I think a big mistake was too many major net neutrality advocates in the US tried to bundle too many things under the "net neutrality" label.<p>Net neutrality should have been this, and only this:<p>> If an ISP customer has a plan that purports to give the customer B bytes of data per month and a data transfer speed of S bits/second, then<p>> 1. The ISP will not limit (unless legally required to) what sites the customer can use those B bytes per month with, and<p>> 2. The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion.<p>If the ISP does that, they satisfy net neutrality. If they <i>also</i> give you access to their own services without counting that against your B bytes, or make deals to give you access to certain sites without it counting against your B bytes, that may be anti-competitive but as long as you still get your B bytes at S bits/second it would not be a net neutrality violation.<p>If it is anti-competitive it should be dealt with through the large body of law that had been extensively developed for more than 100 years to deal with such things: antitrust law. Trying to shove a subset of antitrust law into net neutrality just because a particular behavior that might be anti-competitive happens to involve in internet service makes no sense.
I feel like the USA is focusing on the wrong thing with net neutrality. The core problem is that individual ISPs have total monopolies on infrastructure (or at least on the better infrastructure) in a lot of areas, and so can do all the anti consumer bullshit they want without repercussions.<p>Enforcing net neutrality is just treating a symptom of the monopoly. Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.
IMO it was the hyperbole/reality cycle that is common in many politicized issues.<p>Many, and arguably the vast majority, of political issues are built upon extremes of hyperbole. Support this, or oppose this, or the world will end - or something not far from it. And so when some meaningful change does occur on any such topic, and the hyperbole does not play out, the issue tends to more or less die. The ending of net neutrality was supposed to create something like a borderline unusable internet. In reality once it did end [1] and had more or less no impact, the hyperbole obviously proved unjustified. I feel obligated to cite my statement that it ended since I find many don't even realize the US no longer has any notion of net neutrality.<p>IMO net neutrality is inherently and obviously desirable. So I think the moral of the story is more to focus on realistic outcomes, consequences, and justifications for issues. Appealing to hyperbole is a great way to emphasize and grow your cause in the short-run, but absolutely destroy it in the long-run. It feels analogous to how MBAs run companies: optimizing for next quarter, in exchange for long-term implosion.<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_by_country#United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_by_country#Unit...</a>
I still remember watching Ajit Pai explain why he didn't want net neutrality at an interview he gave in San Francisco. [0] He was obviously trying to stay on the good side of Verizon, ATT, etc. but his argument against net neutrality never made any sense. I think Tom Wheeler had it right. [1]<p>[0] <a href="https://youtu.be/0OydO9GyhVg?t=570" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/0OydO9GyhVg?t=570</a><p>[1] <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/13/14266168/tom-wheeler-final-speech-net-neutrality-defense" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/13/14266168/tom-wheeler-fina...</a>
I used to REALLY care about net neutrality. Growing up in California, especially in high school and college, it was probably the number one thing politically that I cared about. All the other political issues I felt were too complicated with too much history for me to feel strongly about, but net neutrality I really understood and felt strongly about.<p>Growing up and moving to SV, I eventually just stopped caring. Data caps and mediocre bandwidth were good enough for me, I was too tired and concerned with building a life. Now I live in a city with Google Fiber and have amazingly fast internet with no data caps, and I have a newfound gratitude for good, unbiased internet.
It would be so nice to have net neutrality as the biggest problem these days, rather than deadly diseases, proxy war between nuclear superpowers, political/cultural derangement on all sides, kids brains rotted by social media...<p>When it comes to net neutrality itself, folks also got to understand that services they take for granted wouldn't exist without sophisticated traffic management. There is a Netflix box inside the ISP data center that streams video to subscribers without going through the Internet. Without it, no streaming HD video for you, no infrastructure to provide it at that scale exists. What if you are a startup that is not Netflix? Good question, but the answer is not as obvious as a slogan and at the moment there are far more urgent matters to lose sleep about.
From what I remember neutrality was poorly explained to the public by people with in a somewhat deceptive way trying to slam dunk sell the issue. So the average person ended up thinking they were opposing unrelated things like vanilla peering agreements or even residential bandwidth caps. Many totally misunderstood the real issue and promptly looked like fools when they tried to talk about it. Perhaps this was all done on purpose to poison-pill the issue right out of the gate. Taking a page out of the CIA/FBI's playbooks.
We are starting to see the effects of this. Individual ISPs can cause huge disruptions by dropping packets that pass through them. This was done to kiwifarms recently where middle ISPs would simply drop the packet and break the connection despite not being the user or the hosters isp. Simply a relay.
My cynical narrative is that as progressive activists came to embrace social media censorship as a mechanism to win political battles, the underlying advocacy not having ISPs meddle with the internet became harder to square with enthusiastic advocacy for censorship at the layer of the internet's actual communication applications (or basic service layer, eg. Cloudflare.) "ISPs must not oppress us, but it's fine when social media platforms do it" probably lacks mass appeal.
Net neutrality went away and as far as I can tell, nothing changed.<p>On the other hand, FOSTA-SESTA killed Craigslist personals and, I think, lots of other stuff.<p>I've seen an almost infinite amount of advocacy for net neutrality and almost nothing against FOSTA-SESTA.<p>People worry about the wrong things.
It's pretty hard to be pro-"safety" on things like social media, news, AI, etc., and then turn around and say with a straight face that infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to be moderated.<p>I long for the net neutrality times when we were still sane.
I detect a certain decline in almost all activism: You can spend years fighting any issue, but the other side will have too much money, too much patience, and even if, by some miracle, you eke out a temporary victory, you know that the same forces you oppose will rapidly regroup and launch a whole new assault, and you'll have to start fighting it again from square one.<p>In addition to that, you have to work harder than every just to live. The energy gets sucked out of you, and it becomes harder than ever to sustain a fight you know you'll be lucky to win. No wonder people burn out, and simply give up. Everyone has their limits.
It might also have dwindled because there actually has been meaningful and in my eyes good legislation introduced. Both the EU net neutrality proposition and the California one is very similar and very reasonable imo. I might be in minority around here but I am not for hard line net neutrality - which to me is when you don't think any different kinds of nets / qos can exist.<p>As far as I understand both the laws I referenced earlier makes it possible for an ISP to sell different QoS and innovate on that axis. What the laws forbid is for them to provide that service in a non-competitative way. So they have to offer that option to everyone and in a open way. This to me is the real problem and why net neutrality becomes a necessity in some cases if this is not followed (behaviors like throttling specific sites while boosting own sites for example).
I live in a non-net-neutral country. People really seem to like the fact that Meta is willing to subsidize their data costs for using Facebook, IG, and Whatsapp.
It turned out that most people actually enjoy the benefits of net non-neutrality. All my friends with T-Mobile rave about how streaming Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc. don’t count against their data caps, which is diametrically opposite to net neutrality.
I went with T-Mobile precisely because they stood with net neutrality when it was first on the chopping block. They are now, by far, the worst offender. The battle is long over, and completely and utterly lost.
The US doesn't have a problem with net neutrality, they have a problem with monopolies.<p>as you all know, net neutrality means that all traffic is given equal access. but that is an obscure concept to anyone outside of tech. What consumers want is fast cheap & reliable broadband(that they can actually buy).<p>In Europe, if your ISP is shite, then you change ISP to a better one. This has driven down the price of broadband, and with some cash injections from governments, increased the speed from 512k to at least 20meg in most places(with most suburban places having access to 500meg).<p>Not only that, but ISPs bundle "free" access to things like netflix, which doesn't count against a cap (if you have one).<p>In the US, if you're lucky you have a choice of two ISPs. They are both shite, and both don't bother competing, apart from being more and more shite to you. Despite the FCC's bundling rules, there is no practical way to operate a virtual ISP on resold copper/fibre/coax.<p>So if I was to create a new campaign, it wouldn't be for net neutrality, it would be called "American Competitive Internet" with some nonsense about making america better by going back to what made it strong: competition. Then enforce reasonable resale rates, so that virtual ISPs can be a thing. second I would enforce rules that mean you can only charge for transit, not peering (with caveats)
What I think is important in looking at the difference in treatment between “big tech” and telecom firms is the political expedience. Not to sound too much like a Mayhew acolyte, it can’t be denied that most legislators have their primary focus on reelection. It comes as a priority before efficacy of legislation.<p>To the voters, telecom companies have always been a priced in annoyance. Additionally, their services aren’t differentiated so although they’re annoying with pricing, the average voter doesn’t see them as quite so pervasive. You pay, you forget. They’re all mildly frustrating to deal with but un-noteworthy .<p>Big tech on the other hand is in your face. I don’t see my telecom but you can be rest assured I see Microsoft, Facebook, etc on a daily basis.<p>This means that a congressman fighting telecom is taking a stand against an amorphous blob that we forget about after our monthly bill. Conversely a congressman fighting big tech is a valiant warrior fighting greed and corruption.<p>I’m sure people here have different views due to a grasp of the nuances but the sad truth is that most of america isn’t all too aware. Big Tech just <i>seems</i> scarier.
What makes anyone think Net Neutrality is less of a pressing issue? Frankly, nowadays, it's even moreso of an issue than ever before!<p>Do you:<p>Ever find yourself wondering if you need to upgrade to a "business" plan to host that service?<p>Ever wonder why it seems one type of traffic ends up running into more problems than others?<p>Wonder why the local network infrastructure always seems to be woefully inadequate for any type of ambitious use?<p>All of that comes from a staunch <i>lack</i> of Net Neutrality. Dumb pipes, as many as possible, connecting everyone to everyone else. No QoS segmentation. no fast-lanes. No zero-rating. No nudging people toward one set of endpoints over another. No inspecting the bloody packet; just routing.<p>Unfortunately; we don't see that, because ISP's are way better at fee extraction and exec/lobbyist enrichment than actually getting bloody wire laid, maintained, and packets routed through the AS anymore.<p>If it's gotten quiet, it's probably because people are still trying to absorb/learn the implications/principles behind user hostile network topology resulting from exploitative business models.
There's a cell/mobile service over here that's advertised as "Unlimited Social Media". So customers get limited data but "Social Media" data is unlimited. Exactly what they define as "Social Media", I don't know. (Does my blog count?)<p>That's a curious business model. Why does an Internet Service Provider want to prioritise one particular class of website?
Activists really tried to push too much crap into the pile of "net neutrality."<p>There were at least a few different issues in the NN bundle:<p>1 against preferred ISP access
2 against content-based ISP restrictions
3 against charges to upstream content providers based on traffic
4 against paid prioritization
5 no change to the current peering models<p>Most of it was IMO total bullshit. Having worked with ISPs, I can tell you that they have no real interest in being content police, prioritizing specific services, at least in the US.<p>Their real interest for ISPs was making large sources of traffic pay.<p>This is going to conspiracy theory land, but IMO a large part of NN was the content providers (YT, google, facebook, etc) manipulating the public into supporting some bullshit law that prevented them from having to pay ISPs for the downstream traffic they generate. And it's a lot of traffic...and billions of dollars in advertising revenue.<p>All of that was wrapped up in the typical "call to freedom" that is the equivalent of "it's for the kids."
You don’t hear about anti DRM activism either.<p>Basically the internet geeks have sold out. The moment DRM meant that the money was going to the techies (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) and not the music companies, we were like “what problems”?<p>The only one who didn’t is RMS but we all laughed at him. He’s one of the only real principled geeks left today.
I was a net neutrality supporter, but as the article mentions the feared changes haven't materialized. Also, I moved into a condo in a large city where I have three options for gigabit speeds. If one provider decides to implement a customer hostile policy, I will switch.
> Net Neutrality can easily be ignored during the pandemic and recession, which does makes sense, people were in a health crisis and now in an economic one.<p>As a counterexample, in 2020 here in Mexico our telecom regulator tried to deregulate net neutrality and there was enough backlash for the draft to be amended to be mostly pro net neutrality (except for zero rating which is still allowed). [1]<p>I still agree with OP though, I haven't really thought about the topic for the last couple of years.<p>[1] Source in Spanish: <a href="https://www.forbes.com.mx/red-forbes-que-implica-la-nueva-neutralidad-de-internet-en-mexico" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com.mx/red-forbes-que-implica-la-nueva-ne...</a>
California's net neutrality law bars ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes as of 2021. Fast internet is $50/month from several providers in the state.<p>No further action needed.
For the average person, Net Neutrality with respect to Big Telecom is mostly about contract disputes between multi-billion dollar corporations. Because of the common carrier laws, most people are worried about being censored by their telecom.<p>With Big Tech, there is worry about censorship. A big example is how any discussion of the lab leak was censored as a conspiracy theory.<p>People are far more worried about censorship.
The recent Peter Eckersley memorial made this fresh in my mind. It was a beautiful collection of many of the net neutrality activists at the Internet Archive building in SF, and gave me renewed hope that the world still cares about this and the people who fight for it.
It's simple: Americans have the political attention span of a fruit fly. Of course, it doesn't help when both parties decry everything besides puppies and apple pie to be the end of America as we know it, and the news media amplify it so that they can sell more advertising.
In the EU, we have an ex-CEO of France Telecom dressed as an EU Commissioner (Thierry Breton) proposing to abolish Net Neutrality.<p>Revolving doors between big businesses and politics, thanks to Macron.
Net neutrality is one of those peacetime aspirations that simply does not matter as much as the ongoing culture war, climate crisis, political stability crisis, economic crisis, pandemic aftermath, and the literal (hot/shooting) war in Ukraine.<p>The center has eroded to the point where net neutrality only matters to many people if <i>it has an impact on one of the above</i>.<p>Yet any appeal to one side of the above issues will serve to alienate the other. This means that you can't really get enough oxygen in the room to shout over the shouty people already shouting about the above.<p>I bet you dimes to dollars that other center/administrative issues are similarly affected.
Anything too anti liberal simply doesn't fly in the U.S. of A.<p>Let the big corporations decide what we can/cannot do on the internet; they worked hard for it!
I lean more toward the libertarian/conservative part of the political spectrum, but net neutrality is an issue where the conservatives/republicans got it wrong. Somehow they felt that it was analogous to the "equal time doctrine", which it never has been. In some ways companies such as CloudFlare have solved part of the problem, but issues such as the anti-competitive throttling of competing services by ISPs still need to be addressed. We also still have the problem of media monopolies often being the only available consumer "Internet" service providers, but the "Internet" they provide is often highly monitored, filtered, and shaped.
The Reddit net neutrality campaign started in my office by a friend running a videogame blog posting the right thing at the right time: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200315191138/https://redditblog.com/2015/02/26/thank-you-reddit-your-efforts-led-to-an-historic-fcc-ruling-and-this-note-from-the-president-of-the-united-states/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20200315191138/https://redditblo...</a><p>I think it is maybe not an accident that this blog post is deleted from Reddit's official blog, but it happened. It happened in Verizon HQ's congressional district too, where their funded representative lost his seat shortly after. I don't post on this as some great authority, it was purely luck and we were small businesses that could articulate why net neutrality was important at the time.<p>Fast forward to today, far less independent sites like his exist, his is gone now. He went to work for a hosting company that seems to be pivoting away from serving small business as they were acquired by a large enterprise firm. This is the concern of someone who pays for hosting, we are used to paying a quota or port, but at our size we rarely have to consider peering and transit costs. Our main concern has been 'channelization' of the net, where plans get sold with only access to major providers.<p>I think on the consumer side, net neutrality terminology has to be worded carefully because back then calls were still mostly a circuit routed thing. We now have good enough networks where everything is IP data and voice must be prioritized to maintain quality of service. I prefer the current reality on most plans where data is de-prioritized after heavy use works better than the old throttle to a certain speed restrictions. Allows radios to get into lower power states quicker and access resources when it's available.<p>Last mile for everything is the main problem out here, Blightspeed/Centurylink is the copper 1.5mbit DSL provider and there's Comcast cable which has no incentive to price compete unless choosing the wireless route (Which is ultimately what I did). I am wary of advocating changing the regulations from where they are currently because we've already witnessed fallout from Section 230 modifications. In any case it's been a weird time the mostly the past 5 years or so, and I think it's hard to motivate people to care on net neutrality when there's so many other related issues that seem more pressing and a whole new adult generation hasn't really experienced the internet as a ton of small websites/companies/projects, they use apps. It's a hard sell.
The whole point is to not charge users twice for both the volume AND the rate of flow.<p>It's not hot button because there is no FCC chair. If the dems seat a chair, regardless of who it is, that would allow grassroots campaigns to reactivate.<p>Under Trump, I believe broadband ISPs were implementing data caps, and they backed off on that after Biden was elected. And some telecoms offer zero rated content. It's far more common overseas for telecoms and content providers to partner in providing access, so you get places like the Philippines where Facebook basically <i>is</i> the internet.
I have seen a pattern in "Activism". Since such activities are largely conducted by people generally on the "left" or associated with the Democratic Party almost all activism declines (not gone but much much lower) when democrats are in power nationally.<p>I suspect now that one chamber of the congress is republican controlled we will see a slight increase in activism, and if Republicans take the presidency in 2024 a huge jump in activism, or if they take both the house and Senate<p>While conservatives / republicans will get out for protests the number of issues that will spark that is very much more limited... namely 2, abortion and guns. Outside of that you likely will not see a conservative protest / political activism. In contrast there are 100' or 1000's of issues on the left that will spark protests.
I gave money to Free Press Action years ago to fight for net neutrality. I’ve been absolutely shocked by recent emails from them asking to give them money to pressure companies from not allowing certain individuals on their platforms.<p>Or their complaints that Elon Musk wont restrict certain speech.<p>Like what?
There's no longer net neutrality, because China.<p>Discriminate technology based on ideology and security is an on-going bipartisan effort happening in the US.
Net neutrality was fraudulently put forth by Internet giants and the activist organizations they fund as an issue of free speech. It put the most censorious platforms on the face of the Earth in the ridiculous position that if they were made to pay their own bandwidth bills, it would lead to content censorship and the inability of Americans to freely express political ideas.<p>As Ajit Pai's FCC Ruling stated:<p>>This consensus is among the reasons that there is scant evidence that end users, under different legal frameworks, have been prevented by blocking or throttling from accessing the content of their choosing. It also is among the reasons why providers have voluntarily abided by no-blocking practices even during periods where they were not legally required to do so. As to free expression in particular, we note that none of the actual incidents discussed in the Title II Order squarely implicated free speech. If anything, recent evidence suggests that hosting services, social media platforms, edge providers, and other providers of virtual Internet infrastructure are more likely to block content on viewpoint grounds.<p>This statement included a footnote specifically noting the unilateral suspension of The Daily Stormer.<p>Of course, "net neutrality" was struck down, YouTube was made to pay their bandwidth bills, and absolutely nothing changed at all. The corporate censors went on with their work of suspending everything that was bigoted, and then most Trump supporters, and then prominent Bernie supporters during the primaries, and then people who talked about the risks of experimental vaccines. They continue this regime of censorship up to this very day, but they have to pay for transit in places that it is limited.<p>It was an absolutely absurd fraud that went on for years, but the game is over. Why would anyone pretend that Net Neutrality means anything other than a cheaper bandwidth bill for Google at this point?
net neutrality was sold to the public as anti-censorship, when really it had nothing to do with free speech. the author of the post seems to have a more developed understanding that it's really about increasing bargaining power of media companies (specifically big bandwidth users like streaming video) and decreasing the bargaining power of telecoms, but most do not understand this.<p>the difference is that now most of those activists are pro-censorship, as long as the censorship is what they like, and those same big media companies are able to enact that type of censorship. as far as I can tell, that's really it. most people never really understood net neutrality.
It's basically Newcastle coal roads all over again, with the competition from the canal haulers upsetting the rentier sector. The only real solution is the same as with the roads: no limitations on access, and if congestion is an issue, use the tax revenues to broaden to the roads to handle the increase in traffic. The government manages the roads, but if they need to buy material (steel, or fiber), then submit competitive contracts to the private sector.<p>Of course, wannabe fascists and the like will try to control the flow of information for their own reasons, nothing new about that either.
I think part of the reason that net neutrality advocacy has been neutered is because a lot of the advocates don’t like the idea of tech platforms being beholden to common carrier status and if the FCC can go after ISP and force them to act as dumb pipes then many see twitter/Facebook/YouTube as next. And the types of people who want ISPs to be seen as dumb pipes are generally very against free speech (because they worry that most people aren’t as smart as them and thus while they (the advocates) are above being brainwashed, the rest of the netizens aren’t and will succumb to fascism).