Tech luminaries call net neutrality vote an 'imminent threat'
theverge.com
theverge.com
The entire comment period was for show. Pai and his republican co-commissioners are going to jam this through regardless of what anyone says or does. He was brazen enough to admit, early on, that he does not care whether or not his plan is unpopular and that what the public thinks makes no difference whatsoever.
The only way to change this is to convince Congress that this is an election issue. Unfortunately there are too many other things happening right now, so net neutrality is being drowned in the noise and will likely continue to be drowned in the noise.
Two possible silver linings if it does get removed on the 14th:
1. We were wrong the whole time and reversing net neutrality launches us into a golden age of fast and cheap internet for all. (Very unlikely)
2. We were right, and reversing net neutrality is as bad as we feared. While it will be painful in the short term, hopefully it's bad enough to The Internet/Net Neutrality a relevant election issue for more people.
Either way, the sure silver lining is that by hashing this out now the consequences will be fully felt by the time the next presidential election rolls around.
Can you imagine if they were trying to shove this through in the lead up to the 2020 election when everyone is distracted by all the other issues at stake in the election?
Well, here's my bet on what will happen:
3. There will be no immediate catastrophic consequences. Over time, the Internet will become less amenable to innovation and small players and will just overall be worse than it would otherwise. But there will be no sudden dramatic change that will spur action for people who weren't already concerned.
Among other things this is an issue of competitiveness for the United States.
Eventually some country or federation of countries will recognize the opportunity to grab some of the market once America becomes less startup-friendly. It may even happen in the developing world somewhere, in countries that are being mostly ignored today, taking the rest of the world by surprise.
For example excluding affiliated sites from any caps (let's stream 4k movies from Hulu, RedBox etc even if you have lower bandwidth than necessary, you would be excluded for these services) or have data caps not apply for affiliated sites.
For an extra fee you could also get similar treatment for non-affiliated sites (Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Video etc).
In the mean time everything else will gradually is getting slower and slower. Tough luck for any new startup trying to enter the market. As it already is difficult right now, it will be nearly impossible after that.
The absolutely bad things (throttling/blocking/modifying content of sites the companies don't agree with) will happen much much later.
Like how cell phones are "free" so it's impossible to buy one without a contract.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/verizon-kills-two-ye...
For example, will people notice the lack of a really great Netflix competitor that would have gotten off the ground? What about the new best search engine to topple Google Search that died out of the gates?
I disagree. Pai and his GOP sponsors are making enemies of people who buy bandwidth by the terabyte-second. That's much worse than making enemies with people who buy ink by the barrel, as the old saying went.
Any negative consequences to this decision, real or imagined, absolutely will come back to haunt the Republicans.
That's why I don't understand why they're doing this. They are pissing off millions of people who wouldn't otherwise bother to vote against them.
Imagine a world where more people think twice before inserting tracking and adware junk into their websites!
Edit: typo
I'm not versed in the APA at all so I might be remembering the article wrong but it seemed reasonable.
Most relevant section:
>So drastic is the reversal of policy (if, as expected, the commission approves Mr. Pai’s proposal next month), and so weak is the evidence to support the change, that it seems destined to be struck down in court.
> The problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a good reason, such as a change in factual circumstances. A mere change in F.C.C. ideology isn’t enough. As the Supreme Court has said, a federal agency must “examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action.” Given that net neutrality rules have been a huge success by most measures, the justification for killing them would have to be very strong.
However, a legal challenge will likely take a while to wend it's way to the Supreme Court.
The issue is for companies that will try to exists after that and would offer better service than Netflix. They won't succeed because: "well, the service might be cheaper and offer more shows, but it is dogshit slow and unusable/goes against my datacap so why should I use it?"
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/12/h...
Senate confirmation is a political vote, one of “advice and consent”. There are no rules. Justice Thomas was not held to a “reasoned interpretation of the law” standard. Judge Garland was not rejected on a “reasoned interpretation of the law” standard. If a political hack like Talley can’t muster 51 votes in a Republican Senate, you should wonder about him.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/12/politics/trump-judicial-picks/...
The other nominee, Jeff Mateer, is an obscene choice by either incompetents or malicious people. Mateer has said transgender children are part of "Satan's plan." This psychotic religious nonsense injected into government should not be socially acceptable behavior in a thinking society. Someone should be fired.
But because Trump claims he hires all of the best people, we have to take the selection seriously as intentional. And since the buck stops with the president, you have to accept that he's the one whose incompetent if he isn't neither hiring good people, nor firing them when they fail this spectacularly.
They aren't even trying to make sensible, plausible justifications. For example, see paragraph 252, where they discuss paid prioritization.
They say ISPs need it because ISPs may not be able to figure out how to do usage based billing of their customers, so they need to be able to make sites like Netflix pay instead.
Looks like it. It's pretty surprising how ambivalent the guy is to public pressure.
Also, we really need to look into how government and regulation works in this country. What's the point of having a regulatory system for industries if the officials of companies in these industry lead the governmental/regulatory agencies?
If former goldman sachs officials run financial agencies and if a former verizon official runs the FCC, what's the point of these agencies?
Remember that Wheeler was a former cable industry lobbyist. Unlike Pai, he actually listened to non-industry voices during his proceeding and created rules based on inputs from many different sources. He did not give net neutrality advocates everything we wanted, but he did listen and did create something much better than what the industry has been demanding.
Not necessarily. An obvious conflict of interest would be someone who has a significant financial stake in the industry, or someone who is married to a CEO in that industry, etc.
Also consider this: who is actually qualified to regulate an industry? It is often the case that the only qualified candidates are people who have worked in the industry or who have worked against it (which is just as much of a conflict of interest). Someone who is clueless could be worse: they could be more susceptible to lobbying pressure, since they have no prior knowledge of the issues they are dealing with.
In theory the job of the Senate should be to determine whether or not a candidate will be able to serve the public instead of their former industry bosses. Such people definitely exist -- Tom Wheeler is a prominent example. We also have an impeachment procedure to deal with the possibility of failure i.e. the possibility of the Senate confirming a regulator who fails to serve the public; by now there is ample evidence that confirming Pai was a mistake, but with today's hyper-partisan Congress there is not much hope for impeachment.
Off the top of my head, economists and lawyers?
I don't think you need first-hand experience in an industry to regulate it. We need experts in regulation that can take input from industry and consider the public perspective.
I'm not convinced it's possible to have a career in a field and not have your opinion tainted by that experience. This is why neither industry insiders or opponents should be responsible for regulation.
Sure. In the abstract. But in practicality, it doesn't pass the smell test. Just like if I committed a crime and my mother was judge of the case, there isn't anything specifically wrong with it. But there are potential issues of conflict of interest and she should probably recuse herself from the case.
> in fact, good regulation should include the input of the regulated industries (failure to do so was a causative factor in the bankruptcy of railroads in the 60s and 70s).
Of course regulatory agencies need input from the industry. But there is a difference between providing input and leading the agency. I'm all for input. I'm not too keen on former Directors, CEOs, etc of banks, ISPs, etc leading agencies that regulate those companies. Especially when we have people going back and forth between regulatory agencies and companies.
If you have an ex-Verizon person they shouldn’t have any loyalty to the company. If they do, then there would be a conflict of interest.
Yes, and people should be good at all times and not lie.
For most industries, the only people who are interested enough to become legal/policy nerds are either people who work in the industry in legal/policy executive positions, or a small number of academics who specialize in those industries. The academics are usually a little too theoretical to deal with actually running an agency, and so that pretty much just leaves people from the industry.
It actually could be expected. He is not an elected official, so he can easily do the bidding of corporate masters, instead of serving the public, especially if he feels that legislative power is too dysfunctional to do anything about it. It can happen even with elected officials, even more so with appointed ones.
But Pai has tens of millions of people vehemently opposing him. He is probably recieving jeers and hate mail and rude gestures every time he goes out in public. And people have even started harassing his family - at what point does the money cease to be worth it? Most people would have given up under a hundredth of that backlash.
Pai digs in and fights back against racist death threats? Good for him. Shame on anyone expecting him to back down in the face of that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2QorHUU-Kg
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>You can't say "One thing that should remain Sacred is family, wife, and kids"... when there are families who make a living by working online. If this goes through MILLIONS of people will be fucked... I can assure you .. If this falls through, go into witness protection or some shit because you are gonna get killed. Period. 384 upvotes
>This twatwaffle needs to be burned at the stake. 301 upvotes
These are people promoting Net Neutrality. I don't support that. It is disgusting.
strawman: misrepresenting argument to make it easier to attack
ad hominem: attacking your opponent's character or personal traits instead of engaging with their argument
appeal to emotion: manipulating an emotional response in place of a valid or competing argument
texas sharpshooter: cherry-picking data clusters to suit an argument, or finding a pattern to fit a presumption
But you implied that don't support NN itself, not disgusting comments. So do you support monopolists?
If this guy is going to play dirty then I don't see why others shouldn't fight back.
This was all Ajit's fault, but he's been sacked from public office, rejoice!
Reminds me a story, where there was an official who had an arrangement to receive a payment for every day in prison (if he ever ended up there as a scapegoat for actual criminal overlords, whose crimes he was covering up).
If Verizon is bribing him, they certainly wouldn’t need a former employee to do so. They can just invest in PACs or lobbyists, or even straight up bribe any elected official.
Not necessarily direct employ, but serving their interest. They wouldn't be so stupid as to publicly employ him.
> they certainly wouldn’t need a former employee to do so
It was the path of least resistance for them. He was already in the FCC, and he was always backing the interests of ISP incumbents against the public, if you paid attention.
ethics have gone out the window for this presidency, shouldn't doesn't matter anymore
Here's what I don't understand, maybe someone has some insights.
Demographics is not on the side of the Republicans. It hasn't been for a long time, and the imbalance is getting worse, not only because of immigration but because the Republicans depend on older white voters. That cohort isn't growing at the rate it needs to, if the Republicans are to continue to win elections at either the local or national level. If they aren't careful, many of the gerrymandered districts they've constructed so carefully will turn into electoral deathtraps.
So, given that they must expand their appeal to younger, more diverse voters, why are they choosing this hill to die on? Internet regulation is one of the vanishingly-few issues that actually gets young people involved in the political system. It gets them to sign petitions, call their representatives, and -- who knows? -- maybe even vote.
If and when the ISPs follow through on their newly-granted powers to balkanize and channelize the Web, the outrage will be seismic. Young people and old people alike will remember who made it happen, and will respond accordingly. Every race, every gender, every faith, and almost every individual has a stake in this issue. The rest of the Republican agenda will be imperiled by the resulting groundswell, as people who wouldn't otherwise have bothered to vote do so.
In American politics, you can collude with foreign and domestic enemies to install raving demagogues, you can raise peoples' taxes, you can even start wars, but you do not mess with the Internet. The SOPA/PIPA fiasco should have made that clear enough. What exactly is the GOP expecting to happen here?
They gave up trying to appeal to more diverse voters long ago and are becoming increasingly desperate. So desperate that in the last election they took hacking assistance from a foreign adversary.
> why are they choosing this hill to die on?
They're not. Almost no one outside of our bubble will think about this when they go to vote.
On the other hand, this move may be expected to result in substantial campaign contributions from those who stand to benefit.
It seems hypocritical for them to take a pro-net neutrality stance when they're funding the capture of entry-level mobile data plans.
Both producers and consumers have already been conditioned to accept this new model.
https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/
> Allow me to state this point plainly: I am absolutely in favor of net neutrality... The question at hand, though, is what is the best way to achieve net neutrality?
> Any regulatory decision — indeed, any decision period — is about tradeoffs. To choose one course of action is to gain certain benefits and incur certain costs... equally difficult to measure is the inevitable rent-seeking that accompanies regulation, as incumbents find it easier to lobby regulators to foreclose competition instead of winning customers in an open market.
> A classic example of this phenomenon is restaurants: who could possibly be against food safety? Then you read about how San Francisco requires 14 permits that take 9 months to issue... and you wonder why anyone opens a restaurant at all.
> This argument certainly applies to net neutrality in a far more profound way: the Internet has been the single most important driver of not just economic growth but overall consumer welfare for the last two decades. Given that all of that dynamism has been achieved with minimal regulatory oversight, the default position of anyone concerned about future growth should be maintaining a light touch. After all, regulation always has a cost far greater than what we can see at the moment it is enacted, and given the importance of the Internet, those costs are massively more consequential than restaurants or just about anything else.
In other words, the whole history of "the single most important driver of not just economic growth but overall consumer welfare" has occurred under defacto network neutrality.
I fear there are a lot of people out there who don't understand the distinction and are confused when they hear that NN is both the status-quo and that NN is new regulation.
While Title II classification may have some burden, there are no viable alternatives for preserving net neutrality. Ajit Pai isn't interested in making net neutrality better or in making the telecom market more competitive. Further, it's possible to streamline Title II compliance for small ISPs.
> In 2008, the FCC ordered Comcast to stop slowing BitTorrent traffic on its network. Thompson argues that the Comcast case is insignificant because Comcast had stopped throttling BitTorrent by the time the FCC issued its order. But the real importance of the case was a federal-court ruling that the FCC didn’t have authority to regulate Comcast’s internet service, in part because it wasn't a Title II service.
So if the FCC didn't have authority to prevent Comcast from throttling Bittorrent in 2008, why didn't they start throttling it as soon as that verdict came in? Title II didn't arrive until 2015, many years after it was decided that Comcast could indeed throttle Bittorrent if they wanted.
2008: FCC issues Comcast order citing ancillary jurisdiction under the Communications Act of 1934.
2010: Comcast v. FCC strikes down only that justification.
2010: FCC issues a new Open Internet Order primarily based on section 706 authority. See pages 62-150 of https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-201A1.p...
2014: Verizon v. FCC strikes down the Open Internet Order because FCC didn't classify ISPs under Title II.
2015: FCC classifies ISPs under Title II. Tom Wheeler comments that "this is no more a plan to regulate the Internet than the First Amendment is a plan to regulate free speech. They both stand for the same concept."
1) by taking certain options off the table (e.g. metered pricing), you are removing the ability of new entrants or other challengers to come compete with a new pricing model (as T-Mobile did in the case he highlights in the article), and
2) the stakes are really high; if the regulations are even slightly negative, multiplied across the entire digital economy of the world, getting this wrong could have a major impact.
> ISPs have to do exactly what they've been doing for decades - nothing. Just leave packets alone and pass them along.
Well, do nothing except for invest billions of dollars in building out new and faster networks to keep up with ever-increasing customer demand for data.
13 of those 14 permits are not for food safety, but that doesn't stop op-eds from being deliberately dishonest about it.
Most of those regulations have been written in blood - but surely we'll all be better off if we just bulldoze Chesterton's fence!
I think you need to do a lot more work than you have to prove that someone is being deliberately dishonest; otherwise you're just lobbing slander around.
And shouldn't you be listening when the people who have made internet possible today (Tim Berners-Lee, Steven Bellovin, Steve Wozniak and Brewster Kahle to name a few) is very much against it?
The vote, the process and the resulting decision otherwise should be done in an objective and transparent manner. Just the way that the internet has been envisioned to be.
Well, technically it wasn't a majority, but it was a majority of the people who's votes count the most.
Now, if the standard were “no” instead of “less”, the answer would be very different.
I doubt they learned anything at all from their failure to get Clinton elected, though. I don't know that Sanders could have won the general election, but arguably the DNC's sabotage of the Sanders campaign and their subsequent failure to win the general election (with probably Russian interference) has and will continue to cost us dearly, now that we have lost much good faith in our international relations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-b...
http://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wass...
Because of crony politics.
The controversy of executive appointments across 2017 was... Somewhat unprecedented.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority .
/s
It's exactly analogous to the RIAA squeezing music startups dry: You absolutely have to pay them so why would they demand anything less than everything you make?
So why should ISPs demand anything less than everything the internet companies make?
Comcast/Verizon/etc don't want to pick a fight with Google or Facebook. They want to pick fights they can easily win and gain extra money from: companies too small to pose a threat.
As the internet kept growing for the last 20 years, "global bandwidth" have increased by a lot because of services like youtube, netflix. The democratization of smartphones multiplied this effect: people listens to music using streaming, and you could say it doubled the amount of connected devices (not to mention smartphones update apps quite often).
I'm not against net neutrality, but the internet is still a very centralized platform, and it's not surprising that very popular services can become problematic for ISPs.
If you look at bandwidth, the largest actors are using a disproportionately larger share of it compared to smaller actors.
I just want to ask, is there some accounting of how those big actors contribute to the internet infrastructure, or how much they pay for its access considering the bandwidth usage?
I know that monopolies are bad, but I'm really curious about the business of internet infrastructure and how things works.
Netflix, for example, pays for Netflix's internet connection according to their usage at their endpoint[1]. The consumers cumulatively pay for the same amount of usage; it's just spread across a large number of endpoints. Netflix's ISP and the consumers' ISPs pay for the infrastucture to connect the two together, and set their end user rates accordingly. Nobody in this chain of connections is getting a free ride.
Is this deliberate misdirection from the ISPs? Do I have some fundamental misunderstanding? Is it more nuanced than this?
[1] ignoring CDNs etc. for the sake of simplyfing the argument
Mozilla promotes Google over Yahoo and switches user search preferences back to Google. Net Neutral.
Google blocks YouTube access from Amazon's streaming devices. Net Neutral.
Netflix throttles AT&T and Verizon customers. Net Neutral.
You know why I don't care if Pai "repeals" NN?
Netflix throttles AT&T and Verizon customers. Net Neutral.
They've limited the bitrate/quality for the benefit of the consumer, since those ISPs have low monthly bandwidth limits. This allows them to watch more video before they hit their bandwidth limits, something most would probably find to be a desirable tradeoff.
That's the point. When you put up a law that says "Cable Co can't do this, but Internet Co can" it offends my sense of fairness.
Google locks you out of all your email and everything google-related because you used a name they thought was fake. Net neutral.
Facebook blocks you and flags your posts for speaking your mind. Net neutral.
Apple deletes apps that compete with them from the app store. Net neutral.
Reddit has banned me from /r/india, so I cannot post in the one sub that's in any way relevant to Indians. Net neutral.
I understand completely why you don't care about the "repeal".
Paid prioritization is that threat.
Again, streaming video content for all ages is not more important than online courses.
Allowing carriers to discriminate against content providers seems like legalizing extortion.
Is there an argument in favor of this change that would convince a reasonable person?
If tech companies and luminaries genuinely considered the loss of net neutrality as an existential threat, wouldn't they be hiring every lobbyist under the sun to fight for it?
Zuckerberg needs to forget about profits for a moment, and put a 5-minute blackout page instead of people's feed. And phone number Geolocated to their representative.
I guarantee this will change the winds of internet history!
They want to lock low income people into the Facebook bubble.
I believe they want NN to be gone only in places where they can be their own ISP (as they try in Africa and India with internet.org). In US they already have the market in their hands and NN actually gives them certain protection so Verizon can't make their version of facebook and price them out of the market.
US without NN could be much more expensive for Facebook. And as much as i hate Facebook this is the reason for NN. I can't understand why would anyone think that Internet is not utility like electricity and water. It is crazy how can get people confused and some people even here on HN are against NN.
"Free Basics" was the name of the program, and it only allowed access to Facebook and whatever sites whichever sites Facebook (in all its infinite wisdom) decided were appropriate for the users to visit. The program was eventually found to be in violation of India's neutrality rules and was shut down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics#Net_neutrality_cri...
See the comments and tell me if I missed any.
So yeah, you did miss something, and comments on The Verge are basically just noise.
To my mind, T-Mobile's BingeOn (and rate limiting for subscribers who don't have the ONE Plus add-on) is closer to a violation than simply paying for Netflix subscriptions.
* Not that you used this word, but I'm on a mission: I intentionally write "customer" instead of "consumer." We are not consumers; we are customers paying money for a service.
Binge On is the exact definition of a net neutrality violation, but since it's not available "a la carte" as an "add-on", nobody's really talking about it. Free things pass under the radar.
Zero rating by T-Mobile hasn't been blocked by the FCC's existing rules which is one of the reason's I'm in support of the repeal: The orders being repealed aren't even protecting our net neutrality successfully.
BingeOn initially had opposition, until T-Mobile gave customers option to disable it, and also opened it up so anyone who satisfied requirements (in particular had streaming that quality adapted to the bandwidth) could join for free.
Honestly I would support FCC stepping in and said that this can't be done even though I'm T-Mobile customer.
This isn't a "perfect is the enemy of good", this is "I can't really find an upside to what everyone is advocating for".
And Binge On being disablable doesn't solve the primary issue with zero rating: It provides consumers and incentive to stick with the big companies over the new guys, who probably can't necessarily cut a deal with T-Mo. It creates a strange gate for newcomers to get through, even if they do allegedly "allow anyone to join". (Because it isn't just a checkbox, T-Mo throttles Binge On content, effectively.)
It is a layering violation, since the network is dictating application requirements (the video streaming technology must be "T-Mobile friendly" to benefit from the zero-rating).
It fails when users use VPNs, because the network cannot inspect packets or determine which service is used. Likewise with proxy servers, Tor, etc.
It is not applied equally to all streaming services; T-Mobile maintains a list of registered services that is not even remotely comprehensive.
So yes, this is a net neutrality violation, even if it is not the sort of behavior prohibited by the 2015 rules.
It's equivalent of replacing blacklisting with whitelisting. In the end you can achieve the same thing what NN supposed to block, so allowing it creates a loophole (e.g. start provide only plans with ridiculously small data caps, and do zero rating on affiliates)
However, the prior action, an opt-out scheme to limit bandwidth of streaming video in exchange for zero-rating certain approved streaming providers was vigorously opposed here on HN.
After that T-Mobile added option to easily disable it. I still think FCC should step in and not allow that because it is treating selected traffic differently.
Edit: I thought you were talking about Binge On, which probably supported your point better. Anyway in this case they are just including extra service membership in the plan what that has to do with NN?