Wozniak and Copps: Ending net neutrality will end the Internet as we know it
usatoday.com
usatoday.com
Overall, the speed is much faster than with commercial Internet, and the bandwidth is symmetrical.
In my opinion, this is a good example of the two faces of the left. One person forms a union and tries to bully their employer into giving them better conditions, or petitions the state to create laws which will benefit them. The other face of the left creates co-ops and gives the corporate world the finger.
I personally believe that the second approach is superior to the first, and rather than trying to twist Comcast's arm into being nice, Americans should focus on building community networks, at least in the cities where such a thing is possible.
It's funny you say because I have my favorite counter-example from one of those surrounding countries. I was in Thailand when Thaksin Shinawatra with his ThaiRakThai party was first elected into power. Many people I spoke to had voted for him because "he's the richest man in Thailand, he doesn't need any more money so he cannot be corrupted!". Fast-Forward five years and he changed laws that allowed him to sell a larger share of his own company as well as evade paying taxes for the sale. He was ousted by the military for being too corrupt for Thailand!
If there was a "pay $10 billion to get a law" corruption system in the US, all the big companies would spend that money. Nothing is more valuable
We don't need to reward politicians for not being terrible. Having a strong independent judiciary is good enough.
Sure, in the US there's super PACs and whatnot, but when the bribery is explicit enough, politicians go to jail.
Most of them are not that stupid. Why risk jail when there are countless ways to be compensated and not get caught.
Sure I agree with you. But that still leaves a pretty big hole in the system.
If you represent people faithfully you prosper, if not you get a foot shorter.
The average person in parliament in 2016 made around 100 000 CZK or $4,545USD. The head of parliament made 200 000 CZK or $9,091USD a month.[2]
The judges are paid by years on the bench. A judge started with 78 500CZK a month and after 18 years on the bench made 104 900CZK in 2015. And the judges also get money on the side for all sorts of things, so you can think of their pay as being like "spending money", their basic living expenses are already paid by the state. It's not an extreme amount of money, but it is generally true that politicians and judges are the best paid professions in the country. [3]
[1] http://www.statistikaamy.cz/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Hol%C...
[2] https://www.novinky.cz/domaci/423136-poslanci-si-pristi-rok-...
[3] http://www.ceska-justice.cz/blog/ustavni-soud-o-platech-soud...
The main points are:
1) Citizen funded campaigns
2) Equal representation (ie, Proportional Representation)
3) Equal freedom to vote
* Objective civil service exam which establishes competency in the position the person is applying for
* Once a person demonstrates basic competency, they can be entered into a pool and the final candidate chosen using sortition : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
* The selected person can only serve in that position once
* The person will be well compensated above average
Also i wonder there were any other trials in Athens similar to the trial of Socrates.
I'm not yet sure of the solution. I do know our collective belief in barking cats doesn't help.
We need more and better choice.
Look at Obama. He got $400,000 to speak on Wall Street. That was for one day. His salary as POTUS for a year isn't that much.
I'm not picking on Obama. He's just the example. The point is no one cared that it happened. Why? Because both parties, as well as The Fourth Estate are complicit in the scam.
This is an important message about "Net Neutrality". The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation wishes to support the fight for "Net Neutrality". If you forward this message, either through social media platforms or email, my friends at Microsoft will track the message and I will send you USD $100 (ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS) by post. Originally the internet, through the DARPA (Domestic Animal Recreational Photo Archive) project, was created to share amusing pictures of cute animals; primarily cats. Later, Senator Al Gore reinvented the internet to be a series of "tubes". Not only did this slow the growth of global climate change, but it also allowed the introduction of services such as YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Tinder. Unfortunately, the telephone and cable industry are not content to simply charge you for access to the internet, they also want to charge for access to content that they don't even own. "Net Neutrality" will ensure the continued freedom to get free and unfettered access to cat pictures and news about the Kardashians. Please join me in sending a strong message to congress about the importance of "Net Neutrality". And remember that to be eligible for your USD $100 (ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS), you must forward this message via social media or email within the next 3 days. Regards, Bill.
In the days of MLK if they had internet everyone would have just retweeted #marchonwashington.
Sure, the internet allows armchair protestors the luxury of 'protesting' from home, but it's also a great tool for raising awareness, organizing, and it could be argued that even some amount of armchair protesting is beneficial, as it at least makes the cause visible to those who might not have seen it otherwise.
Let's face it, it would have been very hard to get the ~4 million protestors to march in DC without the internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_and_the_Arab_Spri...
"According to some experts, the initial excitement over the role of social media in political processes in the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East has diminished. As Ekaterina Stepanova argues in her study concerning the role of information and communications technologies in the Arab Spring, social networks largely contributed to political and social mobilization but didn’t play a decisive and independent role in it. Instead, social media acted as a catalyst for revolution, as in the case of Egypt, where the existing gap between the ruling elite and the rest of the population would eventually have resulted in some kind of uprising."
That said, Malcolm Gladwell agrees with you -- that the low-risk protesting that social media provides is also basically without reward [1]
[1]:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/10/04/small-change-m...
Not that I blame people. I don't want to get shot at by a police sniper either. Things have to get really bad before folks rise up.
"Need" is distinct from "makes far, far easier and likely". It can be done without the internet, obviously, but the circumstances in which it can be done are undoubtedly far more rare.
I think it's unfair to task 'the internet' with the entire task of establishing a fair government.
The communications channel succeeded. The call-to-arms was heard. The failure wasn't with the use of the internet, it was with everything that went on after dissent began.
People expected 'internet = democracy' and overburdened the whole concept. Free and wide communications is just a stepping stone, one of many, that edges a governing body into fair-practice.
That easy: make you liable for what people do on your network. Make it hard to register as an official network provider that would forfeit some of the liability.
https://qz.com/694618/why-is-it-impossible-to-find-free-wi-f...
(AFAIR, in Germany there are some changes now, but it's a good example how Internet sharing is made difficult for anyone without a large legal department.)
On an unrelated note, incredibly shady things are currently being done by US corporations in regards to the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum being used for commercial LTE [1]. This is obviously a very slippery slope and would need strong regulation from the FCC. However, the FCC just approved it for live use in February (Pai got into office in January).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTE_in_unlicensed_spectrum
We've added a price metric, route verification and low overhead payments to babel. You guys probably don't need it because you have a business structure in place, but it could allow for more anarchic, decentralized mesh "ISPs"
Oh come one
Of course, it is becoming common for people in positions of privilege to complain that others demanding equality are bullying them by expecting the same rights they get to enjoy, so it isn't surprising.
Look, I'm not on the side of the employers and against the unions. I just find the whole conflict to be "heading no where". Because it doesn't fundamentally change the relationship, it just pushes back against the power disbalance.
> One essential prerequisite is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power, which distinguishes bullying from conflict.
The mesh network is then connected to NFX fiber lines in some places. https://www.nfx.cz/
NFX is then connected to the main fiber backbones for the Czech Republic, NIX: https://www.nix.cz/cs
You can read about the exact connection information on page 3 here: https://www.nix.cz/en/file/NIX_PROVOZNI_RAD_EN
Edit: I also posted the map here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15376982, so "maybe" there will be more discussion on the technical side of it.
What do you think ending Fake News involves? The only way to do it is to have the government, Google, Facebook and probably these same ISPs you hate deciding what can and can't be put online.
You simply want to replace one giant beaurecratic gatekeeper with another one.
Anyone dumb enough to think Fake News resulted in the election results (please, show me the data) while rushing online to scream about Net Neutrality is a pawn in the game.
You imply that the only way to mitigate the problem of fake news (no need for scare quotes, we're talking about news that is fake here) is to hand over total control of the internet to some single entity. You have failed to make any case that every other action that could be taken to mitigate fake news would be insufficient. This is far from clear to me. I think there is a great deal that could be done to mitigate fake news aside from that. Note that I say mitigate because I do not think it would need to be eliminated entirely to be effectively made powerless.
Further, it's an old propagandist trick to claim that people who disagree with you are "screaming", to make them seem less rational and thus wrong. The language you choose to use in this post undercuts your points. Show me the data that fake news didn't affect the election results in any way. The probability of some effect is much greater than the probability of no effect at all, given the complexity of the system and the obvious mechanism. I think the burden of proof is on you.
Net neutrality is an irrelevant issue given that situation. And if you want to change that situation, pay-to-play is the least of your worries: convincing people to change their walled garden habits will be far more pricey.
No, it most certainly is not, because those of us who do not belong to the 95%, those of us who are trying to build new Internet services or new products that need fast, reliable Internet service in order to work, need net neutrality as a core principle in order to have a fair chance at competing. Innovators are always a small percentage of the population, but that does not mean their needs are irrelevant.
The threat of Non-Net-Neutrality isn't some arbitrary increase in costs for starting a business that gets paid, and filed with other nuisance.
It's that by virtue of their position in the market, the providers can extract all the added value any company makes with their customers. That's because the startup isn't the one choosing their customers' internet access. What the provider charges for access to the customers that signed up with them doesn't factor into the decisions of the market, because the customer doesn't pay it, and likely will never know about it.
And "the market" will not solve this. There are maybe three or four companies large enough to cause significant backlash when they can't be reached. But besides Facebook, YT and Amazon, everyone will have to pay up.
And when faced with the decision to pay or not to pay, the rational decision will be to accept any price that leaves you with a single cent of profit. The power imbalance is staggering, and the potential for success with content startups on the internet will suffer dramatically.
On the practical side, your startups' second to tenth employee better be contract lawyers. Because you don't just have to pay Comcast and Verizon. You will have to make arrangement with every single one of tens of thousands of providers around the world if you want to reach customers connected via their network.
Of course, you probably won't bother with some of them. Or decide against, say, reaching potential customers in Montana. That will kill off several of the best features of the web. Namely the long-tail of default-accessible content that ordinarily nobody would think were interesting to someone of your age in your location.
Your prediction is like a Terry Gilliam movie (which I love!), but it's not actually going to happen that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger
Nothing is happening now that hasn't happened before. People forget, is all.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz...
So what? That's traffic that the ISP's customers requested. That isn't Netflix using some shared resource. Customers are paying Verison to transfer data, and if 30% of that data is NetFlix, that's fine. Throttling denies the customer the service they are paying for.
Should FedEx or UPS throttle the number of Amazon packages per address they will deliver on time since Amazon represents a very large percentage of their business?
(If this isn't compatible with a business model based on oversubscription, that's the ISP's problem)
> No ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages
Of course not, because that isn't what Network Neutrality is about. Obscure ferret jousting fan pages are not competing with Verison. However, ISPs are* often involved in various aspects of "media" production and distribution, which is a conflict of interest.
Ethical or not, this is not a practical issue for new companies.
That's what they've done in the past. They've carved up territory like drug gangs to maximise profit. (Look at the maps - notice how they don't overlap? https://www.publicintegrity.org/2015/04/01/16998/us-internet... ). At the same time, they've often colluded to pass legislation that locks out competitors (https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...). And they've gotten so good at it that even the almighty El Goog couldn't break into their territory - I mean, market.
What makes you think that these rent seekers won't extract their pound of flesh and then some from you and your customers?
After all, past behavior is indeed predictive of future results.
I think the fact that many ISPs have local monopolies is not fine. I don't think net neutrality is related to that, and I think we're basically talking about a corporation billing another corporation for data transfer, which is pretty ok as business models go (and certainly doesn't justify this level of outrage).
STRONGLY disagree! The corporation already billed their subscribers for the data transfer, why should they be paid twice for the same thing?
Are you upset that magazines and newspapers collect payment (twice!) from both readers and advertisers?
No but this is not 'B2B arrangements' were talking about here, this is 'pay us protection money or we'll effectively eliminate your business'
I do get up in arms when a company buys a drug that used to cost $10, makes no improvements to it and ramps up the price to $700, but this is even worse, since in the former case there's at least still only the customer being charged for the product, not also the delivery driver for the right to deliver it.
What value are the ISPs adding that the customers are already not paying for?
> Are you upset that magazines and newspapers collect payment (twice!) from both readers and advertisers?
The cost of a newspaper doesn't usually cover all its production costs via customer sale, so the ads fill the rest, whereas here Comcast is already a hugely profitable company from customer sales anyway.
There's Amazon Kindle 'with special offers (ads), but the device is cheaper than the version without ads. I don't think the plan is for ISPs to make broadband any cheaper for customers by starting to charge businesses for the thing they already were paid for.
I don't think my argument should be this hard to understand, unless you're a Verizon lawyer.
Nobody today is stopping you from hosting a forum about hobby endangered snail breeding from a Raspberry Pi in your closet if you want. I'm sure you've met people who make decent money off of niche websites -- and even giants like YouTube and Gmail have modest competition. Sure, not competition that's gonna eat their lunch, but does every business have to Take Over The World™ to be considered a success?
A few websites capturing most of the public's attention is to be expected to a certain extent: for better or worse, it's always been the case that a handful of media companies lead the conversation (that's why it's called "popular culture").
AWS increasingly monopolizing the web's hardware is something to worry about much more IMO; but so long as they don't get special treatment they can be circumvented.
Without net neutrality, forget about it.
Why? I just don't see it. It makes no sense that telecoms companies are going to go after startups that anyway don't have money. But I can imagine YouTube, for example, is another story, given how much bandwidth must be consumed by it.
Even if true, an open Internet provides a hedge/fallback/alternative to corporate overreach and therefore is necessary.
Net neutrality is what allowed these sites to exist in the first place and push aside the Altavistas and Myspaces of the earlier Internet!
Going one further, after hearing "ending net neutrality is going to kill the internet" one too many times, I got interested in hear what the other side was saying. Populist arguments always make me want to question them and find out more. It's almost a taboo so not be anything but 100% _for_ net neutrality. I resent being told what my opinion should be.
In fact it's pretty interesting to listen to Ajit Pai the FEC chairman talk about it eg https://youtu.be/6Q5_oV4JB10
His point that a "flat internet" disincentives telecoms companies to invest in infrastructure makes some sense. Google, Facebook et al. have completely cut them out of the "applications" part of the Internet (voice, messaging etc) so now all that's left is flat data provision to a stable / not growing customer base which leads to them going on "cruise control", cutting costs and investments.
What if feels at the moment is there's big money behind propping up net neutrality. That's why it's getting so much air time. Would like to follow the money...
Yes, in this case what is good for public also aligns with what is good for GOOG and FB. So what? It's like saying you're not convinced about children getting good education because it aligns with 'big money'.
Hire lobbyists.
Whoever pays the most wins.
Having control handed away from the populous that paid for the infrastructure is wrong. Net neutrality maintains continued public innovation.
> If Pai’s majority permits fast lanes for the biggest internet service providers (ISPs like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T), companies could speed up or slow down the sites and services they prefer.
Is the slow down part a real thing? I'm familiar with local peering to speed up last mile services (ex: Netflix hubs) but I'm not aware of ISPs targeting specific companies to slow down their bandwidth. Beyond generic packet shaping to slow down or limit your overall connection, is targeted throttling like that for real? IANAL but I'd imagine the latter would get an ISP's ass handed to them in a lawsuit.
> Fast lanes or “paid prioritization” create anticompetitive incentives for ISPs to favor their own services over those of their competitors.
A better solution is to require that ISPs be only ISPs. If they don't have their own content mills to push then you don't have this problem. While you're at it, split out the physical maintenance of the pipes from the companies providing the ISP services so that the latter can compete as well.
Ah fuck it, just let the municipality run it and be done with this. Then we can all go to our local townhall meetings and listen to irate neighbors rail at our local representatives for throttling their porn downloads.
See https://www.thenation.com/article/chattanooga-was-a-typical-... for a description of what I mean.
They don't necessarily have to slow down competitors. They can just leave them at today's available bandwidth and speed. So ten years from now only companies who pay the toll, or ISP's own content, will stream over multi-gigabit connections. All others will be stuck at 2017 rates.
That train left the station long time ago. Today almost all of them are tripple-play providers, meaning that will want competing TV and phone services to be "worse".
Anyone know where we can buy said service?
That's essentially what most residential internet is all about... all the data is being moved at low priority at lowest cost and no penalties whatsoever for broken service.
Business internet is different, with much different SLAs but for the most part without serious penalties. For the critical data stuff, look into banking SLAs etc where penalties are severe.
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes barreling down the highway at 70mph."
Well, probably.
There was a stack of floppy disks sitting on a shelf in an old thrift store. I couldn't help but buy it for $1. What could they contain? They're sitting on my desk right now. I still haven't bought a floppy disk reader, but I'm really curious. I assume a USB floppy disk drive + linux will be enough to dump the raw bytes, but I haven't looked into it. Spelunking around old tech is fascinating for unknown reasons.
Although now I'm interested to know what's on those disks you have :-p
Lotus 2/22/93
Lazarus, (formatted) WP
LAZ6
Backup 13
Backup 12
Backup 11
All the backup discs are scratched out with pen though. I hope they didn't wipe them!
All the rest is just asking for something they've already made clear they don't want to give you. (And won't, using physical force as a last resort.)
(I originally wrote "interest and manipulation", but in that regard, how are they any different than the rest of us? But "control"? No, not that.)
Competition is pretty damn good here (coming from Aus), and speeds are amazing.
My last connection was 2gb/s for around $40 us/month with no cap or throttling.
This makes me nervous, I'd much rather the government stay out of the internet. Legislation is painfully slow to both make and unmake, and legislators will almost certainly be out of touch with the technology and there is a real risk of a restricted, heavily regulated internet which is far worse than what we have today. Not to mention that such a classification opens up ISPs to equal time laws, where the government decides who is or is not a candidate and forces telecom companies to play equal ad time for all candidates. Here's a great example of how this law would have already broken down: how many Republican candidates were there last election? Would you have wanted your ISP to be responsible for shoving political ads down your throat? How could you even enforce equal time laws on ISPs?
Net neutrality is a power grab by the U.S. government, and the propaganda has been well executed IMO; but I really hope that we will leave the internet to the markets. I dont trust our government to make something as enormous and complex as the internet any better, and it's been going quite well so far.
The government in the U.S. has already regulated ISPs to the point that an enormous artificial barrier has arisen to market entry.
We need deregulation. Approval for the major carriers in the U.S. is low enough[0] that someone could probably disrupt the entire industry, except it is next to impossible to enter.
You're also aware of regulatory capture, right? This regulation was premature, and, as is typical of government, overreaching.
Imagine even further expanding the power of the last three administrations, especially with the disaster that is the patriot act. Regulations are bad for business and bad for innovation, outside of monopoly laws, and those give me pause as well.
0. http://www.fiercecable.com/cable/comcast-still-ranks-last-cu...
At the behest of telco lobbying.
> We need deregulation. Approval for the major carriers in the U.S. is low enough[0] that someone could probably disrupt the entire industry, except it is next to impossible to enter.
Small carriers are starting up, I just read an article chronicling several successful municipal broadband carriers in isolated pockets, and in each of their stories they are essentially boxed in by .... guess.... lobbying from larger telcos. (I think it may have been on HN, but if not just google 'successful municipal broadband')
Every step of the way it is the large telcos that prevent their growth. Perhaps if there were no incumbents in the ISP space deregulation might actually see improvements, but as it is the last thing we need is AT&T/Comcast/et al given free reign. The more we staple their balls to the chair the closer we get to a truly shared internet commons.
A startup trying to disrupt Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. will have a much harder time succeeding if it doesn't have equal/fair access to the American market. Added to the fact that historically most web startups come from the USA, and you're talking about a potentially huge decrease in total innovation on the web.
You're right though, in that other places outside the United States won't immediately see issues.
Wow, talk about disconnect.
The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.
from;
I didn't realize Woz invented the Kenbak-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1 ;)
Oh wait.
In a free market, if an ISP was to mess with the traffic going through its pipes, that would just encourage anyone who cared about this to switch to a competitor.
The real problem is the lack of a free market, which is the direct result of over-proliferation of laws and regulations, which discourage and stifle innovative businesses. Net neutrality regulations are just another layer of these, and will further cripple innovative competition and lead to increased monopolization of Internet infrastructure by big crony-statist corporations.
More fundamentally, it is a violation of basic individual rights and property rights for the government to tell any private enterprise how to operate its business. That's the economics of fascism.
>net neutrality
>Apple Siri promotes Google search engine in favor of Bing for billions of dollars.
http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-siri-google-bing-2017-9
lol. Good one Woz. You're a riot.
The authors talk as if the ISPs will suppress political opinion. However, I am not aware of a single case where ISPs suppressed political opinions. However, there are cases where the dominant search monopoly may have suppressed political opinion (https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-sear...). Also, several registrar services together made it impossible for a website to have a domain. Also, the major consumer DDOS protection company removed the above website from their protection because of content, there making it easy for someone opposed to the website to DDOS them and keep their message from getting out.
This is why Net Neutrality is getting limited traction with the public. If we talk about net neutrality from a business perspective, they don't see any real harm. For example, a lot of the cell companies are offering zero rated music and movie streaming from select companies. Net Neutrality would end that. You could argue that net neutrality would prevent competitors from forming. However, my guess is that obtaining music and movie rights would be far more expensive and difficult than signing deals with ISPs to get on the fast lane.
And, if you try to bring the political opinion angle, it is far more likely that your speech will get suppressed by search engines, domain registrars, and DDOS companies than the ISPs. I would guess people might be more receptive to Net Neutrality for those companies.
As for ISPs, there have been a bunch of high profile cases of them violating net neutrality that seem to be constantly ignored by people who choose to attack it.
Time Warner cable intentionally degraded traffic to servers owned by Riot Games until they caved in and paid off the ISP in order to get back to average traffic quality. A quote from the NYAG filing [1]:
> Data from Riot Games confirmed that from at least September 2013, when Riot Games started to maintain this data, through August 2015, when Riot Games agreed to pay Spectrum-TWC for access, Spectrum-TWC subscribers did not enjoy a “good network experience.”
And let's not forget the multiple times Netflix has been shaken down by ISPs. Comcast [2] and Verizon [3] were trivial to find writeups for.
They may call those "peering" agreements, but the data is pretty solid. In both cases, the problem was the ISP refusing to allow Netflix to upgrade interchange capacity, despite having plenty of bandwidth available on both sides of the interchange. Netflix only got to improve the situation by paying the ISP for access to their customers. This is a very clear violation of net neutrality.
These are a set of events that actually happened. They aren't vague warnings about worse cases, they're violations that already have been observed. I do not believe the practice will magically never happen if it becomes legal again.
[1] https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/summons_and_complaint.... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/24/5541916/netflix-deal-with... [3] http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-agreement...