Opposition to net neutrality was faked, New York says
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Why was FCC head Ajit Pai able to get away with citing fraudulent evidence? How can we stop such blatant corruption of the FCC's policy-making process in the future?
If they wanted to make legal or technical points, it doesn't even matter who they are, the points are true (or not) no matter who said them.
So I just don't see what the big deal is here, because someone spammed meaningless comments into a comment form and it's not like they really took any of our opinions into account when making the ruling to begin with.
If I can still keep doing all these cool things, why the need for repealing the Obama-era regulations (his words) in the first place?
Elections matter.
For the record, I support the goal of NN, I just am too cynical to believe that these comments ever mattered.
Obviously, one that just says “** you Ajit” or whatever doesn’t need to be considered, but ones voicing concerns or similar have to be.
I agree that Ajit made the wrong decision, I just facepalm when I see people raising this as an argument as to why when there are so many better arguments than whether someone spammed an insecure comment box.
While I remember it being a big deal in tech news I don't recall it gaining a lot of traction in the establishment press.
It is also worth mentioning that Ajit Pai differed from his predecessor Tom Wheeler. Wheeler had intended to introduce rules that allowed various NN violations but changed course in response to public comments and went with the stronger regulations. Pai never cared what the public had to say and made that very clear in his public statements, where he basically said that the only thing that would change his mind would be comments concerning the FCC's legal authority (not that there was any serious dispute about that legal authority).
To be clear, I don't believe Wheeler's statements about his motive for changing course; I think he changed because the administration believed it would be politically advantageous.
Also, it may seem hard to believe, but some regulators do actually care and they do pay attention to expert comments that the FCC (or whoever) receives. Sometimes they will invite the author of a well-research comment to meet with their staff and discuss the issue in more depth. The system is not as completely corrupted by money as people sometimes claim (not that there is no corruption at all; it is almost obvious that deep-pocketed corporations have outsized influence in these processes).
Ajit Pai was forced to publicly dismiss comments containing only facts related to the technical details of the Internet, which made it harder for the FCC to defend its decision in court (as they are supposed to consider those technical details).
> The report said investigators had not found evidence that Broadband for America or the lobbying firm it used for the campaign were aware of the fraud. But, the attorney general said, several “significant red flags” had “appeared shortly after the campaign started, and continued for months yet still remained unheeded.”
> The attorney general’s office said it had reached agreements with three “lead generation” services that were involved — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media, companies that gather customers for clients as part of marketing efforts. Under the agreements, the companies said they would more clearly disclose to individuals how their personal information was being used. The companies also agreed to pay over $4 million in penalties.
As time passes we see more and more groups intentionally exploiting this and exploiting it more often, and it feels like it will only get worse, especially since we can see it happening overseas in major political referendums or elections. The impact only grows bigger as these systems are exploited to put people in lifetime positions, so that the damage can't be undone for decades.
It's really unfortunate because the knowledge that the system works this way makes it very easy for people to make false claims about a particular election being stolen or the methods used - people seriously making claims that "fake ballots were flown over from China" [1] or things like that when the reality is that theft is simple and not the work of foreign spies, illegal immigrants, or hugo chavez [2] - it's our neighbors, fellow citizens, elected officials, etc
1: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/goofy-az-republican-vote-a...
2: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/18/fac...
Incredibly, what they're doing isn't cheating at all. Lobbying (newspeak for corruption) is 100% perfectly legal.
NOTE: I'm not saying I agree with at at all - I'm just saying this is what it's come to. The people with all the power and the money are making the rules to suit themselves.
Lobbying itself is neither good nor bad. There are aspects of it that are both. The more excessive negative portions even pass into illegality, but that doesn't mean there's no good from it.
The EFF meeting with lawmakers and explaining how their proto-legislation is not only impossible in practice but has many negative consequences they should be aware of is the exact definition of the benefits of lobbying as envisioned by the system in place and something we should not lose sight of. Babies, bathwater, etc.
That is literally their job, and the reason they were elected. If they're not doing that..... then we have no use for them and should eliminate their position entirely, because it obviously doesn't serve a purpose.
The problem I have is when this "meeting" involves giving those elected officials money, because then you can just buy whatever laws you want. The more money you have, the more you have laws that agree with what you're trying to do and squash everyone else. [1]
[1] I mean, you just have to buy 8.5 million votes in this case - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/biggest-isps-pai...
But that's not lobbying, and that's against the law. The problem is the weird edge cases, like inviting the politicians and their families to a summit to discuss the issue that just happens to be in the Bahamas, or less obviously all the different dinner meetings that add up, etc.
Honestly, those examples aren't so much edge cases as much as entrenched obvious problems some of which are explicitly illegal and others grey, but there are lots of edge cases that are much harder to track down, where the quid-pro-quo is separated by time or other things, such as businesses of close or not so close family members and friends getting more consideration, etc which then flow back to the politician from someone else (can a politician's cousin not invite them on a family vacation and offer to foot the bill?).
Lobbying isn't so much the problem as corruption is, and lobbying just makes some small part of the corruption easier to do in the open, the explanation of what's wanted, because that's an obvious thing you want politicians to hear from interested parties in the areas they represent, whether businesses or individuals.
Blaming lobbying for corruption is like blaming encrypted messaging for terrorism. Sure, they help those using them for nefarious purposes, but getting rid of them doesn't eliminate the problem, it just makes it slightly easier to see at the expense of the people that used those for good purposes. In both cases I would argue we're better off leaving those communication mediums available and attacking the problem from a different angle. I'm not sure what that is for lobbying, but "you're not allowed to talk to your politician" doesn't seem like it's it.
.... Right. Overseas. Wink. [Cries in Bernie Sanders.]
Out of curiosity, what election or elections are you speaking of?
You can see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_unlawful_campai... for some examples of the accusations.
I don't mention this to claim that foreigners are somehow worse - the US specializes in doing this at home if anything, even if we also love to interfere in foreign elections.
Nothing is final unless you make it final.
The Electoral Commission spent a long time trying to build cases against Leave campaigners. It did so because although theoretically neutral, like a lot of British government institutions it's run by people who are openly biased and happy to make strongly political statements on the record. The EC is literally run by people who made public statements saying Brexit and the Tories are bad, and that they wanted Remain to win. They also never bothered speaking to the people they were fining as part of their investigation. Not a good start.
https://order-order.com/2018/07/17/electoral-commission-emai...
So they worked over-time to try and prosecute people who campaigned for Leave, but they themselves (fortunately!) do not have law enforcement powers. This is indeed fortunate because every single case they referred to the CPS and Police was dismissed on the grounds that no crime had actually been committed. The High Court has repeatedly criticised the EC for appearing not to know what electoral laws actually say. Or in other words, the people you are claiming "officially found" one side to have violated the law, had their investigations/decisions labelled by the High Court as "unconstructive", "arbitrary" and lacking "any rational basis" (quoting the judgement itself there).
https://order-order.com/2018/09/14/high-court-finds-electora...
Here's another case where the EC lost in court against Leave:
https://order-order.com/2020/04/29/breaking-aaron-banks-wins...
The Metropolitan Police stated the EC itself had broken the law in its attempt to submit a case against Leave campaigners due to withholding evidence and not complying with criminal evidence and procedure law:
https://order-order.com/2019/07/03/met-police-slam-electoral...
Part of the reason the EC's arguments were dismissed is that the EC is responsible for issuing interpretations of electoral law. In at least one case, the Vote Leave campaign requested such an interpretation, was told what they were going to do was entirely legal and OK, and then later the EC changed its mind and decided to fine them for doing it. That sort of thing is hard to explain: either the regulators are corrupt, or incompetent, or both, but it's certainly not the fault of people who explicitly requested clarification about an unclear rule and then were put in Kafka-esque no-win situation.
Naturally they ignored quite blatant violations of electoral law when it was done by Remain campaigners like the famous mailshot to the entire country that mysteriously didn't count as campaign spending, or this one (who they eventually DID fine, but only after a lot of kicking and screaming):
https://order-order.com/2018/08/02/electoral-commission-whit...
The EC's quite transparent campaign against anyone who campaigned for Brexit, certainly motivated by the biases of the people appointed to run it, is a classic case of exactly the same problem Americans are complaining about in this very thread w.r.t. net neutrality. The regulator was captured by a certain viewpoint and appeared to care very little about even the appearance of doing their job properly let alone neutrally.
For others, just look at Guido Fawkes' front page.
How could they NOT have known? I mean... surely they were seeing these fraudulent comments, and the internet was stirring about it because we all knew they were fraud. Claiming that the ones who paid the fraudsters were unaware seems like a stretch. Did they not look at what they paid for?
I find it hard to believe these investigators truly think Broadband for America had no idea.
Nope. Plausible deniability is a thing. It's not uncommon corporations and lobbying firm to pay contractors large sums of money for 'image management' and intentional ask no questions about how it gets done.
Everyone knows what's happening, but as long as no one explicitly asks (in a documented form), the benefactors can feign innocence.
> I find it hard to believe these investigators truly think Broadband for America had no idea.
The individual investigators likely know full well that Broadband for America knew what was happening, at least in broad terms. But knowing something and being able to prove it in a legally actionable way are two completely different things.
It’s the same issue as a phone call about having someone assassinated can be a “smoking gun” even if they never say what they want to happen.
It only works if you don't hold actors responsible for consequences, only for knowingly doing wrong. For example, if Tesla cars periodically exploded when the batteries drained to zero, Tesla couldn't say 'well, we didn't know'. Nobody cares; it's your job to know. In fact, it adds to the failure that you didn't know (though knowingly selling that product might not be so hot either - not a perfect example).
When does law and regulation require knowledge? When is knowledge part of your responsibility? IMHO, there are civilians and soldiers. The mom & pop convenience store can say 'we didn't know' about some things; Whole Foods, with its resources and expertise, had better know.
Personally, when I'm doing something professionally, I never want to say 'I didn't know'. It's embarrassing. Unless it's some oddball thing that isn't even worth thinking about, it's my job to anticipate and to know. 'I didn't know' means 'I wasn't doing my job, and I don't even understand that my responsibility or what it means to be professional.'
Using someone else's identity to influence federal law seems like it would be a crime, but I'm not a lawyer and I don't know how that would hold up in court.
Internally, they would never say the word, "AT&T" but had a client code #, like client 750, or something like that. It was always sketchy and everyone in the firm knew it was sketchy but they tried their best to keep the details from the employees.
What they would do is work with "community outreach groups" to create fake outrage about certain "bad" legislation that, people participating in such protests, problem didn't even know who was ultimately behind it.
Overall, pretty disgusting behavior and the fact that we let corps behave like this with no repercussions, speaks a lot to where we're at as a country and why. The US rewards sociopathic behavior.
The PR firm: Jasculca Terman strategic communications. I believe their contract with AT&T was severed many years ago but I don't know the reasons why. So, I doubt that particular firm worked on this astroturfing but it doesn't matter because companies like AT&T have a whole bevy of companies at the ready to do this work for them.
Very interesting!
I am not implying that it cannot be done, but I like to encourage people to think long and hard about why things are the way they are and what systemic changes would be necessary when they propose that "society should do X". Most people would agree that we shouldn't have big companies running the government. So why do we keep letting them do it?
Maybe the tanking stock price that results will force the Board of Directors to replace the top brass at these companies with someone much less brazen. If not, whelp, maybe there was some truth in those rumors.
The lead generation companies paid the fines. See how it works?
If not, let me give another example that's more familiar, from movies: The mobster wants someone dead. The mobster tells the head of their criminal syndicate, who talks to another criminal syndicate who specializes in this sort of thing, who hires some outsiders to do the job. The police catch the outsiders, who take the fall; the DA prosecutes and convicts them, and says 'justice has been done!'
The NN debate online was a massive propaganda warfare campaign between two teams of huge corporations, neither of which had any of our interests in mind. We were squeezed in the middle of it and everyone was pressured to take sides.
"Investigators also found 9.3 million comments supporting net neutrality that used fictitious identities, most submitted by one California college student majoring in computer science."
And I will also admit that I DID OPPOSE NN regulations, as they were "specified" (if any one remembers, they were only released AFTER being accepted by the FCC). Specifically in the "why fix what's not broken?" sense (ref stratechery for a more detailed consideration than I can give: https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/) . It was not clear to me that they would provide any benefits that propaganda claimed. It was also clear to me that the quite reasonable thing of Netflix to pay Comcast (and other Tier 3 providers) to skip interconnect issues, which was being done before the whole argument came up, would also possibly come under scrutiny by the new regulation. And so I threw up my arms and said "If real technical solutions are going to be abandoned because of some misunderstanding of technology, I'm not on board".
The vitriol that still exists over this from people who this never really effected nor even understood the technical problem. Moreover, I was appalled at the lack of care here to even consider this from a technical perspective. Complete blindness to consideration due to tribalism.
Now were people wrong to use other's info without consent, sure! I 100% agree there.
Downvotes, commense!
The propaganda framed it like sites like Netflix would be really fast because they could afford to pay for it and startup competitors would be very slow, but economic incentives would have actually caused the exact opposite. A startup video hosting site is of relatively no burden to an ISP compared to a behemoth like Netflix so they would have no reason to slow down the startup speeds. If the startup succeeds because it has a competitive advantage to Netflix, then when they become big they get a new customer they can bully into keeping their speeds high.
Yes ISPs will take a cut of the fees they charge content providers, but they will also be able to pass those savings onto the average consumer because the Netflix customer, who is already using most of the internet bandwidth, is helping pay for the service connection. Market forces would force streaming services to go up in price and ISP costs to go down. It would be generally fairer.
The irony is that this is how Netflix already operates. They sign direct interconnect agreements with ISPs to host their servers directly at local ISP network distribution hubs. They have a competitive advantage that is literally built in to the internet infrastructure.
For those who don't think that would be possible, then you haven't had the pleasure of watching a law with good intentions ban you from using Drop Box.
Like seriously, who has time to write an opinion to the FCC? Not even most people on HN who might even have real, honest opinions about net neutrality. And probably 99.5% of society doesn't have a clue what net neutrality might even be. Is it possible that there's one honest opinion in the batch? I suppose so, but it's probably like Ajit Pai's mom.
This particular attack seems less familiar.
I'm wondering whether we'll deliver such a firm corrective "no" on this attack, that actors decide not to do anything too similar in the future.
But, I'm guessing there will be no firm corrective "no". The parties involved will get away without any consequences. Maybe a slight slap on the wrist for one or two of the minor corporations involved.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
b) This is an article in the NYT that came out today, about findings by the NY AG released today. Yes, we all more or less "knew" that most of the comments were bogus all along, but having an official finding that says that is still extremely important, and is news in its own right.
Analysis here: https://www.gravwell.io/blog/discovering-truth-through-lies-... (disclaimer: I work for Gravwell)
The Francis Wilhoit definition of conservatism as a form of aristocracy seems applicable:
“There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
Correct me if I'm wrong, but would Net Neutrality effectively subsidize high bandwidth providers, such as Netflix & torrent providers, presumably creating latency across the network? It may no longer be an issue, as rate-limiting can be applied to the consumer.
The context of the Net Neutrality debate is different today than it was a few years, as content providers have more capitalization compared to ISPs, technology has improved, & new markets are in play. A big benefactor to NN nowdays seems to be distributing computing platforms such as IPFS, cryptos, Holochain, etc; which I find beneficial.
But then, as systems are designed, where does Net Neutrality stop? If there were a bill that includes NN, would it be written in a way where lawfare can be abused to require any load balancer or proxy service to provide NN? Which leads back to the primary legitimate (IMO) concern of regulation being abused by entrenched powers to stifle competition. Is regulation better or is less more? At this time, what harm is being perpetrated that NN would solve?
Yeah, this is wrong. Netflix is already paying it's ISP, and both sides of a BitTorrent connection are paying theirs.
Someone like Comcast wanting to charge Netflix just because too many of Comcast's customers are requesting Netflix traffic is ridiculous. Comcast already got paid... by their customers.
I don't have a preference who gets paid what in this situation as both are multi-billion dollar companies. Netflix serves as a middleman in a big machine as does Comcast. I have to care about my direct interests instead of spending energy on a crusade on behalf of a big tech company with the liability of the cost & making sure that the legislation does have any unintended consequences. Knowing politicians & lobbyists, there are always unintended consequences to any piece of legislation.
From what I'm seeing, the argument for NN is moot, heavy-handed, & rife with unintended consequences; Unless you can provide information about how somebody like me is adversely affected by something that only NN legislation would solve, why should somebody like me support NN when there are many alternatives that would be better for me? With NN, Comcast, Verizon, etc. are only going to capture the regulators to crack down on their competition (e.g. independent ISPs).
Focusing on providing better competition for underserved markets, included distributed networks & community wifi, would probably be more effective at keeping the quality of ISP market high. Improving distributed tech & removing (or rendering obsolete) legislation that limit competition to 1-2 ISPs in a region would also truly be beneficial. I also care about distributed systems. Is there something that regulation would do that the free market would not?
I'm a wee bit tired of NN being an oxygen-sucking rallying cry wedge issue that does not solve the root issues that affect me personally, but instead could be another regulatory tool to crack down on independent providers & distributed platforms.
NN is another of a long list of schemes to crack down on independent providers to capture yet another set of markets by the govt, lawyers, technocrats, etc. I wouldn't put it past Comcast to act as the heel in this charade.
They pass that on to the consumer. It's Comacst trying to indirectly charge their customr twice for not using Comcast's streaming platform.
You should care because it's your money.
As far as the rest of your comment is concerned,maybe you can point at what exactly would be the costs in complying with net neutrality? Complying simply takes inaction and isn't a burden on smaller ISPs.
I can also opt out of Netflix but I have to use an ISP. I'd rather go for a larger ISP market & stimulate more competition, with solutions such as small ISPs, municipal ISPs, & distributed networks.
The costs of NN are in the regulation, the extra laws that will include pork & more funding for government agencies. Also the ISP market used by everybody shrinks while the large content companies get a subsidy for flooding the commons, incentivizing these large content companies to grow even larger.
With the development of distributing computing, distributed networks, & open source/free software, there are new solutions on the table today that were not available a few years ago. I'd rather go with a bottom up effort to make the state of the art & my life better than top down legislation that only creates more government, more expenses, & does not benefit me.
It's not mutually exclusive. And I'll throw out there that the days of the most competition in the ISP space, the days of dial up, had these same provisions on the books. Since it was based on phone lines, the last mile providers were all full Title II Common Carriers, with these same provisions.
And what specific laws and regulations were a burden? Net neutrality existed already as rules on the books before being removed by Pai's FCC. I always here vague "think of the burden", but no one can point to the actual burden except in vague, propagandistic terms deeper than name dropping "regulation".
Yet since regulation was introduced, the ISP market became consolidated. This is yet another example of an unintended consequence of regulation. Proving compliance has costs that the smaller ISPs are less able to afford than the large ISPs.
> but no one can point to the actual burden except in vague, propagandistic terms deeper than name dropping "regulation".
I encourage you to re-read my previous posts & pay attention to what I'm saying, instead of replying with formulaic propaganda. I point out many of the burdens, effects on the market, opportunity costs, effects on distributed computing, regulatory capture, regulatory pork, compliance costs, etc. I can go to the EFF website to read your arguments. The contexts have changed. The burden of proof is on you since you want more laws.
Which regulation, when?
> > but no one can point to the actual burden except in vague, propagandistic terms deeper than name dropping "regulation".
> I encourage you to re-read my previous posts & pay attention to what I'm saying, instead of replying with formulaic propaganda.
Did you just reply with "no u" essentially?
> I point out many of the burdens, effects on the market, opportunity costs, effects on distributed computing, regulatory capture, regulatory pork, compliance costs, etc. I can go to the EFF website to read your arguments. The contexts have changed. The burden of proof is on you since you want more laws.
You're the one asserting that specific regulations are burdensome. I can't be expected to prove a negative; you should name the regulation that is burdensome.
And I would argue that that is good. It creates an incentive for Netflix to invest into encoding, compressing and developing new tech in general. It also provides openings for competing platforms with better technology.
Take that away, and we could have a race to 8K@120fps or whatever with the whole internet as losers.
In effect, we had net neutrality in all but name until the Internet started to move to other, more vertically-integrated forms of infrastructure like DSL and cable.
I would really love to see a Ted Cruz or Dan Crenshaw or some other disingenuous right-wing hack try to argue that, had it not already been illegal to do so, AT&T wouldn't have done the exact same things to AOL that Verizon and Comcast have gotten caught doing to Netflix.
(EDIT: At least, it would amuse me in theory. In practice, my blood would probably start boiling about 30 seconds in.)
There's also the time he suggested that setting basic standards for ISPs amounted to "Obamacare for the Internet"[2], a patently ridiculous statement clearly designed to pander to a base that thinks any government is too much government. (Crenshaw has made similar comments, claiming that "They want to do it by classifying the Internet under a law from 1934"[3] - referring to the Communications Act, literally the one that established the FCC and gave them the power to regulate the aforementioned phone lines. It was also superseded by the Telecommunications Act, passed in 1996, but who's counting?)
There's also that whole thing where he's spent the last several months pretending that he didn't spread lies about the 2020 election that led directly to a terrorist attack, but now I'm getting off topic.
Except not entirely, because there's also the time three days later that he called Donald Trump's Twitter ban "Big Tech's PURGE, censorship & abuse of power"[4] as if it weren't already well-documented that the only reason it didn't happen sooner - given his numerous violations of their ToS up to and including calls to violence - was his status as a head of state.[5][6] (I would link to examples of some of those violations, but... you know...) Which, specifically, also flies in the face of the same laissez-faire capitalism bit that he would throw around over topics like Net Neutrality - since, if he really believed that, a more logically consistent position would be that Twitter is a private company and is allowed to make its own policies.
In a broader sense, the GOP spent the entire Reagan administration maligning the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional office whose literal job was to educate lawmakers so that they have more knowledge about these topics than Ted Cruz displays in public, before eventually defunding it in the mid-90s - an act which directly contributed to a Congress which has issues like this, or like "Senator, we run ads,"[7] or like that time AOC apparently had to explain to colleagues what Twitch even is while they were attempting to legislate about it.[8]
[1] https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/941489723901665280
[2] https://twitter.com/SenTedCruz/status/531834493922189313
[3] https://twitter.com/RepDanCrenshaw/status/111600513626921779...
[4] https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1347919674101657602
[5] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldlead...
[6] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/bot-banned-from-...
[7] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/10/17222062/m...
Your link seems to point to the correct article, but it is paywalled.
I could get 400mb or 1gb if I wanted but 200mb has been more than enough.
I assume there's just very different issues in other parts of the country, but where I live I haven't seen any need for NN so it makes me wonder if there will be some negative effect to my currently good experience?
If ISPs were just a dumb pipe, this wouldn't be a problem. But most of the major players are part of massive media conglomerates and have incentive to throttle/restrict certain content.
https://i.insider.com/5887a523f10a9a2a768b6ac9?width=700&for...
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/186576-verizon-caught-...
https://time.com/2871498/fcc-investigates-netflix-verizon-co...
"See? Without NN, the speeds keep going up! This is great! NN sucks!"
Congrats on being bamboozled.
edit: I'd love a net neutrality bill or order, but I'd prefer net neutrality + prison time for those responsible for the fraud.
However I don't see the report linked anywhere in the article, but I do see sporadic statements from the NY A.G. which were made 5/6/2021.
If these were criminal actions created by the previous FCC chair, e.g. using a citizen's name to submit a false comment, the actors at the FCC and at "Broadband for America" should to be held accountable.
Especially at this particular time: good luck trying to incite an anti-NN right-wing response right now when the primary rhetoric among the right currently is about internet censorship.
The fact that some other corporate actors might be doing similar shit in the other direction is totally irrelevant; if they got caught, we should all want to bring the hammer down on them too.
It seems to me that there should be “social media neutrality” — the very real effects of corporate-sponsored censorship have caused more harm than a lack of NN.
What. If. Every. Thing. You. Did. On. The. Internet. Took. This. Long.
Give me a break. There were no “good guys” in this debate, just corporations scrambling to control the popular narrative to suit their business interests.
* Can an ISP have charge for access to Spotify but not YouTube Music (and presumably get a kickback from YT)
* Can an Mobile phone forbid you tethering on you unlimited use plan?
* Can an ISP ban you using bittorrent?
Even in the case of your Spotify but not YT music example, what if there was a 5/month offer for 15mb internet with spotify streaming. Because spotify and your provider made a deal that subsidized the plan? At the end of the day, partnerships are not bad for the consumer. YT music could make a competing for deal for less money with more Google offerings. Also, this wouldn't eliminate an unlimited option across the board. When has competition made something more expensive? Its regulations like NN which pour amber over a system and make it impossible to be cheaper or better.
Peering is for fellow ISPs. Netflix, as you may or may not be aware, is not, in fact, an ISP. They already pay for their internet access. Do they pay enough? That's between them and their provider. Does their provider need to pay more for peering with its fellow ISPs? That's between the provider and its fellow ISPs.
What we do not need is for me to need to pay for my internet access and a Netflix subscription, and then pay extra just to let Netflix's internet traffic actually reach me.
Net neutrality would say no - they are a defacto utility and need to treat the traffic objectively and fairly without prioritizing their own at the expense of others.
Reprioritizing say ALL video traffic? Perfectly fine. Peering arrangements at the network link layer that would benefit some players due to locality and not others? Perfectly fine as long as they don’t do it explicitly to penalize a competitor (and even then probably fine).
Targeting certain services or protocols because they are a threat to their own products? Or asking for upsell money to get useful speeds for certain protocols not due to network management/bandwidth and handled objectively, but for revenue extraction? Not fine.
Would you like USPS or UPS to be able to charge you extra (the package recipient) to ACTUALLY deliver Amazon’s packages at the rate Amazon paid those companies already to deliver them, since they know you’re buying expensive things a lot and obviously have money? The extra load on their trucks from these packages is awfully expensive after all. Surely once a week deliveries will be fine for now unless you want to kick in? Don’t worry, the spam mailers will still be free.
Most of the peering talk was leaving that part out, trying to pretend that Netflix was using Comcast's network to reach third parties like is the model being addressed by peering agreements between tier 1 ISPs.
Let's re-emphasize: the dire predictions of removal of net neutrality didn't come to bear. They didn't pass the sniff test either. The dire predictions were fake news - however they are now the official record in the media, and won't get corrected.
It really does beg the question why it was ever needed in the first place.
Nonetheless, the very charitable "perhaps the dire predictions didn't come to pass precisely because of the amount of controversy that was generated" would be neutrally described as "fake news must be published so that bad things don't happen". That's not a valid civilizational setup: it's both ripe for abuse, and also teaches people to dabble in double-think for sake of the greater good.
Why would they start to use that power while the process is still ongoing, and there's (as can be seen in this very article) still active investigations of fraud in the underlying process?
That also brings up why do they want (and spend millions on) the removal of net neutrality if they didn't plan on violating net neutrality in the first place?
This is an undue presumption of bad faith.
There are many situations where Net neutrality legitimately harms global internet routing efficiency and user experience. For example, under net neutrality ISPs are not allowed to privilege high priority packets such as real time video streams. It’s much more nuanced than net neutrality good, isps greedy and evil. Think about it from the perspective of a network engineer working for an ISP.
Net Neutrality does not block standard QOS techniques.
Additionally, ISP level QOS of IP packets based on content rather than src/dst is mainly vaporware anyway. You don't have the time to favor certain types of packets at the routers, the streams are going too fast.
That’s not true. Nailing down what ISPs are allowed to do in terms of QoS is still very much an open question. It’s not legally clear, for instance, why Comcast would be allowed to prioritize real-time video streams yet not be allowed to deprioritize BitTorrent sharing. What you’re referring to is peering discrimination but the whole of net neutrality is a larger and more complex subject.
Additionally, I'm not just talking about peering discrimination. The residential ISPs want the ability to restrict arbitrary sources and destinations at the last mile even if capacity exists on the rest of their network and their IX.
The caveat is that throttling is allowed if it is “reasonable network management” which is defined as actions being done with a “technical network management justification.”
And this is where legislation ends, under the ambiguity of reasonable and technical. Comcast tested this when a complaint was filed against them for throttling BitTorrent. I consider throttling BitTorrent “reasonable” and justifiable under purely “technical” reasons but clearly other people disagree. Enough people probably disagree that they had to deny any such throttling practices, meaning that in practice they would likely not be allowed to throttle based on technical reasons alone.
So what you're saying is that there was a process for figuring out the inevitable ambiguities, and you just disagree with the ruling?
As an aside, I also don't see the "reasonable", "technical" justification for throttling bittorrent anymore than throttling https.
The fact that what constitutes “reasonable” and “technical” QoS is ambiguous and strongly dependent on popular opinion is a huge design smell for net neutrality legislation.
> As an aside, I also don't see the "reasonable", "technical" justification for throttling bittorrent anymore than throttling https.
If 20% of your customers are using 80% of your network capacity because of BitTorrent then yes, throttling them is both technical and reasonable.
>No, we're not setting out to throttle Netflix. (We won't need to, because use will go up, and it's already in the contract we reserve the right to traffic shape anyway, and given we won't improve infrastructure, it's a given it will happen).
The stuff in parentheses is the unsaid part that would upset the normal people. The Network Engineers in the crowd heard it loud and clear though .
If Net Neutrality (and the incentive it creates through forbidding QoS to dynamically prioritize traffic), should have lead to investment in the infrastructure to increase network throughput to meet actual demand. Instead, POTS got torn down, broadband stagnated as ADSL lines were milked for every possible cent, Unlimited data plans disappeared and were replaced with caps...
We have more IP addresses than we should ever need, yet the biggest hurdle to robust connectivity is no one wants to spend money to actually get the wires strung/buried/overhauled. Why? because screw y'all. We're near if not de facto monopolies now, wires cost money, and they'd subtract from the exec bonus that gets cut.
https://www.cnet.com/news/verizon-throttled-california-firef...
When you start resorting to rationing (data caps), you have an infrastructure problem. Fix it. Don't embrace it.
I could give a —- expletive — about what the corporations think. What about normal people?
It feels like we need a better audio mix for public policy discourse.
(If anyone in their respective industries is in a position to benefit over their competition by making deals with ISPs, it is likely them)
This is reflected in the Netflix CFO's comments in 2015, among others: https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-says-it-still-supports-net...
One of the most successful was the John Olivers Last Week Tonight piece. I saw some evidence later that the ‘evidence’ provided in that piece (claims from Netflix about throttling) were either fabricated or exaggerated, although I did not look into it too much.
Of course Google and Netflix were going to pay for peering and priority. The question was if everyone else who wanted to get into the video business should have to do so. Comcast wanted to basically double-bill for traffic: they wanted their customers to pay, and then they wanted the services on the other end to also pay.
This is all a moot question nowadays, because the video market is dramatically different than it was a decade ago. "Free-to-air" content is basically all handled by YouTube and Twitch, both of which are services run by companies with the money to afford the storage costs. "Premium" content fragmented into a bunch of different exclusive providers that already have business relationships with cable companies. So there really isn't a competitive video market being stymied out of existence purely because Comcast wants them to pay in order to compete with cable. The barriers to entry in video got a lot higher than just getting double-billed on bandwidth.
(As an example of this: Floatplane, an early-access "premium" platform for people already on "free-to-air" video platforms, had far more problems getting onto iOS than paying for bandwidth. Apple was their existential threat more than Comcast.)
With distributed computing & peer-to-peer storage networks such as IPFS, this may not be moot.
Right now, using something like PeerTube is taking your life into your hands. Look at all of the copyright nonsense that hits otherwise legitimate YouTube channels, and now imagine that they get to sue everyone who watched the video, too.
Centralized services can rely on DMCA 512 for liability limitation; and individual viewers almost certainly do not have copyright liability for merely watching a video on a central service. At the very least, you'd have to subpoena the service to get an IP address, and then subpoena the ISP to get at DHCP logs, and then argue to a court that a user that the temporary copies involved with merely watching a video had infringed your copyright.
When you join a swarm that shares a file, you just broadcast that IP address directly to the person who's going to sue you. That's how these networks work. There's a cottage industry of firms that deliberately "leak" their content to BitTorrent and then sue whoever downloads it; that also applies with PeerTube, IPFS, etc. You don't get DMCA 512 liability limitation because it's your own copyright liability. Furthermore it's easier to argue that someone in a P2P swarm has infringed copyright as there's uploading - further copying - involved. So both practically and theoretically speaking it's far easier to get sued in a P2P system.
Also, P2P video is terrible for mobile use-cases. Mobile devices are leeches in a P2P system - they don't have access to unlimited power like a desktop does. So you either flatten the batteries of everyone on phones, or you detect the use of a battery and lose the benefit of the swarm.
Also, it's ok to have leaches on a P2P system if you can properly incentivize & pay the hosts. Ethereum, FileCoin, IPFS, Holochain a market for hosting data. Ethereum & Holochain will provide a market for hosting apps.
We're in this incredibly undesirable place where instead of debating something, we have this meta debate. "Net neutrality is valid because it's opponents astroturf."
It's pretty funny, because I have the same opinion, but in reverse. Net Neutrality disappeared off the radar, and now all of a sudden it's on HN every other week. Looks like astroturfing to me! "No, you're a towel!"
But you know what? Whether or not something is being AstroTurfed is entirely irrelevant, and debate is fruitless. We can have a debate on Net Neutrality without pointing fingers at who has genuine interest, and who is astro turfing.
And yes, that includes "they should be allowed to do the above Because Freedom".