Net Neutrality or..Follow

No, it can't. The Internet is a nationwide thing. If California passes laws that prevent ISPs from charging more for Amazon Web Services, but Georgia and Virginia do not, both consumers in Georgia and AWS itself gets screwed over if the local ISPs don't want people accessing Amazon streaming, especially since the AWS server I'll probably be connected to is in Virginia and not California. The Internet is, by its very nature, "interstate commerce" and thus under the domain of the federal government.

Cable companies could opt to slow any of the competing streaming services to a crawl unless the customer is also paying for a bundled cable package. And it'd be perfectly legal.

I'm not understanding the problem though. It's a "local ISP". Thus, it must obtain a license to provide that service to customers living in the area *and* is subject to all local laws regarding that licensing and the obligations that come with it. If the city you live in passes a law that says that ISPs providing service to customers within city limits may not throttle bandwidth based on the ip address range of remote sites, then it's required to comply with that law. Period. Now that doesn't prevent it from engaging in such throttling for customers outside that city, but for companies with maintain a presence and service licenses in dozens of cities and counties across the country, trying to maintain a patchwork of different network policies for each one would be pointless (and a waste of money). So for the most part, companies are going to avoid practices that put them in the crosshairs of any legislation or litigation.



They could. But no one does (not for very long). Precisely because customers will complain and switch to a different service and/or sue, and/or local municipalities which those cable companies have to maintain licenses for will apply regulations to put a stop to it. As I said, this does not need broad nationwide legislation. I think most people don't understand that any company that has a semi-monopoly is also strongly bound by local license restrictions. As a general rule, there are two (and only two) direct data services directly wired into your home (done so as to minimize wire infrastructure running under the street): Phone and cable. These have to be different companies and they're bound by anti-trust laws which prohibit them from cooperating or interacting with each other. Additionally, they must periodically renew the license to be the company which manages those physical cable or phone lines into the homes of residences in each service area.


This does a pretty good job at preventing the local ISP from engaging in the kinds of practices you're talking about. And while there have been a couple cases of abuses, they really are the exception and not the rule, and the companies that engage in them invariably find themselves on the losing end of a lawsuit and/or loss of their franchise in a given area. Don't forget that the municipality is *also* a customer of those customers. And their satisfaction with the service tends to be reflective of the volume of complaints by the residents (and voters!) in the area. There are plenty of checks on this that can help prevent abuses. There's no need for national regulations, and arguably national regulations would be more likely to result in negative outcomes for some customers. A one size fits all solution isn't really ideal here. Not when it's really not needed.


I'll also point out that much of what net neutrality focuses on isn't actually the local ISPs, but rather on larger back bone providers. This is why I keep arguing that the proposed solution doesn't really fit the claimed problem. If the problem really is a local ISP misbehaving, then the locals living there can much more easily apply pressure to their local city council (or judiciary) to address the problem than they could apply the same pressure to some federal level bureaucracy. So a federal solution isn't needed for that. What is being proposed is sold based on that problem but the actual solution has more to do with packet routing at the backbone level. And that's an entirely different animal and arguably (cause I've argued it) isn't about preventing local ISPs from exercising monopolistic power, but rather making it easier for them to maintain that power.


We tend to focus on the IP based routing rules, but that's really the red herring of this issue. The real target of net neutrality is the packet type based routing rules, which would give priority routing to packets based on what type they are. So a packet containing part of an email message would have a lower priority than a packet containing part of a streaming video or VOIP communication. This is necessary to make things like IPTV and VOIP actually viable competitors against locally provided video and telephone services on an even footing. Absent this packet prioritization, because of distance and latency issues, you're always going to get better performance from your cable or phone company than netflix or hulu (for example). And you will always get better phone service from your cable or phone company as well. Simply because they own the physical wires running into your home. Allow voip and iptv packets higher priority and competition can more easily compete.

Obviously, a local ISP could prioritize them differently, but that's again something that can be handled at the local level. At the national level, the "rules" are designed in common based on packet types (or at least are proposed to do so). So an IPTV packet gets a given priority regardless of where it's from. The problem is that trying to impose net neutrality rules would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. While you can prevent a local ISP from unfairly prioritizing its own services higher than competitors, you *also* prevent backbones from prioritizing all services that are latency sensitive higher than those which are not. That's the "neutrality" of "net neutrality". So you are solving a local ISP problem, which could have been solved with local legislation or litigation, and which at worse may result in competing remote video or phone services being "slow", by passing a law which guarantees that all remote video and phone services will be "slow" because latency across the internet is high and we've made backbone routing rules which could mitigate that slowness illegal.


Do you see why that's a problem? It's why I keep saying that the local ISP issues aren't really relevant. The big honking problem with net neutrality is that it applies to backbones as well. It will effectively kill any cross internet content competition.

Edited, Jan 17th 2014 4:35pm by gbaji

You know what's missing from your response? Any discussion about the merits of net neutrality legislation. Look, this thread isn't titled "things I don't like about ISPs". It's about net neutrality. Want to even attempt to talk about the freaking legislation that this is about?


I get it. You think that ISPs have an unfair advantage over consumers. I happen to disagree with you, but hey, that's the beauty of living in America. We're free to disagree. My issue isn't with you disagreeing with me about ISPs, but your complete inability to provide even the barest hint of a logical argument connecting your dislike for ISPs with a pro/con position on proposed net neutrality legislation (which, in case you've forgotten, is the point of this discussion). That's kind of a problem, don't you agree?

What argument you have provided is more or less "X is bad, so lets do Y", with no mention of what Y is, or how it solves the problem of X. And, as I've pointed out already, that's not a good argument.

Um... I've already written at length what I think about net neutrality. Why don't you tell the class what you think about it?


Oh. And for the record, net neutrality is *not* about making ISPs deliver what they promised. It is about prohibiting any sort of packet prioritization at the network layer. That's what the "neutrality" part of the phrase means. That the network is to be neutral with regards to the source, destination, and type of packets which cross it. The law applies to all publicly advertised routers and switches (so anything that is actually part of the "internet" as opposed to an internal or privately routed network).

So no, it's not really about ISPs. That's just the bait and switch story that advocates of the proposed legislation use to get suckers to support it.

And that's kinda the problem. It's a whole lot of speculation about what some company "might" do or "could" do, all of which can be dealt with via normal legal processes. It's a regulatory solution in search of a problem.

No. Nearly all ISPs have datacaps/throttle points. Most consumers would never reach them, and would assume they have "unlimited" capacity at whatever the plan speed is, but they don't.

But fuck, let's not let you having no idea what you're talking about stand in the way of assuming everyone else is worrying about something that doesn't exist. I mean "date rape" come on, you mean "buyers remorse" amirite?

Um... So not a problem then. Just like I said. Hence, no reason at all to use the concern about ISPs capping or throttling their networks as a justification to pass net neutrality legislation. Solution in search of a problem, right?

You were not. You are not. I am against ISP being able to do whatever it wants, I am against ISP potentially double dipping, I am against ISPs being in oligopoly.

And so to why, I already said that too. I don't like having my balls squeezed. Can you understand that?

Edited, Jan 17th 2014 11:15pm by angrymnk

Great. So explain to me how net neutrality will protect you from the ISPs. Do you get that "I don't like X", doesn't automatically translate into "I support Y". You have to actually explain how/why supporting Y helps prevent X. You haven't done this. You just keep saying "I don't like what ISPs do, so I support net neutrality". Um... What makes you think that net neutrality will make things better? Isn't it kinda important to at least know what the hell net neutrality *is*? You've shown no indication that you have the foggiest notion as to what the proposed law would do.

No, it's not. It appears that way to many users of the internet precisely because the bulk of it is paid for by big businesses in return for priority use of that capacity, which allows everyone else to use the idle leftovers "for free". Ironically, that's also something that net neutrality would hose up. What's going on is the network equivalent of pedestrians upset that they only get a small sidewalk to walk on while the cars get the whole road insisting that we pass a law making it illegal to drive a car. They think that this will mean they'll get all that pavement for themselves to walk on, but have failed to grasp that the "free" sidewalk they were walking on was paid for as part of road construction, which in turn was funded by taxes on car sales, vehicle registrations, and gas taxes. By making cars illegal they eliminated the funding for the roads, so in the long run they don't get the roads or even the sidewalks for free anymore.



For like the tenth time, I'm not arguing that we should allow ISPs to arbitrarily throttle or ban content. I'm arguing that the proposed net neutrality legislation is a moronic way of doing this. It's not needed to solve the problem, and it introduces additional problems which are arguably much much worse than the occasional ISP pissing off its customers.


I get that most of you don't actually understand how packet based networks work, but trust me when I say that if you make it illegal to prioritize packets based on source/destination and/or packet type, you will "break" a whole ton of things that currently work that most of you simply take for granted as magical things that the internet does. We're talking about some pretty fundamentally necessary parts of the network itself here. It's hard to even predict just how ridiculously screwed up things will end out if this moronic legislation were to ever pass. It's like trying to pass legislation making it illegal to breathe so as to prevent exposure to carcinogens in the air. Hell, I'm having a hard time coming up with sufficiently absurd legislation we could propose which would be equivalent to net neutrality.

Edited, Jan 20th 2014 5:30pm by gbaji

What a way to misunderstand the issue. The pedestrians are upset because every single pedestrian that uses that sidewalk had ALREADY paid for that service. They do not understand why Implicit Sidewalk Provider decides to incovenience them by blocking them access to the sidewalk by penalizing those businesses who won't pay for.. and here the important part.. a service that was already paid for by the sidewalk users.

If it wasn't paid for, then obviously the sidewalk provider did a small miscalculation regarding their sidewalk infrastructure. But hey.. couldn't the the consumer vote with their wallet?

Nop. Why? Because we have an effective oligopoly on sidewalks. And so we return to the sidewalk neutrality; the only avenue left.

Is it a slogan? Absolutely, but then so is war on terror, poverty, pro-choice, and bengazi. So don't give me sh*t over this because you seem to understand well what I mean under that umbrella. You just choose to ignore it.

Edited, Jan 20th 2014 10:47pm by angrymnk

Edited, Jan 20th 2014 10:48pm by angrymnk

You know gbaji is losing an argument bad when angrymnk has a better grasp of the discussion than he does.

I vote for you, some of them get lengthy.

Still has to walk from the parking space to the desk, sympathizes with the poor folk.

Edited, Jan 21st 2014 8:25am by someproteinguy