I feel like net neutrality should be fought for at almost all cost. Marsha Blackburn doesn't care what her constituents believe...she got payed and her district is mostly safe.

In this case I am opposed to net neutrality and things like this, the fcc bot comments, and a "study" showing 75% of the electorate "doesn't understand" do nothing but make me want to entrench my beliefs further.

It is entirely appropriate to limit the speed and size of large trucks (high bandwidth users) on roadways or charge them more. The ISPs need to be able to do this sort of economizing to help maintain everybody's min service guarantees and to a apply market force to the bloating of popular websites.

With regard to the censorship argument (only allowing Honda cars), I agree that a democratic government entity needs to have power here as roadways and the fiber under them are natural monopolies (why dig up a street twice?). But it seems fairly clear that the appropriate regulating body is at the size of the city which administers the land on which the distribution network is built--NOT the Feds. No city would allow something like that (only X brand cars allowed) to stand, the FCC is overkill.

I think there is a real economic and business case for ISPs discriminating based on bandwidth requirements. You have to throttle streaming and prioritize phone packets because they need stronger latency guarantees. Basically its a market, which suggest the ISPs are going to be doing this, whether its against the rules or not. If you make something so logical against the rules, it basically becomes another "look the other way" law; providing the federal government with a legal club with which to beat companies it is not pleased with, perhaps when an ISP refuses to comply with an inappropriate information request.

I am concerned about censorship mostly by the Feds, less so by private utilities, and less still by city halls.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality. ISPs already get to sell their users as much or as little bandwidth as they choose to. If the ISP's users are sending a lot of traffic to one web site, that's only possible because the ISP's users are sending a lot of traffic. They can't stream movies unless they're already paying for a connection fast enough to stream movies. Which web site streams those movies doesn't matter.

As an ISP you can't give your customers (the very vast majority, I realize that a small minority have symmetric connections) vastly asymmetric pipes (usually in the order of 10:1, if not 20:1), and then "complain" about how your inbound upstream traffic is asymmetric and thus "unfair" to the peering arrangements.

It is as it was designed.

Give users symmetric pipes and they'll use them differently. Far more uptake of offsite backup, other services from users with a lot of outbound bandwidth.

Will ISPs scream about how unfair it is if Dropbox, Crashplan, BackBlaze, Carbonite and the like start charging THEM more because "oh gosh, look, your users are sending far more data to us than we are to them, so you're abusing our peering relationship"?

It's a bunch of willfully ignorant BS. Design a traffic model and then complain that the usage pattern dictated by the traffic model is unfair to you, and therefore you need to double dip your billing.

Now, you probably want the ISPs to be operated or regulated by your local government so that the marketplace they encourage is favorable to the citizens. But please no more federal regulations on the pipes of communication between citizens.

My point is that the cost of distribution is going to be paid one way or the other. I don't see why we should make federal rules about it. You really want a society where the national government is not in charge of communications.

Net neutrality (or the lack thereof) isn't about paying for what you use (your argument about trucks is incorrect because of this). It's about paying based on who you are, so your ISP can discriminate based on who the data is coming from.

The original analogy was correct, it's about toll roads where cars of the same size and build pay different prices depending on their brand. "You have a BMW, so you must have more money, so pay more, even though you use the same as a Toyota."

But it does take a genius mayor to also be fully aware of the more technical arguments thrown around by ISPs to fight regulation such as NN. We are not discussing roads. As much as the analogy helps, someone might not be there (who isn't working for ISPs) to tell the mayor or governor about it. A small town mayor might not have any idea what impacts a decision like that could have on the local area, and if they make the wrong choice, an entire town is basically held back from an open internet, and therefore communication, point of view.

As an aside, "flushing out the analogy" in this case would mean you were holding the trucks as high-bandwith users, like you've stated previously. I'm not sure if you were admitting a mistake with your comment or not, but I'd like to support the other comments arguments against this.

I also am not sure I understand the point of nitpicking the analogy. A roadway is like a cable. Sort of. A truck would be like a superposition of a large content provider, the upstream ISPs, and all the customers requesting data from that domain. The point I am trying to make is that when you try to charge this ``truck'' for its use of the cable, well its like taxing economic activity between all these entities and we should be careful when making rules about this: we may lock ourselves into the current model of ISPs without realizing it.

This does pertain to Net Neutrality because how else is NN assessed than by getting into these details?

Netflix sends data via a number of backbone providers that charge Netflix for traffic. The backbone providers connect to other backbone providers via peering agreements. If the amount of traffic between the peers gets out of balance, they settle up via payments. Those payments eventually get passed on to the consumer that's how it should be.

I'm not sure I understand. Netflix pays for it's high bandwidth to deliver data to users. And you pay for your bandwidth to receive that data.

You could have 10 services that are using bandwidth equally or 1 service using (and paying for) 10x the bandwidth -- what is the significant difference here? The total data is the same.

Net Neutrality isn't about the "what" it's about the "who". Netflix is a big popular service so your ISP wants to extract more money from them -- not because of what they do, but who they are. 1 big service vs. 10 smaller ones.

The premise that the ISP payment should be born by only one side of the transaction should not be codified into law.

Also I do agree we should regulate protections for the ``who''. I just think these should come from the cities under whose streets the fiber is laid, not the FCC. There is even a strong case to be made for municipal ISPs.

If household customers were provided internet for free and ISPs earned all their money from servers the cost would be distributed through this network. ISP #1 with the customers would charge ISP #2 with the servers for the traffic and it would somewhat balance out (as ISP #2 can make no money if it can't get to customers). Netflix is, for example, already paying your ISP indirectly to deliver content to you when it pays its ISP.

I think you're confused about what net neutrality means. ISPs can still charge whatever they want how they want as long as they don't discriminate on the content of the data (who it's from and what it is). The quantity of data, the physical location of the data, and whatever else is free game. In your thought experiment, the net neutrality has no impact one way or the other.

But should the transarctic link be able to make extra money prioritizing traffic between financial centers in NY, London, and Tokyo? I say yes.

More at home, lets say the peering agreements were set up with a DNSy system allowing you to do breadth first search for the cheapest route to serve data from one domain name to another. The cost ought to vary depending on which path through the small ISPs you take, for example an ISP which had Netflix servers high in its topology could advertise cheaper rates for netflix.com requests to its neighbors.

Such a market system would be required for my renaissance of the internet vision. And consequently, consumer-facing ISPs would have to be allowed to discriminate against high volumes of requests from domains which it cannot cheaply access. One way of correcting this would be charging those domains on the side, i.e. discriminating.

You would also need to be able to discriminate on content type and other pricing schemes to help fund those backbone ISPs. If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen?

You still need regulation and democratic oversight of the local ISPs though, to prevent corruption from harming consumer access.

Finally there is the concern that this would unfairly burden small content providers who have only one server. But this is silly even if it costs more to obtain data from the breadth-first search to this lone server in the middle of nowhere, its a small volume so you can ignore it and average that cost in elsewhere.

Thus regulating for net neutrality directly impede the possible creation of a more distributed, more free system. In such a system all data is inherently not equal and the system could never function if we pretended it was.

> If traders in NY, London, and Tokyo will help finance an undersea link through higher pricing for preferential service, why not let that happen?

One can already pay more for faster service by paying for priority traffic (QoS). One could even pay for a private link. It happens all the time. In fact, my business already pays for multiple tiers of traffic for different purposes (video streaming, phones, regular Internet traffic). This not any sort of violation of net neutrality.

Honestly, net neutrality is not significant impediment. I would argue that it boils down to simply treating all traffic fairly. If you can imagine a scenario where an ISP could treat your data or another service's data unfairly, it's probably a violation of net neutrality.

But I still don't think it is appropriate or even productively useful for the federal government to mandate this and declare what is fair. And ISPs should have the right to use their position to get payment agreements with:

1. the end consumers,

2. intermediaries, per peer networks--thank you for calling these to my attention, and

3. from the domain of origin if serving that domain from external ISPs incurs a higher than average costs for the local ISP.

National scale network neutrality laws would make 3 very difficult and I absolutely do not think selectively applying 3 to only the flushest companies is wrong.

Why not let cities, who already have to have plans for integrating cable into roadways be the regulatory/ownership entities?

The fact is that nearly all service providers in North America are monopolies (or duopolies). This is the reason the federal government needs to be involved. There are no market forces to correct for being unfairly treated by your ISP. You literally have no choice. If your ISP were to charge you $5 more to visit hacker news, what could you do? What if hacker news had to pay your ISP $5? What if they just didn't bother?

Because naway.com's server is so far away, it could cost isp0 more than average to serve this data. If there is a lot of traffic from naway.com, the ISP could compensate by raising prices on all end consumers, throttling the speed to reduce demand, or negotiating with naway.com for extra $$.

Note that isp0 would only bother to do this with domains of sufficient size. If you had regional ISPs answerable democratically to the city entity that owned the roads, your ISP would be fighting for your lower prices and it would still be important to the ISP to provide access to these in demand sites.

Net Neutrality seems to try to correct a symptom of a federally created, legal monopoly's concentration of power with more federal regulation. In the same way that the FCC allocates airwaves for the entire US, we need to acknowledge that the natural size for a ISP monopoly is the size of the government entity that owns the streets. Open protocols and market forces could be used for the rest of the network.

> Because naway.com's server is so far away, it could cost isp0 more than average to serve this data.

The distance makes no difference to the Internet. I'm not sure how much better to explain how the Internet works but you do keep inventing new ideas to support the idea of an ISP charging a specific domain but it has no basis in reality of how the Internet works.

> If there is a lot of traffic from naway.com, the ISP could compensate by raising prices on all end consumers, throttling the speed to reduce demand, or negotiating with naway.com for extra $$.

There is absolutely no traffic from naway.com coming to ISP0. All the traffic comes from ISP1. And that traffic is an aggregate of all the traffic requested by ISP0 customers. This is arguing about charging more for different tap water based on the source reservoir; at some point it's all just water. Every router reads a bunch of fiber lines, copies that data, and aggregates that output to another line. Both sides agree on how much data they are willing to accept and the router drops anything over that amount.

It's really not feasible for an ISP to have a business relationship with every possible end point.

> Note that isp0 would only bother to do this with domains of sufficient size.

That is the problem. In effect, only large domains would either suffer or get the benefits of these business relationships. Would Facebook ever be possible in a world where Myspace had exclusive relationships with all the major ISPs? Your ISP is effectively picking the winners and losers on the Internet by whom it chooses to do business with.

> Net Neutrality seems to try to correct a symptom of a federally created, legal monopoly's concentration of power with more federal regulation.

One could argue that monopoly concentration in providing Internet is a natural physical consequence of the world. There is only so much right of way, so much wireless spectrum, etc. In a situation where it's physically impossible to start a new ISP, competition is going to be very limited. Perfect is the enemy of good; you want perfection but net neutrality is a good solution to today's problems.

No one is attempting to create a new concept here; net neutrality simply attempts to codify into law what has been convention for most of the existence of the Internet. It's what allowed the Internet to thrive when so many closed networks failed.

Arguing against legislation for legislation sake begs the question that all legislation is bad by default. But that's an entirely different argument. The argument here is whether or not net neutrality is bad policy and I would say that it's entirely not. You have not found an argument, based on the physical reality of how the Internet works, where net neutrality has any real negative consequences. It absolutely doesn't have any for consumers or Internet businesses. And ISPs have been doing brisk business for the last 20 years without issue.

> we need to acknowledge that the natural size for a ISP monopoly is the size of the government entity that owns the streets.

The only solution to this problem of monopoly ISPs is more federal regulation. But as you are against federal regulation in one form you should also be against it here as well.

> The distance makes no difference to the Internet. I'm not sure how much better to explain how the Internet works but you do keep inventing new ideas to support the idea of an ISP charging a specific domain but it has no basis in how the internet works.

I feel you are attacking me personally. It is true I am libertarian and opposed to many federal laws, but not all. There are many that are appropriate. I know how ethernet and tcp/ip works. I have read RFCs on domain names, DNS, etc.

From physics, it is not true that distance doesn't matter. I am not arguing about how the internet business models are structured today, but about they should be structured. I am ``inventing'' reasons that are logical, to refute them and convince me, please read my model (isp0...isp n) again and say which part is illogical without reaching for how the current ISP monopolies work.

The idea that all data is equal is false. It depends on where its coming from and by what path. You may say that this would not be NN discrimination, but the mere fact that we are talking past each on this example suggests it would be super complicated if not impossible to enforce NN correctly. It will become yet another part of the legal framework which helps keep monopoly ISPs in control.

> One could argue that monopoly concentration in providing the Internet is a natural physical consequence of the world. There is only so much right of way, so much wireless spectrum, etc.

I support federal level, FCC auctioning of spectrum. And you further make my case, the ``natural'' physical monopoly size for wired ISPs is the city or regional government entity. Thus regulation should be at that level. This is a big power grab for the feds to regulate our communications at what should be a local level.

> The idea that all data is equal is false. It depends on where its coming from and by what path.

There is some truth to this but an ISP's only concern is it's immediate connections. It has connections to other peers (and it's own clients) and it has a certain capacity to each of those connections. That's it.

Imagine you have two scenarios, one is content is generated in ISP1. So the data travels from ISP1 to ISP0. The second scenario is that the content is generated 10 routers away. The data is copied from ISP10 to ISP9 to ISP8 and so on till it gets to ISP1. It's then copied from ISP1 to ISP0. There is no difference between this data and the data generated by ISP1 in the first scenario as far as ISP0 is concerned. If the data packets did not have addresses there would actually be no way of telling the difference.

To put another way, if you request content from something 3 hops away or 15 hops way -- it doesn't cost your ISP any more money to deliver it. The cost of the Internet as a whole is born by the entire network.

Why does ISP0 need to charge by domain? Where does that fit in anywhere in this system? ISP0 and domain1 could come to an agreement to move servers into ISP0's network to improve latency and decrease traffic and that is perfectly reasonable. But charging domains for simply putting data on the Internet somewhere else makes no sense -- it's pure abuse of monopoly.

> It will become yet another part of the legal framework which helps keep monopoly ISPs in control.

It's meant to keep monopoly ISPs from abusing their monopoly position. It even helps smaller ISPs as a neutral network allows anyone to provide service and receive service fairly without having to have financial agreements with larger services. I'd like to hear the opposing argument to this, if you have one. I don't want to attack you personally but you make the above statement as if it were fact without any argument. Simply that it's regulation so it must be bad.

If net neutrality helped large monopoly ISPs they wouldn't be fighting so hard to get rid of it.

As for regulating this on the federal level, the Internet is a global system. The idea that regional governments should be enacting rules that will affect large and small companies around the world seems a bit crazy. You already have individual states imposing streaming media taxes. So yes, in some states you can be taxed for Netflix but not taxed for an online game. Giving ISPs their own power to enact these taxes seems like madness to me.

This is a right every enterprise in a market has. And we have been having this good discussion so I know that we agree that ISPs are naturally a monopoly and need to be regulated or gov owned to prevent abuse. I'm just opposed to NN because I think that the appropriate regulatory/ownership level is the municipality, township, etc. federal regulation in this space risks future curtailment of free speech.

And as a internet constomer, why are you opposed to google or Netflix paying more and having your bill be less? (If your ISO were locally regulated and had an interest in providing the content you want)

> There is some truth to this but an ISP's only concern is it's immediate connections...

Exactly, it only has a business relationship with its neighbor ISPs. But if the server is in ISP1's network, as opposed to passing through ISP1s network from a further series of hops, then it is probably cheaper for ISP1 to serve data from its region than the cost of the data associated with its arrangement with ISP2 plus the costs of routing it through its own network. If you were to fight for a world of smaller ISPs with less power, then for that system to function ISP1 would have to be able to charge more for that domain, and then you would probably want city 0 to be allowed to negotiate with that domain directly for the privledge of having access when it is more expensive. Again I want ISPs regulated or municipalized. I am just an Internet customer and a citizen. No Comcast stock or whatever. I don't see why Chattanooga's city ISP shouldn't be able to try and shift some cost from its citizens to large data domains without fearing a lawsuit in that negotiation.

We have open standards, it's not like the Internet would cease to function if the federal goverment doesn't enforce that ISPs use tcp/ip. And I would argue it would be less madness to have local ISPs negotiate with a few big companies than to have them track traffic and share routing data with every other municipality or private/state backbone company who may be on the routing paths. Less "collusive" too.

Regardless of which way is more difficult, we as a free people should be always trying to reduce the federal government's interaction with enterprises that disseminate information.

We shouldn't fight for net neutrality on all battlefields. Only on the level of civic organization that owns the public right of ways, i.e. the size of the natural monopoly.

If these things haven't already been killed; they will be. Almost all municipal broadband projects are dead or dying. It some states it's now illegal for cities to provide broadband services. I would totally advocate for this but since the broadband monopoly effectively controls the legislature through aggressive lobbying this is a massive dead end.

Unfortunately, cities are affected by state laws and states are affected by national laws and national organizations.

The tax is gonna get collected, but whoever is the primary check writer can have market effects on the system. If Netflix had to write some of the check, we may see more investment in compression technologies and towards-the-edges network distribution.

You say this like you think Netflix is somehow using the internet for free.

My first inclination is that an ISP is like the taxman. If and end user transacts with netflix, then a tax is collected by the entity that provided the facilitating infrastructure. The tax is on the economic transaction, not one party xor the other. Just as government funds roads by a variety of taxes on different entities, individuals and companies.

But its about the possible scale of abuse. If the federal government abuses its power what you get is the early USSR. If a city abuses its power what you get is a city you can leave.

It sounds like what you object to is not network neutrality but rather having it imposed at the federal rather than the state level. But there are two major problems with that.

The first is that interconnection is inherently interstate. Netflix might have no physical presence in Tennessee at all and reach all customers there through an interconnect in Atlanta. Is Tennessee supposed to regulate commerce in Georgia? If Tennessee and Georgia have conflicting rules, which ones control?

This sort of thing is why the interstate commerce clause exists. It's not some fraud where the feds get to regulate intra-state non-commerce because reasons, it's actually black -letter interstate commerce.

Which leads to the second problem, which is that there is a thing called preemption. What it means is that the states aren't allowed to regulate something once the feds have already put their bootprints on it.

You can argue that the feds should stay out of it entirely -- repeal the Communications Act -- but that isn't what the Republicans are actually doing.

> providing the federal government with a legal club with which to beat companies it is not pleased with, perhaps when an ISP refuses to comply with an inappropriate information request.

This is not something major ISPs actually do regardless, because they know where their bread is buttered. See also Qwest Communications for what happens if they try to stand up. This is why everyone is focused on end-to-end encryption -- trusting your ISP is foolish.

> I think there is a real economic and business case for ISPs discriminating based on bandwidth requirements.

The problem with the free market argument is that it's not a free market. Comcast has millions of customers that cannot be reached without going through Comcast. You can't go to Verizon and negotiate better access to Comcast subscribers, and you can't pay for access to Verizon subscribers instead of Comcast subscribers because you need both.

Consumer-level ISPs have market power. You either regulate them or they abuse their local monopolies.

> I think there is a real economic and business case for ISPs discriminating based on bandwidth requirements. You have to throttle streaming and prioritize phone packets because they need stronger latency guarantees.

Endpoints marking packets for QoS has nothing to do with network neutrality. Moreover, in practice most if not all residential ISPs ignore the QoS bits and everything still works anyway, because contention in the core of the network only happens in poorly designed networks that are too oversubscribed.

I agree with you about end-to-end encryption but the Qwest Communications thing I think helps make my first point. We shouldn't want the federal government having such economic and legal leverage in this space.

My second reason for opposing net neutrality deals with > the problem with the free market argument.

ISPs are a monopoly and should be regulated or government owned. Just at municipal and regional levels. To do this you have to allow money transactions higher up in the network topology. To make the market work this way with regional ISPs you have to be able to charge where the content is coming from as well as charging for consumption at the edges. FCC's net neutrality would codify into law a system that makes that legally difficult. I.e. we shouldn't pass a rule today that makes a more ideal system in the future more difficult to develop.

> Endpoint marking packets of QoS has nothing to do with network neutrality. Moreover, in practice most if not all residential ISPs ignore the QoS bits...

But not their own QoS bits for telephone and cable services. Likewise why not let Vonage or Netflix pay for this special treatment?

You have to separate the speech from the infrastructure. It's no argument to say that a law requiring UPS and FedEx to deliver packages to all households (instead of only white households) is a free speech violation, just because packages contain documents and other media. The law isn't proscribing any particular content, it's only requiring common carriers to be common carriers.

> I agree with you about end-to-end encryption but the Qwest Communications thing I think helps make my first point. We shouldn't want the federal government having such economic and legal leverage in this space.

The source of the leverage isn't legislation, it's jurisdiction. ISPs have huge physical infrastructure investments that they can't just pick up and move to another country if the US government is leaning on them, so they fold.

> To do this you have to allow money transactions higher up in the network topology.

This I think is the root of the misunderstanding.

It makes no sense to have Joe pay Comcast directly and have Joe pay Comcast by way of Netflix. All that does is create unneeded transaction costs for no reason, compared with having Joe pay the total amount going to Comcast directly to Comcast.

It's only a subterfuge calculated to disguise the fact that the Comcast aims to leverage their ISP monopoly to damage competitors in video content. Netflix has to pay Comcast actual money, but Comcast-video nominally paying Comcast-ISP is just moving money between two pockets in the same pants. They want to give their own video service an unfair advantage. There is no reason to engage in that inefficient money laundering triangle unless there is something dubious going on that requires artificial complexity to obfuscate.

> But not their own QoS bits for telephone and cable services. Likewise why not let Vonage or Netflix pay for this special treatment?

Because it allows the monopoly abuse subterfuge, as opposed to having the ISP sell the feature directly to the end users. Which apparently nobody wants enough for it to even be offered.

> You have to separate the speech from the infrastructure. Its no argument to say that a law requiring UPS and FedEx to deliver packages to all households...is a free speech violation, just because packages contain documents and other media...common carriers.

I would argue that communications are an abstract thing, not subject interstate commerce or federal regulations upon common carriers. I would argue the abstractness, an idea exists at once everywhere, there is no transporting over state lines that needs to be done. There is not even a net flow of electrons and the infrastructure is static. Everything facilitated by the ISP has this nature by default unless it is otherwise sold as some specific product you can buy like a movie.

And the point of this argument would be to reduce the legal surface area for lawsuits and executive enforcement by the federal government on ISPs.

> The source of leverage isn't legislation, it's jurisdiction.

I am not sure if I understand. ISPs have so many laws governing them and are so big (causal relationship?) that they are bound to be always in violation if the government looks hard enough. It would benefit freedom of speech to reduce both.

> This I think is the root of the misunderstanding.

Sorry I am starting to confuse different responses, but the misunderstanding seems to be...I am not arguing about whether NN would help address some shortcomings of the current setup. I am saying NN would further entrench the current state of affairs and could prevent a better one from ever being built.

If there is nothing of material existence crossing state lines then we should be able to just cut the fiber at every state border without causing any trouble, right?

You're arguing that it is inappropriate to regulate interstate couriers because ideas are very abstract. But the thing being regulated isn't the ideas. It's the equivalent of prohibiting interstate electric utilities from charging monopoly prices to any press company that needs electricity to run their printing press, when the electric utility owns their own competing press company. It's not a regulation of words or bits or electrons, it's a regulation of utility companies and anti-competitive business contracts.

> And the point of this argument would be to reduce the legal surface area for lawsuits and executive enforcement by the federal government on ISPs.

The FCC is part of the executive branch. Congress has given it the authority to regulate telecommunications companies. The executive doesn't need any particular rules to put pressure on companies because it has the authority to make new ones at any time.

Moreover, network neutrality rules shouldn't provide any leverage to the executive because there is nothing to punish unless the company is violating network neutrality.

I completely agree that a rule should always either be enforced or repealed, but the solution to that in a case where the rule is meritorious is the first one. If the rules are actually enforced then there won't be everyday violations for the executive to use as a pretext to punish other behavior.

> I am not sure if I understand. ISPs have so many laws governing them and are so big (causal relationship?) that they are bound to be always in violation if the government looks hard enough. It would benefit freedom of speech to reduce both.

If that is your goal then you have to go to the root. The reason ISPs have to be heavily regulated is that they lack vigorous competition, which prevents market forces from doing the work for you. In order to have fewer regulations you need more competition.

This is not a chicken and egg problem. You don't need one before the other because you can do both at the same time. What you can't do is to get rid of the regulations without first having effective competition, or the result will be monopoly abuse.

And we know of effective solutions, such as local loop unbundling. Or even better, municipal-owned last mile fiber leased per-customer to multiple competing ISPs.

> I am not arguing about whether NN would help address some shortcomings of the current setup. I am saying NN would further entrench the current state of affairs and could prevent a better one from ever being built.

The problem with that argument is that NN violations are not a prerequisite to any positive outcome, so prohibiting them causes no harm. In a competitive market they wouldn't even happen because none of the hundreds of competing ISPs would individually have enough market power to extract any such concessions from anyone. In that case NN rules would be unnecessary but still harmless because they would only be redundant with market forces.

What you're after is potentially meritorious, but you have to do things in a sensible order. You can't remove the anti-monopoly rules until after you first remove the monopoly. But you don't have to remove the anti-monopoly rules in order to remove the monopoly -- so start there and then object to NN as an unnecessary redundancy after you've successfully eliminated its justification.

On comparing to electric utilities I would counter with three things: first many of the regulations upon them are state or local level, which I think are appropriate for ISPs. Second, where the federal government is involved, there is a physical good being transferred across state lines--power. Finally one can make national security arguments for federal electricity oversight. Again I argue there is no concrete good being distributed by telecommunications networks. Only abstract. There should be a legal distinction, although I do not know enough to say if there is already.

On doing things in a sensible order, I respect your thoughts, but politically I am inclined to disagree. Comcast et al have big legal teams and lobbying expenses for a reason, and I think this only further entrenches the big monopolies. I think that NN would be sufficiently difficult to enforce and likewise to defend against in court that it basically amounts to a law giving the executive more power over ISPs for possible future violations of privacy and free speech rights.

Perhaps more people on here could agree with me if I advertised my stance as breaking up the big ISPs. But the FCC's net neutrality is the current topic in this space.

My comments: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/10522187689085

On the study, (1) I think the term "net neutrality" was very politically chosen and (2) I think people are more intelligent and act in their own interests more than studies like this give them credit for.

I thought it was the opposite. People even traced down the anti-net neutrality bots to be from mostly one organization.

Also, I read your comment. It was well constructed, but I would say that the FCC does not profit from wireless spectrum auctions. The auctions exist to ensure the spectrum owner has a vested interest in using the spectrum in a utility maximizing way.

The FCC does profit. But its not like they are stealing that money, they literally create value out of thin air by being the authority that says you are not allowed to interfere with others' spectrum space. But the profit is undisputable, see https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-rakes-in-45-billion-from-wirel...

The Federal Reserve does the same thing.

To my understanding, that's false. Lots of humans were copy/pasting suggestions from various websites, but analysis showed that bot posts, including issues like dead people posting comments, comments posted under people's identities without their permission, etc, were anti-net neutrality.

Ok, so, let's do it (maybe).

Are you in Denver? Let's have a beer.

More than likely, you aren't here. Still, try https://www.meetup.com/ and try going to a meetup of a different echo-chamber-y-thingy. They only way through this mess of politics is words, a lot of them. Better than bullets, I figure.

Also, anyone that wants to have a beer in Denver and talk (about anything, really, I'm not picky), lets try and set up a meet-up somewhere.

I've always thought that was a better solution than involving the feds anyways. Why do people from California need to beg senators from Alabama to stop Comcast from screwing with their local fiber?

The last mile connection seems to be the only important one anyways: It would be feasible for someone like Netflix to hook together all the big cities themselves, but they can't dig up all the streets to lay their own fiber.

I haven't heard any net neutrality advocates give a good argument for that yet. I could imagine "It's easier to have one standard than 50, for each state", but we don't seem to currently have too many disparate Net Neutrality laws that need to be unified. Or "Even unenlightened rural areas deserve open internet" - but that's not convincing if the big tech cities don't even have it yet.

I suppose there's, "It's easier to organize a nationwide campaign than to organize hundreds of local ones", but that makes it a matter of logistics not principle. Is that all there is to it?

Are they currently forbidden by e.g. the FCC from passing local net neutrality laws?

Not directly, but it would be problematic. The "channels" of interstate commerce are an area in which the Federal government has primacy. States can regulate them to some degree (e.g. prescribing speed limits on the portions of interstate highways passing through their jurisdiction). But they can't regulate them in a way that conflicts with how the federal government regulates them.

There was a big thread yesterday based on a survey that most people don't even know what net-neutrality is. This is a net neutrality billboard that anyone can understand.

God help us.

A key part of this is the GOP's big shift towards ideological purity tests over the last 20 years. Party line messaging obedience is expected to a much higher degree now and since network neutrality was successfully politicized many people go along with the statements even though it's bad for them personally and violates the principles they believe in.

I suppose technically that'll never happen; you could fall back to a dial-up ISP. After all, the phone company is not allowed to decide that you can't call their competitors. One tiny part of the Title 2 regulations that cover telecommunications forces them to allow all telephone subscribers to call all other telephone subscribers. It's telephone neutrality. Look up the whole MCI thing from a few decades ago.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

google.com

bing.com

baidu.com

Other less popular but in many cases still excellent options include:

yandex.com

gigablast.com

lycos.com

askjeeves.com

duckduckgo.com

qwant.com

And the list goes on and on and on... these are just the "similar to google" search engines. There are also search engines for particular topics, search engines that take a different paradigm ("semantic search"), and with beer money you can even buy search engine+crawler software packages and build your own search engine for the portion of the web you care about.

And major sites like Wikipedia and Amazon and all the social sites have their own search features so you don't even need a third party search engine within most of the big silos.

If you're using google it's because either a) you want to use google; or b) you're monumentally lazy. Not because there aren't other options.

You can also write your own crawler and search engine. In fact, as literally all of these options demonstrate, with a surprisingly small amount of VC cash you could build your own "more than good enough" search engine. The same amount of cash probably wouldn't be nearly enough to build out a Verizon or Comcast competitor in even one city.

Conversely, I have exactly 3 options for ISPs in my area. One of them is the local equivalent of "build your own search engine" (and about similar quality). So actually 2 options -- Comcast and Verizon. There is no long tail of other providers, and what's more, there almost certainly never will be because acquiring the land rights would be enormously expensive. Oh and BTW I live in a major city; outside of cities you're even more screwed.

And even if we just limit ourselves to the "big best in class" search engines -- google, bing, baidu, duckduckgo -- that's still twice the number of options that most people have for ISP in the US.

I don't think I could switch an ISP in 10 days, let alone seconds.

So effectively I have no choice, unless I want to stop all video watching, downloading games regularly (not gonna soak 18 hours of 100% of my bandwidth to download a new title), etc.

There are thousands upon thousands of webpage hosts on the internet.

In many areas of the US, however, you may have only one option for ISP. You either take it, or you go without internet.

in addition to that, "but what about google" is no defence for what last mile ISPs are doing. If google ever becomes too ubiquitous as a gatekeeper (it's already at that point according to the EU antitrust commission) they'll also need to be regulated.

>How many ISPs can you choose from where you live ?

Let me ask you this. How many search engines can you choose form, really? How many phone OS's can you choose from?

Phone OS? 3, one of which is literally open source and used by a bunch of other competitors. Cost of switching is about $150 and a day.

ISP in the US I have actually no choice. I'm crossing my fingers that CenturyLink or municipal fiber will become a thing, but I ain't optimistic about it. Cost of switching if there was a second one would be around $200+ for modem, installation fees, etc, and last time I did cus I moved it took like a week.

Also, Philosophically you won't really care about net neutrality if you have ISP choice. correct?

And they're still technically not monopolies, because even if they're the only place you can get 100MBps service, you might still be able to get 2Mbps service from the phone company (or dial-up service if you're more than a couple of miles from the POP), and internet service is internet service.

The phone companies also have regional monopolies, but because they have to share their network with everyone there are lots of options. I can buy my DSL from a dozen companies, but the circuit will be provisioned by AT&T. This means that none of these companies are likely to act in bad faith; their customers can switch easily, and the FCC is generally watching.

Having more options is indeed another way out; the cable companies have actually gotten a lot better in the last few years, if you're in a market where there are other choices. In some cities you can get Google Fiber, and cable there has suddenly started competing. In SF you can get Sonic.net's fiber service, etc.

You are correct in that the root of this problem is that our anti-monopoly laws aren't being enacted here because there's too much money being made by those on top. We should fix that problem as well.

However, I'm not convinced that "just get a different ISP" would work in the US like it does elsewhere. Service companies here are very good at hiding details and the US generally ends up with a small handful of choices that are all terrible. See also: Phones, Healthcare, Transportation

The recent case of GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare is much closer to political censorship; there's no technical reason behind it.

that the definition I am using. What does it have to do with freedom of speech?

Yes they surpassed it on their platform. Censorship doesn't mean "make inaccessible to everyone on any platform". If you censor something on your own platform its still called censorship. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.

Indian govt censors kissing on movie screens but you can still go watch it on youtube. That doesn't mean what they are doing is not censorship, the govt entity that's responsible for it is actually called "censor board".

And I still don't believe what they did was censorship. That was them exercising their right to free speech. I do not believe that it is possible for an expression of free speech to be censorship.

I was just using that as an example. So according to you only govt can do censorship?

Thats a definition you made up, not the definition in dictionary. I quoted the dictionary definition from the dictionary and it perfectly matches what google did. Can you tell me how am wrong precisely?

Definitions don't depend on one particular person's beliefs .

Also, doing business with Nazis (and I'm not throwing that term around lightly; the Daily Stormer identifies themselves as such) is, especially given recent events, considered bad for business. So I would say they have a business reason there too.

Doing business is a way of living in the modern society. Stopping doing business (including firing an employee over non-business reasons, a very popular measure in liberal circles) threatens your well-being and even life. If everyone stops doing business with a person, the person is very likely to die. This is very close to lynching and is a total opposite of justice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...

It's about a woman with that tweet about white and AIDS and how the mob response to it ruined her life. The punishment turned out to be completely out of proportion with the crime. Punishments carried out by mobs tend to. Imagine that she were tried by a court for her tweet, given a defender and all the due process; do you think the court would order her to be punished to that extent? So yes, this is very close to lynching; it's social lynching done by well-educated progressive people who think they're humane and are doing the right thing. Projected to its logical conclusion it's meant to deprive the victims of their lives.

Actually, much more people became aware of Daily Stormer; I, for one, I've never heard of them before. I wish I could see what it was about, I prefer to trust my own judgement in such matters, but I cannot. All I can see is a small excerpt in a search engine: "We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, ..." Well, that's all; the information is not available. But it's ironic, isn't it? I'd say this credo is an opposite of that of their antifa opponents who claim it's good to use violence against Nazis and boldly declare that at the pages of New Your Times and whatnot.

But in terms of technical effort and economics, these are not the same. It's much easier to write html and find someone to host it for you than it is to trench in municipalities and lay fiber across the country. Net neutrality restricts ISPs from having a competitive advantage in the content space.