I'm more or less neutral on net neutrality. The worst-case scenarios on changing the 2-year-old policies vary from less-than-believable to outright ridiculous, IMO. As a person who pays for things, I'd like for things to be a cheap as possible. As someone who tends to like the things I pay for to stick around, I don't want the prices to be artificially low.
Let's take Netflix as a working example. They built an empire with charging their subscribers to pay their royalties, taking no responsibility for the resultant flooded residential networks that can still become nigh-unusable during peak viewing times (source: my observation with multiple ISPs). This is a simple supply/demand issue; at $7.95/$8.95 a month, the demand outstrips the distribution pipeline.
That's not to say that this is completely bad; this crunch has caused them to innovate both in delivery and with server-side technologies to carry this load. Without the ISPs, though, Netflix is still shipping you discs ridiculously quickly instead. Why should their perfectly adequate networks be required by law to be upgraded because some upstart came along and saturated them?
Of course, they could just raise the prices to pay for this network expansion. Now the consumer is paying for the Netflix royalties and the network upgrades! (even the poor elderly couple who just use their connection to see pictures of their grandchildren on Facebook...)
None of the net neutrality advocates even seem to acknowledge any of the above. They also have little to no faith (or less) in the market to establish rates that are acceptable to consumers and producers. Oh, but you say, the "free market" doesn't exist when there's a monopoly! But that brings us to the other aspect I'd like to highlight...
Net neutrality can actually cause the monopoly it decries. How so? Well, if a company is prohibited from setting up a special-use Internet-connected network, this hurts any sort of start-up ISP who would like to challenge the established players in the industry. It's also a unique burden to people who try to serve rural and under-represented areas in our country. Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte of Security NOW! did an interview with a man (Brett Glass) who rus an ISP in Wyoming with majority rural customers. Their discussion as at the top of the transcript for episode 457, and is very interesting.
I opened this by saying I was neutral; I detailed the non-net-neutrality arguments above because the pro-net-neutrality arguments are overrepresented in the tech industry. They have a financial stake, to be sure, but "beneficial to my job" is often different than "fair". ISPs have also demonstrated their fair share of scummy behavior, trying to sell their subscribers as their service rather than their customers; distrust of them is a natural reaction.
Anyway, that's why I'm neutral. Every policy picks winners and losers, even if they're named to seem "fair" or "free". Not having it be subject to the whim of the FCC chairman would go a long way toward bringing stability, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Re: Netflix causes saturation of local internet providers.
I don't understand your point that Netflix is at fault here. The internet provider and the internet subscriber have an agreement on the amount of bandwidth provided by the service. The user then chooses to use some of that bandwidth for Netflix or YouTube. Users can't violate their bandwidth limit at most every ISP I've had. So I don't understand how it's unfair to ISPs when subscribers use what they paid for. I understand how it's inconvenient to ISPs because they oversubscribed their available bandwidth. But they chose to take that business risk to increase profits. It just so happened that consumers took a liking to video services and the risk didn't pay off at times. I also understand that video services cause increased load at specific points in the network. Having worked for an ISP as my first job after college, tuning bandwidths in different parts of the network or rerouting traffic based on demand is a routine part of doing business. That has nothing to do with legislation or FCC rule changes or video services being unfair.
As far as net neutrality side being over-represented. It has already happened that ISPs have extorted video services for money by disrupting service or throttling (in particular, look at the graph from July 2013 thru Dec 2014 during which time Netflix paid off various ISPs). So it seems to me like the level of tinfoil-hattery is about right based on history.
And to me the even more scary part has already been passed. That is the privacy protections against ISPs being repealed last April. It has already happened that ISPs have used subscriber data illegally. The policy change last April made it allowable now, but the fact that they were willing to cross that line does not inspire confidence that they will be reasonable with even less privacy restrictions.
This is why I am a big fan of companies like Ting, who are simply trying to provide the best service for their customers. Not squeeze every nickle possible out of them. They are both an ISP and MVNO cell provider, and they have openly stated that they do not and will not sell customer data or analyze browsing history, and have generally advocated for privacy and net neutrality. Too bad their ISP isn't available in my area.
I said I was neutral, and I pretty much said that ISPs had done their fair share of less-than-desirable behavior.
Video streaming was a relatively newly-mainstream technology when Netflix began streaming. The networks, up to that point, had the capacity they needed for the traffic they had, plus a little extra. That wasn't even a drop in the bucket compared to what they needed to support that (and YouTube). Should a change by one company drive a mandatory, force-of-law upgrade on another, with no remuneration for the latter company? I say "no" to that. I also say "no" to government taking tax dollars and giving them to the latter company to pay for those mandatory upgrades. So, who pays - the consumer of the service, or the service responsible for the bottleneck?
I do think some regulation is necessary; you need that in any monopoly/non-competitive scenario to prevent unfair practices. I just don't see the net falling over if the current proposal takes effect as planned.
I'll second your fandom of Ting; I've had my phone service with them for years. :) Do you think their stance on Internet service gives them a market advantage if the current proposal is enacted?
A discussion of who pays isn't really relevant today. The rise of video streaming services has already happened, upgrades have already happened. Maybe it would be interesting historical analysis to know "Who did pay at the time?" And compare that to the general laws of supply and demand: As demand increases and supply remains constant, the price to consumers goes up. I believe the case can be made that Netflix and perhaps other video services did already pay for those upgrades. So supply and demand didn't apply to bandwidth, and it would be interesting to examine why.
The net won't fall over, and for most it won't even be any different. It's just another erosion factor. Another setup for companies to be anti-competitive. Example: Verizon (who already has been shady) launched their own video-on-demand service. If these changes happen, what are the chances that they throttle other video services but send their own down the pipe full blast? Nearly 100%. And if particularly egregious in their throttling, they might be sued for it too. But they will still do it because the short term benefit is too tempting for your typical executive to pass up.
Ting is awesome. They have great promise in the ISP segment, but are beholden to the pace at which municipalities can get things done. AFAIK, they require the municipality to own their local fiber and then they will manage the internet service over it, including customer service. I do hope it becomes more common. But I also hope that municipal governments don't try to manage their own internet. One of the many things that governments are hopelessly inefficient at (and have no incentive to do well) is customer service.
Ting's mobile service is much more generally applicable, and of course it provides mobile internet as well (over common mobile carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint). I think their net neutrality / privacy stances will encourage some people to switch to them. But I don't think they do it for that reason. I really think they are just trying to do the right thing for customers.
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I'm more or less neutral on net neutrality. The worst-case scenarios on changing the 2-year-old policies vary from less-than-believable to outright ridiculous, IMO. As a person who pays for things, I'd like for things to be a cheap as possible. As someone who tends to like the things I pay for to stick around, I don't want the prices to be artificially low.
Let's take Netflix as a working example. They built an empire with charging their subscribers to pay their royalties, taking no responsibility for the resultant flooded residential networks that can still become nigh-unusable during peak viewing times (source: my observation with multiple ISPs). This is a simple supply/demand issue; at $7.95/$8.95 a month, the demand outstrips the distribution pipeline.
That's not to say that this is completely bad; this crunch has caused them to innovate both in delivery and with server-side technologies to carry this load. Without the ISPs, though, Netflix is still shipping you discs ridiculously quickly instead. Why should their perfectly adequate networks be required by law to be upgraded because some upstart came along and saturated them?
Of course, they could just raise the prices to pay for this network expansion. Now the consumer is paying for the Netflix royalties and the network upgrades! (even the poor elderly couple who just use their connection to see pictures of their grandchildren on Facebook...)
None of the net neutrality advocates even seem to acknowledge any of the above. They also have little to no faith (or less) in the market to establish rates that are acceptable to consumers and producers. Oh, but you say, the "free market" doesn't exist when there's a monopoly! But that brings us to the other aspect I'd like to highlight...
Net neutrality can actually cause the monopoly it decries. How so? Well, if a company is prohibited from setting up a special-use Internet-connected network, this hurts any sort of start-up ISP who would like to challenge the established players in the industry. It's also a unique burden to people who try to serve rural and under-represented areas in our country. Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte of Security NOW! did an interview with a man (Brett Glass) who rus an ISP in Wyoming with majority rural customers. Their discussion as at the top of the transcript for episode 457, and is very interesting.
I opened this by saying I was neutral; I detailed the non-net-neutrality arguments above because the pro-net-neutrality arguments are overrepresented in the tech industry. They have a financial stake, to be sure, but "beneficial to my job" is often different than "fair". ISPs have also demonstrated their fair share of scummy behavior, trying to sell their subscribers as their service rather than their customers; distrust of them is a natural reaction.
Anyway, that's why I'm neutral. Every policy picks winners and losers, even if they're named to seem "fair" or "free". Not having it be subject to the whim of the FCC chairman would go a long way toward bringing stability, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.
Re: Netflix causes saturation of local internet providers.
I don't understand your point that Netflix is at fault here. The internet provider and the internet subscriber have an agreement on the amount of bandwidth provided by the service. The user then chooses to use some of that bandwidth for Netflix or YouTube. Users can't violate their bandwidth limit at most every ISP I've had. So I don't understand how it's unfair to ISPs when subscribers use what they paid for. I understand how it's inconvenient to ISPs because they oversubscribed their available bandwidth. But they chose to take that business risk to increase profits. It just so happened that consumers took a liking to video services and the risk didn't pay off at times. I also understand that video services cause increased load at specific points in the network. Having worked for an ISP as my first job after college, tuning bandwidths in different parts of the network or rerouting traffic based on demand is a routine part of doing business. That has nothing to do with legislation or FCC rule changes or video services being unfair.
As far as net neutrality side being over-represented. It has already happened that ISPs have extorted video services for money by disrupting service or throttling (in particular, look at the graph from July 2013 thru Dec 2014 during which time Netflix paid off various ISPs). So it seems to me like the level of tinfoil-hattery is about right based on history.
And to me the even more scary part has already been passed. That is the privacy protections against ISPs being repealed last April. It has already happened that ISPs have used subscriber data illegally. The policy change last April made it allowable now, but the fact that they were willing to cross that line does not inspire confidence that they will be reasonable with even less privacy restrictions.
This is why I am a big fan of companies like Ting, who are simply trying to provide the best service for their customers. Not squeeze every nickle possible out of them. They are both an ISP and MVNO cell provider, and they have openly stated that they do not and will not sell customer data or analyze browsing history, and have generally advocated for privacy and net neutrality. Too bad their ISP isn't available in my area.
I said I was neutral, and I pretty much said that ISPs had done their fair share of less-than-desirable behavior.
Video streaming was a relatively newly-mainstream technology when Netflix began streaming. The networks, up to that point, had the capacity they needed for the traffic they had, plus a little extra. That wasn't even a drop in the bucket compared to what they needed to support that (and YouTube). Should a change by one company drive a mandatory, force-of-law upgrade on another, with no remuneration for the latter company? I say "no" to that. I also say "no" to government taking tax dollars and giving them to the latter company to pay for those mandatory upgrades. So, who pays - the consumer of the service, or the service responsible for the bottleneck?
I do think some regulation is necessary; you need that in any monopoly/non-competitive scenario to prevent unfair practices. I just don't see the net falling over if the current proposal takes effect as planned.
I'll second your fandom of Ting; I've had my phone service with them for years. :) Do you think their stance on Internet service gives them a market advantage if the current proposal is enacted?
A discussion of who pays isn't really relevant today. The rise of video streaming services has already happened, upgrades have already happened. Maybe it would be interesting historical analysis to know "Who did pay at the time?" And compare that to the general laws of supply and demand: As demand increases and supply remains constant, the price to consumers goes up. I believe the case can be made that Netflix and perhaps other video services did already pay for those upgrades. So supply and demand didn't apply to bandwidth, and it would be interesting to examine why.
The net won't fall over, and for most it won't even be any different. It's just another erosion factor. Another setup for companies to be anti-competitive. Example: Verizon (who already has been shady) launched their own video-on-demand service. If these changes happen, what are the chances that they throttle other video services but send their own down the pipe full blast? Nearly 100%. And if particularly egregious in their throttling, they might be sued for it too. But they will still do it because the short term benefit is too tempting for your typical executive to pass up.
Ting is awesome. They have great promise in the ISP segment, but are beholden to the pace at which municipalities can get things done. AFAIK, they require the municipality to own their local fiber and then they will manage the internet service over it, including customer service. I do hope it becomes more common. But I also hope that municipal governments don't try to manage their own internet. One of the many things that governments are hopelessly inefficient at (and have no incentive to do well) is customer service.
Ting's mobile service is much more generally applicable, and of course it provides mobile internet as well (over common mobile carriers like T-Mobile and Sprint). I think their net neutrality / privacy stances will encourage some people to switch to them. But I don't think they do it for that reason. I really think they are just trying to do the right thing for customers.