The Glade 4.0

Most of the people discussing net neutrality have a view of how large content providers get stuff to consumers that is from how it was in 2003.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

I don't know of any place where one company has a monopoly on internet delivery. They may have a monopoly on cable internet (which may be the best version available), but AFAIK they don't have a monopoly on it any more than they do television - mainly because they don't control the phone lines, and don't control the satellites. Phone lines go everywhere and satellites are, you know, IN SPACE so they don't need physical transmission infrastructure.

For example, down here in the RGV I get my internet from AT&T over the phone lines, and my TV from DirecTV and my phone from Verizon (cellular, we don't bother with a home phone any more) which actually gives me a second source of internet if I need it. I don't do any business with the cable company at all, despite their monopoly on cable services.

Now, I may go back to them because they actually offer a better service than AT&T (which is **** atrocious) for a price that isn't all that different in terms of absolute dollars, but I don't have to just to get the internet.

I don't know that there's anywhere that you can't explore at least one alternative to cable for internet, or other services for that matter. Yeah satellite might cost more, but it's available.

Comcast's profit-maximizing price is probably a lot lower than you think it is, both because of that and because people can simply only afford so much for the internet. What people on this board are willing to pay to have home internet services is probably significantly higher than what the average person is - we tend to have a lot of "internet junkie" in us - for a lot of people if internet gets too expensive they'll start just using their smartphone or the public library or doing without if there aren't any alternatives to present service - which for most people, there are.

Also, if Comcast shifts the cost onto Netflix then Netflix has to raise its prices - and people will rapidly discover that they don't really need Netflix that badly. Much more quickly than they will discover they don't actually need the internet. If Comcast forces Netflix to jack their prices up, people will dump Netflix a lot faster than they will Comcast, and the cable company may rapidly find that it's killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

Your Wal-Mart analogy does not hold because of all the things Coro mentioned. Wal-Mart cannot actually monopolize consumer attention anywhere besides remote areas where Wal-Mart is the only game in town - which, by definition, is not the case for many people because those areas are remote. In non-remote areas, companies like Target provide a viable alternative. This is actually the reverse of the internet situation where Comcast or Time Warner isn't usually found in the remote areas because of the physical realities of running cable vs. using a satellite signal.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The example I keep using here. My company rerequires a high speed Internet connection for our subscribers phones to work. Now day Comcast decides it wants tob"run the little guy out of town" they can arbitrarily charge a VoIP provider ridiculous rates for our traffic to go across their last mile. Effectively increasing the cost until we can no longer offer services in that market. That is where my problem lies.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

And if they did that, they'd deprive themselves of a source of income by putting you out of business.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The internet is cirlces now? Are we done with tubes?

Edit - Was a response to Elmo's picture, didn't realize replies went to another page.

They offer their own phone solutions, unsure if they offer it to businesses though. So they would be trying to trade one form of income for another. Stifling out more competition.

Again, please do not think I am in favor of the FCC having anything to do other than watch reruns of AFV on Netflix, I just wish there was a third option. Heck Comcast has already bullied Netflix into paying them in some markets. Moose knew where the study was, I do not.

My original question was answered on page 1, and it was why is it okay for one party to say it is okay, but when the other party agrees with you: you HAVE to change your mind... and that is because; douchebaggery.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

I actually wrote a paper on this a couple years ago. My philosophical leanings are towards the ideals of net neutrality and an open internet, and in the trustworthiness department, I generally like the companies backing net neutrality vs. those opposing it. So I really expected to walk away from it in favor of net neutrality. After researching it more thoroughly, I wound up doing a complete 180. The situation is far more complicated than most people realize, and much of what you believe and feel about net neutrality is powerfully mythological.

I still favor net neutrality and "open internet" ideals, but only philosophically speaking as a matter of personal consumer preference. In the end, I think net neutrality legislation is both thoroughly unnecessary and extremely dangerous. Khross already touched into the most significant of those reasons.

I know it's long and that likely not many people will read it (not criticizing; just sayin'), but FWIW, here's my paper and the related sources:

http://www.gladerebooted.org/~stathol/net-neutrality/Net%20Neutrality%20v2.pdf (~88kB)
http://www.gladerebooted.org/~stathol/net-neutrality/Works%20Cited.zip (~58MB)

I'll try to summarize as best I can:

• First and foremost, the Internet is not now and never has been a neutral medium. Not even close. The Internet as you know and love it is a very non-neutral place, not in spite of consumer preferences but because of them. It's always been the case that those with the means to pay can get their traffic delivered with higher priority, and that's actually a good thing as it turns out. You benefit from it every single day without even realizing it.
• Similarly, a "tiered Internet" is nothing to be feared. The internet is already tiered, you just don't know it.
• There's still a case to be made for anti-monopoly policies and transparency mandates for ISPs, but monopoly powers are not as great as you imagine. In fact, ISPs today have far less power than they did back in the day when the NSFnet backbone was decommissioned. CIX tried to wall off the Internet from anyone who didn't pay to join them. At the time, they were more powerful than any collusion of ISPs today. They failed. Badly. There's a reason that most of you have never heard of CIX. Even with a virtual monopoly over the Internet, they couldn't maintain control. The same thing happened with AOL back in the late 90s. The fear of tiered internet and walled gardens, though it sounds reasonable on face value, is a baseless bogeyman if you know the history.
• Also, as long as there are alternatives, walled gardens aren't necessarily a bad thing nor harmful to innovation. Ever heard of AOL? iPhones? Gaming consoles?
• There are all manner of "good" kinds of non-neutral behavior that even net neutrality advocates support. The problem is, there's no way to craft meaningful net neutrality legislation that also exempts these "good" kinds of discrimination. Legislating net neutrality will either have severe unintended consequences, or be utterly impotent, and there's just really no practical way around it. Many of the companies who support net neutrality are being massively hypocritical as they directly employ and benefit from non-neutral network behavior themselves (Vonage, Google, ...).
• On top of the above problem, legislative capture is a very real fear, here. That should be underscored by Obama's appointment of Tom Wheeler who -- you guessed it -- is a former long time lobbyist for telecom industry.
• Speaking of the FCC, their entire claim to have regulatory power of net neutrality was and still is based on the "ancillary jurisdiction" clause of Title 1. You'll just have to read that portion the paper to understand why this is a very bad idea, but in brief: 1) if we accept this argument, it would give the FCC unlimited legislative power over the Internet, including the ability to censor it just as they do broadcast television. Their response to this is "trust us, we really, really promise not to do that". 2) The courts have already explicitly rejected this argument. The FCC doesn't care. They continue to spout this as the legal framework for their supposed regulatory power. It is no exaggeration to say that the FCC believes itself to be above the law and judicial review where the Internet is concerned. Even the EFF, who supports net neutrality in principle has repeatedly warned that net neutrality legislation, as it has been and continues to be drafted in the present, is a trojan horse based on a bogus legal framework.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Huh. Somebody has posted in here that I don't need to stab with a fork.

Didn't see that coming.

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Stathol,

I have read your paper, and it has given me more things to consider on the subject. Seeing a Cited paper with the arguments against it is more though provoking than other methods of discussion. Thank you. Could I possibly link to this paper for others who would like to read it?

I suppose it really boils down to I do not want my ISP telling me that I can or cannot access various things I may want to view.

I do still have the firm belief that Comcast is a bunch of cock bags though. And chances are that will not change. Even if they come out and apologize for every shitty thing that they have ever done.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Sure, although technically, legally speaking, I shouldn't be distributing several of the source materials. Some of them are publicly available online, but a number of them came from academic journals that I was only able to access through DCCCD's EBSCO account. Personally, I don't really care, but since they're presently stored on Mookhow's server, it's not my call. If you want to re-up them to somewhere else, then I suppose you can do whatever you want.


Sure, no one wants that. I just think that A) the chance of that actually happening, let alone succeeding in the long run are much smaller than people think and B) as things currently stand, your choice is to either risk having your ISP tell you what you can or can't access or risk having the FCC tell you what you can or can't access. I certainly won't deny that ISPs have done some shady **** now and then, but the FCC has a much worse track record when it comes to restricting people's freedom of choice/speech.


Oh, no doubt. It's just that the reach of their cock baggery exceeds their grasp. If they could have pulled off the kinds of things that net neutrality advocates have been fretting about for decades, they would have done so long ago. The FCC, on the other hand, is pretty well unlimited in their cock baggery. They've already displayed a willingness to completely disregard judicial review. There's no reason to think they'll gain a sudden, road-to-damascus, new-found respect for rule of law, privacy, and freedom of speech any time in the near future.

And it's not really a choice between letting jerk A or jerk B run the show, anyway. Comcast, etc. may be somewhat limited in what they can get away with now, but I won't expect that to continue with someone like Wheeler running the show. I hate using this phrase because of the connotations, but he's pretty much the textbook definition of an industry shill. I'd wager good money that the effect of whatever gets drafted by the FCC will be to silently shield ISPs from consumer wrath while sounding "good on paper" to consumers. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the foxes are guarding the hen house. Whether or not there's a problem, the solution is definitely not to hire more foxes.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

For this reason I will refrain from linking.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

The paper itself is fine. It's my own writing, so feel free to whatever you want with it. It's just the journal articles in the zip file that are at issue.

I mean, you could go to your local library and obtain a copy of any of them yourself for free, but technically I'm not supposed to redistribute it. The article authors themselves surely wouldn't care, but EBSCO/Jstor/etc take a dim view of it.

_________________
Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

Shuyung, thanks for posting more than 20 words, and Stathol thanks for posting your written paper. Good points all around. Not sure I'm ready to reverse my stance but I have a lot more to consider now.

You make it sound like there's a shortage of bandwidth. Bandwidth is currently only valuable due to an artificially created supply shortage. There is more than enough without ISPs limiting the supply in order to increase cost. I pay for unlimited Internet. That is what I should get. Some other party should not get to decide if my traffic is less important and therefore limit it. Furthermore, ISPs already have a track record of slowing some types of traffic--not because of bandwidth saturation, but because they want to make services like Netflix less appealing than their own cable or satellite services. If net neutrality does not exist, neither will cable cutters.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

There is, it isn't, no there's not, no you don't, no it isn't, yes they should, that's true but disproportionate, you're wrong.

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An abundance of capacity exists in the wired environment insofar as there is available conductor to send signal down. That signal still represents an electrical load that costs money. Bits have to be sent, received, and processed.

In a wireless environment, available channels to transfer data are considerably more choked.

Moreover, in a wired environment, you will never have total user activity exceeding capacity under normal operating conditions. Just like a power utility doesn't produce enough power to melt their own lines, the physical layer of the Internet has more conducting paths than traffic requires. That is, in fact, by design. Networks have to continue operation under fault conditions, such as when a server farm goes down and they have to send traffic through neighboring nodes. You may be fine under normal conditions, but be the straw that breaks the camel's back, overloading your provider under fault conditions.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Shuyung knows the technicals of it better than anyone, but he's also (1) indoctrinated by the company he works for, and (2) confusing the craptastic peice of legislative garbage currently slapped with the label of "net neutrality" as actually representing Net Neutrality in any form. You can't have Net Neutrality if the FCC is administering it. It won't be neutral. Likewise, it has nothing to do with the internet "backbone" providers of the sort Shuyung works for, except to the extent some of them are also end-user ISPs. This is all about preventing companies like Comcast from throttling their "competitors" bandwidth (Netflix competes with Comcast cableTV service, so they throttled Netflix until Netflix payed them a premium) to extort extra money out of them.

Ideally, the end-user ISPs are reduced to being dumb pipes to prevent anti-trust issues, and they compete with each other for customers, and are forbidden from making special exclusive content deals with content providers.

Like most US legislation, by the time your legislators are through with it, it is likely to become pure shite. That doesn't mean something shouldn't be done. It just means your government is trying to do it wrong.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I stopped reading after this. This argument is **** when people use it to talk about "internalized racism" and "internalized misogyny" and such, and it's **** here too. If Shuyung knows the technical stuff, then he knows it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

You stopped reading before I pointed out it's not about the technical stuff. It has NOTHING to do with the technical stuff. It's everything to do with anticompetitive business practices and craptastic legislative incompetence. The proposed US "Net Neutrality" bill is NOT net neutrality, and won't result in it. Likewise, something MUST be done to prevent ISPs which are colluding en masse and working to effectively ensure that the customer has no real choices in product purchasing, from continuing to engage in their business practices. Net Neutrality could fix that, but putting the FCC in charge can only make the problem worse.

Also, you generally shouldn't put much stock in a scientist working for either the IPCC or an oil company talking about global warming, either. The conflict of interest undermines the credibility of the argument. That doesn't mean that their arguments are wrong, it just means the data they provide and assumptions they are working from have to be filtered through the inherent bias and conflict of interest they may have.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

You know, a few weeks ago, some drunken idiot on alliance comms told me he knew "all about the military" despite never having served becuase he had a lot of brothers and cousins involved.. but somehow me being a major and having 17 years of service all told made me "part of the problem" because I was contradicting.. whatever it was. He was drunk so I don't think it was much of anything.

Conflict of interest involves a conflict between one's duty and one's personal interests. Shuyung has no duties in conflict here. For that matter, neither do scientists in oil companies, or at least no more than the environmental group's scientists.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Note that I pointed out that the IPCC's scientists were also in conflict of interest.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Yes, and in both cases its equally nonsense. That's a question that was the subject of original research. It's quite possible for original research to reach different conclusions. Eventually it tends to settle on a common understanding, but that can take time. The internet is not a matter of new scientific inquiry.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."