Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

http://gigaom.com/2014/01/15/marc-andreessen-talks-about-the-pros-and-cons-of-net-neutrality-and-the-need-for-innovation/

by mathewi • 13 years ago

33 55 13 years ago

gigaom.com

protomyth2• 13 years ago

What is the technical definition of net neutrality? I look at a lot of these articles and they seem to imply people are using the same term for multiple things.

twoodfin3• 13 years ago

Indeed. You can imagine pretty expansive definitions, and whatever definition you come up with can create potentially undesirable incentives.

I don't know whether Comcast is using IP to deliver their video-on-demand services to your cable box, but let's assume they are. That IP bandwidth is above and beyond whatever you're paying for as a "broadband" connection, but that's just accounting: It's all packets in the end. Is it "neutral" for Comcast to be able to use that bandwidth to provide you with movies and TV while restricting NetFlix to your capped/metered "Internet" bandwidth?

If NN would disallow such restrictions, then Comcast really is a low margin dumb pipe provider. Some people love that idea, but it doesn't encourage any of the existing broadband providers (maybe sans Google) to keep spending tens of billions of dollars to roll out faster and faster networks.

If NN doesn't apply to these services, then of course Comcast will simply package up as much of their IP-based applications and content as possible into proprietary interfaces with your TV and other devices while making the bandwidth available to "open" IP applications commensurately smaller.

lhc-• 13 years ago

Im not sure how the second case incentivizes them to build out their networks either. They have barely done that for the last decade or so (consider how expensive and slow internet access in the US is compared to much of the first world), so I'm not sure why they would start now that they have even more control.

pbreit3• 13 years ago

Network neutrality rules prevent the network providers from cutting preferential deals with content providers. The pipe providers must remain neutral regarding the data flowing through their pipes.

If you want to know what the world looks like without network neutrality just go back to the days of Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie, AOL, et al. Dismal does't even begin to describe the situation.

protomyth2• 13 years ago

"must remain neutral regarding the data flowing through their pipes" - what would be the technical definition?

"If you want to know...." - no, just looking for an actual stated technical definition of net neutrality without the hand waving from these articles

higherpurpose• 13 years ago

It should basically be no "Internet discrimination" for service providers and that all bits are equal.

jackgavigan• 13 years ago

I had a bit of back-and-forth with Marc on this topic and I think he's underestimating the difficulty of regulating a non-neutral 'net such that competition (and, therefore, innovation) isn't stifled.

I can't help thinking that if, 20 years ago, Microsoft had struck a deal with the major ISPs to prioritise packets being downloaded to Internet Explorer over those being downloaded to Netscape browsers, Marc would have had a very different take on net neutraliy.

billiam• 13 years ago

Exactly. I think that the woeful state of US broadband and wireless infrastructure today is the strongest proof of the failure of a poorly regulated private sector that effectively has captured telecom governance. That sunny world of virtual worlds and holographic telepresence will happen in Singapore a lot sooner than in the US if government allows the Internet to look like Cable TV.

I consider Andreesson to have zero credibility in this matter, for reasons stated above and more. Why not allow rich and powerful corporations to control access to US consumers? Our smartest consumer startups, denied US consumers, will start to build Twitter and Pinterest and other services for consumers outside of AT&T and Verizon's control, and we will be more and more irrelevant as a market and a technology innovator.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

It's weird to me to blame the "state of U.S. broadband" on the telecom providers, and in the same breadth compare it to Singapore, a city-state where all 5 million people live in a single urban area of 270 square miles (i.e. a bit smaller than New York City with a population density a bit higher than San Francisco).

The state of broadband and wireless in the U.S. is proof only of the fact that it's much more expensive to build infrastructure to a huge, sparely-populated country with large suburban, exurban, and rural populations. Half of South Korea lives in the metro area of the largest city. About 30% of people in England live in the metro area of London. About 25% of people in Finland live in the metro area of Helsinki. Only 4% of the people in the USA live in the metro area of New York City. Beyond that, more than half the population of metro London lives in the city proper. For a typical U.S. city like Boston or DC or Atlanta, its more like 15%.

crazy1van6• 13 years ago

I can't help thinking that if, 20 years ago, Microsoft had struck a deal with the major ISPs to prioritise packets being downloaded to Internet Explorer over those being downloaded to Netscape browsers, Marc would have had a very different take on net neutraliy.

Interesting point. However, imagine if regulators had dictated the web browser as a "common carrier" and defined exactly what it can and can't do, we might never have had all of the new tech that makes the modern web so much better than the IE5 days.

dotrob• 13 years ago

Twenty years ago, those major ISPs were using the telephone system (via dial-up), which was designated a common carrier. If ISPs had to convince everyone to buy into a new cable or dish transmission system because the tel-cos could block their traffic over the phone lines or charge inflated fees for it, where would we be now?

Patrick_Devine2• 13 years ago

We could ultimately replace our internet infrastructure with something more distributed which makes it difficult for ISPs to determine what traffic they're carrying. Ultimately traffic analysis works right now because the ISPs can detect where the traffic is coming from. In a more distributed internet, that wouldn't be the case. If all packets are encrypted, it would also make it harder to snoop and shape traffic that way.

Bit Torrent already does this with Message Stream Encryption/Protocol Encryption, and it can potentially hide on port 80/443. But why stop at just Bit Torrent traffic? Why not build a new web out of something more akin to this?

wmf• 13 years ago

Hiding the source or destination of traffic (which is one of the major things ISPs want to discriminate on) requires onion routing which will make things ~2x slower and more expensive. If we end up in a situation where a significant fraction of Internet traffic is being onion routed I would consider that a massive failure.

Patrick_Devine2• 13 years ago

I actually wasn't trying to suggest onion routing, but a more peer-to-peer distributed internet, similar to the way bit torrent works. If a CDN was spread across multiple sites instead of concentrated at one place (ala S3), it would be very difficult for an ISP to track.

john_b• 13 years ago

The major providers like to pretend that they're in a wonderful competitive market where, if only they were allowed to discriminate on traffic more, there would be more competition, prices would be lowered, and investment in infrastructure would grow due to the competition.

This is a nice rosy view of things, but it's just not accurate. They're de facto infrastructure builders, and for their efforts they want a monopoly on that infrastructure, with all the powers it comes with (e.g. favoring some traffic over others). The problem is that everybody long ago realized that infrastructure monopolies are a bad idea because they destroy both competition and infrastructure growth. It's why major roads aren't owned by private companies, it's why the electric company can't charge you more if they don't like the brand of your TV, and it's why public transportation services like trains and buses can't charge you more if you're partners.

Letting private businesses compete in various niche ways is fine as long as they are (1) actually private and (2) actually in a working free market. Telecoms in the U.S. are neither. They're so heavily subsidized and regulated that they function more as pseudo-government entities who should be entrusted with very serious business of maintaining public infrastructure. But they should definitely be prevented from rampantly discriminating against their customers to profit. The whole point of infrastructure is that it is a common public good, available to everyone equally without discrimination.

alberth2• 13 years ago

>" It's why major roads aren't owned by private companies"

In the US, many major roads are owned by private companies like Cintra [1] to give one example, and they charge tolls [2] on those roads.

It's become common practice in many US states that any new highway construction must have a toll on it and then the state sells the road to a private company.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cintra [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_road

wavefunction• 13 years ago

>It's become common practice in many US states

I think it's unfortunately down to the incessant anti-tax rhetoric in the US. It's a lot easier to get a private company to finance a toll-road with a concession agreement than it is to pass bond measures or increase taxes.

nostromo• 13 years ago

This is actually a great illustration of the reason we have common carrier laws in the US.

Should we allow Cintra to let you go 100MPH instead of 70MPH if you pay a higher toll on the Indiana Toll Road? Maybe every 10MPH is an additional $1. Or maybe Cintra knows that Tesla drivers are rich, so their tolls could be set 10x higher than a Kia's toll. Or maybe people with Illinois license plates are on average more wealthy than people with Ohio plates, so they can pay more too...

Jtsummers6• 13 years ago

Looking up the numbers it's still a tiny, tiny minority of roads in the US. Cintra's worldwide holdings are ~1% of the total length of major highways in the US. Significant, but not all in the US. And many toll roads are publicly owned. Or under private contract for X years so the taxpayers didn't have to take out a bond or front $Y million for the project.

sowhatquestion2• 13 years ago

Sure, maybe private companies have a small supporting role in piggybacking on one of the biggest (and highest ROI) government infrastructure projects ever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

The real problem here is that many advocates of net neutrality frame their support of neutrality strictly in terms of enabling free-market innovation. Perhaps because they're afraid to lose the support of the many libertarians who still walk among us, net neutrality supporters are afraid to give a fully fleshed-out narrative of what should happen: the government either makes a massive direct investment in increasing information bandwidth (as it has done with transportation bandwidth), or it assimilates the telcos and makes them do so. Finally, the current wave of market-based innovation can continue, supported (as markets always are) by a robust public infrastructure. There is a properly dialectical relationship here: you can't have one of these moments without the other, even though they are contradictory.

Is this plan perfect? No, but it sounds a million times more preferable than Comcast and Verizon picking which startups live or die.

pbreit3• 13 years ago

I don't know how Marc squares his free markets love with his presence at the table being substantially enabled by the government (internet + UIUC + NCSA).

Surely people have not forgotten what it was like pre-neutrality (Compuserve, Prodigy, Genie, AOL, et al)?

crazy1van6• 13 years ago

I don't really understand the fear. The Compuserves and Prodigys of the world died because they weren't open and it didn't take a government dictate to kill them.

bdb• 13 years ago

Openness won in the early iterations of online services in part because there was a neutral medium over which you were able to connect to your choice of service: the PSTN.

pbreit3• 13 years ago

I'm not talking about why they died (that's obvious, the non-corporate internet was much better). I'm talking about how lousy the offerings were when the pipe providers could do whatever they wanted.

rayiner5• 13 years ago

"Pre-neutrality"? You mean like 2009?

Jtsummers6• 13 years ago

Completely OT: Is there any reason why all their content is SCREAMING? I'm stuck on IE 8 in the office, do they have some js or something that produces normal text on non-outdated browsers?

calroc4• 13 years ago

There are no "cons" to net neutrality. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous at best and duplicitous at worst.

The idea that we won't get enough bandwidth in the future unless the telecos et. el. are allowed to play gatekeeper makes no sense to me.

roin3• 13 years ago

CON: The more money I think I can make by owning network infrastructure, the more I will invest to build it now.

That's not to say that net neutrality is bad or wrong on balance, but no cons at all?

calroc4• 13 years ago

Faulty frame. Try it with other basic infrastructure: "The more money I think I can make by owning ROAD infrastructure, the more I will invest to build it now."

See the flaw?

Zikes• 13 years ago

So the argument seems to be that the more money these companies believe they can make, the more likely they are to build infrastructure that will ultimately reduce the costs for consumers.

This is a highly idealized view, which does not mesh well with synonymous real world systems like cable TV and cell phone networks. Those two examples alone prove to me that these companies would prefer to collude to keep prices artificially high than to use their monopolistic infrastructures to provide cheap and high quality service to consumers.

Besides which, America has already paid $200 billion to these companies in the name of infrastructure improvement, and all they did with that was take the money and run.

Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality

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