[navyrain]

It should be obvious that AT&T's "concerns" are simply a thinly-veiled threat to withhold high-speed access from the citizenry unless they get guarantees that they can manipulate said access with impunity.

The thing is that AT&T and others won't just pack up their broadband monopolies and go home; they'll respond to whatever market conditions the regulatory regime shapes. They can complain all they like, but the citizenry overwhelmingly wants more integrity guarantees for their internet connections.

This sort of threat is akin to a tantrum from a spoiled child.

[pessimizer]

>AT&T's "concerns" are simply a thinly-veiled threat

I don't even think they are a threat. They're a rhetorical point that their lobbyists and bought and paid for supporters in government are going to drum endlessly leading into the 2016 elections.

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Do you remember how Obamacare said you could keep your policy, but it turned out that there were many horrible policies that wouldn't turn a profit if there were better policies with lower prices available from exchanges, so the insurance companies stopped offering them? Obama 'lied'. Just wait for Obamanet, where Obama told everyone that net neutrality would guarantee equal access for everybody, but AT&T couldn't afford to roll out to your town because of the burden of his new regulations. Regulations that didn't exist during the Internet's rise, and if they had existed would have strangled it in it's crib.

It is simply unprofitable to operate under regulations that micromanage every aspect, every packet that is delivered to every home. The rollout of gigabit internet to 2M homes over the past two years (to wealthy/gentrified portions of a few, big, prosperous cities) shows you how wonderful your internet could have been if AT&T could have figured out to make their original plan to roll that same speed out to 100 cities profitable under Obamanet. They couldn't; nobody could - the only reason they rolled out to the 2M households was as an extortion payment because Obama threatened to hold up their acquisition of DirecTV if they wouldn't do what he wanted.

Obama wants to treat every piece of the internet equal[sic] - hardcore child pornography and stolen music should download exactly as fast as your netflix that you paid for downloads to your TV, or your electronic medical records (that keep your family safe) download to your family doctor. That seems like something that should be managed by the technicians and job creators that actually built the networks, and have run the networks since the beginning - maybe they know a little more about your internet than some jerks in Washington that are worried that their fancy wine and cheese magazine website won't download fast enough because no real people want to read it. They don't like what we like, so their socialist instincts kick in, and they get scared that what they like can't survive in the market without cheating (Solyndra!!! Solyndra!!! They're trying to kill us!!!), so they regulate that their things must always have as much of the internet as everybody else's things do, even if nobody has ever visited those websites in so long that when you go there, you get spiderwebs on your keyboard (chortle!)

It's socialism for their internet, but not for yours. When you hear them talking about this 'net neutrality' being 'fair' for everyone, look at all of those people in Brooklyn with their super-fast internet while your netflix is freezing so long that you can make a sandwich before it comes back and ask yourself - is this fair???.

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If AT&T weren't confident it had the political support, it would do whatever it was told. It would still be absurdly profitable. Profit levels might even end up being written into the law. AT&T knows that they have all of the Republicans (even the libertarians), they have the head of the FCC, and they have plenty of individual Democrats.

I think it's a good thing because the industry is going to pull out all stops and show all of their cards in order to kill this. We'll know who to target politically and who to support. I have little doubt that they will win, though, and this push will be entirely killed for some legislative procedural reason or in the courts on a technicality. Obama is terrible, always loses because he doesn't actually care, and the only reason he's pushing this is political pandering to people like me.

/rant

[xaa]

First, there's quite a difference between unprofitable and less profitable.

Secondly, the internet is a utility. Utilities are regulated because they are essential and because they spawn natural monopolies. Interestingly, the prices I pay AND the service I get for utilities that are recognized as such and regulated (electricity, water, natural gas) are great. Completely the opposite for my cell service and internet. YMMV.

The only way capitalism works is if you have competition. The investment costs are too high, the players have implicit noncompete agreements, and when competition threatens to happen in this area, one player just buys out the other.

[Aloha]

Regulation before, the whole monopoly thing, came with rates set based on a rate of return, in exchange, all traffic had to be carried equally - and service had to be provided universally, meaning to every customer in the service footprint.

If we return to that mechanism, it will all work, if we try to do one or the other, nothing will work, meaning, you can't net neutrality it without making internet access a common carrier product, and by setting rates based on a reasonable rate of return.

Local regulation is a far bigger impact on building out a new network than any other single factor - it can take up to two years just to pull a permit to upgrade a cell site cabinet, its an order of magnitude more for something the magnitude of building out even a FTTN network.

[pessimizer]

>First, there's quite a difference between unprofitable and less profitable.

Not for fiber that was never rolled out. That can be exactly as profitable or unprofitable as you need it to be to make your point.

[xaa]

The CEO is implicitly claiming here that: a) given the current regulatory environment, the expansion would be profitable (since they're doing it), and b) if net neutrality were passed, there is a serious possibility that it would no longer be profitable.

Net neutrality does not really affect what customers pay. So, there are two possibilities here: the first is that AT&T was planning on shaking down Netflix, Google, et al for peering, in an amount large enough to make the difference between the expansion being profitable or unprofitable. The second possibility is that he is full of hot air and net neutrality would not significantly affect their profit margin.

[pessimizer]

If Google and Netflix want to use all of the internet and still take all of your money, why shouldn't they pay for it? Under net neutrality they're not allowed to.

[xaa]

Traffic on the modern internet is almost totally unidirectional: it comes from big content providers and goes to consumers. When I pay my ISP for internet, I am paying them for the service of delivering the bits from the content providers to me. The concept of Netflix or Google "using up" all the internet is incoherent, because by the definition of an ISP all the traffic they generate is going to consumers who are paying the ISP and are bandwidth-capped.

Imagine if the major postal service providers decided that, instead of only the sender paying for the package, now both the sender and the receiver have to pay, because they are both "using" the service.

I suppose there is nothing inherently wrong with someone being paid twice for the same service, although it comes across as incredibly greedy, but the end effect is that consumers pay more and the ISPs get more profit, because the content providers' costs will be passed on to consumers.

EDIT: There's also no logical reason why the content providers should be paying ISPs for peering. The reverse is equally "logical". You might as well ask why Google and Netflix aren't shaking down ISPs because they provide things that customers want and the ISP would be less desirable without them.

[msh]

Why should the bandwidth be paid twice? It's all ready paid for by the consumer so why should Netflix also pay?

[comex]

Of course Google for one is trying to "pay for it" by getting into the ISP business.