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I'd love to hear from some Republican supporters who think this is a good idea. More often than not, the party of "individual rights" is anything but. I don't

I'd love to hear from some Republican supporters who think this is a good idea. More often than not, the party of "individual rights" is anything but. I don't mean to start a flame war, but am genuinely curious.

e40 10y ago
I believe there won't be any people around here that vote Republican that will support this. The GOP (we can discuss when it happened, but it definitely) has gone off the rails in terms of supporting their constituents. They feed them red meat in terms of social issues, and then do what they want on economic and other issues, which are almost always completely pro-business and anti-labor.
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  The following is less an attempt to start a partisan argument than to clarify the lines along which such arguments have taken place previously. >The GOP (we can discuss when it happened, but it definitely) has gone off the rails in terms of supporting their constituents. They feed them red meat in terms of social issues, and then do what they want on economic and other issues, which are almost always completely pro-business and anti-labor. Isn't that, well, normal? I was under the impression that anti-labor Republicanism started around the time of Ronald Reagan and continued indefinitely since then. If anything is especially original about what the Republican Party are doing now, it's that their Presidential candidate ran on an atypically liberal economic platform (no cuts to entitlement programs, major infrastructure spending, rebuilding the blue-collar jobs base in the Midwest), while their Congressional majority continue the traditional Reagan Republican legislative program. Precisely this division on economic issues, more than anything else, is what has always stopped me from voting Republican. It has done so even when I thought that some or another Republican, especially a moderate, had a valid point or two, or just seemed like a decent and honest person. For example, I always thought that John McCain seemed like an honorable, patriotic Senator who stood up for civil liberties and veterans, but oh well, 2008 was the middle of an economic crisis and the Republicans are anti-labor. So I voted a firm Obama instead of being a swing voter. What's the perception on the Republican side of the divide? That the party was originally pro-labor in its own way, but conservative on social issues? That there was an appropriate time in our history to be anti-labor?
- thehardsphere 10y ago
  I disagree with your assessment that Republican voters are primarily motivated by social issues, yet implicitly opposed to "pro-business and anti-labor" things. There are quite a few Republican voters who prefer them on (stated) economic issues and hold their nose when it comes to the social stuff. Really, the problem (or benefit, depending on your point of view) is that the two party system creates very broad coalitions of people with differing interests. The problem with the Republican coalition is that many of its constituents want things which are contradictory. Like, say, free market economic policies and stricter immigration (which is a form of labor market regulation). The Democrats have their own versions of these problems, but they're usually less obvious because their coalition is more explicitly transactional.
  - blackflame7000 10y ago
    Yes, well said. I consider myself more of a Peter Thiel type of republican who supports the party on an economic basis but would really love to see the party abandon its culture wars.
  - e40 10y ago
    I was talking solely about the non-HN, Republican crowd.
    - thehardsphere 10y ago
      So was I.
cantagi 10y ago
I am also curious about how one can vocally defend freedom to carry guns but not care too much about having surveillance and censorship free communication. From what I can tell, they believe that the FCC regulating the ISPs is an overreach of government, which should be as small as possible.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  I'm thinking, its all about the money that can be made from rent-seeking? Is that the right term?
- battlebot 10y ago
  Well, for one thing, the "right to privacy" came from a Supreme Court opinion handed down over the scope of the 4th Amendment. I think it was Renquist, but the court basically created a right out of whole cloth. Privacy has always been a kind of non-starter in the US and there is only a hodge-podge of laws that support it. If you value your privacy you will stay the hell off the Internet and never carry a cell phone.
- mod 10y ago
  I think they are either ignorant on the topic of surveillance and its breadth and implications, or they have some kind of belief that the intelligence community is fighting for our country. I'm conservative on a lot of issues, including 2nd amendment rights, and my family is full of "right-wingers." None of them would support spying on our own citizens or the violation of the privacy of American citizens. The Republican party at large does not reflect the values of most modern conservatives that try even a little bit to not have hypocritical views. However, while conservatives tend to believe in small government, they have never believed in small military/intelligence/etc.
cpburns2009 10y ago
As a Republican I think this is a repugnant idea. ISPs should be treated as utilities in this age. They should simply be dumb pipes. They should not be allowed to monitor, track, and snoop through your data. This is all the more reason that websites should be using HTTPS to prevent eavesdropping and modification of data in transit.
- rayiner 10y ago
  > ISPs should be treated as utilities in this age. "Treating ISPs like utilities" involves more than just making them do things we want for free. I live in the Annapolis suburbs, and our house just got public water/sewer in 2015. We're paying off the county assessment at $3,000 per year for 10 years (http://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits/permit-center/utility-and-impact-fees http://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits/...). That gets baked into every new house. If we did treat ISPs like utilities and impose a $30,000 levy on every house built, we'd have fiber everywhere.
  - JohnHenrySDM 10y ago
    The thing is, we already paid that bill years ago. Taxpayers gave something like $200 Billion to the Baby Bell telcos in exchange for the promise of building a broadband network. We paid, then they didn't build it. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml
    - rayiner 10y ago
      That number is just false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709910. The number is computed by comparing Baby Bell profit margins after deregulation to "utilities" as a whole and calling anything above the average for "utilities" as "excess profits" that were a "taxpayer subsidy" to the Baby Bells. It is based on two fundamentally incorrect ideas: 1) That the expected rates of return of companies in an industry with exploding demand, like telecommunications was in the 1990s, should be comparable to the rates of return for your water or power company. But water and power utilities use 50-100 year old infrastructure to cater to extremely stable demand. That's exactly the opposite of what was happening in the telecom sector in the late 1990s. 2) That regulating telecom rates so those companies were no more profitable than water or power companies would not have affected investment. There is a reason our water system gets a "D" from the American Society of Civil Engineers: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/water-infrastructure http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/water-infrastructure. Imagine comparing the profit margins of smartphone manufacturers in 2007-2017 against the average profits of "phone manufacturers" before that time, and calling everything over that average a "taxpayer subsidy." Alternatively, imagine telling phone companies that they could not make any profits beyond the average profitability of the phone industry from 1995-2005. Do you think we'd have iPhones today?
weberc2 10y ago
The rationalization I've heard is something along the lines of "anything that the free-market is a better regulator than the gov't; gov't regulation reduces competition and creates monopolies like those that exist in the ISP biz today". Please don't shoot the messenger. :)
- sremani 10y ago
  The point also includes that Facebook and Google which are effective duopoly of on-line advertisements are not restricted but the owners of the pipes are. It also includes interpretation of FCC's core mission and how expansive the powers of application are. I am more worried about advertising duopoly than ISP eating my data. If you have smart phone, you have pretty much given a heck lot of privacy, including where you go etc. Your android phone sucks so much data about your spatial movement, it can predict when you got sick or about to get sick.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Just because the FCC is 15 years behind the times on this doesn't make it a bad idea. Google, Facebook, and advertising networks with over a certain percentage of the market should absolutely be subject to privacy regulation as well (and likely will be in another 15 years).
  - roc 10y ago
    The problem with this comparison is that, while it's not remotely easy, it's far easier to compete with Facebook or Google than to compete with an ISP. Facebook barely existed 10 years ago. And it wasn't until maybe the last five years that it was recognized as a competitor to Google. Compare that to Google Fiber's 7 year slog.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- losteric 10y ago
  These days "national security" has replaced the "free-market" buzz word.
Goronmon 10y ago
Regulations cost businesses money, which hurts the business, and hurts jobs. The government is too big and regulations like this only serve to strengthen the government's control over businesses and citizens. At least that seems to be a couple of arguments you could make. Not that I would personally make them.
battlebot 10y ago
You need to stop with the partisan nonsense. Regular Republican voters are not your adversary--the government is! This government of ours is not trustworthy and it doesn't matter whether the rep has an R or a D after their name, they represent the party of big government and lobbyist dollars to screw over the little guy. So is it any surprise that these idiots are doing things that regular people are stunned by? It has been this way my entire life! Look, I'm happy that Trump is trying to roll back regulations and pave the way for helping businesses function without red tape, but you see how hard it is to actually carry off even the simplest changes. Maybe in some twisted way this FCC change was sold as that kind of measure, I don't know. I personally wish the government would stay the hell out of my life. How's that?
root_axis 10y ago
It's pretty simple. If you have a technical understanding of the topic and have no vested interest then you'll almost certainly be against overturning privacy rules regardless of politics. If you don't have a technical understanding then you'll just take your cue from your political tribe. It doesn't necessarily matter that an arbitrary member of the republican party has sponsored this resolution, at this time, republican values among the masses are totally subject to Trump's opinions (which are not always in-line with republican orthodoxy), so Trump's position on this will ultimately dictate whether or not republicans constituents are ok with this.
rayiner 10y ago
It's not about ideology, it's about the distortionary investment incentives that result from government policies. If you regulate one industry more heavily than another, you'll drive investment out of that industry into less regulated industries. Likewise, if you want to discourage investment into an industry, you tax its products. That's why we add extra taxes to cigarettes and soda (and likewise why health experts oppose subsidies on things like corn). When you regulate the wires more heavily than the stuff flowing through them, you drive investment into content and away from infrastructure. Likewise, when you impose a special 20% tax on telecommunications services (as we do), you dampen demand for those products.
- SapphireSun 10y ago
  This sounds like a canard. If by "regulate more" you mean the available profit margins are smaller, then yes. However, if profit margins are very high, you can place quite a lot of expensive regulation (not all regulations are expensive, some of them tell you not to do injurious things) and people will still invest. By its nature, content will drive a huge amount investment. Funneling bits at high speed is an interesting business, but the recombination of those bits has a universe of more possibility in it. I'd be surprised if (after the ecosystem reaches critical mass) content investment always dominates infrastructure investment. In any case, the case for neutrality is stronger than an abstract argument against an arbitrary regulation. The promise of the internet is that of decentralized many-to-many content generation, i.e. the strong airing of many different opinions by large and small operations. When the people that own the pipes can pick favorites, the strong voices will over time winnow to the favored ones. This is a pattern that happens over and over again in US media where large corporations are able to pick ideological favorites and narrow the spectrum of discourse to suit themselves. Network neutrality being knocked down is a strategy of corporate dominance over public discourse. Note that very few, very rich, cable companies provide most of the telecommunications for the entire population. Granting them this power allows small groups of individuals with many common interests to pick favorites to a startling degree.
  - rayiner 10y ago
    > This sounds like a canard. If by "regulate more" you mean the available profit margins are smaller, then yes. However, if profit margins are very high, you can place quite a lot of expensive regulation (not all regulations are expensive, some of them tell you not to do injurious things) and people will still invest. But they're not. The telecom industry as a whole has among the lowest returns on investment of any industry: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/a-long-term-look-at-roic http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp.... The idea that telcos are "very rich" is an alternative fact. Look at the actual operating profit margins of the wireline divisions of the big telcos. Huge amounts of money comes in, and almost all of it goes right back out because maintaining physical wires is expensive.
onetimeusename 10y ago
This isn't about opposing privacy. There is a reasonable expectation to privacy people have but the privacy laws adapted by the FCC in the past have only been applied to ISPs and not other edge providers, such as Google or Skype. So in short, they are just bad laws. The regulations placed on ISPs place an undue burden on them but not on other Internet companies. Firstly, this means that users have to understand a lot about the networks they use to understand how privacy laws affect them. Second, it also means that edge providers(Yahoo, Skype, Google) have an unfair advantage. The justification given for this is that ISPs see much more data than edge providers. But this does not appear true and in fact a great deal of personal information and network-usage data appears to be available to other parties besides ISPs. You can search headlines to see that. So it doesn't make sense to single out ISPs for privacy laws but not other Internet companies that have access to user data. Also, it makes the law more complicated regarding user data privacy. I also want to point out that, in my personal opinion, there is a tendency to view ISPs as malicious actors but not for other edge providers which biases the debate on Internet privacy laws.
- HeyImAlex 10y ago
  Im interacting with edge providers, so I understand to some degree that I'm exposing information. Take phone calls as an analogy; obviously the person on the other end of the line can hear me, but I don't want a stranger at the telephone company listening in.
- toddmorey 10y ago
  "..the privacy laws adapted by the FCC in the past have only been applied to ISPs and not other edge providers... So in short, they are just bad laws." I feel that builds the argument that they should be implemented more widely, not abandoned. Also, ISPs are targeted specifically not because people believe they are malicious actors, but because they are literally the gateway to everything, impacting you just about any time you use the internet. Think how much it would say about you as a person in detailed logs from your service provider.
  - onetimeusename 10y ago
MrQuincle 10y ago
Trying to play the devil's advocate. 1) Security is just more important than privacy. 2) Individual freedom is about not restricting your actions, not about defending you from others. 3) Privacy is something of the past anyway. In a 100 years we will know every word you say, every thing you buy, every breath you take. You're defending the right to spit tobacco on the street. 4) In a few years when something happens everybody is gonna turn around and blame the government about not knowing enough. It is good for PR for that reason. "We tried, you didn't want to."
- astrodust 10y ago
  "We're all going to die of old age eventually, so I'm having cyanide for breakfast today." These are really terrible counter-arguments.
  - MrQuincle 10y ago
    I will try to counter your counter-counter arguments. 1) Security versus privacy is a trade-off and should be respected as such. There can be lives at stake. If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email I would immediately sign up and travel to the US for it. The difficulty is that in reality this trade-off is not transparently made. However, this does not mean that there is no such trade-off. 2) To protect someone from others can be done in multiple ways. You can create laws that protect someone from having others reading his/her letters, protect someone from having others entering their home, protect someone from others saying bad things about them, protect someone from others stealing from them. Although recommendable, all these laws are restrictive and not necessarily promoting individual freedom. 3) In the future there are so many sensors in the (virtual) world that they will find it ridiculous that people in the past thought that there were things private. Are you an owner of the photons that bounce of you? Are you an owner of the audio waves generated by those neurons formed by interactions with you? The concept of privacy is arcane and in certain situations criminal. 4) Blaming the government is gonna happen. This is a cynical argument. However, the political parties that have political fitness will survive. In the end a party should reflect would its majority want. If that is enough data collection to prevent 9/11s, then that is what it should try to do.
just2n 10y ago
> I'd love to hear from some Republican supporters who think this is a good idea What idea, exactly? Doing what the title of the article claims? Obviously nobody wants to reduce privacy except perhaps serious proponents of IAs. You can't even really judge that based on intent or claims, and Obama is a great example of why. He always claimed to be fighting them but in reality he expanded and affirmed their power in ways that make him look more like Bush than a liberal-minded Democrat. I'm not even comfortable putting a political party label on myself (it just so happens more libertarian and classical liberal minded people like me seem to be more favorable of some people in the Republican party as of late, largely due to the disturbing trends going on in the Democratic one), but I personally don't find the idea of repealing laws that protect privacy very palatable. That's a gut reaction, because I'm not aware of what other plans are in place because the media doesn't appear to be reporting those, nor do I have any confidence it would if that news would conflict with what they've set out to do: to vilify Ajit Pai and the FCC under new administration. What's more important to me, however, isn't necessarily the clickbait-tier quality of the title presented here, but the larger strategy. If you opened a code review and saw someone removed a critical piece of code as part of a much needed refactoring and immediately yelled "THIS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA!" but ignored the part where that critical function was maintained and improved upon further down, you'd be seen as a bit of a reactionary focusing far too narrowly on specifics. I think that's a genuine risk here, and all too often in politics in general. Why am I not outraged? Because I don't think I'm getting the whole picture. http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/01/24/why-is-the-media-smearing-new-fcc-chair-ajit-pai-as-the-enemy-of-net-neutrality/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/01/24/why-is-th...
masonic 10y ago
Did you apply your genuine curiosity to reading the rules in detail and formulate why you specifically think the entire rules' contents are important to retain and have no downside? Did you then ask yourself if the need for this rule, as written, is so compelling, why did the Obama Administration only sneak it in the week before Trump was elected?

e40 10y ago

I believe there won't be any people around here that vote Republican that will support this. The GOP (we can discuss when it happened, but it definitely) has gone off the rails in terms of supporting their constituents. They feed them red meat in terms of social issues, and then do what they want on economic and other issues, which are almost always completely pro-business and anti-labor.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
The following is less an attempt to start a partisan argument than to clarify the lines along which such arguments have taken place previously. >The GOP (we can discuss when it happened, but it definitely) has gone off the rails in terms of supporting their constituents. They feed them red meat in terms of social issues, and then do what they want on economic and other issues, which are almost always completely pro-business and anti-labor. Isn't that, well, normal? I was under the impression that anti-labor Republicanism started around the time of Ronald Reagan and continued indefinitely since then. If anything is especially original about what the Republican Party are doing now, it's that their Presidential candidate ran on an atypically liberal economic platform (no cuts to entitlement programs, major infrastructure spending, rebuilding the blue-collar jobs base in the Midwest), while their Congressional majority continue the traditional Reagan Republican legislative program. Precisely this division on economic issues, more than anything else, is what has always stopped me from voting Republican. It has done so even when I thought that some or another Republican, especially a moderate, had a valid point or two, or just seemed like a decent and honest person. For example, I always thought that John McCain seemed like an honorable, patriotic Senator who stood up for civil liberties and veterans, but oh well, 2008 was the middle of an economic crisis and the Republicans are anti-labor. So I voted a firm Obama instead of being a swing voter. What's the perception on the Republican side of the divide? That the party was originally pro-labor in its own way, but conservative on social issues? That there was an appropriate time in our history to be anti-labor?
thehardsphere 10y ago
I disagree with your assessment that Republican voters are primarily motivated by social issues, yet implicitly opposed to "pro-business and anti-labor" things. There are quite a few Republican voters who prefer them on (stated) economic issues and hold their nose when it comes to the social stuff. Really, the problem (or benefit, depending on your point of view) is that the two party system creates very broad coalitions of people with differing interests. The problem with the Republican coalition is that many of its constituents want things which are contradictory. Like, say, free market economic policies and stricter immigration (which is a form of labor market regulation). The Democrats have their own versions of these problems, but they're usually less obvious because their coalition is more explicitly transactional.
- blackflame7000 10y ago
  Yes, well said. I consider myself more of a Peter Thiel type of republican who supports the party on an economic basis but would really love to see the party abandon its culture wars.
- e40 10y ago
  I was talking solely about the non-HN, Republican crowd.
  - thehardsphere 10y ago
    So was I.

cantagi 10y ago

I am also curious about how one can vocally defend freedom to carry guns but not care too much about having surveillance and censorship free communication. From what I can tell, they believe that the FCC regulating the ISPs is an overreach of government, which should be as small as possible.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
I'm thinking, its all about the money that can be made from rent-seeking? Is that the right term?
battlebot 10y ago
Well, for one thing, the "right to privacy" came from a Supreme Court opinion handed down over the scope of the 4th Amendment. I think it was Renquist, but the court basically created a right out of whole cloth. Privacy has always been a kind of non-starter in the US and there is only a hodge-podge of laws that support it. If you value your privacy you will stay the hell off the Internet and never carry a cell phone.
mod 10y ago
I think they are either ignorant on the topic of surveillance and its breadth and implications, or they have some kind of belief that the intelligence community is fighting for our country. I'm conservative on a lot of issues, including 2nd amendment rights, and my family is full of "right-wingers." None of them would support spying on our own citizens or the violation of the privacy of American citizens. The Republican party at large does not reflect the values of most modern conservatives that try even a little bit to not have hypocritical views. However, while conservatives tend to believe in small government, they have never believed in small military/intelligence/etc.

cpburns2009 10y ago

As a Republican I think this is a repugnant idea. ISPs should be treated as utilities in this age. They should simply be dumb pipes. They should not be allowed to monitor, track, and snoop through your data. This is all the more reason that websites should be using HTTPS to prevent eavesdropping and modification of data in transit.

rayiner 10y ago
> ISPs should be treated as utilities in this age. "Treating ISPs like utilities" involves more than just making them do things we want for free. I live in the Annapolis suburbs, and our house just got public water/sewer in 2015. We're paying off the county assessment at $3,000 per year for 10 years (http://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits/permit-center/utility-and-impact-fees http://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits/...). That gets baked into every new house. If we did treat ISPs like utilities and impose a $30,000 levy on every house built, we'd have fiber everywhere.
- JohnHenrySDM 10y ago
  The thing is, we already paid that bill years ago. Taxpayers gave something like $200 Billion to the Baby Bell telcos in exchange for the promise of building a broadband network. We paid, then they didn't build it. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/2021240.shtml
  - rayiner 10y ago
    That number is just false: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709910 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709910. The number is computed by comparing Baby Bell profit margins after deregulation to "utilities" as a whole and calling anything above the average for "utilities" as "excess profits" that were a "taxpayer subsidy" to the Baby Bells. It is based on two fundamentally incorrect ideas: 1) That the expected rates of return of companies in an industry with exploding demand, like telecommunications was in the 1990s, should be comparable to the rates of return for your water or power company. But water and power utilities use 50-100 year old infrastructure to cater to extremely stable demand. That's exactly the opposite of what was happening in the telecom sector in the late 1990s. 2) That regulating telecom rates so those companies were no more profitable than water or power companies would not have affected investment. There is a reason our water system gets a "D" from the American Society of Civil Engineers: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/water-infrastructure http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/water-infrastructure. Imagine comparing the profit margins of smartphone manufacturers in 2007-2017 against the average profits of "phone manufacturers" before that time, and calling everything over that average a "taxpayer subsidy." Alternatively, imagine telling phone companies that they could not make any profits beyond the average profitability of the phone industry from 1995-2005. Do you think we'd have iPhones today?

weberc2 10y ago

The rationalization I've heard is something along the lines of "anything that the free-market is a better regulator than the gov't; gov't regulation reduces competition and creates monopolies like those that exist in the ISP biz today". Please don't shoot the messenger. :)

sremani 10y ago
The point also includes that Facebook and Google which are effective duopoly of on-line advertisements are not restricted but the owners of the pipes are. It also includes interpretation of FCC's core mission and how expansive the powers of application are. I am more worried about advertising duopoly than ISP eating my data. If you have smart phone, you have pretty much given a heck lot of privacy, including where you go etc. Your android phone sucks so much data about your spatial movement, it can predict when you got sick or about to get sick.
- ethbro 10y ago
  Just because the FCC is 15 years behind the times on this doesn't make it a bad idea. Google, Facebook, and advertising networks with over a certain percentage of the market should absolutely be subject to privacy regulation as well (and likely will be in another 15 years).
- roc 10y ago
  The problem with this comparison is that, while it's not remotely easy, it's far easier to compete with Facebook or Google than to compete with an ISP. Facebook barely existed 10 years ago. And it wasn't until maybe the last five years that it was recognized as a competitor to Google. Compare that to Google Fiber's 7 year slog.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
losteric 10y ago
These days "national security" has replaced the "free-market" buzz word.

Goronmon 10y ago

Regulations cost businesses money, which hurts the business, and hurts jobs. The government is too big and regulations like this only serve to strengthen the government's control over businesses and citizens. At least that seems to be a couple of arguments you could make. Not that I would personally make them.

battlebot 10y ago

You need to stop with the partisan nonsense. Regular Republican voters are not your adversary--the government is! This government of ours is not trustworthy and it doesn't matter whether the rep has an R or a D after their name, they represent the party of big government and lobbyist dollars to screw over the little guy. So is it any surprise that these idiots are doing things that regular people are stunned by? It has been this way my entire life! Look, I'm happy that Trump is trying to roll back regulations and pave the way for helping businesses function without red tape, but you see how hard it is to actually carry off even the simplest changes. Maybe in some twisted way this FCC change was sold as that kind of measure, I don't know. I personally wish the government would stay the hell out of my life. How's that?

root_axis 10y ago

It's pretty simple. If you have a technical understanding of the topic and have no vested interest then you'll almost certainly be against overturning privacy rules regardless of politics. If you don't have a technical understanding then you'll just take your cue from your political tribe. It doesn't necessarily matter that an arbitrary member of the republican party has sponsored this resolution, at this time, republican values among the masses are totally subject to Trump's opinions (which are not always in-line with republican orthodoxy), so Trump's position on this will ultimately dictate whether or not republicans constituents are ok with this.

rayiner 10y ago

It's not about ideology, it's about the distortionary investment incentives that result from government policies. If you regulate one industry more heavily than another, you'll drive investment out of that industry into less regulated industries. Likewise, if you want to discourage investment into an industry, you tax its products. That's why we add extra taxes to cigarettes and soda (and likewise why health experts oppose subsidies on things like corn). When you regulate the wires more heavily than the stuff flowing through them, you drive investment into content and away from infrastructure. Likewise, when you impose a special 20% tax on telecommunications services (as we do), you dampen demand for those products.

SapphireSun 10y ago
This sounds like a canard. If by "regulate more" you mean the available profit margins are smaller, then yes. However, if profit margins are very high, you can place quite a lot of expensive regulation (not all regulations are expensive, some of them tell you not to do injurious things) and people will still invest. By its nature, content will drive a huge amount investment. Funneling bits at high speed is an interesting business, but the recombination of those bits has a universe of more possibility in it. I'd be surprised if (after the ecosystem reaches critical mass) content investment always dominates infrastructure investment. In any case, the case for neutrality is stronger than an abstract argument against an arbitrary regulation. The promise of the internet is that of decentralized many-to-many content generation, i.e. the strong airing of many different opinions by large and small operations. When the people that own the pipes can pick favorites, the strong voices will over time winnow to the favored ones. This is a pattern that happens over and over again in US media where large corporations are able to pick ideological favorites and narrow the spectrum of discourse to suit themselves. Network neutrality being knocked down is a strategy of corporate dominance over public discourse. Note that very few, very rich, cable companies provide most of the telecommunications for the entire population. Granting them this power allows small groups of individuals with many common interests to pick favorites to a startling degree.
- rayiner 10y ago
  > This sounds like a canard. If by "regulate more" you mean the available profit margins are smaller, then yes. However, if profit margins are very high, you can place quite a lot of expensive regulation (not all regulations are expensive, some of them tell you not to do injurious things) and people will still invest. But they're not. The telecom industry as a whole has among the lowest returns on investment of any industry: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/a-long-term-look-at-roic http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp.... The idea that telcos are "very rich" is an alternative fact. Look at the actual operating profit margins of the wireline divisions of the big telcos. Huge amounts of money comes in, and almost all of it goes right back out because maintaining physical wires is expensive.

onetimeusename 10y ago

This isn't about opposing privacy. There is a reasonable expectation to privacy people have but the privacy laws adapted by the FCC in the past have only been applied to ISPs and not other edge providers, such as Google or Skype. So in short, they are just bad laws. The regulations placed on ISPs place an undue burden on them but not on other Internet companies. Firstly, this means that users have to understand a lot about the networks they use to understand how privacy laws affect them. Second, it also means that edge providers(Yahoo, Skype, Google) have an unfair advantage. The justification given for this is that ISPs see much more data than edge providers. But this does not appear true and in fact a great deal of personal information and network-usage data appears to be available to other parties besides ISPs. You can search headlines to see that. So it doesn't make sense to single out ISPs for privacy laws but not other Internet companies that have access to user data. Also, it makes the law more complicated regarding user data privacy. I also want to point out that, in my personal opinion, there is a tendency to view ISPs as malicious actors but not for other edge providers which biases the debate on Internet privacy laws.

HeyImAlex 10y ago
Im interacting with edge providers, so I understand to some degree that I'm exposing information. Take phone calls as an analogy; obviously the person on the other end of the line can hear me, but I don't want a stranger at the telephone company listening in.
toddmorey 10y ago
"..the privacy laws adapted by the FCC in the past have only been applied to ISPs and not other edge providers... So in short, they are just bad laws." I feel that builds the argument that they should be implemented more widely, not abandoned. Also, ISPs are targeted specifically not because people believe they are malicious actors, but because they are literally the gateway to everything, impacting you just about any time you use the internet. Think how much it would say about you as a person in detailed logs from your service provider.
- onetimeusename 10y ago

MrQuincle 10y ago

Trying to play the devil's advocate. 1) Security is just more important than privacy. 2) Individual freedom is about not restricting your actions, not about defending you from others. 3) Privacy is something of the past anyway. In a 100 years we will know every word you say, every thing you buy, every breath you take. You're defending the right to spit tobacco on the street. 4) In a few years when something happens everybody is gonna turn around and blame the government about not knowing enough. It is good for PR for that reason. "We tried, you didn't want to."

astrodust 10y ago
"We're all going to die of old age eventually, so I'm having cyanide for breakfast today." These are really terrible counter-arguments.
- MrQuincle 10y ago
  I will try to counter your counter-counter arguments. 1) Security versus privacy is a trade-off and should be respected as such. There can be lives at stake. If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email I would immediately sign up and travel to the US for it. The difficulty is that in reality this trade-off is not transparently made. However, this does not mean that there is no such trade-off. 2) To protect someone from others can be done in multiple ways. You can create laws that protect someone from having others reading his/her letters, protect someone from having others entering their home, protect someone from others saying bad things about them, protect someone from others stealing from them. Although recommendable, all these laws are restrictive and not necessarily promoting individual freedom. 3) In the future there are so many sensors in the (virtual) world that they will find it ridiculous that people in the past thought that there were things private. Are you an owner of the photons that bounce of you? Are you an owner of the audio waves generated by those neurons formed by interactions with you? The concept of privacy is arcane and in certain situations criminal. 4) Blaming the government is gonna happen. This is a cynical argument. However, the political parties that have political fitness will survive. In the end a party should reflect would its majority want. If that is enough data collection to prevent 9/11s, then that is what it should try to do.

just2n 10y ago

> I'd love to hear from some Republican supporters who think this is a good idea What idea, exactly? Doing what the title of the article claims? Obviously nobody wants to reduce privacy except perhaps serious proponents of IAs. You can't even really judge that based on intent or claims, and Obama is a great example of why. He always claimed to be fighting them but in reality he expanded and affirmed their power in ways that make him look more like Bush than a liberal-minded Democrat. I'm not even comfortable putting a political party label on myself (it just so happens more libertarian and classical liberal minded people like me seem to be more favorable of some people in the Republican party as of late, largely due to the disturbing trends going on in the Democratic one), but I personally don't find the idea of repealing laws that protect privacy very palatable. That's a gut reaction, because I'm not aware of what other plans are in place because the media doesn't appear to be reporting those, nor do I have any confidence it would if that news would conflict with what they've set out to do: to vilify Ajit Pai and the FCC under new administration. What's more important to me, however, isn't necessarily the clickbait-tier quality of the title presented here, but the larger strategy. If you opened a code review and saw someone removed a critical piece of code as part of a much needed refactoring and immediately yelled "THIS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA!" but ignored the part where that critical function was maintained and improved upon further down, you'd be seen as a bit of a reactionary focusing far too narrowly on specifics. I think that's a genuine risk here, and all too often in politics in general. Why am I not outraged? Because I don't think I'm getting the whole picture. http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/01/24/why-is-the-media-smearing-new-fcc-chair-ajit-pai-as-the-enemy-of-net-neutrality/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrydownes/2017/01/24/why-is-th...

masonic 10y ago

Did you apply your genuine curiosity to reading the rules in detail and formulate why you specifically think the entire rules' contents are important to retain and have no downside? Did you then ask yourself if the need for this rule, as written, is so compelling, why did the Obama Administration only sneak it in the week before Trump was elected?