FCC chair wants to replace net neutrality with "voluntary" commitments | Hacker News Reader

FCC chair wants to replace net neutrality with "voluntary" commitments

arstechnica.com

74 pointsniftich45 comments

The regulations were put in place because ISPs were not voluntarily cooperating with net neutrality. The FCC chair appears to be either unaware of history or practicing wishful thinking.

Normally, the quote goes "never attribute to malice what can be assigned to stupidity" or something along those lines. But Pai is a categorical, shit eating politician. And in the case of politicians, "never attribute to stupidity what can be attributed to malice".

This is a willful dismantling of consumer protections for political or financial gain.

Edit: typo

> Normally, the quote goes "never attribute to malice what can be assigned to stupidity" or something along those lines.

I always like to respond to that quote with another one. I think it fits our current governmental situation particularly.

"Which is more culpable: stupidity or malice?"

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice."

That quote was designed by malice, to encourage stupidity.

Sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice anyway.

More likely he is being paid by monopolists to do it. It's called corruption.

You're very generous in your assessment.

the FCC chair is daft

Not daft. But obviously motivated by economic gain at the cost of ethics. How is a guy supposed to regulate the telcos playing notes to their songs?

One needs his Internet history to trace the money, if any.

> the FCC net neutrality order "imposes intrusive government regulations that won’t work to solve a problem that doesn’t exist using legal authority the FCC doesn’t have."

That is an outright lie. Actually, four of them in one sentence! .. Ok, the "intrusive government regulations" part is arguable (at best), but they do work, and they do solve a problem that exists, and, by definition, they do have the authority (these rules clearly give it).

> The net neutrality order also required ISPs to make more specific public disclosures about prices, fees, and data caps.

What is wrong with that, exactly? Do customers not need to know prices? Is it not literally fraudulent to not give this information?

Related (from yesterday): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057164

This Ars Technica article provides additional context vs. the Reuters article on the history of net neutrality in the FCC and the current chair's past statements when he was a commissioner; as well as additional context on the implications of FCC vs. FTC enforcement.

That's because he's a corporate shill. Corps need to keep their dirty fingers out of politics. Gov't has already restricted consumer choice with ISPs and now they want to use that lack of choice to punish us. It's really messed up, and there's no actual way for consumers to go somewhere else. I hope all the major US ISPs get sued into oblivion for anti-trust violations.

Can we pay taxes voluntarily? Equally likely to work.

'Voluntary commitments' is not only a paradox but has turned this unfortunate policy push into a ridiculous farce.

Especially since that's the default situation under this new anti-net-neutrality push by the GOP anyways.

if net neutrality fails would google become an isp then?

No, it's really hard hard to become a new ISP, and actually Google is a perfect example. They have tons of money to pull it off, yet even they are giving up on it (they are no longer expanding to other places).

What is happening is that they pull to a city, and offer attractive deals, as soon as they do companies like Time Warner will adapt and match their price and speed, but only in the region that Google get, every other customer in another region is still being f*cked as usual.

The regional ISPs can actually provide service even at a loss, because they are available in different regions so they can use money from other regions to subsidize losses in the specific one they want to eliminate the competition.

I think at this point best deal for us is if a cities would start providing ISP services, and some are trying to do just that, but unfortunately existing ISPs fighting tooth and nail with this by suing every city that is trying to do that.

So, no, nothing can easily replace existing ISPs and they know it. Currently a lot of regulation is needed because there's no competition possible, otherwise ISPs are free to do whatever they want, because who you're going to switch to if you're fed up with them?

Yup, ask yourself, why aren't there multiple water and sewer providers to homes? It doesn't work economically to supply a competitive market for certain services - physically doubling sets of pipes to end customers just don't work, regardless if they carry water or data. Just saying "the market will provide a fix" in situations like this is a shallow analysis of the problem.

The incumbent ISPs will charge just enough that it is cheaper for Google to pay the toll.

If Google is smart they'll double-down on Google Fiber. If the rest of SV were smart they'd chip in and blanket the top 200 cities with gigabit fiber to kickstart some real competition.

Ma Bell looks back at the days of $5/minute long distance calls with great fondness. The internet is an asset to be monitized to the maximum extent possible.

These things are not related to each other.

Google owns/operates one of the largest, possibly the largest network in the world. It's called YouTube. (All the other traffic also rides it, but YT is the major app by volume.)

Google also is an ISP, in the form of Google Fiber.

Google also is a (virtual) wireless carrier, as Google Fi.

Note that Google Fiber is only available in a limited number of markets, and they're no longer expanding. So they're not much of a competitor to national ISPs.

I promise I won't make more money. I promise, my word is my bond.

Everyone here is so cynical, saying he's in the pocket of telecoms. Maybe he is.

But maybe he's just ideologically opposed to these rules being implemented by a regulatory bureaucracy on the federal level.

Being a clueless libertarian might as well be indistinguishable from outright malice.

> But maybe he's just ideologically opposed to these rules being implemented by a regulatory bureaucracy on the federal level.

Or maybe he's incentivized to be ideologically opposed.

Cynicism should be the norm when dealing with politics and people in positions of power.

First, in what possible way would it make sense for those rules to be implemented at the state level? As for whether there should be rules in the first place, why should the opinions of providers carry more weight than that of the consumers who pay them?

ISPs will of course say that all those rules will drive prices up for consumers. OK, let prices go up and then let consumers decide whether they want to change the rules. somehow europe manages to have strong privacy protections and dirt cheap broadband. Market conditions are not exactly the same in the US, but nor are they anywhere near as difficult as corporate spokespeople claim them to be.

He can be ideologically opposed to rules, but he is also blatantly ignoring information regarding lack of competition for last mile broadband customers, and without that, consumers have no market method of counterbalancing corporate overreach.

Of he offered more of a structural remedy, or something, anything that actually addressed lack of last-mile competition I would be willing be less cynical about him.

His structural remedy is to remove government from the mix and let the market dictate the price of bandwidth. One thought is that the last-mile problem becomes irrelevant when mobile providers are offering high-speed internet.

Whether you agree with that sentiment is largely dependent on how you view the world.

The wireless provisioning of bandwidth to a residential market has basically failed and does not provide any real competition to wired last-mile access. Without that there is no competitive market for the last mile.

The current landscape is that mobile service providers basically do not provide any service that meet the needs of residential networks. It is difficult to even connect a network of devices to a mobile wireless hotspot without violating the terms of service from the mobile provider or very rapidly hitting bandwidth caps. As far as I can tell, multiple small companies focused on providing wireless residential network service have failed, or stayed very small regional companies because of an inherent technological inadequacy of wireless to compete with the same level of wired transit...

So it becomes not a market for raw bandwidth (which I would be reasonably happy with), but a market for access to bandwidth bundled with whatever junk the provider is trying to bundle. That bandwidth is further encumbered with business agreements restraining travel of data through last-mile access bottlenecks based on secondary agreements not between the customer and ISP (and not disclosed to the end consumer). This also does not make for a good market - choice and visibility are removed from the customer.

> "One thought is that the last-mile problem becomes irrelevant when mobile providers are offering high-speed internet.

> Whether you agree with that sentiment is largely dependent on how you view the world."

There are readily available objective truths about what wireless networks can and cannot do. They cannot compete with fiber or high-end DOCSIS deployments. Since wired last-mile infrastructure is a natural monopoly, there cannot be any reasonable expectation that a free market will exist.

Net neutrality is a relatively recent policy development in response to actual market conditions. Deregulators like to avoid the question of why the regulations were put in there to begin with, claiming they were imposed by some ideological interloper but never acknowledging that regulations are often put in place by popular demand.

To have an ideological stance does not mean every decision is already made.

Neither ideology nor partisanship excuse an individual of ignorance or malice.

Read about him on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_Pai

He worked as a lawyer for Verizon before becoming FCC chairman.

It can be both - in their pocket because he's just ideologically opposed.

The beautiful thing about a VPN is it means I don't have to care who voluntarily agrees to what.

Until your ISP 'de-prioritizes' traffic between you and the VPN?

I don't know if you're making a joke, but revoking Net Neutrality is exactly the thing a VPN won't protect you from.

If ISPs are allowed to charge different rates for different traffic types on their network, they can charge an exorbitant fee for VPN traffic and punish you.

They can, but they won't. Most major companies and the government require their employees to use VPNs now, and an ISP can't tell the difference between a personal VPN and an employer-mandated one. If they penalize VPN users, they're going to get flack from the Fortune 500 and from the governments whose goodwill they depend on to exist, not just from a bunch of individual hackers.

> ISP can't tell the difference between a personal VPN and an employer-mandated one. ... Fortune 500 and from the governments

To an ISP that sees net neutrality as a barrier to extracting their "true value", they hear: a user is depending on the ISP to provide a corporate VPN to their Fortune 500 or government job.

It's only reasonable that the ISP is fairly compensated for that, after all, without the ISP the employee couldn't work at all! Now it's just a question of price.. +$200/mo? 5% of the employee wages might be reasonable? Or maybe a % of the company's revenue? The employee contributes to revenue, the ISP enables the employee to work... it's only fair.

They'd have to charge this for any VPN of course, because like you said, they can't tell the difference between personal and corporate VPNs.

(In case it's not obvious I vehemently disagree with the above situation, and strongly believe that we should either have very tightly-enforced net neutrality or even better, make last-mile a utility that's not allowed to directly provide internet access and instead let people choose from dozens of ISPs to provide their upstream connection)

ISPs can easily tell the difference between corporate and residential customers, and penalize the latter. 'I can figure out a way to game this system therefore it's not a problem' is a very hackerish response, but it's also an immature one; not because it's bad to mediate social relations with technology, but to pretend that oneself is the only actor one needs to be concerned about, a position which is neither pragmatic nor principled. Of course I don't expect you to hew to the same principles as I do, but as a practical matter you won't be able to invent/hack your way out of your problems forever* so it behooves you to consider situations in which that strategy will not be available to you.

* unless you die young or go live in a cabin in the woods like Ted Kaczynski.

> ISPs can easily tell the difference between corporate and residential customers

How?

BTW I agree with you that we can't just hack our way out of policy problems. But one avenue of resistance to bad policy is technology.

Street maps? Kind of service their customers asked to buy? They don't know anything about why you're browsing but they know what kind of service you're buying from them because you told them. OK you could buy the basic corporate package because you like the download speeds and then just use it as a consumer to watch multiple cat videos at once, but most people aren't going to pay extra for the business package. It's like lying to political pollsters, a few people do it but not enough to invalidate the basic methodology of polling.

Yes, you can use VPN but it will be unusable, unless you purchase a special business package for $200/mo extra.

I'd say even ISPs have their employees on VPNs.

Only the flack from big companies is what should matter to the ISP?

Sadly, that's not how that works.

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