[dinoleif]

"Net neutrality" is one of the most Orwellian terms in modern usage.

It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.

Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations? Whose lives have been made better? Compared to what?

Net neutrality advocates are utterly unable to give convincing answers to these questions.

[jdavis703]

Net neutrality means that ISPs are required to be neutral to Internet-based services. You might disagree with if this regulation is required, but the term itself is not "Orwellian."

People who will be harmed is anyone who doesn't want their media coming from sources controlled by large corporations such as TimeWarner, Facebook, News Corp., etc. Such conglomerates will get special deals that make it harder for more "alternate" media sources to compete.

[ajmurmann]

OK, I take the bait: Netflix and it's customers were harmed by traffic being throttled and customers being held hostage.

[dinoleif]

In what way are customers "held hostage"?

If you sign up for an internet plan that promises not to throttle certain sites and then that provider throttles those sites, you can sue them.

If you sign up for an internet plan that makes no such promises, why would one expect anything different?

This may sound like a harsh reality, but it's called "taking personal responsibility" and "voting with your feet". Switch to another internet provider.

The appeal to paternalistic regulatory bodies to restrict the choices of other consumers (who may want to purchase cheaper, more restricted internet plans) is creepy.

[charonn0]

> Switch to another internet provider.

That's not an option for most Americans, and part of the reason why net neutrality is necessary.

[dinoleif]

This is plainly false.

Most households have multiple internet providers.

[so33]

In Ontario, there are three major internet providers: Rogers, Bell, and Telus. For the longest time, their plans (all of them) had bandwidth caps, something that would be unheard of in the United States. They used to be extremely ungenerous, about 100 GB a month or worse. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/how-internet-use...)

The other internet providers, Bell and Telus, had an opportunity to distinguish themselves here.

But they didn’t. They had bandwidth caps too. There was a smaller ISP (TekSavvy) which offered 300GB bandwidth caps (still ridiculous by US standards), which they could offer as a result of a law requiring Canadian ISPs to resell infrastructure to smaller providers (meaning TekSavvy has access to all of Rogers’ customer base). Around 2015, Rogers started introducing plans with higher bandwidth caps, and bandwidth restrictions have relaxed (but they still exist).

It took pretty much a decade for innovation-stifling bandwidth restrictions to stop being a thing in Ontario, and arguably only because of a law (i.e. government interference) letting smaller ISPs use big ISP infrastructure.

[Fnoord]

100 GB/month doesn't tell us much if you don't include a date for context (the Ars article is from 2011).

I think that if you are in a market with caps, and you go offer a subscription without a cap, you end up with a bunch of subscribers who will saturate their line. So it makes more sense to slowly compete on increasing the caps, quite like we see in the mobile industry as well. Plus, network capacity goes up (hence I said date context matters).

Personally, I got nothing against caps, as long they're clear and the subscriber is informed about it beforehand. A FUP has a cap as well. If you download 24/7/365.25 on broadband then many ISPs will complain. Not all, but many will. Although nowadays less than say in the 90s or 00s.

[lovehashbrowns]

Phew! That's so true. Before Google Fiber came to my apartment complex, I only had Time Warner if I wanted broadband internet. The option aside from that was 56k or satellite. So many options.

In Chicago, I had Comcast and AT&T DSL. Neither was very fast, and Comcast was really expensive (something like $90+ if I wanted decent speeds). Again, very fortunate of me. I chose to go with AT&T because I was a poor college student. Trying to watch Youtube on that was a complete nightmare. I was also very unlucky if one of my online courses required watching an instructional video or a lecture.

So many options! Expensive and slow internet vs. cheap and really crappy internet. Both with data caps, awful customer service, constant connection issues, expensive+aging equipment--gee wiz we're so lucky.

[eregorn]

I'm wondering where you are getting your information from. Particularly, when I search my own zip on ISP search sites, I get anywhere from 4-6 providers even though I only have 2 options. There's possibly a discrepancy between what's reported and what customers actually have.

[dboreham]

From the ISP lobbyist she works for?

[charonn0]

If you count sub-broadband connections, sure.

[dinoleif]

"not an option for most Americans"

OK.

[swozey]

Let me guess, you live in some mecca of ISP options like the Valley? Because the rest of us don't. I live in a major tech city of 1mil+ pop, to the point that a quarter of the city has Google Fiber, and the only ISP options my neighborhood has (12 miles from downtown and in a vastly tech area) is 1 Cable provider, 1 DSL provider, and Directv.

That means my speed options are 300mbps, 3, or 1.5 with 400ms latency.

Such great "options" if my cable provider decides to upcharge me now.

[orthecreedence]

> live in some mecca of ISP options like the Valley

Oh man, I wish. I live in the heart of SF and the only option I have is Comcast. I suppose I could try Monkeybrains, but I'd have to get landlord approval and that may be an issue.

The point is, in the US, even in the tech capital of the world, we are still encumbered by private ownership of internet infrastructure.

It's fucking pathetic.

To be clear, I'm a supporter of Net Neutrality, but more so a more built-out municipal fiber system across the US.

[swozey]

Yeah. It's an absolute slap in the face to be told "Just pick another provider, you have 2 alternatives!" when those alternatives are 10x slower and my main source is already below the fastest in the city (gig). It's like telling me to turn in my cell phone for a rotary land line or to just suck it up.

Internet should've been made a utility a decade ago.

[vilmosi]

I highly doubt any Internet plan will list all the websites they won't throttle and it's unreasonable to expect them to do so.

Would you be happy if your electricity provider was free to block access to, I don't know, refrigerators?

[steveadoo]

There IS no other provider. At least not for me. And pretty much everyone I know.

We wouldn't need net neutrality if the ISPs didn't have a monopoly.

[so33]

Customers are “held hostage” because often there is only one choice of ISP. They may not offer throttling.

How can you sue your ISP if there is a clause that you must go through binding arbitration instead?

How can you switch to another internet provider if AT&T is the only game in town?

[tpolischuk]

A huge portion of the country does not have access to multiple ISPs or has access to only 2. Capitalism doesn't work without competition. It's also naive to assume everyone can just afford hiring lawyers.

[berbec]

I live in New York City on the island of Manhattan. I have 1 (one) ISP choice. Would you suggest I switch to cellular?

[charonn0]

> Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations?

It's not that these regulations didn't exist, it's that they hadn't been formalized as regulations. Net neutrality is how the Internet has worked for over 30 years, and is what made it such a success.

[vorpalhex]

Does your ISP have the ability to censor the internet for you?

Do you watch Netflix? If you don't, that's ok, because most consumers do use it or a competing service. Internet Companies absolutely did try to charge Netflix extra, and in some cases throttled them. This was well documented.

I don't know if you're a corporate shill or just genuinely lack the ability to comprehend how bad this is. Spectrum, Verizon and their ilk have absolutely shown zero regard for consumers and there is no reason to believe that pattern of behavior is going to change anytime soon. If they can screw over their consumers for a dollar, they will, just like they have continually done so in the past.

[tzs]

Netflix is a special case, because it was generating some unbelievable fraction of the total internet traffic in the US for a few hours each evening. The internet was not designed for such large amounts of traffic in such a short time all coming from one source. Almost all cases of Netflix throttling or blocking turned out to be due to legitimate traffic management of overloaded links.

I believe most of the cases where Netflix ended up paying were also to deal with the effect of the large traffic on peering arrangements. You have networks that have a peering arrangement where neither charges the other for transit for the other's traffic, relying on the fact that each is sending on average about the same amount through the other, so it all balances out. Netflix traffic greatly upset that balance.

I'm not sure that even now the Internet can really handle a Netflix-like service well. Netflix at least partly addressed the problem by putting their content in a CDN, often making arrangements to host their machines right in ISP data centers, so that the Netflix load would be coming from all over instead of just a small region.

That can work for Netflix, and the next few things that get big, but how far can that go? We can't have everyone that gets big putting machines in ISP data centers, can we?

[vorpalhex]

That is perhaps the single greatest amount of bullshit in one paragraph that I have ever read in my entire life.

[arcbyte]

Are you referring to the topic in this 2014 article refuting your claim about "internet companies" trying to charge Netflix extra? When in fact Netflix's own ISP, who Netflix rightly pays, was actually doing critically important network management.

I am attentive to Net Neutrality arguments because I care about an open internet, but I have yet to hear one that doesn't betray a total lack of understanding of how the internet actually works; i.e., peering. Perhaps counterintuitively, the FCC is right on the money about rolling back Obama's populist regulations.

[arcbyte]

Forgot to actually post the article: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2014/11/25/how-netf...

[vorpalhex]

Net Neutrality doesn't prevent QoS related management, but it does prevent per site throttling.

My ISP doesn't have a right to throttle streaming video content because they want to sell me a $90 cable package.

[arcbyte]

Throttling is or can be indistinguishable from QoS management.

[Canada]

It cuts both ways. What's to stop Google, Amazon, Netflix and Facebook from blocking all traffic from AT&T entirely? How long would Comcast or AT&T survive without access to the top 50 sites?

[creaghpatr]

Bingo. More competition, more possibilities.

[TheDong]

> first 20 years of the internet without these regulations

Those regulations existed for most of that time because ISPs then were dial-up over phone-lines, and the phone-lines were under Title II, so de-facto all internet was.

[dragonwriter]

> "Net neutrality" is one of the most Orwellian terms in modern usage.

> It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies

It was coined in academia in 2003; the concern was raised (without the term) at least as early as 1994, well before most of the “large tech companies” embracing it existed.

> to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.

No, while it was largely an abstract concern when the issue was raised in the 90s, and even perhaps when the term was coined in 2003; by the time in 2004 that the FCC defined it's “Network Freedom” principles concrete threats were visible, and for years before the first effort to adopt regulation (starting shortly after the Network Freedom principles) the FCC responded to numerous concrete problems with case-by-case actions, which provided the direct experience with real, existing problems on which the regulatory efforts of the two Open Internet orders was based. The idea that the regulation efforts were preemptive ignores the well-documented history f the issue.

[tzs]

Both Verizon and AT&T executives publicly stated that they wanted to charge sites like Google and Yahoo in order for the ISPs customers to be allowed to access those sites.

Stopping them from doing that was one of the reasons that first Congress and then the FCC took up the net neutrality issue about 10 years ago.