[NNagain] On "Throttling" behaviors

[rjmcmahon]

Competition in a natural monopoly is a myth. There are a few places that 
competition in the OSP may survive, e.g. NYC, but otherwise it's like 
water, electric, sanitation, sea ports etc.

There of course is FWA competition, but that's likely a transient, or 
just along freeways (no freeways, no FWA) as we move to 100Gbs and 
beyond and less energy. But that assumes we do the work.

The belief of "monopoly as always bad" miss that without the land grants 
and railroads, the U.S. economy would have developed like Russia, who 
decided against funding RRs for over a century and, in turn, missed the 
industrial revolution. It's ironic that the U.S. "capitalist" state 
provided the land grants while the yet to be "communists" didn't.

Bob
> Well, if that were the case, I believe that would support my thesis:
> the problem is lack of competition. The reason for the lack of
> competition is a mix of local contracts and legislative problems.
> Especially in more rural areas, one can understand how getting a cable
> company to build out the infrastructure may have required a promise of
> exclusivity – otherwise, they would not have been willing to incur the
> substantial cost of building out the capacity, especially in a
> low-density area. As the smaller local cable companies were acquired
> by the modern behemoths, they maintained the monopolistic control over
> those regions. Some do automatically time-out to allow competition
> eventually. Many do not.
> 
> In reality, there are alternatives in most places, just not generally
> very good alternatives:
> 
> DSL is available in most places (I suspect more broadly available that
> cable Internet). Unfortunately, and I suspect many here can speak more
> knowledgeably than I on the underlying technology, DSL is often
> limited to lower speeds than the cable offerings, due to its extreme
> distance sensitivity and relatively short range. Where I live, I had 3
> DSL lines and dual T1's combined via SD-WAN as the only way to get
> sufficient bandwidth for video conferencing from home until Starlink
> came along and saved the day at a fraction of the cost. There is no
> cable option here – we're too rural to be worth a cable company's
> efforts. On the other hand, in addition to DSL we also have another
> wired option: our electric company is running Gbps fiber all over
> rural parts of NH now, which should become available here in another
> 1-2 months.
> 
> Just north of Philly, I had FiOS fiber as an option in addition to
> traditional cable. When that arrived, anecdotally, I can report that
> cable customers talked about her their service improved too (due to
> the competition, I am confident).
> 
> And obviously not wired (to your point), but cellular connectivity is
> also available in most places that support cable. Starlink, and other
> wireless options also exist and may benefit from being able to limit
> certain kinds of traffic.
> 
> My point is more general than these specifics though. I caution
> against regulating an industry where we depend on innovation to
> radically improve performance over the upcoming decades. Forcing
> specific behavior will slow the pace of innovation on connectivity
> infrastructure. To be fair, it may speed certain other areas of
> innovation or help with customer experience around streaming services.
> These were the original champions of NN, because it's to their
> benefit, at the cost of the carriers.
> 
> Again, the problem is with the forced monopolies for cable service.
> Break that up and history shows that the rest will largely solve
> itself. Not immediately (which is why Google and Netflix pushed the
> original NN model rather than busting the regional carrier exclusive
> locks), but in way that's stronger in the long-run.
> 
> Or, to put it another way, the original NN push (not suggesting that's
> what anyone's doing here) would have just been the US government
> choosing one set of companies to support over another.
> 
> Cheers,
> Colin
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: rjmcmahon <rjmcmahon at rjmcmahon.com>
> Sent: Monday, October 2, 2023 5:08 PM
> To: Network Neutrality is back! Let´s make the technical aspects heard
> this time! <nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net>
> Cc: Colin_Higbie <CHigbie1 at Higbie.name>
> Subject: Re: [NNagain] On "Throttling" behaviors
> 
> I see it quite differently. The cable cos in the U.S. are the primary
> (only?) companies providing wired access.  The common carriage fixed
> wires co and their regulators abandoned communities to go to FWA as
> Noam predicted in 1994. (They turned off my, 48V battery backed up in
> the CO, landline without even letting me know. No 911, no dial tone,
> no
> nothing.)
> 
> I think waveguides, e.g. fiber, to and inside premises are the only
> long term answer and we seem to keep bashing the companies actually
> helping.
> 
> Bob
>> While product and service innovation often originates from pure R&D or
>> work performed in academic labs, in virtually all cases, converting
>> that into commercially viable products and services is the result of
>> profit incentives. A company won’t invest in doing something new with
>> attendant risks unless they can expect a return on that investment
>> greater than the alternatives (or they believe it will provide
>> strategic support to some other product or service). For that reason,
>> we want to be extremely careful about regulating how companies can
>> implement innovations, including the use of potentially distasteful
>> business practices. None of us who want to see the Internet become
>> better over time and more accessible should want anything resembling
>> NN regulation.
>> 
>> The regulatory side of this is largely not a technical discussion
>> because future innovation, by definition, may exceed technical
>> considerations we can conceive of today.
>> 
>> It's easy to conceive of examples where an ISP wants to prioritize or
>> penalize certain kinds of traffic. And while that may seem
>> superficially bad, it’s an important part of the very competition that
>> drives innovation and cost reductions over time. E.g., recall when
>> Google Fiber had been willing to install Gbps fiber in places at a
>> time when most of the rest of the country was struggling to get 20Mbps
>> connections. If Google had wanted to limit that to Google services,
>> that still might have been a boon to those customers.
>> Further, it could have shown the uses and values of what was then
>> considered limitless bandwidth for a home or small business user. Even
>> though this would clearly have been in violation of the tenets of NN,
>> it would have provided important data that might have spawned
>> significant investment by others and advanced the state of
>> connectivity across the board.
>> 
>> I know the counter argument to this is that local ISP monopolies
>> already break innovation, and those companies, especially the big
>> cable companies, therefore have no incentive to provide a good
>> service. I largely agree with that (there is still some small
>> incentive, in that if they are too terrible, customer outcry will turn
>> to voter outcry and demand breaking those monopolies, and they don’t
>> want to risk that).
>> 
>> Therefore, the legal issue to address is NOT how they treat or
>> prioritize data, whether by content or protocol – which they should be
>> allowed to do, EVEN WHEN IT’S BAD FOR CUSTOMERS – but, at least
>> referring to the U.S. specifically with our federal/state system, to
>> put federal limits on durations of regional monopoly durations. I
>> believe this is within the scope of what FCC can mandate (some would
>> debate this and it may take the courts to sort it out). These need not
>> be purely # of years, they can be a function of time to recoup
>> deployment costs. If a company negotiated a local monopoly as part of
>> covering their deployment costs, I would personally say that they
>> should be given an opportunity to recoup those, but then after that,
>> they need to open up their lines for use by competing firms, similar
>> to what happened with the RBOCs and the old telephone lines.
>> 
>> This is also the legal logic behind patents: give a company a 20 year
>> monopoly on the invention in exchange for making it public to everyone
>> and showing them how to do it (the patent must provide clear
>> instructions). We deem the temporary monopoly worthwhile to incent the
>> innovation, provided the inventor makes it public. This is the right
>> philosophy to consider for something like bandwidth innovation,
>> investment, and access.
>> 
>> In short, with ISP’s the open-ended government protected monopolies
>> are the problem, not the providers’ ability to overcharge customers or
>> prioritize some data over others. Competition will fix that over time,
>> as long as competition is allowed to occur. And while it may be faster
>> to force it through regulation, that has dangerous long-term
>> consequences with respect to future innovation.
>> 
>> Starlink is one example of innovation. FTTH is another. Cellular-based
>> Internet is another. Simply buying bulk access on existing lines and
>> repackaging it under different terms could be yet another. Those all
>> seem obvious, because they’re the ones we know. The real danger in
>> unforeseen consequences is the dampening effect NN-style regulations
>> have on yet-to-be-seen innovations, the innovations that never come to
>> fruition because of the regulations.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Colin Higbie
>> _______________________________________________
>> Nnagain mailing list
>> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain