Comment by xxxdarrenxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xxxdarrenxxx | Hacker News Reader

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My phone company offered me free data usage on spotify.

Sounds great right!

Except this is bordering against net neutrality.

You see, like with net neutrality, Apple could offer services in the future to companies to get a "free pass" on their cute filter. This means people who want to advertise their innocent little game, have no chance against companies with a lot of money who can afford to do so.

If you are in favor off this update, but against for example net neutrality, then you might want to check up again on how well you understand these concepts, and how they could play out in unfavorable division of power.

tldr; Monopoly is inherently unfavorable, not just theoretically but has proven so time and time again in many different sectors.

Net neutrality is about ISPs. Apple is giving the end user control over how their own device behaves here. This is not a violation of net neutrality any more than me throwing away junk mail is a violation of the neutrality of the postal service.

> Apple is giving the end user control over how their own device behaves here.

Are they? That's not really their approach to many things. It seems to me they are making decisions for users. I have nothing of note to say on this specific change, but we should be careful about where we want "neutrality" applied in our network go-betweens (be them ISPs, devices, whatever).

It’s an option you can turn off, so, yes, they are.

Surely we can acknowledge that control is not binary? There was no control that said "don't turn this on by default" or a control that lets me set the specific parameters of cookie sharing.

The essence of neutrality concerns is the absence of control. Whether an ISP allows you to turn off the on-by-default traffic shaping or whether a device lets you turn off the on-by-default cookie restrictions is not the concern. It's whether these go-betweens make decisions for us, such as cookie sharing parameters, video downsampling, etc.

The essence of neutrality concerns is the absence of control. Apple gives the user control over this, and many other aspects of the browsing experience. So... what's the problem here?

No this is the postal company deciding for you which ads are not "worthy" enough, and not delivering them at all.

This has nothing to do with net neutrality directly at all. The parallel it does share, is giving Apple a potential position of power to decide which data goes through and which don't. This is also the essence off the net neutrality debate.

Their proposed "filter" could even very well be perfectly to my liking and in line with my personal standards for ads or how they are brought upon me.

This is however about them providing a code, or at the very least a seed off their own for their machine learning algorithm to filter content.

I like experiments, but I rather do not wish Apple or any singular entity for that matter to regulate my content.

I do hold bias against Apple, because they have a certain position. They gave everyone phones, ecosystem for devs and patents and rights and indirect control to web frameworks through licences. Their might be conflict off interest. They have so much (acces to) people's data already through their devices and market influence, that I do not feel fully comfortable about them deciding that now the rest is not allowed to gain similar data.

As this is a user configurable option, it's hardly a net neutrality issue. You haven't lost any control over what you can access or how deeply advertisers may invade your privacy.

> As this is a user configurable option, it's hardly a net neutrality issue.

That's what makes it not a net neutrality issue? To continue the analogy, if my ISP decides to limit traffic from some non-paying upstream provider, but makes it a user configurable option, it's also hardly a net neutrality issue? So I haven't lost any control over what I can access because the option exists, right?

Net neutrality is a two-way street, not just about users. This one is just more favorable to most of us because we like the result. Same way with Google's safe browsing lists and other things. But we can't pretend there's neutrality here like there would be if the browser was completely hands off. Sure it may not be "net neutrality" as defined by only network providers, but the concept of neutrality spans more than the network.

If your ISP gave you the option to deliberately rate-limit access to some sites and you used it, that would not be a net neutrality issue. Correct. The hazard is if they default to throttling and make it hard to unthrottle. Particularly if the things they are throttling are their competitors and not their own services.

As I understand this feature, Apple will not be excluding their own services' cookies from it. This is not an anticompetive act. It is not an anticonsumer act. And as you have the choice to turn it off, it is not an impediment to your ability to consume and degrade your privacy by allowing advertisers into your life.

> If your ISP gave you the option to deliberately rate-limit access to some sites and you used it, that would not be a net neutrality issue. Correct.

Yes it would. Net neutrality basically says "regardless of what users ask for or what providers provide them, they can't give preferential treatment to some companies over others".

I do agree that, since this is on-device and not targeted definitely is the right way to go and alleviates many net neutrality concerns. But the closed classifier, the choice of 30 days, etc and that this is a single browser doing it on a device where they allow no other browser just gives me a slippery slope feeling that Apple can unilaterally choose which default parameters users browse under outside of web standardization.

I think the 3rd party cookie thing is a bit of a red herring anyways. If ad networks weren't so stupid, they'd use first party cookies and correlate unique identifiers on the backend. Even when done w/ minimal fingerprinting (which iOS is exempt from most forms of due to its user base consistency) and IP tracking (which iOS also more exempt on cell networks than home ISPs), it can be quite effective.

I'm going to be honest. The idea that users cannot request data be restricted in reaching them is not something I've heard associated with net neutrality before. Fuck, I'm in violation of it! I throttle video streaming services so they don't interfere with other applications on my home network.

You can have other browsers on iOS. They don't perform as well, and I do disagree with Apple over that decision. But they do exist.

Users cannot request providers do it for them. As in you requesting Comcast sell you a Facebook-only plan is in violation of net neutrality even if y'all both want it. Doing anything you want as a end user on your own system or a provider sending you whatever bytes they want is still neutral because nobody in the middle (device, network provider, etc) is doing it.

> You can have other browsers on iOS. They don't perform as well, and I do disagree with Apple over that decision. But they do exist.

What other engine can I use other than mobile Safari? Maybe I wasn't clear with "browser". I mean as in no Apple code, my own rendering engine, etc so that Apple can't make decisions about what it does.

While I'm not a fan of the "webkit only" policy on iOS, I'm pretty sure this tracking blocking is not included directly in the webkit rendering engine and thus other iOS browsers would not be affected by this change.

If you want to run something with no Apple code, don't run iOS. Otherwise you are running the non-FLOSS code and trusting them at some level. It seems silly to distrust webkit because it is "Apple code" (which is FLOSS) and yet trust iOS (which is not FLOSS)

As long as the traffic limit is imposed by your device, or by content provider, this is not a network neutrality issue.

However, if the filtering is done (even opt-in at your request) by the network, that is a network neutrality violation. Making that filter opt-out rather than opt-in is better, but both are still technically network neutrality violations

To come back to your analogy, this filtering is being done by your device. It is not being done by Apple directly so it is not directly analogous.

Indirectly analogizing to the intent behind Net Neutrality, there is a point to be made about giving established players more of an advantage. I am assuming that Apple is going to make this an opt-out option. That certainly lends weight to the concern that this can make Apple into a gatekeeper for advertisers / trackers. If this option were opt-in this would be much less of an issue (and have much less of an effect).

Other than opt-in vs. opt-out and market share, I don't see any fundamental difference between this and any other ad blocker or privacy protecting tool that maintains a white or black list.

If net neutrality means the ISP cannot filter and shape at my request then I don't want it.

You realize that reliable VoIP requires ISP side traffic shaping, right?

I am unaware of any such requirement and can't find anything to back it up. As far as I can tell, the VoIP industry seems to widely support Net Neutrality so I would be surprised if this is a significant issue.

If you don't have it then your voice conversations go to crap during heavy network use. It's very noticeable.

Apple is not analogous to the postal service. That would be Verizon or Comcast or AT&T or whoever. If they did this, it would be troubling.

It is not literally analogous, but then you favor an argument about semantics over the actual argument at hand.

People tend to default naturally to what requires the least effort to work;

- This feature is default on their browser.

- Other browsers are disliked or simply not used on IPhones for the big majority off users.

- Their browser is realistically thus the main gate way used by people with Iphones to access the internet, aside from the social media apps.

- At this early layer between people and the internet, Apple wants to place a machine learning algorithm, that decides which data is let through and which isn't.

I am not sure about if I want them to have that position off power at all so closely to what is for many their main and potentially only access point to the internet.

Net neutrality is about the ISPs. That's how it's defined (semantics!) and that's what I think it should be.

If you want to discuss the ramifications of browser features for the net, by all means do so, but don't try to paint my approval of both net neutrality and this Apple feature as somehow being inconsistent or indicating that I don't understand what's going on.

But this entire thread surely stems from 'ramifications of browser features (by Apple) for the net', and not about the english literature, and certainly nothing personal towards you. This is at least not my intent.

If you disagree, could you point to any reply which contains your arguments or views on the actual topic within your previous posting towards my comment?

Yes, the topic at hand is the ramifications of Apple's feature. The topic is not net neutrality. You brought that into the discussion and basically accused anyone who is in favor of both net neutrality and Apple's feature of being ignorant. You said "nothing personal, but how else am I to take "If you are in favor off this update, but against for example net neutrality, then you might want to check up again on how well you understand these concepts"? That, to me, means that if I hold these two positions (and I do) then I am not only wrong in your view, but that I don't even understand the topic.

Exactly; they are the gatekeepers of their iOS ecosystem but got no backslash like Microsoft did with Windows (circa 2001); so now they know they have a free pass and are trying to be the gatekeepers of the Web [for their users] as well.

The backlash against MS began in the 90s with the start of the anti-trust trial. It was preceded by MS achieving a greater than 90% [0] market share. Apple has nowhere near that and so will not see that sort of legal backlash for them for a while.

Microsoft used their position to do things like:

Spend over $1 billion to advertise a free web browser to compete with Netscape (fear of cross-platform applications that Netscape could support).

Embraced a fucked up version of web standards where they literally did the exact opposite of what the specs said in order to make sites compatible for their users break (without serious dev effort) for everyone else.

Convinced Compaq (memory fuzzy, I get them and HP mixed up now) to not release computers with BeOS. If they had, MS was going to eliminate their favorable Windows licensing costs. This would have driven them out of business as they could not achieve competitive PC prices with reasonable margins (PCs already being a low margin business at that point). They tried similar, though less aggressive, pushes against companies that later wanted to release Linux workstations.

There's a whole litany of MS's abuses of its monopoly position in the anti-trust suit, it was actually fascinating reading if you care about economics, business, politics.

[0] Precise numbers failing me, I believe they got close to 97% at some point.

iOS is not a monopoly product.

As a user, I welcome Apple's new feature, and I'm fine with it being the default.

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