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Comment by bifrost | Hacker News Reader

I think you misunderstand - NN is new, the internet worked fine on its own prior to it. NN is not a colloquial "neutrality" agreement, its a "lets force carriers to do things because we don't understand how it works".

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.

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I was a financial analyst, and I had the chance to cover the telecom sector.

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.

Which Internet rule is it which states that we can all claim we have been any occupation that suits the discussion, and without any additional evidence to support such claims?

The assumption of honesty on HN. I really don't get anything out of this place, and afaik I'm not even contactable.

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.

More non-points.

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.

Feel free to reject them. You'll still only truly know when you see the data.

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?

> Which Internet rule is it which states that we can all claim we have been any occupation that suits the discussion, and without any additional evidence to support such claims?

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.

It seems notable that you consider an unverified attempt to be an expert as acceptable, but pointing out someone engaging in this behavior is not.

NN was never codified but it has always been the agreed upon practice. Except for a few exceptional breaches (like the netflix/comcast deal https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/business/media/comcast-an...) it's just what carriers have always done. It's only now that they're getting greedy that they demand to be paid to deliver content to their customers.

I've worked in big ISPs, I know exactly how it works, and it's never to the benefit of the customers. Especially when there's zero competitive pressure.

Out of curiosity (by someone who doesn't know exactly how it works), is there no way for society to go completely off-grid with respect to ISPs, like power customers do with solar panels? Couldn't we then people build an inexpensive wireless black box server/partial cache nodes that everybody owns (stronger ones or bridges for rural users), and that communicate as a smart distributive network - physically detached from the existing GIG and ISPs?

Wireless doesn't scale. Municipal delivered internet is the feasible option, which Comcast has sought to prevent via regulations.

The state should file antitrust charges and use the fines to erect new infrastructure that any ISP can lease, restoring competition.

Here's a 'mostly wireless' open/neutral network that seems to be scaling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net

Your characterizing of the net is disingenuous. The net never had the dollar or technical pressures it has today; television, streaming, large traffic, advertising dollars. Just because you don't see the regulatory problems doesn't mean they are not there; lawyers have been dealing with people and business for a very long time and you talk like they are a bunch of stupid noobs. Remember the Bell monopoly? They do as well as I, and you are wrong.

> "lets force carriers to do things because we don't understand how it works"

Are you suggesting pro-NN people don't understand how it works? This is a strange summary of NN to me.

What do you think about YouTube and Facebook's edge servers?

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