The sticking point for me is that the market is already regulated such that it makes it very difficult for a competitor to challenge companies who engage in exploitative practices (and for similar reasons, the incentive to collude is extremely high). In a free market, net neutrality wouldn't need to be regulated because companies who attempted to enact business plans like the AT&T plan described in the article would rapidly find themselves losing marketshare to competitors.
I'm not really okay with the idea of regulating net neutrality from an ideological perspective, but from a practical one, we're kind of stuck with the market we have - effective regional monopolies are granted to a very small number of companies, and there is very little space for counterbalance from competition (which is why Google Fiber is such a Huge Frickin' Deal!). Left unfettered, the end result would likely be that the AT&Ts and Comcasts end up leeching their customers dry on both ends of the pipe, because those customers don't have any alternative.
In my ideal world, there would be no need to regulate net neutrality because I could penalize bad companies by refusing to do business with them, and getting my friends and family to do the same, but we don't have those options - choosing an ISP is a lot like choosing which knee you want to be hit in. In a market where companies have been granted regulatory monopolies, the invisible hand is rather ineffective.
Why would a free market guarantee net neutrality? All the big players could still prefer to offer products that curtail it. There's no logical step ensuring net neutrality.
An example - in Australia, there is an ISP called Internode, which used to be run by a techie called Hackett. They were very much for user's rights and net neutrality, and were always at the forefront of lobbying the government for users. Their support centers are in-country, and the web tools they offer make techies happy.
But they only have a sliver of the ISP pie, despite the very high quality product - because that shit does not come cheap. They're 50-100% more expensive. Instead the public run towards big brands like Optus - who actively engage in tactics like obscuring the structure of your bill to make it harder to understand, or engage in openly deceptive marketing, and see users as cattle to manipulate. Or they'll go to bargain-basement ISPs with woeful service, then complain about that service and give you a hateful stare when you suggest they pay a little more for good service.
I can see zero evidence to suggest that 'net neutrality' is a killer feature that would be automatically enabled by a free market.
Internode are amazing in every aspect and everyone I've switched to them continue to use them and continue to thank me to this day. The customer service is second to none: http://xkcd.com/806/
IIRC they were bought out by Adam internet. They were also among the first (the first?) to introduce naked DSL, which you still can't get here in the UK apparently.
The telcos are competing over very limited resources (easements necessary to build fiber, etc.). In the absence of a regulatory system you'd have cartels instead.
They may have been monopolies once, but they're not anymore. At least in the US. Most people already have two broadband subscriptions: home cable broadband and HSPA+ or LTE. The home cable broadband is in competition with ADSL throughout much of the nation, and the HSPA+/LTE providers are in fierce competition everywhere.
Furthermore, what makes you say this:
>In a free market, net neutrality wouldn't need to be regulated because companies who attempted to enact business plans like the AT&T plan described in the article would rapidly find themselves losing marketshare to competitors.
I certainly would not expect them to lose market share.
I'm not really sure that you can call mobile data networks competitors to home broadband, if for no other reason than that their usage is aggressively capped, and is device-specific. I've never heard of someone cancelling their cable broadband because they can just tether their phone for all their household's internet needs instead.
ADSL vs cable is certainly the big battlefield right now, but even then, you're dealing with one telco and one cable provider. Time-Warner and Comcast are so reviled that it's practically a joke now, but people still subscribe to their services by the millions, because they don't have any actual alternative.
> Furthermore, what makes you say this...I certainly would not expect them to lose market share.
If I had my choice of several competing, technologically-equivalent ISPs, and mine decided to start charging extra for full-speed access to Netflix (or Netflix started charging me extra because I was an EvilISP subscriber, meaning that sending me those bytes costs them extra), I'd jump ship to a competitor who didn't in a heartbeat.
The home cable broadband is in competition with ADSL throughout much of the nation...
Except the only cable company and the only phone company often collude to convince the state legislature to outlaw anything that could actually compete with them, like municipal fiber projects.
Why wouldn't you expect them to lose market share? They're actively hindering customers from their desired actions. Doesn't that typically mean customers will look for alternatives?
I don't think they'd always be given the choice to. Especially something like Netflix, which directly competes with cable companies and their online offerings.
The population didn't elect Bush II the first time [1]. The electoral college did, making it the fourth time a candidate winning the popular vote didn't win the electorate vote.
Would the alternatives of McCain or Romney have resulted in the current NSA scandal not happening? No, it's silly to think that way, especially because it was happening (on a slightly smaller scale) when Bush was president. How it's being handled now might not be the best way to handle it, but would it have been handled differently with McCain or Romney in the Oval Office?
And making a grand statement about how a vastly large group of people doing something you perceive as not being in their best interest doesn't mean they didn't believe it to be in their best interest.
1) Yes, the population did elect Bush II. According to the rules of the game, the population picked him. If you want to get all picky over it, you can note that XX% of the population didn't even vote - so technically the population didn't pick any of them! Har har.
2) The alternatives of McCain, Romney, and Gore were also chosen to be the alternatives by the population.
3) I'm not sure what this all has to do with the NSA.
4) You seem to think that net neutrality would be in their interest. Yet they seem to have selected politicians which oppose it. So that would be one (possible) example of the population acting against their own interests (as you see it).
Most rights are a balancing act. In this case, the freedom of the ISP is contrary to the freedom of the subscriber, so whose freedom is supreme?
I could understand opposition to net neutrality if there were competition in the ISP market. However, I have no choice but to use Comcast, so the idea that they can decide what sites I visit and how fast they are is very scary.
Bullshit. The "freedom" of the subscriber is not on the line. The subscriber can do as they wish. I can't go into a hotel and claim I have the "freedom" to use my room as a distillery just because I paid for the room.
The ISP can also regulate bandwidth as they wish. They're a company, not a public organization (depending on where you live). If you don't like it, choose another ISP. If you can't choose another ISP, work to change the situation so you can.
I'd rather get people pissed off enough at the current monopolistic ISP situation to change it rather than keep the situation at just the right place that no one is happy.
So... I'm supposed to move to another city, maybe even state, in order to place competitive pressure on my ISP?
Of course you mentioned the monopolistic ISP situation that creates that problem, but that seems to just be handwaving; I don't think you can point to angry consumers as a solution without explaining what exactly you think those angry consumers under a monopoly can possibly do to improve their situation without government intervention akin to the current FCC neutrality arrangement.
Agreed totally, except for the order of what should happen. The monopolies, which are usually granted by agreements with local governments, should end first.
How do you propose to distribute access to fiber networks laid in public land, then? Are the new competitors in these markets going to make individual contracts with every property owner they come in contact with, too?
I don't know .. that's something to be debated, however it does impinge on my individual freedom if my government decides who can wire what to my house. I did not personally agree to grant any corporation such a right.
Until then, arguments that net neutrality violates the freedom of the ISPs don't hold up, as any state-enforced monopolies must be considered at least partially public property.
It's something that has been debated. Do you think telecoms and utilities sprang into existence fully-formed world-wide the day you were born? These issues are not new, they date back centuries.
I don't. Neither, I'd wager, does djur, who you initially replied to. You should read his other posts in this thread.
He and I are both speaking of the practical problems of the mentality that governments shouldn't be involved at all, not arguing that telecom monopolies are a good thing.
You can't have a practical system of utilities of any sort without government involvement. That doesn't mean you have to have government-granted monopolies to nominally private companies. There are other options, like having the core utilities (e.g. fiber) be a public utility to begin with.
That analogy is not at all applicable. It would be more like you rented a hotel room over the phone, but when you show up to check in, they say "Oh, you are black. Sorry, we can't give you that room, but we have a smaller one in the basement".
Net neutrality means that it does not matter what kind of car you have, you are allowed to drive on the highway. No one is going to say, oh you are not driving a domestic sedan, sorry you have to drive over there in the slow lane.
Lack of net neutrality goes directly against entrepreneurship. Any Joe Blow can buy bandwidth, build a server and start offering service online and compete against anyone and often times successfully. But without net neutrality, telco has the power to kill your business, by throttling access to it (which is esp. important in the early stages of your business). In fact your competitors can pay the telco to throttle you (why not? it may be cheaper than competing with you).
It is also extremely easy to kill access to dissenting views, blogs, news sources etc. This all rides on net neutrality.
so you say people will work to lay fiber everywhere til they can have a neutral internet?
Oh yeah, right, that'll happen because it's totally possible!
Freedom of saying this ain't right. Freedom of making laws against it. Freedom to steal. Freedom to pirate servers. Extend the thinking far enough til you get to freedom to kill people. Exactly the same thinking.
This circular argument is useless. Freedom without means to limit and enforce it is no freedom at all.
It's obvious that for the general good, there should be net neutrality. If you make it impossible (laying fiber in all the country from scratch is impossible), this is wrong.
It's not just the freedom of the subscriber: it's the freedom of startup founders who need a way for users to reach their sites. Suppose Comcast et al. had been able to decide that, say, Dropbox was "competing" with their own offerings of file space to subscribers, and either blocked or throttled access to dropbox.com, so subscribers couldn't even go there to view the "about" page without a lot of hassle (if at all)?
I agree with you on principle, if there was a free market for providing internet services. However, this is totally not the case .. ISPs gain local monopolies by virtue of agreements with local governments.
For example, Verizon struck a deal to provide fiber access a few years ago with my parents' hometown. Part of this deal was that no other provider could do the same.
This impinges on the subscriber's freedom to leave for another provider, so your argument falls flat, unless you are ready to invalidate all such agreements with local governments.
The government of the United States has the authority and the responsibility to regulate the commercial use of limited resources held in common. The freedom at stake here is the right of the people to regulate the use of public property.
Provider already has that freedom. But once I buy my bandwidth for what ever price the telco is selling, net neutrality guarantees that every packet of information I send is routed all the way to its destination as equal with anybody else's (i.e. telco's are neutral and don't prefer anyone's packets).
But without net neutrality, your provider may decide they don't like your packets going to Youtube esp. since they are also selling TV cable service. So they are now allowed to slow down your traffic to Youtube.
I find it amusing that those think freedom is only about their ability to pay for things, not to be FREE from paying additional money for things they have already bought.
Where I live, I only have one choice for internet provider (Comcast). One choice. And I should trust them with content censorship? I would be in idiot to believe this is anything but a terrible idea.
The telcos don't owe users anything more than is specified in the contract. The telcos are a company; there is no moral reason to force the ISPs to do anything more than they contracted to do.
Instead of having everyone continue to be pissed off at the shitty monopolistic telcos, and having the telcos continue to be pissed off because we keep demanding that the government squash the telcos' rights to provide a shitty service, let's work to change the situation so that telcos don't get exclusive rights to public resources like land and spectrum.
Telcos and cablecos that own the lines in the ground are not an ordinary company; they often have a monopoly granted by the city that prevents others from running a parallel physical deployment, which would be wasteful anyway. Further, the last mile physical deployments are often subsidized by taxes.
As you say in your second paragraph, removing the exclusive rights held by telcos and cablecos would be one option, but since running parallel cables is physically wasteful, I'd prefer common ownership or regulation of the last mile to save companies and customers the expense of running a parallel cable, while ensuring competition beyond the last mile.
The telcos make extensive use of common property like licensed portions of the RF spectrum and a great deal of land in order to do their business. The people have every right to enforce regulations on the use of their property.
Because we don't call them inalienable corporate rights, we call them inalienable human rights. Equating a corporation to a human is part of what got us in a whole host of messes.
The Free Market of libertarianism reknown doesn't exist and can't exist. For such a market to work, each participant needs perfect information and capacity. If you've had any involvement with business should be enough experience to understand that there's no such thing as perfect information once the product is more complex than say, an orange, and even then it'd be a stretch (grown where? what pesticides? which labour? which transport company? where are all the other places I can purchase this orange? ...)
> Because they're demanding the freedom of the telcos be overridden in favor of our own personal interests.
Imagine that someone was allowed to own the air, and then control / privileged what you are allowed to say (sound waves). Would your opinion be different?
The principle of net neutrality is directly related to freedom (or ability of a corporation to curb it, kill competition they don't like by throttling access to them etc).
How net neutrality is put in practice is entirely a different matter. And for some reason you think if it is the government doing the enforcement, that it is somehow against freedom? I completely disagree. Government not allowing another private entity to abuse me is fine with me.
In some countries net neutrality is the law already by the way.
Do you consider those who support antitrust regulations to be on the side of freedom? Monopoly is the opposite of freedom and is much closer to dictatorship.
