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Comment by kem | Hacker News Reader

Is this a surprise? Pai has made it abundantly clear he doesn't care what consumers think. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but the idea he would respond to their concerns always seemed naive to me.

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He might not care, but big amount of negative responses can help beat him in court, when FCC will be sued for repealing Net Neutrality. If it will be demonstrated that FCC acted against public interest, courts can simply prevent this idiocy from happening. It also helps the Congress to understand that people pay attention aren't buying the monopolistic koolaid.

So, please comment if you care.

Be careful of wishing for judicial oligarchy, because when it happens you may not enjoy what it looks like.

You prefer the Rule of Pai? I think I'd prefer the multiple court of appeals process to determine whether the FCC discharged its duty, rather than an uncontested decision by Pai that clearly goes against what the people want, in defiance of the duty the FCC is charged with.

I prefer the rule of nobody but the consumer. That's what markets are for.

My understanding is that in most US cities there is only one choice of cable Internet provider so the consumer cannot choose a provider that offers neutral service.

So the FCC is required to force the providers to comply with the will of the people. And they're not doing it.

In case of monopolists, you get the rule of monopolists. Do you prefer that? That's part of what Net Neutrality is supposed to protect from.

Yeah, that would be great in the Ayn Rand's fantasy land. Unfortunately, back here in reality there is no ISP market. Consumers have little to no choice, and vertically integrated mega-corps have a stranglehold on everything. We all rely on our representative government to stand up to a titan like Comcast.

Yep, but worth reminding you at this point that in this case you are the commodity, the companies are the consumers and the Internet is the market. Free market will make more sense if you think about it that way.

the market only exists when there are multiple providers for services or goods. I have only one choice of ISP where I live, so basically i have to pay whatever they want for internet service, have no internet, or move.

This is also the case for many Americans, and with our FCC director also being pro-merger, it could also get a lot worse (your two options merge into one option). The ISPs have lobbied and colluded with each other to the point of making their regional monopolies legal in order to have no competition. This is why we need government oversight of this industry, as they've done a damn good job making sure you don't have the option to switch providers if you don't like them.

How can the online market function if some services are throttled?

That's exactly what net neutrality protects — consumer choice. Corporations aren't consumers, however, as they, Pai, and yourself are trying to argue that they are. This is taxation and extortion, plain and simple. You don't have to be a genius to see that. Arguments like yours are becoming a dime-a-dozen this decade; purposefully detracting from the issue and making it seem more complicated than it is to confuse people. Websites that are heavily trafficked already pay a premium to keep their services up and running — it's called infrastructure. ISPs want a piece of someone else's pie - have you seen "There Will Be Blood?" The internet is a milkshake, and Comcast, Verizon, and their disgusting ilk, to which you seem to want to be a party of, find it amusing to imagine having some very long straws, different from the kind that belongs to the man in your argument.

Jesus Christ, here we go again.

If you "free market" types figure out a way to get ten different companies competing on public fiber in 100 different cities across the US, then I'll finally listen to this argument. Until then, realize that there is no market. It's a monopoly.

Stop dismissing consumer protection with a wave of your magic market wand when you really have no idea what you're talking about.

I'm not sure what that commenter was suggesting, but one possible solution is to give the public the ability to vote.

Right now, the FCC has to receive comments from the public but does not have to listen to it. If the FCC were bound by the vote of the public, it would likely behave very differently.

Local loop unbundling seems to work pretty well in the EU (at least we appear to get cheaper, better internet).

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:l...

This doesn't really help in low-population areas though, as there's little incentive for anyone to update the lines.

The result of the regulation is a mostly healthy market in consumer ISP service, which is weird.

At 5 different apartments in 2 different states, the only choice I've had for high-speed internet had been Comcast. There is no free market here. Starting a new ISP is a non-starter due to right-of-way, pile attachment, paid peering that the big players current force on Facebook, Google, etc.

You don't understand the word "oligarchy".

Kritarchy — rule by judges: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritarchy

In the context of his comment, as well has his other posts, it is clear to me that he objects to judges essentially limiting what people can and can't do. In my opinion, it's implied he applies that to those currently in power and their assumed mandate.

Unfortunately for that argument, we don't have rule by judges by any stretch. Judges (and police/prosecutors/etc) do have lots of power, but they are still bound by the law and therefore checked by the legislative branch of the government, should it come to that.

The courts don't have to examine whether or not they think a rule change is in the public interest, nor would they have to conclude that the public interest is proven by what position got the most individual comments in support of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act_(...

They could conclude that an agency unreasonably ignored specific arguments in public comments, but probably not that the fact that the agency wasn't swayed by the volume of the comments was unreasonable.

If the arguments were repeated multiple times, it's easier to point out that FCC intentionally ignored them, and it's not "we didn't notice" situation.

Pai, like most Republicans, have repeatedly shown their view that the profit of a corporation is always more important than human interests.

Agreed. Even with service providers saying "we aren't trying to get rid of net neutrality", Pai himself has in numerous public forums said explicitly that he wants to get rid of net neutrality.

no it isn't a surprise but we should still be mad as hell, try to stop it, and punish those responsible.

I'm a consumer and I think this is a good thing. Can't make all the people happy all the time.

Edit: Besides, government policies reflexively guided by consumer sentiment is called populism, which is dangerous.

Please explain.

Read this article by the brilliant Ben Shapiro: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/11/10/7-reasons...

Edit: To those knee-jerk rejecting the argument based on the Breitbart domain, besides being intellectually lazy, you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author on matters of economics and politics (and indeed that Breitbart used to be a very respectable media outlet before the founder, Andrew Breitbart, passed away and the company was taken over by Steve Bannon)

Had to stop reading after this quote

"ISPs generally do not discriminate against highly-trafficked websites. If they did – holding a figurative gun to the head of those websites by throttling back speed to those websites – consumers would dump those ISPs in favor of others."

I'd believe this true if any of the large cities I have lived in actually had competition between ISPs.

Ok well you made it about 10% through the article - at least you made a modest attempt at understanding the other side of the debate.

Oh I get both sides of the debate. I also understand why we put regulations in place. Don't get me wrong, our government has fumbled the ball on a few occasions but generally regulations are only put in place once an industry habitually breaks the trust of our citizens.

That's the same phantasy they have in health care. They think there is a functioning market with choices where there simply isn't for most of us.

Interesting, I think an alternative to the net neutrality ruling might be to go the way that Canada and the UK did which largely prevented this from becoming a significant issue: force the major ISPs to lease last mile lines to the upstarts. Make a market that works. It also did great good for competition on speed grounds.

Well, there's a great way to ruin your credibility on Hacker News.

Already have net neutrality? Except we don't. ISPs are already prioritizing their own content over 3rd party content. Sometimes via bandwidth limitations, sometimes via throttling.

Companies putting a lot of bits on the net? Yeah, and they're paying for it! And the customers are paying to pull those bits down. Why, again, do those companies have to pay a third time on those bytes?

The Government Still Allows Discrimination In Traffic? Sure, they allow prioritization of (for example) real time traffic over web traffic. The key is that this is done equally across all real time traffic, not just the ISP's VOIP offering.

That article is shoveling BS pretty hardcore.

Citing Breitbart? Really?

Okay, fine. Let's pretend this is a credible argument.

"Companies won't prioritize traffic" - they do, and they have. Cell carriers routinely do, counting traffic to ~their~ paid services as not counting against their data cap.

"Or else consumers will just change providers" - there is very little choice in ISP in most of the country, and almost entirely owned by large, established players. 'Duopoly' it's called. And due to the costs, it makes it hard for a scrappy third party to come in. Also, Pai is pushing for "competitive" to literally mean "at least one other high speed provider providers service within half a mile of a residence". Meaning he'd say there was no monopoly even if you literally had choice of only one ISP. So trying to act like competition will save people, when he's actively trying to fight against competition being required, and the market is too expensive for a non-incumbent to enter, is really disingenous.

"Some companies take up more bandwidth". Actually, no. The -consumers- do. Netflix isn't using that bandwidth; consumers are. They're demanding to use the connection and bandwidth -that they paid for-, on whatever service they want to use it on. To correct Shapiro's analogy, this is like charging the person taking delivery of a truck a fee for a certain number of trucks, then turning around and charging the companies operating those trucks differing amounts -because you feel like it-.

Yes, the network can be 'reasonably managed'. If you want to clarify that, that's fine, and an -entirely different argument-.

"Create barriers to entry" - actually, the reverse is true. Again, see what has already happened with mobile carriers, and their prioritizing their own services (or services willing to pay them money) over others. This is obvious. Heck, the article even negates their own example (which is just...-one- example) by showing that Google has taken both sides of the issue.

"Technological stagnation" - whoa whoa whoa. This says the landscape isn't competitive; didn't this guy just say back in the first paragraph that consumers will just change ISPs, implying the landscape -is- competitive?! Otherwise this is a completely different issue; stagnation was there even before net neutrality. 2015, we were way behind everyone. You can't claim net neutrality is even related.

"Internet taxes could happen" - "could". Or Pai could just say "Hey, we totally support net neutrality, and we're not collecting fees". He's totally able to do that. Same as Wheeler was doing. We're done here.

"Content restrictions from the government" - I believe there's a couple of amendments here, that would lead to a legal showdown. And regardless there's nothing preventing, say, Congress, from passing legislation to mandate this anyway. Again, red herring.

Man you really destroyed that guy

Wonder if he's gutsy enough to change his mind.

I'm generally in agreement with you, but one minor criticism, cell carriers are not home ISPs and there's a lot more competition in the cell carrier business because cell carriers are not limited by physical lines.

The physical lines are what kills competition in the home ISP business and largely breaks the market. If you look at countries where they've freed the physical last mile lines, the issues are a lot fewer as there is greatly increased competition.

Oh, I know. Cell carriers -have even more competition than landline ISPs-. So when I can point at -their- having flouted net neutrality principles, you can't claim that competition in landline markets will ensure net neutrality principles will be upheld without regulation.

You need merely look at other countries where this is implemented like Canada and the UK though to see its success.

Cell carriers are a completely different case which isn't comparable - bandwidth costs them a lot more than it does to landlines due to air time costs and the associated impact on other customers, the sheer cost of spectrum also prices many smaller players out of the game altogether, limiting the real ability for competition in the cellular space.

Freeing those last mile lines results in plentiful and cheap bandwidth - something unavailable in the cellular space and an easy tool for small competition to use against the big guys.

EDIT: Sorry if that seems contradictory to what I said before, just trying to make the point that the cases are quite different and more appropriate examples would be better, I'd mistakenly oversimplified this before.

> To those knee-jerk rejecting the argument based on the Breitbart domain

Breitbart has destroyed their credibility, or more accurately never gained any, through constant lying and intellectual dishonesty (this is when the letter of something is true, but the spirit of it is false).

I can cite any number of disreputable sources saying anything and then demand you parse through them and disagree piecemeal, but that would be a waste of your time. Or we could be reasonable people and cite reputable sources to back our coherent arguments. I am unaware of any fact-based coherent arguments against Net Neutrality.

>you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author on matters of economics

Actually he's not.

"you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author..."

Honestly Breitbart has destroyed their name to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if they took a well-respected author's article, rewrote the whole thing, and then published it under false pretense.

> consumers would dump those ISPs in favor of others.

Competition does not exist in the US for ISPs.

> Some Companies Take Up More Bandwidth Than Others.

They pay for that bandwidth and we pay for the connection. Asking companies to pay more so they're not artificially throttled does not make sense in the actual world of the internet.

> The Government Still Allows Discrimination In Traffic.

Saying because there is vague language in NN we need to get rid of it entirely does not make any sense what so ever. You don't demolish a building because the window is broken.

> Barriers to Entry Are Created

NN removes barriers to entry for many startups that simply can't pay the "troll bridge" of the ISPs.

> Technological Stagnation

These ISPs that are for the removal of NN were given billions of dollars in tax breaks to make the internet better in the US. NN has nothing to do with development of the internet, and using Europe as an example is pretty stupid. Europe has NN, they also have heavy governmental regulation in terms of the last mile.

Saying NN is bad because it doesn't solve that problem is like saying oranges are bad because they can't power your car. It's a totally different matter.

> Internet Taxes Could Happen

If these taxes are used to deploy more public owned fiber lines, I'm all for it.

> Content Restrictions From The Government

NN has nothing to do with this.

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