Does anyone here actually oppose Network Neutrality?

[Yalius]

I oppose net neutrality, but then again, I'm also coming at it as a network technician working for a 5000-member rural ISP.

I've seen firsthand the difficulties of managing a resource like bandwidth for thousands of simultaneous users. Over the last 5 years, we've seen bandwidth consumed by Netflix subscribers grow from 5% of our total traffic to 95% during peak times. We had to implement a direct peering relationship with one of Netflix's CDN partners just to keep up. And in those same 5 years, we increased our uplink from a 2Gbps link to 40Gbps-- actually a 20Gbps and 2x 10Gbps pipes. We're quite a distance out in the boonies, as well, and fiber doesn't plow itself into the ground. This stuff costs money, and in the same time frame, data package plans have changed from 90$ for 6Mbps to $54.95 for 50Mbps.

We implement no caps, throttling, or packet shaping for any customer. We're even a not-for-profit co-operative, and our operating budget is still razor thin. Our area is transitioning from an agriculture-based economy to a suburban / bedroom community base, and we're seeing more and more people moving from the urban areas with a plethora of internet choices and cheap infrastructure-- with all the expectations that situation entails-- to an area that's in the process of transitioning from 40-year-old copper wiring to fiber at a cost per subscriber of roughly $5000.

If a big content provider like Netflix or Amazon came to us with a monetary offer or bandwidth solution or cost-sharing plan for laying new infrastructure, we would be all over it in a heartbeat. The only ISPs that can afford the costs of network neutrality are the ones who are leveraging themselves to prevent it in the first place.

 

[Upchurch]

I oppose net neutrality, but then again, I'm also coming at it as a network technician working for a 5000-member rural ISP.

So, for the sake of 5000 people, you would stifle innovation for the entire internet, kill start-ups, and make success based not on how good a company's product is, but rather on how much they can pay-to-play?

 

[Newtons Bit]

I oppose net neutrality, but then again, I'm also coming at it as a network technician working for a 5000-member rural ISP.

I've seen firsthand the difficulties of managing a resource like bandwidth for thousands of simultaneous users. Over the last 5 years, we've seen bandwidth consumed by Netflix subscribers grow from 5% of our total traffic to 95% during peak times. We had to implement a direct peering relationship with one of Netflix's CDN partners just to keep up. And in those same 5 years, we increased our uplink from a 2Gbps link to 40Gbps-- actually a 20Gbps and 2x 10Gbps pipes. We're quite a distance out in the boonies, as well, and fiber doesn't plow itself into the ground. This stuff costs money, and in the same time frame, data package plans have changed from 90$ for 6Mbps to $54.95 for 50Mbps.

We implement no caps, throttling, or packet shaping for any customer. We're even a not-for-profit co-operative, and our operating budget is still razor thin. Our area is transitioning from an agriculture-based economy to a suburban / bedroom community base, and we're seeing more and more people moving from the urban areas with a plethora of internet choices and cheap infrastructure-- with all the expectations that situation entails-- to an area that's in the process of transitioning from 40-year-old copper wiring to fiber at a cost per subscriber of roughly $5000.

If a big content provider like Netflix or Amazon came to us with a monetary offer or bandwidth solution or cost-sharing plan for laying new infrastructure, we would be all over it in a heartbeat. The only ISPs that can afford the costs of network neutrality are the ones who are leveraging themselves to prevent it in the first place.

Hi Yallius, I appreciate your thoughts on the matter, however I'd like for you to try and see this from a consumers point of view.

You're selling us (the consumers) a 50mpbs line. We only use about 5% (ish) of that line when we watch a show on Netflix. I view this use as moderate. Also, please consider that by data usage, your business is primarily a means for your customers to watch TV and movies. Netflix also provides a part of this service (the actual content), but your business receives about six times more money for this than Netflix. You shouldn't get any more of the pie as you already have the vast majority of it.

I only have two real options for internet: cable or DSL. If both the cable provider and the DSL provider fail to reach an infrastructure agreement with the internet content providers that I like, then what? Do ISPs such as yours throttle those services down to poor quality? Where does that leave me as a consumer?

For me, the biggest frustration is that ISPs are selling fat lines to the consumers and advertise them as blazing fast capable of viewing super high quality HD video straight to their desktop, but then get upset at the content providers that provide aforementioned HD video. Your organization probably doesn't do this, but the big players in the net neutrality fight do. The cynical part of me believes that these big players only object to net neutrality because it hampers their ability to leverage their infrastructure monopolies into the content distribution market.

 

[Yalius]

So, for the sake of 5000 people, you would stifle innovation for the entire internet, kill start-ups, and make success based not on how good a company's product is, but rather on how much they can pay-to-play?

Multiply those 5000 subscribers-- equating to 15000-25000 people or so, and we're on the smaller side-- by 5,000 similar rural ISPs? How about 110 million people? Does that clear the bar for actually caring about their needs? Or would you rather say, let's just abandon the rural market and let create a two-tiered internet of haves and have-nots? Which side were you on, the side of providing a useful, cost-effective service, or of perpetually ghettoizing anyone who doesn't have the common sense to move to an urban area?

 

[Upchurch]

Multiply those 5000 subscribers-- equating to 15000-25000 people or so, and we're on the smaller side-- by 5,000 similar rural ISPs? How about 110 million people? Does that clear the bar for actually caring about their needs? Or would you rather say, let's just abandon the rural market and let create a two-tiered internet of haves and have-nots? Which side were you on, the side of providing a useful, cost-effective service, or of perpetually ghettoizing anyone who doesn't have the common sense to move to an urban area?

A temporary problem, made better with improvements over time to the technology, solved by making a bigger and far more permanent problem. That's like fixing a hangnail by cutting the leg off.

And I question your numbers. Are you claiming that 1/6th of all Americans do not have access to broadband internet access? I'm skeptical. I think, rather, they may not have a wide choice of ISPs. None of us do, really. That's no reason to kill competition on the internet.

 

[elbe]

There is something to be said about the costs of running an ISP, especially these days, but there is very much a sense that if you are promising a certain speed to your customers you should be trying to meet it instead of complaining that they are using your service. If net neutrality went out the window and the providers did whatever they want would they start advertising their service as "XMbs for any content we choose!" I suspect the customers would not appreciate that and with the practical monopolies cable companies have on their regions they don't have much of a choice to vote with their wallet either.

I would say that ending NN would hurt the market all around more that it would help it.

 

[Aulus Agerius]

Multiply those 5000 subscribers-- equating to 15000-25000 people or so, and we're on the smaller side-- by 5,000 similar rural ISPs? How about 110 million people? Does that clear the bar for actually caring about their needs? Or would you rather say, let's just abandon the rural market and let create a two-tiered internet of haves and have-nots? Which side were you on, the side of providing a useful, cost-effective service, or of perpetually ghettoizing anyone who doesn't have the common sense to move to an urban area?

I think you're proceeding on the false assumption that rural ISPs like yours would really get something out of the loss of net neutrality. The trouble with the loss of NN is that it allows the biggest players - the huge cable companies - to use their dominant market position to extract money from content providers. Netflix can't afford not to do a deal with Comcast because Comcast has a lot of customers. But Netflix can probably afford to have its service to your 15-25k people throttled. For you, Netflix is the big guy and they'll drive a harder bargain with you than Comcast.

The loss of NN isn't going to do anything for rural ISPs, but it will make cable companies very happy with their new found ability to blackmail successful content providers with throttling.

 

[bonzombiekitty]

Allowing an ISP to decide which packets warrant top speeds is basically death to the web as we know it.

I agree. The only sort of speed control that I would be willing to set is a packet prioritization that is set voluntarily at either end of the communication. Something that lets the client and server decide "of the packets going between us, please try to give packets for X a higher priority than packets for Y".

 

[Upchurch]

I realize it was just the previous page, but it was also years ago, so I feel these should be bumped:

I think this image describes what the anti-net-neutrality crowd has in mind. It amazes me they can convince their rubes that this is a good idea.

 

[theprestige]

"If it could be done?"

Scaremongering about Al Gore aside, NN is what we have now. It is the status quo. Nothing needs to be done in order to implement it; it's already implemented. What's happening is that several companies want to change that, so they can find yet new fees to implement for sites to have their content delivered faster. That's why it's an issue.

If you are seriously terrified of the Internet as it is, I suggest you find yourself a qualified therapist. Or stop going to 4chan.

Net Neutrality isn't just the status quo. The 'Internet as it is" isn't its end state. It's an emergent property of an evolving system at an arbitrary point in time. At the current level of Internet regulation, it seems likely that it will evolve away from net neutrality and into the kind of cartel-based structure that everybody seems so anxious to avoid.

And it seems equally likely that the only way to avoid this evolutionary outcome--or at least the only way that net neutrality proponents can imagine--is to increase the amount of regulation of the Internet.

Personally I don't really see a lot of options, but I do find it annoying when vocal NN proponents try to pretend that more regulation doesn't bring its own risks and tradeoffs.

The Internet was never going to remain truly free. As more and more people do more and more of their important things online, the government is sure to follow. The regulator, the taxman, the military--these never lag far behind wherever people set up business.

So government is coming to the Internet. The only real question is, when, and where, and how, and what can we do to influence this?

 

[Yalius]

And I question your numbers. Are you claiming that 1/6th of all Americans do not have access to broadband internet access? I'm skeptical. I think, rather, they may not have a wide choice of ISPs. None of us do, really. That's no reason to kill competition on the internet.

From the very page you linked, did you check the map? The white areas do not have broadband access faster than 3 Mbps from any carrier. Urban areas can get 25+ Mbps via fiber, VDSL, DOCSIS 3, fixed wireless. Rural subscribers are much more limited until the infrastructure is upgraded. Now unless you support a national funding model for telecom infrastructure, where does that money come from? Can't wring it from subscribers, you're looking at thousands of dollars per home for new fiber trunks and drops. So you take the funding from whatever sources are available. If a content provider wanted to invest in infrastructure in exchange for privileged access, who says no to that?

 

[Upchurch]

From the very page you linked, did you check the map?

Take a look at the pie chart just above that. 2% of households have 0 broadband providers, dated December 2013.

Vs. the map you are referencing, dated December 2012.

 

[Aulus Agerius]

Rural subscribers are much more limited until the infrastructure is upgraded. Now unless you support a national funding model for telecom infrastructure, where does that money come from? Can't wring it from subscribers, you're looking at thousands of dollars per home for new fiber trunks and drops. So you take the funding from whatever sources are available. If a content provider wanted to invest in infrastructure in exchange for privileged access, who says no to that?

If you try to take money from content providers that money still comes from somewhere. Content providers are also profit driven and if forced to give additional money to ISPs they're going to try to recover that money from subscribers or advertiser. The idea that without net neutrality Neflix will suddenly come along to your ISP and offer you tens of millions to upgrade your infrastructure in exchange for bandwidth priority sounds a bit over-optimistic. Out of that investment, netflix might get a few thousand new customers and a few thousand existing customers who are happier with their service. That's no kind of return on their investment.

Even supposing that a content provider saw profit in providing investment funds to a rural ISP in exchange for priority, why should the rural ISP get to make that decision for the community it serves? You've probably got a monopoly of broadband in the area - if people are don't like the arrangement you have with the content provider, they can't switch. Even if your ISP is in a position to speak for the community, a loss of net neturality does not only allow a beneficent content provider to come in and offer you investment money.

Even if one accepts that the situation you outline - a content provider initiated investment in infrastructure in exchange for a "fast lane" - is a good thing, abolishing NN does not just allow that sort of transaction. It also allows:
Content providers to use their market position to pressure small ISPs for priority (e.g. "give us a fast lane or we'll charge your subscribers more")
Large, monopolistic ISPs to extort money from content providers (e.g. "give us money or we'll put you in the super slow lane")
Large, monopolistic ISPs to impose conditions on content providers (e.g. "carry the content of our parent company for free, or we'll put you in the slow lane" or even "don't criticize us or we'll put you in the slow lane")

Is the possibility of content provider infrastructure investment worth any of that? I don't think so.

 

[Mister Earl]

The way I usually explain it to the non-savvy right-winger types (my family has many of them) is, "Ending net neutrality basically means, if an ISP got paid political money to do it, that you'd have lots of problems getting to the Fox News website, but your neighbors would have no trouble getting to CNN."

 

[elbe]

The way I usually explain it to the non-savvy right-winger types (my family has many of them) is, "Ending net neutrality basically means, if an ISP got paid political money to do it, that you'd have lots of problems getting to the Fox News website, but your neighbors would have no trouble getting to CNN."

If they have Comcast they may find MSNBC far easier to access.

 

[GodMark2]

I oppose net neutrality, but then again, I'm also coming at it as a network technician working for a 5000-member rural ISP.

I've seen firsthand the difficulties of managing a resource like bandwidth for thousands of simultaneous users. Over the last 5 years, we've seen bandwidth consumed by Netflix subscribers grow from 5% of our total traffic to 95% during peak times. We had to implement a direct peering relationship with one of Netflix's CDN partners just to keep up. And in those same 5 years, we increased our uplink from a 2Gbps link to 40Gbps-- actually a 20Gbps and 2x 10Gbps pipes. We're quite a distance out in the boonies, as well, and fiber doesn't plow itself into the ground. This stuff costs money, and in the same time frame, data package plans have changed from 90$ for 6Mbps to $54.95 for 50Mbps.

We implement no caps, throttling, or packet shaping for any customer. We're even a not-for-profit co-operative, and our operating budget is still razor thin. Our area is transitioning from an agriculture-based economy to a suburban / bedroom community base, and we're seeing more and more people moving from the urban areas with a plethora of internet choices and cheap infrastructure-- with all the expectations that situation entails-- to an area that's in the process of transitioning from 40-year-old copper wiring to fiber at a cost per subscriber of roughly $5000.

If a big content provider like Netflix or Amazon came to us with a monetary offer or bandwidth solution or cost-sharing plan for laying new infrastructure, we would be all over it in a heartbeat. The only ISPs that can afford the costs of network neutrality are the ones who are leveraging themselves to prevent it in the first place.

When I read this (and I have many times, from many different people) I hear the following

So, I started this company to sell network bandwidth. I got 100 of them. I sold 1000 people 1 bandwidth each, and since the didn't use their whole 1 most of the time, it was all OK.

Then the ungrateful peons started actually using the entire 1 bandwidth that I'd sold them. Rather than fessing up and telling them that I'd sold too many bandwidths, I want to be able to keep people from using the bandwidth I sold them, unless they're paying me extra, or they're using that bandwidth to talk with my good friends (defined as the companies that have paid me extra).

It's like reading the script from The Producers

If you want to complain that your business strategy was doomed to failure from the start because you were selling more product than you had for too small a price, you're doing it well. It's the same as AOL selling people 1500 hours of service, but it has to all be used in the first month.

Net neutrality says "If you sell someone bandwidth, they get to use that bandwidth how they choose. You are free to charge people what you want for that bandwidth, but not for how they choose to use it."

 

[Mister Earl]

I work for a small-ish ISP (We don't even cover an entire state!). You know how we handled the Netflix problem? We have a server internal to our network that contains the entire netflix library. Boom. Anyone streams from Netflix, traffic stays inside our network.

Problem solved. Any other ISP can do this. They simply choose not to.

 

[daredelvis]

It's like reading the script from The Producers

If you want to complain that your business strategy was doomed to failure from the start because you were selling more product than you had for too small a price, you're doing it well. It's the same as AOL selling people 1500 hours of service, but it has to all be used in the first month.

Net neutrality says "If you sell someone bandwidth, they get to use that bandwidth how they choose. You are free to charge people what you want for that bandwidth, but not for how they choose to use it."

Yep. The Producers connection is brilliant.

Daredelvis

 

[marplots]

I work for a small-ish ISP (We don't even cover an entire state!). You know how we handled the Netflix problem? We have a server internal to our network that contains the entire netflix library. Boom. Anyone streams from Netflix, traffic stays inside our network.

Problem solved. Any other ISP can do this. They simply choose not to.

Is that legal?

 

[KoihimeNakamura]

It's called co-location.