The FCC voted to kill Net Neutrality today.

ISPs now have the ability to monetize every single request you make over the internet.  A few years ago, I worked on a product that injected ads into web pages at the DNS level.  From the user's perspective, it was impossible to stop or avoid.  It took a team of 3 of us less than 6 months.  I am curious what an ISP with more budget and hardware flexibility are going to come up with.

Losing access to netflix and amazon are pretty annoying but only the beginning of the problems.  If you want to receive work emails at home, plan on signing up for a business account instead of a personal one.  If you have a reason to use a VPN, prepare to pay an astronomical amount for access.  What would it cost to connect to a server on a port outside of the normal internet range?  There are 65 thousand of them and I use 5432 for some personal projects.

My wife works remotely as a speech language pathologist for children in public schools including some who are deaf or hearing impaired.  She is on a video call with the kids 5 or 6 hours a day.  We have no idea if her job will be profitable next year.  ISPs could charge by the hour for video calls.  Or they could have a package for Skype but not support any other protocols.  Skype isn't HIPAA compliant so maybe this whole field will go away.
 

In reply to Bobcougarzillameister :

I have been running strictly on cell data at home for almost a year. It sucks but I have zero hard line options. We will see which of the cell providers will put the screws down hardest but I suspect that Sprint and T Mobile will remain fairly open to try and gain market. Worth switching over if it gets to the point you want to dump your DSL provider. 

singleslammer said:

In reply to Bobcougarzillameister :

I have been running strictly on cell data at home for almost a year. It sucks but I have zero hard line options. We will see which of the cell providers will put the screws down hardest but I suspect that Sprint and T Mobile will remain fairly open to try and gain market. Worth switching over if it gets to the point you want to dump your DSL provider. 

This is exactly right. If the local 'monopoly' ISP starts acting like more of a dick than they already are, that just opens the doors for other companies to expand their business. Luckily for us, tech is at a point where you don't need a hard cable connection to be cost competitive anymore.

According to wiktionary political is " relating to the public affairs of a country" so good luck discussing anything that isn't political. Heck. By definition we cant even discuss the weather! I think this forum has one of the best cross sections of America out there. And regardless of "political affiliation", I think it is one of the few places where proof matters and well stated opinion is rightfully considered. So I hope this thread isn't locked. I'm genuinely interested to know what this body thinks.

From my perspective, it seems like this is a bad idea. I know our country has a bad opinion of government control and maybe a sentimental attachment to free enterprise. But in Atlanta, where I live, there are numerous examples of how privatizing (essentially the same thing as allowing internet companies to free market access like this seems to be) have backfired and actually raised costs and diminished services. It happened with privatized natural gas services and happened again with privatizing the domestic water service.  

I think there are several scenarios that could occur under this plan.

1. and in no particular order,. Most high speed internet in the country is via coax. Sure there are DSL only locations and some opportunities for fiber,  but most users are on some cable based platform. The existence of hulu, sling, and youtube tv has largely made TV affordable due to some level of competition. If comcast, time warner, etc can restrict bandwidth to these outlets they can essentially kill their competition. Therefore eliminating any barriers to raising fees.

2. In a similar fashion. Whether you agree with the reasons or not, our chief executive has picked news outlets of preference. One of the great things about our county is that all of the networks have a voice. You may not agree with what they say, but having a competing voice with access keeps them all a little honest. And that is important. If an access provider has an affiliation with a particular news channel (which they almost always do) do you really want to be subject to a particular bias in reporting? 

This is real for everyone on all of the political spectrum and every single consumer out there.

In reply to Robbie :

Except their next trick is going to be continuing to attempt to outlaw municipal broadband, which various interests have been lobbying hard for already.

There's no interest in building out last mile infrastructure anywhere except densely populated areas. It just isn't as profitable and God forbid you don't increase dividends next year.

Additionally wireless services were never classed under Title II that was one of the concessions Wheeler made when it was implemented. That's why Verizon and TMobile were able to get away with zero rating services they have interests in.

The problem here isn't YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, or iTunes. They can all afford to pay the protection money. The problem is you'll never get to see another emergent service because they won't be able to pay to play. 

Robbie said:

singleslammer said:

In reply to Bobcougarzillameister :

I have been running strictly on cell data at home for almost a year. It sucks but I have zero hard line options. We will see which of the cell providers will put the screws down hardest but I suspect that Sprint and T Mobile will remain fairly open to try and gain market. Worth switching over if it gets to the point you want to dump your DSL provider. 

This is exactly right. If the local 'monopoly' ISP starts acting like more of a dick than they already are, that just opens the doors for other companies to expand their business. Luckily for us, tech is at a point where you don't need a hard cable connection to be cost competitive anymore.

Actually, they thought about that, too. In an increasing number of places, there are laws in place that protect the local cable/phone company monopoly. Municipal broadband? Fuggedaboutit, it's illegal.

What other options are there? Cellphones are the obvious ones,  but even the "unlimited plans" are anything but (read the fine print) and there are other issues with them, for example latency issues, although those are getting better. Either way, unless you're happy to accept their shortcomings, they are not a 1:1 replacement for most consumers.

The real problem is that in most cases, there are no cost effective alternatives to the local cable co unless you are living in one of very few places where you actually do have a bit of competition. Even the other alternatives like microwave are rare, comparatively expensive and bandwidth constrained. And unlike other places in the world where the telcos are required to provide competitors with access to the last mile infrastructure (for a fee), this isn't the case in the US. The advent of the always-on service (DSL or cable) mostly killed off small local ISPs because they couldn't get the data to/from their customers.

Robbie said:

singleslammer said:

In reply to Bobcougarzillameister :

I have been running strictly on cell data at home for almost a year. It sucks but I have zero hard line options. We will see which of the cell providers will put the screws down hardest but I suspect that Sprint and T Mobile will remain fairly open to try and gain market. Worth switching over if it gets to the point you want to dump your DSL provider. 

This is exactly right. If the local 'monopoly' ISP starts acting like more of a dick than they already are, that just opens the doors for other companies to expand their business. Luckily for us, tech is at a point where you don't need a hard cable connection to be cost competitive anymore.

I'm sorry but I wasn't aware that I could get 100MB/s low latency internet or higher from my cell provider.  if everyone had choice I could understand, but provider choice is vanishingly small and the cost of entry is way too high for a new competitor to get in.  This is protection of monopolies in its most blatant form.  It is especially troubling that this happens as the consumers are voting with their dollars away from the monopolies.

The0retical said:

The problem here isn't YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Spotify, or iTunes. They can all afford to pay the protection money. The problem is you'll never get to see another emergent service because they won't be able to pay to play. 

I'd actually suspect that we won't see emergent, non-mobile tech titans in the US, they'll flourish in other places.

I suspect the way this is going to play out is that the cable cos will go after the services that directly impact their bottom line (Netflix, Hulu etc) first, followed by the quasi-monopolists like Google and Facebook. I don't think "Joe's fishing blog" will be on the radar, at least not until much later. But yeah, if you're trying to build even something fairly small that relies on the Internet, Ajit Pai has a hearty "berkeley you" specifically for you.

Streetwiseguy said:

I will be very interested to see how this actually plays out.  There is a chunk of me that says, "If you use more bandwidth, and you are more popular, maybe more money is legitimate.  Billy-Bob Paronoiac and his ramblings won't be subsidised anymore."

The thing is, we (and people running businesses) already pay for bandwidth. Use more bandwidth, pay more money. And that's fine and fair. The issue is that without net neutrality rules, an ISP who wants to do what Netflix does can charge Netflix way more for a given amount of bandwidth than they charge themselves or an affiliate.

At this point, minus a couple people on this thread who've said they can do without the Internet, most of us need the Internet for most of our daily professional and personal lives. Like a lot of other things that are outside the basic food/shelter "needs", but are central to what we consider normal. You have a hard time job-hunting without the Internet. Or working from home. Or checking CL for projects. I could continue...

The analog I always come up with is that it's like letting someone maintain a stretch of public highway as a toll road, but letting them set the toll based on whether you're driving to *their* burger joint, or the one next door. It's going to be really hard to run that other burger joint, and it's not going to help foster innovation in restaurants, because it's hard to sell hot dogs when the toll to get to you is $5, and you're next door to a burger joint customers can get to for $1.

I seem to vaguely remember that net neutrality also affects the way the content is handled, but I'm not a lawyer. However I could see that your ISP will suddenly start manipulating the pages that are sent to you and say, replace the ads that this forum relies on for revenue with ones that make the ISP money.

The other funny thing is that Im expecting this to increase the adoption of https connections (and encrypted email transmission) quite considerably to at least prevent shenanigans that don't involve MiM'ing SSL connections.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this plays out in court as the FCC has pretty much ignored all procedural issues so far and this might come back and bite them in the posterior quite hard.

In reply to mattm :

those consumers were duped.

In reply to BoxheadCougarTim :

As has been mentioned in this thread already, the ISPs could disallow the use of other DNS services and force you to use theirs so that every mistyped URL shows you an advertisement on top of being significantly slower than other options.  I mean they have been trying to monetize dns search failures for years!  If they do that, what won't they do when real money is involved?

In reply to BoxheadCougarTim :

I disagree to an extent (related to Joe's Fishing Blog everything else I agree with). What's to stop ISP's from offering a Google AdWords like experience for the internet? 

The big 3 could enter a contract with Verizon where their traffic gets priority based on a bid and the German automakers websites are throttled. Consumers don't have the attention span to wit more than 5 seconds for a page to load. 

Scaling it down Amazon could pay a consortium of ISPs to throttle Barnes and Noble to finally finish them off.

Or further where Dicks Sporting Goods pays an ISP to throttle traffic to other websites classed as sporting goods. That would effectively kill a number of small businesses.

This could effectively lead to the "great equalizer" (as the AdWords marketing dopes like to put it), the internet, to be no better than traditional mediums where they already can't afford to compete. This is very dangerous for anyone other than megacorps.

In reply to itsarebuild :

Obviously duped.  How else could you explain customers trying to find a better customer experience?  

The0retical said:

In reply to BoxheadCougarTim :

I disagree to an extent. What's to stop ISP's from offering a Google AdWords like experience for the internet? 

The big 3 could enter a contract with Verizon where their traffic gets priority based on a bid and the German automakers websites are throttled. Consumers don't have the attention span to wit more than 5 seconds for a page to load. 

Scaling it down Amazon could pay a consortium of ISPs to throttle Barnes and Noble to finally finish them off.

Or further where Dicks Sporting Goods pays an ISP to throttle traffic to other websites classed as sporting goods. That would effectively kill a number of small businesses.

This could effectively makes the "great equilizer" (as the AdWords marketing dopes like to put it), the internet, no better than traditional mediums where they already can't afford to compete. This is very dangerous for anyone other than megacorps.

I will have to stop you at "ISPs offering an AdWords like experience."  ISPs are not internet companies and are not good at the internets on multiple levels.  In many cases they support networks and you need to reach level infinity to find someone who actually knows how a network functions.  People wouldn't be leaving because they are happy with the service.  Netflix already killed blockbuster, they and their ilk could kill the cable companies if the network remains equal to all.  This ruling allows the legacy providers to manipulate the costs the competitors must bear.  Those legacy providers only have to use those new levers to prevent their extinction.  In plain fact the ruling does nothing to increase disruptive competition.

In reply to mattm :

ISPs provide the last mile from the interconnects and are the entire reason classification under title II was necessary in the first place. They were screwing with traffic and very publicly extorted money from Netflix as well as others. (NETFLIX was simply the most visible)

Level3 and Cognet kicked off the first round of Net Neutrality complaints in 2015 and both remain committed to the principle to this day. Level3 has been pretty outspoken about this topic.

It's most definitely the ISPs that are the problem. Verizon and Comcast have taken this to the extremes already and I'm sure someone would agree to build them the tech to offer pay to play experiences if the price was right.

I only need to point to the issues Google Fiber has been experiencing getting their cables hung to show that last mile competition isn't an area you can just throw your hat into. It's heavily tilted towards incumbents and even with the kind of resources Google Fiber has it's been really slow and expensive going.

The0retical said:

In reply to mattm :

ISPs provide the last mile from the interconnects and are the entire reason classification under title II was necessary in the first place. They were screwing with traffic and very publicly extorted money from Netflix as well as others. (NETFLIX was simply the most visible)

Level3 and Cognet kicked off the first round of Net Neutrality complaints in 2015 and both remain committed to the principle to this day. Level3 has been pretty outspoken about this topic.

It's most definitely the ISPs that are the problem.

I only need to point to the issues Google Fiber has been experiencing getting their cables hung to show that last mile competition isn't an area you can just throw your hat into. It's heavily tilted towards incumbents and even with the kind of resources Google Fiber has it's been really slow and expensive going.

Totally agree with the entirety of your post.  Title II regulation is critical for innovation and competition in this space!

In reply to WildScotsRacingCampbellCougarSeed :

Yes.  Between 2005 and 2012, five attempts to pass bills in Congress containing net neutrality provisions failed because of lobbying and contributions by ISPs. Each sought to prohibit Internet service providers from using various variable pricing models based upon the user's Quality of Service level, which they dearly wanted to do.  ISPs also looked at using fast and slow lanes for content.  So as it turns out, Barrack Hussein saved the Internet and the American auto industry...

ProDarwin said:

I'd like to hear a single anti-net neutrality argument from someone that is not a cable company.  I just don't get it.

 

I think this article has more of a balanced look at the issue than most of what's been floating around the internet lately.

Tom_Spangler said:

ProDarwin said:

I'd like to hear a single anti-net neutrality argument from someone that is not a cable company.  I just don't get it.

 

I think this article has more of a balanced look at the issue than most of what's been floating around the internet lately.

I wouldn't say the anti regulation website is any more balanced than google et al.  I would point you to this part of the article you quoted.  

Title II effectively setting up a non-discrimination standard for network management, content, and pricing.

That sounds pretty good to me..

Tom_Spangler said:

ProDarwin said:

I'd like to hear a single anti-net neutrality argument from someone that is not a cable company.  I just don't get it.

 

I think this article has more of a balanced look at the issue than most of what's been floating around the internet lately.

That's a pretty long way of saying that they can screw you, they just need to be upfront about it.

Here's the rub: The FTC is already forbidden from proactively making rules to protect consumers. They can only step in after harm has been proven. That's how their chater is laid out.

Additionally they lack a number of enforcement mechanisms available to the FCC. They've also Already admitted that this agreement doesn't give them anymore leeway than they already have. 

Further more the FTC has no expertise in the area. Telecom and communications are the mission of the FCC and they're vacating that responsibility.

Finally all an ISP would need to do is amend their "promises" to remain within the letter of the law and stay out of trouble with the FTC. Comcast already completed this step by removing the throttling and blocking clause from it's website.

I'm really hoping someone is making a better case than "procedural issues" when the lawsuit lands.

mattm said:

Tom_Spangler said:

ProDarwin said:

I'd like to hear a single anti-net neutrality argument from someone that is not a cable company.  I just don't get it.

 

I think this article has more of a balanced look at the issue than most of what's been floating around the internet lately.

I wouldn't say the anti regulation website is any more balanced than google et al.  I would point you to this part of the article you quoted.  

 

Title II effectively setting up a non-discrimination standard for network management, content, and pricing.

 

That sounds pretty good to me..

 

If everyone's arguments sound unbalanced and it seems difficult to find any facts that support the repeal, it's because there really are no upsides to repealing net neutrality other than enabling ISP greed and giving jollies to those who categorically hate regulation...net neutrality has pretty much been the status quo forever (mobile Internet being the exception), then in the early/mid 2000s, some ISPs became greedy enough to think that charging different rates for different traffic sources and destinations was a good idea, and net neutrality rules started to look like a good idea to everyone who wasn't an executive at an ISP.

On many cell phone data plans, data to Facebook and your provider's own video streaming platform doesn't count towards your data cap, while data to Netflix and any company that would like to compete with Facebook does. That's an example of what happens where there is no net neutrality.

And here's why this is bad for every other country in the world...this is blood in the water to ISPs everywhere:

http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/15/technology/net-neutrality-global-implications/index.html

Kind of ironic that the same day that net neutrality was ended, Disney bought a big chunk of Fox.  And one of the stated reasons was for control over content and streaming service.  

IMHO, I think it's a mistake for companies to think that consumers will put up with high fees for entertainment.  The reason people get streaming service now is that it's cheaper than having full cable.  They see the price increases that ESPN in demanding, noting that they don't watch that and that they are not getting their money's worth and finding a better alternative.

For some reason, providers think that they can make more money controlling this.  What they don't seem to get is that people *might not* want to pay for this "entertainment everywhere" to the degree that they can make money.  

Sure, there are people who actually stream on a regular basis with their phones, but is it because they want to, or it's the best deal for them as a whole?

I think if eyeball entertainment gets to be too expensive, people will find another outlet for entertainment.  Heck, we've only had this kind of cable for just over 25 years, and the internet that is effective in entertainment streaming is less than 20 years old.  It's not as if there are not historical alternatives.

But I also think that it's quite possible that enough people will realize that this is a really bad idea, and before you know it, the internet will be added to the price controlled utilities out there.  So the greed of the entertainment industry may come back and do the 100% opposite of what they want.  Given that people see the issues of privatizing some things- this seems like a large possibility.  All it takes is an act of congress to not make it switch back and forth on the whim of the executive branch.

<devil's advocate>  So, it's "corporate greed" to charge what they think the market will bear for a service a private company provides that people can decide for themselves whether to buy or not.  Got it.

Why is it not then "consumer greed" to demand legal control over the pricing of those services?  </devil's advocate>