The FCC voted to kill Net Neutrality today.

I know the NY AG found over 2 million comments for  removing the net neutrality rules that were fake. This certainly sets up an interested lawsuit

Duke said:

<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 that services?  </devil's advocate>

Is it "consumer greed" when people expect their utility providers to charge them a fair rate, rather than "what the market will bear"? We as a society have deemed that certain things like electricity, water, and natural gas should be regulated such that consumers pay for what is used, but providers cannot charge whatever they wish. We've decided this because those things are required to maintain an agreed upon standard of living in today's world. They are basic needs that can be fairly provided without impeding people's efforts to achieve basic standard of living. Like it or not, Internet access has become a basic need in modern society. It should be treated as any other utility.

^^ this is especially true as it is becoming more and more a requirement for children in school.

In reply to STM317 :

But who determines what is "fair", legislatively?

mattm said:

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

 

Compared to the "sky is falling" hysteria from the pro-NN side, I think it's about as close as you're going to get.  I'd also like to point out (again) that the only thing that happened was the rollback of regulations that were imposed in 2015.  That's why I don't get all the hand-wringing over this.  I'm trying to tread lightly here, but I suspect that it has something to do with the current occupant of the White House and the belief that anything he or his appointees does is automatically bad.

Duke said:

<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>

Mainly because there is little competition among ISPs, especially in the US where regional broadband monopolies are the norm.

the big question.. is internet a utility and does it need to regulated like one.

GameboyRMH said:

Duke said:

<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>

Mainly because there is little competition among ISPs, especially in the US where regional broadband monopolies are the norm.

Bingo. Competition is great...when there is any.

Duke said:

In reply to STM317 :

But who determines what is "fair", legislatively?

If we continue the assumption that it should be treated as a utility, then each state has regulatory boards that oversee spending from utility providers and determine how much profit they can glean from their efforts. This is often known as the "regulatory compact". It basically acknowledges that supplying a utility requires significant infrastructure spending, and therefore having competing companies isn't likely in most areas. So, a utility is allowed to operate as a monopoly, but they are highly regulated to avoid runaway costs for consumers. They must justify rate increases to the board based on their costs plus a predetermined amount of profit.

Most people trace the legal foundation for this concept back to an 1865 US Supreme Court case: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/70/51/

This site does a nice job of laying it all out: https://blog.aee.net/how-do-electric-utilities-make-money

GameboyRMH said:

Duke said:

<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>

Mainly because there is little competition among ISPs, especially in the US where regional broadband monopolies are the norm.

...which is largely the result of local and regional government regulation.

Duke said:

GameboyRMH said:

Duke said:

<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>

Mainly because there is little competition among ISPs, especially in the US where regional broadband monopolies are the norm.

...which is largely the result of local and regional government regulation.

So are phone, power, and gas companies.  Which means it would be easy to deal with internet connection as a utility.  

I know very little about this, and I've been following the thread, and even posted once.  I am still a bit lost, but from a different standpoint now- I seems like there is some sort of argument going on here, but I can't tell the difference between the sides.

Oh well...

Duke said:

GameboyRMH said:

Duke said:

<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>

Mainly because there is little competition among ISPs, especially in the US where regional broadband monopolies are the norm.

...which is largely the result of local and regional government regulation.

No offense but we had this argument during the days of MaBell. We as a society decided that there need to be controls on specific areas which are considered essential services (Phone, Power, et.al) because, after our experiment with laissez-faire capitalism, corporations couldn't be trusted to uphold the public good in these areas. Hence the regulatory boards and controls emplaced on these industries.

I talked exhaustively about last mile infrastructure in several posts and both the natural monopoly and regulatory enforced monopoly enforced in these areas. It's expensive just in material and labor. Then there's a massive regulatory burden both locally and federally to simply getting the lines up. After the infrastructure is in place it's easy Net Neutrality or not. This could change with the use of the white space radio frequencies but incumbent providers bought most of this spectrum for billions of dollars to squat on ensuring the rollout of that tech won't be for decades more.

The huge push to move numbers of essential services (VOIP, medical device monitoring, emergency service hosting and dispatch, medical databases, public comment on legislation to name a few) online was driven by the net neutrality principle. Now your access to these services are effectively held hostage by a modern day MaBell.

That's crazy.

As for "Fair Legislatively" that's why agencies have public comment periods before enacting rules.

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.

Biggest issue is the amount of data used. For work, I get one day a week from home or if something needs fixed at home. We use a butt load of data for 9 hours. 4 days of that would kill me on all the cell plans we have looked at. Friend of mine works from home EVERY day and used up the 40GB of data his cell plan offered in under 4 days. He supplements that now with slow DSL. They start charging extra, he's screwed. 

Man, I'm glad I saved the Sears catalogs, my Penthouse collection and kept BlockBuster membership. 

Tom_Spangler said:

mattm said:

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

 

Compared to the "sky is falling" hysteria from the pro-NN side, I think it's about as close as you're going to get.  I'd also like to point out (again) that the only thing that happened was the rollback of regulations that were imposed in 2015.  That's why I don't get all the hand-wringing over this.  I'm trying to tread lightly here, but I suspect that it has something to do with the current occupant of the White House and the belief that anything he or his appointees does is automatically bad.

Net neutrality is a relatively recent fix to a relatively recent problem. To suggest that everything was fine 2+ years ago is like saying everything was fine in the village that didn't have an anti-bear fence 2+ weeks ago...which was built in response to when bears were found poking around the village which the people fought off and erected a fence against. Bears that have since ravaged other villages that did not build fences. Drop the fence and things will not be like last month when nobody had ever seen a bear around.

If it makes you feel better I've had the exact same position on this issue over the last 2 occupants of the White House.

Fueled by Caffeine said:

the big question.. is internet a utility and does it need to regulated like one.

 

Quoted for truth.This is the fundamental issue here. Most of us could probably live fine without internet, but you could say the same about water, electricity, gas, etc. We used to live without all of these things back in the stone age, but now they are considered public utilities. Economics told us those things don't really work in a free market, so we grouped together and figured out a solution. That's all government is. People coming together to fix things that bartering and trading cannot.

In my opinion, internet should be treated as a utility, but it was just late to the game, so now it is causing a big ruckus.

Jack Baruth made some arguments against net neutrality today, partly on TTAC and partly on his personal blog, linked within:

http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2017/12/qotd-ready-showroom-neutrality/

He makes two arguments: First, that net neutrality in the age of streaming video amounts to a ripoff to ISPs and cable companies (yes, try to hold back your tears) and second that net neutrality could empower private censorship.

To the first, I say that's a billing problem. If ISPs aren't making money on the bits they transfer, by all means, let them charge more per bit. Netflix can't send them through without paying for them (directly or by proxy) after all, any more than you can ship a package without paying every shipper along the route somehow. There is no good reason to charge more depending on who sent that bit or which application will receive that bit though. A bit is a bit. If your billing policy somehow makes large volumes of traffic unprofitable (like selling customers a fixed allotment of bits for a certain period with the assumption that they won't use most of them), you have a billing policy problem.

To the second, I've argued this to those on the far-right on other sites: If you're worried about private censorship, a tiered Internet is a nightmare scenario for you. It would accumulate even more discourse onto the large mainstream sites that are the greatest practitioners of private censorship. Facebook and Twitter could afford to cut deals with ISPs, but Gab and 8chan couldn't.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/timothy-karr/net-blocking-a-problem-in_b_5695997.html

This is a good sample of reasons the rules were created in the first place:

MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today.

COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers.

TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites.

AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such “over-the-top” voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009.

WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results.

MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon’s court challenge against the FCC’s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency’s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices.

PAXFIRE: In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person’s search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service’s results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites. 

AT&T, SPRINT and VERIZON: From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis, which all three companies had a stake in developing.

EUROPE: A 2012 report from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications found that violations of Net Neutrality affected at least one in five users in Europe. The report found that blocked or slowed connections to services like VOIP, peer-to-peer technologies, gaming applications and email were commonplace. 

VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon’s $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots. By blocking those applications, Verizon violated a Net Neutrality pledge it made to the FCC as a condition of the 2008 airwaves auction.

AT&T: In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers’ iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text-and-voice plan. AT&T had one goal in mind: separating customers from more of their money by blocking alternatives to AT&T’s own products. 

VERIZON: During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency’s existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: “I’m authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements.” Walker’s admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.

I'm posting just honestly for clarification on my part.  I haven't found anything but far left "NN is godly" or far right "NN is satan" which is pretty typical of politics in America these days.

I like the idea of regulating big corporations who are already swimming in cash, but I don't recall this being an issue prior to 2015 when NN came into play.  Nor do I recall a market fallout in the communications industry when NN was enacted.  I certainly don't want to pay like cable TV packages that include certain services, but I don't recall that being an issue prior to 2015's NN ruling.  

One quip I heard against NN was that (in 2015) the FCC voted on something that wasn't their business to solve a problem that didn't exist.  Now I'm hearing that rolling back to pre-2015 is suddenly the anti-christ and the death of the internet.

Can someone clue me in on actual "things" instead of just left and right?

ProDarwin listed incidents that would have been considered NN violations above. They weren't common in the grander scheme of things. but they were there. You still see this kind of thing happening on mobile networks, especially in the US where NN doesn't apply to cellular Internet.

With NN regulations in place, those kinds of acts are illegal. Rolling back to pre-2015 rules allows ISPs to do those kinds of things again, restricted only by the goodness of their hearts.

In reply to Curtis :

I don't want to give a specific link, because links go to sources deemed so often to belong to one side or another. One of my largest concerns is ably demonstrated by the easily-researched issue of Comcast throttling Netflix in late 2013/early 2014. It is a concrete example of the sort of behavior that we saw some of prior to this legislation.

The Internet is still evolving, and we see entities struggling with how to adapt their existing models to it, or find other ways to work with it. Which very broadly is why rules which perhaps weren't necessary at some point can become necessary. New technologies foster new products, new businesses, and new abuses. New instances of all three are still being invented.

I still think the clearest example of why this is a problem (and simple enough that you don't need an MBA to see why a company would absolutely do this if not legally barred from doing so) is that owning the path to get to several competing businesses AND owning one of those competitors creates a situation wherein it's easy to make it expensive, difficult, or impossible for a consumer to do business with the other companies. If ExcitingNetCo has a neat business, but OtherNetCo is a competitor, and is owned by your ISP, why would the ISP not charge you more to get to ExcitingNetCo, or otherwise hobble connectivity to ExcitingNetCo in order to favor their own OtherNetCo? Without net neutrality, this is simple, legal, and lucrative. It could be argued as a failure to maximize shareholder value *not* to do so.

In reply to GameboyRMH :

I figured there were some things like that, I was just trying to get a finger on the pro-NN's argument that it will be instant death when it wasn't before.

Thanks for the edumacation.

The way I see it, if the NN rules didn't really change much but provided future benefits, then I saw no reason to take it away... other than lining the pockets of the rich guy, of course.

GameboyRMH said:

restricted only by the goodness of their hearts.

I don't mean to harp my point in this thread, but they are actually mainly restricted by their customers, just like any other corporation.

For all the "let's regulate this like utilities" arguments: I can buy power from many different suppliers and my electric company charges separately to deliver it to my house. There are also plans available where I pay different amounts for power at different times of day or different times of year. Same electrons, different price when coming from different places at different times. I have way more choice than I need. Why is there not electron neutrality? I can choose that plan if I like, or I can choose a different plan if a different one fits my needs better. I agree that they don't exactly make this easy knowledge, but the choices are out there for smart consumers.

I'm also not arguing that we should not have net neutrality, but rather that I'm not sure life without it is the end of the free world and the beginning of the decent into chaos.

I am interested to know how I can buy wired broadband internet from a different supplier and have it delivered to my house over the existing lines.

I'd have loved to show Time Warner how much I dislike their service by switching to another internet provider, but I simply don't have that option.