Trump’s F.C.C. Pick Quickly Targets Net Neutrality Rules

This worked really well so now there is a health population of companies in both the telephone/mobile and isp sectors.

I can get at least 5 different wired isps and maybe 50+ mobile broadband providers in the outskirts of a town of 60k people.

In addition, it is quite possible to have competition while still regulating something as a utility. Regulation is really more what the classifacation is about. You want clean water standards, companies that don't turn you off for being a few hours late, and so forth. This stuff is doubly important since in many areas, utilities are a natural monopoly. The classifacation can also ensure that the large companies venture out into small and rural cities and areas. Some folks in the US have only had home phone service less than 20 years despite such laws, after all, and I doubt they would without regulation.

I've read a bit about WISPs, because they seem like a happy solution to the whole monopoly problem but they haven't caught hold in the way that I've hoped. Latency seems to be a pretty significant issue. Consistency in signal strength is also a problem.

I also sort of think that this is kind of the way we get out of problems without ever getting at the root cause. We look to technology that may exist at a later point to fix problems caused by underlying political, organizational and infrastructure issues. Always looking for the next band aid for the bullet hole I suppose.

As an example we can see what happened when New Orleans did that after Hurricane Katrina. Not only did Bell South take back donated resources to the rescue efforts, but they and several large telephone companies stepped up an aggressive lobby actions against the city during a time where focus should have been to save human lives and restore the infrastructure.

Same for GSM - if you are too high, too low, too far or in shadow from tower it just doesn't work properly. Holiday overload on the cell - goodbye internet.

Wireless is barely functioning as it is and more customers will just make it worse.

PS: also when something in the last mile is not working it is insane to debug it. Phone disconnects for some reason and that's it. Router is working but devices can't connect or auth. Some APs work and some aren't. My devices from same vendor and same model lineup can't even properly restart by themselves after power outage. I need to go and reboot them in order one by one each time. I hate wireless... :)

Still, the distribution grid is a natural monopoly, if somehow it became obsolete because everyone was producing energy at home it would become useless but still have the same characteristics that made it a monopoly.

It is speculated that much of the lobbying that occurs is by the influential people in an unregistered capacity and it's known as "shadow lobbying".

What perseusprime11 is pointing out is that the typical house will consume much more broadband in a few years than it does now, not just the houses with carefully chosen stories.

The government should lay fiber to every home and business, then sell access to that fiber at cost. Let ISPs setup equipment racks at a local POP and do the termination & CPE.

Now you can innovate by replacing the equipment at either end without digging a single trench.

Fierce competition made sense in the 90's and 00's when all the last mile technologies were duking it out. Now we know that DSL and Coax cable don't have a future. It'll be either wireless or fiber, and you just can't go wrong with fiber.

10 years ago, how many static web pages had several megabytes of JavaScript just to render three paragraphs of text?

:)

It's really funny because they offer gigabit speed internet but it's cap is lower than the 100Mbit. So you get faster transfer speeds but less actual data.

Also our city (which is relatively small in the 200k range) has two competing cable providers installing fiber for gigabit internet across the city. This doesn't seem uncommon and I'd call that a total replacement.

Netflix/youtube streams are still garbage in image quality with huge amount of compression artifacts.

But 4K per eye prototypes exist, and will almost certainly be at CES next year. And will ship, maybe next year, maybe the year after. That's 4-ish people on gigabit? Hmm. Doesn't that seems a little bit tight to be confident that "gigabit should have decent lifespan"?

Of course this has the same fundamental issues as all economic modeling when employed in practice.

"Free market capitalism" is a not particularly coherent utopian aspirational vision which defenders of real-world crony capitalism invented as a distraction.

Piketty's "Capital in the 21th century" can serve as a source on how wealth has been getting concentrated in the real world (interrupted by WW2 which spread it out again). He also argues well for why this is an intrinsic feature of our economies.

You may oppose him and say "that was just because the market isn't free enough", but it is an extraordinary claim and I would say the burden of actual proof is on you then.

The basic problem is this: no matter how good your system, it's not going to be used solely by angels, but by a distribution of people. A few of those will be very ethical and unselfish and operate completely within the rules and the spirit of the system. A few others will be total assholes and just exploit every weakness they can find to advance their own interests, regardless of the damage inflicted on others. And a lot of people in the middle will just go in the same direction as everyone else - when there are more good people around they'll conduct themselves ethically, when there are more bad people around they'll help themselves. But the middle group is generally passive and doesn't make any particular effort to either support or subvert the system within which they find themselves.

So in the context of capitalism you'll have some very high-minded entrepreneurial people and some corrupt cronyist types, in the context of socialism you'll have some very selfless individuals and some authoritarian thugs, in a religious context you'll have some saintly types and some hypocrites who prey on the naive and use fear of divine retribution to silence their victims, and so on.

When we design or experiment with social technologies, we have to be on our guard against two extremely risky assumptions: one, that our proposed system would work great if only everyone adopted it, and two, that our proposed system will be used by people like ourselves who share our basic assumptions about right and wrong.

In sum, you're right to point to cronyism but you're wrong to ignore cronyism given the fact of its widespread popularity. there are bad as well as good people int he world, and so we should consider what the possible negative outcomes of our technology would be if such people gained control of it.

Rather than linking you to a particular source of information, there are plenty of good sources here on this 'cronyism': https://www.reddit.com/r/socialism/search?q=crony&restrict_s...

Also, capitalism without government intervention is still as flawed because it is capitalism.

And either way, wealth accumulation is a feature of capitalism, 'crony' or not. So is wage labour, the two-class society of the proletariat and bourgeois, maximising exchange value over use value and the biggest teller of them all, private ownership of the means of production.

Recommended reading is Marx's 'Wage Labour and Capital', and I'm making my way through 'The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists' by Robert Tressell if you want to get to the nitty gritty of what Capitalism was like and how it still persists in its exploitative global form.

I mean I don't give a nickle about wall street, but I understand that the collapse of wall street would have been totally devastating to the global economy.

Compartmentalization is key for the financial industry.

If there aren't any community banks, it's pretty hard to choose them. Dodd-Frank, according to many -- including Barney Frank, the "Frank" in Dodd-Frank -- had a number of unintended consequences, the largest of which was the compliance cost, which smaller banks couldn't manage.

The result of burdensome compliance, more often than not, was consolidation; couple that with the too-low threshold for what counts as 'too big' and the end result was that most community banks were too small to succeed - where we once had 18,000 main street banks in America as of 1985, we currently have fewer than 2,000.

I feel like this is cyclical.

You start out with a bunch of smaller companies that compete and consumers tend to win with the advantages you listed. Over time, some get bigger, the smaller ones eventually either go under, or get absorbed by the larger, growing companies until you end up with either one or two really large companies that then become essentially monopolies.

A prefect example is here in the Midwest when they deregulated US West Communications - now Qwest Telecom. There was a huge explosion of CLECS getting into the game, leasing lines from Qwest and essentially competing with Qwest using its own infrastructure (which seemed weird to me).

Consumers won (in the short term) because these new companies were taking all the risks. How much above cost the CLEC's were willing to risk either made them or broke them. It was a gold rush to see who would have the thinnest margin and try and lock down the most customers they could and get them to switch.

I have many, many stories from those days, but in the end you know what happened? Most of those companies went under, a few survived and merged with other companies and are still around, and most of the people who wanted more choice and lower costs eventually went back to Qwest anyways after having poor billing experiences, poor installation, and poor customer service. People think all you need to do is have more competition and it will solve everything - but that's just the beginning.

terms and conditions apply, all other internet traffic is at speeds of up to 1mb/s"

It is far fetched sure, but I honestly wouldn't put it past some ISPs to attempt something super lame like this.

because you're trying to view it through the lens of "rational, beneficial policies that are supported by a democratic majority" whereas our current system is "niche issues of low utility but high tribal divisiveness used to distract the democratic majority while we secretly empower monopolist corporations"

If everyone you talk to agrees with your particular political ideology which doesn't match well with either of the major parties, then you have an extraordinarily strong and narrow filter bubble, which you'll need to get out of if you want to achieve any of the goals of that ideology.

Does not compute. Mutually exclusive desires. Unchecked gun ownership leads to loss of life at a shocking scale.

edit: i see downvotes, but I don't see counterarguments. Parent post says "everyone I talk to agrees", if nothing else I'm trying to point out that while it may seem like common sense to you, others will see other things as common sense.

Note that choice of voting systems don't matter so much if you only have one representative per electorate.

Canada uses the shitty FPTP system and while at the federal level it's mostly been two parties, several other parties have held significant clout over the last century. It's not impossible for it to work, it's just difficult. At the provincial level you see a lot more variety because they don't need to appeal country-wide, they can focus on local issues (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parti_Québécois, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildrose_Party)

Sadly electoral reform here has recently been put on hold much to the frustration of many as it was an election platform issue.

I'm sure part of the problem with reform is there's too many options and some of them are so dizzyingly complicated to explain that most people prefer the "simple but busted" FPTP method to something more mysterious and formula-based.

In fact I might go as far to say that corporatism is the natural state of the world. The wealthy and powerful will always use their influence to gain even more wealth and power. It is a state that we must constantly fight against regardless of whether we call ourselves anything from libertarian to socialist.

And then, when the state government can't stand up to them, we could use the federal government to do so!

If only someone suggested doing that in the first place.

He declined.

Disclaimer: I went to school/am friends with him. I'm a software engineer and he's also a better coder than me and he still gives me shit for using an IDE rather than emacs =P

I don't think the average person spends much time thinking about politics. I think most may see some stuff online or on TV but are largely locked into their beliefs. You probably have +1 std. dev. who "pays attention" to politics as a bit of a hobby and +2 std. dev who make it one of their top priorities. That still leaves a lot of people who care far less than the average person does.

If you want to effect change in Washington, you either have to make people care more or find a candidate who people who don't care will still rally behind. I think both Trump and Obama fit that bill well but for much different reasons.

edit:

I wonder how it would play if during a debate, a candidate really drilled down into how the incumbent's policies negatively affected people in small ways they may not realize. This net neutrality thing may be one of them. "Your cable provider won't let you stream Netflix at full quality? That's Trump's fault".

b) I don't want to sidetrack too much from your own sidetrack, but there's a great deal of literature on the theory of public goods, why they don't actually exist, and why government isn't needed to create or manage them. Even if you want to argue that this isn't the case, I'm not sure how the internet would definitely be one.

c) You're free to make an argument that you like things like the roads and water system. But do you really love them? Yeah, the freeway system kind of works, sure. The water system kind of works, sure. But it's not really flourishing, there's no market pricing on these things that truly eliminates waste (how many roads actually need to be built? Is overproduction of roads crowding more efficient means of travel like rail out of the market?), and innovation in these fields moves at a snails pace.

No they do not. Yet, this is due to government regulation. If you'd like to read about the historical development of cable regulation this article provides a decent summary: http://www.uclalawreview.org/cracking-the-cable-conundrum-go...

For Internet, yes. My phone is pulling over ten megabits.

I'm not sure if there's a lot of correlating data but the Trump core supporter group does seem to be older (50+) and not always the first to adopt any new technology. They read newspapers, they watch TV news, they use Facebook, they have wired home phones, basically things that the FCC won't really alter.

What removing Network Neutrality does is destroy the next generation of services, something that they have no vested interest in.

It's almost as if they'd gladly pay $50/mo. in cable/telephone fees if their taxes went down by $200/mo. The thing is, that $50/mo. increase really squeezes out those in the lower income brackets or those on fixed incomes. They don't pay a lot of tax to see any offsets.

But fuck them, right?

> Hillary believes that the government has an obligation to protect the open internet. The open internet is not only essential for consumer choice and civic empowerment – it is a cornerstone of start-up innovation and creative disruption in technology markets. Hillary strongly supports the FCC decision under the Obama Administration to adopt strong network neutrality rules that deemed internet service providers to be common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. These rules now ban broadband discrimination, prohibit pay-for-play favoritism, and establish oversight of “interconnection” relationships between providers. Hillary would defend these rules in court and continue to enforce them. She also maintains her opposition to policies that unnecessarily restrict the free flow of data online –such as the high profile fight over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

Google is offering service in limited areas of 8 cities and have put on hold any future expansion. That is not comparative to the rest of the country and shouldn't be used as an example of competition. The country has no real competition for internet service providers.

Fortunately, the speed's good enough and I'm happy with their service otherwise.

this leads to extreme service reduction and price gouging of consumers, as all the costs of paid prioritization that the backbone imposes on the local ISP get passed right through to the end user.

this is particularly problematic for mobile internet access too, since the mobile data provider is often owned by the same parent company as a large backbone company.

>Congressional Democrats and Republicans offered widespread agreement Wednesday that the time has finally come for the government to step in and take action to preserve net neutrality. Then again, they disagreed strongly on the shape that protection should take.

I have yet to see party-based Republican support for solid net-neutrality proposals. I have seen some proposals using the name "net neutrality" that in fact undermined it deeply.

If you give me some examples of this "my way or the highway" that's something I can push back on my congress people with.

It matters who we vote for, "the people" don't lose equally no matter who is in office. This "all politicians are bad" thing comes up frequently when criticizing them, but it's simply not true that all politicians are equal, and it's not an excuse fro their bad behavior. The difference between the Pai and Wheeler are clear and stark. And that's not to say that Pai is innately evil, he still could do some good for the internet, and some of the things he says I agree with. Wheeler was intensely criticized as a shill for cable companies when he entered, however he turned out not to be one in the least. Was it our criticism that had an effect? Who knows, but by calling him out as a former lobbyist, people were at least aware of what was going on.

Perhaps if we publicly shame Pai for his bad behavior we'll see the same thing. Let's forget whether we are a D or an R, lets focus on the policies. That's what non-partisanship is.

But if you remember Obama took over a severely damaged economy, one that many people at the time thought was on the verge of collapsing. There's nothing flashy about stabilizing an economy, there's no single policy or action he took that you could really point and say "that saved the economy". But he took a lot of actions, including controversial ones like bailing out the auto industry, which in hindsight may be part of the reason we didn't fall into another depression.

I think when we look back at Obama a lot of people feel like he didn't do much since at the end of his term we'd basically returned to the same status quo (tho it should be noted that the status quo is a lot more beneficial for some than others). The only real lasting difference we can point to is Obamacare, and obviously that doesn't look great. But when you look at what he might have potentially saved us from, you have to give him some credit in those first two years. Certainly the republicans are going to dismantle the Frank-Dodd legislature, but they did that in his first 2 years as a response to the banking crisis in order to stop it from happening again.

Just something to think about.

That's not what political conservatism has ever meant.