House Passes Bill to Sabotage Net Neutrality
Some clarity is badly needed here. If you don't know some fairly arcane details of what'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'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 --> Consumer-ISP --> Backbone-provider <-- Business-ISP <-- 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's happening is that some consumer ISPs aren'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 --> Consumer-ISP --> Backbone-provider <-- Business-ISP <-- Website
                      ^_____________________________________________________|
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The problem is that this arrangement would have businesses paying money to ISPs that they didn't choose, and can't walk away from. From a consumer's perspective, if a web site is slow, it looks like the website's fault rather than their ISP's fault, which distorts the incentives. This sort of arrangement isn't really compatible with free-market incentives, since the flow of money doesn't match who's providing services to who; it's less like normal business, and more like extortion.<p>Unfortunately, I don't expect Congress to have access to clear explanations of all of this. But if you happen to have a congressperson's ear: rather than convince them of a position, please make sure they understand the full shape of what's happening. They're smart enough to draw the correct conclusion, but are constantly bombarded by misinformation.