive then. This sort of thing regularly happens all around the you. Kickbacks, exclusivity and companies colluding for competitive advantage is commonplace, not unrealistic.
For the US, looking at iMessage's example, I'd say the trend would go the other way and Facebook getting way more power.
it is very hard to force trancparancy.
Transparancy (at least how I see it) is matter of culture.
For example, if you open up ISP accounting books to the public, creative people will find ways to hide things. Instead of line item “10M € kickback from facebook”, there will be “10M € sale to facebook”.
Instead: make it a utility, subject to regulation and codes as any other. I don’t need to be a plumber to ensure I get adequate sewer service, I don’t need to be an electrician to ensure that I get adequate electrical service, why should I need to be sysadmin to make sure I get adequate network service? It makes no sense. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it makes even less sense because those examples require less education overall than you would to detect bad faith behavior on the part of your ISP. if you don’t have enough water pressure for your shower to function, you don’t need to be a plumber to diagnose that. If your homes electrical service is so bad that you can’t run your appliances you don’t need to be an electrician to judge that. But how do you know if your given ISP is throttling Netflix without substantial IT in your background?
I don’t think it’s an outrageous opinion that any Tom, Dick, or Harry, who is participating in this market should be able to get the service to a reasonable standard of quality that they are paying for without needing to verify it independently.
To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.
But even if it were, it’s #199542 why HN commenters don’t understand what a “monopoly” is and why utilities that require physical infrastructure which are natural monopolies aren’t the same as cellular where there are three healthy competitors.
It's a natural monopoly in exactly the same way any other utility is. "It doesn't make sense to have more than one utility build towers everywhere to create the needed infrastructure." In theory if only one company did it you would only need one set of towers and costs would be lower. But a private monopoly doesn't exactly optimize costs either, and some utilities cost more to duplicate than others. It's much more expensive to have redundant roads than redundant cables running along the same set of utility poles or in the same cable trench, and cell towers are on that end of the range.
The spectrum is a red herring. You could operate live auctions to bid on spectrum in real time in areas of scarcity instead of allocating it permanently to particular companies. This would also give companies the incentive to operate more towers at lower power levels, because you'd only need to bid on spectrum in the same collision domain and lower power levels would cause that to be smaller areas with less contention, lowering their spectrum costs.
And what problem are you trying to solve again?
This is decidedly the case with ISPs today, so arguments over the pedantic definition of monopolies and whether it applies here are rather irrelevant.
What do you hope to gain by regulation?
Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.
I’d sooner trust an average 15 year old to regulate the Internet than literally any elected politician or professional lobbyist.
This is such utterly brain-dead individualist defeatist nonsense that I struggle to respect it as an actual position. Do you believe either the common consumers or the politicians understand vehicles? And like, even the broad topic of vehicles belies several specifics of interest to regulators like emissions and safety features. Of course they don't know all of that. They hire in people qualified to judge the effectiveness of those systems and to write the regulations that will then be enforced by agencies charged with that task.
Is this perfect? Of course not, no human system is or ever will be, but I would argue that based on the overall trajectory from the initial rollout of cars in the 1940's to the average consumer, where we started with brutally primitive machines that would kill people basically all the time, both pedestrians and their drivers/passengers, that spewed black vile smoke out of completely audio and emission unmitigated exhausts and were utterly terrifying at even their comparatively low speeds, all the way until today, when you can, as a consumer, purchase a car that manages it's own emissions within the bounds of reason, has numerous safety features to keep you alive, and can safely travel at speeds that well exceed the maximums posted on any highway without utterly flying apart, as an original Model T probably would have attempting half that speed, and you can do that all without knowing fuck shit about cars, ensured of the fact that you will get at least a decent product that will not harm you if used properly? That seems to me to be overall, quite an effective regulatory atmosphere. Not perfect, again, but quite effective. And that regulatory market is broadly practiced every day for probably hundreds if not thousands of products you have purchased without a second thought, because you don't need to think about them, because government agencies you know nothing about are working to ensure the safety of that market.
We have had this shit figured out for almost a century I would say. The fact that ISPs now operate such an utterly critical resource for our daily lives with near total absence of regulation in terms of the product they deliver, the quality of it, the usability, etc. etc. is frankly ludicrous. We're sitting here having arguments about which ISP throttles which sites worse and how to avoid them, when the solution is clearly: Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service, you should be able to access Netflix, YouTube, Mega filesharing, 4chan, Imgur and fuckin PornHub at will with zero thought to the notion that any of them will perform any worse than any other because they didn't put together a sweetheart deal with your fucking cable company.
The problem with that statement is, like anything else imagined by bureaucrats, is divorced from reality. Hence my point that I wouldn’t trust the government to regulate the Internet.
Internet providers peer with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other networks. They do so in some cases by paying money, but in most cases through something called settlement free peering, which came out of mutually beneficial agreements to connect at perking exchanges. In all cases providers have avoided passing the costs down to consumers, even though the economics are incredibly complex.
IMHO Leave it to the experts. No one is paying a special fee to access 4chan or Netflix. It’s a big fat, widely disproven lie that proponents of net neutrality made up and have been arguing for nearly 15 years now, one that never came to pass.
How many of them are throttling content to prevent competition in this hypothetical anti-net neutrality scenario? Exactly zero.
Which is evidence to me that Net Neutrality is a sham, what more people need is a free market. Not another government monopoly with some regulations slapped on.
Whether a market would converge on providers violating network neutrality depends on the characteristics of the market and its customers etc. But if nobody would have violated it anyway, what's the benefit of not having the law? Whereas if you don't have the law and do have violations, that's bad.
These are very real things. Regulating them out of existence makes no sense.
Google threw in the towel on wiring more new cities about mid-way through the SLC build, which makes need think perhaps the biggest obstacle to your thesis bearing fruit, is upfront infrastructure investments…
Google wanted a monopoly.
The nice thing is that they can properly screw off, because now we have dozens of better options where I’m supporting the little guy instead of Silicon Valley Big Tech.
As to why it has not happened yet: it is easier to corrupt a new infrastructure from the beginning than change one that is already entrenched.
Are there examples of what you are talking about with zoom etc? Because as far as I can reason: if an isp throttled something like that in a high competition market, they'd lose their customers. And if it was a low user / start up phase app it wouldn't provide any competitive advantage for an isp to throttle it.
I’ve read that ISP buys various links to to other networks at various prices.
So maybe something like: if facebookBar server is on pricier linkFoo and for that reason ISP buys cheaper version of linkFoo effectively downgrading facebookBar service (along with everything on linkFoo)?
If such scenario is realistic, maybe it could be due to valid financial stuff, not due to anticompetetive behaviour. (Just saying, some technically valid scenarios should be taken into account)
> And if it was a low user / start up phase app it wouldn't provide any competitive advantage for an isp to throttle it.
What we’ve seen in developing nations is internet that’s subsidized but only for certain companies (eg free Facebook, paid everything else) and people just use Facebook and have 0 access to the outside internet.
There are examples in the US at least, albeit less severe. It was (is?) common for cell phone companies to offer unlimited data cellphone plans, but they throttle video streaming to a lower resolution. Then offer “unmetered streaming of Netflix” (pick your VOD provider) while, again, degrading the video stream of other companies.
I’m pro-net neutrality but also I question if subsidized internet would actually be bad. If you can take a heavily metered or poor service, and subsidize it, then that could be the tool that helps bring internet to more people at less cost to those users. Advertisers would basically be subsidizing internet through these giants. The catch would be to find rules that don’t throttle competition which I don’t know if that’s possible.
It was mostly. Basically in the USA it costs money to peer with people, and even more money to put edge caches inside the ISP's network (because that means the ISP can't charge for peering.)
This pissed of a bunch of rich web firms, so they poured money into pro net neutrality publications. (also a lot of anti copyright stuff as well, so they didn't have to pay content creators, but thats a different topic)
In the UK, peerings is much much cheaper because of LINX and other peering exchanges. moreover, having an edge cache inside your network saves you cash as you don't need to spend as much arranging upstream peering. (It might save money on transfer between last mile and the core network, but I'm hazy on the costs there.)
The overall net effect isn’t what you say it is though.
If you model it, how could competition work to protect a YC startup with 1,000 or 10,000 users?
You can't start an alternative ISP at that scale, so it's unthinkable that a new ISP would emerge just to serve that throttled startup's pissed off users.
And again, only a tiny minority of users would correctly attribute throttling-induced failure to the ISP. Most will attribute it to the new startup being janky.
Even or those who do correctly attribute it, what are they going to do? Convince everyone they want to use this new product with to switch ISPs?
You are right that net neutrality, and competitive markets (and thus low prices for consumers) don't really go together.
Most economists understand that ISPs in the US are a natural monopoly, you simply can not have more than 1 or 2 choices in most locations.
And when there is no possibility of competition, regulation becomes necessary.
(Regulations that make market entry harder push things into the monopoly direction, but that's far from 'natural'. See some of the recent troubles SpaceX has been having.)
See also https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/net-neu... or https://www.cato.org/regulation/winter-2011-2012/economics-n...
> Network neutrality makes competition and consumer welfare dependent on law and lobbying, not natural competition. So you’ve chosen the area in which the telcos are strongest on which to fight!
Black is white. War is peace. Yeah, we know that.
> What makes you think they are? Especially if you take mobile broadband, paid 'public' wifi and satellite internet into account.
Neither mobile nor satellite (even Starlink) can compete for the main Internet connection for the majority of people. Around 50-70% of the US population has exactly ONE choice of a wired broadband ISP, and maaaaybe 2 if you count ADSL as broadband.
Less than 10% of the population has access to 3 or more wired broadband ISPs.
Btw, you can also do ethernet-over-powerline for the last mile. And there's tv cables, and the plain-old-telephone wires already in the ground.
If there's not enough competition, you should perhaps looks into regulation that's strangling that competition; instead of assuming blindly that more regulation is the answer to problems caused by too much regulation.
Because wireless simply is not enough. There is a pretty fundamental limit to it, called the "sampling theorem". You simply don't have enough available bandwidth for the cell wireless to replace the wired connections, even in moderately dense environments.
This is not a theory, btw. I had T-Mobile 5G "fixed wireless" connection and could immediately tell when major live games were on. It also became nearly useless during the Superbowl. And that's with T-Mobile limiting the number of subscribers (there's a waitlist for 5G home Internet in my area).
> If there's not enough competition, you should perhaps looks into regulation that's strangling that competition; instead of assuming blindly that more regulation is the answer to problems caused by too much regulation.
The main problem is morons who think that you can compete within the ISP market, and thus strangling regulations meant to improve it.
After all, don't we all have 10 different tap water and sewage providers?
I live in Singapore which is denser than basically any place in the US, and people are obsessed with their phones. Mobile bandwidth works just fine.
I suspect your underwhelming 5G experience could be related with cells in your area being rather big, so they had many people in them? If you have a higher density of people, you need a higher density of cells.
> After all, don't we all have 10 different tap water and sewage providers?
Try starting up a new tap water or sewage provider. I don't think the government will let you.
In any case, providing new 'last mile' connectivity whether with wires or with water pipes is hard to make work economically, if someone else is already there with an established service. (So in that sense I agree that last mile connectivity does have network effects. Though I wouldn't classify things binary into 'natural monopoly' or not; it's a spectrum.)
In any case, that's why I was emphasising the different wires we already have (cable tv, plain old phone cables, power line, and in some places optical fibre, etc) and the wireless options (3G, 4G, 5G, wifi, satellite, and the more directed exotic microwave transmission, etc). I probably missed a few.
If you can sort out the last mile, or you can piggy back on some already existing last mile, the tendency for what you call 'natural monopoly' drops a lot.
If there's insufficient competition in the US, perhaps don't blame 'nature'.
For 4k video? No, it doesn't. Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.
I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.
> I suspect your underwhelming 5G experience could be related with cells in your area being rather big, so they had many people in them? If you have a higher density of people, you need a higher density of cells.
It's both. The US favors low-density housing, as it's much more people-friendly than any other alternative. The other option is high-density Downtown hellscapes with scyscrapers. Both areas are not great for wireless.
> In any case, that's why I was emphasising the different wires we already have (cable tv, plain old phone cables, power line, and in some places optical fibre, etc) and the wireless options (3G, 4G, 5G, wifi, satellite, and the more directed exotic microwave transmission, etc). I probably missed a few.
Only cable is capable of 1G speeds. Phone wires realistically max out at ~30/10 Mbps up/down with VDSL. There is no Internet over powerlines in the US, and there'll never be because of RF leaks.
So your realistic option is either the coaxial cable or newly laid fiber. And fiber is often owned by the same company that owns the cable.
> Try starting up a new tap water or sewage provider. I don't think the government will let you.
Nothing stops you. There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools. It's just not economically feasible, unless there are special circumstances.
> If there's insufficient competition in the US, perhaps don't blame 'nature'.
There are no countries that are similar to the US that have competitive "last mile" Internet. None.
All the more successful countries (e.g. Sweden) decouple the last mile, making it a state-owned (or a heavily regulated) utility. And then ISPs can just buy access to it and compete based on services/price.
Alas, the US presents a false dilemma here: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing
> Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.
Yes, and that's great. The density of cells goes up with the density of people.
> I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.
The free government wifi we get here in many train stations and hawker centres regularly gives me 50 Mbps (on fast.com), and I never got less than 10 Mbps.
That's plenty fast for many applications, especially when it's free.
4G and 5G Mobile broadband is usually a lot faster than that.
> Only cable is capable of 1G speeds.
Singtel advertises that they have Gigabit mobile, and that's on 4G technology. 5G is going to be faster.
> There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools.
Interesting. How do they get the water to you?
That's beside the point. Nobody is going to rebuild the entire US for better Internet.
> Yes, and that's great. The density of cells goes up with the density of people.
The problem here is the same. If you can get connectivity very close to consumers, you might as well just provide fiber to home.
> The free government wifi we get here in many train stations and hawker centres regularly gives me 50 Mbps (on fast.com), and I never got less than 10 Mbps.
See? Free handouts from government, not multiple competing providers.
> Singtel advertises that they have Gigabit mobile, and that's on 4G technology. 5G is going to be faster.
4G peaks at 100mbps per channel, you can use multiple channels for about 500mbps in total. But that's shared across _all_ users. 5G has better efficiency, so you can get about 2gbps in total for low-frequency (i.e. actually useful) bands.
That's why "1Gbps" mobile Internet borders on false advertising. You _can_ get that speed, but only if all the stars align. It also won't be super-reliable.
> Interesting. How do they get the water to you?
Tanker trucks. It is usually cheaper than municipal water sources because pool filling companies can reuse the water. They also don't need to purify it to drinking water standards (in fact, they can _not_, pool water has to contain fairly high levels of chlorine).
Huh? We have multiple competing providers for normal paid Internet services.
Btw, I called it 'government wifi', but I think it's actually provided by multiple competing companies (but I don't know how it's financed. I assume the government pays for it. You can research for yourself if you care , it's called 'wireless@sgx'.)
This is counter-intuitive but here's how it works:
In a competitive marketplace ISPs have tighter margins and look for every opportunity for cost savings, so if throttling a high-bandwidth application only affects a small percentage of customers, and only a tiny tech-savvy minority of those affected will accurately attribute the effect to ISP throttling, it will incur only the tiniest competitive pressure on the ISP, so the ISP will do it to increase profits.
We actually saw more net neutrality violations in competitive EU markets than in the US, until EU-level net neutrality rules passed.
Another way to look at the limits of competitive pressure is from a startup's point of view: if your startup is offering a new videoconferencing service, how will competition help you when a rogue ISP breaks your service for 10% of your customers by throttling your service but putting Zoom in a fastlane? Your customers will not think "oh, I'd better switch to a better ISP," when ~10% of call participants are unintelligible. They will think, "oh, this new service sucks, I'm going to stick to Zoom."
Competitive pressure on ISPs does not protect nascent startups with small userbases from ISPs. And yet, everything we care about on the Internet started as a nascent startup with a small userbase.
Competition is great for keeping prices down and the US needs more of it. But to protect the long tail of startups and all the new ways people use the Internet from ISPs you need net neutrality laws.
1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2700055. Key finding: Relying on consumer switching behavior to provide more comprehensive competitive discipline was insufficient for a variety of reasons, including the presence of switching costs.