FCC Commissioner Vows to Ignore Staff's 'Serious Concerns' About Net Neutrality | Hacker News Reader

FCC Commissioner Vows to Ignore Staff's 'Serious Concerns' About Net Neutrality

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107 pointsourmandave50 comments

If only Republicans actually stood up to market principles and they didn't just use them as an excuse to help their big corporation buddies, and then that's it.

I actually believe a free market full of competition would work way better than most regulations would in trying to restrict a few monopolies from doing harm. Although I don't think a free market should be free of any regulations. A baseline of regulations is needed to ensure that competitors play fair.

We actually have proof of this with Google Fiber. Wherever Google Fiber would land, previous local monopolies would trip over themselves to drastically increase the value of their offerings (but still being significantly behind Google Fiber). As soon as Google announced it would kill Fiber, all of that stopped, and they even reduced the value in their offers in some places.

I get it that cable companies need to be somehow rewarded for digging ditches to lay cable, but that doesn't necessarily mean they ought to be given a legal monopoly in that state or city. If you must, just pass a law that would force that cable provider to license its cables at a fair price. Then you'd have some competition, but it would also get to recover the cost of digging (the more competitors/clients the faster it can do that).

You want Republicans to be Libertarians, which they are not.

I think the cable companies probably waited for government-granted monopolies before they invested in the last-mile infrastructure, because they wanted to be sure it would be worth it. So on a free market, the investment in infrastructure would have been slower (probably), but competition would be better long-term.

Although any infrastructure discussion must include the phenomenon of suburban sprawl fueled by government's over-investment in roads.

> You want Republicans to be Libertarians, which they are not.

To be fair, that desire is likely based on over three decades of Republicans pretending to be Libertarians in the rhetoric directed at building opposition to programs they don't like.

I would be with libertarians if they didn't go to the extreme of wanting no regulations. There should be regulations for the environment and for creating fair market conditions. Healthbcare should be regulated in some way to ensure accessibility.

Whatever I hear from libertarians will lead to people with money accumulating all power in the same way we see now.

Libertarians oppose crony capitalism and the use of state power for special interests in general.

The libertarian theory on regulation is that the market punishes bad behavior way more effectively than the government, which can always be swayed by political forces. During the Industrial Revolution, for instance, judges sided with corporations in pollution cases, thinking, "We can't hinder industrial progress for the sake of a few people's lungs." So the government granted monopoly pollution privileges to industry. Under a free market property rights scenario, any damage done to another person via pollution would be grounds for a suit against the polluter, no special government protection.

Edit: take a closer look at libertarian writings on environmentalism and pollution

In the libertarian world you just sue when you are being wronged and justice will be done. In reality if you sue a big company you have to go against an army of lawyers, expert witnesses they can buy and media campaigns. You simply can't win that unless you have a lot of money. We still would have lead paint if the EPA hadn't banned it. How can a single family prove to a court that whatever problems their children have is caused by lead paint? Fund a clinical study for a few million dollars?

"You want Republicans to be Libertarians..."

I want politicians (be they Republican, Democrat, etc.) to act in the best interest of all the people in the nation, and not just the small fraction that benefit from large corporations making inordinate profits.

I know they aren't. But they pretend to be for the most part (except the social issues and religious issues).

Also, I disagree with "pure libertarianism" myself. I think fair baseline standards are needed to establish a level playing field. But what the U.S. has now is far from a "free market" anymore. It's much closer to a "pay to play" market.

People should stop glorifying "capitalism" and instead be for "competitive market economy". We see more and more that capitalism just leads to incumbents accumulating mote and more power and trying to suppress competition. Unfortunately the Republicans talk a good game but in the end they will almost never do anything that offends their capitalists.

"Capitalism" is just a way of the powerful to manipulate the powerless in the US.

To give a specific example, residential waste collection used to be public, meaning you'd pay a tax and your garbage would be taken away. Then, in the name of "capitalism," the business was sold to a private company who could jack up the prices, lower the qualty, and make profit for itself.

But "wait!" I hear you yell. Capitalism is at its core about competition! If we take a public service and privatise it shouldn't private citizens have a choice? You'd think. But in the US that isn't how it works. They will happily take a public service, privatise it, consumer costs skyrocket, and you have no competitive choice still.

This kind of thing is then protected via regulation so that even if competition did want to compete with an entity that was just handed tons of formerly public business, they wouldn't be able to. Naturally there's often rumours or proven kickbacks to the politicians from the private entities who received the public business...

Capitalism without competition isn't capitalism, it is fascism.

This “zero rating” was the bone of contention in the big fight against Facebook’s Free Basics in India, where this sort of price discrimination for data was eventually blocked. We did this after the grassroots movement for Net Neutrality in the US, so maybe it’s time for the US to pick up the baton again… the price of net neutrality is eternal protest?

> … the price of net neutrality is eternal protest?

When shills like Ajit Pai are in power at the FCC, yes.

Eternal or until Internet is correctly reclassified as a public utility like roads, bridges, and other vital infrastructure.

Then the government can pick up responsibility for the last mile, and you can buy internet service from one of a two dozen different providers (who utilise and pay rent on the government's last mile cabling).

That's where we'll wind up eventually. Government will put fiber into every home, then cable companies and internet companies will use that fiber and pay a fee to the government while charging end users.

This is similar to what we have in many urban areas in Sweden. It works really well. The local government runs the local fibre loop, just as it runs roads, piped water, electricity, sewage, and other services too, like schools and hospitals etc. One key thing is that the local government has local taxation rights to be able match the demand. Water, fibre, electricity is run on fees, and things like schools, roads and hospitals are run on taxes.

Well then, we have a lot of work ahead of us, because I don't see how that is going to happen on the watch of the major telecom companies.

Other than political will - is there anything preventing local municipalities from doing this right now?

IIRC some have, much to the ire of local telcos.

Large incumbents filing strategic anti-competitive lawsuits.

"If you can't innovate, litigate!"

Yeah - all the local muni's (and other local govt) who subscribe to this model:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...

What has happened to many municipalities that tried is that the incumbent telcos went to the state legislature and had laws passed making it illegal for cities to run their own telecom infrastructure.

Basically, the political will has to be present at the city AND state level for this to happen. And that turns out to be a small set.

regulatory capture. The deep pocketed telecos went to state political leaders and had laws passed to prevent/restrict these in many cases

For a lot of places in the U.S. and certainly parts of India, last mile broadband should stay remain the purview of local providers (co-ops, municipalities, etc.), and might be wireless.

For agricultural applications, for example, it makes no sense to run fiber to the home just to run it back out with a patchwork of low-quality repeaters. Other places (there's an example from Spain) it makes sense for a neighborhood to deploy a wireless mesh network.

-- I work with broadband data in the U.S. for economic development purposes.

> the price of net neutrality is eternal protest?

It's not enough to win net neutrality. Like everything else worth fighting for, you have to remain vigilant and watchful in order to defend it.

The actual letter from the likely future commissioner:

> STATEMENT OF FCC COMMISSIONER AJIT PAI

> On the FCC’s Midnight Regulation of Free Data

> WASHINGTON, January 11, 2017.—It is disappointing that the FCC’s current leadership has yet again chosen to spend its last days in office the same way it spent the last few years—cutting corners on process, keeping fellow Commissioners in the dark, and pursuing partisan, political agendas that only harm investment and innovation.

> This time the midnight regulations come in the form of a Bureau-level report casting doubt on the legality of free data offerings—offerings that are popular among consumers precisely because they allow more access to online music, videos, and other content free of charge. This report, which I only saw after the FCC released the document, does not reflect the views of the majority of Commissioners. Fortunately, I am confident that this latest regulatory spasm will not have any impact on the Commission’s policymaking or enforcement activities following next week’s inauguration.

> It was my hope—as I have consistently expressed to my colleagues—that we could spend the remaining days of this Administration working together with bipartisan comity to ensure a smooth transition. It is sad that the outgoing leadership of the agency has chosen a different path.

> Office of Commissioner Ajit Pai: (202) 418-2000

> Twitter: @AjitPaiFCC

> https://www.fcc.gov/about/leadership/ajit-pai

From https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-342990A1.d.... Note the .docx (not .html or even .pdf) suffix on that link. Note the .docx suffix and weep.

Contrast this with Tom Wheeler's report from yesterday: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017... (.pdf, which your browser probably handles well) which, starting on page 15, analyzes existing wireless carrier zero-rating plans and finds issue with AT&T's Sponsored Data zero-rating its own DirectTV service, suggesting that "these sponsored data offerings may harm consumers and competition by unreasonably discriminating in favor of downstream providers owned or affiliated with the network providers."

Tom, we're going to miss you.

Commissioner Pai seems to have rebranded "Zero-Rated" content as "free data offerings", but its not really free, you already are a paying customer.

Also really political wording: "popular among consumers precisely because they allow more access to online music, videos, and other content free of charge"

instead of the more accurate

"access to our chosen providers online music... without counting against your data cap"

ok t-mobile is the one company that doesn't charge to be a "chosen provider", but the others.

This doesn't bode well..

It's both better and worse than that. The FCC has no problem with "zero rating" or "sponsored data" per se.

Instead of paying Netflix $8/mo to stream content from their servers to peering network providers, and then paying AT&T a marginal $4/mo to take that data from the peering servers to their towers and eventually to your phone, you could pay Netflix $12/mo and have them pay $4/mo to AT&T on your behalf.

Annoying and problematic for sure - you can bet that some sites like fcc.gov, for example, are unlikely to pay AT&T for sponsored data, that this makes it more difficult for upstarts, and that this allows AT&T to offer less general-purpose data and more control over bandwidth. But it could in theory be done fairly.

Nonetheless, the clear and present issue is that DirectTV, owned by AT&T, is getting this "sponsored data" class for free. If DirectTV were offered the same deal as Netflix, who were offered the same deal as fcc.gov and news.ycombinator.com, that would be one thing. But they're not. And that's discrimination.

If we really care about net neutrality is it viable to create our own ISPs? Are net neutrality rules different between the backbone networks?

Can you get around last mile monopolies?

Without laying fiber or networks to the millions of homes around the entire united states (kind of like google tried and found not economically viable), no.

That is, ironically, a problem largely created by public interest minded people. Most places in the U.S., it is illegal for an ISP startup to be like Apple: targeting the lucrative high end of the market and working down. You have to build out to every neighborhood, even in nehgborhoods where the cost of build out will be more than what you can hope to make from subscribers there.

That means even behemoths find it difficult to enter each others' markets. Baltimore, for example, wants fiber. Verizon was ready to build fiber. It would have been easy--Baltimore's suburbs are already wired. But the city wouldn't give Verizon a television license (fundamental to the economics of broadband) without universal build out. But it just didn't make sense to do that in a city where a third of the population is below the poverty line.

In fact, nobody has been willing to build fiber in Baltimore on those terms, despite the city railing against Comcast and trying to get a competitor.

Not quite, that is an issue, but not remotely the biggest one. The biggest problem (and google themselves admit this!) is planning and zoning happens at the city and even county / neighborhood level. If you want to move into a city like say Chicago you don't just need to pass city muster. You need to get the alderman to agree for each small neighborhood. What if you need to lay fiber through neighborhood B to reach neighborhood C from neighborhood A and the zoning committee in B denies you? Well that just cut off a large swath of potential clients. This is fundamentally a problem with all infrastructure improvements in the US. The local communities have too much control over what happens. This is also why things like infra happen to move so quickly in a place like say China where the federal govt can trample over all local regulations. For things like infrastructure, this is a great thing.

Sometimes you aren't allowed to - the local regulations can prohibit you from building your own last mile even if you wanted to pay the huge cost to needlessly duplicate it.

I really hope the new wireless attempts to the last mile are successful. I think both Google and Facebook are seriously trying.

It would be great if I can buy my physical line (to the interconnect) from my current ISP.

Then I'm responsible for getting someone to service the quality of that connection between my house and this connection.

The difficulty, is that where this matters is in the "last mile" leg of the connection.

Which, to do at scale, is notoriously difficult given the required capital expenditures, as well as navigating the regulation minefield, that the incumbents do everything in their power to keep difficult.

Is it really last _mile_?

If the missing leg of the connection is truly that short, could there be an opportunity for inexpensive cooperative wireless mesh routing in neighborhoods with several outlet nodes onto more regulation-sparse fiber?

Or is 'last mile' just a euphemism for distances that in actuality are much larger?

Last mile is a euphemism for:

* Interconnects

* Customer Support

* Pole Access

* Physical Plant

* Customer Premise Equipment (CPE)

Perhaps if the FCC would designate more long-range friendly frequencies as unlicensed, perhaps with slightly higher power limits, you could eliminate a few of those items?

Don't get me wrong -- there are many cooperatives very successfully running stable and competitive wireless mesh networks, but that model doesn't work very well in major metro areas, with lots of buildings, and very high-density users.

This was tried in the mid to late 2000s and many of the mesh networks, at least the ones run by cities, were shut down or are much smaller now. The problem with doing things through the legal system or through government is that mesh routing can be seen as competitive to the existing oligopoly (which has more $$ to lobby government to increase barriers to entry).

Sharing one beefy connection with 10-20 people in a few nearby houses would be a good first step because it's under the radar of the big telecomm companies and you can't be legally barred from sharing your connection?

I love cooperative mesh networks, but they can't really compete on speed and latency with regular internet connections.

If we really care about net neutrality, we should focus on privacy. If we build the internet so that it hides the destination data from the carrier, net neutrality will automatically happen as a byproduct, and we don't need the FCC or have to care about different backbone networks.

We should stop arguing that AT&T should be legally barred from doing something with the data it has access to, and start making it so that AT&T doesn't have access to that data.

We should stop arguing that AT&T should be legally barred from doing something with the data it has access to

Why should we stop arguing that? The postal service operates under the same constraints.

I thought I explained that in the remainder of my sentence, but I'll go ahead and clarify that I do think AT&T should be legally barred, but I also think it's a waste of time to argue about it. It's a question of effectiveness and of time & energy and how to best spend it. Why spend time asking lawmakers for net neutrality regulation, when instead we could do what we do best as engineers and build the network such that net neutrality and privacy is built in. Then we don't have to sit around hoping that AT&T and others are not tempted to seek ways to make money. Why spend time writing articles that complain about the Republican pro-industry FCC, when we have the power amongst ourselves to build a better internet and take the question of net neutrality off the table entirely?

The USPS analogy is a bit apples to oranges; the USPS is a government organization and AT&T is one of many private for-profit entities that carry our digital communication. Furthermore, AT&T already was legally barred from listening to conversations going through their network and they did it anyway. I don't exactly trust them, even if there are laws.

I don't think we should expect companies to not try to make money. Their function is to try to make money. If they see ways to try to make money, by asking consumers to pay extra for faster connections to Netflix, they should be allowed to offer premium services.

A big problem with the question of net neutrality is that it's subjective. It's fair to say they're slowing people down if they don't pay more. It's also fair to say they're just offering premium service for a premium fee. These is no winning this argument, both sides have valid arguments. Focusing on privacy instead will answer a question that has a clearer "right" answer, and it will automatically yield a network that has net neutrality built in.

I think this is a great point. Expecting companies not to act in their own best interest is foolish. It's also foolish to expect our elected officials to act in the citizens' best interest rather than for their donors. Instead, let's make net Neutrality the only option so we can focus on technical challenges.

You can certainly do that, but only in countries that have LLU (local loop unbundling) where you can create an ISP without having to own a ton of wire. The US does not have this market-promoting measure.

Every day something worse.

Yes. A few days ago I remembered the floating island states that were discussed a few years back. Ever since I can't stop to fantasize about it.

What is the best concrete action to take to express our concerns to the FCC?

But if the new FCC Commissioner's mind is already made up before he takes the job, there is no incentive to listen to our concerns.

If a commissioner can make a decision unilaterally and not be subject to concerned citizens and lawmakers saying "that's a bad idea," then something is wrong.

Whoopee.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com