Even if you adore the principle of Net neutrality, it's reasonable to demand that federal regulatory agencies stick to what Congress authorized them to do. Otherwise you have illegal regulations and bureaucratic turf-grabbing that will not treat the Internet well. Remember Hollywood's successful efforts to lobby the FCC to impose "broadcast flags" on computers by bureaucratic fiat? A federal appeals court correctly struck it down as exceeding the agency's legal authority, as I wrote here in 2005: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-5697719.html

That same appeals court is currently considering the FCC's Net neutrality regulations. BTW, it's also the same court that slapped down the FCC's first attempt to impose Net neutrality regulations without legal authority in 2010: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001825-38.html

If Net neutrality violations become an actual problem, there's no shortage of publicity-hungry politicians in Congress (hi, Ed Markey!) who will hold hearings and push legislation forward. Obama will happily sign it. Until then, other government debacles including NSA domestic surveillance and Obamacare should make us wary of federal agencies exceeding their legal authority -- especially after Congress considered and rejected a law that would have given it to them in the first place.

BUT, because this does force deals to be crafted behind closed doors, they will turn out looking a lot like the deals that HBO/Shotime have with Comcast and TWC. Plus, look at what's going on with Facebook already... phones in some countries have "facebook data" only plans. Sure, this is great for emerging markets to have access to family and friends for free, but at the loss of any other social network upstart that wants in on it.

I don't see indie content ever being cut off, but I do see them becoming "premium" subscription level services that require people to pay more to access them. Want to play COD or GOW online? You will need this level access to play with any reasonable speeds. It will happen slowly too, as people become accustom to the idea that opening a Wikipedia page will take 1000 ms then to 5000 ms to fully finish rendering. Someone at Comcast will nudge slowly testing whether people notice or care.

If we don't fight the good fight and force internet providers to remain dumb pipes, we are asking to have the most expensive internet on the planet. As cable TV dies in favor of watching what you want, when you want, they will naturally move to charge you for things you want to do on the internet instead.

edit: autocorrect fail :-P

That and I'm kind of biased, because I founded a company which is trying to level the playing field and make net neutrality de facto for internet services instead of de jure. Information is like water. Put a barrier in front of it and it will always try to find a way to flow through it.

In 2013 there is absolutely _zero_ rationale for contracts to play a part in either the wireless or the pipeline infrastructure. Telecoms know this and are doing everything they can to drag out the death sentence, making it as painful and expensive as possible for everybody involved.

If we let the telecoms do with fiber what's been done with mobile networks not only is the web going to be less neutral, the bias will naturally lead to the dissemination of news and information as being more easily controlled and piped to the masses in sinister ways.

Bad news for old money - the Internet has an appetite for rentier blood. This will not be tolerated long term.

This creates a competitive market between service provides (competing on price, service quality, and customer service) while removing the high costs to enter that market.

Infrastructure, as opposed to service, becomes the regulated market.

The best case scenario is if the US was disconnected from the rest of the worlds connectivity. Almost all evils that has generated hate from the public has been american corporations.

But based on our conversion rate, I don't think there is a market for it. Feel free to email us if you have any constructive criticism. contact@uplink.aero

Any new developments on this matter?

As a consumer, i would obviously be a proponent of my current ISP giving non-discriminatory access to all sites. However, aside from voicing my opinion in the form of purchasing the services of a specific ISP, i do not believe we should have the power to do much else in dictating how these companies should run their business through the passing of laws. The author points out that the loss of net neutrality would hurt small-scale ventures - yet ignores the fact that these ISPs he wishes to regulate were once the same small start-ups that he wants to protect. Was the success of these businesses the single factor that moves them from protected status to regulatory target?

The size of these dominant ISPs means that a great deal of the population relies on their services - but our "need" for these services does not give us the right to dictate how they should run their business. If enough of us feel that none of the dominant ISPs are adequate, then our need goes unserved, and sooner or later another ISP will arrive to serve these customers.

Again - i am strongly in favor of net neutrality. But if we resort to regulatory means to get what we want, it will lead to vastly negative consequences down the road. Why start a business if this is the reward for success?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum

As long as we have an oligopoly of telcos, they will lobby their way to destroy Net Neutrality.

You have to be willing to show them that reason in order to save your business. You all have to innovate a solution. How are you going to join together with the other businesses in your sector to PIVOT TOGETHER in order to jolt ordinary people out of their careless stupor and educate them about how to force the hand of those corporations who could easily solve the problem ?

Do you really think a black page background and a banner is anything more than a sloppy haphazard attempt to save your industry ?

Aren't you risking shareholder value if your company is not engaging a significant percentage of it's resources towards engineering a plan to resist the takeover of the key infrastructure that your business needs in order to survive ?

How can you justify that kind of risk taking to your board ?

VC's what percentage of your fund's budget is set aside for the task of preserving the Internet that your portfolio will rely on ?

Ordinary people won't care if a page is black or not or if some banner is present or not, but if twitter, instagram, and pintrest for example all go offline at the same time that would send a message. Or what about if all the major social startups started paying attention to HTTP referer headers and they started redirecting inbound visitors to educational splash screens based on their referred header? The splash screens would educate these people about how they should really change their default search engine or delete their Facebook account in order to help save the Internet.

I'm not saying we should pick on Google or Facebook specifically per say, but I do think that if enough "social pressure" was applied Google alone could fix the problem by helping the Internet route around the entities who are engaged in a Denial Of Service attack on key Internet infrastructure. All Google has to do is punish a few corporate websites like they did to rapgenius the other day. That's a good start at least. Does your startup "scene" have a plan to help force google's hand ? If not then why not ?

If all of the major web startups started doing this kind of thinking Google would have to take this stuff more seriously REAL FAST. Think about it! That's how you send a real "social signal".

Why is this industry not trying to defend itself ? Ask yourself this question.. Who controls your company ? Who gets to decide how important preserving a free Internet is to the long term viability of your business? Has your company already sold out ?

Founders, where do you stand ? How willing are you to be public about where you stand and how long are you going to wait ? How long can you afford to wait before you take action with others in order to save your business ? Why aren't you already more organized on this issue ? Why aren't you ready ? Why are you not taking this threat to your business more seriously ? Why do you apparently assume you are powerless ?

In addition to protesting, we should also consider building a free open source network thats protected and run by the community. (It could be run by the government, but until the government is 'for and by the people', we'll crowdsource the maintainance and seek to rapidly automate the work that nobody would volunteer for) We can give ourselves the best, but lets start with free gigabit internet wired and wireless for all of America! What would this 'cost' in terms of money? millions or billions? But the resources are here; just being hoarded until money is traded. Would AT&T build a free network for us? Not if it meant losing money to Verizon. But what if it wasnt about money? The value in having a fully connected country is priceless.

Thankfully we have the government to protect us against trusts and monopoly's. But what if the trust or monopoly was a community one? If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile colluded to give free gigabit internet to America, they could combine their separately walled gardens and use those resources to further the human race. But this would have to be a guaranttee so that once everyone put all their time and resources into this, some CEO cant just flip a switch and start charging. Once free, always free. So if they did this it would probably mean giving up their pride and names. I mean, would this free network be called Verizon? Why do they get their name on it? So we could crowdsource a new name for our free network so no one can boast. US Telecom, US Net, Free Net, the name can be anything, something we would all be proud to get behind. the most important part is the 'us' and 'US'. All of us in the US have the resources to take care of all of US(just focusing on America now, but eventually we could help the world). These telecom companies will either become part of the solution or they will precipitate out.

Again though, this would be a huge project and there's currently no website we can go to in order to find and take part in these country and perhaps global initiatives. Imagine a mix of Kickstarter and Change.org. First a project or idea is petitioned to the community and if enough people like it and think it would be the best solution, then its opened up to a crowdsourcing page to collect funds and not just money but people can also donate the final resources that are ultimately needed, which is what the money would eventually be traded for anyways....more to come, working on this website...

In situations like this, one role of government is to regulate these natural monopolies to protect citizens.

One such regulation, for instance, is that the power company cannot shut off your power in the middle of winter in Minnesota without fulfilling some pretty stringent criteria.

Setting up telecommunications networks is expensive and legally complex, and the resources involved are extremely limited. The likelihood of a functioning free market in this space is essentially nil. In the absence of a functioning free market, the government is the only entity with the authority to apply regulations for the benefit of the citizenry.

I argue that most people won't care about their "choice" (air quotes, because most people can't pick from more than 2 ISPs) of ISP until it's too late.

Already you have ISPs throttling access to streaming video sites (netflix, youtube, twitch) with little to no REAL blowback.

With the barriers to entry as high as they are, there's no way for a competitor to succeed in the market solely on the basis of being net-neutral.

Google Fiber, in markets where it's available, has led to competitors reducing prices and offering better service. However, there's no word of change regarding net neutrality.

If you leave it up to the prisoners, they will both rat each other out resulting in the worst possible outcome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma). Assuming that consumers will decide what is best for the whole of society is simply incorrect. "Internet innovation" is very much one of those big picture goals where I think some community planning (e.g. government intervention) would help the outcome.

For that matter, read about the origins of antitrust law. Monopolies and oligopolies neutralize the market's usual power to straighten things out. Giant companies aren't generally interested in innovation; they're interested in dominance. (See The Innovator's Dilemma for more on the economics of why.)

If it makes you feel any better, it's not like the FCC's going to go around kicking down telco doors and inspecting routers. Proof of net neutrality failures will come from us, the nerds. As individuals, measuring our own networks, and as the techies at innovative companies, going public when telcos try to discriminate against them.

IMO, the US government correctly concluded that the Bell Monopoly was initially in the best interest of the nation, as it accelerated universal phone service. Later, with a lot of prodding, they reversed that policy and unleashed the telecom competition that helped bring us the last 30 years of innovation.

The problem is that the telephone companies are essentially rebuilding the old AT&T through merger, and wants to pillage the consumers of telecom services once again. They are doing this by declaring that the FCC can only regulate voice, defined as legacy TDM/POTS lines and related technology. Simultaneously, they are moving in state legislatures and congress to eliminate the requirement to provide universal POTS service.

I've worked in a large enterprise where the network teams became too politically powerful (essentially becoming a troll under the bridge instead of a service provider) and basically put the organization out of business by making it either impossible or too expensive to get anything done. Empowering phone companies without a short, tight leash would be doing the same thing to our nation.

Powerful network owners are the most dangerous people in technology.

Because it's not a technology issue, it's a business fairness issue. You know, the same way we let the government handle contracts.

>Seriously, I can't get over the dissonance here. If it's such a shitty idea, let consumers decide.

One's the genie is in the corporate box, there will be no turning back. The consumer cannot decide if he is not even provided with an alternative -- or if any alternative is more expensive. Like you couldn't decide about carrier-locked phones all those years.

You either push for fairness to be regulated in law, or let the 4-5 top players divide the pie as they like.

>Google Fiber et al will just eat the major telecoms' lunch sooner or later anyway.

And who told you that Google WONT take advantage of crashing net neutrality itself?

I'm very against government regulation, but something it's necessary.

Also, it's true, as others have noted, that competition among ISPs won't be enough to ensure net neutrality because there can't be enough competition (either through regulatory capture or natural monopoly economics).

However, even if there were competition, competing ISPs have the economic incentive to discriminate. The economic modeling is available in the work of Barbara van Schewick (she wrote an amazing, and dense, book on net neutrality). So competition would not necessarily solve the issue, as it does not solve things like car safety (or safe housing). I'm a huge fan of free markets, but there are market failures requiring some government intervention in the form of contract law, property law and its exemptions, and regulation in specific situations.

Not sure how i'm getting the choice to use a "net neutrality compliant" ISP if comcast decides i can't reach site Z or Y.

(Also, Google is probably one of the worst examples imaginable for arguing the market should make such decisions.)

I think the key is the false assumption that this is how the origins and advancement of political authority works. This net neutrality issue is much easier to explain with a model of political authority that treats it as something the ruling class takes by force.

Social contract theory was just the best thing Enlightenment thinkers could come up with to settle the cognitive dissonance they experienced upon realizing that the existence of governments was a plain violation of their new ideas about natural rights.

edit: typos.

It's like somebody being wrong on the internet, only you can feel you did something about it. Like empowered somebody who doesn't know how to fix it and has abysmal track record in fixing hundreds of other things, to do whatever it takes to fix it. That can't ever go wrong, can it?

And we can be sure we can totally trust them with this power and they won't think about usurping this and taking it way beyond original purpose and trying to control everything everywhere. It's not like we're living through the wave of revelations showing how far the government can go subverting privacy, undermining security and expanding its powers in very short time. It's not like we have an agency that has an official logo of globe-encompassing octopus on top of the slogan "Nothing is beyond our reach". Calling for more control of the internet for those people would be indeed a bit myopic. But that's not what is going on here, right?

This is one of the two key dynamics in the tech industry. The other is distributors versus content companies. When Amazon streams you a movie made by NBC/Universal over pipes built by Verizon, Amazon is positioned antagonistically to these other companies in wanting to extract the largest share of the total you're willing to pay for the whole package. Net neutrality helps them do this, and so does weaker copyright protections, among other things.

I would argue that it's not even clear how the market would respond to this, and yet the pro-neutrality camp paint a picture of corporate apocalypse. This seems reasonable to me:

Neutrality rules are repealed. Some ISPs begin discriminating against certain publishers that do not pay up, but can use the payments to subsidize reductions in cost of consumer access. The "multitudes" of neutrality proponents begin demanding undiscriminated connections, calling for boycotts, switching to providers that offer such connections. Neutrality activists develop tools to compare and publicize connection rates to different publishers through different ISPs. Small-time providers form associations to raise awareness of the issue as well. Ethical marketing comes into play as some ISPs and some big publishers reject connection rate differentiation. Some ISPs that also own publishing properties are caught or implied to be preferring their own content over competitors, drawing political attention. In some areas, net neutrality laws (not just "rules") are passed, which is a draw for startups. Meanwhile, many who had no home connectivity in the past are now able to afford the "subsidized/sponsored" service level.

What irks me about the middle-class idealogues raising a fuss about this now is that they arbitrarily draw the line of equality around big corporations, with little attention given to the fact that service is tiered at all. If it doesn't make sense for small publishers to be penalized for not ponying up, it should make even less sense for certain individuals in society to be penalized for not being able to afford anything more than dial-up or basic DSL. Going further, it should be more appalling that the most financially under-resourced can't even afford the most basic service level, and live without any internet participation. Instead, they prefer corporations to carry the costs of keeping the level field artificially level, while doing nothing to help those below them have the same level of access they do.

Because we have no free market in the ISP business. It's close to a sick monopoly, or to cartels which agree on fixing high prices. If the government won't reign it, who will?

Yes the free market should decide, but we just don't have one. Net neutrality is an imperfect remedy at best, but letting the telcos run wild with artificial privilege isn't the answer either.

Indeed, it will be unfortunate for the United States when internet services are akin to healthcare and prescription drugs.

Who do you think is footing the bill for those Facebook-only plans? Covering the costs of all internet use sounds like an unsustainable business strategy.

Are 'social network upstarts' losing out on users in the USA because people don't want (or can't afford) to pay for a data plan? How is this any different?

I'm not really okay with the idea of regulating net neutrality from an ideological perspective, but from a practical one, we're kind of stuck with the market we have - effective regional monopolies are granted to a very small number of companies, and there is very little space for counterbalance from competition (which is why Google Fiber is such a Huge Frickin' Deal!). Left unfettered, the end result would likely be that the AT&Ts and Comcasts end up leeching their customers dry on both ends of the pipe, because those customers don't have any alternative.

In my ideal world, there would be no need to regulate net neutrality because I could penalize bad companies by refusing to do business with them, and getting my friends and family to do the same, but we don't have those options - choosing an ISP is a lot like choosing which knee you want to be hit in. In a market where companies have been granted regulatory monopolies, the invisible hand is rather ineffective.

I could understand opposition to net neutrality if there were competition in the ISP market. However, I have no choice but to use Comcast, so the idea that they can decide what sites I visit and how fast they are is very scary.

How net neutrality is put in practice is entirely a different matter. And for some reason you think if it is the government doing the enforcement, that it is somehow against freedom? I completely disagree. Government not allowing another private entity to abuse me is fine with me.

In some countries net neutrality is the law already by the way.