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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

> 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:".

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> ("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.

> 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.

> 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.

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._...

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

I'm glad someone with a history agrees.

> 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.

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