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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

I am not a corporate person and I am in the “public citizenry” and I oppose so-called net neutrality. If the public citizenry is unhappy, they are invited to vote. As Obama famously said, elections have consequences.

We should be demanding policies that encourage ISP competition instead of demanding policies that would ultimately suppress it.

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One does not preclude the other. We'll set policies that increase competition among ISPs aside because literally everyone says that they agree with that idea. Moving passed that, what is your specific reasoning for opposing NN, and if you don't mind, could you offer up your definition of NN in practice, just to be sure we're addressing the actual policies and not semantics.

Net neutrality would not suppress ISP competition in any way, shape, or form. Unless you count upset ISPs trying to take their ball and go home, like spoiled children.

And yes, robust ISP competition would be awesome. But there are parts of the country that realistically could not support more than one ISP. Do those people not deserve neutrality in their internet service? What do you say to them if their ISP suddenly decided to fuck with their traffic? There would never be anyone else to turn to.

I agree with you and its annoying when people say you sound like a corporate shill. I don't think it should be federal level government doing net neutrality. I worry about these studies too, because I know my "unique comment" was surrounded by at least a hundred on either side opining the same pro-net neutrality text.

The reason we think you are corporate shills is because you position makes no sense. ISPs have regional monopolies in a huge % of cases, and the consumer has no chance for free markets to work their magic and get red of bad internet practices that way. Do you not understand that? Or not care? We don't get it. explain.

My comments: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filing/10522187689085

Your comment shows you seem to have bullshit beliefs about QoS that are a complete red herring to any net neutrality discussion.

Care to elaborate? My understanding is ISPs can internally implement or not implement any QoS that makes economic sense. Also that was my lesser point. Can you address my larger point about jurisdiction for regulating ISPs?

The burden is on you to show how QoS concerns are relevant to net neutrality regulation, such as by pointing out how the net neutrality regulations could possibly have impaired an ISP's ability to handle QoS. Otherwise, pointing out that there exist different kinds of traffic on the internet with different bandwidth and latency requirements has no relevance to the regulations that were under consideration. You shouldn't imply that there's any technical motivation for being anti-net neutrality unless you're prepared to back that up with a real explanation.

I'm not going to respond to the part where you don't believe that the federal government has the power to regulate interstate commerce in non-physical goods, because that's so far into crackpot territory that nobody on either side of the net neutrality issue cares about your stance on that issue. It's hard to take you seriously when you're so against net neutrality that you also advocate for getting rid of federal wire fraud statutes.

[flagged]

> The Feds can regulate wire fraud--that is definitely commerce. Sorry you are very bent on misrepresenting me.

And yet, you wrote:

> I don't see how light crossing state borders is construed as commerce.

You're not convincing anyone when you pretend to be unable to understand how paying someone to carry information across state lines on your behalf is commerce.

I'm talking about the 1st amendment and the commerce clause, together and where they conflict. Sorry if I went a little abstract in a different series of comments.

Where's the first amendment come in to any of this? It sounds like you're trying to refer to first amendment rights of the ISP, but I don't see where that is at all relevant to their business of forwarding my packets. There's no speech on the part of the ISP to be restricted there, and forwarding my packets is in no way analogous to the ISP publishing anything. ISPs are extremely keen to make sure that their subscriber's data transmissions are never regarded as speech/publishing by the ISP itself, because of things like copyright infringement liability.

Please don't get personal, even if provoked. It breaks the civility rule and leads to worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This comment breaks the HN guidelines by name-calling ("crackpot") in the sense they ask you not to. Please don't do that. It's uncivil and usually provokes worse, as it did below.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I’m going to tread lightly here because I’m not intimately familiar with the full details of NN, but assuming that big bad ISP starts making life difficult for large tech companies by charging them premiums (and please correct me if this isn’t the way it works), wouldn’t that spur the giants to compete?

Or perhaps a more realistic scenario, when ISP customers aren’t able to access their paid services reliably and start dropping off en mass because they refuse to be held under the gun, how would the “big guns” react?

edit: spelled “held” as “elf”... autocorrect

> wouldn’t that spur the giants to compete?

It does give Google incentive to try creating Google Fiber. But the incumbent ISPs already have existing infrastructure deployed that constitutes a natural monopoly. The free market is not enough to overcome the uphill battle any initiative like Google Fiber faces, and digging multiple trenches along every residential road and driveway is not the kind of competition anyone wants.

" I don't think it should be federal level government doing net neutrality."

Why should your right to information change because you moved 5 miles in one direction?

You totally sound like a corporate shill.

Except it's prohibitively expense to compete in that space hence the regulation.

net neutrality doesn't suppress competition. the only thing it suppresses is the amount of information the consumer has about what the internet is actually costing them.

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