To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet | Hacker News Reader

To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

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266 pointscardamomo156 comments

No. To save the internet, we have to make the most gigantic stink the world has seen since the Trump election.

The solution is not "give up and let this pass, and then quietly try to work around it." It's "make the people in power pay DEARLY for their transgressions."

Your solution needs to be refreshed with each election, we need a permanent solution that won't be reversed 2 years later.

Step 1: Try to convince the FCC to not vote to kill NN.

Step 2: Call your members of Congress and tell them to enshrine NN into law.

Step 3: Vote your Rep out next year if they refuse to do what you ask for.

Step 4: Vote out the President in 2020 if he vetoes NN.

Pretty straightforward, imho.

Trouble is, Ajit gets up there and talks about competition being good for the consumer, and then all the rightwingers echo that "Bigly". As wrong as this is, it will be hard to vote someone out if the facts are muddled.

I think this can easily be made a bipartisan issue, in that it's the common man vs. big, rich, controlling corporations. If I were the telecoms (and telecom lackeys), that's the movement I'd be scared of.

I agree. It's a purely populist play, and we're in a populist mood as a country.

Yes, and the Republicans conveniently ignore that most consumers in the US have very little choice in ISPs. These days you probably have the option of DSL from your phone company or the offering from your cable company.

Luckily some communities are setting up their own broadband services, but the telecom monopolies are doing their best to make it illegal for communities to do this.

Simple solution from the FCC; they'll outdate the outrage.

Simply make some rule that to the average person looks like Net-Neutrality but in reality isn't. Or go only half way.

And with that all the average people will simply tell you "but they did bring back net neutrality!" and you'll have to update the outrage.

It's a much more efficient way to deal with outrage, currently employed by EA.

I don't see how that's straightforward, especially numbers 3 and 4. Are you gonna vote out the president just for NN? Even if you don't think the other guy is gonna be much different in that regard?

Americans cast one single vote (in presidential elections) for one of two candidates, on a myriad of issues of every level of seriousness. Leaving aside the fight to convince a majority of americans, just deciding to vote against someone for NN is anything but straightforward.

I don't see why the criticisms on the idea discussed in the article. We can try both routes, give them all the flak we can for this and also try alternative paths to NN. This is an extremely uphill battle, we should be looking for every remotely-viable path.

One reason to raise stink now is to make it clear to any candidates for 2018 and 2020 elections that this is an issue to which they can pander for the sake of good PR and votes. That applies also (and, perhaps, especially) to the primaries.

This Congress has been trying to gut healthcare and is about to pass an extremely destructive and unpopular tax “reform” bill. It is obvious they don’t care about popular opinion or even their chances for re-election.

They care very deeply about reelection. In order to get reelected, they need money and to survive a primary.

They won't get money from their big $$$ donors if they don't pass the tax cut bill. They won't survive a primary if they're seen as being 'soft' on the ACA by the true believers in their party.

They don't have any idea how they're going to make it through the general election, but that's a fight for another day. They have other priorities first.

They also have to make it past the general election. GOP House members in blue states voting for the tax bill are basically acknowledging they don’t care about re-election. I suspect they hope to get a good job with their donors in exchange for committing political suicide.

I think the GOP knows they are going to get one bite at this apple, and they are taking advantage of it. Hello tax reform and good bye NN.

Just because it's a blue state, doesn't mean that it doesn't have red districts. Washington and Oregon are pretty damn blue, but it's because the western parts are ultra-blue. Eastern ones are very conservative in comparison, though. So their representatives very much care about re-election - which is why they're voting for, and very visibly supporting, the Republican agenda, because that's what their electorate demands of them.

The ones that are on shaky ground are those in areas that previously voted Republican primarily for economic rather than social reasons (i.e. for the sake of low taxes, not because they wanted to ban abortion etc), and are now flipping to blue because Republican social policies became intolerable. This is many suburban districts. And Republicans there are listening; for example, in my district (WA-8), Dave Reichert voted against AHCA.

The catch is, Republicans in those districts know that even if they pander to the new electorate somewhat, there are still enough reasons why their Democrat opponent will likely get their vote. They'd basically need to be liberal on everything except taxes (and given the nature of the tax proposal that Republicans unveiled, not even on that, since it hurts the suburban mid/high-middle class dwellers most!), at which point they might as well just switch parties. So you see a bunch of guys saying they won't run for re-election at all, and then they treat their remaining term as a means to squeeze the few last things in while they can.

How're you feeling about the choice of (someone) vs. Rossi, out of curiosity? (also, I see we have a bunch of shared connections on LinkedIn. I'm ex-Visual Studio.)

It depends on who that someone will be, of course, but I'm feeling rather optimistic - our district went for Clinton by 3 points, and I think by 2018 any Republican candidate won't be able to clearly distance themselves away from Trump and the federal GOP platform. Reichert had the benefit of being the incumbent, and being a fairly moderate Republican (or rather a very pragmatic one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIlizXcKVLY).

If you mean who I'd vote for, it would be the Dem candidate, no question. The parties are far enough now that I don't foresee a situation where a Republican candidate would be more closely aligned with me on the issues than a Democrat, even a particularly disagreeable one. But, more importantly and urgently, I think that this administration must have some counterbalance in the Congress to check it. But this is a moot question, anyway, because I'm not a citizen and cannot vote.

I meant the former, but I appreciate the answers to both.

The vast majority of Congressional districts in US are non-competitive. This means that what matters in those is the primary, not the general election. So if you're a liberal in a solid red district, threatening your Republican elected representative probably won't do much good (unless it's a swing district - those guys actually listen to some extent, especially now that Dems won a bunch of special elections in the suburbs, and there's talk of a wave next year).

But if you're a liberal in a blue district, then you should write your rep and let them know that 1) you will vote in the primary, and 2) having a firm public position on this issue will be your litmus test for who gets your vote.

Getting my elected officials to do stuff I want is hard. I guess I'll go build an autonomous vehicle instead.

Millions of people who are registered to vote simply didn't turn out last November because they thought their vote wouldn't matter, that the candidates would be about the same, or...who knows what else. If just a few tens of thousands of them happened to have voted for Clinton last November, we wouldn't even be having this discussion right now.

And for the record, I think the President should be voted out for a couple dozen things, one of which is NN.

If next year my choice of mai party reps to vote for boths support ending net neutrality, then what? Vote third party and hope a majority of my state has also turned politics into a one issue system?

It is unlikely that both candidates will be opposed to NN. NN is part of the Democratic Party platform agreed upon at the 2016 Democratic National Convention: page 9 of http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/papers_pdf/117717.pdf

However, there are a few Democrats who have voted against NN in the past, or have indicated that they do not support it.

From this vote in 2016: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2016/roll152.xml

You have:

Jim Costa (CA-16)

Scott Peters (CA-52)

Collin Peterson (MN-07)

Kyrsten Sinema (AZ-09)

Albio Sires (NJ-08)

If you live in their districts, call up their office and tell them that you want them to change their tune on NN. Go to their town halls and tell them there.

There are also four Democratic Senators who listed as being part of 'Team Cable' according to this: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2017-10-04-democrats-...

Again, if you live in their states (MI, MO, MT, or WV) call them up and tell their staffers that you want them to change their mind on NN and tell them why. Go to their town halls and tell them there.

Bemoaning your elected officials' choices without ever trying to influence them will not change anything.

Is Trump able to override the FCC? Talk about a clear route for easy "heroism"

He follows the money. No way.

Let's be clear on something. "The Internet" doesn't care how Americans go about ruining their economy by prioritizing certain network traffic. As a Dutchie my Internet is largely unaffected by the FCC.

If anything the FCC rejecting net neutrality may be a boon for investment in EU startups and might actually benefit the EU tech sector. So go right ahead and take a crap on yourself America.

But let's be clear that the FCC has nothing to do with "The Internet". They're strictly an American affliction.

When the Americans successfully ruin NN for themselves they might inspire other countries to follow though.

Netherlands has a net neutrality law since 2012, Chile – since 2010.

>As a Dutchie my Internet is largely unaffected by the FCC.

You can't be more wrong. Since Netflix, Amazon, youporn, imgur, reddit will be affected by this and they will have to pay more to keep their bandwidth on the same level as now, or slower by only 10% (hey, they could slow down their network links by 60%, but since they pay 20M per year, its slower by only 10%!) you as the end, you the end consumer will have to pay for this more. It doesn't matter where you live, as long as you use any of US internet services, you will pay for this more, sooner or later.

His Internet will still not be affected.

The Internet is not just Facebook, reddit, google, youporn and Netflix or the dozen or so popular companies.

Not to mention that most of those have servers in the EU which will not be affected by this. Sure they could raise prices there, but since this would just subsidize US costs a local competitor would have a competitive advantage.

What this non-Net Neutrality does is largely saying "if you want to build an internet-based startup the US may not be the place for you".

Are you saying it will create positive competitive edge for companies from Holland?

>> As a Dutchie my Internet is largely unaffected by the FCC.

> You can't be more wrong. Since Netflix, Amazon, youporn, imgur, reddit will be affected by this

The same Netflix that reportedly has very poor show selection outside US? The same Amazon that has its data centers all over the world? And the three sites that are a pastime of little use and importance?

You need to do much better job at selecting examples to make your point compelling.

I don't think you're in opposition - the argument being, what's going to happen to the location of those services if they're held to ransom by new data transfer fees?

Move them to another jurisdiction without them.

Investment into the EU (in the form of datacenters, locating jobs to prove the work is done there, and the transit costs in the new location).

That being said, the cynic in me agrees that broadly you're right, and whatever the companies do to mitigate the effects of it by moving hosting/transfer elsewhere, they'll use this as an excuse to jack the prices up regardless.

Traceroute from Germany shows that none of leave continental Europe, at least not this morning. Are you suggesting that they'll cross-subsidise? That they will raise their euro-denominated prices in order to compensate for increased costs in the US?

They might. Of course. Vendors will raise prices where they think the market will bear it. But it seems strange to assume that by default, vendors will respond to raised costs in one market by raising prices in another.

Well, the servers even of USian internet services need not be located in data centers in the US. So we'll just add the emigration of data centers to the list of negative consequences for the US.

Not really, these charges were be born by the consumer. This is about the ability to offer consumer tiers. Sure there might be companies that pay the consumer fee to be included, like QVC did to be on everyone's cable.

> Since Netflix, Amazon,

The thing is, that if that would happen, a lot of people who got onto Netflix/Amazon for streaming content because it's a good convenience/price ratio, will simply revert to illegal downloads from local servers if the prices go up much. I recommended Netflix to people here in my poor farmer village and they got off it again and went back to illegal download simply because they did not want to pay the same price Americans pay while getting much less (quality) content.

So those companies move their servers out of the USA, which would be good anyway, or their competitirs get an edge.

Most countries like to copy the most successful country on Earth. You probably think of things like software patents, that were rejected in the EU. But that was a very long fight!

I hope we don't even have to _start_ the net neutrality fight in the EU, by winning it outside.

Copy the most successful country in the world? Who would want a great firewall?

Maybe that's the plan in the USA... Without NN it's easier than with NN.

Are you sure your logic is sound here(?):

The great firewall and net neutrality are both examples of the government regulating the internet.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm sure we all agree that our ISPs should offer neutral transmission of packets without deference to source/destination or protocol/port.

Both regulate the internet, but in complete opposite ways:

Net neutrality is the default state of computer networks (a packet is a packet), and protecting it forbids discrimination by source, destination or contents.

The great firewall discriminates by source, destination or contents.

One of the main arguments against net neutrality is disallowing offering different speed or latency depending on the type of service (VoIP, gaming, downloads), but that's false, because you can do that without looking at the source, destination or contents; you just have to compare them with other packets (as opposed to comparing them to a pre-made list).

Sorry to sound like a nationalist here (i'm not), but the US has 1/3rd the population of China yet still has the largest economy, and the goto reserve currency. China actually has an ownership stake in all of their IT companies.

Contrary to a sibling comment, NN paves the way for the government to regulate what a private company can do with their IT assets, and therefore a great firewall situation.

>but the US has 1/3rd the population of China yet still has the largest economy

USA is first by Nominal GDP, but second by PPP GDP (or third if you count the EU). I wouldn't declare a definitive winner based on that. And it's better to leave population out of that, because per capita the US is far behind countries like Norway or Switzerland, and at only half the GDP of Luxembourg (both nominal and PPP).

You people are unbelievable. Please tell me about the last tech startup from Switzerland or Luxembourg... I'm not trying to declare some definitive "winner" here, but if you don't recognize which country is clearly dominant in the world, I can't help you.

>Most countries like to copy the most successful country on Earth.

By what criteria is the USA "most successful country on earth"?

Also, by "most countries" you mean "countries with legal codes even vaguely compatible with Westminster-derived legal concepts" which is in no way "most countries" in a global sense, right?

> By what criteria is the USA "most successful country on earth"?

Power, influence, GDP. Things that matter to politicians, which are the ones that get to choose these matters.

The FCC are appointees, not elected.

US soft power and influence are waning (e.g. gutting if the state department) and the US consumer is about to take a hit with a massive transfer of wealth to the super rich. Even with the hard military power, I don’t see how the US is the “most successful country on earth”.

Net neutrality has nothing to do with the consumer. Very specifically, it has to do with peering and PNIs. There's a reason why NN is not a grassroots movement - it's literally corrupt corporations fighting each other over regulatory capture.

You make this claim as if it is a fact, and various Americans cannot have different points of view. I believe heavily in the ideas of individual liberty and private property. Even though I'm a nobody, in fly-over country does not mean I have not researched the underlying principles, and have not independently come to the same conclusion as these corporate conglomerate broadband providers.

These ISPs are insanely jealous of FANG.

> By what criteria is the USA "most successful country on earth"?

Given we're talking about the Internet. How about ARPANET?

>Most countries like to copy the most successful country on Earth.

Countries with free and universal healthcare: 117. Countries with free (but not universal) healthcare: 39. Countries with universal (but not free) healthcare: 2. Countries who copied the USA in having neither free nor universal healthcare: 42. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_univers...

Countries who voted in favour of the United Nations resolution “Combating glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fuelling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance”: 131. Countries who abstained from voting: 48. Countries who copied the USA and voted against the resolution: 2. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-un-nazi-...

Number of countries who copy the USA and spend more than more than 4.1% if their budgets on military expenditures: China, who spends 13.0%. USA spends 36.0% https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/04/24/the-to...

Number of countries who copy the US policy of not guaranteeing paid maternal leave: 2. https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us0211webwco...

My choice of words may not be good, but other countries (esp. allies) copied MANY more things than things they didn't copy, esp. with topics related to NN... Copyright law, patents, free speech, and internet itself... and the fight against software patents was long and difficult.

yeah, I was being a bit flippant... You are definitely right that those in other countries with anti-NN agenda's will use this to advance their cause.

What your comment misses is the commitment to the principle of liberty as set forth by Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations and its influence on the U.S. Constitution. I would suggest reading all 71 Anti-Federalist Papers. Here is a good collection that was put together:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Complete_Anti-Federalist

I live in the US, and agree with most of your point, but regarding military spending, a significant portion of that is due to occupation of foreign countries and external military bases. The US is basically the last country paying to maintain an empire.

The historical norm is that a successful empire is very profitable. If you have to spend money maintaining it, you're doing it wrong.

In other words: the US is not an empire. It's something that needs a different term.

What makes you say that it isn't profitable? The US has the largest GDP of any country by a large margin. Even the entire (pre-Brexit) EU combined is about 10% smaller.

But how much of the US GDP is attributable to its 'empire', especially considering the opportunity costs of the human and other capital invested in the DoD? I'd love to see the result of a detailed analysis.

Yes, and many countries would have to pay more for their own defense were the U.S. not building those bases and helping defend them.

> As a Dutchie my Internet is largely unaffected by the FCC.

Which in turn doesn't affect my outlook or my agreement with GP. I don't want to convince you either, I just want to route around you.

From what I understand you will still be put in the slow lane if you're a Dutch startup offering services to Americans. and the US market is not exactly small. It's a loss for the Internet as a whole, not only the USA.

the EU market isn't exactly small, either. it is smaller, but not small.

Which means you're going to be in the slow lane for roughly more than a half of your market.

Your internet will not be affected for exactly as long as it takes local providers to see the proof of concept and financial benefits and lobby your government to pass similar regulation, their efforts now bolstered by the ability to point to the US as a “successful” forerunner.

> No. To save the internet, we have to make the most gigantic stink the world has seen since the Trump election.

This "call to arms" happens every year or two. Basically that's a short term solution, and sooner or later a law will manage to get the votes it needs and it's game over (will be very tough to reverse).

And even the demonstrations after the Trump election did not achieve anything, by the way, so I doubt this is a good analogy.

> A future in which ISPs are owned by local governments, small businesses, nonprofit community groups, and the people they serve are the path forward and the only realistic way of ending big telecom’s stranglehold on America.

I'd like that. These day internet access is more like a utility. It helps people telecommute, do banking, grocery shopping even, pay bills, etc. If municipalities can handle providing water and sewage they should be lay some cable or provide a wireless solution in a more rural area.

At least there should be some provision where the big telecom companies cannot go around suing and bullying municipalities. Maybe have a Federal ban on states banning municipal ISPs.

If Verizon or Comcast want to come in and sell super-premium FIOS packages with fast transfer rates, they should be able to, but they shouldn't be able to squash or fight against the municipal internet.

The free market competition among the providers is just not happening and will probably never happen in a lot of areas. It has been enough years already, fiber technology is here, wireless as well, but hasn't helped enough. Time to stop pretending and using it as an excuse.

>The free market competition among the providers is just not happening and will probably never happen in a lot of areas. It has been enough years already, fiber technology is here, wireless as well, but hasn't helped enough. Time to stop pretending and using it as an excuse.

It's important to remember that the FCC is our nation's censor, and will be far more cozy to government censorship of the internet than what we're used to. You're right that free market competition hasn't been as strong as it could/should be in the ISP market, but I doubt that the FCC piling on a bunch of regulations, increasing the barrier to entry even further is going to help. I fear whatever benefits we see will be only temporary and that overzealous FCC regulators will stifle internet innovation the same way it stifled telecommunications for over a century, resulting on Bell.

TLDR: I'm generally for net neutrality, but I think the FCC taking over regulating the internet is going to have a lot of unintended consequences.

Exactly this. In fact, even if you support NN, you should oppose Title II NN. It literally does the opposite of what NN supporters think, plus it allows strong government regulation of the internet.

I’m oppose to NN on principle (because it goes against the basic operation of the Internet and restrict innovation), but I’d much rather see a modern law passed than A law written 80 years used to implement it.

"The free market competition among the providers is just not happening and will probably never happen in a lot of areas."

Actually, we know exactly how to create a competitive market: line sharing rules. We used to have line sharing requirements for DSL and there were dozens of competing services in most cities. The situation we face today is the result of those rules being eliminated during the Bush administration.

Right. Line sharing works for electricity.

When I first used DSL, I could choose among many ISPs. All delivered through the same legacy copper.

I'm hoping that if the big ISPs start giving poor service, it will help local non-profit ISPs stay competitive because they're providing better service.

I'm in favor of network neutrality myself. My main criticism is that it doesn't go far enough, in that it only requires neutrality from network providers to content providers but not vice versa or like-to-like. But I do have a serious question for other supporters.

How can so many of those who are usually anti-regulatory "free market" extremists also be so strongly in favor of this regulation?

* This is their theory, not necessarily mine * Internet service is a market. In theory, without network-neutrality regulation, providers can charge extra for certain services but market forces will limit how bad that can get. You can't charge for something that people won't buy. Customers will go to competitors who offer what they think are more favorable terms, including competitors who claim no limits at all (even if the promises are misleading or impossible to keep). This already happens in other countries. People post the price sheets as support for network neutrality regulation, but those same price sheets are also evidence that lack of such regulation does not mean the end of the internet as we know it. As long as the content differentiation is explicit and subject to consumer choice, not behind-the-scenes discrimination, there should be no problem. * Now, back to my own thoughts *

If somebody believes (as I do not) that markets are fully capable of regulating themselves in all necessary ways, why would they support regulation in this one case? Is it just because this particular regulation is seen as benefiting them personally? Is it because their "free market" beliefs are really pro-corporate beliefs, and network neutrality as currently defined benefits the corporations they like at the expense of the corporations they don't? Can anybody provide a convincing alternative free-market justification for network neutrality?

>How can so many of those who are usually anti-regulatory "free market" extremists also be so strongly in favor of this regulation?

Because in the US, network providers (at least the last mile providers; those charging end consumers) are local monopolies. Most people in the US have one legit high speed internet option, a few have two. There is little competition and the barriers to entry for new comers is very high (cost of obtaining easements and running cable to every house). In situations like this, monopolies are to be regulated.

I'm not convinced that such local monopolies change the equation here. Access to the internet might be a right, but is unlimited access to Netflix a right? A monopoly on essentials must be regulated, because there's no market elasticity (and the extremists often deny even that). A monopoly on entertainment, though? Even a monopoly is constrained in how much in can charge for such a thing before customers just walk away.

Network Neutrality(tm) isn't about constraining these monopolies. It doesn't even address the issues of price gouging or discrimination against consumers. If that's what we want, there are whole different sets of laws to talk about. The regulations currently at issue only seem to address concerns orthogonal to those related to monopolies.

The ISPs (with their local market monopolies) are also content providers. How is them using their network/distribution monopoly to gain an unfair advantage for their content distribution different from Microsoft using their OS to gain an unfair advantage for their browser in the 90's? Isn't NN about constraining unfair competition practices?

That is FTC not FCC.

Fair enough. If the ISPs don't what to be liable for the content that traverses their network then they ought to be neutral to content and not prioritize traffic based on it's content (or source, destination, protocol, etc). But if they are inspecting the packets then they should have some liability for what they are delivering and the content on their network. The ISPs want it both ways like someone else mentioned, the want to control what people see but not be liable (responsible).

How about they don't inspect any content, but I download the media player provided by my ISP and it doesn't contribute to my data cap, but netflix does?

I would think if they have data caps then they will have to determine how much data their own content consumes and count it against the data cap. Otherwise this is abusing their network monopoly to support and provide an unfair advantage to their content business.

In the United States there are often deals where certain services used on certain networks do not count against mobile data caps. For example, DirectTV Now app does not count against an AT&T datacap.

> That is FTC not FCC.

It's the FTC in the case of Microsoft because Microsoft isn't a carrier. Regulating communications carriers is the FCC's entire purpose.

That is correct and I should not have conflated the two. Personal opinion, media should be moved to FTC in the context of internet.

I don't know if internet access is a "right", but it is pretty important in a modern society because internet access equals information access. It is hard to be an informed, productive participant in a modern society without information. Therefore unlimited access to Google search is a better example than Netflix.

And I would argue it isn't unlimited. It's limited to the rate the ISP offers. If I'm sold a line that offers up to 100mbps/sec then it shouldn't matter from what source I'm requesting to receive those 100mbps/sec from. Now if the source can't provide them at that rate that's on the source, but the ISP ought not be throttling them.

Unlimited access meaning I can access the website as often as I want without having to pay more money.

It would be wasteful to duplicate the last mile fifteen times. Are there any municipalities that create/manage this infrastructure themselves? Having local, public ownership of the lines and contracting out the maintenance seems like the most efficient option. It seems that most IT monopolies lobby hard against this.

Chattanooga's super-fast publicly owned internet

http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/20/technology/innovation/chatta...

Every time a monopoly arises, that is the market telling you the most efficient way to produce the good is with a single centrally planned organization, and that competition is not possible or effective.

A monopoly is the market's way of saying an industry/service should be nationalized.

I'm not sure I agree, but an interesting thought. Thanks.

> A monopoly is the market's way of saying an industry/service should be nationalized.

The U.S. doesn't have a nationally run garbage service. Police departments aren't national. There is no national toll authority.

So yeah, publify not nationalize. But the argument is clear. Not going to resist the rationality of the market, after all.

Wonder why there’s no standard term for “publify”? Let’s change that!

But there still is a market. Cities compete against each other and that keeps them honest. If a city neglects it's police force, it faces demographic consequences. And if citizens are hurt by poor policing, they have other cities to choose. These properties are not true to the same degree in national issues.

I too think this is an interesting question. I also think you’re hinting at what I believe as well, that networks are a classic case of economic good that make the preconditions for a free market nearly impossible.

Some people are so committed to the ideal of unfettered market conditions that they lose sight of whether such conditions are possible. Such people are normally immune to all reason when it comes to assessing the true potential for a market to exist.

So why the crack in the facade in this instance? I think Internet access is one of those areas where people accutely feel the obnoxious rent seeking behavior of monopolists on a day to day basis.

As an aside, I do think it’s funny how much talk we hear of entrepreneurs seeking to create network effects with their products. To what end? Presumably to create another means—beyond simple competititve product fitness—to retain customers and extract value from them. You want network effects? Try owning an actual network, where there are first mover advantages, and huge barriers to market entry!

Decentralising the Internet is the only way we are going to be able to stop corporations from lobbying (aka bribing) the government to make decisions in their favour.

Check out https://substratum.net/ - they have an idea to do just that. As our computers get more and more powerful then there is no reason why we cant distribute more of what forces the internet to be centralised, if no one controls it then it can be free and open (which also raises a whole new set of problems but one step at a time!)

It would be really cool to see the rise of mesh networking from this + IOT.

I also like the idea of using IOTA for metering mesh networks.

Unless I'm misunderstanding it, the Substratum project you've linked is attempting to implement a decentralized WEB, not a decentralized INTERNET. From what I gather, Substratum would still be running on the same internet backbone, and be subject to the same consequences if Net Neutrality is repelled.

Hypothetically a project like substratum could include internet bandwidth itself as another resource which is rewarded with substratum.

the whole reason "net neutrality" is even a thing in the United States is because how one is able to access internet bandwidth. it's an duopoly at best and the majority have exactly ONE option for broadband internet access.

without an access network (be that copper, fiber, or radio) internet bandwidth can't be delivered. the choke point is the modem.

access networks are a natural monopoly and infrastructure to support an access network MUST be regulated like one in order for "market solutions" to prevail.

but ATT, it's descendants, and the CableCo's have spent tens of millions on lobbying efforts to make sure that never, ever happens.

I don't quite buy this suggestion. ISPs would easily be able to identify and block VPN traffic running over their lines. The best action here is to act while there is still time to change course.

Another pressure point besides contacting your gov representatives (or visiting their offices in person!) is to contact Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and let them know that you, your friends and family will cancel contracts and boycott their services if they continue to support Pai and his dangerous agenda.

What he is proposing would be like giving your telephone company discretionary control over which calls they let in or out and relegating the rest to busy signals.

> Another pressure point besides contacting your gov representatives (or visiting their offices in person!) is to contact Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and let them know that you, your friends and family will cancel contracts and boycott their services if they continue to support Pai and his dangerous agenda.

The rep on the line might not even know what you’d be going on about and would just cancel your line without relaying the message.

Then take it as an opportunity to patiently explain the issue to them. Perhaps they do not realize they are working for the Dark Side. And perhaps your explanation will enable them to understand similar calls from other customers.

the nihilism that's infected HN is so disheartening. we're so screwed if this is what the conversation looks like on a forum for technologist entrepreneurs. Everything from, "protests don't matter," to "eh, it's not my country."

This place used to be interesting. "Hacker" news, not really. "Grumpy programmers by trade" news fits better.

When is the last time a protest stopped determined politicians/policy makers? Maybe the 1970s? These days, protests are a dime a dozen, and are only convincing to the protestors and no one else.

Yes we should be looking for technical solutions even if they seemingly don’t exist. I know political solutions do ... but this is Hacker News.

There’s always a way.

How about a decentralized internet software that works on local wifi and mesh networking and only needs to send its signals to the cloud when absolutely necessary?

Watch this video to see what I mean:

https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/the-future-of-decent...

And this architecture:

https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0

https://substratum.net/ << these are doing exactly that

Shill much? There are tons of projects like this doing the same thing and you've already plugged this once.

I posted it here as an off the cuff remark then decided it deserved a full comment?

There's also Broadband-HamNet, which works within the existing regulatory framework (but requires you to have a ham license to fully utilize its potential).

All revolution aside...

I wonder if this might actually be the kick out of the nest for services like Starry need.

https://starry.com

Out helplessness on the choice side of internet service is almost entirely a function of paying to run wires under roads. Remove the wires and...

Has seemed liked a nice to have most days...but now... negates the need for physical infrastructure to develop a network. The market could actually work as intended.

I would love to create my own neighborhood wired network, but up front cost would be a problem, and I don't think my neighbors care that much.

Definitely true. Supposedly Motherboard will be publishing some guides on this, so I'll have to wait and see how helpful those are.

I keep seeing stuff about using VPNs, but that be throttled easily. Wireless is just a mess and just that much more insecure/unreliable.

When I was reading this, I was reminded of a company - Blockstream.

These guys are have a satellites which broadcasts bitcoin blockchain: https://blockstream.com/satellite/

I can be wrong but I wonder - what might be the impact of a non-neutral internet on cryptocurrencies?

Obviously any impact will depend on how much of bitcoin or any cryptocurrencies volumes are from US. I tried to look it up and found this page: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins

I have a proposition: You know how Tor works? Onion routing? Send traffic encrypted multiple times through a list of nodes before exiting at an edge?

What if everyone sent their traffic back and forth to eachother. One hop, encrypted, and then forwarded. Just like Tor, but a single hop. Not anonymized, just peer-to-peer distributed.

If everyone did that (build it into browsers) the internet would function _full-mesh_. I mean, that's how IP works, right? Full mesh, peer-to-peer?

Hey ISPs! Good luck filtering on the entire internet.

I guess they would put all P2P traffic on the low priority lane. Some part of the people would try the fast lane, because the slow one is too slow and they do not care enough about NN. In the end the P2P people would lose.

And that's precisely why Europe will be affected too. I'm thinking of distributed systems, like ipfs or tor, that would be impacted as a whole by slow p2p traffic.

Yep. It's a shame that everyone just wants to binge netflix and facebook. The _rest_ of the internet is inherently peer-to-peer.

I was just posting this.

Its also low latency routing as tor router routes only for directly connected nodes where as internet router routes for all nodes. After certain network size, internet router will become too inefficient.

It's really, really easy for ISPs to just start making peer-to-peer connections of any kind slower than molasses while making white listed IPs from people who've paid the "High Speed Lane" tax travel at normal speeds.

That kills your "Hey use a VPN/Tor/Other-Alternative-Routing-Mechanism" ideas dead.

If you could manage to tunnel traffic through [Huge Internet Company], like if they started offering a VPN service, then maybe... but there's not a lot of incentive for any of them to host such a service. It'd almost be cheaper for them to build their own, second Internet altogether at that point - something I'm sure Google is kicking themselves over on the Google Fiber scaleback.

On Last mile in copper or fiber networks becomes easily a market failure due to large capital cost.

In many European countries (Finland for example) the last mile is divided by law into two services cable providers and internet provider. It can be the same, but other ISP's can get into business by making deal with the customer and renting the network. There are regulations for the maximum price of the rent.

Israel implemented this long ago. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Israel

> Every ADSL or cable Internet user has to pay separately to the infrastructure provider and to the ISP, due to competition laws.

When I was there in 2007, I needed to struggle with getting PPTP and L2TP going on Linux. It was quite interesting! Now of course that's done by routers and you have wifi.

As much as I love the idea of locally building network infrastructure and making it a true commonly owned system... it doesn't work for rural areas. As soon as you hit the city limits, it's no longer the city's problem.

We gave hundreds of billions of dollars to AT&T/Verizon to build infrastructure for everyone, and they took that money and told their shareholders "look how well we scammed the US!"

What we should do is go back to those companies, tell them they've failed and owe us it back plus interest, and use that money at a federal level to build an internet backbone for every single US citizen, period - like the Federal Highway Administration, but for broadband.

But, alas, the GOP will start screaming "Socialism" and that will never happen...

The somewhat ironic thing is that this is literally the core reason for the ideology of government being more hands off. Bad behavior enables competition. Google Fiber is an interesting case study. There are indeed major barriers to entry to competition in telecoms, both financial and regulatory, yet Google managed to overcome them in a variety of areas. However, after 6 years in business they only managed to obtain 0.07 million television subscribers and 0.45 million broadband subscribers. They've put all expansion plans on hold and have been downsizing current operations.

The reasons for their failure are complex (for instance they discovered that in poorer regions, families were inexplicably not even willing to sign up for the free option - they responded with grants for digital literacy) but the fundamental problem is simply that they didn't get anywhere near the marketshare they expected. So thus in spite of what every inclining would lead us to believe, people didn't really feel incentivized enough to go through the hassle of moving away from Time Warner/Comcast.

The masses move like molasses. And people only really feel incentivized to change things when actions against them become particularly onerous. I think we should not really make this sort of 'onery' unlawful, but instead embrace the positive change such negative actions can foster. Make companies consider not only profit, but ethics and consequences of unethical activity. The recent events with EA are a similar example. There are no real regulations in video games and so you ended up with EA turning a major franchise title into a burdensome 'fee-to-pay' style game and it finally resulted in real action from the consumers. Now people want to try to get laws stopping companies from including loot crates. In other words stopping companies from engaging in behavior that actually gets the masses to do the one thing that gets actual change from companies - speak with their wallet.

Granted, this is uncomfortable given the monopolistic nature of Comcast/Time Warner. If no competition does emerge then instead you're getting screwed by the one and only real option you have for service. But as I think this article is showing, so long as companies know they can get the marketshare - options will emerge. The one major condition on all this is that companies must also be allowed to fail, regardless of any possible consequences. 'Too big to fail' means 'too big to ever be held accountable' which, in turn, means 'too big to exist.'

I've met some of these people and they were very inspiring to me. Detroit has become a leader in mesh networking they have helped setup mesh networks in the US and overseas.

If we want faster net connections that cost less they've shown us the path.

You can argue all this mess is about not enforcing trust laws in the first place

NN will always be under constant threat. My own country had it all enshrined in law only to be overruled by Brussels.

You're fighting against an entire industry who will stop at nothing to expand profits.

Brussel actually enforces nn.

The EU enforces a less strict interpretation of NN. The Netherlands stricter law was therefore overruled with a softer version.

This came to light when the ACM (The Dutch FCC if you will) fined T-Mobile for applying a zero rating on music streaming. T-Mobile argues in court they are allowed to do so by EU rule. The Judge agreed.

https://www.wirelessweek.com/news/2017/04/t-mobile-netherlan...

As far as I know country law can be more strict than EU law, is that not so? In that case, the stricter law could not have been overruled with EU laws.

"zero rating" is not conducive to neutral treatment of network traffic.

My ISP is a local mom-and-pop shop that is using fixed point wireless, which seems like a great solution because it doesn’t require digging up pavement, massively reducing startup costs.

This isn't a solution by any stretch but I am curious, what's the stop me using a VPN provider (or an EC2 tunnel, etc) and tunneling all my traffic to prevent slowdowns?

Yes, the ISP could throttle anything they don't recognize, but that seems incredibly risky, given that VPNs are used widely across enterprises in the US, and degrading people's work internet seems like a really terrible idea...

That could work on the "slow" option. The thing is that they will make money by forcing you to pay for what you want to see (not by forcing you to pay in their "everything" package).

Say you buy their "netflix" package. Then you won't even be able to turn on your VPN because you will only be allowed to watch netflix.

Now here is the deal: this kind of business model they are forcing does not work on the current switching model of the internet (but does on the phone/tv), because you can circumvent it down on the stack. Either by setting up a fake netflix server and/or forcing the routing table on your own machine, or some other kind of weird tunneling/workaround with packets to a supposed netflix server. Net neutrality is a hoax.

But doesn't the ISP know what the Netflix servers' IP addresses are? How could you fake a Netflix server?

During dotCom era there was a Internet2 project. I remember PR statements dubbing it as the "new internet", replacing an decades old network with new infrastructure and modern protocols. It seems Internet2 project is still around, but pivoted a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2

No, we shouldn’t save Net Neutrality. To save the internet, we must end it and realize it’s the best way to destroy the free and open internet.

Not wanting to tout my own horn but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15760556 I posted this exact thing as an answer to the developments yesterday.

You own internet will eventually be regulated if enough critical services creeps on it, the you could be back to square one

If we could easily build our own internet then there would be no need to regulate the internet at all.

guifi.net is already doing it in Catalonia and other parts of Europe:

https://guifi.net/en/node/2413/view/map

Isn't IPFS already there to fill that need?

https://ipfs.io/

You're getting the web confused with the net. Decentralizing the application layer is different from decentralizing the physical infrastructure, which is what is needed to maintain net neutrality.

Yep, I think that ipfs, being peer to peer, would be actually negatively affected by p2p traffic being in the slower lane. Globally.

Sneakernet

Rather than "build our own" we should take back what used to belongs to us in the first place.

They say there's a shortage of qualified I.T. people. If you work for telecoms who support a non-neutral internet, then quit. Go on strike. Work only for companies who support Net Neutrality.

Kill the enemy using free market capitalism.

> If you work for telecoms who support a non-neutral internet, then quit. Go on strike.

For shame Peter! That's class warfare.

> They say there's a shortage of qualified I.T. people.

Whoever told you that is lying to you.

> "take back what used to belongs to us in the first place"

Could you elaborate about how we used to be the owners of the ISPs?

Are you referring to the use of eminent domain laws to lay cable?

I think they mean the internet in general, built originally by the US government.

ARPANET infrastructure became redundant and obsolete after private entites made better and faster backbone links, and so was decommissioned in 1990.

> If you work for telecoms who support a non-neutral internet, then quit. Go on strike. Work only for companies who support Net Neutrality.

...you'll probably starve to death, though. Even with the immense shortage of technicians, there's also an immense shortage of ISPs that give a damn about Net Neutrality and are willing and/or able to give people jobs. We've foolishly allowed all of the ISPs to merge to the point that most areas are served by one or two ISPs total. And if you're lucky enough to be in a market with two ISPs, one of them is usually not classifiable as "broadband".

Your next best bet would to organize and implement a slowdown rather than quitting. At least then you're not going to starve waiting for something that will never happen... but then again given the state of customer service at most ISPs, it's also not likely to have any kind of noticeable impact - ISPs are already stupendously slow at completing tasks.

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