Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
blog.google
blog.google
How? Well, a simple statement saying "any ISP who abuses net neutrality will have their customers cut off from Google products". No Google search, no YouTube, no Gmail. Have those requests instead redirect to a website telling the customer what their ISP is doing, why Google won't work with them, and how to call to complain to the ISP. Make the site list competitors in the user's area that don't play stupid games.
Is this an insane idea? Yep. Would Google come under scrutiny because of their now-obvious market power? Oh definitely. And Google would probably lose money over it. But it would certainly work.
People don't get internet, and then decide to use Google. They want Google and then get internet for that purpose.
edit: an hour later, fixing an autocorrect word
So you are suggesting that they harm their own business interests? For how long exactly?
Suddenly Google is facing a fine 10x larger than what the EU just threw at them (after all, look at the business % ratio regarding markets over the last decade, the majority of their business has been in the US), and a dozen agencies begin pursuing them on a variety of issues.
The government can do anything it wants to to Google at any time it wants to do it. They have enough methods, they can make Google's existence absolute hell.
Also, the belief that there would be "competitors in the user's area that don't play stupid games" that offer comparable services (eg, within a factor of 5x bandwidth-per-dollar value) seems to be a misunderstanding of the utility/monopoly/duopoly economics in play in many regions of the USA.
But I agree that it wouldn't work because the ISP monopolies are more entrenched than the web service monopolies.
If ISPs don't see the point in it then they can't complain when other don't follow it (and they get the shaft)
the culture employs special circumstances when the situation exceeds the moral capacity of contact.
or to put it differently, sometimes outside forces are so strong that you either let your ethics... be flexible for while or just disappear in the annals of history.
whether OP's particular action would be effective is a different question - bing, ddg or baidu would gladly jump at the opportunity if this wasn't coordinated.
That's how you start thinking it's okay to drop napalm and nuclear bombs on cities since "it'll end the war faster"
Anyone who doesn't subscribe absolutely to radical honesty or to a morality handed down by an all powerful being has to make these kinds of decisions in their personal life all the time and rarely do those decisions have as much impact as net neutrality. Large companies are made up of people and they shouldn't get a pass when they stand by and watch as when the very foundations of their industries are destroyed by extreme rent seeking just because they have shareholders to answer to, most of whom are in a far better position than the employees of the companies to jump ship when their investments don't behave like they'd like them to.
Exactly the point I'm trying to make. If Google turns around and says "Fine, you don't like net neutrality? Let me show you how this works both ways".
The ISPs do not make the product, they sell the access to the product. If the product goes away, then they aren't selling anything at all- and their customers will stop paying them.
For some people, their tolerance for bullshit is less than others. For those people, perhaps charging a dollar extra for YouTube access is enough. It only takes a fairly small percentage of customers to put a lot of pressure on service providers. Monopoly or not.
What you're describing is a substitute good. When the "choice" is to not purchase said product/service and look to alternatives, you're literally describing the effect of a monopoly.
My point is simply that a monopoly isn't some sort of God-emperor who can do anything without consequence. Even monopolies have to bow to customer pressure, they're just less sensitive to it than companies in more competitive industries. Supply and demand applies to monopolies, too, that's why their prices might be higher than they would be in a competitive environment, but their prices aren't infinite. "Going without" is always a choice, even if there are no competitors.
You can always put money on the lottery several times, win, buy your own satellite and have your own DTH service. Or kill yourself, so that you no longer need internet.
So no, there isn't always a choice in broadband service. And most times, there isn't a choice at all.
So I doubt Google would ever do anything at this point.
[edit]
It could however work if they throttle priority isp traffic to counterbalance.
How? Google is a private individual/company; they can deny anyone service, so long as the reason is not discriminating against a protected class.
Sometimes it seems easier to communicate something by stating the opposite and let people work out themselves why this is a bad idea.
Why doesn't Twitter flex its muscle and cause a national crisis by tweeting "watch out China, nukes are coming" from Donald Trump's Twitter? That ruins trust in the platform, but what if they just banned the US president's account for TOS or something? Enormous amount of power.
What if Musk's first ship to Mars had a hidden Railgun on it? "Anybody else that wants to come to Mars must pay equivalent US 100,000 million per vehicle." Alternatively, "I now own mars, who can come as well is up to my whim."
What if Microsoft issued a malicious patch that gave it access to the NSA's servers? What if Comcast slurped up FBI traffic?
In the internet and space age, corporations are getting enough real power that government power can be outright stepped over. Sure, say Comcast slurps data somehow from CIA and FBI, goes to prez, and says "give us x or we sell this to Russia," the US gov can turn around and threaten to arrest the CEO, or fine them, or kick down doors and start tearing apart infrastructure with the US military, but Comcast could easily say "do any of the above and the data is given to Russia, for free."
Musk has weaponised Mars, a state actor says "unweaponise it or be hanged," Musk can say "well, the cannon is automated, has 300 rounds of ammunition, and will not deactivate unless my secret passcode and the secret passcode of another person who I will not name, are provided. Per detected vehicle."
Etc.
Exciting, fun, terrifying. It can go fantastic for us (Google and Netflix telling telecoms to suck it), or absolutely horrifying (Comcast holding the US government hostage).
Because the US Government has terrifying amounts of power and can be very spiteful.
Their ability to easily intimidate corporations has been demonstrated time and time again. See: NSA v tech, Qwest, broad anti-trust powers (which have nothing to do with monopoly and everything to do with subjective definitions), SEC, FTC, FCC, national security powers, executive orders, and the list goes for days.
It wasn't about one specific, small example but the big picture. Since these companies care about profit and the people running the companies likely care about their lives I'd imagine much of this wouldn't ever happen but it's all technically possible which, compared to where we were say 20 years ago, is just absolutely amazing in every sense of the word.
I understand and that's a fantasy at best, which was my point. The US Government is radically more powerful than any corporation inside of its domain. It's not even remotely close. They're more powerful than every corporation in the US combined.
The moment they send federal agents to shut down Google HQ (even if it's just for a day) and begin arresting people on terrorism charges (doesn't matter if any of it sticks, they never have to stop coming), specifically targeting management, and then walking them through & out of the buildings in handcuffs - Google instantly capitulates as their stock collapses by 20% in one day. And that's the easiest of moves the Feds can make, that's a trivial demonstration of their power to intimidate.
Then the IRS begins pursuing any exec they want to. They can do horrific things to anyone at any time, even if it doesn't stick long-term it still makes your life hell - and they never have to stop coming.
Then x y z, forever, paying their bills with your tax dollars and the infinite fiat machine.
Their initial efforts don't work? They change the laws tomorrow to give themselves a new sharp stick. They only really need one really nasty stick, and they have dozens already.
For sure, that was never in dispute. No one pretended there wouldn't be consequences, either. That was never the point of my post or parent's. Take a look at the examples for what was being referred to.
Google has the kind of power that staves off that from even happening in the first place. The US government isn't a singular entity, it is comprised of several hundred individually powerful people. Three branches, plus several military branches, each with their own branches of authority and people of power. Then you have states with their own 3 branches and national guards, police. You have a national police equivalent (NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF, Border Control).
That's a lot of people google can go to and say "Interesting that you are into midget porn, I wonder what would happen if the whole world knew that?"
That's a lot of people google can go to and say "Did you know that your neighboring state's governor is having an affair with a man? Give us this land grant for server space and we'll give you the proof."
"Give us guaranteed protection from the Fed and we'll give you the entire query history from all whitehouse IP addresses."
"Do not fuck with us or we will DDOS every single DNS server in the world with our absurdly massive server infrastructure."
"Do not fuck with us or we will turn the public against you by messaging the 63,000 people using our site per second"
"Do not fuck with us or we will make your very existence invisible to 80% of the people on the internet."
That's how wars happen, and why it's a bad idea to make ultimatums to the US government.
Like the King's head Surgeon - he could never take on the King in hand to hand combat, but he can certainly poison him slowly, over time and invisibly, in return for more consolidated power or money or some other such thing from the King's son.
1. Order ISPS to switch off access to Google's servers and CDNs. Most internet traffic stops working as any website using a google CDN breaks, all analytics stops working, internet advertising breaks almost entirely, the internet is suddenly a less profitable and very scary, mostly unusable place. Google releases as its death-throes the fact that the ISPs are entirely to blame for this, gives coordinates of ISP offices and pitchfork emporiums. Customers revolt, UN issues a missive reminding the world that access to the internet is a human right.
2. Order power regulators to cut off their power - Pretty similar to above. Internet stops working very well, except Google continues to work in other countries, and suddenly it doesn't really make sense to do business in the USA. Google employees flee abroad where they can. Opportunistic countries take advantage of this and grant asylum.
3. Freeze their bank accounts - best idea yet, I think, except for I'm not sure how it would be implemented. Government order comes through declaring "Alphabet, Inc" to be entirely comprised of terrorists? Not sure. Either way, Google goes the way of Pablo Escobar and talks directly to bank VPs - "give us some of the money / give us a warning you get a freeze order / whatever, or we tell the world about your midget porn / location of all your private estates / your tax fraud." Alternatively, google uses its near total access to civilian populations to cast the US government as a totalitarian dictatorship issuing a coup against the American people's access to free information and fosters a revolution.
The scenario is insurrection. Communications going down while people are arrested is perfectly acceptable.
> Google goes the way of Pablo Escobar and talks directly to bank VPs
Bank VPs have no control over dollar clearing and settlement. In any case, violating an OFAC freeze is automatic jail time for lots of people. Nobody messes around with this.
Let's not kid ourselves - well before that happens there would be "Guys with guns" to see them which would stop all possible posturing.
The Twitter nukes one wouldn't even have to ruin trust in the platform that badly. They could say the president's account got hacked. Hell, blame the hack on China if you're already trying to start a war there.
Don't forget about this lad!
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
I.e. he must convince the Vice President et al. that ending all human life on Earth is a good idea.
They absolutely have the real authority (ability) to refuse the order, and then the real authority to prevent the nuke from being launched (by eating their key, shooting anybody else that comes into the room, shooting the key/console, etc).
Which is to say, the orders may not be followed by the persons at the switch. I make no claim that they will, or will not, be followed. I merely point out that rules aren't always followed.
I can tell you for certain that there are dozens of safeguards. That scenario not only isn't possible, it's not plausible. Yes the President has the "codes" but those codes don't launch the missiles [1]. The scenario described is one in which there are literally nuclear warheads on a ballistic trajectory headed to the US with a verified source of origin.
I think the trope stays around because people, despite what they say publicly, like the idea of an emperor style president with supreme power.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2016-nuclear-wea...
A recent radiolab episode (http://www.radiolab.org/story/nukes/) made a pretty convincing argument that any US president could on a whim destroy the world. It goes into the whole history of why that power was given to a civilian, and not the military.
They interview ex-Secretary of Defense William Perry asking him what controls there are, if any, on a crazy president just willy-nilly deciding to nuke something.
He says there's absolutely none, even if the president is in a room full of people who vehemently disagree with him he alone makes the call to launch.
but I did learn the word "Verisimilitude" the other day.
The President can make the call to launch and everyone in the room can ignore him, arrest him, tape his mouth shut.
Or just shoot him.
Edit: fixed a word
There's an argument to be made for checks on presidential power to wage nuclear war at a pin drop. President Trump pulling us back from the joint establishment Democrat and establishment Republican push for worldwide nuclear armageddon is not it.
The only check currently seems to be people disobeying his orders, and even that is accounted for to some extent (see "mutiny is unlikely" in the article you cited).
It remains possible that ranking members of the executive branch and military might cooperate to make sure the president is isolated and unable to execute the protocol, and perhaps even conceivable (if unlikely) that enough of the military would refuse to participate. But that's the only real check, and it extralegal rather than any part of the system.
If you've ever been suspicious of "the deep state", think about that for a minute here, because it's really just another catchy term for the one of a half-handful of checks on the power under discussion here.
> I think the trope stays around because people, despite what they say publicly, like the idea of an emperor style president with supreme power.
I suspect that people really want to believe the system works, it can't be that messed up, someone else thought of this, some one else is paying attention, and they want things to be better, not worse, and they will take care of it for you.
But the system will fail if "the whole chain is stupid." This is why it's so dangerous to have a President obsessed with loyalty.
Alex Wellerstein is a academic researcher on the history of nuclear weapons, and he describes the situation thus:
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
"""
>>Are there any checks in place to keep the US President from starting a nuclear war?
What's amazing about this question, really, is how seriously it misunderstands the logic of the US command and control system. It gets it exactly backwards.
The entire point of the US command and control system is to guarantee that the President and _only_ the President is capable of authorizing nuclear war whenever he needs to. It is about enabling the President's power, not checking or restricting him.
"""
Are there verified nuclear warheads on verified trajectories from verified origins?
Does the US President need to retaliated?
The entire point of the US command and control system is to guarantee that the President and only the President is capable of authorizing nuclear war whenever he needs to.
Yes, legally and formally. Informally though, as I said, it won't go down like that, especially if it's not completely unambiguous that there is a nuclear attack on the US.
http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-59-the-des...
The captain and some fixed number of executive officers. Possibly with redundancy for one or two crew being dead. The auth codes would cause a safe to unlock or message to de-crypt.
Presumably the instructions would be delivered to each authenticating member so that all could receive the orders simultaneously.
In practice however I'd certainly be surprised to learn that there were absolutely zero checks on the process as suggested in the article.
Can you recommend some novels ? (I'm also a cyberpunk nerd) Thanks in advance
For me there's a lot of crossover between Cyberpunk/scifi, the only difference being time period, so I'd throw in the Culture series and the Revelation Space series.
The Stars my Destination (grunge as fuck)
Neuromancer, though I'm sure you've already read it.
Just wanted to chime in and say that this is one of the great SF books. Alfred Bester at the height of his powers. Gritty, fantastic, political, emotional, psychedelic, and epic. A truly astounding work, especially when you consider it was written in the early 1950s.
If you like science fiction: READ THIS BOOK.
If a corporation succeeds in building General AI with enough hooks into basic infrastructure, and a loyal enough employee base, then they will have a more powerful weapon than any nuclear bomb. They can then build their own drone army that no conventional military could stand up against.
Second, what about an AI would give them an advantage over cyborgs in building drone battalions? Aren't conventional human cyborgs doing that right now?
Not much that suggests it's impossible either.
Yes, it's annoying to me that people who believe AI to be extremely dangerous forget that people themselves can already do all that nasty stuff.
"go on..."
> What if Musk's first ship to Mars had a hidden Railgun on it?
"oh god... don't stop!"
> ... the secret passcode of another person ...
brilliant.
yeah... we (in the US) gave AI/meta-cognative-entities/"corporations" a type of inalienable right with the Citizens United ruling. and now the gov't is going to find out what happens when those entities start testing the boundaries of their container. (plot twist: the container walls are permeable)
Holy shit I hadn't even considered this, this is awesome. New story idea.
I'll contribute that this is a good way to explain to someone why corporations inherently care about their employees only to the extent of their usefulness.
Except that's not true. Corporations have always had personhood. See 1 U.S.C. §1[0]:
> In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, unless the context indicates otherwise—
> ...
> the words "person" and "whoever" include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, as well as individuals;
Corporations being people is what allows them to own property, use the judicial system (to sue), etc. Basically anything corporations are able to do is because they are people. The speech of a corporation is protected under the First Amendment. Donating your money to a non-profit is a form of speech, no? If I donate $25 to the EFF, I'm agreeing with what the EFF does. That's a form of expression that is protected under the First Amendment. All Citizens United v. FEC did was affirm that money can be a form of speech.
Citizens United didn't establish any president of corporate personhood anymore than Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, 118 US 394 (1886)[1] did back in 1886.
[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/1
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Clara_County_v._Southern....
You're right.
And now there's precedent.
Always? You cite the U.S. Code, which was first published when? 1926.
>Donating your money to a non-profit is a form of speech, no?
It's a hell of a lot different when it comes to influencing people during elections. Bad analogy, and an insincere play to the audience here with the EFF. If we allow money to be speech, we allow outsized influence on governance by a few. Corporations have much more money to spend on campaigns which works against the public interest.
> Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company
The precedent of corporate personhood didn't even come from arguments in the case, it came from an oral remark by the Chief Justice Morrison Waite, who earlier worked as a lawyer for railroads. It was recorded by the court recorder J.C. Bancroft Davis, who earlier was a president of a railroad. The precedent and its house of cards should be thrown out.
This theoretically gives a company power to shut the government if they really wanted to.
Are you serious? That would cause actual people to die. And Twitter will end up with a huge lawsuit.
If you've ever experienced the not too occasional fighting between cable companies and some of the networks they carry, it can get ugly. With both sides claiming they're in the right. Sometimes the channels even go off the air because the cable company won't pay what the networks want.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carriage_dispute
The only problem is if say google pulls YouTube from comcast, its not like customers have a plethora of other internet providers to choose from, so they suffer.
If you're blocked, you'll only see the message once. If you have to watch a video before instead, you'll get angrier and angrier each time.
What is the net result of this? People call up and complain to their ISP? Complaining hasn't worked yet and that's the problem. You can complain all you want but when there's no competition it doesn't matter.
A far better idea in my opinion would be for Google to spend money and muscle in partnering to provide municipal broadband.
If people had a choice between a municipal broadband provider that preserved net-neutrality or choosing the existing duopoly that wants to "rent seek" then I think the net-neutrality issue might finally be able to be put to rest.
There are some case studies in successful municipal broadband deployments here:
http://www.bbpmag.com/snapshot/snap0612.php
Google is already partnering with NYC via Sidewalk Labs. See:
https://sidewalklabs.com/about/
and LinkNYC is already up and running, so its not much of a stretch:
http://screenmediadaily.com/citybridge-to-launch-linknyc-lar...
"""You seem to be using <x> which is a lousy internet provider for reasons x, y and z.
Feel free to call them now at <phone number> or send a mail to <email> and let them know what you think.
Also here are other known providers in your area: <list>
You can also sign <here> and <here> to show your interest to other sane providers that are considering offering fiber in your area."""
At this point I dislike chrome for exactly the same reasons I disliked IE: it is not good enough for me[0] and its sheer dominance makes web creators lazy and triggers bean counters to skimp on cross browser compatibility checks.
But this time they could actually use it for good.
[0]: yep. You would hear the same thing back then: You are the only one wanting to use another browser. Just get over it and use IE.
Well, I am curious: what makes other browsers better for you? The other day I posed this question in a thread, and the main answer was "a good feeling inside".
Then the news that Mozilla forces you into being tracked by Google Analytics comes out, and that good feeling is gone, so what's your use case?
[0] https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
[1] https://mozilla-services.readthedocs.io/en/latest/howtos/run...
Real extensions? Yeah I know they will be less useful than they used to be but still way better than anything else it seems.
The fact that it handles my browsing habits like a few hundred open tabs?
Oh, and by now using almost any other browser than chrome give me a happy feeling. The limit goes somewhere between Edge and IE it seems :-P
Then the news that Mozilla forces you into being tracked by Google Analytics comes out, and that good feeling is gone, so what's your use case?
I didn't see that and didn't find anything when I searched now. Do you have any pointers?
Additionally, from the link "legal contract with Google" on that page:
> Mozilla went through a year long legal discussion with GA before we would ever implement it on our websites. GA had to provide how and what they stored and we would only sign a contract with them if they allowed Mozilla to opt-out of Google using the data for mining and 3rd parties.
> We now have two check boxes in our GA premium account that allows us to opt-out of additional usage of our data. Because Mozilla pushed Google so hard, those two check boxes are available to every other GA user in the world regardless if they have a premium account like we do.
When and where Mozilla caves to pressures they always stood against, I will not hold it against them more than against the ones putting them under pressure -- or against those trying to muddy the waters even more in these already trying times, for that matter.
It discusses the use of faster lanes that only companies with money would have access to. At first this seems fair that companies should be able to purchase better technology to improve their speed. The question then becomes what happens to traffic on the slower lanes? I could argue this both ways. At the end of the day, the history of most ISP companies makes me not trust them.
Here's an article about Comcast trying to find loop holes https://www.wired.com/2015/11/comcast-may-have-found-a-major...
Is this a mistake? Am I missing something?
[0] https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/#participants
Edit: I also checked for the parent company "Alphabet", which also is not listed.
To be fair, Apple is pro-NN but not vocal about it.
I think that's why they won't.you are asking them to do something where they have a deep conflict of interest not to.
Which competitors?
> Is this an insane idea? Yep.
It sounds like we're in agreement on the latter, as for the former; the way it would play out is that Google Search, YouTube and Gmail would fade and successful competitors would replace them overnight.
Where as an ISP is unaware of any specific relationship and therefore isn't attempting to interfere.
IANAL but that's my interpretation of this specific tort law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference#Elements
What's one way that could change? Google stops working for millions of people, so they start using another product.
Essentially, what i'm saying is they are not, and have not been for a very long time, about search
The money is mostly coming from advertising across these services and especially adwords and adsense
That would really send a statement that they were serious about network neutrality.
1. I pay an ISP to provide me with internet service
2. Google cuts off services from my ISP I've already paid.
3. I call my ISP and say "google told me to complain to you," they say, "thank you for your feedback."
4. I look for a competitor. There aren't any, or the competitors don't suit my needs. Which is why this problem happens in the first place. If I could go to a competitor, I would. This is the key assumption that the whole scheme is based on and from what I understand, for most Americans, it is flat wrong.
5. I don't use my ISP's bandwidth cause Google is blocking it. I've paid them money. My continual complaints tie up a cheap call center which inconveniences them very slightly, if at all. They still have my money, plus the costs for the services they're offering me just plummeted cause I'm not using any bandwidth cause I can't access the internet. They win, I lose.
Or buy internet from phone company instead of cable company.
Cell phone data is usually much more expensive and often people don't have a lot of choice on what connection options they have.
Unfortunately, they (we) are a minority.
Also, it's double expense, especially if you do something like Netflix.
They could change their banner, though, and I'm sad they aren't serious enough about this issue to do that.
It's not even that insane. MTV did exactly this to gain an edge when negotiating with cable companies. They ran ads telling people to call their cable companies and say, "I want my MTV!" The campaigns were largely successful, and MTV quickly became a standard offering on cable TV.
Google has far more negotiating power than MTV did. If Google actually cut off ISPs and told people to call their ISP and say, "I want my net neutrality!" it would have a good chance of working.
Editors: David Dorwin, Google Inc.Jerry Smith, Microsoft CorporationMark Watson, Netflix Inc.Adrian Bateman, Microsoft Corporation (Until May 2014)
https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/
So in this way we can save the net neutrality?
One of the arguments against Net Neutrality is it would help break up the Google marketing monopoly (yes this logic is shockingly what the cable companies have provided for the government as a pro).
In some sense Google is not much different than the cable companies except that the only entity that can out leverage the cable companies is the government that owns the poles and airways.
(If you don't think google is a monopoly or at least extremely unfair it is impossible to make a competitor to google as you would have to do your marketing of a such a product through them).
Frankly I'm already concerned that 99% of the marketing is controlled already by two entities: Google and Facebook. If google were to do what your proposing it would probably make far more people aware of the monopoly.
They should be redirected to a page saying - your ISP is against Net Neutrality. Contact them and tell them how you feel about this...or find a new ISP. Your access will be restored on Tuesday. If you don't like this, get used to it-it's the way a net neutrality-less internet works.
Those same ISP's will be begging to bring back net neutrality in a month or two.
First: this is pushing the onus on the consumers. Not just pushing---forcing, even. My grandmother, my wife even, doesn't care about net neutrality---they want to use the Internet. I've seen suggestions of using a VPN, and I use Tor for all of my Internet traffic, but this is an even _greater_ onus on consumers. It's a far bigger impact than the abolishment of net neutrality itself.
Perhaps more importantly, this is subverting the legal/regulatory system by using your market dominance to essentially declare your own law. The system is failing us (those who support net neutrality, at least) right now, but it's there for a reason, and it's a slippery slope to try to reverse legislative and regulatory decisions by force.
Civil uprising is fine. Campaigns to raise awareness (like the blackout for SOPA), okay. Many other things are okay. But leave innocent people out of the crossfire. They should care, yes, but it's up to _us_ to make change---those of us who understand the issue and why it's important. It's up to us to raise awareness. I'm not going to go hold people hostage over my ideals. What if Google weren't on your side? What if they did _not_ support net neutrality? Would you be okay with them using their dominance to push an agenda you didn't like? I'd think not.
Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
I think the argument here is the same for any argument of nationalization: To turn a private good into a public one.
Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
It's like nobody remembers the internet of the 90s and how blatantly over the top siloed it was for the average AOL style user. I mean I remember my paid dial up internet service came on a floppy and had it's own browser and pop-up ads.
The "free" services required that you click on header links every few minutes.
This is the neutral net that I recall and so wish I still had.
I never once dipped my toes into the AOL muck.
Instead you're just giving the bad apples your money. Oh how awful for them... and they will put data caps and raise prices, because as long as the laws gives them monopolies you can't do nothing about it.
Is that what was happening, because if so it was never made clear to me. The first I remember this coming up was with the internet "lanes." AFAIK, again tell me where I'm wrong here please, there was nothing preventing an ISP from creating a "fast lane" before 2015.
I'm very shaky on the details there, so don't take my word for it.
Before 2015, there was really nothing stopping them from doing it aside from consumer outrage. But as time goes on, large ISPs have been making more and more noise about "internet fast lanes". There have been several incidents of them throttling sites like Netflix in secret. So while they previously adhered to defacto-net-neutrality via informal gentlemen's agreement, the likes of Comcast are no longer acting like gentlemen.
Without net neutrality, it will get worse. Especially since ISPs are also cable and phone companies who are justifiably worried about how the internet is increasingly affecting their cable and phone revenue.
There's considerable reason to believe that even without enforceable rules, the attention and active policy activity directed at enforceable rules inhibited non-neutral action by ISPs compared to what it would have been without that activity.
> So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
To say net neutrality regulations have been would be without merit, sure. To say net neutrality has been, OTOH, is factually true.
Starting in the early 2000s however some groups started breaking that informal contract and the goal in the early 2000s was to codify that into law.
So "net neutrality" in this case is trying to make a formal system out of what would be considered common law.
Makes sense holistically. Thanks.
Maybe it's also a matter of competition with cable TV - if Comcast reduces Internet service prices and takes the money from Netflix instead, Netflix will have to rise their prices and be less competitive?
AT that time, we were comfortable because we didn't think DPI was possible.
But eventually some coder cooked it up, iirc it was to "protect the children", while being desperately sought after by the MPAA/RIAA.
From then on its just been a long slug fest to today.
So yes you are wrong.
Actions such as what? I'm talking specifically about regulations that prevent a company from throttling traffic in a discriminatory way.
The net neutrality was not necessary early on because it was not feasible in the past to control it on such large scale.
So between 1980-2015 net neutrality (did not exist as a law) but was there indirectly in forms of:
- the technology at the time did not allow for deep packet inspection
- net neutrality was indirectly present due to telecom regulations. For example telecom could not just block calls as they wished. So during dial-up times anyone could enter that market and provide service and cost was low. During the time of DSL there was a regulation that required telecom companies to lease their lines so again cost to enter and be DSL ISP was relatively low. There's no such thing with cable companies.
> Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
I think you're misunderstanding it. This has nothing to do with Internet being a public good or not. It's all about controlling access to it.
What net neutrality does in a nutshell is preventing the ISPs (which provide Internet access) from being able to censor at their whim what you can access.
In normal scenario, free market would solve this issue. No one would use ISPs that place restrictions on their service and would move the competitors.
The problem is that we don't have a normal scenario, we have regional monopolies, and if you don't like your ISP, tough luck.
It's also nearly impossible to enter this market anymore, for example Google was attempting to deploy Google Fiber, but even they failed.
We need net neutrality now more than ever, because a single company essentially now will be able to control what content you can access. It would be a smaller issue if each region had its own separate company, but in reality the only companies that benefit on this you probably can count on your one hand.
Seems like breaking the local monopolies would solve all of these problems. Even with Title II it's still a huge problem and local ecosystems don't really benefit.
Although whenever city wanted to start providing internet access existing ISPs were fighting in courts to prevent that.
Another solution would be to do something similar to DSL that the cable companies are required to lease their fiber at reasonable price. The problem would be to determine what reasonable price is, and I'm sure the cable companies would fight against that.
But even then I still think net neutrality should be there. ISPs should just provide access to the Internet with parameters I agreed to paid for. They have no business to control what I can access (or even monitor my activity).
It's similar to electrical or water companies, they don't care what appliances you plug in[1], they won't charge you extra because you want to use 50" TV a dishwasher or add a water filter. All they care is how much electricity/water you consume, that's how it supposed to be.
[1] ok, with electricity there's thing called power factor (https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...), which you should strive to be 1 (or 100% on the mentioned site) otherwise you might get charged extra if you're big consumer of electricity, but this is there to not waste energy
Or perhaps they're all secretly looking forward to fast lanes they can buy...
I don't think the people pushing to dismantle net neutrality are stupid. They know that removing it is bad for innovation and consumers but they'd rather help the ISPs make more money than help keep America's economy healthy overall.
Probably because they directly receive benefits from the ISPs.
So since we are all being ignored, why will yelling louder make a difference?
I thought that this will be the one issue where hacker news crowd will be united.
Google has so much private peering around the world that they just don't really care, it will not affect them too much. People will change their ISP to have fast youtube access rather than stop to use youtube or google.
oh I tought it is way more than 40%. well the problem is the other providers are not (that) better options either.
Seriously, I'm disgusted by what counts as "action" these days. This reeks of lip service, nothing more.
Common Joe just doesn't get it or know what we're talking about.
He instantly gets "death panel" or "fake news." But net neutrality sounds like something fuzzy almost benign.
For example, Comcast will simply say "we support Open Internet" with the implication that "Open" in this context means "We can do whatever we want with our own lines.", i.e. complete corporate freedom. This deliberately promotes confusion, and then whoever has the most money wins.
In my opinion, the biggest problem is that this topic is relatively more technical than most people are used to understanding, which makes it very difficult to convey the various ramifications without over-simplifying.
Add network neutrality legislation and it would be very easy to lobby against: "Turnbull wants you to pay more for Facebook and Twitter"
Most people don't have an understanding of what Quality of Service is.
At least it has a negative connotation to it, while "net neutrality" has not.
I'm guessing it is easier for people to oppose something, than to support something. Opposing something feels more urgent.
That's perhaps the intention. Raise awareness first, then come together to do something. It's gonna take lots of days of action over the years to gain momentum..
Went to reddit.com...where's the Net Neutrality protest? Oh I just realized they made their logo a gif that looks like it loads slow...and they made a post...
Went to google.com...the doodle is unrelated and I saw nothing about net neutrality on the site...
Went to mozilla.org and I see absolutely nothing about it. I feel like I must be missing something here.
Hackernews...looks the same but slightly grayed. Oh the black bar is a link, didn't realize that. But no messages or anything obvious.
LinkedIn.com maybe? Nothing
Twitter? They have a hashtag that's trending...that's it.
Facebook? I see nothing. Not even a trending topic.
This is a very luke warm day of technology companies protesting net neutrality. I expected at least a tiny blurb on a homepage SOMEWHERE. So far Netflix and DuckDuckGo are the only large sites that I've notice actually put something on their homepage.
I remember Wikipedia doing a "black out" day, along with several other websites years back. If you visited the web page, all you saw was a black page and a quick explanation that the web could be censored if legislation were to pass.
I've visited several participants' sites to see nothing. GitHub didn't have a single thing, Wikipedia: nothing, and Google (or Alphabet) isn't even listed on the list of participants [0].
Worth noting that Wikipedia Zero [3] exists, and has been taking flak for not being the most NN-friendly initiative.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Jimbo_Wales/Archive_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(propos...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/11/25...
Sorry about your Internet today, but they're doing it for your Internet tomorrow.
I would be curious if users even look at those on mobile since it requires more effort to see.
Hacker News -> Noticed the black/grey bar, but assumed it was a variant of the "someone notable has died" black bar so didn't pay it much attention.
Reddit -> Didn't even see the altered logo until probably the tenth page I was on, and just though "Oh, the logo didn't load in all the way, weird" (by the time it gets to the "Bandwidth exceeded" message it's probably off the page, and even that's hardly a call to (user) action).
Google/Twitter/Facebook -> Didn't notice anything.
Also, isn't it likely that the largest companies would benefit most if they were in a position to pay for priority over small upstart competitors?
;TLDR I don't support Net Neutrality.
I'm against it because it as an idea has failed in both its proposal and implementation. If people are going to whine and rally for a "fix", they should at least propose an action that will actually fix things instead of complaining. Proposing new legislation (which I'm not fully in favor of) or expanding rules would be doing something.
My position is that: We don't need big pipes (or millions of hours of television piped to us every month), we need the interfaces and hardware for connecting with each other.
promo ends -> cancel plan -> new roommate signs on.
https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/665-Oh...
It is similar to price controls, limiting the price a service can be offered at. Like price controls, it causes shortages by making the service too cheap for some users, increasing demand for them to use it even more, and making it too expensive for other users, who don't use it very much.
Let's say you're a company like Netflix, and you and/or your customers use 30% of an ISP's bandwidth. Why shouldn't you and/or your customers pay more for using more bandwidth? If Net Neutrality forces everyone to pay the same, then the costs of the extra bandwidth used by some customers will have to be paid by other customers, raising everyone's prices.
The idea of offering different levels of service at difference prices should be welcome, because it allows low-income people to afford the internet, and it ensures that enough resources are allocated for heavy-duty users. If Net Neutrality says that all internet services should be offered at the same bandwidth and same price, then it will raise the price for all customers, and it will make heavy users of the internet overuse it, making ISPs use throttling to avoid the inevitable overuse which occurs when prices are too low for some customers.
(Think of the 1970s gas shortages when Nixon instituted price controls -- the result was that customers had to be "throttled" by only being allowed to buy gas on certain days based on their license plate number. If this "throttling" wasn't done, there would be worst gas shortages and empty tanks because the heavy users would use up all of the gas because their demand for it is more than the price-controlled price indicates.)
As for blocking or throttling certain protocols/ports, this is wrong, but I think it's a symptom of other issues, such as security vulnerabilities, or overuse of a given level of service because it's priced too low.
It feels like Google (and other companies for that matter) are only concerned about "the open internet" when it benefits their bottom line. In fact, I'm not convinced that Google _does_ care. For SOPA and PIPA they actually did a (lukewarm) blackout of their site for the day of action. Wikipedia shut down on that day. Where has all of the enthusiasm gone?
I remember the mass freakout when Wikipedia shut down--journalists and congressional staffers suddenly couldn't do their jobs and suddenly it was front page news, not just a John Oliver rant.
As a consumer on ISP's last mile lines, I make a series of TCP requests and I expect responses. Fill my pipes with those responses as best you can and charge me for the privilege. If you're not making enough money on that, charge me more for the bandwidth.
Market-wise, why would an ISP anything else than fill my pipe with what I'm asking for?
An ISP should make all the money it needs to make off my service subscription. It's not too far of a leap for me to imagine U.S. laws being changed that restrict ISP's to only being able to charge the end-user for their subscriptions with heavily regulated flat fees for peering arrangements and co-location services placed near the consumer.
The obvious shenanagans that are ramping up here will eventually lead to a massive consumer backlash and a regulatory hammer coming down. People are not going to forget what the open internet looked like.
Given the amount of alarmism it actually seems to me there is heavy propaganda advocating for the status quo, for some reason, perhaps they want further regulations that can be done more easily through net neutrality. Not sure.
Heavier regulations usually favor established players who can engage in regulatory capture, to shape the new rules to prevent future competition from smaller companies and firms that don't even exist yet. Often times they cloak this motivation with justifications that sound uncontroversial and difficult to object to.
I don't know specifically what the real goal is here with Net Neutrality, but that's the sort of thing that happens in other industries all the time. Often in terms of "safety" or "helping the environment."
I agree, if that is where your heart is at. U.S. government is very dysfunctional. Corporations buy up representatives, regulatory agencies are politicized and made into paper tigers or weapons to attack enemies with, etc.
I don't expect that to change in the U.S., and in fact I expect deregulation and a non-neutral net real soon. Then, we'll begin the slow slide into the nightmare scenario where ISP's can extract more rents from both websites and users. Extorting fees from websites for accessing the fast lane to the users will be the favorite way of simultaneously increasing profits and wounding competing media companies that don't control their own last mile fiefdoms.
When the quality of service dips too low and the costs rise too high, I believe the result will be a populist wave of anger sweeping over these companies. They will be broken up into smaller companies based on function, municipal ISP's will get established to handle the last mile, and there will be harsh regulations put on what ISP's can legally do with data flowing over their pipes.
My frustration with the net neutrality folks (probably similar to yours) is their insistence that we "REGULATE IT" where no specifics are given and is not really a plan, leaving things open to mischief. The devil in the details here is establishing what is reasonable and fair for an ISP to do -- and we then fairness hug the ISP's to death.
This point seems to be lost on all people making an econo-governance argument against NN.
Telecom tends towards a natural monopoly.
The power is with the industry, not with the consumer.
It will always be so, because of the inherent nature of the industry, and that is why the industry shows up as a text book example of industries which require legislative intervention to result in optimal outcomes for consumers.
In particular:
Telecom requires large up front investment in fixed costs. You need to lay cable, build infra, and more.
This immediately means that you cannot have a fluid competitive marketplace, as new entrants are curtailed by the costs.
Without point 1, you cannot competition.
Without competition you cannot have innovation, and differential servicing.
Maximum throughput and quality of service are not their goals. They want as many people as possible paying for service on a line they paid $X to install. And they get this by being able to throttle their user's traffic in order to allow as many people to use the same line as possible.
What you're saying is basically the same as the "unlimited" argument in terms of internet access or even cell phone plans. You don't have a personal internet connection just for you that you can use in an unlimited way. The internet line run to your neighborhood is essentially zero sum. If you take a huge chunk of the bandwidth, then other paying customers get less. Charging you more doesn't help unless you fund entirely new network lines and installation. They want everyone to have an equal size of the pie. You can't have a dozen households sharing a connection to the internet and all be streaming netflix in 4k. There simply isn't the infrastructure to support that right now, in most places. No matter how much you're willing to pay.
I can speak to what I want. I want to be charged for service. If the ISP's aren't charging me enough to make the money they need to make off the service they provide to me, I want them to charge me more. And, if they get too greedy, then let a competitor try to come in and charge me a bit less for similar services.
What I'm saying is basically let the market do its thing. It can't do its thing if we have these ISP's unfairly using their position to snipe at competing companies' streams flowing over their pipes. It's not transparent, and they're going to double-dip anyways - charging me AND the popular websites for using their pipes.
What I'm saying is basically we can't have the market do its thing when ISP's are allowed to be more than a dumb pipe and a host for near caches.
There's no such thing as "enough" money, only "more" and "less". Holding last-mile delivery of Netflix's content hostage for a ransom payment gives the ISP more money. So if they can do that, they will.
Not if ISPs maintain their monopolies, and convince government that they don't have the funds to improve service if they can't keep their "freedom" to dick over consumers by charging more for the same stuff.
Sure, there would be backlash, but as long as these regional broadband monopolies persist, it's quite difficult for the people and government to negotiate with companies.
As hard as it seems to fight today, we are in a much better position now to prevent these monopolies from gaining more power than we will be if Title II is repealed.
Imagine, instead, if this were a choice between net neutrality or SOPA. If you had to choose one which would you find the be the lesser evil? In the end you are either playing the game media wants or the way telecoms want.
He doesn't care, his goal is to get what he wants, while keeping his political "team" on his side, and thus its senators.
His is a position of convenience and will change as the wind changes.
Real politicians do "opposition research" for a reason; they don't seal themselves into an echo chamber, despite the frequent accusations to the contrary, because they know they won't hardly last a week if they do seal themselves off from what their opponents are doing and saying.
Here is a fallacy, but feel free to look into others: https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/bandwagon
edited: added explanation
Now, my turn:
why do you use an app to call/talk to your friends instead of calling their number on your smartphone, exactly ?
This is what we are getting ready to get back into. I do not want to have an internet where the ISP can hold me (the consumer) hostage to other companies to increase the ISPs bottom line. It isn't a good experience for the consumer, it isn't a good experience for providers of media and apps.
This was due to a peering dispute with Cogent over link saturation and maintenance costs, not Comcast throttling Netflix traffic. Netflix ended up peering directly with Comcast in order to bypass Cogent's bottlenecked links. Neutrality regulations have jack-all to do with peering mutual maintenance agreements.
Can you please write more about this, or provide some links where I can learn more? I don't feel I have an understanding of how peering would change under proposed net neutrality rules.
Particularly, I am curious about the claim that "[Comcast was not throttling Netflix traffic]". Under the proposed FCC rules, would it be claimed that they were throttling in that 2014 situation? My understanding is that they would be seen as throttling, and I see that as a problematic outcome because Comcast loses significant bargaining power and essentially is forced to eat losses whenever a link becomes saturated... I think I read that the FCC would step in and mediate such talks, which is even crazier.
tl;dr: I don't think the neutrality end of the rules would change peering at all, and peering disputes are never grounded in the kinds of things that neutrality seeks to protect. Title II classification permits the FCC to arbitrate peering disputes, which is a desirable side effect for people who just want to watch Netflix without buffering, but doesn't make it a neutrality issue.
Longer version:
Netflix reached Comcast customers through a third-party transit provider named Cogent. Cogent and Comcast have their networks connected together, and Netflix's volume of traffic was such that the links from Cogent -> Comcast became saturated, resulting in congestion and traffic issues for Comcast customers trying to get their packets from Netflix to their Comcast line. Non-Netflix traffic on this same link degraded, as well - but Netflix was the lion's share of the traffic, and online video tends to be more visibly sensitive to congestion issues than most other forms of traffic, so Netflix became the poster child for the problem.
Cogent and Comcast had a settlement-free peering agreement, broadly meaning that they agreed to exchange traffic with one another without charging for it, and with each side reasonably contributing to maintaining its end of the link. I'm remembering the details vaguely, but IIRC, Comcast claimed that the agreement's settlement-free status depended on maintenance of a roughly equal exchange ratio - traffic in from Cogent to Comcast should be appropriately balanced with traffic out from Comcast over Cogent. Netflix in particular skewed the ratio hard such that traffic in massively outweighed traffic out.
Historically, settlement-free peering agreements included provisions (or at least an understanding) that each party would built out their half of link capacity necessary to handle the exchanged traffic. As demand goes up, each party is responsible for contributing to the link's overall capacity. Comcast's claim was that Cogent's traffic ratios were so out of whack that Cogent should pay for the link upgrade. Cogent refused to pay for the link upgrade, citing the settlement-free nature of the peering relationship. Since nothing got upgraded, the link remained saturated in the face of increasing demand, until Netflix got tired of Comcast and Cogent slap-fighting and peered directly with Comcast, so they could deliver their bits directly to Comcast's customers without having to go through a transit provider (they had previously had similar issues with Level3, another transit provider). As I understand it, Cogent has a reputation for abusing traffic balances to offer cut-rate transit - they have a long and storied history of fierce peering disputes with a large number of peers, which makes me somewhat sympathetic to Comcast's position in this case (ick!)
So, as I understand it, Comcast was "throttling Netflix traffic" in the same way that a straw throttles nitrogen flow when you blow air through it - that is, traffic (air) was congested and limited, but it wasn't limited because it was Netflix (nitrogen) traffic, it was limited because the link was saturated (the straw was full of air), and it didn't really matter if it was Netflix or email or porn or what - if it went over that link, it was subject to routing issues. It's my non-expert, non-legal opinion that Comcast wouldn't be in violation because the Open Internet Order applies to a company's management of its own network, not of the interconnection points between networks, and because link saturation is not "impair[ment] or degrad[ation of] lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices". As long as all packets are congested equally, it's still being treated neutrally!
It's my opinion that Comcast absolutely was using Netflix's traffic as a bargaining chip to try to force Cogent into paying for the upgrade. Whether that was justified or not is a lot more nuanced than "omg, Comcast is blocking my Netflix, they must be evil!", though. As pertains to the regulations, Title II classification does grant the FCC the authority to step into peering disputes and take action if it deems a company's actions in a peering dispute to not be "just and reasonable", and would have allowed the FCC to step in and slap one party into compliance, thereby fixing the issue. That isn't a neutrality issue, though, and I'm not all that sure that Comcast would have been the losing party in an FCC mediation of the dispute.
Eh, Comcast was being extremely disingenuous, trying to act like a Tier 1 ISP.
For Tier 1s like Cogent, they expect to more or less equally peer. Ie. BGP routes and the physical routers themselves should be setup so that a main, backbone style ISP would receive about as many bytes on an individual connection as they transmit. This makes sense for backbone ISPs, or else they end up in the situation where an ISP is essentially using another ISP's infrastructure to route their own customer's traffic in an unfair way.
Comcast was trying to make the argument that Netflix was unduly routing traffic unto Comcast's network... but all of that traffic were packets that had been specifically requested by Comcast customers. It's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns.
> Comcast was trying to make the argument that Netflix was unduly routing traffic unto Comcast's network... but all of that traffic were packets that had been specifically requested by Comcast customers. It's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns.
Comcast was arguing that Cogent was unduly routing traffic onto Comcast's network (the majority of which happened to be Netflix traffic). You're certainly right that it's not Cogent's fault that Comcast's customers have asymmetric traffic patterns, but it is Cogent's fault that they've been historically abusive to their peers on the pretext of the traditional agreements built around symmetric exchange. I think that Comcast just got fed up with Cogent throwing its weight around and saw an opportunity in Netflix's huge amounts of traffic to force Cogent into terms more favorable to Comcast.
(It's pretty clear that Comcast won that round, IMO - but the loser was Cogent, not Netflix.)
Back in 2014 when all this was going on Level 3 published an unusually scathing series of blog posts where they called out residential ISPs for deliberately allowing their exchange links to saturate in order to extort extra payments from Level 3 and their customers.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140512082831/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20140512082813/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20150508143932/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20150313121250/http://blog.level3... http://web.archive.org/web/20150320123512/http://blog.level3...
There likely is room for some reasonable middle-ground that allows for some 'non-neutral' activity to truly benefit consumers but people don't trust that our political system can find it. It's much more likely that unfettered telecoms will further exploit their monopolies to collect data, segment the market (eliminate any consumer surplus), deincentivize competitors, push their mediocre products, or otherwise find ways of increasing revenue beyond being a 'dump-pipe' because they've exhausted the margin in that. They is is almost expected behavior from a commercial entity, it's the government's job to keep them in check.
Including telecom lobbyists, who study how misinformation and complex arguments can help them win political capital to push their ideas.
India in particular bore the brunt of Facebook's fortunately ham handed approach to pushing non neutral net down our throats.
And the success and failure, of the American system is used as a reference point to study Net Neutrality in India.
To be fair, the responsibly authority also uses references from interested parties, and legal examples set in other countries.
The TRAI (Telecm Reg Auth Ind) focuses on the best outcome for its citizens, so its relatively open minded in its focus.
At the same time, the Indian telecom Authority is severely lobbied by Indian telecom firms, who are now mounting their second assault on the neutral net.
And they are learning from their debacle. The TRAI is now asking questions on scenarios in which it might be a good thing that NN was not applied and so on.
Correct rulings in America, their reasoning, their supporting documents, the evidence and so on, will be used and studied around the world.
And I suppose that if American's so chose, they could look beyond their borders and see what other NN related rulings have been made around the world.
But it is the unwholesome development and innovation in your political and lobbying fields, that is being used to set standards around the world.
A vast chunk of problems today trace their roots back directly to the MPAA and the RIAA, and their efforts to stamp out piracy.
Piracy which in turn was defined by a set of copyright protections which ensured that the people with the better lawyers and lobbyists now dictated when a good or creation escaped protection.
I'm American and I also wish that this policy didn't impact the world but the fact is that the world is connected, and pollution made in one place will eventually drift and effect another place.
I don't want to overstate how big of a worldwide impact this policy would have, just pointing out it does have some. If anything, it's an opportunity for other countries to operate differently and attract top tech talent, sort of like France is trying to do.
You might argue that net neutrality is not such a threat... But this is first step. This is how it all starts.
All the comments about being this americans decision - like its their internet - are not helpful.
Government of my country is stupid and they might get idea to follow us. God i hope they follow Germany or some openminded country.
Vote for less regulation, not just getting rid of NN but getting rid of the monopolies that exist at the local level.
Net Neutrality does nothing to hinder competition. In fact, we need more regulation to force competition.
It's because of a lack of regulation that my city tricked into selling their amazing municipal broadband service to Comcast.
How?
https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/#participants
Why, Google?
Yes I see they sponsored https://netneutrality.internetassociation.org/action/ but why not get behind both sites?
Also, certainly being active online and discussing it openly helps.
I think you'd want to refrain from commenting on the FCC website or otherwise pretending to be American. While there are anti-NN folks doing impersonation, it's not a good behavior to copy.
Two great ISP's who WON'T be doing shenanigans like comcast/att when net neutrality is destroyed.
Too bad more people in America don't have good choices... I do think though the biggest thing they could do for 'action' --would be every Monday block all comcast/att users from using Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit in protest... till the ISPs cry and beg and plead w/ the FCC to re-instate net-neurality.
If it's legal to prioritize websites over others... then it's legal for those same websites to prioritize certain ISPs over others...
Since then, the provision of connectivity has consolidated among only a few very large companies, which among them have strongly oligopolic power to enforce whatever conditions they please upon their customers, both residential and commercial.
In the late-1990s, early-2000s environment of healthy competition among Internet service providers, utility-style regulation of ISPs, such as that here under consideration of repeal, was not a necessary measure.
However, in the current strongly oligopolic environment, only the regulatory power of the United States Government can continue to provide and enforce sufficient oversight to maintain a semblance of free market behavior.
Internet-powered entrepreneurship greatly benefits the US economy. The small, and occasionally large, businesses thus created have an outsized economic impact in terms of taxes paid and jobs created. Absent a true free market, or even the regulatory semblance of one, for Internet connectivity, these businesses may well find themselves severely hampered in their ability to earn revenue, with concomitant negative effect on their ability to contribute to our economy.
As such, I must strongly urge the new regulatory regime proposed in this filing not be adopted.
I thank you very kindly for your time and your consideration, and trust that you will decide in that fashion which you regard to best serve the interests of your constituents and of the nation which you serve.
(Also, the "Battle for the Net" folks would have done well to hire a UX designer - or perhaps to hire a different one. The lack of any clear confirmation that one's message has been sent fails to inspire confidence. Perhaps there's an email confirmation that has yet to arrive, but...)
The other issue is that small sites including startups could get throttled almost incidentally in this war. They don't use much bandwidth, being small, but if Comcast enacts some "bizdev" process where it takes six months of negotiations to get into the fast lane, any deal below $1M is probably not worth their time.
This is how cell phone software worked before the iPhone - get permission before you can develop (IIRC). If we end up with fast-lane preferential pricing, it should really be available to the smallest players. Ideally it should be free, but the Apple app store model would work - $99/year for fast lane access until your bandwidth is really significant. But would the individual have to pay $99 to every major ISP out there?
So Google didn't do what they could here.
Long term company health ought to be interested in maintaining net neutrality. Those seeking short term profits would prefer the ability to gut existing company reputation in order to line executives' pockets. I believe Google is still long-term focused, but their lukewarm action here gives me some doubts.
Obviously this is an analogy to net neutrality, so why is this reasonable situation fundamentally different? In a free market, shouldn't I be able to increase the tolls on my private infrastructure for those that put the most stress on it?
(Now I will say, the fact that there's only one toll road option for many people is anti-competitive and against the free market, but that's not this topic)
ISPs' monopoly on access to broadband customers allows them to extract rents based on the marginal value of each transaction. There's no reason we as a society should allow this.
Imagine if the cost of your water supply depended on your companies profits. That's what we're talking about here.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/17/14952904/elon-musk-spacex...
Anyway I kind of doubt Musk's plan comes to fruition before more threats to Net Neutrality come up. Right now we need to address it at a policy level. New ways of accessing internet won't prevent people from trying to monopolize and control it.
Did you confuse India with China?
Good luck with that.
https://www.google.de/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2017/05/19/these-...
Net neutrality could be forced into place, regardless of the laws passed by Congress or the malfeasance of the ISPs.
I see no reason why Google would ever support such a thing.
Especially consider this the next time a friend says ‘every politician is the same,’ or whatever.
At least that how they would do it in Philippines.
Far too many people don't seem to understand the arguments against net neutrality as it has been proposed... There's been much made about the "astroturfing" and automated comments on the FCC website that go against net neutrality-- but what about the reverse? John Oliver doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. Reddit and HN provide warped perspectives on the issue.
Don't you guys realize that no matter what policy is chosen, someone is getting screwed and someone going to profit? Don't get me wrong, the ISPs are not exactly benevolent organizations. But I don't think they're evil either. Plain and simple, if you think this is a cut-and-dry, good-versus-evil, conglomerates-versus-littleguy issue, I think you're not hearing both sides of the issue. This issue is between content providers that serve far more bits than they take in, and ISPs, and there are billions of dollars on both sides.
In other words, don't think for a second that this is about protecting small internet websites from having to pay ransom. That's not what is going to happen. The only people who are going to be squeezed are the giants like Google, Netflix, etc., and it's no surprise that these are the people who are making such a fuss about it today.
The particular event that made me reconsider net neutrality was digging into the details of the Comcast/Netflix/Level3 fiasco a couple years ago. Everything I had heard about that situation made it sound to me like Comcast was simply demanding ransom. The reality of the situation is that L3 and Netflix acted extremely recklessly in how they made their deals, and IMO deserved everything that came to them. Much is made about "eyeball ISPs" and the power it gives them. In reality, I think Netflix has more power in swaying consumers, and I think they used that power to bail themselves out of a sticky situation by badmouthing Comcast.
I don't see how compensatory peering agreements would work out well in a net neutral world. Specifically, the FCC proposal for Title II classification (paraphrasing here) said that the FCC would step in when it believed one party was acting unfairly. It is far too open-ended, doesn't list any criteria for what that means, and it's not the FCCs job anyway, the FTC should be doing that.
But in general I don't think net neutrality is a good idea. I think that people are out of touch with internet access in rural parts of the US, and I don't think NN is beneficial for that situation at all. My grandmother pays $30/mo for internet access that she barely uses, and I don't think it's right to enshrine into law that Comcast can't offer her a plan where she pays $5/mo instead for limited access to the few sites she uses.
As a bandwidth-hogging internet user, a lack of net neutrality will probably mean that I will pay more. But maybe that's how it is supposed to be. The internet didn't turn out to be what the academics once hoped it would be. And that's okay. The internet should serve everyone, however they want to use it, and the market should be built around that principle-- not around decades-old cypherpunk ideals.
I think it's incredible that behemoths like Google have the nerve to paint this as if they care about an open internet. It's obvious that their dominance is what makes an open internet irrelevant.
Unfortunately, many markets are served by only one high speed ISP in the United States. This makes the net neutrality fears somewhat more realistic.
I will say that from this angle, I put quite a bit more weight on correcting other anti-competitive practices pushed into law by communications companies. Things like states banning and suing municipal broadband efforts come to mind. The American marketplace for Internet ISPs as a result is quite distorted, certainly far from an open, competitive marketplace.
ISPs are too greedy for that nonsense. You're more likely to see $30 becoming the base price, and $50 is what it costs to access more content. Price shouldn't be based on what sites you like to visit. Under the title 2 designation, the internet is treated as a utility, so ISPs can't charge consumers based on how they use the internet, akin to how your water company can't charge you a premium if you decide to drink the water instead of using it to water your lawn. Abolishing net neutrality would allow for just that.
> As a bandwidth-hogging internet user, a lack of net neutrality will probably mean that I will pay more.
Why? ISPs already have data caps to charge customers more. Data caps are another story altogether... The cost of increasing broadband capacity has declined much faster than the increase in data traffic. For that reason alone Sonic doesn't impose data caps. If an ISP as big as Comcast says data caps are because heavy users are costing them more money, or saturating their network, it's a bunch of bullshit. One of the big reasons some ISPs have data caps is to keep customers from cord cutting cable TV. AT&T owns DirectTV, Comcast is a huge cable TV provider, they don't want customers relying solely on services like Netflix. If they can get customers to pay for both internet and TV, they will.
Fair enough...
> to the few sites she uses.
My understanding is that it's this second bit that has people up in arms. Why does it matter what sites she uses? It's completely legal for an ISP to offer a hard-data-capped, low-cost plan even now.
Here's a list:
https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...
Excuse me for being blunt, but you're being willfully ignorant if you ask this question. A simple Google search of the exact wording of your question reveals this [1]
> "Internet providers have attempted to throttle traffic by type or by user (Comcast in 2007), have imposed arbitrary and secret caps on data (AT&T 2011-2014), hidden fees that had no justification or documentation (Comcast in 2016), and tried to give technical advantages to their own services over those of competitors (AT&T in 2016). These attempts were only revealed in retrospect once they were discovered and lawsuits filed."
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/19/these-are-the-arguments-ag...
The second link is the example of crap I've read about the issue that never resonated with me, please don't tell why arguments against are bad, tell me why I need it the the first place.
And calling me "willfully ignorant" is a good example of why net neutrality has failed to get wider support. I'm a full-time developer, I do read a lot about a lot of issues, but I'm also busy with a full life. Guess what, my governments tax, drug, school funding, and police policies get more of my attention than a poorly explained argument for limits on ISPs.
Advocates should learn to tell their audience clearly and concisely why Net Neutrality benefits them. And without being dismissive or condescending. I mean, only if they want to build more support.
Because they're not fraud unless we make laws regulating such behavior. And, lawmaking can begin with setting proper FCC policy.
> And calling me "willfully ignorant" is a good example of why net neutrality has failed to get wider support. I'm a full-time developer, I do read a lot about a lot of issues, but I'm also busy with a full life.
Dude, if you're a developer, I'm not going to let you off the hook so easily. You should be familiar with the arguments, both for and against. Whether you agree with one side or the other is up to you-but you should at least be aware of the issues.
I'm sure you've told someone to Google answers to a simple question before. This is no different. I got those links by Googling your question.
Generally speaking, the concise arguments are to spread awareness among non-tech folks. They are a dumbed down version of the details. The old CP Grey video is good [1], as are recent graphics showing what could realistically happen [2].
Monopolies vs monopolies.
Where's the freedom for us?
Title II was instituted basically as a last resort. And nobody has been coming forward saying, "Okay.. we have a plan here to undo the Title II but still preserve net neutrality."
Non-Title II regulation of ISPs would require an act of Congress, a Republican-held congress with a Republican President. Good luck with that. :P
> Tell everyone that you want to keep the Internet free and open.
Why should I if you're not even going to mention it on your home page? They could even make it the doodle. Or not load a doodle and say it's due to bandwidth concerns because of lack of net neutrality. They just put some random blog up that nobody is going to see. Nice work!
I was at least expecting what is currently at https://duckduckgo.com/
That being said, it all just kind of feels underwhelming.
These same corporations can invest or purchase smaller new buisness and enhance their portfolio. Some already support network neutrality as they understand this.
I know my buisness depends upon my own effort. But I am sure many other small buisness owners face the same difficulty.
I know it is hard to be fair and objective in allowing access to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Thanks for the article.
Whether NN enables competition or kills it is debatable. But difficulty in business is not a reason.
If being granted monopoly status is the problem, let's fix that. Instead of treating it as a given and imposing unneeded regulation on top.
These same corporations can invest or purchase smaller new buisness and enhance their portfolio. Some already support network neutrality as they understand this.
I know my buisness depends upon my own effort. But I am sure many other small buisness owners face the same difficulty.
I know it is hard to be fair and objective in allowing access to the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
I would suggest the best way to fix ISP competition is to make wireless ISPs faster/cheaper/better/more reliable. This obviates the "last mile" problem that makes competition in landline businesses so untenable.
These days, we've gone one step further, and the majority of lines are owned by wholesalers, who don't deal directly with the consumer.
For those who want to read further about HN's approach to this, there's another thread from today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753932 and links to much more from there.
Not arguing that it’s worse than the US, but I did have FIOS I’m Jersey City several years ago that was faster then than the so called “high speed” fiber is in French cities now. On paper, really fast connections exist, but they are based on geographic luck rather than the result of good policy.
What really needs to happen is that internet providers should be decoupled from TV providers. It might just be my tin foil hat not working but it feels like Netflix and iTunes gets throttled or has very temperamental connections, but watching some high def content from Orange just flies. Same exact wires. Orange has a huge incentive to prioritize their services. Yet supposedly, net neutrality is in France? I bet there is some fine print that allows Oranage to prioritize their content.
I am ranting because I have a business internet plan that has a full 0.75 Mbs upload speed and I pay more than did in Jersey City where I have a 200 Mbs upload speed – with worse service and a disasterous excuse for customer service.
Being “more like France” is rarely a good idea when it comes to technology. Hopefully, Macron will change that.
1) How is Net Neutrality different from a slippery slope to communism?
2) During the President Obama years, my ISP in the U.S. offered 3 different tiers of service at 3 different prices. How is that pure "net neutrality"? (this was similar to the situation where in the U.S., rich lefty-liberals don't send their kids to public schools... but want poor conservatives to send their kids to public schools, rich lefty-liberals don't want public housing built in their neighborhoods... etc. etc... but still want to virtue signal that they're in favor of public education and public housing)
2: Your straw man argument relies on a very small subset of the US population and distracts from the issue of net neutrality.
2) The 'neutrality' in net neutrality refers to not privileging traffic based on its origin. It has nothing to do with things like different connection speeds.
2. Your ISP offering three different tiers of internet is like being able to buy three different priced cars. That is perfectly OK and has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. However, if you had to pay $3/mile to drive in one highway lane that had no speed limit, that would be like net neutrality.
It seems like you're polarized over left/right politics and don't really understand net neutrality at all.
I'm sorry, but the Internets just don't work that way.
The only way to get guaranteed 100Mbps when crossing a few AS borders', is to have bandwidth SLAs all the way. Which is - as far as I understand it (could be mistaken) - about the opposite of what Net Neutrality proponents seem to stand for.
ISPs can guarantee (or, at least, try to provide) you a certain quality of service within their network, as they have full control over it. They can also try poke their direct peers (whom they have agreements with) to do something if the problem is at some neighboring AS. They can also try to politely ask other systems (hoping they would care to help). But that's about it.
2) In the situation you laid out, the speed you're paying for is the same speed no matter who you are connecting to. Without net neutrality, you will get different speeds depending on who is on the other end of your connection.
I'd like to point out that "strongly regulated" in this case is still far less regulation than current water or power utilities enjoy. Do you consider those regulations, that have been around for decades, a "slippery slope into communism?" Is the government telling your electric utility that they can't charge you differently for using your refrigerator vs using your lights "communist"?
2. It isn't net neutrality at all, or even related. Net neutrality is the principle that packets are not prioritized. If I want to watch Netflix instead of Comcast's video service, I should be able to utilize my full bandwidth to do so.
2) >During the President Obama years, my ISP in the U.S. offered 3 different tiers of service at 3 different prices. How is that pure "net neutrality"?
Well, for one, Title II wasn't enforced during the "President Obama years" that I know of, so there is no difference in what you could have experienced than as what you could experience now. And second, offering different speed tiers has nothing to do with net neutrality, as long as that speed applied neutrally to all content you can access over the internet.
I guess I understand if the threat of losing it is the impetus to behave well.
I have to imagine it would just drive the user to create more throwaways, though.
The Battle For the Net website mentions a vast range of online companies who apparently stood in solidarity to take action on this day.
* Github: a blog post displayed on your feed.
* Etsy: Nothing.
* Kickstarter: Nothing.
* Netflix: Nothing.
* Twitter: Nothing.
* Vimeo: A featured video on the landing page.
* Reddit: A tiny blurred logo.
* Hacker News: A grey bar!
* Mozilla: Nothing.
* OkCupid: Nothing.
What a great display!
Really not sure what you're talking about here.
Along with this blog post: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/07/11/defending-net-neutr...
There's a snippet on about:home about Net Neutrality for every Firefox user:
https://ffp4g1ylyit3jdyti1hqcvtb-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-...
We've got a form here to make it easy to submit your comments to the FCC: https://advocacy.mozilla.org/en-US/net-neutrality-comments
We even voiced 9hrs worth of Net Neutrality comments that had already been submitted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=twksX_S3vkg
The most recent episode of the IRL Podcast is centered completely around Net Neutrality: https://irlpodcast.org/episode2/
https://twitter.com/fightfortheftr/status/885140707866017798
Are we really being asked to take this hill? Why? By whom?
History will record the hundreds of thousands of children who will die of the current-and-present famine affecting East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. It will only exacerbate the current, historic, and costly human migration to Europe.
This is a matter of life and death for millions. Though, unfortunately, the cost can only be measured in human lives: https://www.oxfam.org/en/emergencies/famine-and-hunger-crisi...