Because it isn't an election year issue. This has been in the works since at least 2022.https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/net-neutrality-will-make-...
The rule making process takes time!
>From my perspective, nothing about the internet changed since then (my experience did not upgrade or downgrade). People stopped talking about it, there weren't major protests, news about it even largely disappeared from the front page of HN (!). ... What, then, is the impetus for restoring the net neutrality rules, given there is always some political cost to any action like this? Has the lack of net neutrality caused issues that I just have not heard about?
IMO it seems likely ISPs knew the rules were likely to come back so they avoided most of the practices that would generate outrage (throttling streaming and other popular services unless you pay an additional fee). I have no doubt if they could get away with it they would haha. Many providers did roll out zero rating programs.
As for why this is important just because ISPs aren't currently doing it on a large scale doesn't mean steps shouldn't be taken to prohibit it. We already know what happens in the long run when ISPs are allowed to double dip https://restofworld.org/2024/south-korea-twitch-exit-problem...
And several states passed their own laws.
As a group, they sure do love to complain. They voted to get rid of the national standard in the first place! Then when real solutions are being voted on they love to yell and screech about how it's "THE END OF THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT!!!" yeah... Bunch of whiners.
It really didn't have to in this case. It would have been perfectly acceptable to crib California's NN law, ctrl-r "California" "United States of America" and call it a day.
Not even bothering to follow the clear objective formal requirements of that process (the question about Trump was more about good faith in the substance) would make it trivial to defeat in court.
No, it doesn't take this much time. It's just that net neutrality wasn't a priority for the Biden administration, so they dragged their feet until the very last minute. IIRC, there's been a flurry of rule-making just now because they are running up against a Congressional Review Act deadline.
The FCC was deadlocked until September 2023 and started this process a few days later. Maybe they could have started in 2022 if Biden had nominated someone else after Republicans blocked his 1st choice. But Democrats believed Republicans would block anyone who would restore net neutrality.
I am aware of that.
> Maybe they could have started in 2022 if Biden had nominated someone else after Republicans blocked his 1st choice. But Democrats believed Republicans would block anyone who would restore net neutrality.
And they were proven wrong, and didn't even try to test their theory until half his term was over. That counts as "not a priority" in my book.
This isn't a hypothetical, this is the case now and it's not happened. The reason is because of public backlash which is a market effect.
NN being saved by consumer backlash doesn't really make sense in the US, anyway, where many (most?) people only have one or two choices for internet service. ISPs don't really need to care if their customers don't like their policies.
If that's the case, which I doubt it is, it's not like it's expensive to charge some customers more money and not others, no need for FCC regulation then, right?
there's usually some principled people in the government, and every now an then when an issue is obscure enough they can manage to get something done without the other side caring too much.
what's the impetus for blocking this?
See, I would have agreed more with this if most of our internet infrastructures were not controlled by three megacorps with more power than many small to medium sized economies in the world. As it stands, the only valid option is to fight fire with fire.
Better question for you. Why did ISPs attempt to fake support for repealing Net Neutrality [0][1], as well as spend money lobbying Congress? You'll note in that article that there were also fake comments in support of Net Neutrality, apparently mostly generated by one individual, but many, many fake comments against it from ISPs that even used real people's identities [2].
These aren't the actions a company takes if they don't have incentive.
[0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/11/29/public-comme...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/fake-net-neutrality-comment-fcc
A federal rule is good, though, to harmonize things, even if the state/local laws were more or less already doing the job.
Personally, around the time the whole Unqualified Reservations / NRx thing was starting up, I considered myself a libertarian with more rightist sympathies. Reading UR and its classification of left versus right is actually what pushed me back into seeing that my philosophy is more aligned with the left. Axiomatic framing and fundamentalism simply doesn't work (cf Gödel). Systems need to be judged on their effective results regardless of their implementations' terminology.
Doesn't that still require your definition of coercion to prevent my neighbor from using it for what he wants? Or to prevent a new party moving in and setting up their own shelter there?
To me, the right libertarian conception of property rights is not the problem per se. It's when that is taken as an axiomatic framework and claimed to justify all the emergent behavior that happens on top of it.
Monopoly ISP in your region the Government can't stop? Fine, start your own, The monopoly can't stop it either by lobbying.
And for this purpose, “government action” excludes protection of what the libertarian in question thinks of as proper property rights, which almost dogmatically have no adverse consequences.
Why does there need to be another new law that, instead of punishing the monopolistic companies, gives them the right to maintain their monopolies as long as they promise not to discriminate on filtering their traffic?
Why can't the government pursue these literal monopolies using the DOJ with existing laws?
No, they aren’t. There is some overlap between “libertarians” and groups from left to right (in the modern sense) that are grounded primarily in classical liberalism, and those include the bulk of what tend to get labeled “libertarians” in America (which are mostly the center-to-right subset of the classical liberal subset of libertarians.)
But “libertarian” also encompasses anarchists, libertarian socialists, and a number of other left-libertarian ideologies that are not particularly grounded in what would usually be regarded as classical liberalism (most of them are grounded in newer philosophies which could reasonably be viewed as later developments from or reactions against – but not in a reverse direction – classical liberalism.)
In America, the word "liberal" in 1900 is very similar to "libertarian" in 2020.
You may agree or disagree with this variability (I'm not a fan personally). But there you have it.
I don't think 'libertarian' has to be synonymous with 'anarchist', but US libertarianism desperately needs an analog of anarchism-without-adjectives and to drop the axiomatic-fundamentalist approach that ends up fooling so many into supporting authoritarianism. Coercion is not some binary thing, but rather a matter of degree based on power differentials.
The difference between political authorities and corporate authorities is that the former can conscript you, tax you, send you to jail, seize your assets, etc.
The latter can affect you insofar as you enter a contract.
There is no "opt-out" of a political authority. "No thanks, I'm better off without your services."
Plenty of the most powerful corporations a few generations ago are weak or nonexistent today. Their abuses of power, though problematic, are typically less egregious than governmental abuses of power.
Even at an individual level, I can simply withdraw my support by not buying their products or services.
Whereas fighting the government - or even trying to withdraw support - typically leads to imprisonment or death.
It has flourished under private sector control without net neutrality. A 30 year track record of success, yet people are still clambering to have it back under government control.
I don't support legislation that bans something undertaken voluntarily unless it proves to be very harmful and the last few years have proven that we don't need this legislation.
I can't comprehend why you think ISPs would feel compelled to be so altruistic without any government intervention.
Except, since when was free wi-fi an impossible thing to find? Ever been to a coffee shop? Even in the "free shitty half-internet for everyone" pipe dream, the costs of such a service don't just magically disappear. Either way, someone's paying for that free internet, and it isn't the ISP.
Telecoms likely didn't deploy anything because this was obviously going to get overruled by the next non-Trump FCC. Even Ajit Pai has a long record of advocating for modernizing the FCC, which would explicitly involve the regulation of internet services. Abolishing net neutrality is only universally popular among communities where the underlying philosophy is "government is bad, and I'm gonna prove it by running it badly."
Price discrimination. No altruism necessary. Kind of like my isp offering me different speeds.
Meta tried to offer free limited internet to poor rural Indians but idealistic tech workers from wealthy neighborhoods opposed it on moral grounds since it was against net neutrality so then they got no internet
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-india-rejected-facebooks-...
If you want to see what happens to countries where Facebook is essentially "the internet", look no further than Myanmar.
I really want to better understand the thinking of people who hold opinions like yours.
I'm hung up on something though - in this specific subject, there's been massive market capture in the USA by one to four ISPs, depending on region. For most of rural america (something insane like 80% of the geography) there's only one provider. In these situations, the provider provides subpar service, often asking for handouts from the government before being willing to build more infrastructure (hm.. is that still "private?").
On the other hand, some local governments have simply built their own broadband networks, with far better results: https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map and they have some of the highest satisfaction ratings in the nation https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/teleco...
If the private market is better, why does Comcast, which routinely wins "worst company in america" awards, still exist, despite providing abysmal service to its customers? Surely a private enterprise could have eaten their lunch by now?
If the private market is better, why are local governments providing the highest rated internet services in America?
So basically, your feeling rests in the belief that you have more choice when it comes to private options - but in telecom, that doesn't seem to be the case, and of the options available, they're all widely considered to suck. Perhaps this isn't true for every industry, Stalin and Mao certainly showed us that it doesn't work for food, but does that mean the private option is better for everything we use? What does it mean to have a "private highway" system, or a "private fire department?"
But you can't just look at final price with a lower price being good. If some municipal service costs half the price but it costs taxpayers the other half, is that better? Maybe if you think they have a right to this service and you're okay with subsidizing it. But there is no free lunch, someone is paying.
I think ultimately you want it to be provided by private market if possible. So leaving it open at a high price encourages others to try and innovate. Think about starlink. If government was providing Internet to everyone for below market prices, no innovation would happen because they essentially crowded out private industry. So in the long run it would be much more expensive and opaque. You lose a market signal through artificially low prices
Where, exactly, is that happening?
As I understand it, the vast majority of taxpayer monies for broadband doesn't go to municipally owned networks, but rather to private ISPs. And that's been the case for decades.
And those monies are given with a pinky-swear that this time, we'll actually spend the money on expanding broadband to under-served areas, with a similar likelihood that will happen as the last four or five times taxpayer monies were given to those folks.
Meanwhile, actual municipal broadband[0][1] pays for itself by charging multiple ISPs to access their last mile -- paying for the infrastructure and introducing (often for the first time) competition into the market.
What's more, nearly a third of states have laws[2] blocking/hindering municipal broadband. Most of which are related to model legislation promulgated by groups like ALEC[3]. Many of the artificial roadblocks put up by such laws make municipal broadband (both implicitly and explicitly[4]) more expensive than private broadband
[0] https://broadbandnow.com/municipal-providers
[1] https://www.theverge.com/23763482/municipal-broadband-biden-...
[2] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/virginia-broadba...
Because you have such limited experience with the world. Did you know there are countries out there — dozens of them even! — which are not American?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/realestate/paris-france-h...
In practice, both effects exist, but are not perfectly efficient for lots of different reasons. That’s why neither Stalinist planned economies nor right-libertarian total lack of regulation work well overall, and the correct approach is somewhere in the middle and different for different sectors (and different countries).
Given that large states like California and New York passed independent net neutrality laws and there were continuing legal battles in almost half of all US states I don't think you can draw many conclusions. ISP behavior very likely never changed because they knew they were just one decision away from having to comply. Sort of proven by this very decision we're commenting on.
If ISPs just behave because it's always just a ruling away, then I'm fine with that status quo. I don't want unintended consequences from invasive legislation that could eventually be used to control what ISPs can show us
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/veriz...
What specific legal principle do you think would lead to this? Network neutrality is the polar opposite of that - it’s like arguing that we shouldn’t have restaurant health codes because the government could start requiring us to eat peas.
Think about surveillance legislation after 9/11. None of it applied to domestic population originally
You seem pretty pro-free-market, so here's the free-market angle: things like zero-rated Netflix on your mobile plan and free "basic" internet are market distortions. Companies are abusing the lack of net neutrality to engage in bundling, discounting, and collusion practices, which are bad for you as a consumer - these are anti-competitive practices!
Everyone likes getting something for cheap/free, but that doesn't mean that it's actually good for you, other people, the market, or society as a whole.
I agree that most of the bad things that net neutrality advocates predicted would happen wouldn't, but the things that did happen are still bad.
There's two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling. Zoom and slack unbundled video chat from places like Google workspace and similar software suites. A company like clickup tries to bundle all that stuff as a one stop shop (tagline is one app to replace them all)
If anything more offers would increase competitiom as it's a bigger vector to make a sale.
This is pretty obviously wrong - you can sell things to make money, in a way that requires neither.
Now, the problem with bundling itself is that it introduces market distortions. The way that free markets work is that producers make things, and then buyers buy the best thing based on its price and other factors. Bundling impedes this process because it means that consumers no longer buy the best goods based on their individual price and merits.
Plus, bundling is usually used by monopolistic companies to anti-competitively extend their influence from one market to another, in a way that doesn't allow the market to work.
So why can't the solution be that the DOJ files antitrust lawsuits? Like every other antitrust issue. It really doesn't make sense to create a new set of rules when there already exists antitrust regulations.
The rule was always going to get reversed eventually. Several major factions within the Democratic party are strong supporters of net neutrality and they've become increasingly more powerful over the last two decades, at the expense of its detractors like the media conglomerates and ISPs.
It only took this long because of the Administrative Procedure Act [1] which regulates how agencies make rules. They can't just flip flop the second a new political party gains power because of judicial review - they have to follow a process (though they probably also timed this for an election year).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act
CA making something a rule makes it a very strong incentive to follow it nationwide.
It is the right thing to do. That's it. That's the impetus.
I know everyone likes to shit on the idea that some people in government might actually give a shit about effectively governing. The party that is not interested in governing loudly proclaims this fact (and gets rewarded for it), and spreads the idea that anyone that is interested in effective governance is a naive moron. But there are some people who actually care about governing, and those people are all in one party (the converse is not true -- not everyone in that party cares about governing.)
Just like shithole-dictators love it when you think every country is a shithole run by a dictator, so do those who wish to destroy our government love it when you think that nobody else cares about governing, either.
Shits happening again and I'm here for it. Constant gridlock in passing laws is terrible.
[Edit] Looking through your history you seem to often make similar political posts making biased, (in my opinion hate-based), partisan assertions and having people reply to you telling you this. There's Reddit/Twitter/etc for you to do this sort of thing.
As for rooting through their comment history, those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones, my friend. So far yours is "cars good", "California bad", "won't someone think of the poor companies (unironically)", "public transit bad", "everyone does propaganda so it's okay when Russia does it". Is this comment hate-based, in your opinion?
I do wonder if they're sucking up LAN traffic data too, though, some of it which might be unencrypted, like smart devices talking to each other.
It's incredible bullshit that they can pull this crap, but... well, at least it's possible. Here, anyway. Dunno if they offer that everywhere.
given it's all still just regional ISP monopolies, there is decided _not_ a lack of issues
I had an extended outage and could not contact my ISP. They kept sending me to a bot, and I had no idea if anyone actually knew about the outage or was doing anything to fix it.
They aren't a secret:
If the ISP isn't able to provide the service they advertised and sold they should be investigated and be issuing refunds at the very least. Can't provide the service you said you could? Maybe don't advertise and defraud customers.
Instead of upgrading their total capacity, reducing their user count by 5x or reducing the speeds they promise, the ISP decides that it's the service's fault that they can't provide the 1 Gbps they're selling. This is obviously double dipping. They want to both sell higher bandwidths than they can provide, and charge others for making them have to provide what they're advertising.
>causing general service degradation
Customers using their internet service they pay for isn't causing service degradation. If the ISP oversold or lied about being able to provide the service they were selling that is another issue. The response to that shouldn't be charging more for a service customers already pay for.
It is fair for ISPs to ask their customers to pay for required upgrades. Netflix's ISPs can ask Netflix. Netflix's customers' ISPs can ask Netflix's customers.
Increased bandwidth = Increased costs
Who do you think is paying?
>Who do you think is paying?
The customer..? Are you really confused about this?
In some cases. In other cases, it hasn't even happened yet.
> Are you really confused about this?
I'm not at all confused.
The ISP spends $X to build and maintain infrastructure for Y Gbps internet.
Mobile carriers do the same.
You can tell it’s not a real barrier to the business in two ways: one is that it only affects MBA-infested companies - small ISPs and municipal broadband never seems to have a problem providing better service for less money – and the other is that they’re not asking their customers to pay more. If their cost of providing service had actually gone up, they’d have been open about that and own the claim that a few Mbps costs more than it used to despite all evidence to the contrary. Keeping as a back room deal lets them try to hide all of the details behind NDAs.
..? By the point ISP customers receive internet they have either already paid for the service, paid a deposit, or agreed to pay for it the following month like other utilities. In all of these cases by the time the user makes use of their service they have already agreed to pay for the internet service which includes data, hardware, and other infrastructure fees.
>The ISP spends $X to build and maintain infrastructure for Y Gbps internet.
EXACTLY. You are proving my point! The customer of the ISP has already paid for that. It doesn't cost the ISP any more money if I make use of my service by sending data to netflix, reddit, or whoever! If I watch netflix 12 hours a day it costs the ISP exactly $0 extra dollars. Asking me to pay more money or be throttled is ridiculous.
Hell, if you have one of the largest ISPs they pay nothing for any amount of data transfer over their networks anyway so your argument is even weaker lol.
I bought a 1 gigabit connection. If the 10-20 mbps data stream from Netflix is overloading my ISP, then my ISP is not providing me with what I paid for.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a less than noble ulterior motive behind this push, although I’m hoping for the best. Sounds like the main reason it may actually make sense to bring it back from their PoV is because ISPs have to deal with individual state laws.
"Oh your power is out? Guess you should have purchased a ElektriciT+ subscription! YOUR FAULT!"
If any of the companies that wanted to exploit the lack of FCC enforced net neutrality did business with California they would have had a big problem.
They could not get away with it. Otherwise, they would. There is little to no competition in the segment. And that must change.
California adopted it's net neutrality law in 2018. 12 other states adopted net neutrality laws or executive actions, and over 100 local governments also did so, some before and some after the lawsuit over the federal repeal was resolved. Democrats in Congress in 2019 moved to legislatively reverse the repeal, and that passed through one house. Biden was elected in 2020, and either a legislative or executive reinstatement of net neutrality was expected.
All of this made meant that big ISPs would have to have patchwork rules in different jurisdictions if they wanted to skirt net neutrality and face a significant risk of having to unwind them. So, generally, no one did much that would go against net neutrality.
How much can you make doing business with or in CA vs. grifting the rest of the nation and bad press? It's very risky move. CA won and Verizon et all blinked.
I got downvoted heavily years ago on HN for predicting this when it was making the rounds
There is almost no evidence of a tiered model either working or being legitimately attempted, even globally in places without these rules. The only evidence I was ever given was some tiny Portugese mobile network entirely serving the lowest end of the market, and even that barely made a dent in the local market.
I want a free internet as much as anyone but people like to fear monger scenarios they invent in their heads, and pointing at vaguely defined wealthy people conspiring to do so behind the scenes, even when theres little evidence it was ever a plausible market nor technically coherent scenario.
But I guess people fear that sort of chaos where every detail isn't in a neat box clearly defined by the government, even if it means finite regulatory time/resources gets redirected from pre-existing tangible issues like privacy and spam.
Just like Obamacare, another gift from the left that has worked out so well...
— Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile slowed down YouTube + Netflix traffic. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/youtube-a...
— Verizon throttles so much that the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s ability to provide emergency services during the California wildfires. "The fire department experienced slowed down speeds on their devices and had to sign up for a new, expensive plan before speeds were restored." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...
— CenturyLink blocked content to insert their ads, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/centurylink-bloc...
Claiming that nothing happened is false. A lot did happen. A lot of people have been fighting very hard to preserve internet access and the internet has been degraded.
> Even when net neutrality rules were in place, all major carriers imposed some form of throttling on unlimited plans when customers used more than a certain amount of data. They argued that it was allowed under the rules' exception for "reasonable network management." But while such throttling is generally applied only during times of network congestion, the Santa Clara Fire Department says it was throttled at all times once the device in question went over a 25GB monthly threshold.
> Even if Verizon's throttling didn't technically violate the no-throttling rule, Santa Clara could have complained to the FCC under the now-removed net neutrality system, which allowed Internet users to file complaints about any unjust or unreasonable prices and practices. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's decision to deregulate the broadband industry eliminated that complaint option and also limited consumers' rights to sue Internet providers over unjust or unreasonable behavior.
Soft caps for "unlimited" plans and content-neutral QoS don't seem like net neutrality violations as I understand it. If they started slowing down one internet service while allowing another on the same plan to run at full speed, that would be another story.
- i believe this was the study: https://wehe.meddle.mobi/papers/wehe.pdf
- the app and the data has continued to be collected and is also available in bigquery https://www.measurementlab.net/blog/wehe-bigquery-announceme...
edited to format bullets
<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40161991> (Top comment on this post as I submit this comment.)
They still do... Get on AT&T and hist fast.com You are pegged at 4Mbps
Net Neutrality does not prevent throttling. Bandwidth + data volume limits still exist.
Rather, NN prevents throttling or preferential treatment based on content/services.
---
Likewise, the CenturyLink example has nothing to do with NN either.
Data throttling during heavy load wont violate NN either.
And cell phone networks have long throttled video data connections even during NN. Not much of an issue nowadays because of robust networks.