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Comment by LoSboccacc | Hacker News Reader

At this point the problem isn't Net Neutrality, it's the internet is privately owned by for profit companies.

Imagine what'd be if every single road and water pipe was ran by private company for profit without oversight.

Internet needs to be treated like infrastructure, because that's what is, both to service consumers and providers.

There are many ways to have private company to profit over infrastructure if they so chose it, but having a guaranteed baseline would resolve most issue about having to regulate private companies or stifling innovation. I.e. there could be private pipes with state subsidized access having guaranteed QOS. There could be public pipes with state renting access to private companies.

There are plenty solution, but the issue is that public can't lobby for what benefits them and deep pocket can and will buy legislation.

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> Imagine what'd be if every single road and water pipe was ran by private company

My wife used to take the bus to work in Wilmington, DE. Government-owned and operated bus service. Busses would regularly be 20 minutes off schedule, in a city with little traffic. Drivers would regularly decide to just quit their shift 15 minutes early, passing by stops full of people waiting.

My wife and I rode every day between D.C./Wilmington and Baltimore for two years. $1,700 per month train fare, but a good day was five to ten minutes late. A bad day was sitting in a broken down train for hours while waiting for another train to come rescue. (That happened once a month).

I tried to ride the D.C. Metro to work last summer. One of the best subways in the US (and also one of the most expensive). Last year tracks were literally catching fire. Regularly runs 15-20 minutes late for a 30-40 minute trip.

Our au pair is German. Her mom, sister, and several friends have visited us from Germany. She couldn't drink the tap water in Baltimore, neither could her mom drink the tap water in DC. Every single German to visit my house has remarked how bad the roads are here.

I'm a big believer in publicly run services, at an intellectual level. But out of the various cities I've lived in, I'd trust maybe two (New York and Chicago) to run my internet service. Certainly not Baltimore, Wilmington, DC, or Atlanta.

I think that says more about the the US-based public services than it does about public services in general.

From a european perspective, public services in the US seem really terrible. Whereas in the UK and Europe, the default mode of transport in large cities is public transit, in every US city I've been to (accepting maybe NY) your only real options are Uber or your own car.

Japan's famously efficient train network is almost entirely private.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Japan

"The privatised network is highly efficient, requiring few subsidies and running extremely punctually."

You don't need services to be fully publicly run. It'd be sufficient for just the required natural monopoly infrastructure to be publicly run, with companies buying access to that infrastructure to actually sell service to consumers.

This doesn't fully address your point. The government might still do that part badly. But it isn't quite as bad as entirely state-owned public services. We don't have any better solution for natural monopoly situations, such as pipes and roads.

> At this point the problem isn't Net Neutrality, it's the internet is privately owned by for profit companies

Eh, I don't think that's so bad. We needed some privatization to foster competition and raise quality.

What we don't need to grant is increased monopolies.

There is a balance to strike. Removing net neutrality policies would shift it too far away from increasing competition and quality, and buying back ISPs would be both expensive and also reduce competition and then quality.

Where do you live where there's significant ISP competition? Where I live, there's Comcast and....that's it. This is a pretty common case around the country. I can choose to pay Comcast for internet, or I can choose to not have internet.

Well mobile is one option.

I don't know anyone who has more than one or two land-line options.

I think the reason for that is businesses invested in infrastructure, and they expected to earn some profits for that. That was necessary to get the internet to where it is today.

Going forward, the question is how to continue increasing quality.

Buying out ISP's doesn't seem like the right solution to me. That's a worst-case scenario for the American public, when something needs to become totally government-owned, like banks or mortgage backers.

I think killing net neutrality would build more silos, enabling people to further insulate themselves from each other, which leads to more miscommunication, and would be detrimental.

We don't need to do that. We can make this issue known, and even if it passes, monitor its effects afterwards.

Sorry I just don't think there's an overnight solution for increasing ISP competition, unless you're willing to switch to mobile.

If you feel Comcast is somehow breaking their contracts, take them to court. That's how we address bad businesses.

Perhaps there's some argument for breaking some up -- I don't know. That doesn't seem to be on the table at the moment and I think it's better to stay focused on net neutrality for now.

The problem is that ISPs already operate like monopolies. They don't operate in the same areas as their competition. It is not the free market serving consumers.

Also, leaving regular people to take massive corporations is not really a solution. Most people don't have the time or money to go to court with anyone, let alone a team of corporate lawyers. ISPs know this, so we all just deal with their mistreatment because there is no other option around.

> The problem is that ISPs already operate like monopolies. They don't operate in the same areas as their competition. It is not the free market serving consumers.

I agree with that, I just don't think it's a problem that a market or politics are going to solve, and breaking up monopolies with regulation certainly isn't on the table in this administration.

> Also, leaving regular people to take [on] massive corporations is not really a solution

It is in the sense of voting. Your vote is more powerful than corporate spending.

I agree going to court isn't an ideal backup option. It is nice that we have such a system that allows it, and a supply of pro-bono lawyers who will take class-action cases.

> Well mobile is one option.

No it is not. Mobile is either Verizon or AT&T. All the other mobile companies use infrastructure from one of those two monopolies, and follow the same business model.

I haven't ever seen a mobile company that does not have some sort of data cap.

I've had my Sprint plan for a few years and I'm grandfathered in to unlimited data. Before I had Internet set up in my apartment, I used 400 GB in one month with it tethered to two laptops, a desktop, and a PS3. No complaints and no slowdowns.

Are these plans really nonexistent nowadays?

I haven't seen them.

I meant it is an alternative to land lines. Can't help you build more companies, sorry. I don't think the government can either

I've lived in 500 person towns, and currently live in a county with less than 60K, but I have always had DSL available. It is not great for bandwidth, but it is sufficient. I've read that ~80% of the US has access to DOCSIS and DSL, so usually it's a duopoly.

Edit: I guess I'm a bit surprised you have cable lines running into your place but not phone lines.

DSL is kind of a wide range, I know people that cap out at 256kbps which is not broadband. Sure, if you can get 6-12MB/s download that's not bad, but most people are lucky to hit 1.5Mps/ download and 1/3 of that upload which is not really competitive.

My experience with DSL is that providers use a "burst" to give you ~15-20mbit (whatever you pay for) for a few seconds, and then quickly slow down to ~1mbit.

Cable companies tend to act the same way, but much less consistently.

> We needed some privatization to foster competition and raise quality.

Or alternatively, public (and by public I don't necessarily mean state) owned infrastructure, in which the public can vote directly for what they wish to be improved about it. The argument against the quality of infrastructure isn't very strong when it's the public that decides how the infrastructure is operated and which parts are improved. As for competition, I can't see why that's necessarily a good thing. It's a waste of finite resources.

You mean like the public owning the means to production?

No thanks, too many cooks in the kitchen. We're a democratic republic specifically to avoid that.

As inept as we view our Congress to be, we're still a highly developed, functioning country.

>No thanks, too many cooks in the kitchen. We're a democratic republic specifically to avoid that.

To avoid what?

Uninformed decisions by masses who can't be expected to have the general knowledge to solve every issue. In a republic, we trust that our representatives will find and tap such experts to inform them. We don't always agree with the end decision, but, at least we are not on the chopping block. If some portion of the voting public became directly responsible for a poorly engineered bridge failure, or Flint water, I can only imagine the backlash. With a republic we can hold a small few responsible without upending everyone for their votes all the time.

> Imagine what'd be if every single road and water pipe was ran by private company for profit without oversight.

FWIW this is the current administration's plan for "unleashing" "trillions of dollars" for physical infrastructure spending (bridge and road repair etc). So the NN plan is consistent in its approach.

(though I agree with you)

So government should buy the infrastructure from different ISP and nationalize it. Then ISPs can rent the it from the government. However if I want to start a ISP which only delivers Netflix, I should be allowed to.

Should the only ISP covering a territory be allowed to only deliver Netflix? Should one of the ISPs that serves your area be allowed to buy all the others and then block Youtube and Netflix to your house and only allow Vimeo?

In a perfect world competing infrastructure companies should spring up out of thin air due to infinite availability of capital and an endless supply of engineers to implement all of this. But real markets have to operate within the confines of a finite world and limited resources. Results and outcomes matter.

> In a perfect world competing infrastructure companies should spring up out of thin air due to infinite availability of capital...

You wouldn't need an infrastructure company, nor would you need a big capital expenditure. The point is that the infrastructure would be state-owned and available on a non-discriminatory basis already. If demand exists, a competitor could bootstrap by buying fractional bandwidth from the last mile infrastructure, fractional bandwidth from a peering provider, and connecting the two.

The problem at the moment is that huge capital expenditure is required because I need the majority of a street to be interested before digging it up becomes economically viable. This problem would go away.

gov can also rent infrastructure and enforce neutrality on gov't resold lines, leaving private provided lines unregulated.

I would love this, but can you imagine the gnashing of teeth from the 63 million people who voted for Trump? Not gonna happen. We're stuck with the for-profit Internet thanks to the scary, shouty man on TV.

You think the internet would be just as efficiently run if the government controlled it without a profit incentive?

I think the left are naive to how lazy people are without the right incentives, and how without a monetary incentive office politics can be ridiculously crippling.

Maybe the HN perspective is driven by the fact that open-source in software engineering has flourished - leading many to think that great things can be built without monetary incentive.

Or perhaps its because they are surrounded by very smart people and start believing that the rest of society operates at the same calibre.

There is enough politics involved inside companies where huge monetary incentives are up for grabs, when you take away this monetary incentive, it becomes insanely political.

Water and streets are doing relatively well. Any problems lately have occurred after Republicans cut infrastructure spending.

Honestly I don't care what those people think. Their judgement is bad and they should feel bad.

People should feel bad for using CDNs.

Can you expand? I don't understand this viewpoint.

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/07/09/what-does-...

I think liberals' judgement is bad. They thought they would win the election and did not.

"voting for trump" != voting for ISP monopolies and anti-net neutrality. Don't blame everything in the world on people who voted for Trump. Look at how difficult it was to get any sort of good regulation for net neutrality under Obama. You need to go after ISPs, Comcast, etc... and the people both R and D who get money from them.

Many of those people have actually been led believe it has something to do with quashing conservative media.

From the man himself:

Donald J. Trump‏ Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...

Like those millions of people who believed the fake news fed to them, these people don't even know what it means, much less make an informed decision, so the Republicans aren't going to lose many votes over this compared to informed voters who are typically in the cities and vote D anyway.

> Like those millions of people who believed the fake news fed to them, these people don't even know what it means, much less make an informed decision, so the Republicans aren't going to lose many votes over this compared to informed voters who are typically in the cities and vote D anyway.

Totally, I mean, Obama's FCC and internet policy was completely on point, the unceasing vigilance to protect encryption and the snowden and wikileaks affairs really showed us that under his administration internet freedom and protection from dragnet surveillance was absolutely a top priority. The massive focus on these issues both in his campaign after bush as well as the continuation of making these issues a top priority in the Sanders and Hillary camps during the last cycle only proves this point even more, and I can only credit the well informed and highly vocal supporters of each candidate for making this the case.

Glad you made this point, I was thinking the same thing but too intimidated by the sheer number of the overwhelming majority of pro-trump neo-facists on this site!

> the sheer number of the overwhelming majority of pro-trump neo-facists on this site!

Do you have any data to back this up? Please don't make sweeping generalizations of the HN membership. There's a wide variety of views held across the people who participate here, and due to each of our own very natural human psychological biases, we tend to view these in a very biased way. In my experience here, and as evidenced by the vigorous debate on any number of topics, it's decidedly unfair to characterize the membership in any sweeping way like this, and it also prevents people from being able to engage in meaningful, constructive conversation.

... thinking you missed the sarcasm here ...

You're correct. I did miss the sarcasm.

Given that you've written so much sarcastically, what are you actual thoughts on the political demographics on HN? Often sarcasm is used to express the opposite of the actual belief, so is your belief that there is a wide variety of views, or is it that it's a majority of the opposite of "pro-Trump neo-fascist"? If the latter, my first comment still applies.

Politicians will be politicians.

"Like those millions of people who believed the fake news fed to them,"

So people using Facebook which includes both Democrats and Republicans? You do realize a lot of Democrats are not technologists right? And that they won't have a better understanding of technology than their conservative brethren?

I know it's popular among my circle to just outright shit on all Republicans no matter what, but it's really not helping our cause.

> You do realize a lot of Democrats are not technologists right?

Technologists believe fake news, too.

Don't try to "both sides are the same" this. Look at the accomplishments of the previous administration's FCC and the current one. There is a stark difference.

I didn't say "both sides are the same" even though they largely are. But you're naive if you think that Comcast isn't lobbying their democratize representatives in Philly to vote against net neutrality regulations.

Furthermore, look at how much work it took to get net neutrality passed even under Obama. If the democrats are so much on our side, why was it so difficult?

Under the Democrats, the FCC passed net neutrality, twice, after a court order struck down the first attempt. Under the Republicans, the FCC isn't just doing nothing, it's actively going out of its way to repeal it. The difference could not be more stark. If a neutral Internet is important to you, the sides are not even remotely the same.

Right. My point is look how difficult it was. We (dems) dragged our feet doing it. Why?

I'm not defending the republican's choices here, I don't agree with what they're doing.

Is the internet not for-profit right now? Comcast doesn't seem to be struggling. ISPs are highly profitable as it is.

Yeah I miss Obama. Remember last year when the Internet wasn't run by private companies? And when the people who voted for Trump weren't Republicans yet? Suddenly on January 20th all these things that happened before were suddenly his fault.

Uhhh Obama's FCC didn't push to remove net neutrality after pushback from the public.

With a new administration, content providers are looking amp up lobbying and give it another go.

We need to forget politics red vs. blue and consider that this may be a bad idea. If we make it an unpopular position for politicians to support, they won't pass it.

Votes beat dollars because at the end of the day, without your vote, politicians supporting a given position don't have the job.

>> We need to forget politics red vs. blue and consider that this may be a bad idea. If we make it an unpopular position for politicians to support, they won't pass it.

Then let's stop blaming the shouting man for stuff other than being the idiot he is. There's plenty of other folks to blame, and plenty of them were in power before now. There was plenty of scary and stupid Internet regulation discussed under Obama that he didn't react to the way I would have liked AT ALL. There's plenty of stuff Democrats suddenly decided they didn't like and Republicans suddenly decided they like when in reality it's hardly that different at all. There's a bunch of shitty people in Congress and in many other sectors of government, and let's not forget that they're not going to go away once anyone's President-of-choice wins the next election, or that they're not partly responsible for a whole bunch of conservatives feeling disenfranchised and going with a lunatic as an overreaction.

> Then let's stop blaming the shouting man for stuff other than being the idiot he is

I can't control what other people say =)

> There was plenty of scary and stupid Internet regulation discussed under Obama that he didn't react to the way I would have liked AT ALL

I agree. For example, he was totally wrong about how to deal with everyone having access to E2E encryption in their pockets.

All I can do is advocate for focusing on this one issue. I believe in net neutrality and I think if more people understand how it contributed to today's internet, then more would be on board.

One thing to note is that net neutrality was always built into ISPs until content providers started focusing on subscriptions to data via the internet rather than TV.

At that point, content companies started to see how they could corner markets by using dollars to persuade ISPs to give them better throughput than smaller competition.

So, while the neutrality regulation only came into place in 2015, it was really standard practice up until then.

> There's a bunch of shitty people in Congress and in many other sectors of government, and let's not forget that they're not going to go away once anyone's President-of-choice wins the next election, or that they're not partly responsible for a whole bunch of conservatives feeling disenfranchised and going with a lunatic as an overreaction.

Yes, well, I think in this case we can set aside how inept many in government seem to be. On this issue, I think we can come together and agree that net neutrality is a good thing, and that Netflix or Comcast shouldn't be able to give you faster speeds to certain websites, because that means you'll be paying more to visit sites that they don't own, thus limiting your choices.

> Imagine what'd be if every single road and water pipe was ran by private company for profit without oversight.

Around here the highways are owned by the government and maintenance is contracted out. But there is one toll highway that the government "sold" (99 year lease) to a private company. And the costs to use it have been increasing constantly.

You have to look at this from the standpoint of Rail Roads back and the resulting mess that came from the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887. It took decades if not a century to realize how regulating transport versus producers did not help anyone, resulted in sub standard services and little advancement. Why? Because once codified it is damn hard to move. Net Neutrality is going to require detailed pricing regulations, routing, bandwidth, and more. You can guarantee once those exist they companies will see no need to expand on it.

So why should we not be overly concerned. Because in a system some perceive as unfair others perceive an opportunity. We are going to trap ourselves into a realm of where any attempt to offer more services will be met with legal shenanigans locking out competition and preventing even the established groups from expanding. It will become yet another industry wholly under the control of groups paid to solicit politicians endlessly. (more K street). We won't have the equivalent of AirBnB, Lyft, and Uber, companies trying to offer a better internet experience because regulation will stifle it and protect a status quo

>Imagine what'd be if every single road and water pipe was ran by private company for profit without oversight.

We'd have higher quality, lower cost water and roads.

"Government agencies less likely than private to comply with environmental regulations, study finds" Here are key points from the article linked below:

For power plants and hospitals, public facilities were on average 9 percent more likely to be out of compliance with Clean Air Act regulations and 20 percent more likely to have committed high-priority violations.

For water utilities, public facilities had on average 14 percent more Safe Drinking Water Act health violations and were 29 percent more likely to commit monitoring violations.

Public power plants and hospitals that violated the Clean Air Act were 1 percent less likely than private-sector violators to receive a punitive sanction and 20 percent less likely to be fined.

Public water utilities that violated Safe Drinking Water Act standards were 3 percent less likely than investor-owned utilities to receive formal enforcement actions.

http://archive.news.indiana.edu/releases/iu/2015/10/when-gov....

Here's another viewpoint on the benefit of road privatisation: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate-uk/2012/03/22/road-pri....

As far as "imagining" what it would be like with private water and roads -- instead of imagining, perhaps we ought to look at the topic rationally.

Here's another (opinion) article about privatized roads:

http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2012/05/a_glimpse_of....

https://fee.org/articles/privatize-public-highways/

And here's an academic study about water privatization benefits in Argentina: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=648048

> without oversight

Your examples are "with oversight" via environmental regulations and quality regulations.

That's a goalpost on wheels. Anyway, it doesn't change the fact that the GP offered than even under the same regulations, public facilities perform significantly worse than private ones.

When privatization works it is good but it doesn't always work. The current cable industry seems to be just exploiting a monopoly so I think "privatization" has already failed here

So your cable broadband service has been stagnant for a decade? Mine has gotten about 10x faster for roughly the same cost.

I only have 1 possible cable provider and it's pretty expensive and their service is terrible. It's gotten better in they last 10 years but that doesn't mean that it is a competitive market.

EDIT: Maybe it's changed but when I checked last they had low customer satisfaction but really high profits, which is bad for consumers and (I'm not an expert here so take with a grain of salt) would be really unlikely if the market was competitive at all

Is anyone actually advocating an abolishment of laws? No privatization advocate is suggesting no laws at all.

How about the air you are breathing? Would that be better quality if you paid per breath? What about the people who can't afford to pay to use the roads?

Dear Brian, you're currently living in France and you're spewing that crap? Have you not noticed the ever decreasing quality of our highways which were sold to private entities, our hospitals getting worse and worse as the governement incentivizes the creation of private clinics which offer worse service, the privatization of France Télécom into what is currently Orange, the privatization of the SNCF, of EDF, GDF Suez, and every single public service?

If you haven't been here long enough to notice that, since it's been a process done over the last thirty to fourty years, let me spell it out:

Privatized public services offer a worse service and are a danger to society.

How DARE you provide a contrasting opinion!

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