212 replies
1d6h
The thing that is actually missing from this entire essay is competition.
The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite is because of the monopolies that exist.
In the EU there are similar offers for "enhanced" access, but its not speeding up/slowing down apps, but giving "free" access, as in not counting to your data cap.
Instead of making the FCC stop fast lanes, the FCC should either be breaking up infrastructure from retailers (ie allowing regulated priced access like openreach) or splitting up operators and fining ones that dont provide proper access.
Actually, the empirical record on this shows that we see more net neutrality violations by ISPs in marketplaces with high competition.[1]
This is counter-intuitive but here's how it works:
In a competitive marketplace ISPs have tighter margins and look for every opportunity for cost savings, so if throttling a high-bandwidth application only affects a small percentage of customers, and only a tiny tech-savvy minority of those affected will accurately attribute the effect to ISP throttling, it will incur only the tiniest competitive pressure on the ISP, so the ISP will do it to increase profits.
We actually saw more net neutrality violations in competitive EU markets than in the US, until EU-level net neutrality rules passed.
Another way to look at the limits of competitive pressure is from a startup's point of view: if your startup is offering a new videoconferencing service, how will competition help you when a rogue ISP breaks your service for 10% of your customers by throttling your service but putting Zoom in a fastlane? Your customers will not think "oh, I'd better switch to a better ISP," when ~10% of call participants are unintelligible. They will think, "oh, this new service sucks, I'm going to stick to Zoom."
Competitive pressure on ISPs does not protect nascent startups with small userbases from ISPs. And yet, everything we care about on the Internet started as a nascent startup with a small userbase.
Competition is great for keeping prices down and the US needs more of it. But to protect the long tail of startups and all the new ways people use the Internet from ISPs you need net neutrality laws.
1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2700055. Key finding: Relying on consumer switching behavior to provide more comprehensive competitive discipline was insufficient for a variety of reasons, including the presence of switching costs.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are talking about mobilr providers. Are you really saying there is no competition?
What do you hope to gain by regulation?
Agriculture isn't a natural monopoly either, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't have food safety standards.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For the US, looking at iMessage's example, I'd say the trend would go the other way and Facebook getting way more power.
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”.
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.
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…
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.
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?
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.
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.
It seems unlikely that there are anywhere close to as many of the latter as the former
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.
If the FCC does not do something, they will.
As to why it has not happened yet: it is easier to corrupt a new infrastructure from the beginning than change one that is already entrenched.
I thought net neutrality was about ISPs trying to get netflix, facebook etc to pay them extra not to throttle. The only throttling I've heard of here in the UK (which has lots of providers and competition) is on torrenting.
Are there examples of what you are talking about with zoom etc? Because as far as I can reason: if an isp throttled something like that in a high competition market, they'd lose their customers. And if it was a low user / start up phase app it wouldn't provide any competitive advantage for an isp to throttle it.
Getting a high-traffic service to pay extra or degrading other services are basically the same thing. Because the obvious question is “what happens if they don’t pay”? The obvious answer is throttling.
What we’ve seen in developing nations is internet that’s subsidized but only for certain companies (eg free Facebook, paid everything else) and people just use Facebook and have 0 access to the outside internet.
There are examples in the US at least, albeit less severe. It was (is?) common for cell phone companies to offer unlimited data cellphone plans, but they throttle video streaming to a lower resolution. Then offer “unmetered streaming of Netflix” (pick your VOD provider) while, again, degrading the video stream of other companies.
I’m pro-net neutrality but also I question if subsidized internet would actually be bad. If you can take a heavily metered or poor service, and subsidize it, then that could be the tool that helps bring internet to more people at less cost to those users. Advertisers would basically be subsidizing internet through these giants. The catch would be to find rules that don’t throttle competition which I don’t know if that’s possible.
Taken straight out the mafia for dummies handbook. "It would be a shame if something were to happen to the bandwidth of your service in our network".
It is multiple things based on a simple concept: no traffic should be discriminated based on source, destination or type. That means that netflix ones and zeros are treated the same as facebook, same as your web page filled with cat pics, same as torrents.
Can there be technical things why cerain services get lower level service?
I’ve read that ISP buys various links to to other networks at various prices.
So maybe something like: if facebookBar server is on pricier linkFoo and for that reason ISP buys cheaper version of linkFoo effectively downgrading facebookBar service (along with everything on linkFoo)?
If such scenario is realistic, maybe it could be due to valid financial stuff, not due to anticompetetive behaviour. (Just saying, some technically valid scenarios should be taken into account)
It was mostly. Basically in the USA it costs money to peer with people, and even more money to put edge caches inside the ISP's network (because that means the ISP can't charge for peering.)
This pissed of a bunch of rich web firms, so they poured money into pro net neutrality publications. (also a lot of anti copyright stuff as well, so they didn't have to pay content creators, but thats a different topic)
In the UK, peerings is much much cheaper because of LINX and other peering exchanges. moreover, having an edge cache inside your network saves you cash as you don't need to spend as much arranging upstream peering. (It might save money on transfer between last mile and the core network, but I'm hazy on the costs there.)
Net neutrality is pretty silly as a regulation, and most economists are against it.
You are right that net neutrality, and competitive markets (and thus low prices for consumers) don't really go together.
Most economists? BS.
Most economists understand that ISPs in the US are a natural monopoly, you simply can not have more than 1 or 2 choices in most locations.
And when there is no possibility of competition, regulation becomes necessary.
Huh, ISPs are far from a natural monopoly. What makes you think they are? Especially if you take mobile broadband, paid 'public' wifi and satellite internet into account.
(Regulations that make market entry harder push things into the monopoly direction, but that's far from 'natural'. See some of the recent troubles SpaceX has been having.)
See also https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/net-neu... or https://www.cato.org/regulation/winter-2011-2012/economics-n...
Black is white. War is peace. Yeah, we know that.
Neither mobile nor satellite (even Starlink) can compete for the main Internet connection for the majority of people. Around 50-70% of the US population has exactly ONE choice of a wired broadband ISP, and maaaaybe 2 if you count ADSL as broadband.
Less than 10% of the population has access to 3 or more wired broadband ISPs.
Selection bias. They only picked UK and US. Plenty of countries in Asia have robust competition and is arguably a reason why they are so cheap and so good. One company offers twice the speed for the same price. People quickly start switching and new accounts (people coming of age) go to that cheaper better company. The other companies are forced to follow suit or lose their customers.
Yes, competition works for factors that the majority of consumers are aware of, like price and speed. But it doesn't work for enforcing net neutrality.
If you model it, how could competition work to protect a YC startup with 1,000 or 10,000 users?
You can't start an alternative ISP at that scale, so it's unthinkable that a new ISP would emerge just to serve that throttled startup's pissed off users.
And again, only a tiny minority of users would correctly attribute throttling-induced failure to the ISP. Most will attribute it to the new startup being janky.
Even or those who do correctly attribute it, what are they going to do? Convince everyone they want to use this new product with to switch ISPs?
This isn’t at all true in the way you are portraying it. Of course, if you have more of something, you have more of the related things. If you have more oranges, more oranges are going to be rotten. This is obvious if you can think about it for more than 30s.
The overall net effect isn’t what you say it is though.
I was definitely someone who wrote the FCC (futilely) in support of net neutrality in 2017, and I figured the inevitable outcome of the FCC decision back then would be skyrocketing broadband costs, fast lanes, etc.
Except none of it happened. It turns out there's actually kind of okay competition in this space. Maybe not as much as there should be, but prices have stayed reasonable, broadband access is expanding, and people by and large don't seem bothered by data caps when they're subject to them, and they have access to reasonably priced, uncapped plans.
All that said, I certainly won't say no to reinstating net neutrality, since I don't think you can argue it'll make anything worse. In fact it might make competition easier. But it's not the existential pillar to online existence that we seemed to think it was.
I know there’s a gun pointed at my head, but listen, nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine.
Sounds like your position is one where no empirical evidence could convince you otherwise, because even if the apocalypse did not come to pass you would use the "gun pointed at me but they didn't pull the trigger" excuse.
Huh?
This is literally what the article is about. It's happening now, it's been happening, it will continue to happen unless the laws get restored.
1. If your claim was that the net neutrality doomsayers from 2017 were correct, then your original comment of "[...] nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine" does a terrible way of conveying that. Any reasonable person reading that comment would interpret that as you conceding that the the doomsayers' predictions have failed to pass, but nonetheless refuse to admit the predictions were incorrect because it was only a matter of time before the predictions would become true.
2. "Net neutrality" is a term that doesn't have a precise meaning, and I'd rather not get into a fight about what it really means. That said, in the context of this discussion about the net neutrality fight in 2017, and whether the doomsayers' prediction came to pass, I think it's fair to compare to the pre-2017 net neutrality regime. In that context it's not clear whether "degrading video quality for mobile users" would be illegal. For instance "network management" was explicitly allowed, and only "pay for priority" would be banned[1]. Moreover there was a court case a few years before where FCC fought to prevent bittorrent being throttled, and lost the case on appeal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
Your link has a definition of Net Neutrality in the first paragraph. If you recall, one of the big points that groups like Comcast kept trying to make was that they weren’t just a dumb pipe for the internet, and instead had enough value-add for consumers that people would choose them over a competitor with the same internet service. And NN would prevent them from offering these competitive services.
Mobile ISPs like T-Mobile are quite open about wanting to offer plans that privilege certain services over others.
We can turn this around though, can't we? If the ISPs have no designs on violating network neutrality then why do they oppose it?
If you repeal the law against burglary and then burglary doesn't immediately skyrocket, would you say that we shouldn't have a law against burglary? Of course not, because regardless of how often it happens, you'd like it to never happen and would want to prosecute it any time it does regardless of how often.
It's been 7 years, but any day now we'll wake up to broken online video, random timeouts, paltry data caps, and skyrocketing costs.
This is like the folks who compare the covid death rate with treatment, mitigations, and vaccination to prove we could have let it run its course in 2020.
Public sentiment was pretty high and we actually had network neutrality for the first 40 years of the Internet not to mention the over 100M people who live in states that adopted laws.
https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/net-neutra...
This is like the folks who think the rapture is coming, any day now. just be ready, its coming.
"Not with a bang but a whimper."
lol. This is better attributed to you getting used to the shitty situation you, and everyone else in your country, is dealing with. Your speeds are shit and you're paying too much for them, and those "not bothered by data caps" just don't know better anymore.
I pay $50/month for 300/30 in the middle of nowhere. Symmetric gigabit is available for $80ish/month in small cities around me. Unlimited phone data is widely available and fairly priced. It's not impossible for things to be acceptable for the vast majority of use cases just because some predicted apocalyptic event which was hyped up by certain large players (and not out of the goodness of their hearts) didn't come to be.
Wow, that is very expensive
Better than Hughsnet which was the only option for a long time other than cellular.
I'm afraid to tell you what I pay for starlink for speeds much lower than that. Still very grateful as without starlink is have 20 M down and still pay $75 per month for it
$90/month for 25/2.5 Mbps here. I honestly never thought we'd see that kind of speed. In late 2015 it went from 512 kbps to 10/1 Mbps on a new system. Four years later (2019) they upgraded it to the present speed with no increase in price. It's all wireless and since we're in AT&T telco territory there is no chance of them doing anything (the phone lines have been in the ground since the late '70s), so this independent telco built out as a WISP almost 20 years ago. They're looking at doing their own FTTH in this area.
You, and everyone paying those absurd prices, is getting ripped off.
None of what you've listed would be fixed by net neutrality.
Sorry officer, not intimately familliar with your american laws!
I've got a symmetric gigabit.
I could have five but what would I even do with it?
Yeah, the discourse around the Net Neutrality thing was intense. I was one the few people who argued it wouldn't change much, and I remember being struck by the state of near-internet-apocalypse people were predicting at the time.
Helps that I was seeing the whole thing from the outside as a non-US-resident.
I have to take the L on going with the flow there. It's impossible to build a case that repeal of net neutrality was apocalyptic.
That the potential of a future FCC reinstating it precluded ISPs' baser instincts?
Their goal was to avoid excess, so maybe they could argue that net neutrality wasn't a good idea anyway, so they could gradually introduce new revenue streams from apps/platforms.
That repeal lasted five years, with virtually none of the visible effects people predicted. By contrast, when the Trump administration started tearing down environmental regulations, mining companies jumped on the occasion within months.
If ISPs are playing the long game, they're being incredibly patient about it.
They actually are, and this is how politics and lobbying work. In 2017 it made no sense for US ISPs to run ragged over net neutrality when the 2020 election was looming and far from predictable. Even less once Biden gets elected.
Plus there was the credible threat of state-level laws, which are even worse from the ISPs standpoint since each might go farther than the FCC rules in certain ways.
The California law passed and was a really big deal.
If you're looking for a controlled experiment of what the world looks like without net neutrality rules, just look to countries where there was never any such movement or credible threat of them.
Across Africa, for example, 1GB of mobile data can cost 10x more if you're accessing the normal Internet, vs. a mainstream service like WhatsApp or Youtube.
ISPs use net neutrality violations for price discrimination to extract more from white collar workers who need access to the Internet beyond WhatsApp-- which is fine until you think about the effects on any new WhatsApp competitor.
Much as I agreed with net neutrality, I could see that it was being driven mainly by big tech lobbying for their profit margins. This is also why the attention and outrage was way out of proportion to the actual impact.
That's because the internet went to shit and actually very little happens outside of major platforms anyway. This type of traffic shaping would just cement it as-is, making it almost impossible for a new platform to come up.
Tiktok would beg to differ. Starting a new social network is hard, but bandwdith/net neutrality is the least of your problems.
This is some research it would be cool to see: was TikTok adoption measurably slowed in countries where net neutrality violations were common?
For example, it's the norm across Africa for providers to offer plans with radically lower per-GB costs for WhatsApp, Youtube, and other mainstream apps, as a way to price discriminate and charge a premium to tech and white collar workers who need access to the actual Internet. In such countries you would expect TikTok adoption to happen more slowly than expected.
One of the issues here is decentralized services. If you're starting a new centralized service, you can pay a CDN which itself is already paying the danegeld or is too big to degrade without the ISP's customers blaming the ISP. That's a tax but if you're state-funded or VC-funded you can just eat it.
Whereas if you want to build something based on IPFS or just host your own website out of your home/business, ISPs have the incentive to thwart this, because then they couldn't double dip anymore. See also cable companies explicitly designing slow upload speeds into the most widely deployed versions of DOCSIS.
So then you're creating a bias towards centralized closed-source services instead of open standards and self-hosting.
AFAIK the actual reason most of these things did not appear is because of many states passing their own net neutrality laws, such that it would be a regulatory nightmare to offer services in violation of net neutrality without coming under fire.
The California law is particularly strong and had a huge impact.
The other big factor is the threat of new FCC rules, state laws, or federal law. As long as net neutrality advocates can pose a credible threat of passing rules that, from the ISP's point of view, are more restrictive than the status quo, ISPs have to think twice before engaging in what John Oliver famously called "cable company f*ckery".
I’m constantly having buffering videos across many websites and paying significantly more for this shitty service than nearly anywhere else in the world pays for something significantly better.
Looking at the rising prices of streaming services and their increased enshittification via ads even in paid subscriptions, I find it hard to take the "prices have stayed reasonable" claim at face value. It's not just about the price of the internet access itself, but also about the price of the services that actually make said access useful and valuable.
Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.
Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?
What's your Internet speed up and down, provider, and monthly cost? Actual monthly cost, not temporary promotions.
It's like $50/mo for 200/50 I think. Why, what are yours?
The GP is comparing the US to the rest of the world, and they're correct: the US (including yours) lags behind other modern countries. Singapore, for reference, offers 500/500 symmetric connections for approximately the same price as you're paying. 2gbps symmetric is less than $200/mo.
You're saying your Internet is fast enough for you, and that's fine and probably correct, but you're still getting slower speeds for higher prices than you should. You're also likely better situated than much of the rest of the country.
If by "the rest of the world" you mean a cherry-picked selection of the most advanced countries, then yes, the US is behind on internet access (and everything else).
It never makes sense to me when people say how the US ranks last among developed countries on a bunch of metrics. Of course, that just means the US is indeed... less developed than those countries. If it's not fair to compare the US to Somalia, it's not fair to compare it to Sweden either. It just is what it is, somewhere between the two development extremes.
How, exactly, are you supposed to compare if not to other countries? There’s no bar for “this is what a developed country’s internet should look like” so the only way to compare is to do it against other countries roughly in the same range as the US.
It’s also entirely factual to say that in comparison to other developed countries, the US lags in internet.
If the US is significantly behind developed countries in practically every category, why do you consider it a developed country? What does “developed” mean?
The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?
There are several definitions for what makes a country “developed” and the US is solidly in all of them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country
I’m not sure how you can possibly argue that the US is not “developed”.
Feel free to take any of those lists and compare the US to countries around them in those lists. The countries might differ slightly, but the notion of what is a “developed” country has been firmly established for a long time now.
The U.S. is considered developed only because it’s extremely rich. However, the general state of its infrastructure, education, governance, media, etc. is more typical of a developing country in many ways.
That’s my point: all these lists of things the U.S. is worse at than every developed country are collectively what it means to be developed, more so in my mind than just being rich.
only because it’s extremely rich
Wtf!? Yes!
Now I'm curious what you thought developed means.
You compare cities, since you need to include average income.
And what is your solution to that?
Not vote for politicians that are ardently anti-consumer and anti-infrastructure? We’re talking about what exists, not who you can call to upgrade your internet :/
Aggressive regulation of large businesses, and local government-run non-profit ISPs to provide a sensible baseline that can be relied upon without being at the whims of private companies.
My prices are much lower in the states than in my place in Italy right now. Service sucks here too.
Anyway you're ignoring income. Seattle is around triple the median of France for example. You need to compare cities of similar size and income.
West coast USA.
My current service is 130 a month for 200/20.
Its getting replaced: 50 bucks a month for 10gig fiber.
It's going to cost me 800 ish bucks to set up to take advantage of that (routing, switching, nic's)... I will still come out way ahead before the end of the year.
Competition has its benefits.
What is great about paying $50 for such low bandwidth?
$70/month for 10Gb/10Gb
Actual speeds are more like 5/7. But I’m happy!
In the US? Can you link to the promo page showing where others can obtain such a deal?
Even if you deliver, surely you know that such a connection is an extreme, extreme outlier?
That's not really that rare in the USA though? Most decently sized cities have some form of fiber offering that will at-least give you a gig for $50 a month or so.
California. I have multiple multi-gig fiber options available and they compete.
https://www.sonic.com/residential/internet
Looks like the prices must vary by location. They don’t have a price there.
In the great Europe (Germany, Telekom) I pay 50 for 16MB/4MB… good deal!
In France, I pay monthly 27.48€ (~$29) for 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up (in theory, in practice, it's more like 500~600Mbps down, 250~300Mbps up). This includes a TV option for 2€ (without it, it's 25.48€).
My provider is SFR (the only one giving access to optical fiber in the small village where I live).
EDIT: I'm talking about home internet. For mobile internet, I pay 19.99€/month for unlimited access (5G), but I haven't done a speedtest.
For comparison, I live in Washington State 50km away from Seattle, and I get 1200 Mbps down and 200 Mbps up (in practice more like 900/100) for $115/month. This is just pure Internet, no TV or anything else.
The ISP that I currently use - Comcast Xfinity - is also the only cable provider in this area. I can get some mobile and satellite options, but they are all more expensive for lower speed and higher latency.
I’m currently doing 6.3/9.1 with 81ms latency on AT&T. I’m seeing Europe averaging 48 Mbps [1], though my experience in Italy and the UK has been far spottier than in America. (Lot of people in this thread confusing home and mobile internet. I get 1Gb/35 for $65 at home, but that’s irrelevant.)
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/689876/average-mobile-sp...
That average looks outdated, and includes a lot of rural and under-developed areas. It also varies a lot per country[1].
Most people in urban areas can get deals like 300-500Mbps for < €30/month. I have symmetric 1Gbps and pay about the same, could get 8Gbps for €80 but have no use for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...
I pay $55 a month for 1gps symmetrical at&t fiber. No caps I normally hit 2TB a month and they've never complained. Somedays I only seem to get like 800mpbs of that gig but it's rare.
Symmetrical 1G, Verizon, 60/month in NYC
There's actually a couple of local providers that aren't bad, for example, https://www.sonic.com/.
$40/month (if you don't rent a modem/eerio, which, why would you) for 10 gigs up and down, not to mention excellent customer service.
But I will happily admit that they're a bit of an outlier and the offerings in much of the country are complete shit.
Both experiences can be true in the same country.
For me, internet is great (both wired and wireless). For wired, I have a choice of cable and FTTH in my apartment, both cancelable month-by-month and without any bullshit fees ("taxes and surcharges", yeah, believe it or not I also pay taxes and I don't make it your problem, ISP!) beyond the sticker price.
No idea if this is due to competition, regulation, or both; I suspect that at least the "no bullshit fees" part is due to the latter, as I can't imagine major US corporations all somehow collectively dropping them in one region but not the other.
I also don't doubt that it is significantly worse for somebody living elsewhere. Data caps seem to still be a thing for wired access in some places.
once you get outside of truly major metro areas, internet access tends to go to shit.
i've got 1G fiber internet in Seattle now, but in Everett ~25M shared access comcast is the best you can do in a lot of places. and it isn't like you need to be surrounded by cows and horses to have bad internet, you can have the boeing factory just down the road, but you're living in a ~100k population city as opposed to a tech hub.
Heres a little illustration. I used to work for a multinational company that had its main office in london and a number of satellite offices around the world. We wanted to install decent internet into everywhere so we could begin to manage our data in a more effective way.
London: look for a good offer, phone up a few ISPs, get a quote, work out if we have spare capacity in the building (we did) boom, 1 gigabit install inside a month.
Redwood city: 6 months. we had some sort of shitty T3 line installed as a stopgap. It never reached SLA. I had to phone the NOX, get a report. I then phoned the EMEA president of $large_International_network_provider to complain personally that I had to do the work of half his fucking company to get dailup++ installed. I left before they managed to get actual fibre into the building.
Santa Monica: "we cant install fibre as the previous engineer reported seeing eyes under the building" Try and use a different company. Turns out that there is only that company in santa monica (Can't remember which) Ok, order an upgrade to what we already have. "line is bad needs replacing" cue me having to _fucking fly out_ and manage the fourth attempt at upgrading because the company are such useless fucking pricks.
domestic wise
I am in the suburbs, they've just rolled out fibre to the house. I have 900 meg down with 100(might be more) up for £50 a month. Thats the pricy version with a fixed ipv4 address.
I can get a less fancy version for £30.
Best internet in the country is offered by a monopoly in Chattanooga. Up to 25 Gbit up/down.
Monopoly? That's a bit bold of a claim.
The provider you're talking about is the utility company. You might not know why the utility company provides the internet either. It's because before that they couldn't get the other companies (AT&T, Comcast, Hughe, Verizon) to offer good speeds and reasonable rates. The utility also doesn't take a profit. Mind you, those other companies still operate and no one is holding them back. They just decided that the profit margins weren't worth it, though they did lobby against NoogaNet.
It's not a monopoly. It's a city coming together and saying
And overnight all those companies increased their speeds. They found what they were happy with and NoogaNet still decided "fuck it, we're going to just be better." I really REALLY wish more people/cities would take this "fuck you, we'll do it ourselves" attitude. Waiting on others to fix our problems clearly isn't working.It's weird that we keep seeing this happen and work but then it isn't more popular. Government services are typically inefficient, but so are private monopolies for almost exactly the same reasons. If you put them into competition with each other then they both have more competition and have to do better.
I think it is because it requires significant cooperation. And by significant, I mean size, not the actual amount of action required by an individual.
This is an interesting problem to me and seems to be quite a prolific issue. I think it is because everyone feels like they are a tiny meaningless cog in a giant machine. But this confuses me. Even tiny cogs play an important role. Even if your function is redundant, that redundancy is built in for a reason. I hear the common sentiment "you're replaceable" and I think people take this to be "perfectly" fungible. But you may be a replaceable worker, but that also doesn't mean replacing you is easy. They usually gotta look for someone new, pay them more, and then train them (this is why I'm also really confused why companies won't increase existing workers' salaries against new hires. Because your current workers likely have significantly more utility than a new worker. You lose money by doing this. Not to mention essentially give away your work practices to competitors, weirdly leveling the playing field).
But it infuriates me when there are things that are universally hated, have relatively easy solutions, AND no one does anything. Be it a boss/manager who just says no to pressing a button that enables functionality where all the work has already been done and tested. Or simply voting in a new politician when everyone hates the current one. Or how 1 in 4 Americans dislike both Trump and Biden. How the early primary states will not even use their advantage to push towards a different candidate because we're playing this stupid game of chicken where people act like the primaries aren't actually the BEST time to vote or signal for a different candidate. I just don't get it...
And I've always been a fan of government directly participating in the market. (Even though I generally like weaker/smaller governments.) They can set a baseline. Gov is always participating, regardless, since they do regulations and all that, so I don't buy those arguments. But there are many more things becoming natural monopolies as advantage is provided by scale. A government actor essentially is able to set pseudo regulations by participating. USPS helps make FedEx and UPS better, but now they get so many cuts that UPS uses them as last mile deliverers despite operating in the region. Still, USPS ensures mail gets to people who would otherwise not be able to even get mail. I don't see why we don't have similar services from broadband and telecommunications. They are essential services these days. Plus, it would create a lot of good quality jobs as not only those people needed to maintain the systems but even all the contractors to do the initial buildouts.
Oh, we already know how this one works. People generally like their elected representative, because that's how they won in that district. The district has e.g. a large employer, and the representative makes sure those jobs for the people in the district aren't lost. Even though that's the very thing people in other districts are complaining about, and in order to get that one thing the representative had to betray the citizenry in 250 other subtle ways to get votes from 250 other districts.
This is why federal legislation was originally meant to be limited in scope and require approval from both the House and the Senate, the latter of which was meant to be appointed by the state legislatures and thereby more inclined to reject that kind of populist vote buying and expansion of federal power. But we changed all that without thinking it through and now we suffer the consequences.
This is definitely part of it but not all of it. There's more. I hear people complaining about the exact people they vote for.
I think another part of the problem is simply parties. We vote along lines rather than actual beliefs. I actually believe we'd be better off without them. Or at least affiliations on ballots. Like how we do judges. Hand out a booklet, let people vote by mail and take their time. But don't give people the super lazy version. Some friction is good, too much is bad.
The issue I see is it just makes tribalism very easy. And it's very easy to abuse this. Even countries with more than two parties only effectively have two either via major parties or through coalitions. America just has their coalitions under two big umbrellas (Biden and AOC in the same party? Trump and Romney? Those would be different parties in many European countries, but under the same coalitions)
That most often happens in one-party districts because the incumbent doesn't have to please the voters when the district would never go for the other party.
The two party system itself is caused by first-past-the-post voting. In that system if there are more than two parties, the two most similar parties split the vote and both lose, giving them the incentive to merge together instead of running against each other, until there are only two left. Score voting/approval voting fixes this.
It's not __caused__ by FPTP, but yeah that certainly doesn't help. But I am glad that my excessive campaigning on this site for Approval/Star/cardinal systems has had some effect :) (Very happy to see ordinal systems not being suggested)
There's much more complexity to it all, but yeah, voting systems are important. The cardinal systems are just about better embedding preference while minimizing the capacity to hack. But they still assume rational voters. These cardinal systems may make strategic voting less effective, but they don't prevent them. A major benefit to be though is transparency, since it is easier to understand the tallying. Especially when it is (parallel) column sum and argmax. Much easier to understand than multi-round elections. (Could you imagine the Arizona recount with RCV...)
But again, you can build more representation and transparency into the system but it doesn't remove the human component. Where name recognition is a major predictor in winner. Where people are not investing time to vote. This takes a much larger cultural shift to have things like giving people time to research their candidates. But a single extra day off is probably just going to be used to catch up on all the more immediate issues we have. We're all constantly playing catch-up and truth of the matter is that politics is much more abstract than these things and so it gets de-prioritized. Voting systems won't fix that (obviously I still actively advocate for cardinal systems though. I'm a firm believer in addressing problems from the bottom up)
Isn't it? FPTP makes it all but impossible to sustain a third party because of the vote splitting effect. Even when there have been new major parties in the past, they replaced one of the major parties instead of coexisting alongside them for any significant period of time. The most viable districts for minor parties like the Green Party are the ones where the least similar major party is completely out of the running and then the minor party serves the role of the second party rather than a third.
But these things are related. If you have a two party system then you typically either have a clear choice where you know without doing much investigation which party you favor, or you don't align with either of the major parties and then no party satisfies you and your choice is basically a coin flip. Neither of these promote investigation because either the choice is obvious or the choice is unsatisfying and equivocal.
Wheres if you had e.g. four viable parties, there would much more likely be one that does closely represent your interests, and another that could come close, giving voters the incentive to at least pay enough attention to distinguish them.
Parties are a naturally emerging phenomenon in representative democracies, though. Simply put, if you can band together to pool votes somehow (e.g. by agreeing to disagree on some matters to some extent), you consistently win over those who do not. So it's inevitable that someone will do just that, and then others will respond in kind.
Fundamentally, this is a problem with representative democracy in general. There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place. In US, the original design of the system explicitly recognized that: "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand". The problem, of course, is that this wasn't sustainable as population grew, which is why it eventually became a fixed number of seats instead. Either way, even with 30k per representative, there's just no way one can well and truly vote on their actual beliefs in a consistent way. You have to compromise some of them for the sake of others, and then justify those compromises to yourself somehow. And the easiest way for our monkey brain to do that is to do the us-vs-them thing, and then justify the compromise by asserting that it is for the sake of "us".
I think that if we want actual democracy of beliefs, we need to seriously start looking into either more direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days), or else multi-level federated systems such as council democracy.
This leads to coalitions, not necessarily parties. And then the coalition changes as a result of elections, because a different combination of blocs can form a majority.
It also doesn't necessarily have to be the same set of people even within an election cycle. Suppose you have (representing ideologies rather than parties) 40 democrats, 40 republicans, 15 libertarians and 5 greens. The greens wouldn't have enough seats to do anything, and the democrats and republicans together could do whatever they wanted, but so could the libertarians and either of the democrats or republicans.
Then in the same session you might have a bill that eliminates mandatory minimum sentences favored by the democrats and libertarians, another that lowers taxes on small businesses favored by the republicans and libertarians, and a third that creates a new Medicare benefit favored by democrats and republicans.
Then in the next election one of the major blocs ends up with 48 votes, which is very different, because now a majority coalition is either them and anyone else including the smallest bloc, or not-them but all of the other blocs together.
There is no way for a policy to represent any plurality of distinct individuals, because they'll each want different things. But a representative can try to balance their interests as best they can, and an election using a less defective voting system than FPTP would actually impose consequences on pissing off significant parts of the district, because a candidate which is similar but different along that dimension could plausibly replace them in the next election.
Direct democracy is best when it's used to repeal or veto things or otherwise bind the government, acting as one of the checks and balances against corruption. Using it to create new crimes or spending programs leads to unchecked populism.
We have enough trouble with that as it is because we made it too easy to pass national laws without broad consensus. What you want instead is "laboratories of democracy" where different localities try different things and then everyone can see how each of them goes and make their own decision, and continue that way until the right answer is clear enough to achieve consensus and go through a much more deliberative process to pass a national law. Or, for that matter, just let each of the localities separately pass the law there is now consensus should exist.
This is hard. Start here: https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-i
The problem is the activation energy and a bunch of people who will oppose you no matter how useful something is.
Why are you calling their municipal fiber internet a monopoly? Not only is it a utility, here is a list of 10 other broadband providers including att fiber, xfinity and verizon 300mb 5g:
https://broadbandnow.com/Tennessee/Chattanooga
Pretty ridiculous and disingenuous to call it "monopoly".
Does someone else have access to that infrastructure that can offer the service? Utilities are granted monopolies.
You can say that as many times as you want, but you don't have any evidence or even an explanation.
If there were ten power lines and ten water pipes to your house would say each of those twenty companies had a monopoly?
Repeating something isn't evidence of anything.
That's amazing. I just upgraded my home network to 10G to take advantage of my 1.5G internet connection.
That's also in breach of EU net neutrality laws. A Dutch ISP lost a lawsuit over this for providing free Spotify traffic. I don't remember which one, I think it was T Mobile (now called Odildo or something lol)
Odildo? Cant be truth in a country where almost all people speak english!
It's actually Odido but everyone I know calls it Odildo :P it was really a stupid name choice
I suspect it's a brand name they tested across multiple languages, etc
Most countries are somewhat familiar with english slang, such as the word dildo.
It's not slang, it's just a word. And the Dutch for dildo is ... dildo (I would have expected shared roots in French or some such, but apparently it's a loanword from English since the 70s).
Spanish: jodido
Haha yes that means fucked (as in "you're fucked"). I speak Spanish and I didn't actually think of that.
I must be weird, but I like the name. It's a palindrome and I dig their symmetrical logo.
And of course, it is clever marketing. Even here we are talking about it.
Kinda funny how neutrality is hurting consumers. I dont think many of us thought about this potential benefit.
It's not hurting consumers. These companies are not coming up with these plans because they're cheaper for the consumers. They're doing it to entrench them into their service and then extract money in other ways.
Do you think that laws that make buying electoral votes illegal (where they exist) should be repealed on the basis that they are harming people who'd prefer to take that cash?
It was always going to hurt consumers short-term. I don't know why anyone is surprised.
Maybe it's just because I'm old and remember the clusterfuck when the EU decided one TV company couldn't hold the rights to all the football matches.
(They divvy the rights up in such a way that you can't see a single competition on just one service, let alone just one team's matches.)
I immigrated from China to Canada and I'm not sure if monopoly is the root cause. In China, ISP is state-controlled and 100% monopoly, yet the plans are dirt cheap compared to those in Canada.
I just looked up the price in my hometown in China: 1000 Mbps fibre internet + 3 mobile phone lines (105 GB data) + IPTV = 249 CNY tax included (30 USD / 42 CAD / 28 EUR)
The 1000 Mbps fibre Internet plan alone (no phones no TVs) I have in Canada is $65 + tax. And it's a discounted plan. The price on the ISP website is $100.
Also in China phone plans have fast lanes as well. SNS and video streaming data are treated separately (cheap or even free).
I lived in China for 9 years and always found the internet, even for going just to Chinese sites, to be really slow. Like sure you have 5G, but the overall internet trunks are just saturated and not built out enough. Maybe it has gotten better since I left Beijing in 2016?
It was definitely cheap and affordable. But I always felt a huge speed bump (along with easy access to foreign web sites) when I went to Thailand or Indonesia for vacation.
A lot of that is because of the GFW.
MITM/TLS decryption/DPI has a massive performance overhead (and why the first question any agent based security product is ask is whether it is "in the path of traffic").
It's basically a giant version of Zscaler Private Access (ZPA)
The performance hit is a major reason why a lot of edge computing development has happened in the Chinese ecosystem (you can't guarantee stuff works with latency, so how do you solve that)
This is an older investigation (2017) by ThousandEyes about this - https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/benchmarking-network-perfo...
Note that the infra has changed drastically since 2017.
Hmm, then I’m not even sure why they bother with lines out anymore. They’ve blocked pretty much everything abroad, it seems like they could speed things up by just scrapping the GFW and physically disconnecting their internet from the rest of the world.
If you do that, international commerce for China grinds to a complete halt (though ik one very large F50 that is in the process of completely decoupling in the next 2 years)
Especially because this kind of an en masse disconnection means completely disconnecting Chinese assets abroad from their mainland HQs.
Down the grapevine, I have heard some provinces testing that kind of a whitelist, but I'm not sure how true that is.
If an actual nationwide whitelist is implemented, I think that is proof enough that war be coming. Even Roskomnadzor didn't try implementing a similar system until the 2022 escalation.
That makes sense, but at least China has to pay a cost for keeping it kind of opened but mostly closed.
It is also really hostile for foreign tourists. You'd be surprised how many people still go to China and have all their trip plans stored in Google docs...doh. Although if you come with a foreign SIM and use roaming, you circumvent the GFW automatically for some reason.
That's because when your SIM is in international roaming, traffic is routed by the local telco to a tunnel back to the home telco provider. This ofc decreases margins significantly (because those bytes are routed via fiber or satellite by a Transit Service) and is why roaming costs are so high.
Oof. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that Google is banned in China, but I guess some tourists just aren't tech savvy, so who am I to judge.
Not really. As an individual you are definetly paying a performance cost in the form of low latencies and speeds, but this is also why edge computing solutions (eg. Compute offloading, packet size optimizations, etc) are heavily researched by Chinese players compared to Western players. In isolation, it's a good forcing function for innovation.
That said, it is absolutely 1984-esque.
Also, a lot of these innovations seem to be a result of the Urumqi and Lhasa riots from 10-15 years ago as well as Tahrir Square, so clearly maintaining the political status quo seems to be top of mind.
It's bad for business, but China (and especially Xi) has seemed to have taken a very statist approach after the 2015-16 financial crisis.
We hosted an ACM conference in 2011 in Beijing. One of my friends came, first trip to China, really smart guy just finishing up his PhD in EECS at UCB, but OMG did he mess that one up. We had to use the guest wifi in my office so he could make offline copies. If you aren't used to it, and don't follow China closely, you could be very technical and still be caught off guard. Lots of people will tell you China is just a normal tourist spot like Japan, Thailand, or Indonesia, but it really isn't.
I was in Beijing for those. A lot of things blocked afterwards, we slowly lost more services that we had previously. I would say 2008 was a peak for Chinese internet liberalization (and well, lots of other liberalization, I also spent 6 months in 2002 so can compare), and then it just tanked from that point on to present. They made a show for the Olympics and then decided they didn't need to bother anymore. It doesn't help that Xi is much more assertive and autocratic than Hu was.
Until a couple years ago, it was fairly common to smuggle VEOM, Airtel, and Ooredoo sims in much of Xinjiang and Tibet, because the Uyghur and Tibetan diaspora largely uses WhatsApp to communicate as the Uyghur diaspora is largely in the CIS, Turkey, and Pakistan and the Tibetan diaspora in India, Nepal, and the US.
Oh boy! That sounds rough, but also makes sense.
Did you have your VPN / proxy on? That might be one of the reason as Chinese internet is only fast for traffic within its borders. Traffic that crosses borders are super slow in terms of throughput AND latency (if not blocked altogether). If you have your VPN / proxy on, your request basically crosses the borders twice before it reaches the destination web server.
Another reason I can think of is the mobile ISP incompatibility. For some ridiculous reasons, most "foreign" phones' (iPhones exempt) do not have full radio coverage when connected to CMCC.
We tried many VPNs, and they all would stop working after paying for the mandatory few months, so I eventually gave up. IT is slow inside China even without using a VPN, and only accessing domestic Chinese websites (well, if you don't have YouTube, at least you have tons of pirated content to view).
This is with a wired line from China Telecom, China Unicom internet is fine for text viewing, I don't I bothered much with video (and really, it is slower than China Mobile 5G, I guess this has changed now).
Communist and capitalist monopolies are two completely different things.
Yes I'm sure it's all due to competition and not the EU's 2015 law that explicitly requires net neutrality (Net Neutrality Regulation 2015).
They do that because speeding up/slowing down apps is illegal and they are using loopholes in the law to get around that.
Why do these have to be in contention?
Regulations are a critical factor in ensuring competition in markets. Without regulations monopolies quickly come to power because your power and influence is not linearly (or sublinearly) correlated to your size (even excluding lobbying power). A free market is a ,,well'' regulated market. A laissez-faire market is only free in passing.
A free market is not a lawless market but instead free within regulations. However, the amount of regulation should not make it impossible for competitors to join the market either. With the amount of subsidies in the US for ISPs, I think the services they render might be event called a public service, more than a utility.
We don't disagree. I just thought it was obvious enough that an over regulated market isn't free that it need not be stated explicitly. Especially since this is the general belief.
Sorry for not clarifying. I do agree with your initial statement and wanted to add something to it, not criticize it.
Okay, I was not quite sure if you were criticizing, rebuting, or what. Thanks for clarifying.
I never claimed. I simply pointed out that claiming something illegal is not being done by corporations due to increased competition is inherently a BS argument. It's not being done because it's illegal irrespective of the competitive landscape.
One is an explicit policy stating expectations and the other is a speculative hypothesis that the same policy will naturally happen through some form of economic osmosis if only we leave things unmolested enough for an unspecified duration.
I for one, would rather not rely on the assumption of magic.
We know what we want and it's achievable directly. Let's not Rube Goldberg it.
Yeah, but the loophole is also illegal. (so it’s not a loophole?)
Not to turn this into a pissing contest, but Canada's internet is far more shite and far more captured by an oligopoly. Independent ISPs are harder to find than competition up here in the North.
Canada isn't so bad off when it comes to wired service. Several ISPs are owned by the government: Sasktel, Bruce Telecom, Tbaytel, CityWest. And many more are co-operatives owned by the customers.
The mobile space is more challenging. A number of those co-ops and government ISPs were running mobile service back in the mid 2000s, but they never found the customer base and most of them eventually shut it down, Tbaytel and Sasktel being the exceptions.
That said, many of those ISPs have more recently turned to reselling Big 3 service, so you can still at least minimize how much the Big 3 take, giving the small guy at least some of the cut. Maybe some day they can take that small cut and build out their own network again? But, you get what you choose to become a customer of, I suppose.
Those are completely irrelevant in 95% of Canada. There's bell, Rogers, and Telus. I guess Videotron in Quebec too. That's pretty much it and even then, here in Quebec it's either Videotron or bell, or their resellers. At least in Montreal.
> Those are completely irrelevant in 95% of Canada.
But quite relevant as they provide a proven, working model that can be used anywhere in Canada. That's the beauty of public/cooperative ownership – all people have to do is do it.
> here in Quebec it's either Videotron or bell
What about CoopTel, Sogetel, and Téléphone de Courcelles?
Well I'm not saying they are irrelevant in the sense that they don't provide a good model for what an ISP should be, but more so that they are irrelevant because they don't provide services to the vast majority of people.
Also a part from sogetel, those are either very small or regional. Even sogetel is regional and doesn't really provide services outside small villages and cities. That's not bad, but it's not enough to say that Canada's market isn't deeply uncompetitive. Even the US has tons of cooperative and WISPs that follow a similar coop pattern.
> more so that they are irrelevant because they don't provide services to the vast majority of people.
The vast majority of people can do the same. What do you think public/cooperate ownership is, exactly? It isn't something that magically comes down from space by aliens or sent to us by god. They are by the people. All the people have to do is do it!
> Also a part from sogetel, those are either very small or regional.
So? They still exist in Quebec. The question was really trying to ask why you didn't mention them?
If you like their model, and want to see them grow, then you'd think you'd be preaching their existence to high heaven. The only way small businesses can grow to cover the nation is to have people talk about them. No business has ever swept the nation in secrecy. Yet here we are, even after we started talking about them, being told that they shouldn't be talked about because they are too "insignificant".
Why is it that the people who complain about the "Big 3" most are the ones who seem most happy to keep on using their service?
That's cold comfort to the overwhelming majority of people who aren't served by such ISPs. Population of...
Saskatchewan (Sasktel): 1.1M
Bruce County (Bruce Telecom): 66.5k
Thunder Bay District (Tbaytel): 146k
Prince Rupert, British Columbia (CityWest): 13k
That makes up a total of 1.3M, against Canada's population of 37.0M.
Moreover, looking at Sasktel's website[1], their prices don't look too competitive. They're asking for $105/month for 1G (promotional offer, regular price $150), which is actually worse than what corporate ISPs offer, eg. $110/month for 1.5G (promotional offer, regular price $130)[2].
[1] https://www.sasktel.com/store/browse/Personal/Internet/Inter...
[2] https://www.rogers.com/internet/packages
> That's cold comfort to the overwhelming majority of people who aren't served by such ISPs.
But is actually warm comfort as it shows a proven model that anyone, anywhere in Canada can also do. It's just a matter of whether or not the people actually care if they are a customer of an independent, or if being a customer of a major is just as good or better.
> Moreover, looking at Sasktel's website[1], their prices don't look too competitive.
Sure. Nobody said owning your own business allowed it to operate for free. Publicly-owned and co-op businesses are not a panacea. But they are independent and free of a major private business, which is the topic at hand.
Saskatchewan's population is ~80% rural, and Sasktel doesn't operate outside of Saskatchewan. It isn't terribly surprising that it costs more to service rural areas, and without much in the way of an urban base to help subsidize the operation. But this does indicate that other providers are operating within reasonable margins. Indeed, Canada is a very expensive place to do business in, and not just in telecom. You are never going to see cheap internet compared to other countries, or much of anything, without radically upheaving what the country stands for.
This is similar to what I see too. I've actually gotten a borderless phone plan from AT&T just so I don't have to deal with the Canadian oligopoly.
I think there is limited room for competition in many of these categories. For example, the infrastructure costs for telecoms make it very difficult for new competition (like a startup) to enter the market. The existing ones benefited from past funding and a lack of competition, but have captured market share. In some cases, there are other practical limitations, for example, splitting up wireless spectrum. Apart from Starlink I’m not sure there can be viable alternatives in this space
You force the infrastructure operator to allow competitors to use their infrastructure on a fair basis. It’s what happens in Europe (including the UK). It works.
OR, (and I know this is near heresy) you force the infrastructure operator to allow competitors to use their infrastructure regardless of whether it is fair to that operator.
This isn't a schoolyard playground. We don't have to play fair and treat these megacorporation with kid gloves. When the shoe is on the other foot, corporations don't play fair with us. "Fair" doesn't even come into the picture when they are in the conference room deciding their prices and terms. So why should the government treat them fairly when it comes to a regulatory solution?
“Fair” as in “on the same terms that their own retail unit gets”, without any terms that would be anticompetitive.
And no cross subsidisation.
(I meant “fair to competitors”, but I think you thought I meant “fair to the infrastructure owner”.)
In Europe they only do this for the last mile as far as I know, and this actually also prevents innovation since again there isn’t competition that can meaningfully introduce alternatives (let’s say cable versus fiber versus whatever). But I agree that approach is still an important tool (certainly better than nothing) and the US should adopt it.
Actually many places offer choice between cable and DSL variants. But once there is fiber in the ground it actually doesn't make much sense to go with anything else, so choices disappear (only for connection type, not ISP). With fiber it's much cheaper to provide high speed access (and there is a much clearer update path).
I live in sweden and can pick from roughly 30 different ISPs where I live. I don't live in some big city, but in a smaller village. There is tons of room for competition if the laws are set up to push for it.
Do you know how they are set up? What elements of their networks they share?
Giving “free data pass” to limited set of apps is even more harmful IMO, the monopolies can afford pay the network infrastructure but small app developers will not be able to.
This. If ISPs want to QoS traffic into different lanes... fine.
But those lanes should:
Or, or, hear me out. The companies that need such high speed networks, should pay the infrastructure companies and get their own communication lines built, instead of buying QoS access on publicly funded projects.
I don't think any company should be able to buy QoS access.
They should simply qualify for it on the basis of their use case.
E.g. "video streaming" or "real-time telecom"
I agree. What do you think about fair use policies? Things like having 250GB/Month kind of limits.
The internet infrastructure was built with certain utilization and speed in mind. Instead of owning up to the fact that it’s not as good as it used to be, these companies are selling quality of service products. Otherwise it’s too much of a publicity hit if they admit it.
I'm in favor of things that ultimately benefit the consumer.
"Unlimited" plans have always irked the hell out of me, because they rarely are.
I think capped totals (ideally without overage charges and with slow-lane bandwidth until reset) are perfectly fine.
But I'm 100% against named exclusions that don't count against a cap -- that's unfairly preferring an existing incumbent, and doesn't benefit the consumer in the larger/competition sense.
This is what big CDN and cloud vendors do. You can see them as part of the infrastructure. For big users of cloud you can get dedicated connections, for example Azure ExpressRoute.
That's a complete different game than that between end-customers, ISPs and service providers.
I lived in Tennessee when Google Fiber was announced there. At the time Chattanooga (and a few small towns) already had fiber internet that were offered by the utilities companies.
It was an absolute shitshow. Actually, a shitshow would have been cleaner.
Immediately AT&T rolls out gigabit internet, but not everywhere. I was in one of the small towns with gig and the previous renter had AT&T. AT&T literally cut the lines into the apartment instead of disconnecting them, causing me to have a $50 install fee (the technician was clearly also annoyed).
Then Google, AT&T, and Comcast got into a big fight and it got political. Politicians would talk about how Google coming in was preventing competition (I shit you not) and attacking the little guys. Then a judge ruled that Google couldn't operate on telephone polls because Google would "cause danger to employees" and "be a union violation" (not the unions saying these things, it was AT&T. Obviously this made people think the unions were blocking things and continued to get mad at unions)[0]. So basically one of a Comcast and AT&T technician had to be there while Google would place in fiber and you know how it goes.
It was a literal circus and the whole while it was politicized and misinformation was spreading like wildfire. Big Tech screwing over the little guys. Big Tech coming after the public utilities (never happened). Unions making everything impossible. Something about Big Tech and liberals/trans/gays taking over at some point. Like the on the ground conversations that would happen were mindbogglingly dumb. It actually was hard to figure out what was actually going on because every person and news article would have a unique story to tell. But the weirdest thing to me is about how nearly everyone I knew was a self-proclaimed Libertarian who hated government yet was licking their boots ad propping them up because they didn't want those gay/liberal/furry/godless/<insert random insult> techies rolling in decreasing competition and destroying the free market. That's when I truly started to believe that there's no such thing as a Libertarian (or any other cleanly encapsulated idea, but Libertarians are in your face), it's just a label. Because I watched anti-government free market devotees bend over backwards to protect monopolies and not even have a clue of the cognitive dissonance. It also made me really pay attention to how this happens more often than we care to think (including how we ourselves do it).
[0] https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2017/11/22/judge-rule...
Libertarian does seem to mean different things to different people, but if somebody is supporting government or propping them up because they are concerned about preserving or maintaining current or traditional social values, that is the definition of a social conservative, not a libertarian. A libertarian position on that would be a "you do you" , but don't force others to do "you." A "the government should enforce or promote this" is a social conservative position.
But yes, I mostly agree. Most of the people I know who would identify as libertarian, suddenly become much more comfortable with government action when the government is wanting to do something they like, or is even run by their person. Once "the other side" gets in control, they seem to rediscover their libertarian principles. Seeing this was a good reminder to me that we should look at actions, not words, when deciding who to vote for.
Most of these people would repeat the common lines of taxation is theft, government is bad, prefer small government, complain about things like that existence of USPS/FDA (and an inaccurate story about peanut butter)/health instructors, and all those things you'd stereotype of those positions. They'd also take positions like you say about things like drugs (despite the state having a lot of dry counties, including the one Jack Daniels is in...).
Truth is that people say they believe a lot of things but don't act as if those beliefs are true. I think people like labels more than beliefs.
A common one is how common it is to say that all politicians are corrupt. I know people that say that like it's a catch phrase and then when we talk post voting they vote in incumbents. ¯\ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) {insert industry} is shite is because of the monopolies that exist.
ppls comments on this thread towards Canada really struck a nerve with their cluelessness about Canada. People from other countries always act like it's some shining example of the Western world, but that's not the real deal at all.
Canada is basically just three big resource companies propped up by a massive housing bubble that traps newcomers in debt slavery in a form of reverse colonialism where they trick immigrants to become serfs paying rent so people who bought homes in the 80s (after working for like 6 months) can keep flipping it to the next wave of immigrants and blame them with the media owned by the very oligarchs that are supposed to regulate the real estate industry (lol!).
They don't even bother using or valuing the skills and experience these immigrants bring - you've got surgeons from the UK working as cashiers, immigrants without income so all they can do is start businesses or become traders, all to line the pockets of the ultra-rich oligarchs who get everything for cheap and flip at insane markups. They have every Prime Minister wrapped around their little finger, letting them monopolize everything and then screwing over everyone that comes to this miserable piece of land.
Take this one famous billionaire in Vancouver - I'm not gonna name names, but this dude practically owns all the salmon in BC, along with Aboriginal monopolies that were handed out just because of what has been described in anthropology textbooks as "white guilt". Then there's another billionaire from Ottawa who has a monopoly on the legal drug market - guy ended up getting choked out with a wire, and the RCMP just called it an "accident." Oh, and let's not forget the billionaire who somehow scored the exclusive rights to run the only online casino in BC. The list goes on and on.
There's no such thing as a free market in Canada - it's just a banana republic country club for the rich old Canadians at the top. Actually, I'm not even sure if the casino guy was born in Canada, but he definitely looks like he could be.
So yeah, to a lesser extent makes no sense here as somebody that has decades of experience with that country. At least America still recognizes the value of some free market and competition with or without a housing bubble.
I'd agree with this comment if it was 2010. But today the US has good internet speeds -- in general much better than Europe despite it's bigger geographic size and less-dense population.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...
Despite the category mismatch (continent vs country) .. Europe and USA have very similar population densities (~35 p/km2) [0] [1] [2] [3]
Also, many sparsely populated European countries have relatively good internet speeds (eg Iceland, Sweden).
[0] https://database.earth/population/europe/density
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula...
[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=U...
If that's true, then why does the US have higher average and median broadband speeds than pretty much every European country[0]? The narrative that is seen online isn't necessarily representative of the reality, Americans just like to complain more. In my experience, bundled data whatsapp/YouTube or whatever else is much more common in Europe too and no one really complains because again, Americans are just that much more vocal.
[0] for mobile, they are also in the top 15. For fixed broadband, they are 5th. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed
Here’s some better research https://research.rewheel.fi/downloads/Wireless_market_operat...
The FCC did that with DSL. The incumbent telcos retaliated by not maintaining their copper plant and killing their own line of business as an ISP.
The mistake there was in leaving the private monopoly intact whatsoever.
If you want to have ISP-level competition, one of the better ways to do it is to have the government install cable trenches along the roads which the government then owns and provides cheap access for anyone to lay cable. Once the trenches exist, wiring a neighborhood with fiber is then far less expensive and makes it feasible to have multiple competitors.
T-mobile offers it in the US still: https://www.t-mobile.com/tv-streaming/binge-on
In this mode, video streams will be limited to 480p but will not count against your bandwidth cap.
And by "video" we mean "Netflix". There goes neutrality and fair competition.
The worst part is, imo, US taxpayers paid for all that infrastructure.
These ISPs absolutely should be forced to open their infrastructure to other providers, like in Europe, and for the same reasons.
Isn't that exactly how it always worked? Whatever public service works well is privatised (for some reason I don't get), and whatever is a source of cost stays public. Such that the taxpayer keeps paying, and some people get rich by screwing them.
Canadas ISP situation was far better when Crown corporations were providing better, cheaper services. In standard fashion, conservative government successfully convinced half the population that it’d be better if the crowns were sold.
Spoiler: it has gotten way way worse. Not better.
I live in a city with a competitive municipal network and Google fiber. If you live in a house down the street from me, you can get 1gbit for $70.
Yet somehow, I'm paying $100 for 190mbit. The price and ISP (not the speed) are literally written into my apartment's lease agreement. This is an apartment managed by the same developer who owns every other apartment I can afford, so it's not as if I have any bargaining power here, either.
My parents, who live in a remote area, but happen to be next to a major fiber line, pay even more than I do for less than 20mbit FTTH!
I think we have made a grave mistake obsessing over the word, "monopoly". It doesn't take a monopoly for anti-competitive behavior to absolutely ruin a market. Even if healthy competition thrives in a market, some participants will find a way to abuse some customers.
We shouldn't be so lazy that we point a finger at what's working, and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
There is no “monopoly” on cellular service. There are three national carriers and a few regional carriers that have their own network.
How exactly do more carriers competing locally even work? You slice the spectrum they are allowed and have worse service? Do you remember when t-mobiles spectrum allocation was so bad that you couldn’t get a signal inside of a building?
Why to a lesser extent? In my experience Canada's was way worse than the US, which I honestly didn't think would be possible.
The OpenReach model doesn’t make much sense for wireless, where the market can support three competing providers (plus a ton of MVNOs) and overbuilding is necessary to provide sufficient capacity anyway. (E.g. AT&T couldn’t serve everyone with just its own cell towers.)
I think the more salient issue is the market simply doesn’t care about this stuff. As long as you can get on Facebook and instagram they are not mo rd by what’s going on behind the scenes.
New Zealand went from having a single provider for service and infrastructure, to having actual options. The breakup of the monopoly was imposed by regulation [1]. Following this there was a lot of taxpayer investment in fibre and while it’s been a flawed rollout, it’s made a hell of a difference. I’m on symmetric gigabit and have 2gb/s, 4gb/s and 8gb/s options if I pay more.
[1] under history section https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_New_Zealand
This was my thought. My municipality has been working towards laying a city-owned fiber network that ISPs compete on, and if that goes through I would have no problem with some of them running the kind of programs described in TFA. If consumers want it they'll choose those ISPs, if they don't they'll choose ones that offer flat rates for all traffic.
The problem with unregulated broadband isn't the lack of regulation in the abstract, it's the lack of regulation over a sector that has 2(±1) choices per household and no easy path for new entrants.
Hot take - Reliance Jio+Bharti Airtel, China Mobile+Telecom+Unicom, and NTT+KDDI are basically duo/triopolies yet were able to roll our 5G nationwide in just 2-4 years in India, China, and Japan while keeping competitive pricing, and make the US market look free in comparison.
The issue seems to be the relative lethargy of the FCC and regulators, along with issues around deprecating older infra.
This doesn't mean we should go all Reagan, but if this is streamlined at the executive level, it would really simplify everything.
there were such offers. about 10 years ago, but they are illegal EU-wide.
Broadband funding just funded some competition here.
Before: One ISP. Spectrum $120/mo 1Gb down & 40Mb up.
After: New choices of 8 fiber ISP. Opts inc $35 250Mb/250Mb, $50 1Gb/1Gb, $70 2.5Gb/2.5Gb, $120 10Gb/10Gb.
ISPs spend billions on politicians to make sure (the most possible) Americans don't have choices. They get their money's worth.
ref: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/04/28/infuriating-tel...
All the free access has been removed in Germany a while ago because of net neutrality.
The free access also came with a limit like bitrate and video resolution.
I haven't checked lately, but Comcast tried that data cap crap and was completely pushed back on in every economically important state they tried it in or there was actually an option someone could switch too. I was shocked in Chicago when I got an overage fee, but I promptly switched to RCN even before Illinois shut it down.