= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
PhilGoetz comments on Open Thread: May 2009 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (204)
What do people here (esp. libertarians) think about (inter)net neutrality?
Seems to me that net neutrality is a great boon to spammers and porn downloaders. People might not like it so much if they discovered that, without net neutrality, they could pay an extra dollar a month and increase their download speed while browsing by a factor of ten.
It seems you are conflating net neutrality (ISPs should not discriminate based on packet characteristics, including origin) with the concept that users should pay for the resources they use.
For one thing, spammers usually use botnets so no change there, average users would bear the cost one way or another. Unless you are advocating depriorization of all email traffic, ISPs have no way other than spam filters to differentiate what counts as spam. I see no connection to the net neutrality debate, or the pay-per-usage model.
As for porn-downloaders, I take it you mean people with high bandwidth needs, which includes all sorts of downloaders. (I really don't see why you would emphasise porn here, even if you're trying to evoke feelings of moral resentment, LW would seem the unlikeliest of places that this would have any efect.) I never had a problem with bandwidth usage caps, as long as they are explicit. Then carriers can compete on what they set these limits to and I can choose based on my needs. Nothing to do with net neutrality as far as I can see.
As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care. But then again, in a truly competitive market, I doubt we would be having a net neutrality issue to begin with.
| As for my libertarian view on net neutrality: When the governments allow for true competition between ISPs, they can drop all net neutrality provisions as far as I care.
Do you believe that true competition can exist in a free market where the economics of scale are as big as in the ISP market? If net neutrality isn't enforced, a big ISP could squash a small new ISP by demanding a lot of money for peering. They are much less likely to try something like this against a big ISP, who has a lot more bargaining power.
(I am Assuming "true competition" means at least low barriers to entry.)
The arguments against monopolies in a free market apply, here. A big ISP which set out to squash little ISPs would run up its own costs trying, thereby losing to other big ISPs which didn't do this. If there was only one big ISP, they'd eventually fail if they kept this up, since it would be in the interest of all the little ISPs to peer with each other, and they'd eventually have most of the market, collectively. Economies of scale can be really useful, but unless your firm is able to use force, much of the savings will go to the consumers through competition.
Of course, in the real world, we're awash in force, so perhaps this isn't very useful. :(
But in the meantime, very many small ISPs would go out of business trying to compete before they collectively pull down the big ISP, which likely has other advantages beyond competing on price, such as having a lot of friends and influence among the set of people who could possibly invest funding into a new ISP.
At some point people are going to realize that getting into the ISP market is a recipe for disaster, and if this happens before the big ISP runs out of slack, competition dries up and the big ISP gets to continue being a monopoly.
So yes, if you assume that significant numbers of people will make irrational decisions and take large personal losses starting businesses that are very likely to fail it might work out, but I'm not sure that's justified.
Honestly, most of the arguments about why monopolies would never survive in a truly free market are glaring examples of how irrational hard-line free market ideas are, usually because people turn the idea of an unregulated market itself into a terminal value and then start rationalizing why it will obviously produce ideal results.
Check out the startup market sometime. Most startups fail, yet there always seems to be money for new ones, because every now and then there's a Google. You seem to be assuming that people won't do what they're actually doing.
Technology startups generally have relatively low entry costs and aren't trying to jump into an established market with substantial network effect and force out an entrenched larger player.
How many startups do you see trying to, say, go toe-to-toe with Microsoft in the desktop OS or office suite market, and how successful are those?
It's a fallacy to point to the lack of direct competition from startups in the desktop OS or office suite market and claim that as proof that natural monopolies exist. Companies that dominate an industry for a period often lose their dominance when new technologies come along that make their dominance irrelevant.
Companies that dominated telecommunications when fixed land lines were the only game in town now compete against cellular phone networks and Internet telephony. Microsoft's dominance in the desktop OS space is becoming less and less relevant as more of people's day to day computing needs move into the cloud. Google Docs is a potential challenger to Office in the future and has its roots partly in a startup (Writely).
Technological innovation has a way of undermining monopolies that are not protected by government regulation. Sometimes it even manages to undermine protected monopolies - the process of updating legislation to maintain profitable monopoly privileges in the face of technological change is fortunately slow enough that the rent seeking entities can be beaten by faster moving companies.
Net neutrality is a bunch of different issues that get incorrectly lumped together.
The first issue is prioritizing traffic based on endpoints. An example of that is where ISP A contacts example.com and offers to speed up its customers' connections to example.com, in exchange for money. The problem is that example.com isn't a customer of ISP A, but of a competing ISP. The full graph of business relationships is
End user --- ISP A --- ISP B --- example.com
The end user pays ISP A to use its portion of the network, example.com pays ISP B to use its portion of the network, and they split the cost of the link that connects the two ISP's networks. If ISP A goes after example.com, then it's trying to bill its competitor's customers. This is probably in violation of its peering agreement with ISP B, and it would cause a total nightmare for anyone trying to run a web site, as they would have to negotiate with every ISP instead of just the one they get their connectivity from. So with respect to traffic endpoints, net neutrality is extremely important.
The second issue is prioritizing traffic based on type. This is reasonable and sometimes necessary, because some protocols such as telephony only use a small amount of bandwidth but are badly disrupted if they don't get any for a fraction of a second, while other protocols like ftp use tons of bandwidth but can be paused for several seconds without disrupting anything. The problem there is that protocol prioritization is more often used as a cover story for anti-competitive behavior; eg, ISP A wants to drive ISP B out of business, so they configure their network so that ISP A's expensive VoIP service gets high priority, ISP B's VoIP service gets low priority, and everything else gets medium priority. You end up with telephone companies setting the priority on VoIP services that directly compete with their own voice services, cable television setting the priority on streaming video services that directly compete with their own television services, and so on.
Phil, things like cables and phone lines going to houses are "natural monopolies" in that it costs so much to install them that competitors probably can never get started. In fact, if the technology to deliver video over phone lines were available or anticipated when cable TV was building out in the 70s, the owner of the phone lines (pre-breakup AT&T) could probably have stopped the new cable TV companies from ever getting off the ground (by using the fact that AT&T has already paid for its pipe to the home to lowball the new companies). In other words, the probable reason we have two data pipes going into most homes in the U.S. rather than just one is that the first data pipe (the phone line) was not at that time of the introduction of the second pipe technically able to carry the new kind of data (video).
It is desirable that these duopolists (the owners of the phone lines and the cable-TV cables going to the home) are not able to use their natural duopoly as a wedge to enter markets for data services like search engines, online travel agencies, online stores, etc, in the way that Microsoft used their ownership of DOS to lever their way into dominance of markets like word processors and web browsers.
One way to do that is to draw a line at the level of "IP connectivity" and impose a regulation that say that the duopolists are in the business of selling this IP connectivity (and if they like, levels below IP connectivity like raw copper) but cannot enter the market (or prefer partners who are in the market) of selling services that ride on top of IP connectivity and depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.
This proposal has the advantage that up to now on the internet companies that provide IP connectivity have mostly stayed out of most of the markets that depend on IP connectivity to deliver value to the residential consumer.
It is possible to enshrine such a separation into law and regulations without letting one cable-internet user on a local network (or whatever they call them) shared by a whole block of houses hog up most of the bandwidth of the local network. I.e., there is nothing incompatible here with contracts that impose a monthly cap on bytes received.
And even if spam filtering is made an exception to the separation, so that both connectivity providers (cable-internet and DSL providers) and Google can offer spam filtering, that does not mean that spammer get a free license to spam. What we want is to prevent Verizon or Comcast from making it impossible or more difficult for the Joe Consumer to go to Expedia than to go to Travelocity (or the Comcast Travel Store) -- or more difficult for him to go to Windows Live Search than to Google Search -- and we can do that while still allowing Verizon and Comcast to cut off recalictrant spammers (or requiring Joe Consumer to get his email from a email provider that does not happen to be a duopolist who will cut off recalitrant spammers).
Bob Frankston has been eloquent on this issue for at least 10 years now.
How does that square with the fact that in places without government-granted monopolies, there are often more than one provider? My apartment building has two separate cable companies, in addition to Verizon fiber. Is there a general argument for how rental houses often end up with two or more separate cable boxes from more than one provider in areas without government suppression of competition, while still holding that it can't happen in the general case?
Installing wires requires digging up roads, using utility poles and leaving utility boxes on other peoples' property. You need permission from local government to do that, period. In some places, the local governments only give one company permission to do that. That's a government granted monopoly. In other places, they give permission to more than one company, so that they can compete with each other. That's a government granted oligarchy. But whether there's one pre-existing cable company or five, if you want to start a new cable company, you need government permission, and you probably won't get it. It's nothing like a free market.
And it's worth noting that a gentlemen's agreement to not compete too hard is profitable for all parties in a heavily restricted market. Ergo, the government-granted oligopoly is only superior to the monopoly insofar as you expect business executives to be irrational enough to not cooperate in the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma.
You mean oligopoly
Yep, it's the bankers that are a government granted oligarchy.
There are other alternatives as well. There's a company here that provides high speed broadband to businesses via a network of roof mounted microwave transmitters. Businesses use them because they offer better value than paying a local cable company to hook a building up. My parents in rural England had a number of options for broadband despite no cable companies operating in the area, including DSL and a wireless relay from a satellite uplink.
I'm not a libertarian. I am in favor of net neutrality for the following reasons:
This seems to be an argument that people who have something they want to say that nobody wants to pay to hear should be subsidized by people who have something to say that they are either willing to pay to make available or have found others who are willing to pay them to hear (usually through the intermediary of paid adverts under current Internet business models). Is that your actual position or do would you not support that argument? If you do not support this interpretation where do you see the distinction?
If I parse your long sentence correctly, I think I disagree with your interpretation. If no one wants to pay to hear something, that could be for any of several reasons, but the one I had in mind was lack of information about the message or the speaker (e.g. "Hey, do you want to buy a book? It's only fifty cents!" "What book?" "I'm not going to tell you. It could be the latest John Scalzi, or it could be Volume Four of an outdated botanical encyclopedia, or it could be sheet music for the ocarina, or it could be a coffee table volume about those giant cow art projects in Kansas City."). Browsing unknown websites is a gamble with time already; making it a gamble with money too will make it less appealing and fewer people will be able to get large audiences. New content providers already have difficulty attracting attention.
I see that as a feature rather than a bug though. Spam is a problem in large part because the cost of sending it is extremely low, much lower per mail for the spammer than the cost to the recipient in wasted time. If someone has some information that they want to share that they believe will be of value to others then an up-front investment is a measure of how valuable they really think it will be. If the primary value of sharing the information is the pleasure of hearing the sound of your own voice (as seems to be the case for a significant percentage of the Internet) or as an attempt to steal other people's time for personal profit (as in the case of spam) then I think a higher barrier to entry is a good thing.
It seems to me that filtering out information that I don't want is at least as big a problem on the Internet as finding information I do want.
People already have to spend time and effort to provide the information, which constitutes a concrete investment indicating how valuable they think it is. Many also pay for web hosting. Why would additional costs in money serve any purpose other than to introduce a selection bias in favor of people who have more money?
Also, it wouldn't help with spam at all and I have no idea why you think it would.
If different types of traffic can be given differing priorities or charged at different rates then I think creative solutions to the spam problems are more likely to be discovered. If some kind of blanket legislation is introduced prohibiting any kind of differentiation between types of traffic then I'm inclined to think we will see less optimal allocation of resources. Even differentiating between high-bandwidth/high-latency usage like movie downloads vs. medium-bandwidth/low-latency usage like online gaming will be restricted. I have no faith in lawmakers to craft legislation that will not hamper future technological innovations.
You may recall that net neutrality is currently being debated, there is no current legal barrier to adjusting priorities for types of traffic. Spam has been a problem for quite a while now and no such solutions have been found.
The general rule of thumb when it comes to "creative solutions to the spam problem" is "it won't work".
I don't think it's true to say that no creative solutions to spam have been found. Spam filters are probably the most successful real world example of applying Bayesian techniques. The battle against spam is an ongoing struggle - we have solutions now to the original problems but the spammers keep evolving new attacks. Legislation will tend to reduce the options of the anti-spammers who have to follow the law and give an advantage to the spammers who ignore it.
Any legislation will limit options and hamper innovation and technological progress. That's what legislation invariably does in all fields.
Bayesian filtering at the user end is the only exception to the rule of thumb I'm aware of. The only other anti-spam actions I've heard of with any success are distinctly non-creative variations on cutting the hydra's heads off, such as blocking individual spam sources.
"Invariably"? Do you have any evidence for this assertion?
I let automatic programs filter most of my spam, and the small trickle that gets through seems a small price to pay for the fact that I can have my creative projects on the Internet for free, without having to pay a premium to eliminate a special opportunity cost for potential readers. According to my stats, they are not utterly valueless wastes of space - I have some people who are willing to invest time in viewing my content - but I don't doubt for a moment that I'd lose most, if not all, of my audience if they were obliged money (that didn't even make its way to me, the creator of the content).
People drop or refrain from picking up new sites over very little provocation - I stopped reading Dr. McNinja when I started using an RSS feed instead of bookmarks to read my webcomics. Dr. McNinja didn't become more inconvenient to read when I made this switch; I could have kept the bookmark - it simply didn't get more convenient along with everything else. I didn't care about it quite enough to keep it on my radar when it would have taken ten seconds of conscious effort three times a week - not even money and the hassle of providing money over the Internet. I can't think of any (individual) website that I would pay even a trivial extra amount of money to visit.
The situation you describe is the one that currently exists without any net neutrality legislation though.
I'm suspicious of net neutrality because it uses the threat of imagined or potential future problems to push for more legislation and more government involvement in a market that seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far. This is a general tactic for pushing increased government involvement in many different areas.
The actions that have so far been taken that would be prohibited by net-neutrality legislation mostly seem to be about throttling bittorrent traffic. I'd much rather see a focus on eliminating existing government sponsored monopolies in the provision of broadband access and allow the market to sort out the allocation of bandwidth. I am very doubtful that any kind of legislation will produce an optimal allocation of resources.
The fact that something seems to have worked pretty well without significant regulation so far could mean that it will continue to do so, or it could mean that it's been lucky and taking no new precautions will cause it to stop working pretty well. I don't have any antivirus software on my Mac; if more people start finding it an appealing challenge to infect Macs with viruses, though, it would be stupid for me to assume that this will be safe forever. More companies are starting to show interest in behaviors that will lead to biased net access. Regulation will almost certainly not yield optimal allocation of resources; it will, however, prevent certain kinds of abuses and inequalities.
I guess this comes down to politics ultimately. I have more faith that good solutions will be worked out by negotiation between the competing interests (Google tends to counter-balance the cable companies, consumers have options even though they tend to be limited by government sponsored monopolies for broadband provision) than by congress being captured by whoever has the most powerful lobbyists at the time the laws are passed. I take the fact that things are ok at the moment as reasonable evidence that a good solution is possible without legislation. Certainly bad solutions are possible both with and without legislation, I just tend to think they are much more likely with legislation than without.
I must have misread, lifetime access to lesswrong isn't worth one cent, but you'll voluntarily spend hours of time on it?
This may or may not have to do with the fact that I am not paid by the hour. My stipend depends on grading papers and doing adequately in school, but if I can accomplish that in ten hours a week, I don't get paid any less than if I accomplish it in forty. Time I spend on Less Wrong isn't time I could be spending earning money, because I have enough on my plate that getting an outside job would be foolish of me.
Also, one cent is not just one cent here. If my computer had a coin slot, I'd probably drop in a penny for lifetime access to Less Wrong. But spending time (not happily) wrestling with the transaction itself, and running the risk that something will go wrong and the access to the site won't come immediately after the penny has departed from my end, and wasting brainpower trying to decide whether the site is worth a penny when for all I know it could be gone next week or deteriorate tremendously in quality - that would be too big an intrusion, and that's what it looks like when you have to pay for website access.
Additionally, coughing up any amount of money just to access a site sets up an incentive structure I don't care for. If people tolerate a pricetag for the main contents of websites - not just extra things like bonus or premium content, or physical objects from Cafépress, or donations as gratitude or charity - then there is less reason not to attach a pricetag. I visit more than enough different websites (thanks to Stumbleupon) to make a difference in my budget over the course of a month if I had to pay a penny each to see them all.
In a nutshell: I can't trade time alone directly for money; I can't trade cash alone directly for website access; and I do not wish to universalize the maxim that paying for website access would endorse.
The telecommunications market in the United States is so ridiculously far from an idealized free market in so many ways that I don't see why you'd expect a libertarian perspective to be insightful.
The only sensible free market perspective on anything related to telecommunications has to pretty much start with "tear down the entire current system and start over".
Obviously we would do things differently if starting over from scratch, but that isn't going to happen, and it doesn't mean that we shouldn't think about the incremental steps we should take. And I don't think we should ignore economics when thinking about what those incremental steps should be.
Of course not.
However, the typical libertarian response is roughly "move closer to a free market", which does not necessarily give better results from all starting points. In the case of a market that is by its nature far from a perfectly competitive one, that's been heavily distorted by previous government interference, has several entrenched players, &c., there's every reason to believe that naively reducing regulation will lead toward a local minimum.
Internet should be as free as streets. Internet cables, switches, retransmitters, etc. should be considered public space.
Applause light. Why do you think it should be free? And why would that offset the inefficiencies inherent in a massive public system?
This is what I'm talking about.
The reverse statement is not absurd.
Is there any evidence that massive systems are efficient no matter who is running them? Government-run utilities don't seem to do worse, and the USA health care system is demonstrably less efficient than many countries' public systems.
Can you give an example? All the government run utilities that come to mind are disasters. There are probably examples of government run utilities that are efficient but I'm having trouble thinking of any.
My local town provides unusually good garbage collection service. An attempt by the borough council to save money by hiring private contractors for garbage collection was met by many, many outraged people showing up to the council meeting to protest.
Efficient implies cost-effective: government run garbage collection might be a reasonably high quality service but come at an unreasonably high price. It sounds like cost concerns were the motivation for the change in your example.
The protesters made it very clear that they preferred to pay more for the higher level of service.
But since this is a government run monopoly they don't have that choice as individuals so instead they have to take political action.
Look up Tim Lee from the Cato Institute. I think he has written on this topic. I think the standard libertarian position on net neutrality is that it's no good. Personally, I don't have the technical knowledge to really comment, though once at what might be called a libertarian boot camp, I came up with the slogan "surf at your own speed" in an exercise to come up with promotions for net nonneutrality.
Also, see this podcast: http://www.econtalk.org//archives/2009/01/eric_raymond_on.html
Toward the end (i think) they get into the issue. I can't remember what Raymond says, but IIRC, he takes a nonneutrality position while not sound like the standard libertarian position. It's an interesting podcast throughout, however, and you should listen to the whole thing. All of you.
edit: It was Tim Lee, not Tim Butler: http://www.cato.org/people/timothy-lee
For a libertarian perspective on these issues see:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/11/hazlett_on_tele.html
"Thomas Hazlett of George Mason University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about a number of key issues in telecommunications and telecommunication policy including net neutrality, FCC policy, and the state of antitrust. Hazlett argues for an emergent, Hayekian approach to policy toward the internet rather than trying to design it from the top down and for an increased use of exchangeable property rights in allocating spectrum."