black321 wrote:
That's the thing about anecdotes: you can paint any picture you like with them.

Depending on how we define ethical behavior all companies, all organizations, all individuals can be painted as unethical. And large organizations have many players; the more players the more opportunities for misbehavior.

That it never happen is an unrealistic expectation, but when it reaches the scale of the examples you cited the relevant question is: what can we do about it?

The regulatory answer is usually write another rule. But what about us puny humans?

We can take our business elsewhere. And we do. When we're allowed.

 Lazy8 wrote:
I'm no expert here...but as far as i know, i'm offered difft prices from the providers, but not necessarily based on quality of the stream (each provider has POP)?  So how how will this new law change pricing?

 Lazy8 wrote: 
Really?  They are the anomaly?  My anecdotal evidence paints a different picture.  Of 1/2 dozen cos. i've worked for (from fortune 500 to small entrepreneurial), 4 were involved in some type of unethical behavior...not an individual (e.g., taking a bribe), but the corporation.  And for those cos. that are "ethical" how many are so because of the regulations that force them to be? The only difference i see in the ethical behavior between corporate and gov entities is that gov are less likely to regulate themselves. 

 black321 wrote:
We already do, and have for a very long time. But maybe we should force everybody's DSL connection to run at dial-up speed—fair's fair!

 cc_rider wrote:
Those made the news, right? Because that's not normal.

Now imagine you wanted to make sure it made the news, because the news is important to our society and news organizations are for-profit companies and so of course they will behave unethically. What's more important than an informed public, right?

So we should get the government to regulate news outlets as public utilities.

Let that sink in and get back to me.

So with the new rule we should start to see tier pricing...cheaper, than the current pricing, for basic and higher for premium, right? we shall see.

 Lazy8 wrote: Enron, Wells Fargo, Monsanto, Audi/VW, Takata, GM...

There is ample evidence businesses, specifically corporations, do not act ethically.

edit: There is ample evidence governments often do not act ethically either.

islander wrote:
Nothing is inherently a utility. That designation is a result of a political process, not a law of nature.

Railroads require massive infrastructure investments, rights of way, cooperation with government entities in planning and operation, and they're not treated as utilities. Passenger service is of course, and that's (ahem) a train wreck, but the railroads that haul freight every day are private businesses that conduct operations without the massive meddling that utilities get.*

I want to get Verizon and AT&T on the same side of the fence as the rest of us by knocking down the fence for good and all. There should never have been a fence, there should never have been protected monopolies.


Oooh, evil capitalism restrained by the virtuous and heroic state!

There is always the risk that an unethical company will get temporary advantage. This has nothing whatsoever to do with which byzantine bureaucracy regulates them. Utilities have Big Brother watching their backs, protecting them from the biggest counterbalance against unethical behavior: competition, as the history of our regulated utilities amply demonstrates.

*There was a time when railways were treated as utilities; the resulting looting of the public treasury and corruption drove the feds to take their hands off and let them fend for themselves. If you want to see how that process works I recommend examining China's experience with high-speed rail—they took a mixed utility/state-owned approach and squandered many billions at it.

 islander wrote: 
You *are* me!

 Lazy8 wrote: 

I get that. But I'm arguing that there is a place for utilities. Things that require massive infrastructure cost and provide a broad public service. Things that are good for our collective society - a stable power grid, a safe and reliable water supply. Phones as a communication service have been on this spectrum and I've argued in the past that is correct because of the public utility of communication and the benefits of 911 services and the like. But we commoditized voice services, and let the voice carriers play in the data space and thus blurred the lines. 

I think there is a good argument that they shouldn't be treated as a utility. The market has shifted. But if we move from that, we should do it completely - make the carriers move out of the public right of way, stop making Vonage provide E911 service.  Treat data as a market product and voice as just another component of that market.  

But we should stop letting Verizon and AT&T play on both sides of that fence just because they have a history and an army of lawyers and lobbyists.  Then we wouldn't need to worry about enforcing a common carrier rules.
Lazy8 wrote:  
Sure, because no business haw ever acted unethically without monopoly power?  I'd argue that with the pressure of shareholders, who are often removed far enough that they only care about the financial results, that unethical behavior is a norm once organizations reach a certain size. I also know a lot of unethical individuals who's only reason for not being openly unethical in their business practices is the consequences they may face from the state. I'm glad that the state is there to keep them from undercutting safety and environmental standards that I happily comply with.  They would be able to outcompete me in the market by hiding the consequences of their actions from the public (and everyone else) until I'm out of business.

Yeah, I know a lot of assholes. Maybe it's above the norm, but I bet it's not. I think a lot of others just aren't looking hard enough.

islander wrote:
I'm arguing that treating ISPs as utilities is what gives them the leverage to threaten the kinds of behavior Net Neutrality sought to control.


I'm implying that businesses acting ethically is normal, and that only monopoly power—enforced by the state—makes unethical behavior a viable strategy.

 Lazy8 wrote: 
You are working really hard to twist my words here. Again utility or not?  If not that's just fine by me. But Verizon/Comcast et. all need to get their poles out of the public space. If yes, then they should play by the utility rules. 
Lazy8 wrote:
I'm not sure what you are implying here. We had carriers, we aggregated them and resold the bandwidth to our customers. Carriers were free to make deals directly with our customers and often did.  I had the ability to impact the service a carrier provided to my customers to make my bandwidth look better, but I didn't because I thought that was a stupid way to increase the value of the services I offered. No, we didn't spy on traffic or hold data hostage. We actively worked on traffic shaping and peering that would be beneficial to all. We were well rewarded for our efforts. 

Many telcos take a different approach. And they do it after making a bargain that is/was ostensibly for the benefit of the customer.  Then they turn to the government for more support when competition emerges. 

I'm just saying make a declaration and stick to it. 

islander wrote:
You should know better.

The internet isn't even a thing. It's the result of connections between things—a gigantic cooperative endeavor with no owner, no centralized control. You can't regulate the internet as a utility, you can only regulate the things that connect to each other to make up access. Talking about the internet as a utility is like talking about conversation as a utility—you can't put handcuffs on conversation, only on people that converse.

The concept of a regulated utility is an example of cronyism and rent-seeking: Keep people from competing with me and I'll let you load me down with all the rules you want. Even if I don't get to make the rules I get to be the only game in town.

So no, that monopoly deal is not fair enough—it's the root of the problem you want to solve with yet more rules, yet more barriers to entry.


Instead of going back to the public utility model let's force Qwest's descendants to compete with people who won't restrict access to services that compete with it.

When AT&T phone service was broken up it didn't go from a national monopoly to an open market, it went to a bunch of regional monopolies. Qwest was a result of that. And now it has competitors, at least where that's allowed. If it behaves badly it gives those competitors an advantage to exploit. Where it doen't have competitors it does as it pleases.

If you put the FCC in charge of regulated monopolies then the monopoly does as the FCC pleases; the monopoly gets paid regardless. Why doesn't that also frighten you?


Nonono, that would never happen! You would hold their data hostage and spy on them! Because, on some theoretical level, you could—and your customers would have no alternative but to keep paying you. Right?

Right?


Throw the FCC (and it's many layers of rules and fines and months-long approval processes) at Comcast and they'll deal. Throw it at a startup and they'll spend most of their energy figuring out which rules they have to comply with and submitting the wrong form. Regulation is a barrier to market entry—exactly the scheme that favors the entrenched over the insurgent.

 Lazy8 wrote: 

I'm not a doomsayer. And I support all the examples of normal, capitalistic behavior you cite here.

But a question remains - Is the internet a utility?  The phone company made some bargains. They guaranteed service at a base level to all in exchange for certain monopoly rights and access to the public right of way.  All fair enough.   The problem comes when they declare that data (internet) is not a utility service, so they don't have to be bound by the rules for utility voice, but want to use the same infrastructure and exclusivity that they have for phone service to provide data.   They claim that it is unfair to have to comply with the rules because their start up competitors don't, but they fail to notice that their startup competitors weren't given a leg up with public support to get started.  

Then there is the services bit. Again, I'm fine with tiered service pricing. More speed, more money. Makes perfect sense. To follow the utility model, when I put a big BTU water heater on my house, I had to pay up for a bigger regulator to feed it. But when Qwest (century link now)/Verizon/Comcast charge me more for high speed, it's bullshit that they then try to block Vonage data because they want to sell me their own VOIP service. To go back to the utility model - it would be like the gas company  charging me more for gas for my water heater, because they wanted me to subscribe to their own competing pre-warmed water. Again, this is fine if you are an open market business, who hasn't taken public funds and made deals with governments (small and large) to build your business. But the major ISPs have all made those bargains, and now they want to toss them out because it's inconvenient in the market that has evolved since. 

In my data center, we had premium services, and allowed competition. It was up to the customer to decide. But we didn't hinder anyone, and we didn't take any public funds to build the service based on some long term trade off. 

The internet will be fine, and everyone will still get their face book. But the big players will take advantage of the situation and make more money from it. They will behave in anticompetitive practices because they can, and small competitors will find windows of opportunity. Sometimes those will wind up benefiting customers, but generally this will only be after the customers have suffered through a period of 'buyer beware'. And again, it's a question of is the internet a commodity, or a utility.  I'm really fine with either answer, but I'm pissed that big companies are treating it as both and cherry picking the compliance pieces that are required for each.   

 islander wrote:
When I moved to the valley I live in in 1992 I went looking for a way to communicate with my internet buddies, The only option I had was to get a paid account at the local university—$10/hour typing away at a dumb terminal timesharing on an ancient DEC mainframe. I had to plead with the sysop to get a UNIX account—most of the students had to deal with some clanky obsolete proprietary DEC OS and they were afraid I'd get into mischief. They needn't have worried—the system was so overloaded that just loading the headers to a USENET group took half my $10. I gave up pretty quickly.

Around 1995 or so I was trying to get broadband service for the company I worked for. Qwest was the only game in town, and at the time there were only two dialup options—up from one a couple of years earlier, when we had a single Point of Presence line shared between Compuserve and a long-defunct service I can't remember the name of.

After many tries I finally got thru to a customer service guy in Denver (the locals had no idea what I was asking for) and asked him what it would take. He gave an exasperated list of hoops he, personally would have to jump thru and how many weeks we would have to wait until the company decided it was something it wanted to do.

"Y'know...your service really sucks out here" I told him. "I know!" he replied.

Just some background: this a town of 30K in Montana. I live a ways out of town, and right now, not counting satellite, I have 8 ISPs competing for my business. The one I use put a fiber line right up to the house.

Somehow all that happened without the FCC regulating any of it.

When I read the apocalyptic predictions of the terrible consequences of the FCC's recent reversal I'm reminded of the scaremongering over Y2K. I mean...to those of us who know what we're talking about y'all are hilarious. But back to those ISPs...

Most of the predictions of extortionate behavior by ISPs rely on an assumption: that you can't change to a competitor willing to behave better to attract customers. How does that come about? How can large urban areas have so few ISPs (or only one) when out here at the far end of the line I have so many?

Because local authorities have granted monopolies to those ISPs—they forbid the competition that would compel them to behave better. Somehow this is evil capitalism's fault. But I digress.

The other dystopian claim is that there will be fast lanes for the haves and slow lanes for everyone else. I sure hope so. This is already true at the last mile: fiber is faster than cable is faster than DSL is faster than dialup. You pay for speed. This is not a monstrous evil, this is paying the freight for what you want. Somehow setting up a path thru the internet that prioritizes, say, the video feed for a telemedicine session (yes, that's a hot topic out here in flyover country) over people watching Spiderman 6 on Netflix is a harbinger of the End Times.

Things like that have been going on since the first wire went up on a pole. Traffic like that was routed thru telco lines (regulated monopoly telco lines) and over telegraph lines before that. Routing it thru internet infrastructure is neither scary nor sinister. And if you want it you have to pay for it.

So if Netflix wants to offer a stutter-free service for its bandwidth hog users it will have to charge a premium for it. If they charge too much competitors will eat their lunch. Why does this sound like the coming of the four horsemen?

Oh, right—because John Oliver said so. On a show you can only get access to by paying for it.

 fractalv wrote: 
We sold bandwidth from our data center and so were a sort of ISP. Traffic shaping and peer weighting are fine and standard practice. It's the larger problem of targeting specific traffic and throttling for the purpose of holding either side of the transaction hostage that gets ugly. This is exactly the kind of thing Qwest wanted to do (things like degrade/block Vonage traffic so people would use Qwest voice services) all the time. They thought nothing of impacting their customers if it meant a dollar to them. And for the most part, and especially in rural areas, there were no legitimate competitors.

 oldviolin wrote: 
There were some true genius level people around there.  It was a lot of fun, and a great place to learn and play.  Some real characters as well - there was a couple that worked there who were married. They shared and office and sat back to back about 4 feet from each other. When you stuck your head in their office and asked if they wanted to go to lunch there was a moment of awkward silence, then they would simultaneously pick up their coats and join us.  I later figured out that in the silent moment, they were messaging each other instead of just talking.

 Carl wrote: 
My basic electronics instructor in tech school once upon a time was a Bell Labs retiree. He was childlike and simple and absolutely brilliant at 78 years old. I learned so much from him and heard some great stories and had so much respect...

 islander wrote: 
Sounds something like Xerox's PARC. Incredible innovations left to die on the vine. Until they were stolen by people with the imaginations to see the possibilities.

I think most, if not all, companies reach the point where their size impedes their progress. For all  the reasons you listed.

 Carl wrote: 
All post divestiture, but my first 'real' engineering job was at Bell Labs, and I worked through the chain of AT&T, Lucent, Avaya, (6 years, 5 offices, 5 companies, one phone number), and then a stint at Qwest (Where I did the outside plant work). The Bell labs side of things was different, maybe it was because our customers were more corporate, but there was still an air of "we're the phone company, we don't care because we don't have to". On the Labs side, there was a lot more care about making good things. At Qwest the focus was always on cost - how to cut it on our side, and how to get more $s from our customers. 

Bell labs was a gem, but it was also a weird corporate conglomerate that had it's own issues. Many projects were developed and redeveloped because of lack of information sharing or simple corporate turf protections. The east/west ideological battles were always present, and there were a lot of people there just punching the clock to get their years in. Their size made adaptation difficult, and with the rapid innovation curve of the 90s they missed a lot of opportunities (we had a fully functional VOIP product there in the mid 90s, but marketing didn't see any value in it). The break up didn't help them at all, but I don't think they were on a path to retain their glory regardless.