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Comment by redleggedfrog | Hacker News Reader

“When an emergency strikes, it’s critical that Americans are able to use 911 to reach those who can help,” said Pai in a statement. “The CenturyLink service outage is therefore completely unacceptable, and its breadth and duration are particularly troubling.”

In response CenturyLink is now offering a new service, called "911 Fastlane", that guarantees that your 911 calls will get through and will be prioritized ahead of calls from standard CenturyLink accounts. This service is only an additional $10 a month.

Of course, satire.

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Or more likely, CenturyLink is now tacking a mandatory $10 "911 robustness and replication" fee to your bill.

Someone's gotta pay for those duplicated systems.

They already have that. If you look on your phone bill's list of fees, you'll see one for 911. It's not $10, but it's there.

When I read that I always assumed that was a fee that went to the 911 call centers to fund them (paying the people who answered the phones, renting the land they're based out of, etc). Does the entire fee go directly to the phone company?

Here's the relevant California legislation for example (it's regulated at state level): https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2005/rtc/41135-41142... it's pretty straightforward as to where the monies go.

Nobody understands what that is though. So I present to you:

    CenturyLink Peach Fuzz - keeps you peachy and the details fuzzy

That's good enough, what's important is signing popular actors and licensing some really catchy music for the ads.

It is, of course, appreciated that you clarify this is satire, but the fact that you need to is alarming.

As the sibling subthread notes, it isn’t just satire (even if the parent intended it as such), and it’s already happening. They already do charge a 911 fee, they just ... don’t use the money to honor the SLA that it promises.

The ankh morpork firebrigade hard at work.

Absolutely brilliant! You win the internet.

Not sure if your comment is satire or not. Thanks anyway, though.

Judging by the number of downvotes my comment achieved, it seems a lot of folks couldn't tell it was satire. Seemed rather obvious to me.

No, you were downvoted because your comment was content-free and this isn't reddit.

Why did you feel the need to post this weird piece of NN propaganda in a completely unrelated thread?

You're right, sorry about that. Won't happen again. Not satire.

It seems related to me.

Could you help explain why? I really don't see any connection between NN and this story.

I understand that NN is an important issue for the BigCos employing many HN users, but I'm not really convinced we need their talking points to be brought up in every single vaguely network related thread.

Ok, so it's tangentially related. Even though it was meant in satire, it seems like something that a big telco would try to do.

  weird piece of NN propaganda

The irony of the internet ruining itself in a single comment.

I’m not sure that it is pro-NN propaganda, since it implies that some traffic should have priority.

(FWIW, I don’t think you should be downvoted for objecting to the tangent.)

I don't really care if it's pro or against, both sides are primarily pushed by corporate stooges.

Despite the huge push by ISPs and massive media companies like Google, FB and Amazon, this stuff isn't actually really relevant to normal people.

The conversation surrounding NN has been totally poisoned by corporate interests, even here you constantly see comments suggesting that the internet will be destroyed without NN regulations.

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