[Cryptography] Standards Trolls: Re: net neutrality

John Gilmore gnu at toad.com
Sun Jan 3 21:48:41 EST 2021


(This is off-topic for rants about bitbux, but it's also such a poorly
 understood bit of 1990's Internet history, even among cypherpunks, that
 it may be worth one explanatory message.)

Ismail Kizir <ikizir at gmail.com> wrote:
> When I saw this message, I decided to be "more concrete", put a real life
> problem example, and then to continue to follow.
> Here is one:
> USA, has "suspended" net neutrality for years for its institutions.
> Now, they may go back to standard net neutrality, or not!
> Today USA, tomorrow Turkey, China, Russia, England, France ...

It turns out that your concrete example is based on sand.

The USA never had "network neutrality" before it was "suspended".  What
the USA had was 3,000 ISPs.  So if an ISP did something unfriendly to
its customers, they could just stop paying the bad one, and sign up with
a different ISP that wouldn't screw them.  That effectively prevented
bad behavior among ISPs.  And if the customer couldn't find an ISP that
wouldn't screw them, they could START ONE THEMSELVES.  I know, because
we did exactly that in the 1990s.

Anyone could start an ISP because by law, everyone had tariffed access
to the same telco infrastructure (dialup phone lines, and leased lines
at 56 kbit/sec or 1.544 Mbit/sec or 45 Mbit/sec).  You just called up
the telco and ordered it, and they sent out techs and installed it.
We did exactly that, plugged it into our modems and routers and bam,
we were an ISP:  "The Little Garden".

Later, DSL lines required installing equipment in telco central offices,
at the far end of the wire that leads to your house.  But the telcos
were required by the FCC to allow competing companies to do that.  Their
central office buildings were 9/10th empty anyway, after they had
replaced racks of mechanical relays with digital computers.

The telcos figured this out, and decided they'd rather be gatekeepers,
instead of being the regulated monopoly that gets a fixed profit margin.
Looking ahead, they formally asked the FCC to change its rule that
telcos had to share their infrastructure with everybody -- but only for
futuristic optical fibers.  They whined that "FCC wants us to deploy
fiber everywhere, but we won't, unless we get to own it and not share it
with our competitors."  As usual, the regulated monopoly was great at
manipulating the public interest regulators.  The FCC said, "Sure, keep
your fibers unshared."  This ruling never even mentioned the Internet,
it is all about the physical infrastructure.  If the physical stuff is
wires, regulated telcos have to share it; if it's glass, they don't.

The speed of dialup maxed out at 56 kbit/sec.  DSL maxed out at a couple
of megabits.  Leased lines worked to 45 Mbit/sec but cost thousands of
dollars per month.  Anything over that speed required fiber, not wire,
at typical distances.  As demand for higher Internet speeds arose, any
ISP who wanted to offer a faster connection couldn't just order one from
the telco, because the telco fibers were now private and unshared.  If
you want a fiber-based Internet connection now, you can't buy it from
anybody except the guys who own the fibers -- mostly the telcos.  Most
of the 3,000 ISPs could only offer slow Internet access, so everybody
stopped paying them.  The industry consolidated down to just one or a
few businesses per region -- mostly the telcos themselves, plus the
cable companies that had build their own local monopoly via city
government contracts.  Especially lucky regions had maybe one other
competitor, like a Wireless ISP, or an electrical co-op that ran fibers
on its infrastructure.

So now if your ISP becomes nasty to you, censoring your traffic or
slowing it down for their own benefit, you have nowhere else you could
buy Internet service from.  You can pay a cable company to screw you, or
pay a telco to screw you.  What held them back in the '90s was that
anybody could start honest competition.  They manipulated the regulators
to mostly prevent competition in high speed Internet.  So now they can
do what more or less what they want, or what they think they can get
away with.  (For example, I once got AT&T fiber installed to my house;
their required gateway box refused to pass my traffic unless I
click-signed a contract of adhesion that was hundreds of pages that it
wouldn't even let me read.  I read enough of the few accessible pages to
know that it let AT&T screw me and my Internet traffic about seven
different ways.  I refused to sign it and had them take out the fiber.)

The telcos' elimination of fiber based competition, and nothing else,
was the end of so-called "network neutrality".  The rest was just
activists, regulators and legislators blathering.  There never was an
enforceable federal regulatory policy of network neutrality, so the FCC
could hardly suspend it.  If the FCC actually wanted US customers to
have a choice of ISPs, they would rescind the FIBER RULE.  And if
advocates actually understood how only competition, not regulation,
restrains predatory behavior, they would ask FCC for the fiber rule to
be rescinded, so a small ISP company could rent the actual glass fiber
that runs from the telco to (near or inside) your house, for the actual
cost plus a regulated profit.  Then customers could get high speed
Internet from a variety of vendors at a variety of prices and terms.  So
far neither has happened.

	John
	


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