[DEFEATED] Repeal "Internet Net Neutrality Act"

[Auralia]

Repeal "Internet Net Neutrality Act"
Category: Repeal

Affirming the legitimate practice of varying the quality of consumer goods and services with the price paid, also known as "tiered service", which fosters competition, maximizes consumer choice, and improves the overall quality of goods and services,

Noting that the first clause of GAR #89, "Internet Net Neutrality Act", prohibits Internet Service Providers (ISPs) from offering tiered services, such as charging more for faster Internet speeds, more bandwidth or higher quality of service,

Concerned that this restriction reduces consumer choice, preventing consumers from purchasing an Internet plan appropriate to their needs,

Distressed that this restriction makes it more difficult for ISPs to be profitable and competitive, preventing them from recouping the costs of existing investments in network infrastructure as well as justifying further investments in network infrastructure,

Remarking that the limited bandwidth available in several nations to handle the rapidly increasing onslaught of Internet traffic, particularly streaming video and other content with low-latency requirements, makes additional investment in network infrastructure especially crucial,

Saddened that this restriction prevents the commercialization of new Internet content, applications and services which rely on tiered service, such as real-time medical monitoring over the Internet, which would require an unusually high quality of service and therefore a more expensive Internet connection,

Noting that the anti-competitive practices targeted by net neutrality can also be prevented simply by creating a sufficiently competitive environment for ISPs, which is strongly preferable to harmful, overly broad regulation,

Recalling that the postal service (the Internet's predecessor) has traditionally offered tiered services, including charging more for express mail delivery, and that there have been no corresponding calls for "postal neutrality",

Emphasizing that nations remain free to introduce national network neutrality legislation without compelling other nations to do the same through GAR #89,

Hoping that the World Assembly will focus its attention on more appropriate Internet-related pursuits, such as maximizing the availability of broadband Internet access in all member nations,

The General Assembly,

1. Repeals GAR #89, "Internet Net Neutrality Act".

[The Solarian Isles]

Though I understand your concern and that or your corporate benefactors, Mr. Ambassador, the Solarian Isles cannot support this proposal. Now, it is true that that the Solarian Isles have traditionally been very business-friendly, the true value of the internet simply cannot be measured in mere Solars.

You see, uniquely in this world, the internet represents true equality. The small are not constrained by the great. Despite the potential concerns of security and infrastructure, access to a good quality internet connection should be expanded to everyone, not restricted to those with the gold. In fact, we may just prepare a proposal to that effect sometime soon.

His Radiance Cleric Joran Kell
Solarian Delegate to the WA.

[Auralia]

Though I understand your concern and that or your corporate benefactors, Mr. Ambassador, the Solarian Isles cannot support this proposal. Now, it is true that that the Solarian Isles have traditionally been very business-friendly, the true value of the internet simply cannot be measured in mere Solars.

You see, uniquely in this world, the internet represents true equality. The small are not constrained by the great. Despite the potential concerns of security and infrastructure, access to a good quality internet connection should be expanded to everyone, not restricted to those with the gold. In fact, we may just prepare a proposal to that effect sometime soon.

His Radiance Cleric Joran Kell
Solarian Delegate to the WA.

First, access to a broadband, high-speed internet connection is not an inalienable right. The ability to download a copy of Ubuntu or an episode of Friends in a few seconds is not exactly necessary for survival. Thus, it shouldn't be considered an essential service, provided to everyone for free.

That said, ISPs have no intention of giving broadband exclusively to the wealthy anyways. Competition will force service providers to provide the best Internet connection possible to their consumers at the lowest price possible. Unfortunately, if they don't have the ability to try a new business model - namely tiered data plans - at a time when bandwidth usage is rapidly spiraling out of control, everyone's Internet connection will suffer.

Net neutrality is frankly just another example of unnecessary and possibly harmful government interference in business. I urge you to support our proposal.

[Arivali]

And what happens when the ISP's don't have any competition? Limited bandwidth is nothing more than a flimsy excuse for these companies to bleed more money out of the public.

[Auralia]

And what happens when the ISP's don't have any competition? Limited bandwidth is nothing more than a flimsy excuse for these companies to bleed more money out of the public.

Have you ever taken a look at the quarterly earnings reports from ISPs? Most of their money is made from services other than home broadband, because it's extremely expensive to maintain a network. It's not a simple as just putting a few wires in the ground - a lot of incredibly complex technology is required to keep it operating efficiently. Example: Rogers (a Canadian telco) made $232 million in operating revenue last quarter from Internet services, but spent $459 million in operating expenses.

Furthermore, ISPs do have competition. But even if the Internet was controlled by a monopoly, net neutrality wouldn't fix that problem - anti-trust laws would.

[Flurgen]

The Ambassador's from the Democratic States of Flύrgen must support and congratulate the delegate from Aurelia on this proposal to repeal the over-stepping and business crippling Internet Net Neutrality Act. As a small, only recently founded nation, it is imperative that the economy of both my nation and all other nations in the same financial situation be allowed to grow with as little government oversight as possible. As has been proven throughout history, a capitalistic society based on free-market principles will always grow economically faster then any other form of society. And as several other delegates have already stated on this forum, the internet is one of the fastest growing markets in existence today. While it is unfortunate that internet providers discriminate based on business' desires or because certain users cannot pay them for the service, and we from Flύrgen condemn this practice, we understand that this is the right of these companies to do so. WA interference in this market will do nothing but slow the growth of business and show once again the unlawful policy of the WA in overstepping their bounds and infringe upon legitimate business' practices. We thus encourage all to support and vote for this resolution.

Delegation from the Democratic States of Flύrgen
On behalf of Prime Minister Sunderland
And the National Parliament

[The Emerald Legion]

Meh, Our Corporations are subservient to the government anyway. So it's not like it affects us.

Personally I don't see the point. Are you seeling the product or not? That product is access to the internet. If you think you need to charge more for that service to cover expenses... do so.

Don't try to cover up half-baked schemes for censorship as profit-making.

If you're gonna use censorship, go all out.

It's really quite pathetic, if you are going to do something... do it. Don't dance around the issue in order to avoid dissaproval.

~DP-343

[Flibbleites]

Meh, Our Corporations are subservient to the government anyway. So it's not like it affects us.

Personally I don't see the point. Are you seeling the product or not? That product is access to the internet. If you think you need to charge more for that service to cover expenses... do so.

Don't try to cover up half-baked schemes for censorship as profit-making.

If you're gonna use censorship, go all out.

It's really quite pathetic, if you are going to do something... do it. Don't dance around the issue in order to avoid dissaproval.

~DP-343

Dear God, that's a Garish Post.

[Auralia]

This repeal inspired me to re-write this old draft of mine.

[Glen-Rhodes]

Believing that no person has an inherent right to the same Internet access as any other person, just as no person has an inherent right to the same access to another person's property as any another person, so long as there exists a bona fide justification for such discrimination, such as providing different levels of access based on the price paid for or nature of that access,

This is a really weird statement. Net neutrality doesn't contend that internet access has anything to do with property rights. The internet itself is not a property that can be owned. People can own intellectual property that they place onto the internet. Internet Service Providers can own the infrastructure that allows users to access the internet. But nobody owns the internet is and of itself. If you're trying to make a lucid analogy, it's not working.

The internet is an agreement between network providers, a set of rules, regulations and standards created to ensure that the internet continues to function in a meaningful manner. Rather, let me be more specific. The internet itself is a public good; the access to it is the agreement. Internet access is essentially a club good: it is made artificially scarce through pricing schemes. Much like over-the-air television is a public good, but cable television is a club good. At this point, the internet is part of the fabric of society. If it were to shut down tomorrow, many functions we take for granted would cease to exist, without any viable or readily available replacement. There ought to be no doubt that the internet itself is vital enough to be subject to increased scrutiny.

But of course, the internet cannot be accessed without an ISP. Property rights are not sacrosanct. If you own the only functioning operating room in the county, but charge prohibitive prices, the government has the ability (some might say the responsibility) to infringe upon your property rights and force you to provide access at lower prices. It can do this by taking your operating room for itself. But it can also do this by setting price ceilings. Both are legitimate functions of government, because access to that operating room is vital to society.

The same thing applies here. The public's ability to access the internet is superior to an ISP's property rights over their infrastructure and data centers. If governments were to treat internet access as a true public good, ISPs would not exist as commercial entities. The trade-off for allowing internet access to remain a profitable club good is abiding by common-sense regulations. Those regulations ensure that innovation is protected and that the internet is not unduly censored. Net neutrality is the trade off to complete nationalization. It's a necessary middle-ground, that brings internet access somewhere between a public good and a club good.

On a more specific note, the bulk of the argument in this repeal is that ISPs may not be able to handle various levels of bandwidth. This is not an argument against net neutrality. First of all, an ISP that cannot meet bandwidth demands is either going to be very expensive in the first place, or way over-crowded. Traffic discrimination is not a luxury these ISPs can afford. In order for them to make access to certain services faster, they will need to actually slow down all other traffic. This is not how traffic discrimination is usually done. It's a poor business model, because people will invariably want to access more non-premium services than premium ones.

The assertion that consumers may benefit from tailored internet access is nonsense. Consumers don't want to buy content; they want to buy access to the internet. It doesn't cost ISPs any more money to deliver 2 gigabytes of a movie from a streaming service, than it costs them to deliver 2 GB of 100 different small family video clips sent over email. Bandwidth is bandwidth. In the unlikely event that consumers do want to purchase content from an ISP, such as VoIP priority or something similar, WAR#98 does not prevent ISPs from offering that content. What it prevents them from doing is allowing certain websites to pay into a scheme that gives them priority access over other websites, slowing down the websites that don't pay into the scheme, or from charging a non-optional fee for providing "premium services" by default. This is done because none of those things gives consumers a choice.

- Dr. B. Castro

[Auralia]

Believing that no person has an inherent right to the same Internet access as any other person, just as no person has an inherent right to the same access to another person's property as any another person, so long as there exists a bona fide justification for such discrimination, such as providing different levels of access based on the price paid for or nature of that access,

This is a really weird statement. Net neutrality doesn't contend that internet access has anything to do with property rights. The internet itself is not a property that can be owned. People can own intellectual property that they place onto the internet. Internet Service Providers can own the infrastructure that allows users to access the internet. But nobody owns the internet is and of itself. If you're trying to make a lucid analogy, it's not working.

The internet is an agreement between network providers, a set of rules, regulations and standards created to ensure that the internet continues to function in a meaningful manner. Rather, let me be more specific. The internet itself is a public good; the access to it is the agreement. Internet access is essentially a club good: it is made artificially scarce through pricing schemes. Much like over-the-air television is a public good, but cable television is a club good. At this point, the internet is part of the fabric of society. If it were to shut down tomorrow, many functions we take for granted would cease to exist, without any viable or readily available replacement. There ought to be no doubt that the internet itself is vital enough to be subject to increased scrutiny.

But of course, the internet cannot be accessed without an ISP. Property rights are not sacrosanct. If you own the only functioning operating room in the county, but charge prohibitive prices, the government has the ability (some might say the responsibility) to infringe upon your property rights and force you to provide access at lower prices. It can do this by taking your operating room for itself. But it can also do this by setting price ceilings. Both are legitimate functions of government, because access to that operating room is vital to society.

The same thing applies here. The public's ability to access the internet is superior to an ISP's property rights over their infrastructure and data centers. If governments were to treat internet access as a true public good, ISPs would not exist as commercial entities. The trade-off for allowing internet access to remain a profitable club good is abiding by common-sense regulations. Those regulations ensure that innovation is protected and that the internet is not unduly censored. Net neutrality is the trade off to complete nationalization. It's a necessary middle-ground, that brings internet access somewhere between a public good and a club good.

On a more specific note, the bulk of the argument in this repeal is that ISPs may not be able to handle various levels of bandwidth. This is not an argument against net neutrality. First of all, an ISP that cannot meet bandwidth demands is either going to be very expensive in the first place, or way over-crowded. Traffic discrimination is not a luxury these ISPs can afford. In order for them to make access to certain services faster, they will need to actually slow down all other traffic. This is not how traffic discrimination is usually done. It's a poor business model, because people will invariably want to access more non-premium services than premium ones.

The assertion that consumers may benefit from tailored internet access is nonsense. Consumers don't want to buy content; they want to buy access to the internet. It doesn't cost ISPs any more money to deliver 2 gigabytes of a movie from a streaming service, than it costs them to deliver 2 GB of 100 different small family video clips sent over email. Bandwidth is bandwidth. In the unlikely event that consumers do want to purchase content from an ISP, such as VoIP priority or something similar, WAR#98 does not prevent ISPs from offering that content. What it prevents them from doing is allowing certain websites to pay into a scheme that gives them priority access over other websites, slowing down the websites that don't pay into the scheme, or from charging a non-optional fee for providing "premium services" by default. This is done because none of those things gives consumers a choice.

- Dr. B. Castro

This post contains OOC content.

First of all, not all nations consider the Internet to be a public good of the same importance as a transportation network, an electricity grid, or, to use your example, a health care system. It's ridiculous to force a one-size-fits-all net neutrality policy on a community as diverse as the World Assembly, given that many nations are still in their technological infancy and simply can’t afford to implement net neutrality.

Furthermore, I feel that much of your argument rests on flawed assumptions about the nature of the Internet and how it has changed in recent years, given that you’re calling it an artificially-scarce club good and comparing it to cable television. Access to the Internet is limited by the available network infrastructure; there is a maximum bandwidth cap and therefore a maximum number of users. In order to increase that cap, investment is required into that infrastructure. Bandwidth is also a serious problem, since unlike classical cable television, the same content isn’t broadcast to all consumers; the Internet is entirely on-demand.

In recent years, the problem has been exacerbated by the mass migration of the population to the Internet for the consumption of audio and video content. Bandwidth usage has shot up through the roof. The business models previously used by ISPs, like unlimited plans, are now fiscally unsustainable – unlimited plans only work so long as consumers don’t actually consume an unlimited amount of data. But now that everyone’s using Hulu and Netflix instead of watching TV, guzzling down 300GB for a mere $40 a month, ISPs are being forced to spend a great deal of money on network upgrades, making the service unprofitable.

Things are going to change; there’s no question about that. The question is whether the government will make it easier or more difficult for service providers and consumers alike to adapt to the new realities of the situation. Because the truth is that no ISP will completely cut off access to certain services, or raise prices to such a point that they cut off a significant segment of the population from access to the Internet; that would back-fire horribly. They will, however, use discrimination to increase their revenue, so that they can afford to continue to make network upgrades and keep prices as low as possible. They will use bandwidth caps and throttling. They will charge more for better quality of service. They will make deals with content producers to zero-rate their content on their networks, or offer better quality of service for their websites.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s great for consumers compared to the alternative under net neutrality, where the above business models wouldn’t be allowed – raise prices to the point where only the rich can afford to use the Internet, or discontinue innovating and building network upgrades altogether and let network congestion build up; everyone’s packets will be dropped equally. That’s what I meant when I was talking about consumer choice – I might want a plan with unlimited access to service provider content and a low bandwidth cap for $60 a month, instead of an unlimited plan for $200 a month or a really slow unlimited plan for the $40 a month I pay today.

Plus, let's not forget the fact that ISPs do own their network infrastructure, and therefore should have the right, within reason, to do what they want with it.

You may not like this. You may find the notion of an Internet that is not “open” and “free” to be ethically unacceptable. If so, feel free to nationalize your broadband network. Nationalization is always better than over-regulation. If you believe that the Internet is a public good, make it a public good - don't try to apply socialist thinking to private companies. It won’t work, since the two are fundamentally incompatible. This is why net neutrality has turned into a giant mess in the United States, which is actually one of the only countries where net neutrality has been attempted in the first place. But frankly, I live in Canada, where there's no net neutrality legislation, and I don't think we even need it, thanks to the competition between ISPs.

But let’s actually take a look at GAR#98, shall we? It’s actually far more extreme than any net neutrality proposal I’ve ever seen:

FURTHER DEFINES network discrimination as intentionally blocking, interfering with, discriminating against, impairing, or degrading the ability of any person to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service through the Internet or imposing a fee beyond the end user fees associated with providing the content, service, or application to the consumer.

REQUIRES member countries to take immediate steps to adopt conforming laws, rules, and regulations, prohibiting network discrimination by Internet Service Providers in regard to lawful content, services, and applications;

The resolution prohibits ISPs from engaging in any activity which would “discriminate against”, “impair” or “degrade” the ability of any person to access the Internet. I’d say this outlaws most activities considered standard industry practice, like bandwidth caps and rate-limiting. In fact, under this resolution, it seems that it is illegal to offer any sort of tiered service plan. That’s insane – it forces ISPs to offer only one unlimited plan at a fixed rate, which results in the scenario I’ve described above. I’m boggled at the fact that it actually passed in the first place.

One final point to consider: you once told me that it is impossible to cover an issue of significant complexity – in that case, international trade – in a few lines. Yet this is what this resolution purports to do. That alone is sufficient justification for a repeal; we need to have a discussion about what constitutes valid discrimination by businesses, instead of just banning it outright.

I’m going to re-write my repeal to match the argumentation and line of thought presented above when I have the time.

[Glen-Rhodes]

First of all, not all nations consider the Internet to be a public good of the same importance as a transportation network, an electricity grid, or, to use your example, a health care system.

There's nothing fundamentally different between internet access in one country and internet access in another. It is all done using the same technology, and it all connects to the same internet. Whether or not internet use is at the same levels is irrelevant. The internet is an international beast, as it should be. Policies and regulations dealing with how people may access the internet have international aspects. Despite protestations to the contrary, the internet has become part of the fabric of society. Society as a whole does have certain rights specific to the internet, just as it has certain rights specific to newspapers.

It's ridiculous to force a one-size-fits-all net neutrality policy on a community as diverse as the World Assembly, given that many nations are still in their technological infancy and simply can’t afford to implement net neutrality.

The only way an ISP could not afford to implement net neutrality is if it couldn't afford to provide internet access in the first place. Your example of bandwidth scarcity truly doesn't make any sense. When bandwidth is scarce, an ISP will either limit its consumer base, or limit its speeds.

If doing the former, internet access is already going to be fairly expensive. It's already going to be a premium product that only a subsection of the population can afford to purchase. An ISP is unlikely going to implement traffic discrimination, because they're already ensuring quality of service through limiting their consumer base. Profit motivations won't exist, because increasing the price further restricts their consumer base. In normal situations (ie. non-scarcity), an ISP might introduce tiered service regardless of bandwidth scarcity, because they have little direct competition, and people will accept higher prices in order to keep their existing connections. When you've limited your consumer base because of bandwidth scarcity, you run a greater risk of more customers leaving due to price increases. People are more willing to give up luxury goods after price increases, when they originally had just enough money to purchase them in the first place.

If they decide to maintain an open consumer base, prices will be lower, but they will have to lower speeds to handle the amount of users. If an ISP wanted to have tiered services under bandwidth scarcity, under your terms that they cannot handle a neutral internet, then they would have to lower the speed of non-premium services. This is not how it's usually done. It's a bad business model, because people don't want to purchase content from ISPs. They want to purchase internet access, which entails being able to visit all of the internet at reasonable speeds. If you slow down non-premium services, rather than just placing premium ones at a higher priority, you are not providing a product that people actually want. Rather, these ISPs have turned themselves into content delivery services, not internet service providers. They are not going to make as much money if people do not like their overall speeds.

In short, you will not normally see tiered services under true bandwidth scarcity. The argument that we shouldn't mandate net neutrality because it's damaging to bandwidth-scarce ISPs is terribly flawed. Those ISPs most likely already maintain net neutrality as a matter of infrastructure limitations, regardless of whether or not they want to have tiered services.

In order to increase that cap, investment is required into that infrastructure. Bandwidth is also a serious problem, since unlike classical cable television, the same content isn’t broadcast to all consumers; the Internet is entirely on-demand.

It's obvious that bandwidth is not unlimited. But it's not a serious problem in general. This is why we don't see ISPs going with Plan 2 that I described above. They are introducing tiered services merely to generate a profit, not because they have bandwidth issues. When employing non-neutral internet services, ISPs are not slowing down non-premium content. They're simply placing certain content at higher priorities, but keeping the same underlying speed for general content.

Only in cases of peer-to-peer networking have we seen certain ISPs employ deep packet inspection to slow down a certain type of traffic. But that was for copyright infringement reasons, not for bandwidth reasons. In fact, this doesn't happen anymore on the specific ISP I'm referring to, which only proves that it wasn't done because of bandwidth scarcity. Most ISPs will throttle high-traffic users. This is a legitimate activity, so long as it's not around-the-clock and it's only used when absolutely necessary to maintain quality of service. Net neutrality doesn't say you can never discriminate for any reason whatsoever.

... ISPs are being forced to spend a great deal of money on network upgrades, making the service unprofitable.

This is a simple lie. Once the infrastructure is built, the service basically becomes pure profit. ISPs have been benefiting from that for quite some time now, while neglecting to slowly but surely upgrade their infrastructure. The way ISPs provision "bandwidth" per customer is to purchase 50kbps while charging the customer for 8mbps. It costs around 2-5 cents to deliver one gigabyte of bandwidth. That's about a dollar per month per customer. The median internet cost in the US is around $40/month. The idea that ISPs are struggling to manage their costs is a lie created by them to provide a excuse for 90% profit margins.

Upgrading the underlying backbone of the internet does not require massive capital investment. This is another lie. Japan and the United States have the same internet technologies. Yet Japanese ISPs have upgraded their speeds and bandwidth capacities at a cost of $100 per household. That is not prohibitively expensive. The difference between Japan and the United States is that Japanese ISPs actually have competition. On average, urban areas have 2 providers in the US. Rural areas and areas otherwise away from urban centers usually only have 1 provider. Lack of competition means lack of incentives to upgrade services and provide those services at low prices. So US ISPs tell lies that bandwidth is expensive and capital investment requirements are too high, and use these lies to either avoid upgrades or raise prices to implement upgrades.

So this, too, is really a poor argument against net neutrality. Where you have healthy competition, consumer prices are low. When you don't, those prices are high. In both situations, however, actually providing the services is cheap. Building the infrastructure requires capital investment, but not as much as you're arguing. The true costs of upgrading the infrastructure does not prevent net neutrality principles from being followed.

You may not like this. You may find the notion of an Internet that is not “open” and “free” to be ethically unacceptable. If so, feel free to nationalize your broadband network. Nationalization is always better than over-regulation.

No it isn't. France had a nationalized ISP. It was a massive failure. Competition breeds innovation, and if we had more competition, prices would be lower and services would be better. Nationalization is not the only answer, nor did I ever say it was. I said that the internet itself was a public good, but internet access was a club good. You can utilize regulation to bridge the gap and allow innovation to prosper, while preventing internet access from becoming a prohibitively expensive luxury good.

If you believe that the Internet is a public good, make it a public good - don't try to apply socialist thinking to private companies.

This isn't a socialism vs. capitalism debate. Net neutrality is not socialism. You're degrading the debate by using this attack line.

I’d say this outlaws most activities considered standard industry practice, like bandwidth caps and rate-limiting. In fact, under this resolution, it seems that it is illegal to offer any sort of tiered service plan. That’s insane – it forces ISPs to offer only one unlimited plan at a fixed rate, which results in the scenario I’ve described above. I’m boggled at the fact that it actually passed in the first place.

Continue reading the resolution, and you will see where the resolution specifically says that it should not be construed as prohibiting network management, so long as that management is consistent with the principles of nondiscrimination and openness. In fact "reasonable network management" is the exact phrase used in the FCC's net neutrality guidelines!

One final point to consider: you once told me that it is impossible to cover an issue of significant complexity – in that case, international trade – in a few lines. Yet this is what this resolution purports to do. That alone is sufficient justification for a repeal; we need to have a discussion about what constitutes valid discrimination by businesses, instead of just banning it outright.

The resolution leaves the specifics up to member states, as it should. It sets out to define the overall goal of net neutrality, rather than trying to dictate specific policy. How member states ensure that the principles of nondiscrimination and openness are upheld is up to them. If I were to write a resolution on net neutrality, I would have done it this way as well. You have misunderstood my concerns about addressing complex issues.

[Auralia]

First of all, not all nations consider the Internet to be a public good of the same importance as a transportation network, an electricity grid, or, to use your example, a health care system.

There's nothing fundamentally different between internet access in one country and internet access in another. It is all done using the same technology, and it all connects to the same internet. Whether or not internet use is at the same levels is irrelevant. The internet is an international beast, as it should be. Policies and regulations dealing with how people may access the internet have international aspects. Despite protestations to the contrary, the internet has become part of the fabric of society. Society as a whole does have certain rights specific to the internet, just as it has certain rights specific to newspapers.

Yes, there are fundamental differences between Internet access in one nation and Internet access in another. What in the world are you referring to when you speak of "the same Internet"? The Internet is not some cloud in the sky, publicly available and accessible to all. It's just a collection of private networks whose owners have agreed to give each other mutual access, since it's ultimately in their best interests. This means that if the network in one country is low-capacity, less people will use it, and Internet access will play a less significant role in that society. As a result, there is no reasonable justification for disregarding the property and ownership rights of ISPs through net neutrality. The "right" to equal Internet access does not and should not exist in every nation.

It's also worth noting that in poorer countries, ISPs are forced to offer low-cost plans as it is, meaning that they have to find other ways of gaining revenue in order to accumulate sufficient funds to upgrade their infrastructure, such as discriminatory measures prohibited by net neutrality laws.

It's ridiculous to force a one-size-fits-all net neutrality policy on a community as diverse as the World Assembly, given that many nations are still in their technological infancy and simply can’t afford to implement net neutrality.

The only way an ISP could not afford to implement net neutrality is if it couldn't afford to provide internet access in the first place. Your example of bandwidth scarcity truly doesn't make any sense. When bandwidth is scarce, an ISP will either limit its consumer base, or limit its speeds.

If doing the former, internet access is already going to be fairly expensive. It's already going to be a premium product that only a subsection of the population can afford to purchase. An ISP is unlikely going to implement traffic discrimination, because they're already ensuring quality of service through limiting their consumer base. Profit motivations won't exist, because increasing the price further restricts their consumer base. In normal situations (ie. non-scarcity), an ISP might introduce tiered service regardless of bandwidth scarcity, because they have little direct competition, and people will accept higher prices in order to keep their existing connections. When you've limited your consumer base because of bandwidth scarcity, you run a greater risk of more customers leaving due to price increases. People are more willing to give up luxury goods after price increases, when they originally had just enough money to purchase them in the first place.

If they decide to maintain an open consumer base, prices will be lower, but they will have to lower speeds to handle the amount of users. If an ISP wanted to have tiered services under bandwidth scarcity, under your terms that they cannot handle a neutral internet, then they would have to lower the speed of non-premium services. This is not how it's usually done. It's a bad business model, because people don't want to purchase content from ISPs. They want to purchase internet access, which entails being able to visit all of the internet at reasonable speeds. If you slow down non-premium services, rather than just placing premium ones at a higher priority, you are not providing a product that people actually want. Rather, these ISPs have turned themselves into content delivery services, not internet service providers. They are not going to make as much money if people do not like their overall speeds.

In short, you will not normally see tiered services under true bandwidth scarcity. The argument that we shouldn't mandate net neutrality because it's damaging to bandwidth-scarce ISPs is terribly flawed. Those ISPs most likely already maintain net neutrality as a matter of infrastructure limitations, regardless of whether or not they want to have tiered services.

I don't think you really understand the bandwidth scarcity problem. No ISP in the developed world suffers from an imminent threat of bandwidth scarcity. To let things get into that state would be incredibly stupid, since consumers would quickly get fed up of the slow speeds and move to another ISP that hasn't quite reached their tipping point yet. So most ISPs have already made massive investments in network infrastructure in order to prevent a bandwidth crisis.

So the question is not how ISPs deal with imminent bandwidth crises, as you seem to believe. The question is how they will afford to pay for future innovation and investments in infrastructure, particularly given that the Netflix revolution is just beginning. The problem is that, even though bandwidth consumption is increasing, they are not making any extra revenue from users - all of it is going to OTT (over the top) providers like Google and Netflix. And ISPs only fund infrastructure improvements if they will ultimately increase their ARPU (average revenue per user).

In order to deal with the problem for the time being, ISPs have eliminated unlimited Internet plans and turned to bandwidth caps. Bandwidth caps, by the way, are a form of discrimination that wouldn't really qualify as "reasonable network management", since they allow ISPs to collect extra revenue from users who want to consume more bandwidth, and so they're prohibited by this resolution. But, of course, people hate bandwidth caps, so they want to find other business models that provide sufficient revenue to afford upgrades to network infrastructure, like those based on other forms of discrimination, getting into the content business, etc. The alternatives are keeping the punitive caps, slowing speeds or raising the cost of Internet access for everyone. None of these are appealing, but that's what happens when you treat Internet access like a commodity.

In order to increase that cap, investment is required into that infrastructure. Bandwidth is also a serious problem, since unlike classical cable television, the same content isn’t broadcast to all consumers; the Internet is entirely on-demand.

It's obvious that bandwidth is not unlimited. But it's not a serious problem in general. This is why we don't see ISPs going with Plan 2 that I described above. They are introducing tiered services merely to generate a profit, not because they have bandwidth issues. When employing non-neutral internet services, ISPs are not slowing down non-premium content. They're simply placing certain content at higher priorities, but keeping the same underlying speed for general content.

Only in cases of peer-to-peer networking have we seen certain ISPs employ deep packet inspection to slow down a certain type of traffic. But that was for copyright infringement reasons, not for bandwidth reasons. In fact, this doesn't happen anymore on the specific ISP I'm referring to, which only proves that it wasn't done because of bandwidth scarcity. Most ISPs will throttle high-traffic users. This is a legitimate activity, so long as it's not around-the-clock and it's only used when absolutely necessary to maintain quality of service. Net neutrality doesn't say you can never discriminate for any reason whatsoever.

Tiered services already exist in the form of bandwidth caps or rate-limiting in most developed countries. Zero-rating of bandwidth of certain content is done by Telstra in New Zealand. Since most ISPs used to have unlimited plans anyway, this constitutes placing restrictions on non-premium content. Of course, all those are illegal under this resolution. And yes, ISPs are doing it because they have bandwidth issues. Telcos haven't suddenly become greedier than usual in the past few years, but streaming video has become more popular.

It is extremely naive to believe that Comcast was slowing down P2P connections for copyright infringement. That's not in Comcast's best interests. Besides, if they really wanted to stop copyright infringement, they would have given subscriber information to the RIAA/MPAA, or blocked P2P connections altogether.

... ISPs are being forced to spend a great deal of money on network upgrades, making the service unprofitable.

This is a simple lie. Once the infrastructure is built, the service basically becomes pure profit. ISPs have been benefiting from that for quite some time now, while neglecting to slowly but surely upgrade their infrastructure. The way ISPs provision "bandwidth" per customer is to purchase 50kbps while charging the customer for 8mbps. It costs around 2-5 cents to deliver one gigabyte of bandwidth. That's about a dollar per month per customer. The median internet cost in the US is around $40/month. The idea that ISPs are struggling to manage their costs is a lie created by them to provide a excuse for 90% profit margins.

Upgrading the underlying backbone of the internet does not require massive capital investment. This is another lie. Japan and the United States have the same internet technologies. Yet Japanese ISPs have upgraded their speeds and bandwidth capacities at a cost of $100 per household. That is not prohibitively expensive. The difference between Japan and the United States is that Japanese ISPs actually have competition. On average, urban areas have 2 providers in the US. Rural areas and areas otherwise away from urban centers usually only have 1 provider. Lack of competition means lack of incentives to upgrade services and provide those services at low prices. So US ISPs tell lies that bandwidth is expensive and capital investment requirements are too high, and use these lies to either avoid upgrades or raise prices to implement upgrades.

So this, too, is really a poor argument against net neutrality. Where you have healthy competition, consumer prices are low. When you don't, those prices are high. In both situations, however, actually providing the services is cheap. Building the infrastructure requires capital investment, but not as much as you're arguing. The true costs of upgrading the infrastructure does not prevent net neutrality principles from being followed.

That's ridiculous. You really don't understand how the Internet is structured. The fact that each customer has a line to their house rated at 50-100Gbps (I assume you meant Gbps instead of Kbps) is irrelevant. Along the outside of their networks, ISPs oversubscribe on a massive scale, since nobody uses the 8 or 10Mbps they're allotted 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The core of their networks are only capable of withstanding a certain amount of traffic. They have to do this, because as it is they can't afford to upgrade their infrastructure to support everyone watching Netflix all the time.

What's more, it's not "pure profit" after the initial capital investment, which is sizable enough to begin with, actually. I'm not sure where you got your $0.02/GB statistic, but it's wrong, according to a friend of mine who works at Alcatel-Lucent. It costs a hell of a lot of money to purchase and then maintain all of the complex infrastructure involved in providing Internet access. Cable Internet service, on its own, isn't even profitable. If you take a look at Rogers's cable expenses from 2011, you'll find that they made $927 million in revenue on cable Internet, but spent $1.76 billion in operating expenses, a significant part of that being network maintenance. The only reason why the cable business unit makes money is thanks to television services, which are slowly becoming less popular since people are starting to watch more content online; Rogers lost 14000 cable TV subscribers in 2011. The notion that network infrastructure operates on some kind of "set it and forget it" model is also contradicted by the fact that the enterprise business units at Cisco, Juniper and Alcatel-Lucent, who sell routers and network equipment to service providers, make an insane amount of money - how would that be possible if ISPs aren't upgrading and maintaining infrastructure on a regular basis?

It's interesting that you pick Japan as an example of a country with great Internet access, given that it doesn't have network neutrality legislation, unlike the United States. It's also worth noting that streaming video isn't as large an issue in Japan, since most content is restricted to the United States and is available only in English. I'd be interested to know where the $100/household statistic comes from. It sounds like it refers to lines to the home rather than the overall infrastructure.

By the way, if a lack of competition is the issue, net neutrality isn't going fix anything, but anti-trust laws will.

You may not like this. You may find the notion of an Internet that is not “open” and “free” to be ethically unacceptable. If so, feel free to nationalize your broadband network. Nationalization is always better than over-regulation.

No it isn't. France had a nationalized ISP. It was a massive failure. Competition breeds innovation, and if we had more competition, prices would be lower and services would be better. Nationalization is not the only answer, nor did I ever say it was. I said that the internet itself was a public good, but internet access was a club good. You can utilize regulation to bridge the gap and allow innovation to prosper, while preventing internet access from becoming a prohibitively expensive luxury good.

Who said anything about nationalized ISPs? I'm talking about the likes of Australia's National Broadband Network, where the government owns the infrastructure itself but private companies sell Internet access and other services as RSPs. With respect to drawing a difference between "the Internet" and "Internet access", see my comments at the top of my post.

If you believe that the Internet is a public good, make it a public good - don't try to apply socialist thinking to private companies.

This isn't a socialism vs. capitalism debate. Net neutrality is not socialism. You're degrading the debate by using this attack line.

I'm not using socialism as a degogatory term, like how it's often used in the United States. But net neutrality, the principle that Internet access should be equal for all, is a socialist ideal. When it comes to private ISPs, Internet is a business, not something that should be "free" and "open". Look at it this way - if the transportation system were private, would it be fair to force the owner of a private road not to offer a special lane to those who paid more in tolls? You would essentially be forcing all of the liability and risk of maintaining the road on the private individual, but with none of the potential to make a profit. If you believe infrastructure is important enough to be regulated to that extent, then nationalize it. But you can't tell private companies that they have to behave like a public company would - it just doesn't work.

I’d say this outlaws most activities considered standard industry practice, like bandwidth caps and rate-limiting. In fact, under this resolution, it seems that it is illegal to offer any sort of tiered service plan. That’s insane – it forces ISPs to offer only one unlimited plan at a fixed rate, which results in the scenario I’ve described above. I’m boggled at the fact that it actually passed in the first place.

Continue reading the resolution, and you will see where the resolution specifically says that it should not be construed as prohibiting network management, so long as that management is consistent with the principles of nondiscrimination and openness. In fact "reasonable network management" is the exact phrase used in the FCC's net neutrality guidelines!

Yes, but what is "reasonable network management"? It's not bandwidth caps, rate-limiting or many other standard billing practices across the world, since higher bandwidth caps, speeds and QoS are available to users or content providers who pay more. The ISP is making money by discriminating against users based on how much they pay, not trying to maximize the availability or quality of Internet access for everyone. It's not consistent with "the principles of nondiscrimination and openness". Therefore, it's prohibited by this resolution. Unfortunately, it's also necessary for them to make money.

One final point to consider: you once told me that it is impossible to cover an issue of significant complexity – in that case, international trade – in a few lines. Yet this is what this resolution purports to do. That alone is sufficient justification for a repeal; we need to have a discussion about what constitutes valid discrimination by businesses, instead of just banning it outright.

The resolution leaves the specifics up to member states, as it should. It sets out to define the overall goal of net neutrality, rather than trying to dictate specific policy. How member states ensure that the principles of nondiscrimination and openness are upheld is up to them. If I were to write a resolution on net neutrality, I would have done it this way as well. You have misunderstood my concerns about addressing complex issues.

No, it's not up to them. The definition of "reasonable network management", while vague, clearly excludes certain practices which are valid business models, as I've stated above. They are then banned by the overly broad definition of "network discrimination". The resolution goes way over the top, even by the US's standards. It doesn't really leave the specifics up to member states.

[Glen-Rhodes]

What in the world are you referring to when you speak of "the same Internet"?

The internet in one country is no different from the internet in another country. Everybody is connecting to same internet. There is no Canadian internet or American internet. You are conflating internet access and the internet itself. My point was that the internet cannot be a public good in Canada, but not in France. There is only one internet, and it is a public good. Internet access is a different thing altogether.

I don't think you really understand the bandwidth scarcity problem.

There is no bandwidth scarcity problem. You have invented it to support your arguments. I entertained your invention and showed you why tiered services would not be provided under true bandwidth scarcity.

The question is how they will afford to pay for future innovation and investments in infrastructure, particularly given that the Netflix revolution is just beginning.

They will pay for it the same way they paid for it before. Average bandwidth usage in 2012 is far, far higher than it was in 2002. ISPs did not need to introduce tiered services to raise funds for upgrading their infrastructure. They did the sensible thing and invested capital to provide DSL and broadband to dial-up customers who wanted or needed faster connections. ISPs are already upgrading existing infrastructure to handle higher bandwidth usage (DOCSIS 3.0), and they are doing it under net neutrality guidelines

In countries with healthy competition, ISPs upgraded infrastructure long ago, and provide better speeds at more affordable prices without violating net neutrality. I think you need to realize that the ISP environment in the US is terrible. There is virtually no competition between ISPs. They almost always have monopolies over their service areas. That is why people in the US pay $40 for a 4-5 Mbps (600 kBps) connection on average, when that same $40 could buy you a 10 Mbps actual connection speed in Japan in 2009. There is no incentive for US ISPs to invest capital until they want to increase capacity, and absolutely no incentive whatsoever to lower their prices and profit margins. It's not socialist to say that 90% profit margins are outrageous. The US has been experiencing a massive ISP market failure for the past decade.

In order to deal with the problem for the time being, ISPs have eliminated unlimited Internet plans and turned to bandwidth caps.

Again, this is not true. We've been hearing about an 'exaflood' since at least 2007. We've been told for years that the internet is going to break down any day now. The myth was debunked years ago by looking at real data. Comcast instituted a cap in 2008 at 250GB, knowing that it was high enough for most users to not worry about it. They then proceeded to develop their own content services (e.g. Xfinity) and jump on the streaming entertainment trend. Since 2008, speeds and bandwidth consumption have increased, but the cap has not budged. The entire purpose of the cap was to quietly institute a bandwidth trap, bank on 2008 streaming media trends continuing and growing, and cash in a few years down the road as users pay overages for hitting their bandwidth cap.

The internet backbone is not in danger of reaching capacity. There is plenty to go around, and it's cheaper than ever. ISPs have 90% profit margins, because backbone capacity can be bought for a few cents per customer, but they charge $40 anyways and purchase less than they advertise to you on top of that. The only people who will tell you that the internet backbone cannot handle bandwidth usage trends are ISP lobbyists. Actual specialists have been saying the opposite for years, now. But as long as ISPs can create scarcity by not purchasing enough backbone capacity, they can convince the government and ignorant populace that they need to charge more for bandwidth.

Bandwidth caps, by the way, are a form of discrimination that wouldn't really qualify as "reasonable network management", since they allow ISPs to collect extra revenue from users who want to consume more bandwidth, and so they're prohibited by this resolution.

Now I'm convinced that you just don't understand the resolution at all. You have a preconcieved notion of what net neutrality activists want to do, and you're just assuming that the resolution does that. Bandwidth caps don't violate net neutrality, anyways. If there's an actual physical limit that requires a bandwidth cap, that is absolutely legitimate under net neutrality.

The issue comes when an arbitrary limit is set, when the underlying infrastructure can indeed handle a lot more than that limit. When this it done, it is done purely for profit. If ISPs are truly concerned about congestion and scarcity, they would not employ bandwidth caps. This is because caps do not discourage peak usage, when congestion is actually a problem. They only discourage overall monthly usage, which doesn't to anything to help the (false) scarcity issue. If they were truly concerned, they would employ congestion pricing and charge high-bandwidth users who hog bandwidth during peak usage times. That, too, is legitimate under net neutrality. That is reasonable network management.

Tiered services already exist in the form of bandwidth caps or rate-limiting in most developed countries. Zero-rating of bandwidth of certain content is done by Telstra in New Zealand. Since most ISPs used to have unlimited plans anyway, this constitutes placing restrictions on non-premium content. Of course, all those are illegal under this resolution.

Prioritization is not illegal, and it isn't even against net neutrality principles. Honestly, you need to read the resolution without your glaring biases. There are two definitions of network discrimination in the resolution:

1. "Intentionally blocking, interfering with, discriminating against, impairing, or degrading the ability of any person to access, use, send, post, receive, or offer any lawful content, application, or service through the Internet."

2. "Imposing a fee beyond the end user fees associated with providing the content, service, or application to the consumer."

Neither of those make prioritization illegal. Offering to put VoIP in the "fast lane" is not blocking, interfering with, discrimination against, impairing or degrading anything. It's doing the exact opposite. The only way this would violate the resolution is if everything else was slowed down. And that is rightly so, because that type of system encourages ISPs to make "premium" options out of everything, effectively charging double for common services, by discriminating against certain types of traffic. The problem is even worse when ISPs are able to discriminate based on companies and specific services.

It is extremely naive to believe that Comcast was slowing down P2P connections for copyright infringement. That's not in Comcast's best interests. Besides, if they really wanted to stop copyright infringement, they would have given subscriber information to the RIAA/MPAA, or blocked P2P connections altogether.

Comcast reversed their throttling in 2011, thanks to an FCC decision. There was no doomsday scenario as a result. Comcast could always handle p2p traffic. If there was a true problem, they would have throttled only high-bandwidth users during periods of congestion. Instead, they used a hamfisted approach and the FCC censured them for it. It was a clear combination of profit motive (charging for the allocation, but throttling anyways) and big copyright infringement interests. Comcast is owned by NBC Universal, a well-known copyright maximalist. While they have recently pushed back against copyright trolls, they have a reputation in the file-sharing community for a reason.

I'm not sure where you got your $0.02/GB statistic, but it's wrong, according to a friend of mine who works at Alcatel-Lucent.

Your friend is wrong or you are misreading what I said, then. $0.02/GB is actually a liberal estimate. The cost of a 1 Mbps (megabit per second) connection is about $5/month. A 1 Mbps connection can transfer 316.4 GB per month. That breaks down to $0.0158/GB. That figure is likely lower for the big ISPs. This is the cost to send one gigabyte of data through the backbone. There may be transit costs for ISPs that aren't connected to one another. These cost break down to around $0.01/GB, which also happens to be what Amazon charges for its cloud service (an example of transit costs).

The cost of creating new networks or upgrading existing ones is way overstated in your arguments. First, this information is not easy to come by. ISPs protect it heavily, ensuring that it always remains confidential, the point where government documents are almost entirely redacted. (I wonder why.) Every now and then, a document arises that gives us a glimpse into the costs. Bell released one such document, which ultimately showed that the cost of creating an entirely new high-speed network would lead to a price of about $0.07/GB. This takes in all factors, including last-mile costs (which are the highest). This document, by the way, was for the worst case scenario.

So overall, the higher end cost of delivering 1 gigabyte is about $0.08. Let's put this in perspective. AT&T charges $35/month for 3 Mbps. That's $12/mo per megabit, or a 140% markup and 60% profit margin. A 3 Mbps connection should allow you to use a little less than 990GB per month. Yet AT&T caps you at 250GB per month and charges you $10 for every 50GB over that. That comes out to $0.20/GB in overage fees, or 900% markup of the the actual cost of sending 1GB of data. A 90% profit margin. Now we know why ISPs were so quick to put caps in place, even though experts were saying (and continue to say) that there's no scarcity issue.

Source: http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/5727/125/

Cable Internet service, on its own, isn't even profitable.

This is kind of useless observation. Cable internet is usually provided by cable TV providers. I don't know of any examples where cable internet is provided by a company that only does cable internet. Not because it's not profitable, but because cable TV companies are the ones who own the cable infrastructure.

Rogers Q1 (2012) operating revenue for cable services was $825 million, $241 million coming from their internet services. Their total cable service expenses $447 million. Cable TV and internet services use the same infrastructure, so Rogers has to maintain it anyways with or without offering internet services. It's highly doubtful that the vast majority of the maintenance costs are attributable to their internet services.

Source: http://goo.gl/eKONg

It's interesting that you pick Japan as an example of a country with great Internet access, given that it doesn't have network neutrality legislation, unlike the United States.

Japan doesn't have network neutrality laws, but rather guidelines that tend to be followed by most ISPs. My discussion of Japan had to deal with competition and its effects on prices and infrastructure, not net neutrality, anyways.

By the way, if a lack of competition is the issue, net neutrality isn't going fix anything, but anti-trust laws will.

Net neutrality helps protect competition and innovation. It does this by preventing certain companies from purchasing priority treatment from ISPs, and preventing ISPs from slowing down websites that don't purchase priority treatment. We can disagree on whether or not net neutrality should be imposed by law, but the underlying competitive advantages net neutrality has aren't really debatable. The issue in the United States is that ISPs aren't competitive, so they're very capable of doing that kind of thing with little to no consequences. In a competitive environment, net neutrality usually just happens naturally, because people will go to ISPs who don't charge for priority treatment.

But net neutrality, the principle that Internet access should be equal for all, is a socialist ideal.

No it's not. It's an idea about maintaining the internet's underlying structure and purpose. A "socialist ideal" would be if I were arguing that all people should have internet access, and so the government should subsidize it or provide it outright. Openness and competitiveness are very capitalist ideals.

Look at it this way - if the transportation system were private, would it be fair to force the owner of a private road not to offer a special lane to those who paid more in tolls?

Yes, it would, because transportation systems are vital to society. I realize you disagree, but I simply believe that the internet has become important enough that the government has a vested interest in regulating it. There are plenty of services in history that started off with no regulation, only to be regulated when they became critically important. Simply because the infrastructure is privately owned does not mean it should be free from any and all regulation.

Yes, but what is "reasonable network management"?

Something to be defined by member states, as I said before. A reasonable person would recognize that anything necessary to maintain quality of service is reasonable network management. When Comcast stopped throttling nearly all torrent traffic, it instituted a policy of throttling high-bandwidth users. That is something everybody can agree is reasonable. You have this warped vision of net neutrality, where ISPs aren't allowed to mitigate bottlenecks or traffic congestion at all, because any and all discrimination is banned. That's simply not the case.

No, it's not up to them. The definition of "reasonable network management", while vague, clearly excludes certain practices which are valid business models, as I've stated above. They are then banned by the overly broad definition of "network discrimination". The resolution goes way over the top, even by the US's standards. It doesn't really leave the specifics up to member states.

Is it defined in the resolution? No? Then it's up to member states to define what reasonable network management is. The resolution obviously provides that network discrimination can occur under reasonable network management. You can choose to ignore that and deny long-standing interpretation conventions. But that doesn't change anything.

[Auralia]

Look, I'm done. I'm only going to invest so much time in an online game, and I've reached my limit for this particular repeal. Since most will likely respond in the way that you have, I'm shelving it.

I can see that you fundamentally misunderstand the problem facing service providers, and that it is not, strictly speaking, a bandwidth scarcity problem, but rather a lack of return on investment in network infrastructure. Net neutrality will only push them towards letting the quality of the public Internet diminish as they invest in infrastructure where only their content is available, and where there is a guaranteed return - this is already happening with services like IPTV. This is why, at the end of the day, few countries have implemented net neutrality laws, and the US is slowly rolling back theirs. But you believe I'm perpetuating some kind of big lie put out by service providers, so I don't think I'll be able to convince you, and I'm not going to bother.

I will, however, point out that net neutrality in the US is not the same as net neutraity as implemented in this resolution. First, there is no consistent definition of "network neutrality", even in the US. The proposals put forward by Congress are extremely varied, and differ greatly in some cases from the FCC's guidelines. You happen to have a moderate definition, but there are far worse ones, like the one in this resolution. Certain activities, like bandwidth caps and rate-limiting, are currently legal in the US not because they're allowed under reasonable network management, but because they haven't been prohibited in the first place by the FCC's guidelines. They're not strictly necessary to ensure quality of service, but they are necessary for content producers to make enough money to justify further improvements to network infrastructure. The definition of network discrimination in this resolution is far more strict, and so it prohibits those activities.

[Auralia]

While I'm no longer actively working on this proposal, I came across this discussion of bandwidth costs for a UK ISP. This kind of information is relatively rare, given that ISPs generally treat it as proprietary and confidential, so I thought I would share it with anyone who's monitoring this thread.

[Auralia]

I've decided to give this proposal one last shot. I've made some substantial revisions to the draft, and plan on submitting it shortly. Should it fail, Auralia will declare outright non-compliance with GAR #89.

[United Federation of Canada]

I've decided to give this proposal one last shot. I've made some substantial revisions to the draft, and plan on submitting it shortly. Should it fail, Auralia will declare outright non-compliance with GAR #89.

Why does this need to be repealed?

Should it fail, Auralia will declare outright non-compliance with GAR #89.

The WA will miss you we suppose, but if this is what you have to do, then this is what you have to do for your nation.

[Auralia]

I've decided to give this proposal one last shot. I've made some substantial revisions to the draft, and plan on submitting it shortly. Should it fail, Auralia will declare outright non-compliance with GAR #89.

Why does this need to be repealed?

Because we believe that net neutrality regulations are not appropriate for Auralia and a number of other nations, and we fail to see why it is the responsibility of the WA to enforce them.

Should it fail, Auralia will declare outright non-compliance with GAR #89.

The WA will miss you we suppose, but if this is what you have to do, then this is what you have to do for your nation.

OOC: I think you misunderstood - I intend to remain in the WA, but I plan to roleplay non-compliance with GAR #89.

[United Federation of Canada]

Why does this need to be repealed?

Because we believe that net neutrality regulations are not appropriate for Auralia and a number of other nations, and we fail to see why it is the responsibility of the WA to enforce them.

The WA will miss you we suppose, but if this is what you have to do, then this is what you have to do for your nation.

OOC: I think you misunderstood - I intend to remain in the WA, but I plan to roleplay non-compliance with GAR #89.

Net Neutrality is a very important issue. Why should governments be permitted to control the internet?

OOC: I think you misunderstood - I intend to remain in the WA, but I plan to roleplay non-compliance with GAR #89.

Oh? We can do that now? I thought GAR #2 REQUIRES all nations to follow standing WA acts in good faith?

[Auralia]

Because we believe that net neutrality regulations are not appropriate for Auralia and a number of other nations, and we fail to see why it is the responsibility of the WA to enforce them.



OOC: I think you misunderstood - I intend to remain in the WA, but I plan to roleplay non-compliance with GAR #89.

Net Neutrality is a very important issue. Why should governments be permitted to control the internet?

An excellent question. You are aware that net neutrality rules are government regulations, right?

OOC: I think you misunderstood - I intend to remain in the WA, but I plan to roleplay non-compliance with GAR #89.

Oh? We can do that now? I thought GAR #2 REQUIRES all nations to follow standing WA acts in good faith?

Yes, it does. In this case, we will be acting in defiance of GAR #2.

[United Federation of Canada]

Net Neutrality is a very important issue. Why should governments be permitted to control the internet?

An excellent question. You are aware that net neutrality rules are government regulations, right?

Oh? We can do that now? I thought GAR #2 REQUIRES all nations to follow standing WA acts in good faith?

Yes, it does. In this case, we will be acting in defiance of GAR #2.

An excellent question. You are aware that net neutrality rules are government regulations, right?

Yes they seek to create a neutral internet free of government regulation. The act itself is a blocker against further government mettling.

Seems like a good thing to us.

[Auralia]

Yes they seek to create a neutral internet free of government regulation. The act itself is a blocker against further government mettling.

Seems like a good thing to us.

No, the Internet Net Neutrality Act prohibits ISPs from employing network discrimination; it does not in any way prohibit government regulation of the Internet. In fact, the Act specifically states that "nothing in this Act shall be construed as...limit[ing] the rights of member countries to enact laws regulating Internet content, applications, and services."

[United Federation of Canada]

Yes they seek to create a neutral internet free of government regulation. The act itself is a blocker against further government mettling.

Seems like a good thing to us.

No, the Internet Net Neutrality Act prohibits ISPs from employing network discrimination; it does not in any way prohibit government regulation of the Internet. In fact, the Act specifically states that "nothing in this Act shall be construed as...limit[ing] the rights of member countries to enact laws regulating Internet content, applications, and services."

So where is the problem here? You are free to censor the internet all you like in your nation then.

[Auralia]

No, the Internet Net Neutrality Act prohibits ISPs from employing network discrimination; it does not in any way prohibit government regulation of the Internet. In fact, the Act specifically states that "nothing in this Act shall be construed as...limit[ing] the rights of member countries to enact laws regulating Internet content, applications, and services."

So where is the problem here? You are free to censor the internet all you like in your nation then.

Please read the repeal; my reasons for opposing net neutrality should then become clear.