With no NN, you need to make deals with every ISP for your online services. It is only cost effective to do such deals in your main markets. Thus we Balkanize the Internet.
I was not making myself clear; the top comment seems to imply that there's some sort of natural connection between anti-globalism (in the popular sense of the term) and a rejection of net neutrality laws.
I am a fierce proponent of net neutrality, and I don't understand how you can reasonably conclude that I must therefore be pro-globalism.
Or how you can say that someone who is anti-globalist is probably also anti net neutrality.
That's the connection I don't understand. How do you make it?
Neutral networks converge on natural monopolies, globally. So a neutral net ends up with Facebook and Google "on top" in every country. This is globalisation in the Naomi Klein sense: the same brands dominating every market.
Of course, a non-neutral net ends up with the ISPs as natural monopolies instead, but these are local and a lot closer to the state in most places.
How well this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear. The issue is obscured in America because the big players are American, but I think it plays better in Europe where privacy concerns about exporting data matter.
Wow, thank you - I've never heard that argument before.
I'm not sure I know of an intelligent right-leaning person who thinks monopolies of any kind is a good idea, but I can see the argument being used in a "stepping-stone" sense towards a Republican ideal less regulated environment that would "naturally eradicate" monopolies.
I can see it used like that, but I've never heard of it. Of course, that might be because I'm not from the US.
Also, I don't necessarily agree that ISPs are closer to the state in most places, but that's not worth talking about because as far as I can see, neither of us agree with the argument anyway, you only enlightened me to its existence.
But like you said yourself, how this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear.
The original poster said,
> "It goes along with the Trump political theme of anti-globalization."
So that's really the question at hand. At this point, it feels to me like the original poster is just virtue-signalling, which baffles me.
Depends on the structure, but a lot of them are inheritors of telcos, which were often nationalised and/or subject to state control, surveillance and censorship. I was thinking particularly of BT and its heir Openreach, which owns all the wires. While they may be privatized the oversight is a lot closer than that of SV startups.
Owning a lot of physical infrastructure and needing to dig up roads requires having a good working relationship with the authorities, at least. Whereas to be Facebook you don't even need a local presence in the country.
Indeed, I've read on and off about ISPs lobbying local US government bodies for probably a decade or more.
I'm not sure what we are discussing, or if there is any point of contention between us that I can't see.
Perhaps you're not as much replying to me as simply being informative for posterity. In which case I'll thank you again, and stop writing now as to not drown out the information with drivel :-)
A subsidized Internet connection is just wishful thinking.
Online services (Google, Facebook, ...) make just a few bucks per user. This is peanuts compared to what broadband costs. The fixed costs alone are tens of dollars per month.
The real reason we have few ISPs is that building facilities require large amounts of capital, returns are low and the incumbents have already built out the profitable markets.
Regulation is not the root of the problem. Sure, lessening the burden would help, but not solve the problem.
But I can't see why regulation must be necessary to maintain net neutrality; of course it's a good thing, I'm just not sure the government necessarily needs to mandate it.
Documented abuses of net neutrality were few and far between and there really wasn't a precedent for the 2010 Act in the first place. Mobile phone carriers are not subject to the same net neutrality rules, yet I haven't heard of any of the 4 major providers deliberately throttling internet service.
>> Can't have that if there is no competitive ISP you can change to, if you don't like this NN violating ISP.
>Sure, but that indicates a need for competition, not net neutrality.
True. I'm fine with not requiring NN in markets where there are at least four more equivalent or better options to chose from, one of which has to be following NN.
> As I said in another comment, even if it prevents some of the worst abuses by incumbents, net neutrality regulation isn't going to create more competition.
Again true, but that does not mean we should allow NN abuse in the absence of competition.
>> This analogy breaks down immediately, because Comcast is already getting Netflix traffic for free. There is no toll that needs to be subsidized, no charge that needs to be zero rated. Comcast is just blackmailing Netflix for protection money.
> I don't think you understand the example. Mail carriers also get packages from Amazon for "free" in that sense. They don't pay Amazon for the right to deliver Amazon's mail.
I understand the example just fine, it's you that's got the wrong end of the stick.
Your first error is equating the mail carriers with Comcast. Comcast is not the mail carrier. The mail carriers are not the recipients of each piece of mail. Comcast, on the other hand, is the recipient of the bits.
A more apt analogy is that Comcast is the building owner with a mail room. The mail carrier drops off letters to the mail room, for free to Comcast. Comcast then distributes the letters to each tenant, who all pay Comcast for this letter delivery service.
Not a single building owner would get their mail delivered by the mail carriers, if they had a guard standing at the mail room door and if that guard demanded payment before letting anybody pass. In fact that would be a really quick way of ending up in court.
Your second error is thinking that the delivery of mail is the same as the delivery of bits. Each piece of mail requires incremental energy and manhours to deliver, whereas Comcast does not incur any marginal cost for taking delivery of and passing along the bits that their customers have requested.
>> You do realize that this effectively sets up Comcast as the gatekeeper to the Internet? Do you really want Comcast to be able to decide what's on your Interwebz?
>If the market was sufficiently competitive, then Comcast wouldn't be the gatekeeper. If Comcast behaved badly, people would switch to a different provider.
Yes, that's how it works in theory. Too bad Comcast doesn't have any competition in most areas. What's your non-theoretical solution?
> Not every instance of possible bad behaviour needs to be regulated.
So, allow bad behavior until somebody comes along with billions of dollars and builds out a (hopefully) better behaved competitor?
>> That's even before we get into the fact that requiring to contract with Comcast before you can offer any online service is a barrier to entry and a competitive barrier.
> We're talking about zero-rating, not "requiring to contract with Comcast before you can offer any online service". Those are completely different things.
Please explain how those are different things. How will I be able to stream HD cat videos to my users with Comcast without contracting with Comcast for zero rating?
>> So that's your solution? Screw the small guys?
> My solution is to increase competition, actually. My point is that we don't penalize big companies for being successful by taking away the benefits of being big, such as economies of scale.
How is being able to afford to pay protection money an economy of scale?
> The "small guys" have to compete as well and shouldn't rely on the state to reduce consumer benefit in order to make it easier for them to increase their market share.
Wait, what?! How is consumer benefit reduced by abolishing NN? How is consumer benefit reduced by increased availability of online services?
>> Even if we start now, there won't be another option for years.
> That's not necessarily true. For example, the FCC could do what Canada does and require ISPs to sell Internet access at fixed wholesale rates to resellers. Competition will spring up overnight.
You know, that's what we had with the Telecom Act of '96. The FCC decided we shouldn't have that after they lost the Brand X case.
Any other suggestions? Preferably some which can be practically implemented in a reasonably short time frame, such as years instead of decades.
> There are many other approaches as well, such as blocking municipalities from entering into monopoly franchise agreements with ISPs, ensuring equal access to rights of way, and supporting municipal broadband.
I'm all aboard with these suggestions, but even with all of these any improvement will take years, if not decades, and presupposes billions of capital and totally ignores the winner takes all of natural monopolies.
