While we understand the arguments of the ISPs, the simple truth is that the web will not work if a few Internet providers control what can and cannot be streamed to your computer. Without net neutrality rules, they could decide to shut off YouTube, Hulu, or any other website for whatever reason they choose.
As long as there is even a modestly competitive market for internet hookups (more than one firm), then ISPs will compete to serve the interests of the consumers. Comcast isn't going to shut off Hulu unless it's massively unprofitable. If there is not a competitive market, then that is the real problem that should be addressed. You shouldn't limit people's ability to enter into contracts to buy services. If we want bandwidth to expand, and if we want fast, low latency video and voice connections, cable companies will need to be able to charge premium prices, both to consumers and content providers. Instead, we are beginning the long process of binding the internet in a layer of legislative gray goo, despite there being no evidence of ISPs acting against the interest of consumers.
I think you're underestimating the amount of competition needed for a healthy market. I have two choices: Time Warner Cable or AT&T DSL. It's easy to see how they could both decide that, for instance, crushing Hulu is in their best interest. Both of these companies provide television service. If they did this before Hulu got popular, it'd be even easier to avoid angering customers.
ISPs are free to charge premium prices for premium services, but it is dangerous to allow them to discriminate between sources of traffic when there are so few competitors.
Then, as I said, fix the competition problem. Don't add some new regulation that doesn't fix the underlying problem, and that causes new problems of its own.
Isn't the only way to fix the competition problem more administrative grey goo? I have worked in this industry. There is a nice history of buying up all competitors... Especially when the competitors used to be parts of you.
Did you forget the governments attempt to break up AT&T already?
Or you could go the opposite route, and remove existing administrative grey goo that acts as a barrier to entry.
AT&T and Time Warner may be the only companies with cables running into your house, but why isn't there a viable market for satellite/wimax/local wireless mesh/cdma? Why can't other organizations that want to compete run new cables?
I hope at some point we'll stop making quasi-permanent decisions that affect the long-term development of a particular area of society based entirely on people's perceived fears about the status quo at the present instant.
I'm about as much of a free-marketer as you're going to find, but it's not administrative red tape that's stopping you from choosing between bunches of wireless ISPs: operating one is really hard. The startup costs are immense.
Satellite? You have to launch satellites. You have to get spectrum allocations (which aren't going to disappear in any regulatory environment; the results would be chaotic and bad for just about everyone, except maybe the purely wired services). You have to either subsidize receivers, because they're going to be more expensive than most consumers will ever buy outright, or you have to manufacture millions of them to get the per-unit cost down. And, of course, you have the backhaul problem.
WiMax is probably the closest to being practical, along with cellular-type services, but it still has a very high natural barrier to entry: you have to get spectrum, you have to rent space on towers in the areas you want to serve, you have to somehow ensure that enough people are going to have WiMax equipment to be able to use your service at all. Again, lots of natural barriers to entry.
Wireless mesh networks have significant scalability problems if the content most nodes want to access isn't evenly distributed around the mesh. A lot of people put a lot of effort into getting community mesh networking working back in the late 90s, and nobody could really make it work. And this was using 802.11 equipment (mostly) that didn't have any regulatory burden at all.
3G and 4G cellular are competitive, at least in some ways, with wireline services, but in many markets they're owned by the same company that owns one of the wired services! (That'd be Verizon.) So even if you have the choice between cable, DSL, and 3G cellular, your choice of companies might still be Comcast or Verizon.
It's not regulation that's stopping these alternatives from existing, it's the inherent complexity and expense of offering high-speed data service. The regulatory burdens should certainly be kept to the bare minimum, but they're not to blame for the lack of choice in Internet access. Even in some sort of perfect, minimally-regulated market, you'd still be dealing with a very Hard Problem.
How do you fix the competition problem without regulation? Isn't this one of those cases (like roads, power, water, etc...) where it's more efficient to provide infrastructure (bandwidth) once instead of 10 times?
Call it a pet peeve, but I hate when people (especially technical ones talking about it in a technical context) forget that the Web is a subset of the Internet.
Actually net discrimination makes ___ over HTTP more popular because then you can hope that the magic black box prioritizes your traffic rather than penalizes it. In a neutral net, tunneling your protocol over HTTP or port 80 doesn't help.
What I don't understand is why a bunch of entrepreneurial types (or at least this blogger for a web start-up site) would be in favor of more government regulation.
Because many existing laws & regulations are bought and paid for by big business to preserve their dominant position through the use of legally sponsored anti-competitive tactics. You can't undo the past but you can make new laws & regulations to level the playing field some.
Then you should unwind the existing laws and regulations, not add a new regulation that will inevitably favor narrow interests. And if you cannot role back the existing detrimental regulations, what chance of success do you have making new positive regulation?
In US telecom most of the damage is done already. Taking away the laws, regulations and policies that built government assisted monopolies does not set things right. Many of those regulations are already side stepped and you don't see new wireless, cable or fiber deployments from startup private industry. It's too expensive to compete against an infrastructure that was bought & paid for decades ago. A great example of this is the FCC wireless spectrum auction. Who ended up getting it? All the big established government assisted telecom monopolies of years past for the most part. It was open to anyone yet Verizon & AT&T spent more than $15B to extend their strangle hold. It's nice to have $15B worth of capital you earned from years of plundering anti-competitive markets.
I see your point about the problems of more regulation to solve past regulation and would prefer to see socialized broadband instead. The market is too screwed up for the private telecom sector to ever recovery even with lots of good regulation. Since it's quite expensive to build this type of infrastructure nationwide open/fair access policies are a step in the right direction. It's treating the symptoms, not the disease.
I can pretty much guarantee that eliminating the regulations that led to the current telecommunications oligopoly will not result in Bell competitors sprouting up all over the place. It's a done deal.
Why shouldn't it? Didn't Mint successfully take on Intuit? I don't understand this lack of faith in entrepreneurship in such a place as HN. Not just picking on the parent, but my downmodded question and the general fervor towards legislation such as "net neutrality".
What about after the airlines were deregulated? Didn't we get great prices and service from lots of newcomers? Would you rather we go back to airline regulation?
What about after the electricity market in California was "deregulated" a few years ago? Didn't my employer lose millions of dollars by having to shut down its factories during the ensuing rolling blackouts, which in turn were caused by successful efforts to create artificial scarcity and extort billions of dollars from the public?
But you shouldn't read too much into that example either. The lesson here is that buzzwords aren't always useful for understanding the world. The word deregulation means different things in different situations. Airlines are still a heavily regulated industry: Health and safety regulations, security regulations, labor regulations, international treaties, state and local regulations. (You think you're going to be allowed to launch a jet helicopter from your suburban backyard? Your neighbors think otherwise.) But there was a moment when a few of those regulations were removed or changed in a useful way that permitted the market to work better, and that event was named "airline deregulation".
Which does not imply that every action called "deregulation" is going to be equally successful, or even that such actions are especially similar to each other. The devil is in the details. What matters is what the regulations are, and what the situation is.
The comparison is not apt; you seem to be invoking airlines in the belief that they are a similarly capital-intensive industry. This is not really true. You can start up an airline with a bunch of rented or chartered planes, so you don't have to buy much of anything. (And even if you do want to buy them, investors know that they can be sold later and take that into account when loaning you money.)
You can't really do that if you want to be a modern ISP. (At one point, due to line-sharing rules, you could be a DSL ISP without too much infrastructure investment, but this is no longer true; the rules were gutted a few years back and with them went most of the small mom-and-pop DSL operations.) It's a hell of a lot harder to get investment for a fiber deployment---which won't be worth much of anything if the business folds---than it is to buy an aircraft, which at the end of the day will still be a valuable asset.
The industries in question have very little in common, so it should come as no surprise that strategies to induce competition within them look totally dissimilar as well.
Quite right, big business has successfully lobbied for many unfair advantages. But two wrongs do not make a right. Undo the damage by repealing existing regulation instead of heaping statute upon statute.
"Repealing existing regulations" would not suddenly make the entrenched entities who grew powerful under the protection of those regulations vanish.
Sure, you'd have a level playing field (of sorts), but some of the players would have had years to practice: the result would be anything but a fair fight.
The only way deregulation would work is if it was accompanied by demonopolization. Since that is not politically feasible, it would be a mistake and probably lead to worse outcomes to go ahead with only the deregulatory part.
There is also a third player on the web which is non-businesses. Now, you may argue that there is no place for non commercial entities, and this may very well be a valid argument, but there is also an argument for the web being a place where data can flow without discrimination regardless of the capital behind it.
You wouldn't just have to take away all the laws that created the monopolies, but also all the money those monopolies earned. Right now, they have accrued fiscal resource to the point where they no longer need legislative resource; they can simply buy their competitors (or the things their competitors need to get started) rather than relying on any governmental body to stop them.
reedlaw - I think you're too caught up with ideology. I'm now more libertarian than I've ever been, but I temper that wonderful ideology with real world considerations. Historical events in the U.S. have caused such imbalances that simply making "a level playing field" now, in many situations, would never self-regulate everything back into balance solely from free market principles. Even Ron Paul who is against pork barrel projects ideologically "brings home the bacon" with pork projects for his district because that is part of the reality of how government currently works. He would take heat for staunchly passing on it all. The best he has been able to do is purposely draft pork into legislation he knows will pass, then vote "No" on it himself for symbolism only. If we admit to ourselves that the world we live in is not perfect (and unlikely to change soon) then we ask ourselves should legislation be sensitive to that or guided only by ideology?
reedlaw - I just read a recent quote which illustrates my point nicely:
>The "biggest driver" for the more intense opposition to his administration's proposals, Obama told the network's "This Week" program, is more likely to be from people who are "passionate about the idea of whether government can do anything right."
The president similarly told NBC's Meet the Press program that it is an argument "that's gone on for the history of this republic – and that is what's the right role of government? How do we balance freedom with our need to look after one another?"
As long as there is even a modestly competitive market for internet hookups (more than one firm), then ISPs will compete to serve the interests of the consumers. Comcast isn't going to shut off Hulu unless it's massively unprofitable. If there is not a competitive market, then that is the real problem that should be addressed. You shouldn't limit people's ability to enter into contracts to buy services. If we want bandwidth to expand, and if we want fast, low latency video and voice connections, cable companies will need to be able to charge premium prices, both to consumers and content providers. Instead, we are beginning the long process of binding the internet in a layer of legislative gray goo, despite there being no evidence of ISPs acting against the interest of consumers.