The decline of net neutrality activism
neelc.org
neelc.org
Net neutrality should have been this, and only this:
> If an ISP customer has a plan that purports to give the customer B bytes of data per month and a data transfer speed of S bits/second, then
> 1. The ISP will not limit (unless legally required to) what sites the customer can use those B bytes per month with, and
> 2. The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion.
If the ISP does that, they satisfy net neutrality. If they also give you access to their own services without counting that against your B bytes, or make deals to give you access to certain sites without it counting against your B bytes, that may be anti-competitive but as long as you still get your B bytes at S bits/second it would not be a net neutrality violation.
If it is anti-competitive it should be dealt with through the large body of law that had been extensively developed for more than 100 years to deal with such things: antitrust law. Trying to shove a subset of antitrust law into net neutrality just because a particular behavior that might be anti-competitive happens to involve in internet service makes no sense.
"ARTICLE 56. - Network Neutrality. Each user shall be guaranteed the right to access, use, send, receive or offer any content, application, service or protocol through the Internet without any type of restriction, discrimination, distinction, blocking, interference, hindrance or degradation.
ARTICLE 57. - Network neutrality. Prohibitions. ICT Service Providers shall not:
a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any content, application, service or protocol except by court order or explicit request of the user.
b) Fix the price of Internet access by virtue of the contents, services, protocols or applications to be used or offered through the respective contracts.
c) Arbitrarily limit the right of a user to use any hardware or software to access the Internet, as long as they do not damage or harm the network."
1. Dos/ddos ?
2. Hacking?
3. Some sort of device /software you can install to do stuff like you can do to an electrical network like overload and circuit breaker bypass? Can those things be done to a fiber network? Beyond congestion, what'd the worst you can do to a ISP?
> Beyond congestion, what'd the worst you can do to a ISP?
Nothing much, which is why that exception is not very strong.
If the law uses the words "purposely harm the network" instead of "harm the network" then it's harder to claim it applies to services that e.g. increase congestion by sending a lot of legitimate data. Being clearer narrows the scope of the excuses their lawyers can emit.
What's needed is a way for recipient endpoints to tell upstream networks that they (temporarily) don't want traffic from particular sources. But that requires a new network protocol, not some arbitrary policy judgement on the part of random ISPs.
That leaves a pretty huge loophole as to when it's "necessary"
Yes, I disagree with it. Zero-rating is just as much of a net neutrality issue as throttling is.
The former involves things that are specific to networks so it makes sense to have network specific regulations to cover them. There's nothing really network specific about the kind of concerns people raise over zero-rating so there isn't a need to handle them different than we handle pricing and billing concerns in everything else.
Previously disagreeable behaviors suddenly look acceptable because they were not specifically made banned when new legislation was passed. By allowing zero rating, ISP's could craft plans where you get "packages" of sites and then anything not under a subscription falls into a more austere X bytes at S speed bucket. Yes, they're doing that yet but such a thing could happen by not specifically stopping it in advance.
This is the folly and downfall of all social causes and political movements. Take any subject that gain political power and inevitably other movements will attempt to latch on to it diluting the message, expanding the focus, and in the end destroying the support.
It'd be a lot easier to for people to start supporting, e.g. markets closer to home, if it wasn't conflate with (1) the push for EVs, (2) the push to reduce emissions vis renewable energy.
I can support pedestrian-trips without it all being about the EV evolution or about some vague altruistic goal about less emissions. Make it more about my health (more walking), neighborness (seeing people around you that live next to you), convenience (I don't need to drive 15 minutes for a gallon of milk) and cost (may not need 2 cars or even any cars evebtually).
It's not a messaging issue. It's systemic.
If you fix the root issue (competitive market), like the EU did with local loop unbundling, or voiding local govt issuing monopoly contracts to ISPs, then you don't need to try and specify a bare minimum for internet access.
The other thing naive leftists don't realize is complex regulation always favors corporations over consumers. Sure you may get a headline "win" in year 1, but by year 10 history has shown regulatory capture will set in. The rules will be so complex, the FUD will be so thick, consumer interests will not be protected. The lobbyists love complex regulation.
You're right about complex positive-rights regulations but the proposed NN regulation was a small set of restrictions on what ISPs aren't allowed to do. Once the various execs cry it out over lost future profits the regulation costs nothing and turns internet service into a known quantity you can purchase from anyone who offers it and know what you're getting.
I also believe that the "federalization" of all issues is bad for the country and bad for culture. It makes everything super high stakes, and doesn't allow for the country to have a range of options to match citizen policy preferences. There are very, very few issues 350M+ people have strong policy alignment on. The rest of the issues should be sorted out at the state & local level. Going federal on every issue just increases the concentration of power in our society.
Wheres local loop unbundling, etc., is extremely intrusive in terms of telling businesses what they must do, and then courts handling lots of practical and legal requirements to make it work, with respect to many different build outs of varying costs, local laws, etc.
It does make me happy to think that every local monopoly or duopoly is getting new competition from Starlink, and potentially other low orbit satellite constellations.
IMO, this is not specific enough. The ISP should also not be able to give “bonus speed” to certain companies or sites. Otherwise the goal will just be to set a standard that’s above the normal speed, and use bonus speed as your artificial barrier to entry.
Enforcing net neutrality is just treating a symptom of the monopoly. Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.
Yes, and the problem in the US has been that every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISPs, and since the ISPs have much deeper pockets, the suits never get to the point where they could drive meaningful change with a ruling against the ISPs. That's a big reason why net neutrality has been pushed in the US: because it's the best that can be done given that a better fix has failed.
It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level. It needs significant regulatory change and a large investment.
You mean the levels that produced all the sweetheart deals the ISPs currently have? The ISP monopolies are products of state and federal (mostly state) intervention in the name of supposedly necessary things like "enabling internet access".
Sort of like Biden canceling student debt by executive order when the constitution says congress has the power of the purse. You can assign the blame to Biden, Republican AGs, the Supreme Court, or the authors of the constitution. Doesn’t make much difference, so long as the issue is correctly understood. A day in court makes sense.
There was a contract between every municipality and ISP with an explicit term that the municipality couldn't finance a competitor? That seems unlikely.
The so-called big govt states subcontract to private companies and let them make large profits.
Alas the US is fucked. In 2004 the FCC agree to Verizon's ask, that FCC exclude fiber to the home because it was expensive to build out. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/technology/fcc-shields-fi...
It keeps getting worse. In 2020 the FCC exclude a variety of dark fiber & ds3 owners from unbundling regulations, phased in over 8 years. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25...
Monstrous behavior. Society needs some safeguards. Letting old incumnents do what they want forever is an filthy disgraceful low place to be, especially for such a core utility. Living under this degrading pro-monopoly regulatory environment has been a major heartbreak of my life, and the people who should be doing something to protect one of our most prized embodiments of democracy- our ability to communicate with each other- keep making the situation worse.
This is 100x worse than Chicago selling the parking meter system to private interests for 100 years, which they recouped in 6. At least that was a limited area, at least that doesnt control speech & access (there are alternatives to driving then street parking). https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/ch... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988984
Absolute travesty. Humanity getting beatten in the face with a stick by shitty corporations forever. The FCC backing them up. I dont even know if it's possible to get these decisions changed.
In New Zealand we have a national fibre network covering about 90% of the population. That was built by four private entities to a set of minimum specifications and with some government subsidies. These companies are not allowed to sell retail services, must offer wholesale access to all ISPs, and have their wholesale pricing regulated.
https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed
Other rankings seem to more or less agree on that too.
Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...
Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.
You probably need to measure lower percentiles to get an idea of how bad it can get.
Suppose you were looking at countries median car top speed. Fining one countries median is 150 MPH vs 156 just don’t tell you much when you can’t drive that speed on public roads. Or in internet terms Netflix etc isn’t sending 8k stream let alone multiple 8k streams.
On the other hand many internet connections can’t handle a single 4k or even 1080p stream so percentage of connections over X threshold is more impactful.
E.g.
* Country/ISP A has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $50/month.
* Country/ISP B has 4 gigabit fiber for $100/month, and 1 gigabit for $90/month.
In country A a lot more people are going to opt for 1 gigabit - it's way cheaper and still good enough - therefore their average speed stat is going to be lower even though the actual options are strictly better than in country B.
If government wants to do that by contacting out a bunch of the effort, ok!
Government trying to insure good baselines, not just regulatorily, but actually doing the work & owning the system (again even if contacted) feels like it's ever more necessary step to keep a healthy society.
No it isn't. NPCI is owned by a consortium of banks.
But it could work pretty well if it's funded by bonds it has to pay back out of subscription fees and a default causes everyone involved to be fired.
Your second thought sounds like a good idea. Let's have another competitor (government) funded by private entities via debt equity (bonds) which is paid back by customer receipts (profits) where failure equals unemployment. Actually, this is starting to sound like a business, but with more steps and the power to pass laws affecting its own operating environment. What's the advantage to having the government be the competitor?
Voters choose management instead of shareholders. Maybe they'd make different choices. Diversity is good.
Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.
If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.
They're two independent things. If a different management style would produce a public benefit then do it without access to the taxing power. If using tax money to subsidize some service is in the public interest (spoiler alert: it rarely is) then the subsidy should go to anyone providing that service.
> Yes in many place that would drive out current businesses.
Which is the problem -- because then they're no longer competing, and it's the competition on equal terms that keeps them honest. If they're actually helping people then people should have no trouble voluntarily choosing their unsubsidized offering. Without that they're just an unregulated monopoly susceptible to inefficiency and corruption.
> If we are worried about inefficiency, maybe we make government compete with itself. Have it's initiatives be charters, and issue new overlapping charters over time. Governmemt is not required to have a stasist implememtation; dynamic behavior can be part of the system.
Charters where funding only goes to the politically connected are effectively corruption, and whoever is getting fat off the cash will exert their influence to make sure no one capable of doing it more efficiently can get access to the funding. Charters where funding goes to anyone who signs up to provide the service are effectively tax credits.
Competition itself can't protect against net neutrality violations, because even small-marketshare ISPs can break your startup's product for some customers.
Almost none of these customers will ever even learn that the failure is the ISP's fault. And even if they do, who will switch ISPs just to use some not-yet-proven product by a new startup?
Meanwhile your competitor's product will work well, either because they were too big to mess with or because they paid whatever the ISP was demanding. Maybe you should too!
This is why Europe needed net neutrality rules, and actually passed stronger rules than the U.S., even though the system you describe was prevalent there. Amusingly, before the rules existed, the increased competition in Europe had actually led to more net neutrality violations there (specifically, blocking or throttling things like VOIP and BitTorrent) because ISPs in that competitive landscape were under more pressure to cut costs!
My source on this is Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, who is a leading expert on net neutrality policy and whose work informed both the U.S. and E.U. rules.
The ISP doesn't need to be anything close to a monopoly to get leverage for extortion and (in the process) mess up competition at the application layer.
Yes, we need more competition, but we still need net neutrality rules.
Competition improves prices and service. Net neutrality rules protect competition at the application layer, and they ensure that ISPs are really competing on how good they are at moving data, not just on how good they can get at shaking down the application layer.
Nobody is gonna complain about their ISP when the conversation is simply this: “Aw, shucks, [startup-product] doesn’t work, at least [established-product] works everywhere. The new thing is probably crap anyway.”
Now if every store in a 100 mile radius only had Coke, then switching to Pepsi just got a lot harder despite the two products being literal drop-in replacements for one another.
The result is that said provider is basically running a regional monopoly, but this doesn't get regulated against because the total ISP market isn't monopolized.
Some non negligible percentage of people might choose the one that only works with most websites, due to some other reason, such as they have reduced prices.
That non-negligible amount of people on this other service, could still be leveraged by that ISP to strongarm websites.
An ISP grows a large user base by doing aggressive price competition, then starts shaking down services, rate limiting their traffic if they don't pay up. The services are over a barrel and pay, after which the ISP's users don't see slowdowns and have no reason to switch. Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users. Smaller ISPs don't have as much leverage to extract the danegeld so they can't compete.
It makes perfect sense to prohibit that business model as an antitrust measure.
Yeah, we’ve already seen this in the Comcast/Netflix debacle and Deutche Telekom vs the world. In fact a lot of large incumbents do this.
> Meanwhile they use some of the shakedown money to lower prices and get more users.
If things were even so rosy. The shakedown money is used for larger profits and monopoly positions to get more users.
They don't block the conferencing systems in the regions where they have an ISP monopoly, they block them for all their users because they have a monopoly on the network path to those users. The conferencing system needs to be able to reach 100% of its own customers' users or they'll be bleeding customers faster than the ISP does, so they blink first and pay, after which the ISP's customers have no reason to switch because the conferencing system is working.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/28/netflix-inks-peering-deal-...
But another issue is that if it isn't banned, it can happen in private. The ISP doesn't need to actually throttle the target's traffic if it can credibly threaten to and force them into a contract with an NDA, and they have the incentive to require that when their demands are unpopular, so we have no way to know how widespread it is.
Though it would be nice if multiple companies were allowed to lay fiber. It seems existing govt regulation prevents that, thereby creating the monopoly people complain of.
Multiple companies are allowed to lay fiver. It’s not regulation that prevents overbuilding but economics.
Other than that, what specific regulation are you referring to?
More often than not it’s the economics that prevent overbuilding an existing monopoly rather than regulatory barriers.
Now here we are 40 years later and AT&T has virtually reassembled itself and the Equal Access laws have been completely obliterated. I wonder if there's a correlation?
More seriously, private ISPs in a (local) government owned open access network does not mean the (local) government controls and observes everything.
If you are afraid of the local government, run for office.
Personally I relate to the American route of the last 200 years and believe in limited government power (you know, the same government power that abused it's authority when it gave out monopiles on communication infrastructure. I don't see how it's abusing power should result in...giving it more power?????). I posted above about how my house is denied US mail delivery because when my mother was dying of cancer she couldn't get to the mailbox in a timely manner and she dared appeal. Petty tyrants gonna tyrant and there are limited battles one person can fight.
Read the comment about NZ. Or refer to Sweden.
Besides, a government run by the “majority” tends to trample on the rights of the minority. I don’t just mean racial minorities. I mean anyone who holds minority viewpoints.
So it seems. Then let's not blame governments and democracies in general.
Many, and arguably the vast majority, of political issues are built upon extremes of hyperbole. Support this, or oppose this, or the world will end - or something not far from it. And so when some meaningful change does occur on any such topic, and the hyperbole does not play out, the issue tends to more or less die. The ending of net neutrality was supposed to create something like a borderline unusable internet. In reality once it did end [1] and had more or less no impact, the hyperbole obviously proved unjustified. I feel obligated to cite my statement that it ended since I find many don't even realize the US no longer has any notion of net neutrality.
IMO net neutrality is inherently and obviously desirable. So I think the moral of the story is more to focus on realistic outcomes, consequences, and justifications for issues. Appealing to hyperbole is a great way to emphasize and grow your cause in the short-run, but absolutely destroy it in the long-run. It feels analogous to how MBAs run companies: optimizing for next quarter, in exchange for long-term implosion.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_by_country#Unit...
That favors me, because I believe that's very important.
The opinion that no number should be illegal gets thrown out the window when you talk about an image. This used to be as common as AOL email addresses 20 years ago.
I disagree. The impact of NN regulations on investment decisions by network providers is a key factor in the NN debate.
Market experiments show that broadband regulation substantially impacts network growth – negatively. To highlight a few that originated the NN regulatory process….
- In 2008, the FCC attempted to sanction Comcast for degrading certain peer-to-peer services used by its broadband subscribers, but the attempt was rebuffed by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
- Comcast claimed that it was managing its network to limit congestion and protect the great bulk of its customers from traffic generated by a few. The FCC saw the country's largest cable-system operator as blocking Web videos to stop its customers from cannibalizing the operator's video-on-demand revenues, but no evidence was presented to support this proposition. Managing a network to limit congestion, seeking to protect the majority of customers from traffic generated by a few, if true, would “preserve a free and open Internet,” not undermine it.
- AOL's business structure violated “end-to-end,” and it was criticized as a “walled garden” that stifled consumer choice, application innovation, and Internet development. But the end of integrated ISPs, not only AOL but CompuServe, Prodigy, @Home, and many others, came from unregulated competitive forces as efficiencies rendered by the integrated ISP faded.
- The mobile marketplace disrupted fixed-network dominance, revolutionized economies in the developing world, and brought an array of lifestyle changes that brought enormous improvements in industrial efficiency, public safety, social networking, and health services.
- Traditionally, mobile devices have been tightly tied to a particular mobile network, and customers had to purchase the handset that was associated with the network, and vice versa. Mobile carriers exercised a fair degree of vertical integration, maintaining broad control over the devices and applications that accessed their systems. New "gardens" both walled and unfenced have recently upended the traditional "walled gardens," and killer wireless applications arose from handset innovations and the platforms organized around them.
NN regulations may suppress anticompetitive conduct, but may also slow infrastructure growth and alter capital flows.
[1] The Fallacy of Net Neutrality
[0] https://youtu.be/0OydO9GyhVg?t=570
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/13/14266168/tom-wheeler-fina...
I'm a little confused about the implication that Verizon and AT&T have merged (they haven't). AT&T acquired some spectrum from Verizon back in 2013 [1], and there have been various cases of customer-base horse trading between them, but these two merging at a corporate level would be a massive news story, and it strains credulity to imagine the top two wireless providers merging without being struck down by the FTC for antitrust. Maybe you could shed some light on what you mean?
Tom Wheeler did indeed have it way more right than Ajit Pai, though.
[1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/at-t-completes-acquisition-...
This was before AT&T purchased Time Warner, but as of 2022 they spun off WarnerMedia by selling it to Discovery, so they just want to be an ISP and not a big media company. This was also before Verizon bought all of Yahoo and later sold it.
Edited my comment to remove that.
I don't have the particulars here, but recall it was something that was very obvious when it happened, but took some years to prove.
You just wouldn't expect so many on a supposedly educated and sophisticated tech forum like HN.
Growing up and moving to SV, I eventually just stopped caring. Data caps and mediocre bandwidth were good enough for me, I was too tired and concerned with building a life. Now I live in a city with Google Fiber and have amazingly fast internet with no data caps, and I have a newfound gratitude for good, unbiased internet.
It's one thing to have algorithms for assuaging populations or disseminating cycles of information per an order or a routine. That's great. It's another thing entirely when Joe Schmoe over there at some crusty ISP is going to slow down your internet because they don't like that you're researching how to build a competitor ISP on Youtube.
Information must flow freely and be neutrally accessible by all. Networks must be built and maintained for this purpose, so that information moves at the flow that is maximally supported by hardware.
Right now some networks are artificially constrained for no real reason.
Yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap between people who care about both. I think both are real concerns, but it seems like most of the noise was just astroturfed political wrangling.
When far bigger actual abuses in censoring and limiting and influencing speech and opinion on the internet are overlooked or even cheered on by many of the people who were advocating for net neutrality, I kind of question the purity and motives behind it, certainly for those people they are not motivated by any ideals of freedom.
Not that it's necessarily a bad policy to have, but so might thousands of different policies and regulations that limit private enterprise so I'm much more sympathetic to regulation that is designed to solve observed problems. Hence my question about whether it solved any real problems (or caused any since its repeal).
It may not be a problem now, but if the platform power goes up then so does the risk that we need to have these systems being built now.
For the record, Netflix for this very reason was an antagonist to net neutrality
I'm aware of some of the hypotheticals. Just curious about yours though, what's happening there? Netflix paid ISPs to prioritize their traffic over other video traffic, rendering Disney+ unusable? What would prevent Disney+ paying the ISPs as well if they wanted to be a competitive video streaming service? That seems like it would allow choice.
It might also capture some of the externalities that high bandwidth users impose on non-video users by having the ISP get some more money from them.
See I think this is a big part of why this died out. The boogeyman NN was to save us from was corporate censorship, which is now widely regarded - in particular by formerly energetic NN advocates - as a good thing.
When it comes to net neutrality itself, folks also got to understand that services they take for granted wouldn't exist without sophisticated traffic management. There is a Netflix box inside the ISP data center that streams video to subscribers without going through the Internet. Without it, no streaming HD video for you, no infrastructure to provide it at that scale exists. What if you are a startup that is not Netflix? Good question, but the answer is not as obvious as a slogan and at the moment there are far more urgent matters to lose sleep about.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?
Now, that agenda wasn't bad at all, but it was very hard to explain or to get people to care about it as-is. So what we got instead was a very... innacurate debate and a discussion that was centered around the (deserved) dislike for ISPs. Which obviously played in favor of big tech.
I'm not saying there was a big conspiracy by big tech against the poor ISPs, just that there was obviously a heavy PR push that took advantage of the mood around ISPs (comcast very bad!) once the debate started. What was more of a business dispute turned into yet another "very important and urgent current event/crisis." Net neutrality is still important, though, but I'm not sure the general population would've been very empathetic towards what could be seen as massive tech corporations not wanting to pay for their utilization.
I mean you can also just send a TCP Reset packet to both sides. I've seen this done inside corporate firewalls.
The difference is that ISPs have no competition and that social media platforms are actively recommending things.
If social media truly became "dumb pipes" and operated only on the desires of their users, I'd agree with you, but that's not the case.
And the desire for social media censorship goes way beyond biased recommendation engines. Based on the reaction to Musk's "zero recommendation score" proposal for hateful content, just messing around with recommendation algorithms but not going further (ie. banning the content itself from being viewed by anyone) means the fascists win.
This is absolutely untrue about 70+ million people in the US[1].
It's also functionally untrue for most of us who have a choice between 1-3 large companies. I live in a major US city, and my options are Comcast or AT&T. We don't even have Starlink yet.
When 3-4 companies control nearly 100% of the market, there isn't any real choice. It's easy for them all to just be terrible.
1. https://ilsr.org/report-most-americans-have-no-real-choice-i...
This may sound somewhat glib, but it's also glib to say that a person whose friends all primarily interact on say Facebook is not subject to comparable market power from Facebook.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_polarization_in_th...
On the other hand, FOSTA-SESTA killed Craigslist personals and, I think, lots of other stuff.
I've seen an almost infinite amount of advocacy for net neutrality and almost nothing against FOSTA-SESTA.
People worry about the wrong things.
Same with Russia paying for anti-fracking activism in the Aughts: https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/596304-invest...
Fracking is bad for the environment. Balancing 'the United States and Earth will not become inhabitable to humans within 500 years' with 'our oil companies want cheaper product and less overhead' is a pretty big challenge, but it's safe to say that Russia is more interested in short-term gains than the US is (and is a large part in why the US is pushing EV adoption).
The articles posted on HN discussing this very topic bring this up, so reading them is worthwhile instead of simply dismissing the entire thing as “big tech bad.”
The entire pitch for 230 is a wild astroturf project. And as a recent non-American pointed out, it's paper thin when you realize no other country has an equivalent immunity law, and all of them allow user generated content.
A comedic example is the claim I've seen that Mastodon servers can't survive without Section 230, but the largest one is in Germany, where no such blanket immunity exists.
It does however mean that if you do get sued over third party content on your site, you will probably lose, which is an expensive possibility for any small site operator.
If you are willing to be even slightly clever you will figure out that this is an easily solvable problem.
Just do what the EU did, or Texas did, and remove/modify section 230 protections only for very large social media companies, defined as have literally 10s of millions of users.
That way, the small platforms are protected, and the large ones that are the problem actors, have to change.
Problem solved.
No need to worry about this straw man position of "look how bad things would be if we do the dumb thing and didn't implement the easy to figure solution that solves most of the complaints!".
Because the small mastodon instance does not have any assets behind it or make any profits that make it worth filing a law suit, and because there are many small mastodon instances, any legal campaign would have to go against many small operators with no assets or profits to seize, and thus nothing to gain.
Decades of legal battles between the MPAA/RIAA and unlicensed content distributors demonstrate this very well. The media monopolies never won anything against small operators and gave up (except for public relations stunts) and were only ever able to force large companies into paying them royalties.
Section 230 only protects large companies, not small operators. Small operators can be taken out by a SLAPP lawsuit irregardless of the law if it is really in someone's interest to do so.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratton_Oakmont,_Inc._v._Prod....
The fact there's only a single badly litigated case that is obsolete as heck to justify a law that got Trump elected and has a death toll in the hundreds is a great example of how little real justification 230 has.
If it was repealed tomorrow and Facebook had to choose between these two paths, which would they choose?
A: keep moderation; anytime someone posts something libelous, they're responsible for damages
B: no moderation; they let anything and everything go so that they become a service provider and thus aren't considered to be editorializing or approving the content people post
It's safe to say that 230 being gone would require every single website with UGC to choose between the two options. If you think it could be revised instead, feel free to suggest such.
It was always a scam. Revoking a mandate in 2017 that had been imposed in [drum roll, please] 2015 was never going to Destroy the Internet(TM), contrary to the claims by all those Reddit subreddits that "went dark" in protest. In retrospect it was, in large part, yet another example of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
I long for the net neutrality times when we were still sane.
It's only hard if you're willfully ignoring the distinction people are making, which is that ISPs are "dumb pipes" operating in a government-sanctioned oligopoly. Just like broadcast networks, the privilege of using a limited public resource (underground cabling, bandwidth, whatever) comes with regulations.
Social media, on the other hand, isn't borrowing a finite resource from taxpayers. It's a fungible resource and can exist in a competitive environment, which we've seen with the rise of TikTok and everyone else's blatant copying of TikTok.
And most importantly, no one is forcing them to censor themselves. They're bowing to protests and market forces. Libertarians are always whining about how there isn't enough competition, and then they whine when the invisible hand makes a decision they don't like.
In addition to that, you have to work harder than every just to live. The energy gets sucked out of you, and it becomes harder than ever to sustain a fight you know you'll be lucky to win. No wonder people burn out, and simply give up. Everyone has their limits.
As far as I understand both the laws I referenced earlier makes it possible for an ISP to sell different QoS and innovate on that axis. What the laws forbid is for them to provide that service in a non-competitative way. So they have to offer that option to everyone and in a open way. This to me is the real problem and why net neutrality becomes a necessity in some cases if this is not followed (behaviors like throttling specific sites while boosting own sites for example).
as you all know, net neutrality means that all traffic is given equal access. but that is an obscure concept to anyone outside of tech. What consumers want is fast cheap & reliable broadband(that they can actually buy).
In Europe, if your ISP is shite, then you change ISP to a better one. This has driven down the price of broadband, and with some cash injections from governments, increased the speed from 512k to at least 20meg in most places(with most suburban places having access to 500meg).
Not only that, but ISPs bundle "free" access to things like netflix, which doesn't count against a cap (if you have one).
In the US, if you're lucky you have a choice of two ISPs. They are both shite, and both don't bother competing, apart from being more and more shite to you. Despite the FCC's bundling rules, there is no practical way to operate a virtual ISP on resold copper/fibre/coax.
So if I was to create a new campaign, it wouldn't be for net neutrality, it would be called "American Competitive Internet" with some nonsense about making america better by going back to what made it strong: competition. Then enforce reasonable resale rates, so that virtual ISPs can be a thing. second I would enforce rules that mean you can only charge for transit, not peering (with caveats)
So yeah, you can ISP hop, but might be hopping for a long time or in circles, until you get better than 3rd world country Internet connection.
To the voters, telecom companies have always been a priced in annoyance. Additionally, their services aren’t differentiated so although they’re annoying with pricing, the average voter doesn’t see them as quite so pervasive. You pay, you forget. They’re all mildly frustrating to deal with but un-noteworthy .
Big tech on the other hand is in your face. I don’t see my telecom but you can be rest assured I see Microsoft, Facebook, etc on a daily basis.
This means that a congressman fighting telecom is taking a stand against an amorphous blob that we forget about after our monthly bill. Conversely a congressman fighting big tech is a valiant warrior fighting greed and corruption.
I’m sure people here have different views due to a grasp of the nuances but the sad truth is that most of america isn’t all too aware. Big Tech just seems scarier.
Tech wealth is far more concentrated and it's concentrated among the "very wealthy" and the "coastal elites". Both of those groups are pretty unpopular outside their own bubbles right now.
That further tips the scales in favor politicians targeting tech.
Do you:
Ever find yourself wondering if you need to upgrade to a "business" plan to host that service?
Ever wonder why it seems one type of traffic ends up running into more problems than others?
Wonder why the local network infrastructure always seems to be woefully inadequate for any type of ambitious use?
All of that comes from a staunch lack of Net Neutrality. Dumb pipes, as many as possible, connecting everyone to everyone else. No QoS segmentation. no fast-lanes. No zero-rating. No nudging people toward one set of endpoints over another. No inspecting the bloody packet; just routing.
Unfortunately; we don't see that, because ISP's are way better at fee extraction and exec/lobbyist enrichment than actually getting bloody wire laid, maintained, and packets routed through the AS anymore.
If it's gotten quiet, it's probably because people are still trying to absorb/learn the implications/principles behind user hostile network topology resulting from exploitative business models.
That's a curious business model. Why does an Internet Service Provider want to prioritise one particular class of website?
Nobody wants to service the top residential users because they cause way more traffic and trouble, but it's probably hard to fire individual customers in most places. It's like zoning in that way. Nobody cares if I have chickens in my backyard, but it's illegal because 15 years ago someone's neighbor had 20 chickens and a few roosters, and the neighbor got a law passed rather than resolving it with the neighbor.
There are several binaries-on-Usenet-esque projects on GitHub to push e.g. yEnc-encoded chunks to Reddit & Twitter.
So we just need a few people with unlimited bandwidth via another ISP to act as exit nodes and code to get this madness to hook into a tun interface.
There were at least a few different issues in the NN bundle:
1 against preferred ISP access 2 against content-based ISP restrictions 3 against charges to upstream content providers based on traffic 4 against paid prioritization 5 no change to the current peering models
Most of it was IMO total bullshit. Having worked with ISPs, I can tell you that they have no real interest in being content police, prioritizing specific services, at least in the US.
Their real interest for ISPs was making large sources of traffic pay.
This is going to conspiracy theory land, but IMO a large part of NN was the content providers (YT, google, facebook, etc) manipulating the public into supporting some bullshit law that prevented them from having to pay ISPs for the downstream traffic they generate. And it's a lot of traffic...and billions of dollars in advertising revenue.
All of that was wrapped up in the typical "call to freedom" that is the equivalent of "it's for the kids."
Basically the internet geeks have sold out. The moment DRM meant that the money was going to the techies (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) and not the music companies, we were like “what problems”?
The only one who didn’t is RMS but we all laughed at him. He’s one of the only real principled geeks left today.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-direct...
Obviously, I failed. But I did nothing else for four years but fight DRM at the W3C. I wrote op-eds. I personally telephoned every single W3C member's rep to talk to them about this - many times. I published hundreds of articles. I did radio interviews. Podcasts. We organized an in-person protest and picketed a W3C event.
There was never a "day when EFF, Cory Doctorow...kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec."
As a counterexample, in 2020 here in Mexico our telecom regulator tried to deregulate net neutrality and there was enough backlash for the draft to be amended to be mostly pro net neutrality (except for zero rating which is still allowed). [1]
I still agree with OP though, I haven't really thought about the topic for the last couple of years.
[1] Source in Spanish: https://www.forbes.com.mx/red-forbes-que-implica-la-nueva-ne...
No further action needed.
With Big Tech, there is worry about censorship. A big example is how any discussion of the lab leak was censored as a conspiracy theory.
People are far more worried about censorship.
"The leopards aren't eating my face RIGHT NOW" is not an argument.
Revolving doors between big businesses and politics, thanks to Macron.
The center has eroded to the point where net neutrality only matters to many people if it has an impact on one of the above.
Yet any appeal to one side of the above issues will serve to alienate the other. This means that you can't really get enough oxygen in the room to shout over the shouty people already shouting about the above.
I bet you dimes to dollars that other center/administrative issues are similarly affected.
But it is so simple and considered baseline behavior so I would still support yelling at you if you spit at the floor even while the war is still ongoing an we haven't stopped the attackers.
Same goes for net neutrality: there is even less effort needed. I mean: complying with the rules is as simple as not introducing a number of rules or devices in your network setup.
That said, you don't seem to be interacting with my claim -- I'm not saying net neutrality is unimportant, I'm saying it's undervalued right now. Because of the wars/permacrises.
I think upon closer read you'll find our views are relatively aligned.
It’s hard to imagine in 2023 4chan, reddit and wikipedia all turning dark because of net neutrality. It feels like “we used to care about that?” issue.
Let the big corporations decide what we can/cannot do on the internet; they worked hard for it!
I think it is maybe not an accident that this blog post is deleted from Reddit's official blog, but it happened. It happened in Verizon HQ's congressional district too, where their funded representative lost his seat shortly after. I don't post on this as some great authority, it was purely luck and we were small businesses that could articulate why net neutrality was important at the time.
Fast forward to today, far less independent sites like his exist, his is gone now. He went to work for a hosting company that seems to be pivoting away from serving small business as they were acquired by a large enterprise firm. This is the concern of someone who pays for hosting, we are used to paying a quota or port, but at our size we rarely have to consider peering and transit costs. Our main concern has been 'channelization' of the net, where plans get sold with only access to major providers.
I think on the consumer side, net neutrality terminology has to be worded carefully because back then calls were still mostly a circuit routed thing. We now have good enough networks where everything is IP data and voice must be prioritized to maintain quality of service. I prefer the current reality on most plans where data is de-prioritized after heavy use works better than the old throttle to a certain speed restrictions. Allows radios to get into lower power states quicker and access resources when it's available.
Last mile for everything is the main problem out here, Blightspeed/Centurylink is the copper 1.5mbit DSL provider and there's Comcast cable which has no incentive to price compete unless choosing the wireless route (Which is ultimately what I did). I am wary of advocating changing the regulations from where they are currently because we've already witnessed fallout from Section 230 modifications. In any case it's been a weird time the mostly the past 5 years or so, and I think it's hard to motivate people to care on net neutrality when there's so many other related issues that seem more pressing and a whole new adult generation hasn't really experienced the internet as a ton of small websites/companies/projects, they use apps. It's a hard sell.
It's not hot button because there is no FCC chair. If the dems seat a chair, regardless of who it is, that would allow grassroots campaigns to reactivate.
Under Trump, I believe broadband ISPs were implementing data caps, and they backed off on that after Biden was elected. And some telecoms offer zero rated content. It's far more common overseas for telecoms and content providers to partner in providing access, so you get places like the Philippines where Facebook basically is the internet.
You're welcome to believe as you wish. We've never seen data cap issues, under President Trump or Biden, or any president.
> Following a multi-month suspension of its usage-based policy during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic, Comcast restored and updated its data usage policies in July 2020, raising the monthly limit to 1.2 terabytes – 200 gigabytes more than the 1TB limit that was in place prior to the COVID-19 outbreak. Under the revised data plan, residential broadband customers who exceed 1.2TB of data per month are charged $10 for each additional bucket of 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 per month (Comcast's maximum data overage charge prior to the pandemic was $200). Comcast also sells a standalone unlimited data option that costs an additional $30 per month.
https://www.lightreading.com/cablevideo/comcast-extends-dela...
I suspect now that one chamber of the congress is republican controlled we will see a slight increase in activism, and if Republicans take the presidency in 2024 a huge jump in activism, or if they take both the house and Senate
While conservatives / republicans will get out for protests the number of issues that will spark that is very much more limited... namely 2, abortion and guns. Outside of that you likely will not see a conservative protest / political activism. In contrast there are 100' or 1000's of issues on the left that will spark protests.
Or their complaints that Elon Musk wont restrict certain speech.
Like what?
Discriminate technology based on ideology and security is an on-going bipartisan effort happening in the US.
Tor is heavily throttled and blocked.
As Ajit Pai's FCC Ruling stated:
>This consensus is among the reasons that there is scant evidence that end users, under different legal frameworks, have been prevented by blocking or throttling from accessing the content of their choosing. It also is among the reasons why providers have voluntarily abided by no-blocking practices even during periods where they were not legally required to do so. As to free expression in particular, we note that none of the actual incidents discussed in the Title II Order squarely implicated free speech. If anything, recent evidence suggests that hosting services, social media platforms, edge providers, and other providers of virtual Internet infrastructure are more likely to block content on viewpoint grounds.
This statement included a footnote specifically noting the unilateral suspension of The Daily Stormer.
Of course, "net neutrality" was struck down, YouTube was made to pay their bandwidth bills, and absolutely nothing changed at all. The corporate censors went on with their work of suspending everything that was bigoted, and then most Trump supporters, and then prominent Bernie supporters during the primaries, and then people who talked about the risks of experimental vaccines. They continue this regime of censorship up to this very day, but they have to pay for transit in places that it is limited.
It was an absolutely absurd fraud that went on for years, but the game is over. Why would anyone pretend that Net Neutrality means anything other than a cheaper bandwidth bill for Google at this point?
the difference is that now most of those activists are pro-censorship, as long as the censorship is what they like, and those same big media companies are able to enact that type of censorship. as far as I can tell, that's really it. most people never really understood net neutrality.
Of course, wannabe fascists and the like will try to control the flow of information for their own reasons, nothing new about that either.
I used to think this, but then I realized that algorithmic radicalization is not a bug that social media companies are working to fix. It is a feature. Social media does not work without an algorithm hyper-focusing your feed onto the most extreme bullshit takes.