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Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

From Wikipedia: The FCC's mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (amendment to 47 U.S.C. §151) is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.

It appears as a government agency they have acted against their legally defined mission statement by putting consumers at greater risk of discrimination.

I don't know if this is a legal argument to be made and it doesn't answer your question about Mozilla in particular but still I wonder if there is some legal standing here. The repeal seems to put them odds with their stated purpose as an agency.

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I don't see how they are putting customers at risk of discrimination "on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex". I haven't seen any evidence that FCC intended to tolerate or actually tolerated such discrimination, or even that any of the ISPs ever attempted such discrimination. Could you explain why you think FCC violated this part of the mandate?

My reasoning was that those most affected by NN repeal and potential loss of access (slow access) are those who would not be able to afford ISP price increases for what most reasonable people would consider open and equal Internet access comparable to Internet for people with more means.

This would effectively discriminate against a significant percentage of the population would it not? And put them at further disadvantage.

This sounds like "world ends, poor people hardest hit". Of course, any price increase would affect poor people, but that's not how "discrimination" works - you can't just claim that anything that increases the price of any good is "discriminatory" (otherwise we couldn't have most of regulations, since many of them do increase costs, whatever are their other perceived or real benefits).

And, "poor people" are not enumerated there anyway - it's "on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex". You could of course claim that since there's more poor people among, say, blacks than whites, it's related to race, but that would extend "discrimination" way beyond point of any usability - you could then claim that producing and selling any expensive good is racist, which is insane.

Different groups of customers can have on average different preferences. ISP content discrimination could be correlated in favor of the preferences of some groups but against the preferences of others. Even if the dont do this on purpose.

Let's assume that facebook pays a lot of money to ISPs to be prioritized. Meanwhile github/gitlab can't afford to make any payment and these websites feel slugish. Let's also assume that the consumers of facebook are mainly female and the consumers of github/gitlab mostly male. ISPs would de facto be discriminating based on gender, even when it is not explicit.

EDIT: This argument should hold as long as consumers groups according to race, color, religion, national origin, or sex have heterogeneous preferences and if the internet provides more than one type of content to be consumed.

> ISPs would de facto be discriminating based on gender, even when it is not explicit.

is discrimination based on preference a real thing that the law can protect you against? my understanding is that you cannot discriminate against things a person has little control over (race, gender, etc.)

i imagine you'd have to prove that preference discrimination was being used specifically as a proxy for the others to have any legal footing and it's a steep hill to climb because some preferences can be more expensive to deliver than others, too.

> some preferences can be more expensive to deliver than others

I don't think that a kb of facebook is significantly more costly to deliver than a kb of github.

ISPs bill by kbs consumed or a flat rate according to bandwidth availability. In the second case, even if some consumer groups use more bandwidth, it is not consumer's fault. ISPs sell you some capacity, but they underprovision and are therefore affected by total consumption. Without underprovisioning, costs should be out of the equation.

However I agree with you that this point is hard to argue in court.

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