In fact, if you were to believe Comcast, there are already regulatory fees and taxes associated with my internet access (non-TV).

In a light-touch regulatory framework, this could lead to innovation leaps. If anyone is familiar with the economics of Coase (generally credited with devising the spectrum auction scheme), would love to read some good counter-points.

The history of telecommunications regulation tells a sorry story of glacial decision-making focusing on yesterday’s problems, inhibition of innovation, and, worst of all, what economists call “rent-seeking”—businesses’ use of the regulatory process to put their competitors at a disadvantage.

http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531671/are-we-really-sa...

Besides, there's very little innovation in the actual IP layer anymore -- though, perhaps you could point to some? It's basically (by sheer domination) not displacable at this point. Hence QUIC and such things which could probably be done (even) better at a lower layer, but which for all practical purposes are dead in the water if they don't function above IP. (In the case of QUIC at the IP/UDP layer.)

Setting aside innovation at the IP level, has your internet access improved over the years? Even in the Verizon/Time Warner duopoly I'm stuck in, I've gone from 768kb DSL to 10mb cable, to 75mb fios. Companies are driven existentially towards profits. When that doesn't mean creating value for the customer, then you typically don't have to look far to find rent seeking, monopolies, and misguided regulation.

I feel like many of the most fervent net neutrality supporters don't know what it means, and just feel like it is going lower their cable bill. Rude awakening ahead.

Well, except it does. It has everything to do with NN. If you can't choose your ISP unless said ISP has agreements with, oh I don't know, the WB or Netflix or HBO (or whatever) then the competition has been stifled, or in terms your sponsors might understand better: freedoms have been curtailed. So, in short: Stop trying to mislead people.

You don't need to be angry about it, no one is astroturfing, and no one spat on your mom. - grab a cold danish beer and enjoy one of your 5 broadband providers. Wish I had either option.

The only reason these companies have power to shape traffic is the federal and local governments have given them monopolies.

There aren't one or two ISPs because of regulation, there are one or two ISPs because the barries to entry are discouragingly high. It's fantastically, stupefyingly expensive to run that much cable. There's a reason we as a country have paid for so much of it.

Wireless broadband and satellite are inferior goods and don't replace hardline connections. Even so, you seem to have this curious idea that spectrum usage isn't rivalrous...which is not exactly borne out by reality.

Infrastructure and Internet service used to be separate businesses at one point, the barrier was created when infrastructure owners were allowed to kick the other ISPs out. I had dozens of ISP choices when I signed up for DSL in 1998.

This stinks of deregulation to me.

EDIT: Btw, love how two commenters pounced on my post immeditaely even though we're in a 280+ comment thread. How's that astroturfing going for you?

I think it's unfortunate that anti-intellectualiosm has become so prevalent that you feel comfortable with a post that consists of nothing more than the word "bullshit" and an assertion that I must be astroturfing. Labeling the argument without a counter argument and then labelling me.

Can't you do better?

In my particular country of residence, industries (including ISPs) are regulated quite heavily, and I hope I might be forgiven for thinking that this might have something to do with the rampant lack of monopolies in the ISP sector (in my particular country).

(I readily acknowledge that my original post was perhaps a little hasty and inflammatory, but one gets tired of this shit.)

This has got to be the height of irony. See my posting history to see why you're Oh So very wrong.

Goodbye, I'll stop replying or acknowledging you from now on.

> How's that astroturfing going for you?

Personal attacks are not ok on Hacker News. Please stop.

I was co-founder of a VOIP startup in 2003, and a significant percentage of our time and resources was spent dealing with how the service was going to be classified for purposes of the Telecom Act. A bunch of the states were wanting to regulate VOIP providers as telephone companies, the FCC was on the fence (the pulver / fwd decision wasn't out yet[1]). Almost everyone was advocating for VOIP to be classified as a interstate information service so that we could avoid the onerous outdated state-by-state telephone company regulations. We got what we wanted (VOIP classified as a information service), but then a few years later we ran into the problem of ISPs blocking/interfering/throttling VOIP connections. The FCC in its first net neutrality foray went after some of the companies (See e.g. Madison River[2]) for blocking VOIP. However, the interesting thing was they could only go after Madison River under their Title II authority because Madison River happened to be a DSL provider and subject to Title II authority. When they went after Comcast for Bitorrent blocking of course they lost[3].

If we had been subject to Title II and regulation as a telecommunications service almost all of the states had regulations they would have applied to us included such gems as: * tariff filing * price caps or approvals * required interconnection with legacy carriers * requirements to use legacy telecom protocols * surcharges for stuff like E911, relay service, universal service, etc. * obtain state approval before offering new services or products or discontinuing services or products * obtain state approval before opening a new facility * provide notice to the FCC and the state of network changes * intercarrier compensation * mandatory build outs (to offer service you have to offer service through all of area X) * required the use of specific accounting methods and cost assignment and reporting rules that make the tax code look simple and friendly * countless other stuff down to things like how much and what kind of UPS capacity we would have. Do we really want to open the door for every ISP to have to get approval from some government agency before it can interconnect to another network, put in a switch or open a new POP? They might not do it now, but once the regulatory framework is in place, it always seems agencies are willing to enact a new regulation a lot quicker than they are willing to get rid of one.

As an aside one of the things the ISPs were publicly saying around that time was that they didn't have the technology to block or degrade VOIP even if they wanted to. Of course now this sounds absurd, but some policymakers were buying it. We actually traveled to DC and ended up demoing for several of the FCC commissioners how easy this would be to do (along with how hard it would be to detect) with a couple of lines of code. On one of these trips we ended up in an elevator with Kevin Martin [4] who was chairman at the time. He said his opinion was it was a mistake for the VOIP providers to race to get classified as an information provider to avoid the state regulation, taxes, etc., because it was going to end up permitting the ISPs to block/degrade the service. I don't know if I agree with him, but I see his point now. In the end VOIP providers ended up subject to a lot of the regulations anyway (as "interconnected VOIP providers"), but without the protections of Title II[5].

I think something does need to be done about net neutrality but I think the best solution is to encourage competition and more/smaller ISPs instead of giving the FCC carte blanche to regulate the Internet as a utility. Dane Jasper of sonic.net has laid it all out much better than I could[6]. It is essentially giving up and saying we are going to live with Internet access being run by monopolies like the power company. It puts us back to the Bell System in 1982, and that makes me sad.

[1] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-04-27A1.pd...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_St... and https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-05-543A2.pd...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_St...

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Martin_(FCC)

[5] http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/voice-over-internet-protocol...

[6] https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2014/11/12/neutrality-is-just-a-s...

What do you think we have now? A robust ecosystem of carriers?

Also, your post sounds a lot like you don't want Title II because you'll have to comply with regulations and you don't like the current system because instead of complying with regulations you found a loop hole and then the ISPs found a loop hole to throttle you. This whole post sounds like why it's bad for you and provides no reason why it would be bad for the vast majority of people.

No, not at all. I think we pretty much have a duopoly with the cable company (Comast+TW) and the phone company (AT&T) as the only realistic choices for the vast majority of consumers.

>Also, your post sounds a lot like you don't want Title II because you'll have to comply with regulations and you don't like the current system because instead of complying with regulations you found a loop hole and then the ISPs found a loop hole to throttle you. This whole post sounds like why it's bad for you and provides no reason why it would be bad for the vast majority of people.

If that is what it sounds like I'm sorry because that was not what I wanted to convey. I wanted to convey that Title II regulation may solve the net neutrality issue in the short term, but may set a framework and precedent that will subject all ISPs (and the Internet) to other harmful regulations which could ensure we never move beyond the duopoly we have now. Remember cable companies and AT&T are masters of guiding agency regulation and state laws (see for example the state laws banning municipal fiber projects). They are probably going to lose this round because of the public outcry and their outrageous behavior regarding net neutrality, but we should be very weary of what they will be able to do with the new regulatory framework.

I don't have anything to do with the VOIP company anymore, my only skin in the game is as a ISP customer whose only choices are Time Warner and AT&T for internet access, both of which offer what I consider crappy service and speeds. Although I actually spent several months and a bit of money looking to put together a local fiber ISP in my area, but in the end shelved (or put on hold) the plans due to a (mostly state/municipal) regulatory environment that was heavily tilted in favor of incumbent companies who were cable cos or telcos.

Electricity is electricity, water is water, natural gas is natural gas.

But Internet traffic isn't a homogenous substance.

A utility is a platform that is standard/common so that more useful platforms can be built on top of it. Utilities become part of the stack of economic production. A utility could be seen as an economic standard.

If wireless and radio are utilities then so is broadband and wired.

Bytes.

As for the water, once delivered it is used for drinking, for washing, for cooling, for watering...but it travels, unmolested, as water being commonly carried.

UDP and TCP is what I want my ISPs concerned with, not what I'm doing with those packets.

I guess you're just going to define it a utility, ham sandwhich is also a utility.

  Utility, or usefulness, is the (perceived) ability
  of something to satisfy needs or wants.

I agree, they regulate a bunch of stuff. I suppose that's a carte blanche to regulate anything it sees itself fit to regulate?

Needless to say, not evey tax is destructive, just as not every driver is a deadly menace who needs to be gotten of the road a.s.a.p.

Have you been on the interstate recently? ;)

Whether you agree with the assessed level of negative externalities or not (I don't, actually), the tax hasn't "destroyed" anything. Smoking still exists. Fewer people get sufficient utility from smoking to go on doing so, but that's the point of the tax in this case. Too many people were smoking previously due to market inefficiencies. Now the "correct" (again, I believe the externalities were lower than many people believe they were) number of people are smoking.

http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm

I'm sure it's already on your to-do list, of course.

When someone misuses their money, you shouldn't react by giving them even more. Really, is this such a radically-offensive position for me to take?

I think it's specious for him/her to ask other people to pay more money when the existing funds are being managed so badly. Clearly he/she wholeheartedly approves of the current Federal budget, but it's not valid to assume that the rest of us feel that way. It's just another case where people cut the government some slack that they'd never grant to a corporation.

How they think this won't make them poorer as well shows they aren't really thinking it thru.

Unwillingness to do the former does not equate to unwillingness to do the latter.