FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Parallels are then drawn to the Internet, where if we're not paying attention to what is happening now, then the free and open nature of the Internet today will slowly vanish and be replaced by only the big sites who can afford to be on the Internet.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/02/master-switch-... (book review, you can find the actual book on Amazon or wherever)
Some shippers (Standard Oil) wanted to monopolize the rails or at least they wanted rebates for shipping their freight. Others argued that the rails should offer the same rates to all shippers since they were using eminent domain in some cases to obtain property and they should exist as a shared resource.
We’d be renting Wi-Fi cards, access and with additional fees by the second and byte if they had their way.
Not to mention that many of the big players in silicon valley like to jump back and forth over the line of "is a provider" / "is not a provider". Twitter and Google and Facebook like to police the content on their systems, which is their right, but at the same time they like to hold up the DMCA safe harbor provision anytime someone finds copyrighted material on their networks. They have no problem banning unpopular parties from their networks while simultaneously profiting from clear copyright violations.
We should insist that net neutrality extend all the way to layer 7.
Let's not sacrifice the good for the perfect.
The latter isn't something traditional we're about to lose, but a novel goal for the future which is qualitatively and quantitatively different.
I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean. How could a "neutrality" argument possibly apply to my proprietary application stack?
That's like the difference between saying who's allowed on the sidewalk vs. saying who's allowed in the bar.
EDIT: In case it's not clear, this comment is pro-net neutrality. I am pointing out the absurdity of disallowing site owners from curating their own content.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak
The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger
I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through purely technical means. Even if there's not a word of truth to it, it's a completely realistic description of what consumers can expect in a world without net neutrality. It can be considered a modern-day Aesop fable.
Once you've related the Strowger story, then you can speculate on how it might have unfolded if Ma Bell herself had owned the competing funeral home. That's basically where the Comcasts and Verizons of the world want to be.
The hard part is giving people something useful and worthwhile to do about it.
[0]: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
[1] https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-propert...
I find it absurd that some politicians support both the repeal of net neutrality and the restricting of willing communities to build out their own infra at the same time. I could intellectually entertain either option but never both simultaneously. For a political cohort whose brand has long included local self-determination and rural self-reliance, it's bizarre to me to see them take positions that don't even appear to be logically consistent. It's difficult to accept that they truly have the best interest of their constituents in mind.
[1] https://muninetworks.org/content/competition [2]. https://muninetworks.org/communitymap
Before the unbundling, Telecom NZ basically had a monopoly on ADSL connections, connections cost a lot of money and had comically small caps (like 10 GB, which even in 2006 was not a lot). Now, in straight dollar terms, plans are cheaper, and uncapped plans are standard.
The right wants isp/telcos to be able to bundle and offer more speeds/services. Assuming it won't censor.
The left assumes isp/telcos will offer services/bundles (tiers) but will censor its services/bundles. (Like it did with netflix.)
As most places have a monopolistic type access (or worse, no access) thats the primary cause for concern. Nobody loves their cableco. If we had a plethora of choices for internet access, that would be the cure for censorship.
But we don't. We are stuck at fighting censorship due to lack of access.
Even with some competition and access, it can take a while for unfavorable conditions to resolve, partially because consumers don’t really care about things like censorship, lack of access, (or in my example) bandwidth limits.
Markets are eventually consistent, but in terms of net neutrality I really don’t think we can afford to wait.
Then ... don't. If someone's actions contradict their words, don't believe their words.
Call your reps and let them know how you feel. If they think they won't get re-elected all the bribe money in the world doesn't really matter.
Ever consider that maybe they are more beholden to those who give them money than those who give them votes?
But any new services that threaten existing ones will be hard-pressed to compete.
Imagine I start a new streaming service. In order for my service to reach people, ISP's will charge me a higher price than Netflix, probably a _significantly_ higher rate. This will make it extremely difficult for my new service to reach enough people to make it an ongoing concern.
This is just another nail in the oligarchy coffin we are actively sealing ourselves in.
It will also allow ISP's to control and block content if someone pays them to do so. There are still anti-competitive laws on the books, but are any of them even being enforced anymore. We allowed the banks to become monopolies, we've allowed the AT&T fox back in the hen house.
If we don't fight back, we're going to become slaves to the digital age.
Huh? Did you forget already that both Verizon and Comcast throttled services like Netflix? They both argued they should get a cut if they were going to carry the traffic to their customers. Now they're getting exactly what they wanted.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz...
2. https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-com...
https://www.cnet.com/news/net-neutrality-netflix-reed-hastin...
This is a highly politicized topic but it's hard to find rational discussion.
If I built a network I would expect to be able to charge whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted in exchange for the use of my network.
Is the answer that taxpayers helped fund the network so now feel they deserve not to pay twice? How much of the current internet infrastructure is paid for by taxpayers vs private corporations?
Any good sources you'd suggest reading on the pros and cons of each side of the argument?
the big companies just don't want to be the _only_ ones paying.
"Amazon EC2 and S3 now include prioritized traffic to the network edge through Amazon's deals with over a hundred local and regional ISPs. Just add traffic priority to any elastic IP or S3 bucket and for only $0.04/gb outgoing your traffic will take the fast lane to your customers!"
How will Digital Ocean, Vultr, ARP Networks, Linode, etc. compete with that?
What we're seeing here is the closing of the digital frontier.
That being said my personal preference is not for net neutrality but for changes to state and local regulation to allow for a lot more ISP competition. But due to the patchwork nature of state and local regs that's a brutal slog in the trenches. So we need net neutrality in lieu of more ISP competition. Either that or we need to somehow overrule state and local regs at the Federal level to allow municipal and small startup broadband. That's tough given the fact that the Fed doesn't necessarily have any authority there. They'd have to argue it's interstate commerce.
Now imagine that model with the threat of throttling that startup if they dont comply.
But Netflix is already getting a better deal than start ups at many ISPs. Netflix gets free rackspace for their CDN servers. No start up gets that.
There is already a "fast lane" in many ISPs and Netflix gets it for free.
Or rather, that we're being sealed into, since this can hardly be called democracy.
That's the sad part: the new services that fail will fail quietly and we'll never know what we lost.
Content is controlled and blocked by advertisers in the application layer already. E.g. youtube
>On December 14, the FCC will vote on Chairman Pai's plan to repeal President Obama's heavy-handed Internet regulations and restore Internet freedom.
I love how these laws are veiled with patriotic sentiments, e.g. "Internet Freedom". Just like the "Patriot Act", it is reasonable to assume anything with these sort of labels will likely be an encroachment on your freedoms.
Also
>"The job of the FCC is to represent the consumer," he said in an interview. "If you like your cable company, you'll love what this does for the Internet, because it gives Internet service providers the same kind of control over content and price as cable operators have today."
I am confident there is not a single person who "likes their cable company". Who in their right mind would want their internet controlled like their cable is controlled? This image[0] is exactly what we get to look forward to.
I have called my reps, sent emails, faxes, and just feel so helpless about all of this.
[0]: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4252153/wh...
edit: It appears the article altered the above quote, and the second half is no longer the same.
I've never once, in my entire life, heard anyone say they like Comcast.
Long story short there's one person I like at Comcast, his name is Dev, hope you're doing well Dev, you made my commutes fun.
Wheeler, despite being a former industry man, definitely pushed for the consumer agenda despite industry pressure.
If Comcast is going to try to charge me more to be able to access Netflix, I'm gone.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/12/comcastlevel3/
It's profitable and with their lobbying, they can protect themselves from competition. If cable companies had the opportunity to cut streaming services at the knees 10 years ago (and the foresight to understand how it would affect their market) you bet they would have.
This is as anti-consumer as you can get.
Because it's a monopolistic monoculture, and they can do whatever they want and get away with it. In this age, having corporate controlled information choke points is a feature that those who want to control what the citizenry think and say are no doubt in love with.
Because the cable companies are the ISPs, and without ISPs acting differently, there's less impetus for people to ditch their cable companies as cable companies.
Especially when the phone/cable/ISP firms can block or tax into submission services that compete with their phone and video offerings by virtue of their control of internet access.
When you control what people see, you control what people think. Dismiss that as tinfoil malarky if you will.
This is what I don't understand. All of these businesses seem to be missing that point. Or, I am over-valuing it. Or something else that I don't understand or see. But, I have the exact same perspective and stance as you.
If I have to pay more to watch streaming video or play video games with my friends or download my Steam library or my Kindle titles, well, I'm very likely to just opt out of all of that. I am 36 years old and I have never once paid for a cable television subscription in the last 18 years that I've been on my own for _exactly_ this same reason. I am not going to pay for 3 separate and/or premium packages just to get access to the one piece of content that I actually want (sports programming).
Because there is a lot of money in that model if you can make it so there is no where else to go. (But you knew that- you were speaking rhetorically. I am the voice in your head.)
If you have competitors to choose from, sure. If you don't? Or if all the competitors do the same thing?
Freedom for whom?
It's an accurate characterization, it gives ISPs lots of freedom!
Except it's not, even. In the world of cable TV, the base cost is set by the content providers - the Disneys and such. With this, I guarantee you are going to see ISPs taking action on their own to tier websites and apps, pocketing the extra money, without input from nor payment to the sites which they intend to profit directly from.
HAHAHHAHAA, wow they're not even trying
I don't think it's paywalled.
If you want better internet access, instead of begging the FCC for scraps get on repealing legislated monopoly rights for kinds of wires and/or unbundling last mile from ISP.
Then ask yourself why internet reform is focused on NN instead of provider competition.
More to the point, can you imagine how fast the knives would come out if the FCC announced this deregulation and also a federal universal broadband plan where they use taxpayer money to deliver fiber to the home of everybody in the country in order to insure healthy competition?
On a side note, what do you think the odds are that this plan will remove uncompetitive restrictions on ISP (especially municipal ISP) development at the same time? I mean it's all about competition right? If I didn't know better I'd say that the talk of "competition" was just a smoke screen to hide the fact that this is the "allow ISPs to hold your service hostage with no repercussions" bill.
Not to mention, there are areas of the country which absolutely could not support more than one provider. Why should they have to suffer non-neutral net?
While competition is by all means good, I also DON'T WANT ISP controlling what I can access and how. I want ISP simply just provide the service, and Title II does just that.
More to the point, the people writing the regulations need to consider everyone in the U.S. not just the happiest Internet users. There already is a fairly large divide between people who can and can not access decent Internet service and this policy will only make that worse.
But hey! The free market and invisible hand will sort everything out! /s
If anything, this FCC change will cement Google's dominance. They'll pay some rent to ISPs to maintain their priority lane, something an incumbent won't be able to do.
For example, if Facebook saw this as a real threat, even a basic banner at the top of their site could help warn and give action to those people who don't understand this or are not sure how to help?
I just don't fully understand why I'm only seeing people post about this on social media, but the companies used in majority of the examples of what it will effect are so quiet about it? Can anyone explain this further on why they are not making a big deal and informing their users to help fight this?
Same with all the big e-businesses
And Facebook (to use an example) is already under alot of heat for the stuff the Russians pulled in the last election. They gotta deal with the current administration for at least the next few years regardless of what happens with the FCC. So they can be vocal about this in some ways, but not in others.
Digital fundraising for politicians is a very real and active thing. Would they be upset with if their side was suddenly hit with a 30s / page load penalty? DNS blackholed?
The deeply cynical part of me thinks that's exactly what they want.
This is actually pretty likely to happen.
Of course I suppose it'll be kind of funny to see God Emperor Trump usher in policies that make things like Gab and Voat unreachable. Top Kek!
So why would right wingers or anyone else with politically unpopular opinions want to train their ire at ISP's who have no history of political censorship, when censorship is happening right now, under everyone's nose. Where are all the articles demanding Google et al become neutral carriers of information or lose their Common Carrier status? In fact, we are getting the exact opposite, with article after article posted here and elsewhere basically demanding that big tech companies censor Fake News, i.e. propaganda you don't agree with.
THAT is the reality we're about to enter with this FCC change. Who gives a shit about Netflix being slower? Using that example to fight for Net Neutrality is a guaranteed way to lose.
the clipper chip was a clinton thing, the obama administration was for a long time on the fence, etc.
i will credit that the current administration is 'right', whatever that actually means these days..
We could still be using Altavista today.
This deeply cynical view has already come true.
Lack of NN will allow ISPs to essentially implement censorship in addition to what we have.
Until that happens, all this does is screw consumers. Honestly, internet service needs to be declared a public utility.
Thats why internet service kept dropping in costs, more choices as more providers. Now you are lucky if you got more than 1 provider (or many in the USA, none)
Muni service is a huge threat to them for this reason.
Routing would be painful, but something like IPFS would encourage peers to cache content in order to ensure faster access to the content they want.
It could be done if only the barrier to entry for normal folks was lower. I'm thinking a dedicated piece of hardware in a form-factor like the Google Home where the setup would be as simple as plugging it in to the wall.
Servers would still be in datacenters, but the ISPs don't get to play price and speed games with their connections.
The more towns get municipal fiber, the more Comcast's grip loosens, until they're forced to compete at a local level with local ISPs run by people you know and trust who support Net Neutrality.
If a local ISP doesn't support Net Neutrality, drop their ass and use one of the 20 other ISPs that rent the infrastructure from the city.
This is the real shift we need. Net Neutrality regulation will be ping-ponging in various parts of the government for the rest of time...which is a symptom of a much larger problem: the public currently doesn't own the infrastructure, and we need to.
Mesh networking was mine. I really really wish this would happen.
Caching would only work for a subset of content, and anything large that is not cached would take exponentially longer to retrieve.
This is a design flaw in the Internet and most conventional network designs. There is an inherent level of trust given to network members and this works just fine for a research network between CS departments at Universities, but when my traffic must pass through 12 routers each potentially malicious to reach the edge of Google's network I have to trust each of those 12 routers.
Protocols like the ones that underly Bitcoin and IPFS place no trust in nodes. The IPFS whitepaper outlines a very abuse-resistant protocol whose concepts could be used to build another more resilient network layer.
All and all it says one major thing to me. We cannot rely on executive orders and pseudo-legislation to drive change. The reason why Trump has been able to roll back so many of Obama's legacy is that so much of it was executed via E.O; the one thing he cannot seem to roll back is Obamacare which was delivered via Congress. If we want net neutrality to become law we have to push for Congress to deliver it.
On the other hand, while the internet is approaching its 50th birthday for most of that time there was far less money involved and fewer players with monopoly status over it.
In the 90s, we had dialup and DSL from hundreds of service providers because DSL was subject to a similar neutrality provision which meant that the phone company had to resell access to copper at cost. That's a pretty huge difference: had, say, PacBell tried to steer pets.com traffic to a partner, every single one of their customers had the option to switch ISPs immediately without any loss of service quality.
Unfortunately that wasn't preserved for fiber and there has been massive consolidation in the industry, so most people have a choice between — if they're lucky — a massive cable company and a massive phone company. Many people live in buildings with exclusive contracts for only one company. In that environment, your choices are basically falling back to DSL if it's still available (increasingly not) or going without an increasingly vital utility.
I would be very hesitant to say our past experience is a good source of prediction for the modern market.
My parents and siblings are sitting around talking about how Trump is going to save America. My brother mentions how a guy in town (also a Trump supporter) said he's a fascist. I'm sitting on the other side of the table and my grandma is looking down at her plate not saying anything. She's about 80 years old at this point.
I can't help but think she knows we're about to go through it all over again.
Edit: I don't think Trump is Hitler but I do think we are losing freedoms. I'm also not trying to even argue that it's Trumps fault. This was just an observation about my surroundings. I felt it relevant due to the seeming zealotry of my family and their lack of questioning certain decisions and outcomes coupled with the fact that today it looks like we lost more freedom due to that mindset.
But what does that have to do with the FCC saying they will not use their authority on Internet service providers?
Like a fever, it's a sign that our country is sick. If we let the fever take over it will kill us. If we treat the underlying problem we can survive. We MUST solve the problem of wealth disparity or mark my words - it will be our undoing.
“Ask HN: How can we stop the plan to end net neutrality?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745057
We need grassroots municipal fiber campaigns across the country until Comcast et al are forced to compete with local ISPs on public infrastructure.
Then Net Neutrality won't be an issue anymore: the market actually will solve it. No need to regulate. You'll have 20 local ISPs to choose from, and chances are they will all support Net Neutrality because it'd be suicide not to.
This isn't an issue in places with real market competition. The best path to that is publicly-owned infrastructure.
Which is exactly why it won't happen even if they were given the option... Everyone would flock to the ISPs who didn't do this. Or to technology options such as encryption and VPNs to circumvent it, while still using the cheaper packages.
Selective internet packages has been an incredibly unpopular idea among the public and has been for over a decade.
I'm not sure why people think the only thing that has held ISPs back from doing this is a 3yr old FTC regulation. Not to mention no ISP in any other country has tried it either in the ~2+ decades broadband has been available.
imagine having to pay your ISP extra money for the privilege of using a privacy-oriented search tool like Duck Duck Go over Google... and none of the money you pay goes towards Duck Duck Go.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/how-phones-changed-the...
Except we’re already using toll roads. Instead of having free-ish municipal wifi, we’re already paying upwards of $100 per month to one of the cable/DSL duopolies in each city.
The question we should be asking ourselves is, does it have to be this way? What are the alternatives? I see two possible futures:
1) Work towards keeping the internet free and open through civil discourse, working at city, state and national levels to keep our elected officials honest in how they represent our interests.
2) Roll out the darknet - use onion routing, mesh nets, blockchains and other p2p technologies to effectively circumvent the internet, under the assumption that it’s been compromised.
There is a third option, which I think is the least likely but is all anyone seems to talk about. That’s the status quo option - the loss of net neutrality leading to a doubling or tripling of prices every decade or so, poorer a la carte service like with cable TV, maintaining the illusion of second class netizens as only consumers, and so on. But I think it’s not going to happen because technology doesn’t stand still. Look at what smartphones do today compared to even a decade ago. Technology will always.. find a way as they say.
So I don’t know about you, but I am deeply concerned that the loss of net neutrality will lead to option 2. I don’t think that corporations have the foresight to know the lengths that technology will go to to give people what they want. And I think we in the tech community only barely graze the surface of how far the intelligence community will go to track everyone as more and more people go dark. So what we are really talking about here is dystopia.
Maybe we need a new phrase for net neutrality. Net freedom? Net survival? I don’t know.
There's certainly lots of artificial barriers to entry to competition, but Google managed to overcome these in a number of regions. Yet somehow Google Fiber was ultimately a failure. It's already been downsizing and put all further expansion plans on hold. So what happened? You could write a novel there, but the most basic point is that not enough people signed up. After 5 years of operation Google managed a whopping 68,715 television subscribers and 453,000 broadband subscribers. They found that in poorer neighborhoods people would, inexplicably, not even sign up for the free option! That factoid alone, which is really hard to even conceive of, I think emphasizes how much of a bubble we all, including Google, live in. They responded by sending out grants to digital literacy groups.
Nobody seems to really like Comcast/Time Warner, yet people apparently are not sufficiently incentivized to swap carriers when the possibility arises. If the doomsday scenarios do come to pass, this could hopefully change. Ultimately the power is with the people, but most are not yet willing to speak with their wallet. The time when things will finally change is when this happens, or when a new competitor (perhaps satellite/balloon internet) enters the picture.
Honestly, I wish our societies would do way more experimental policy i.e. do away with policy like Net Neutrality on a smaller scale for instance, for some cities, counties or states and analyze, evaluate, and iterate. Test it, have the states and/or cities cooperate. Why not? Its like taking a step in gradient descent you're trying to find a local minimum and you have to try things to know what direction to move in.
Why does it seem almost all major policy in the US (and the world for that matter) is either let's force it down on everyone from a federal level or just let states decide but have no strategic plan for evaluation, test, and iteration going forward?
[1]. https://www.forbes.com/sites/washingtonbytes/2017/07/12/brin...
You're right of course. Economies are chaotic dynamical systems. Precisely, what I meant was "there is a high probability that I will suffer less from immediate externalities associated with this policy than those living in the US.". Thus, my risk in the near term is lower, and my assumption is that if it doesn't work that in the long term my country won't copy the mistake. I could be completely wrong here as well, but anyway my main point was about policy methodology.
Sure, you won't initially have to pay higher prices for un-throttled traffic, but don't think for a second that there won't be knock-on effects on innovation and consumer choice that affect everyone on the internet.
I think you've under-considered the political aspect of centralized control of online media by incumbent players of a similar political bent in the US and the effect that has beyond the US, as well as the degree to which the money to be made in the US—and thus US market conditions—effect globally-available internet services.
Selective throttling has worked great to make my t-mobile mobile data usage seamlessly switch between email, websites, and video on an “unlimited” plan. They even doe sample my videos to 480p to save bandwidth unless I vpn.
So there’s one non-trolly example of innovation that has made my life better that net neutrality would prevent.
I do not buy the doomsday scenarios. We started with AOL internet and moved to a freer internet over time, all without net neutrality.
ISPs will start charging content providers to be on the fast lane. Now if you are a big co this both good and bad. Bad because you have an additional fee to reach your users. Good because it is a small fee to block out the small guys still in garages who could completely take you out.
This is not about increase in monthly internet bill. It is about kissing goodbye to the kind of innovations we have seen with neutral internet.
But also bad because the ISPs are also your competitors, and not only will you need to pass the additional costs on to your customers (making your service less competitive), but they'll also.b able to use the money to subsidize their competing service.
It does Google no good if startups that might compete against YouTube have a harder time, but Google is forced to subsidize competing ISP-operated streaming video services that already exist.
As a non-american, what can I do to help you?
I'm from the UK, and I'm fairly worried that if this happens in the US, we'll be next.
I obviously don't have a US representative to call. Is there anything I can do to support the net neutrality fight?
(Will donate to EFF if I can think of nothing better)
I'm not sure how things work in the UK, but if you guys have publicly-owned/municipal internet infrastructure, then I wouldn't worry about Net Neutrality.
If your infrastructure is owned by a few big companies like in the US, then my recommendation would be to start fighting for public control.
As far as helping people in the US...Net Neutrality is a loaded term now. We need to stop convincing people why Net Neutrality is a good idea and start convincing them why municipal broadband is a good idea. Maybe approach it from that angle.
Well the EU seem to have a decent (if slow moving) record on consumer protection (PSD, PSD2, roaming, data protection, etc.) so maybe lobby your MEP
> I'm from the UK
No, wait ...
For the past 7 months a group of volunteers has been building and scaling out Resistbot. Almost 5 million faxes and 1 million e-mails have been sent on behalf more than 1.4 million citizens. Super easy and low friction to have your voice heard - simply text RESIST to 50409, or Resistbot on Messenger, Viber, Telegram, we will find your officials, and help you craft your letter. It's important to note that the more personalized your letter the more effective it'll become, so avoid using templatized letters.
Then, more importantly, actually voting people out of office who support this.
We're actively trying to drive for better engagement through targetted alerts regarding town halls in your area or helping you with voting ( https://resistbot.news/find-your-polling-place-620d1ea5faf7 ). Resistbot is more about helping get people engaged through low friction than be the alternative to showing up and having a face to face conversation with your officials.
When the mobile internet was first getting it's roots most of the American mobile providers offered unlimited bandwidth. Once the network become constrained and consumers started overloading the networks with streaming content the industry moved to tiered bandwidth plans. Years later a few companies (possibly t-mobile leading the charge?) saw this as an opportunity to win customers and started offering all you could eat again. In order to compete it seems most if not all of the providers have an unlimited plan now.
I think the same thing will happen with internet providers. At first you might think that it won't be possible because there are locations with zero provider competition. But I don't think competition is all that far away. Mobile internet is starting to get fast enough for many use cases and there's all kinds of innovation in internet delivery (balloons, planes, sat, etc.) Eventually someone is going to use unfiltered access as a competitive advantage and an opportunity to win customers. The industry will have to follow to compete.
Sadly this is going to get much worse before it gets better. But here's hoping!
“Ask HN: How can we stop the plan to end net neutrality?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745057
Is there anything meaningful a non-american can do to help?
As for affecting policy, that is a more interesting challenge.
Netflix and Youtube are probably safe from such actions now, but what about the much smaller services that try to compete with Youtube or Netflix, or podcast platforms, and so on?
Also this recently happened in Portugal, where technically there are some net neutrality rules now, but the current Commission canceled the previous Commission/Neelie Kroes' proposal to ban zero-rating. And since that meant they were allowed to do this sort of stuff, they went right ahead and did it:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNGlrABUIAAr9RO.jpg:large
This is way more likely to happen in the U.S., where internet companies have local monopolies.
When do we get to the point where we recognize that the internet is officially holding up massive portions of industry, commerce, education, and communication. And that it should maybe not be in the hands of a few conglomerates?
This means Netflix has less money for content investment which helps their competition i.e. the same ISPs.
I blame the tech giants: Google, Apple, Amazon, Neflix, they should have done more to prevent this.
Looks like they don't care about it anymore now that they are the winners.
If companies want to do away with net neutrality they also have to lose the legal protections that being a common carrier give you .... just wait until the family of someone who died in a terrorist act sues you because the terrorists used your ISP .... because you're responsible for ALL the content on your wires
Is it because net neutrality is now a good thing for the big tech encumbents? I mean this stifles innovation aka the little guys who’d they have to buy or compete with. Though overall it stifles innovation period!
Stupid Trump.. the worst..a baby ..an egomaniac ..an embarrassment.. I could go on and on...
The 2013 uproar was with a pro-neutrality majority on the FCC, and was a reaction to what critics perceived as a too-weak implementation of neutrality. While certain people (John Oliver, notably) acted like the FCC majority was anti-neutrality, this was basically a disagreement between the loud public critics and the FCC over methods where the goals were shared.
The scenario is very different now.
The rules that are being repealed actually enshrined into case law a loophole that allows ISPs to edit which sites are visible as long as they inform customers they are doing so. This case law is now forever on the books even though the rules were temporary. [0]
This is really a battle between tech giants and telecommunication giants. Neither care about you.
[0]: http://reason.com/archives/2017/07/18/net-neutrality-support...
> The staff comment noted that the FCC’s proceeding also would restore the FTC’s antitrust enforcement authority related to broadband providers. The FTC has worked to prevent unfair methods of competition since its inception more than a century ago, and the agency’s activities in Internet-related markets demonstrate its ability to preserve competition and promote innovation for the benefit of consumers.[2]
FTC Commissioner McSweeny, in a comment opposing that endorsed by the chairman, points out that the FTC may lack the authority to enforce net neutrality at all:
>...ISPs are free to change their terms of service regarding nondiscrimination on their networks without violating the FTC Act’s ban on deception so long as they provide clear notice of changes. If these disclosures are truthful, there is no deception for the FTC to police. [3]
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/advocacy_document... [2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/07/ftc-s... [3] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
The FTC can regulate all areas business, the FCC can only regulate communication. If people stop turning this into a red vs blue issue we could actually get somewhere.
I wrote the following comment on a net neutrality thread here about nine months ago, and some of the feedback was that it's unlikely, dystopian, a little hyperbolic:
"The ISP then starts selling premium bundles on the customer side -- Platinum Service will include Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Apple (and get our bonus in-house streaming service at no extra charge!). Platinum-Plus, for another $14.95 per month plus fees, adds priority streams from your choice of up to three major sports content sources. And Platinum-Pro adds non-degraded VPN so you can work from home. Choice!"
This is going to happen.
[0] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344614A1.p...
Well here you go, turns out politics affects real life, and even the tech industry.
I feel there's an INCREASE in the intersection between tech and politics, because tech has become more accessible both to the masses but also to the courts and politicians who write our destinies.
To wildly flag posts as political or (StackOverflow-style 'off-topic') is, arguably, morally wrong. I saw an introduction-type post by a new HN moderator a few months back who described his reasoning for reduction of political posts. Alas, the mission is in vain.
Thank you for your insights.
It would only affect international people if a company's servers only existed inside of the US, which exempts all large startups that have co-located servers.
It would affect all traffic of people in the US though since the ISP can charge services to pipe in to their lines and charge consumers to pipe out of their lines.
85. Need for the No Paid Prioritization Rule. The Commission concluded in the Title II Order that “fast lanes” or “paid prioritization” practices “harm consumers, competition, and innovation, as well as create disincentives to promote broadband deployment.”189 The Commission adopted this ex ante flat ban on individual negotiations to address an apparently nonexistent problem. The ban on paid prioritization did not exist prior to the Title II Order and even then the record evidence confirmed that no such rule was needed since several large Internet service providers made it clear that that they did not engage in paid prioritization190 and had no plans to do so.191 We seek comment on the continued need for such a rule and our authority to retain it.
ex ante: based on forecasts rather than actual results.
And that’s just LTE, 5g will increase the speeds and capacity another order of magnitude. I think the whole cable monopoly will come to an end rather quickly.
mesh networks or any kind of connectivity, enough to have basic web (mail, chat, irc, hn class websites).
anybody with knowledge is welcomed
ps: some articles recently popped up about Detroit hackerspaces doing just that. So far 3 small areas were built.
If net neutrality rules are thrown out, there should be more stimulus for small local ISPs - private or non-profit / municipal.
If government bends to the telco desire on this, it's not going turn around and go against them by sponsoring competition for them.
This is a simple tool that calls you and puts you through to your legislators, one after another.
I believe it if someone walks us through the incentive structure here step by step, or explains the natural-monopoly nature of this market or something. But just by implying it or pretending this to obvious I'm not convinced.
Its a talking point the ISPs have been using for the last few years, that they're "Pro-Net Neutrality, but want it enforced differently, legally." Its a propaganda tactic in that it is both factually incorrect, misleading, and is a response created to make the public lose interest in what sounds like a nuanced debate. ISPs arguments against net neutrality have all, repeatedly, fallen apart every time this has come to the political forefront; they simply do not have a leg to stand on in the US.
The only reason we're going through this again, is because Trump and the Republican Party put a stooge in charge of the FCC. This has, incredibly, somehow become a partisan issue with each political party taking explicit stances for or against NN.
Create a lobbying group, funded by a mix of regular people and businesses that push towards the ultimate aim of net neutrality being a part of national and international law.
I think a lot of people are sick of having to contact their representatives, or don't do it because it's a burden. I imagine many more people would happily throw a few dollars for someone to do that on their behalf, even if it was a recurring thing ($5 a month).
"Internet providers will be able to do X!"
Okay, so who can already choose what sites you see? Well there's your browser, Google could (and does) block sites, so could (and does) Microsoft. How do you find out about content on the internet? ISPs? No you probably find a link on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, or by searching. Well those are all censored, they can literally decide what you do and don't see. Google's own CEO has even been quoted in video saying they're fine doing that.
What about at the infrastructure level? There are in reality two vectors to getting software on the most popular devices on the planet: phones. You've got to deal with Apple's store or Google's store. There're plenty of examples of apps being blocked for political reasons from both of these. They can literally choose what you're allowed to see, what software you're allowed to install ON A COMPUTER THAT YOU OWN. Google just killed a website, The Daily Stormer, by seizing the DNS, and any registrar can do this. Whatever you think about that website, we do have a fundamental freedom of speech in the US, where this site and Google operates, but that doesn't stop Google from just arbitrarily killing a site they disagree with. How about payment processors? There aren't many, they're mostly big companies, and they forbid you from using their systems to do certain things, most of which aren't criminal. They literally decide what you can and can't do at a business level, which indirectly impacts customers.
I could go with hundreds more examples just like this.
These things exist, they're abused, these aren't FUD, and the tech media turns a blind eye to much of it. Every single day.
This regulation is absurdly dubious in its value. The most common FUD are "but your ISP will be able to block what you see!" Maybe I want them to. Some person gets infected with malware, maybe I want that person's access to be restricted. Maybe I don't want to even be able to visit a machine known to be compromised. Google already does this in Chrome, to the benefit of most users.
How about "but they can shut down a competing service." No, no they can't. The citations where this has happened can mostly be explained by QoS, which is necessary to keep a network functioning properly, and is effectively illegal by NN. We have laws against anti-competitive behavior like this. Why do we need yet another? Those laws work. And if they are insufficient, maybe Congress should do something about it, and while they're at it deal with all those other examples of companies doing much worse.
At the end of the day, I'm so unconvinced that this is actually a concern, that I've started totally ignoring discussions about Net Neutrality. Is HN really so devoid of people who have ever operated a large network or dealt with issues of scale? I would expect that not to be the case, but requiring ISPs to overprovision and to bear the burden of infrastructural growth at whatever demand their customers make seems unreasonable at the very best. Don't cite AT&T and Comcast at me, fuck them, I don't care if they are shady shitty companies. What about new ISPs? What about the hundreds of small ISPs destroyed by NN, the ones you don't hear non-stop complaining about? What about the ISPs that can't exist because without hundreds of millions of dollars they can't afford to achieve a level of quality customers expect from hundred billion dollar ISP monopolies.
I want competition. I don't want my world to be ruled forever by Google, Apple, Comcast, and AT&T. I sure as hell don't want shitty rules in place that effectively ensure these largely unethical borderline sociopathic companies remain in their positions. I really don't want Net Neutrality, because it doesn't do what it says and fundamentally harms the internet in a way only hypothetically compared to the real evils these companies impart on us EVERY SINGLE DAY.
When you end all the abusive bullshit already happening on the internet, end the censorship, and break up these monopolies, when you put your effort into fixing problems we actually have rather than fighting fictional dragons, then and only then will I be again open to discussions about this topic.
It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations? Whose lives have been made better? Compared to what?
Net neutrality advocates are utterly unable to give convincing answers to these questions.
People who will be harmed is anyone who doesn't want their media coming from sources controlled by large corporations such as TimeWarner, Facebook, News Corp., etc. Such conglomerates will get special deals that make it harder for more "alternate" media sources to compete.
It's not that these regulations didn't exist, it's that they hadn't been formalized as regulations. Net neutrality is how the Internet has worked for over 30 years, and is what made it such a success.
Do you watch Netflix? If you don't, that's ok, because most consumers do use it or a competing service. Internet Companies absolutely did try to charge Netflix extra, and in some cases throttled them. This was well documented.
I don't know if you're a corporate shill or just genuinely lack the ability to comprehend how bad this is. Spectrum, Verizon and their ilk have absolutely shown zero regard for consumers and there is no reason to believe that pattern of behavior is going to change anytime soon. If they can screw over their consumers for a dollar, they will, just like they have continually done so in the past.
Those regulations existed for most of that time because ISPs then were dial-up over phone-lines, and the phone-lines were under Title II, so de-facto all internet was.
> It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies
It was coined in academia in 2003; the concern was raised (without the term) at least as early as 1994, well before most of the “large tech companies” embracing it existed.
> to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
No, while it was largely an abstract concern when the issue was raised in the 90s, and even perhaps when the term was coined in 2003; by the time in 2004 that the FCC defined it's “Network Freedom” principles concrete threats were visible, and for years before the first effort to adopt regulation (starting shortly after the Network Freedom principles) the FCC responded to numerous concrete problems with case-by-case actions, which provided the direct experience with real, existing problems on which the regulatory efforts of the two Open Internet orders was based. The idea that the regulation efforts were preemptive ignores the well-documented history f the issue.
Stopping them from doing that was one of the reasons that first Congress and then the FCC took up the net neutrality issue about 10 years ago.
But I never enjoyed speaking with people who watch TV. That's why I found the Ultrix and the Net in the 1980's back at Harvard. I live in DC and like cities for policed walkable streets (I don't drive), live jazz, museums, book clubs and small ethnic restaurant venues.
But our consumer Net has been been a waste of time just like roadside American life has always been.
This is like the film "China Town" with cable utilities filling in for water utilities. I know I'm an old man, but nothing has changed much despite our SFX propaganda fictions.
Should an E911 call or tele-surgery packets really be treated the same as Netflix? Net neutrality forces the ISP to do that and that seems like madness to me.
And it's origin/destination that ISPs demonstrably want to prioritize by.
And in your E911 example, there are already ways for this to be solved without requiring censorship or throttling of data on the public networks. You can already buy life-/safety-critical bandwidth that is "off-Internet bands", if you need it - the point is, this isn't lumped with the 'general public Internet'.
So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster. Not to mention the cost of having to monitor traffic and the additional charge to do so on the consumer in comparison to the "anarchic" TCP model we have now.
The last time we bad this conversation when Verizon first sued for the rules to be dropped. Level 3 showed that the apparent need to create these fast lanes were due to an artificial bottleneck created by isps to throttle Netflix. When the new rules passed, the version that went in still allowed for these fast lanes to be created, but only through the supervision of the chairman. Whichb was a win for isms, despite the internet community cheering.
Also included I the original title 2 is that you would not have a data cap and yo u would be charged for the internet you use versus a bulk sum every month. Articles around this time showed that after subsidies and tax credits to build infrastructure. It took TWC only a $1.24 to supply a custoomer internet access in which they charged $49.99. This included all operating costs.
An operator like Verizon, for example, that runs phone service (including emergency calls) over the same lines as their standard internet service pretty much has to prioritize packet types differently. This is expected and understood by all parties.
The Net Neutrality that people are up in arms about is related to limiting traffic of the same class based on which endpoints are involved. For example, Verizon cannot throttle (or worse, outright block) HTTP traffic to Netflix/Hulu/Youtube to 1KB/s to drive users to their own competing service.
The problems here come from ISP's that won't upgrade their infrastructure to support the demand, because they are trying to maximize profits, and see advantages to being able to charge/extort fees from actors they think can afford it (netflix for example) or they feel are competing with their own offerings.
Oh well .. that's the america we live in now.
You need regulation in markets like.