Thanks in part to net neutrality, the open internet has grown to become an unrivaled source of choice, competition, innovation, free expression, and opportunity.
Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
I think the argument here is the same for any argument of nationalization: To turn a private good into a public one.
Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
Net neutrality regulations were adopted to protect (and in some degree restore) the net neutrality condition; the internet was largely neutral from its inception; though by the early 00s threats to neutrality in practice were becoming clear, and the FCC began discussion the issue, adopting open internet principles that it first attempted to promote via case-by-case action (which was limited by the courts), then Title I regulation (which was struck down by the courts) in 2010.
There's considerable reason to believe that even without enforceable rules, the attention and active policy activity directed at enforceable rules inhibited non-neutral action by ISPs compared to what it would have been without that activity.
> So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
To say net neutrality regulations have been would be without merit, sure. To say net neutrality has been, OTOH, is factually true.
So if I understand your point here, it's basically that ISPs had an informal "code of conduct" if you will, that "All packets are created equal." That this was an informal contract with the users that everyone tacitly agreed to - what you state as a condition.
Starting in the early 2000s however some groups started breaking that informal contract and the goal in the early 2000s was to codify that into law.
So "net neutrality" in this case is trying to make a formal system out of what would be considered common law.
They didn't change. They bought eachother and squeezed out competition out until their influence was more powerful than the consequences of playing unfairly. A long long time ago, you could choose between dozens of ISPs. That is no longer true.
I think what changed is streaming services - huge and costly (to the ISP) bandwidth hogs which are just asking to be extorted because they make money on their content.
Maybe it's also a matter of competition with cable TV - if Comcast reduces Internet service prices and takes the money from Netflix instead, Netflix will have to rise their prices and be less competitive?
Even though there were no explicit rules requiring something, there were nevertheless unofficial norms that were followed. If (almost) everyone does something without a rule, then making a rule is pointless. But when you get enough people skirting those norms, it then becomes necessary to codify them. For instance, the Special Prosecutor law that Ken Starr operated under was put in place in the wake of Watergate and the Saturday Night Massacre, when it became clear that the understanding that a special prosecutor should be protected from firing upon executive whim.
But when you get enough people skirting those norms, it then becomes necessary to codify them.
Is that what was happening, because if so it was never made clear to me. The first I remember this coming up was with the internet "lanes." AFAIK, again tell me where I'm wrong here please, there was nothing preventing an ISP from creating a "fast lane" before 2015.
Hasn't actually happened, no. The closest thing was some deal between YouTube and MetroPCS, though competing streaming services didn't have the technology required implemented and MetroPCS said they would add other sercices once that happened.
I'm very shaky on the details there, so don't take my word for it.
Before 2015, there was really nothing stopping them from doing it aside from consumer outrage. But as time goes on, large ISPs have been making more and more noise about "internet fast lanes". There have been several incidents of them throttling sites like Netflix in secret. So while they previously adhered to defacto-net-neutrality via informal gentlemen's agreement, the likes of Comcast are no longer acting like gentlemen.
Without net neutrality, it will get worse. Especially since ISPs are also cable and phone companies who are justifiably worried about how the internet is increasingly affecting their cable and phone revenue.
> Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
The net neutrality was not necessary early on because it was not feasible in the past to control it on such large scale.
So between 1980-2015 net neutrality (did not exist as a law) but was there indirectly in forms of:
- the technology at the time did not allow for deep packet inspection
- net neutrality was indirectly present due to telecom regulations. For example telecom could not just block calls as they wished. So during dial-up times anyone could enter that market and provide service and cost was low. During the time of DSL there was a regulation that required telecom companies to lease their lines so again cost to enter and be DSL ISP was relatively low. There's no such thing with cable companies.
> Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
I think you're misunderstanding it. This has nothing to do with Internet being a public good or not. It's all about controlling access to it.
What net neutrality does in a nutshell is preventing the ISPs (which provide Internet access) from being able to censor at their whim what you can access.
In normal scenario, free market would solve this issue. No one would use ISPs that place restrictions on their service and would move the competitors.
The problem is that we don't have a normal scenario, we have regional monopolies, and if you don't like your ISP, tough luck.
It's also nearly impossible to enter this market anymore, for example Google was attempting to deploy Google Fiber, but even they failed.
We need net neutrality now more than ever, because a single company essentially now will be able to control what content you can access. It would be a smaller issue if each region had its own separate company, but in reality the only companies that benefit on this you probably can count on your one hand.
Thanks for the in depth reply. Great point about technical capability to actually impact usage - and I would imagine the regional monopoly is one of the reasons that is possible.
Seems like breaking the local monopolies would solve all of these problems. Even with Title II it's still a huge problem and local ecosystems don't really benefit.
Since there's limited space and it's not only prohibitively expensive for companies to run their own fiber, but also impossible (due to limited space) for the city to allow every company to run their fiber, it would be great if city would create the infrastructure, maintain it and lease it to companies (of course at cost to cover the maintenance).
Although whenever city wanted to start providing internet access existing ISPs were fighting in courts to prevent that.
Another solution would be to do something similar to DSL that the cable companies are required to lease their fiber at reasonable price. The problem would be to determine what reasonable price is, and I'm sure the cable companies would fight against that.
But even then I still think net neutrality should be there. ISPs should just provide access to the Internet with parameters I agreed to paid for. They have no business to control what I can access (or even monitor my activity).
It's similar to electrical or water companies, they don't care what appliances you plug in[1], they won't charge you extra because you want to use 50" TV a dishwasher or add a water filter. All they care is how much electricity/water you consume, that's how it supposed to be.
[1] ok, with electricity there's thing called power factor (https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...), which you should strive to be 1 (or 100% on the mentioned site) otherwise you might get charged extra if you're big consumer of electricity, but this is there to not waste energy
Hasn't the spirit of the Internet always been about a neutral Internet? That spirit was being threatened and so regulations were put in place to keep it neutral.
We have retroactively latched on to this RMS style idea of a digital library of alexandria that has somehow been abandoned.
It's like nobody remembers the internet of the 90s and how blatantly over the top siloed it was for the average AOL style user. I mean I remember my paid dial up internet service came on a floppy and had it's own browser and pop-up ads.
The "free" services required that you click on header links every few minutes.
The Internet of the 90's I remember was a small, local ISP that basically gave me creds to a unix system. I had access to ftp, telnet, usenet, web, email, etc. I knew the people working there and could drive over and have lunch with them. They were eager to share how it all worked. As long as you didn't (regularly) go over your storage quota, you were good.
This is the neutral net that I recall and so wish I still had.
Yet from the network perspective, there was not much preferential routing based on service providers, because consolidation is always a late stage thing. (Where content and connection providers combined.)
If there are bad players, why instead don't you get rid of the legislation that gives them monopolies, so other people can offer better services?
Instead you're just giving the bad apples your money. Oh how awful for them... and they will put data caps and raise prices, because as long as the laws gives them monopolies you can't do nothing about it.
I would love to get rid of the legislation that promotes monopolies among the ISPs. Please do tell me how? Seems every politician these days doesn't hold my same opinions.
There were net neutrality actions before 2015, and net neutrality has applied ever since they were using phone lines for internet service (as, for example, those - phones - are where the original legislation was targeted, and where net neutrality came from). The 2015 Title II was a specific decision about specific ISPs (namely mobile data plans).
Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
I think the argument here is the same for any argument of nationalization: To turn a private good into a public one.
Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."