Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shawnee_ | Hacker News Reader

Pai's logic is flawed in so many ways.

But in 2015, the FCC decided to treat the Internet like a public utility, taking away the FTC’s ability to police the privacy practices of broadband providers.

The decision to treat it like a public utility had almost nothing to do with privacy or "policing the privacy practices of broadband providers" and almost everything to do with rekindling the war on Net Neutrality.[1].

This move -- like pretty much everything else this administration is doing -- was done to appease and strengthen oligopoly power. It will ultimately hurt small upstarts in the "ISP /broadband delivery" category[2] (who vehemently opposed the stripping of this legislation), and it will make it orders of magnitude harder for small upstarts whose business may only benefit or scale with "neutral" access to the internet.

In oligopoly situations there are few, if any, choices available to switch to when said provider oversteps is bounds and decides to just start charging everybody more based on the kind of traffic they request... "because it can". Everything to do with everything on the Internet is going to get astoundingly more expensive very soon.

Pai does not understand small business. And it's worth noting that this is probably because he worked for Verizon as an attorney. Though despite his government appointment, he does not seem to have switched his mindset away from that to the best interests of the American people in mind with his policy agendas.

[1] [https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/2015021... [2] http://bgr.com/2017/04/03/twc-charter-merger-fcc-rules-ajit-...]

> But in 2015, the FCC decided to treat the Internet like a public utility, taking away the FTC’s ability to police the privacy practices of broadband providers.

This is a lie and Pai knows it; the case that spurred the FCC privacy action ruled that even in non-commit carrier activities, common carriers couldn't be regulated by the FTC, which meant many large ISPs—all the telcos like AT&T and Verizon—were completely outside of FTC jurisdiction even when acting as ISPs even without the Open Internet Order from 2015.

The FTC has no authority to regulate many ISPs, and an FTC privacy regulation that applied only to ISPs that aren't also telcos would've pointless. The FCC is the only agency with authority to issue privacy regulations that treat the whole ISP field the same, with or without the Open Internet Order, and Ajit Pai knows this as well as anyone.

I've got to say that my Comcast home internet is already bordering on "not worth the money" if it gets any more expensive I will cancel it and just use the free wifi that is available at almost any cafe or coffee shop.

With a VPN of course ... right?

I probably would not. Anything work related is already done over ssh, so effectively that's a VPN.

Pai makes a lot of questionable arguments:

The FCC’s regulations weren’t about protecting consumers’ privacy. They were about government picking winners and losers in the marketplace. If two online companies have access to the same data about your Internet usage, why should the federal government give one company greater leeway to use it than the other?

1. Is he implying that the previous FCC was intentionally boosting content providers over ISPs? What motivation would they even have for doing this?

2. Content providers and ISPs do not directly compete with each other in the course of their primary business, so in what respect does the rule create winners and losers in the marketplace?

I suppose he could mean in the advertising marketplace. I guess I would prefer that both Facebook and Comcast be losers in that marketplace though.

3. Two online companies do not have access to the same data. Facebook has data + metadata for any interaction you have with their platform. Your ISP has metadata for interactions you have with any platform, along with data for any plaintext interactions. This is a massive difference in scale.

Users have the choice not to use Facebook, and thus not provide them with data. Users do not have the choice to access the internet without making use of a public utility (i.e. their ISP).

He cites an expert saying:

Rather, the most commercially valuable information about online users . . . is coming from other contexts,” such as social-media interactions and search terms.

I can see how user-shared data might be considered more commercially valuable, but this misses the point about the differences in the kinds of data we are talking about. When someone publishes on social media, they're making an explicit choice to share information with the public.

When that same person visits a website, it is not commonly understood that this act might reveal personal information (though end-users ought to be more aware of this). Consider a teenager doing research on pregnancy tests -- they do not intentionally publish information, but the metadata (webpages visited, time of visits, etc) is potentially revealing.

It's really unfortunate that a government official is so blatantly and factually wrong. And that wrong information provides the only rational basis for a dramatic change in policy.

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