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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

I’d be in favor of a much narrower legal avenue for achieving some of what falls under the banner of “net neutrality”. What the FCC previously did in declaring ISPs to be common carriers is unacceptable. It purports to solve problems which haven’t materialized and which may very well never arise in the US.

This is Congress’s place to act.

EDIT: I’ve removed this bit because it’s based solely on the claims of AT&T, which don’t seem to be corroborated elsewhere: ”It subjects the internet to content regulation at the whims of the FCC.”

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/att-claims-commo...

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> It subjects the internet to content regulation at the whims of the FCC.

I'm curious about your understanding of the title II neutrality regulation -- I don't see a clear line from "all packets must be treated equally" (which is what common carrier means) to "subjects the internet to content regulation at the whims of the FCC" (I'm not clear what you even mean by "content regulation", or what it has to do with common carrier.)

It turns out that is AT&T’s interpretation of the law, one that doesn’t seem to be accepted by anyone else, so I retract that claim. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/att-claims-commo...

Thank you for following up, it's good to know the source of that claim.

Why do you feel that "What the FCC previously did in declaring ISPs to be common carriers is unacceptable"?

To me it seems the obvious, common sense solution: I want my ISP to deliver the packets of data I request; I don't want them to have any incentive to interfere with or modify those requests. Just like I want my phone company to deliver my phone calls, without any incentive to interfere with or modify those calls. Common carrier rules do exactly that, cleanly and simply, as demonstrated by decades of successful precedent in a nearly-parallel industry.

"It subjects the internet to content regulation at the whims of the FCC."

Explain, in detail, exactly how this is possible.

Agreed. Common carrier just gives power to Google, Amazon, FB instead of the ISPs.

How does it give the power to those companies you listed? Because they can link you to certain sites? And they choose to host certain content?

They choose what gets buried through their search and suggestion algorithms.

Common carrier / net neutrality doesn't do anything about that one way or the other. Certainly, repealing net neutrality doesn't fix that problem.

It does not. But protecting Net Neutrality in the current context that it exists creates other problems. Right now Google, FB, amazon can spike content as needed. Without NN ISPs have that power as well and are the only ones rich enough to fight against GFA.

The "little" guys are screwed either way.

A comprehensive legislative solution is the only way we don't accidentally grant someone a monopoly.

I can't say I agree. The solution to "these oversized corporations have too much power" is not "let's give too much of a completely different kind of power to those other oversized corporations".

(The little guys are screwed either way -- that part I do agree with.)

Surely this is a joke or shill account. Not only are you arguing against an entirely different topic than at hand. You're openly suggesting that the best way out of getting screwed is to allow more companies the opportunity to screw you?

It breaks the HN guidelines to insinuate shillage as an argument tactic, so please don't do that here. If you think it might be happening you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com so we can look into it. But bringing it up in a routine way is internet poison.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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