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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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So... What happened with net neutrality? It's been 5 years since the FCC voted to repeal it in 2017. Net neutrality supporters promised a dystopia where small businesses and individuals are throttled by ISPs, and consumers have to pay for each website separately.

As far as I can tell... That didn't happen? Nothing happened? Did it even matter? I must be missing something, why would anyone bother trying to repeal or keep net neutrality if it doesn't make a difference? Biden apparently made an executive order in July 2021 asking the FCC to restore net neutrality, but they haven't done it. The Wikipedia article doesn't have much on what happened after 2017 other than legal developments (on the national level, there were two failed congressional laws and a failed lawsuit by Mozilla to restore net neutrality).

Same for the SF shoplifting epidemic...hardly anyone seems to talk about that anymore either

these things come and go in waves

I think a combination of the new administration, Jan 6th, BLM protests/riots, and Covid shifted priorities . The Net neutrality thing was a big deal from 2017-2019 in part because there was not much else going on

The looting in SF is still front & center culture war stuff and it's currently ongoing?

I'd bet it has something to do with the fact that small businesses and individuals aren't really a big enough fiscal presence on the internet to matter. Everything is big websites of big companies anyway. I remember reading/talking about how without Net Neutrality we'd just be a few giant websites and that's how it happened out anyway even with Net Neutrality in place.

Related to this, I was reading about Netflix peering deals because I was wondering how Net Neutrality dealt with that and apparently ISPs can effectively throttle large companies if they feel like it because refusing connections from another network and/or not delivering it in a timely fashion is not a violation of Net Neutrality. It only becomes about Net Neutrality when it's on their network. So, they can essentially extort money from Netflix to keep its connections to their network from being refused or connected slowly.

I think people just assumed Net Neutrality meant more than it actually does because to my tiny mind the above seems like just the kind of thing that Net Neutrality should protect against.

Under any version of Net Neutrality I've seen a network could refuse to peer with another network, but they couldn't discriminate against packets transiting in from networks they do peer with. For example, Comcast could refuse to peer with Netflix. But Netflix could pay AT&T to take the traffic, and AT&T would then deliver it to Comcast.

That's what Netflix was doing. They were paying Cogent to take the traffic and it was being delivered to Verizon but because Cogent was handling Netflix it was using more bandwidth than Verizon felt was fair so they let their ports fill up with Cogent and it slowed all Netflix content to Verizon. Netflix subsequently entered paid peering agreements with Comcast and Verizon after this to make sure their interconnections weren't disrupted. That just seems like a scam to me and not just toward Netflix. If I'm paying Verizon to provide me with internet and they don't provide Netflix simply because they're unhappy with their peering agreement with Cogent then that seems like something that shouldn't affect the customer and if it does it seems like they're not providing the thing they're supposed to be selling.

Peering/interconnection was a major aspect of the original Net Neutrality fight. In principle it should be possible for two nodes on previously peered networks to route through an intermediary network but in practice when it's tier-1s or near tier-1s (like Cogent and it's usually Cogent having/causing this problem) those routes don't happen. The 2015 Open Internet Order did allow the commission to look into peering/paid interconnection agreements.

Interconnection: New Authority to Address Concerns

For the first time the Commission can address issues that may arise in the exchange of traffic between mass-market broadband providers and other networks and services. Under the authority provided by the Order, the Commission can hear complaints and take appropriate enforcement action if it determines the interconnection activities of ISPs are not just and reasonable.

I think it's an example of the simplistic political thinking most people have, where they assume a regulation to prevent X will actually prevent X, and repealing such a regulation will cause more of X to happen. Most people think rent controls reduce rent and repealing rent controls will cause rent to rise, despite mountains of empirical data suggesting the opposite is true. It's just much easier to assume that laws do what they say they do, rather than thinking about all the complex ways that stated intentions can fail to manifest in the real world.

Wait, why do rent controls fail to control rent?

I was under the impression that they did keep rent from rising (by pushing externalities onto...landlords or something?). The ensuing supply shock seems like a different problem so long as controls stay in place.

There are three main reasons, as I understand it, why many economists think rent controls drive up rent:

  1. When renting to a new tenant, the landlord has to set the rent based on the expected market price over the next, say, 10+ years the tenant may occupy the property, instead of setting the price for the coming year knowing it can be raised later. This raises rents.

  2. A rent controlled apartment is effectively an asset that gets more valuable the longer the tenant holds onto it. This reduces apartment turnover, which reduces supply, which increases price.

  3. Rent control makes building new housing a less attractive business model, so fewer apartments get built, thereby reducing supply and increasing price.

A fourth point (e.g. relevant for the Swedish rent control system) is that if the maximum rent is based on templates like how much rent may be set based on furnishings and access to services and so on, then that creates a strong incentive for landlords to provide the cheapest possible amenity that still meets the legal definition of the thing.

This means that shortly after rent control is enacted, landlords goodheart the regulation to the max by erecting the smallest possible "park" in some unvisited corner of the plot, or modify the building so that there is technically an "ocean view" if you stand on some exact spot and use binoculars.

In the end rents don't decline, and the costs of the modifications is susequently partially borne by the tenants, either in increased rents or worse quality of the amenities they actually do care about.

Because rent controls effectively take market rent apartments off the market, which raises rents on anything that avoids the controls.

In aggregate most of the data shows those controls drive rents up. Those externalities lead to things like reduced supply (which increases rates) and higher rates on new renters to price in the inability to raise rents over time and to offset the losses from existing rent controlled units. Individuals in a rent controlled unit don't have their rents increased but may be subject to all kinds of other pressures encouraging them to give up their hereditary claim to Apartment 23B at 200USD/mo passed down through the generations.

What happened is that the ISPs and Big Tech played the corpo war game, using their various pawns, and that the ISPs trounced Silicon Valley by making it assault their own well defended positions.

Google and their ilk got routed because they couldn't bear the infrastructure costs of replacing them or had the savvy to play the regulatory game against world class professionals (at least at the time). Google Fiber was therefore a nonstarter.

And the other avenue of attack, the political one, though it generated a lot of noise (on Big Tech's platforms mind you), didn't really manage to dislodge the strong grip of the ISPs on their regulatory apparatus, fruit of decades of revolving door and cosy deep state relationships.

Ultimately Big Tech doesn't care anymore, they can just pay the tribute with their ginormous profits and not play a losing battle. Perhaps this will eventually be revisited, but I doubt you will see as much effusion now that the public isn't as friendly to them as they have become The Man as well.

There are some interesting footnotes to this if you're are the sort of person who was interested in network neutrality before it was SV agitprop, and therefore most likely still are (people like France's own Benjamin Bayard) but as said by others the interesting parts of the debate have moved on from the network peering into the politics of centralized platforms as the Internet has been consolidated into Big Tech's walled gardens.

The straightforward theory is that NN was intended to prevent a scenario where YouTube, FB etc. would make contracts with carriers to prioritise their traffic over other competitors (or even only offer access to them), locking out any future challengers to their monopoly forever. However, it turned out that all tech giants turned into converged institutions, while their challengers look like Gab or Liveleak, so the locked-in monopoly became desirable.

IIRC I saw mentions of free-data deals with Netflix, etc. on certain mobile providers, though I'm not sure they still exists. OTOH, I think California enacted its own NN in 2018, so a lot of Big Tech are still covered by it, I think?

Indeed, it's worth noting that Facebook had a big zero-rate service in India, IIRC (and WhatsApp is huge in India).

I know for a fact that data plans exist for which Spotify streaming doesn't count.

The most recent development has been the fight to confirm Gigi Sohn for the FCC, but I haven't heard about developments there.

To echo one of the replies below, I guess the ISPs decided to just not get greedy, somehow.

Has net performance improved since net neutrality ended?

I feel like a read somewhere once where Zoom as a thing people were regularly doing wasn't something that the internet of 5-10 years ago could handle technology wise.

Is there any connection to the improvements made following, or incentivized by, the end of net neutrality and the rise of video conferencing apps like Zoom?

Network speeds continue to get better, at noticeable and measurable rates.

This would happen in a world both with and without NN.

So... What happened with net neutrality?

Short answer is that that it was a manufactured controversy from the start that was dropped the moment it became clear that it's utility as a political weapon against the sitting administration was limited.

I don’t buy it. The controversy was manufactured in the sense that major social media networks blared it constantly, but it was always about the money, not the POTUS.

Also, Ajit Pai, with his fellow kids and his astroturfed comments, made lots of cringeworthy meme material. That part burned out all on its own.

Yes, the FAANGers wanted a particular outcome and tried to use thier bully-pullpit to attain it. The fact that they could use the repeal of a policy with "nuetrality" to play into thier ongoing narrative about Trump's being a fascist was icing on the cake.

However much to the surprise of those who get their news from imageboards, Twitter is not real life, and the FCC under Pai turned out to be a lot more savvy than anyone had given them credit for.

The whole episode has since been memory-holed, lest big-tech and it's cheerleaders be forced to admit the loss.

I agree that there are some people who treated it this way, but then why would Pai/Trump bother repealing it, if that's all it was? Why spend their political capital on this, if it doesn't make a difference?

Other users have covered the reasons for repeal better than I would, and I don't think it actually cost Trump or the FCC much if any capital.

The FAANG companies tried to use their bully pulpit to force the FCC and ISPs to heel but aside from a lot of sound and fury on sites like reddit and hackernews their efforts didn't amount to all that much.

There’s an idea bumping around in my head about how “political capital” doesn’t mean “currency.” Something like—Capital is an investment. Trump et al. weren’t spending (burning) their capital because everything was already partisan enough. The outrage was driven by Democrats who already 1) hated his guts and 2) distrusted corporations, so they didn’t get much more traction from an investment in corporate power.

I am convinced NET Neutrality was a push by FAANG companies because they were attempting to monopolize the internet through preventing any company besides themselves to sensor content, the ISPs were the top concern because they controlled the end user experience. Ajit Pai should be recognized by congress as being smart enough to see through corporate greed and went along with his notion to repeal Net Neutrality, especially since the FCC was hardly the correct agency to control the internet anyways.

ISPs aren't very eager to censor right now. The front-end platforms are censoring like crazy, the second-tier platforms - like Cloudflare, DNS providers, cloud providers, etc. - are censoring reluctantly and only when the Lefist activists are particularly inflamed (I don't think anything on the Left has ever been censored by second-tier) and low-level ISPs as far as I know don't do political censorship at all, so far. Of course, this could change very quickly - but as of now, I don't see ISP censorship being something that's on the agenda.

I know of at least one case of ISP censorship. Verizon doesn't allow its users to access the Deepfake porn site http://mrdeepfakes.com because it offends feminists. Try it.

I'm not sure how that would follow. FAANG breaks the power of ISPs, shifting locus of control towards them? But I fail to see how Net Neutrality gets you to censorship--Net Neutrality, as popularly described, doesn't have any implication for censorship other than impedance of traffic/content. And the ISPs still own the actual physical infrastructure at the end of the day.

The whole censorship angle was always more about silicon valley progressives' need to paint Trump as a fascist and Pai as a race-traitor than it was any reasonable reading of the policy.

I really don't think it was about any of that at all. Nobody was calling Pai an Uncle Tom and Trump himself didn't represent anything in the fight.

As far as I can tell... That didn't happen? Nothing happened? Did it even matter?

From a technical perspective, absolute net neutrality was probably never a tenable prospect: there are all sorts of reasons why ISPs want to optimize traffic flows. Interactive applications (Zoom calls, video games) prefer minimal latency, while streaming services focus on bandwidth and can happily buffer enough to handle less continuous data. Legal streaming being a huge bandwidth user, many services were interested in distinctly less-than-neutral contracts where ISPs would host either hardware or data close to customers to reduce bandwidth costs (these are largely mutually beneficial). Some internet plans are cellular, and IRL bandwidth is a very finite resource: do we really want to enforce that wireless providers can't throttle video streaming (not necessarily completely, but perhaps forcing a lower resolution) to make sure your neighbors in any sufficiently crowded space don't prevent you from checking your email. Honestly, some sort of traffic prioritization is probably inescapable, and it's very unclear to me that "neutral" is either well-defined or desirable.

There's also a decent argument that it was only really an argument because the people pushing for it thought they might lose. Millennials and Zoomers with Netflix accounts were scared their ISPs were going to rope them into costly plans to replace falling cable TV package revenue. Sometimes this takes the form of a generic data cap, which exist but aren't universal even on cellular plans. I don't know that those fears were misplaced, but in the past 5 years I think it's clear that between the political will of streaming companies and their (voting!) customers, legislators can't outright ignore their concerns.

I'm sure there are some principled cyperpunk libertarians out there that support Net Neutrality on a purely dogmatic basis, but I am pretty confident that most of the folks involved circa 2017 were probably more concerned about who was going to bear the financial burden of growing bandwidth costs. Personally, I was loosely in favor, since ISPs are often monopolies. Since then, though, high-bandwidth internet usage has gone mainstream (even outside of the pandemic) such that (even self-interested) neutrality advocates aren't a minority.

There's probably also a darker view that the mainstream left that supported net neutrality as anti-censorship when they were plucky upstarts are now in positions of power and their interests against censorship were never principled, just self-interested. I'm not sure I would endorse that view, but I see how someone could argue it, and it's not a great look.

cyperpunk libertarians out there that support Net Neutrality on a purely dogmatic basis

No libertarian can support NN on a purely dogmatic basis - since it's a governmental intrusion into private business and restriction of freedom of association and contract. Of course, some libertarians may still support it, arguing that this is a minimal intrusion that achieves a lot of good outcomes and prevents outcomes that would be less desirable - but that would be pragmatic and not dogmatic basis. Dogmatic basis is that government intrusion can only happen to protect natural rights and enforce contracts. I do not see any natural rights arguments that demand NN, thus on purely dogmatic libertarian basis, NN is treif.

A principled libertarian probably wouldn't support the government mandated service provider monopoly/duopoly that creates the conflict in the first place either. One that accepts the public utility infrastructure principle applied to last mile (libertarians here, not anarchists) would probably want something like local loop unbundling rather than strict net neutrality. But regulating common infrastructure such that it cannot discriminate between private parties isn't heterodox within that philosophical framework. Right libertarians would typically favor auctioning services while left libertarians would favor a common carrier equal service regulation.

I always find this genre of "that's not really libertarian" when applied to already very regulated industries strange. It's like that joke where someone offers to sleep with you for a million dollars and you say yes then changes the offer to $1 to the objection of "what kind of woman do you think I am" with the reply of "we've already established what kind of woman you are, now we're just haggling", except we've cut off the part were I accepted the first offer.

Yes, I'd prefer the world where capitalism reigned and I had 80 different ISP options that will fight with each other to serve me as well as possible. But we don't live in that world, we live in the world where these companies are granted a monopoly and I have, if I'm lucky, two choices in ISP that both spend more money lobbying than on maintaining their service. And if we're going to regulate this industry how about doing it in the interests of the citizen instead of the lobbyist.

I find the idea that right libertarians believe that natural monopolies don't exist, both true, and disappointing. As a right libertarian myself.

One that accepts the public utility infrastructure principle applied to last mile (libertarians here, not anarchists)

There's no such principle in libertarianism. For anarchists, "public" doesn't mean anything at all, since there's no state. For libertarians, "public" means "operated by the government", and the only thing that can be so is the institutions that are dedicated to preserving natural rights (e.g. the police putting murderers in jail) and enforcing contracts (e.g. if you promised to pay your bills, you better pay them or else). I don't see much place for "public utility infrastructure principle" here. Now, you may like the practical benefits of this, whatever it means - but if we're talking about "dogmatic basis", there's just no place for it, and anybody who accepts it may be dogmatic anything, but not a libertarian. Just as somebody who accepts private ownership of means of production is not a communist, even though there are probably much proven benefits to that concept.

left libertarians would favor a common carrier equal service regulation.

They may favor anything they like, but they're not any kind of libertarians then. It doesn't make sense to use the label "libertarian" for somebody that accepts regulation they like and rejects regulation they don't - everybody is "libertarian" like that, the label will provide zero selectivity then.

I think this is an overly restrictive reading. A communist still accepts that capitalism exists. Likewise, a libertarian may accept as a matter of fact that state regulation exists. Then starting from that position, the libertarian may have an opinion on what manner of adjustment to that regulation makes the system more free, or less free, even in a libertarian sense.

The domain of opinion of a political system is not limited to a complete instantiation of that system - and well so, because otherwise it would be impossible to reshape society to your wishes. You have to be able to target smaller steps than complete instantaneous replacement.

A communist still accepts that capitalism exists.

Sure, there's a difference between what communist wants to happen, ideally, and what's existing on the ground now. So a communist may push for higher taxation of private business - but always with the ultimate goal in mind that these businesses should eventually be all nationalized and under the control of Gosplan. So if we talk about tactical flexibility, then yes, that's a thing. But if we're talking about dogmatic position - then I can't call someone who accepts capitalism a dogmatic communist. And I can't see any libertarian support regulation of private business on a purely dogmatic basis. On the tactical grounds, as a political move to improve an imperfect situation and make it less imperfect - sure.

I'm sure there are some principled cyperpunk libertarians out there that support Net Neutrality on a purely dogmatic basis

Hi there, I am indeed concerned about ISPs censoring Bitcoin and thus supporting radio based alternatives, how could you tell?

But you most definitely have a point. The reason behind a lot of support of the NN stuff wasn't the sort of concerns I have but the dread caused by this possible future.

It's striking to visit random subreddits, check their top posts of all time, and see that at or near the top is "SAVE NET NEUTRALITY!" from 2017, which has nothing to do with the actual subject of the subreddit.

I would hope that people would at least learn from the fact that things turned out differently than they expected, but that's a hope that's rarely fulfilled.

It ended up not mattering. The censorship isn't really happening at the ISP level. Its happening at the level of social networks, and search engines. None of the net neutrality stuff was ever intended to prevent it (because why would big tech want to hamstring themselves? They were the biggest advocates of net "neutrality"). The issue has been quietly abandoned since the level of insincerity to call for a "neutral" internet would be pretty obvious.

In theory Net Neutrality would have required other network companies to peer with Kiwi Farms, although in practice I suspect some exception would be found. (Josh has not yet been un-peered, while his opponents rely on DDoS attacks, but I no longer have confidence in rubicons remaining uncrossed.)

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