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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

However, based on what you just said, the pro-NN people might ought to consider other views as well. The pro-NN crowd is guilty of one-sided thinking and has had no interest in actually considering other viewpoints. So the FCC should consider everyone’s comments, but then regardless of those comments, uphold NN anyway? Is that what I’m reading?

Regarding the ignoring NN supporters — at least a few of those supporters engaged in credible death threats against Pai and his children. At that point, I’d be done. I would give no credence to the pro-NN side if they are going to threaten my children. As soon as some NN supporters started acting like racist jackasses, that point of view ceased to matter to me.

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Hate to break it to you, but there were plenty of racists on the anti-NN side; the Daily Stormer was full of anti-NN commentary that seemed to be based on the fact that NN was a policy of the first Black president. Racism is on all sides of any major policy debate, which nobody should be surprised by given how many racists there are in society.

Also, as someone who submitted a comment that was actually cited in the final order, I did consider the other points of view. In fact my comment addressed the anti-NN claims made in the NPRM, as did many other thoughtful, original comments submitted by other engineers and computer scientists, including a comment submitted by Vint Cerf (inventor of the Internet). By necessity I and those other experts had to think about the positions from the other side. All of us concluded approximately the same thing: that the anti-NN arguments were based on a poor understanding of how the Internet works and of the current state of the ISP market.

(That is being generous. In fact the NPRM was based on deliberate, dishonest distortions of the truth, meant to stretch technical facts to support the legal argument for what can only be described as a preordained conclusion. Facts were never really the basis of the anti-NN argument; the argument is mostly based on ideological opposition to any regulation of ISPs, even regulations that might encourage competition among ISPs e.g. line-sharing requirements. The goal is just to minimize regulation, regardless of the impact on consumers or on society as a whole, regardless of the state of the ISP market, regardless of the facts.)

"A few supporters" of literally any position with sufficient numbers will be assholes. If you discount the entire position over that, you're not fit to run for office.

> that point of view ceased to matter to me.

Except that you still feel the need to talk about them. eyeroll

I think you troll topics masquerading as legitimate commentary (almost every assertion you made is an ad-hominem), because you don't really know the difference. This is a common problem with people who have superiority complexes.

As a pro-NN person, I'd appreciate a good explanation of the benefits of removing NN that reflects the current reality of the situation. If you could kindly explain to this one-sided thinker why Pai seems like he just does the bidding of the companies he used to, likely will again, and (one would argue) currently works for, that would be a boon to my jackass brain.

Thanks in advance for your hard and thankless work.

Its really a very simple argument, for me at least: this shouldn't be regulated at the federal level. State and city regulations (or even outright ownership) are fine though. Heck the cities literally own the streets.

Beyond that, how did the net neutrality policy makes sense? If two parties want to communicate with each other, why does it matters which side gets what percentage of the bill? It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges. The main argument for net neutrality is they are monopolies so we should beat them up, but I fail to see how net neutrality does that.

You read a lot about the FCC chairman's bad motives (who can say, maybe true?), yet in the same opinion piece the author will want him to have more legal power over the conduits of free speech and media.

> It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges.

From what I've read, (I haven't followed it too closely as I'm not from the US) the issue is that repealing NN enables an ISP to throttle Netflix for users who don't pay more for (for example) a 'Media' plan WITHOUT even needing to make a deal with Netflix. Monopolies then become a problem because certain areas of the US can only get connection with one ISP, so there is no room for them to choose a better option if their only available ISP starts charging through the roof for access to specific websites.

I could be completely wrong, but this is what I took away from most of the pro-NN arguments.

I think that's become the poster child for the most accessible way of delivering a pro-NN argument to the masses; even if I think-personally-it's an incredible oversimplification of otherwise GOOD pro-NN arguments. Popcorn and circuses, etc. If you can explain it to people as "it's gonna hurt your ability to Binge Orange is the New Black Season 22" their ears perk up. If you start talking about "last mile" and startup competitiveness in an increasingly commoditized internet landscape, eyes glaze over.

Perhaps even to the point of possibly being the petard hoisted by the pro-NN crowd when the powers at be decide to focus their attention on that topic, artfully skirt the issue to seem conciliatory to average-joe users while implementing the very types of platforms and policies that have more or less demonstrable affects on the Internet as a platform for Enterprise.

Just my theory.

>> >> If two parties want to communicate with each other, why does it matters which side gets what percentage of the bill? It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges.

>> ...the issue is that repealing NN enables an ISP to throttle Netflix for users who don't pay more for (for example) a 'Media' plan WITHOUT even needing to make a deal with Netflix. Monopolies then become a problem because certain areas of the US can only get connection with one ISP, so there is no room for them to choose a better option if their only available ISP starts charging through the roof for access to specific websites.

These are essentially equivalent statements, no? On the one hand ISPs want Netflix to pay them, and on the other hand ISPs want Netflix to pay them.

Again I want to reiterate, for me this is all about the 1st amendment to the Constitution. I would love for the telecom monopolies to get broken up.

> On the one hand ISPs want Netflix to pay them, and on the other hand ISPs want Netflix to pay them.

Not at all. On the one hand, ISPs want Netflix to pay them because Netflix is a source of high traffic volume. On the other hand, ISPs want Netflix to pay them because Netflix is a competitor to their own video services, and Netflix happens to be a source of high traffic volume because it's a better video service for the money. Metered pricing isn't the evil we're trying to prevent, discriminatory pricing is the problem.

If it's just metered pricing on the table, then the market will always choose the simpler option of the full bill being paid by the last-mile subscriber, rather than a needlessly complex system of trying to bill at both ends of the network.

I still find the two statements equivalent if you ignore the positive and negative sounding spin. As you point out, the market will always choose the simpler option. How could an ISP have a business relationship with every server in the world, even those not physically being on its fiber? It can't its an explosion of complexity, so an ISP has to discriminate against a couple big, identifiable companies.

If the pro net-neutrality position was something to break up the telecom monopolies, I'd be all for it.

> so an ISP has to discriminate against a couple big, identifiable companies.

No, they don't. They already have paying customers, and infrastructure to credit packets to those customers' quota/bill. There's no need to expend any effort tracking the other end of the connections, even if some targets are relatively easy to identify. They have everything they need to bill a responsible party for cost increases due to heavy traffic, without trying to single out (read: extort) companies like Netflix in a monopoly-abusing fashion.

Why do you think we have a right to interfere in the business and choose how they make money and administer the network? Because they are a monopoly? Then I agree we should break them up. Because they are a utility? Then I agree cities and states should regulate or own them. Federal Net Neutrality does none of these things.

What about extremely bloated news sites that clearly spend no effort decreasing data size? Should end customers just pay for that lack of incentive?

Why are you unwilling to accept any regulatory recourse to monopoly abuse aside from breaking up the monopolies?

Last-mile ISPs are always a natural monopoly at the neighborhood level, regardless of whether they are part of a multi-state conglomerate or a local entity. The monopoly needs to be regulated no matter what the larger ownership structure is. Many local governments do not have the capital or technical capability to build, own or operate an ISP, and there are clear advantages to consolidating the ownership and administration of the network, provided that it is still subjected to effective regulation.

So city/state ownership and state level regulation? Sounds good, no first amendment trouble there.

>Its really a very simple argument, for me at least: this shouldn't be regulated at the federal level. State and city regulations (or even outright ownership) are fine though. Heck the cities literally own the streets.

Why do you think it's alright to regulate this at the state or city level but not the federal level?

How do you feel about the federal government regulating telecommunications carriers?

I think any government involvement in telecommunications is bad, but there is no denying ISPs are monopoly businesses by nature. So then the question becomes, what is the appropriate level of state ownership? For example the wireless spectrum needs to be partitioned out at the national (even international) level to have value, so the FCC is a wonderful agency. But for ISPs the logical size is the entities which own the streets. I'd much rather have a budding authoritarian Mayor than President.

I believe large parts of the various communications acts are unconstitutional and I don't see how light crossing state borders is construed as commerce.

"I believe large parts of the various communications acts are unconstitutional and I don't see how light crossing state borders is construed as commerce."

The money crosses state borders also. ISPs are not state/local scale businesses.

> ISPs are monopoly businesses by nature

No they are not! Many other countries have a wide variety of ISPs to choose from. This is purely due to collusion in the US. (And it's blatant, well-documented collusion.)

"If two parties want to communicate with each other, why does it matters which side gets what percentage of the bill?"

Some Internet applications are unidirectional and can in principle (and sometimes in practice) can use datagram-oriented communication, without necessarily including information about the sender IP address; in other words from the ISP's perspective it may not be clear who the other party even is. The Internet is designed to support applications in general, including applications that have yet to be invented and which we may not be creative enough to even imagine. New protocols and applications are deployed with regularity.

All of that innovation and generality is dependent on net neutrality. Without net neutrality it is possible that deploying a new protocol would require coordination with one ISP after another. It is possible that an application that works at my house will fail to work at your house because your ISP refuses to provide service for that application. Maybe your ISP refuses to forward packets without a return address, or only supports two-party protocols (nobody said we cannot have a three-, four-, or N-party application -- except maybe some ISP).

"It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges"

That has nothing to do with net neutrality.

"The main argument for net neutrality is they are monopolies so we should beat them up"

No, the argument is that the utility of the Internet to society as a whole is maximized by neutrality and that the benefits far outweigh the cost of possibly lower ISP profits. It makes no difference if net neutrality is achieved by a regulation or by a competitive market, but for the vast majority of Americans there is no competitive market for ISPs. If you think a competitive ISP market is better than regulating a specific outcome, you need to have some proposal for setting up that market -- for example, re-instating the line-sharing requirements that gave rise to a competitive DSL market in the late 90s (a market which completely disappeared when those requirements were rescinded).

If you are not going to impose a line-sharing rule, then for the majority of Americans who have to deal with a local monopoly there will be abuses. Before net neutrality regulations, this was happening:

http://www.practicallynetworked.com/news/comcast.htm

Yes, that is Comcast blocking VPN protocols for residential customers, because if you want to work from home you have to buy their "professional" service, where VPNs are not blocked, because VPNs are only for professionals. I do not want to "beat up" Comcast just because they are a monopoly, but I do want to stop them from abusing their monopoly power by arbitrarily limiting the Internet applications their customers can use.

"legal power over the conduits of free speech and media."

Net neutrality promotes free speech on the Internet. Why should your ISP allow you to visit independent media websites? Why should an ISP allow anyone to exercise their free speech rights on The Daily Stormer? Net neutrality, of some form, is the reason you can consume whatever media you want to consume and freely engage in whatever form of speech you wish to engage in on the Internet without having to get your ISP's permission or to pay extra for the privilege (or maybe just having your ISP say, "sorry, we do not support Hacker News; have you tried Reddit or Slashdot?"). Maybe you are lucky enough to have a competitive ISP market in your area and you would just find another ISP, but, again, most Americans have either no choice or a very limited choice (e.g. one can either have Cable or DSL, which are not comparable, and a duopoly is not even remotely a competitive market).

Even without the Title II rules, the FCC still has the very legal power you object to; it is simply choosing not to exercise that power. The law as it is currently written allows the FCC to change the classification of ISPs back to Title II by following the same process used by Pai to reclassify ISPs under Title I. The courts found that the FCC had acted appropriately and within their power when ISPs were reclassified as Title II services. If you think that power is not something the FCC has then the burden is on you to change the law (good luck).

>> Even without the Title II rules, the FCC still has the very legal power you object to; it is simply choosing not to exercise that power. The law as it is currently written allows the FCC to change the classification of ISPs back to Title II by following the same process used by Pai to reclassify ISPs under Title I. The courts found that the FCC had acted appropriately and within their power when ISPs were reclassified as Title II services. If you think that power is not something the FCC has then the burden is on you to change the law (good luck).

Exercising the legal power I object to is something I object to. It is on me to object and bring up my opinions in the forum in which this is being debated.

>>"It makes sense for the health of the network for big companies like Netflix to have business relationships with the ISPs to push the servers closer to the edges"

>> That has nothing to do with net neutrality.

How can an ISP get Netflix to pay it, or lean on Netflix to install new servers in their network, if it is illegal to use their own bargaining position?

>>"The main argument for net neutrality is they are monopolies so we should beat them up"

>>No, the argument is that the utility of the Internet to society as a whole is maximized by neutrality and that the benefits far outweigh the cost of possibly lower ISP profits. It makes no difference if net neutrality is achieved by a regulation or by a competitive market, but for the vast majority of Americans there is no competitive market for ISPs. If you think a competitive ISP market is better than regulating a specific outcome, you need to have some proposal for setting up that market -- for example, re-instating the line-sharing requirements that gave rise to a competitive DSL market in the late 90s (a market which completely disappeared when those requirements were rescinded).

So we agree that, 1) ISPs are monopolies, 2) monopolies find ways to abuse their power, 3) regulation could help achieve net neutrality. However, I do not agree that the current "net neutrality" situation is so bad so as to require a stopgap fix and I definitely do not think the federal government should be the level of government doing the fixing.

> How can an ISP get Netflix to pay it, or lean on Netflix to install new servers in their network, if it is illegal to use their own bargaining position?

ISPs don't have to lean on Netflix to install CDN nodes within the ISP's network. If Netflix finds that it's cheaper for them to do so rather than buy transit to the last-mile ISPs from Netflix's existing ISPs, then Netflix will come to those ISP's offering money and begging for the rack space. If, on the other hand, it turns out that Netflix doesn't need the low latency that CDN nodes afford and that they can more cheaply obtain the necessary bandwidth indirectly through Level3, etc., then the last-mile ISPs should not be empowered to distort that market outcome.

So lets say the ISP does not have a business relationship with either Netflix (because its illegal under net-neutrality) or with Netflix's existing ISPs because there are others in between. But the path used to route movie packets is expensive. How does the ISP lean on Netflix to pay for its part of their operating costs?

> How does the ISP lean on Netflix to pay for its part of their operating costs?

They don't. It's purely your accounting fiction that is attributing those costs to Netflix instead of to the ISP's customers who are using Netflix.

If streaming video increases the ISP's operating costs, they can simply increase prices, preferably through a fair metered usage model that can address all of the video streaming usage costs together, instead of just the Netflix costs.

So if data from company A costs the ISP more that the same quantity of data from company B to get a hold of, how ultimately should this cost be passed on?

Separate metering for end users? Targeted agreements with large hosts? Same metering for all, screw those who are frugal with packets.

> So if data from company A costs the ISP more that the same quantity of data from company B to get a hold of,

Expand that hypothetical a bit more, so that we can determine if the situation you're asking about is one that ever happens in the real world. Are you asking about traffic imbalances at peering points? If so, the agreements in those cases are between ISPs and do not include end users like Netflix as a party to the negotiations or payments. The primary purpose of an ISP is to ensure that their subscribers don't have to worry about whose lines their packets might travel on to get to their destination.

Not traffic imbalances at peering points. Rather a situation where data has to travel further, through more nodes from source to destination. Shouldn't a logical system allllow that data to cost more? Or for example through the same number of nodes but more expensive source nodes.

Beyond that, there is some "discrimination" I would be just fine with. For example why should the end consumer pay the cost of YouTube ad data?

The fear is of course discrimination on political or ideological grounds, not just economic. but it would be fairly obvious and nearly impossible technically for an isp to pull that off. And a net neutrality regulation or even ownership at the state or local level would be perfect. You only need net neutrality at the end points where there is no competition, not in the network at large

> Rather a situation where data has to travel further, through more nodes from source to destination. Shouldn't a logical system allllow that data to cost more?

That's not what the cost structure looks like for ISPs, so you would need a pretty good justification for making the price structure look like that. It doesn't necessarily cost the ISP more to have packets travel across more hops within their network; it's more likely to reduce the ISP's expenses by reducing the amount of traffic they have to buy transit for. Where a packet is within the network really only matters and becomes worth tracking when a link gets congested.

" Same metering for all, screw those who are frugal with packets."

Metering would be by bandwidth used, so those who are frugal with packets would inherently pay less.

Your grasp of the concepts seems confused.

"lets say the ISP does not have a business relationship with either Netflix (because its illegal under net-neutrality)"

That is not illegal under net neutrality, and it is basically irrelevant. Netflix, like any Internet user (yes, that is what Netflix is) must contract with some ISP (probably many ISPs given their scale). Net neutrality does not prevent ISPs from selling rack space in their data centers and allowing companies to colocate their servers with the ISP's routers.

Net neutrality is really about the logic ISPs use for routing, and the basic requirement is that routing decisions should not be based on the sender address or the application. There is plenty of room for argument about how strictly that should be enforced e.g. some experts support different priority classes for different application types while others believe in a stricter form of net neutrality. The general idea is that the performance of Internet applications should depend solely on technical details and that ISPs should not be allowed to impose artificial or arbitrary restrictions. There are plenty of legitimate questions over what is truly a technical reality and what is artificially imposed by an ISP (e.g. if an ISP uses the same physical infrastructure for Internet and non-Internet services, is it artificially constraining the Internet users by denying them capacity that is not being used for the non-Internet services?) but for colocation there is no real debate and nobody is claiming that is a NN violation.

> some experts support different priority classes for different application types

That's a thoroughly outdated QoS paradigm. It's almost impossible to make rule-based traffic classification neutral and fair, because it always privileges existing applications and protocols over upstarts that aren't correctly identified by the ruleset. It's also far too easy for ISPs to "forget" to properly classify their competitor's traffic when the ISP is also a content provider, and poorly-designed rulesets can be gamed by using protocols/applications on non-standard port numbers.

Fortunately, this QoS paradigm is no longer necessary and the state of the art for QoS has moved on to techniques that only need to look at the quantity and size of packets in order to correctly infer the correct latency vs throughput tradeoffs for each traffic flow. Packet scheduling is now much more like CPU scheduling, in that it works well enough out of the box without requiring manual tuning or prioritization.

"this shouldn't be regulated at the federal level"

It's inherently inter-state. My internet is through Cox. I'm in Connecticut. Data gets routed to me through Rhode Island, so geolocating sites often think I'm in Rhode Island.

How does state regulation help me if Cox throttles my bandwidth in Rhode Island?

It didn’t bother you that someone impersonated tens of thousands of Americans and the FCC ignored that fraud and voted anyways? People shouldn’t get death threats, but we shouldn’t act like it doesn’t happen on all sides of every dispute. People on reddit received threats from anti-NN posters, doesn’t that de-legitimize their stance?

"However, based on what you just said, the pro-NN people might ought to consider other views as well."

What makes you think we haven't? What makes you think that we haven't thought about what the removal of net neutrality means, and that's why we feel the way we do?

"The pro-NN crowd is guilty of one-sided thinking"

This makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. "The side that's for something is guilty of only wanting that to prevail!"

When have you given serious thought to having net neutrality and the benefits it will bring?

"at least a few of those supporters engaged in credible death threats against Pai and his children"

So because a few bad people are out there, we should fuck over the entire country? How many death threats have journalists received from GOP supporters? Does that mean we should abandon everything they stand for?

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