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The Internet Government

Is the Net Neutrality Debate a Pointless Distraction? (nytimes.com) 104

"People may scream at me for saying this, but net neutrality is one of America's longest and now most pointless fights over technology." So argues the New York Times "On Tech" newsletter author Shira Ovide, calling the debate "a distraction for our elected leaders and corporations when there are more pressing issues."

Ovide also shares their discussion with Times technology and regulatory policy reporter Cecila Kang: Kang: You can see the appeal of rules that make sure internet providers don't stall web traffic unless it's from their preferred business partners or their own streaming services. However, the debate feels much less urgent now that we're talking about threats of online disinformation about vaccine deployment and elections. The net neutrality debate focused on internet service providers as powerful gatekeepers of internet information. That term now seems better applied to Facebook, Google and Amazon....

Ovide: Internet providers, public interest groups, some tech companies and a bunch of our elected leaders have been screaming holy war about an issue for 13 years without a resolution. Can they reach a middle ground and we'll all move on?

Kang: There probably isn't much of a middle ground. There are either net neutrality rules or there aren't. And the internet service providers see net neutrality as a slippery slope that leads to broader regulation of high-speed internet services or government-imposed limits on prices they can charge. They will fight any regulation. And that's true, too, of the lobbyists who are hired to argue against anything.

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Is the Net Neutrality Debate a Pointless Distraction?

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  • by Lordpidey ( 942444 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:42PM (#61106432) Homepage

    Just because someone is bleeding to death from a gunshot wound, doesn't mean their brain cancer doesn't also need to be treated.

    • Or maybe you mean it the other way around? The attacks on net neutrality are like gunshot wounds? (I also had trouble decrypting your sig.)

      My initial take on the topic is that the notion of "neutrality" itself is quite unclear and thus a weak foundation for policy. Maybe it's fine and dandy to proclaim that all information should flow freely, but the information is not "neutral" nor are any of the people sending or receiving the information. Basically doesn't matter what dimension you measure, ceteris parib

      • Explicitly: no neutrality specifically and unerringly benefits monopolies.

        For those not willing to the history lesson, TOR, filesharing, and other acts perceived as thwarting both the media copyright monopolists, but also the Telcos who believe they own the wires, and do NOT want to invest in the capital necessary to actually distribute the Internet, rather than buy the minimum necessary.

        The shift in common carrier status made them livid. Ajit Pai put on his knee pads to make sure his ex-bosses and their fr

        • The debate over net neutrality only masks the real problem in broadband access in the US, which is *lack of competition.*
          • by shanen ( 462549 )

            Well, I can address the lack of competition aspect. That fits into one of my favorite imaginary solution approaches. I think that one of the principles of the tax system should be to encourage freedom, which includes more competition. Not so sure if it there should be a principle of favoring small businesses over large ones, but my approach can easily be extended in that direction.

            The basic idea would be to have a progressive profits tax based on market share. Not calling it an actual crime, but if you're t

    • by larwe ( 858929 )
      While that's true, I think that the facts are incredibly more bleak and that it's fundamentally true that net neutrality doesn't really matter any more. The original argument for net neutrality (or at least one of them) went something like this: If the pipe-owners are allowed to charge different pipe-users different fees to move bytes, it will be impossible for new, innovative data-heavy startups to arise. New arenas of publication won't be able to get off the ground because the incumbents will have cheaper
    • by e3m4n ( 947977 )

      Only an idiot of a surgeon would give someone a strong dose of blood thinning chemo while they are on the operating table trying to tie off arterial bleeding while the patient is hemorrhaging. Its called Triage for a reason. In survival its called the rule of three's. Looking for food when you have a wound, or have not built a shelter is a recipe for death. You can go as much 3 weeks without food, 3 days without water. In harsh environments 3 hours is enough to kill you and if your bleeding out you might ha

  • Simple Answer (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Seranfall ( 680430 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:47PM (#61106454)
    No
    • The Obama era FCC "Net Neutrality" rules were unneeded and the arguments for them, along the lines of "the end of the internet", were completely overblown.

      That's what many of us said at the time, and events have proven it. They've been repealed for years now and the internet didn't end. In fact, nothing particularly bad happened as a result. Oh no! Some company is allowed to not charge their customers for streaming service bandwidth against their data cap if their customer agrees to limit the video resoluti

  • Utterly pointless (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:47PM (#61106456)

    It seems like there are a thousand different definitions of what "net Neutrality" even means, so no matter if someone is for or against it, you can't even know if you agree with them without an hour of discussion!

    That also means when any legislation or regulation that comes up that supports "Network Neutrality" most people don't even understand 1/100 of what said rules actually do, or think they do something entirely opposite of what is actually happening.

    • It seems like there are a thousand different definitions of what "net Neutrality" even means, so no matter if someone is for or against it, you can't even know if you agree with them without an hour of discussion!

      That's a serious and real problem.

    • by larwe ( 858929 )
      That's all true. But a decision needs to be made here. We currently don't measure what people use (say) their home water supply for. Drinking. Rinsing dentures. Bathing. Washing the dog. Washing the car. Filling a koi pond. Should your water utility be able to demand that you pay 2x rates for filling a koi pond? Should everyone be allowed 5 glasses of free drinking water a day, and each one charged $0.25 thereafter? These questions haven't been asked SOLELY because it is VERY DIFFICULT to figure out where a
      • your water utility would love to maximize profit through price discrimination.

        They do already though, although they do not track exactly how I use water, they very much do charge a premium if I go over a certain amount of water use.

        they are tempted to seek rent. Should they be able to do so?

        this goes back to my main point, you say seek rent, but what if it's the other way and they want to discount water for some specific purpose. Like if I were using water to feed sick kittens, are you arguing that the lo

        • by larwe ( 858929 )
          "although they do not track exactly how I use water, they very much do charge a premium if I go over a certain amount of water use."

          Charging on quantity usage, or the time of day at which you do your usage, is completely different from charging according to what you are doing with your usage. The water utility cannot see what I am doing with their liquid gold - but they would love to be able to.

          "what if it's the other way and they want to discount water for some specific purpose. Like if I were using wate

          • First, a profit-seeking company is not going to spend time figuring out how to give me things for free.

            T-Mobile did exactly that with Netflix, which is why I used that metaphor - rather than changing extra for things, the things ISPs have done with freedom to adjust pricing is generally not charge network customers for traffic from some sources.

  • No (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:54PM (#61106488)
    what an incredibly stupid question. Is this a propaganda piece from the anti-NN crowd?

    There are many, many pointless wedge issues used to distract from economics. Net Neutrality isn't one of them. The Internet is a basic component of a modern economy and NN ensures access to it.
    • There are many, many pointless wedge issues used to distract from economics. Net Neutrality isn't one of them. The Internet is a basic component of a modern economy and NN ensures access to it.

      There's a demonstration proof we don't needNN regulation to have internet access. We didn't have any NN regulation prior to, what was it, 2016 and haven't had it since 2018. Somehow I still have internet access at increasingly greater speeds and basically flat prices.

      That's the point of the article: perhaps NN regulation is addressing a concern people had 15 years ago, we've since learned it's not the problem it could be, and there are other concerns which seem more realistic and pressing.

  • by VeryFluffyBunny ( 5037285 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:54PM (#61106490)

    The net neutrality debate focused on internet service providers as powerful gatekeepers of internet information.

    And they're still powerful gatekeepers of internet information. With a sheer lack of imagination & such a laissez-faire attitude towards net neutrality, the author probably won't understand why it matters until it's gone.

  • No (Score:3, Interesting)

    by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:54PM (#61106492) Homepage Journal

    Turning the internet into "channels" or a pay-per-view system is a terrible, suffocating, and expensive idea.

    The debate on censoring or otherwise fighting disinformation is important but entirely unrelated.

  • If social media monopolies control the discourse, and ISPs control which web sites gain preferential access, then merely solving one of those two problems won't resolve a disinformation morass. It's not as if television media outlets don't lie. And I'm looking at you Fox News, and OANN, and Newsmax, spreading all sorts of lies which led to a violent insurrection and attempt to overthrow the US government. So resolving social media control over the free flow of information by breaking up these monopolies wou

    • Fox News actually runs quite the social media site in addition to their "news". Thousands of posts are made on many articles every day, many of them openly racist or thinly veiled threats of violence or calls to assassinate Democrats, particularly AOC and Ilhan Omar. Some of them aren't even that veiled.

      And of course, they do everything they accuse social media sites of. Posts are deleted arbitrarily and people are actually shadowbanned, which AFAIK is something FB and Twitter don't do. If you get banne

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:56PM (#61106504)
    the 1% can stop trying to wrest control of the Internet away from the rest of society and turn it into 21st century Cable TV with them in charge of programming.
    • They pretty much already control programming. What do you think facebook is? Or even your stupid fark.com site. Pick any other larger one, like reddit and even slashdot, and the situation is the same: These sites aren't exactly owned and run by poor people.

  • by Can'tNot ( 5553824 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:56PM (#61106508)
    This is a very short article in which the author has a very short interview with another person and makes the very short argument that Net Neutrality matters less now because things have gotten so much worse that it's turned into one of our lessor tech-related problems. That's it.

    It's not so much that an argument like this can't be made, but it's provocative enough that it really needs to be supported. This article has all of the content of a blog post.
    • You are a charitable motherfucker.

    • by larwe ( 858929 )
      Sure, as I said elsewhere in this thread it sort of "doesn't matter" because there are other gatekeepers now that have made the question irrelevant; even with unlimited neutral connectivity, the online landscape would still be controlled by Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft for other reasons. HOWEVER. It still seems to have enormous value to set a line in the sand on the network access/paytoplay issues. Because if you don't - then if you try to solve the "there's only a few real hosting providers in the
    • by doom ( 14564 )
      Is the New York Times a pointless distraction?
  • by bjdevil66 ( 583941 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @03:59PM (#61106518)

    Net neutrality must be ultimately set in legal stone, and Ovide's "it's a distraction" argument in the summary sounds like a distraction itself. Just because it's a tough battle doesn't mean it shouldn't be fought.

    With that said, if the NN battle IS a distraction, it's not social media. It's the ISP monopolies over the pipes to everyone's houses. Opening that up would provide a different form of real world net neutrality via market competition.

    Getting one of those two codified would be big, but to get both done is the Holy Grail for consumers.

  • by RogueWarrior65 ( 678876 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:05PM (#61106542)

    It started out as yet another "free sh*t" debate. Bandwidth hogs didn't want to have to pay more for certain kinds of content because somehow they felt that it should be free like driving on an interstate highway. (These people have never had to deal with all the 18-wheelers taking up both lanes of I-5 in central California on a regular basis.) But that was ten years ago. Now, there are a ton of streaming media services and the infrastructure to handle it is in place so the original justification for net neutrality is no longer there. The issue should, however, have shifted to the social media companies deciding that they hold the power to determine what content is acceptable and what isn't. By that token, net neutrality should be expanded to include those companies. The social media companies aren't creating the content anymore than Verizon or AT&T created what was on Netflix. If you believe that social media companies have the right to decide what should and shouldn't be allowed on their platform then the infrastructure companies should also be allowed to charge companies for consuming more bandwidth. If you believe that the infrastructure companies should be regulated like a utility, so should Twitter and Facebook.

    • by reg ( 5428 ) <reg@freebsd.org> on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:33PM (#61106628) Homepage

      I posted this above, but net-neutrality is about making sure that ISPs cannot charge based on packet content, only size/priority. It's like making sure tolls are not set on 18-wheelers based on their cargo, origin, or destination, only their mass. Conflating this with other issues like peering in-equality or disinformation just makes things harder to understand and solve.

      As for the "bandwidth hogs", that's an issue of tier-1 ISPs who've taken ownership of the internet and are not allowing others into their club. The solution for that is to make sure that all bandwidth charges on the internet are fully symmetric - i.e. you can charge for a connection, and you can charge for packets, but you can only charge for packets in the same directions - if you charge positive amounts for packets leaving your network to someplace else, you must charge negative amounts for packets entering your network from other places. Caping use counts as pro-rated charging.

      Disinformation has to be dealt with at a social level. It's not a Facebook or Google or Twitter problem - they're stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they remove all the crap they're censoring content and if they don't they're destroying the fabric of society. The solution is reforms of US libel law so that people can be held accountable for false speech freely made. But that's not going to happen...

    • But that was ten years ago. Now, there are a ton of streaming media services and the infrastructure to handle it is in place so the original justification for net neutrality is no longer there.

      You have that entirely backwards. Now that the infrastructure to support streaming and other high-bandwidth use is in place, we should not tolerate artificial constraints on Internet traffic from ISPs.

  • by Ungrounded Lightning ( 62228 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:05PM (#61106544) Journal

    The problems with network "non neutrality", IMHO, are essentially either anticompetitive practices or consumer fraud.

    As such they're much better handled by the FTC (a consumer protection agency with a track record of being willing and able to take on and beat big players - Standard Oil, AT&T, IBM, ...) than the FCC (a technical regulator that institutionally treats two providers as "competition" rather than "a recipe for a cartel that doesn't even need to collude because market forces do it for them").

    Unfortunately, the FTC thinks the "don't kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, so hands off the internet" legislation ties their hands. So congress needs to pass a small bit of legislation to assure them it does not.

    • The FTC thinks that the legislation binds their hands because when when hey put out net neutrality rules Verizon and ATT sued them and the Supreme Court ruled that the FTC had their hands bound and the FCC was the only agency tht could handle net neutrality.
      • The FTC thinks that the legislation binds their hands because when when hey put out net neutrality rules Verizon and ATT sued them and the Supreme Court ruled that the FTC had their hands bound and the FCC was the only agency tht could handle net neutrality.

        ORLY?

        I hadn't heard about such a ruling, and couldn't find such a ruling in a couple minutes of searching the net.

        What I Did find (fuzzy because our newsies don't seem to be interested in giving us case names or numbers either):
        - FTC reclassified

  • by NormAtHome ( 99305 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:13PM (#61106580)

    The customers of ISP's pay for internet service, to my mind they pay for access to use the highway and what they do with it is up to them. For example Comcast throttled Netflix and wanted money to not throttle them or offered them colocation services so Netflix could have streaming servers on Comcast's own Network which is what Netflix did. But then Netflix ended up raising their prices to pay for the additional costs so the customers who were already paying for internet ended up paying more on the backend for the service that they were already paying for. To my mind this isn't right, the customers of Comcast who use Netflix shouldn't have to pay twice for their internet service and let's be honest Netflix competes in a certain area with Comcast so it may have also been vaguely anti-competitive. This should not be allowed.

    • by thule ( 9041 )
      The Netflix situation was NOT a net neutrality issue. It was an issue with their CDN (Cogent) and existing peering agreements. Cogent prides themselves on peering. Specifically settlement-free peering. That is that they exchange equal amount of traffic with their peers. Because it is equal, the bandwidth is free. When Cogent took on Netflix, the peering ended up sending much more traffic to their peers. Cogent didn't want to upgrade the ports because it would only end up costing them more money in traffic f
  • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:20PM (#61106602)

    "a distraction for our elected leaders and corporations when there are more pressing issues."

    Net neutrality is important and far from pointless. Hell, I would argue it's more relevant than ever now that so many people are stuck at home and using lots of bandwidth for video. Pretending that only one issue can be addressed at once is arguing in bad faith and lets issues go unaddressed.

  • by PPH ( 736903 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @04:25PM (#61106612)

    And now controlling access to the Internet takes priority over making sure everyone has a chance to speak.

    ISPs will implement that control as all 'private' companies are expected to prioritize party policy under National Socialist governments.

  • ... there will always be those who will argue that the issue is not worth the attention and that there are more pressing issues. Welcome to politics.
  • When the FCC made the decision on how to classify an ISP service back in the 1990s, they had two choices: it was a telecommunication service, or it was an information service. The decided to classify it as an information service for two reasons: (1) at that time, no one had succeeded in selling a data transport service by itself, and (2) if they made it a telecommunications service there were a bunch of statutory provisions that had to apply and the cable companies wouldn't have built out their networks.
  • Misdirection (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TomWinTejas ( 6575590 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @05:04PM (#61106706)
    It's a total misdirection and as such a waste. The question of neutrality is not a foundational question, but one that arises as a symptom of a larger problem... that of the duopoly in last mile access for residential services.

    Eons ago data centers began to brand themselves as carrier neutral to distinguish themselves in a competitive market. Those established players like AT&T who would not allow for interconnection with their competitors had to rethink their model as customers began to move to carrier neutral facilities and create a critical mass with players like Equinix and Telx. The entrenched players like AT&T and Verizon had little choice but become neutral because of market forces. And as such at places like 350 E Cermak or 1950 N Stemmons customers have a multitude of choices in transit providers and see the most competitive pricing. They also see newer "features" first... IPv6 was commonly supported years ago by transit providers at such locations while it has taken longer to reach the edges of the network.

    Yet in residential last mile we see a regulatory structure that creates a monopoly or at best a duopoly in most areas. The results of this are widespread and concerns about neutrality are just one of many as a result. Customer service is horrendous, forced equipment rental fees were commonplace and it took ages for the FCC to react, and now data caps are looking like they will become the norm. ILECs and MSOs see their customers as hostage eyeballs that can be sold off to content providers through paid peering agreements... while ISPs that are actually forced to compete tend to freely peer with content providers to not only reduce their costs, but to provide their customers with a better user experience. ILECs and MSOs care little about customers' user experiences as those customers have no real recourse... they're stuck with what they have.

    Now imagine if our regulatory structure looked like that of Japan where NTT owns and manages the FTTH infrastructure, but ISPs are able to overlay networks on top of that infrastructure to provide consumers with many choices. All of a sudden if one provider decided to institute data caps, a segmented Internet, or provide QoS, would anyone really care? If you had 8 other choices, would it really matter?

    We can look at grocery stores for the answer. Whole Foods carries a small subset of brands and charges a premium for them... but since I have a choice in going there it really doesn't matter to me at all. Aldi offers a limited set of brands, mostly their own, but at substantial savings. Kroger provides a middle ground where there are tons of choices and reasonable prices. As I'm not locked in to with whom I must transact, it's great that they are all filling a niche and offering different services and consumers ultimately can choose. There's no reason this can't be the case in the residential last mile... and Japan has demonstrated this.

    So I ask my fellow geeks and nerds, when the masses begin to drone on incessantly about net neutrality again, tell them that they're being fooled into thinking it is the actual problem instead of a symptom. And the ILECs and MSOs would much rather have to deal with mostly useless neutrality regulations that they can sidestep with a tiny bit of creativity... but they'd shit themselves if they actually were forced to compete in a marketplace.
    • Yay, multiple last mile providers. Do you want ATT (zero-rated streaming HBO) or Comcast (zero-rated streaming... what is the new name, paramount plus) or GoogleFi (zero-rate steaming YouTube)? Because I love adding new questions instead of just looking at dollars and tech specs.
    • Last mile is not a accurate argument for why net neutrality is/ is not valid since consumer protection as far as the Internet is concerned is very well regulated on all level of government. I suspect net neutrality was intended to address link level internet and how much the federal will influence any future technology. As an end user link layer is now represented by the "cloud" and most if not all services now reside within it. So it is a state of Virtual Interstate Micro Transactions? A vast corporate net
  • you have to make sure net neutrality doesn't exist

    without it, at least it won't be public when
    something censored

    this is much like YT simply makes censored comments invisible to others while
    still appearing on the user's account so that they still feel free/unconstrained

  • by algaeman ( 600564 ) on Saturday February 27, 2021 @08:07PM (#61107066)
    Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
  • There is no rational reason to be against a level playing field.
    • Some people claim NN regulation hurts mom and pop internet shops. Maybe there's something to that, I don't know. Honestly, it seems like those are all gone already anyway.
  • Hmm I must stop binging trek, the only thing I could think when seeing the name Kang Was,: the klingoms are coming get your Bat'leths ready, jokes asside tho, NN mightactually be a distraction ...
  • The NYT represents the Establishment. It's a propaganda arm of the Establishment. So, therefore, I ask myself, why is the Establishment keen on getting rid of Net-Neutrality?
  • Imagine you did not have "power neutrality". Your power grid provider could e.g. decide what appliances you were allowed to use, and charge extra for certain use. Would you think of this as a trivial issue?

    Internet access has become critical infrastructure. Net neutrality is about you being in the driver seat to decide what you are going to do with your net access, rather than some corporate drone who has a masters degree in how to milk the last drop of blood from their customers, and pulling every possible

  • What are these mouth breathers mumbling about? Are they unable to chew and walk at the same time? Can't there be multiple issues that need to be solved?!
  • When Trump was in office, the Democrats SCREAMED BLOODY MURDER about the internet needing to be neutral. Now that they are in the White House and can bully platforms and carriers in their favor, all talk of net neutrality is suddenly abandoned. What a bunch of opportunistic hypocrites.
  • The NYT, and most of the left, including a large proportion of Democrats, favors censorship and restriction of speech. Net Neutrality works in the opposite direction, making it more difficult to coerce ISPs to censor content and deplatform those that NYT does not like. Hence NYT is now against net neutrality. That's all you need to know. The rest is just rationalizations to persuade people who get caught up in academic arguments, and lose sight of the very simple political goals involved.

  • I hope people will just more adequate on the net. Otherwise, we will get restricted and it will be more complicated to use it. I work online. Without access to the Internet, I can lose my job. Of course, I can easily find a new offline job on https://ca.jooble.org/jobs/She... [jooble.org] . But I prefer working from home.

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