Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

I have to be careful to give my scraping methods away, as I've had digital targets attempt countermeasures.

Step 2: Massively-parallel downloading of all the sites using clustered nodes, compression of it, and resulting data stored into high-performance, clustered filesystem.

Step 3: Move it off of there when traffic is low or overnight if system doesn't go offline overnight.

There is definitely something in account settings somewhere that removes you from search results, I may have mixed that up with the NSFW flag.

>They have only been hidden from Tumblr's search engine if the user has their account set to not see adult content

As I mentioned, this is default. And "adult" blogs do not show up at all in search results on mobile.

My point stands, though. Yahoo already started making adult content harder to find (accidentally or intentionally), the momentum is already there.

One common version: Many sells come with some sort of earn-out. Meaning that the company has to perform at some level over some amount of time in order for the buyer to be on the hook for the full amount of the sell price (or some other bonus).

It is not uncommon to attach a buy-back clause to the earn-out. If you fail to hit the earn out, you have some ability to buy back the company and/or it's assets (there are many different versions). It's a win-win clause. If the company fails to perform under its new leadership the buying company has some hedge against it. It gives the seller a chance to effectively hedge at least some of the risk that they won't be able to fully earn-out the purchase price due to management issues at the new company.

I've been on the executive team for five company sales. Two of them had exactly this clause. Both during earlier stages. We never exercised them.

That's what I was trying to get at. I didn't mean to make it sound like you'd go to jail.

If there was actual competition for broadband internet access, maybe net neutrality would be superfluous. However, there is basically zero competition in the internet access market (at least in the US), so the hypothetical "free market" can't do shit.

> I don't understand what is the problem of that. In every other situation of life you pay for the "type" of the thing you're consuming. When you go to a restaurant you don't pay for volume of food, but for the types of food you're asking. There are indeed restaurants where you pay for mass of food, but you don't have all the expensive options available. I can see a world where you would have to pay a little more for Netflix and a little less for sshing to your VPS.

I don't pay for access to specific sites, I pay for access to a network.

The internet is, structurally, a buffet, in your restaurant analogy. Paid prioritization is basically going to an all-you-can-eat buffet, paying for entrance, only to discover that all entrees other then the rice are charged individually.

I don't think anyone complains about paying more if they stream a lot of video online. But people ask for NN so they do not have to pay more if they stream from Netflix instead of Hulu.

> Then if some law is enacted to prevent you from limiting that consumer, then you'll either make the lives of the others miserable or you'll be forced to spend more on your link and luckily pass the cost down to all your consumers. Right?

Yes but the consumers of the bandwidth are the locals in that small rural town, not netflix. Charge the locals for using more bandwidth because they are the ones requesting it.

Mass of food is a false equivalence; cost of food per kg varies widely based on food, but cost of transmission of bulk traffic (the only kind ISPs are proposing to charge the entity on the other side of the connection for) is largely identical to the ISP. The cost may vary depending on where it comes from (network wise, not precisely geographically), but ISPs are already able to deal with that by having different sized links to other ISPs.

At least one problem with charging by type is my ISP doesn't know what type of thing I'm consuming. I'm streaming Netflix over SSH, but they don't know this. Do I get the high or the low price?

The issue with removing net neutrality is that it enables censorship and removes 'the free market' of the internet. The internet provider doesn't like your political blog? Well now they can wall it off under a addon package just like cable TV. Facebook makes an exclusive deal with the internet provider? Now Twitter is locked behind an addon package or completely unavailable.

You might say, "well people will just use a different internet provider!". The problem with that is that many places in the USA only have one, maybe two providers to chose from; So it's not like a restaurant where they can just go somewhere else.

You might say, "well more internet providers will be created if no-one likes the current ones!". But its very expensive to create a network of fiber optic cables. Billions of dollars, maybe trillions. A start-up can't just 'interrupt' the market. And usually when a new internet provider is created, they have to lease the big-company lines just work. And you can bet if they make that deal with existing companies they'll have to accept big-company's traffic policies.

I too am a proponent for free markets, but I have to point out that the telecommunications industry could care less about free market principles.

For the last hundred years telcos have consistently lobbied the federal government for regulations that lock out competition. They pretend regulation prevents them from performing as well as they could, but the last thing they want is a minimally regulated market with a low barrier to entry.

The only reason we're even having this conversation is because there was a small window of opportunity in the 90's to pass smart Telco laws that both regulated and deregulated divergent aspects of the industry. First, because the incumbent telcos enjoyed monopolies for nearly 50 years, they were obligated to lease parts of their networks to resellers like local ISPs.

Had this not happened, the larger telcos and service providers could have choked the early Internet and giving us networks like AOL/MSN instead.

If you truly believe in the virtue of free markets, you need to understand that powerful politically connected companies do not and they can be some of the biggest opponents of free markets while they pretend they are.

NN doesn't force ISPs to not have bandwidth caps on consumers. They are free to do this. The fact that most ISPs in the world are able to provide unlimited bandwidth should provide you some hint on how cheap bandwidth is.

> I can see a world where you would have to pay a little more for Netflix and a little less for sshing to your VPS.

Unlike a restaurant, ISPs are in the delivery business. It should not matter what is being delivered.

The "somehow" is key here. There is a neutral solution called per-customer fair queueing but most equipment doesn't support that so some ISPs end up using non-neutral "solutions" like just banning Netflix and BitTorrent.

Also, I want to caution people about reasoning by analogy since ISPs aren't analogous to restaurants or grocery stores or really anything else. A real argument doesn't require analogies.

I think -

So first up, the "types" metrics don't analogize well. AFAIK, there are legit types of traffic - high bandwidth, low bandwith; burst, continuous; high latency OK, low latency required. Seems pretty reasonable to charge based on this (although, slippery slope and all that.)

These types then correlate to food items; the steak, the veggies, the pasta.

The first issue you run into is that "brand" is not "type". Classic: Hulu should not be a different type of traffic than Netflix; Bing vs Google, etc (if there are any other pairs like those...). The follow-up problem here is then actually enacting categorization; Netflix is subscription only, Hulu has ads, and I wouldn't be surprised if the tech resulted in importantly different kinds of traffic (according to above metrics).

The second issue is that it's not analogous, because I don't pay the restaurant to attend, and the chefs don't pay the restaurant to cook. Now, you could twiddle these nobs - "internet" is free, but all offerings aren't (and then Yahoo! News becomes the free bread...); or the ISP pays the sites it makes accessible (TV cable style, with all it's flaws).

So I think the real issue with the comparison is that it either doesn't compare (restaurants), or it does compare and the other thing, well, kinda sucks (TV cable), and NN becomes the fight to keep this great thing we've got from becoming this mediocre thing we tried to abandon.

Then the local government comes in and says that they are the only store allowed in town.

Now, is it fair to General Mills that they have to compete with the store brand cereal when the store brand is effectively free and there is no way for General Mills to get their cereal to you any other way?

Right now is like a public road, with free and equal access for every body, and thus, an economy can be built around it. If you change it to the store model, it morphs from an economy to a business, and businesses are not capable of supporting an entire economy built on top, so it won't.

https://s22.postimg.org/lilkrmo4x/Screen_Shot_2017-06-21_at_...

What do you think your chances of competing against Facebook, or Facebook-based businesses, are, when clients see this before accessing your site?

ISPs are like mail services: a letter is a letter is a letter. A package is a package is a package. And a packet is a packet is a packet.

And actually, I think an unusual answer is:

Grocery stores kind of suck, actually. I know I'm not able to get the best need/product fit, because of all the presentation that goes into it (display case arrangement, psychology of product locations...).

You can pay the grocery store to make me think your product is better, instead of having a better product. You also have to get your product into the grocery store in the first place, which is a serious hurdle.

On the other hand, 90% of everything is crap, and you actually need special skills to navigate the free-for-all street markets... which still have a lot of the same problems.

Under such a view, it's not that NN is great, it's that everything else (that's known) is worse.

The real answer is they're really not analogous enough to compare this way, even if comparing them yields interesting thoughts.

Say you get a fine over some law. Doesn't matter what, but let's say it is a minor fine over a law you disagree with. So you refuse to pay it. Now perhaps it ends there, with the law not being fully enforced (with sometimes does happen). But what else could happen is that you are summoned to court concerning the fine. Now the punishment for the fine includes a court summon. So in protest of the fine being wrong, you choose to not go to court or go to court and refuse to court order to pay the fine. Either way, the court will either drop it (unlikely at this point) or you could be arrested for refusing a court order (you don't go to prison for a debt, you go to prison for refusing a court order to pay a debt, which seems to be an important distinction for some reason I can't see). Now you either submit to being arrested, or violence will be used against you.

Under this reasoning, that original law is backed by violence. Either a law ends up not being enforced or being enforced with an eventual threat of violence. There are cases where there is little chance of it ever having someone protest it.

One example people use to counter with that seems to work at first is government restrictions on limiting licensing. For example, take a law that says government has to approve a license for some activity if it doesn't given a definite disapproval within a week of application. In this case, breaking the law would be done by someone at the government either refusing to give approval at all or giving a no after the deadline to give a no has passed. One likely result is someone who didn't follow the law getting fired, but in this case it is the government overriding itself and eventually following the law. But assuming that every manager approved of violating the law such that no one was fired and the office in question maintained its stance, then the party that requested approval will have cause to sue the government. At which point the court will make specific orders (such as demanding testimony or demanding certain actions be performed), and any person directly disobeying those will now face possibly being arrested, which is when violence comes into play. Or the court could choose to not make any demands, at which point the government is choosing to not enforce the law. A practical example of this is to look at the individuals who refused to give marriage license to same sex couples. Either someone higher overrode them and someone else (representing the government) gave out the license or they were sent to jail (with the threat of violence if they did not obey).

You're being patronizing. Why do you assume that the OP is referencing this point in his "diversity of opinion" quote? A charitable interpretation would be "the subject of whether or not NN is a social good is a subjective matter, and we need more diversity of opinion on this topic".

I've phrased this bluntly for effect. If you say an idea is mistaken, then you've said the worst thing you can say about it. Censoring it only pushes inquisitive minds further into their camp.

If HN has become a place where mistaken ideas are no longer tolerated (in the sense that you can't lay out your reasoning without being attacked) then we've all lost something valuable.

I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet -- in this case, the downvotes were due to the flimsy nature of the comment -- but it's worth watching for.

This is a common claim that is rarely supported with data. Why does enforcing net neutrality increase downstream costs?

If you mean that it shifts costs (you pay more for Netflix because they have to pay Comcast for fair service), then sure. I don't see any evidence that net neutrality actually changes the underlying cost of net service, though.

There's a great counterpoint to your claim in the USPS. Their prices are regulated by congress. Those prices are pushed down artificially to the point that it's slowly bankrupting the USPS. So service is definitely cheaper than it would be without regulation. (Send a letter via FedEx and see what the free market charges for this service.)

Bandwidth usage whales are just those that constantly use the bandwidth they paid for - which, outside of those peak traffic windows, isn't actually costing you anything to provide, because you aren't saturating your bandwidth anyway.

If ISPs want to cut costs, they rate limit customers (globally or during their peak usage times). That reduces the amount of routing hardware they need and the amount of backbone bandwidth they need to buy. If they institute data caps or try to break the Internets P2P architecture, they are just destroying the intent of the Internet while still having the same peak bandwidth rates they always did. Their routers just run cold now at night because nobody is using them for anything.

Can you go into a little more detail about "given" here? I'm not under the impression that it's true.

Part of the value of the network is how much bandwidth one can use in a month. The other part is simply the convenience of being able to send/receive lots of data in short bursts.

I'd argue most people don't need to consume lots of data to appreciate 1 Gb connection when it's available. I think you'll find most people are willing to pay a premium for convenience and optionality, even when they don't use it.

Now, if they're not using more total bandwidth, then your point stands. If the network is idle, it's more than likely not to get built out at all, but I'm not sure that rule applies to last mile networks.