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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

M-W defines "bribery" in relevant part as: "money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust."

It's only "bribery" if the recipient is in a position of trust. The ISP's are not. They are just businesses operating their wholly private networks. Paying someone to use their private property for your benefit isn't "bribery." It's a basic commercial transaction. E.g. it's not "bribery" for me to pay an Uber Black driver more than an Uber X driver to take me somewhere.

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You are narrowly interpreting 'position of trust', ISPs are not only in a position of trust (we give them ALL of our data to look at), they are because of their trusted position subject to all kinds of directives historically more associated with post offices and telephone companies. They carry our data. As such we trust them very much.

The full quote of what TBL said was this:

"We need rules," said Berners-Lee. "If businesses are to move here and start here rather than start in Europe or Brazil or Australia — they're going to look around and make sure, 'Oh, does the power stay up?' And they'll look for other things. 'Is the Internet open?' Will they have to effectively bribe their ISPs to start a new service? That's what it looks like from the outside. It's bribery."

In other words, if you need to pay the gate-keeper for equal access to the subscribers then that's bribery because the common-carrier principle holds that no priority should be given to other people's packets over yours ('without discrimination') and VV. Allowing such differentiation could for instance cripple any voice-over-ip offering that was not sanctioned via deep packet inspection.

That's what this is about, not about a narrow definition of bribery, not every word is to be taken literally but in this case it is close enough that I don't think you can pretend that you did not understand the slight metaphorical component and simply acknowledge that a gatekeeper that needs payment where none should be due is tantamount to having to bribe someone.

Uber does not enter into it.

Trusting our data (which btw is not true, that's why we have SSL and other crypto) has nothing to do with it. If somebody would pay your ISP for revealing your data - that would be bribery. However, paying ISP to get favorable business deal, like better channel, is no bribery - no more than hiring a private limo for higher price than riding a bus is a bribery of public transportation system. The business of ISP is to provide connections, and paying them for better connection become bribery only if you consider yourself somehow entitled to be provided these connections and not just entering a contract and paying for service. With all respect to Berners-Lee, I don't see where that entitlement would come from.

>>> In other words, if you need to pay the gate-keeper for equal access to the subscribers then that's bribery because the common-carrier principle holds that no priority should be given to other people's packets over yours

That's a circular argument. You declare that ISP has no rights to provide different levels of service (as if that was some obvious law and not the very point being argued) and then conclude that if they do it, it's bribery. But of course, pre-assuming this makes the whole discussion pointless as you declared the victory for yourself before it begun. However, that declaration is baseless - ISP can have different levels of service and do that regularly - they offer different bandwidths, different channel types, etc., etc. and restricting them from doing so serves to purpose but to satisfy a perverted feeling of "fairness" - maybe I cannot buy the best service but at least nobody else can too!

The limo analogy seems backwards when we're discussing paying for favourable access for incoming traffic for customers.

Also bear in mind that those customers have themselves all had to pay for their internet access. Some of those customers will themselves have paid extra for supposedly fast connections.

Communicating on the internet is a two-way transaction mediated by quite a lot of paid third parties. If some of those third parties start trying to extract some rent for premium services, we will have a mess.

What you are saying doesn't make much sense. The "private property" of the ISP's is valuable for content providers only when the public is using it. An ISP with 10 users has exactly 0 power to demand money, even if they have the largest and greatest infrastructure on the market.

Think about this: I, as a user, am paying my ISP money in order to connect and receive content through the Internet, irregardless of the source of that content. I trust my ISP to send that content, and I don't care where it comes from. They should send it as fast as they can (according to my plan) because that's what I pay them for. I think there's no argument there, any user would want to get any content as fast as his plan allows.

Now, my ISP wants to be paid by content providers to give them preferential treatment, breaking completely the trust I put on them when I chose their service. Isn't this exactly "money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust"?

The only way I can imagine this isn't bribery is if they start sending the preferential content faster than your plan allows, while maintaining the rest at the same speed as before. But we know it won't work like that.

I find it interesting how public discussions in the U.S. often are centered around the semantics of single words instead of focusing on the larger picture, which is often connected to morality (entitlement vs. priviledge comes to mind).

The real questions are never even asked. Would a society accept that only rich people would be provided with water in the case of a water shortage? Should one of your children receive more food becuase it scores better grades at school? How important is the delivery of opinions and information compared to water and food? I am not saying that those things can be compared, but these are the things that need to be discussed in public.

Don't worry, this is just because you are reading from rayiner. Lawyers have this tendency to fall into a rabbit hole of explaining things in some legal category, where everyone else naturally operates on morality and expects the law to reflect that.

(Not a personal attack, it's just different.)

I don't see where morality comes into play when talking about weighing the interests of different for profit corporations. I realize that people here tend to sympathize with internet companies over telecommunications companies, but that's precisely why we don't just base the law on peoples' conceptions of "morality."

In any case, a debate over words is rarely just a debate over words. Words delineate the scope of expectations and obligations. Which category you fit into dramatically affects what's expected of you and what you're entitled to. Imprecision as to categories on the basis of vague moral arguments makes it easy to ignore the bargain achieved within each category balancing obligations with entitlements.

> I don't see where morality comes into play when talking about weighing the interests of different for profit corporations.

I think you just summarized in one sentence why many people hate lawyers. It's not just that lawyers are dispassionate, doctors are also dispassionate, and people don't hate doctors nearly as much as lawyers. It's that you miss the forest for the trees.

Categories are inherently imprecise, and focusing on them exclusively leads one to focus on delineation of experience as the ultimate arbiter. Categories cannot prefectly map reality, normal people know this, while lawyers ignore this. Those vague moral arguments are what matters to moral people, not some outdated belief that Aristotelian categorization somehow can properly capture reality.

Lawyers categorize circumstance and then map the law onto those categories. When the law doesn't map well to circumstance, or when we cannot properly categorize the facts, we have questions of interpretation.

"When does a change in degree become a change in kind?", or "Do we need a law of the horse?" Both questions assume categorization as the problem. But our minds don't work like that. Everything that we're learning through cognitive science tells us differently.

For some takes on this that tell it better than I, here are some book links: http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-The-Flesh-George-Lakoff-ebo...

http://www.amazon.com/Clearing-Forest-Law-Life-Mind/dp/02269...

People hate lawyers because they don't like applying the same rules to people they don't like as to people they like. That's why lawyers fixate on categories. Those abstract definitions force people to take personal prejudices and interests out of the calculation.

Morality is the domain of legislation. Litigation deals with how these things fit into real practice.

I think you're ignoring the natural monopoly position of last mile internet providers. If there were practical ways of providing choice & competition to this portion of the link, the market for last mile would be competitive, and letting private networks play with tradeoffs in net neutral arrangements vs fast lanes would be self correcting.

However, because of the monopoly position, then I feel that net neutrality provisions are the only way to prevent unfair (and economically unproductive) rent seeking behavior on last-mile links. Last-mile may end up between being something of a misnomer - network wise it would be end-customer to wherever a fanout of network links allows choice/competitiveness to come in.

Actually there's another way to preserve the utility of last mile links, but in some ways it's more invasive. That would be to structure the market so the last mile is gov't owned (probably municipal), but access to it is separated along lines of maintenance, operation, and service offerings (across it). This seems like a structure less vulnerable to regulatory capture.

> They are just businesses operating their wholly private networks.

Operating a private network for profit and deciding what may be transmitted via that network should be entirely separate concerns in 2014.

It's not even 'what' may be transmitted but 'how'.

I could let you transmit all your 'skype' packets but at 10 seconds delay. You wouldn't have a leg to stand on wrt to eventual deliver or what was delivered.

I'm not sure you can say "wholly private networks" when they use public infrastructure...

What public infrastructure? In most places they pay for their rights of way.

The right to have a legal monopoly? I only have a single high speed internet option, and they know it.

Monopolies aren't illegal. What's illegal is commercial behavior in furtherance of maintaining a monopoly. You probably don't have just one credible high-speed option because of anticompetitive actions on Comcast or AT&T's part.

(I'm prepared to be wrong about that last point; I'm in Chicago, where I do in fact have several high-speed options).

> You probably don't have just one credible high-speed option because of anticompetitive actions on Comcast or AT&T's part.

> (I'm prepared to be wrong about that last point; I'm in Chicago, where I do in fact have several high-speed options).

Easy to test for: collect prices in areas where there is only one supplier versus areas where there are many and compare.

The typical excuse is that it costs more to supply rural areas. Until there is competition and then suddenly ADSL and Cable drop in price tremendously. This situation existed until recently in one rural area where I had a house, the prices were outrageous. Then, just as we were about to roll out a wireless network for the neighbourhood the prices dropped through the floor. Probably coincidence ;).

There's an element of post hoc ergo propter hoc to this. It's also very plausible that whatever force introduces a competitive high-speed carrier to a rural area also works to reduce prices: for instance, maybe competitive carriers enter the market because something happens to suddenly make that market cheaper to serve.

I think the problem is that you're referring back to classical models and frameworks of law and business. The internet has become something too big and too great, it's a weird system in that it is the commons yet parts of it are privately owned. New rules should apply. The owners of the tubes (so to speak) should have some privileges that are normally afforded to owners of any business or technology, but they shouldn't be totally free to endanger the state the Internet is in today -- where small startups have some hope of taking on the big players.

Basically, it's a new world, we have to make some new rules.

I understand where you're coming from, but you can see how that's a non-falsifiable argument, right?

Their monopoly puts them in a position of trust?

They do not have legal monopolies. Technically they are mostly de-facto oligopolies. If oligopolies put you in a position of trust, then we can apply the same reasoning to Google/Bing in search, or Google/Apple in mobile OSes, Pepsi/Coke in soda, EBay in auctions, PayPal in online money transmission, etc.

The ones you name have fringe competitors, but fringe competitors that offer slightly less refined services and products at lower prices.

Because of the way the internet is, to use a fringe competitor you usually pay more to get less. (Satellite internet, home LTE providers).

Around here, Verizon and ATT recognize that their only competitor is Comcast (or other company on the list to be bought by comcast) so they set their prices slightly higher and rely on marketing to add perceived value for about the same service. It may not be explicit price fixing (though it probably is), but it's still not good for national economic health or security.

Difference is, I can choose google or bing, and pepsi or coke. I can't choose time warner or comcast, they already picked that for me. I only have a single high speed internet option.

Pretty sure there would be trouble brewing if somebody paid Google and had their PageRank raised.

This is pretty much what AdWords does.

If you're trolling, I think you can do better.

  If not... Advertisement snippets  on the google SRP are called out with a different background color and are not "organic" search results.

The ads that get shown are "organic" in a certain way: they're the ones that won the auction for that particular search.

There doesn't seem to be any trolling. Adwords provides exactly the function of allowing people to pay to have their results placed above the highest pageranking result.

The claim that offering this spot to the highest bidder is 'organic' seems bizarre at best.

Yes, they are vertically above the highest search result. They also have a different background color.

...... apparently that last sentence is no longer true. No idea when that happened. However, the ads are called out by a yellow button saying "Ad" before the link text.

> If oligopolies put you in a position of trust, then we can apply the same reasoning to Google/Bing in search, or Google/Apple in mobile OSes, Pepsi/Coke in soda, EBay in auctions, PayPal in online money transmission, etc.

You're looking at the wrong markets. The fact that an individual customer can choose between AT&T and Comcast provides very little consolation to the likes of Netflix. There is no other provider that can supply Netflix with connectivity between their servers and their customers who subscribe to Comcast. Netflix can't switch those customers from Comcast to AT&T if AT&T provides better terms. Comcast has a monopoly.

The analogy to Apple is completely appropriate. The smartphone customers see plenty of competition but the app developers are at the mercy of Apple for access to customers with iPhones. The same would be true of Google if they prohibited competing app stores as Apple does.

But it only applies to markets where the vendors can and do try to leverage their market power into a related market. Pepsi can't demand a tithe from the makers of cups because it has no control over what cups its customers pour their Pepsi into. You don't have to sell on eBay to accept PayPal.

The common theme is that a company places itself into a position of trust. By inserting themselves as a gatekeeper for third party access to its primary market customers they are carving out a monopoly in the ancillary market(s), which is an affirmative act that creates a position of trust.

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