GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/gop-net-neutrality-bill-would-allow-paid-fast-lanes-and-preempt-state-laws/

by mido22 • 9 years ago

113 117 9 years ago

arstechnica.com

coldcode• 9 years ago

If it allows paid fast lanes, then clearly it allows degradation.

croon2• 9 years ago

The GOP didn't expect us plebs to see through that.

eli_gottlieb• 9 years ago

I dunno. Given their recent fondness for passing statute at GOP-held level N that preempts statute at non-GOP level N-1, they seem pretty brazen to me. Federalism is out the window, districts are gerrymandered, packing the courts, etc.

pjc50• 9 years ago

They're in charge. Their supporters will vote for them no matter what so long as the guns and abortion issues are untouched, because they get their news from a parallel system in which this is all presented as a good thing. They don't depend on floating voters because there aren't any.

rhino3692• 9 years ago

Priorization and throtting aren’t exactly the same. Throttling implies rate limiting even if there is surplus bandwidth. Prioritization would only occur when bandwidth was limited.

Think of it as QoS based on a list of sites provided by the ISP.

sametmax3• 9 years ago

But throttling is really hard to prove. They can always downsize some hardware to "prioritize" and "retarget their budget", but effectively they just throttle. Basically they can do whatever they want with the proper wording now.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC• 9 years ago

"We don't have the factory capacities at the moment, therefore your car is missing the back seat" is no better an excuse than "It's cheaper for us to leave out some parts, therefore your car is missing the back seat".

There is no such thing as "surplus bandwidth". How much bandwidth there is is as much the decision of the ISP as what gets prioritized or throttled. If you make it illegal to throttle below available bandwidth, they will simply reduce available bandwidth (or even simpler, fail to increase available bandwidth).

If there is more than one way to achieve the exact same result at exactly the same cost, it's completely pointless to make one of the ways illegal.

murph-almighty• 9 years ago

Literally my concern with this.

Everyone gets the same coverage except premium customers. Then degrade that base degree of coverage. Boom.

sametmax3• 9 years ago

Most of the time when somebody is selling "premium service" in IT, it doesn't mean "better service", but "regular service while we artificially make any other ones worst".

Regular customers will just see their quality drop for the same price. Web sites will have to pay for the bandwith their customer already paid for to their ISP.

It's going to suck.

Hope this never happens in France, but our leaders love to copy the worst decisions taken in the US so...

g00gler• 9 years ago

Is that definitely the case?

I interpreted this as meaning that although you pay for 10mb/s Internet, Comcast can offer a special package that allows you to stream Netflix in 4K.

tantalor• 9 years ago

That would be unfair to other streaming services e.g. YouTube, Hulu, HBO, Amazon, etc.

wanderingbort6• 9 years ago

That is objectively false. Degrading the "slow" lanes is only one way to produce a fast lane. Direct peering arrangements and co-location of services are two ways to create "fast" lanes without having to degrade anything. They are also not free, so it makes sense that business-to-business deals would be made to establish them (aka paid fast lanes).

The effective bandwidth of the internet looks like an hour glass. As things fan out to individual users you may have capacity for 100+mbps but no way to consume it because upstream there is a bottleneck. In many cases that bottleneck exists at the edge of an ISP or farther upstream of it. Direct peering increases the capacity of the ISP's "edge" but only for the services available on the peer. Co-location puts those services on the internal side of the bottleneck, again increasing effective capacity, but only for the services that are co-located in the ISPs datacenters. Almost all major providers (google, akamai, netflix, facebook) offer some form of co-locatable server however, those cost money to deploy and maintain.

dahart• 9 years ago

You've missed the point. The very existence of fast lanes means that whatever's left is a degradation. This has been the point NN proponents have been making all along. Proposing to ban slow lanes but allow fast lanes effectively does nothing for NN proponents.

It doesn't have to be "actively" slowing down traffic to be degraded. If ISPs can go faster, and they choose not to unless you pay more, that is a form of degradation. One of many forms the degradation could come in is ISPs failing to build out faster networks until people are paying higher prices. Service can be allowed to degrade over time by simply not doing anything unless you pay more money.

AnthonyMouse4• 9 years ago

Direct peering increases the capacity of the ISP's "edge" but only for the services available on the peer. Co-location puts those services on the internal side of the bottleneck, again increasing effective capacity, but only for the services that are co-located in the ISPs datacenters. Almost all major providers (google, akamai, netflix, facebook) offer some form of co-locatable server however, those cost money to deploy and maintain.

This is a textbook lobbyist argument -- something which is technically true without doing the math.

A 10Gbps port on a switch is maybe $100. Say it can service a hundred customers, so $1/customer, and has a lifetime of two years. So $0.04/customer/month.

These are very conservative numbers. In reality it doesn't even cost that much.

The fact that the ports go to different places is irrelevant in the aggregate, because there is no need to add a port when the existing links to that peer aren't at capacity. And it's not as though the fact that Netflix and Google have separate ports would allow a 100Mbps customer to get 100Mbps from each of them at the same time.

Colocation is independent of this. If anyone with traffic could get peering at cost (i.e. ~free), they might still do it or might not, but then the ISP would have to charge market rates for space and power instead of monopoly prices because they're really charging for gatekeeper access to customers.

notyourday9• 9 years ago

Not needed:

https://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2010-December/0292...

wanderingbort6• 9 years ago

whats interesting is that nothing about the current net-neutrality discussions addresses concerns like these. They may or may not be substantiated concerns. The graphs don't show intent so, that much is assumed.

gravy2• 9 years ago

How is this different from me paying for more for faster internet?

JoeAltmaier3• 9 years ago

Because the last mile is (sometimes) truly bandwidth limited. But the trunk lines aren't. Now they just get to extort money from us or artificially throttle us. Worse, they'll likely (as they have everywhere else) extort money for websites they have no connection to (like Facebook or Twitter) just because they can. Like an entrepreneurial thug standing outside a club and extracting an extra fee to let folks in. Or paying protection money to the mob. Like that.

notyourday9• 9 years ago

Exactly opposite. Last line is not bandwidth limited - FTTH exists. FIOS and even comcast do that.

100 people at 1Gbit/sec to the edge are 100Gbit/sec in the core to content providers.

[Edit: Downvoting 2+2 being 4 is stupid]

1 Gbit/sec is easily deliverable at the edge, even if it costs 5 thousand dollars to get it connected. 1 Gbit/sec of non-oversubscribed IP transit is at least $500/mo. A building with 100 apartments would require $50,000 a month in IP transit costs. This does not include costs of the long distance fiber, locations for PNI and gear that can do 48x 100Gbit/sec ports. So your Interwebz is going to cost you either > $600 a month or you get congestion and that congestion would be coming from the core, not from the edge

gravy2• 9 years ago

It was a question of genuine curiosity. Thanks. How do the regulations or whatever it is that was repealed stop them from doing so?

I actually have no idea what was repealed.

snarfy• 9 years ago

It hurts entrepreneurs a lot more than the end user. With tiered internet comes tiered pricing and tiered access. 'Basic' internet will get you google.com, facebook, etc. If you get the 'sports' package then you get espn.com. If you get the 'DIY' package you get some howto sites, craftsy, maybe thingiverse.

But what if you come up with a brand new DIY site that you wish to host ads, have logins and accounts with monthly fees, etc. How will anybody ever see your site with tiered internet? Your new site is not be in any of the predetermined packages. You would have to go to the ISP and beg/pay them to get your site added to the 'DIY' package just to even get any traffic at all, let alone users. It totally destroys innovation and tilts the playing field towards the existing incumbents.

maxxxxx3• 9 years ago

It's funny how they always vehemently advocate for states rights unless these states rights get in the way of their agenda.

e40• 9 years ago

Came here to say this. It shows the GOP doesn't really stand for anything. They just say what they need to say, in the moment, to get what they want.

If Clinton were POTUS and Russian ties like had been found to the Trump administration, she would have been impeached already. But it's their man, so let's look the other way. Same with State's rights.

ictoan2• 9 years ago

This! "They just say what they need to say, in the moment, to get what they want"

And Trump is the magnification of the GOP.

We need to hold them accountable!!!

Spivak2• 9 years ago

This isn't very charitable. You should be happy that the GOP doesn't rotely apply their 'principles' even when it's idiotic to do so. Federal laws that create 'maximums' like this always come with preemption. Otherwise a different states are going to enact different versions of NN to score political points accomplishing one of two things: a rule that tries to simplify the regulatory environment will actually make it more complicated because now there's 50 separate policies, or ISPs will be forced to follow the rules of the state with the strictest rules which more-or-less invalidates the federal rule.

Buttons840• 9 years ago

I don't think the FCC did, nor can they, create a new "federal law" though, right? The FCC removed a regulation. Do states not have the right to regulate in the absence of any federal regulation?

meri_dian3• 9 years ago

Just because the Republican party is traditionally associated with states' rights doesn't mean they should always have to give precedence to states.

The sway of ideologies should be balanced with a willingness to judge issues on their own merit.

Allowing states to enact their own regulations in this case would be incredibly burdensome to internet businesses looking to operate in multiple states (so all of them), there's a good reason for net neutrality laws to be uniform across the whole country.

maxxxxx3• 9 years ago

It's always burdensome to have different laws in different states. Different sales tax in different states is a major PITA for example. I don't think this is different from other laws.

wtallis10• 9 years ago

incredibly burdensome to internet businesses looking to operate in multiple states (so all of them)

Not all of them. Just the ones that want to lay cable in that particular state. Most internet companies are only concerned with deploying physical infrastructure to a handful of data centers, and leaving the rest of the connectivity up to their ISPs. ISPs providing major backbone links would be subject to the hassle of different state regulations, but ISPs providing last-mile service only need to care about the laws of the states their particular customers reside in.

dragonwriter4• 9 years ago

“States Rights”, since just before the Civil War, has consistently been a political code for protecting discrimination (including, originally, demanding other states be bound to treat escaped slaves as property not people through federal law.)

It has never meant what the words taken together would naively seem to mean.

ryanlol2• 9 years ago

Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we always had paid fast lanes available? At least for VOIP this stuff hasn’t seemed very uncommon.

Brockenstein2• 9 years ago

Not in the sense of:

Dear Netflix, if you want to service our customers you need to pay us a $10 million dollars a year.

Dear Customer with 30mbps service, Netflix takes a lot of bandwidth and we're just a poor multi-billion dollar ISP and can't afford to shoulder the burden. But if you pay an additional $9.99 a month we can probably scrape up the bandwidth to let you watch Netflix in HD ($29.99 for 4k)

Also see our other premium options. Have the freedom to pick which services are right for you! Hulu: $9.99 Amazon Video: $9.99 Apple Music: $5.99 YouTube: $7.99

ryanlol2• 9 years ago

How would this actually work in the somewhat competitive and very low-margin ISP market?

What you’re describing just sounds like suicide.

Velchronus• 9 years ago

No, you're right. The FCC's Net Neutrality rules excluded private offerings such as MPLS circuits.

natch• 9 years ago

GOP (“Grand Old Party”) == US Republican Party in case it wasn’t obvious from the apparent shortsightedness of the proposed law.

djschnei4• 9 years ago

Can someone explain to me how it's evil for them to charge more money for a "bigger pipe"? Their networks can only service so much traffic; not sure why supply and demand are seen as evil in this case.

scoon1329• 9 years ago

The issue is more complex than just a bigger pipe.

As a site owner, you pay a service provider (or cloud hosting service or whatever) to offer you a certain amount of bandwidth to host your site.

The problem comes when other ISP's implement their fast lanes and traffic from your site doesn't get equal priority to traffic from another site who has paid that specific ISP to prioritise their traffic when serving their customers.

So you end up having to pay multiple ISP's to prioritise your traffic on their networks. Your site could appear slow even if you've paid your own service provider for a high bandwidth.

notyourday9• 9 years ago

That's also not correct. If you, as the site owner, are still talking about ISPs or cloud hosting you are someone who is riding a bicycle on a shoulder of I-95 next to semis doing 80mph in 65 zones. You are, frankly, irrelevant. Also you do want to make sure that those semis use <blah>-bypass instead of clogging your highway.

The real issue is that we allow those ISPs to determine which semis are allowed to use a bypass. Public's ( even technologically advanced public's ) mixing of the two issues is why NN fight would continue to be lost.

djschnei4• 9 years ago

Thank you for explaining your concerns in a civil way. So this is a hypothetical problem or something that's manifested in the past but regulation then stopped?

Brockenstein2• 9 years ago

As a customer you're already paying the ISP to access the Internet. The websites you're paying your ISP to access already pay for bandwidth and whatnot from their providers. But now they need to also pay your ISP to ensure you get optimal performance.

So you've got 30mbps internet? Sorry, Netflix is in the 256k lane so your speed doesn't matter. And this is Netflix's fault because they haven't paid us. Also Netflix costs $19.99 a month to cover the costs of paying your ISP. And now maybe your ISP wants to also charge you a premium on to of your normal bill to view Netflix.

It won't be a bigger pipe, this won't create a fast lane. It's just going to create a slow lane.

dmschulman• 9 years ago

It's evil because the cost of the actual service you're paying the ISP for (data transmission) has gone down and continues to get cheaper every year.

These companies are able to flaunt the laws of the marketplace by forcing consumers to pay more for a product despite the "physical good" becoming cheaper and cheaper every year for the ISP to produce.

https://broadbandnow.com/report/much-data-really-cost-isps/

tzs• 9 years ago

The issue is who they are trying to charge. Supply and demand is great...when it is between the right parties.

To keep things simple, imagine an ISP with only one plan: 1 TB of data/month at 100 Mb/second for $50/month.

Note that at 100 Mb/second it would only take 22 hours to use all your allotted data for the month. Because of this they do not have to build their network out to where it can handle everyone doing 100 Mb/second all the time. In fact, building it out to where it could do 100 Mb/second all the time would be prohibitively expensive.

So they just build their network out to where most of the time, most people get their 100 Mb/second, but during some peak times there may be congestion and things may slow down.

Imagine now that it is during one of those congested times. I am trying to watch a video lecture at a free MOOC. You are trying to watch, say, Netflix. Bob is trying to download a video game he just bought. Alice is trying to do a major OS and XCode update on her Mac.

You, me, Bob, and Alice all bought the same service from our ISP at the same price, so it seems pretty reasonable to expect that we would be treated the same. We should share the effects of congestion equally.

If the ISP wants to bring supply and demand into this, they could offer service level agreements for an extra cost. You pay a certain amount per month and they guarantee, say, 90% of rated speed even during congestion. I think this would be allowed under net neutrality.

What they want to do with paid prioritization, though, so go to the MOOC I'm trying to use, Netflix, the place where Bob got the video game, and Apple and say "Hey...if you pay us $X per month, when our network is congested we will prioritize the traffic for our customers of yours".

There are two bad things with this:

1. Suppose that Netflix buys paid prioritization, and nobody else does. That means that during times of congestion you get good service, and the service for the rest of us gets even worse. Even though we are paying our ISP for the exact same service, you are now getting preferential treatment because a company that has no relationship with the ISP other than they and the ISP have some common customers was able to pay to give you preferential service and degrade ours.

2. It may discourage the ISP from building out more network capacity as demand grows. They may instead focus on getting paid prioritization agreements from the most popular internet services. That could mean that those who use smaller services that even if they wanted to could not afford to make prioritization deals with every ISP, might be doomed to perpetual terrible performance, as the ISPs only need to build out their networks enough to provide good service to those who use services that have paid prioritization deals with the ISP.

Essentially ISPs want to reverse their role. Right now, their role is to sell to us (the end users) access to the internet. They want to turn that around, and make their role be to sell the internet access to us. And they still want to charge us while doing that...basically they want to be the pimps of the net, with us as the prostitutes and the websites as the johns.

notfromhere• 9 years ago

Should the power company charge you more based on what appliances you plug in at home, block appliances that it doesn't like, or slow down power to appliances it doesn't like on a whim?

That's basically what the ISPs want to do.

djschnei4• 9 years ago

Breaking news Law proposed which would allow EvilCorp to charge more money for the services which cost more to provide.

notyourday9• 9 years ago

Yes, those fast lanes are called PNIs between content providers and eyeball networks. They have been in existence since the time Excite@Home went to the exchanges.

24gttghh4• 9 years ago

Here [0] is the actual text (i.e. hosted directly by congress.gov) which arstechnica was so thoughtful to not link to.

“(2) may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.

Seems like what NN proponents want, isn't it?

“(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in paragraph (2), nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the ability of broadband internet access service providers to offer specialized services.
“(2) PROHIBITION ON CERTAIN PRACTICES.—Specialized services may not be offered or provided in ways that threaten the meaningful availability of broadband internet access service or that have been devised or promoted in a manner designed to evade the purposes of this section.

Ah those might be a problem...

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4682...

ensignavenger5• 9 years ago

I was going to ask if anyone had actually read the proposed bill. It isn't very long, and I didn't see anything about "paid" prioritization, though that might be considered a "specialized" service. From what I can tell, this bill puts give a lot of power to the FCC to determine what types of specialized services would "offered or provided in ways that threaten the meaningful availability of broadband internet access service or that have been devised or promoted in a manner designed to evade the purposes of this section".

So the FCC could still potentially prevent prioritization that would degrade broadband internet service.

Of course, I am not a lawyer.

24gttghh4• 9 years ago

And neither am I, but I could see how the paid prioritization may be considered a "specialized" service. I am leaning towards reading it as double-speak.

Retric• 9 years ago

Seems like ...

No the exceptions are huge. Netflix is throttled based on network they slow everything on that network down so this explicitly allows one of the known examples of throttling that actually occurred.

24gttghh4• 9 years ago

I figured as much but since no one was talking about the actual text of the bill I thought this was a good starting point :)

wtallis10• 9 years ago

"in ways that threaten the meaningful availability of broadband internet access service"

"availability" here does not cover performance. Specialized services will likely subtract from the performance of communication with the rest of the internet, but this clause only cares if the impact would be a more thorough loss of connectivity. As long as the ISP continues to offer a neutral tier of service at some level of performance and price, they can devote the bulk of their bandwidth to providing non-neutral service.

ensignavenger5• 9 years ago

I think it will depend on how it ends up being interpreted, and maybe we can work with legislators to provide more guidance there in the final Bill.

To me, if I am paying for a 50mpbs Internet access, and I am only getting 25 or 30, because the rest is devoted to "specialized services", then they are threatening the meaningful availability of the service I am paying for.

If however I am paying for 50 mbps, and getting 50-55 mbps, and my ISP is offering an over priced Voip package, I don't think it is interfering in a meaningful way (obviously this ignores latency, which is also an important factor, for simplicity of the example).

MentallyRetired• 9 years ago

“(3) SPECIALIZED SERVICES.—The term ‘specialized services’ means services other than broadband internet access service that are offered over the same network as, and that may share network capacity with, broadband internet access service.”.

So, fast lanes/bundled packages?

ensignavenger5• 9 years ago

As long as they don't interfere with meaningful broadband internet, I think so. It appears to be aimed primarily at Voip and IPTV services and that type of offering, but it may be possible for them to sell access over a "fast lane" service.

aeolus811tw• 9 years ago

Normally a lurker, but I created an account specifically to reply to you.

“(2) may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.

look at the very end.

"subject to reasonable network management"

I think that is an extremely broad term to be put in place; recalling the argument ISP had for throttling was to maintain network quality.

wtallis10• 9 years ago

The "reasonable network management" bit is a gaping loophole carried over from previous net neutrality regulations. So far, no serious attempt has been made to determine what technological measures are actually justifiable DDoS protections and which ones are impermissible preferential treatment.

mancerayder• 9 years ago

Isn't one of the issues the increasingly close relationship between ISPs and media owners? I mean they are literally the same in some cases.

ep103• 9 years ago

From now, until the day I die, I will never vote or donate to the republican party again. This last year was the straw that broke the camel's back.

This isn't the party of small businesses and tax cuts any more. This bill is a handout to large ISPs at the expense of the economy, and the tax bill last night raises my taxes so people making 100k+ more than me can see a tax cut. I'm done with them.

prklmn• 9 years ago

“We’re the party of small businesses” has been a guise for decades.

BeefySwain• 9 years ago

Good thing you will likely be districted in a way that prevents your vote from mattering for the rest of your life, and your donations are paltry in comparison to corporate ones.

afinlayson• 9 years ago

It's the party of “The party of small businesses”™ not the party of small businesses. It's been a trademark in the same way McDonalds uses "Grade A"™ beef.

1024core• 9 years ago

and prohibit state governments from enacting their own net neutrality laws.

So much for "States' rights", huh? Fucking hypocrites.

A man is known by the company he keeps, as the old adage goes. Anyone who supports Republicans in any shape and form is also a fucking hypocrite and a liar.

meri_dian3• 9 years ago

Take a deep breath, you're being extreme.

Just because the Republican party is traditionally associated with states' rights doesn't mean they should always have to give precedence to states.

Allowing states to enact their own regulations in this case would be incredibly burdensome to internet businesses, there's a good reason for net neutrality laws to be uniform across the whole country.

haZard_OS3• 9 years ago

Take a deep breath, you're rationalizing away hypocrisy.

rjdagost• 9 years ago

Democrats are not traditionally states' rights proponents. And yet they will wrap themselves in the banner of states' rights when it suits their agenda (gay marriage, drug laws, etc.). It is run of the mill political expediency- no more, no less.

foobard• 9 years ago

"States' rights" is a racist dog whistle. Nothing more.

benjohnson• 9 years ago

Republicans broke "State's rights" a long time ago when they abolished slavery.

meddlepal• 9 years ago

It'll just be rewritten in five or ten years or whenever the other team is in power. I'm not sure why anyone gets worked up about this stuff anymore.

wtallis10• 9 years ago

Because it's not a pendulum.

Net neutrality was how the internet worked de facto from its inception through approximately the end of the dial-up days. It wasn't necessary to impose net neutrality de jure until home broadband was widespread and capable of eating into traditional cable TV revenue. It wasn't necessary to regulate net neutrality for DSL carriers back when local loop unbundling applied to them. But between 2000 and 2010, the net neutrality situation got worse than it ever had been, the regulatory efforts from 2010 to 2015 were half-assed at best, and the 2015 regulations weren't in place long enough to even establish enough judicial precedent to tell whether they could work long-term.

Partisan control of Congress definitely swings back and forth semi-regularly, but that's not what the history of net neutrality looks like.

tmaly• 9 years ago

In regards to preempting state laws, did Congress forget about the 10th Amendment? I know they tend to skirt around it in law school according to my colleagues who are all attorneys.

wtallis10• 9 years ago

Regulating Internet Service Providers ranks pretty low on the list of ways in which the Commerce Clause has been stretched.

throw7• 9 years ago

As far I'm concerned, I've never had "net neutrality"...

If I wanted to run a server (web/smtp/etc.) on my consumer level broadband account, I was not allowed to per TOS. For me, real "net neutrality" would've let me do this, but it's never been the case. I have to jump up to "Business" level account.

This situation is what ISP and corporates want... to get you to pay more for a problem you don't have. And them the power to shut you down and force you to higher tier level of "support".

Comcast pushed one step too far against Bittorrent (and was caught), but this is exactly the power that the big boys want and Title II weakens their argument that what they provide is a managed service not a pipe.

neo4sure• 9 years ago

This is all I need to here. "SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed.". We have to just bid our time and wipe out an entire class of cockroach enter prices.

jessaustin2• 9 years ago

That sounds great, but one expects FCC will be deployed to quash that as well. After all SpaceX would still use some portion of the over-regulated spectrum, and at those distances probably not wifi band.

If we had reasonable spectrum regulation, various terrestrial WISPs would have replaced all of these horrible companies a long time ago.

pawy• 9 years ago

Truely I don't understand why the biggest aspect of this problem is not talked out.

They are basically tempering with everyone's liberty to start a business on internet. Damaging US citizen capacity to create new internet opportunities and be able to compete with their favorites pets.

Why the f* are you talking about slow and fast lanes ? It is true, but most importantly is this passes on. Any service that would like to be taken seriously would have to pay his way in.

Why everybody has so gentle titles ? Fast / Slow lanes is very abstract.

GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

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