[rich_sasha]

Not an American: what is the non-libertarian public-facing argument against net neutrality?

I'm sure its opponents say it's bad for the general public for some reason, and one of them might be some kind of "let market competition work it out" etc. If you discard that, what is left?

There is probably also the argument that various businesses want this repealed, this is kind of clear.

[sumtechguy]

There are 2 'net neutrality' items in play and are conflated and team lines drawn up ages ago.

One is the double charging of services. Buy service XYZ on the internet then the ISP says 'hey you buy or special package or ABC is throttled'. That is the one most people think of when they hear net neutrality. Or 'we have not cut a deal with XYZ no data for you'.

Then there is the 'stop the cap' ones. Where 'hey here is a nice unlimited service except when you use more than X data then its not'. 'want more data pay for more on top of your "unlimited" plan'.

Also at one point both 'sides' playing the other side. The donations flowed and the 'sides' were drawn up. I have watched this since it started. That was wild to watch. Then instead of passing laws to do it right they again are pretzelling the existing laws. Made some up and said yep thats good. Each "side" of the argument has had control of both houses and the presidential. Yet none of them got it done. Instead we are going to end up with more rubish and no real laws. Just made up interpretations that can change on a whim (and it will).

Then both sides are pretending there is robust competition and not oligopoly/monopoly pricing. When the reality is I used to be able to choose from 20 ISPs with different perks or whatever. I can now realistically pick between 2. They are then stepping in with a bunch of rules that make it even harder to make an ISP. That is by design and called regulatory capture. Not once have they talked about how to make competition more robust.

[dfxm12]

If you look at Ajit Pai's (former Verizon lawyer turned FCC chairman who did away with NN) comments, he basically says "there is no problem to solve".

However, you can read through this thread and see if you feel this is true or not today in practice, let alone in perpetuity in theory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37945011

[bombcar]

In a simplistic view, net neutrality prohibits QoS bandwidth allocation. You can't prioritize video over Linux ISO downloads.

In reality that would be solvable.

[r00fus]

This is not true at all. What it means is that an ISP can't prioritize their own video service over say, Netflix. Or their own (perhaps ad-infested) download service vs a straight ISO download from a distro's site.

[hn_acker]

Net neutrality prohibits ISPs from restricting internet traffic based on content, senders, and recipients [1]. It is not exclusively about restricting internet for profit reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

[supertrope]

The former Net Neutrality regulations provided exceptions for an ISP's own VoIP (phone), IPTV and other managed services.

[supertrope]

The former Net Neutrality regulations provided exceptions for an ISP's own VoIP (phone), IPTV and other managed services. That means the bundled phone service is inherently more reliable than an unaffiliated VoIP service using best effort delivery. As long as they did not anti-competitively block or hobble a competing over the top phone service they were legally fine.

On cellular the effect of priority is much more apparent. The "bundled" phone call service has very high priority and can function normally under network stress/congestion. Over the top Whatsapp or Facetime calls will suffer audio glitches or fail to connect under the same conditions.

[hn_acker]

Indeed. There should be no need for bandwidth "allocation" because fiber would provide enough for high-bandwidth tasks (video and games) and low-bandwidth tasks (sending emails) at the same time, for everyone. If large ISPs hadn't been purposefully committing subsidy fraud instead of building fiber, they wouldn't have to rely on lies about network scarcity. (For bonus info, see another comment I wrote [1].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949298

[axus]

Data traffic goes up to the physical limit, and everyone's services get sluggish with "no way" to fix it. Of course they could spend more money to fix it/compete but wanted an alternative.

[MerManMaid]

I really wish more of my fellow network engineers contributed to these conversations but alas.

As weird as it might sound, net neutrality really doesn't present any meaningful technical challenges. As a network engineer working for one of the big service providers, the only major change I foresee would be the person telling me which/whose traffic they want me to prioritize/throttle...

The other aspect I wanted to mention is when we're talking about service provider networks QoS ought to be viewed as a short-term answer rather than a permanent solution. (which is almost always more bandwidth) Think of it like taking a pain med when you have a cavity... Great way to alleviate some of pain in the moment, the problem is only get worse if you don't see the dentist.

[rich_sasha]

Oh, some kind of, "ISPs want to tailor a good service and do some clever optimisation but can't with NN"?

[slaymaker1907]

Some applications want extremely low latency compared to pretty much anything else such as cloud gaming. Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently. It's kind of like how when ordering stuff online, sometimes you don't care if it takes 3 weeks to arrive but other times you want same day shipping. It would be a bad experience if USPS was forced to only offer one priority class for delivery since people ok with slower delivery would be forced to pay for faster service than they need and people wanting faster delivery wouldn't have that option.

However, I think rules could be put in place to prevent the anti-competitive practices without limiting the legitimate use cases for going against net neutrality.

[hn_acker]

> Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently.

This is not convincing to me at all. ISPs could have supported low latency internet for everything, not just for gaming. If latency is too low then it's because the large ISPs are purposefully doing a bad job of upgrading to fiber and expanding fiber to places without internet access. Fiber would allow ISPs to provide service for cheap and still profit in the long term [1]. Subsidy fraud is as normal as breathing among large telecom companies such as AT&T [2], Comcast [3], and Verizon [4].

Internet bandwidth is not like shipping of physical goods. Sending twice the data doesn't cost the ISP twice the money, nor does it take twice the time. Data caps are artificial and unnecessary [5]. Any ISP trying to justify expensive, fast internet by bringing up metaphors of physical transfers and physical scarcity is lying to you.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-networks-real...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con...

[4] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

[5] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...]

[slaymaker1907]

You can believe whatever you like, but the fact is that it is may be expensive to get the necessary agreements on the backend for extremely low latency. I'm not talking about negotiating for 15ms, I'm talking about negotiating for 2ms latency.

[MerManMaid]

> Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently.

Could you provide an example of how net neutrality might impact a companies ability to form peering relationships and/or raise the difficultly of securing reasonable/enforceable SLAs with service providers?

[JacobThreeThree]

One group of corporations lobbying for a brand new law to cripple another group of competing corporations, with the side effect of good PR and a theoretical benefit to consumers, is not the proper way to regulate this issue.

The primary reason for people supporting net neutrality is due to the existence of clear-cut ISP monopolies. This problem of monopolistic ISPs could be easily solved by enforcing the existing anti-trust laws that have long been on the books. Net neutrality essentially gives these monopolies a pass, so long as they make some vague promises about not throttling.

Net neutrality is the convoluted nonsense regulation that gets written by politicians who are trying to balance the various sets of competing lobbying interests.

The correct and proper solution would be to simply enforce existing anti-trust laws.