An opposing viewpoint on net neutrality

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/09/fcc-neutrality-mistake/

by roshanr • 17 years ago

16 32 17 years ago

pierrefar• 17 years ago

Fine, let the ISPs charge us for what we use. Just like they did with dial-up modems. In a truly free market, competition between ISPs, apparently limited by their technical abilities, will only lead to better service as they try to gain market share by providing better service cheaper.

Imposing a constraint now does not mean long-term doom. So fine, let them charge and see what we, the customers, do.

padmanabhan01• 17 years ago

"when we’re talking about ISPs that are near-monopolies built in large part on the basis of government subsidy or exclusive federal licensing,"

Isn't that the real problem? Govt first helps create monopolies and then worries about how to deal with them with antitrust and what not and starts lecturing about the flaws of free market or capitalism. Why create those monopolies in the first place? Why not have free market all along? This is the same story in telecom, healthcare, etc etc

wmf2• 17 years ago

Why not have free market all along?

That's nice to say in retrospect, but simply deregulating rights of way and video franchises wouldn't address the fact that strong incumbents exist today. Overbuilding an incumbent like AT&T or Comcast will cost billions and the reward for this investment is 20-30% market share. I think we're dealing with genuine natural monopolies here.

tc10• 17 years ago

Being a competitor in this industry, I'm always surprised by the simplistic treatment telecom issues receive even by technical people.

I suppose it is the difference between being a driver on a road, or perhaps even the manufacturer of an automobile, and knowing anything about the messy business of road construction.

For one thing, everyone seems to focus just on consumer internet. But this is hardly the whole picture. Most people spend over half of their waking hours at work. To the consternation of many employers, people probably spend more hours on the internet at work than at home. And the market for business internet services is highly competitive and quite far from monopolistic. It perhaps shouldn't be surprising that a smaller number of names stand out in the consumer space -- it seems to happen with all consumer products.

Further, even the argument you posed is self-contradictory. Do you know how much a 30% market share is worth? It's worth enough that plenty of people are building to compete in that space right now.

aaronblohowiak• 17 years ago

"Why not have free market all along?" -- Because having every company dig up ditches along public thoroughfares and through yards would be untenable. Also, some companies only decide to make the infrastructure investment in towns if the town council would agree to allow that provider to be exclusive (a town council then has to decide if the monopoly is better than no service... but the problem is that these contracts are sooo long.)

tc10• 17 years ago

More companies than you probably realize lay fiber and copper. You can check the permits issued by your local municipality to see what I mean.

If you wanted to lay a few miles of fiber yourself, you'd find that it is fairly straightforward in most areas. You cross a bit of red tape, fill out all the forms, and pay the impact costs. If you don't want to do it yourself, companies like Comcast actually do a good bit of work laying fiber on contract for smaller carriers.

As far as cable monopolies, those are fortunately on their way out anyway, at least in Tier 2 cities and their near suburbs. Increasingly, Brighthouse is competing in Comcast territory, and vice-versa. That's the direction. But of course, networks take time to build, with or without a bunch of government mandates.

tc10• 17 years ago

This is the most important point:

Third, the new regulations create an additional layer of government bureaucracy where the free market has already proven its effectiveness. The reason you’re not using AOL to read this right now isn’t because the government mandated AOL’s closed network out of existence: It’s because free and open networks triumphed, and that’s because they were good business.

ewjordan• 17 years ago

Don't forget the next statement: Now the FCC is proposing taking a free market that works, and adding another layer of innovation-stifling regulations on top of that?

Of course, the problem is that we don't really know whether a free market would work or not without the looming specter of net neutrality legislation, since the current market (which may be free, but is certainly not competitive, at least where I live) has the internet providers arguing strongly against such legislation based on the following argument: "Hey guys, we haven't been so bad so far, just trust us, okay?"

Call me a cynic, but I'm not convinced that this good behavior is based on the fact that they think it's ultimately good business to feed the customer through an unblocked tube; I tend to think it's a lot more likely that they would love to start squeezing websites for "delivery fees" and the like, but correctly realize that with all the current net neutrality fuss they can't try anything now, for fear of proving how necessary said regulation is. Better to cross their fingers and hope the issue dies down...

Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know. Personally, even if I'd pay more than I do now, I'd rather actually pay for the bandwidth that I use and have a more transparent service agreement than find that it's impossible to find a provider that will give me unfettered access to any site, service, or data that I want, regardless of its origin or content. IMO the general public should be somewhat more directly exposed to the true costs of bandwidth than they are now, that might actually lead to some downwards pressure there.

tc10• 17 years ago

Speaking as just one person in this field, every new regulation makes me reconsider my desire to be in the industry.

It doesn't so much even matter who the regulations favor. It's that at some point, after spending countless hours with lawyers, filing government paperwork, and fretting about current and future regulatory issues, you really begin to see your customers as being politicians and regulators rather than the people who pay you for service.

Which is all to say that, I believe, if you regulate enough, you will get the monopolies that you fear.

skolor4• 17 years ago

Ha-rumph. Allow me to call them out on their "three points":

1. The networks are running at capacity. Well, maybe they are, I don't have inside information as to the big ISP's networks. What I do know, however, is that other countries have networks with 5x the bandwidth that the fastest internet connections available here have.While it may be prohibitively expensive to roll that out all across the country, there is no real reason not to have it available in major cities, except to create an artificial scarcity of bandwidth.

In addition to that, traffic shaping doesn't help the problem, it makes it worse. There are two ways an end user sees the speed of their connection: latency and throughput. Traffic shaping works by lowering the throughput of bandwidth-intensive applications, so that there is more bandwidth left over for the rest of the users. However, if all of the bandwidth intensive applications are being shaping, and slowed down, then the overall throughput the user sees will decline sharply. In addition, latency, or the overhead time it takes for any request to be processed goes up when traffic is being shaped, making it take longer for individual pages to load too, and make the service seem slower in a non-quantifiable way.

2. We can't enforce it. This is simply not true. Its relatively simple to check to see if your traffic is being shaped and/or impeded, and several applications have been released to do so. Sure, it would be difficult for the government to do so, but if the average user can quickly and easily check, that is not nearly the problem the article makes it out to be.

3. Ok, you have a point there. Having regulations does add bureaucracy into the situation, which is rarely a beneficial thing. Now the FCC is proposing taking a free market that works Except that it doesn't work. The ISPs are already threatening to close down their networks, and make things much more closed off. We already regularly have ISP peering problems, there is little to stop them from just cutting off portions of the internet at their whim. Blind faith in "Free Market" is not infallible, it requires the public to be well educated, both in how the service/product works, and in the alternatives to it. At this point, neither of those are true. Your average user understands how an ISP works to about the point of: "It gets me my Youtube and MySpace". On top of that, there largely aren't alternatives. Want high speed? You have one, maybe two options, depending on where you are. Live out in the country, and you're lucky to have one.Sure, you could have some kind of satellite setup, but that is slow and expensive, and generally harder to set up/keep maintained.

I am generally against government regulations, but with something like the internet, I think Net Neutrality is a necessary thing, and that the government needs to step in and make sure ISPs don't start abusing their networks.

tc10• 17 years ago

Since I'm in this industry, I'd like to point out that bandwidth is not artificially scarce. It is just scarce, necessarily limited by the capital available to buy equipment and lease facilities, fiber, and copper. Before talking about the artificial scarcity of bandwidth, I'd encourage you to check the prices on some Cisco or Juniper gear. No one buys this stuff to intentionally underutilized its capacity. And correspondingly, no one avoids buying this gear to create scarcity; they avoid buying it because it is expensive.

Carriers are bound by the same forces as other businesses. People buy expensive equipment if and only if they expect to see a return on their investment.

skolor4• 17 years ago

I am fairly aware what network infrastructure costs. I am also very aware that in several other countries it is not only profitable, but profitable enough that there are several companies doing it.

There are only two reasons I can see for not having the kind of high speed connections some many other places in the world enjoy, is either: A) the backbone of the network is overloaded, and that is what needs upgrading most, or B) they don't want to upgrade one part of the network and leaving the non-urban areas with only lower speed connections. Without any kind of inside knowledge, I would guess it is a mixture of the two.

In any case: I pay roughly the same as I could get several times the bandwidth in other countries. If it is economically feasible there, there really is no reason why it wouldn't be feasible here. You may not be able to see network-wide improvements due to a slow infrastructure, but with sites like Google and Amazon putting up edge servers in most large cities, and the use of P2P technology, the gains would still be significant. Hell, if the major ISPs really wanted to make an impact as far as bandwidth was concerned, they would embrace P2P far more. A network-aware P2P network helps solve much of the problem of a slow backbone connection, as long as there is a fast local (metro-area) connection. Of course, I can't see the companies going for that, for the same reason they dislike Net Neutrality: it forces them to give up control.

niels_olson5• 17 years ago

No knock on you in particular, but the comment is typical of a sort of insider Stockholm syndrome where members of one industry, or one sector of an industry are presently at the mercy of another sector, and the "prisoner" tells outsider "Well, from the outside, idea B might appear attractive, but if you have my inside information, you'll see Plan A is Plan A for good reason."

Your comment does not address why the equipment is expensive (Cisco exerting oligarichic price controls?), or why the market won't bear added expense (eg, where do so many other countries find the money?)

symesc• 17 years ago

Net neutrality? Has to happen.

Unlimited bandwidth? Can't happen.

No business is sustainable without a usage cap. The all-you-can-eat buffet will get a few pigs at the trough but there's still a cap: night falls and the restaurant is closed.

What I seek is value in the equation, whereby I can choose how much bandwidth I can reasonably eat, pay for it, and not be bankrupted if I go over. The chart of bandwidth cost should not look like a hockey-stick stock price.

My wireless provider does this with text messages. I hate them for it. And I always will.

paul9290• 17 years ago

This is a no brainer! The cost and way we pay for Internet will have to change; resemble cell phone and electric bills. Economies have been hurt by the Internet and when it starts hurting the ISPs we will finally start to feel it. The ISPs offer Cable TV & phone services and those services can be enjoyed for free using the net now. ATM only a select few connect their computers to TVs to enjoy a free Cable TV like service(thanks Justin.TV) and only a few use iPod Touch's as a cell substitute, but in time .. more and more will do this and the ISPs will be hurting as no one is buying their Cable TV or phone services anymore. GIve it five to ten years but the cost of Internet is going to increase. Either bill by the byte or hefty costs for unlimited monthly broadband. Sucks but it makes economical sense!

An opposing viewpoint on net neutrality

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