An eloquent comment about FCC's Net Neutrality proposal | Hacker News Reader

An eloquent comment about FCC's Net Neutrality proposal

apps.fcc.gov

19 pointsbreadtk20 comments

Not so eloquent broadband propaganda:

Curt Overcash seems to be acting as a mouthpiece for Broadband Illinois (a PAC for the broadband industry) by restating their party line: Any regulation will kill investments in the Internet. This is just coded language for "Net Neutrality will hamper our ability to milk profits from our near-monopoly on broadband."

His only other argument is that "you don't want the Internet to become another utility like the outdated phone company, do you?"

Why, yes we do. The phone company can't charge you more if you decide to talk about one thing vs. another. Also, the phone company is required to lease bandwidth on their lines at competitive rates so that 3rd parties can innovate and compete for your business, something that scares the pants off of broadband providers.

I have to agree. This gentleman seems a bit confused. I imagine a virtual livestock auction is something you'd want to utilize all the bandwidth you've paid your provider for and not risk being on a slow lane if the auction provider hasn't paid off your particular ISP. He seems to be advocating a market-based solution, but doesn't conceed that here is no competition.

I have to disagree. The "last mile" problem will require deep pockets, and investments like those are not made when the upside is restricted by regulation. There are those on HN who get excited by Google Fiber. Reclassification of broad band makes that investment by Google less profitable and therefor less likely.

You seem to assume that private companies are willing to invest in the last mile.

They are not.

I live in an area that's been trying to solve its last mile problem for over a decade now. It looks like it might finally be happening, too!

...thanks to a federal grant.

The potholes comment really gets under my skin. Why not point out any of the thousand bad things about private companies? It we want to limit it to ISP's why not just point to the comcast service rep thing making the rounds today?

It's an elequent comment. To be honest I'm not sure that classification under title II is a good choice. Unfortunately it seems like it's the only choice we currently have to protect the internet. Lawmakers are unwilling to work together to solve the problem. Private companies aren't fixing the problems. If there was any other practical way we could do this, wouldn't we have done it by now?

There are lots of theoretical solutions. This is the only one I've seen that looks like it's actually doable.

The potholes comment is especially hilarious to me. I live in a rural area where there are a lot of county and unincorporated roads where the residents are supposed to do the "collective private investment" thing to maintain the roads.

Those roads are almost without fail the worst roads in the area.

The city roads might not be great, but they're a heck of a lot better than private roads.

> Why not point out any of the thousand bad things about private companies?

In fairness, I think the "potholes comment" applies to any lumbering, overgrown bureaucracy, regardless of whether it's private or public. Much in the same way major ISPs will drag their feet when asked to fix a problem, so too do governments when tasked to respond to requests that their regulations have mandated. Is it unfair to point fingers at one bureaucracy over another? Probably.

It's the nature of the beast. Or perhaps more accurately, the nature of human interaction on large scales.

There's nothing eloquent about this argument, it's a sound byte that reflects a typical "durrr free market" knee-jerk reaction. They sound like the words of a man who's been intentionally duped by the ISP lobby.

First, we've got an Illinois farmer claiming "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" when clearly there's something massively broken about the cost / performance ratio of our internet service.

Second, he's also confusing innovation in the ISP world with innovation in the tech startup world. He uses the example of improvements in farming (tech startups) as a reason why we need the internet (ISPs) to be de-regulated. This makes no sense.

Because we've completely forgotten the meaning of antitrust laws, deregulation these days doesn't mean competition and innovation, it means monopoly. If we're not going to fix antitrust, then the next best thing we've got is declaring the internet a utility.

Where we absolutely need to continue nurturing innovation is in the tech world, which relies on internet service being stable and fast and universally available.

Since when have we been hurting for a lack of innovation in the water, electricity, and phone utilities? The services that these companies provide to customers haven't changed in decades, and that's fine.

It's the businesses which depend on utilities that are in need of constant competition and innovation, and they can't do that if they and their customers can't have a guarantee of service.

I totally buy the argument that discriminatory "fast lanes" are a potential danger to internet startups. I mean, at least, at a hand-wavy level.

But I also buy the argument that regulation can disincentivize competition. At the same hand-wavy level as above, it's easy to imagine regulations that would make an ISP say "fine, if we can't charge more for an improved product, we'll just focus on cutting our costs... like our customer service costs".

So, is it more important to protect innovation in startups (a few of which are transformative, but the overwhelming majority of which have no social value), or to protect innovation in connectivity (which everyone uses, so benefits everyone)? I dunno.

Of course, all the foregoing assumes that there current exists meaningful competitive pressure in the ISP space. That doesn't appear to be the case very often (both in U.S. markets and elsewhere). I think this is a far bigger issue than net neutrality will be, in practice.

I'm not convinced that it's a choice between innovation in connectivity and innovation in startups. I think, in particular, the connectivity innovation is unlikely to happen. The current monopolies offer _terrible_ connectivity (as compared to most other developed countries). Preserving that status quo is not going to do anything to help that. Allowing for "fast lane" connectivity will, in the best case, provide acceptable connection speed for a small number of services. In the worst case, they will offer current speeds and just degrade the slow lane. Because monopoly.

He grows astroturf, i assume.

Let's put it this way: here in Canada we've got competitors using cable lines the same way they would use existing DSL infrastructure. Cable companies still have the upper hand for 6-12 months by rolling out new modems with better encoding to provide faster speeds. While third-parties focus on cost, customer service, installation issues and eventually getting those faster modems. The big cable companies are happy -- they still make profits off the cable customers that aren't theirs and can raise the wholesale prices whenever they introduce new speeds. It's a win-win compromise. ;-) Now... This arrangement doesn't involve net neutrality for any provider, with the exception that even third-parties pay for their customer's line access and therefore get unfiltered access to it. What they do from there to connect you to the open internet, as a third party, is their business.

I'm willing to trade away regulated net neutrality for honest-to-goodness competition. But it doesn't seem like there's anyone in Washington willing to deal with our serious monopoly problem.

Stay Canada as long as you can.

I find the "heavy hand of regulation" comment amusing given that it's the "heavy hand of regulation" that makes my European cellphone bill cost 5 times less than my US cellphone bill.

And don't get me started on my Broadband bill...

The comments on this post motivated me to search a little, and I found this.

    Title II includes more than 100 pages of regulations
    that common carriers must follow
    to ensure they act "in the public interest."

...From http://www.dailydot.com/politics/what-is-title-ii-net-neutra...

Honestly, that seems totally reasonable. 100 pages is shorter than many company operating plans—considering that broadband is an essential utility, I fully expect regulations to be as complicated as their business model.

These regulations are pretty straight-forward, too. As messy as the FCC tends to be, their rules are generally easy to follow. 100 pages is nothing.

I think that I accidentally took the quote out of context. I think it was meant to indicate that the legislators of 1934 actually cared about the public good. As in: 'This stuff is pro-consumer, and there's 100 pages of it! Awesome! Let's use it against Comcast, posthaste!'

"If the FCC successfully reclassifies broadband under Title II, private investment and important innovation would come to a standstill."

My big issue with this was that within the context of this comment, the above quote is unfounded speculation? As far as I can tell at least.

He's right. 'Nuff said, a lot of the comments here come from people who seriously think socialization = free and better, but never have anything to say about the economic side effects of "net neutrality" which has never existed anyway.

"I hate this debate. It's mostly politics and buzzwords with 0 cost/benefit analysis. Google already buys last mile access and if people keep acting like profits don't already come from customer choice they're going to end up with slow socialized internet and you'll never see 4k video. Net neutrality helps competition... In what world? That's like saying public schools increase competition in education."

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