Keep the Internet Open
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
While all their CEOs will make faint noises in favor of Net Neutrality, SV outspends Wall Street 2:1 on lobbying[1], the goal of which is to cement monopoly status, not to make the world a better place. Most of it goes to Republicans.
Things have changed fast; Google's lobbying spend has increased by over 50% since the SOPA blackout.
The technology industry serves the interests of capital/share-holders, not technologists.
[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/outspendi...
EDIT: "Google hardly even had lobbyists back during the SOPA blackout." > "Google's lobbying spend has increased by over 50% since the SOPA blackout." h/t DannyBee below.
Google for ex - https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623
Microsoft also almost 2x to dems - https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000115&l...
Note that I'm talking about money from companies (most to Republicans) not the individuals that work for them (most to Democrats).
Labor unions are corporations, and corporations will fight for the corporation's interests. Those interests may align with the interests of their shareholders, but they may not always.
It wouldn't be good for Google, but this seems as likely as an ISP beating SpaceX to the moon. It's hard enough to get an ISP to provide internet service most of the time.
Demand for Youtube and FB are so high and ubiquitous that pretty much any ISP will immediately cave in.
Comcast is the most disliked company in the USA. Guess what happens when G runs a banner under each search or Youtube video mentioning that performance is bad because Comcast is blocking things, here's Brian Roberts's phone number?
Nothing because consumers typically have a choice of 1 or maybe 2 ISPs? You said it yourself, Comcast is already the most disliked company in the US - they'd have nothing to lose by blocking YouTube - or worse, making it so slow that Google begins to lose viewership.
It's really clear. Democrats: This is the customer's information. Republicans: This is the ISP's equipment, and therefore anything on it is fair game for the equipment owner to use however they want, deny service to whoever they want, for any reason they want.
So distilled down what you end up with is a classist system where privacy in infrastructure isn't a right, it's something you pay for: Rich people are better, they get more rights, because they can afford to buy those rights.
They do on the FCC, for the whole time since net neutrality and internet privacy have become an issue. Congress is a little fuzzier but mostly along the same lines.
In the electorate it might be blurrier, but clearly the distribution of views of the relevant politicians shows that the people who cross lines on the above description and who prioritize the issue when it comes to voting aren't that numerous.
Not sure what you mean by that, you mean the breakdown of Republicans vs Democrats at the FCC?
Ajit Pai opposes any sort of regulation that prescribes or proscribes specific activity under Title II, and Republicans in Congress likewise prefer ISP regulation under the far weaker rules in Title I, rather than Title II. And he opposes subsidies favored by the Connect America Fund in reducing the disparity in broadband performance between urban and rural areas, and also the Lifeline program which makes it more affordable. Last year Lifeline was expanded, and Pai becomes chairman and blocks it as one off his first acts. These are night and day differences. It's fairly binary.
It's forcing free market ponies on what is a deeply monopolistic and anti-competitive market. Anytime there's meaningful competition you see conglomeration or market exit. It's absolutely a philosophy of "if you can't afford access or performance, the free market says go F yourself, and we aren't going to regulate an alternative outcome to that".
Except that the tone of your post implies:
Republicans="evil rich people" Democrats="good folks looking out for the average Joe"
I don't believe it is anywhere near that simple. It was not at all clear to me that your original post was referring to FCC regulators alone. It would have been better if that would have been explicitly stated at the outset.
Unequivocally today's Republicans are heavily weighted, not exclusive, toward classism. It is a good and proper thing that there are rich, middle, and poor. People are different, egalitarianism is P.C. nonsense, and the classes should be preserved. People aren't equal. Better people have more wealth, wealth gives them goods and services like privacy, and even better justice because they can afford better lawyers. There are very few true rights, in this neo-feudal ideology. That is what explains the policies, including that of the new FCC.
Evil? No. I don't believe in anything supernatural. And far be it from me to imply anything. I see this as objective fact. Tone isn't required.
This isn't the Republican party of the 1920's or even the 1950's where we had massive subsidies for certain kinds of public infrastructure associated with having a civil society: telephone service was subsidized, obviously roads heavily subsidized, and the postal service was subsidized in these rural areas. There was simply no other way to level the playing field. They, and Democrats, built massive amounts of infrastructure.
And like any aristocracy, Republican policies will favor established players. Netflix is now a player, and they are paying for better access. Now, this game only gets enhanced, which will act as a barrier to entry to future competitors. It's bad for free market folks, and it's bad for fair minded civil society folks, because it isn't either of those things. This is finders keepers, losers weepers. It's a party largely about classism.
And Democrats largely provide the veneer of opposition, but really that's specious. But like any crotchety old man with poor hearing, sometimes they get the message and we're not all just left eating cake.
The problem is the Democrats do the same thing just on different issues.
Republicans are in the pocket of oil companies, ISPs, agribusiness and defense contractors. Democrats are in the pocket of Hollywood, lawyers, HMOs, public sector unions and, let's face it, tech companies. They're both in the pocket of Wall St.
The idea that one of them is overall worse rather than worse for a specific industry is belied by the fact that they each get ~50% of the votes.
The problem is sometimes, like with Network Neutrality, there are objectively worse and objectively better overall alternatives, but those alternatives line up across party lines. So when the Republicans get in they try to destroy network neutrality and when the Democrats get in they try to pass SOPA and negotiate the TPP.
The key is to recognize that candidates matter more than parties. Zoe Lofgren and Diane Feinstein are both California Democrats, but what a difference.
There is a bill in Congress now to strip away the rules the FCC passed last year that prevent ISPs from selling your browsing history and other personal information without your permission.
In the House, here is the list of sponsors:
Rep. Flores, Bill [R-TX-17], Rep. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN-7], Rep. Olson, Pete [R-TX-22], Rep. Lance, Leonard [R-NJ-7], Rep. Scalise, Steve [R-LA-1], Rep. Latta, Robert E. [R-OH-5], Rep. Guthrie, Brett [R-KY-2], Rep. Kinzinger, Adam [R-IL-16], Rep. Johnson, Bill [R-OH-6], Rep. Long, Billy [R-MO-7], Rep. Brooks, Susan W. [R-IN-5], Rep. Walters, Mimi [R-CA-45], Rep. Cramer, Kevin [R-ND-At Large], Rep. Collins, Chris [R-NY-27], Rep. Costello, Ryan A. [R-PA-6], Rep. Bilirakis, Gus M. [R-FL-12], Rep. Shimkus, John [R-IL-15].
In the Senate, here is the list of sponsors:
John Barrasso (R-WY.), Jeff Flake (R-AZ.), Roy Blunt (R-MO.), John Boozman (R-AR.), Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV.), Thad Cochran (R-MS), John Cornyn (R-TX), Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Deb Fischer (R-NE), Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Dean Heller (R-NV), James Inhofe (R-OK), Ron Johnson (R-WI), Mike Lee (R-UT), Rand Paul (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Richard Shelby (R-AL), Dan Sullivan (R-AK), John Thune (R-SD), Roger Wicker (R-MS), Jerry Moran (R-KS).
Note that all 17 sponsoring Representatives and all 24 sponsoring Senators are Republican.
If it weren't, they'd have halled in Steve King from Iowa into the House an expelled him for what he said over the weekend. People are Americans because of shared values, not this illiberal bloodline nonsense espoused by King and the ignorant redneck wing, or the inheritance and primogeniture wing. They smiled and said nothing over birtherism either, they took the wins.
By your logic, the FCC should regulate a conversation two people were having in person just by virtue of them being on public land. Yet the FCC does not. The FCC also does not regulate the signs on the sides of buildings, even though light is reflected from them to public airspace.
1. They also have been given the power to provide censorship of public spectrums as well because some idiots deemed swear words to be scary.
It's the exact same situation with net neutrality. If an ISP decides to give traffic from some hosts higher priority than my traffic, then that other traffic is interfering with my communications in the exact same way as an antenna that transmits a 50 GW signal on nearly all frequencies.
> By your logic, the FCC should regulate a conversation two people were having in person just by virtue of them being on public land. Yet the FCC does not. The FCC also does not regulate the signs on the sides of buildings, even though light is reflected from them to public airspace.
It's not that the government must regulate everything that happens in the public sphere. The government should regulate things if it's for the good of everyone (or most everyone), and if those things happen in the public sphere, then it has legitimacy to do it.
So, to address your examples, the FCC should regulate that conversation if those people are so loud that no one else in the city can speak, and it should regulate a sign on the side of a building if it emits such intense light that things in its path catch fire.
You're paying the ISP to carry your traffic under the conditions in your private agreement with them. When someone spews radio frequencies, you don't have a private agreement with them that permits them to do so. If radio frequency interference was opt-in only, the FCC wouldn't need to exist.
Due to the regulatory moat that the Carriers have built up over the years (including spectrum rights) it's at least a 10 year battle to loosen their stranglehold at all, and that becomes a fascinating war if indeed content can be prioritized. Such a battle would be not unlike battles of the past, but at a larger scale.
Do you remember what it was like to load apps onto phones before the iPhone broke the carrier app lock?
The size of those transit and/or internal networks is really not at issue here. In discussions about vertical integration and monopoly power, what matters is the last mile - of which they have almost zero.
Demand for Youtube and FB are so high and ubiquitous that
pretty much any ISP will immediately cave in.
I utterly fucking loathe Comcast, and yet they get thousands of my dollars because of an unspoken of oligopoly among ISPs that has grown out of the tacit agreement to not enter in to each others fiefs.
Now, I'm in Cincinnati and have excellent fiber service from Cincinnati Bell, so it's possible to have good quality from the incumbent carrier.
I've used Sonic many different times throughout SF and while their support guys have been great, any and all problems I've had were usually a result of the copper. And AT&T couldn't care less.
Currently I have 50Mbps FTTN service from Sonic and it's rock solid. It's never been down in the few years I've had it. It does, however, still use AT&T infrastructure. But this is the only time I've used Sonic over AT&T and been pretty happy with it.
Oh how I've pleaded with them to bring fiber here. I remember when they announced that Berkeley was on the shortlist about 5 years ago.
TLDR: I hedged the possibility of oligopolistic/monopolistic pricing practices of a company that I cannot avoid by assuming that such predatory pricing practices will benefit their stockholders.
Their standard rates in my area have doubled since I bought the stock. The stock price has tripled. I wish this experiment had ended differently, with me realizing that Comcast wasn't so bad after all, and selling the stock at cost.
1: https://medium.com/@nicklum/how-my-hatred-of-comcast-drove-m...
The ISP filters the banner before it reaches the customer, and replaces it with their own message (or just advertising from someone who has paid the ISP.)
I suspect there are already niche ISPs out there that cater to the content-blocking impulses of certain customers by doing deep-packet inspection and firewalling at the gateway.
Unfortunately I don't think this is totally true, e.g. in many places in the USA (even large cities and tech hubs), consumers only have one ISP option fast enough to stream YouTube.
They can pay. Start-ups, hobbyists, and non-profits can't.
* Local municipalities own the last mile, making ISP competition have less of a natural monopoly.
* Cities add regulations that don't require universal coverage which results in more competition over profitable locations. Poor or underserved areas could be subsidized in other ways if that was the goal.
* ISPs charges a toll to all the big companies, which makes installing lines more profitable, which increases competition and results in faster more available networks overall.
Net neutrality might be the best option on the balance, but talking about the alternatives as though there isn't a whole wide world full of ISPs that have different regulatory structures and different incentives is just silly to me.
Do you know of academic/scholarly articles or books on this topic?
Net neutrality strikes me as a topic with a lot more scope for disagreement on both goals and policy than the hardcore pro net-neutrality crowd admits. It's somehow taken as an article of faith that a non-market solution would be best, even as we're living in a time with more last-mile competition than ever before (due to wireless).
Further, I don't see the Internet as a "public good". RF spectrum is a public good; it exists in a purely physical sense, and can be used by anyone, any time, anywhere. Internet infrastructure takes massive capital investment over many years, as well as ongoing expensive maintenance, and there's no reason someone shouldn't earn a reasonable rate of return on that invested capital.
It's not taken as an article of faith: we have decades of evidence showing what private players do. It's always same stuff that hurts consumers. They get as much territory as possible. They ensure through cut-throat competition, consolidation, and lobbying that there's little competition. Then they keep speed, innovation, and customer service as low as they can with prices as high as the market will sustain. This goes back to MA Bell.
Then, some pro-consumer regulations and billions in broadband subsidies made things better for a time. They also started upping their speed in areas where utilities or Google deployed high speed. As in, they could do it whole time but all big players chose to gouge customers instead. Obviously, one scheme works and one doesnt.
And there is a whole world of working ISP models - which America specifically chooses to ignore and instead follows it's usual free market/competitive religion.
Your ISPs are playing your country like a fiddle. I have personally taken notes and look for firms making the same moves as them as it is an excellent signal of market weakness and, political backing and weak regulators.
I mean, your guys hid post codes in bids for territory during auctions, so that they wouldn't have to compete.
American ISPs are in the business of making money with the least amount of outlay. Buy telecom stock, because looking at the disarray even places like HN, is clear who is going to be winning.
By the by - google/tech firms- will never buy an ISP, they aren't interested in a single business in America which is not their core competency. Instead ~~they will let NN fall,~~ edit: it is in their interest to, collude/pay ISPs their price and use their deeper moats to purchase other firms or services at even better prices than they can afford now.
> * Cities add regulations that don't require universal coverage which results in more competition over profitable locations. Poor or underserved areas could be subsidized in other ways if that was the goal.
The problem with these solutions isn't that they can't work, it's that they take time to implement. So first you have to do it, and then we can revisit network neutrality after you're done and there is actually vigorous competition. Doing it the other way around doesn't work, not least because it's all too easy to claim you're going to do something to create competition and then not actually do it well or at all.
> * ISPs charges a toll to all the big companies, which makes installing lines more profitable, which increases competition and results in faster more available networks overall.
That would never actually happen. It doesn't matter how profitable an ISP is, you haven't done anything to address the natural monopoly, which means that as soon as there is any real competition all the margins disappear. The second competitor knows that ahead of time and doesn't bother to make the investment, so the market remains a monopoly but now there are monopoly tolls.
Errr, the DC office had 100+ people at that point, so ....
(IE i'm not sure why you think that, and given it's completely wrong, i'm going to go with 'you just have no idea what you are talking about')
In any case, i was second person to start in the DC office (after the policy director), so i can assure you i know precisely how many people it had at working on government affairs/lobbying/etc at a given point in time :)
The leaders of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc are NOT Republicans. Most of them are pro-immigration, pro-abortion, and pro-gay marriage.
It's like the folks who work extremely hard at amateur sports. They're not going to be content with placing in the top 100. "Welp, I made the top 100. What a ride. Alright, I'm good. I'll keep cycling, but I'm not going to be training as hard anymore." They're looking at what they need to do to get into the top 50.
Why does Paul Graham do what he does? He didn't even need to start Y Combinator. After Y Combinator had a bunch of success, he could have retired then, too. He's still plugging away. I assume he gets fulfillment from winning in a competitive marketplace, because he could, at any point, say, "Wait, why am I bothering with this? I'm rich!"
The fact that he's still working is an indicator that for some people, work and business is just as fulfilling as, say, backpacking and weightlifting is for me.
Zero rating as it gets implemented by comcast, for instance, is much more sinister.
Either way, they get to take us for a ride.
One thing I also find interesting:
The new FCC chairman is all about de-regulating. Yet, the one thing he is not advocating is de-regulating open access rules to public utility infrastructure, IE, as this wired article explains: https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju...
"The ‘open access’ term gets thrown around a lot as code for creating artificial competition among resellers of a monopoly service at government-controlled rates. There’s no better way to kill incentives for building out or upgrading new networks.
But ‘open access’ really means promoting easy, inexpensive and open access to publicly owned rights-of-way"
The FCC has the power to petition congress for the authority (and there are some legal experts who think the FCC already has the power to dictate this see here: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-11-50A1.pd... also see the Telecommunications Act of 1996).
I have seen NO movement toward increasing competition by stripping away unreasonable local regulations on rights of way access by Ajit Pai. He not once ever proposed this, and nor since taking FCC chain, made it an agenda item to do just this. This would increase competition astronomically if the right of way access situation was to be sorted out and streamlined, for open access and implementing firm open access rules (like 30 day auto approvals for projects if the objecting party does not respond before that).
Though one might say, upon reading the telecom act of 1996 and say "Hey! it was suppose to give the authority!" well, it had one important caveat
However, the 1996 Act permits utilities to deny access where there is insufficient capacity and for reasons of safety, reliability or generally applicable engineering purposes
This gets abused, frankly, and the appeals process is rather non-existant and fighting it is very drawn out (companies sue each other over this clause all the time).
If he wants real competition, this would go a long way in doing the right thing.
> I have seen NO movement toward increasing competition by stripping away unreasonable local regulations on rights of way access by Ajit Pai. He not once ever proposed this, and nor since taking FCC chain, made it an agenda item to do just this.
Is that more of a local or FCC issue? I do agree he should do somthing to make it easier for people to create alternative ISPs instead of 2 to 3 choices per area like it is now.
1) as previous stated, they may already have this authority per the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which may already give the FCC the power to dictate right of way access terms
2) If that isn't upheld as legal opinion by the courts, Ajit Pai could petition heavily congress in the name of competition and stripping out harmful local regulation that is stifling businesses from being able to compete. Congress could give the FCC this authority.
Yet, he agitates to make no such move. Its a republican controlled congress. This is a net win for de-regulation (since it simplifies this process into a standard, and done right, would make everything more efficient), its pro business AND consumer, since barrier to entry drops significantly.
Yet, the one thing that de-regulation could accomplish, and I feel relatively easily, he does NOT do.
I don't think he actually wants competition. He wants to let existing ISPs lock in their customers and regions. All the actual actions he's taken thus far, do just that.
the other thing he could do is declare ALL FCC franchise rules null and void. (for those unfamiliar, this gives a great run down of the current structure of FCC franchises around broadband https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-06-180A1.p...)
Trying to sway people who already agree with you with is a waste of time and money. Of course most of the money and lobbying effort goes towards convincing people on the 'other side'.
This is an important perspective. Recommend sharing this insight with the article author to consider appending to their original article.
1) While I dislike monopoly carrier antics, I'm even more unhappy about the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs. If you build a network with caches/content servers close to users, and expensive backhaul back to your network core, you can offer essentially unlimited traffic to users hitting the cache, and still provide more limited access to other stuff. I'd prefer high bandwidth everywhere, but that isn't always an option. It should be a market decision, not a national government decision.
2) The real problems with lack of NN are due to lack of competition in the access provider market. Focus on fixing that. A lot of this is due to local governments requiring providers cover entire markets to cover any of a market -- if someone wants to build another WebPass or CondoInternet and only serve high-density developments, that's great! Trenching fiber to single family homes is marginal anyway, but if you have low take-up in a neighborhood it is even worse. If you are going to push for regulation, have it be regulation to empower actual competition in the network access market.
3) Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for video services.
The FCC and states should do something to help foster more competition and lowing the barrier to entry.
http://www.recode.net/2016/2/26/11588286/google-fiber-swings...
I have to admit I read that and I completely discount the rest of your comment. Nobody who actually believes in even the concept of sensible government regulation uses phrasing like this. I'm surprised you didn't call out "three letter agencies" too.
And besides that I believe you're just trying to fool people too stupid to know what NN is when you say net neutrality "dictates network engineering standards". I don't think your comment is intellectually honest at all.
If we generously assume the latter, it's important for you to know that the sort of thinking that let Trump win the white house is echoed in your entire comment. Congratulations!
I've got to run, but in the meantime, perhaps you can educate yourself on some of the potential shortcomings associated with regulating the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality#Reduction_in_in...
Edit: Oh look! Downvotes for observations. What an amazing display of irony.
I wonder if this breakdown is at least in part between populations in the USA and everyone else.
I've sat down with some pro-nn folks, honestly trying to understand how they reconcile the two, and have not made much progress.
Are you suggesting that all government regulation is a violation of user privacy? (If so, I would suggest you share a different definition of privacy to most people)
Does the solve the cognitive dissonance issue for you?
Supporters of Open Internet regulation do not want the government "regulating the entire internet".
The core idea is only fairness: e.g. Comcast can't throttle or charge for connectivity based on your perceived ability to pay and their in-house service shouldn't get separate pricing.
Similarly, zero-rating isn't usually considered a network neutrality problem as long as the option is open to everyone at the same pricing. It becomes anticompetitive if e.g. you're quoted twice what Comcast charges the company they have an interest in.
That's still extremely anti-competitive. Incumbents are in an much better position to pay large sums of money to have relatively minor services stream for free. People will flock to those services and a small competitor will have no viable option of paying for the fees and remaining profitable.
You might counter that with "get funding!" But I think the internet is amazing because of it's low barrier to entry. Blocking that might not prevent "disruption" from startups, but it sure as hell will prevent many people from casually trying things.
I do agree that there's a public-good aspect to supporting Internet access but I think that's an even greater change to the current market, at least where most users are on wireless.
If NN were structured such that a company like Netflix had to provide content servers for internal-to-network deployment or netflix customers would higher rate or lower performance for Netflix traffic, but Comcast had to charge the same rate and same standards for Netflix, Comcast's own video product, or any other third party to do this, I'd support it.
I don't particularly value the ability of a carrier to engage in bundling/commercial exploitation of the monopoly, but I do want providers free to engage in technical innovation to provide multiple 4K streams and gigabit access to customers at $50/mo, etc.
This is an even bigger deal when you start looking at other network technologies (wireless/cellular, some of the WISPs, etc.) than fiber to the home or HFC.
Competition > Regulated Monopoly > Unregulated Monopoly. (A duopoly which decides not to compete isn't really competition.)
I think the regulated monopoly model makes the most sense for the last mile connection: make it like what we had with DSL where anyone can rent the wire and competition happens at the service level. I wouldn't mind Verizon offering a ton of bundled services over FIOS if I could simply buy only internet from someone else.
Fiber to the Home is an extremely marginal economic proposition today. It's not deployed today. Without strong economic drivers for it, it won't get built.
I'd accept that once FTTH exists (bringing fiber back to a neighborhood point), that might be good enough to not require more competition at that level (as long as maintenance can be done.) I'd in principle be fine with any solution to get that built -- a regulated monopoly, direct government buildout, whatever.
Also, not sure you've looked at FTTH recently enough: Verizon alone has 32 million customers according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_in_the...
I think as long as we are talking about the hardware infrastructure, (2) is a fundamental problem that cannot be fixed by adding competition, because it shares some common features with utilities like water, electricity, etc (making me believe internet access ought to be treated more like a utility). Maybe a better solution is a national commitment to fund and build quality internet access infrastrcture for the entire country, then encourage competition among what flows over those wires. (Disclaimer: not an economist and do not have expertise on this subject.)
It should be possible for me to build some kind of public network, somewhere, for some purpose ... and dictate bits/traffic any way I see fit.
Now maybe I can't do that with CATV because common carrier.
And maybe I can't do that with public spectrum because public resources.
But there should be some way I can do that. Net neutrality extremism suggests that there should not be any way I can do that.
I doubt I'm the only one.
I recommend picking a better argument than CP to defend net neutrality.
You either follow net neutrality or you can try and get along without common carrier protections.
We figured this out with the telephone company many decades ago, and the principle hasn't changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicati...
47 USC §230(c)(1) provides that "[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" and then (c)(2) immediately says that "[n]o provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of [...] any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected [...]".
Edit: to be precise, the content immunity in §230 isn't a generic common-carrier immunity; if you read the introductory text, it's a very Internet-specific immunity for "interactive computer services" such as Internet services!
The issue is ISPs, who by definition are supposed to provide Internet access. Throttling and filtering for profit are not compatible with the Internet as we know it.
No, I should have been more clear - I mean an Internet connected network that is open to the (paying, presumably) public.
Again, we know lots of ways you can't do that because of common carrier laws and public rights of way ... and even human decency ... but if I conjure the thing up out of thin air and there's nobody twisting your arm, I should be able to run that thing.
And then throttle your speeds to xyz.com in favor of abc.com.
Or whatever.
> No, I should have been more clear - I mean an Internet connected network that is open to the (paying, presumably) public.
Again, you couldn't advertise it as "internet access" because you're not giving people equal access to the internet.
> but if I conjure the thing up out of thin air and there's nobody twisting your arm, I should be able to run that thing.
The problem is if you're the only carrier in an area, or if the majority of carriers make this sort of decision. "You can just pick someone else" doesn't work if someone doesn't have another option.
I don't know the exact answer to where that line is, but I truly believe it needs to be much more strict than it is right now.
There are some interesting ways to increase competition, including: 1) New access methods (WISPs, etc.) 2) Letting providers pick types of customers (multi-tenant buildings, for instance) 3) Dropping universal coverage requirements at some level of granularity -- maybe a provider only serves new neighborhoods, or some smaller lot size neighborhoods, or richer neighborhoods more likely to buy service. 4) Shared trenching/pole access, possibly in the form of bulk-running infrastructure a few times per year? 5) Shared physical infrastructure in some areas -- maybe local or single-purpose utility owned, like fiber in the ground going to neighborhood locations with Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory colo for provider equipment, or optical cross-connects?)
That's all well and good where competitive markets exist, but in many places, they simply don't.
Only 23% of American census blocks, for example, have more than 1 option for 25MBPS+ internet.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
In general, it solves the problem that underlies it all: unregulated private monopolies become anticompetitive.
If you force private monopolies to be fair, or end their monopoly, you have a nice solution.
So the NN side are the extremists. Not the side that wants to radically change the way the internet has worked for 40 years. Not the side that wants to upend the most innovative segment of the economy in favor of dinausour monoplies, radically reshaping the foundations of billions of dollars in investment and billions more in created wealth. Those guys are "conservative" right?
I've worked on the carrier side, on the last mile side and on the consumer side and I'm not a fan of most of the proposed legislation. We need to prevent anticompetitive practices, but thats about it.
The state should file antitrust charges and use the fines to erect new infrastructure that any ISP can lease, restoring competition.
Are you suggesting pro-NN people don't understand how it works? This is a strange summary of NN to me.
I know how the market works, NN is not new, it is how the world worked.
Anti NN is new. It's hugely anti competitive and anti consumer.
If it gets close to getting passed, I'll be really happy for the segment. Wouldn't be happy being a consumer.
Edit: IMO, the American telecom industry is shafting its consumers regularly and has been underinvesting for years. (Investing in regulatory capture is a lot more), there's many other nations with significantly better networks and speeds, and it's a joke stock for the rest of the world to see the country which created the internet writing the book on how to not enjoy it.
But yeah, if you don't believe me, feel free to look at a bunch of financial statements and lavish over as many models as you like. Check ARPU numbers or read up on the history of your own markets. In true finance fashion, do your diligence and reach your own conclusions.
It's a lot less morality based once you look at the numbers. It's just business.
To summarize your statement: "I am correct because I have read the data. Since you have not read the data, you should go read the data, because then, and only then, will you see that I am correct. Until then, just accept that I am correct."
I still reject your claims because you have not provided any meaningful measure of support for them.
If I knew the world was round, and you kept saying it was flat - why would I have any reason to do more than let you know it wasn't so?
Translation: I don't really have good arguments against NN except for a couple one-liners I'm reading off some Free Market (tm) blog, so I'll attack who you are instead of what you're saying.
Since I think bureaucrats are gonna bureaucrat, handing them power over anything is a terrible idea.
Are companies good? no, many of them are terrible.
But if enough people don't like a company, the company ceases to exist.
I've yet to see a similar mechanism work for changing something about a bureaucrat i don't like.
I.E. the same thing that causes you to distrust a company (human nature) plays out just the same with a government body. What is it about being a bureaucrat that fixes human nature?
If you violate some obscure statute, you can be fined. (At best.) If you don't pay the fine, the penalties can escalate until the local police or feds arrest you (at gunpoint, if you resist) and lock you in a box.
There's 180,000 pages in the federal register [0].
How is that "easy to ignore"?
I'll take "business that I can stop paying at any time" over "armed gunmen with the legal authority to arrest me" every time.
[0] https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/regulatory...
"Bureaucrats" are ultimately responsive to the politicians which are ultimately responsive to us, as we see with Trump now getting the power to reshape Obama's FCC policies. I'll tell you this, if they really go through with giving the web over to the ISPs for them to ruin with nickel and dime schemes voters will eventually force your new favorite bureaucrats to back down.
Also, bureaucrats are responsible to the organizations most influential to them. "The American People" can barely be motivated to vote in a presidential election, because they rightfully perceive that their votes don't matter, and a vote between two shitty options is a shitty vote.
So, businesses (like Comcast) can just earmark a few million dollars a year to keep buying whatever organization has the power to regulate them, and we (the people) can do nothing about it.
The reason I strongly dislike Net Neutrality is _because_ comcast is horrible and hated. It's reasonable to assume that as we speak, the comcast executive team is figuring out how to best wine and dine top FCC officials.
Because that's way cheaper than being a better company.
You are right that this is a big problem, however it is more an implementation flaw than a flaw of regulations. A more strict enforcement of information and financial transparency could address the bribery concerns.
There is another problem that is perpetual in the interaction of government and corporations, which is that the corporation lawyer has many times, 10x or 100x, the financial incentive to make the bureaucrat ineffective, than the bureaucrat himself has to be effective.
I would suggest a (difficult) solution that any governmental office or agency should have their success evaluated in terms of economic impact by something like a team of independent economists every year or two.
The agency's funding as well as staff compensation would then be derived from that, as a fixed percentage of the societal benefit. I have no idea of the exact numbers, but the point is to create the same motivational incentives as the corporations have.
One side is working for themselves and reap the significant benefits of their hard work. The other side is working for all of society and really should also reap the benefits of their hard work.
While we've set up a complex representative government to try and hold the people in power to account, that is still much more rigid and manipulable than the fluidity of a highly-competitive commercial market.
We need to focus on making the markets run well organically, not trying to make things happen by fiat.
Net neutrality is arguably part of that, but it's not the only, or even the major, part of it. The biggest part is finding some way to allow open competitive access to the in-the-ground infrastructure that runs modern telecoms. Net neutrality is a band-aid to cover up the fact that most Americans are beholden to a single ISP for data services. In a functioning marketplace, it wouldn't be necessary, because if $ISP_Y slowed down $Site_X, $ISP_Y's users would, in theory, move to $ISP_Z.
In reality, most consumers would probably happily accept a plan that allowed universal access at 5mbps and "turbo access" to some sites in exchange for a lower monthly fee. I understand that makes some people unhappy, but that doesn't mean we should deprive people of the freedom to make that tradeoff if they wish to do so.
This is completely untrue. I'll give an analogy: If enough people don't like a tyrannical government, does the tyrannical government cease to exist? No, it has all the power to keep people in line and also to make life just bearable enough so people tolerate it. Any sign of uprising or resistance will be squished in infancy.
The only way is if the situation becomes so unbearable for the people that there is a massive uprising/revolution, and even then the people are not guaranteed victory. Furthermore, suppose the tyrant is overthrown, without the institutions of democracy in place it's more likely than not that there will just be another tyrant in his place.
This is the law of the jungle, and it is not the best way to run a society. That is why we have laws, and that is why we need regulations for our corporations.
Edit to clarify: On second reading the above may sound to some like hysteria but any entity that has monopoly on a very expensive but vital infrastructure in a completely free and unregulated market, has all the power over its "customers". Hence the tyrannical government analogy.
Why? Government bureaucrats dictate aviation engineering standards to airplane manufacturers, automobile engineering standards to car manufacturers, radio engineering standards to electronics manufacturers, and so on. These are generally good things: they ensure that citizens can have a reasonable expectation of safety and that resources are shared fairly.
Even with better competition, the ISPs will still wield a tremendous amount of power - internet access is critical to modern, prosperous life, so demand will be quite inelastic regardless of what they do to consumers. Furthermore, lifting regulations that providers must service an entire market won't help the many consumers who are in single family homes. They'll be left to pay for the service of a monopoly (or a duopoly if they're lucky) who can now legally extort smaller content providers without the power and clout to negotiate better terms.
Fiber I lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, and no one's safety is impaired by prioritizing my on-network traffic over off-network traffic.
A more direct analogy is government regulation of something like how food tastes or how entertaining TV shows are.
There's some justification for regulating carriers who have an enforced monopoly in a region, but the problem is the monopolies are local government monopolies, and the regulation here would be national.
That's true, sort of. The fiber you lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, but the internet as a whole IS. Mediating my access to it without reasonable alternatives removes my stake in a shared resource.
> A more direct analogy is government regulation of something like how food tastes or how entertaining TV shows are.
I'm trying to interpret this charitably, but I must admit that my initial reaction is "that's absolutely ridiculous". This strikes me as a lurid, sensationalist comparison designed to appeal to anger rather than logic. If I am missing an obvious logical connection then I'd love to hear it.
If anything, I think a worst-case breakdown of net neutrality falls closer to having my personal choices regulated than government intervention does. It's not hard to imagine an example scenario where it is only profitable for my home to be serviced by an ISP which has political beliefs antithetical to mine. In such a case it would be perfectly legal for them to charge exorbitant rates to access this content, effectively controlling what I consume.
> There's some justification for regulating carriers who have an enforced monopoly in a region, but the problem is the monopolies are local government monopolies, and the regulation here would be national.
I think you're making this statement because of regulation requiring that providers service an entire market? I can't imagine how else to interpret the statement that "monopolies are local government monopolies", given that most people have a choice of one (two, if they're lucky) of {comcast, time warner, AT&T}. Simply lifting this regulation doesn't necessarily solve the problem - admittedly I'm speaking from a position of ignorance, but it strikes me as likely that there are many consumers to whom it isn't immensely profitable to provide service.
I couldn't easily think of a non-public-safety, non-shared resource regulation that exists. (because most of those things aren't regulated). If you can think of a better example, I'm fine with using that.
> local monopoly
Local monopolies are because local governments restrict who can trench or otherwise install in an area. I believe there are local/state/federal restrictions requiring universal access. If it weren't for these monopolies you'd at least have two crappy cable companies in a region vs. one, and there would be competition. (In my market, sometimes apartment complexes and others do monopoly agreements with one or the other of the local carriers -- Wave vs. Centurylink vs. Frontier (dying) vs. Comcast -- which is an issue too, but much more open to commercial pressure.)
There are some national policies which restrict the total number of providers in the US market, but mostly it is restrictions at the local level which keep individual locations from having multiple of those providers. There are some inherent natural monopoly aspects here -- trenching has costs, etc. -- but a lot of it is a consequence of government policies.
(I want there to be open access to high speed, inexpensive Internet (with as uniform speeds across sites as possible) in as many places as possible; my disagreement with extreme NN policies is that they both violate private property rights AND are not likely to produce the desired result.)
Comparisons between regulation of telephone service and internet service seem like the closest analog, and there are certainly examples of the former. Early telephone network providers were forced to peer by government regulation, for instance. An even more closely related example is the regulation that cell network providers may not charge extra fees for tethering; that's actually quite close to the net neutrality argument, where the cell network provider is being forced to act as a "dumb pipe" and accept traffic at the same cost regardless of the source (though admittedly they have metered usage billing, which I would be totally fine with from my ISP if that solves the problem). That we as a society accepted regulation in both of these cases is not a sufficient argument for why net neutrality is necessary, but it defeats the argument that such regulation is unprecedented.
I think we're in agreement about what we want, and the argument that net neutrality will fail to produce this is reasonable since we aren't currently in the goal state. My fear of anti net-neutrality legislation is based on the fact that what we have now, though not ideal, is acceptable, and it's quite plausible that things could become much worse rather than better unless this is addressed very, very thoughtfully. I'm open to the idea that net neutrality as it currently stands is unsustainable, but that needs to be paired with a clear explanation of how revoking it won't lead us to the nightmare scenario I've described above in which a small monopoly of providers serve as unelected gatekeepers. As I mentioned earlier, if the answer is metered billing where the high costs of the long tail are amortized by the low costs of popular content, then that seems perfectly appropriate. You also gave an example in a sibling comment about net neutrality only being waived when consumers had access to a certain number of providers.
I disagree, and you are trivializing serious issues that lead to this regulation.
There's a good reason there's a lot of regulation in this space: people don't like it when companies tear up their street (or yard or driveway) to install utilities, and complain to their local elected officials when it happens. Democracy really works at this scale. For every person that is willing to have their street torn up for a second (or 10th) time to install a competing ISP's infrastructure, there are 49 people that don't understand and will keep paying comcast, and 50 people that don't care at all, but they sure as hell care about backhoes and construction workers in their yard.
Honestly, the local officials preventing competing ISPs from operating aren't even wrong, even if you view it as short sighted to represent their constituencies accurately. It's monstrously inefficient and stupid to lay competing physical networks.
If you are a small company trying to start an internet based business, I'm pretty sure you'd take "limited bandwidth for all" over "high bandwidth for the competition; limited bandwidth for me" anytime.
That is also the best way to ensure the 'lower bound' for bandwidth is kept as high as possible.
Funny how you call other extremists. This is a pure ideological viewpoint that has proven to be wrong in how internet and telecommunications evolved. It was built on standards and it was built on national and international regulations. It's why you can take a phone used in Germany and use it in India.
"3) Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for video services."
What are you basing this on? Data is very cheap and cost has been decreasing rapidly the last years. If you can afford a device that can play internet video then you can afford the data. Having lived in Cambodia over a few years I have witnessed the extreme uptake in mobile phones in a developing country (a very poor one too). A GB of data is about one dollar. It's used by garment factory workers earning about $130/month. It's used by women selling their own produce at the market. We are seeing the same in Myanmar with mobile phones being used along nearly all income groups. It's really obnoxious to see Facebook and supporters making arguments of farmers earning a dollar a day when they try to introduce a closed network. Poor people got 99 problems and paying top dollars for watching a video online isn't one of them. Those who cannot afford data cannot afford a usable phone. If Facebook wants to help these people in India then there is a bunch of ways of doing so that doesn't lock people and countries into a walled garden from a tech giant.
Why assume they are stupid and unable to make decisions for themselves?
So regulations are important. Partly so because some markets are very difficult for an average consumers to gain full knowledge about. That's for example one of the reasons why we had a financial crisis some years back.
First of all you seem to dismiss the problems I described. Perhaps you need to re-read what I wrote with a less subjective attitude. Second you seem for some strange reason think that there is a choice between "pesticide-laced food or malnutrition/starvation". That's a false narrative. Also don't get hung up on pesticides, it was just as an example of lack of education, lack of information, lack of laws, corruption, and other issues that results in a market where the consumer have not got enough information to make a reflective choice.
I don't want to continue down your strange little rabbit hole that doesn't reflect any realistic option or facts of how life is in Cambodia or other similar countries. Given your strange questions I don't think you actually know so much about life in these countries or the issue people face. Seems you rather have some ideological viewpoint that you want to define as a narrative. I can assure you that any solution is not as easy as you think. It's complex issues. So please don't come with any simplistic ideological based statements with questions that doesn't make any sense, and attack me as someone who doesn't want to communicate with you.
"What was everyone in Cambodia eating before the food with the pesticides on it?"
Seriously, what are you expecting from this kind of question? Does it provide any value? Does it provide any argument at all? What are you really expecting me to explain to you from this question?
Oh and btw: Cambodia was a educated country with a functional society until the 1960s. Then USA decided to drop US 540,000 tons of bombs on the country killing hundred of thousands people. This resulted in Pol Pot taking over who then pretty much killed everyone with an education and lots more.
Easier said than done. As with utilities like power, water, or gas, it's not exactly that easy to get multiple companies running infrastructure to every home.
And to be clear, all of Americas Internet provider problems stem from the last mile monopolies, not the core infrastructure.
I agree there is a lot of detrimental regulatory overhead, but I disagree that it is the primary hurdle.
Last mile infastructure is not fluid. If the customer doesn't buy, it can't be sold to someone else and the builder is stuck with the bill. It's just too expensive to build and maintain for investors to want to enter in saturated markets.
Actually, this is why I feel wireless networks need less regulation than wired ones. Radio spectrum is fluid and normal market marchanics are more at play.
This is too insidious and must be killed
Firstly - google offers free, complete internet via wifi at train stations in India. This solves multiple problems at once and actually makes an impact. (No last mile issues, at a major node where millions of people interact every day)
Secondly - Zero rating as proposed in India, would allow for a small curated list, which of course would be done by Facebook.
As zero rating stood, it was used by college kids who wanted free Facebook. Not by Kanta Bhen, in the middle of no where trying to find medical advice.
Thirdly-importantly: Wikipedia is not the internet. Facebook is not the internet. Google is not the internet.
These are fundamentally sites on the internet, and while hugely important to the English speaking world, the real value is the place where these things were made possible. And that is the internet.
That is what India risks losing, at a time in its development when it's more prepared to make pong than it is to make candy crush.
Sure, theres huge English speaking populations in the cities.
But rural India speaks a whole menagerie of local languages, many of which don't share a common root language.
So removing the chance for people to actually see that open, flat network, connecting everyone around the world is a massive short sighted loss.
This is not the argument you make against net neutrality.
3. Terrible idea. No one wants FB to be the gatekeeper. And no its not the only way. Many state govts (especially Telangana) are rolling out programs to provide data access to poor people. Telangana in particular is laying out the fiber optic network statewide wherever the ground is being dug up for more critical infrastructure projects like water and gas.
Your point stand only when the markets are ideal and utopian. Unfortunately it can only happen when the companies are not beholden to shareholder interests.
Today's software can enable multiple ISPs to share the fiber/spectrum. I could then have 10 ISPs today and 15 ISPs tomorrow. I might use ISP #1 for certain content, and ISP #2 for certain services.
ISPs essentially become a function of the services and content they provide, and how they provide it, in an ultra-competitive, granular market. The way it should be.
More generally, certain goods need to be owned by the community, such as infrastructure. Privately owned streets are a nightmare, and so are pipes and fibers. Almost by definition this must lead to malfunctioning markets. Only if a level playing field on this ground is guaranteed, a market on top if this can function efficiently.
Also the OSS/BSS/ops implementations for shared DSL were too costly and ineffective; we can do much better with today's software.
But then you'll be called a communist.
I always had the idea of timed exclusivity - whoever builts infrastructure first should enjoy 2-4 years of exclusive operation before other providers can join.
Should the power company be able to offer you a discounted rate if you host equipment that offsets their cost (for instance: a powerwall)[1]?
I think that the answer to that question is yes.
Well okay, then should your ISP be able to offer you a discounted rate to use services that offset their cost (youtube, which has an cache near you, vs vimeo, which doesn't)? If the power company can do this, then why can't the ISP?
Again, I don't like this, but I can't think of a consistent explanation for why they shouldn't be allowed to dynamically charge you based on their cost.
[1]: I don't know enough about the electrical grid to know if a powerwall could actually be used in a way that offsets the cost to a power utility or not. I don't think that the correctness of this statement matters to the example. Substitute "a powerwall" for "equipment that saves the power company money".
I think the issue here is that power is binary as far as the argument here is concerned, you have it or you don't, but influencing consumer patterns on data usage has the potential to seriously influence how they use the internet in a way that paying differing amounts for power doesn't. Competition is one of the most powerful driving forces of the internet today. The idea a lone programmer can offer a service that compares to multinational companies (in some areas, obviously not others) is phenomenal. But say consumers or that developer suddenly have to pay a large ongoing entry cost due to the fact that the product that they have made and are competing with is high bandwidth. Innovation dies overnight without net neutrality.
Power is not binary. It is fundamentally analog. You can certainly have different degrees of power. See brownouts. Consumers only tend to see power as binary because of deep standards penetration in the electronics market.
To extend the argument of net neutrality in this direction, I think an important distinction needs to be made, because surely you could argue LED's over florescent bulbs due to power consumption, but consumers already pay for different speeds and data caps, the argument shifts to your utility offering different prices based on who is making your LED's, even if they are functionally identical. This is where the comparison breaks down, because the bulbs don't magically become more efficient for your utility because they are somehow peering with the manufacturer.
Right. Because of deep penetration of market standards, a mix of government regulation and industry standards, consumers interact with power in this very limited fashion.
I don't believe users of bandwidth would want to behave in a similar fashion. Is it so crazy to imagine a dynamic bandwidth market, largely automated for pay per use? I worry about the impacts of such a thing, but it like any other has its benefits and plagues.
/To be honest, I have no idea what you mean by your extended metaphor...
If a Powerwall saves the utility money, then any discount flowing from that is just returning money to the customer. My watching a video on Facebook instead of YouTube does nothing like that.[2]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/net-n...
[2] As an aside, neither do Powerwalls. Utilities sell commodities, so any savings must be realizable as reduced usage. E.g. if solar were cheaper but for storage, utilities could buy storage themselves.
From my perspective, along the last mile a bit is a bit. The fact that they may have some back-bone infrastructure that optimizes delivery of traffic to an edge-node for youtube or Facebook doesn't really apply to me (e.g. it is not something I control). The fact that e.g. Comcast and Facebook can do a deal that monopolizes in their favor vs. other social networks/ISPs is not exactly to my benefit. I can't control that deal like I can control adding "a powerwall" in my house.
A bit is not a bit. Some bits actually are cheaper to deliver than others.
Also, because of things like edge caches, there are bits that have to travel a shorter distance, and interact with less hardware, than other bits.
Your GE microwave doesn't require that it gets electricity from a GE power turbine. All watts are the same in that sense. The watts can come from a GE generator (in the town over) or a westinghouse generator (in the local town). It doesn't matter.
But a youtube application does require that the bits come from youtube servers. Youtube cannot use bits from vimeo, and because of network topology, the vimeo bits might be more costly for the ISP to deliver than the youtube bits.
The notorious Comcast/Netflix case was certainly not motivated by transit costs, since Netflix offers video content free to any ISP - see https://openconnect.netflix.com/
Comparing to websites, you can have all the "common" websites that have local caches, peered with your ISP directly, for low rate X. If you want access to a niche video streaming startup that has to go through other peers we haven't optimized for, you pay more.
It's still not a perfect analogy, but it forms a similar comparison "Where do I get (content|electricty) from?"
It hobbles the system as a whole in order to provide the justification for price differentials which would drive profits for ISPs. This is basically a money grab on the part of the ISPs (natural monopolies).
I think this could be reasonable as long as it's not by having YouTube do a deal with the ISP, but is by a company-neutral measure of how much costs are actually lowered for the ISP (which is passed onto you). If Vimeo can do some engineering to reduce cost to the ISP and automatically have the lowered cost passed onto you without Vimeo having to negotiate some special deal with the ISP, then that becomes another area they can compete and innovate on, and hence harnesses the power of competition rather than foster anticompetitive practices.
By contrast, if special deals are allowed ("YouTube traffic is free"), then it would be mutually beneficial for monopolies to offer ISPs kickbacks in return for helping them maintain their monopoly by suppressing competition, while the rest of us lose out.
For that matter, maybe this is a chance to you yourself reach out to Trump on an issue and invite him to meet at the White House or come to the Bay Area to meet the next batch of YC startups.
Beyond that, point of engaging Trump would be on a topic I would assume everyone agrees is important - and if you think hidding and hoping things will magically get better, well, good luck!
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-meeting-photo-jeff-bezo...
Uber CEO had to stop his collaboration as Lyft started catching up for the first time in a long time.
Elon also faced a lot of heat and had to qualify his statements. Negative reactions towards him were counteracted by his accomplishments and clean energy contributions.
I think people should collaborate but in a clandestine fashion.
Inviting Trump to Bay area would unleash all the rage against Trump towards the startup community. I'm just afraid it would be a bigger "throw stones at Google buses"
Thiel knew he'd be attacked, took a risk, and there's zero reason to believe he's not happy with the results; if you think Thiel cares what the "Bay Area" thinks, I'd be interested in your reasoning.
Uber's not even worth covering, they're currently a cluster F$&@ waiting to happen and the idea that it was somehow born of talking with Trump is what it is.
Bay Area and for the matter the greater tech community needs to engage the world, not withdraw from it.
> Be afraid all you want, doesn't matter to me.
One of these things is not like the other.
What am I missing?
A pair of riots in Berkeley within a month, San Jose during the election, the Brendan Eich situation, myriad letters from CEOs post election. To quote sama's recent post [1], "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me, but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump supporter."
Care as much or little about the concerns of people not like you as you want, just don't act like you want to have a conversation with them too in the same breath.
1. http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters
Do you think this is reasonable in the context of expressing your support for the leader of your nation at your workplace? I certainly don't think so.
The fact that people can't even meet to have a discussion is just simply wrong.
Without communication between parties almost nothing will happen.
There is no way private companies are going to be able to keep the internet open for long. What's their incentive to keep it open? Assume they are against you, and deal with it from there.
And we should be using 40Gbps internet right now, enabling live low-latency video, but we can't because there's no competitive reason for local ISPs to upgrade.
Thankfully, someone else saw the need for a group of people dedicated to fighting for everybody's rights online, back in 1990. I'm talking, of course, about the EFF.
So you can donate.
The head of the FCC doesn't believe in net neutrality, so it's going to be a long fight so they could use your support.
Everyone needs to take action, even if it's the smallest possible action. Take a minute to donate to the EFF or tweet about the issue, or five minutes to write a blog post that actually rallies and informs people. What can we start building now to prepare for when this threat starts manifesting as legislation?
In theory this is a good argument. In practice, my experience is that this argument causes people to write off net neutrality as just being something that's about letting tech bros make lots of money. I've even heard this from folks in the tech industry, who really should know better.
An argument that may be more convincing is that the Internet is the only media channel where we don't get all of our information from the same three or four mega conglomerates. But if net neutrality is eliminated then ISPs are going to pull a Martin Shkreli, and overnight your cost of hosting a Wordpress blog is going to go from $5 a month to $25,000 per month or whatever.
When this happens the only way to have a blog will be to host your content on Facebook, who will be able to decide which points of view are allowed and which are banned. If we lose the Internet, the last free media channel, then there is no going back. Not just on this issue, but on every issue.
ISPs literally "own the road", to create an analogy for internet businesses. If the only road company in town installs a toll booth or a series of speed bumps in front of McDonald's because Burger King paid them to, it artificially distorts the market in a way that allows successful companies to pay to entrench themselves and fend off competition.
Innovation and disruption inherently require free and fair access to the storefronts of upstarts, whether physical or digital. To slant the playing field with throttling or zero-rating is tantamount to a big box corp having the ability to pay someone to install a toll booth in front of my competing mom and pop business.
This kind of thinking will lead to a big debate about what exactly is a speed bump -- how high can they be? Do rumble-strips count? What about potholes?
A better solution would be to just let more companies build roads in your town. Then all the people who want to go to McDonalds will take their business to the other road companies.
That sounds great, except the roads have all been built. It's prohibitively expensive and risky to try to build out your own parallel set of infrastructure, whether it's roads or cable. I mean, if Google tried and failed to do it, who else is going to be able to succeed?
So why didn't that happen prior to now? The NN legislation as proposed is new and the internet existed just fine prior to it.
That's a good question, and it's hard to say. Empirically we can see that it is starting to happen, e.g. with t-mobile not charging users when they consume video and audio data from certain sites.
My guess is that the reason it didn't happen historically is because content was worth almost zero. E.g. Flickr was bought by Yahoo for almost nothing, and if I remember correctly YouTube was on track to go bankrupt until Google bought them to set the legal precedent they wanted.
It's only in the last couple years that the costs of producing and distributing content have now also basically fallen to zero, so it's now possible to make a lot of money in the content business even if any individual item is still worth very little. There have obviously been companies who have made a lot of money on content previously, but mostly only when there was either some quirky situation affecting the price of display ads (e.g. Yahoo) or else when there was some quirky situation affecting the valuation of the company itself (e.g. YouTube).
If it comes to it, you can come over to my house and plug into my ethernet and we'll grab a Slackware CD and start a new internet if we have to. Deal?
Is it surprising? What organization is supposed to speak up? Tech workers don't have a union so nobody is lobbying for us in DC. We have to hope that enough huge companies and their leaders will act in the way we want and I don't exactly expect Zuckerberg and Thiel to represent me and my interests in Washington.
There's ACM.
Yes we do, just not on US.
It needs to be the consumers who speak up, and the businesses that would be negatively affected.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/naacp-union-net-neu...
The same thing that caused the Indian public to reject internet.org curated by Facebook.
Once we get massive consolidation, whether of banks, telcos, cable companies, social networks, phone makers or whatever else is "too big to fail" then your choice is illusory in the first place. Title I vs Title II isn't the most meaningful choice.
Originally the Internet was designed with no single point of failure, but now email, the web, streaming video, etc. has been centralized.
What we need to do is greenlight technology to enable decentralized:
+ Social Networking instead of server farms whose engineers post on highscalability
+ Mesh Networking instead of cellphone carriers whose networks go down in an emergency
+ Power Generation instead of a power grid that can cut you off anytime
Bitcoin decentralized money. Git decentralized version control. Look at how the power and trust dynamics shifted. That's what we need.
The best way to do that is to fund open source hardware and software projects that will enable this technology to be widely available, and then regulators will have to expand their frameworks to allow it, as they did with bitcoin.
Disclaimer: I am the architect of http://github.com/Qbix/Platform
Courage. The cynic in me answers "Someone who doesn't mind being becoming a target?" I notice nobody is jumping up and down volunteering to be "another Assange" or "another Snowden". Different topics but similar level of fortitude needed.
I don't know if I have the courage, but I definitely don't have a plan.
I feel badly prideful the way that sounds like I'm presuming that I have the capability but not the courage - yet at the same time, I'm reminded of the end of this quote:
“We bring you here to a House for the Feeble-minded and the man who won’t accept that is the man we want. It’s a method that can be cruel but it works. It won’t do to say to a man, ‘You can create. Do so.’ It is much safer to wait for a man to say, ‘I can create, and I will do so whether you wish it or not.’ There are ten thousand men like you, George, who support the advancing technology of fifteen hundred worlds. We can’t allow ourselves to miss one recruit to that number or waste our efforts on one member who doesn’t measure up.”
- Asimov, Profession"
On the rare chance that it's that case - for anyone reading thing and thinking the same think - it's worth asking the question.
I think the big companies have totally nailed it. They have kept things free. And they have kept the population sufficiently distracted that there is no time for 'activism' or thinking of society. This means that the big corps can now push reforms unquestioned in their favor.
Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people. I don't think any of this is true and that the argument you make here is self-contradictory.
I really just don't think your comment holds any water at all.
Huh? Just see all the gmail ids. Just ask any company as to how many email ids are gmail and prepared to be stunned. Same goes for GitHub, medium. Even so called "decentralized" projects are happily hosting code on github and blogging on medium. (I am not judging the users here by any means. I am just saying they are "happy").
> Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people.
Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies.
That doesn't mean people are happy with the situation nor the product. In many situations, as I already mentioned, it doesn't even mean the product is successful. I'm well aware of all these near-monopolies and how many users they have- Gmail's monopoly over email, Google's monopoly over search, YouTube's monopoly over video, etc. Plenty of users are extremely dissatisfied with these services. Furthermore, your point doesn't address the "mono-culture", which is a separate issue from some specific corporations maintaining very high userbases.
>Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies.
This doesn't respond to what I said at all. I'm saying there is no evidence that software provided without a direct cost inevitably has an impact in deterring activism.
I worry that you don't understand what "free software" is. Facebook is free as in free beer, not as in freedom. There is a huge difference. You should read up on the definitions of free and proprietary software.
Even hosting a blog with Wordpress or Ghost can be a pain, let alone hosting your own git infrastructure. Then you have the whole sign-on / password / account management nightmare. Nobody wants to (sigh, grumble) create yet another (grumble, grumble) account on yet another site.
If there were some kind of open SSO standard that actually worked and was actually low-friction for users, that would go a long way.
That being said I don't have a problem with it. We (ZeroTier) are kind of a decentralization effort, and we use GitHub and Slack because they work and they save time. Use the present to build the future.
I think there isn't anything specific to fight against now as there was with SOPA. Once a specific legislation/regulation appears, I think the tech world will strongly oppose again. I also suspect the large tech companies are trying to use their lobbying power behind the scenes preemptively again.
Those forces only make things better unless they don't. To me, it's crazy that's not immediately clear.
In this case, the regulation is for keeping the system free unless you're a monopoly or part of an oligopoly. Your future chances of being in that camp are so minuscule and even smaller if you support killing off Net Neutrality. Are you fighting on behalf your future self that will likely never exist? That's arrogant and delusional.
This is not what Ayn Rand meant by espousing the public good is best served when people are self-interested. That's not the same thing as being delusional.
I would love to see an actual technical, written definition so that I could tell my Congress folks to put it in a bill.
Really makes you wonder what's going on, since Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are nowhere to be found on the list.
I can monitor and control the power usage of my electrical appliances.
I can control outgoing network requests from my networked devices.
I cannot control what is sent to my network from the outside. It doesn't make much sense to be charged for what someone else sends to me. Even if I shut off my network device, a particularly rude service might just continue blindly sending data my way, running up my costs with no way to opt out.
Typical postal mail delivery is paid for by the sender, not the recipient. It becomes complicated here.
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130602210518/http://news.ufl.ed...
Most people have either one or zero options for coax (i.e. cable) or fiber. That leads to a monopoly where you either have to take whatever Comcast / Time Warner / Verizon offer or live with craptacular DSL. Get rid of that monopoly and have the maintenance of those pipes be run by the local municipality. Then you can have real competition.
This does happen though. Electric companies, phone companies, etc all charge different rates based on who is using the service. Based off of different programs and income based subsidies who is using the service determines the cost paid. This also effects what producers sell to the low end of the spectrum. If electricity is substantially cheaper for lower income consumers, they will care less about paying for better energy efficiency. So you are technically paying a different rate based off what your appliances are.
Thank you, Sam, for the mote of hope.
Sums up America 2017. Outsource everything, even your fights.
For example there's people who want to regulate Netflix, Amazon Instant video, Playstation Vue, YouTube TV as if they are a cable system, with all the extra regulations the major cable and satellite companies have to follow, and were created way before IP based networks became popular. I feel like the free market should always win, a kid in their basement should be allowed to create competitors.
I personally feel like everything should move to IP Based networks. You don't have to worry about a limited number of stations, as IP based is pretty much unlimited.
So even if people disagree with him on net neutrality, I do believe he's doing good work. Maybe if regulations are cut and made modern we'd have more options in the market. Maybe Google Fiber could be nationwide at some point if regulations were out of the way. Google already owns a bunch of dark fiber. I'd really love if the internet was just one dumb pipe.
For example I have satellite TV and cable internet. When you watch on demand content they use your internet connection to download/stream the shows instead of being beamed down by the satellite. My ISP does not have a cap, but maybe if I lived in another part of the US served by one that does it would be metered as internet traffic, compared to using cable's TV service and watching on-demand which is locally within their own network(and not counted in the internet meter).
I'd love in the future if we had internet only providers but It seems like one is so hard to get going I doubt we'll have that. I know some communities have done their own Fiber, but even were sued to stop it by the major players. Google "communities fiber lawsuit" for example. I don't know why but it seems like depending on your area there's only one cable company, one phone company, and if you are lucky one fiber company. So I really wish it was easier to do ISP startups and compete. I'm not even sure if it's possible to share the lines. The regulations, and politics around it are probably why we aren't really having new entries in the market.
TESTIMONY OF COMMISSIONER AJIT PAI, FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION- https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-336418A1.p...
Commissioner Pai Remarks Before the Churchill Club https://www.fcc.gov/document/commissioner-pai-remarks-church...
Public enemy number one is a pretty fair assessment as far as anyone in tech is concerned.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/ad-industry-lobb...
Unless it's anonymized for like statistical purposes, sorta like saying Google.com is the #1 website like Alexa does.
I just wish instead of having 100's of pages of regulations scattered throughout a bunch of different acts where it's impossible for one person to know. Even if you are trying to not break the law, you probably will by accident. I know I heard a statistic the average American commits 3 felonies a day without knowing.
I feel like we should have more common sense, and have more straight to the point shorter regulations. It is impossible for someone in one life time to even read all the laws and regulations that exists.
It just seems like the laws, and even agreements for services are long and bloated. If people actually read their subscriber agreements they sign when getting cable installed, it seems like the cable guy would be waiting on you for quite a bit. I doubt anyone even reads the terms of service for Facebook.
But we even have PSA's to tell people to not text and drive, so maybe the world isn't smart enough to go by common sense.
Then not all regulations are even online. Maybe if everything was in markdown, categorized and formatted to be more digestible things would be better. I know we need some regulations, but it seems we have way too many and poor formatting. It just seems like insanity to me.
Even third party developers get an ID number per user associated to that app only(think of it as a proxy to your real id number). It seems like Facebook and Google cares a lot more about privacy than people think. If they just sold me the data, I could run off with it but by keeping the data to themselves and letting marketers pay them to make use of it they make recurring revenue.
From my understanding, LexisNexis and other data brokers were the ones that are selling the data. Here's a 60 minutes clip on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAT_ina93NY
I don't have any relationship with LexisNexis, I never agreed to anything yet they have information on me. Another example is I was looking at my credit report, and it even lists addresses from childhood. I never had a credit card back then, why do they have information on me? At least with Google and Facebook, I gave consent and I see a benefit. You can even buy lists of people and their medications(sounds like a HIPPA violation but the data brokers know this stuff)
The whole discussion is a farce at this point. Tech workers who literally created the incentive to make clickbait content, filter bubbles, and data silos are now upset with "fake news", social polarization, and a "closed" net, while flatly refusing to acknowledge their role in getting us here over the last 20 years. Ajit Pai is the last person to blame when wondering who broke the net.
> YMMV, but I find working for companies who's business model is to exploit other people's personal information for profit is an enormously distasteful thing to do.
For the record, I don't work for any company's that abuse people's personal information. I do have a bit of knowledge on how Facebook ads work because I've used them before.
I don't even view Google or Facebook as doing bad compared to the large data brokers.
https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking...
I can get cheaper electricity for my water heater if I choose to attach it to a source that can be interrupted at times of peak load. I'm not quite sure this line of reasoning will stand.
Edit: It appears the linked article has been updated since I originally posted this. The new text is:
> You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates depending on the manufacturer of each of your appliances.
This makes the argument much clearer and my concerns no longer seem important.
This is a different scenario - the comparable scenario would be that your electricity company charges you a variable rate depending on which manufacturers appliances you buy, for example, if you buy and use only samsung appliances, you get a cheaper rate (and the electric company gets a kickback from samsung).
When you pay for an internet connection the only practical matter that I expect my ISP to care about is the speed I expect to get, the latency of the network, and the volume of traffic I am permitted over a period. Everything else is a congestion issue, and if they are going to manage what I can access to and modify the parameters of my connection based on resources I access, I am not buying Internet access, I am buying access to a curated online service.
The scenario you introduce is different from the specific line I was responding to. My intention was to show that some more consideration and rework of the idea could bring more clarity. You have helped refine Sam's point and now I understand it better, but as I read it, it seemed like something that should be addressed.
> Consumers generally tolerate that network management for some things is ok, for example, constraining the transfer speed of users at peak times.
I could have a switch to change my water heater to the non-interruptible service if I needed to use it during a time of peak demand. How does "pay more for priority" fit into the net neutrality picture? Is it okay as long as the user is the one choosing which of their traffic is in the fast or slow lane?
In your example you are choosing to accept interruption of service in exchange for a preferential rate.
Net neutrality preserves the integrity of internet access by stating that ISPs may not interfere with traffic based on it's origin or destination for competitive reasons (e.g. to coerce payments from service providers a consumer may choose to access). The core premise of Internet access is that a consumer is paying for access to the Internet. If a consumer chooses to permit the service provider to modulate service at the consumer side in order to gain preferential treatment (better price, etc), then this is a consumer choice.
> I could have a switch to change my water heater to the non-interruptible service if I needed to use it during a time of peak demand. How does "pay more for priority" fit into the net neutrality picture?
There are numerous ways to "pay for priority"; even with electricity you can pay a supplier to upgrade capacity in your area to ensure that you have the ability to more consistently draw power, especially at peak times (granted this is not a trivial process). With Internet access the same thing is available - if I want a 10Mbps connection, that has minimum bandwidth of 1Mbps at peak times, and 99% uptime, then I could reasonably expect to pay more than someone who only wants a 1Mbps connection, can tolerate a minimum bandwidth of 512Kbps at peak, and only needs 90% uptime.
This is not a net neutrality issue, and this should be consumer choice (I am old and from Canada, so the numbers above are low :P); allowing lower cost terms of service for less guarantees is a time honored tradition in delivering utilities and services, but most utilities in many parts of the world have a minimum standard that must be met to achieve regulatory compliance for consumer services (e.g. water pressure upper and lower limits, natural gas line pressure, electricity amperage and voltage, etc). Anything above that regulation-blessed "consumer grade" is an opportunity to extract value for priority, and is compatible with net neutrality.
The Net Neutrality issue is that your provider can then regulate the service which you have bought and paid for (network access to your ISPs network peers, and via those access to the Internet) to prevent you from access resources from specific sites and resources, and deliberately applying QoS to degrade a users experience with those third party sites and services in order to coerce the upstream services to pay the ISP.
This is why I say that a service that does this is not Internet Service, but rather a curated network service.
The comparable scenario would be that your electricity company not only provides electricity, but also owns an appliance manufacturing chain. The electricity company charges you a different rate depending on which manufacturer's appliances you buy. Additionally, if you buy their appliances, then you get free electricity for those appliances.
The above scenario doesn't wrap in that it's not just a lower payment rate but, due to artificial caps on monthly usage, can lead to a situation where the only option becomes "use the ISPs preferred music/video/etc provider, or don't use that type of service at all".
edit:
P = (A * R) + (B * R') + C
Where:
P is the final bill a user pays (or data charged towards a cap)
A is the amount of services that are provided by the ISP/Provider/Pipe
R is the rate that is charged for the provider's own services
B is the amount of services that are provided by a third party
R' is the rate that is charged for the those third party services
C is a base payment amount (or zero in the case of considering P a data cap)
Assuming that equation, then the lower R is, the higher R' is, and lower P is, the more likely a consumer is going to choose ISP services.
So, if R is 0, then the ISP can slowly lower P (when considering it as a data cap) to be basically zero. Thus pushing out an ISP competitor services (or making new services not even viable), as the user is highly incentivized to use ISP services. The user is also incentivized to use ISP services, even if they are worse, otherwise be penalized with data cap usage or higher rates.
When R == R', then the ISP is a "dumb pipe", and competes to provides those services, and has no other incentive to do anything other than provide transit.
We are not talking about charging different amounts of money depending on the brand of device you are consuming the data on. NN is about not differentiating the cost or quality of bits based on their source. In the US, can you not opt to pay a slightly higher rate for renewable energy? (This happens in Australia).
I'm all for NN, but the analogy Sam used doesn't hold in my opinion.
As an additional thought from someone outside the US: NN doesn't exist in places like Australia, and has actually overall led to better services, especially in the early days of the internet, because overseas data is significantly more costly to provide than local data. The difference is that we have more robust competition and we can more easily switch providers, where is seems in the US (purely based on things I've read on the internet) that the near-duopoly cuts consumer choice, so if NN was not in place, people would have little ability to switch providers, and they would be stuck with it.
Is the lack of competition the real issue here? If people in the US had a choice of many providers and it was easy to switch, then people would likely switch to services that are Net Neutral.
Yes. Governments -- from federal to small towns -- created rules giving de facto local monopolies to certain ISPs and making market entry of competition very difficult. And yet, people want to solve this created problem with more rules about how ISPs are allowed to compete.
> The internet is a public good
Black's Law says a public good is "An item that taxation is used to finance, the consumption of which has been decided by the whole of society. It is not an item for consumption that an individual has decided upon."
Does Sam want to tax all of us for net access, then have the government decide how it should be allocated? Do ISPs disappear under this scenario? Does Sam want the same government that has gone insane collecting personal data to have further control over net our access? Does he trust them to do the right thing with it? If so, does he have any evidence it would do so?
> I believe access should be a basic right.
"Basic right" is not defined and doesn't have a legal tradition, so I'm not sure what it means. Is it meant to be a constitutionally delineated right like (in the USA) freedom of the press, or to worship, or to bear arms? Because none of these require that we have the government confiscate our money in order that others may exercise those rights.
Not to say that net neutrality is different but comparing it to utilities may not be appropriate given diff classes of customers are granted different kinds of rates and service.
If I use Netflix on Comcast I would pay Comcast for my use of their network. Comcast would pay Netflix's ISP for the use of that network (at negotiated rate lower than my rate because of volume). Netflix would pay their ISP For their usage as well.(also priced for volume)
The two end point rates would have to be set so carriers make a profit and the responsibility of traffic is shared between the sender and receiver. (people who get thing for free tend to treat it as worthless).
This model has to be worked out to completion to understand all the implications.
The key thing is if Comcast was getting reasonable revenue from moving Netflix traffic it would not need to throttle other people's traffic to bully consumers to buy on demand TV from Comcast.
As side effect this may reduce usage by people who download stuff just because they can because its free/already paid for. This is related to free things are treated badly concept I mentioned earlier.
Barring some government oversight panel that bans or allows anti-NN practices on a case by case basis, I think it's better for the market to decide. ISP's shouldn't be able to extort businesses to be allowed in at all, but offering premium speeds (as Netflix has paid for years), free data, etc. are within the realms of anti-NN practices that I feel are acceptable.
The net neutrality issue is not black and white.
If you believe that it is OK that Iraqis can access Wikipedia for free via zero rating, then there are exceptions to NN, because zero rating is inherently anti-NN. From then on, it is a slippery slope. Is it OK to zero rate data only in "poor" countries? The moment they get rich enough, must we ban it? Is any non-profit allowed to zero rate, but all for-profits are not?
My point is, once you open the door to anti-NN practices being acceptable, you must then start analyzing all situations individually.
I respect NN absolutists although I disagree with them. At least they have a coherent philosophy.
Verizon's zero-rating of themselves is anything but.
What does that have to do with Iraq and its internet access?? Not that it isn't important. It just has nothing to do with internet access in the United States.
you're not exactly elaborating on how that example applies.
I see no evidence here, yet you claim Net neutrality 'absolutists' need to tone down their rhetoric, and give no cited or strong example as to what is actually wrong with net neutrality.
If you do believe that Iraqis should be able to have zero rated Wikipedia, because they are poor, shouldn't poor Americans (of which their are millions living in abject poverty) be able to get zero rated services as well?
However the FCC of which the article speaks (which sets the tone of the conversation that is about what article I would naturally think) is based and regulating companies and is regulating institutions within ....you guessed it! The United States.
I don't believe Iraqis should have zero rated internet access. I also believe you aren't quoting me saying as such. Again I ask: how is what Iraqs telecom regulations are have an impact on the FCC?
And to be clear I believe strongly in net neutrality in the USA and abroad. It just holds no direct bearing on FCC policy.
I think zero rating in essence limits access, allows ISPs to pick winners and losers on the internet, and could threaten the next great platform for free speech.
I'm still awaiting a real factual rebuttal to net neutrality. I'd love to hash these ideas out. How does zero rating actually benefit anyone? How does the current changes and near term purposed structure of telecom regulations benefit the average consumer? How would you seek to increase competition specifically.
Not hide vagaries of "reduce regulation". What regulations exactly?
In this same thread I posted at length what I believe to be strong facts in favor of net neutrality. I can re post them here if you like.
It's not so hard to imagine the harm that comes from Verizon or AT&T picking winners based on the relationships they have and blocking innovation.
FWIW, that isn't just a hypothetical situation; it's already happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Zero
I don't accept this premise. This is a false dichotomy because these are not the only two options. There is a third, better option: to get access to the entire internet.
A company offering you that choice is using a classic game-theoretic bargaining approach: commit to only allowing a restricted set of possibilities, of which the other person's best option is the one you want to happen. This makes it sound like the company has no chioce in the matter: they are just presenting you with the options, and you are the one who has to choose between eliminating this poor Iraqi's internet or giving her partial access. In reality, the company has stacked the deck by presenting you with this particular pair of options.
I'm not saying it's completely illegitimate for a company to want to sponsor free partial internet for those who don't have it in some places of the world.
But I am saying it is opposite from the ideal we should be working towards in already-developed countries like the USA. Ideally, the company providing internet should not at all be vertically integrated with the company providing websites on it and should have no incentive to prioritize one over the other.
Posting garbage about poor people's situations that is untrue only serves to hurt everybody. Please stop.
Now you could make the same argument that you made in your post, but I don't think the lightbulb company comes off looking so good.
1. Local folks taking turns calling a handful of BBSes.
2. BBSes synchronizing some messages with each other, even long-distance.
3. BBSes providing some limited Internet services (email, newsgroups).
4. Quasi-Internet services like Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL.
5. Slow but "real" Internet access. All content available but still had to ration use.
6. Fast, ubiquitous, unmetered, unthrottled Internet.
7. An ISP that doesn't care if you run a server.
While I strongly sympathize with anyone sitting at #6 or #7 who views a move to any previous step as a huge regression, I can't sympathize with denying people any kind of connectivity unless they can snap their fingers and manifest the infrastructure to enable #5. All of those previous steps served a purpose at the time.
Developing economies have an opportunity to learn from our mistakes as first mover, and leapfrog ahead to something more robust against all these threats we're facing today (centralization, stratification, eavesdropping, denial of service, walled gardens...).
BBSes were an artifact of the old phone infrastructure, so that's not a necessary phase, but otherwise the story would look roughly the same: Local communities gradually connect peer-to-peer and then interconnect. This time wirelessly, securely, without entrenched middlemen.
It's like saying the poor Iraqi is better off getting free coca-cola, and getting locked into coca-cola for the rest of his life, than actually getting water (and, if they desire, the possibility of coca-cola).
A country growing its infrastructure, which is apparently not yet essential, under the perverse influence of a non-neutral playing field, is a country that will have immense trouble shaking that influence off in the future. As an example, look at America and its relationship to cars vs. public transport.
If you want me to "bite a bullet", here I'm biting it: The Iraqi is better off without internet. Give him true choice or let him continue to be free of the delusion that Facebook == The Internet.
I'm from Peru. I came from a well-off peruvian background, and I've seen the families of my rich peruvian peers as well as foreigners exploit the hell out of poor people in that country, all while claiming that anyone who wants to enforce some minimum standards or think long-term, is "condescending", or "paternalistic".
I've put forward the case of America being hooked on an endless and destructive addiction to cars. I can bring up many others, such as the existing ones with opioids, or unhealthy food. What do you put forward? How many drug pushers have a healthy relationship to their clientele, and help them knock the habit as soon as possible?
Stop being disingenuous, you know full-well that's what Zuckerberg was aiming for with `internet.org`.
The idea that NN vs. non-NN network proliferation is an intrinsically paternalistic battle is flipped on its head when cast in real terms.
You're describing colonialism. Let me rephrase what you said: "It's better for poor Iraqi to get free access to American web services even though that hurts other upstart web services (such as Iraqi ones), than for poor Iraqis to have no web services at all."
How is this different that colonial powers sending back wealth from the colonies they conquered? If "eyeballs" are the currency of the internet, what you're describing channels those eyeballs to US companies while suppressing local competition that might keep that wealth in the countries of origin.
With that being said, I would like to ask from a technical perspective, what can we do if this does go into effect? I remember a quote, I want to say it was by Sit Timothy Berners-Lee, but I can't find it. So I will just state it myself.
Any lack of neutrality within the internet network is not a feature or a regulation but is in fact a bug within the system. When a bug is found, software engineers find ways around those bugs.
So, if ISPs finally succeed in causing our internet to no longer be neutral, how will we be moving around that bug?
It wouldnt be easy, but mesh networks are the best option I'm aware of.
I think doing this might have advantages increasing freedom at the other end of the stack too - if you can drop out to cheap Internet on a mesh network with local traffic free, you might find the advantage of having a Nextcloud Box in your house (instead of Dropbox) clearer.
The real question behind that – and where we differ – is how the role of government fits into that.
If you believe government is inherently good and necessary to enable a "basic right" like the internet, then yes, of course, government should be the one to keep the internet open. This is Sam's view.
On the other hand, if you distrust government and believe their own interests for power and control are always in play, then handing them even more control of the internet is absolutely not the solution.
Knowing what we know of the NSA's mass-surveilance and CIA's targeted hacking and surveillance for unclear-at-best purposes, doesn't that at least give you pause about whether government should be the one to keep the internet open?
Knowing what we know of anti-competitive practices and the tragedy of the commons, doesn't that at least give you pause about whether corporations should be the one to keep the internet open?
I don't believe that the government is inherently good, but at least the government is democratically elected. The CEOs at Comcast/Verizon are not. Allowing them to exert control over internet content while participating in a market that is inherently NOT FREE is a recipe for disaster and a closed internet.
In the Carnegie model, 2G and 3G towers could be subsidized for accessing Wikipedia (for example) while new 5G towers are only available to premium subscribers.
Look at the Millions be spent dismantling the 2G network. That bandwidth could be subsidized by the FCC for the common good. https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM10696...
- 3 caching, if you're closer to a cache edge you pay less.
- 1 we give you a heavily discounted data plan but show you only content we want to make money off of you, argument being at least you get something instead of nothing if you're very poor.
- 2 regulations are mostly bad, you don't want government sticking its nose in everything.
- 0 monopolies want their moat to grow.
anti-NN: "If you let the federal government dictate how packets are treated.... then you let the federal government dictate how packets are treated. Perhaps you are familiar with Ed Snowden, Wikileaks and recent revelations about the NSA etc? no concern at all eh? You just want your Netflizzzzzz. Ok then"
It fixes more than just the net neutrality problem, it also fixes the lack of infrastructure improvement by making big ISPs have a monopoly on last mile improvements for the first year or two - they're greatly incentivized to keep improving infrastructure and speeds or lose customers to the smaller guys who can run leaner. It's a pretty clever regulatory model that manipulates incentives quite well.
I'm sure there are flaws, regulatory models are rarely perfect, but from what I've seen over the last 10 years going from 5mbit DSL to gigabit fibre for only about 1.5x the cost, I'd say it's doing a pretty good job, without any net neutrality enforcement or any complicated legislation - just by giving the regulatory authority the ability to compel ISPs to lease lines.
Some electric companies do charge different rates to different types of customers depending on what type of business those customers are in and w/o regard to actual usage (which can also vary rates).
All that this will do is move people towards obfuscation of their Internet access through technology. I say let them try to break the web; there will be technological solutions to stop this immediately I bet...
In many parts of it, yes, they are, because of deals that ISPs have struck with local governments.
> wouldn't stopping these monopolies be the surest way
Yes, and every time it's been tried, the ISPs go to court and, since they have much deeper pockets, end up getting the attempts shot down.
There really is decent competition for Internet in the UK, it's surprisingly successful at stopping this type of stupid stuff from happening.
I think that would be a great idea.
And I for one want alternatives that work around the damage of current chokeholds.
If someone wants to stream netflix, youtube or grab something from a torrent why not have a content agnostic(safe harbor) block cache distributed around the internet?
This is most concretely expressed by ipfs https://ipfs.io/ but it's an old idea -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking
Bittorrent itself is a limited form of it. On some level AMP from google and CDNs are trying to make up for its lack.
As long as the ISP doesn't actively force this on their users but instead its something companys and people actually want I think its a net good to make this a thing.
We should mature and adopt IPFS AND fight the net neutrality battle.
I hate to say it, but this battle seems lost.
We don't need to squander our time arguing over the finer points of the policy. We need a simple way to explain it to the masses.
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/two-space...
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...
For home Utilities, this is based on the fact that, indeed, your usage pattern is a couple of things
1) In the best of Utility markets, electricity has no real elasticity. Electrical demand is a constant game of just simply keep pace with existing demand as much as possible. There is no excess capacity problems per say, as the game is trying to be as efficient as possible.
2) For the most part, people's usage patterns are routinely predicable and stable, so the demand cost associated can be metered reasonably and with relative transparency (Not to say, its completely transparent, because its not, though its very well regulated in comparison to say, internet service access & quality). This allows a relatively consistent and low variable cost of delivery of this service, however its not a 'fixed' cost, with the exception usually of the wiring the house itself to the grid.
3) The device in which a home uses, in fact, can be measured in absolute terms. For instance, your appliances can be calculated to the letter how much they will cost to run (see here, for instance: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html). I would argue that this is not true of internet usage, which can vary EXTREMELY widely. The EIA gives a nice summary on this too: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electrici...
Now, often people will say, reasonably, that in an environment maintained much like the power utilities, if things could be achieved to this level of usage/monitoring/charging for use would make sense. Transparent pricing, easy ways to calculate usage based on the app or app(s) or some other methodology for chunking the pricing structure so its really transparent and stable to price out a month to month usage pattern for the average person. Sounds cool right? Well, here is some notable differences:
(As an aside, for fun, imagine a world where the app had to tell you how much on average it cost to use for an hour on a metered connection, like how energy star rated appliances tell you their yearly cost)
Broadband is a completely different story
1) Wired service has a fixed cost and tons of excess capacity. The cost, while not cheap is fixed, per house or neighborhood, and that infrastructure doesn't have to be changed out for many years, in some cases a decade or more. Once the wired service has been installed to a house, thats it. the ISP then can flip the service on and start delivering product to the homes at virtually no cost after that. There is no ongoing 'generation' of bandwidth to closely meet demand. The technology itself, after all, takes care of all that. All the ISP has to do is run the ship smoothly, but they don't have to build a new bandwidth power plant to make more bandwidth.
2) Which leads me to my second point. There is a ton of bandwidth in the system already. WE know this. The system not only has a fixed cost, but the actual capacity of the wired services being deployed already have a ton of extra bandwidth capacity, in particular if we are talking about home users. From DSL Reports https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Deconstructing-The-Exafl... we get this great line (i encourage everyone to read the full report):
Andrew Odlyzko is one of the nation's top experts on global Internet traffic. Stationed at the University of Minnesota, Odlyzko posts all of his data to his website, and notes that while growth is strong, it doesn't necessitate drastic new pricing model shifts (metered billing), or wailing to the heavens about the dire menace that is P2P traffic. "There is not a single sign of an unmanageable flood of traffic," Odlyzko says. "If anything, a slowdown is visible more than a speedup," he says
And thats just from 2008, and the situation for bandwidth excess capacity has actually improved:
Tech Dirt reports from 2012 (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable...):
The relevant bit, in response to a Michael Powell, a cable industry lobbyist:
If usage caps were about "fairness," carriers would offer the nation's grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like "fairness" to you?
Even as far back as 2008, they tried to push the bandwidth hog myth (https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-M...):
relevant quote:
Assuming that if disruptive users exist (which, as mentioned above we could not prove) they would be amongst those that populate the top 1% of bandwidth users during peak periods. To test this theory, we crossed that population with users that are over cap (simulating AT&T’s established data caps) and found out that only 78% of customers over cap are amongst the top 1%, which means that one fifth of customers being punished by the data cap policy cannot possibly be considered to be disruptive (even assuming that the remaining four fifths are). Data caps, therefore, are a very crude and unfair tool when it comes to targeting potentially disruptive users. The correlation between real-time bandwidth usage and data downloaded over time is weak and the net cast by data caps captures users that cannot possibly be responsible for congestion. Furthermore, many users who are "as guilty" as the ones who are over cap (again, if there is such a thing as a disruptive user) are not captured by that same net.
Also see this: https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/myth-bandwid...
3) [Opinion piece here]: Fair and open internet access is in my mind, is going to become a first amendment issue, or at least should be treated as one. The growth and power of being able to be seen, heard, and read on the internet is quickly, as we all know, supplanting most if not all other forms of media. And for the media it is enabling, other mediums that carry forward, like video, are quickly consolidating onto the internet in great numbers. This makes it the place for public speech. While the space may be non-physical (virtual), the ability for ISPs to pick winners and losers to access will have inevitably terrible political and economic consequences, and not just for start ups. Imagine if employees who got cancer from working in an industrial facility could not publish their stories to say, Medium, because a large ISP like Comcast will refuse to carry medium's traffic in and around that issue, or at all, if it becomes a hot bed for other interests that are willing to pay vast sums of money to filter that traffic from ever being delivered or surfacing. Does this sound farfetched? I don't think so. We know groups have tried to do this with newspapers in the past, and of course groups have also tried to do things like pressure individual websites from publishing things to. If you open the internet and mandate its traffic is treated equally regardless, it largely negates the ability for this to happen on that level, as in an ideal implementation, the ISPs would be stripped (and monitored to ensure) that they aren't reading any traffic in the wild that they don't have an explicit reason to do so (Say, a warrant to tap into a connection of a suspected murder looking at their network traffic or something)
4) While we are talking about this, there is no damn spectrum crunch either, its a nice myth that wireless carriers/ISPs are using to justify their underhanded tactics here, because physics dictates there can be a spectrum crunch. that doesn't mean there is or soon will be a spectrum crunch:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable...
https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-M...
https://gigaom.com/2012/01/30/is-the-spectrum-crisis-a-myth/
https://gigaom.com/2012/10/21/the-myth-of-the-wireless-spect...
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507486/the-spectrum-crunc...
http://www.androidauthority.com/wireless-industry-flipped-bu...
https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20121004/024...
My question is: How can something be a human right if you need to pay for it? Because as of today you still need to pay an ISP for internet access.
Some folks believe that healthcare should be a basic right, and people definitely have to pay for that.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol...
Not to contradict your basic point with a this, but, technically, you do: through government. Corporations are creatures of law, and their governance is ultimately itself governed by rules set by the chartering government, and further constrained by the governments of jurisdictions in which the corporation seeks permission to operate.
Yes, that's the point of net neutrality. Whereas an internet with no net neutrality regulation means that corporations have final say.
I just don't see how we can win. Not without some seriously strong top-down consumer protection laws. Net neutrality needs to solidify into law, and get some serious teeth. And I'm talking Amendment-level protections, not something the next chump-in-chief can come along and pull the rug out from under like they're doing with health care right now.
I don't see why this is true. Why can't the competition go back and forth? And why must proponents of the open Internet play defense, instead of gaining ground and increasing openness and protections?
Keep your head up my brother, and keep fighting the good fight. It's worth it.
That's why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. To overturn this law, or to make consumer protection laws force neutrality you only have to win "once" where the other side has to keep defending.
The net result is that both sides are always constantly fighting for what they want and one side wins sometimes, and the other side wins other times.
My browsing history is about to go up for sale. My emails are fair game for the US government with no warrant. My ISP is free to double-charge for peering, driving my Netflix subscription costs up. My mobile operator is streaming certain services without it counting against my data, while services I want to use still do. I have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to my ISP for a decent connection, despite the government giving telecoms huge subsidies (our own tax dollars) in exchange for building nationwide fiber, most of which went straight to the company's own coffers with no repercussions.[1]
If there was at least some back-and-forth, I would see your point, but as it stands I only see one failure after another.
Does 'sama have a Facebook account?