THBT: On balance, Net Neutrality must be restored for consumers with internet access.

RationalMadman

06.18.2023 02:25PM

#3

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@<<<Sir.Lancelot>>>

I will make you concede the debate, little worm 3

Rebuttals (unless connected to a constructive) will serve as a mitigator, to ultimately nullify the strength of an opponent's argument rather than as a point for one's own side.

Few expected it. Last week the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2–1 decision, completely upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s 2015 order regulating the Internet under Title II of the 1934 Communications Act, an order commonly called “net neutrality.” Most analysts predicted that the FCC would at most get a partial win, but legal challenges asserting that the order violated administrative law, the Communications Act, and the First Amendment failed to convince two of the three judges that deference was unwarranted. The decision ratifies the FCC’s decades-long transformation from economic regulator to social regulator and, if not reversed, will do lasting damage to U.S. technology and to free speech. 

Readers with passing knowledge of net neutrality may have heard that it means that Internet service providers must treat all Internet traffic the same. This notion of equal treatment, repeated in the first line of the court opinion, has unknown origins, makes no appearance in the rules, and is widely derided by network engineers as a fantasy. Many services transmitted on broadband lines would break with “equal” treatment.

As you might gather from the FCC’s two prior failed attempts at regulating the Internet and from the length of the final order, net neutrality is far more than a traffic-management requirement. In the words of Tim Wu, the law professor who coined the term, the Internet rules are about giving the agency the ability to shape “media policy, social policy, oversight of the political process, [and] issues of free speech. 

The court decision is a godsend for the New Deal agency that was created to oversee the telegraph industry, AT&T’s long-distance monopoly, and broadcast radio. The upheld rules give the FCC sweeping new authority to regulate Internet and Web companies.

Title II regulations, created to police the Ma Bell monopoly, transform the Internet from a virtually unregulated, private system of networks into a quasi-public utility subject to conflicting common-carrier precedents, bureaucratic designs, and interminable waiver proceedings.

Many rules and regulations kick in, including a selective ban on blocking Internet content and oversight of the competitive Internet interconnection market, but the so-called general-conduct standard swallows them all. This amorphous rule allows the FCC to prevent any practice by an Internet access provider that the FCC believes will “unreasonably disadvantage” an Internet user, application, or content provider. The FCC and net-neutrality advocates correctly recognize that if the agency can monitor and control the distributors of speech, they can shape culture and politics.

For students of the FCC and media, this looks familiar. The FCC is reluctant to engage in obvious censorship — Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction notwithstanding — so, like censors throughout history, interest groups use the agency’s licensing and regulatory powers to control the distributors
The most prominent example of abuse of regulations came in the 1960s, when the Democratic National Committee and its affiliates used the FCC’s Fairness Doctrine to drive conservatives out of TV and radio for a generation. But in recent years, broadcast media and print newspapers are losing influence to the Internet, television, and streaming video, and the new media had the potential to escape regulators’ scrutiny.

The competitive technology marketplace should be a cause for celebration for a communications and media regulator. Instead, a well-functioning market needed a manufactured crisis — in this case, illusory “neutrality violations” — for the agency to reassert power. Title II brings new media firmly inside the regulatory tent. 
Until this expansion of power, the FCC — like other common-carrier regulators, including the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Interstate Commerce Commission — faced the real prospect of slowly winding down, as the AT&T monopoly fell apart and mass media virtually exploded with the Web and new technology. Laissez-faire in communications and media — which gained steam in the Carter and Reagan administrations — led to the deregulatory 1996 amendments to the Communications Act. Until the early 1990s, regulators treated television and telephone as natural monopolies, and most consumers faced high prices and no choice for cable TV and local phone service.

• “I am sure both sides will already fully agree that a business under NN cannot purchase priority in any shape or form on the Internet, therefore it already has become totally socialist AKA anti-business in that sense. The reason advocates say it helps businesses is that this results in lesser and smaller businesses having theoretically equal ability to end up high on searches and to run at just as high speeds, except for the business of Internet Service Providers themselves and for ones who would be able to be able to weight whether paying for premium on certain ISPs is worth it or just maintaining good speeds is.
  

The reality is that right now, the same big businesses that show up first on the list when you use Google (whether as ad results or search results) would be still showing up early on the lists withoutNN but having to pay to stay there. In fact, if you weren't aware, NN doesn't really matter for search engines, since Google, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo and such are just as able to play around with their search result algorithm in what they show early or not with or without NN. The only thing that really is affected is that ISPs can make some sites run faster than others on their end by dedicating more servers to these premium sites.”

• Since, ISPs themselves right now in NN-enforcing nations, are pretty much competing in a semi-socialist environment. In this environment they are all really giving you the exact same service and rather than let them offer throttled speeds to more rural areas, they are given an ultimatum to either completely not provide to an area or to provide full speeds and service to an area with terrible cabling (which ends up impossible to achieve for most rural areas and is just an accepted loophole as long as they are trying their best to provide said speeds).”
  

• “Not only can ISPs not throttle areas that either use them less or have worse cabling (which means even if they dedicate more data the cabling makes them unable to use/give the full speeds anyway) but let's be crystal clear, they have to dedicate the same servers to every region regardless of population using their Internet and regardless of the amount of data they use. So, for instance if 2 people in one town use an ISP, that ISP has to provide them the same everything as an a busy city where around 200k use their service. While NN does allow for competition beyond this, it starts to make major problems for companies, since you are now curtailing their ability to offer different tiers to users (other than fibre vs non-fibre) and different anything really.  In fact, even in nations with NN, ISPs are allowed to offer custom parental controls which really means the users can ban any websites to censor it for the others using their Internet (usually parents to children but  you get the idea).”
  

So, in other words, the ISPs can and will censor and alter what you see on the Internet, in NN nations but are only permitted to do this as requested by the user (except some choose to default to certain automatic controls anyway which doesn't just stop pornographic websites but any at all that may radicalise or otherwise influence people).

“NN says the ISP cannot in any way block or throttle networks but it actually means that if the government order ISPs to block content, then all ISPs must unanimously do so while pretending they don't and saying absolutely nothing to anyone about it. Of course, such would include black market websites, things deemed to radicalise (whether websites or blogs of certain material within websites) and of course any pornographic website that has banned fetishes (blood-related incest, bestiality, necrophilia/snuff etc).

Any nation at all that has NN can actually suddenly ban a certain website from all ISPs and the ISPs are banned via NN to even state protest to it, argue it or in any shape or form protest it as they are bound by NN if they wish to keep providing (so they could protest it by going out of business to do so and then not being bound by NN).”

“NN is actually always going to lead to a cartel of ISPs that function like a group-monopoly, all having the same this, same that or going extinct. Yet, what they are conforming to is what consumers want at costs unreasonable dictated by needing to supply everybody with unlimited speeds other than on mobile data which they're allowed to curb, for unlimited data on wi-fi etc, at all times with equal dedication given to all websites and areas.”

NN gives companies the chance to compete fairly. They will constantly be refining and upgrading their product. And if companies are not actively blocking their opponents’ access, this means users will actually have the freedom to choose which content they engage with.

Con misunderstands how the government and NN works.

The government cannot do this because even in a nation where NN exists, the government’s control is limited only to the speed, quality, and accessibility of the content provider. 

Not the specific content hosted by the content provider or content that the user tries to access.

Title II rules make the FCC the ultimate arbiter of which tradeoffs and business models are acceptable. Call it innovation by regulatory waiver. So when providers are unsure about whether a new technology or business model “unreasonably” harms some Internet constituency, they can submit those prospective plans to the Commission and pray for an affirmative (and timely) advisory opinion. These advisory opinions border on Kafkaesque. The FCC can decline the request for an opinion, can permit the innovation, or can require more information from the submitting party. These opaque determinations cannot be appealed, and affirmative decisions can be reversed at the agency’s whim.

If history is any guide, these Title II rules and obligations will drive out smaller ISPs that can’t afford to hire lawyers and lobbyists to interpret the neologisms and incantations that will pour forth from the FCC. The larger carriers, with hallways of attorneys watching the agency’s every move, will muddle through the complexity as they grow more sclerotic, and they may even grow a little larger and more profitable as weaker rivals throw in the towel. Internet and technology companies, used to Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” culture, will increasingly need to lawyer up and ask permission before experimenting with new technology that touches on data transmission.

Some Internet providers may initially fight or test the legal boundaries, but the FCC has ways of breaking defiant firms. The most alarming is that the agency is increasingly using license and transaction approvals to coerce various policies — like net-neutrality compliance, increasing the number of, say, public-affairs, Spanish-language, and children’s TV shows, and abandonment of editorial control of TV and radio channels — that it cannot, or will refuse to, enact via formal regulation. In the long run, Internet and technology companies, now FCC supplicants, will have to divert funds from new services and network design to fending off regulatory intrusions and negotiating with the Internet’s new zoning board.

“No it doesn't. It limits the ways they can compete fairly and certainly turns ISP competition into a near-socialist realm.

Companies could not pay to block their competition, you could even if you thought they could do that, make a law only for that kind of 'negative' package/premium. NN stops any company at all purchasing higher bandwidth and streaming power with an ISP. This is a risk for them, it's an investment. They don't have all potential customers using the same ISP, they'd need to make different deals with different ISPs and be losing funds to this advertising revenue. Everything about it is fair expenditure. Every single element of it is fair even if they are richer than another company, unless as you said that they can 'buy the removal of another' that is not fair. There should not be any such deal offered. NN focuses on stopping companies getting premium speeds to their website, there was no issue about people 'buying other websites to have no access'. They can't stop their competition doing the same, that's a separate topic and a separate law. NN does stop that in theory but that was never being done to be stopped. It doesn't even serve the ISP's interests to offer such a deal, it would be terrible press.

This is also why Pro has not shown you examples of companies paying ISPs to give 0 access to their (the non-ISP company) competition. It wasn't happening and is not what NN really stops, it is the entire positive end of the spectrum, paying for higher speeds, that is stopped.”

“Why is it that you can't search radicalisation content? Why is there a 'dark web' in the first place? Instead of censorship being done in a way where private ISPs could speak up, NN has clauses that blackmail all ISPs to censor on demand and supply the same sites to all users. Despite this, ISPs are still completely allowed to privately censor further, since they can default any level of 'safety controls' as long as the user technically can undo them.

Instead of ISPs having full ability to choose what runs faster, slower or isn't shown, NN makes it so the government decides for them, which removes a huge part of healthy capitalism between ISPs and basically leads to socialistic competition where they are just different names to identical services.

NN inherently is censorship, they are censoring the Internet to provide all websites at equal speeds and blackmailing ISPs to have their own service 'censored' as their control over it is being paralysed.”

“In no shape or form is this fair on ISPs. Let's look at ISPs themselves and talk about 'healthy competition'. All you have is shell corporations now, in theory, serving the agenda of the government. They are competing rather paralysed, they need to supply equal Internet speeds to areas withbarely any customers as areas with many (which is why they often are getting motive to pull out from rural areas altogether, leaving only 1 or 2 ISPs to each, that happen to have had a head start and therefore get enough customers to make it worth it).

They not only need equal speeds to all areas, they need all websites to run at equal speeds, have barely any right to as a private firm prioritise basically anything.

NN is entirely socialist in every sense of the word. The only part of it that enables capitalism is the fact it allows ISPs to technically exist as private companies but beyond that they are competing in an environment where the only means of competition is how nice the box looks and the quality of customer support, maybe a discount deal but they can't really offer much better there or they'll go bankrupt at this rate.

What you have really achieved via NN is that the Internet Service Providing industry has been paralysed of capitalistic competition. Furthermore, what Pro fails to understand is that it is fair competition for companies to pay for priority on ISPs.

They are risking investing advertising revenue specifically into ISP priority, they are gambling that people will turn up on that ISP enough to their website to get excellent speeds as a worthwhile investment. They even can invest into areas meaning their website services work faster in some regions than others, pleasing their target audience. This investment can all lead to losses for the company, meaning it is entirely fair.

This has been totally removed. Also, NN is very vague on the 'how' of a lot of it. The reality is that it costs ISPs a lot of money to suddenly introduce fibre optics to some rural areas if they want to operate there. It's actually surprising they didn't just starve rural areas of Internet altogether, since they could have. Virgin actually pulled out of many rural areas instantly and is only began to encroach during the Covid spike in Internet usage (factcheck me yourself, I know I am right on this, the sources will tell you that only after the 2020 lockdowns began Virgin suddenly began to be interested to extend to rural areas, since other ISPs had already laid down physical fibre optics cabling and there was a spike in usage). Cunning filthy rich ISPs would tend to avoid less densely populated areas since NN blackmails them to have to give completely equal allocation of speed and servers to those areas, so they realise they're better off just focusing on busy cities and being the better advertised one there (Virgin and Comcast AKA Xfinity are both major hypocrites that did this and then began a 'rural area campaign' when Covid spikes happened).”