Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

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Well, when relatively few people in favor of NN are in favor of regulating content (under the shield of "they're private businesses, they can censor what they want!"), it's hard to criticize McArdle for taking the side of the free market with ISPs as well.

I largely believe the problem isn't ISPs anymore, it's content-providers. Content is getting increasingly centralized by so-called "content providers" instead of ISPs. People's experience of online censorship is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater when it comes to the increasingly restrictive rules of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Pinterest/YouTube/etc.* (all in the name of being advertiser friendly). My one and only experience with ISPs censoring content was a long time ago when my torrents were throttled. I've never had the ISPs (short of government intervention) block a tweet, a status update, a video, or an online service since then. So when people's experience of online censorship is with content providers, not ISPs, how can we expect to sell the public on Net Neutrality when it doesn't touch the largest experiential part of online censorship? There's an elephant in the room and we're screaming about the mouse in the corner.

*EDIT: Let's not forgot the app stores which give two companies the power to essentially erase you from mobile devices if they decide to.

Personally speaking--ISPs, content providers, backbones, etc--regulate them all!

We can have "optimized", where we economy-of-scale everything into a few (or one) efficiently centralized provider(s) that can quickly make whatever micro-decisions they deem best in an opaque and unaccountable manner, or we can have "accountable" where everything has to grind through disclosure and review and due process and liability--like almost every other field of engineering and business.

A big part of why the big 4 have revenues on par with small countries is that we just let them do whatever the hell they feel like.

Yes censorship by content providers is a (relatively small while Tor exists) problem, and it happens currently in real life. Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility. Because something is not currently happening does not mean we should not be concerned about it, rather, the opposite.

> Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility.

They're both devastating and difficult to circumvent, are they not? I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage. I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever. No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC. So if Gab is limited to technically savvy people, do VPNs really require much more savvy? Basically my point is that the results of the censorship seem to be roughly equivalent, which is a de-platforming of an online voice.

> I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage.

You mean "while net neutrality is the law", right? Because that's exactly what you will lose if net neutrality is no longer required.

Don't condescend. My prediction for the odds of Netflix or other major site getting blocked by a major ISP still hovers at roughly 0% with the new FCC ruling. Even without Title II classification, there are other ways for the government to intervene in anti-competitive behavior (and indeed, they have). EDIT: It's worth pointing out that ISPs in general have shown much better behavior w/r/t censorship than content providers.

I didn't make a statement either way about likelihood of it happening, I replied to your naive hope that the FCC would still jump in and stop Comcast from doing so after net neutrality rules are abandoned. If you think that this would still be illegal, please do explain which laws and regulatory bodies would be involved and how it would be enforced. Also, it is not at all worth noting that a group who are legally barred from a behavior engage in it less than a group that is not legally barred. Why on earth would it be?

>Even without Title II classification, there are other ways for the government to intervene in anti-competitive behavior (and indeed, they have).

You don't actually believe this will happen or can be relied upon do you? There are ways for them to do it but we are at the mercy of whoever is in charge of the executive that particular year. This administration will never step in. Maybe if we get a new administration and never have a Republican in office again and the Democrats completely restructure their priorities and come out in favor of trust busting in contrast to their decades of moving right and doing favors for corporate power this is a feasible assumption.

Also, maybe ISPs will just choose to leave money on the table after they gut NN and do nothing because they really care about having a free and open Internet /s

>I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order,

What? What has possibly ever lead you to believe this? The FCC is doing everything in its power against massive popular demand to ensure that Comcast can do exactly this even though everyone is screaming about hating it. Perhaps Netflix would accept paying massive bribes to prevent this from happening, but the current FCC will never step in.

>I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever.

I agree with you here, the monopoly and walled-garden system we use for phones is very bad. Users should have ultimate control over their own machines. And this should perhaps be mandated by law, i.e. mandatory jailbreak switch.

>No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC.

There is no consumer outrage because nobody cares about Gab, it is a niche service for extremist conservatives who were kicked out of other platforms for doxxing, horrifying racism and advocating and organizing violence and genocide. The twelve people who would use it connect through Tor to the daily stormer and are just fine.

If you can't download the Gab app, you can still connect through the web to the service. Iphones don't ban visiting certain websites. Your problem is that Apple controls what you can install on your phone, because the Apple ecosystem is closed and censored, but the web is open. But not for long. If your ISP blocks your connections to the Gab servers, it doesn't even matter what you can put on your phone.

It seems to me you want NN and also something stronger than that, which I'm completely on board with.

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