[artursapek]

Honest question, what changes can we expect as ISP consumers if this happens?

A follow up, if all it is is them charging customers more for using more bandwidth, how is that any different from any other fundamental resource like water, electricity, etc? Why should I pay as much money for my SSH and Hacker News as the guy down the street streaming Netflix all day?

[legoforte]

That's a good question. Net Neutrality is not about whether an ISP can charge you more for using more bandwidth. It's about whether an ISP can charge your more (or restrict your usage) based on which websites you communicate with.

One way to think of it is that we already have "electric neutrality" (not a real term), which is to say, you pay for the amount of electricity you use, but you're free to plug in any appliance you want. Losing "electric neutrality" would mean that, for example, your utility could charge you more or less for plugging in an Apple microwave than a Microsoft microwave. That would be insane. Can you imagine trying to start a company selling a new appliance if you had to pay a special fee to an electric company to stop them preventing your customers from plugging it in?

Net neutrality supporters want the internet to be treated like a utility. We are willing to pay for the amount of data we use, but we are not willing to let an ISP decide which websites should have their data made cheaper or more expensive.

An internet with net neutrality is one where you pay for access to the whole internet (perhaps per Gb or perhaps your ISP chooses to sell you a plan with unlimited data). An internet without net neutrality is one where you might pay $X for a connection that only talks to Facebook, and connecting to Gmail costs $Y more. A brand-new startup in a world without net neutrality is at a huge disadvantage if they aren't included in the package of websites that a customer buys. That's the end of the internet as we know it.

[bzbarsky]

> you pay for the amount of electricity you use, but you're free to plug in any appliance you want

You can get metered at different rates for different uses for electricity. A simple example I found just now is shown in https://www.eversource.com/content/docs/default-source/rates... (see Rate 1 vs Rate 5 vs Rate 18), but that sort of setup is pretty common.

Now, this is metering based on _type_ of use (heating vs hot water vs whatever else), not based on the manufacturer of your water heater. But to be a devil's advocate for a moment, this is the sort of thing ISPs _claim_ they want to do: prioritize certain _types_ of content over others. Now I don't believe them on this, of course...

But a priori, there is not necessarily a problem with an internet where you pay one rate for data streams that need certain bandwidth and latency guarantees and a different rate for ones that don't. That would be equivalent to the different-uses electrical billing above.

[pdonis]

Your comparison with "electric neutrality" is a great analogy. Another one I've used is "road neutrality": you can be charged a toll for using a road, but what if your toll depended on what model of car you drove? Or what if you had to have a certain model of car to use the road at all?

[artursapek]

OK, thanks. That's a great explanation. Now it's clear why everyone hates this. Fuck.

[bo1024]

> if all it is is them charging customers more for using more bandwidth

It's not -- this is currently legal. Examples of what they can do if NN is repealed are: charge you extra per month to use SSH, VPN or other forms of encrypted traffic; and charge the guy down the street extra per month to stream Netflix (but Comcast video comes bundled free).

> what changes can we expect as ISP consumers if this happens?

It's hard to predict with much certainty. I see short term and medium term possibilities and likelihoods.

1. Short term, expect pricing changes that involve bundled services. Video is very likely first and biggest -- some video services strike deals with some ISPs to be offered at low cost while their competitors cost customers extra.

However this principle could easily be extended to any kind of websites -- music, social media, online banking, retailers, search engines, news sites, etc. For example you could picture a deal between CNN and Comcast such that all basic internet plans include CNN free but block Fox, NBC, etc unless the customer pays for a news upgrade.

2. There is also a near-term likelihood of extra charges for certain kinds of traffic -- SSH and VPNs top of the list because they can circumvent the other blocks; gaming; torrents; etc.

3. Censorship. This I think will start slow but is the biggest medium and long term threat. It could start with some politically unpopular sites like thepiratebay.org and wikileaks.org. Then I would expect it to creep in scope gradually, and soon the government will want to tell ISPs what to block like they do in Britain.

4. Messing with traffic in other ways, e.g. stuttering or buffering videos, dropping packets, changing contents of unencrypted connections to change text or insert/replace ads, etc. These things I see as possible but less likely, especially with encryption being more popular. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see these underhanded tactics employed against competing video services like Netflix, so that the customer gets fed up and switches to ISP Video.

[carry_bit]

> 3. Censorship. This I think will start slow but is the biggest medium and long term threat.

We already have that under NN (the Daily Stormer incident a few months back).

[bo1024]

That did occur, but two points. First, any additional avenue for censorship is bad. Second, it's a completely different mechanism. There, if I recall right, web hosting companies refused to host the website. Worth noting, this can be routed around by hosting the website in other countries or even on one's own computers. Still I agree it's a form of corporate censorship.

However, the corporate censorship opened up by removing NN is much more direct and, I argue, frightening, because there are much fewer ISPs, and they can directly block users from accessing the site very easily. Once they start it will be very easy for them to grow their blacklists quickly. Further, it's actually in the direct business interest of these ISPs to block sites in many cases, which was not the case for web hosting. Finally, it's much easier for governments to step in and start censoring via this mechanism since they can control all ISPs in their own country -- not true for web hosting.

[arise]

There are countless ways you can use traffic discrimination to pad your own pockets without adding any value to the economy.

In the past we've seen ISP's block apps and websites that compete with their own services. For example, Verizon blocked tethering apps and AT&T blocked FaceTime at one point. A slightly different example is the time Comcast imposed a monthly cap on users (250 GB), but then exempted their own streaming media service.

We don't know how it will play out in the future. Most likely ISP's will act slowly at first to avoid excessive backlash. They may try to shake down websites instead of customers directly. For instance, they may take payolla form established players and slow down their competitors. Or they could do the cable TV style bundling thing. I suspect that VOIP, VPN, streaming, bittorent, and cryptocurrencies will suffer first and hardest.

[HuggableSquare]

With regards to exempting services from data caps, it's called "zero-rating" and as far as I am aware, the net neutrality laws we have on the books don't mention it (which is why mobile carriers have been doing it for years).

I do believe that if you exempted only your own services you would start to fall into anti-competition territory though.

[jlgaddis]

If memory serves, the current Net Neutrality doesn't apply to mobile carriers. They got exempted from that and some other rules apply in their cases.

[tangent128]

Metered usage is not a violation of neutrality.

Varying prices or manipulating quality of service based on the endpoint's identity is.

[artursapek]

So if I understand, they're disguising this as "Netflix eats up so much bandwidth" but really it's "we want an unfair advantage over Netflix"? Otherwise, I have no idea why republicans would support this.

[bo1024]

Yes, that's a good assessment. You can think of it this way: ISPs act like roads between people's houses and the sites they want to access. People currently pay ISPs to reserve a certain amount of road, and net neutrality says they can drive whatever cars they want over that fraction of road without being discriminated against in pricing or speed.

The ISPs say things like "xx% of traffic is Netflix -- that uses up an unfair portion of bandwidth". But a more accurate phrasing is that xx% of people on the road choose to fill their purchased slots with Netflix traffic.

Right now, since all traffic on the road is routed fairly and equally under NN, all video services can compete on a fair footing. But after eliminating NN, ISPs will be able to charge users a big premium based on what kind of traffic they route down the road, even though there's no difference given that they already paid to reserve that portion of the road. So ISPs can route their own video service faster and everyone else's slower (or charge you extra to regain equal speeds), which squashes competition.

> I have no idea why republicans would support this.

I don't get it either. I think that most republican politicians have little understanding of the issue and how anti-competitive it would be to eliminate NN. Instead, they just hear superficial arguments that "NN is a regulation, and regulations are bad for competition" and since this comes from other Republicans, they trust and believe it. Unfortunately the ones it's coming from are lobbied really hard by ISPs, perhaps they believe their own propaganda.

[carry_bit]

> People currently pay ISPs to reserve a certain amount of road, and net neutrality says they can drive whatever cars they want over that fraction of road without being discriminated against in pricing or speed.

In the case of roads, heavy vehicles like big rigs cause more wear-and-tear than light vehicles like compact cars. It would be fair then to charge heavy vehicles more so users of light vehicles aren't paying for users of heavy vehicles.

[artursapek]

...but it wouldn't be fair to charge people using the same car more or less depending on where they are driving.

[carry_bit]

Some roads have weight limits, so you're actually banned from driving certain places depending on the car you have.

[bo1024]

Sure, you can take my exact analogy, but where "fraction of road" is interpreted as "fraction of the weight the road can take". The key point is charging fairly by usage (e.g. weight) not by brand, for example Netflix trucks costing more than Comcast trucks of the same weight.

[tzs]

In the case of Trump, no one knows if he would support or oppose net neutrality if he knew what it was. He thinks net neutrality means that websites will be required to be neutral in their content [1], which will be used to target conservative media.

[1] "Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media." https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/53260835850816716...

[tzs]

> Metered usage is not a violation of neutrality

According to the document the FCC released trying to justify this stuff, ISPs can't always figure out how do that, so they need paid prioritization: "Without paid prioritization, ISPs must recover these costs solely from end users, but ISPs cannot always set prices targeted at the relevant end user".

See paragraph 252, which starts on page 142, of this document: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...

Here's the full paragraph in case the FCC site gets slow (their file hosting wasn't designed for a world where people are actually interested in FCC documents):

FCC> 252. Efficiency. We find that a ban on paid prioritization is also likely to reduce economic efficiency, also likely harming consumer welfare. This finding is supported by the economic literature on two-sided markets such as this one, and the record. If an ISP faces competitive forces, a prohibition against two-sided pricing (i.e., a zero-price rule), while benefiting edge providers, typically would harm both subscribers and ISPs. Moreover, the level of harm to subscribers and ISPs generally would exceed the gain obtained by the edge providers and, thus, would lead to a reduction in total economic welfare. The reasons for this are straightforward. Some edge services and their associated end users use more data or require lower latency; this may be the case, for example, with high-bandwidth applications such as Netflix, which in the first half of 2016 generated more than a third of all North American Internet traffic. Without paid prioritization, ISPs must recover these costs solely from end users, but ISPs cannot always set prices targeted at the relevant end users. The resulting prices create inefficiencies. Consumers who do not cause these costs must pay for them, and end users who do cause these costs to some degree free-ride, inefficiently distorting usage of both groups. When paid prioritization signals to edge providers the costs their content or applications cause, edge providers can undertake actions that would improve the efficiency of the two-sided market. For example, they could invest in compression technologies if those come at a lower cost than paid prioritization, enhancing efficiency, or, if they have a pricing relationship with their end users, they could directly charge the end user for priority, leading those end users to adjust their usage if the user’s value does not exceed the service’s cost, again enhancing economic efficiency. And to the extent an ISP has market power, antitrust law would only allow such ISPs to engage in pro-competitive paid prioritization practices.

[wwweston]

> Without paid prioritization, ISPs must recover these costs solely from end users, but ISPs cannot always set prices targeted at the relevant end users.

Is there any way this statement is not a straight up pants-on-fire lie? Why wouldn't an ISP have metering built into its infrastructure? And the only other thing you'd need in order to make it happen is the freedom to set your price -- are there places in the US where ISPs aren't free to price on bandwidth usage?

[Can_Not]

I've never seen an ISP that didn't have an extremely accurate measurement of my usage in MB, so it's a bold face lie.

[darkstar999]

I would also like to hear a rational answer to this. For example Comcast claims that they support "sustainable net neutrality protections" for their customers. Then why are they fighting so hard to dismantle it? What are they going to change?

[HuggableSquare]

The arguments I've read is that ISPs would like to investigate traffic priority solutions. e.g. I'm a business that needs low latency (maybe I'm League of Legends or something similar), so I could pay Comcast to prioritize my packets.

Opponents would argue that it's pretty much the same as a "slow-lane" by virtue of the fact that everyone else gets de-prioritized. Proponents would argue that companies like Netflix already put their hardware in ISP's data centers to get that advantage, so this is just a more accessible way to do the same thing.