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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

"How do we frame this so we can still screw the public on behalf of our lobbyist paymasters?"

Takes time to figure that out.

"There are so many comments against this, it would look bad if we went through with it anyway."

"I know! Generate a bunch of fake comments in favor of the change, and it will look like we made a hard decision instead of blatantly spurning the public!"

"Great idea! But it will take a couple days to generate them and comments close tomorrow, so we'll have to fake an outage as well to give ourselves time."

I know you're joking, but there's no way they'd do this because it'd be painfully obvious that all of the positive comments came in right at the very end, because all of the comments are publicly available[1].

[1]: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment_search/execute?proceeding=1...

How about the fact that net neutrality has never actually been a thing on the Internet? Paid interconnect agreements to ISPs are as old as the Internet itself. To force companies to roll that back at this point would cause catastrophic damage to the Internet as a whole.

Because these agreements are so common place, the best the FCC can really do is put a regulatory structure in place to ensure they're consistently (and legally) applied.

They could add provisions saying something like "the amount of data carried over paid direct interconnects with content owners cannot exceed the amount of data carried through traditional peering arrangements" that would take care of many people's concerns about a "slow lane".

But saying "net neutrality or nothing" requires adopting an idealized, revisionist history of the Internet. The Internet has always been run by large ISPs; it's just that they're large consumer ISPs now so the commercial guys like Level3 are crying about it. Paid data carriage is a fact about the business of the Internet, and if you remove it, capacity will disappear with it until someone figures out another way to make money transmitting data (which will likely involve the consumer paying more).

> How about the fact that net neutrality has never actually been a thing on the Internet? Paid interconnect agreements to ISPs are as old as the Internet itself. To force companies to roll that back at this point would cause catastrophic damage to the Internet as a whole.

That's not what this is about.

What is it about then? Because that's exactly what these so-called "fast lanes" are.

Talking about paid interconnects is kind of meaningless since transit, backbone-backbone peering, and content-eyeball peering are quite different things.

When you try to save the other party money and they ask you to pay them even more, that's fishy. If anti-competitive, anti-consumer behavior has been going on for years and is only now being revealed, that doesn't make it any less bad. Fortunately the FCC is already being motivated to create transparency in this area.

They're not different things and haven't been since the late 90s. All the big media companies have interconnects for CDN purposes; the only difference is that they pay for them (or have settlement-free peering arrangements). Peering disputes like this are as old as the Internet.

When the other party dumps their nice, CDN-backed delivery service in favor of cheap transit from a provider long known to have ~20% packet loss at peak hours, then complains loudly about it, THAT is fishy.

Many people seem to think of the Internet as a big hole that you can throw data into and it magically gets where it's going. Once you start pushing enough traffic, it's YOUR responsibility to ensure you traffic gets where its going, which means spending money on delivery.

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