FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote | Hacker News Reader

FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

techcrunch.com

1,489 pointsLukeB_UK711 comments

Unfortunately the Net Neutrality 'debate' was another lose-lose situation for the United States. What we wanted wasn't for the big telecom duopoly to be forced to either run their business as a tiered service or as a regulated utility. What we wanted was for the US Government to exercise its Anti-Trust capabilities and bust the universally hated Comcast and Time Warner into a bunch of small companies, and set "Goldilocks" regulation so that it's easy for small and new ISPs to compete on both price and service. Additional laws preventing corporations from discriminating by content, protocol, or customer may also have been nice, but would have been that extra nice something.

Are Comcast and Time Warner going to be somehow less shitty now? Are they going to monitor our communications less? Are they going to provide better prices and better customer service? Are they going to cease fraudulently charging customers? No.

Of the two options the FCC chose the better one. But it's America's fatal flaw that all problems have two political solutions, neither of which address real issues or people's needs.

It's not the job of the government to make companies less shitty, it's their job to protect the free market so OTHER companies can reduce the shittiness of e.g. comcast. This is just the first step.

I'd also like to point out that splitting up Ma Bell hardly solved the problem.

> It's not the job of the government to make companies less shitty, it's their job to protect the free market so OTHER companies can reduce the shittiness of e.g. comcast.

While you're correct you also need to remember that it was the government who helped create many of these monopolies in the first place. Trying to force the market to become more open for smaller companies arguably could have been the best move to make. But that doesn't really matter now.

"I'd also like to point out that splitting up Ma Bell hardly solved the problem."

Really ? I'm not an expert, but one item that comes to mind is that my children have never heard the term "long distance" and never will. That's pretty swell.

Ma Bell's children went on to do the exact same thing with cable and broadband.

So... it sounds like we need to do the exact same thing again.

But you're advocating the opposite. Why?

Separate infrastructure and service. Require companies to sell access to the infrastructure a wholesale price to anybody who wants in. This way it allows for new entrants to the market who can find different ways of packaging the wholesale price at lower cost to the consumer without requiring them to build infrastructure.

(The service part of the infrastructure company pays the same wholesale price as everybody else so that there are no advantages to owning both)

This is the model that a lot of European countries with post privatization telecoms monopolies went with and has worked surprisingly well and has kept prices low.

Or if you are building infrastructure on taxpayer dollar keep it public like they keep almost everything else. Depends on location, but usually power lines are public but maintained by a private contracted company, roads are public but are maintained either by subcontracted engineering corps or state public unionized engineers, sewer lines are public, etc.

It seem we only think that twisted pair / coaxial / fiber channels should cross everyones private property but stay privately owned. On average at least. I know a lot of backwards thinking that leads to the privatization of other infrastructure (water, power, etc) that leads to tremendous exploitation of the citizenry by the monopoly provider.

This is exactly what the Baby Bells are required to do with their lines. This is why you sometimes see small regional DSL providers - they're leasing the lines from the Baby Bell and reselling them.

That might also be why the two companies doing really shady net neutrality stuff are both cable providers rather than DSL providers - the DSL providers wouldn't be able to get away with it.

Breaking up a company will be no means guarantee fair access in any given location.

Broadly speaking we've slowly gotten closer to the monopoly status again which is why we are seeing this now.

http://eon3emfblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/ATT-Reborn...

"long distance" charges continued for a long time after the split up. I'm not convinced that the splitup was a causal factor at all with regards to those going away.

(As a reference, my most recent landline also had long distance charges just a couple of years ago. Getting unlimited was cost prohibitive relative to the benefit.)

Agreed. There's a great documentary on this called "Long Distance Warrior". It's about the MCI court case against Ma Bell/ATT.

Was on PBS a while back, but think it's uploaded as a private Youtube video somewhere.

I'd like to argue that splitting up Bell succeeded so utterly that it's time to break up some of the modern incarnations of the Baby Bells.

Back in the day, you could make a person to person collect call knowing they would refuse to accept the charges. You would do this to signal that you safely arrived after a long trip...etc. You could also encode information in the name you told the operator was making the call.

The split up of Ma Bell was a huge part of the story of the history of computer communications. Remember, AT&T owned the whole system, including the wires in you home or office and the actual phones. Prior to the breakup, you had to be granted permission to connect any equipment to the phone system. One of the primary reasons people used Acoustic Coupled modems was so that Ma Bell did not have to get involved in the approval and installation of your equipment.

I well remember installing my first modem with an RJ11 jack in the early 1980's. As a 14 year old, I remember feeling quite the rebel for not getting AT&T's approval.

Actually, the Carterfone decision (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_...) allowed attachment of lawful devices to the AT&T network.

I remember renting my phone from AT&T. Premium colors and touchtone were extra. They would periodically ring your line to measure the voltage drop to detect unauthorized phones.

And that is why you would disconnect the Bell on all the "extra" phones. ;)

Fascinating and informative! Thanks!

I had no idea it was this bad, as I am from the UK.

It was almost that bad in pretty much all European countries too. Including the UK. Prior to the start of deregulation in 1981 you could only rent your phone from BT, and BT/the Post Office had sole authority to decide what could be attached to the network.

Starting from 1981, standardized sockets were introduced to allow people to buy and attach third party equipment, and BSI took over the responsibility for setting the standards for what equipment could be attached.

(And you can still rent your phone from BT if you prefer: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/13012/~/is-it... )

Ah I was born mid80s so grew up after the deregulation. My brother once moved into a flat where the previous tenant had rented their phone from BT but moved without telling them, leading to many threatening letters from BT regarding the phone.

One thing I am surprised about these days is how RUBBISH home phones are. Given the advances in cheap mobile phone technology and the finishes/quality even on cheap devices, home phones still feel like toys and have abysmal quality and no features - I would love to pair a bluetooth headset to a base station and wander around but apparently this is entirely beyond the normal use patterns envisioned by manufacturers. It's very frustrating - I almost want to go back to a 1980s polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride rotary phone.

The opposite use case is covered. They do make base stations you can pair with your cell phone as a bluetooth headset.

It depends on your definition of "bad." The Ma Bell monopoly certainly constrained your ability to even hook your own equipment to their wiring for many years and resulted in an uncompetitive market in terms of pricing. Even intra-state long distance was very expensive by today's standards. (Though some of that was a function of the technology economics as well.) On the other hand, it just worked. US telephone service was extremely reliable.

"the free market" is like saying "the world peace". your ideological slip is showing.

Why couldn't we just get congress to pass a law stating that ISP's cannot throttle one type of content in favor of another? Why this heavy handed approach?

You mean Title X? The vaguely-worded proposal, hand-written by the telecoms, to castrate the FCC's ability to regulate, and to impose a set of exploitable loopholes that are difficult to reverse once in effect?

After seeing the absolute ignorance congress has of the internet, how it works, who uses it, how it benefits the country/world, and why it's important, the last thing I want is those people voting on new internet regulations.

I'd rather have an organization regulating the internet that has been set up precisely to understand the issues. Yes, it's removed from direct voting influence, but at least the people there understand what the internet is and are willing to listen to people who know what they're talking about.

*direct money influence

There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly.

Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets.

Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier.

Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1?

Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.

Wouldn't drastically increased competition solve problem one over time?

Probably not; ISPs don't do traffic shaping because they're evil, they do it because it saves them money. The average customer probably cares more about the price of their broadband and the big number in front of it, not whether they get full utilization.

This is a bad assumption that any new competition would act differently than the status quo. More competitors would make it harder to have a solid argument of "pay me, or else", but that wouldn't stop some behind-the-scenes collusion.

Possibly but it hinges a lot on drastically increased in an often prohibitively expensive commercial sector and it would take a lot longer than enforcing one, and then encouraging competition to bring speeds up and overall cost of bandwidth down for consumers.

And there's been lots of no compete agreements among these ISPs and I'm sure there's other examples out there where the "competition" makes it better for all of them at the expense of consumers.

well there was one attempt by Clinton to have the gov fund increased capacity... and the telecoms just ended up taking the money without doing anything

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

I believe the Obama admin tried it again. I don't know the full result, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened.

Originally the answer is No, because shaping reduces costs for overburdened (older) networks, and these these are infrastructure-heavy regional markets so the entry cost is already very high for competition.

But then you have companies like Google who can come in an put in Fiber because they're a tech conglomerate who can subsidize these costs in other ways.

'Competition' isn't the panacea solving all problems that some make it out to be.

No, because telecom specifically has very high barriers to entry (infrastructure, licensing, etc).

Quite possibly the opposite: new entrants wouldn't try to compete on general-purpose internet service but would deploy a service that's cheap because it's sponsored by large content providers, and those content providers would get preferential treatment.

Oh wow, that's a great point. I've always tried to compromise with opponents by agreeing that increased competition should alleviate many of my fears but now that you've mentioned it - I could absolutely see a HULU.net come in, sponsored by various content creators.

But perhaps that price is all they could afford, and in that case, something is a lot better than nothing.

Not necessarily. Consumers would prefer the probable lower prices of tiered services. Yet in the long run this would hurt consumers by throwing up barriers to startups and competition among internet services. This is an example of how markets favor short-term interests (lower ISP prices) over long-term.

Another example: advertising-subsidized media. Used to be (100 years ago) newspapers didn't necessarily runs ads. There was a rich working-class press. Then the ad-subsidized model came out and it slashed the price of newspapers, but on the condition that the content was generally business friendly. (Otherwise they wouldn't get many advertisers.) So nobody bought the working-class newspapers anymore because they were too expensive. This had a massive impact on the tone and perspective of published media that persists to this day.

The headline could say that world hunger was cured but the top comment on HN would still be something like "yes, but X people are still dying in car crashes every year"

There does seem to be a bias towards overly worded critical comments.

I like reading the counter argument so that I can feel like I looked at both sides of the matter. What can I say?

"both"? There's far more than two perspectives in any argument worth having.

In some things the other side is just idiocy. Vaccines work and are generally safe. There is no legitimate other side to that.

I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much. When there's a post that says "we solved this problem", a lot of people here (me included) think "great, what's the next problem to solve". The focus is on "the next problem to solve" more than the "great", sometimes to the degree that the "great" is completely ignored. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, but it can get grating. It reminds me a lot of a part of the essay "How to ask questions the smart way"[0] by Eric Raymond:

> Much of what looks like rudeness in hacker circles is not intended to give offence. Rather, it's the product of the direct, cut-through-the-bullshit communications style that is natural to people who are more concerned about solving problems than making others feel warm and fuzzy

It's not quite the same, but it comes from the same cut-through-the-bullshit attitude.

[0]: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

> I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much.

Possibly, but there are a couple more factors.

1) In the general population, criticism is still the norm. The default reaction to any change is neutral to negative. If any response is made, chances are it will be negative.

2) On HN, vacuous responses are discouraged. And since substantive positive responses are hard to make (most of the positive spin usually ends up in the article, not in responses), positive responses in general are uncommon. Comparatively, substantive negative responses are easier to make, not least because it's almost always easier to see a problem than to see a solution.

Either one of those would push the responses towards negative criticism. Combined with yours, you now have three not-insignificant forces. There are probably more. There probably aren't many forces pushing towards positive response, and demonstrably not enough to balance the scales.

I think at least part of it is because the people on HN enjoy solving problems so much.

Or we're all cynical assholes. Just possibly.

"Por qué no los dos!?"

I think it's because we are pedantic. In a pedantic way no more world hunger, but people still die in car crashes, is correct. Pedantically correct.

I'd rather "Idealistic Perfectionist", thank you.

> Or we're all cynical assholes. Just possibly.

Unlikely. HNers are wide-eyed Utopians in the Platonic fashion of believing in virtue through central planning. There is no cynicism here to be found, but in the downvoted comments.

Not a fan of centralized control... I much prefer distributed, concurrent, fault-tolerant, scalable systems. You'd think most HN readership would too.

Well, which comment would you upvote?

1) Yay! 2) Here's where they could have done more...

Or overly pedantic alpha nerds, the lot of us.

With all due respect to ESR, and speaking as an autistic person who has struggled with socialization, I get tired of people trying to paint their failure to grasp basic social principles as a virtue. Behaving like an efficient robot is useful when dealing with machines, but other people are not machines and treating them as such does not improve productivity even if you think it ought to.

A couple of jobs back, I met with a supervisor to proudly tell him that a gigantic, exhausting project I'd been working on for the last nine months was finally ready to deploy. His response, almost verbatim, was "Cool. Here's what I need you to do next..." I found it nearly impossible to care about what he wanted for the rest of my time there. 60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.

Sorry, that got awfully off-topic. It's just a hot button with me.

Thanks. That was as or more apropos as the comment you replied to, and much more valuable.

60 seconds' worth of interest and congratulations would have gotten dozens of hours of extra productivity out of me.

Hundreds, probably, thousands maybe. It's hard to overestimate the value in these things.

Except, of course, on HN.

So, to reiterate, other people are not machines.

I don't know - I think in order to properly recognize and understand the difference between achievements and failures the community should at least give some credit and also give itself a small pat on the back for achievements such as this.

If you never know what success looks like, you're always failing.

It's easy to sound smart when you write critical comments.

It is a problem, but I also enjoy the fact that I can rely on HN for to reason about why things aren't as great as they seem. It's important to know what stills needs fixing and I'd much rather digest it in a matter of fact HN comment than the common world is ending tone many other tend to take towards the US government.

Well people tend to take victories as if the problem was solved. You might say world hunger is solved, and people move on to fixing car crashes. And then when you point out that people still don't have access to clean water, everyone's attention has already moved on. By the time we can get their attention back, world hunger is a problem again because without clean water you can't run a farm.

No, the top comment would be a bitter complaint that world hunger had been cured by the government, which can't do anything right, so it must be wrong to cure world hunger.

And for good reason: Don't live yesterday. Just because you won a fight doesn't mean you'll win the war against all the worlds problems. Bask a few moments in the nice glow of a victory and then start attacking the next problem.

This is all well and good, but I did argue this over a month ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8882088

Totally agree. We can harp on the FCC for their performance with a wide range of issues, but at least here we have them [finally] taking action on one of them.

Did problem 1 really need 700 distinct new regulations to be solved?

I have yet to see any basis for the "700 distinct new regulations" claim, and given the parallel claim, often from the same posters, that the Order is only on the order of 300 pages, find "700 distinct new regulations" to be highly suspicious, and suspect that if it is even loosely tied to fact, its tied to a count of the number of numbered sections, not the number of things that are in any sense distinct regulations.

I suspect this is a reference to the number of regulations that current apply to other entities regulated under Title II. Of course, there is more than one category of entity under Title II, each of which faces a different regulatory burden. Broadband ISPs are sure to be yet another category, with different regulatory burdens. In fact we know this, because the FCC has been quite clear that it will use its authority to "forbear" from subjecting broadband ISPs to many of the requirements that typically apply under Title II.

So you're exactly right: there is no support for the "700 regulations." It's total nonsense.

As far as I can tell, the 700 regulations is complete nonsense from people who did not read the release thoroughly. I have the news release sitting right in front of me, and on the 3rd page under the heading "Legal Authority:..." it says:

"the Order refrains - or forbears - from enforcing 27 provisions of Title II and over 700 associated regulations that are not relevant to modern broadband service."

That's your over 700 right there. This is the only place that I can find that number anywhere. The people who are talking abuot "over 700 new regulations" are party to a misunderstanding of hilarious proportion, making it clear that they have not RTF(news release).

It's not a misunderstanding. It is part of a deliberate misinformation campaign. And I don't find it hilarious.

This is a probematic comment in any forum, but I'd think it'd be especially unwelcome in a forum filled with programmers.

Because even assuming it's true that there are 700 new distinct regulations, programmers should know better than to use regulations as a pejorative or high numbers of them as a proxy bugaboo. We're people whose job includes filling text editors with regulations specifying the inputs, tranformations, and actions of a program. Defining entities and creating specifications and rules for how they behave is how we make systems.

700 lines of code is generally a pretty low number for doing anything complex. 700 pages of code wouldn't write you a bot to regulate network communications businesses. If the current FCC produces that much writing about how they plan to do things, it says nothing about the quality of their plans.

Yes but by drawing that parallel, you have to realize that programmers represent totalitarian dictators. Software isn't a democracy. America is.

Even democracies run better with unambiguous rules.

I don't know what your job is like, but at mine, I'm accountable to various technical leadership, PMs, UX, and ultimately the client, from which all authority to commit code that goes to production is derived. :)

And the FCC is an agent deriving its authority to regulate from legislation and working under elected executive authority.

So I'm not sure what the connection with totalitarian dictatorship is.

You write the rules that govern exactly how every aspect of the program runs. If a part of the program runs in a way that your government doesn't approve of, it gets modified or ripped out and replaced with code that does follow the rules exactly. You don't let the code decide for itself whether it should loop or not, you tell it exactly when it should loop and exactly when it should continue.

Totalitarian governments don't exist of just one person, either.

Worth noting: the FCC also struck down laws in two states that had barred municipalities from setting up their own broadband networks.

The widely covered ruling (Title II) stops the major ISPs from getting worse. The less noticed ruling is what will put the screws to their executives, and make them actually perform.

For their customers, I mean. More on the muni. ruling here: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/02/fcc-did-lot-mo...

But it's almost a catch-22. To solve problem 2 after solving problem 1 with regulation, you have to introduce more regulations. As a general rule of thumb, the more regulations you introduce, the more lobbying is used to stifle competition. The companies get in bed with the government, time and time again.

Were now increasingly dependent on the goverment for internet progross.

That's not what we want. We want progress to be a freebie. A natural by product of real competition. We've effectively gave up on the pure solution, and elected for the long politically complicated "government mandated progress" solution.

History shows it's unlikely to end up in our favor in the long run.

Damnit.

...I'd be so happy if we could just cut through all the political tape and see Google Fiber come into our neighborhoods

If Problem 2 is solved, I don't see why Problem 1 is any more of a problem than allowing FedEx and UPS to charge different prices to different customers.

> ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets

I'm still not getting it. Isn't this like saying restaurants are charging to provide more flavorful, healthier food? The cost burden may appear to fall on the suppliers in the ISP case, but they just pass that onto the consumer, just like the price you see next to the menu item.

Problem 1 only appears to be a problem because of problem 2. It's a competition issue. Are we really closer to solving problem 2 now? How so?

But there already is legislation in place to deal with problem 2. Antitrust law exists and has been successfully used in the past. If the political will is created it could be used just as well against the ISP duopoly. Problem 1 on the other hand is a brand new problem that is peculiar to the medium of the internet. Unless the legal framework for it is laid down as early as possible, the service will always be vulnerable to political agendas. Simply put, net neutrality legislation is essential for the future of the internet, while shitty competition is a temporary problem that can be solved.

We're already seeing progress (albeit very minor progress) in solving problem 2. The entry of Google Fiber in the market is more significant than most people realize, because it shows that companies that rely on efficient internet service for their revenue are willing to expand into ISP roles in order to ensure reach to customers. Who's to say that Apple, a massive corporation with deep pockets that lives and breathes user experience, won't invest in ensuring that their customers have the best experience with the internet possible?

Call me optimistic, but I don't think the ISP duopoly in is going to last forever. The stakes are just too high for other large companies to not enter into the field. Eventually, I believe we'll see a bunch of walled gardens ISPs instead of the current duopoly, with Apple, Google and maybe even someone like Facebook acting as ISPs for their own subset of customers. When that does happen, we need to make sure that the playing field for all websites stays level and independent of economic or political interests. Strict net neutrality laws are exactly what we need in a situation like that.

Restaurants can't prioritize white customers over black customers. They can't provide more flavorful, healthier food for white customers only, while giving rotten, old, bad food to black customers while charging the same price.

ISP's can however charge a higher price for faster speeds, same as a restaurant can charge a higher price for more flavorful and healthier food.

competition solve problems when every actor acts rational, and everyone competes fairly with the same moral and ethical values. As soon one of those two assumptions are wrong, competition stops to solve problems in the market.

Your discrimination example is a straw man. Not applicable.

I'm talking about the menu a restaurant puts together based on the deals and choice they get from suppliers. One supplier may undercut the other. The restaurant may sign a long term deal with a supplier that isn't beneficial to the patrons. Competition is a check on that scenario, just as it is with any market where there is at least a handful of non-colluding sellers.

It's not rational to charge suppliers for priority? It's totally rational. They want more of your pipe. Ignoring the popular notions of fairness and "packet equality", why shouldn't they get charged more?

Competes fairly? How about just legally? A rule violation is a rule violation and should be settled in the justice system. The beauty of competition is that companies would rather undercut/offer a superior product over the competitors rather than waste time in court (or jail). You just need several competitors to keep them honest. It's a sufficient quantity of options, not the heavy-hand of the state, that ensures consumers are protected.

If anti-discrimination laws were repealed, do you honestly believe minorities and women would have their dining and golfing options cut by 50%? I bet it wouldn't even be 5%. And I bet white males would have their options cut by the same number. Popular opinion and competition help solve that particular market problem. Law definitely helps, but the assumption that competition only works when "everyone competes fairly with the same moral and ethical values" is flat out false. On the whole, the profit motive is much stronger than any superficial biases. Finding talented workers who share the exact same superficial biases, and not having someone like Jesse Jackson leading picket lines outside your business would both be damn near impossible.

I think an apt analogy would be if GFS[0] opened a chain of restaurants and started restricting deliveries to other restaurants, unless those restaurants paid an extra fee that the GFS restaurants weren't subject to.

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Food_Service

Again, they could only do that if they had monopolistic control of the market. That would be a symptom of problem 2.

True, but the regional monopolies are pretty solid. Net neutrality doesn't fix the root problem, but it makes it harder for ISPs to flex their muscles.

Personally, I think that solving problem 2 is the most important, and problem 1, if it is truly a problem, could be solved by a competitive free market. If it's truly possible for new competitors to enter the market, then if problem 1 really matters, market forces will handle it.

if problem 1 really matters, market forces will handle it.

Market forces didn't handle seat belts, air bags, fuel efficiency, racial discrimination, taxation without representation, etc. We cannot rely on the market to solve all problems.

As always, these items are only presented as "problems" because of the presence of government. So when government steps in and solves them, all pro-state individuals shout a glorious "Hurray, take that free-market!!'.

>Seat Belts: If individuals wanted them, the car companies would have followed suit. You forget that not only were seat belts mandated to be installed, but people were FINED if they didn't put them on.

>Air Bags: If there wasn't a state, I'm sure you'd have safety organizations putting out reports/studies about effectiveness of air bags. Rich people would buy them in their cars, poor people wouldn't, and they don't do that now anyways. Not sure how you see this is as something "government" fixed as it's different to seat belts, which are mandated?

>Fuel efficiency: Ah yes, another environmental tax meant to incentivize good behavior. Let me know how that's working out. All this does is drive up the cost of cars unnecessarily under the pretense of environmental benefits. Again, if people wanted it, you wouldn't have to force them to do it. This is the basic basic difference that most pro-market, and anti-market sentiments boil down to.

>Racial discrimination: This was enforced and perpetuated by state laws. Some would argue it still happens today with certain mandatory sentencing laws, minimum wage, etc.

>Taxation without representation. What? You want the market to solve a problem that solely exists because of the state, revolves around the state, and is absolutely not subject to any market forces at all? Perhaps if I could "choose" where my tax money was spent, then there would be some sort of market force driven by individuals. But that's nowhere near the case.

Now, a little more on-topic. You are absolutely right that we can't rely on the market to solve all problems, but in the presence of a state. The temptation is always there to "correct" or "slightly nudge" the market in directions we want it to go, rather than what the collective unconscious has decided. The free-market is more democracy than democracy is right now, and people fundamentally can not accept that.

As with a pure democracy, in order for market forces to work, you have to assume that the individuals really want what is best for them or best for society at large. Pure capitalism isn't going to solve many serious problems that can be attributed to tragedy of the commons -- pollution, fuel efficiency, etc. -- because not everyone is an expert in those areas, and I don't fault them for that. Likewise with issues like racial and gender discrimination, if those decisions were left up to individuals to decide whether they "want" to promote fairness to marginalized people, then I can assure you that the status quo would not change. Market forces can fix many things, but they won't fix societal issues way larger than the individual -- or at least not in a timely manner.

I'll let that great promoter of free trade and market forces Adam Smith weigh in here:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together... but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public,...”

Corporations have vast resources and capabilities far beyond those of the individual and frequently use them against us for their own benefit. Tobacco companies faked and suppressed research and knowingly lied in their advertising. Car companies fought seat belts and air bags tooth and nail. Few companies campaign for minimum quality standards in their categories of products, yet information about quality are essential to informed participation by purchasers in any market.

Ideally each of us indivudualy should be fully informed about every decision we make, but the fact is it's simply not possible. So instead we delegate responsibility for many of these decisions to our leaders. They regulate markets on our behalf and increase the efficiency of markets by performing necessary research, standardisation and negotiations on quality once so we can all benefit from it every time we make a purchase.

Appropriate regulation of markets is essential to their function, and delegation of responsibility based on democratic choice is itself a market mechanism. Of course there are arguments to be made about the appropriate level and type of regulation.

"They regulate markets on our behalf..."

That would be awesome if it were true, but it's not. It's very naive to believe politicians and bureaucrats work for anything other than their own self-interest.

Now that the FCC runs the Internet who do you think is going to influence them more- Comcast's lobbyists or you?

Some cynicism can be healthy, but just because there are issues, some of them serious, with American democratic processes doesn't mean the whole system is corrupt and run purely for the benefit of the ruling elite. I know what that looks like. My wife is Chinese.

Not sure i see an issue here, we know that individuals did not particularly want them, just as i would prefer not to wear a seatbelt on an airplane because i'm not capable of understanding at any given time what the likelihood of danger is on a plane. Do you get mad at the government went the fasten seatbelt sign goes on during turbulence?

> If there wasn't a state, I'm sure you'd have safety organizations putting out reports/studies about effectiveness of air bags

You are "sure" are you? congratulations, no one else is. You can't use hand waving to dismiss this problem.

>Rich people would buy them in their cars, poor people wouldn't

In a country that absolutely necessitates the use of a car, do you think its morally acceptable to keep airbags out of reach of the poor?

>and they don't do that now anyways

Are you under the impression that poor people in the US drive around in cars without airbags and seat belts?

>Fuel efficiency: ... Let me know how that's working out.

Its working quite well, I lease cars and each of my last three cars (3 years each, current car is due next month) were cheaper than the previous and more fuel efficient. For the record i was not switching types of cars - previous cars where pontiac G6, Chevy Malibu, Mazda 3, all similarly sized/priced cars.

>Again, if people wanted it, you wouldn't have to force them to do it.

OK so i want a 99 MPG car. If i dont have to force an automaker to produce one, why arent they? Youre looking at the market as a abstraction of reality. In reality an automakers motivation is profit, not sales. There are other ways of increasing profit than determining and matching consumer demand. To ignore this is far from trivial.

>Racial discrimination: This was enforced and perpetuated by state laws. Some would argue it still happens today with certain mandatory sentencing laws, minimum wage, etc.

Whats your argument here? That we would be better off with no state laws at all? That we would be better off with no regulation on discrimination in any direction?

>The free-market is more democracy than democracy is right now, and people fundamentally can not accept that.

Its not that people can't accept it, it is that a direct democracy is universally accepted as a terrible organizational structure. Theres a reason the US is NOT a democracy. There is no disagreement, the free market would be a direct democracy, and that is not a positive thing to say.

True - but in defence of OP's point, the UK has a competitive market for broadband service providers and there (for the most part) net neutrality is not an issue. So, anecdotally, solving problem 2 could minimize the effect of problem 1.

On the other hand I think this is a great win on its own :)

In particular it's worth noting that some providers wanted to make net neutrality an issue in the UK: In particularly once iPlayer launched, they were wildly unhappy with the traffic the BBC "caused".

But they were in the unhappy position (for the ISPs, not users) that if they started negatively affecting iPlayer, their customers would have plenty of choice.

The comical part of that whole affair was that they should have cheered the BBC on:

Bandwidth used for iPlayer was bandwidth they could get incredibly cheaply simply by peering with the BBC [1] at a range of public peering points or even directly, and bandwidth end-users used to get at iPlayer content would be bandwidth they wouldn't use to stream over far more expensive routes.

Of course, the reason they were whining was that many of them had severely underdimensioned their backhaul networks to their core networks compared to the speeds they were actually selling to their customers, so in the short run it drove up costs, but in the long run the larger market share the BBC and other domestic streaming providers have, the better, for the above reason.

[1] https://support.bbc.co.uk/support/peering/

Huh - I was vaguely aware of the uproar about iPlayer in the early days, but I had no idea the BBC did peering agreements. This was fascinating, thank you :)

From the original comment: > Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets. > Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier.

My point is that problem 1 is only a "problem" because of problem 2. If it's easy for new competitors to enter the market (which I think addresses the main complaint about charging for traffic), then "problem 1" is not a problem. It may well be the case that you can't solve the competition problem without solving the pay-for-traffic "problem", but the competition problem is the only one that matters on its own.

If Comcast wants to charge Netflix for their traffic, let them go ahead. This country used to have antitrust laws that should be perfectly sufficient to take Comcast to court and break them up if the case can be made that they're doing it to punish competition and promote their own services.

I can see the case that sometimes it makes sense and is fair to charge big users, and that sometimes this behavior can be abused to harm competition. My worry is that Net Neutrality is a sledgehammer we don't really need.

Problem 2 will go away fairly quickly if the two biggest ISP's do not invest in their infrastructure as they will create a situation where it is easy to get leapfrogged by other players. Net neutrality curbs an aspect of piss taking and bad behaviour that is both current and proven and is merely a law to abide by for all players, whereas breaking up independent companies is surely far more of a sledgehammer, and one that should only be used as a last resort if legislation fails.

Market forces didn't handle those problems because either 1) there was no established market or 2) the problem was institutionalized by government (last 2).

Cars and highways were novel. People wanted them more than they wanted to be sufficiently safe, or fuel-efficient. Volvo is not touting their ultra safe cars because of regulation. The market wants it now. There is a market for that now. It's impossible to prove there would be no market if not for the government regulation. Just look at what we elect to spend on health care. Just look at Tesla and the success of the Prius.

With enough information, people will pay for well-being regardless of government mandates.

Market forces would have handled racial discrimination if the government had done the one job it had to do of equally protecting businesses that were owned by or catered to racial minorities.

local loop unbundling is what you need

There is a reasonable argument that if Problem 2 is solved, Problem 1 is no longer a problem.

> Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier.

While its not a complete solution, the FCC decision -- on the same day as the open internet vote -- preempting state laws prohibiting municipal broadband efforts (which laws prevent one potential alternative to the incumbent providers) at least addresses Problem 2.

How does busting them into smaller companies help anything? You'd still have regional monopolies or duopolies.

But breaking up Comcast or TW wouldn't lead to increased competition and more options for consumers. Breaking them up would not change the fact that most people will only have one serious option for wired internet service... it would simply change the name of the one option that a given consumer would have. The reason being that, for a given location, the permission to actually lay down the lines is going to be given typically to one company (or a select few). This means that wired internet service is not capable of being a healthy competitive market. Which leads to the conclusion that treating those lines as a utility is the right choice.

At the very least, they wouldn't have the overwhelming advantage when negotiating peering terms with content and carrier networks. Eyeball (broadband) networks currently have far too much power, and is the reason why they make huge profits while pretty much every primarily carrier network loses money. The cost of Internet connectivity is dependent on the cost of cable in the ground, and the cost of equipment. For both, carrier networks have to make larger (and thus riskier) capital outlays and pay a premium to operate at a larger scale. Meanwhile, the broadband networks received billions of public funds on the condition they'd ensure access in rural areas and provide a minimum level of service, both of which they haven't done yet kept the money.

Even if the giants were broken up you'd still have the problem of local monopolies. To actually enable competition within the same market you'd probably need to go the route of a regulated utility that is required to lease their cable lines to independent ISPs, as we've done with phone companies. Only then could the market even conceivably let consumers choose between tiered and neutral services.

Even then it wouldn't necessarily be good in the long run, because consumers will prefer the cheaper (tiered) service, not "realizing" the long-term effect that would have on inhibiting startups and competition among internet services.

What we wanted wasn't for the big telecom duopoly to be forced to either run their business as a tiered service or as a regulated utility.

That's exactly what I wanted. It will lead to more consumer-facing competition.

What we wanted was ... exercise its Anti-Trust capabilities and bust the universally hated ... into a bunch of small companies

That's not at all what I wanted. It would lead to endless localized land-grabbing bureaucracy.

There's a lot of echoing of telco FUD in here. Let's get some things straight:

- The FCC is unelected, but so is the EPA, FBI, CIA, DOD, DOJ, etc. We can't elect everybody who works in government. That wouldn't work.

- This does not mean the FCC is uncontrollable or unanswerable for what it does. It answers to both the executive and legislative branches of government, and of course anything it does can be subject to the courts as well. So it is checked by all three branches of government.

- With all the shenanigans and expensive lawyers the telcos have at their disposal, it shouldn't surprise you that 700 regulations were involved in this. What do you think, a one page paper that says "The Internet is Neutral. Don't throttle traffic on it." is enough? Of course it's not. Comcast has you sign a user agreement that's dozens of pages long just to use their service.

- Regulations are not usually published before they are done. There would be little point because they are constantly changing. I can see the transparency argument that it would be nice to see the proposed regulations being worked on in "real time", but in progress documents like this have a lot of things added and taken out constantly. Something that's not going to stay in could be cited while it's being worked on by pundits to try to sway public opinion against it. There's a balancing act between transparency and muddying the waters.

- The regulations will be published. If there is something awful in there it can be dealt with. This isn't the only thing that will ever happen. Laws get repealed and changed all the time.

- This is a good thing for anyone who isn't on the board of a telco.

I think many of us here call it a generally good move, we just wanted to see everything that was proposed before it was passed. Not that we could do anything about it.

We'll see it all soon (as in the next couple weeks) and if there's something awful in there we can start calling for revision.

Nothing is going to happen in the next couple of weeks.

There are going to be lawsuits galore that will hold up any significant changes to internet services for years.

What? The regulations will certainly be released in the next couple weeks. Yes, that's also when the lawsuits will start. But I was talking about the regulations being released (since that's what the comment I was replying to was talking about.)

Feel free to take your terrible attitude elsewhere.

You ad hominem attack aside, whatever wording may or may not be in the regulations will not matter near as much as how things will actually be implemented, and how these implemented changes will affect us all here on the web.

For example, there are 1000's of crazy laws on the books here in the US. Plenty of websites document "laws" like "it's a misdemeanor to walk your dog on Sunday within 100 feet of a church"

Since no police actually enforce these type of laws, the wording in the statue goes unnoticed...no one cares.

But if they did, all hell would break loose and the current local officials would probably quickly change them.

That is the gist of the direction I was trying to take.

I repeat your attitude sucks. That's not an ad hominem attack. An ad hominem attack is an attack directed at your person, I'm attacking the nature and premise of your comments; they come from a place of useless negativity.

Your attitude is basically "This means nothing because only the implementation and enforcement means anything." Which is just absurd.

Of course the implementation and enforcement matter, but the regulations matter as well.

Yes, but of course, my attitude is a part of my "person".

Perhaps it is you who should lighten up a bit, my friend.

"Your attitude sucks" is not an ad hominem argument, "Your argument is incorrect because your attitude sucks" is.

The first is an observation and has no bearing on the facts.

> Plenty of websites document "laws" like "it's a misdemeanor to walk your dog on Sunday within 100 feet of a church"

I recently learned that these are actually mostly jokes, and have never been real laws anywhere.

> Feel free to take your terrible attitude elsewhere

Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News.

I stand by my assertion that telling him he has a shitty attitude is not a personal attack. No more so than you telling me that I made a personal attack is a personal attack. His comment showed a shitty attitude underlying it.

Pointing that out is just like pointing out that someone is being aggressive, insulting, etc.

EDIT:

And as far as me telling him to feel free to take it elsewhere, that's just me saying I'm not interested in it.

While it's good that HN discourages/disallows personal attacks, that can be taken too far to the point of being reactionary and looking for any excuse to simply dismiss someone because they said something someone else didn't like.

For those interested, here is a fact sheet outlining the rules (PDF from NPR):

http://media.npr.org/documents/2015/feb/fcc-wheeler-openinte...

Where are the actual rules?

That rules governing the internet are not immediately available on the internet after approval does not bode well.

I'm in the camp that the astroturf is running high right now; but moreover, the claim that "we haven't seen it!!" is also, I think, meaningless and irrelevant.

I keep thinking about that Richelieu quote, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

My suspicion is, the people clamoring about not seeing the regulations, given a chance to see them, would still find something to object to, because, like a lot of other people here suspect, the point isn't a rational objection, the point is to collect a paycheck by faking widespread grassroots outrage.

Trying to discredit a good-enough proposal by yelling "But it's not perfect!" is typical of modern politics. And the tactic is terrifyingly effective.

We in the hacker community should know better than anyone else that iteration, not a once-and-for-all solution, is the key to ultimate success. Unfortunately, it is difficult even for well-educated people to throw off the influence of the dominant political rhetoric. The fact that our political systems are designed to make iteration difficult doesn't help, either.

But the U.S. government ain't going anywhere for the foreseeable future, and neither is Comcast. Today's announcement is little more than an MVP. There'll be plenty of opportunity for iterative --and sometimes even revolutionary -- improvement in the years and decades to come.

There's even a saying that gets at what you're going for:

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Is this the perfect government regulation? Probably not. Better than the old way? Oh yes.

Same thing for Obamacare. Perfect way to give health care to a nation? Definitely not. Better than it was before? As someone who was ineligible for health insurance due to a surgery I'd had in my 20s, oh yes.

(On a side note, and as a general rule, I look to see: are big, entrenched, unpopular companies fighting a regulation? If they are, that's a sign that it's probably a regulation that's good for consumers, probably one I'd support.)

Okay, as a Canadian with no dog in this fight, this seems to be a good thing for America. So I'm having a very hard time understanding the opposition.

The arguments for title II are pretty clear and logical. The arguments against include giving up personal freedoms (You live in America, you've been giving up most of your personal freedoms willing for the pack two decades) and this isn't one of them. There are some comments about the extra rules that no one has seen, but this is standard FCC practice. Lawsuits will bear this out. Then there are a lot of illogical arguments that don't hold up. Does anyone have a clear argument against this. My argument would be that there is no last mile access, so competition won't increase, so this is at best a half measure until we get either some disruption in the space, or they finally open up that last mile.

So what are the actual logical, non-fearmongering arguments?

It's pretty common for Americans to argue against things that are actually good for them. The dis-information campaigns funded by billions in contributions are very good at convincing people universal healthcare, etc. would actually be bad.

Of course, every other developed country knows the truth.

What a snide remark. Why should people expect that NN is either good or bad? Or that the FCC has done the completely right thing?

I'm entirely pro-NN in the way I understand NN to be. That is, that it specifically bans QoS setting for particular parties. This means an ISP couldn't QoS Netflix higher or lower than anything else. QoS can still be used for TYPES of traffic across the board, but not per company/person. Is this what the FCC did? Is this all they'll do?

And yes, the apparent secrecy in the ruling is a bit disconcerting.

> It's pretty common for Americans to argue against things that are actually good for them. The dis-information campaigns funded by billions in contributions are very good at convincing people universal healthcare, etc. would actually be bad.

It doesn't have to be disinformation. For example, some may think that principles are more important than results. This could mean you care more about how infrastructure and healthcare is funded than the actual cost.

I've also seen people claim that others oppose universal healthcare because it would disproportionately benefit some ethnic groups they don't like.

Agree, this just aligned the US with most other industrialized countries (I'm also not American).

Mostly I envy the US for its free markets! But now and then I get amazed seeing lobbying/monopoly/regulatory-capture being stronger in the US than other places.

I think it was Friedman who used to say he was pro-market, not pro-business [a sound principle]. Sometimes US politicians seems to get that wrong.

I think we are all happy here that the vote went in favor of net neutrality, but some are unhappy about the way it happened. For example, classifying internet access as a utility and introducing lots of new regulations. It could just make it more difficult for more businesses to enter the market.

And how many new businesses have been entering the Internet utility market before this happened.

For most of the country theres Comcast and Time-Warner (and those 2 want to merge).

As an American, with an uncertain dog in this fight, could someone explain the pro side to net neutrality? I can certainly see that in theory if your ISP is providing you a bit pipe, they shouldn't treat different bits differently. But the status quo seems like it has been working remarkably well for the last 20 years (at least from my perspective). It seems like the big hub-bub is that one of the hated cable companies is slowing down Netflix traffic to extract a ransom from Netflix.

A.) Is this really a government concern that potentially some people won't be able to stream "House of Cards" without buffering? And then we're also worried about the fact that your ISP could decide at some time in the future to pull the same extortion stunt on other services that are less trivial (examples of the worst case scenario might be good, and why it hasn't happened so far).

B.) Apparently there exists a technical fix by using a VPN, so then if you are really inconvenienced, you could use this, or potentially another ISP (satellite seems like it should be available to most people with only one cable provider, right?).

C.) Why wouldn't the customers complain to/blame their ISPs just as much as Netflix? I have a hard time caring about the plight of either the big cable companies or Netflix (or Facebook, Google, any other billion dollar enterprise).

...I'm know I'm ignorant on this issue, but I can't help to think that both sides are blowing things out of proportion.

> It seems like the big hub-bub is that one of the hated cable companies is slowing down Netflix traffic to extract a ransom from Netflix.

The combination of limitation choice and blocking policies are actually the big thing -- Netflix specifically and "ransom"/paid prioritization are recent aspects of that debate, but it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection.

> Is this really a government concern that potentially some people won't be able to stream "House of Cards" without buffering?

No, the government concern is that incumbent ISPs (who often face very little local competition) will use blocking and/or paid prioritization policies to inhibit competition with their own services (many of the major incumbents also offer their own services, like streaming video services, cable TV service, phone service, etc., for which services offered over the public internet by other providers are competition.)

> Apparently there exists a technical fix by using a VPN

In the absence of the no-blocking rule, VPNs could be blocked by ISPs, thwarting this workaround.

> Why wouldn't the customers complain to/blame their ISPs just as much as Netflix?

Lack of significant competition means that you don't have to care that people are complaining to or blaming you.

>it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection.

...I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"? Certainly I can see that the 'net is supposed to be peer-to-peer and your server shouldn't be blocked from your residential connection, but can't you usually upgrade to a "business" package and get around those limitations? On the one hand I suppose you could get mad at having to pay extra for the "full" internet. On the other hand I suppose that someone could equally say that they're offering a discount for offering less services.

I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow. Kind of a Consumer Reports for ISPs? And I suppose someone has crunched the numbers and knows what percentage of people are only served by one broadband supplier. Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind?

> I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"?

Maybe try googling before you comment? Comcast would inject forged TCP rst packets to inbound bittorrent connections. It did not send these packets to people running servers or other peer-to-peer protocols. In fact, people complained that the resets would sometimes prevent Windows Remote Desktop from working and Comcast adjusted their system to prevent it from jamming.

https://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery-isps-report-comcast-af...

> I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow.

The current issue isn't really blocking, it's throttling. There are a couple of sites that do this sort of measurements. Look at http://www.measurementlab.net/

> Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind?

The FCC's current definition of broadband is 25mbps.

Vast majority of DSL isn't broadband speed (Avg is 10Mbps.) 4g isn't broadband speed (~12Mbps). Satellite isn't broadband speed (~15Mbps and usually expensive compared to wired.)

At 25mbps, 20% have no service and 55% have only one service.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/09/most-of-the-us-has-n...

Thanks for that informative link about the number of providers and the speed links. I wonder what the velocity of those numbers is, or how fast the average speed available is increasing. Also, I am enjoying my advancing years quite a bit. <you need to read this next part in the Ernest P. Worrell lecturing mode (look him up)> You kids and your making a federal issue about only having one provider of 25Mbps for your you-tubes, and your corporately produced circuses. Talk about a first world problem. Back in my day we had 9600bps, and by golly we were grateful to have that. Get off my lawn ;-)

Are you serious, there are developing nations with better internet than America. This isn't about how great 'murica is, it's about how because of a lack of competition, American internet is about to become a liability. My first modem was 600 baud, so cut the old man crap.

A perfect job for the FTC.

Net neutrality is the way things ran for most of the last 20 years. This is less of a change but a return to what worked well in the recent past. The reason we are even discussing this topic is that telecoms are moving away from net neutrality.

A) What happens if your ISP blocks all VOIP traffic unless you buy their phone service bundle? Or throttle all streaming video (which competes with their cable offerings)? In other markets these would be seen as an abuse of monopoly power (which, in many local markets, telecoms are). Given that, is indeed a government concern.

B) Any workaround is trivially blocked by the ISP.

C) It isn't obvious to the consumer why a site is slow, especially if some competing sites do pay the extra fees ISPs are asking for. Again, local monopolies (and oligopolies) mean that telecoms don't have much incentive to make their customers happier: at this point nobody is going to forgo internet service entirely.

As far as billion dollar enterprises are concerned, Google, Facebook, or Skype could have been squashed in their infancy. AOL search would be the best we ever got - or the only search engine that AOL users could access: there's no incentive to improve when you're the only option.

Congratulations, but it's far from enough to improve things. It will just prevent some abuse. Now, as a next step they should pass unbundling of the last mile.

Really, that's the only regulation that was needed. All the other concerns that the other regulations targeted would be taken care of.

Exactly.

Disbanding the last-mile monopolies would introduce the market forces needed to fix almost all the problems that most people think need fixing, although the corporate plutocrats would quickly scramble to consolidate things again, as they did during the cell phone explosion.

There's nothing to consolidate when last mile is unbundled. Cell companies consolidated because spectrum is a finite resource that they could possess sole ownership of. The consolidation of ISPs already happened when last mile unbundling was removed from the market. If they open it back up, buying an ISP is literally buying their staff. If the founders are smart, they cash out and just start up a new business doing the exact same thing competing with whoever was dumb enough to buy them.

> If the founders are smart, they cash out and just start up a new business doing the exact same thing competing with whoever was dumb enough to buy them.

Interesting, but I'm sure we all know that part of the buyout would, of course, be a non-compete.

Shmerl, love to learn more about what you mean by this. Do you mean a rule that a network could not sell to consumers both TV and internet access and phone?

No, that competitors should be allowed to use the last mile to provide service. See:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...

A rural Washington state regulatory and infrastructure organization, KPUD, is attempting to encourage access to the fiber they've added to the Kitsap county area. They have implemented this rule in a fairly watered down sense. The result is that, years after the large federal government grant to help high speed rural internet access, and almost two years after construction has been completed, no one in Kitsap county has access to fiber internet.

I have spoken to entrepreneurs and investors, and the reason they refuse to get involved is, without exclusive access to the last mile infrastructure, they would be spending thousands of dollars per building and be immediately replaced by anyone who could bankroll loss-leading services the longest (notably Comcast, who is setting up Fiber in Seattle).

This issue may be politicized, but I've run the unit economics with these people. The people of Kitsap county will simply not have fiber internet until this rule is removed.

And other people will never have fiber Internet, lower prices and higher bandwidth because current monopolist in their area doesn't care to do any of the above. So how do you propose to fix that? Unbundling is the only way. Not sure about Kitsap, but unbundling worked well in Europe. How weren't they scared there of the same thing?

A lot of the difference in economics between Europe and rural Washington state has to do with the extremely high fixed cost of "last mile" internet connection in rural areas, which are, for a number of reasons, substantially more prohibitive in America. Trying to pay off $9000 in fixed costs with $30/mo internet simply isn't going to happen if a competitor can swoop in and offer the same service for $20/mo with no investment in infrastructure. If the cost is lower, due to having either higher population density or more available infrastructure to scaffold off of, this becomes a less-insane business prospect.

But I'm somewhat confused by your initial sentiment. At least four small, local ISPs have investigated installing last mile connectivity to the fiber, and all declined. The status quo (largely a single provider per household) has little to do with this.

Are you saying we need unbundling because otherwise we won't have both fiber internet and low prices? Without the rules regarding ISPs being unable to have ownership over infrastructure they pay 100% of the costs for, fiber could be provided profitably for less than $90/mo. to many portions of Kitsap county.

Additionally: There are some households in Kitsap that have never had internet access at all -- surely blaming "the monopoly" is nonsense for those customers, and yet they too are hurt by this local policy.

EDIT: I anticipate this being non-productive. Suffice it to say, I'm not trying to say "Unbundling is not the best policy." I'm saying, while we consider this policy, let us understand that it is not a pure, unalloyed good in all situations for all people. Policy decisions should not seem one-sided.

> Are you saying we need unbundling because otherwise we won't have both fiber internet and low prices?

I guess it can differ in scenarios when there is no infrastructure in place yet, and when it's already there.

For instance when infrastructure is in place and there is one monopolist owning it (it can be already fiber, or coaxial cable for example) charging high prices for mediocre bandwidth while having an ability to provide way more bandwidth for lower price, unbundling can fix it. But if there is nothing there, it's of course different. May be unbundling rules can be applied based on that difference.

There sure should be some incentive to build up the network, but it has to be balanced with restricting the natural monopoly which develops when that network is built.

The way it's typically been handled is that the last mile ownership is still with the company that builds it, but they have to lease its use to other companies at a reasonable rate.

For places with no last mile infrastructure yet, one way to handle it that's been done is that the public builds it (i.e., it's owned by the municipal government) and leases its use also at a reasonable rate.

An example in a different industry is electricity. I'm in Canada and in my province we pay to a local company, but a separate company owns the overall grid. There's a charge for distribution that appears on everyone's bill to pay for the infrastructure.

Is this something that might be cured by a technical means in the future? Should we be opening up more radio spectrum for "last mile" connectivity? Maybe blimps instead of satellites? Microwave? Line-of-site laser towers? I'm reminded of an acquaintance who was busy wiring his house with cat5 cable in the late 90s, when wifi was available, but not ubiquitous. Now I can't imagine anyone but the most super-hardcore running wires inside their house for connectivity.

WiMax is generally promising, as is the idea that cell networks speed up way past 4G bandwidth. Lasers / line of sight is somewhat cheaper but still has a not-great marginal cost. Radio spectrum for last mile seems like an essential step in universal wide area internet (WiMax needs spectrum, and we are running out of decent frequencies for cell network internet).

I am personally not sure what blimps would add, but this is ignorance, not even an attempt at saying they won't matter.

That all being said: Comcast is a big pain in the butt. But I'd prefer not to worry about downloading more than 3 gigs of data a month. So if the future is in cell network internet we should all except them to be nicer if they want our money.

Blimps would seem to be cheaper to deploy compared to satellites, and have much lower latency. How about drones delivering SD cards? The latency might be bad, but you might still have a pretty high data rate.

Same problem, but worse: marginal costs would kill you with the drone delivered SD cards. Blimps... might be interesting. I feel like the blimps I've seen are so close to the ground they'd just be harder-to-maintain cell/WiMax towers.

The drone idea was just something crazy I threw out there for the heck of it, but now I'm kind of warming up to it a little more. Let's say you, the end-user, owns the drone, a one-time cost of let's make up a number of several hundred dollars. You give it instructions to download the next 10 episodes of your favorite netflix shows, etc.. It flies to your nearest library3 miles away where you've got an account, and it downloads it wirelessly while hovering overhead. It then flies back and land on your roof and acts as an access point for you. And maybe you share ownership of the drone with your neighbors. Or maybe there are 10 drones at the library waiting for commands that come over dialup to deliver your content. It flies to your place, where you download it while it hovers over your house for a few minutes, and then heads back. In that instance maybe the library owns the drones, and you just pay for a subscription? What marginal costs are you thinking would be the killer?

3 miles of fuel for a drone is the expensive part. The latency isn't great but I suppose that's a matter of taste.

Unbundling means that one of several companies can provide service over the line that the "utility" installed. E.g. you could buy Cablevision service over Comcast's network.

This is unrelated to service "bundles".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_loop_unbundling

Yeah unbundling the last mile has worked quite well in the UK. The wires to the phone socket my London flat were put in by British Telecom but now used by Plus Net to provide me broadband at about half BTs rates. I'm not quite sure how the deal works between the companies - I guess Plus Net rents the line from BT at some government fixed price? I pay like £13 a month line rental.

Unpopular opinion below - downvote constructively!

Last mile deregulation was the only thing that was needed. 10s of last mile providers would have battled for that $50/month. Comcast would be irrelevant in 10 years. Tom Wheeler knew this and this was what he fought to keep. In the mounting public pressure, this was the compromise.

100% of what I've read online about the net neutrality debate was disallowing differential charges, but now it's magically about the last mile?

It is completely outside the avenue the FCC perused on this fight. However, it has not gone undiscussed over the years. It's just had lower traction at a policy level and taken a backseat to conversations on the more-likely scenarios. I'm not surprised if people comment they would have preferred that approach.

Congratulations to all the people who've put so much effort into this. It's a good day for the internet. I hope some day something like this will happen in Germany as well.

Out of interest, what is the situation like in Germany with regard to the networks?

Mostly depressing. Basically the Telcos are acting in the same way as the ones in the USA. But we didn't have such an uproar from the people without which, I assume, the new NN rules couldn't be established in the USA.

Politicians are influenced mostly from the telcos and seem to follow their line of argument. We do have some services that would violate net neutrality rules, like the circumvention of data caps sold by Deutsche Telekom (totally different from T-Mobile US) for users of Spotify.

In addition there doesn't seem to be much hope for the internet's infrastructur. Germany has one of the world's worst FTTH market penetration. It's literally non-existent. Telcos try to use the old copper lines and cable to avoid investing and they seem quite succesful in convincing the government that fibre optics is not necessary.

The last frustration came from a government agenda a few months ago. It states that until 2018 everyone should have 50MBit/s. But it doesn't state by which means or whether this applies to the downlink or peak speed or whatever. Many people fear that the telcos will meet the goal by simply putting up some LTE towers with data caps and "theoretical peak transfer rate" of 50Mbit/s.

The agenda's goal would be met, since it's formulated so vaguely. However, we are just postponing the necessary FTTH build-out, while the big telcos make stupidly high profits from infrastructure that has amortized decades ago.

There's also the issue with peering. Up until recently Deutsche Telekom was basically non-existent at the DE-CIX (Germany's largest Internet Exchange). Now they have a little band-width there. However, as Deutsche Telekom was once a state-owned company (still partially state-owned) and owns basically all copper infrastructur (ISPs can rent the last-mile), they are on a high horse and expect everyone to pay for peering, similar to Comcast.

So yeah, up until recently, Germany and the USA could have a shittiness contest when it comes to the inet. Now, the winner is more clear.

"the circumvention of data caps sold by Deutsche Telekom (totally different from T-Mobile US) for users of Spotify."

This is not net neutrality, it is just Deutsche Telekom bundling a product with their subscriptions. It only becomes a net-neutrality problem if DT begin to prioritise Spotify traffic over other traffic (ie; let's allow Spotify traffic, but throttle iTunes).

Considering that you can't really use music streaming with the usual caps here (200MB, 500MB, 1GB, 3GB), it makes it impossible to compete with Spotify, unless you also pay DT.

Therefore, in the context of mobile, all other music streaming services are essentially throttled when compared to "exclusive partners of DT."

Very informative, thank you! The more I read about the USA and other developed countries and their networks and poor mobile networks, the more I realise how fortunate I am to live here in the UK where fibre optic is rolled out for suburban areas and you generally get a mobile signal most places (apart from extreme countryside locations or in valleys).

I would be curious to get emails from network ops people who really think today's move was not a good idea, but who do support the traditional, open, handshake peering internet. (I am asking because I am advising a very senior policymaker in Washington.)

ji -at- malchow -dot com-

This is great news. Over a years worth of fighting on this one.

So you've read all the new regulations? Which one is the best?

Stop being so cynical. Not sure what is up with this community. When FCC was reluctant to do anything on net neutrality everyone here was up in arms. Now that FCC has passed something, you are still up in arms. So much cynicism - for all you know most of the regulations passed might be pro-consumer. At least I would like to believe that it is better than the current model - which in itself is a good step forward.

You're stating that you think the US government can create 700 new Internet regulations and not mess things up?

I'm stating that I think the US government is mainly made up of morons, especially in regards to technical issues.

The cynicism is from the fact that there are 300+ pages to do what would apparently be a fairly simple change, so there's more to it than just the "Net Neutrality for everyone!" bit.

What leads you to believe that it's a fairly simple change?

The Affordable Healthcare Act was gigantic and created by morons, but by most metrics is improving the American healthcare system. The argument that the government can not act in a way that improves things, even if it is not the perfect solution, is contrary to fact.

EDIT: I treat down-votes in the absence of a counter-argument as up-votes.

The Affordable Healthcare Act was ... created by morons

Really? I thought it was drafted by very clever, largely self-interested people.

I treat down-votes in the absence of a counter-argument as up-votes.

Good luck with that. Sounds like a great way to eventually find yourself banned.

The morons part was just me being facetious. Since I edited my comment I went from -3 to 0, so apparently people agree. I don't know why asking for a counter-argument would get me banned, or how you know anything about being banned from HN when you've been a member for 86 days and I've been a member for over 600 days. I've never actually heard of banning here.

I don't know why asking for a counter-argument would get me banned

You didn't do that. You wrote snark about downvotes.

or how you know anything about being banned from HN when you've been a member for 86 days

What, you think they charge for accounts around here, or something? Why in the world would you think I haven't used other accounts before? If you made it to 600 days and haven't heard of the slow-down (whatever it's called) or hell-banning, then you haven't been paying much attention.

Not being in the USA, could you summarise the Affordable Healthcare Act and the problems with it?

Unfortunately, not really. You might know it better as Obamacare, though. It created health insurance exchanges that are subsidized for low income people and reformed other aspects of medical reimbursement and regulations governing health insurance. The aspects you think are problematic will depend on whether you're criticizing it from the right (it increased government involvement, and the complexity of the healthcare system, etc.) or the left (that it gave private insurance companies too much power, wasn't universal, and didn't fundamentally address some of the problems driving cost increases, etc.). Either way, the data shows that healthcare costs are growing more slowly after implementation and that more people are insured than were in the past.

Thanks. Where does the subsidisation come from?

You're referring to HN as though it's one person.

There's wide disagreement over net neutrality.

There's wide disagreement over allowing the FCC to pass a large framework for regulating the Internet without allowing the public to see what's in it.

It's outrageous the FCC did this. Who knows what new powers were just granted to the government. You have no idea, because you were not allowed to see it. Recognizing that fact, is not cynical.

> It's outrageous the FCC did this. Who knows what new powers were just granted to the government. You have no idea, because you were not allowed to see it.

Are you outraged at every FCC regulation? They're pretty much all passed before publication.

Yes, I find any government regulations that pass in a clandestine fashion without allowing the public to first have an opportunity to know what is being passed, to be truly vile. Who wouldn't be bothered by that approach to government? It's the kind of mentality that leads to laws like the Patriot Act.

It's the: we have to pass the bill, before we can know what's in it, form of government authoritarianism.

When it comes to not publishing what they're doing, I'm outraged in proportion to the scale or impact of the action. This was an extraordinarily large regulatory action, impacting the best vehicle for free speech that has ever existed.

The same government that has spent the last decade massively abusing Americans when it comes to privacy, just got handed regulatory keys to the Internet, without the right of the public to first review the new regulations.

How could a person not be outraged by that?

It's for this reason that I cannot follow this debate anymore. Every time this debate comes up buzzwords get thrown around and people take sides but the issues keep moving.

From what I read in the comments, these rules make all packets equal in terms of prioritization. If that's the case, then Net Neutrality has won, right? Can we start a new debate to work on the other problems?

These are not the rules the FCC has adopted; these are sections of Title II that could be applied to ISPs if classified as Title II Common Carriers. Keep in mind that DSL was considered Title II until it was reclassified in 2005. It's not like broadband was never regulated under Title II. It used to be, we tried things without it and things went to shit, so we're trying it again.

I like this one:

47 U.S.C. Section 202

(a) It shall be unlawful for any common carrier to make any unjust or unreasonable discrimination in charges, practices, classifications, regulations, facilities, or services for or in connection with like communication service, directly or indirectly, by any means or device, or to make or give any undue or unreasonable preference or advantage to any particular person, class of persons, or locality, or to subject any particular person, class of persons, or locality to any undue or unreasonable prejudice or disadvantage.

This one is pretty good, too:

47 U.S.C. Section 208

(a) Any person, any body politic or municipal organization, or State commission, complaining of anything done or omitted to be done by any common carrier subject to this Act, in contravention of the provisions thereof, may apply to said Commission by petition which shall briefly state the facts, whereupon a statement of the complaint thus made shall be forwarded by the Commission to such common carrier, who shall be called upon to satisfy the complaint or to answer the same in writing within a reasonable time to be specified by the Commission. If such common carrier within the time specified shall make reparation for the injury alleged to have been caused, the common carrier shall be relieved of liability to the complainant only for the particular violation of law thus complained of. If such carrier or carriers shall not satisfy the complaint within the time specified or there shall appear to be any reasonable ground for investigating said complaint, it shall be the duty of the Commission to investigate the matters complained of in such manner and by such means as it shall deem proper. No complaint shall at any time be dismissed because of the absence of direct damage to the complainant.

This one is pretty great:

47 U.S.C. Section 251

(a) GENERAL DUTY OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS CARRIERS.--Each telecommunications carrier has the duty-- (1) to interconnect directly or indirectly with the facilities and equipment of other telecommunications carriers; and (2) not to install network features, functions, or capabilities that do not comply with the guidelines and standards established pursuant to section 255 or 256.

255 is with regard to the use of telephones by those with disabilities, so it will very likely undergo forbearance.

256 is fairly long, so I won't reproduce it here. The title is pretty important though: "Coordination for interconnectivity." The full text is available here: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/256

time will tell

More than that - since the Napster days.

Key provisions (only four pages, take the time): http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015...

The devil is in the details as they say. I really want to see the full list of regulations passed. Though I'm sure the jargon will send me for a loop.

I hope you guys save this page and open it up ten years from now to read your own comments again.\

When you read my comment again, say these words to yourself:

"I asked for this."

My initial instinct is to be excited for this, but to be honest I have only a very cursory understanding of the issues.

Reflecting on my motivations, I would say 90% of my support comes from the signal of Comcast squealing about it, and 10% comes from WMF and EFF support. Which I grant is arational, but it's probably a major driving force behind much of the support in the tech community.

So, to opponents: you're likely to have a more effective argument if you can convince me that this isn't correcting a government-guaranteed fiefdom of monopoly power to Comcast, and that the political forces opposing it aren't pawns of Comcast.

Unless you're going to fund the infrastructure costs publicly you're always going to have a few large players that can sustain the capital investment necessary to build.

I don't see that happening any time soon ("socialized internet!")

So I applaud the FCCs move. What blows me away is that lobbyists have convinced average joes that this is a bad thing. I don't think people grasp how much control a company could exert over what you see simply by prioritizing traffic.

Can someone clarify "paid prioritization" and "fast lane"?

If I buy the 50Mbps ISP plan and someone else buys the 10Mbps isn't that a faster lane / paid prioritization?

What about if a company decides to put their server in a datacenter instead of hosting out of their office? Aren't they paying for better access?

What about CDNs? Aren't those "fast lanes"?

It doesn't seem like this is the intent but based on how it is worded, it seems like it would apply.

Offering different levels of service to be purchased at the types of endpoints you describe is not the target of this. It is (generally) about network peering, and throttling based on deep packet inception.

I wonder how this will affect T-mobile's offering with free music streaming services

Amazing that a change of this magnitude rests on a 5-person vote.

Not really, there are two people in the world who have the power to completely obliterate it with a full scale nuclear strike.

A small committee of people making a proposal, giving 9 months to comment on it, then vote on it sounds like a normal procedure to me.

The 2000 presidential election was decided on a 5-4 vote.

What bothers me more are that these votes are always evenly split among party lines. It doesn't matter which side you are on, when one seat flipping means business-as-usual does a complete 180. What sensible person would want to invest in a country so polarized and with such an uncertain future?

Chairman Wheeler proves that he isn't a dingo.

Actually, if you watch any of the various hearings and what-not that he's been in, talking about his plans (and previous attempts) to preserve net neutrality, I think it was pretty clear he was on the right track all along. Surprising, I know, given his background, but still.

I was skeptical up until I read a few weeks ago that he started doing something like cable internet in the 80s, but was shut out of the system. He saw one of his colleagues strike it rich with dial up AOL, while his tech (although much faster) failed in the market. I sort of imagined that today's decision was his revenge on the industry.

http://www.wired.com/2015/02/fcc-chairman-wheeler-net-neutra...

When will the whole thing be published?

No idea if this is accurate, but I read that there is still some hammering out of details that may mean it will be a couple of weeks.

> Commissioner Michael O’Reilly criticized the proposal to reverse Title II: “I see no need for net neutrality rules. I am far more troubled the commission is charting for Title II.” He continued, calling the move a “monumental and unlawful power grab.”

More interested in politics than his job.

I hope you guys save this page and open it up ten years from now to read your own comments again.

When you read my comment again, say these words to yourself: "I asked for it."

a thank you note from Obama to reddit https://imgur.com/dZqiFrX

one question, can I now run a media server of my own legal content in my home with the full upstream bandwidth I pay in my contract?

Free markets lead to better profits, better profits lead to better innovation. Better innovation leads to cheaper prices. I guess no one learned from the last multi-hundred page bill (that no one was allowed to see) that didn't "lower prices" as it was chanted with religious zeal. Self-righteous power grabs in the name of the common good are always more important than actual consequences in reality.

Curious how the American Disabilities Act will be applied to the internet through these regulations. It could mean anything from requiring all content providers to meet unknown rules to providing special equipment in homes as part of service requirements. Let alone, what is protection from discrimination when it comes to the internet?

This is the problem with such open ended rules, there are no real limits. Why no public review?

What, you don't trust one of the least trust-worthy governments in modern history?

You don't trust the government that is actively, hyper aggressively abusing nearly every aspect of human privacy one can imagine?

Comeon now, this is a gentle, freedom loving, privacy loving government. They would never put anything in those 300 clandestine pages enabling vast expansion of censorship or spying powers.

What scares me is that there are 700 regulations (that we haven't even seen) that got passed.

I wouldn't sign a contract without reading it (and having the person on the other side telling me all of the reasons why I should), and neither should you. But apparently, the general population (and many here) will.

I watched the entire live broadcast and the pros played only on emotion (safety, helping out the disadvantaged,etc) and did not really mention any of the regulations. Facts and rationality was only brought up by the opposition.

*edited: I see the down votes. The pro-NN astro-turfing is high here. This is just my opinion. If there is nothing to fear, you shouldn't be trying to silence it.

Any idea when or how these additional 700 regulations will be published?

Two of the dissenting commissioners attempted to get the bill published so people could see how bad it was going to be - without success. Also add in the fact the FCC is supposed to be a independent office, and Obama has been meddling them since he got into office:

http://reason.com/archives/2015/02/25/fccs-ajit-pai-on-net-n...

Regulating the internet like a utility is quite possibly the worst thing you can imagine, and now its come to reality.

This is what scares me, what was there to hide?

There isn't. Everything gets published. The vote on the rule change came after a public comment period.

This thread is just full of HN's intellectually-challenged users waving their hands and saying "ooooOOOOoooo GOVERNMENT! SCARY GOVERNMENT! BE AFRAID OF SCARY GOVERNMENT! ooooOOOOoooo!"

I don't even think it's HN users. There's a bunch of zero-day accounts in here parroting anti-NN talking points.

Can you provide a link to the 700 regulations? Can't find one anywhere else.

The full regulations should be published within the next few days. They won't go into effect immediately, and the public (and Congress) will certainly get to comment, and suggest revisions.

Holy hell - why the down votes? "Everything is public" made it sound like the regulations had been published. I just wanted to know where. What's wrong with asking for a citation?

I'm with you, it's like asking for the ability to read something is blasphemous. Never did either of us say we were against it, but the flood of downvotes. Oh my.

So this doesn't scare you at all?

The plan gives a Washington bureaucracy a blank check to decide how Internet service providers deploy and manage their networks, from the last mile all the way through the Internet backbone. Take interconnection as just one example. The plan states that the FCC can determine when a broadband provider must establish physical interconnection points, where they must locate those points, how much they can charge for the provision of that infrastructure, and how they will route traffic over those connections. That is anything but light touch regulation. And the plan extends the FCC’s interventionist gaze well beyond this part of the network. Small wonder that some pro-regulation activists are already deeming the FCC the “Department of the Internet.

http://www.fcc.gov/document/comm-pai-press-stmt-president-ob...

Doesn't scare me a bit, because I know the secret formula. Every night after I brush my teeth, I stand in front of the mirror and yell "LIBERAL FARTBONGO OBUMMER" five times; that magic incantation keeps the black helicopters from coming to force me to use the internet the way they want me to, and also protects my guns and repeals the entire income tax code.

Good, maybe comcast will finally update those oversaturated interconnects that they engineered to force netflix to pay them for access to their customers.

Social media personas

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2011/fe...

http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/hbgarys-high-volume.html

> Regulating the internet like a utility is quite possibly the worst thing you can imagine, and now its come to reality.

Why? My electricity and water work a hell of a lot better than my cable internet.

Yes, but both electricity and water don't really require innovation in the future. I can't remember the last time I wanted higher speed water in my house.

You almost couldn't be more wrong about that. Providing electricity and water are both massively complex undertakings, and ongoing innovation[0] is crucial to providing service for a growing population, and meeting the ecological challenges of tomorrow. California is in the middle of an epochal drought[1], and you're saying we don't need innovation in water?

[0] http://energy.gov/oe/services/technology-development/smart-g...

[1] http://ca.gov/drought/

Right. We have zero issues with water availability in the world. I guess those billions being poured into desalination, water recycling and alternatives are all, forgive the pun, money down the drain?

And you're absolutely right - we have zero need for alternative energy sources (although on that, it's kinda true - I've no particular issue with nuclear fission per se, though we need to figure out something better in regards to storage, and nuclear fusion is something that merits a huge deal of research into commercial viability).

You do know that television is also regulated like a utility, right? How did innovation in that sector turn out when the FCC took control?

It grew to be our primary form of news and entertainment nationwide. The internet has now mostly replaced it for news and appears to be replacing it for entertainment.

> Two of the dissenting commissioners attempted to get the bill published

There is no bill. And, under the normal regulatory process, there is nothing to be published until the authority responsible for regulation approves something -- its true that the FCC could have delayed action and issued another NPRM. But regulations are published fairly quickly once adopted by the issuing authority, not generally effective immediately, and subject to revision by the issuing authority or overriding by Congress once they are published, so the idea that this will go into effect without people knowing what is in it is incorrect, as is the idea that there is anything unusual about the process here.

Having failed to drum up opposition to the general idea of regulation, opponents have attempted to paint the process as unusual and nefarious, but that just isn't an argument that has a grounding in reality.

> Regulating the internet like a utility is quite possibly the worst thing you can imagine

Even the worst possible regulation of the internet isn't even in the top 50% of the worst things I can imagine.

> Any idea when or how these additional 700 regulations will be published?

If the past experience on similar FCC actions (including, e.g., the last Open Internet Report and Order) is a good guide, they'll be published in the next several days, and the biggest delay in getting them published will be the opposing commissioners getting finished writing up their dissenting views, which will be published alongside what is adopted.

*Comcast getting finished writing their dissenting views...

In addition to this, Chairman Wheeler refused to testify before congress about Net Neutrality. I would just like more transparency.

With all of the Snowden leaks, why aren't we demanding transparency? Do we really just want to give our rights away like this?

Honestly, I don't blame him. We have a GOP-controlled Congress, so testifying would just be an hours-long exercise in getting yelled at by old people who don't understand technology or believe in science, but love an opportunity for political grandstanding against an Obama-appointee.

This. There was widespread belief that Wheeler was a cable industry stooge. Wheeler and Obama deserve some credit for making this happen in an obstructionist environment.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/obamas-bad-pick-a...

This is a poor excuse for a lack of transparency and is unacceptable.

Congressional testimony is not the same thing as transparency. In my experience, it's just the opposite.

Transparency shouldn't be dictated based on which party controls congress.

Not to mention it's not just the GOP that's full of old people that have zero technology grasp.

Intel, Cisco, and IBM are on the Republicans' side on this issue. Do they not know technology?

Ars has been playing on the 'Republicans are against it so it must be good' emotion card for awhile now. That's almost all I see on this issue in the tech media. What's been happening is that all objections are being dismissed as "Republicans lol" and "Fox News reporting so must be wrong". Our national discussion is literally at the level of Jon Stewart's mockery of things that warrant serious discussion.

When was the last time you heard a Republican politician on the national stage raise an issue that was not obviously directed at their base, or donors?

A comment that plainly stated a fact in a noninflammatory way?

Or proposed a course of action that was not designed to be punitive to some group, or alternately, designed to disproportionately benefit the powerful?

Republicans inhabit a carefully-crafted parallel reality that is at the breaking point of divergence from American and global first-world society.

Personally, I'll take them seriously when they change their methods and rhetoric, which is probably never.

Their current attitude and language indicates they are not interested in either my vote, or my problems.

> When was the last time you heard a Republican politician on the national stage raise an issue that was not obviously directed at their base, or donors?

Do you seriously believe that it's only Republicans that pander to their base?

It's certainly not only Republicans. But neither are they pandering to their "base" in any traditional sense; rather, they are pandering to a few dozen specific people, the extreme concentration of whose wealth generates gravitational fields that that propagate through today's medium more freely than in any time in recent memory.

To be fair, Republicans are way better at pandering to their base. Democrats tend to flake out and betray their base at the drop of a hat.

> When was the last time you heard a Republican politician on the national stage raise an issue that was not obviously directed at their base, or donors?

What would you expect a politician to do—raise an issue his supporters don't care about? That doesn't even begin to make sense.

All of your points apply to every politician, and to every talking head.

I would assume they want to sell expensive traffic-shaping routers and networking gear to telecoms.

They would be better served long-term by overall growth in internet traffic. But large corporations beholden to the stock market don't want to have to explain to Wall Street that earnings are going to tank next quarter after some of their most lucrative customers went elsewhere in retaliation for their political stance.

Ahh, they're big, so they must know better than us. You're not actually making any salient points, other than appealing to authority and big bank accounts (sounds a little like the Republicans). In fact you haven't made a salient point anti NN in this entire thread other than to complain about people questioning people's motives.

And then there's this. I'm not sure what it's meant to mean.

Although, I have seen the cost of some Cisco networking devices. I know exactly what they stand to gain from a tiered Internet (Hint: Billions in sales to telcos looking to shape their traffic based on contracts).

Your comment would have been better, in my view, without the ad-hominem attack on older people. Especially if you wish to advocate for a pro-science, reason and evidence approach to argumentation.

As a relatively old person, at least for HN, I don't believe it's ad hominem to suggest that old people don't understand new things as well as younger people do. And it's clearly an issue for the Internet. Note, for example, the strong correlation between age and internet use here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-age-literature/#many

There's also the term "digital native": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native

There's always a difference between the technologies you grew up around and the ones that have emerged after you became an adult. For me it feels similar to my native language and the ones I've picked up later.

"As a relatively old person, at least for HN, I don't believe it's ad hominem to suggest that old people don't understand new things as well as younger people do. "

My issue is that many young people think that new things are completely different..when in reality, it's just better/different packaging and marketing on an old idea.

> As a relatively old person, at least for HN, I don't believe it's ad hominem to suggest that old people don't understand new things as well as younger people do.

As a pretty-young curmudgeon, I will say that young people often throw out "he's old and doesn't understand the internet" when they really mean "he's old and doesn't share our values re: the internet." "Neutrality" is a value you subscribe to, not a technology to be understood.

He wasn't attacking old people per se, but describing a group. The mean age of Congress is 57 across the board, but the mean age of the Republicans in control of Congress is 63.8.

It's probably a fair assessment to say that most people of that age are going to be on the back side of the bell curve in understanding issues of technology, and it's fairly verifiable through their words and actions that the Republicans in Congress are the most vehemently anti-science, perhaps in our history.

Almost nobody in Washington reads anything. They just rubber stamp stuff written for them by bureaucrats, think tanks, and lobbyists.

Question is who wrote this stuff: telecoms, Google, the NSA, ???

How about all of the above?

I'm willing to bet there are provisions in there for further NSA-related cruft. I'm also suspicious that this will set the stage for increasing the tax burden on consumers, but that remains to be seen.

Don't forget the MPAA and RIAA.

You know, it's funny you mention this...

I was thinking last night about how I haven't heard much from these two organizations over the whole net neutrality debate. But then I started wondering why the FCC commissioners kept using the phrase "legal content" in the context of these regulations. Maybe I'm a touch paranoid, but it almost sounds too coincidental.

Gosh, I hope it's not true, but now that you mention it, they probably handed more than an olive branch to these two clowns.

Even if such a thing were included, it is utterly unenforceable without breaking encryption and rendering all e-commerce and other secure uses of the Internet compromised.

Also the free press and new america's open technology institute. Google and the 2 of them offered a revision in language to close a loophole, which would imply all 3 had access to it.

Just because you don't agree with the content doesn't they don't read it. :-) I'm sure the people that matter do read it, but they aren't concerned with the general public. Their only mission is to keep the populous naive while they do the bidding of their superiors (powerful leaders, lobbyists, corporations, etc...)

Funny how something intended to prevent ISPs from throttling content turned into a debate about helping out the disadvantaged, etc. It worries me that issues like this are co-opted to turn them into a one-size-fits-all batch of regulations sidelining their original intent.

On the other hand, it's my understanding that the FCC will enter a period of public comments after voting on the rules but prior to enacting them. So there's also a chance for further revisions to take place, but I'm not overly optimistic given the 300+ pages of regulations for what should have been a fairly simple issue.

I suspect if the rules are too far-reaching, they'll be mired in litigation for years. Hopefully the regulations will be released to the public so we can start disseminating them today or tomorrow. Although the FCC doesn't commonly release rules it's voting on prior to a vote, I do think this illustrates a dysfunction of government agencies and transparency. Maybe that's something we should change.

Congress can also slap them down I believe.

Also true. But then you run into the problem of Congress actually doing something. And even if they do, the President can still veto it.

I suppose they could try to defund the FCC, but I guarantee that would never happen.

If the FCC had no funds to enforce regulations, what's to stop me from squatting prime spectrum property that Verizon spent so much money on?

Honestly, I wasn't outright suggesting the FCC should be defunded (that blurb was sarcasm; I should have labeled it as such). That would be a bad thing. ;)

However, I can say with a straight face that I know plenty of people who might make that sort of suggestion...

>Funny how something intended to prevent ISPs from throttling content turned into a debate about helping out the disadvantaged, etc

Isn't that just politics in general?

Yep.

It's like everything else in the last 20+ years. Someone drafts a bill that sounds like a good idea, then before you know it, it balloons to thousands of pages of rhetoric drafted by every lobbyist in Washington.

I don't know what the answer is. I can think of a few solutions, but they're impractical and would never happen.

Limit the length of bills and require them to be read out loud into public record in their entirety before passage.

Telecom is peculiarly mired in it. By and large, here is the mainstream positions of the two major parties on telecom:

Republicans: Want the government out of it. Democrats: Only care about it to the extent that it's a nexus of class/race warfare.

> Republicans: Want the government out of it.

Only when it benefits big business. Republicans are more than happy to stick the government into your religion, your health decisions, your recreational drug use, etc.

I have no faith in the general public anymore. I've seen so many Twitter hash tag campaigns started on false information and lies (and even the mainstream media picks up on it and continues to spread it around as truth) that I can't expect the opposite to happen when it comes to really important things such as regulating the Internet. Anyone with a little bit of social power can convince more people to vote their way.

It's a good example of why we have representatives representing the people and we don't have a traditional democracy.

> It's a good example of why we have representatives representing the people and we don't have a traditional democracy.

Exactly. It's worrisome to me that nearly all political campaigns have been driven by emotional rubbish without any regard for possible repercussions. Yet, you're decried and rebuked for daring to suggest that we probably ought to stop and think very cautiously about what it is we're asking for!

On the other hand, our representatives are paid for by lobbyists and seldom appeal to their constituents even if it's in the latter's best interests.

I can only hope at this point that these regulations are not so overbearing and damaging that it harms innovation. But with 700+ regulations on the books now, I'm feeling somewhat pessimistic. I rather wish the FCC focused exclusively on what it was so-called "net neutrality" was originally intended to do. But now I'm afraid that if their language is too broad, Mark Cuban may be right, and it might affect QoS and related protocols. (I don't think that would happen--and I feel Mr. Cuban may be a touch paranoid--but politicians aren't exactly known for their technological prowess either.)

I'm truly sorry for my pessimism. I just don't have much faith.

I can imagine a lot of ways the regulations might have been screwed up and subverted. "One size fits all" doesn't apply to any of them. In fact, it sounds to me like a good thing; we don't want to start down the road of carving out exemptions and exceptions for non-neutral behavior that should be treated as completely intolerable.

Except the ISPs were never actually throttling content (well, other than BitTorrent, which the FCC promptly told them to stop doing), and the title II regulations passed today would have had no impact on the entire Netflix vs. Comcast/Verizon dispute. That boiled down to a dispute over settlement-free peering contracts, which the FCC does now have some oversight, though based on past comments I doubt their decisions would go the way most people would hope.

One positive about this is that it will give the FCC some oversight over the pricing of interconnect deals. But interconnect deals will still happen, and they won't be free - these rule changes effectively codified them into law. So Netflix will still have to pay Comcast/Verizon to send lots of traffic to their users, only the FCC now has the ability to regulate the pricing terms of such deals.

> Except the ISPs were never actually throttling content (well, other than BitTorrent, which the FCC promptly told them to stop doing)

Yeah, but Comcast took that FCC order -- made without any advance regulation -- to the courts, which struck it down on the basis that the FCC could not issue such an order under its ancillary authority. Comcast v. FCC, 600 F. 3d 642, D.C. Cir. (2010).

As this specific order to Comcast being struck down was one the things motivating the FCC's initial Open Internet Report and Order which applied nonblocking of lawful applications as a generally-applicable regulation (and which itself was later struck down as being a common carrier regulation which could not be applied without Title II reclassification), its pretty odd to use the existence of the Comcast Order as a way to dismiss the need for generally applicable regulation to prevent blocking (or even, given the history of the subsequent order, to dismiss the need for specifically Title II regulation to prevent blocking.)

I'm not saying it was unnecessary to clarify the issue -- it was. But I'm saying it won't have a significant impact on the behavior of ISPs because they weren't really doing it with those methods anymore anyway. Things like data caps and direct interconnect agreements are still allowed; so "fast lanes" will still exist (and are actually now codified into law).

It's my understanding that the FCC will enter a period of public comments after voting on the rules but prior to enacting them.

That was all done last year. Now the rules are out.

I'm aware of that.

The problem is that I had been "corrected" (incorrectly) in a discussion elsewhere when I mentioned there was only the one comment period by someone who stated that there would, in fact be a period after the rules were voted on where there would be a second period to accept comments from the public. I should have looked it up myself, rather than taking the correction at face value.

In fairness to the individual who attempted to correct me, I think he/she was confusing the reconsideration period with a second round of comments. It's a fair and reasonable mistake to make, so with that in mind, I suppose you could correct my initial post to make mention of the reconsideration period in lieu of what I wrote.

One of the issues I take with some of the pro-net neutrality crowd is that they're willing to vehemently hyper-correct everything, including statements that were not wrong, and due to the insistence of some of the comments I read, I made the mistake of presuming my initial understanding was wrong.

Go figure. It's too late for me to correct my original post, but feel free to use this as an addendum to it. :)

For what it's worth, since no one's bothered to post a link to the actual rule making process, I'll share what I've stumbled on:

http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/rulemaking-process-fcc

As dragonwriter wrote in reply to me--and as you can read above--there's at least 30 days after the rule vote before they become available to allow for analysis and for dissenting petitions to be filed during the reconsideration period.

It should be interesting to see what happens at this point.

> On the other hand, it's my understanding that the FCC will enter a period of public comments after voting on the rules but prior to enacting them.

No, the usual process is NPRM, comment period, Final Rule. The NPRM was last spring, the comment period took up much of last year, and the Final Rule is now.

> I suspect if the rules are too far-reaching, they'll be mired in litigation for years.

There'll be litigation for years in any case (whether the rules will be blocked while it proceeds is less certain.)

> Hopefully the regulations will be released to the public so we can start disseminating them today or tomorrow.

They won't be published until all the commissioners have finished their commentary (particularly, the opposing commissioners). That will almost certainly take more than a day or two.

Good points, thanks for the corrections!

It's long passed time that I can add edits to my original comments (so obviously, there's no point), but I've included what I've found, and why I was incorrect here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9116126

So it looks like the timeframe we're expecting is 30+ days or so to allow for a) the commentary you mentioned and b) the reconsideration period to come to an end for parties wishing to file petitions against the rules.

Thanks!

The grass is always greener.

Seriously though, I think there was a lot of hype built up around net neutrality(for good reason) and it ended up clouding the discussion.

Quickly it became a dichotomy, you must be either for Title II and whatever the FCC decides that entails, or you must be against any change to the status quo.

Now that we are passed that dichotomy, we are faced with the reality that we have little control over the FCC and how it chooses to enforce regulations. That is understandably making many people nervous.

I look forward to the regulations being published and sincerely hope that it works out as many people hoped it would a few months ago, but someone rather late in the process pointed out to me that the FCC loves to censor things like television, and it wouldn't be insane to think they would consider doing the same with the internet (one only has to look to England to see how real that possibility is)

I don't really know anymore, I'm more unsure about all of this than ever - i really hope nothing nasty surfaces because of this decision, but what can we do at this point but sit and wait and then try to change it all again if we object.

Yep, that's all most of us want. Transparency.

The FCC is un-elected, that's always scary. Not that our elected officials know better. Haha.

I agree On one hand- the FCC is non-elected and thus the people have less control of them

On the other hand, this also means they don't need to seek funding for running a campaign which theoretically could insulate them from what we see with our elected officials currently pandering to business interests.

Time will tell with this decision i suppose, whats important from my perspective is that change happens quickly if there are any major objectionable pieces of these new regulations

Agreed. It's safe to say public pressure got this into place, so hopefully we come back around when we see the rest.

"this also means they don't need to seek funding for running a campaign which theoretically could insulate them from what we see with our elected officials currently pandering to business interests"

Check the employment history of FCC folks after their term. It is very much like other staff members in various regulatory bodies in DC, they get high paying jobs in the industry for their work.

Couldn't this be more because politicians appoint people to the FCC? Thus an entrenched politician would appoint (or recommend) a corporate-vetted candidate.

The advantage (and again i'm not claiming this to be the reality) would be that that the new FCC employee doesnt need to rely on the corporation to continue working at the FCC, Once they have left the corporation, why would they seek to push pro-corporate regulations?

Of course this is all muddled when you see that these people then go BACK to the corporation after their time in the FCC, which leads to well grounded suspicions.

Its really a complicated mess; I only meant that there is a logical reason why having non-elected persons creating regulations can be advantageous

"I only meant that there is a logical reason why having non-elected persons creating regulations can be advantageous"

We elect people to do that. Perhaps if they were forced to do the actual rule making we would not get 1,000 page bills with all of the rule making to be done later[1]. Perhaps they would pass less bills that need regulation if they had to put them in the bill.

The staffers at various agencies are doing their apprenticeship for their big payday when they join lobbying organizations or the companies that they were supposed to be watching. It happens enough that it has been suggested multiple times that employment restrictions (basic conflict of interest) should be put in place. The DoD is famous for a lot of this (check Boeing's hiring).

"I only meant that there is a logical reason why having non-elected persons creating regulations can be advantageous"

Because those folks are their friends and future employers (again).

1) yes, I read the ACA because I needed to know the ruling on a specific situation and it was one of those rule making later. It was very frustrating but not very surprising.

I definitely agree that the 'revolving door' between lobbyists and regulatory positions needs to end.

But i disagree that pushing regulation onto elected officials would be better.

My point is that non-elected officials are shielded from many aspects that lead to corruption in elected officials. Namely having to re-up on funding every couple years. Non-elected officials do not have to raise money to keep their position.

Is there still corruption with non elected officials? yes I am not saying otherwise nor am i satisfied with the current state of things. But to say that the solution to that corruption is to place the power into the hands of an already corrupt congress seems backwards to me.

Also, I totally agree with you on the language and length of bills. I would go further to say that the congress people should be the ones AUTHORING the bills, let alone reading them. Nothing smells like corruption more than a corporation drafting a bill to regulate themselves and stamping a congress person's name on it.

"My point is that non-elected officials are shielded from many aspects that lead to corruption in elected officials"

My point is that the non-elected officials are not shielded and have a different corruption path going. In a lot of ways, a rich elected official is probably better insulated than a high level bureaucrat.

We elect people to make the laws. Regulations are the laws and they should be the responsibility of the people we elect. I cannot vote out of office a bureaucrat. If you believe your congress person is corrupt then vote them out. This whole rule-making process is a corruption of the system.

Regulations are not the laws, they are applications of the laws, and they are made by processes laid out in the law, by persons empowered to make them under the law, and their substance is constrained by the law.

Regulations are the law. The thought they are separate is some technicality of the modern world. People get fined and go to jail over them.

> Yep, that's all most of us want. Transparency.

I'd certainly be interested in general proposals for improving regulatory transparency, but I don't see what basis there is for painting this particular decision as something special in that regard, and find it interesting that the people prominent in the media that have been concerned about "transparency" in this process (a) are consistently people that were opposed to net neutrality, (b) became concerned with "transparency" only after it was clear that anti-neutrality policy arguments were failing to gain traction, either at the FCC or with the public, and (c) have not generally voiced similar transparency concerns over any of the other processes (e.g., every other regulatory action of the US government) that uses the same basic process, including not publishing intermediate drafts between an NPRM and a final action on the matter covered by the NPRM that incorporates changes based on subsequent analysis and the public comment on the NPRM.

That is definitely not scary to me. There are a number of things that absolutely shouldn't be directly elected, like the Federal Election Commission, the Federal Reserve, and the Supreme Court.

Politicians spend much of their time getting re-elected, and they have to focus a great deal on whatever the electorate's current opinion is. That is excellent for things that should respond relatively quickly, and terrible for things that should move deliberately or be countercyclical.

It would be way more scary to me to have the FCC commissioners out fundraising from industry all the time like our elected officials do. Right now they're appointed on staggered 5-year terms, which is intentionally longer than the election cycle of the President who appoints them. No more than 3 can be members of the same political party, and none can have a financial interest in any regulated business. It's not perfect, but I think it's a great example of how to minimize the ills of direct election while still having it be (indirectly) accountable to the people.

John Oliver did a nice piece on judges getting elected in the U.S. as opposed to getting appointed. Basically, what you said. Judge's elections turn into politics as usual (money, political ideology, various other unrelated banter) as opposed to, you know, law.

While in theory it seems like a good idea, in practice it's not and all of a sudden you have judge's (or in the case at hand, FCC officials) with "interests" other than the law (communications).

> the FCC loves to censor things like television, and it wouldn't be insane to think they would consider doing the same with the internet

Unfortunately, this is kind of a red herring. There are a few places in the telecommunications act that require the FCC to fine for indecency/obscene material. Cable operators themselves, for example, are not responsible for channels that display obscene material - the original transmitter is. That's under Title VI (cable communications) and Title III (radio and television).

Title II is all about common carrier status. Cable television, broadcast radio, and broadcast television are not common carriers, and Title II does not give the FCC either the requirement or permission to fine or censor obscene content. Neither does it give ISPs the requirement or permission to censor obscene content.

As Title II has been interpreted by courts, you are actually _more_ protected from internet censorship if they are considered Title II common carriers.

They can't terminate based on suspicion of unlawful use; there must be evidence:

* Shillitani v. Valentine, 53 NYS 2d 127 (1945); "a telephone company may not refuse to furnish service and facilities because of a mere suspicion or mere belief that they may be or are being used for an illegitimate end; more is required."

* Nadel v NY Tel., 170 NYS2d 95 (1957); carrier suspected caller of using the telephone for illegal gambling transactions and terminated their service. Court ruled that service should be reinstated: the telephone company "is not at all qualified, in the absence of evidence of illegal use, to withhold from the petitioner, at will an essential and public utility."

They are not authorized to collect said evidence themselves (this could be interpreted to mean that, as a common carrier, ISPs are not allowed to read the contents of the packets that they transmit, only the headers -- like telephone numbers -- as needed to get the packet to its destination):

* People v. Brophy, 49 Cal.App.2d 15, at 33, 120 P2d 946, at 965; "public utilities and common carriers are not the censors of public or private morals, nor are they authorized or required to investigate or regulate the public or private conduct of those who seek service at their hands."

You, as an internet user, are not protected from those actions unless your ISP is classified as a Title II common carrier.

> Unfortunately, this is kind of a red herring. There are a few places in the telecommunications act that require the FCC to fine for indecency/obscene material.

That is the true red herring we hear over and over again. Don't worry about censorship, you can still say indecent/obscene things... if you happen to have been awarded the broadcasting license.

Sir, or Ma'am, please understand. The censorship problem we anti-FCC complain about is the problem of not being able to get a license in the first place. You and others like you are always addressing this red herring non-issue of indecency and obscenity. That can only happen if you get a broadcast license. The problem with the FCC is that they are a gatekeeper for getting a broadcast license and it is at that point, when they are deciding whether to give the license that they exert the most dangerous kind of censorship. Not after you have the license.

How is it that nobody thinks forcing people to obtain a license for broadcasting isn't censorship, and/or forced monopoly? Like how do you reason yourself into believing those two things are false?

Like, the biggest problem is that people are unhappy with comcast and there's no alternative. Then they get the bright idea that making entry into the market harder will fix this problem?

There's very limited spectrum and if everyone is fighting to see who can broadcast the loudest the entire system will fail.

There's also very limited land but land is not tightly controlled by an unelected government agency the same way radio waves are.

If what you say is true then we should be able to buy and sell radio wave frequencies from each other. But radio waves are treated specially by the government because they're a long range means of communication. Same with the internet. That's why the FCC wants in. Not because "it's limited". Land is limited, where is the FCC for land? Gold is limited, yet we can freely buy and sell. Everything is limited but the FCC only has eyes for LONG RANGE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. Why?

EDIT for temporal:

Please explain this:

"One of our troubles in getting legislation [to nationalize the airwaves] was the very success of the voluntary system we had created. Members of the Congressional committees kept saying, 'it is working well, so why bother?'" -- Herbert C. Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency 1920-1933, at 142 (1952). Cited in Hazlett, 1990.

Aside from the fact that radio waves have strategic role for every country, it's mostly tragedy-of-commons case. You can't just let anyone start broadcasting anything at any power and frequency, because there's no way they'll themselves coordinate to use the spectrum wisely instead of trying to overpower one another until the whole thing collapses into a total and unusable mess.

> Everything is limited but the FCC only has eyes for LONG RANGE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION.

Well, there's the matter of their statutory brief. There is a reason they are called the Federal Communication Commission, and not the Federal Every Limited Resource Potentially Subject to a Tragedy of the Commons Commission.

It's pretty easy to identify when land is in use, but not so much when it comes to radio spectrum.

> Land is limited, where is the FCC for land?

Lol, that's the government. You cannot "freely buy and sell" land, you have to follow certain processes to register your dealings and you are responsible for how you use that land (zoning, environmental laws etc). That's basically what the FCC does for airwaves, except they want to make sure you'll be "responsible" before they actually allow you to register your dealings.

> How is it that nobody thinks forcing people to obtain a license for broadcasting isn't censorship, and/or forced monopoly? Like how do you reason yourself into believing those two things are false?

We grant land ownership and leases. Why not radio spectrum too? Not all that different really IMO.

If the major problem as you see it is the cost of licensing, then I don't really have a response to that.

Forgive my ignorance, Why would i need a broadcast license?

Is this to start an ISP? a website? or what?

I'll answer you because you're asking explicitly, but see warfangle's reply to my post making fun of me.

What warfangle etc don't understand is that was exactly the excuse for the FCC to get into the Radio business. Oh no, it wasn't to require licenses! It was to protect people from warfangle's "chaos" that he paints so vividly but that never happened in actual reality, you know, the one we live in. Maybe it happens inside the theoretical realities that warfangle makes up. Regardless.

So the FCC at first was all like "yeah we need to step in to protect the radio waves from jumbling". Even the president at the time said he saw no problem with just leaving it be. But the FCC got its way. But oh! We forgot. In order to protect the waves from jumbling we'll need to require that people get licenses, but you know, it's just to assign a name to a frequency. That's all! But you need a license.

The same will happen online. Not at first, but eventually. And the excuse will be the same. Netflix uses too much bandwidth? Well, they'll need a license. Suddenly all busy websites need a license, but they'll only get it if the FCC approves it. Netflix? Granted. Popcorn Time? Disallowed. Mainstream X? Granted. Controversial Y? Disallowed.

Wow, that "history" is so painfully wrong. The FCC didn't lobby to get involved in radio, nor did it somehow add the licensing requirement after it was granted regulatory authority over radio.

Licenses that could be denied for radio was a policy adopted by Congress in the same law that created the Federal Radio Commission, before the FCC existed. The FCC inherited its radio role from the Federal Radio Commission. Neither the FCC, nor its predecessor, could have lobbied for the power to grant and deny licenses, because they didn't exist when Congress was considering creating that power.

The FCC frequently stop pirate radio stations since they were not granted a license to broadcast and were causing harmful interference with those who DO have a valid license.

Please step outside your bubble and understand what the FCC does.

And a citation for you, cheers mate: http://www.fcc.gov/maps/fcc-enforcement-actions-against-pira...

If you wish to test them, please setup a pirate radio station and you will be arrested. The sentencing is not pretty, so tread lightly.

I think you just proved his point. Bye bye thepiratebay or anything else the US government calls a 'pirate' website.

Oh yea, be sure to pick up your public web service license so are not causing harmful interference with those that DO.

I think there is a fundamental difference between the internet and Radio.

Radio represents a hard-limited amount of spectrum. There is literally a maximum amount of broadcasts that are possible before you have to start overlapping on the same frequencies. Those pieces of spectrum can be owned or rented just like public address space on the internet.

The internet has no such limit, adding to the internet just makes the internet bigger, it doesn't push someone else off the internet.

The real corollary to pirate radio would be someone hijacking google.coms DNS records to point to their own website instead. And tthat is and should remain illegal.

> not being able to get a license in the first place.

Sure! You should totally be allowed to throw up a transmitter and blast white noise through fifty percent of the radio frequencies at 50 kilowatts of power! And so what if the car next to you on the highway has a transmitter that interferes with your radio tuned to the classical station by blasting dubstep. FREEDOM

The problem is, that's all covered under Title III. Title III is very specifically about radio broadcasting.

And has nothing. At all. To do. With Title II.

And so what if the car next to you on the highway has a transmitter that interferes with your radio tuned to the classical station by blasting dubstep.

Well, I'm already driving out of the state tomorrow, now I know what I'll be doing with my unlicensed FM transmitter.

This is awesome information, thank you!

Other than censorship, do you foresee any major gotchas in the upcoming regulations?

The other major one that garners complaints is the regulations surrounding rate and fee setting. But the FCC has already stated that those would be under forbearance.

And even if they weren't, there is a clear process for companies to petition for forbearance on regulations which they find too burdensome.

> but someone rather late in the process pointed out to me that the FCC loves to censor things like television

I think you mistake "is mandated by Congress" for "loves".

Abosulutely, you are correct - I really meant that they historically have done so, i wasn't really trying to get at their motivations.

Congress has mandated the censorship of TV and radio broadcasts, it was not purely invented by the FCC - sorry for any miscommunications.

They are also looking to relax those rules as well, so you will hear 'fuck', 'piss', etc more often.

http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/view?id=6017170272

> What scares me is that there are 700 regulations (that we haven't even seen) that got passed.

Regulatory orders aren't generally published before being approved by the initiating authority (preliminary notices that are subject to revision before being approved are published when those are approved by the authority, as was the case with the NPRM on this issue published last year. The final decision based on the NPRM and public comment received since the NPRM, is what was voted on today, which will then be published.

This is the processed followed by basically every regulatory body for virtually every regulatory action in the US government (sometimes there isn't an advanced notice like the NPRM, however.)

That spin, "Obama's secret plan to control the Internet!" has been bouncing around the right-wing echo chambers in more or less blunt forms since the FCC first proposed the rules.

The spin doctors consistently fail to mention your point: the new rules went through the exact same process as all the previous rule-making.

So when ex-Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai said the FCC is replacing Internet freedom with government control and then blamed Obama, that wasn't playing on emotion?

"replacing Internet freedom with government control"

This is what is happening. The government is now regulating the Internet. Where is the emotion?

"then blamed Obama"

He played a clip in which Obama talked about what he wanted. The FCC complied and now we have Internet regulation (exactly what Obama wanted). Again, these are facts, not emotion.

I also think it's funny that you mention one line of potential emotion when the pro-regulation speeches were almost all emotion.

It boils down to that much: emotive people that can't reason without reacting are the majority, and they are easily swayed by politicians who are swayed by professional talkers (lobbyists) that know how to appeal to politicians' emotions.

We will never convince emotive people to think, because they are so overwhelmed by fear. To think for oneself means to shed cultural ties and to stop identifying oneself with a group. We are all individuals and that's the only identity we all share in the world. The minority that realizes this will forever be prisoner to the irrational mob majority that act like tribesmen and incessantly demand group privileges.

> The government is now regulating the Internet.

No, the government is regulating carriers.

When talking about "the Internet", people usually mean both actual wires (carrier infrastructure) and websites (content). If anything, with Title II the FCC is actually forcing companies to keep content less regulated, preventing commercially-motivated censorship.

> He played a clip in which Obama talked about what he wanted. The FCC complied

Obama tried long and hard to stay out of this mess, but Verizon's and Comcast's actions have been more and more outrageous every year.

I have a lot of complaints about the Obama administration, but everyone knows this is just the result of some carriers' continuous brinkmanship.

Tom Wheeler was a career lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries. I assume those firms are getting what they want, sort of like how Obamacare is good for insurance companies (they are only "allowed" to sell expensive plans, with government subsidies for those who can't afford them).

I liked this stat from Wheeler's bio:

"Wheeler was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame in 2003, and in 2009, as a result of his work in promoting the growth and prosperity of the cable television industry and its stakeholders, was inducted into the Cable Television Hall of Fame.

He is the only member of both halls of fame."

I remember when this guy was appointed, everyone flipped out because of his history and called it a bad move. Now this happens and he's the messiah! Haha.

Teraflop just posted this above your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999657

So while you are right, you are muddying who you consider to be "everyone".

It's a figure of speech, and I believe it was top news on here at the time.

According to a recent comment, the truth about Wheeler's lobbying activities is more complex than that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8999657

Tom Wheeler was a cable lobbyist when cable TV was unheard of -- 1976-1984. He fought for the underdogs there, whether or not you like where cable has gone. It's much the same with his record in cell lobbying, though he was there for a bit more of the maturing of the tech -- 1992-2004. He helped promote two nascent industries; how is this a bad thing?

He was a lobbyist for the cable industry from 1976 to 1984. I don't totally know what the industry was like back then, but from what I understand it's completely different then what we see today. Back then it was a large number of smaller providers that could easily be pushed around by larger networks. There was no massive comcast, timewarner or what have you.

I haven't read up on his time at the CTIA, but that was 1992 to 2004. Again during a time of a lot of smaller companies in the cellular industry. Remember when roaming was down right expensive or didn't even work? I think that was changed while he was part of CTIA. The wireless industry grew dramatically in that time.

What is the bad thing about him being a lobbyist for these groups? He's someone that has been part of the communication infrastructure at the political end since 1976. This means he probably has a very good idea of how his actions will impact companies. This seems like it may be a good thing?

> the pros played only on emotion [...] Facts and rationality was only brought up by the opposition.

That's my rule of thumb for knowing which side is right. There's always one side that makes emotional arguments, and another side that makes factual arguments. This simple heuristics is inaccessible to over half the population, who are collectivists.

Also notice, most of those collectivists do not believe they should oversee their representatives (corollary from the fact that they don't). They believe politicians are a "set and forget" thing that you input tax-money/votes and without oversight, out comes exactly what was asked for.

There's only one solution that I can see. People who want to be led and believe in godonearth, I mean, government, should be allowed to live their communist fantasy; but they should not be allowed to demand that others do so too - this much is fascism. As soon as that schism is feasible, you will see the progressive dwindling of brainless taxpayers and the fattening of the free side; but as long as everyone is forced to participate in this immorality, no change will come.

I have no idea why this is being downvoted, this is a legitimate comment. If there were ever a point that the emotional argument will try and force others out, this demonstrated it.

You don't think "godonearth, I mean, government" and calling half the population "collectivist", "communist", "fascist", and "brainless" might be a little bit emotional? I downvoted it because it was a content-free screed full of political shibboleths and mantras.

Given two or more sides of an issue, there will be those that use more emotional arguments in their rhetoric, and there will be those that won't care about the pathos side of rhetoric and focus on the logic. According to my experience, a good heuristic to know which side is right is to pick the one that is more grounded on logic and relies less on arguing from pathos.

Unfortunately, this simple heuristics is out of reach for most people.

First, let us establish that because we have a democratic government, this must mean more than half the population wants it to be like this (otherwise this is not a democracy). Therefore more than half the population is composed of people who are collectivists. Collectivists believe that by utilizing a middleman to share costs amongst everyone, they can make the cost of goods and services cheaper. The word "collectivist" is used disdainfully by those who reject the idea that adding a middleman central planner to decide how resources will be allocated in an economy will make goods and services cheaper.

Now we can argue that collectivists cannot grasp the heuristics suggested herein, because they fall time and again to government propaganda, and it can be demonstrated by public polling that most people accept unquestioningly any narrative that the government puts forward about important political and economic events. That is why news anchors are fatherly figures that seek to gain their viewers trust, so that they won't think they need to research by themselves what they are fed by the media, since the tone and emotion set by the anchor give the information an aura of authority.

Because collectivists are so prone to being lied to and manipulated by hyperpathetic rhetoric, I can only see one solution for the individualist: coarsely put, they should all move to a place and establish an individualist colony, and peremptorily reject the influence of collectivists by accusing them of fascism, which is a suitable moniker for a group of people that believe in the authority of a central planner over a region; much like the kings and the pharaos of yore, the collectivists still believe there is a numinous person that is pure and incorruptible that must pull the excalibur of power and peacefully rule over and for us all. This much has never been seen matter-of-factly in objective reality.

I believe if this secession were to happen and enough individualists moved to a separate place and claimed it their own and carried on with their lives for generations, that eventually the average collectivist would realize that prosperity and wealth blossom in a free society at a much more efficient and rapid pace than in the collectivist side.

djur: Is this non-offensive enough for you? It's the same points I made above when I used those words you don't like. I hope from this you will learn that as a critical thinker, you are supposed to see past the shape (the rhetoric, the pathos, the choice of words) of the discourse and examine the arguments being put forward for their validity (not harmony, not beauty, not political correctness). If you can't see the arguments amidst the "bad words", keep trying. You will get it eventually.

Also consider that if you downvote those that use bad words, you probably upvote those that use good words. The media targets people like you that react positively to good words and badly to bad words. They rely on that reaction mechanism to shape your opinion. By reacting emotionally you are publicly proving that you are easily swayed by pathetic rhetoric.

Your definitions of "collectivist", "fascist", "individualist", and for that matter "heuristics" are novel and vacuous. I see in your comment a great deal of ten-dollar words and not a single citation or even a verifiable claim of any sort.

The existence of a democratic government does not begin to mean that "more than half the population wants it to be like this", whatever "this" is. The failings of formal democracy in representing the desires and interests of the population are well-known, and most democratic systems are openly designed to prevent a bare majority from getting everything they want (including ours -- see the Federalist Papers).

Your definition of "fascist" would apply to any sufficiently powerful central government, from Hammurabi to the tsars to the UK parliament. There are numerous working definitions of fascism but all of them recognize that fascism is a reaction to liberal democracy and thus inherently modern. There is also no fascism without militancy, or without nationalism. You also don't seem to see the contradiction to your "heuristic... to pick the one that is more grounded on logic" inherent in your proposed strategy of "accusing ['collectivists'] of fascism".

And your flight of fancy about a "numinous person... pure and incorruptible" wielding "the exalibur of power" (which looks a lot like an argument from pathos to me) has nothing to do with any standard definition of "collectivist". Nor does it have anything to do with "making goods and services cheaper". You yourself admit it's just a slur ("used disdainfully by those that reject the idea"). Mises, Hayek, Marx, none of them used the term this way. Collectivism is a sociological concept, not a political position.

A rationalist should start with observations of reality and proceed from there, not from the axioms which one presumes to be self-evident.

Do you disagree that most people want a government? I think not.

Do you disagree that most of those people want a government because they want government to intervene on social and economic issues?

Do you disagree that most of those people want a government because "otherwise we'd have to make every decision" and they like to delegate some decisions to representatives so that they don't have to bother to check for themselves if their water is clean, so that they don't have to bother having to contract with a garbage collection company, so that they don't have to bother to check if restaurants aren't poisoning their customers, and so on? In other words, so that they can trust things will be taken care of and don't have to manage every aspect of their lives?

Do you disagree that because most of those people seem to want to abstract away certain aspects of their lives, namely those they want government to take charge of, that they also won't be as willing to discuss those issues, seeing that the reason they delegate those things to government is because they don't want to think about it, let alone argue about it?

Do you then disagree that maybe, because of this unwillingness to engage in these discussions, that if a group of people, namely individualists, that believe governments cause more harm than good, would like to see things changed towards freer markets, that it might be fruitless to think the way to achieve those changes is to engage in discussions with those people who are unwilling to engage in discussions because they are in favor of not thinking about those issues and instead abstracting them away onto government?

That's all I'm arguing. Coarsely put, one side wants to debate. The other doesn't. The side that wants to debate usually uses logic because that's the fundamental tool of debating. The side that doesn't want to debate uses emotion because that's the fundamental tool of avoidance.

Agreed on the first two.

Disagreed on the third. The purpose of government is not to delegate decision-making to others, but to join together the power of individuals to accomplish goals that they could not together, and to protect the weak many from the strong few.

I agree that people frequently ignore issues that they perceive as too big or out of their control. Sometimes this is a rational assessment of the situation. Sometimes it's an abdication of personal responsibility.

I disagree that the position you identify as 'individualist' is associated with a willingness to debate, or to use rational arguments. Some of the most rational thinkers I've ever read were communists, and some of the lowest emotional sloganeering I've read was from self-proclaimed libertarians. Emotional and rational arguments are used by every political faction, and the use of emotional arguments is not a sign of weakness. Humans are emotional creatures and they are rational creatures, and there is nothing wrong with engaging with people on an emotional level.

I appreciate this response, even though I disagree with it. Thank you.

False dichotomy.

The final rule won't be materially different from what was in the NPRM: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/view?id=6017642393. And the whole proceeding has been documented publicly in Docket 14-28: http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/proceeding/view?name=14-28.

The Administrative Procedure Act, which requires the whole notice-and-comment dog and pony show, also makes it pretty easy to overturn regulations if the final regulation isn't adequately foreshadowed by the NPRM. And this will be heavily litigated, so you can bet the FCC is trying to do this by-the-book. One might make the argument that there should be public comment on the final text, but that would be intractable. It's taken 9 months just to do one round of notice and comment.

> http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/proceeding/view?name=14-28.

There it is! I found the docket number but didn't know the right website to find the filings. Thanks for the link. 99 pages tho.

> What scares me is that there are 700 regulations (that we haven't even seen) that got passed.

This is a huge problem. It is literally impossible for lawmakers and regulators to read everything they put into law, as many bills are hundreds of pages long.

Does anyone have any viable solutions to this problem? The only attempt to solve this problem that I know of was in early 18th Century England, when they set a limit on the word count of laws. But this was widely criticized (including being lampooned in Gulliver's Travels) and didn't last long. It seems like this is a pretty intractible problem.

The guy you're replying to is scare mongering. We're at the step now where the FCC is opening the regulations up for public comment. Obviously they aren't going to release their footnotes before they've iterated on the regulations internally. All of the negative comments on here are essentially "why haven't we seen this yet?!?!?!" on the day they decided its ready for people to see. It's all quite childish bickering bordering on obvious public opinion manipulation.

> Does anyone have any viable solutions to this problem?

Lawmakers could either abstain or vote No until they've read and understood the legislation. The problem is that votes aren't generally cast on understanding, or even how the law will affect the welfare of the populace, but on party lines, with not enough exceptions.

On the cure for that, I am equally clueless.

This "we haven't even seen the rules yet" line is really just a meaningless talking point promoted by NN opponents.

In the world of government regulation, is is absolutely the norm for regulations to be voted on before being made public. But that does not mean the process is not transparent: the Commission has been conducting an open proceeding for months (years, really) where they have explained their proposals to the pubic, and allowed anyone in the country to submit comments. The commissioners and their staff then look over the comments they have received, draft an order that responds to the important points raised in the comments, vote on it, and then make it public as a binding rule. Perhaps this is counterintuitive to some, and maybe it's not the best way to make rules. But there is nothing at all abnormal about it -- this is simply the process that we call "notice-and-comment rulemaking" which Congress enshrined in law almost 100 years ago when it passed the Administrative Procedures Act. Anyone who tells you that this is weird, or that the Commission is trying to pull a fast one by waiting to publish the rules, is either misinformed or intentionally trying to mislead you.

As for the meeting itself: of course it's theater. The real policy work doesn't happen in the meeting, it happens in the formal notice and comment proceeding that has been happening on paper for many many months. The meeting is primarily a political opportunity.

Rather than being out of the ordinary it needs to pause applause until we know what the rules are. I can't make a solid determination if I agree until I have seen the rules.

From what I know already I'm not in favor. I.e. the trepidation felt vs. those who are pro-titleII.

"the Commission has been conducting an open proceeding for months (years, really) where they have explained their proposals to the pubic, and allowed anyone in the country to submit comments"

As we all have seen in the past, the proposals they explain and the final rules that become law are usually different. We should be able to see these proposals.

"Perhaps this is counterintuitive to some"

This just illuminates why this process needs to be changed. "counterintuitive" is a nice way of describing our lack of freedom and the lack of transparency in choices that will directly effect all of our lives.

> As we all have seen in the past, the proposals they explain and the final rules that become law are usually different. We should be able to see these proposals.

It's not as though the game is totally over. Parties can (and will) petition for reconsideration, and then there will be challenges in court if people think that the Commission has overlooked important issues. End then there's always Congress...

> This just illuminates why this process needs to be changed. "counterintuitive" is a nice way of describing our lack of freedom and the lack of transparency in choices that will directly effect all of our lives.

Fair enough. But I don't know that this is a valid ground for criticizing the FCC.

Edit: While it's true that the Commission's decisions are often not exactly the same as its proposals, it is prohibited by law from making a rule on a subject not implicated by the issues raised by the Commission's proposals (the technical term is "logical outgrowth"). Why isn't this good enough? What is to be gained by circulating the actual rules before they are enacted that is not already accomplished by 1) extended period for public comment on the issues, with full knowledge of the regulatory options under consideration and 2) the possibility of a petition for reconsideration or court challenge after the rules are issued?

Minor correction: the Administrative Procedures Act was enacted in 1946, which I wouldn't consider to be "almost 100 years ago".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act

I agree with what you say, though.

>In the world of government regulation, is is absolutely the norm for regulations to be voted on before being made public.

It's mostly irrelevant what the 'norm' is. Either the process is actually transparent or it's not. Dropping xxx pages after passage is not really transparent.

In fact, the 'norm' is usually what we want to be moving away from. The problems that we are trying to solve exist in the 'norm'. It used to be the norm that the Roman Church could come in, try you for heresy on hearsay and then execute you, all with no real evidence and decided by an inquisitor. Just because that was a normal occurence, doesn't make it right or transparent.

We don't have to fix everything at once. And if someone is making a big fuss about the transparency of this particular regulation, while ignoring the hundreds of regulations that are passed every year in the same way, then it's right to ask whether they have ulterior motives.

Which of those other regulations got this much discussion on HN?

>> But apparently, the general population (and many here) will.

Sadly, yes. I recently purchased a home and was shocked at the logical inconsistency in the contract and the inability of ANYONE at the mortgage company to explain some of the clauses. And I often broken links in terms of service that sites make you accept. It's quite sad. What's the point of any of it?

> I wouldn't sign a contract without reading it (and having the person on the other side telling me all of the reasons why I should), and neither should you. But apparently, the general population (and many here) will.

You were told this was wrong yesterday, and I know you saw that because you responded.

Why are you still repeating it?

Once again, we will all have plenty of time to read these regulations before they are enacted.

Here is how this works, and how it has worked for well over 50 years, as required by the Administrative Procedure Act, at most or all agencies, not just the FCC.

1. Someone at the agency decides to propose rules.

2. They circulate those rules within the agency for discussion, and they may modify them based on that discussion.

3. When they feel that the rules are ready for consideration as an official proposal, they bring them to a vote among before the Commissioners. (Well, for the FCC it is the Commissioners. I have not idea what the corresponding group at, say, the FAA, is called. It would be cool if they were the Aviators, but it is probably something lame).

4. If the rules pass this vote, the agency then publishes them in the Federal Register as a "Notice of Proposed Rule Making" (NPRM). A public commentary period, normally 60 days, begins.

5. People then comment on the rules. They comment on other people's comments.

6. If there are a lot of comments, the agency might extend the commentary period.

7. When the commentary period ends, the agency considers the comments, and decides if it is going to go ahead and enact the rules, or start over, or not regulate at all at this time.

We just finished step #3 and #4 is starting. The published proposal has to include the objections raised by the Commissioners who voted against them, with responses to those objections by those who supported the proposal, so there will be a short delay before publication and the start of the comment period.

1. This is the news release from today: http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-strong-sustainable-ru... on the last page, you can see the docket number, which is 14-28. 2. This is the docket page for 14-28. http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/proceeding/view?name=14-28 3. In the FCC filings section, you can see that the NPRM was filed May 2014. This sets the comment period to July 2014, and the comment reply period to September 2014. 4. There is an order issued in July 2014 that denies extension of the comment period. 5. I conclude that we are in fact, on step #7, and are just waiting on the Report and Order to be filed, at which time the regulations are enacted. 6. Furthermore, Wheeler's statement talks about an 'Order'. http://www.fcc.gov/article/doc-332260a2

Am I wrong in my reasoning? Aren't these rules, whatever they are, about to become active?

It appears you're correct, but the news release specifically mentions that which bits and pieces of title II are going to be implemented and which will be under forbearance. Since those laws are already public, what rules are not being clearly defined, here?

The description of the rule making process given at the FCC site [1] says that "The Final Rule. After the comment period closes and the Commission has reviewed and analyzed the comments received, we decide whether to proceed with the rulemaking we proposed, issue a new or modified proposal, or take no action on the proposal".

This makes it sound like the final rule must be the rule that was proposed and commented on, which would mean we've looped back to issuing a new proposal.

[1] http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/rulemaking-process-fcc#q6

take the time to read this

http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015...

Order forbears 27 provisions of title II and over 700 associated regulations. Will not impose rate regulation, tariffs, burdensome administrative filing requirement or network sharing requirements. The proposed Order would apply fewer sections of Title II than have applied to mobile voice networks for over twenty years.

"Pro-NN astro-turfing" hahaha ok dude, sure. Which side of this issue is more likely to have hired giant PR firms to hire astroturfers? And which side is more likely to actually have grassroots support? I'll give you a hint, the pro-consumer side is probably not the one with the giant PR firm.

Something everyone is forgetting is the FCC regulation of radio. It was a little like Net-neutrality today. Radio stations needed to be regulated because they could crank up the wattage and overpower smaller radio stations. It needed to be regulated and the intent was to just focus on the infrastructure, not the content.

What happened? Speech deemed immoral is banned from the radio waves and content is clearly being regulated. I fear the same thing will eventually start happening with the Internet, which I personally do not want.

Radio waves are different than wireline Internet. The FCC regulates radio because there is a limited amount of usable frequencies, and these are supposed to belong to the people, so they need to be distributed and managed by a central organization. Any since the Supreme Court has ruled that the FCC has the legal authority to enforce censorship, we're stuck with it.

Radio is also different because it is a broadcast medium. Any person who turns on their radio will hear what is being broadcast. Internet communication is much more analogous to a phone or mail conversation than radio or TV.

The Internet is totally different. No one has (reasonably) claimed that Title II regulation provides for the FCC to censor what is transmitted. The FCC doesn't censor phone calls now, why would they censor the Internet using the same rules?

"Radio is also different because it is a broadcast medium. Any person who turns on their radio will hear what is being broadcast. Internet communication is much more analogous to a phone or mail conversation than radio or TV."

It's not though. A phone conversation is only one person (or less than 10) at a time. You can broadcast a message on the Internet that can reach millions of people. Twitter, Facebook, and even HN are broadcast mediums.

"The FCC doesn't censor phone calls now, why would they censor the Internet using the same rules?"

The Phone is not a broadcast medium and does not have the same power as the Internet.

"The Internet is totally different. No one has (reasonably) claimed that Title II regulation provides for the FCC to censor what is transmitted. "

Although I don't think content is regulated, we still haven't seen any of the regulations passed today.

*edit: are astro-turfers out again? I was merely stating my opinion on the topic..and was down voted. Is this an example of an open and free Internet?

Most of us find significant qualitative differences between using a radio and a web browser or even an app.

edit: are astro-turfers out again? I was merely stating my opinion on the topic..and was down voted. Is this an example of an open and free Internet?

Yes, it is. People are freely expressing their disagreement with your fallacy-laden arguments.

"Most of us find significant qualitative differences between using a radio and a web browser or even an app."

Even from this statement, I can tell you don't know what I am even talking about. Using is much different than broadcasting.

"Yes, it is. People are freely expressing their disagreement with your fallacy-laden arguments."

Down voting is not disagreeing. It's silencing. Disagreeing would be actually having a point and having a civil debate. I see none of that here. Saying it is a "fallacy" doesn't count.

I'm tired of arguing with people that want their rights taken away. When and if it happens, I will have enough money to just buy what I need anyway.

I understand perfectly well what you are talking about. I just think your ideas are foolish. Also, I have no difficulty in reading your posts despite the downvotes they have received, so I'm not sure why you feel you're being silenced. Clearly, this conversation isn't going anywhere, though.

"I understand perfectly well what you are talking about. I just think your ideas are foolish. "

I suppose you sign contracts before looking at them? If so, let's do business!

This is essentially what has happened with the American people and you have nothing to say about it..except personally attacking me. I find this suspect.

Everything I have said is fact: There are 700 regulations, which will control the state of Internet in the US, which absolutely have not been seen by the American public before being passed into law.

This is scary. I'm still unsure why there are so many people that just don't care. We can have Net Neutrality in less than 700 regulations.

The foolishness of the American people is why I have lots of money saved to get out of the country when it finally implodes due to pure laziness.

I have no sympathy going forward..and yes, if there are undesirable consequences, it is your fault.

> Everything I have said is fact:

Then you should be able to provide the evidence supporting the claims. Lets start with this one:

> There are 700 regulations

Really? Where is the evidence for this "fact".

> which absolutely have not been seen by the American public before being passed into law.

They are adopted as regulation (under the law, not as law) and will be published before they become effective, and may be changed (e.g., by legislative action) if the American people are sufficiently unhappy with them to compel their Congressional representatives to act.

"Really? Where is the evidence for this "fact"."

Okay. Now you aren't even admitting that there are regulations. Wow. Just Wow.

"They are adopted as regulation (under the law, not as law) and will be published before they become effective, and may be changed (e.g., by legislative action) if the American people are sufficiently unhappy with them to compel their Congressional representatives to act."

Have fun with that. Like I said. I don't want to hear one person coming on HN complaining about worse conditions after these new laws are passed.

I'm going to say this now: I told you so.

> Now you aren't even admitting that there are regulations.

No, I'm asking for support for your claim that there are 700 new regulations. That the as-yet unpublished order contains regulations is a different claim than that it contains 700 new regulations.

> I don't want to hear one person coming on HN complaining about worse conditions after these new laws are passed.

What new laws?

I'm tired of you playing semantics to try to win the argument. I would rather discuss this with someone that has some actual substance.

Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates. The main gist of the the new regulations is the classify broadband access as a utility under Title II of Communications act. This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing... and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US.

Reading comment threads, a person new to the issue might get the impression as if the US government just nationalized comcast. I'm finding it hard to believe that the regular HN crowd has suddenly turned virulently anti Title II. This definitely smells like a coordinated campaign to spread FUD.

Even Eric Schmidt told Obama it was a bad idea. IBM, Intel, and Cisco are against it. My posts were shadow banned on HN for being against these regulations. It's odd that people like you can't fathom that there are two sides to this issue.

Your account was created 15 min ago and has 6 Karma - Can you back up who you are at all?

That's a little Ad hom for my taste.

If he's making bad points, attack and refute those. Not him.

As another brand new account, I could see why you'd say that. But in practice, our understanding of what people say is rooted in who they are.

If somebody wants to write a book making a formal, evidence backed argument on something, I'm less concerned with who they are. But when somebody jumps into a discussion with a few sentences, asking who they are and what their motivations are is much more reasonable. Especially on a topic where, as with this one, billions of dollars are on the line.

There are now plenty of people whose whole job is to argue a party line that may have no relation to the truth or to what the speaker believes. There's literally no point in having a serious discussion with, say, a tobacco company PR rep, because they are paid to mislead people forever, to never be convinced, and to distort the dialog as long as possible. With somebody like that, treating them like an honest interlocutor is not only a waste of time, but I believe it actively harms the discussion.

I just feel like if he's so trivially wrong, and you're so obviously right, wouldn't it be better just to explain that? Instead of sinking so low on the debate pyramid as to only be one step above the bottom?

If you are not a serious interlocutor, then there is no point in explaining anything to you. It's like trying to get to know a bot. And getting off in the 101 stuff for the zillionth time is a distraction from having a more interesting and substantive discussion.

And given that you're apparently mainly here to throw shade on people discussing this in ways you don't approve of, I have no reason to think you're a serious participant who's actually after a useful discussion.

> But when somebody jumps into a discussion with a few sentences, asking who they are and what their motivations are is much more reasonable.

Not really. You're not taking the idea of ad hominem far enough. When somebody jumps into a discussion with a few sentence and no citations or evidence, you ought to reject the validity of that argument regardless of who is presenting the argument. That argument is unsubstantiated, period, whether it's posted by a brand new throwaway account or a renowned expert in the area of discussion.

Given the accusation that this thread is full of astroturfing, the account karma and age of posters seem like very relevant information.

My what a wonderful ivory tower you must live in. I just think it's weak. If being anti-NN is so incredibly stupid, shouldn't refuting the points they make be trivial? why not just do it, and safe yourself the trouble of being accused of sitting one-step up on the debate pyramid from "Name-calling"?

> My what a wonderful ivory tower you must live in.

Accusations of astroturfing without evidence are not ok, but personal attacks such as this are not allowed on Hacker News either. Please review the site guidelines:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

How is it relevant information that a certain topic brought in a new person? I could understand it if the person had been around a few years and only commented on that topic, but a new person could be just a recently inspired person.

This is a politically charged topic with powerful, malicious actors. The thread an unusually large number of green members posting mostly against what HN has been mostly for.

It's an odd pattern, and the parent above saying it's "vile" to call it what it looks like is overblowing it.

I'm not seeing that pattern. I've seen a total of 7 green members on this topic. That to me isn't all that unusual. The vast majority of green I saw was for NN. Are you saying HN is against NN? I thought HN was for NN.

Not for nothing, but:

   user:	CzechsMix
   created:	11 days ago
   karma:	0

People wouldn't be going "hmm, there's a lot of green names and they're all conveniently anti-NN" if there weren't. Like, y'know...you, yourself, elsewhere in this thread.

Yes, I happen to be anti-NN, no, I do not think that the way things currently are works. No I do not think the cable companies operate fairly in a free market.

Sorry, I'm anti-NN, sorry I joined only 11 days ago. I can assure you. the two are not related. Again, if elsewhere in this thread, I'm making points you disagree with. attack and refute the points themselves. How else can anyone ever think you have the slightest idea you know what you're talking about, if all you can do is spout people's account age and karma ratings? if being anti-NN is so trivially stupid, shouldn't you be able to point this out quite simply?

The way I know that eropple knows what he's talking about is that I've been reading his comments for years, and so have a sense of his competence, interest, and manner of thinking.

They reason I suspect you don't is that you've turned up with a brand new account and an apparent partisan interest. If you would like not to be suspected like that, you could, as I and eropple have, connect you account to your full identity rather than concealing it while lashing out at others.

Indeed. The one thing I love about HN is that it's small enough that after time, you simply get to know other commenters and you learn their areas of competence.

That's a pretty good karma rate! I think my account was probably weeks old before I got to 6.

Precisely.

Also, now as a utility, internet can be regulated for content, be it decency standards or political speech. Maybe not now, not next year, but what about in 5-10 years? Content is content, all bits are equal, all bits are over the same utilities. And internet as a utility is now regulated.

> Also, now as a utility, internet can be regulated for content, be it decency standards or political speech.

To be frank, this isn't something I particularly fear. You're referencing TV regulation, but the main limiters on TV content are corporations owning the airwaves and people's fear of sex. The internet is not limited in space the way frequency bands are, and good luck trying to enforce pornography laws. Pornography laws are a limitation I worry about a bit, but so far I don't see any evidence that anyone is pushing for using utility regulation to limit pornography, and we can cross that bridge when (if?) we come to it.

If content regulations happen, they'll come in with the new flavor of the month, i.e. 'social justice.' There will be vague statutes against 'harassment' I'm guessing, and anyone decrying their vagueness or broadness will be decried a racist, sexist shitlord. You won't get 80's style 'Christian moralism' language in 2020.

> Are you suggesting it's some kind of conspiracy?

Despite the Tumblr feminist movement, I don't think most people are in favor of this sort of regulation, and there isn't sufficient monetary motivation that I can see for such regulation to happen.

However, I do agree that this kind of regulation would also be bad. But again: we can cross that bridge when (if?) we come to it.

Your mistake is to imagine that you have any power at all to affect such outcomes and processes. They will be guided by media/PR/social forces, not your arguments. I guess it's the universal democratic conceit of the 'we.'

So government censorship vs corporate? At least the former is a body controlled (indirectly) by public votes/opinion, whereas the latter is a monopoly that's either unaware or indifferent to consumer opinion.

If the telecoms hadn't pushed their luck by starting the censorship process to begin with, we could have all sat pretty with the status quo for a while.

> Also, now as a utility, internet can be regulated for content, be it decency standards or political speech.

Please point to the provision of Title II that allows content regulation, whether it be for "decency standard or political speech" or anything else?

Frankly, I don't give a shit what corporations were for or against. Unless you have actual criticisms of the bill itself, I can only conclude that there are, in fact, not two sides to this issue.

What bill?

Wait, you're telling me to criticize a "bill" that hasn't been published yet? Are you kidding? You do know that this "bill" with its 70+ regulations was passed in private, right?

> Wait, you're telling me to criticize a "bill" that hasn't been published yet? Are you kidding? You do know that this "bill" with its 70+ regulations was passed in private, right?

Which kind of begs what exactly you think you're criticizing.

All the statements by the FCC leading up to this bill have been ones I would consider positive. So until I actually see the bill, I'm not criticizing it.

Also:

    user:	travie7273
    created:	30 minutes ago

Astroturf potential: high.

Great argument, next time call him 12 years old.

It's not a "bill", it's FCC regulations, and this has already been explained in about 10 comments throughout this thread.

Are you a real user, or a paid astroturfer?

* The FCC cannot pass bills, they're generally referred to as rules/regulations.

You're technically correct. The best kind of correct!

http://www.wsj.com/articles/jostling-begins-as-fccs-net-neut...

"""Google has grown. And strong net neutrality rules are now no longer a top company priority. They could even be a hindrance. Officially, Google hasn’t taken a formal position on the president’s net neutrality proposal."""

I fail to understand how this could hurt Google. If ISPs start modifying speed and/or access to certain domains I can only see that as damaging for Google. The only thing I can think of is the typical pattern of a company becoming hugely successful then begin seeking to change the laws that allowed them to grow so nobody else can follow the path. Kinda like cutting the bridge after you've crossed it.

I hope that's not what E.Schmidt is thinking...

I think you are on the right track

If you are google with billions in the bank, what does it matter to you if Comcast wants to charge you a little bit more? The real effect is that entrenched powers get further entrenched because of less access to alternatives.

Lets say Comcast wanted to charge search providers 500million dollars. Thats not a lot of money from Googles search engine profits. But how much is 500 million of Bings budget? Yahoos? DuckDuckGo? I would be surprised if every search provider was willing and able to pay fees like this.

Intel, Cisco, and IBM all sell deep packet inspection products. They have a material interest in not seeing NN go through.

And all of the web-tech companies who support Net Neutrality rely utterly on other peoples' wires to deliver content to their users. They have a huge interest in regulating telcos into "dumb pipes." There's huge monetary incentives on both sides of this debate.

Yes, they rely on other people's wires, namely the ones rented (i.e. paid for) by the consumers of their products. How do you justify double dipping in this case?

Apple charges me for my iPhone, then takes 30% when someone sells me an app for it. Sony charges me for a PS3, then charges publishers a fee for every copy of every game they release. When your property facilitates a transaction between two parties, it's not "double dipping" to charge a fee to both.

And I think dumb pipes open for everyone is best.

After all ... it would be inconvenient if your utility company told you what can you use your electricity for.

It would be inconvenient if my ISP was keeping 100 year old infrastructure running like my power company. Or refusing to upgrade aging lead pipes leaking poison into the drinking water like my water company. The U.S. has a multi-trillion infrastructure deficit, and regulating utilities as dumb services is a huge part of that.

Legislating the wires into "dumb pipes" has certain advantages in terms of openness, but there's no money in building dumb pipes, and these pipes are expensive and must be continually upgraded, much more so than other kinds of utilities.

No its not the reason. You could always price the service high enough to get some sane ROI. It is zero risk investment.

I don't mind paying for what my service is worth. I mind giving someone else control over my digital life.

Utilities don't set their own rates, for obvious reasons. Public rate-setting boards do, and they are beholden to municipal politics, which target the lowest-common denominator. If you tried to raise rates to upgrade the network, you'd be shouted down by people talking about old folks on fixed incomes.

What do you think is going to happen at a rate-setting meeting? For every young nerd who thinks the utility should invest in fiber, how many people like my parents will be there (who wanted to switch from FiOS to cable to get Indian channels)?

The FCC"s plan isn't NN. It's a gigantic steaming pile of regulations that's ostensibly designed to implement NN. So far, any attempts at public debate gets reduced to emotional screeches and partisanship without any real meat to anything.

We're doomed. Maybe not today, tomorrow or next year, but censorship as you fear it is coming and you have yourselves to blame.

I just don't get this. The telecoms already started the censorship process when they decided to prioritize some types of traffic over others. The free market failed free speech the moment that happened, so yes, we the people decided to phone our government and tell them we don't want a bunch of $limeball$ deciding who gets to see what.

We've exchanged impending corporate censorship for possible, maybe, conjectured future government censorship.

I know which one I favor.

    user:	travie7273
    created:	27 minutes ago

This really isn't helpful. If you'd read his comment, it would be clear that his last account was banned, which would all but necessitate that any new accounts would be, y'know, new.

Further, it shouldn't need to be pointed out, but the insightfulness of one's posts should not be judged against how long they've been members of a website.

As someone else pointed out, a lot of new accounts were posting ISP talking points, which looks a whole lot like astroturfing.

Obviously the insightfulness of comments shouldn't be judged by how long someone has been a member of a website, but how long they've been a member of a website may be a good indicator of their motivations.

> Even Eric Schmidt told Obama it was a bad idea.

If you are referring to Google's concerns voiced after early outlines of the Title II approach, they objected to something that was discussed earlier as part of the approach -- identifying a "service" provided to edge providers by ISPs distinct from that provided to retail customers, and classifying that newly-identified service under Title II -- because it might create a basis for ISP to edge provider charges.

This provision, from subsequent outlines provided, is not part of the final package, which only addresses retail broadband service as a Title II service and addresses ISP to edge provider relations in terms of the impact they have on retail customers.

> My posts were shadow banned on HN for being against these regulations

HN accounts get banned for breaking the HN guidelines, not for being against regulations.

For example, a jab such as "people like you" in a comment breaks the HN guidelines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

The ratio of negative comments vs positive ones is indeed odd.

> This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing.

This is revisionist history. Up until very recently, Title II was the "nuclear option."[1] There's plenty of people who are pro-net neutrality who were skeptical of Title II. That's why they originally threw their support behind the FCC's last attempt at net neutrality, which tried to impose neutrality without reclassification.

The EFF only came out in favor of reclassification in June of last year, in a very measured and deliberate release: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/06/fcc-and-net-neutrality....

And some reasonably, technologically savvy people are opposed to net neutrality period: http://bizbeatblog.dallasnews.com/2015/02/mark-cuban-faults-... ("Mark Cuban faults ‘Silicon Valley groupthink,’ says FCC broadband rule a mistake")

[1] Conservatives don't like it because it allows the FCC to do things like rate-setting, even if this administration chooses not to use that power. Liberals don't like the specter of FCC regulation of content.

PS: The accusations of astroturfing on HN are a vile sort of rhetorical tactic.

> Up until very recently, everyone considered Title II the "nuclear option."

As far back as the 90s, when Mosaic was still the most advanced browser out there, I was noting that Title II common carrier rules for ISPs were the best choice to balance free speech needs -- to prevent ISPs and Backbone providers from censoring the content they carry -- and protect ISPs from liability for their users' communications.

It's only taken two decades for the industry to realize the same.

> balance free speech needs -- to prevent ISPs and Backbone providers from censoring the content they carry

Unless it's not deemed "legal." And I'm not talking about torrenting.

The big media companies have almost nothing to worry about when it comes to the legality of the content they sell. It's the individual user or small dissident group that would be harmed by repressive censorship rules. Those same interests would fair no better under corporate-controlled internet, because their views would be blocked or crowded out of access by the companies protecting their own interests.

Except when their own interests do not clash with that of those trying to exercise free speech. Which is pretty universally the case. Regulation will now make it harder for those persons who value free speech, we only have "legal speech" left.

Is there a substantive difference between the two? Free speech has always been subject to a handful of legal regulations.

In any case, this is a red herring.

What are you referring to? And surely this is orthogonal to whether it's Title II or not; not being title II does not magically prevent anything.

Calling FUD here. Do you have any precedent or any other legal basis for imagining that this reclassification will somehow allow FCC to regulate content on the internet.

> Conservatives don't like it because it allows the FCC to do things like rate-setting, even if this administration chooses not to use that power. Liberals don't like the specter of FCC regulation of content.

This is a funny line of reasoning on the part of Conservatives. Reclassification under Title II is supposedly bad because it allows future Commissions to impose rate-setting requirements. But, in the absence of Title II reclassification today, a future Commission could still have imposed a rate-setting regime. How? They could have reclassified broadband under Title II! In other words, reclassification under Title II today doesn't allow future Commissions to do anything they couldn't have done before, if they wanted to, because in either case, the the Commission has the power to take both steps simultaneously.

I guess you could argue that it makes it easier politically to impose rate setting in the future. But I'm not sure this holds any water if the very thing that worries most critics of Title II reclassification is rate setting.

Could someone explain for the ignorant what "rate setting" means in this context?

Does it refer to download/upload rates, or does it refer to $$ rates (between whom)?

It refers to setting the rate for monthly service. Title II was written to regulate phone companies, where for many years AT&T had a government-granted monopoly on phone service. In return for that monopoly, the government got the right to regulate phone rates.

True, but reclassifying now is one step in that direction, making rate setting easier in the future.

So their only argument is the "slippery slope" one. That's pretty weak given how difficult it was to get these rules passed.

Also, in Verizon v. FCC SCOTUS essentially reinforced the Chevron doctrine even more. So there essentially is no slippery slope at the FCC. They don't require a gradual rules change procedure, there is no slippery slope for them to fall down.

> This is revisionist history. Up until very recently, everyone considered Title II the "nuclear option."

That is revisionist history. From the outset of the NN debate, a large subset of the pro-NN crowd has pushed for Title II, and this increased after the court made clear that the critical elements of net neutrality could not be enforced by regulation, without substantial gaps, except under Title II.

It is simply not true that, until very recently, everyone considered Title II the "nuclear option".

Fair enough, see edit.

> Fair enough, see edit.

When you edit a comment, it would help others if you could explicitly mark what you changed with the annotation "Edit:".

> Up until very recently, Title II was the "nuclear option."

Up until recently (2005), ADSL was classified as Title II. Reclassifying it as an information service made it so much better that VDSL2 (which can provide 100Mbps!), defined in 2005, has .... hardly rolled out anywhere.

I'd argue that Title II classification (along with competitive access requirements) was a huge handicap on the telcos ability to make money in DSL, so it was starved of investment, and that by 2005 they were already too far behind cable to compete.

Why won't this happen with cable? What motivation does Comcast have to keep increasing the speed of their network? Especially since, believe you me, the calls for the FCC to mandate "open networks" (i.e. competitive access) could be right around the corner.

We have competitive access in Canada and that hasn't stopped telcos from making money or layout out new technology.

The original Title II classification which included local loop bundling killed DSL investment and allowed cable broadband to take over the market. Ever wonder why America has cable broadband and the rest of the world uses some version of DSL or fiber provided by the telephone company? Title II.

As soon as it was deregulated, Verizon and AT&T began upgrades. But before then, they weren't going to build upgrades to networks that any competitor could borrow at wholesale value.

The title II being proposed is a lot lighter than the old kind applied to the DSL, so it won't necessarily destroy invesment. But the fear is reasonable.

> As soon as it was deregulated, Verizon and AT&T began upgrades. But before then, they weren't going to build upgrades to networks that any competitor could borrow at wholesale value.

Given the great intentions that such bastions of corporate ethics like AT&T and Verizon have, is it possible that they simple held out until the got what they wanted?

If so, it was a massive mistake on their part. AT&T and Verizon lost the ISP market to cable companies in the mean time.

which is actually better than spending billions and then losing the ISP market to cable + other ISPs using wholesale.

It's actually a rational move. Title II prevented them from competing effectively with the companies that were not under Title II, hence the rational decision not to invest in competing infrastructure.

What exactly is "unethical" about not investing tons of money in something that isn't going to yield the kind of profit your investors want? People act like Verizon and AT&T have a moral obligation to spend money on telecom infrastructure as a public good at minimal price above cost.

Having agreed to make such an expansion, and having been paid for it, it is unethical to choose not to without returning the money.

Well, investing tons of money in lobbyists to pass state laws to prevent the deployment of municipal broadband utilizing public tax monies and breaks, is considered unethical (at least to me).

So, not investing in infrastructure is not the problem, but preventing others from doing so, is scummy.

They do not want to invest AND they don't want to compete.

They're given public rights of way and tax write offs to build their infrastructure. So yeah, they have a public duty.

> The original Title II classification which included local loop bundling killed DSL investment

Then why, when reclassified as an information service, did it not get better? It got better from 1999 to 2005 (768kbps -> 1-6Mbps), but only in very select regions has it actually improved beyond that in the past ten years.

That is mostly a technology issue. There is a maximum bitrate at which the transmission line can support for a given distance. To get past that, they have to start dragging fiberoptics to nodes they build closer to your house. Before you hit that speeds, protocol upgrades were giving you faster speed.

And I wouldn't say "very select regions." At least a quarter of the country live in areas with FTTN or FTTP networks deployed by the telecoms.

By the monopoly phone provider's logic, it did "get better" after it was reclassified.

(This is where AT&T switched to "Uverse" fiber-to-the-neighborhood network, with speeds up to 40+mbps. And since that's an "information service", no other companies are allowed to use it to sell internet, even though it's literally the same phone line as DSL, with almost identical technology and performance seen in other countries faster DSL services)

I guess I'm a little confused. The last mile unbundling would have just been the node-to-home lines, would it not? A new ISP entering the market would be able to lease those, but not necessarily the fiber network? Or would that fiber network have been unbundled too?

What's interesting, though, if you look at the published numbers... The number of new subscribers each year grew at about the same rate, with DSL in the lead (of growth, but not hard numbers), until 2005... When they both leveled off. DSL more sharply than cable. Most of the historic data only differentiates between greater and less than 200kbps, though, so it's difficult to know the impact that it did on bandwidth availability growth for the two connection mediums.

Mark Cuban's position isn't technically savvy, it's an opportunity for him to make more money. He says flat out that the Internet model that has worked for decades is broken now, because Netflix. Oh, and QVC should have a right to pay for preferred treatment and lower latency.

The reality is that building core network capacity to handle the likes of Netflix and 8k television is possible and gets cheaper as time goes on. I just participated in the buildout of new datacenter... The cost of building densities of network interconnect and compute unfathomable in 2005 is actually lower than the old 1gb stuff. WAN and telecom equipment that used to take up 10k ft^2 now take two racks and cost 80% less.

The capital investment issues the ISPs face have nothing to do with interconnect -- their dollars are spent in the last mile.

The public interest isn't compatible with Mark Cuban's ability & desire to throw millions of dollars at telcos to give his ventures an advantage. Market forces don't apply when the ISP business is slowly consolidating into a circa 1965 AT&T redux.

Isn't this what it boils down to for the opponents of Net Neutrality ? Either they can't make as much money or they can't buy themselves advantage.

Also expect to see someone like Cuban challenge this on 1st amendment grounds. Given that for the 1% mindset spending money equals speech, the government stopping them spending money to again an advantage is in their mind a restriction on speech. Sad but true.

So was this a good or a bad thing? im sensing overwhelming good

If it sticks its a good thing. My optimism is tempered the nonsensical court decisions of recent times.

Your comment is currently "above the fold" and even though I agree with you, I downvoted because I don't think this discussion should involve what Mark Cuban whatsoever.

Whatever dialog he spurs is going to be an intellectual dead end.

BTW, why isn't anyone talking about the Interstate Commerce Commission, the predecessor to the FCC, and the similarities between common carrier status of railways and Internet service providers?

We have over a hundred years of actual evidence to support the pros and cons of regulating public communications. Why are we choosing to instead resort to blind conjecture based on talking point samples from the last decade?

I mentioned Mark Cuban in context of the parent comment. Whatever our opinion of Mr Cuban, his arguments are essentially the same as the telecom people.

If we had a functional market, the excesses of the ICC would be a cautionary tale of great impact. Unfortunately the behavior of the ISPs has illustrated that we don't have that functional marketplace. I think we should follow the path successfully implemented (in most places) for utilities like water, electricity and the legacy telephone service.

I know, it just sucks that this is now turning in to a discussion directed by some loud mouth on a reality TV show.

Anyways... I'm not disagreeing with you. I agree that we should follow historical precedent and that ISPs should be regulated as Type II common carriers.

The railways that the ICC were primarily established to regulate were most definitely not a functional market. Railways at the time were also charging different fees for the different things they were transporting. Their customers also didn't have a choice of competitors and suffered under collusion between companies. Network Neutrality is essentially an extension of the same conversation.

The ICC also had statues for regulating communication. The FCC took over for the ICC's role in regulating communication in 1934 and the organizational was modeled on the ICC with 5 member appointed by the president.

We should be talking about what worked with the ICC and what didn't. If people are offering conjectures about what the results of these FCC regulations will have on the Internet they have plenty of historical evidence to use for their arguments. We can point to how the railroads abused and had a negative impact on society. We can show how overregulation harms industry. We can show example of regulatory capture. We can show example of tragedies involving unmanaged shared common resources.

Railways and the ICC are a very similar analogy but we can reason about all sorts of other precedent. We can find examples from the Hanseatic League, the Holy Roman Empire, the Dutch East Indies Company, the South Seas Bubble or anything else from our history. It all applies and led to our existing systems of government, business and law.

"The capital investment issues the ISPs face have nothing to do with interconnect -- their dollars are spent in the last mile."

So very true. I'm an ISP owner. The other factor is peering agreements over those last miles but, yes, totally agree.

Mark Cuban's position isn't technically savvy, it's an opportunity for him to make more money.

An update to original article lends evidence to what you said:

Note: 2:08 pm. Thursday. As readers have noted, Cuban has been a celebrity spokesman of sorts for AT&T, appearing in a series of commercials for the wireless giant.

> ("Mark Cuban faults ‘Silicon Valley groupthink,’ says FCC broadband rule a mistake")

Ha, cable network owner Mark Cuban is totally unbiased, of course.

He also owns a large position in Netflix (at least 50k shares, but "a lot more" = ~$170m+???).

Don't know what AXS TV is worth

Src: http://www.cnbc.com/id/102097968

For those who might not know, it's possible Netflix could benefit from paid prioritization: it would protect Netflix from start-ups aiming to take the place of Netflix.

I'm not sure what Netflix's official stance is on net neutrality, but it's possible Mr. Cuban thinks this way.

Netflix has been pushing NN.

They've had trouble getting cooperation from ISPs even when they've gone as far as offering free caching devices to ISPs to minimize their interconnect traffic. This should be a pretty big win for them.

I guess I'm defending network neutrality again today.

> Conservatives don't like it because it allows the FCC to do things like rate-setting, even if this administration chooses not to use that power.

The FCC hasn't been granted any new authority, they always could have done the reclassification and then done rate-setting. The only way to change that is to pass a law, which can happen or not independent of reclassification.

> Liberals don't like the specter of FCC regulation of content.

Are they regulating content? They haven't classified it under Title III or VI.

> Mark Cuban faults ‘Silicon Valley groupthink,’ says FCC broadband rule a mistake

I can't understand what Mark Cuban is talking about. He keeps talking about "uncertainty" and asking questions as if the presumptive answers would be problematic. What if they classify cable TV as an over the top service that can't have paid prioritization? I don't see the problem. There is no actual reason why HBO and CNN can't be delivered like Netflix.

He just seems to be confused in general. Like talking about broadcast TV indecency regulations that aren't even under Title II.

What exactly makes Mark Cuban tech savvy other than: 1) He's loud 2) He's reasonably well known

He was an early entrant into the tech world, having been a software reseller and integrator, selling custom systems and maintaining them himself.

Then he joined Broadcast.com, a sort of mini-Netflix-but-audio for broadcasting sporting events, which sold to Y! for $5 billion or so dollars.

He then co-founded AXS TV, which was the first HD satellite network.

He may be wrong on this issue. He may be right. But to pretend he isn't tech-savvy is to either ignore his history or to set the bar to an absurdly elitist standard. At the least, he's likely more tech savvy than your elected representatives, and possibly moreso than Tom Wheeler.

Whether this is germane to the discussion is another matter.

> Conservatives don't like it because it allows the FCC to do things like rate-setting, even if this administration chooses not to use that power.

I don't understand this fear. Let's consider two hypotheticals in which this administration does not want to do rate setting but a future one does.

Hypothetical one:

• This administration uses Title II with forbearance of rate regulation for NN.

• Later administration drops the forbearance and imposes rate regulation.

Hypothetical two:

• This administration finds some way to do NN without using Title II (perhaps not being able to do as strong a version of NN as they want).

• Later administration wants to do rate regulation. They reclassify as Title II and impose rate regulation.

I don't see how the later administrations ability to impose rate regulation is significantly easier under hypothetical one. It just changes the specific rule they have to write. Since they have the power to impose Title II, they can drop that into their rule if it hasn't been done by an earlier administration.

Semi-relevant nit: the FCC is not technically part of the administration.

Reasonable people can disagree about Title II, but there's no getting around the fact that just in the last few weeks the issue has been turned into 'Obamanet' as a political football.

You might not believe it, but it's true. Just yesterday at lunch I overheard a bunch of old (retired?) guys at the next table repeating that tired line "Obamacare of the Internet".

Oh I know it's true. The Wall Street Journal started callingit 'Obamanet' as soon as Wheeler dropped his editorial a few days back. Joke's going to be on them, I suspect.

> The accusations of astroturfing on HN are a vile sort of rhetorical tactic.

Though I'm in the libertarian anti-NN legislation camp, I don't know if this is true. Previously when I tried to express my views I got voted down. I assumed from this that HN is naturally heavily pro-NN legislation. (Or maybe they just didn't like the particular argument I made. * shrugs *)

Though, I do agree that it's a bad rhetorical tactic.

Within the US, Title II been a divisive topic.

On the global stage, though, countries that have set similar policies (e.g. the UK) have ended up with much healthier broadband ecosystems.

Healthier in what way? Active government involvement in theUK has also led to a lot more invasive content restrictions than we've seen in the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_the...

"Active government involvement" isn't what we're talking about here, though; merely a rule that broadband infrastructure has to be freely sublet to resellers, producing interesting things like this[1].

Title II doesn't force the government to care about what's going through the pipes; nor did the UK's broadband law. That was entirely a separate bout of moralizing, that was no easier or more difficult to enact or enforce given the broadband law.

[1] https://www.icuk.net/broadband-reseller/broadband.asp

The UK did not set up a similar policy. They built the phone network with government money, then when they privatize BT, they gave Openreach a monopoly with high rates to ensure profitability. Consequently, BT has twice the profit margin of your typical American utility, and actually about the same as TWC. It's EBITDA on revenue for Openreach is almost 50%. It's a sanctioned monopoly that enjoys monopoly profits.

> PS: The accusations of astroturfing on HN are a vile sort of rhetorical tactic.

I'm glad someone with a history agrees.

The new rules are very clear that broadband providers are not subject to rate setting.

>Rate Regulation: >the Order makes clear that broadband providers shall not be subject to utility-style rate regulation, including rate regulation, tariffs, and last-mile unbundling.

>Universal Service Contributions: >the Order DOES NOT require broadband providers to contribute to the Universal Service Fund under Section 254. The question of how best to fund the nation’s universal service programs is being considered in a separate, unrelated proceeding that was already underway.

http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adopts-strong-sustainable-ru...

Liberals don't like the specter of FCC regulation of content."

This is a prime example of FUD. Can you cite any precedent where title II powers have been applied to regulate content (also known as "speech") in any other medium?

> PS: The accusations of astroturfing on HN are a vile sort of rhetorical tactic.

You sound upset about the accusation. What if it were true though?

Comments like this are what make musings about astroturfing so toxic.

I don't know what it is about us message board nerds that makes this so hard to grok, but you cannot suggest that someone is a shill without overtly calling their integrity into question. Questioning someone's integrity is intrinsically uncivil. Don't be uncivil.

What I'm hearing is you'd like to make the topic of astroturfing "off-limits", because you feel its discussion is "toxic".

That's exactly what "message board nerds" do: focus on the gestalt rather than the substance. Call people out as not p.c. to silence an opinion.

> You sound upset about the accusation. What if it were true though?

If it were true, that would be bad and a problem. We crack down on such misuses of HN in every way we know how. As a matter of fact, we take them personally as an attack on the whole community.

But making such accusations indiscriminately is a sure way to poison the very same community. We don't want that to happen either. That means we all have to be disciplined about this and not just cry "NSA Shill!" (or whatever) out of frustration at wrong or contrary opinions.

The truth is that opinion is divided on this, as on most other issues, among legitimate community members. That alone means that ipso facto accusations of astroturfing aren't legit here. Without evidence, it's just a personal attack, and those are not ok.

Absolutely spot on.

The FCC even tried to create a net neutrality rule without reclassifying broadband providers under Title II, but it was struck down by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in Verizon v. FCC (2014)[0]

Nobody really wanted to impose the Title II regulations, which were written for a different technology and era, on broadband providers. But absent new legislation, which is a no-go in today's Congress, it was the only way for the FCC to establish the legal authority to promulgate the rule.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v._...

Nobody is against NN. Nobody wants the internet to be less free. The problem here is that the FCC is detonating a nuclear bomb to try to put out a house fire. It's completely unnecessary and will do more harm than good.

> Nobody is against NN. Nobody wants the internet to be less free.

Yes, absolutely the telecom companies are against net neutrality, because they want to be able to charge a premium for some sites, and give preferential routing to some kinds of traffic.

Also, I just want to highlight that there are lot of brand-new accounts on this thread posting cable-company talking points.

> because they want to be able to charge a premium for some sites

Elaborate on this plan.

> and give preferential routing to some kinds of traffic.

This is generally how the internet works. When you say "kinds" you mean surgery in action data vs. netflix data. Or when you say "kinds" do you mean netflix data vs. ISP movie provider data. That is the same kind of data.

You need to be a little more clear.

The internet gives preferential routing to certain kinds of data by design.

* A bunch of new accounts arguing the opposite as well.

The major consumer isps have been crystal clear (unless you don't wish to understand): they look at large consumer-facing internet companies and want a piece of the action. eg the recent action by Verizon to charge Netflix money to deliver Netflix to Verizon's paying customers. So if we don't want pay-to-play internet companies, we need net neutrality. Particularly given the widespread monopoly structure of home internet access.

TitleII is not the solution for this problem.

Can you explain why not?

The FTC exists to police competition and consumer protection.

TitleII is doomed to fail in court > http://techfreedom.org/post/110086459629/wheeler-ensures-fcc...

Simply stating a conclusion is not an argument.

>> because they want to be able to charge a premium for some sites >Elaborate on this plan.

OK. Comcast offers their "On Demand" service over their IP network. I can consume it with their set-top box, or with an XFinity app on my XBox. The bandwidth that I use for this app does not count against any data cap that Comcast may impose, and they're also doing traffic shaping to give this on-demand content preference over what I would get with Amazon or Netflix apps sitting next to the Comcast app in my home menu. That is using their position as the last-mile provider to give their content preferential treatment.

>> and give preferential routing to some kinds of traffic. >This is generally how the internet works. When you say "kinds" you mean surgery in action data vs. netflix data. Or when you say "kinds" do you mean netflix data vs. ISP movie provider data. That is the same kind of data. You need to be a little more clear. The internet gives preferential routing to certain kinds of data by design.

See above. Comcast and others are already giving preferential treatment to their own video streaming services vs. other services that are streaming the same kind of content.

    user:	covzzire
    created:	19 minutes ago

I like how you refuted my points with logic and reason and didn't try to cop out via some lame method like clicking a green link.

Stick around and be a productive member of the community and I'll happily engage you in debate. But I don't see much point debating with < 1 hour old accounts spitting ISP talking points -- so far it's most likely you're just an astroturfing corporate shill. I can't prove it of course, I'm just playing the odds.

Why would people want to stick around and be a productive member if they are immediately branded as a shill?

This topic has certainly brought out the worst. It seems like everyone is accusing everyone of being an astroturfing shill.

Perhaps if a significant amount of the new accounts were not parroting discredited anti-neutrality talking points..

It's a pretty simple calculus. Some fairly influential people hang out here, and monied interests have been screaming their heads off that they don't want this. With that in mind, it's a lot more likely that shilling and astroturfing is going on than it is not.

Whether that applies to you or not cannot be said (it's unfalsifiable anyways), but the facts stand.

Here's the breakdown of new accounts I noticed:

4 for NN (not necessarily for the FCC action) 1 against 1 unknown 1 ambiguous

Unless you have a different definition of new account, it is not even close to 'all but universally'.

Edit: I'm still not seeing how your edit applies. There was only one new person I saw that would even come close to 'parroting discredited anti-neutrality talking points'.

We disagree on your characterization of the posters.

How would you characterize them then?

I'll give you that one person easily fits the bill. The rest I'm just not seeing it. I'm not sure how you can get anything out of 'time will tell'. Two where just arguing against the blanket labeling of green members as astroturfers. One of the parents wasn't even arguing against NN, but the way this decision acheives it. Other than that one person where is the astroturfing from the green members?

Do you consider me an anti-NN astroturfer even though I have yet to comment on the decision?

> Do you consider me an anti-NN astroturfer even though I have yet to comment on the decision?

You're defending people who have commented on the decision. So, it seems pretty likely you're an anti-NN astroturfer, yes.

    user:	meragrin
    created:	6 hours ago

I'm not sure what you were expecting here.

Maybe he doesn't want to risk his Karma on this one. Are you suggesting it's some kind of conspiracy?

> Maybe he doesn't want to risk his Karma on this one.

If someone values conserving worthless internet points over having a conversation, they deserve the downvotes they get.

> Are you suggesting it's some kind of conspiracy?

Given the number of brand new accounts spitting ISP talking points, yes.

> Nobody is against NN.

Lots of people in this debate have come out specifically against net neutrality.

> The problem here is that the FCC is detonating a nuclear bomb to try to put out a house fire.

That's the argument that a lot of people who were publicly anti-neutrality until the last few months have suddenly swung around to, sure.

I don't believe I have enough information to conclude that classifying broadband as a Title II utility will be a good thing. My general impression is that more and stricter regulations in an industry is usually (though not always) a bad thing for consumers in that industry, so while I'm not vehemently against this NN bill, I certainly am not excited or optimistic.

I consider my views reasonable, although I guess an unreasonable person would consider their own unreasonable views to be reasonable. I'm definitely not astro-turfing, although if I get a check from the Ministry of Truth I will refrain from cashing it and let you know.

> I don't believe I have enough information to conclude that classifying broadband as a Title II utility will be a good thing.

It seems like we don't have enough information to say it's a bad thing either, but that's not stopping these < 1 hour old accounts from saying it.

To be fair, I can identify with the desire to place the burden of proof on the supporters of new regulations.

> My general impression is that more and stricter regulations in an industry is usually (though not always) a bad thing for consumers in that industry, so while I'm not vehemently against this NN bill, I certainly am not excited or optimistic.

I would say that's more strongly the case in competitive industries where there's some consumer choice in play to keep bad companies in check. But there are very few people who choose Comcast from between multiple broadband providers. And then they shot themselves in the foot in the public discourse with their constant stream of customer abuse and terrible support stories.

I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic about this, but I should read up more on what parts of Title II are being applied to what parts of the network here.

In particular, does this have any effect on Comcast saying "Netflix needs to pay us or we won't install sufficient peering to meet our customers' demand for Netflix connections"?

Having a second ISP choice where Netflix works properly would fix that pretty quickly, but I'm not clear on whether Title II does. But the FCC also just overruled state laws blocking municipal broadband networks, so that's going to be another option to keep an eye on.

> My general impression is that more and stricter regulations in an industry is usually (though not always) a bad thing for consumers in that industry

In cable internet the average consumer has only one or two potential providers. On top of that, companies who try to break into the industry face significant political and regulatory challenges when they lay fiber.

I don't understand how you can think this kind of industry should be unregulated. There are few market forces keeping providers in line, and we see the results of that in the industry's attempts to extort internet companies with throttling.

The industry is already highly regulated, and there's a difference between thinking an industry should be unregulated and thinking that not all conceivable regulations are good for an industry.

Lets scrap the USDA safety measures. We will eat so much better.

Yes, we should kill the USDA safety measures, as well as the USDA itself.

These rules should be issued at the state level, where we the people can keep a closer eye on it, rather than the federal government.

By the way, how do you like that the USDA is arming itself? Do you thing it's a good thing? Did you even know about this?

http://www.naturalnews.com/045141_USDA_submachine_guns_param...

State level issue is great. If US citizens never cross state borders. Just think of the joys is we have different standards for sterilization across the board.

On the contrary, one reason state level regulations are preferable is that US citizens can and do cross state borders much more easily and often than national borders.

Agreed. This thread is super strange and contrary to what I would have assumed the natural HN biases to be.

Edit: http://www.vice.com/read/cables-companies-are-astroturfing-f...

"This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates"

It's disingenuous to call an opposing opinion "astro-turfing" in an attempt to discredit them. There are 700 total rules to the regulation. We haven't been able to see one of them. This doesn't concern you in any way?

"and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US."

Tell me how more regulation will lead to more competition and a better Internet for the consumer.

"I'm finding it hard to believe that the regular HN crowd has suddenly turned virulently anti Title II. This definitely smells like a coordinated campaign to spread FUD."

Most people were afraid to talk about it because the HN community typically down votes everyone to hell that has opposing opinions.

I gave up awhile back because nobody would listen, but I'm not giving up today.

"This definitely smells like a coordinated campaign to spread FUD."

It seems you won't even listen to the opposition and are trying to discredit anyone that is against this government regulation as "FUD". It sounds like you are the astro-turfing one.

What happened to open and honest discussions?

> We haven't been able to see one of them

How is that different from the other FCC policies? It's only the opposition echo chamber repeating the "secret Obama plan to control the Internet" spin.

It's not. Things need to change.

Then be prepared to change the rules that _all_ independent regulatory bodies with a voting commission operate under. Because this is SOP.

> Then be prepared to change the rules that _all_ independent regulatory bodies with a voting commission operate under. Because this is SOP.

Its actually pretty much all regulatory bodies -- its just there is no formal "vote" in regular executive branch hierarchies before a regulatory action is adopted. But they still don't publish the internal drafts that are considered before they are adopted (they do sometimes publish NPRMs before final rules, but the FCC did that in this case, too.)

I would love to change the rules that all independent regulatory bodies with a voting commission operate under. The SOP is really bad.

How many times in the past did the FCC vote on internet or broadcast policies using the same process as this one resulting in regulations that protected special interests at the expense of consumers?

Apropos "Soros, Ford Foundation shovel $196 million to 'net neutrality' groups, staff to White House" : http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/soros-ford-shovel-196-mill...

"What happened to open and honest discussions?"

I just went through your recent comment history and it's pretty clear you're interested in no such thing. You've been blindly repeating Fox News style prepared talking points without regards to actual information presented to you. As an example this was explained to you in another subthread below:

"Regulatory orders aren't generally published before being approved by the initiating authority (preliminary notices that are subject to revision before being approved are published when those are approved by the authority, as was the case with the NPRM on this issue published last year. The final decision based on the NPRM and public comment received since the NPRM, is what was voted on today, which will then be published. This is the processed followed by basically every regulatory body for virtually every regulatory action in the US government (sometimes there isn't an advanced notice like the NPRM, however.)" by dragonwriter

As just one more examples out of dozens more, here's what tzs explained to you in another thread yesterday:

---

> The FCC has a 332 page plan to regulate the Internet (which the public does not have a chance to even look over before it is passed)

No, the FCC does not have a 332 page plan to regulate the internet. Tom Wheeler has a plan, although it is much much shorter to 332. The 300+ pages is for a document that includes his plan, a long explanation of the reasons and the authorities for each part, and a long look at the large number of comments that were received after last years FCC plan. The FCC will have a plan if the Commissioners vote in a couple day to make adopt Wheeler's plan, at which point it will then be available for public comment so that we can all see it and comment. After that, the FCC decides to adopt it or not.

---

Seeing your ad-nauseam repetition of the same talking points while utterly disregarding cogent responses to them, it's a pretty safe bet that your opinions and desire for "open and honest discussion" carries as much weight as those of party hacks screaming at each other on cable news.

> I just went through your recent comment history and it's pretty clear you're interested in no such thing. You've been blindly repeating Fox News style

> Seeing your ad-nauseam repetition of the same talking points

Attack the argument -- not the person.

My thesis is that these accounts are not here for legitimate argument. They are here to spread FUD via talking points. I attempted to prove the futility of attacking the arguments by showing that they have been clearly countered before while failing to budge this account from their fixed talking points.

> My thesis is that these accounts are not here for legitimate argument. They are here to spread FUD via talking points

If you feel anyone's opinion that isn't your own is somehow FUD, that's a problem.

For example, you are unlikely to change my viewpoint or opinion on a great number of things, even through well thought-out and concise arguments. I also happen to believe Fox News isn't as terrible as a lot of people like to think (they are, after all, the news network with the most viewership and highest ratings year after year).

Point being, you shouldn't attack individuals because they don't agree with you (or the popular opinion). You should attack their argument.

And clearly someone who's invested enough time into getting 1K+ upvotes isn't a drive-by-night account. I get suspicious when new accounts post that were created on or around when the article was posted, and/or accounts with very long account history but almost no comments and no upvotes (why go 500 days with no comment but now you post?).

"For example, you are unlikely to change my viewpoint or opinion on a great number of things, even through well thought-out and concise arguments."

Thank you. I think this is sufficient grounds for me to avoid wasting any of my time arguing with you.

> Thank you. I think this is sufficient grounds for me to avoid wasting any of my time arguing with you.

Conversely, has anyone managed to change your mind here in this thread?

Probably not...

The point of good argument isn't to convince the other party they are woefully wrong and everyone should just eventually come to the same conclusion.

Some debate for sport/fun, others to make a point. In the end a good debate serves to strengthen one's own ideals via plugging of logic holes poked by the opposite party. Occasionally someone may change their viewpoint -- but only someone with a very strong ego would believe their sole argument was so compelling...

If you surround yourself in an echo chamber, it's easy to believe your viewpoint is the only correct one.

> The point of good argument isn't to convince the other party they are woefully wrong and everyone should just eventually come to the same conclusion.

Applied to both parties in the argument, yes it is. Argument is digging for truth. The most productive outcome is for some or all of the parties involved shift their beliefs to more accurately reflect reality.

Just to clarify - when you argue, are you attempting to present the actual reasons you believe your point to be true? If not, then you are arguing in bad faith, and contributing heat to the discussion rather than light. If you really are arguing in good faith, then it's just plain crazy to strengthen your position upon being confronted with flaws in your reasoning.

> Some debate for sport/fun

In the context of a serious discussion, I believe the term for this is "trolling".

> > Some debate for sport/fun

> In the context of a serious discussion, I believe the term for this is "trolling".

That's not always true. Have you never had a sporting debate with a friend who's opinion you knew full well going in?

In addition, a common debate preparation tactic for "serious" debates is often to argue from the opponent's side. This forces one to better understand the opposition's stance, better prepare for common responses and assertions, and discover potential logic flaws in one's own position.

> Have you never had a sporting debate with a friend who's opinion you knew full well going in?

Huh? You mean have I argued with a friend about a belief of theirs I was aware of ahead of time? Yes? If you're asking if I was disagreeing with them just for fun, while pretending to be serious, then no, because I try not to be a jerk to my friends.

I'm well aware of debate tactics and devil's advocacy, and for the most part I think they're epistemic poison. It's great to examine your own arguments for flaws, because you might actually be wrong! But the idea that you would do so merely for the sake of patching up any holes you find is revolting.

I suggest you google "arguments as soldiers" if you're not familiar with the phrase. Not for the sake of learning or gaining perspective or anything, it'll just help you understand where I'm coming from so you'll be better-equipped to take me down.

> so you'll be better-equipped to take me down.

Seriously guy?

Will you genuinely claim to not have any beliefs which are unlikely to be changed?

> If you feel anyone's opinion that isn't your own is somehow FUD, that's a problem.

Where does he make that claim? It sounds like you are trying to discredit him based on conjecture.

> I also happen to believe Fox News isn't as terrible as a lot of people like to think (they are, after all, the news network with the most viewership and highest ratings year after year).

If your opinion of what makes a news network good or terrible is based on whether or not they get high viewers and ratings, I'm not quite sure what to say. No one who calls Fox News terrible is doing so because they think no one is watching, and I can't believe you actually believe that.

> Point being, you shouldn't attack individuals because they don't agree with you (or the popular opinion). You should attack their argument.

Pointing out instances of him ignoring coherent rebuttals to his argument is an attack on the argument. His argument is weak because he is ignoring responses that refute his argument.

Let's turn the tables- I'm going to apply a hypothetical:

I find all of your arguments to be talking points. How can we possibly have a reasonable dialog? I have just insulted you by explicitly stating that you are insincere in your position.

This is how you're treating everyone who disagrees with you. It is utterly unproductive. You are executing a Denial of Service attack on any reasonable dialog.

> I find all of your arguments to be talking points.

Please define "talking points"... I find it often means an often repeated argument that my side doesn't agree with.

The same arguments being repeated again and again, usually by multiple different people (almost as if the arguments have been disseminated from the same source), with any rebuttals or addressing of those points by people opposing the central point being ignored or not addressed in good faith.

See upthread for an example of this.

Repeated argument I don't agree with...talking point.

Repeated argument I do agree with...consensus.

It doesn't matter whether a contributor intends his argument to be "legitimate" or not. The validity of an argument is completely independent of the presenter of that argument.

> My thesis is that these accounts are not here for legitimate argument.

If you suspect accounts of not being here for legitimate purposes you are welcome to email your suspicions to us at hn@ycombinator.com. But it's not ok to make accusations of astroturfing in HN threads. The degradation it causes to the discourse is obvious from the current discussion alone: wherever it comes up turns into a toxic waste pond.

Personally accusing paulhauggis of being a shill just because you don't like his politics is one of the worst examples I've seen. I think you owe him an apology. Even if you're right that someone refuses to change his mind when shown superior arguments, the only thing that entitles you to accuse them of is human nature.

"I just went through your recent comment history and it's pretty clear you're interested in no such thing. You've been blindly repeating Fox News style prepared talking points without regards to actual information presented to you. As an example this was explained to you in another subthread below:"

I don't watch Fox news, sorry (I cut cable years ago). I know it may come as a shock to you that people actually think critically about a situation, but this is what I am doing. I have brought up many good points and concerns, and they seem to be getting side-tracked and you are (attempting) to discredit me.

"Seeing your ad-nauseam repetition of the same talking points while utterly disregarding cogent responses to them"

Look at my response. He said there is a 300+ page plan and now we know there are 700 regulatory rules that still have not seen. Can you show them to me? This would stop me from asking.

"As just one more examples out of dozens more, here's what tzs explained to you in another thread yesterday:"

So, I ask for more transparency and your response is another poster that basically said that it's not done this way. Can you tell me why it isn't done this way and why, going forward, it shouldn't?

Now, instead of trying to delve into my past and attack me personally (which is usually a red flag for me, but I will ignore it), tell me:

1) What are the 700 regulations and why should I not be able to see them? My business and my life runs through the Internet and I pretty much use it every day. I should have some say in rules that will now be imposed on me.

2) Even if we get to see proposals before regulations and laws are in place, it's still not a vote.

In the very beginning, we will probably see no change with the new regulations. It's 5 or 10 years down the line that's still unknown. By this time, people will not associate the higher bills and other effects with this new regulation and politicians will push the blame on something else.

I'm actually shocked that intelligent people have no problem just giving their rights away in the blink of an eye.

> There are 700 total rules to the regulation. We haven't been able to see one of them.

The FCC published the proposal in May. You've had 9 months to comment on it.

Wrong proposal. That's the proposal they dropped after seeing the comments.

Its the only actual formal proposal that there has been. Yes, its true that it (based on the outlines provided) it differs substantially from what has been considered in recent weeks and adopted. That's the point of having an advance notice for comments as part of the regulatory process.

OTOH, its also quite common for the subsequent published act after a call for comments on a proposal to be the final decision, even if it differs substantially from the original proposal.

"Tell me how more regulation will lead to more competition and a better Internet for the consumer."

I would bet our internet bill will start to look like our phone bill with lots of little fees and taxes tacked on. One of them will probably be titled something like "Affordable Internet Access Tax".

Re: lack of competition: In my neighborhood there is only one real broadband ISP: Comcast. The recent re-definition of "broadband" may have caused some other providers to improve some of their offerings.

No, because this is the norm - the commissioners draw up a proposal, vote on it, then it's published in the Federal Register as a 'notice of proposed rulemaking,' witht he text of the proposed rule in full, and there is a comment period. Following that, the FCC publishes a 'notice of adoption of final rule,' which may or may not include changes based on the submitted comments. the process is summarized here: http://www.fcc.gov/rulemaking

Most people were afraid to talk about it because the HN community typically down votes everyone to hell that has opposing opinions.

Spare us the ad hominem attacks. Substantive arguments generally do just fine on HN. Rayiner, for example, has been making substantie arguments against the idea of Title II classification for months and it hasn't done his standing any harm whatsoever.

What happened to open and honest discussions?

It's not honest to pretend that this rulemaking process is somehow different and worse from the normal one that has been in place for years.

> No, because this is the norm

Yes, the norm concerns me.

I don't buy it.

What's wrong with the existing procedure, specifically? Why is it not adequate to view and comment on it at the time it is published in the Federal Register as a proposed rule? This is, after all, the whole point of the Federal Register.

Where was the pressure to change this rulemaking procedure over the last X years before this particular issue came up?

I have no experience in how to aggregate opinions in order to make policy decisions. I don't directly have a problem with the specific procedure. My concern comes from the historical results of US regulatory agencies, which I am not impressed by. I do not know if the public commenting process has a significant effect on those results.

People aren't worried about the main gist. People are scared of the fine details that they categorically refused to release before voting.

> People aren't worried about the main gist. People are scared of the fine details that they categorically refused to release before voting.

Strangely, the people that have suddenly expressed concerned about the second thing in the major media as the vote approached are the same people that were expressing opposition on the first ground until very recently (and, many of them continued to do both.)

So, I don't think that is at all accurate.

What's wrong with that? I consider myself one of those people.

Broadband companies have a government sponsored monopoly. There are good, fair reasons for that. One of the rules with being gifted a government sponsored monopoly should be that you aren't allowed to abuse that monopoly power. Very reasonable. People agree in principle.

Now we're adding some rules to prevent that abuse. However we don't know what they are! Just as the pendulum was much too far on one side it could easily swing much too far to the other. A great way to evaluate if it's swinging too far is by reading the rules. Which people asked to do. And they categorically refused! The only reason this vote came up is because of passionate public opinion. But now they won't let the public know what is actually being voted on? That's fucked up.

I would personally like to see telecommunication companies spend 1 trillion dollars in infrastructure over the next 20 years. I want wireless gigabit internet. I'd like 10 gigabit wired connections. Maybe more. Will these rules make that harder to do? Will that be more likely or less likely than before? NOBODY IN THE PUBLIC KNOWS. To celebrate the passing of laws when you don't actually know what was passed is insane.

If you'll notice, the lines of attack closely mirror the anti-Obamacare lines.

"700 regulations and no one has even read it!" is very close to the "No one — not one single member of Congress — has read the bill" Michael Steel was using in 2009.

> "700 regulations and no one has even read it!"

Note the commenter said no one had "seen it". That's a meaningful difference worth accurately re-quoting.

Also, is it "700" or "70" or "70+" or what? [citation required]

> "No one — not one single member of Congress — has read the bill" Michael Steel was using in 2009

The concept of passing laws that few have read or understood is the very definition of "disconcerting".

The fact that the Obamacare bill probably contains an error that might shut down subsidies for federal exchanges sorta backs up Steel's criticism.

A loophole that allows funding for health care to be cut sounds more like a "feature" to congresspersons.

An "error" that only exists in the most tendentious possible reading of the bill isn't evidence of anything other than the intent of the people challenging the ACA.

Not entirely. If you read the lower court ruling [0] you'll see that the argument made against allowing the subsidies is pretty tortured. You have to read the statute in the most literal and least interpretive way possible to think that the original intent of congress was to bar subsidies for states that opted not to set up exchanges. But hey who knows. SCOTUS season isn't until June. As it applies to NN, it is perhaps appropriate to note the different processes the ACA when through compared to whatever regulations the FCC ends up adopting. We shall see.

[0] http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-4th-circuit/1673339.html

This argument is the essence of ad hominem. First, that disagreement is unreasonable. Second, that those who disagree have ulterior motives.

fake outrage is a very effective tactic on public forums

Sometimes it is, and sometimes they do. It would be unwise to dismiss the possibility out of hand, especially on an issue this contentious that has this many powerful players against it.

I have looked hard at the issues & I'm not on any campaign.

Paid prioritization is not a bad thing. Blocking websites is.

There is a whole nascent standard called LTE direct that suddenly becomes pointless if you can't distinquish traffic priorities. There are innovations that are being cut out of the picture for entirely new m2x flows & peer to peer flows because of the desire to remove paid prioritization.

It is not productive to assume that the only reason that someone disagrees with you is because of a coordinated campaign to spread FUD.

At what point does "prioritization" effectively become blocking? People navigate away from websites that take a long time to load or have advertisements.

Not to mention that companies like Comcast have their foot in the online entertainment content game, and could very easily use paid prioritization to get an unfair advantage over competing services.

If you do a search for the net neutrality position of companies like AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink- you'll find plenty of material on their policy blogs on why this is a bad thing.

http://community.centurylink.com/regulatoryblog/ http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/broadband-classification/thou... http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/fccs-throwback-th...

It is extremely interesting that Comcast has made no public positions on title II neutrality.

Interesting that Verizon and CenturyLink focused entirely on the fact that Title II regulations are old. I'm curious what the specific issues they have with it are; after all, there are plenty of old laws that still work fine.

It's become really hard to find any actual information or discussion though. Seems like every page I find is a bunch of bullet points either saying "Regulation will stop all innovation, drive ISPs out of business, and destroy the internet" or "If we don't regulate, Comcast and TWC will stop all innovation and destroy the internet." Sheesh...

Is your use of the Internet limited to websites?

If you play video games, use realtime video services like facetime, or use a VPN for mission critical work, do you really want your traffic flows to be identical to something that delivers content to a rendering engine?

Different traffic has different requirements & performance characteristics. From a pure engineering perspective, this is a very poor decision and treating all traffic equally provides artificial and often unnecessary constraints.

I have never experienced any situation where prioritization has effectively become blocking.

Interesting, but I'm more concerned about prioritization of Skype over FaceTime because Microsoft pays Comcast more than Apple.

Different types of content have different requirements. Different content within the same type does not. This is not an issue of prioritizing VoIP over a large single file. This is an argument against prioritizing Company A's VoIP over Company B's VoIP.

> Different traffic has different requirements & performance characteristics. From a pure engineering perspective, this is a very poor decision and treating all traffic equally provides artificial and often unnecessary constraints.

Banning paid prioritization does not stop the ISP from prioritizing traffic for engineering reasons.

What it bans is prioritizing traffic because a content provider paid for their traffic to be prioritized. For example, Amazon would not be able to pay to have Amazon video prioritized over Netflix video, and Netflix would not be able to pay to have Netflix video prioritized over Amazon video.

what would be so bad about that? doesn't that mean that we would have to "regulate" every successful business, because they could use their additional profit to gain "unfair market advantages"?

I actually can't tell if you're joking or not, because, well... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

I was not joking. Some additional consideration of how monopoly and deregulation plays into this discussion: http://youtu.be/5Z_nBhfpmk4?t=47m25s

Hmm, I watched from your starting timestamp for a good 10 minutes or so, and the point being made seemed to be that the government should have gone for ISP regulation sooner (or at least done something to prevent ISP monopolization sooner). Is that what you were getting at?

Suppose my ISP has oversold their bandwidth (which they all, of necessity, do). I'm trying to watch Amazon. My neighbor is trying to watch Netflix. My ISP doesn't have the bandwidth to give us both a good video experience, and so has to choose which of us will get inferior service.

Let's say I only watch video occasionally. My neighbor watches all the time. I consume maybe 5 GB a month. He consumes 1000 GB.

Me and my neighbor have the same tier of service, and are paying the ISP exactly the same amount.

You really don't have a problem if Netflix were allowed to pay my ISP to make sure that my neighbor's video watching gets priority, so he gets a great video performance, and mine sucks?

Thank you for the example. However, I thought that's quintessentially part of competition in a free market. Who would prevent netflix from offering a better service, make a deal with another ISP, allow other companies to offer products that fit your consumption and streaming habits better?

I can't help but suspect that the ultimate effect of paid prioritization would be to stifle future growth.

Say you're a mobile carrier in the not-too-distant future. Lots of your customers are addicted to the hottest new social network in the Valley, FaceFlix. Trouble is, you're catching hell from both sides -- your customers are complaining about sluggish performance, and FaceFlix is complaining about inadequate bandwidth. What's your path of least resistance? Do you spend money building out your network, buying expensive chunks of spectrum at auction and erecting new towers all over the place? Or do you choose to make money, charging FaceFlix to drop their competitors' packets into the bit bucket? It will seem like a no-brainer from your point of view, and that's why paid prioritization is a bad idea.

It just sounds like a recap of the apocryphal story from the early telephone days, where a local undertaker was said to be bribing the operator to reroute calls away from their competitor. Why is that behavior suddenly OK this time around, in your eyes?

LTE direct allows peer to peer routing of traffic over high capacity, licensed spectrum. In rural areas where a device has shoddy coverage, you could conceivably route traffic from devices with poor coverage to devices with strong coverage and then out to the Internet.

You wouldn't want to do this for streaming traffic, as it could negatively impact the experience of the device with the strongest coverage. But you could do this for traffic that has lower performance requirements.

Paid prioritization has existed over the course of the entire Internet. I happens every day- and it is known as peering agreements. Would you characterize the history of the Internet so far as "stifled growth"?

The thing is, "net neutrality" arguments are not really about peering agreements. They are a consequence of a deeper, unfortunate reality: anyone who uses a packet-switched network to emulate a circuit-switched one is in a state of sin. Streaming applications like to pretend that they have a dedicated circuit connection to their peer, whether that peer is a centralized service like Netflix (or their CDN provider), or another end user's cable box or handset. That's not the case, but we have to maintain the fiction that it is, and treat packets that are part of a Netflix stream just the same as transient ones to or from Twitter.

Just how to preserve this unnatural state of affairs is what is being debated. If we don't understand this fact -- if we create laws or technical standards that favor one type of packet over another -- we risk foreclosing all sorts of interesting and valuable applications in the future that no one has even imagined yet.

So no, I don't think it's a good idea to promulgate standards that work well with transient messages and datagrams but not streams. If that's true of LTE Direct (and I'm not familiar with the spec, so I don't know if it is), then that's a problem. We've already baked that behavior into the architecture of the Internet itself, and it's only going to become a bigger issue as time goes on.

I conceptually agree with the problems you're describing.

I have absolutely no faith that the government is capable of responsibly managing this ecosystem.

Let the nerds work. Do not bring regulators in whenever architectural decisions need to be made.

Amen. Isn't Google Fiber an attempt of the market responding to a lack of competition? It's probably more likely for a company to go out of business / lose market share than for a government agency to give up power.

> Paid prioritization is not a bad thing. Blocking websites is.

Paid prioritization can be effectively used to block websites at the will of the providers. "We offered that website our paid tier, but they refused our $1,000,000 demand and are now capped at a bit per second."

The thing I have hated the most about the last 20 years of the internet is how often I have been blocked access to a website due to caps.

This has happened exactly 0 times.

We've already seen companies with Netflix competitors wielding caps against Netflix. It's hardly a crazy concept that Comcast could wield them against speech they don't like too.

The caps were already there. That is what peering is about.

If you can offer the service internally on your network, then by all means you should be able to allocate as much bandwidth as can. The peering points are the choke points. This is where things get nutty.

Netflix has developed boxes that can be deployed in operator networks to avoid the peering choke points. They didn't want to pay Comcast to operate these boxes (They have to be operated). It's not like netflix didn't have a choice in this situation.

> The peering points are the choke points.

http://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-to...

> According to Cogent’s CEO, “[f]or most of Cogent’s history with Comcast…[as] Comcast’s subscribers demanded more content from Cogent’s customers, Comcast would add capacity to the interconnection points with Cogent to handle that increased traffic.” After Cogent began carrying Netflix traffic, however, “Comcast refused to continue to augment capacity at our interconnection points as it had done for years prior.”

This was a deliberate strategy to bring Netflix to heel, and it meant Comcast screwing over their own customers, who were paying good money for their internet service, to win the battle.

> Netflix has developed boxes that can be deployed in operator networks to avoid the peering choke points. They didn't want to pay Comcast to operate these boxes (They have to be operated).

Do you have a citation for this? Netflix eventually paid the peering agreements, which are dramatically more expensive than paying Comcast to operate OpenConnect boxes (unless they're taking the same strategy with those and pretending they'd cost millions of dollars to plug a few 4U servers into a rack).

> This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates.

Anybody who disagrees with you must have been bought and paid for by your evil opponents, huh.

> This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing... and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US.

Honestly, this kind of statement is what sounds like ridiculous astroturfing.

There is quite literally almost no competition in US broadband access. See the graph here:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/09/most-of-the-us-has-n...

To have a robust market, you need a variety of players. Witha duopoly, you generally end up with approximately the same service as a monopoly, but with two slightly different price points. But the fast majority of the US has at best 2 choices even for a 4 Mbps plan. At 25 Mbps down, then only 2.4% of customers have three or more choices.

I would rather have a robust market, and indeed I'm one of the few people who has stuck with independent ISPs even though it costs me more. But given the oligopoly we've got, I'm happen to take strong regulation to prevent abuse.

I meant more about what "reasonable people" agree upon.

So the better question is how did we get to this duopoly?

By making it public infrastructure.

Remember, if not for an accident of history (cable and telephone services running over completely different kinds of wires), it wouldn't be a duopoly, it would be an outright natural monopoly -- a prime candidate for treatment as a public utility.

The FCC had to change their definition of "broadband" to get that "quite literally almost no competition" result.

The traditional 4Mbps standard found 2 or more wired and 3 or more wireless providers at about 90% of US addresses.

I like ever-faster service, but the idea that's what most people need or even want – when superfast speeds cost more – isn't well-supported. 4Mbps is already plenty for HD movies and video teleconferencing. When and where people crave more, and if the solo 25Mbps-provider annoys them with pricing or traffic policies, more options will arrive, just as they have been arriving for the past two decades.

Most places in the US had zero 4Mbps options 20 years ago, and now they have 5+. Options and speeds have been steadily growing, not shrinking. But utility-style federal regulation, without regard to local competitive possibilities, slowed telephone-network dynamism for decades. It will similarly constrain rather than expand 'broadband' choices, by forcing them into a nationally-managed utility mould.

> 4Mbps is already plenty for HD movies and video teleconferencing

The last six years of my life have been consumed by work on video streaming services. While in a lab environment you would be correct, I can tell you that in the real world you are off by a factor of about 4, and will be off by a factor of about 8 for 4k video.

> Most places in the US had zero 4Mbps options 20 years ago, and now they have 5+.

I have no idea where you got that idea, unless you think wireless is a substitute for cable or DSL. It's not.

Fixed terrestrial wireless is indeed a substitute to cable and DSL (especially DSL)

I've personally had three fixed wireless installations over the past decade. Two residential, one business. I've researched the option in numerous additional cases for both business and residential service.

Both business and consumer services are typically more expensive by 10-100% and have installation (particularly LOS) requirements many -- if not most, in topographically unfavorable areas -- cannot meet. While the business services are usually OK once installed, consumer services are particularly unstable and the equipment prone to early death.

Notably, the wireless ISPs I'm familiar with ended up either shut down or moving to a different line of primary business as soon as any sort of viable wired service made it into town.

While far better than relying on mobile data if you don't have other options, it's still definitely not a substitute, even for DSL.

I'm no expert in this, but aren't terrestrial wireless setups (microwave relays, etc) out of reach financially for the average family?

Under the hood, consumer fixed wireless is usually just wifi gear, but running on licensed frequencies and attached to big outdoor antennas.

If you're very, very lucky, the hardware might have been manufactured to run optimally on those frequencies, or it might just be a WAP in a different box running tweaked software.

This has the generally-crappy results you would expect.

Business gear is substantially more robust and expensive.

While I trust your experience with regard to whatever specific streaming assumptions & goals your project was seeking, in fact my DSL, maxing at 5Mbps in speed tests, has no problem streaming HD from Netflix for a sharp picture on a 50" TV. (A sibling commenter links to Vudu's FAQ that reports 2.25Mbps as their threshold for HD streaming.)

And we're not limited to streaming: at 5Mbps, iTunes HD downloads complete faster than they can be watched, and at 4Mbps you just need to give them a 10-minute head-start per hour.

So no-one at 4Mbps – the floor at which ~90% of America already has 2 or more wired providers and 2 or more wireless providers – need be locked out of their inalienable human right to video-entertainment. At most they might need to wait a few minutes... or watch in the SD that was good enough for decades of TV-watchers.

Wireless is not yet a perfect substitute for cable/DSL, but it's an acceptable substitute for many people, when they're not heavy audio/video consumers. My wireless service (TMobile LTE) is about 4x faster at my home than my DSL wired service – and so I've switched to wireless on occasion when I needed large software downloads to complete quickly.

You are fortunate to live somewhere with high-quality DSL, and not have anyone else using your connection. These things do not hold true for the majority of people. I expect you're also tolerating much longer startup times than most consumers tolerate.

Vudu is not providing meaningful HD. The way you get 2.25mbps "HD" is by providing a 720p or 1080p stream of very low quality. 2.25mbps is not capable of providing even close to HD quality without going to h.265, which is not currently practical.

Your premise was that 4mbps was "plenty" for HD. To now speak of SD is simply admitting that you are wrong, and 4mbps is not meaningfully broadband.

I also have T-Mobile LTE. It's almost useless without putting the phone in the window, has massive latency spikes, and can't maintain high speeds for long without dropping out completely. It is of no practical use in replacing the connection I do actual work on.

As another data point on your behalf, Netflix won't even serve 720p unless you have 5mbps service;

https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

Netflix HD streams start in about 5 seconds.

If you can download 1 hour of HD in 1 hour and 10 minutes over 4Mbps, that is still "plenty" in my book – especially since 90% of the USA have multiple options for that bandwidth.

If one provider is out front with more bandwidth for impatient cinemaphiles – good for them! Let them charge more, in more ways, as a motivation for competitors to upgrade.

The ability to satisfy all other net uses – web, email, short videos, software downloads, audio streaming, video conferencing, etc – from multiple competing providers almost everywhere is still pretty good. Saying that's "not broadband" is arbitrarily raising the standard to create a false sense of crisis.

It's too bad your LTE needs a careful window positioning; I've noticed mine faces many weak spots around the neighborhood. But wireless is competitive in many places, for many people, for many uses – and keeps getting better. No one is trapped indefinitely with bad service needing federal rescue – the rates and options have been improving non-stop for decades, based on raw competitive factors.

5 seconds is beyond the tolerance point for most consumers. 3 seconds is getting into annoyance territory. You're mostly OK below 2.

Your argument is now circular. 90% of the US is fine because they have at least 4mbps, which is fine because 90% of the US has it. That doesn't work. In fact, I can turn it right around on you, as Wheeler recently did -- "When 80 percent of Americans can access 25-3, that's a standard.".

You have cinemaphiles exactly backwards. They are more tolerant of delays and long downloads than ordinary consumers, because they understand and expect that they will have to put up with such for maximum quality. Ordinary consumers want something that works like a TV channel or a website.

Raising the threshold for internet service to be classified as an advanced telecommunication capability is not a "federal rescue", it's the FCC doing what it's mandated by 47 USC § 1302[0] to do -- report on the availability of advanced communications capability, defined as "high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.".

You should also read the actual report[1], where they discuss exactly why the new level was chosen. Hint: They recognize households consist of more than one person.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1302

[1] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015...

4Mbps is not enough to handle a single HDX stream from Vudu (http://www.vudu.com/faq.html) much less a family household streaming to different devices.

*edit HDX

Per your link, 2.25Mbps is sufficient for HD from Vudu. Also, 4Mbps is the floor for meeting the original broadband definition; most offerings are higher.

> 4Mbps

You're forgetting the huge gulf inbetween "up to 4Mbps" and "4Mbps".

The figures I'm referring to, from the FCC's 2014 report on broadband competition, were based on "4Mbps or higher" (not "up to").

The parent is referring to the fact that consumer plans for nearly all ISPs don't guarantee 4 Mbps at all times. Instead they offer "up to 4 Mbps". Average performance is less than that, especially at high-usage times of day.

Historically, that's been an issue. But in fact, the FCC has been testing this, and most users' actual speeds are barely any lower than advertised (and sometimes even higher) during peak periods. From their 2014 report [1]:

"On average, during peak periods DSL-based services delivered download speeds that were 91 percent of advertised speeds, cable-based services delivered 102 percent of advertised speeds, fiber-to-the-home services delivered 113 percent of advertised speeds, and satellite delivered 138 percent of advertised speeds."

And, a majority of wired connections are advertised as "6Mbps or higher" [2] – so even if throughput at peak times was only 66% (while in fact it averages 90%+), it'd be still be plenty for HD video from Netflix, iTunes, and Amazon.

The sense of distress here is based a lot on folklore and outlier complaints. Most people are essentially getting the full headline speeds, even during peak times, and have 2+ choices for service sufficient for all but the most bleeding-edge applications.

[1] http://www.fcc.gov/reports/measuring-broadband-america-2014#...

[2] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-329973A1.p... p. 2 & p. 3

Right, as in "up to 4 Mbps, up to 10 Mpbs, up to 16 Mbps." All of those are "4 Mbps or higher." That's the game.

This is America, where infrastructure is communism. I mean if we provide good infrastructure, pretty soon we'll be sending people to gulags or something like they do in Europe and Canada.

I'm an European and it's the first time I hear about us being sent to gulags for making infrastructure that actually works.

BTW. In Poland, infrastructure was all fine until they started to privatize it. Now our trains barely work, and public transport companies like to compete with each other by showing which one sucks at doing their job more...

Unfortunately I have to agree in full. I no longer live in Poland but that was my last impression of the country.

Especially the trains went down the drain after privatization and split into multiple companies.

Relax -- the grandparent was being facetious.

Ummm, I thought Europeans were supposed to be better than us poor simple Americans at dry wit and irony?

It sounds as if you might want to reinstate your previous system.

It's not always easy to pick up sarcasm in a second language.

Yup. It seems that in this case the sarcasm was too hard for me to parse :(.

This is pretty typical for HN. You get a lot of techno libertarians who think any form of regulation is the worst thing ever. To say that the new classification is somehow going to be worse I think is a bit of a stretch.

Because recent government conduct has been stellar, I really want more government regulation, government always knows best, government does an amazing job, is very fair, is very open and transparent, government is democratic and responsive to citizen concerns.

What typical myopic bullshit.

Isn't this argument basically, "governments are prone to being co-opted by special interests, therefore we should go ahead and give away the farm to Comcast"?

Wouldn't it be: "governments are prone to being co-opted by special interests, therefore we rather allow companies to compete with each other freely in an open market and let consumers make the choice"

Competition requires a "free open market", which isn't a thing that exists, and it depends on a knowledgeable and informed consumer base, which also isn't a thing that exists, and this all depends upon there being choice in the marketplace, which as has been demonstrated ad nauseum, also isn't a thing that exists.

Hence regulation.

> it depends on a knowledgeable and informed consumer base, which also isn't a thing that exists

There's a comparable argument against democratic government somewhere in there.

Against the concept of democratic government, or against the implementation of a purely democratic government with no other additional regulations?

I think it's the same thing with the "free market". The general concept is sound, but there are corner cases that must be addressed. Infrastructure, I would argue, is one of those.

Against the concept of any government whose policies ostensibly reflect the preferences of the population and whose authority is ostensibly consented to by the population, which I believe includes most modern Western nation states.

According to mainstream Western theory (as I understand it), even aspects of policy which are not directly democratic or even routinely voted on by elected representative, like the Constitution, are justified as having legitimate authority because they are consented to by the governed.

In other words, even those "additional regulations" you mention, which I assume include things like basic human rights which are supposedly not subject to reversal by normal voting, are included in my broad usage of the phrase "democratic government."

What if the free market in telecommunication does not exist "yet" or is, due to a long history of regulation and government involvement, inhibited, we need to add another bureaucratic layer? If Google Fiber shows up in my neighborhood and Comcast did everything to upset us, would not we all switch and Comcast realize that it needs to adjust (its service, pricing, quality, speed)? I guess my difficulty lies in not understanding why this market warrants a different approach than any other market.

Two decades is a long time to set up a market, to be honest. And in that time, there have been fewer choices in the market, with smaller companies being regularly gobbled up into large conglomerates with astoundingly bad customer satisfaction the result.

or is, due to a long history of regulation and government involvement, inhibited

And this is really begging the question, in the fallacious sense.

Where does this "bureaucratic layer" argument come from? The only telcos that are going to be burdened by these regs are ones who are already doing shady stuff. In other words, the ones that need to be.

And on a more visceral and arational level? Fuck 'em. Fuck Comcast, fuck Verizon. They had years to get their house in order, and it wasn't regulation preventing them from doing so. It wasn't regulation that gives Comcast the worst customer satisfaction scores in the entire industry. It wasn't regulation that made Comcast's "capacity" problems magically disappear when Google Fiber shows up in the same city. It wasn't regulation that made Comcast acquire and abuse what amounts to a monopoly position. It wasn't regulation that made Verizon run what amounts to a protection racket on Netflix.

Nobody put a gun to the CEO's heads and said "be the biggest bastards you possibly can" - they managed to do that quite well with minimal government involvement.

Perhaps this market warrants a different approach because it's demonstrably broken and because the internet is more akin to infrastructure than a consumer good.

Stefan Molyneux came out with a one hour long video today - very detailed historic overview and discussion - of the government involvement that led to the current state of affairs (which beg for more government involvement, etc). Its worth watching it in its entirety: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Z_nBhfpmk4 Personally, I can't stand Comcast/Verizon/AT&T either, but I was born in Stasi East Germany. To me, the idea to further entrench government in what should be a completely free market place, seems backwards.

A "completely free marketplace" will always tend towards a monopoly, and besides, that philosophy doesn't work when there are physical barriers to entry.

No, Government intervention leads to a monopoly.

That would be the ideal, but infrastructure issues such as this can't be handled by a "free market" acting all by itself.

That's because whoever owns the land the infrastructure runs through can block progress, and the free market solution of competing elsewhere doesn't work. Land access is inherently limited by real world access problems that don't obey free market ideology.

A free market for public utilities would start from the public, i.e. government, OWNING said infrastructure outright and then allowing private corporations to lease the right to use it to provide service. Only the government has the legal right to eminent domain so it can build roads and public utilities and generally seize land for the common good - private corporations would have to negotiate with every landowner whose property needs to be crossed, and that is obviously unworkable in the real world.

From the current situation - which is a hodge podge of municipal services, private corporate services, agreements that limit competition, coupled with land access needs only eminent domain can provide - the only way to arrive at this paradise of "free market competition" is for the government to nationalize the entire thing, void all contracts with private service providers, and recreate the rules to allow competition among service providers by renting/licensing the infrastructure that is owned by the public. Otherwise it would take decades for existing agreements to expire or be renegotiated, and any improvement still have to rely on access and easements and various forms of eminent domain anyway.

I cannot imagine the unending howling of the libertarian-type crowd if this were to happen. They complain that various governments have created this situation (municipalities giving exclusive deals to cable providers) but government power had to be there in the first place or there wouldn't be any infrastructure at all.

The problem of government isn't simply that they can be co-opted by special interests. It's that they have a near-monopoly on the ability to implement policies using the threat of violence, and that ability can be co-opted by special interests.

The guy who runs the gas station down the street could also be co-opted by special interests, but I'm not particularly worried about that, because he has very little ability to force people to, for instance, give him a portion of their income.

Question: suppose a group of knowledgeable engineers and technicians in a city decided that they were going to run their geography's network infrastructure without the supervision of Comcast shareholders. They decide to stage a nonviolent sit-in overnight in Comcast offices to take over the extant and state-guaranteed monopoly of the network infrastructure in that area, and another group delivers food to them until Comcast gives up its claims.

Does Comcast calmly decide to talk to them about them nonviolently, or does it call in mass State violence to get back control?

You assume a separation between property rights and State power that doesn't exist. They're two sides of the same coin. Capital and property rights don't exist in opposition to the State, but in a mutually-dependent complex of institutions and learned practices.

That doesn't mean you have to throw out one or the other, or both. But it's fair for people to try to change the norms that govern relations between them in a way that generates the social outcomes they prefer.

I suspect that Comcast would call the police. But imagine a similar situation happens in a hypothetical society with no state police, or better yet, in some area where there are no state police available in a reasonable time frame (plenty such areas exist, even in the USA). Don't you suppose that Comcast might have private security guards?

Of course! I'd go so far as to say that's the case in most of the USA--Comcast almost certainly has some level of private security at most of its locations, even (or perhaps especially) in urban areas.

I'm not sure, though, how that undermines the point that Comcast shares in the monopoly of violence with the government. It doesn't make its violence independent of government (at least in the USA): small matters can be dealt with most quickly by those private forces, but in more serious matters, Comcast would call on government violence to provide either a supporting or primary role. The people in conflict with Comcast could do the same, but the difference is that Comcast would actually get the government's help.

Note that this isn't a claim of fascist corporatism or anything: it's part of a healthy society, and really the only way I can imagine a civil society I'd want to live in working. But there's no reason to say that Comcast doesn't have the ability to be co-opted by special interests (its shareholders and affiliated unions, to be explicit about who I'm talking about) and use state-guaranteed violence to impose economic policy in the small on unwilling participants.

> I'm not sure, though, how that undermines the point that Comcast shares in the monopoly of violence with the government.

I didn't mean to imply that. I was addressing your point of protection of property to be only possible via the state, which I believe to be demonstrably false. The fact that Comcast would likely call the largest and most powerful group of property enforcers (the state) is not particularly interesting.

It is much cheaper to purchase legislation mandating people buy a product or mandating legal barriers to protect a business from competition than it is to convince people to willing purchase and engage with a business.

Why are people so afraid of each other? Why are people so afraid of allowing their fellow humans to choose the services and products and businesses they want to choose? Why are people so quick to call upon the government to implement through force the ideas they think are best? Especially when they are faced with the reality that their government continually flaunts their own laws when it suits them?

So many intelligent people so quickly willing to give away their rights to a government they criticize on one hand but call upon to protect them with the other.

>Because recent government conduct has been stellar

Recent government conduct has been the result of decades of deregulation.

? can you help me understand, I am curious why you believe this to be the case?

By any metric I can think of US government regulation has increased dramatically. Size of US tax code, number of laws, number of regulations, number of government agencies, expenditures, population of washington DC, the # of people with security clearances.

The only thing that has decreased is total work force, but if you add in the additional hiring of contractors that reduction is also thrown into question.

Astroturfing? Your account is only 771 days old.

Accusing anyone who disagrees with you of being a paid shill is pure FUD in itself.

Nah. I like it in general, I just want to see all of the regulations/impacts before making a final judgement.

"virtually no competition"?

Title II was designed for phone-line utilities in the 1930s, where there really was a total monopoly: you either got service from your single phone company, or not at all.

For broadband, most Americans had not one but zero options 20 years ago.

Now, most have 2 or more wired options (cable and DSL), and 3 or more cellular-wireless options. Some have extra fiber, cable, or DSL options. Some have other wireless options in the unlicensed spectrum. (Most people have more broadband options than smart-phone OS options; should the iOS/Android be federally-regulated as a software utility?)

There are certainly places where the options are too few and too expensive. But that's a local issue, often created by correctable local government errors. To say there's "virtually no competition… for most" is a false claim lacking perspective.

Based on that false impression, Title II puts every ISP, even where there is competition, under federal-review rules designed for the single-provider telephone monopoly of the mid-20th century. Utility-style regulation tends to lock-in incumbents: it doesn't expand competition or options, but rather gives up on competition, and just tells the presumed-permanent "monopolist" what to do.

> Now, most have 2 or more wired options (cable and DSL), and 3 or more cellular-wireless options.

If this is the counterargument to the idea that we have a captured market and should regulate it like one, then it's essentially a concession: wireless is a non-starter because of inherent limits, and saying "oh, there's always one alternative" isn't exactly describing a vibrant competitive market in the land of tethered connections.

But the thing is, that's pretty much a red herring. The net neutrality debate isn't about competition among carriers at all. It's about competition between people offering services over the network, and most specifically whether those offering/receiving those services have to pay by source/destination.

It's arguable that the new rules address more than that, but if the carriers didn't want us to land here, maybe they shouldn't have fired the first shot by threatening the neutral model.

This sort of comment is a huge pet peeve of mine: you're accusing people who disagree with you of not just being wrong, but being maliciously and intentionally wrong. As if alternate viewpoints can only be explained by a literal conspiracy theory designed to mess with people like you. It's a lazy way to avoid acknowledging that alternate viewpoints even exist, let alone considering whether they have merit.

(But then again, that's just what I would say if I wanted to prolong the conspiracy.)

but this is the standard method Democrats have employed for years. They take any debate and make it personal. No longer is the discussion of the subject at hand but the persons involved. This allows all sorts of toxic labels to be branded about, racist, bigot, for the rich, elitist, and more. They don't want to debate facts, the fastest way to avoid facts is to brand the other side with a label associated with hate and/or stupidity.

I just want to know, what takes so many pages as to describe these rule changes? Why was it so important to pass changes without public review? What part of transparency don't people get?

And now you are doing the same by making this a left/right issue. It's not. Both sides use this same tactic. It's a part of politics.

You support abortion? Baby murderer!

Healthcare reform? Socialist!

Higher taxes on rich? Communist!

Marijuana legalization? Lazy pothead!

Unfortunately, "hate and stupidity" are often correlated with the issues. The political position opposite of granting, say, LGBT's the same rights as everyone else has literally no other basis than hate and stupidity.

There may be valid arguments to be made against net neutrality, but I have yet to see one that doesn't start with putting more money in the pockets of the telcos.

Really? That's all you've got? If someone disagrees with you it's "astroturfing"? I bet you really have some compelling arguments.

It very well could be that Comcast or someone else hired a bunch of people to flood comments (though it's strange timing to do it afterwards rather than before). But can you acknowledge that at least some of us have honest disagreements with you on the issue? Or should this opinion really be anathema to this community?

> Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign

HN users need to stop accusing their opponents in arguments of being astroturfers. Astroturfing may or may not exist, but sincere disagreement is common. It degrades the discourse badly when sincere disagreers are accused of being shills.

It's not that astroturfing isn't a problem. It's that the collateral damage of firing off such accusations indiscriminately is too great for that to be ok without evidence. People disagreeing with you isn't evidence.

If you suspect astroturfing in an HN thread, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Cracking down on that is part of our job. We will take your suspicions seriously. But we will do so by looking at actual data—something that isn't an option in the HN threads themselves and would mostly be off-topic there.

Within the threads, the HN guidelines and Principle of Charity [1] require you to assume that disagreers are arguing in good faith, and to deal with them not by calling names but by making better arguments.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

True, else it degenerates into Slashdot with the word "shill" being thrown around everywhere.

Like it will make a difference. what is to stop them from manipulating packets if there is no visibility into what they do with our packets. Let alone that the average consumer doesn't even understand the concept of throttling or why it is bad for them.

test

So will internet prices go up now, just like with cable, where the FCC initially got involved to keep prices down?

So everyone hates Comcast enough to let them pass this with little fanfare, we can all only hope now that all of the regulations are consumer friendly and not some other interest.

The willingness of everyone to let this happen without being able to see EVERYTHING scared me!

> So everyone hates Comcast enough to let them pass this with little fanfare

"Little fanfare"? Have you been living under a rock since the NPRM on this issue was published last year?

Were you able to read the regulation before it was passed? Not that we could change anything, but weren't you in the least bit interested?

By little fanfare I mean the fact that everyone read his editorial, and cheered and let it be.

Again, I think most people agree this is the right move, but we talk about how it's important for the internet to be open and neutral but I didn't hear much screaming and yelling to see everything before it passed.

So no, I haven't been living under a rock. I guess I just expected more out of the community.

> Were you able to read the regulation before it was passed? Not that we could change anything, but weren't you in the least bit interested?

Sure, I'm interested; I'm also aware enough of the regulatory process to not expect to see anything published between a NPRM and the next official regulatory action, even though that next action is likely to be a final rule/order and even though there are likely to be interesting drafts produced in the process (whether or not the process is in a regulatory venue where there is a single decision-maker to approve official action or a vote of a multimember commission.)

Similarly, while I'm interested, I don't expect to see copies of drafts of decisions while a court is considering a case.

> By little fanfare I mean the fact that everyone read his editorial, and cheered and let it be.

Aside from being a misuse of "little fanfare", that's also factually incorrect; lots of people -- both supporters and opponents of net neutrality -- reacted to the editorial with specific concerns that the content of that the outline presented of the direction of the proposal, and by many reports some of those responses had an effect on the final form of the regulations. No doubt both supporters and opponents will continue to have reactions to the details of the adopted regulations.

Again, I never said I was against it, all I want to to is to be able to read and question the damn thing. Why are you and others acting like that's a crime?

I get treated like a bad person, and questioned, because all I want is to be able to read a regulation. I didn't even say I was against it.

Even if you look at past comments, all I wanted was clarity, not editorials and speeches, the damn text.

Good lord.

You will be able to read and question the damn thing when it's published in the Federal Register as a Notice of Proposed Rule Making. That is the long-standing procedure for government commissions/agencies to promulgate the administrative rules in accordance with their congressionally-delegated responsibilities.

This is in fact how things work. If you follow government regulations closely in any sphere, then you pay attention to the contents of the Federal Register because it is, quite literally, the government's To-Do list. Most countries operate this way, publishing some sort of national gazette or official newspaper that detailsadministrative matters, solicits bids for public works contracts, announces the formation or dissolution of official agencies, etc. etc. etc.

Check it out, it's quite user-friendly and you can literally see how your tax dollars get spent: https://www.federalregister.gov/

Yay we maybe have neutral, expensive internet but no healthcare for many millions of people suffering.

We have very strange priorities.

Fixing healthcare is a much, much larger problem. Totally irrelevant to this conversation.

FCC has now "fixed" something that was not broken, and gov't is now regulating internet. I am on this one with Mark Cuban, who is scared shitless of this gov't take over. Speaking of shitless, is everyone ready for decency standards?

Netflix was having to make back market deals (with companies with conflicts of interest) to have the isp's customers (who were paying for access to) have access to their service. How was this "not broken"?

No, they didn't. Netflix had plenty of options for transit to Comcast - they didn't have to use Cogent. But it would have cost them a lot more. Cogent is famous for both cut-rate transit and peering disputes with last-mile providers.

The fact that they bought from Comcast rather than someone like Level3 or XO should tell you that they rate they got from Comcast was better than what they'd have gotten from another transit provider.

If you serve content on the internet, you have to buy transit from someone.

Edit: Would the downvoters like to point out what's wrong about my assertion?

Netflix does use Level 3. At least for their connections to Verizon FiOS customers. Who also observe shit performance.

The Verizon/Level3 Netflix performance issue is also the consequence of a peering dispute between Level3 and Verizon, by admission of both Verizon and Level3 - not a consequence of Verizon specifically throttling Netflix traffic.

It's very important that the distinction be made between saturated interlinks and throttling of specific origins; many people seem to think that it's the latter that's been done here, when the issue is consistently interlink capacity disputes between last-mile ISPs and T1 providers.

To put it another way, unless these new rules require that ISPs hook up as much interlink as their T1 peers ask for, these rules won't fix shitty Netflix performance on last-mile networks who are engaged in peering disputes with Netflix's transit providers.

"To put it another way, unless these new rules require that ISPs hook up as much interlink as their T1 peers ask for, these rules won't fix shitty Netflix performance on last-mile networks who are engaged in peering disputes with Netflix's transit providers."

100% agree. But it isn't really "as much as peers ask for;" it's more like: as much as consumers demand, keeping peak link utilization at 50% or some industry standard figure.

Netflix didn't buy transit from Comcast; they paid Comcast some large fee to upgrade links to one or more transit providers that Comcast would in the ordinary and traditional course of business done itself, so as to continue delivering its traditional unrestricted internet product to customers.

Netflix can't reach every Comcast node around the country, so it couldn't have 'bought transit' from Comcast. It did try the next best thing: colocating, at its own expense, servers at Comcast POPs with cached Netflix content. Comcast said no thanks to that one. Netflix also tried buying extra capacity from other transit providers (Tata and some others.) I think -- but am not certain -- that, when Comcast learned that that deal had happened, it began failing to upgrade those links, too.

It's hard to think of an explanation for these peering disputes between CDNs/transit providers and consumer ISPs that doesn't imply ISP hostage-taking. (Where the consumer is hostage.) These consumer ISPs have an easy job: keep these links to the middle networks and backbone networks up to date. And keep the copper in decent shape.

> they paid Comcast some large fee to upgrade links to one or more transit providers

Do you have a link for that? I was unaware of any of that happening. It was my understanding that Netflix is engaging in paid peering directly with Comcast now (http://bgp.he.net/AS2906#_peers).

You're right that Netflix isn't technically buying transit from Comcast, but they replaced their transit purchased from Cogent with paid peering purchased from Comcast; the net effect is the same.

> It's hard to think of an explanation for these peering disputes between CDNs/transit providers and consumer ISPs that doesn't imply ISP hostage-taking.

I think that's exactly what's happening here, but it's done as a bargaining chip in the never-ending peering wars, rather than Comcast specifically engaging in rent-seeking from Netflix. The history of settlement-free peering is long and sordid, and last-mile providers have been at odds with the T1s for decades. Netflix massively amplified that dispute simply by virtue of the amount of bandwidth they consume.

Is it necesseraly bad? Netflix making deals with ISPs is exactly what market self-regulation is.

That's a nice video streaming service you have there. It would be a shame if it were to suffer from sudden 'congestion' issues.

Is there any evidence of that actually happening? By that I mean Netflix being specifically throttled. To date, we've yet to see any evidence that Netflix-originated traffic has been targeted. The interlink capacity has been under dispute, but all traffic carried by those interlinks is subject to congestion, not just Netflix.

> Is there any evidence of that actually happening?

Yes. People are buying VPN service to get adequate NetFlix performance. SPs are running a protection racket.

All that demonstrates is that interlink between the ISP and other transit providers isn't saturated. By using a VPN you change the routing of your request, you don't just mask the endpoint. A VPN'd request that gets carried over a saturated interlink would suck just as much as a non-VPN'd request.

Not if the ISP is a roll up of municipal and state created monopolies.

Which incidentally is a general argument for laissez faire capitalism. And in the particular, here, is an argument for regulation.

Two companies making a deal between each other: what an unusual concept! We need to fix it with 700 pages of gov't regulations!

Are you ready for decency (and political) standards?

Two companies making a deal between each other: what an unusual concept!

> government is now regulating the internet...government takeover

Who do you think we are, a bunch of Fox News watching yokel fools? I was on the Internet back when the NSFnet AUP banning commercial use was in effect in the early 1990s. So were a lot of us.

The Internet was a creation of the government, and remained a government funded project from the 1960s until the 1990s. Then CIX came along and eventually NSFnet and ARPAnet were decommissioned.

This type of telco/cable astroturfing talk is for uneducated rednecks who get their news from fundamentalist preachers and Glenn Beck. Not for people who maintained machines which switched from using /etc/hosts to translate IP address, to name resolution via sri-nic.arpa (and then nic.ddn.mil, etc.)

Tell us again how Verizon and others fudging with the cookies in your HTTP requests is not broken.

I don't give a shit about your Netflix, buy some harddisks, but I can't have my ISP fucking around with the payload in protocol layers it has absolutely zero to do with. That's like the postal service ripping up mail, throwing away half and then adding some of its own writing before repackaging. And if that's not terrible enough, if you want to mail to port 6881, you'll find your messages magically arriving late and incomplete.

One need only look back at the Bell Telephone example to know that problems in the current Internet/ISP environment are not true problems.

But the FCC "fix", which will incorporate the same operating standards, will create many of the same problems that kept the phone system from making major advances for about 50 years. Then, in 1984, it all changed -- for the better.

If the government wants to experiment with its theories on "net neutrality", let it first test those theories on the operation of the Post Office.

What I'm worried about is that the internet could become like radio, requiring anyone who wants to broadcast (hook up a server) to obtain a license to do so.

   All people have the right to connect as many devices
   as they want to the internet, and connect their own 
   server(s) on their own network to the public internet,
   and allow others to use their servers for any and all
   purposes including to connect to the internet.
   
   People have the right to serve and distribute content
   on the public internet from their own network or
   server and any other network/server giving them
   permission to do so.

   People have a right to serve and distribute content in
   a way that a maximum number of devices can access it
   with ease.

I believe the rapid social change we're experiencing regarding progressive thought (marijuana legalization, gay marriage, stem cells, etc) is because people have these rights. The longer we have these rights the more our society will change as a collective and many of the mistakes that the government and other overseers have made will be corrected.

Fortunately, radio is covered under Section III of the telecommunications act and not Section II, which is limited to common carriers (of which radio, television, and cable television obviously are not).

"Broadcast" and "hook up a server" are in no way similar under the relevant laws and regulations.

Radio broadcast is licensed because of the general problem of limited spectrum. The Internet's point-to-point nature has no such problem.

Meanwhile, the FCC already regulates all electrical devices -- including servers, your PC, and even light bulbs -- to prevent interference.

So, bad news, your fear came true -- in 1934.

Although I am similarly skeptical, this type of regulation would be next to impossible when considering the architecture of computer networks.

> What I'm worried about is that the internet could become like radio, requiring anyone who wants to broadcast (hook up a server) to obtain a license to do so.

Both the regulatory rules and the authorizing statute behind that requirement are related to broadcast, and have nothing to do with Tite II classification; and not even all radio requires that (there is unlicensed spectrum.) So, while that's a fine thing to worry about, its not really related to the FCC action classifying retail broadband as a Title II telecommunication service.

Radio is a limited resource that needs to be allocated fairly. Bandwidth is a commodity that you get as much as you pay for. Title II classification has nothing to do with radio licensing.

If anything, doesn't this make it easier to set up a home server? Current ISP contracts* include a clause saying that I'm not allowed to use a connected computer as a "server". But didn't the FCC already say that a Title II common carrier can't prevent someone from operating a telephone BBS? So if this goes through you'll be free to host a home server.

[*] I say "contract" except I and perhaps most people don't actually have a contract with your ISP. Even though they'll lie and say you do if you try to cancel service or dispute a charge.

This is exactly what Net Neutrality is trying to prevent, though not in the way you think.

Without net neutrality, we would evolve towards a pay-to-play world in which you could hook up your server to the Internet, but nobody would be able to download your content unless you paid their broadband provider for bandwidth access.

With net neutrality, the government is preserving your right to be heard just as much as the billionaire down the street. That's the entire point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com