Today is the last chance to comment on the proposal to kill net neutrality | Hacker News Reader

Today is the last chance to comment on the proposal to kill net neutrality

techcrunch.com

172 pointskbyatnal117 comments

I'm all for everyone commenting so at least it's well known how far this FCC is going against public opinion, and encourage everyone to make their voices heard.

But, and I hate to be the cynic here, does anyone really believe that even if all 323 million Americans commented in opposition to killing net neutrality, that Ajit Pai would relent?

It's all but guaranteed he's going to do this. The only question is when, not if :(

What are the checks and balances here? He's not an elected official (so he can't be voted out), and he knows his time is up as soon as the executive branch turns blue again. So of course he will do his best to please the ISPs in whose coddling arms he will find refuge after his tenure.

Best I can think of is Congress passing a law to enforce net neutrality.

So the federal regulatory agencies actually have fairly unchecked power; it's one of their flaws. Lawyer boyfriend has remarked that they are actually rather unconstitutional in the sense that they have broad powers to make what are effectively laws, and constitutionally, only Congress can do that.

That being said, Congress has rightly delegated the ability to manage things like radio transmissions, the environment, food and drugs, etc. to bodies that have more time and domain knowledge, and under a decent president and Congress, we wouldn't have to worry about bad actors making their way to the tops of these organizations. And frankly, do you really have faith that Americans would do any better having to elect tens or hundreds of people to various positions in regulatory bodies?

It's the same as for any government employee. First, obviously, the law. It's not actually within his power to just write something down and sign it to make it the law of the land. There's a process that has to be followed, of which the comment period is but one step.

Regulatory decisions are also required to, in general terms, make sense and be fair. The new EPA head is currently coming to the realisation that there are limits to his power, especially when he's trying to change rules which had just recently been created: quickly flip-flopping on regulatory issues is an open invitation to be sued by, for example, companies that have based decisions on the assumption of regulatory stability. It's also really hard to argue convincingly to abolish a rule, when the almost unchanged group of people has just made the convincing case for that rule a year ago.

But beyond those squabbles, he is accountable to the people who hire and fire people in his position: the President and Congress. The assumption being that people realise it is the Republican Party who deserves the blame for this disaster of an idea.

I think that FCC can make some net neutrality rules, but I think the real win is if congress sets the ISP's status to title II common carrier. We already have the laws for that, they've just never been able to get it through so instead we are at the whim of the guy in office at the FCC

Its a system for commenting, not voting. Of course any American with an opinion should be encouraged to comment but if all 323 million actually did, that would not be productive.

The bot programmers and TV programs on both sides don't seem to respect this.

This is just a microcosm of the greater political climate created in the US over the past 40 or so years. Business interests completely control every single legislative decision made. We're all just along for the ride now.

With the importance of lobbying the people who will benefit financially from legislation will be able to afford most lobbying and ultimately almost always get their way. That's a real problem.

There's an interesting essay about democracy in America (well, there are hundreds if not thousands probably) but what's unique is that it's a criticism levelled against the idea of democratic pluralism, and from where it emerges - the 'tolerance' of the democracy, the idea that rather than the individual action expounded by the classical liberals (for all their faults) there is now a system in which representative voices are heard - whether those are religious or ethno-groups or worker groups or business groups. The key part, though, is that the group is recognised as legitimate by the others and only then will it be tolerated.

The idea of this tolerance is a kind of peaceful existence, which, the author argues, is inadequate for democracy but makes us feel good.

The essay is "Beyond Tolerance" by Robert Wolff, and it's part of a three essay book called Critique of Pure Tolerance, which as the name may not suggest to the reader is written from a strongly left-wing point of view (it even contains an essay by Frankfurt School critical theorist Herbert Marcuse!). You can read the PDF of it here, I hope others are as enlightened by it as I was: https://monoskop.org/images/5/55/Wolff_Moore_Marcuse_A_Criti...

Do you maybe care for a tl;dr?

I see, that it's not long (124 small form pages), but I'm very interested in what do you [or others] think of the essence of the essays, what are the insights that it gives to the reader. What was unexpected? What was expected?

I also see that it's from 1968. How has it aged?

Although the book is long, the essay which I pointed to, which is the most poignant to the point of American democracy, is the only the first one (which is 52 pages long). The second essay concerns the benefits of using science (this term used broadly) to understand human society, and a rejection of the tolerance of some other methods. The third essay concerns what kind of political action should be tolerated in society, and the author argues for the tolerance of the Left wing, which is regarded as subversive, and positing that this subversive element is increasingly blocked in modern capitalist society through mass media, and this blocking may need to be cleared using apparently anti-democratic means such as the silencing of Right views.

The sense of the first essay is that pluralistic democracy functions in such a way that groups, once recognised, have some of their needs met at various levels of bureaucracy, however none of them get all that they ask for and all of them get a little. What they ask for tends to affect only their own group with little overreach. Although this seems like a good idea, it also functions on the principle of simply blocking out those "fringe", "radical", "extreme" groups which aren't regarded as legitimate; it does not do this by denying their claim to the platform of groups, but it does this by denying their existence or plight in the first place. The author uses the examples of those left in poverty in America before Kennedy and those who campaigned for disarmament before the Cold War. As examples of groups on the platform, he uses religious ones (Protestants and Jews in particular) and ethnic ones.

He argues that there is another model of pluralism, which he calls the 'referee' model, which contends that so far as the government is instituted to merely protect interest groups from colliding, it favours the stronger ones over the weaker ones. He writes in support of this,

>In the field of regulation of labor unions, for example, the federal agencies deal with the established leadership of the unions. In such matters as the overseeing of union elections, the settlement of jurisdictional disputes, or the setting up of mediation boards, it is the interests of those leaders rather than the competing interests of rankandfile dissidents which are favored. In the regulation of agriculture, again, the locally most influential farmers or 1eaders of farmers' organizations draw up the guidelines for control which are then adopted by the federal inspectors. In each case, ironically, the unwillingness of the government to impose its own standards or rules results not in a free play of competing groups, but in the enforcement of the preferences of the existing predominant interests.

I don't think my summary is adequate, as I first read the essay a long time ago, and I'm not sure if I completely agree with it or not (the author cites Durkheim when he talks about the flaws and advantages of classical liberalism and conservatism, how they together spawn pluralistic democracy) so I would recommend reading it if you get time.

Edit: as for the importance of the first essay, from my point of view not much has changed, though I can't say for sure beacuse I only hear about America on the news. As for the last essay, I would say that it is extremely important considering the current political climate in Western countries, though many (especially on HN) would disagree with my view.

Thanks! Sounds interesting.

The preference toward the majority (plurality) is not surprising considering how regulatory capture is the norm in the US, due to the strong views of anti-federalism. (Which, I guess wasn't much different in the 60s and before.)

1968 was a particularly seminal year for political thought and action. There’s such a wealth of writings and histories to draw upon— Kurlansky’s 1968 provides an easily digested history, and the writings of The Situationist International, particularly Debord’s Society and the Spectacle, provide a great look at thought currents that drove some of the more tumultuous scenes of that year (and decade). Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) fits squarely within the current of cultural critique that fueled the decade. I’d say a great many of the writings age eerily well—they’re often still poignant and relevant to issues we deal with today.

The unfortunate part about many works of political thought, particularly I think from German philosophy is that you need to have a significant amount of prerequisite knowledge, and this has been my case with the Frankfurt School in particular. I simply haven't had the time to do the background reading, so the texts are a little mystifying to me. Take for example The Dialectic of Enlightenment which is so very packed and dense that it reads like poetry to me, and what was accomplished in the first 20 pages therein could have been accomplished in a whole book by any authors other than Adorno and Horkheimer.

I have similar trouble with Society of the Spectacle, though I managed to find help getting through it. Some are more approachable though, like Marcuse's shorter essays, Marx's non-Capital economic works and Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom. Edit: and of course Slavoj Zizek, though he is known to simplify and reduce concepts until the reader only gets a "kinda yeah" idea of what's being talked about.

Sometimes I really do wonder if the wealth of distracting information presented to me, so easy to grab in a capitalist economy has dulled my brain, or if I even had that brain to use in the first place.

Since you mentioned him, anyone interested in this would do themselves a favor by reading Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. I’d imagine Marcuse’s essay draws on similar themes as the book.

This is the great tragedy of American democracy through all its history.

One camp sees that there are big businesses that have achieved rentier positions in the economy and advocates passing laws or using force to punish them.

The other camp sees that it is usually federal rules + global competition which created behemoths in the first place and advocates against further restrictive laws.

The two camps fight about whether there should be more rules or less. Meanwhile the problems are left to fester until the next crisis, when the New Rules are able to win.

The civil war, the banking crises of the industrial revolution, the Great Depression, and the "great" recession, etc.

While I agree with the conclusion that the problems are left to fester, I don't think that those two camps has really existed like that for a long while now. Both camps are in desperate need to have close connection with big businesses during election time, so what they do is employing different tactics to siphon private money into politics.

One camp does this by back rooms deal and government contracts, positioning companies to stay ahead of the competition. Big businesses have to pay or the competition will do it.

The other camp does this through removing rules which otherwise would allow competition to grow into a threat. The methods of the first camp get describe by the second as threats, and big businesses have to pay to remove both.

No one is paying to deal with next crisis.

I did not mean to equate "camps" just with the republican and democratic parties of today. I meant camps to describe groups of people with similar opinions at the same time in history.

For example in the civil war era you had northern opinions which wanted tariffs, more navy power, etc. and saw plantations as rentiers on "property" they should not have ever owned. In the other camp you had southerners who opposed federal restrictions on trade and were very conscience of the competition between global powers, with England wanting cotton yet also outlawing the gulf stream slave trade.

And I should have been more articulate: I am not refuting the parent post about when perhaps the current camps formed. Just that the formation of such camps is not unusual in American history.

Can it be still called a democracy then?

It is not a democracy, was never a democracy, was not designed to be a democracy. It could be considered a "prelude to a democracy if it really wishes to be and is willing to work hard to get there".

The U.S. was invented at a time of monarchy. Three things it innovated were polyarchy (a ruling class of many rather than one, a king), a written constitution (power comes from people who grant a revocable mandate of authority to the polyarchy, rather than mandate from heaven to the monarch), and one person one vote. Of course who gets to vote is not by any means democratic: you had to be citizen, be a man, be white, and own land.

It's become much more democratized since then, on paper. And it could become a democracy at any moment.

However if you look at the ethnic and economic make up of the country compared to their representatives, the polyarchy is still overwhelmingly landed elite, male, and white. The average net worth of a Congressperson is around $7 million. And there's no meaningful difference between Democrats and Republicans when that's broken down, so I'd say we have a one party system with two factions. It's distinctly non-democratic, still, in practice. And it even looks more like an evangelical prosperity theology driven church than a democracy.

But most people don't vote. And most voters, vote party line. It's a tribal system, most voters are deeply ignorant of issues. They're sufficiently happy being peasants and serfs, and having a polyarchy of lords rule them.

Uh huh.

So every news outlet give Trump's a snowball's chance in hell of winning and Hillary Clinton is a member of the political establishment, but there's no democracy; plebian votes don't count.

People may it may not reach" correct" conclusions, but America is most certainly democratic.

It seems a bit disingenuous to call out imply all sides are the same when one party put into place these rules and the other party is removing them.

In a sense, we did vote for it. We elected Trump, who spoke out against NN (https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...) and who had obvious pro-business leanings.

It's cheap to comment. You and I just did it now (max time 5-10 min), just like it's cheap to participate in mail-in vote ballots as a citizen

Sorry citizen, your signature doesn't match the signature we have on file. Better luck next cycle.

That can happen from anywhere. It's more likely to happen when you have people walking in off the street and filling out ballots.

My point is that it's so cheap, easy, and fast to do that it's more of a waste of time rationalizing all the reasons how it potentially won't work.

There's nothing wrong with being cynical in this case, the FCC's politics are quite clearly in favor of those who want internet asymmetry, to slow or outright ban certain content on their infrastructure, to permit the charging of higher fees not based on usage but on content, and so on. This is the very definition of self-interest, and it's not democratic. So there's no reason to hate being a cynic, it's completely rational.

> I'm all for everyone commenting so at least it's well known how far this FCC is going against public opinion

From where I'm standing, I don't see a huge opposition against this move apart from a vocal minority. I believe it's due to the fact that at this stage the arguments are academic, and as such highly debatable. If they kill net neutrality and people see substantive impacts on their wallets or service, that will be the time to take up arms. At this point in time, I don't see it happening.

Root of the problem was the creation of this power center, FCC, to begin with. Once created, it was given that it was going to be abused.

The powers that are enforcing ISP monopolies, and are against municipal broadband, are part of the problem.

That's amazing that a government would so blatantly go against the public interest.

Your politicians might as well just admit they work for corporations instead of citizens. At least they're not implying they think people are stupid.

The problem is more that the public isn't interested. Only a small percentage of people know what NN even is.

Including Politicians.

Here's 100k, NN is bad.

Well, the public shouldn't have to worry about getting interested.

Isn't that why one has a government, so that we don't have to worry about taking care of everything and can live our lives?

Governments should do what's best for the people who have elected them, and I don't see how anyone can think that being the only country in the world where you don't have net neutrality is something good for anyone (but a handful of corporations).

It's unfair to ISPs (some of it is their own doing like introducing "unlimited data" purely based on the assumption that most users wouldn't use their data at the same time, which companies like Google and Netflix capitalized on by building high bandwidth services on top of it) but since Google and Netflix are capable of manipulating consent of internet users and will not let FCC rollback "net neutrality", ISPs will have to stop innovating, keep giving terrible service and pass their costs to consumers.

ISPs are always free to throttle all services. Or (gasp) stop lying about so-called "unlimited" plans.

Don't worry, that is exactly what they'll end up doing. Hope you have alternatives.

Net Neutrality is the idea that ISP cannot target only specific addresses/services when they throttle your connection.

I know what Google and Netflix want to tell you what it is but I also know what it actually is (https://www.fcc.gov/document/restoring-internet-freedom-noti...).

That's actually a fun read. Just loom at this section where they are making an absurd logical Yoga move to get ISPs classified as "information providers" and not a "telecommunication provider":

    In contrast, Internet service providers do 
    not appear to offer “telecommunications,” 
    i.e., “the transmission, between or among 
    points specified by the user, of information
    of the user’s choosing, without change in the 
    form or content of the information as sent 
    and received,” to their users. 

    For one, broadband Internet users do not 
    typically specify the “points” between and 
    among which information is sent online. 
    Instead, routing decisions are based on 
    the architecture of the network, not on 
    consumers’ instructions, and consumers 
    are often unaware of where online content 
    is stored.

So instead they're classifying ISPs as "content providers", when any plain reading of the law can only result in the conclusion that a "content provider" is supposed to be a third party such as a newspaper's website or HN.

It's a truly ridiculous argument. Users of telephone service don't specify the routing of their calls either, yet somehow that fact is sufficient to transform an ISP from a carrier to a "content provider".

This idea is the problem with net neutrality.

The reason people support net neutrality is that ISPs are monopolies even more so than Google, Facebook, etc and we understand that monopolies are unfair, corrupt, renters, etc. Therefore it easy to be blinded into supporting rules that purport to punish ISPs, even if the rule itself is illogical and loaded for unintended consequences.

Reasonable people can oppose Net Neutrality for the economic illogicality of an enterprise not being allowed to negotiate prices with its customers.

What people want is laws punishing monopoly ISPs. No one cares if Google has to pay a fraction of their ad revenue to help pay for serving them bloated ad data they didn't even ask for.

> [..] economic illogicality of an enterprise not being allowed to negotiate prices with its customers.

See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers.

And you're assuming peoples' motives in the face of these people telling you that you're wrong: I actually don't have grudge with my local ISP. What is scaring me shitless is a future where the internet is just Cable TV, and where the chance to have an idea and get it out there essentially unhindered is dead, because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target.

This isn't about google. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt. The large fish will be the last to ever pay.

This is about the business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small. No customer will ever complain if their ISP blocks your new idea, because they will never know about it.

> See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers.

In every willing exchange of data, both the transmitter and receiver are the ISPs' customer.

> And you're assuming peoples' motives ... because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target.

> ...Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt.

> This is about business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small.

This argument is clearly all about our mistrust of monopolies. You clearly don't trust ISPs as a whole, presumably because there is naturally no competition. If you and I don't know a small site exists yet, how is the ISP gonna know? And small businesses aren't going to be targets, for the same reason the IRS doesn't target the small fish with its big guns.

Setting the economics aside, if one is worried about ISPs ability to target free speech by surcharging a particular site, then how is getting the federal government more involved the answer?

http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-deals-that-mean-you-have-to-wa... The big fish already do pay because ISPs hold their customers hostage. They've "opened new revenue channels" by realizing that they can just pay a small amount for lobbying efforts so FCC and friends will leave them alone to make a larger amount from content sources.

Thanks for finding this. This is exactly the point, we can reduce lobbying corruption by scrapping such economics-defying rules.

This is completely orthogonal to real anti-trust legislation against the hardwired ISPs, which both parties seem to be incapable of.

Net Neutrality didn't officially exist for the first 3 decades of the Internet; I never thought making it official policy fixed a big enough problem to make it worth the cost. A lot of data volume coming out of Google and Facebook are profitable ad images we didn't specifically request. Why shouldn't our ISPs be able charge them for this data? End user bills could fall as low as $0! But the mechanism for doing so has to be blunt and "discriminatory": you can't realistically tell what percentage of data from a domain is of a particular type nor can you keep track of, and contact, every tiny data serving domain out there.

Internet traffic changes hands between ISPs and backbone carriers before reaching destination.

What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements?

If someone from Malaysia accesses your site, you would have to have agreement in place for the entire route. Or think other way, anyone can start extorting money from site owners at any point in time.

It's bad for you as a end customer.

It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.

> What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements?

If ISPs were not dominated by federal-government-originated monopolies, then our traffic would have a variety of routes available to it, found by a breadth first search of ISP switches and DNS services, with tolls (effectively) charged at each step of the cheapest path. When possible, market forces are always a better solution than government force. If an ISP in Hawaii has no local servers for [big advertising-data company 1] and the cheapest route for that data is more expensive than [company 2 with Hawaii server], it should be legal for the ISP to negotiate directly with to subsidize the cost of using [domain 1] for its end consumers.

What is bad for the end customer is this federal/private monopoly control of ISPs. If cities, regional government entities, and private backbone viaducts controlled ISPs we wouldn't need net neutrality legislation and more importantly the president would have less legal clubs with which to beat ISPs who refuse any government demands. Net neutrality is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The root problem is these large private monopolies that are under the thumb of, and also lobby federal officials.

> It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.

This is not the closest analogy. One possible analogy is like a gas station defraying the cost of the toll road, in exchange for the right to be built on prime land. Another closer analogy would be like the toll booth on the road charging you extra if you are coming from the bank driving a branded, armored cash truck, which has a quantitatively, provably large value derived from getting from point A to point B. Is this behavior morally ok? I think the answer has to be yes otherwise how can we justify any level of regressive taxation for public services? Indeed how could people trade effectively without taking into account the other parties' interest?

Not sure which analogy is closer to your intent, but to reason honestly by analogy we should get as close as possible to the same situation.

AT&T Uverse has instituted a 1TB monthly cap on residential internet service. Unless you also buy TV service, in which case it's unlimited. Clearly they're targeting customers who want to stream all of their TV via sling etc. with this.

Now, the AT&T small business-class internet (which I've just recently switched to) is still unlimited, though it does cost more.

"AT&T small business-class internet"

Charter/Spectrum has a similar "business" class service. Yes, it costs more. I get a lower contention ratio, no caps and fast state-side customer service. My complaints are poor upstream speed and frequent, brief, early morning outages when they service the network.

Maybe the word unlimited should just be expunged from the dictionary, because so many real-world uses of it are vulnerable to deconstruction.

Why not give good service and pass costs to customers?

Americans are already paying a shit ton for internet access. Any increase in price is artificial.

Because they think they still have an option to pass the cost to companies like Google and Netflix and then use that money to increase their business and hence have an opportunity to provide good service... which is much better than investing in better infrastructure and customer service and then trying to get customers to pay more. Once they realize that internet companies will continue to use propaganda and not let it happen, they will have to take another route... which will be to keep providing the same service and keep maintaining their monopoly.

Why?

1. They don't have to give good service. Most are monopolies.

2. They already do pass all costs, and all profit margins created, to customers.

3. They want higher profit margins than currently being squeezed.

4. They want more entities to pay them. New classes of customers.

5. Deeper the pockets and fewer the paying entities, easier it would be for ISPs. HBO charges the Cable providers, for long long time HBO didn't allow individuals to buy directly from them, subscribing through a Cable provider was the only option. It allowed HBO to have a simple money supply from big entities with deep pockets which were easy to control. HBO could simply terminate one cable provider. Comcast can simply terminate preferential treatment to Vimeo if they didn't pay. Much easier than sending 4th reminder and collection notice to 65 year old Mrs. Smith.

Because ISPs in the US have monopolies over their areas. There is no incentive to provide good service when you have no competition.

Maybe running with net neutrality should be the next ISP innovation? It's clear that there's enough consumer market demand that they could make money from it, I don't understand where the ISP's tunnel vision of "only way to innovate is if net neutrality is killed" comes from.

If there is a law or federal rule, that usually implies there are not sufficient market forces behind whatever we still think should/shouldn't be done.

Or it implies that the public wants things a certain way and they are tired of battling it out with their idiotic providers (especially in a market where most people only have one option).

Market forces do not affect large telecoms.

You're version is more specific. Perhaps I was too general and clunky.

Consumer demand is not a factor. ISPs in the US have a monopoly over areas and can effectively prevent new competitors from coming in. There is no innovation. The only plan is to extract the most amount of money from customers while spending the least amount of money to maintain the system. Killing net neutrality allows them to extract even more money from both sides: customers and content providers.

I just want to point out that this view isn't necessarily wrong, but it's one-sided and reads like talking points from an ISP lobbyist.

You can view Google and Netflix as "capitalizing on ISPs". You could also view it as the ISPs customers demanding more bandwidth from their ISP that they pay.

ISPs like to talk about their "innovations", but what does that even mean? Personally, I want them to provide me with a high bandwidth link to the internet at low cost. The less they do, the happier I'll be.

What innovations do you expect to happen if net neutrality is rolled back? I expect that every ISP will threaten to deprioritize traffic from every content provider unless they pay up. I believe it'll lead to a worse internet experience overall for internet users and raise barriers for new content providers to be able to compete on the internet. That's not the kind of innovation I want.

It's been well established that terrible service and high costs are related to how much of a monopoly the ISP has in the area. Many areas of the US only have 1 or 2 choices of ISP. This shouldn't come as a surprise to any free market capitalist. Why would an ISP upgrade a network or lower prices when it has no competition? Low competition means that consumers lose. When Google Fiber wants to expand to an area, the established ISPs fight hard to make sure they can't compete. If they do reach an area, that area immediately experiences network upgrades and reductions in prices.

A company doesn't just "pass their costs to consumers" and tack on a set percentage for their own profits. A company's job is to increase the profits for it's shareholders. If a CEO is not doing everything legally within his power to increase the profits for shareholders, he can be replaced. Prices for services and money spent on maintenance are set based on what they've determined will net them the maximum amount of profit. If they managed to extract even more money from content providers, what motive do they have to lower prices or upgrade service for customers in a monopoly area? None. None whatsoever.

Sometimes the government has to intervene in a market (like anti-trust laws) in order to create a fair market for companies to compete. And that's OK and every free-market conservative should recognize that fact and agree that it's a good idea if they just think about it for a while.

I am against NN but even from my point of view the innovation argument is 50% duplicitous.

I don't expect big monopoly ISPs to implement these changes with content providers in a way that doesn't disrupt end users' access. But I still don't think we should have universally outlaw this for all ISPs for all time, present and future, including nice little ones answerable to the people of a city or region. The other duplicity is that this is not an ``innovation''. Please Mr. Lobbist. Governments have been taxing economic transactions at both endpoints (buyer and seller) for millenia and the evil tax man has always triaged the taxed at some level where it is no longer economical to collect.

If elected democrats (when NN was introduced) really wanted to help the consumer they would have done something to break up the monopoly ISPs, not this moral signaling rule says Google et. al. are less monopolistic than you so were going to pick their side. If republicans actually favored free markets they would follow up ending NN by doing the same.

> Sometimes the government has to intervene in a market (like anti-trust laws) in order to create a fair market for companies to compete. And that's OK and every free-market conservative should recognize that fact and agree that it's a good idea if they just think about it for a while.

No thinking required in this case, opposing government sponsored monopolies is obvious and shrinking those that must exist to the smallest possible size is too. Conservative federalism. Some conservatives have favorable views of private monopolies though (stating this as a fact, not a personal opinion) and presumably they have thought about it.

I think on the plus side, if net neutrality is killed, and ISPs start gouging the major providers (e.g. netflix, amazon, google/youtube) then it'll give huge financial incentive for those content providers to break the ISP monopoly.

Google started to do so before (fiber), but the political follow-through wasn't cost effective. There is a tipping point where it is.

how does that help anything if i have to choose a service-specific last mile?

maybe i guess in the short term we pay off google by agreeing to let them monitor all the traffic and hope that keeps them sufficiently well fed they don't feel like offering preferential handling to google services and partners.

I soured up on Net Neutrality after seeking what YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit did to silence voices that they don't like on their platforms.

How does net neutrality matter if what travels on a perfectly neutral net is controlled anyway, actually controlled much more effectively, by a very few with agenda that goes far beyond just greed for money?

"Don't open and judge my TCP/IP packets. But, I will open and judge your video uploads all day, every day." - YouTube

How is that fair?

No, thank you. I refuse to be fodder for something, only to be surrendered at a later point in the fight for fairness.

"Bernie" taught me that lesson. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

net neutrality ensures you can get to youtube\twitter\reddit\facebook without the ISP charging you more or throttling sites. It has nothing to to with free speech or altering the policies of individual sites.

Think of it like water. Your water company doesn't care if you are flushing the toilet or taking a shower. They just give you water and charge a rate. The internet works this way now and we want to keep it that way.

Opposing net nutrality means you will end up with this: http://www.wordstream.com/images/what-is-net-neutrality-isp-...

They are going to create a "slow lane" and charge you more to use it.

The slow or fast lane doesn't matter, if I am going to be denied at the destination anyway.

Free speech only protects you from government persecution. It doesn't control how owners of private property react.

You are still going to get banned and moderated, it will just be a lot slower and a lot more expensive for you.

And if you keep getting denied you should probably try and find out why people find you so toxic and repulsive.

People? They are many who would be OK with what I have to say.

The problem is the platform owners want full fairness when they talk (TCP/IP, the platform they use) but want full God powers when their platform is concerned (Social Media Sites, the platform I use). Do you see the hypocrisy of Google/Youtube/Facebook/Reddit/Twitter?

If Comcast shouldn't decide what travels on their wires, then why should Google get to decide what the Youtube video says?

> If Comcast shouldn't decide what travels on their wires, then why should Google get to decide what the Youtube video says?

Comcast doesn't get to decide for the same reason the water company doesn't decide what I use my water for.

And you are free to say what you want in my house but you'd be thrown out pretty quickly if I didn't like what you had to say. Your house is no different. And Google's house is no different too. This isn't a difficult concept

Google is not a private entity, it is a public corporation with share holders.

We hold government with highest demands for equality, we hold private individuals and fully owned businesses with most freedom to discriminate. We hold public corporations somewhere in between.

>Google's house

Sure. Nobody cared when things were being said about Egypt's Mubarak. But say something that some Google executives don't like, you are out of there.

Is there a difference between a private entity and a public corporation?

If I run my own plumbing company, I can hire my son without putting up an ad in the paper. Should a Google executive be allowed to hire her husband without putting up an ad?

We hold public companies at a higher standard that private individuals, correctly so.

What if Mead stopped you from using their notebook to write down a thought that they don't agree with?

Using youtube is a privileged, not a right. Google can censor because its user's agree to it as part of their terms of service.

And Comcast will make their ability to slow down or speed up packets a part of their terms of service. done.

Glad you agree that Comcast has that right, just like Google.

NN doesn't matter if Google can pay God with paying customers, who pay each month for gsuite products, got their account cancelled because Google didn't like what they posted. I would take slow lane over that every day.

Capitalism when I like it, socialism when I don't. That is hypocritical.

You are advocating for changes to laws you don't want because you have a very fundamental misunderstanding of some very basic concepts. Comcast cannot do this now because there are rules and regs to stop them from doing so. Killing net neutrality will enable comcast to dictate traffic. If you don't want them to have that ability, you should be in favor of net neutrality. How are you this dense?

Worrying about Comcast when Google/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit are stifling speech with impunity is like worrying about stains on the carpet when house is on fire.

I have written so much about NN that it could be a 200 page book, and made many donations to EFF. But, NN is comparable to carpet stain, restricting opinions you don't like on a multi-billion-people platforms like YouTube/Twitter is comparable to house on fire.

I would rather use NN being invalidated as a way to teach Google/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit a taste of their own medicine.

I hope someone at Google and Facebook is measuring negative sentiment generated by their actions against speech that they don't like.

Google is allowing ADL to tarnish their brand value. It is dropping like a rock. Google is doubling down on their Clinton campaign investment, they should cut losses and support pillar of American values, Freedom of Speech.

The similarities to "Bernie" telling Democratic party to wise up are too strong here. We are telling Google, the company that I absolutely loved and believed in till two months ago, to wise up or they will lose the affection people had about them taking the company down with it. I can't believe I have stopped using Google search, but here I am.

I am taking no action, no advocacy of NN this time around. Think of this as Bernie supporters telling DNC that Democrats do not represent them anymore. I will band together with the enemy, Ajit Pai, in this case, to make sure Google/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit pay some price for their censorship.

> Google/Twitter/Facebook/Reddit are stifling speech with impunity is like worrying about stains on the carpet when house is on fire.

Two different issues. Your Freedom of Speech only prevents government persecution. I don't know how many times I have to explain this. If you don't like the rules of the sites out there, don't use them.

> I have written so much about NN that it could be a 200 page book

From everything I can tell your voluminous objections are all based very incomplete and extremely incorrect assumptions

> I will band together with the enemy, Ajit Pai, in this case, to make sure Google/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit pay some price for their censorship.

look out boys, we have an edgelord among us. LOL

>From everything I can tell your voluminous objections are all based very incomplete and extremely incorrect assumptions

Those 200 pages were written in support of NN.

Youtube won't be able to open and judge your video uploads if you can't afford to upload a video with your ISP.

You'll be able to afford it, just be prepared to have a throttled, asymmetric upload speed to YouTube.

And when ISPs eventually resort to requiring you insert a root certificate to use the internet at all, your ISP will judge you.

Sure, but it's hypocritical for Google/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit to complain about someone else judging it in future, while they are judging it today with impunity.

We, as people, have same influence on current Google/Facebook/Twitter/Reddit censorship as we do on future Comcast/Verizon/AT&T/Charter censorship... none what so ever.

So the solution is to give up entirely?

No, but there is bigger fish to fry.

Censorship of speech is much much bigger issue for me than Net Neutrality.

I can't stand with multi-billion corporations claiming victimhood on subject of Net Neutrality, while at the same time playing God with people being able to speak their mind.

You can be an activist for more than one cause at a time. Additionally, those corporations (who I detest probably more than most people here) can still be legitimate victims, even if they are terrible. I don't like siding with them either, but if they are right, then their evil-ness is irrelevant.

>You can be an activist for more than one cause at a time.

I agree. But scale does matter. You are not going to be worried about if the person giving you CPR has cooties or not, if you are suffering through an heart attack.

>their evil-ness is irrelevant

It is relevant, because I think free speech is more important than speed of packets. I have to use this opportunity to point out the hypocrisy of these corporations.

You're just being stubborn now.

Speed of packets is part of free speech, as it affects how it's sent and received.

It's obviously in Google/FB/etc's interest to advocate Net Neutrality, but they'll still be using their algorithms to filter what their users see whether or not net neutrality is a thing.

If Net Neutrality wasn't a thing, FB/Google might have a blow to their wallet. But they can afford it. The hobbyist can't.

And if you can choose between a person with cooties versus a person without cooties to save your life, you'd go with the one without cooties. You have nothing to lose to make the more sensible choice.

>You're just being stubborn now.

I hear you. :)

Do I want Net Neutrality? Yes

Is Free Speech more important to me? Yes

Is pointing out hypocrisy of YouTube at this point important for me? Yes

Will I vouch for a guy who gave me finger at the last intersection, if he gets into an accident no fault of his own at the next intersection? Yes, without hesitation.

Would I have some choice words for him for giving me finger? You bet.

And with this response, it sounds like you agree with everyone in this comment thread.

I don't want Comcast looking inside my packets. I don't want Google looking inside my videos.

Deal?

Ideally, yes. But you can just host your videos yourself instead of with Google, which may be difficult to do without Net Neutrality. Most people don't have the luxury of choosing their ISP.

It sounds like you have a beef with how the US is currently handling corporate personhood, not necessarily free speech.

> But you can just host your videos yourself instead of with Google, which may be difficult to do without Net Neutrality.

The problem is not hosting, the problem is not slow speed, the problem is your audience being pulled from you without any legal due process. From listener's perspective, you are denied audience of the person you want to hear, because YouTube decided they didn't like what is being said and heard.

I find that more suffocating than an ISP slowing down my packets.

Google services were taken away, including youtube, gmail, google docs from paying accounts that Google didn't like. That's like Mead coming into your house and taking away the paper notebook they sold to you a week ago, because they don't like what you write in it.

Without net neutrality, you might not have an audience in the first place. I'm telling you, it's as big of an issue as Google/Facebook's algorithms and their account/video takedowns. It would become even more impossibly difficult to compete with their services. The problem is their monopolization, and a lack of net neutrality would kill their competition.

This is a bit of a tangent, but it sounds like you're wanting a social media platform that has:

1) Popularity (essential for any social platform)

2) Unbiased search functionality (Probably needs to be open source, and will frustrate users with how it underperforms at finding relevant results in comparison to search engines that are closed source and rely on user tracking)

3) Incapability to take down user files and accounts (Tons of legal issues here. Probably needs to be decentralized somehow, or hosted somewhere with lax information laws, otherwise the platform itself would be taken down by the server's location's government)

Edit: And as for your analogy, no. It's like renting a paper notebook, which the seller then takes back because you violated their terms of use by drawing lolicon in it.

>Without net neutrality, you might not have an audience in the first place.

DNS can be, and was, taken away without any due legal process. That was my wake up call. Google cloud is registering domains and has that control over it.

When it comes to dire situations, if my ISP does funny business, I can choose another ISP e.g. a mobile connection.

No different than taking another road to go to the bank. My account and money in there is still safe.

If the bank take away my account without due legal process, does it matter if the roads to get to the bank were traffic/pothole/toll free?

For a YouTube content creator, who spent years building brand and audience, one fine day to wake up and have videos demonetized and/or account suspended is like bank terminating your account without giving you a dime from your account. With bank, you can get government/FDIC engaged, with YouTube, they are the Gods of that universe.

>And as for your analogy, no. It's like renting a paper notebook,

Paying account holders of g-suite apps from google, faced account termination with no cause, no access to videos/files/emails. This is digital violence and much bigger threat that has materialized, and is far greater than NN.

If terms of service are enough to allow Google doing what it does, why can't Comcast do the same with their terms of service?

I didn't know it was that easy to do. Don't tell Comcast, please. They would be delighted to hear that terms of service is all it took to convince you to override NN.

You are renting their cable and ability to send traffic over their infrastructure, aren't you? How is cable infrastructure renting different than DNS/Video-site/email renting?

Finally, some good points.

> When it comes to dire situations, if my ISP does funny business, I can choose another ISP e.g. a mobile connection.

No, a mobile connection is hardly a replacement for a traditional internet connection. You can't host a site or connect to it with most devices, for example. And no, most people can't choose another ISP. Comcast will have run out all other competitors, or receive funding from the government to build their infrastructure and outlaw any other ISP's from providing service there (which happened in the outskirts of my hometown, despite us already having a much superior self-sufficient ISP with lower cost.)

> I didn't know it was that easy to do. Don't tell Comcast, please. They would be delighted to hear that terms of service is all it took to convince you to override NN.

Yes, their terms of service is all Comcast needs should there not be net neutrality. You are indeed renting it all from them. Net neutrality will stop them from doing what Google can already do.

I hardly doubt Google's account terminations has anywhere near the level of impact that the lack of net neutrality will have. Once again, you can host your site/media/email and manage your DNS elsewhere. The key to taking down Google's kingdom is to set up competition. Net neutrality will help with that.

And a sidepoint: You should always back up your videos/files/etc. Then if Youtube/etc is taken down somehow, or your account is terminated, you'll still be able to put it up elsewhere.

>And a sidepoint: You should always back up your videos/files/etc. Then if Youtube/etc is taken down somehow, or your account is terminated, you'll still be able to put it up elsewhere.

How do I backup my audience?

>The key to taking down Google's kingdom is to set up competition.

Tread one overlord for another, or be an overlord yourself.

I think anti-competitive behavior laws will play a role in taking down Google.

I can't believe I typed that. I loved, loved, loved Google two months ago. Few with political agenda have co-opted years of work of thousands of imaginative, hard working, caring engineers. Now, I want Google broken up by the government using anti-trust.

Just two months ago? I've been red-pilled for the past decade.

Red-pilled a year and half ago. I still liked Google, the technical parts. The political advocacy was uncomfortable, but OK, political agenda implementation is downright scary.

It would have taken you less time and effort to file a complaint than it took to post these responses. I really think that you are missing the forest through the trees on this one.

File a complaint? With whom do you suggest?

For me, Free Speech is the forest, NN is a group of trees in a corner.

Don't worry about that, I'll use a vpn to get to someone else's internet and that ISP can judge me.

YouTube will still judge me, even if I use Comcast cable or Verizon 4G to upload the data.

Well the good news, is that with NN you can post a video on your own server and other people will still be able to get there because it isn't excluded from their 'video plan'

NN means your packets get there. The TOS of a specific site has nothing to do with it.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are multi-billion people platforms. Platforms that grew because of participation of the people.

Platforms that were open to speech. Nobody stopped Twitter because there were things being said against Egypt's Mubarak.

Now, the platforms are playing God and censoring speech.

Ever been unhappy about an Open Source project switching license on you, going from Apache to Propitiatory Enterprise after enjoying three/four years of community engagement? The social media platforms are pulling the same bait and switch on the people, allowed content for years giving people sense that these were truly open platforms, and then stepping in to push their agenda.

So it would be good if we protect the option to go access any site or thought on the net. If you want to get your opinion out there, you can literally write it down with no markup and share it on an http server. This won't be the case without net neutrality. It's not even that you're confusing the issues at play here which are private companies TOS and net neutrality, it seems that you're intentionally making them out to be the same thing in order to prove a point or something.

If you want the freedom to not be censored. Make it a point to allow ALL communication and ideas to flow over the network.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube have the right to allow or disallow content that they see fit, as do TV networks, News Papers and any privately owned company. If you'd like to change that, there are two ways, one is regulation and legislation which is outside of the scope of NN, and competition, which is only possible if NN exists in a robust form.

>If you'd like to change that, there are two ways, one is regulation and legislation which is outside of the scope of NN,

Is NN not a regulation? Is it voluntary?

My point is that NN is not as high a priority, given what corporate advocates of NN have done when it was their turn to play fair.

I am more concerned about power exercised over speech, than power over making packets go fast or slow.

>and competition, which is only possible if NN exists in a robust form.

Competition would allow NN to exist, not other way around. Monopoly of ISPs is the root of NN being challenged.

None of what you're describing really has anything to do with net neutrality. And getting rid of net neutrality would only weaken alternative outlets.

I'm thinking the problem you had with these services might have been your own fault, judging by your approach here.

Why not let Comcast decide if the video being uploaded to YouTube has a reference to an terrorist organization and then stop the upload?

Why is Google a better judge of what is terrorist content than Comcast?

>I'm thinking the problem you had with these services might have been your own fault, judging by your approach here.

Right. Those pesky packet senders themselves must be the problem because of which Comcast wants to send them to the slow lane.

> Why is Google a better judge of what is terrorist content than Comcast?

Google only gets to decide what you can do on google websites. Without net neutrality, Comcast, in its de facto monopoly position, gets to decide what you do on -all- websites.

Google has monopoly in terms of YouTube.

Instead of Comcast, I can use Verizon 4G.

Comcast, Verizon, may slow me down but YouTube just simply bans people for saying things that they don't like.

>Google has monopoly in terms of YouTube.

And I have a monopoly in terms of my living room, and have as much right to control what happens in my space as google does in theirs. Other living rooms, and other websites, can similarly set their own policies.

Yes, there's a point beyond which a single company can become so large and pervasive that it shades into monopoly, and antitrust measures become necessary. Whether Google is at that point or not is debatable, but ISPs certainly are. Congratulations on being in the minority of Americans that has more than one viable choice for broadband, I guess.

In any case, whatever your feelings about YouTube, this hardly constitutes an argument that therefore net neutrality is unnecessary -- in comments elsewhere you've made clear that you do in fact support net neutrality, so I'm really not clear what this contrarian posturing is aimed at.

When it comes to dire situations, if my ISP does funny business, I can choose another ISP e.g. a mobile connection.

No different than taking another road to go to the bank. My account and money in there is still safe.

If the bank take away my account without due legal process, does it matter if the roads to get to the bank were traffic/pothole/toll free?

There are private entities, public corporations and government. We hold public corporations to a different standard than individual persons.

If DNS can be taken away form you without due legal process, does it really matter if your ISP can throttle you or not. NN has become a fringe issue, yes, I do support NN, but at this point I would rather use NN to show hypocrisy of large monopolistic social media platforms. Free Speech is more important to me than NN.

> How does net neutrality matter if what travels on a perfectly neutral net is controlled anyway, actually controlled much more effectively, by a very few with agenda that goes far beyond just greed for money?

Without Net Neutrality it becomes harder to choose platforms that don't censor or censor less. Especially since non-censoring platforms will tend to have less revenue to spend on access to customers due to presenting potential PR risks to traditional advertisers and business partners.

I don't want speech beholden to advertisers and business partners.

Net Neutrality has been a non-issue at best, or hypocritical at worse, for the content providers, in light of blatant censorship and political agenda carried out.

Why does it matter when domain registrars can simply yank domains for posting speech they don't like?

Individual domain registrars do not have a monopoly, nor is it apparent that they collude against free speech. ISPs do have local monopolies, and do act against net neutrality.

You have a lot more choice in domain registrars than most people do when it comes to choosing an ISP.

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