Why one Republican voted to kill privacy rules: “Nobody has to use the Internet” | Hacker News Reader

Why one Republican voted to kill privacy rules: “Nobody has to use the Internet”

arstechnica.com

67 pointsAdmiralAsshat49 comments

The problem is he's not technically wrong, but he is holistically wrong.

You also don't have to use electricity, gas, water utilities or hospitals. However our society has progressed to the point that these things are considered basic services now if you want to live inside of common society.

I'm not sure if he is intentionally ignoring this aspect or really is too disconnected with reality.

I say that because frankly I know a lot of people his age who don't use the internet directly at all.

I know even recently there was a exec that was being groomed for a major position at a top 5 tech co, who didn't use internet directly and had his secretary print out emails for him, that he would mark up and she would transcribe in response. It's more common than you think in the govt.

Actually Not having electricity or water service in a occupied house is considered a building code violation in some municipalities.

Internet access is considered a basic necessity in several countries too.

You misunderstand...in some municipalities if you were to opt to not connect your house to the power grid, or water mains you would cited.

Nice way of putting it (technically vs. holistically). I wouldn't go so far as to declare anything a basic service, even something I've used almost every day of my life like electricity. I simply view it as "something that's nice to have" and therefore something we shouldn't squat down and take a huge dump on for no reason.

He does not. Most (by far) of the people he represents do.

Why isn't he representing them?

Fix that and you'll fix far more than just a boneheaded internet policy.

that exec is still using the internet directly. That's like saying you don't drive your car directly, because you are only using the steering wheel and the pedals. He just has a really inconvenient and expensive browser extension.

Context: He said this sarcastically in response to someone saying "nobody has to use Facebook."

I'd argue that the number of choices of social-network and search engines choices are about as meaningful as the number of ISP choices. If anything, Facebook/Google have a larger monopoly (by percentage) than most (or all) ISPs.

I watched the video. It didn't sound sarcastic at all.

Someday these old fuckers who are ruining our world will die. Then maybe there will be thoughtful progress of humanity.

But then you will be the old fucker completely out of touch with the strange stuff the kids are into these days and the lame things they worry about.

Not necessarily. Technological progress seems to be slowing.

> Technological progress seems to be slowing.

Comedy gold. Really?

How long ago since you thought 'mail' was something a guy carried for you?

How long ago since you thought a phone should be wired to a wall?

How long before that when you thought a computer was something that banks used?

How long since the last time a major technology was invented that changed how you live your day to day? When that happened, how long had it been since the previous one?

I bet the first number is bigger than the second number.

1. The smartphone (iphone 2007)

2. The internet (early 1990s)

The internet, 70's & 80's, the web, 90's.

It's fairly well established that inventing things gets easier when there are other things that you can build on top of.

what about cellphones? Laptops? GPS?

You can't just pick two things. Being thorough here is hard.

Really? I just see it getting faster and faster.

As I've gotten older, I keep thinking about that; How will I look upon new advancement and things my kids are excited about. Will I be an "old fucker", attempting to slow down progress because it doesn't make sense?

Certainly, my generation will have a different view growing up in the "internet age" but how different will we look from present day conservatives?

I hope I stay open minded for a long time and never disregard anything because it's new but only time will tell.

> Nobody has to use the Internet

Ridiculous! These Congresscritters are completely out of touch!

> Nobody has to use Google

Well, you see, you can use DuckDuckGo, stop pretending Google is a necessity. (Actual Hacker News argument, by the people who are "with it" and "in touch" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13989078)

We've grown up with change and expecting change every year. This old fucker was eligible for AARP by the time AOL offered internet service. Most elderly, especially conservative elderly hold a more static mindset than those born in the modern era.

isn't the wise thing to do consider what WE will think as "not required" when we are old though? :)

Ask 1000 randomly chosen people 10 basic questions about a subject, work out the average score.

If a Congressperson/Senate member can't get a better score than the average of the 1000 on that subject then they don't get to vote on the legislation.

(I'm not serious..but sometimes I wonder).

I call it the "Yogi Test" (smarter than the average bear).

Sounds good. Until you try to define "1000 random people" and "10 basic questions". :-)

And who picks the answers, and who scores

The nice thing about a percentile score is that you have enormous leeway in how difficult the questions are.

And it's not that hard to find people that are mostly not experts on a subject.

Most regulations are already written by "experts."

Oil companies write oil regulations, bankers write banking regulations, etc. I don't think this is an ideal state.

the problem there is not their expertise, but their interests.

you can insist on both.

People who have Internet access are increasingly using it to get or keep their jobs. They don't really have a choice.

Consider the following analogy:

Nobody has to use a car. They can just stay home and be unemployed. Especially in rural Wisconsin. So when carmakers install tracking devices into that car, they can use your movement data as a way to make money. If you don't like it, walk or take a bus.

Nobody has to have any information either

I mean hey, nobody has to participate in a democracy. It'd be so much more convenient if I could just, like, dictate what would happen, and they had no way of looking it up

The internet's such a fad I'm just so sick of hearing about, let's just let companies buy it up and kill it off

Nobody has to read, so it's ok if your library reading records be made public.

Nobody has to get medical treatment, so your medical records should be made public.

Nobody has to have sex, so there should be a publically accessible camera in your bedroom.

Now why can't more of my constituents be like this upstanding citizen.

This is the same guy who wrote the Patroit Act.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Sensenbrenner

Fuck him.

Conservatives have one hammer for every nail: the free market. The invisible hand always does better than government. Deregulation is always good. (There are three exceptions to this with many conservatives: free trade is bad, army is unlimited good, fossil fuels must be subsidized).

That's what leads to such statements. It doesn't matter how ridiculous a corner they will paint themselves into. They can deny that basic supply and demand exists. When backed into a corner they just exclaim "socialism doesn't work! Look at USSR!"

(And then together with neocons proceed to sanction and undermine more regimes to make sure they are right.)

It's kind of a religious conviction. Capitalism is the unofficial religion of the USA the same as Islam is in Saudi Arabia. Don't believe me? Try to say publicly that capitalism has faults and your criticism of capitalism itself would be instantly deflected to something else, or else you will be quickly ostracized.

This religion will soon come up against the hard facts of automation causing demand for human labor to drop, undermining the conviction that wages will always be the primary way for people to get money.

> the free market.

The only libertarians on the senate was two republicans and they both voted to sell online privacy. I guess that's real free market there.

So many of the problems surrounding this would be fixed with:

1. More representatives per capita

2. Shorter (and limited max) term limits.

There's nothing wrong with what he's saying here. The problem is that his view, though representative of some portion of the population, are over-represented due to the lack of representation in general.

So as automation and AI are predicted (and to some extent, already have) to displace a lot of jobs over the next few decades, I feel that making the internet more accessible is America's best interest, as it may be able to make education MORE accessible through free online resources like Khan Academy, YouTube videos, downloadable textbooks, online study groups (Slack, forums), so that the average American has a better chance at switching careers, along with being more informed about things like the environment, their personal health (physical and mental), and government resources in their local area that might help them.

In my city (and I'm sure it's the same around the U.S.), libraries are packed because they provide internet and a safe, free space to learn.

I'm confused about what data the ISPs actually have access to.

It seems over 90% of my online activity is now https. That means they have access to very little that can be useful to an advertiser. (I suppose they have my DNS lookups, but it's trivial to change DNS to a company you trust.)

It's interesting how universally hated ISPs are. Google and Facebook, from a technical standpoint, are much scarier in what they know about everyone on the internet. Yet few people seem to care that they use our browsing and search data to target us to advertisers.

Thanks to SNI the hostname you are connecting to is usually visible to a snoop.

> I suppose they have my DNS lookups, but it's trivial to change DNS to a company you trust

That won't solve it, there's still what's called "passive DNS". With passive DNS someone between you and the internet (in this case your ISP) simply tags and stores all DNS packets it sees before forwarding them to wherever they're supposed to go. From that they can determine which domains you are resolving even if you aren't using their resolver. They can also block DNS requests, and even send you their own responses. That last part doesn't matter as much as you'd think: they can't just redirect you to an Ad server because they wouldn't be able to authenticate the SSL connection.

I should also add that this DNS snooping has legitimate and ethical uses. A big reason to do this is to deal with malware. Often malware uses certain domain names as their command and control server. If this malware has spread far and wide and could affect a lot of your customers, you can black hole the domain name so that, if you have the malware and it tries to resolve mycommandandcontrolserver.biz, the ISP intercepts the request and send back an NXDOMAIN, or have it resolve to 0.0.0.0, or resolve it to a particular server that simply closes every connection it gets so you can figure out which customers are affected and contact them.

They can also get the hostname for https connections the initial SSL connection sends the hostname in plaintext (called SNI). But getting that requires reconstructing the TCP stream for connections in real time, and that's just not very practical at ISP scale.

Even with https it's a lot. Saw this post the [other day](https://www.reddit.com/r/WarOnComcast/comments/65547r/as_if_...), but I can't find a cached version.

Honestly, banning lobbying from Congress might solve the multitudes of issues we're handed down from the government.

http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp-...

I'd suggest that companies, individuals and interest groups file suggestions (similar to amicus curiae) if they want their voices heard. Congress shouldn't be influenced by outside money.

What exactly does banning lobbying look like in a representative democracy?

This is probably mostly an age thing. I mostly agree that "nobody has to use the internet" because for most of my life there was no internet, at least no consumer internet, and I have personal experience living a happy, productive life quite well without it.

Many people over 60 today really don't use the internet much if at all.

A younger person who has never known life without a mobile device and ubiquitous internet might well have a different view.

This is probably mostly an age thing

Argued that way, nobody has to use phone, digital camera and a whole bunch of other things. Part of the job of being a law maker is to understand the needs/interests of all people, not just old people because the lawmaker happens to be old. A sensible person would find out the usage of the internet, its impact, privacy etc before making (even though he himself might not use) a decision.

I don't drink, but that doesn't mean I should vote down any bill that has anything to do with alcohol without understanding what it is about, right?

> Argued that way, nobody has to use phone, digital camera and a whole bunch of other things. Part of the job of being a law maker is to understand the needs/interests of all people, not just old people because the lawmaker happens to be old

It's not just because the lawmaker happens to be old, but also because voters happen to be old. He's a Congressman, so he has to get reelected every other year. Half of those elections will be midterm elections. Almost twice as many voters will be 65+ as will be 18-29.

I also grew up without internet but the definition of things you have to have to function in society evolves all the time. 20 years ago you were fine without internet but nowadays it's much harder to do without. 150 years ago you were perfectly fine without car, today less so in many areas. Same for phone, access to doctors, electrical power, running water, grocery stores and so on. Society evolves.

What the republican party has become makes me sad for any real conservative :(

Yeah, thanks Obama!

He is the one who made it so hard for republicans to both: A) Disagree with Obama, and B) Have a reasonable political position.

Sarcasm may occur... :)

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