If they choose to reduce that speed for any reason, or throttle any kind of connection they are entitled to do that but they can't complain when someone else says that is what they are doing.
Personally, I think given how much public money has gone into infrastructure and the amount of money I pay in taxes it seems insane for me to first pay for the ISP's infrastructure with taxes then have to pay them again. So while they have a right to throttle, they don't have a right to throttle my connection on infrastructure that they did not pay 100% for. Which probably accounts for the majority of their infrastructure.
Last mile is from the POV of the carrier, and implies that something is being delivered to you.
First mile is from the POV of the customer, and implies that this is the first mile of your internet connection.
The direction data is flowing is irrelevant.
It's also very hard to prove that Verizon is throttling, versus, say, simply physically underprovisioning the connection.
With respect to public money, I think you've hit the nail on the head. The crux of the Net Neutrality debate, to my mind, is whether these networks are public or private. If they're private, Net Neutrality is bullshit. If they're public, it's obvious.
It is in consumer interest for the networks to be public, but the same could be said about the socialization of any number of industries. I'm constantly fascinated by the way folks consider socializing the telecom industry to be incredibly reasonable and socializing, say, the healthcare industry to be insanity.
Edit: Maybe I need to tag all of these posts with #DevilsAdvocate to avoid being downvoted into oblivion.
2) Agreed.
3) All of the big Telcos are public, but your point stands.
To be explicit, I wholeheartedly agree with you about humans making pseudo-random decisions. I'm trying to explain the dynamics of the Telco position, from their vantage point because I think it helps the discussion to view things from other angles.
Can't I want both to be socialized?
Also, intentionally physically underprovisioning the connection is throttling, plain and simple. You are limiting the amount of traffic that can traverse that network boundary to 10G/40G/Whatever your port speed is. What difference does it make if I do it in software or simply refuse to bind more ports to the team?
Is it really the same people arguing for that? First and foremost, the telecom industry is nothing like the healthcare industry, and they shouldn't be reasoned about in the same way. Common carrier status has precise laws and legal meaning surrounding it. Please don't confuse it with socialized medicine.
Hard to prove in a court of law, perhaps, but the speeds of access to the businesses being extorted can tell a pretty convincing story.
This chart: http://appledailyreport.com/backend/wp-content/uploads/2014/... paints a nice picture of how ISPs want to extort businesses that are in more profitable lines of work: notice how speeds change from before Comcast started trying to extort from Netflix, to during the negotiations, and after Netflix payed their protection money.
Level3's article also called this out: the ISPs are purposefully, physically, underprovisioning their connections, because it gives them leverage over companies like Netflix.
As to why the internet is different: the internet is not like healthcare. Socialized or not-socialized medicine is obviously not that big of a deal to the future of a nation; both the US and Britain were economically competitive while having very different systems.
In contrast, the Internet obviously matters a great deal to the future. And if various players (hollywood; last-mile ISPs) can manage to appoint themselves gatekeepers and engage in rent-seeking behavior on the internet (in the United States, at any rate), well, HN is acutely aware of what that will mean for the future of innovation, and the future of nations as well.
I understand that it would be a negative impactor on the future of nations and innovation; I'm asking if that's enough to actually drive change. My sense is that, historically, with respect to ISP behavior, over time they get what they want. I'm not saying this is right, I'm simply noticing a trend, just as many have noted that less-private social networks win over more privacy focused businesses.
Sounds sufficiently sophisticated.
It doesn't matter either way, in the end the experience is the same.
You lost me there.
"There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer." ~Peter Drucker (whose writings contributed to the philosophical and practical foundations of the modern business corporation)
“On the face of it, shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world. Shareholder value is a result, not a strategy… your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products. Managers and investors should not set share price increases as their overarching goal. … Short-term profits should be allied with an increase in the long-term value of a company.” ~Jack Welch (former very successful CEO of GE)
Jack Welch was hugely successful in creating and competing in new markets specifically because competing in saturated markets is not profitable.
Those models are great for industries in the 0-80% saturation growth period, but aren't really applicable to high saturation markets.
And yet financial statements are reported in dollar units, not in customer units.
