[volak]

I work for a growing medium sized ISP - and I'm against net neutrality. I could write an entire essay about the unintended consequences, hypocrisy, ridiculous internet memes, and monopolies but I'll only leave one point that hopefully strikes a chord in those who only see one side.

As a smaller ISP we are constantly asked for cheaper plans for - typically - older people who "just want to check their email." Thanks to net neutrality we cannot offer these people anything.

We are forced to compete DIRECTLY against the comcast's and AT&T's in our region. A competition where our only weapon is cost. And if we lower our costs we only get a bunch of power users who consume 10x more bandwidth than typical users - the big business marketing departments eat our budgets for breakfast.

Without net neutrality the first thing we'd do is setup a "email only" plan - charge $5 a month and literally knock on doors in retirement homes and sign up swaths of people. We could probably oversell the single line by an order of magnitude more than usual.

Net neutrality directly prevents any sort of choice for the consumer as to what level of internet access they want or need. And yes that might sound scary - but the VAST majority of people in certain age groups just simply dont WANT to pay $80 a month to check their email.

[polymathist]

In a non-NN world, nothing will stop Comcast or ATT&T from also offering an "email only" plan. Except in their version of the plan, it costs $0/month if you use their own hosted email service. And when the grandkids come over they can watch Netflix for free because Netflix is paying the ISP to subsidize bandwidth.

Eliminating NN will make competition even worse for smaller and medium sized ISPs because the big ISPs have disproportional leverage to extract subsidies from media companies and make all sorts of deals. In some cases, the ISPs even own the media companies (for example, Comcast owns NBC). How can you possibly expect to compete with that?

[joubert]

Assuming there are a sufficient cohort of those potential customers to make it worthwhile going after them in the first place:

Under current net neutrality rules, is it possible to sell a data capped plan (but content agnostic), with overages, where the data capped portion is below rival “uncapped” plans?

That way it seems like one could attract that demographic without the downside you highlighted.

[volak]

There is an entire undeserved niche from the dialup crowd who are extremely unhappy paying more than $10 a month - so yes it could be well worth the investment.

As for caps - which do you think would sell people better: "You have full access to anything on your email" vs "You can download 500 mb of data a month"

And what will happen to their service when the grand kids come over and want to watch netflix?

[thinkpad20]

> There is an entire undeserved niche from the dialup crowd who are extremely unhappy paying more than $10 a month

A low-speed broadband plan (or even dialup) would serve those customers fine, no?

> As for caps - which do you think would sell people better: "You have full access to anything on your email" vs "You can download 500 mb of data a month"

What if those emails link to some other site on the internet? Or contain photo or video links? Does it still count as “full access” if things slow to a crawl in those cases? With email being so small anyway, how does that differ in practice from just a low speed plan? It could still be marketed as “access to everything in your email.”

> And what will happen to their service when the grand kids come over and want to watch netflix?

This question itself seems to undermine your point. What would happen in that situation, on a plan like the one you’d like to sell?

[0xfeba]

That's ridiculous. Just charge by the byte, problem solved.

Otherwise, without NN, we have to rely on ISPs "word" they won't just start forcing cable packages on us. No fucking thanks.

[volak]

Without NN there would be a ton more providers to choose from because we'd be able to compete on more than price.

Comcast's of the world can oversell their lines by 4x what we can because they can simply get the word out to low-traffic users better than we can. Thats 4x the revenue smaller ISPs just don't get directly because of NN.

[annabellish]

NN is explicitly there to _stop_ you from competing on more than price, because introducing free market capitalism to basic infrastructure is a horrifying idea. Should utility companies be able to compete on more than price? Should roads be able to compete on more than price?

Being able to do so is great for the company in charge of the utility, but literally everybody else immediately loses hard.

[kortex]

This would work if ISPs with the pipes were forced to peer with other providers. Just like people have (some) choice to get their power from green generation, but it uses the same grid lines.

There's nothing stopping them from doing this now, but the fact of the matter is ISPs don't want competition.

[0xfeba]

Please explain how NN is keeping competition down. Also consider that we haven't had 'official' common carrier NN until last year. So where was all the competition then since NN was not a barrier?

> Comcast's of the world can oversell their lines by 4x what we can because they can simply get the word out to low-traffic users better than we can.

So NN prevents you from getting the word out? Huh?

[s73ver_]

"Without NN there would be a ton more providers to choose from because we'd be able to compete on more than price."

That is an utter baldfaced lie. NN is not what is keeping competition down, not even close.

If you want sympathy and understanding for your position, it helps if you be honest with the rest of us.

[tome]

Why can't you just sell them a capped data allowance? I don't see any reason why you need to know where their traffic is going.

[volak]

Because they want all their grandchildren's pictures too.

Telling a customer they have full access to anything on their email vs telling a customer they have 500mb a month. Which do you think sells better?

[sumeno]

What happens when the photos are on Google Photos? What happens when they need to update their browser because theirs is outdated and becomes incompatible? What happens when one of their grandchildren sends them a YouTube link to their concert performance from school? I absolutely guarantee you that in each of these scenarios they will call and complain because their email isn't working.

They think that they only want email, but what they really want is to access the internet via their email.

[volak]

To eliminate support calls I would simply design a system where any place they went FROM their email would work - maybe up to 3 or 4 links past email.

And of course monitor account usage and call up tech-savvy granddads who email themselves youtube videos to get around the block.

[mrguyorama]

So not only do you want to snoop your legitimate customer's traffic, you also want to own their personal computers at a level that would allow you to make that distinction? I find that disgusting.

Also, I don't think I've ever heard such a misuse of the word "simply"

[nanny]

>To eliminate support calls I would simply design a system where any place they went FROM their email would work - maybe up to 3 or 4 links past email.

What? What constitutes a "link"? This doesn't make any sense.

[volak]

be on gmail -> click google images picture -> click caption link to small video -> click another youtube video -> ERROR

4 links away from gmail - not allowed. Pretty simple

[semperdark]

NN does not unfairly inconvenience you. You are the type of person NN exists to stop.

Sorry, not interested in giving it up so you can bilk and spy on the elderly.

[bo1024]

After reading a variety of the parent's comments, I agree with you.

[mtberatwork]

In this scenario, how would you handle software patches requested by the user's OS?

[TYPE_FASTER]

Are the pictures attached to the e-mail? Or on the web? Is this e-mail only, or e-mail + web? How do you figure out where to draw that line?

[detaro]

Is there really a meaningful difference in your operating costs between an "e-mail only" plan and a plan with a few GB cap? (or really low speeds)

I guess people actually would need to be able to still install software updates etc, which might be tricky if strictly capped?

[westbywest]

Thank you very much for this perspective from a smaller ISP. Regulation specifically written to address the worst practices of the largest actors in a market can indeed place disproportionate burden on the smaller players. I.e. regulation is always imperfect, especially when lawmakers become zealous about issuing only minimal regs, neglecting nuance. My question, tho, is what sort of regulation in broadband service would you see as beneficial? If you're a WISP, your wire-line competitors hang their service on publicly funded utility poles for attachment fees that don't really share the burden of maintenance. Just ask electric customers experiencing consistently rising bills. Those competitors will continue to depress the level playing field to tilt towards them, which can dramatically stifle innovation too.

[notyourday]

1. You do not need "net neutrality/not net neutrality" for this. if your cohort is people in nursing homes/old people's home then you provide a reference URL to the nursing home and in T&C tell them that by agreeing to this plan they agree to you monitoring their internet usage for "blah blah blah" and in exchange for that you provide price X. If they want unfiltered intewebz, they get it for price X+Y

2. If you are not providing last mile, you are not competing with comcast, verizon, at&t or whoever else owns that infra.

[s73ver_]

I'm sure you'd like that. But I cannot allow it, because while I'm sure you'd have perfectly benign intentions of just using it for stuff like that, Comcast and AT&T don't. And there is no fucking way I am going to let them have the ability to carve up the internet, and fuck the rest of us, just so you can offer your cheap plan.

I care far, far, far more about net neutrality, and not having the internet get fucked, than about your company making money.

[VLM]

Time for a standard issue HN automobile analogy where for various engineering reasons commercial automobiles all have about the same order of magnitude of horsepower regardless of elderly demands that they just want to drive to church on Sunday and are not interested in racing thru national parks at 100 MPH like the TV commercials and young people supposedly demand.

In theory you'd think we could make motorized land vehicles with all random power outputs just like boats, but in practice they're all within an order of magnitude, how odd.

From an engineering standpoint I'm not sure what we could take away from a modern car to make a "Sunday church only" car that would still be street legal and not result in immense staggering levels of customer dissatisfaction. In addition, I'm kinda claiming old people saying all they want is email, are lying. The instant you sell that "email only" product the instant the phone lines light up with support calls. They don't actually want it, they want cheaper prices and they're hoping that stereotype will sell their request. They have no idea that "email only" would be costlier to provide, they just think its an inferior position so gimmie a lower bill. In summary, we can't sell it because it would be a support nightmare and its maybe not possible to engineer without significant extra expense.

The thing about market segmentation is that its very expensive to implement legacy long distance telco style era billing infrastructure... we aren't gonna split product prices from current price X into X/2, X/3, X/4 for inferior products. To fund the billing infrastructure we're going to split into 2(X+100), 0.75(X+100) etc. Both a VERY high offset to fund the billing costs, and an additional medical insurance style monopoly increase to multiples of higher price, not lower. Killing net neutrality is about monopoly middlemen raising prices, never about lowering them.

An even closer although more stretched analogy is a modern car that can drive across the country at high speeds is going to cost almost exactly as much as a car that can just barely drive to the post office. Its not like turn signals or air bags are any cheaper. Certainly there's no such thing as single mode fiber optic lasers that are only rated for email checking vs 10G multiplayer gaming use.

I've noticed watching my kids that bandwidth use has stopped increasing. Thru my life bandwidth use only increased, over many orders of magnitude. That era is over, and we're raising kids who have constant BW use over the course of their lives. For context my daughter is the same age as Youtube and nothing has happened since then WRT BW use. Everything other than streaming video is a rounding error and trillions of hours watched show resolution and quality are totally optional for video consumption despite decades of broadcast engineers and professional producers claiming the contrary in the legacy media.

[volak]

You may or may not be surprised that many tools needed to provide an "email only" service already exist and are quite easy to implement.

Something as easy as allowing email + 3-4 links past email would solve virtually all problems and support calls and a bit of usage monitoring would eliminate the fraud

[sntax]

Tell me again how charging by amount of data use and speed is not already solving this problem? I can go to comcast.com and buy an email only package right now. Also, why is this suddenly going to allow you to take market share from Comcast? Do you honestly think the reason we don't have competition in the ISP space is due to not being able to unbundle packages?

[s73ver_]

Or, you could just offer a low bandwidth plan. Problem solved, AND you don't have to fuck the rest of us over by destroying the internet.