[AnthonyMouse]

> Why doesn't the monopoly employ the same cost-saving measures for even bigger margins?

They would.

The issue is that competition alone wouldn't fix it, because there is an information deficit. Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors. And since this is always bad -- it's anti-competitive in the market for over-the-top services, so this is an anti-trust rule -- it should be prohibited regardless of whether there is competition in the ISP market. Because you need it in order to preserve competition in the markets for other services.

[oceanplexian]

Except I live in one of the places that has widespread competition (Utah) and can pick from one of dozens of Fiber Internet providers, including some that can provide 10Gbps service, a cable company, and even technically Starlink.

How many of them are throttling content to prevent competition in this hypothetical anti-net neutrality scenario? Exactly zero.

Which is evidence to me that Net Neutrality is a sham, what more people need is a free market. Not another government monopoly with some regulations slapped on.

[AnthonyMouse]

They're two independent things. You can still require network neutrality in a competitive market with multiple providers.

Whether a market would converge on providers violating network neutrality depends on the characteristics of the market and its customers etc. But if nobody would have violated it anyway, what's the benefit of not having the law? Whereas if you don't have the law and do have violations, that's bad.

[qeternity]

What if some people would be happy to pay more for priority, and others would be happy to receive cheaper non priority service.

These are very real things. Regulating them out of existence makes no sense.

[CrazyCatDog]

How competative was the isp market in Utah before Google fiber subsidized the massive build-out?

Google threw in the towel on wiring more new cities about mid-way through the SLC build, which makes need think perhaps the biggest obstacle to your thesis bearing fruit, is upfront infrastructure investments…

[oceanplexian]

Google all but abandoned Utah, as soon as we got municipal fiber in most cities (Utopia). Utopia was built out by government issued bonds and shares 0 physical infrastructure with Google. Google refused to participate in the program, because they didn’t like the idea of dark fiber where anyone could “choose a provider”.

Google wanted a monopoly.

The nice thing is that they can properly screw off, because now we have dozens of better options where I’m supporting the little guy instead of Silicon Valley Big Tech.

[addaon]

I live on (presumedly) the other side of Utah, right by the Arizona border, and we have no competition — a single real option. It’s the best, fastest, most reliable, and cheapest internet connection I’ve had access to in my life. What’s the lesson from this? No idea. There are some good companies out there I guess?

[parineum]

So the solution there is transparency.

I'd be much happier if the government regulations gave me information to make an informed decision rather than forced a decision on me.

[AnthonyMouse]

Transparency is part of the problem. It makes the anti-competitive practice easier to carry out because customers don't know they're getting screwed. But there's still a potential anti-trust issue even with perfect information.

Suppose Facebook doesn't want anyone using their competitors, so they subsidize the cost on some ISPs that then block their competitors. The customers of those ISPs are 15% of the market, and they know the other competitors are blocked, but they want the discount. Then the other 85% of people have to use Facebook in order to communicate with anyone on one of those ISPs, and social networks have a network effect, so now everybody is stuck on Facebook even if they don't use one of those ISPs, because they know somebody who does. This is anti-competitive and so an anti-trust problem.

[parineum]

I think it's much more likely people stop using Facebook in that condition. People may be "stuck" with Meta because everyone is on it but the situation you're describing is a big difference between zero friction to make an account and join everybody else and change your ISP so you can talk to your grandma and look at cats on instagram.

I'd rather have choice and transparency and see if the situation you've described arises. It sounds completely unrealistic to me and we don't have to make laws and regulations cover every single edge case right away, they can be modified as we go.

[shkkmo]

> people stop using Facebook in that condition.

You've failed to understand the example. Nobody would have to change ISPs to use Facebook because Facebook paid off the ISPs for some form of exclusivity. It is Facebook's competitors who would struggle wity user acquisition because not only do you have to convince users to change ISPs to use your competing platform, but you have to convince all your frienda and family to switch too if you wanna be able to call them.

> It sounds completely unrealistic

You are incredibly naive then. This sort of thing regularly happens all around the you. Kickbacks, exclusivity and companies colluding for competitive advantage is commonplace, not unrealistic.

[makeitdouble]

> think it's much more likely people stop using Facebook in that condition.

For the US, looking at iMessage's example, I'd say the trend would go the other way and Facebook getting way more power.

[digestivetires]

> I'd rather have choice and transparency

it is very hard to force trancparancy.

Transparancy (at least how I see it) is matter of culture.

For example, if you open up ISP accounting books to the public, creative people will find ways to hide things. Instead of line item “10M € kickback from facebook”, there will be “10M € sale to facebook”.

[ToucanLoucan]

I’d say the exact opposite. It’s clear the majority of customers here cannot make an informed decision either by way of incompetence about the technical aspects that would enable them to detect bad faith behavior on the part of ISPs, or lack of transparency, or outright lack of competition in their market. Competition does not work to increase quality if the customer cannot judge it. The entire benefits of markets and competition break down and become irrelevant.

Instead: make it a utility, subject to regulation and codes as any other. I don’t need to be a plumber to ensure I get adequate sewer service, I don’t need to be an electrician to ensure that I get adequate electrical service, why should I need to be sysadmin to make sure I get adequate network service? It makes no sense. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it makes even less sense because those examples require less education overall than you would to detect bad faith behavior on the part of your ISP. if you don’t have enough water pressure for your shower to function, you don’t need to be a plumber to diagnose that. If your homes electrical service is so bad that you can’t run your appliances you don’t need to be an electrician to judge that. But how do you know if your given ISP is throttling Netflix without substantial IT in your background?

I don’t think it’s an outrageous opinion that any Tom, Dick, or Harry, who is participating in this market should be able to get the service to a reasonable standard of quality that they are paying for without needing to verify it independently.

[oceanplexian]

> It’s clear the majority of customers here cannot make an informed decision either by way of incompetence about the technical aspects that would enable them to detect bad faith behavior on the part of ISPs

Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.

I’d sooner trust an average 15 year old to regulate the Internet than literally any elected politician or professional lobbyist.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.

This is such utterly brain-dead individualist defeatist nonsense that I struggle to respect it as an actual position. Do you believe either the common consumers or the politicians understand vehicles? And like, even the broad topic of vehicles belies several specifics of interest to regulators like emissions and safety features. Of course they don't know all of that. They hire in people qualified to judge the effectiveness of those systems and to write the regulations that will then be enforced by agencies charged with that task.

Is this perfect? Of course not, no human system is or ever will be, but I would argue that based on the overall trajectory from the initial rollout of cars in the 1940's to the average consumer, where we started with brutally primitive machines that would kill people basically all the time, both pedestrians and their drivers/passengers, that spewed black vile smoke out of completely audio and emission unmitigated exhausts and were utterly terrifying at even their comparatively low speeds, all the way until today, when you can, as a consumer, purchase a car that manages it's own emissions within the bounds of reason, has numerous safety features to keep you alive, and can safely travel at speeds that well exceed the maximums posted on any highway without utterly flying apart, as an original Model T probably would have attempting half that speed, and you can do that all without knowing fuck shit about cars, ensured of the fact that you will get at least a decent product that will not harm you if used properly? That seems to me to be overall, quite an effective regulatory atmosphere. Not perfect, again, but quite effective. And that regulatory market is broadly practiced every day for probably hundreds if not thousands of products you have purchased without a second thought, because you don't need to think about them, because government agencies you know nothing about are working to ensure the safety of that market.

We have had this shit figured out for almost a century I would say. The fact that ISPs now operate such an utterly critical resource for our daily lives with near total absence of regulation in terms of the product they deliver, the quality of it, the usability, etc. etc. is frankly ludicrous. We're sitting here having arguments about which ISP throttles which sites worse and how to avoid them, when the solution is clearly: Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service, you should be able to access Netflix, YouTube, Mega filesharing, 4chan, Imgur and fuckin PornHub at will with zero thought to the notion that any of them will perform any worse than any other because they didn't put together a sweetheart deal with your fucking cable company.

[oceanplexian]

> Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service

The problem with that statement is, like anything else imagined by bureaucrats, is divorced from reality. Hence my point that I wouldn’t trust the government to regulate the Internet.

Internet providers peer with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other networks. They do so in some cases by paying money, but in most cases through something called settlement free peering, which came out of mutually beneficial agreements to connect at perking exchanges. In all cases providers have avoided passing the costs down to consumers, even though the economics are incredibly complex.

IMHO Leave it to the experts. No one is paying a special fee to access 4chan or Netflix. It’s a big fat, widely disproven lie that proponents of net neutrality made up and have been arguing for nearly 15 years now, one that never came to pass.

[scarface_74]

The only reason utilities are regulated are because they are natural monopoly. It doesn’t make sense to have more than one utility company with right of way to dig up streets to create the needed infrastructure.

To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.

[AnthonyMouse]

> To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.

It's a natural monopoly in exactly the same way any other utility is. "It doesn't make sense to have more than one utility build towers everywhere to create the needed infrastructure." In theory if only one company did it you would only need one set of towers and costs would be lower. But a private monopoly doesn't exactly optimize costs either, and some utilities cost more to duplicate than others. It's much more expensive to have redundant roads than redundant cables running along the same set of utility poles or in the same cable trench, and cell towers are on that end of the range.

The spectrum is a red herring. You could operate live auctions to bid on spectrum in real time in areas of scarcity instead of allocating it permanently to particular companies. This would also give companies the incentive to operate more towers at lower power levels, because you'd only need to bid on spectrum in the same collision domain and lower power levels would cause that to be smaller areas with less contention, lowering their spectrum costs.

[scarface_74]

Do you realize how complicated that would make both the phones and leaving an area? Besides, even today some phones only operate over certain parts of the spectrum and some parts of the spectrum aren’t even conducive to transmitting through walls - the issue T-Mobile had for years.

And what problem are you trying to solve again?

[int_19h]

The only reason why anything is regulated is because society decided that the consequences of not regulating it produce undesirable outcomes for too many people in said society.

This is decidedly the case with ISPs today, so arguments over the pedantic definition of monopolies and whether it applies here are rather irrelevant.

[scarface_74]

We are talking about mobilr providers. Are you really saying there is no competition?

What do you hope to gain by regulation?

[Nullabillity]

Agriculture isn't a natural monopoly either, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have food safety standards.

[scarface_74]

Yes because something that will literally kill you if there aren’t standards is analogous to net neutrality.

But even if it were, it’s #199542 why HN commenters don’t understand what a “monopoly” is and why utilities that require physical infrastructure which are natural monopolies aren’t the same as cellular where there are three healthy competitors.

[avar]

And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email.

Don't assume that people only pick these plans because they're uninformed.

[AnthonyMouse]

The informed customers aren't the issue. If Disney is paying to make Netflix look bad, it's because somebody is getting fooled into thinking Netflix is to blame for this, otherwise what is Disney getting for their money? So that plan is an anti-competitive measure, regardless of whether it also presents an arbitrage opportunity for customers who don't care about video streaming. If its only customers were the arbitrageurs then Disney would have no reason to pay and it wouldn't exist.

[saghm]

> Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors

> And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email

It seems unlikely that there are anywhere close to as many of the latter as the former