One year on after US repealed net neutrality, policymakers reflect soberly on the future One year ago today, the FCC passed a controversial measure that undermined its own rules, passed just two years earlier, over net neutrality. That anniversary has sparked a series of articles, interviews and tweets today from policymakers that highlight a critical fact: The issue remains so toxic that sober analysis and …
also, from the article:
"Claims of the damage that rejecting the rules would have on internet access have not come true and so therefore, by extension, the rule change was good."
I'm not entirely sure that THIS is the only justification for the rule change being 'good'. I'm sure it has everything to do with REMOVING regulations, and the lifting of what has been considered to be 'overreach' or 'a power grab' over the internet by the FCC, which could have (in theory) been used to CENSOR or RESTRICT content.
For an example of the latter, consider the so-called "fairness doctrine" that was imposed by the FCC on radio and TV broadcasts, which was (finally) REMOVED in the 80's thanks to Ronald Reagan. FYI Ronald Reagan was NOT just an actor but had been a radio broadcaster AND was the head of the 'Screen Actors Guild', aka a union boss. So I think Reagan had a REALLY GOOD grasp on the CHILLING effects that the so-called 'Fairness Doctrine' had on broadcasting in general.
And the general opinion _I_ have (and others too, from what I hear) is that ONCE a gummint agency has its foot in the door, they'll creep along gaining more and more power and control over time until "the agenda" has been acheved (whatever agenda that is), usually to empower those who are appointed to positions within the bureacracy.
So yeah, the DE-regulation has been GOOD. So-called "Net Neutrality" was ONLY a means of preventing someone from "paying for a fast lane", which, from my perspective, is ANTI-PROGRESS. By removing the fast lanes, instead of regulating them to a sane level, you FORCE EVERYONE to be EQUALLY MEDIOCRE.
Anyway, I've argued these points many times. If your mind is made up, you'll just disregard it anyway. But I had to say it, regardless.
Deregulation is not good where there's a natural monopoly. Regulatory capture is happening here precisely because the monopolists desire deregulation so they can do whatever they want.
And the fact that we're ignoring you spouting the same opinion over and over is because you consistently ignore the facts of the matter.
You're not a libertarian, you're an anarchist. Also a hypocrite.
Because companies aren't taking advantage of what it offers yet. If on day one they started throttling streaming providers that compete with their own services, or to extract money from the streaming provider there would be a lot of finger pointing and I told you sos from the pro net neutrality crowd.
It took a while for Verizon to start throttling Netflix once they were able to do it last time, there's no reason to believe they'll be quick about it now. Especially since they don't know what the courts will decide about the state level efforts to prevent it.
Its far too soon to know how it is going to end.
They aren't so silly to start throttling and charging customers at once - especially since many States had enacted neutrality rules, or are going to. Taking advantages of FCC rules now would fuel those States laws, as citizens may become far more aware of what's going on.
I'm sure they are waiting for what the Federal government will do to prevent local regulations. If the States lose, they will start to tighten the rope, probably slowly to see how much customers are going to accept.
Rarely freedom dies in one day - usually it's a long agony, as citizens get used to renounce to more and more rights.
It took a while for Verizon to start throttling Netflix once they were able to do it last time, there's no reason to believe they'll be quick about it now.
How do we know that they stopped the throttling? Some companies still did throttling while net-neutrality being a law. They are probably still doing it. If they did turn it off, they probably left the equipment inline so they didn't have to visit every tower, which means they can just flip the switch and turn it back on.
You mention economists as though they would have something useful to add. But they're social scientists : they produce opinions, not facts. Nothing they offer is more than guesswork because they can only observe previous behaviour and attempt to use it to predict future behaviour - without ever knowing if the conditions that it occurred in and perhaps caused it are comparable.
When economists start behaving like proper scientists, their suggestions might be good for something more worthwhile than politics.
The comment that 'only 11 percent of economists support net neutrality' is telling. You have an 11/89% difference of opinion ? That means something is very seriously wrong with the 'science'. If you had a 1/99% difference, you could dismiss the 1% as mavericks or bought, like the climate change deniers. But with a mismatch like that, you simply don't have a clear view. Science isn't something you can vote. It's not a question of a majority. It's a matter of proof, or, until that's available, consensus, and you haven't got one. Come back when you have.
The problem of economists is whom they work for.
From a telecommunication company perspective, obviously net neutrality is a bad thing. Being able to charge more for some contents transmission evidently boost revenues without investing almost anything - it can help to *reduce* investments as the required bandwidth could decrease, as people could accept lower performance. That's actually what happened in Europe when there were state monopolies - you could only get what they sold you, so they had little incentive to offer better services.
Economist who only look at telco company profits and shares value (especially if they own them) will be against net neutrality, of course.
Those who can look at the overall picture can see even the non-economic short term impact, and the long-term one which is economic too. There's an evident risk that putting telco in charge of what people can access and how can damage education (stupid gossip may bring in ads revenues could be prioritized over educational contents which don't), and of course incumbents will have another weapons to crush challengers.
The real solution, which I think almost everyone agrees with, is a real competitive marketplace. Something like net neutrality is required because in the US there is no real competitive marketplace (and telecoms fight tooth and nail against having internet service classified as a communications service, even though all common and technical sense indicates that's exactly what it is).
The question is, how do we get from where we are to that? The essential reason that we don't have it now is because the telecoms (and their proxy, the FCC) absolutely don't want it to happen.
I wish I had an answer. All I know is that net neutrality looks to be a reasonable stopgap solution until/unless this whole problem can get fixed for real.
" is a real competitive marketplace"
Sometimes, you can't create a wholly and really competitive marketplace, because the required prerequisites are lacking.
There will be areas where is not financially viable to compete and to create more than one network. One solution could be to have a single network, and competing services over it - but usually companies don't like this solution unless forced to, and yet, who builds the network?
"One solution could be to have a single network, and competing services over it - but usually companies don't like this solution unless forced to, and yet, who builds the network?"
This is the only way forward that I've heard about that seems to even have a chance of working. Treat the internet as critical infrastructure that is built, owned and operated by the public, and use of those pipes is leased to, on a nonexclusive basis, to ISPs.
A bit like we do roads.
"We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force."(Ayn Rand) ISPs have brute force so we need government to level the playing field. I want municipal broadband.
Well here's some news : even if the USA is royally screwing itself over, the rest of the world is getting along fine and many, many countries have full fiber FTTP projects going on.
I myself, after having left a year ago a village where I had an acceptable 12MBps connection and arriving in a village where there was nothing but a communal WiFi that worked when it wanted, I have now signed up for and will be getting a 1GBps connection as of next January 3rd. For €50/month. Oh, and there's no throttling or limit in the amount of data, like some operators actually dare to do. If I download 1GBps for thirty days straight (supposing I manage to find enough data for that), then that's my business.
So carry on, USA. You will soon be in the backwaters of the internet, and I'll be reading about how you barely manage a national average of 25MBps whilst surfing at 40 times that speed.
Usually, for consumers there's no warranty you get always 1Gb - usually it is "best effort" with a minimum bandwidth warranty - they can still "throttle" you is you're becoming a bottleneck for others, as usually the backhaul network doesn't have the capacity to fulfill too many customers running at full speed for prolonged times.
Networks weren't really "neutral" - you can pay more to have more bandwidth, and better service levels, maybe on dedicated lines.
But at least it doesn't discriminate traffic or source/destinations - albeit some tried to discriminate P2P traffic, for example.
The real issue is if telco should become full arbiters of what is transmitted and, as they become integrated with contents companies, have the right to hinder competition to artificially increase their profits.
California's Orange County plowed over their orange groves decades ago in favor of apartment complexes. Can't speak for Florida.
Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got till it's gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
This is the future of the current party in control. They can no longer face deal with the facts so they make them up. Then they end up winning and have to either follow through or admit they were lying. This then just cascades through all of the issues. Truth and fact no longer matter. This is what's driving me and other away from the party. I will now bow to das leader...
This is the future of the current party in control
And, sadly, the same thing is happening all over the world, in all political spectra. The demagogues are taking over where truth isn't important - all that is important is the masses believing what comes out of your mouth (and voting for you)
@COCM:
Sadly the truth has become the loudest, most self centred annoying voice at the podium, rather than the quiet list of facts from the academic with the proof in their pocket.
Why you ask does the loud arrogant self centred one get the most attention?
Because the loud self centred one plays off the fears and insecurities of the crowd.
Fears and insecurities that have been accellerated by modern media reporting 'mass shootings' and 'mass assaults' within 3 minutes of them happening around the globe. By social media narrowing and tightening points of view with echo chambers that are self re-enforcing. By extracting minutia from a swamp of data and refusing to look at larger, more complete pictures. By ensuring that the population is less and less effectively educated in each ensuing generation so that logic and reasoning have fallen out of general use and are now looked apon as 'weird' and 'eccentric' behaviours.
Humanity in the western world is once again a slave population, poorly educated, incapable of critical thought and tightly bound to communication devices that can be used to pump them full of fear uncertainty and doubt about their neighbour, their family and their community. They cannot see that the more afraid they are, the less rational their reactions to freedom are. Especially when that freedom is couched in the terms of mysterious, scary, foreign 'others'. Thus each day they gladly sacrifice yet more of their own freedoms on the altar of safety.
Well, I imagine that given no regulation, ISPs may work out service plans similar to cable television -- if you want to play WoW online, then you will either need a subscription which includes that service or you will have to put up with a high-latency, low-bandwidth connection. Want to stream Hulu? You will need to buy that service package from your provider. Maximal profit would be served if Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon were offered in separate packages, each priced separately. Similar packaging would be offered for gaming, I suppose.
Do you think that Comcast and Verizon would never shove that down your throats? Dream on. It works for cable TV, despite the fact that consumers hate it. But consumers have no choice. And most home internet users have no choice of ISP, either.
Why hasn't it happened yet? Because the internet is much younger than television, and the service niche is still evolving.
Corporations have one intrinsic mandate: to maximize profits. It's unrealistic to expect them to maximize the public good instead. This suggests a general rule: if a behavior destructive of the public good will be profitable, then a corporation will act contrary to the public good unless forced -- by law, by regulation -- to do otherwise.
This is supported historically. The Ethyl Corp knew fairly early in the twentieth century that the lead compounds they sold as gasoline additives were toxic. Early mishaps in their own plants resulted in poisoned, debilitated employees. But they denied lead's toxicity, and tried for decades to destroy researchers who showed that lead is a neurotoxin.
If a practice is profitable but harmful to the public, then a corporation will harm the public in order to profit.
Net neutrality? Not on a par with peddling tobacco or leaded gasoline, nor with hazardous workplaces or food contamination. As with cable TV, you can simply choose to go without high-speed streaming or gaming. And you may be healthier and happier for it... ;)
So perhaps the FAA action (or refusal to act) is unimportant. But I suspect that, in a few years, USians will look back to the days of open internet access with a certain amount of nostalgia.
Are you advocating for packet traffic control by FAA? I guess filing a packet flying plan for each connection could be a bit awkward, especially if I had to list every router on the route. Should also I list secondary destinations if the host is unreachable? We should also ask an IP extension for each packet squawk code.
Yeah, the Federal Aviation Administration is not ideally suited for the job. :)
Though unlike the FCC leadership, they might actually give a flying f*ck.
(I wasn't going to twit him for the mistake, really. Working close to the aviation industry means I've made the opposite mistake in conversation a few times, so who am I to judge?)
I reckon historians looking back at Trump's presidency will find it easily surpasses that of US Grant in corruption, incompetence and chaos, not to mention financial disaster probably (except for him and his mates). This is just one example. Fake government by a fake president and his fake appointees.
The very fact that repeatedly, a set of economists oppose the idea, correlates to an agenda outside their specified remit and indeed expertise. The last time I looked the internet, the web and of course much more was designed and built by research scientists and engineers.
What's the result of that straw poll. I would also suggest that even within their remit, any government economist hasn't statistically had the best run recently or indeed in history.
The solution is of course find the right or even better, many opinions with the correct technical expertise, by someone who isn't paid to do so or has a vested interest, it's a bit like democracy but free. #iwouldn'tbetthehouseonitimightbewrong
The very fact that repeatedly, a set of economists oppose the idea, correlates to an agenda outside their specified remit and indeed expertise. The last time I looked the internet, the web and of course much more was designed and built by research scientists and engineers.
What's the result of that straw poll? I would also suggest that even within their remit, any government economist hasn't statistically had the best run recently or in the history of time.
The solution is of course find the right or even better, many opinions with the correct technical expertise, by someone who isn't paid to do so or has a vested interest, it's a bit like democracy but free.
What's the value lost from the training, development and research of the next generation and indeed skill shortage and pipeline or who know's what else from our brightest minds, over the last decade?
#iwouldn'tbetthehouseonitimightbewrong #tenpercentindustryninetypercentinfluence
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