The FCC is planning new net neutrality rules. And they could enshrine pay-for-play. - The Washington Post

Fri Apr 25 03:23:54 UTC 2014

The invisible hand of the market cannot fix problems when there is a monopoly.

Put in economic terms, a player with Market Power is extracting Rents. (Capitalization is intentional.)

Regulating monopolies allows a market to work, not the opposite.

-- 
TTFN,
patrick

On Apr 24, 2014, at 17:57 , Wayne E Bouchard <web at typo.org> wrote:

> My take here is that I'd rather the FCC just leave it alone and see if
> the market doesn't work it out in some reasonable way. That is, to not
> even address it in rules, whether accept or prohibit. Just step back
> and make sure that all you see is dust rising and not smoke. These
> things take a while to resolve. This issue has been building for a
> while but hasn't really reached its pinnacle yet so who is to say what
> things will look like in five years from a business standpoint? To
> codify something pretty well means you want it to look a particular
> way or you are accepting a way of being that may or may not be in the
> interests of those concerned and pretty well ending discussion,
> negotiation, and experimentation regarding that point.
> 
> The problem is that all the RBOCs/ILECs/Cable groups seem to be headed
> in the same direction (and most of them are trying to run their own
> CDN and force their customers to use it instead of a third party--and
> running them badly to boot. Sound familiar?) If that were not the
> case, such a scheme would not be viable since there would always be
> someone undermining it. (Like OPEC... The price they want is never
> what they get because some country or another is always selling more
> than they say they're going to because they want more money, meaning
> supply is greater than it should be and prices adjust accordingly.) It
> only takes one or two holdouts to upset the plans of all the rest.
> 
> *shrug*
> 
> I'll have to see how these changes are implemented and how things
> are interpreted before we know what this is going to do to
> competitveness.
> 
> -Wayne
> 
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 04:42:42PM -0500, Jack Bates wrote:
>> On 4/24/2014 9:59 AM, Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
>>> I think you and I disagree on the definition of "anti-competitive".
>>> 
>>> But that's fine. There is more than one problem to solve. I just figured 
>>> the FCC thing was timely and operational.
>>> 
>> I agree with you, Patrick. Double digit/meg pricing needs to die.
>> 
>> I'm not sure that the change really alters backbone policy, but it would 
>> definitely open the doors for bad things in the access networks. That 
>> being said, only the largest networks could put enough pressure to 
>> benefit from it, and some do that currently. I also don't see this as 
>> any different than the business model some streaming sites enforce where 
>> the ISP must pay for stream access based on their subscribers instead of 
>> interested subscribers just paying for an individual account. Fair is 
>> fair, and some of the streamers have been hitting ISPs longer. Once 
>> again, only the largest streamers can hope to get away with it, and only 
>> the largest ISPs can get the low priced deals. In both cases, it's the 
>> small ISPs and small content providers that suffer.
>> 
>> I don't see the FCC stopping megacorp bullying anytime in the near future.
>> 
>> Jack
> 
> ---
> Wayne Bouchard
> web at typo.org
> Network Dude
> http://www.typo.org/~web/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 535 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20140424/13f58f44/attachment.sig>