Net neutrality is literally constraint on how data passing through networks can be routed and shaped. It’s exactly “constraining the Internet”. It’s not “freedom” in any shape or matter. Freedom is never constraint on others. It’s a popular constraint, and people just happen to confuse and conflate “things I like/feel positivity about” and “freedom”.
It’s controversial to say here but I don’t think it gets discussed enough: Net neutrality only really helps established players. That is not to say it hurts others, but it certainly helps established players.
That’s why they all love it. Facebook, Hulu, Netflix, GitHub, Tumblr, Microsoft. Unestablished unpopular players are not the ones getting throttled. It’s the ones already using tons of bandwidth getting throttled and odds are good most new players bandwidth usage is hardly even noticeable to the ISP. They wouldn’t be touting the joys of something that had the potential to displace them.
The one who would be getting throttled is primarily Netflix, who literally uses over half of the bandwidth of the Internet. Literally slows everything else on the Internet down. Netflix doesn’t want to be throttled, so of course they love net neutrality.
I’m not saying net neutrality is inherently bad, I just don’t think it’s as innately good as a lot of the cheerleaders attest.
Negative. People who support net neutrality do not know what net neutrality really is.
Net neutrality is a push by the big corporations to avoid having to pay for the pipeline they use. Google, Netflix, and the like that use huge amounts of bandwidth. You are witnessing rent seeking 101, the corporations on one side are trying to get regulations to help themselves.
Net non-neutrality used to overcome severe data caps so some poor buggers can browse the Wikipedia?
This really sounds like trying to add one wrong to another to try to make a right.
This really confuses issues too; metered access to a network isn't quite the same thing as non-neutral access where some content gets much better latency and bandwidth.
Cutting off access to all sources of content at a given data cap does in fact meet the definition of neutral: No Netflix for you, and no Usenet, no Skype, no IRC, no git, no ssh, ...
Data caps in fact hurt the high-bandwidth premium services that easily bust data caps, whose purveyors support non-neutrality.
Net Neutrality legislation scares me. Any legislation of the internet to "protect" you from corporations will most likely include new and invasive powers of government to monitor and control the Internet (like SOPA). No thanks.
Let's see if I understand this article though: I can pay $$$$ dollars a month for 250GB of dumb data transfer a month. If I go over that quota, I have to pay $$$ more or I get shut off or slowed down.
But now Comcast allows me to pay $ to get an unlimited access to certain sites like NetFlix that would otherwise eat up most my "dumb" quota (if I watched movies all day).
That sounds good to me, I'd rather pay $$$$+$ than $$$$+$$$ for the 400GB of NetFlix traffic and 100GB of other traffic I use per month.
In a way, this is the market's solution to the piracy problem. Licensed media sources are offered at a discount while torrent traffic is still allowed, but under general traffic prices. Say what you will but, if the market doesn't create a solution, the government will and I guarantee you won't like their solution.
Every time this issue comes up in an online forum, at least one commenter will pop up passionately defending this position. You can easily tell who it is in this submission (it's not you). The thing is, that's an economic perspective, but net neutrality is the name for a technological state of affairs. Focusing on the economic side of the issue subtly undermines the discussion by hiding the real problem before it can even be factored in.
Yet this is mainly a technology-oriented community (as far as I know), so let me try to convey my understanding of why internet pioneers, network engineers, startups and small businesses overwhelmingly support net neutrality (in addition to the afforementioned large online service providers such as Netflix or Youtube). Please bear with me if I write things you already know, and kindly correct any mistakes I make.
The Internet is a collection of thousands of smaller networks, many of which are international. It can only function as a whole because those networks peer with each other all over the globe and exchange information. This means John Doe, customer of ISP A in the US, can communicate with any other internet user - such as Hiro Nakamura, customer of ISP B in Japan, or Raj Singh, customer of ISP C in India. When a company or organization deploys their own network, they can join the internet by finding one or more peers who are already in it and entering a peering agreement with them. ISPs are classified into tiers based on the answer to the following two questions:
- Do I have to pay anyone for them to carry the traffic I generate?
- Does anyone pay me for me to carry the traffic they generate?
ISPs with a more valuable network - who own more actual long-distance capacity (bandwidth) in physical network infrastructure - are more likely to be paid and less likely to pay others, simply because they are providing infrastructure to others. But regardless of the economics of the peering agreement, usually the agreement entails carrying all traffic sent by the peer network to (presumably) recipients in your network, or your other peer networks. The traffic sent by the peer network doesn't necessarily originate in the peer network, but you treat it as if it did - this ability for traffic to traverse multiple networks that are not directly connected to each other is the only thing that ensures we have a single internet, rather than an endless amount of smaller international networks. This decades-old state of affairs, in which a network does not discriminate against traffic sent to it from another network by looking at where it came from, is called net neutrality.
When a company wants to be an ISP and sell internet access to the end user, they have to join the internet in the manner described above. After all, internet participation is always bidirectional - end users generate some traffic themselves. A new commercial ISP can join the internet simply by peering with a single existing network in a single location in such a way that the new ISP pays for all traffic they send over the network. In return, they can receive traffic from everyone else. They make a few access plans for the end consumer with as low an amount of upload bandwidth as they can get away with and price them in such a way that they'll be able to make a profit after paying their upstream provider and other operating costs. For redundancy and quality of service, they can peer with more networks at the same time and charge a little more.
But in the long run, as you can probably imagine, this is not cost effective. Assuming you are going to grow and have a very large participation in the internet (large geographic coverage, millions of users, lots of traffic), then you get a much better return by deploying your own network. By having a larger "network share" you are in a better position to negotiate peering agreements in your favor, not to mention all the traffic you carry within your own network doesn't have to be paid to a third party (or is subject to bandwidth limitations due to you only having purchased a limited amount of upstream bandwidth). Ultimately, an ISP like AT&T owns a backbone so large (currently 660000km of fiber according to their website), they're a substantial enough portion of the internet not to have to pay anyone for peering - it's mutually beneficial for them to peer for free with other large networks and make their money by charging smaller ones and having a bigger profit margin on their own customers, which makes them a so-called tier 1 network.
Enter american ISPs like Comcast. Comcast seems to have grown through a primarily end customer oriented strategy. They grew their last mile business very quickly and became a near monopoly for commercial internet access in many parts of the United States, serving millions of customers, all the while purchasing as little upstream bandwidth as they could get away with from larger networks with a strong presence in the United States, such as Level3 (now CenturyLink). This technologically short-sighted business model did not immediately fail because they "carefully oversold" their upstream capabilities (this is perfectly normal - you sell bandwidth based on your average network load expectations, not based on the assumption everyone will be using 100% of what you sell them at all times), engaged in p2p blocking and traffic shaping, and had a really good customer retention plan ("oh, you're not happy with your service? maybe you can try our competitors... wait, there are none? oops...")
I am a consumer that pays Netflix. Where is that in your diagram?
If Netflix wants to subsidize my Verizon bill I am okay with that. Yeah yeah I know...how will startup X have a chance to compete with Netflix then? Guess what nobody can. And even by some miracle if they get disrupted the benefits again will keep accruing to a handful of people. So what the point of the story?
Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon are unregulated monopolies that I worry about much more than Comcast and Verizon. The EFF needs to bring that onto the table every time they talk about Net Neutrality.
This is actually beautifully ironic to those who understand what is going on here.
AT&T has quietly backed and financed (some might say "astroturfed") the whole push for net neutrality... of wired networks.
Why might they do that? Isn't AT&T an evil carrier? It's pretty simple, actually. AT&T has a massive network built for delivering phone calls. The operation of this network does not depend on packet prioritization, so it is not affected by net neutrality.
Who is affected though? Cable carriers rely on packet prioritization to deliver voice calls with the approximate quality of AT&T's separate network. Net neutrality doesn't affect AT&T much, but it harms their competitors' business plans.
So it's easy to see why AT&T, who backed net neutrality when it was in the interest of harming their upstart competitors, might feel that applying it to wireless networks, where it affects them, is a "bait and switch." They baited a bunch of Congress critters to interfere in the ISP business, and now the scope of that mandate is being switched on them.
this fcc comment is so uninformed. getting rid of net neutrality will make service way better because you will be able to pay for a line with prioritized access for video conferencing and remote presence. net neutrality is what makes it impossible for individuals with a public isp connection to get the same quality as corporations with their own private networks.
Net neutrality is the idea that your ISP shouldn't deprioritize content from someone else in order to benefit their own competing service.
For example, Comcast not counting their on-demand, over the internet, streaming against your data cap. Whereas watching Netflix/hulu/etc would count against it.
Down with net neutrality. It's just another government program that the very top tech companies love, because it helps squash competition. Open and free markets are always superior.
I'm torn... I do support net neutrality. But I guess I also believe that markets get the products they deserve. And if they choose to support operators that constrain their content choices then they are idiots.
I do wonder if net neutrality is supported by a small number of elite/intelligent folk who would be careful in their choices of which providers to support, but realise that given the wider stupidity of the market, their overall lack of market clout will lead to them having no option but to choose a crappy service.
sigh... gives the phrase 'Forcing people to be free' - yet one further dimension.
Net Neutrality or not, it's a shitty service. My video quality went to shit a few months back and I didn't know why. It was because I was opted into this nonsense. Which is just allowing them to throttle your speeds in exchange for unlimited data.
Net neutrality would not suppress ISP competition in any way, shape, or form. Unless you count upset ISPs trying to take their ball and go home, like spoiled children.
And yes, robust ISP competition would be awesome. But there are parts of the country that realistically could not support more than one ISP. Do those people not deserve neutrality in their internet service? What do you say to them if their ISP suddenly decided to fuck with their traffic? There would never be anyone else to turn to.
Very cool article. As someone who's very much for small gov't, net neutrality has been a really hard issue for me, personally, as it's making another law to ensure more freedom? Those two concepts are kind of hard to fit together sometimes.
Net Neutrality isn't about usage, it's about destinations.
Even with Net Neutrality it's fully within an ISPs right to say X GB/mo for $Y and throttle or block over-use. The problem is an ISP deciding that, regardless of what is going on in the network, regardless of what a particular user has used or is trying to use, traffic to Netflix will be slower than traffic to Vudu.
Verizon, Comcast, et al have plenty of available tools to prevent congestion without violating Net Neutrality.
They're intentionally trying to confuse the issue with usage, because it's an easier PR sell.
net neutrality was sold to the public as anti-censorship, when really it had nothing to do with free speech. the author of the post seems to have a more developed understanding that it's really about increasing bargaining power of media companies (specifically big bandwidth users like streaming video) and decreasing the bargaining power of telecoms, but most do not understand this.
the difference is that now most of those activists are pro-censorship, as long as the censorship is what they like, and those same big media companies are able to enact that type of censorship. as far as I can tell, that's really it. most people never really understood net neutrality.
Net neutrality is not a good thing in and of itself. It is one value among many.
If you're a firefighter trying to call for assistance from base camp, you don't care about net neutrality. You want your emergency phone call to have priority over everything else. You want the net to be extremely non-neutral.
On the general internet, where bandwidth is plentiful, net neutrality can keep certain pathological things from being a thing. On a specialized network where bandwidth is very scarce, it can be the cause of pathology.
Net Neutrality is how the internet has operated since its beginning. It's not "giving" the government or anyone else anything new, just preserving a very successful status quo. It's the telco's and the anti-NN crowd that want to change that, not the other way around, despite their dissembling. If you want the internet to remain a level playing field for everyone, as it has been since day 1, from bootstrapped startups to giants like Google and Microsoft, support Net Neutrality.
I don't think I fully understand the argument for net neutrality. I try to think about it from a few different perspectives:
Broadband intensive services like Netflix:
I think a problem that they face is that their connection is often slow, not only intentionally, but also because developing infrastructure is expensive. Why would an ISP bother building out the infrastructure if they can't extract a higher value from those that it most benefits (Netflix)? In fact, Netflix thinks it's worth it to pay Comcast directly. If that was not beneficial, I don't see why Netflix would have done so. Sure, they would probably prefer to get that service for free, but it must be mutually beneficial for both parties to go along. If Netflix were not allowed to make sure a deal with a company like Comcast, would that really benefit anyone?
Smaller Websites:
There is the risk that ISPs try extracting a toll but I think it may not be worth it a lot of the time for the ISP. I think this fear is overblown, although I could be wrong.
Consumers that don't use broadband extensive services:
Why should those consumers be subsidizing those that use broadband heavy services?
Consumers using broadband extensive services:
Why should Netflix not be allowed to help subsidize the cost of providing broadband? Why should this fall solely on the individual?
Government:
The obvious concerns of more governmental control of the internet.
I could imagine a scenario where Netflix was not allowed to pay Comcast directly for increased bandwidth. Instead, Netflix would spend that money to lobby politicians to force Comcast to build out their infrastructure. I don't see how that's a better scenario than currently exists.
I think a better solution to very little competition in ISPs would be to decrease the barriers it takes to compete. Further regulation would only increase the barriers.
It’s controversial to say here but I don’t think it gets discussed enough: Net neutrality only really helps established players. That is not to say it hurts others, but it certainly helps established players.
That’s why they all love it. Facebook, Hulu, Netflix, GitHub, Tumblr, Microsoft. Unestablished unpopular players are not the ones getting throttled. It’s the ones already using tons of bandwidth getting throttled and odds are good most new players bandwidth usage is hardly even noticeable to the ISP. They wouldn’t be touting the joys of something that had the potential to displace them.
The one who would be getting throttled is primarily Netflix, who literally uses over half of the bandwidth of the Internet. Literally slows everything else on the Internet down. Netflix doesn’t want to be throttled, so of course they love net neutrality.
I’m not saying net neutrality is inherently bad, I just don’t think it’s as innately good as a lot of the cheerleaders attest.
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