ISPs Aim to Use Facebook Fracas to Saddle Silicon Valley with Crappy New Laws

The interesting thing is that a huge focus appears to be cost-sensitive. As last mile operators, they have relatively low profit-per-customer (compared to a backhaul operator) with which to build each final physical network link.

Hence crazy stuff like "fiber to the box and short-run copper standard to the house".

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CableLabs

https://www.cablelabs.com/about-cablelabs/member-companies/

I expect that there would be some similar sentiment if we were discussing a specific piece of isp regulating legislation.

However, your ISPs have the capability to control what you see and do, and potentially snoop on your activity, including private information that you'd never reveal to a friend. You can't say "Hey, that's not cool, I'll use a provider that doesn't do that", because in your area such a provider may simply not exist.

I recognize not associating with anyone who uses Facebook is impractical; however ISPs have the potential to do so much more damage than Facebook (even if they're not doing so right now).

I guess I look at ISPs as acting in their own best interest rather than out of malice.

Essentially every initiative they've tried for the last few decades comes straight from HBR [1]. They aren't bad ideas, they're just almost all anti-consumer.

And their options for innovation are limited (as publicly traded companies). The thing we (HN) would like ("faster internet for cheaper") is the most expensive for them to build.

So naturally they gravitate towards VOIP or mobile content, because those things produce better ROI.

The only way we'd get the ISPs we want is if they were prohibited from being anything other than utilities. Although the irony there is that they'd likely find it difficult to access the necessary capital to build super fast networks. (Or in other words, the blood tracking money subsidizes faster internet connections)

[1] https://hbr.org/2007/12/how-to-avoid-the-commodity-tra

Which is what everybody is doing. Doesn't Amazon try to sell you Prime or Amazon Video or Prime Now or Echo or whatever else they have? Doesn't Facebook try to sell you advertising and promotion services? Doesn't Whole Foods, being just bought by Amazon, now try to sell you grocery delivery service by Amazon? Don't thousand of organizations have branded credit cards, branded insurance policies, branded merchandise, etc.?

Cross-sells are as old as commerce itself. I don't see anything evil in that. What's wrong in offering you a deal? If you don't want it, you don't buy it.

> Your oil/steel/water company isn't trying to get you to sign up to HBO or some discounted bundle

Water company regularly sends me insurance solicitations. Gas companies have affiliate networks with all kinds of cross-sells. I don't buy steel beams so no idea what's up there :)

> they won't because they are in the bribing/milking it/monopoly laziness phase not the competitive innovative phase

Wait, so you're complaining about ISPs offering you various "other things" for sale and at the same time you're complaining they are not offering you enough various other things for sale?

BTW, how you easy do you imagine for ISPs to innovate if they'd be tightly regulated on what they can charge, who they can charge and which traffic they can price in which way - based on fixing the current model of doing ISP business?

To innovate, you need to try various things - sometimes crazy things, sometimes wrong things, sometimes wildly unusual and controversial things. But any unusual move by ISP is commonly seen as yet another step in the evil plot of oppressing their customers - how you expect to see innovation in this space with such approach? If every new website would be considered only as a plot to steal your private data and your money - how many e-commerce startups could survive in such an environment? What if the government would crack a whip anytime somebody builds an unusual site or charges customers using a novel pricing scheme?

But you just admitted you can route around them. Let me know when you route around your ISP.

Your line of thinking is basically the ISP narrative of "Hey web companies are doing lots of bad stuff, why can't we? And why can't we do so without building any product or anything anyone wants?"

ISPs could build or help fund products that protect your data from Facebook/Google etc more easily, and those will pop up independently. But ISPs don't actually want to protect your data, they lobbied to get access to it without innovating or building products, they just want your data not them, it is a dangerous game that could really backfire on them.

ISPs are more akin to power companies, which provide vital infrastructure in virtue of government fiat.

That's nowhere in my argument. I merely pointed that government grant monopolies pretty much automatically should be regulated since they are virtually extensions of government fiat already ("we" give Comcast etc a monopoly on placement on phone poles and similar stuff, we should get something for that) and that this situation isn't comparable to monopolistic competition.

If you're curious, I think actual private companies should be regulated when their actions involve negative externalities [1] in their production process - chemical companies should not be able to dump toxins into rivers, broadly greenhouse gases should be limited, etc.

One might argue that Facebook selling people's data to the highest bidder is another kind of negative externality. I would argue that a better outcome is consumer education, gradually people learn whatever they post online has a significant risk of being public. Similarly, it's better for people to learn not to be manipulated by simple schemes than to imagine a firewall against the manipulations of evil people. Just consider that a firewall against manipulations of evil people would let in the manipulation of "good people", right? Perhaps that's the whole idea.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

The enemy of getting this fixed is complexity. Once we start targeting individual companies, types of internet connections, or hardware devices? We've lost. It's all over.

It's not these things don't need fixing, it's that we have about ten words or so to put into a slogan. That slogan needs to be repeated over and over again. I am a firm believer in Net Neutrality -- but that's not the right slogan to march under. If we get Net Neutrality and everything else stays the same, it's a complete loss.

By shifting the focus to each user, we can talk more directly about benefits. And by making penalties perhaps draconian, we can leave the management of the complexities to the vendors, where it belongs, instead of the public debate, where the lawyers win.

Privacy and anonymity are much bigger fish to fry than whether YouTube costs more than Instagram. If we could come up with a simple slogan to cover both of them, sign me up. Otherwise? We gotta stop everybody from putting telemetry on every detail of our lives.

Before the 60s in the U.S., there was pervasive and deeply-held racism, but most people didn't see it, even those who wanted to be morally superior to everybody else. (See the movie "The Help"). Many times I think of what that issue is for us. What will we look back on in 50 years as being barbaric and evil? What is our current equivalent to the Civil Rights campaigns?

It's storing tracking data about the minute parts of people's lives. We will either morally overcome this or we will enter a new Dark Ages. There's no middle ground. Here. Here is the moral battle.

Similarly in tech, many of the people arguing against regulations are economically incentivized to minimize the regulations. FB knew exactly what they were doing, third party developers at the time sounded the alarm [1] about how FB's API structure guaranteed that abuse would happen. What we're seeing now is the digital equivalent of BP Deepwater, where people warned about the safety before the incident and no one cared.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-...

You've also chosen one very specific part of my post and used it to attempt to claim the entire post doesn't make sense. What about the rest? Even if you ignore the entire DNS-related portion of my post, there's no way you can claim that ISPs are able to access anywhere near as much data as GA/etc when users are mostly accessing encrypted sites.