House Passes Bill to Sabotage Net Neutrality
Some clarity is badly needed here. If you don&#x27;t know some fairly arcane details of what&#x27;s going on in Internet regulation, this looks as though it just prevents the FCC from setting price floors and price ceilings, which would be fine.<p>What&#x27;s actually going on is fairly complicated, because there are five different parties involved: the consumer, a consumer ISP such as Verizon or Comcast, a backbone provider such as Cogent or Level 3, a business ISP such as Linode or AWS, and a business with a web site. The wires look like this:<p><pre><code>    Consumer --- Consumer-ISP --- Backbone-provider --- Business-ISP --- Website
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And the flow of money looks like this:<p><pre><code>    Consumer --&gt; Consumer-ISP --&gt; Backbone-provider &lt;-- Business-ISP &lt;-- Website
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For each connection, there is someone paying money who can take their money elsewhere if that connection is too slow. What&#x27;s happening is that some consumer ISPs aren&#x27;t happy with only being paid by consumers, and want websites to also pay them. That would make the flow of money look like this:<p><pre><code>    Consumer --&gt; Consumer-ISP --&gt; Backbone-provider &lt;-- Business-ISP &lt;-- Website
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The problem is that this arrangement would have businesses paying money to ISPs that they didn&#x27;t choose, and can&#x27;t walk away from. From a consumer&#x27;s perspective, if a web site is slow, it looks like the website&#x27;s fault rather than their ISP&#x27;s fault, which distorts the incentives. This sort of arrangement isn&#x27;t really compatible with free-market incentives, since the flow of money doesn&#x27;t match who&#x27;s providing services to who; it&#x27;s less like normal business, and more like extortion.<p>Unfortunately, I don&#x27;t expect Congress to have access to clear explanations of all of this. But if you happen to have a congressperson&#x27;s ear: rather than convince them of a position, please make sure they understand the full shape of what&#x27;s happening. They&#x27;re smart enough to draw the correct conclusion, but are constantly bombarded by misinformation.