He claims that 80% of smaller ISPs have said that they delayed investment in infrastructure due to the costs associated with the net neutrality regs, and also that there was a reduction in overall broadband investment in the last two years and that has never happened before, outside of a recession. He thinks that this has hurt efforts to bring connectivity to rural and underserved areas.
Personally, I think the argument for net neutrality is strong in the present situation where we have less competition, but he believes that the FTC governance previous to title 2 puting ISPs under the purview of th FCC was already protecting consumers adequately. The new proposal also enforces a transparency requirement on any traffic shaping, or filtering.
I don't really understand how net neutrality can hurt smaller ISPs. Net neutrality just prevents ISPs from using certain monetization schemes. It's not like you have to buy special equipment for net neutrality reasons, or maintain records to prove you're compliant, right?
I think a portion of their argument is that it allows smaller ISPs to gain footholds in niche markets. By allowing them to prioritize and shape traffic, they can gain advantages and offer services that the larger telcos won't.
I imagine an ISP that focuses on serving low-latency gaming traffic at the expense of other application's bandwidth. Or perhaps an ISP that rents bandwidth from a larger one and provides its customers with better bandwidth guarantees on weekends and nights (or balanced out with better business-day bandwidth for commercial customers). And in some ways it makes sense from a market perspective (that's generally how smaller companies can innovate and create advantages).
What all that ignores is the immense locality of ISPs in general. Unless things fundamentally change in regards to how the internet is delivered in the US, most people are never going to have meaningful consumer choice in the one place they live. Giving ISPs more control over bandwidth just gives them more control over consumers.
It's like gerrymandering. The most negative consequences aren't that it gives partisan advantage, it's that it gives representatives the power to choose their constituents.
It's not the net neutrality rules that cause the expense, it's the Title II requirements. The FCC had to use Title II to get the net neutrality rule in place.
Title II is a pretty harsh regulatory environment. The FCC had to suspend most of the rules for the ISPs. Otherwise, the FCC would have to set price control rules, etc.
The only one I've seen that really works at all in my mind is a kind of "it's got to get worse before it gets better" argument. Basically the idea is that if we let ISPs do what they want they will pave their own road to ruin and open the door to more competition from things like planned LEO satellite Internet, mesh networks, etc.
I'm not sure I buy that as I think it under-estimates the barrier to entry.
Listen to the latest "Fifth Column" podcast where they interview this "evil" Ajit Pai guy. I think he makes a strong case that regulating monopolies is the role of the FTC or state's attorney generals and not the FCC and there is no real market failure here.
> I think he makes a strong case that regulating monopolies is the role of the FTC
He's echoing the industry on this, the industry that has (succesfully, so far, though the full 9th Circuit will be rehearing the issue) also argued that the FTC is barred by law from regulating them.
Here's the position.
To the FCC: “You shouldn't regulate anti-competitive behavior in our industry, even as a means to serve the clear and precise purposes the FCC is given in statute, because competition in general is the FTC’s job.”
To the FTC: “You can't regulate anti-competitive behavior in our industry, because most major participants are common carriers whether or not broadband is a Title II service, and you are prohibited from regulating common carriers even in their non-common-carrier activities, and any regulation you adopted that only applied to non-common-carrier participants would just concentrate more power in the common carriers.”
That's a completely different topic altogether, though. Even if there were 100 ISPs, Net Neutrality would still be an issue. When there was plenty of competition among long distance phone carriers (back when people needed to worry about that kind of thing), there still was "phone neutrality", meaning that no phone operator could slow down or otherwise interfere with your call based on who you were calling, what provider they had, or anything like that. Net Neutrality is the exact same thing.
It's not the exact same thing. Phone calls are predominantly direct, 1:1 exchanges (in some cases you may have a conference call with a few other parties on the line). No single party could be responsible for a huge majority of the load on a phone network without seeing proportional billing; that is, if you wanted to have 300 simultaneous calls from your office, you had to pay for 300 open phone lines.
Since the internet is instead a broadcast medium, it is much easier for big players to saturate the lines. ISPs naturally believe that _someone_ should be paying for what they interpret as the "extra load" from these big players, and that's not entirely unreasonable when you consider that some households will use 30Mbit/s streaming content to 4 devices for 10 hours per day, and the next household, which pays the same monthly internet bill, uses 5Mbit/s or less to read predominantly-text based sites for 2 hours per day.
Net neutrality is fundamentally large internet companies looking to keep their costs down by using government force to prevent ISPs from charging them usage-based "carriage fees" or similar.
Ultimately I don't know if that's good or bad, but I think it's important we recognize the fight over net neutrality for what it is: an arm wrestling match between industrial juggernauts to decide who is going to pick up the tab for the infrastructure that makes the net tick. The consumer is virtually a non-entity and just watching from the bleachers.
>Phone calls are predominantly direct, 1:1 exchanges
>Since the internet is instead a broadcast medium, it is much easier for big players to saturate the lines
The Internet is _not_ a broadcast medium. Data transfer over the Internet is by nature peer-to-peer.
>ISPs naturally believe that _someone_ should be paying for what they interpret as the "extra load" from these big players
Someone _is_ paying for the load for big players: the consumers who are accessing their sites.
>some households will use 30Mbit/s streaming content to 4 devices for 10 hours per day, and the next household, which pays the same monthly internet bill, uses 5Mbit/s or less to read predominantly-text based sites for 2 hours per day
30 Mb/s residential service already costs more than 5 Mb/s residential service.
>Net neutrality is fundamentally large internet companies looking to keep their costs down by using government force to prevent ISPs from charging them usage-based "carriage fees" or similar.
Net neutrality is fundamentally a consumer protection preventing ISPs from leveraging their natural monopolies on last-mile service to enact rent-seeking policies. Whether ISPs charge consumers directly for access to, say, competing content providers ("Watch Turner Classic Movies for free with Spectrum Basic 10 Mb/s, or upgrade to Spectrum Premium 10 Mb/s for only $19.99 per month to access Netflix, Hulu, and HBO!"), or they charge those content providers extra to peer their traffic and those content providers fold that into subscription fees, we're the ones getting bent over the barrel.
Only in the indirect sense that all expenses ultimately filter down to the customer/buyer. The common trope that businesses never take a loss and always find some creative way to pass each expense onto the consumer is total nonsense, except insofar as it's just a simple tautology that states the obvious fact that a business's revenue must cover its own expenses.
Usage-based billing, per second or per month, does not break net-neutrality.
And as sjolsen pointed out, the consumer is the one who will end up paying the tab, either to the ISP directly, or indirectly via an increase in streaming subscription costs.
