You didn't see the logical argument, because he didn't present one, which was my point.
The personal attack was "well, I don't see you doing it, therefore your assertion that it should be done is wrong".
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Net Neutrality
- Thread starter Gerhardt
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The personal attack was "well, I don't see you doing it, therefore your assertion that it should be done is wrong".
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Lindberg
Final Approach
It's never too late to do the right thing. Only the deluded think you can fix bad regulations with more bad regulations.
Right. Bad regulations are fixed with good, well-researched regulations.
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Ravioli
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Damn... missed that quote in the thread. I can only imagine how that must have stung.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Actually, the government didn't create them.
It regulated them, and it used them to it's advantage, but the monopolies were driven by private sector investment and capitalism. We could go through a lot of explanation to show that, but most simply the highest ROI is attained when there is only one company providing the product/service and when it gets the chance to set the rules for connecting to it's network. Rather than stopping it, the government regulated it heavily (given the magnitude of investment involved).
Starting with the Carterphone decision, the government regs required that the monopoly permit certain other products and services interconnect to the monopoly service. The decree to break up the Bell System came along and hastened things. By that time, MCI built a microwave network and Sprint (originally part of Southern Pacific's corporate network) laid fiber starting along the RR right of way - service was sold to corporations and later to the public, allowing ATT Long Lines to be bypassed.
Where monopoly created innovation originally, breaking up the monopoly led to innovation that we see today.
Cable is a similar story: it started as Community Antenna TV (e.g. a wired system that provided homes with no TV reception access to an antenna placed where it could receive stations). Programmers started to use satellite, and the CATV companies picked up and distributed those signals, too. The only way to financially justify the investment of wiring a town or city was to limit the number of providers. And municipalities were glad to help by granting franchises and limiting competition - much the same way as stadiums are either funded by local bonds or tax breaks to the sports teams. In a few places there were multiple franchises - parts of the NY metro area had 2 cable companies, for example. And in some places, owners of apartment complexes granted one provider the right to wire the building (instead of maintaining a common antenna system for the complex).
So the monopoly status was driven by the demands of the companies, not created by governments per se. Oh, and the government got some benefit back, like free government access channels and perhaps private networks on the cable.
Technology advanced to the point where digital and internet service could be carried on the TV cables and DSL replaced dedicated, conditioned circuits on the telco lines. That's advanced even further today to include fiber and high speed capabilities as TV has gone digital, the cables have improved, and TV uses less bandwidth.
Consolidation has been driven almost solely by the capital markets and demands for increased shareholder return. And frequently the anti-trust authorities really don't fully understand market dynamics.
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PaulS
Touchdown! Greaser!
A personal attack is whatever I want it to be. Where's my safe space?
But if you remember, back when, the government demanded the Bell System divest themselves of much of their holdings because they were, at that time, considered a monopoly. That's what, if memory serves, created Verizon, Frontier, and many other small telecoms. Those companies were cash-strapped and their service was neither better nor cheaper than what folks were paying the Bell System. Anecdotal, but I believe consumer costs rose under the smaller systems to keep them afloat.
Today, there is no cost savings to be found save VOIP. Want a landline? Bring your checkbook. I live close to a major metropolitan area so I am not so likely to get screwed as one who lives in the Boonies where it is expensive for the small companies to string their paired wires and leave you stuck with dial-up internet service.
Which is Verizon's dog in this fight: people are cutting the landline cord and relying on cellular or VOIP services, and Verizon wants a cut off all the phone business they are no longer receiving.
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denverpilot
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Oh my lord. SONET. I haven’t heard that in years. Haha. Wow. I wasn’t directly involved, since I was doing conferencing and then later I was lead tech support for an electrical T3 to T1 multiplexer product. Our company’s stuff plugged in one layer down from there around that timeframe. And I did a bunch of side support for CLECs on GR303.
I am awfully glad my coffee was warming back up in the microwave when I read that line, or I would have spit it all over my kitchen, laughing out loud.
So much wrong here. Just for the Frontier lineage, it went AllNet was bought by Frontier who was bought by Global Crossing. And all three existed before divestiture. I know this firsthand since the buyouts were planned and I had different paychecks from my company being bought one month by AllNet, the next month by Frontier, and then by GC. Okay it probably wasn’t a month per, but it felt like it.
That move was absolutely what I’ve been saying for decades: Judge Green busted it up horizontally... local, L/D, value added services plugged into local... and the businesses just re-arranged their structures vertically... three big companies with all of those old horizontal products. Literally nothing changed. Just mergers of companies into a vertical structure.
There was no monopoly busting at all. It just flipped the monopoly on its side and allowed two more. Cable getting into telecom was disruptive but the mergers continue toward three companies in the end game.
Today’s Verizon was mainly created by their purchase of WorldCom and MCI. Also both around before divestiture. The divestiture case was brought BY MCI who was putting up alternate microwave routes around Bell/AT&T making what once was a “long distance” call, a local call, crossing inter-LATA borders.
Divestiture was really about busting the “long distance” monopoly and had very little to do with (at the time) the local loops. In fact nobody cared at all about the local loop then, because it was either residential POTS, or it was business and copper T1. ISDN was the pipe dream of Pacific Bell dying to offer data services everywhere and almost nobody had it. Almost no place except s central office had ever seen or heard of a fiber optic yet. They were out there and some deployments were done but considered a novelty but a useful one for future growth thanks to Bell Labs.
*Side note: Scott Adams of Dibert fame was a PacBell ISDN engineer which is where his inspiration for a cartoon about never ending useless meetings and useless products and projects at big companies and the hapless engineer Dilbert, came from. His origins were simply documenting the culture at PacBell.
You do realize Verizon is only a local loop POTS provider in a few small areas and it’s never been the majority of their business, and until they did FIOS they wanted to rid themselves of it, but couldn’t because they purchased the local CLEC in those areas, right? Barring their wireless business, which came later and really was the purchase of a whole bunch of B-Side AMPS networks to start that, they were a long-haul company. Back when they first rebranded the few local loop areas they (were forced to) serve, they didn’t want anything to do with operating those. They wanted the backbone railroad fiber optics and microwave links from their old MCI days to carry their data network they bought from WorldCom.
Today they’re still making way more money doing that than residential, last time I looked at their books. And of course their cellular company took off after they owned more spectrum than anyone else. Verizon is technically the closest thing we have to a traditional telecom monopoly of the sort that they had busted up by Judge Greene. Ironic.
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So, with that being said, do you think that forcing a split of content-creators, content-providers and ISPs would allow for more competition? Would forcing an ISP to be only an ISP negate the pressure to throttle/block content to consumers?
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denverpilot
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No, because municipalities have still blocked the last mile and made long term sweetheart deals with the local ISP. If they renege on that they might as well call the local loop a common carrier, and once they do that there’s really no point in having competition at all. Just call telecom a government monopoly and rebuild the Bell System, because that’s what you essentially just did, blocking the local loop.
Every carrier would gladly drive prices to the floor and beat the other carrier senseless to deliver bandwidth to your door if they could get access to do so. Or at least they would in good times when they had lots of cash on hand to blow and could get loans to build infrastructure.
Who’d make CenturyLink a loan today? They were awash in capital offers when they were Qwest but couldn’t get out from under their regulatory requirements to have to offer outdated and dead products. They’re so desperate they’re giving us 1G/s aggregated non-guaranteed CIR bandwidth over fiber to the curb into our office space for $499/Mo as long as we sign for three years. They know Google is coming soon and they’re locking in customers well below cost. Even Comcast who’s better at data by far than CL, can’t offer us that price. They’re about $800 for a CIR of 200Mb/s. And $400 more a month for every bump of 100 Mb/s ordered. Granted, CL is $1200 for 200 Mb/s with a CIR, but a no CIR gig pipe for office workers to do whatever on for $499/Mo? We’ll lock that in for three years. If something shows up better than that in year 3, we’ll just pay the cancellation penalties with whatever savings we get then.
Competition is already really fierce. It’s just only in locations where the local loop is already in place for both competitors. Anyplace the local loop isn’t already there, they put it off because the capital expenditure has to have a payback that’s QUICK or they get hammered by the stupid standard problem of the Wall Street casino... “must make profit each quarter.” No investing capital for the future, allowed. No bad quarters. No saving up to build it out either, they’ll say you have “too much cash on the books”.
The smartest municipalities are putting their own fiber in the ground and to the curb. That’s not efficient from a “what you’ll pay for it in taxes” perspective but it fixes the problem of one commercial carrier to each home or business. Once that’s in place the carriers could all just build out to the POP for the municipality. But... this is usually where the municipality idea falls apart. They once again (stupidly) give only one provider a sweetheart deal to provide service even AFTER the taxpayer owns the fiber. It’s so freaking stupid.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
Verizon is as active at cutting folks off as folks are leaving. Their goal is to get rid of copper because 1) the plant is ancient and a maintenance headache, 2) it can't support high-data-speeds, 3) the data business is largely unregulated (including the VoIP service that Verizon provides on top of the fiber data service), and 4) the labor contracts are much different between fiber and copper plant.
Verizon has received permission in many states to cut off copper altogether and move people to fiber (ours is one: copper service was terminated in late 2016 - you want to stay with Verizon, you move to FiOS.... we had someone in our neighborhood get in a real snit about losing copper service and so forth, she didn't want to go fiber for a bunch of reasons including some that cost her money and she went wild on Nextdoor).
At this point, there are enough folks on VoIP services other than Verizon (including Verizon's own) that there would be holy hell to pay if they cut it off - and I have no doubt that that would cause legislation because of the "public safety" aspect.
It rearranged the deck chairs and did let some new competitors in - so it was effective from that sense. And it allowed innovation. So yes, things did change, but in the end the companies focused primarily on "legacy" have been absorbed back into the borg.
It was actually created when 2 old RBOCs (Nynex and Bell Atlantic) merged in the mid 90's. There was a huge landline presence, and they acquired more as they gobbled up other companies. SBC went back and bought what was left of AT&T.
It was about more than long distance, but you are correct that there wasn't much concern about the local loops as there wasn't a lot of overlap - and no real ability to compete until both cellular - er PCS - and cable came along because no one in their right mind would overbuild a wireline plant in the regulatory environment. Interconnect was part of it, too. But a lot was business practices, even though each state had their own tariffs and regulatory system (which cable and VoIP avoids).
Verizon actually did have a huge POTS footprint from Maine to Virginia, which came (back) to them through the RBOC acquisitions. They still do, though as noted above they've been moving them to FiOS and will soon start moving to 5G. They did sell/shed a lot of the wireline service, especially in rural areas. Don't recall who bought it, but it strikes me that it might have been Frontier.
The cell system was originally one of the A ("wireline") blocks in their service areas (around here, SBC dba CellularOne had the B block). Vodaphone is an equity partner in the deal (or was, the companies were working toward full ownership by Verizon). When they could acquire RSAs, they did so, which is why they have the largest coverage footprint in the US. And they did acquire other companies, too.
Verizon and ATT are the two closest things we have to the old monopoly. Both have substantial portions of their networks that were former RBOCS, and both provide local loops, local video services, business services, long-distance networking, and so forth. Both also have the largest (and arguably the best 2) wireless networks, which, with the spectrum they have and the capital they can leverage in auctions put them in the forefront of using 5G to do away with a lot of the local loops.
Much more subtle and complicated than that. Yes, local and pole attachments are part of it. State regulations also come into play. But they have managed to make the data services largely exempt from the regulatory stricture that applied before. The Federal and State regulations have largely become obsolete.
The locals get little from the companies. Yeah, most get some tax revenue, including the 911 tax, but they'd get that regardless. Pole attachment is a big deal, but it frequently goes to the electric utility.
They have learned from the airlines that you can't win on market share alone. And at 10% per year annual increases on existing plant, it's not about beating the competitor by pricing down.
Maybe, but the real issue is the expense of the local plant and uncertainty of future competition that makes investors balk. Especially when 5G is on the horizon and VZ has publicly promoted 5G as a replacement for local loop. I think they'll do it, but it's as much about protecting the base as anything else.
I wouldn't call them "smartest". Like with sweetheart stadium deals, stuff that's built out by the municipality to save the commercial company money isn't good use of tax money when folks are clamoring for that to go to health care and social programs. These days doing a municipal install is likely to cause election issues.
Even Google has backed off of their ambitious plans for local fiber. With the market cap of Google, it removes the financial constraint, but still leaves the Wall Street valuation and return issue. If Google pulled back it means that they don't see a rosy revenue picture when up against the major telecom and cable companies. The pie is only so big.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
By the way, many power lines contain strands of fiber that could be lit-up. That the power companies don't get into the game is also telling.
Vince R
Pre-takeoff checklist
Haha. See “jiggery-pokery”. Already covered.
Not really. The majority of VPN providers hide off-shore (if you look at their IP addresses) because providing it here means the carrier knows EXACTLY who they are and what they do, when they buy their bandwidth from them. They also have to fill out IP justification documentation for all the IPs they burn.
That’s said, the backbone providers don’t care. They get paid by you AND the VPN provider, so as long as people think VPNs are some magical way to hide from a backbone provider (they’re not... they know...) they get double the money for you’re lack of understanding that they can see the endpoints of everything. They can also just block the VPN provider’s foreign address space if they’re an overseas entity.
Case in point, Net Neutrality law here becomes absolutely meaningless once you leave the US. It is an international network after all. But you’ll be paying Global Crossing (full disclosure, I was a GC employee once after a merger) 80% of the time of you cross an ocean.
And oh yeah. GC wanted their HQ in the Bahamas for tax reasons. They literally have a broom closet there. Have photos. But the important point here is that makes the a “foreign” carrier in the eyes of the national “security” folks.
So they fall under rules the domestic carriers don’t — about reporting traffic back to Uncle Sam. Uncle said they had to provide fiber taps for Uncle to use pretty much whenever they felt like it, or Uncle would squeeze GC saying they were a “foreign carrier” harboring “terrorists”.
Not kidding. Real stuff. Cost GC a fortune internally to engineer it all for Uncle’s convenience to keep themselves off of the terrorist helper lists, after I was gone.
So Uncle has some wonderful visibility into GC undersea fiber traffic that they don’t have legally in a few other undersea fiber cases. Although most folks inside the biz figure all the carriers are playing along with the evidence that came out of AT&T in the 90s by a security and privacy whistleblower. But GCs is built in, thanks to GC wanting to avoid US taxes.
Ironic, isn’t it? The one thing the Net is absolutely neutral about is allowing Uncle to copy packets and look at pretty much whatever they want. Neutral may be a bad word, but “compliant” in a way that is not in any carrier’s customer’s best interests, anyway.
Tapitty, tap, tap! All automated. No carrier has time to have people really looking at the court orders nor wants to pay engineers to turn on data taps. They’re just installed permanently with some weak procedures to turn on particular flows. It’s too much data to cram it all through Uncle’s connections but the carriers like that anyway. Uncle always buys more. They pay for those circuits too. Big time.
There are a lot of other options besides commercial VPN services. For a few pennies an hour, you can run your own VPN service at Amazon, Microsoft or Google. If you configure the endpoints properly, nobody gets to see inside those streams unless you do something careless - the traffic from you to Amazon/Microsoft/whoever is completely private, so your ISP can't (for example) slow down Netflix or prevent you from running a particular VoIP client. All your local ISP sees is a connection between you and wherever you run your VPN server, and then a ton of encrypted packets that he can't decipher. If you're worried about a service provider unfairly penalizing a particular app, this approach gives you an inexpensive way to nullify any restrictions a particular service provider might flirt with.
Of course, privacy is a different topic altogether, and certainly government agencies have a lot of resources at their disposal if they want to spy on you. With encrypted traffic, it is not as simple as you suggest...using my VPN example, the government may find it simple to tap into the flow of traffic, but even Uncle Sam can't read my encrypted data if I configure it carefully. Certainly they could just look at the unencrypted traffic outbound from my VPN server to its final destination - but that's not what we're talking about here...my original point was to show that it's relatively easy to nullify unfair limitations put in place by your local service provider, not to show people how to hide network traffic from government agencies.
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
It is possible for the ISP to block VPN, and some do as a matter of practice. China does it, too. VPN can be distinguished from other traffic with packet inspection.
ATT blocked VPN on some of their 3G and 4G stuff, which is one reason I dumped them.
It's really easy to see the ISP charging more for a circuit that allows VPN services. $10 or $20 a month. They will justify it by saying that you are either using it to bypass their revenue protection schemes or are using it for business which the think is worth more money. Or they will simply slow the VPN services unless you pay up.
By the way, the VPN in and of itself will slow the connection due to overhead. The overhead can be 20-50% depending on the equipment and protocol.
Also, some services - and DirecTVnow is one - require that Location services be on when using their content and if it doesn't match the IP address to a reasonable degree they can and will block content to enforce geographic restrictions. This can and will be a problem if your VPN endpoint is out-of-area.
MadseasoN
Line Up and Wait
No Net Neutrality will result in the same problem that I have with my cable provider. Cable provider and a certain channel can't work out a deal so I no longer have that channel. No other cable provider in my area.
Ravioli
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I wish Hallmark Channel would fight it out with Dish Network. Wouldn't bother me a bit. But instead I occasionally need to live without FNC.
MadseasoN
Line Up and Wait
In that case I would see "Due to rate hikes by Hallmark this channel is no longer available". Like it's their fault.
I despise Suddenlink but there is no other cable internet provider in my area. DSL tops out at 3MBPS and Centurylink told me straight up that "we will never upgrade the telephone/DSL infrastructure because it would cost a fortune and nobody is using phone lines anymore".
So much for 'competition'.
A couple of guys from AT&T showed up at my door in recent weeks, wanting to make some measurements at the utility pole in my back yard. They said it was in preparation for installing fiber optic lines in 2018. 
denverpilot
Tied Down
This thread stopped because all those evil ISPs cut off the Net Neutrality peeps from PoA the instant the rule changed. LOL.
Internet Apocalypse. It happened. Didn’t y’all see it? LOL.
Internet Apocalypse. It happened. Didn’t y’all see it? LOL.
Ravioli
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I c a n n o t t y p e a s f a s t i n t h i s u n n u e t r a l i n t e r w e b.
I need a net biased safe space to be comfortable with my predetermined views.
I need a net biased safe space to be comfortable with my predetermined views.
denverpilot
Tied Down
No no no. That’s the new outrage that hasn’t gotten full approval from the political people yet.
Keyboard Neutrality.
If you don’t use the approved chicklet crap with a touch bar from Apple, they forcibly slow your typing.
It has nothing to do with skill or proper ordering of keyboards that work well or anything like that.
bluerooster
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shorty
Actually, the way I understand it is more like Fedex is the only one that will deliver to you, and through an agreement between them and Spruce, they will deliver your order from them very quickly, but if you order from Sportys, they will either not deliver, deliver very late, or charge you a premium for on time delivery. All the while UPS, and USPS are delivering elsewhere from both suppliers equally, but do not deliver to your area.
denverpilot
Tied Down
By the way, you reminding me of SONET had me thinking of something, and I finally remembered it...
Mr. Shakespere makes a pretty good argument in his IETF RFC...
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1605
paflyer
Final Approach
"Globe Communications" LOL!By the way, you reminding me of SONET had me thinking of something, and I finally remembered it...
Mr. Shakespere makes a pretty good argument in his IETF RFC...
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1605
James331
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And lest we forget one hand washes the other, Im sure the government would never ask a ISP to block access to sites they dont like, or maybe hook them up with some info on a client that they dont have enough cause to get a warrant for.
Real world, I think killing net neutrality gives the government much more power, especially when you realize companies like TWC dont get as big as they are without being kissing cousins with government
wsuffa
Touchdown! Greaser!
James331
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Yeah, ATT is trying to look out for me lol
I'll stick with my encrypted zero logging offshore VPNs thanks.
Two bad assumptions to make with VPNs:
They really aren't logging
They aren't running a man-in-the-middle scheme
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James331
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Depends on the VPN service.
denverpilot
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And what subpoenas they have in hand today, and if they care.
James331
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Also what they log, you don't have to hand over records you don't keep.
https://torrentfreak.com/vpn-services-anonymous-review-2017-170304/
The problem with that is trusting them not to keep the records.
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ARFlyer
En-Route
This will either get rolled back by the courts or get put back into place in the next administration. The FCC can't undo law day 1 that a previous Administration enacted without providing overwhelming evidence it's hurting the country. Which they don't have as this is preventing the ISPs from doing what they've have for years before this law.
This current Administration is the pendulum swinging wildly in the other direction.
Now my opinion is the Internet should be label as a public utility as telephone and electricity. It's become a defacto Basic Right because of the requirement of having internet access for basic living needs.
The major issue that I've been apart of is Rural Internet Access. Under the Net Neutrality law an ISP couldn't cut service to an area by shuttering an older service technology. E.g. DSL It was required that they had to fund, replace, a price protect the service for a set time. Now the ISP can leave these areas without any type of internet service.
This current Administration is the pendulum swinging wildly in the other direction.
Now my opinion is the Internet should be label as a public utility as telephone and electricity. It's become a defacto Basic Right because of the requirement of having internet access for basic living needs.
The major issue that I've been apart of is Rural Internet Access. Under the Net Neutrality law an ISP couldn't cut service to an area by shuttering an older service technology. E.g. DSL It was required that they had to fund, replace, a price protect the service for a set time. Now the ISP can leave these areas without any type of internet service.
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Why would they? Great way to loose business, they are selling a security product, if it comes to light that they are full of chit, no one will give them their business.