Vice News FCC Net Neutrality Vote Live Stream | Hacker News Reader

Vice News FCC Net Neutrality Vote Live Stream

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73 pointsmattl59 comments

Ongoing discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15924794.

"The internet is the greatest free market innovation in history." - Ajit Pai

Someone needs a history lesson. I'm sorry, America, some of the talking points of the commissioners in support of repeal are maddening.

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At this time last year the CRTC made broadband internet access a basic service in Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/crtc-internet-essential-serv...

edited a word for accuracy. Also:

>> 'Until now, local landline telephone service was the only service deemed "basic" or essential by the CRTC, although Blais has previously called internet service "vital" and essential to life and success.' (referring to CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais)

I'm ready for the ignorance of Americans on the internet to get a wake up call. It will be painful and difficult but a decision to revoke NN will force people to become familiar with meshnets/decentralization/encryption if they want any sort of freedom.

However, most will just accept the cattle feed and roam the fenced pasture.

Moo.

There will be no wake up call because nothing is really going to change for the end user. All of this slippery slope nonsense about a walled off internet is just hysteria stoked by social media.

That's not the only effect the de-regulation can have.

See Comcast/BitTorrent: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/22/16691794/net-neutrality-...

See, Indosat in Indonesia: https://imgur.com/gallery/nKZ2yeq

Better yet, MIT does a better job explaining:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609594/the-demise-of-net-...

Comcast could also just throw a 10 gig cap on your line regardless of whether net neutrality. It is not in Comcast's interest to cripple your internet usage as they'll just bleed customers to the wireless providers (who don't fall under net neutrality to begin with anyway).

I see the logic a bit with MIT's article, but at the same time most smaller startups are probably just piggy backing off of AWS anyway. Harvard business review has a good write-up here if you don't want a hyper-politicized Chicken Little take on it. https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-tangled-web-of-net-neutrality-an...

Wireless. Interesting observation. I have often considered trying to startup a wireless isp or wireless mesh network to provide fast net for cheap. But the wireless tech has never scaled well and the speeds have never kept pace with wired.

Even the latest MM wave hardware rolling out would be ok for now but tomorrow? Who knows how much of an upgrade path you will have in terms of speed and capacity.

Wireless doesn’t need to be gigabit to the home. 200mb/s would do a few streams of 4K and then handle most of everything else you need. Throw in caching and I don’t think you would need to offer gigabit speeds. If you did you couldn’t support many folks per station.

I wish wireless was a silver bullet but it’s shaky at best imo.

It’s clearly the ONLY option for breaking the back of the incumbents. Especially if you only rely on private building access and bypass street lights and utility poles.

Thoughts?

Maybe Wireless could be a solution, but maybe if one group leads the way, others may follow. The events that brought on the regulation were small, and increasing in influence and frequency.

I don't follow the "Chicken Little" take. I see it more as a downward slope. It will be introduced as a benefit at first—and whatever allows these kinds of companies a significant increase in margin, they will ultimately pursue. If there's something to be counted on in the whole mess it's greed (and, in turn, stock performance). In this way, corporate bodies have one permissible direction.

The wireless situation here in Canada would be more dire, as the same companies operating cable/sat television packages, internet, and wireless tend to be one of 4 conglomerates who own and operate a few subsidiaries. Outside of a small number of independents, we would ultimately be stuck. Considering those same conglomerates own most of the infrastructure, we might be stuck regardless who operates our consumer-level services. (edit) Should something like this occur in Canada.

Thank you for illustrating my metaphor

"It's time to return control of the internet to the engineers" (not precise quote).

Like the engineers that created the internet who are protesting this vote?

His entire speech was full of whataboutisms (What about Google, Facebook, et. al censoring content), cherry picked comments and total ignorance of how competition doesn't actually exist in the consumer ISP business.

You think he wouldn't stoop to lying about engineers being anti-NN?

The one thing that gives me hope is the fact that e.g. Washington state is planning on defending it on the state level https://www.geekwire.com/2017/washington-state-leaders-annou...

Net Neutrality has been killed in a 3-2 vote.

Why does he think all this is so funny!? Ugh!!!

Because he doesn't have a principled belief in his stance; he just jumps when the money says to.

It would be funny for him, since he and his friends will all profit from this heavily.

He's essentially laughing all the way to the bank.

The amount this video is cutting out is making me feel how Net Neutrality will feel.

The original stream is here,

https://www.fcc.gov/general/live

I'm glad that this was decided by people who couldn't even figure out how to stream mono audio.

This vote was made on November 8 2016.

Clinton was in favor of maintaining NN whereas Trump said that NN was burdensome regulations that need to be scrapped.

Trump won.

as a card carrying libertarian johnson voter, trump was right.

You can't undo net neutrality without putting in place some serious and real competition though, otherwise it's not going to work. Most people have only 1 or maybe 2 broadband providers available.

Agreed. It’s mostly one land based provider and maybe a satellite option.

You know I would almost be willing to consider scrapping NN if they also had the power to overturn and throw out ALL incumbent laws preventing competition from accessing right of ways, street and utility poles and making it so easy to bury cable you could do it in your sleep at state/city/local levels.

> overturn and throw out ALL incumbent laws preventing competition from accessing right of ways, street and utility poles and making it so easy to bury cable you could do it in your sleep at state/city/local levels.

Let's not forget all the laws requiring fledgling ISPs to build out to entire cities, instead of focusing on areas where they might be able to quickly start turning a profit. Even if you have net neutrality, these laws are still preventing you from getting faster and better options for internet.

Agreed. The regulations we both mentioned have killed any competition in providing, let’s just call internet connection providers what they are, dumb pipes. That’s what they all boil down to. Just dumb pipes to give you access to a network.

And in that context the more providers of dumb pipes we have the better. It’s just a race to the bottom then. Who offers the lowest latency, highest speed and capacity pipe for the cheapest price.

the problem is politicians (mostly local) who sell municipal monopolies in exchange for donations at a time when other parts of the world allow multiple companies to build/lease the dumb pipes to great success (like South Korea). its pure corruption. thats why places like florida (the sunshine state) don't use solar. Government backed monopolies.

we should be investigating these corrupt arrangements (given that the existence of obviously better options suggests fraud and abuse) and forcing the government to undo its shitty decisions. (buy back/sell if necessary) the opposite would be to submit the internet to regulatory capture under NN and the FCC (which effectively killed TV and radio - forcing private cable and streaming content creators to give us the few uncensored options we DO have)

well... I've never been in USA but you must have really great streets. but a lot of streets are already painful to use. and if every internet company could dig holes and put their cabeles in, it would probably be even worse. I mean in germany it's common that the street gets opened 3-4 times. 1. to repair/create it 2. to repair/add everything to do with water 3. to repair/add electricity 4. to repair/add networking/telecom

why? because most often they unify themself, because everybody said that they should pay less, because they do not do much... It happens way too often here. I'm just 27 years old and I already seen it many times a year. this year was especially painful. I've seen streets completly remade - and then after finishing it they opened it again and again 1 month past finish

yes it might probably help the competition. but it could make other things worse. I think land-lines, water, electricity should be in the hands of govt. or some kind of foundatition that manages these things in a escrow fashion and everybody could get a piece if he pays x % for x% of usage.

I totally expect that the next administration will create new regulations. Then the next administration will remove them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Could we create a self-regulating internet? One where the desired outcome of Net Neutrality is ensured by the protocol itself? What would it take?

I know there are projects like IPFS and Zeronet, but I don't think any of them are targeted specifically at avoiding throttling based on source/destination pair.

because no one wants that. the overhead of those guarantees makes no sense given the diversity of protocols the "internet" is meant to create. people would just use faster protocols for their intended purposes. the beauty is that the degree of Net Neutrality that we do have was created with minimal regulation before 2015. Risking further regulatory capture now, given the issues with local isp monopolies, makes no sense.

So if ISPs are using deep packet inspection to figure out what you are doing to apply some prioritization to your traffic, then using a VPN is a way of hiding that from them. All they would see is a stream of random data flying by. The pessimist in me says they would probably start slowing all encrypted traffic and sell their own VPN service.

Sure you can - if the intent is to destroy the free Internet that exists now.

Follow the money.

When did libertarians became a synonym for monopoly proponents?

The very moment neo-feudalists appropriated the label "libertarian" from the left-anarchists.

I think a lot of self proclaimed "libertarians" have no idea what the term means. Mr. Money Moustache recently had a quote about Uber that made me laugh, regarding the unfair information and pay disparity the drivers exist under: "This was a disappointment to the Economic Libertarian in me, because it seems obvious that an open market between buyer and seller is the key to more efficiency."

Why would that be a disappointment? Uber is the entity with economic power in the relationship, and they are therefore acting in a way that maximizes their own self interest to the detriment of others. He should be rejoicing about that triumph of the free market.

It's funny how individuals who are used to being the ones on top (he's a former engineer) love the free for all Randian idea of unregulated capitalism up until they get the tiniest taste of being on the losing side (he tried driving for Uber and was being paid so little that he was losing money on some fares with no recourse but to stop driving entirely).

when did the FCC fix monopolies in TV or Radio? Never. When did they censor them? Every time.

FCC can't fix monopolies. But what they can do is prevent monopolistic abuse and encourage competition by removing anti-competitive garbage like state laws that ban municipal networks.

Net neutrality was helping to curb monopolistic abuse. Current FCC basically made the market worse by giving monopolists free reign to do their evil stuff unchecked.

This presumes that must votes were cast with net neutrality in mind.

It's difficult to argue that any aspect of Trump's agenda received a popular mandate, as he lost the popular vote by millions, but it seems an especially big stretch to claim he has a mandate to gut net neutrality protections when it wasn't a centerpiece of his campaign. (I don't recall him mentioning it a single time.)

Elections matter, I guess. The view that "they're all the same" is even more maddening these days. 'crankylinuxuser' is essentially correct.

I wish I wasn't correct.

Early on, in some twisted way, I was hoping that Trump was going to be immune to money effects. I didn't particularly care for Clinton. I was hoping Trump would start telling companies to "Fuck off" - you can't pay off a billionaire...

The opposite happened. Someone who has love of money only further seeks love of money. I completely expect that monied interests will further their agenda. I think it's pretty clear where that leads.

As for us, I'm looking at technologies to mitigate that. IPFS works well, as long as you can populate the cache and not delete it. Tor is a good way to anonymize and privatize content the monied interests don't like (or will soon discriminate against).

I also live in a trailer park. We have the density. It's certainly doable to create a small network between all of us, combined with something like Freifunk for automatic handling of routing.

Now we see how meaningless the concept of a mandate is.

That's not at all how representative democracy works, and I suspect you know that. It's possible for a president to disagree with the regulatory decisions of a federal agency, because the agencies work for us, not the president.

While you're right in theory, in practice, the OP is right. Pai is chair because Trump was elected, the balance of the FCC board was skewed because of this as well, and so the only thing between us and a non-neutral internet is now gone.

In an ideal world, we would pass a law demanding ISPs provide neutral service. However, this is far from an ideal world, and that will never happen.

FCC commission appointments have nothing to do with representative democracy, they're the domain of the president.

And the idea that anyone in government represents the people is naive. The US isn't a democracy, it's demonstrably an oligarchy: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

Would you kindly point out where we elect the representatives on the FCC?

The FCC works for the president, not for us. And now that Ajit Pai has served his sole purpose, he will likely retire and go on to a cushy 'job' at Comcast.

Periscope! Interesting!

Security just cleared the room before the vote could happen. I didn’t see that coming. Bomb threat?

That was really strange. What the hell?

Just to make my comment a little bit more useful, here's a clip of the moment when security advised everyone to take a break: https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/941365229841272832

Their was some loud voices there at the very end, but I couldn't catch what they were saying

"I need everyone to leave everything that you have in place – do not take anything out of here except for your bodies – I don’t wanna see any bags, books or anything."

As and after he says this, all the visible attendees gather their belongings before heading to the exit.

Because who doesn't want to leave their $2K+ camera laying around for security goons to mess with. That said, when a potential bomb threat or other security issue has been called just leave the bag and get out of the room - your life isn't worth your belongings (even if 99% of the time stuff like this is just a false alarm).

That's one way to delay the vote...

CBSN has a live feed showing the empty room after it was apparently cleared by security.

https://www.cbsnews.com/live/?ftag=CNMe94798

They brought in dogs to search the room, then let everybody back in. Pretty safe guess that was a credible bomb threat.

Especially considering 4chan was sending Pai's home a pizza every half hour for a while, if Twitter is to be believed.

After pondering on this quandary I find myself not knowing which is more offensive, the fact that corporate money pours into politics and corrupts everything into a pile of shit, or the fact that revolving doors are legal. Pait was a Verizon executive. So those being regulated are now writing the regulations.

I really can’t tell which horrendous act is worse.

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