23 ms·

Keep the Internet Open

• dsschnau 10y ago
  I'm afraid we can't do the SOPA/PIPA protests again :(
  • Zikes 10y ago
    The enemies of the open internet only have to win once, but to fend them off we have to win every single time. SOPA/PIPA protests had a lot of momentum, and they "won", but within weeks the same intrusive, anti-consumer practices were injected into some other bill that just got pushed through anyways. I just don't see how we can win. Not without some seriously strong top-down consumer protection laws. Net neutrality needs to solidify into law, and get some serious teeth. And I'm talking Amendment-level protections, not something the next chump-in-chief can come along and pull the rug out from under like they're doing with health care right now.
    • hackuser 10y ago
      > The enemies of the open internet only have to win once, but to fend them off we have to win every single time I don't see why this is true. Why can't the competition go back and forth? And why must proponents of the open Internet play defense, instead of gaining ground and increasing openness and protections?
    • rasengan 10y ago
      If you stop breathing, you die. If you stop fighting, you die. Keep your head up my brother, and keep fighting the good fight. It's worth it.
    • OmarIsmail 10y ago
      There is no "winning" the war as long as there is disagreement - of which there always will be. That's why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. To overturn this law, or to make consumer protection laws force neutrality you only have to win "once" where the other side has to keep defending. The net result is that both sides are always constantly fighting for what they want and one side wins sometimes, and the other side wins other times.
      • Zikes 10y ago
        When's the last time consumer protection on the internet "won" though? My browsing history is about to go up for sale. My emails are fair game for the US government with no warrant. My ISP is free to double-charge for peering, driving my Netflix subscription costs up. My mobile operator is streaming certain services without it counting against my data, while services I want to use still do. I have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to my ISP for a decent connection, despite the government giving telecoms huge subsidies (our own tax dollars) in exchange for building nationwide fiber, most of which went straight to the company's own coffers with no repercussions.[1] If there was at least some back-and-forth, I would see your point, but as it stands I only see one failure after another. [1] http://newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm http://newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm
  • Kenji 10y ago
    Why not? Always keep up the fight.
• no_protocol 10y ago
  > You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates for each of your appliances. I can get cheaper electricity for my water heater if I choose to attach it to a source that can be interrupted at times of peak load. I'm not quite sure this line of reasoning will stand. Edit: It appears the linked article has been updated since I originally posted this. The new text is: > You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates depending on the manufacturer of each of your appliances. This makes the argument much clearer and my concerns no longer seem important.
  • tomjen3 10y ago
    Presumably they wouldn't care which appliance you attach? The same deal would make total sense with e.g a smart charger for an electric car (in fact anything else would be nuts) and probably anything else with a big enough battery. If the difference between the two rates you are charged is large enough it may even make sense to have a battery and switch between the cheap source and the normal one if the cheap one is cut of.
    • Zikes 10y ago
      I can imagine peak/off hour internet pricing, and that does sound reasonable to me as long as the overall rates are reasonable. There's no way people would go for the ridiculous per-GB rates mobile companies are charging right now, for instance.
  • ygjb 10y ago
    Your comparison is invalid. Consumers generally tolerate that network management for some things is ok, for example, constraining the transfer speed of users at peak times. This is a different scenario - the comparable scenario would be that your electricity company charges you a variable rate depending on which manufacturers appliances you buy, for example, if you buy and use only samsung appliances, you get a cheaper rate (and the electric company gets a kickback from samsung). When you pay for an internet connection the only practical matter that I expect my ISP to care about is the speed I expect to get, the latency of the network, and the volume of traffic I am permitted over a period. Everything else is a congestion issue, and if they are going to manage what I can access to and modify the parameters of my connection based on resources I access, I am not buying Internet access, I am buying access to a curated online service.
• saycheese 10y ago
  Interesting reviewing the list of organizations that signed the letter sent to the FCC by the ACLU & EFF on keeping the internet open: http://www.commoncause.org/policy-and-litigation/letters-to-government-officials/letter-to-chairman-pai-protect-net-neutrality.pdf http://www.commoncause.org/policy-and-litigation/letters-to-... Really makes you wonder what's going on, since Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. are nowhere to be found on the list.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    I think there was deliberate selection of the type of organizations and the interests they represent for this letter; I don't think it's an accident that it doesn't include tech firms and content hosts, but political advocacy groups and content creators.
    • deleted 10y ago
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• tehwebguy 10y ago
  Ajit Pai is public enemy number one.
  • Keverw 10y ago
    I do agree net neutrality is a good thing, only major thing I disagree with gutting net neutrality as the internet is the future network for everything. But overall I support Ajit Pai because he wants to cut down on regulations it seems from reading some transcripts. For example there's people who want to regulate Netflix, Amazon Instant video, Playstation Vue, YouTube TV as if they are a cable system, with all the extra regulations the major cable and satellite companies have to follow, and were created way before IP based networks became popular. I feel like the free market should always win, a kid in their basement should be allowed to create competitors. I personally feel like everything should move to IP Based networks. You don't have to worry about a limited number of stations, as IP based is pretty much unlimited. So even if people disagree with him on net neutrality, I do believe he's doing good work. Maybe if regulations are cut and made modern we'd have more options in the market. Maybe Google Fiber could be nationwide at some point if regulations were out of the way. Google already owns a bunch of dark fiber. I'd really love if the internet was just one dumb pipe. For example I have satellite TV and cable internet. When you watch on demand content they use your internet connection to download/stream the shows instead of being beamed down by the satellite. My ISP does not have a cap, but maybe if I lived in another part of the US served by one that does it would be metered as internet traffic, compared to using cable's TV service and watching on-demand which is locally within their own network(and not counted in the internet meter). I'd love in the future if we had internet only providers but It seems like one is so hard to get going I doubt we'll have that. I know some communities have done their own Fiber, but even were sued to stop it by the major players. Google "communities fiber lawsuit" for example. I don't know why but it seems like depending on your area there's only one cable company, one phone company, and if you are lucky one fiber company. So I really wish it was easier to do ISP startups and compete. I'm not even sure if it's possible to share the lines. The regulations, and politics around it are probably why we aren't really having new entries in the market. TESTIMONY OF COMMISSIONER AJIT PAI, FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION- https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-336418A1.pdf https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-336418A1.p... Commissioner Pai Remarks Before the Churchill Club https://www.fcc.gov/document/commissioner-pai-remarks-churchill-club https://www.fcc.gov/document/commissioner-pai-remarks-church...
• DaTruthHurts 10y ago
  Sam Altman is the Ycombinator version of Steven Anthony Ballmer you can see failure on the horizon. Its just a matter of time.
  • simplehuman 10y ago
    What do you mean by this? Otherwise, this should be flagged.
• brothercolor 10y ago
  The internet is what makes Silicon Valley go round. Everyone, including Sam Altman, needs to be an activist. Asking for someone else to take point on something so fundamental is like asking Natives to take point on water prot-- wait.
  • beat 10y ago
    And when protesters who demand open internet start getting their access cut off, they'll start seeing the analogy. Too late then. :(
  • sama 10y ago
    I am happy to help, and honestly if I had more time right now I'd take this on directly--right now is an unusually busy time for me. I agree with you it's critical to Silicon Valley.
    • saycheese 10y ago
      Given Elon & Thiel are both in contact with Trump, if you haven't already done so, it would be worth mentioning it directly to both that this is important to you. For that matter, maybe this is a chance to you yourself reach out to Trump on an issue and invite him to meet at the White House or come to the Bay Area to meet the next batch of YC startups.
      • throwaway399 10y ago
        If anyone does this in the bay area and it's public, they will likely be burnt at the stake.
        • saycheese 10y ago
          You mean like Elon, Thiel, etc.? If so seems to me as if they're all doing just fine. [1] Beyond that, point of engaging Trump would be on a topic I would assume everyone agrees is important - and if you think hidding and hoping things will magically get better, well, good luck! [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-meeting-photo-jeff-bezos-elon-musk-tim-cook-2016-12 http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-meeting-photo-jeff-bezo...
• beat 10y ago
  The problem is that the Big Four (or five, if you count Microsoft) just aren't that interested in it. There's a lot of benefit to them to end neutrality.
  • dragonwriter 10y ago
    I don't think there's a net benefit to them (which is why they've been mostly pro-Open Internet); OTOH, they are better positioned than smaller players to deal with it, so they aren't that motivated.
• cb21 10y ago
  > But this idea is under attack, and I'm surprised the tech community isn't speaking out more forcefully. Although many leading tech companies are now the incumbents, I hope we'll all remember that openness helped them achieve their great success. It could be disastrous for future startups if this were to change--openness is what made the recent wave of innovation happen. Is it surprising? What organization is supposed to speak up? Tech workers don't have a union so nobody is lobbying for us in DC. We have to hope that enough huge companies and their leaders will act in the way we want and I don't exactly expect Zuckerberg and Thiel to represent me and my interests in Washington.
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  • zardo 10y ago
    >What organization is supposed to speak up? Tech workers don't have a union so nobody is lobbying for us in DC. There's ACM.
  • pjmlp 10y ago
    > Tech workers don't have a union Yes we do, just not on US. https://www.igmetall.de/engineering-8357.htm https://www.igmetall.de/engineering-8357.htm
    • NoGravitas 10y ago
      There's the IWW's iu560 (Communications, Computer, and Software Workers Industrial Union). http://www.iww.org/unions/dept500/iu560 http://www.iww.org/unions/dept500/iu560
  • WillPostForFood 10y ago
    If there was a tech workers union, presumably it would cover employees at Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and many other companies they are not pro net neutrality. So it wouldn't even be in the self interest of the union to get into the battle. It needs to be the consumers who speak up, and the businesses that would be negatively affected.
• finkin1 10y ago
  I think the tipping point last time (SOPA/PIPA protests) was when Reddit, Wikipedia, Google, etc. went dark. It's sad we don't have Aaron Swartz to help this time around. It's good to see Sam offering help, but who is actually going to step up?
  • RangerScience 10y ago
    What's needed for "another Aaron"? I know he had a pre-existing following; is that required? Do you think someone could fill those shoes this time around, starting from scratch?
    • ryandrake 10y ago
      > What's needed for "another Aaron"? Courage. The cynic in me answers "Someone who doesn't mind being becoming a target?" I notice nobody is jumping up and down volunteering to be "another Assange" or "another Snowden". Different topics but similar level of fortitude needed.
      • simplehuman 10y ago
        And best of luck finding these in immigrant rich silicon valley who are already petrified of losing their visa with the new government change.
        • Derrick_Blake 10y ago
          That's a whole nother issue and equally messed up.
          • simplehuman 10y ago
            Sorry, to put that comment in context.. There was an article a couple of days back of how immigrants are creating massive value by starting startups in the valley. Well, these guys have the most incentive to stand up for an open internet but they won't/can't.
• 981283192 10y ago
  I don't understand why a basic "pay for what you use" principle is so evil while Facebook is a much bigger threat (worse than AOL in its day). Does 'sama have a Facebook account?
• pgodzin 10y ago
  The tech community rallied pretty hard in favor of net neutrality last go-round, they were just lucky that Wheeler (head of the FCC) agreed with them. I think there isn't anything specific to fight against now as there was with SOPA. Once a specific legislation/regulation appears, I think the tech world will strongly oppose again. I also suspect the large tech companies are trying to use their lobbying power behind the scenes preemptively again.
• 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  I think lobbyists should solve this problem, but here's an idea anyway: what if we synchronized our fireworks to go off on the 4th of July at 4:04 AM in protest?
• simplehuman 10y ago
  I don't think activism is the answer to these problems. Instead, we need to show consumer benefits of an open internet. Right now, people are totally loving the mono-culture and the internet silos that the mega corps are building (facebook, whatsapp, gmail, google, chrome, apple app store, github to name a few). It's going to hard to convince them unless you can show them tangible benefits. I think the big companies have totally nailed it. They have kept things free. And they have kept the population sufficiently distracted that there is no time for 'activism' or thinking of society. This means that the big corps can now push reforms unquestioned in their favor.
  • xatan_dank 10y ago
    I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture and many of the "free" social networks are not profitable at all. Very few of them are actually succeeding. Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people. I don't think any of this is true and that the argument you make here is self-contradictory. I really just don't think your comment holds any water at all.
    • simplehuman 10y ago
      > I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture Huh? Just see all the gmail ids. Just ask any company as to how many email ids are gmail and prepared to be stunned. Same goes for GitHub, medium. Even so called "decentralized" projects are happily hosting code on github and blogging on medium. (I am not judging the users here by any means. I am just saying they are "happy"). > Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people. Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies.
      • xatan_dank 10y ago
        >Huh? Just see all the gmail ids. That doesn't mean people are happy with the situation nor the product. In many situations, as I already mentioned, it doesn't even mean the product is successful. I'm well aware of all these near-monopolies and how many users they have- Gmail's monopoly over email, Google's monopoly over search, YouTube's monopoly over video, etc. Plenty of users are extremely dissatisfied with these services. Furthermore, your point doesn't address the "mono-culture", which is a separate issue from some specific corporations maintaining very high userbases. >Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies. This doesn't respond to what I said at all. I'm saying there is no evidence that software provided without a direct cost inevitably has an impact in deterring activism. I worry that you don't understand what "free software" is. Facebook is free as in free beer, not as in freedom. There is a huge difference. You should read up on the definitions of free and proprietary software.
• seibelj 10y ago
  Net Neutrality absolutists need to tone down their rhetoric. When NN activists say zero rating is unfair, they are speaking from an ivory tower. It is better for a poor Iraqi to get free Wikipedia even though that hurts other upstart wikis, than for poor Iraqis to have no Wikipedia at all. Once you accept this premise, you must then accept that exceptions to NN exist. Once you accept that, you must then take every single exception to NN and weigh it on a case-by-case basis about whether it's "fair" or not. Barring some government oversight panel that bans or allows anti-NN practices on a case by case basis, I think it's better for the market to decide. ISP's shouldn't be able to extort businesses to be allowed in at all, but offering premium speeds (as Netflix has paid for years), free data, etc. are within the realms of anti-NN practices that I feel are acceptable. The net neutrality issue is not black and white.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • SomeStupidPoint 10y ago
    I'm not sure I agree with the premise you baldly assert: could you explain why it is true?
    • seibelj 10y ago
      If you think that it's unfair that Iraqis can access Wikipedia for free because the data is zero rated, then you disagree with my premise, and you are a net neutrality absolutist. If you believe that it is OK that Iraqis can access Wikipedia for free via zero rating, then there are exceptions to NN, because zero rating is inherently anti-NN. From then on, it is a slippery slope. Is it OK to zero rate data only in "poor" countries? The moment they get rich enough, must we ban it? Is any non-profit allowed to zero rate, but all for-profits are not? My point is, once you open the door to anti-NN practices being acceptable, you must then start analyzing all situations individually. I respect NN absolutists although I disagree with them. At least they have a coherent philosophy.
  • amluto 10y ago
    Yes and no. I think it's entirely reasonable for ISPs to innovate, play with zero-rating, etc. I just think it should be done neutrally: if an ISP wants to zero-rate, they should publish a rate schedule that applies to anyone who wants to participate. If an ISP wants to try other novel services (QoS, whatever), I think the same principle should apply: make it fair, reasonable, non-discriminatory, and transparent. Verizon's zero-rating of themselves is anything but.
• pizzetta 10y ago
  Not to put a fly in the soup, but don't utilities charge different rates for different customers? for Example PG&E might have one rate for residential, one for small biz and one for large biz? Not to say that net neutrality is different but comparing it to utilities may not be appropriate given diff classes of customers are granted different kinds of rates and service.
  • james_pm 10y ago
    Plus different rates at different times of the day, and in different seasons. We pay less for electricity in the daytime in winter than we do in the daytime in summer when A/C puts greater demands on the network.
  • ryandrake 10y ago
    But they don't have one rate for powering refrigerators, a different rate for washing machines, one rate for computers, etc. Nor do they have one rate for Kenmore refrigerators, a different rate for Maytag refrigerators, one rate for Samsung refrigerators.
    • rdl 10y ago
      They do charge discounts for certain types of equipment (cars, medical devices). I don't think there are any differences between equipment vendors, though.
• no_wizard 10y ago
  > There's an argument that Internet Service Providers should be able to charge a metered rate based on usage. For home Utilities, this is based on the fact that, indeed, your usage pattern is a couple of things 1) In the best of Utility markets, electricity has no real elasticity. Electrical demand is a constant game of just simply keep pace with existing demand as much as possible. There is no excess capacity problems per say, as the game is trying to be as efficient as possible. 2) For the most part, people's usage patterns are routinely predicable and stable, so the demand cost associated can be metered reasonably and with relative transparency (Not to say, its completely transparent, because its not, though its very well regulated in comparison to say, internet service access & quality). This allows a relatively consistent and low variable cost of delivery of this service, however its not a 'fixed' cost, with the exception usually of the wiring the house itself to the grid. 3) The device in which a home uses, in fact, can be measured in absolute terms. For instance, your appliances can be calculated to the letter how much they will cost to run (see here, for instance: http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html). I would argue that this is not true of internet usage, which can vary EXTREMELY widely. The EIA gives a nice summary on this too: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_used https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electrici... Now, often people will say, reasonably, that in an environment maintained much like the power utilities, if things could be achieved to this level of usage/monitoring/charging for use would make sense. Transparent pricing, easy ways to calculate usage based on the app or app(s) or some other methodology for chunking the pricing structure so its really transparent and stable to price out a month to month usage pattern for the average person. Sounds cool right? Well, here is some notable differences: (As an aside, for fun, imagine a world where the app had to tell you how much on average it cost to use for an hour on a metered connection, like how energy star rated appliances tell you their yearly cost) Broadband is a completely different story 1) Wired service has a fixed cost and tons of excess capacity. The cost, while not cheap is fixed, per house or neighborhood, and that infrastructure doesn't have to be changed out for many years, in some cases a decade or more. Once the wired service has been installed to a house, thats it. the ISP then can flip the service on and start delivering product to the homes at virtually no cost after that. There is no ongoing 'generation' of bandwidth to closely meet demand. The technology itself, after all, takes care of all that. All the ISP has to do is run the ship smoothly, but they don't have to build a new bandwidth power plant to make more bandwidth. 2) Which leads me to my second point. There is a ton of bandwidth in the system already. WE know this. The system not only has a fixed cost, but the actual capacity of the wired services being deployed already have a ton of extra bandwidth capacity, in particular if we are talking about home users. From DSL Reports https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Deconstructing-The-Exaflood-Myth-97440 https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Deconstructing-The-Exafl... we get this great line (i encourage everyone to read the full report): Andrew Odlyzko is one of the nation's top experts on global Internet traffic. Stationed at the University of Minnesota, Odlyzko posts all of his data to his website, and notes that while growth is strong, it doesn't necessitate drastic new pricing model shifts (metered billing), or wailing to the heavens about the dire menace that is P2P traffic. "There is not a single sign of an unmanageable flood of traffic," Odlyzko says. "If anything, a slowdown is visible more than a speedup," he says And thats just from 2008, and the situation for bandwidth excess capacity has actually improved: Tech Dirt reports from 2012 (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable-industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-congestion.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable...): The relevant bit, in response to a Michael Powell, a cable industry lobbyist: If usage caps were about "fairness," carriers would offer the nation's grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly, several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like "fairness" to you? Even as far back as 2008, they tried to push the bandwidth hog myth (https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-Myth-117230 https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-M...): relevant quote: Assuming that if disruptive users exist (which, as mentioned above we could not prove) they would be amongst those that populate the top 1% of bandwidth users during peak periods. To test this theory, we crossed that population with users that are over cap (simulating AT&T’s established data caps) and found out that only 78% of customers over cap are amongst the top 1%, which means that one fifth of customers being punished by the data cap policy cannot possibly be considered to be disruptive (even assuming that the remaining four fifths are). Data caps, therefore, are a very crude and unfair tool when it comes to targeting potentially disruptive users. The correlation between real-time bandwidth usage and data downloaded over time is weak and the net cast by data caps captures users that cannot possibly be responsible for congestion. Furthermore, many users who are "as guilty" as the ones who are over cap (again, if there is such a thing as a disruptive user) are not captured by that same net. Also see this: https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/myth-bandwidth-hog https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/myth-bandwid... 3) [Opinion piece here]: Fair and open internet access is in my mind, is going to become a first amendment issue, or at least should be treated as one. The growth and power of being able to be seen, heard, and read on the internet is quickly, as we all know, supplanting most if not all other forms of media. And for the media it is enabling, other mediums that carry forward, like video, are quickly consolidating onto the internet in great numbers. This makes it the place for public speech. While the space may be non-physical (virtual), the ability for ISPs to pick winners and losers to access will have inevitably terrible political and economic consequences, and not just for start ups. Imagine if employees who got cancer from working in an industrial facility could not publish their stories to say, Medium, because a large ISP like Comcast will refuse to carry medium's traffic in and around that issue, or at all, if it becomes a hot bed for other interests that are willing to pay vast sums of money to filter that traffic from ever being delivered or surfacing. Does this sound farfetched? I don't think so. We know groups have tried to do this with newspapers in the past, and of course groups have also tried to do things like pressure individual websites from publishing things to. If you open the internet and mandate its traffic is treated equally regardless, it largely negates the ability for this to happen on that level, as in an ideal implementation, the ISPs would be stripped (and monitored to ensure) that they aren't reading any traffic in the wild that they don't have an explicit reason to do so (Say, a warrant to tap into a connection of a suspected murder looking at their network traffic or something) 4) While we are talking about this, there is no damn spectrum crunch either, its a nice myth that wireless carriers/ISPs are using to justify their underhanded tactics here, because physics dictates there can be a spectrum crunch. that doesn't mean there is or soon will be a spectrum crunch: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable-industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-congestion.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable... https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-Myth-117230 https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-M... https://gigaom.com/2012/01/30/is-the-spectrum-crisis-a-myth/ https://gigaom.com/2012/01/30/is-the-spectrum-crisis-a-myth/ https://gigaom.com/2012/10/21/the-myth-of-the-wireless-spectrum-crisis/ https://gigaom.com/2012/10/21/the-myth-of-the-wireless-spect... https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507486/the-spectrum-crunch-that-wasnt/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507486/the-spectrum-crunc... http://www.androidauthority.com/wireless-industry-flipped-business-model-3-myths-407068/ http://www.androidauthority.com/wireless-industry-flipped-bu... https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20121004/02434820589/now-that-we-know-telcos-exaggerated-about-spectrum-crunch-how-about-some-more-open-spectrum.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20121004/024...
• confounded 10y ago
  Because of the massive amount of consolidation over the last few years, the death of Net Neutrality would be the best competitive moat imaginable for Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. While all their CEOs will make faint noises in favor of Net Neutrality, SV outspends Wall Street 2:1 on lobbying[1], the goal of which is to cement monopoly status, not to make the world a better place. Most of it goes to Republicans. Things have changed fast; Google's lobbying spend has increased by over 50% since the SOPA blackout. The technology industry serves the interests of capital/share-holders, not technologists. [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/outspending-wall-street-2-to-1-silicon-valley-takes-washington https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/outspendi... EDIT: "Google hardly even had lobbyists back during the SOPA blackout." > "Google's lobbying spend has increased by over 50% since the SOPA blackout." h/t DannyBee below.
  • throwaway399 10y ago
    Depends on the company. Sometimes most of it goes to democrats: Google for ex - https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623 https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00428623 Microsoft also almost 2x to dems - https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000115&lname=Microsoft+Corp https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000115&l...
    • NotreDev 10y ago
      Appropriate that I'm responding to "throwaway399": your perspective that monopoly support is partisan lacks an appropriate level of nuance.
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • throwaway399 10y ago
        I was denying that it was partisan, not supporting the notion.
    • confounded 10y ago
• gz5 10y ago
  The utility should be the fiber (or spectrum). Regulate that; leave the ISPs to then compete openly. Today's software can enable multiple ISPs to share the fiber/spectrum. I could then have 10 ISPs today and 15 ISPs tomorrow. I might use ISP #1 for certain content, and ISP #2 for certain services. ISPs essentially become a function of the services and content they provide, and how they provide it, in an ultra-competitive, granular market. The way it should be.
  • vog 10y ago
    Good point. I believe Sweden is quite close to this vision. More generally, certain goods need to be owned by the community, such as infrastructure. Privately owned streets are a nightmare, and so are pipes and fibers. Almost by definition this must lead to malfunctioning markets. Only if a level playing field on this ground is guaranteed, a market on top if this can function efficiently.
  • danielweber 10y ago
    Isn't that what happened to the DSL market? No one will bother laying new infrastructure because anyone can use it.
    • gz5 10y ago
      Good point but much larger overall pie with fiber; enough for the infrastructure owner and the ISPs to eat, and eat well. Also the OSS/BSS/ops implementations for shared DSL were too costly and ineffective; we can do much better with today's software.
    • rbanffy 10y ago
      You can always make the government take care of what is becoming increasingly fundamental infrastructure. But then you'll be called a communist.
      • marknutter 10y ago
        And rightfully so, since taking care of it would mean the Ministry of Communications has deemed the current available bandwidth sufficient for serving the government's approved content (propaganda), thus eliminating the need for improved infrastructure. People should be in the fields growing food for their comrades anyways, not sitting on the internet.
• rdl 10y ago
  While I like the Internet being open, I don't like "net neutrality" extremism. 1) While I dislike monopoly carrier antics, I'm even more unhappy about the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs. If you build a network with caches/content servers close to users, and expensive backhaul back to your network core, you can offer essentially unlimited traffic to users hitting the cache, and still provide more limited access to other stuff. I'd prefer high bandwidth everywhere, but that isn't always an option. It should be a market decision, not a national government decision. 2) The real problems with lack of NN are due to lack of competition in the access provider market. Focus on fixing that. A lot of this is due to local governments requiring providers cover entire markets to cover any of a market -- if someone wants to build another WebPass or CondoInternet and only serve high-density developments, that's great! Trenching fiber to single family homes is marginal anyway, but if you have low take-up in a neighborhood it is even worse. If you are going to push for regulation, have it be regulation to empower actual competition in the network access market. 3) Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for video services.
  • Keverw 10y ago
    Yeah, I do think more competition between providers would naturally solve a lot of these problems. There's to much politics involved, even for a company as big as Google. At&t for example suing in Louisville. The FCC and states should do something to help foster more competition and lowing the barrier to entry. http://www.recode.net/2016/2/26/11588286/google-fiber-swings-back-at-att-over-attempt-to-stonewall-google-in http://www.recode.net/2016/2/26/11588286/google-fiber-swings...
  • 1_2__3 10y ago
    > the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs I have to admit I read that and I completely discount the rest of your comment. Nobody who actually believes in even the concept of sensible government regulation uses phrasing like this. I'm surprised you didn't call out "three letter agencies" too. And besides that I believe you're just trying to fool people too stupid to know what NN is when you say net neutrality "dictates network engineering standards". I don't think your comment is intellectually honest at all.
• bo1024 10y ago
  I think the appliance analogy is a pretty good one. But now imagine that on top of being able to charge different amounts for different brands of appliances, the electric company happens to manufacture their own line of not-so-quality stoves, refrigerators, etc.
• no_protocol 10y ago
  > There's an argument that Internet Service Providers should be able to charge a metered rate based on usage. I'm not sure whether I agree with this, but in principle it seems ok. That's how we pay for public utilities. I can monitor and control the power usage of my electrical appliances. I can control outgoing network requests from my networked devices. I cannot control what is sent to my network from the outside. It doesn't make much sense to be charged for what someone else sends to me. Even if I shut off my network device, a particularly rude service might just continue blindly sending data my way, running up my costs with no way to opt out. Typical postal mail delivery is paid for by the sender, not the recipient. It becomes complicated here.
  • Karunamon 10y ago
    Telecom companies, in general, have no scruples about charging you for what other people send you unsolicited. Up until they got the memo that SMS was on its way out, they used to charge downright extortionate rates for text messages. Same for minutes.
• andy_ppp 10y ago
  Why would anyone buy internet access from people charging like this/breaking their services? Are ISPs monopolies in the US and if so wouldn't stopping these monopolies be the surest way, allowing the market to decide a free Internet is what gets you customers? All that this will do is move people towards obfuscation of their Internet access through technology. I say let them try to break the web; there will be technological solutions to stop this immediately I bet...
  • pdonis 10y ago
    > Are ISPs monopolies in the US In many parts of it, yes, they are, because of deals that ISPs have struck with local governments. > wouldn't stopping these monopolies be the surest way Yes, and every time it's been tried, the ISPs go to court and, since they have much deeper pockets, end up getting the attempts shot down.
    • andy_ppp 10y ago
      Okay so maybe YC should be funding a few clever ISP startups in the US? There really is decent competition for Internet in the UK, it's surprisingly successful at stopping this type of stupid stuff from happening.
      • pdonis 10y ago
        > maybe YC should be funding a few clever ISP startups in the US? I think that would be a great idea.
• vvanders 10y ago
  I love the electricity company/appliance analogy. That seems fairly accurate and something that's easily relatable to the layman who doesn't understand the details of the internet.
  • asher_ 10y ago
    Can you explain? The analogy seems like a terrible one to me. We are not talking about charging different amounts of money depending on the brand of device you are consuming the data on. NN is about not differentiating the cost or quality of bits based on their source. In the US, can you not opt to pay a slightly higher rate for renewable energy? (This happens in Australia). I'm all for NN, but the analogy Sam used doesn't hold in my opinion. As an additional thought from someone outside the US: NN doesn't exist in places like Australia, and has actually overall led to better services, especially in the early days of the internet, because overseas data is significantly more costly to provide than local data. The difference is that we have more robust competition and we can more easily switch providers, where is seems in the US (purely based on things I've read on the internet) that the near-duopoly cuts consumer choice, so if NN was not in place, people would have little ability to switch providers, and they would be stuck with it. Is the lack of competition the real issue here? If people in the US had a choice of many providers and it was easy to switch, then people would likely switch to services that are Net Neutral.
    • crazy1van 10y ago
      > Is the lack of competition the real issue here? Yes. Governments -- from federal to small towns -- created rules giving de facto local monopolies to certain ISPs and making market entry of competition very difficult. And yet, people want to solve this created problem with more rules about how ISPs are allowed to compete.
• Alex3917 10y ago
  > Doing this allows the government to ensure a level playing field In theory this is a good argument. In practice, my experience is that this argument causes people to write off net neutrality as just being something that's about letting tech bros make lots of money. I've even heard this from folks in the tech industry, who really should know better. An argument that may be more convincing is that the Internet is the only media channel where we don't get all of our information from the same three or four mega conglomerates. But if net neutrality is eliminated then ISPs are going to pull a Martin Shkreli, and overnight your cost of hosting a Wordpress blog is going to go from $5 a month to $25,000 per month or whatever. When this happens the only way to have a blog will be to host your content on Facebook, who will be able to decide which points of view are allowed and which are banned. If we lose the Internet, the last free media channel, then there is no going back. Not just on this issue, but on every issue.
  • pharrlax 10y ago
    The best argument I've found for convincing conservatives is to stress that the internet is a platform for commerce, and healthy commerce requires equality of opportunity -- specifically, the opportunity for consumers to access your business. ISPs literally "own the road", to create an analogy for internet businesses. If the only road company in town installs a toll booth or a series of speed bumps in front of McDonald's because Burger King paid them to, it artificially distorts the market in a way that allows successful companies to pay to entrench themselves and fend off competition. Innovation and disruption inherently require free and fair access to the storefronts of upstarts, whether physical or digital. To slant the playing field with throttling or zero-rating is tantamount to a big box corp having the ability to pay someone to install a toll booth in front of my competing mom and pop business.
    • NoPiece 10y ago
      Another net neutrality case for conservatives: you might never get a Breitbart or IJReview in a world where Comcast is selling preference to CNN/Newscorp/Disney-ABC.
    • NoPiece 10y ago
• Not31337 10y ago
  Charging per volume of traffic would eliminate the net neutrality issue. If I use Netflix on Comcast I would pay Comcast for my use of their network. Comcast would pay Netflix's ISP for the use of that network (at negotiated rate lower than my rate because of volume). Netflix would pay their ISP For their usage as well.(also priced for volume) The two end point rates would have to be set so carriers make a profit and the responsibility of traffic is shared between the sender and receiver. (people who get thing for free tend to treat it as worthless). This model has to be worked out to completion to understand all the implications. The key thing is if Comcast was getting reasonable revenue from moving Netflix traffic it would not need to throttle other people's traffic to bully consumers to buy on demand TV from Comcast. As side effect this may reduce usage by people who download stuff just because they can because its free/already paid for. This is related to free things are treated badly concept I mentioned earlier.
  • jack9 10y ago
    Usage monitoring (charging) sits squarely next to traffic shaping and filtering. Just no.
  • Keverw 10y ago
    It's an interesting idea, but unlimited is nice. This idea kinda reminds me of how the telephone network works. Basically everything a call is connected, there's a "dip" fee. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_Routing_Number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_Routing_Number
• koolba 10y ago
  If the physical line itself was separated from the ISP providing you service on the line, this problem would solve itself through natural competition. We almost saw this happen with ADSL but it lost out to the fatter pipes of coax and fiber. Most people have either one or zero options for coax (i.e. cable) or fiber. That leads to a monopoly where you either have to take whatever Comcast / Time Warner / Verizon offer or live with craptacular DSL. Get rid of that monopoly and have the maintenance of those pipes be run by the local municipality. Then you can have real competition.
• hammerandtongs 10y ago
  Part of the problem is that "the internet" has not provided a technical solution yet to the claimed problem (the laziness and shiftiness of ISPs not upgrading simple crossconnects is bs though). If someone wants to stream netflix, youtube or grab something from a torrent why not have a content agnostic(safe harbor) block cache distributed around the internet? This is most concretely expressed by ipfs https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ but it's an old idea - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking Bittorrent itself is a limited form of it. On some level AMP from google and CDNs are trying to make up for its lack. As long as the ISP doesn't actively force this on their users but instead its something companys and people actually want I think its a net good to make this a thing. We should mature and adopt IPFS AND fight the net neutrality battle.
• diminish 10y ago
  If a carrier has a "social" data plan which gives access to only Facebook, is this against net neutrality?
  • mozumder 10y ago
    yes.
• plandis 10y ago
  My entire life I have had access to only one ISP. I want very clear competition before give up on net neutrality. That's not going to happen though :-/
• blhack 10y ago
  This is a difficult question. Emotionally, I am a net neutrality absolutist, but I think I can talk myself out of it, which to me means that the conversation is complex. Should the power company be able to offer you a discounted rate if you host equipment that offsets their cost (for instance: a powerwall)[1]? I think that the answer to that question is yes. Well okay, then should your ISP be able to offer you a discounted rate to use services that offset their cost (youtube, which has an cache near you, vs vimeo, which doesn't)? If the power company can do this, then why can't the ISP? Again, I don't like this, but I can't think of a consistent explanation for why they shouldn't be allowed to dynamically charge you based on their cost. [1]: I don't know enough about the electrical grid to know if a powerwall could actually be used in a way that offsets the cost to a power utility or not. I don't think that the correctness of this statement matters to the example. Substitute "a powerwall" for "equipment that saves the power company money".
  • TOMDM 10y ago
    In a way, I'd say what your describing as far as power utilities is already in effect. There are a good number of people that charge their batteries off peak when the power is cheaper such that they can either use it later on peak when they would have to pay more, or even sell that power back to the grid when it's in more demand. I think the issue here is that power is binary as far as the argument here is concerned, you have it or you don't, but influencing consumer patterns on data usage has the potential to seriously influence how they use the internet in a way that paying differing amounts for power doesn't. Competition is one of the most powerful driving forces of the internet today. The idea a lone programmer can offer a service that compares to multinational companies (in some areas, obviously not others) is phenomenal. But say consumers or that developer suddenly have to pay a large ongoing entry cost due to the fact that the product that they have made and are competing with is high bandwidth. Innovation dies overnight without net neutrality.
    • noobiemcfoob 10y ago
      > power is binary as far as the argument here is concerned, you have it or you don't Power is not binary. It is fundamentally analog. You can certainly have different degrees of power. See brownouts. Consumers only tend to see power as binary because of deep standards penetration in the electronics market.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• ABCLAW 10y ago
  Those involved in technology are often confronted with brutally kafkaesque situations wherein the human and the machine are starkly opposed. Fighting against the machine is often demoralizing, depressing, and dehumanizing - but not always. Not today. Thank you, Sam, for the mote of hope.
• plainOldText 10y ago
  I haven't yet made up my mind on net neutrality. But Sam says: "I believe access should be a basic right". My question is: How can something be a human right if you need to pay for it? Because as of today you still need to pay an ISP for internet access.
  • rrdharan 10y ago
    A lot of folks would consider personal security a basic right, but someone still has to pay for the police. Some folks believe that healthcare should be a basic right, and people definitely have to pay for that.
    • plainOldText 10y ago
      I won't get into the healthcare topic as it's still a mess in my opinion, however, regarding one's right to security, as far as I know police do not have a duty to protect someone. [1] [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol...
• enknamel 10y ago
  >What's clearly not OK is taking it further--charging different services different rates based on their relationships with ISPs. You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates depending on the manufacturer of each of your appliances. This does happen though. Electric companies, phone companies, etc all charge different rates based on who is using the service. Based off of different programs and income based subsidies who is using the service determines the cost paid. This also effects what producers sell to the low end of the spectrum. If electricity is substantially cheaper for lower income consumers, they will care less about paying for better energy efficiency. So you are technically paying a different rate based off what your appliances are.
• beefman 10y ago
  I was convinced in favor of net neutrality by a 2007 study at the University of Florida.[1] When ISPs are allowed to charge content providers individually, there is less incentive to improve overall bandwidth. There's also an incentive to cripple the free tier, especially if it can be done subtly or by neglect over time. So net neutrality seems like good policy. [1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130602210518/http://news.ufl.edu/2007/03/07/net-neutrality/ http://web.archive.org/web/20130602210518/http://news.ufl.ed...
• adewhurst2 10y ago
  you are a good hacker since you are good i'm going to call you "CODER 52" good job.
• bluetwo 10y ago
  Those looking to roll back net neutrality are better organized, better funded, and better connected. I hate to say it, but this battle seems lost. We don't need to squander our time arguing over the finer points of the policy. We need a simple way to explain it to the masses.
• dreamcompiler 10y ago
  We probably need a grassroots effort for VPNs like "Let's Encrypt" is for https. It will eat our batteries faster, but it's worth it.
• subverter 10y ago
  I don't think anyone here is going to argue that the internet shouldn't be open. The real question behind that – and where we differ – is how the role of government fits into that. If you believe government is inherently good and necessary to enable a "basic right" like the internet, then yes, of course, government should be the one to keep the internet open. This is Sam's view. On the other hand, if you distrust government and believe their own interests for power and control are always in play, then handing them even more control of the internet is absolutely not the solution. Knowing what we know of the NSA's mass-surveilance and CIA's targeted hacking and surveillance for unclear-at-best purposes, doesn't that at least give you pause about whether government should be the one to keep the internet open?
  • consto 10y ago
    While the NSA's mass-surveillance and the CIA's targeted hacking cannot be overlooked, these organisations are for all intents and purposes separate entities to the FCC. The FCC's view and ability to enforce net neutrality will never effect the NSA and CIA; I don't know what, if anything, would. And besides, ISP's have formed oligopolies for most regions. Do you trust them to keep the internet open?
  • rybosome 10y ago
    Framing it as purely a question of trust in government and pointing out an example of our interests not being represented is not the entire surface of the argument. The government's stated purpose is inherently good (though they do not necessarily act in a manner consistently with that stated purpose). We have a limited degree of control over how we are governed, and we have ways to express dissatisfaction. None of that holds true for a corporation. Their stated purpose is to create value for shareholders, the voting power that stock gives you is a fraction of the power of your vote as a citizen, and in the case of a monopoly over an important good or service, you have ZERO ways to express dissatisfaction. Knowing what we know of anti-competitive practices and the tragedy of the commons, doesn't that at least give you pause about whether corporations should be the one to keep the internet open?
  • AlexandrB 10y ago
    > If you believe government is inherently good and necessary to enable a "basic right" like the internet, then yes, of course, government should be the one to keep the internet open. This is Sam's view. I don't believe that the government is inherently good, but at least the government is democratically elected. The CEOs at Comcast/Verizon are not. Allowing them to exert control over internet content while participating in a market that is inherently NOT FREE is a recipe for disaster and a closed internet.
• johnwheeler 10y ago
  To the folks on HN who don't vehemently, vehemently oppose a non-neutral system, your line of thinking puzzles the hell out of me. Is the idea that government regulation is bad in all cases but corporate regulation is OK in all cases? Why? Because you've bought into free market forces making all things better no matter what? Those forces only make things better unless they don't. To me, it's crazy that's not immediately clear. In this case, the regulation is for keeping the system free unless you're a monopoly or part of an oligopoly. Your future chances of being in that camp are so minuscule and even smaller if you support killing off Net Neutrality. Are you fighting on behalf your future self that will likely never exist? That's arrogant and delusional. This is not what Ayn Rand meant by espousing the public good is best served when people are self-interested. That's not the same thing as being delusional.
  • protomyth 10y ago
    How about I don't know if I support or oppose net neutrality because depending on the source it means something different. I would love to see an actual technical, written definition so that I could tell my Congress folks to put it in a bill.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • lr4444lr 10y ago
    To answer philosophically about it, because your question seems to me to ask for broad strokes, if you're using a resource acknowledged to have aspects of a "public good" to a quantitatively greater degree than other users, you should pay more for it. The footnote in the original article even admits as much. That's not to say I oppose net-neutrality, but to use your words, don't "vehemently, vehemently" oppose a non-neutral system.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• animex 10y ago
  If only Sam knew someone that had the President's ear...
• animex 10y ago
  If only Sam knew someone that had the President's ear...
• azundo 10y ago
  We see the consequences of a non-open Internet every day where we work in Uganda. It is common there for people to have "social bundles" that only work for Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. Our users believe they have Internet access but don't understand why data from our app is not syncing when Facebook is working. It's a large barrier for us and adds a huge moat for the incumbents. We're considering more integration over WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger so we too can benefit from the cheaper data but that only locks us into those platforms and strengthens their position.
  • botverse 10y ago
    This is eye opening and a perfectly plausible future for new startups in the us and europe.
  • MarkSummer 10y ago
    > We see the consequences of a non-open Internet every day where we work in Uganda. It is common there for people to have "social bundles" that only work for Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. This is an important perspective. Recommend sharing this insight with the article author to consider appending to their original article.
  • lsseckman 10y ago
    This is a really good example of the pitfalls here. All the way down to the micro-level decision influences.
• billions 10y ago
  In my opinion, the Internet is the best modern day example of something working fairly with minimal regulation.
• SAI_Peregrinus 10y ago
  I don't think that NN legislation is the answer. It's a social solution to a technical problem. We shouldn't be making it illegal to discriminate between traffic types, we should be making it impossible. Encrypt everything by default, encrypt and anonymize DNS, and generally get rid of the ability for ISPs to tell one data stream from another. Unfortunately this requires re-architecting quite a lot of the Internet, so it's even less likely to happen quickly than getting a bunch of politicians to stop listening to lobbyists or ISPs to actually compete with one another.
  • nebulous1 10y ago
    I don't think that will solve the problem. Even if the ISP can't tell where most of your traffic is going after it leaves their network, they're still going to be able to be able to differentiate between that traffic and traffic destined for a service they control or a third party service that cooperates with them. It stops them from penalising a particular third party service, but not from penalising everything they don't recognise in favour of what they do.
• d--b 10y ago
  Like Altman, I am amazed that this is not inflaming the community again. In order to pass an unpopular law, you just need to try to pass it several times, until the public gets tired of protesting?
  • erikpukinskis 10y ago
    I suppose the next question is: should the voice of protesters matter more than the overall opinion of the populace, which come election time is that Net Neutrality isn't even worth talking about?
    • ozaark 10y ago
      Sanders did fwiw [1] https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-statement-on-net-neutrality https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sande...
  • oculusthrift 10y ago
    the vast majority of non techies care very little about internet freedom. if we have a nice liberal in office and they don't have much to complain about, they'll go ahead and fight for net neutrality. but it's a little hard to rile them up as much when there's a million outrageous things happening ebrty week.
• gist 10y ago
  > What's clearly not OK is taking it further--charging different services different rates based on their relationships with ISPs. You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates depending on the manufacturer of each of your appliances. Some electric companies do charge different rates to different types of customers depending on what type of business those customers are in and w/o regard to actual usage (which can also vary rates).
• rbanffy 10y ago
  Not exactly surprising.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• dahart 10y ago
  What are the technical, business & political hurdles that prevent routing level encryption from providing enough privacy that neutrality falls out automatically and the question of net neutrality legislation becomes moot?
• matchagaucho 10y ago
  If Telco Carriers continue to invest in their wireless infrastructure, then data "fast lanes" will emerge naturally. In the Carnegie model, 2G and 3G towers could be subsidized for accessing Wikipedia (for example) while new 5G towers are only available to premium subscribers. Look at the Millions be spent dismantling the 2G network. That bandwidth could be subsidized by the FCC for the common good. https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM1069631 https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM10696...
• soheil 10y ago
  Other than below what are some of the other arguments against NN? I also have a number from 0 to 5 next to each indicating how plausible I find these arguments, please shed more light on this if needed as well: - 3 caching, if you're closer to a cache edge you pay less. - 1 we give you a heavily discounted data plan but show you only content we want to make money off of you, argument being at least you get something instead of nothing if you're very poor. - 2 regulations are mostly bad, you don't want government sticking its nose in everything. - 0 monopolies want their moat to grow.
• h4nkoslo 10y ago
  This is all very rich coming from someone who also wants a totalitarian government regime dedicated to suppressing machine learning research. http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2 http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2
• tomcam 10y ago
  I think Sam needs to clarify some terms. > The internet is a public good Black's Law says a public good is "An item that taxation is used to finance, the consumption of which has been decided by the whole of society. It is not an item for consumption that an individual has decided upon." Does Sam want to tax all of us for net access, then have the government decide how it should be allocated? Do ISPs disappear under this scenario? Does Sam want the same government that has gone insane collecting personal data to have further control over net our access? Does he trust them to do the right thing with it? If so, does he have any evidence it would do so? > I believe access should be a basic right. "Basic right" is not defined and doesn't have a legal tradition, so I'm not sure what it means. Is it meant to be a constitutionally delineated right like (in the USA) freedom of the press, or to worship, or to bear arms? Because none of these require that we have the government confiscate our money in order that others may exercise those rights.
• joeblow9999 10y ago
  pro NN: "Oh my god some service I want may charge me with a pricing scheme I don't understand/like! Let's get government bureaucrats to control that for me!" anti-NN: "If you let the federal government dictate how packets are treated.... then you let the federal government dictate how packets are treated. Perhaps you are familiar with Ed Snowden, Wikileaks and recent revelations about the NSA etc? no concern at all eh? You just want your Netflizzzzzz. Ok then"
  • problems 10y ago
    Yeah... it's sort of a lose-lose honestly, I think the model used in Canada and the UK is quite good - the government forced the big ISPs to lease last-mile lines. Keeps a working free market with competition, many people started switching to smaller ISPs with lower rates and unlimited bandwidth caps, a few years later the big guys increased their speeds, increased their caps and made it relatively cheap to go to unlimited. It fixes more than just the net neutrality problem, it also fixes the lack of infrastructure improvement by making big ISPs have a monopoly on last mile improvements for the first year or two - they're greatly incentivized to keep improving infrastructure and speeds or lose customers to the smaller guys who can run leaner. It's a pretty clever regulatory model that manipulates incentives quite well. I'm sure there are flaws, regulatory models are rarely perfect, but from what I've seen over the last 10 years going from 5mbit DSL to gigabit fibre for only about 1.5x the cost, I'd say it's doing a pretty good job, without any net neutrality enforcement or any complicated legislation - just by giving the regulatory authority the ability to compel ISPs to lease lines.
• EGreg 10y ago
  As I have said before during previous net neutrality "crises", this is just a symptom of extreme centralization. The same thing that caused the Indian public to reject internet.org curated by Facebook. Once we get massive consolidation, whether of banks, telcos, cable companies, social networks, phone makers or whatever else is "too big to fail" then your choice is illusory in the first place. Title I vs Title II isn't the most meaningful choice. Originally the Internet was designed with no single point of failure, but now email, the web, streaming video, etc. has been centralized. What we need to do is greenlight technology to enable decentralized: + Social Networking instead of server farms whose engineers post on highscalability + Mesh Networking instead of cellphone carriers whose networks go down in an emergency + Power Generation instead of a power grid that can cut you off anytime Bitcoin decentralized money. Git decentralized version control. Look at how the power and trust dynamics shifted. That's what we need. The best way to do that is to fund open source hardware and software projects that will enable this technology to be widely available, and then regulators will have to expand their frameworks to allow it, as they did with bitcoin. Disclaimer: I am the architect of http://github.com/Qbix/Platform http://github.com/Qbix/Platform
• tbabb 10y ago
  Does anyone else think this thread smells astroturfed?
• bambax 10y ago
  Do not put two spaces after a period. Please. http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/two-spaces-after-a-period http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/two-space... http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...
• LeicaLatte 10y ago
  "I really hope an activist or tech leader will step up and organize this fight." Sums up America 2017. Outsource everything, even your fights.
• ctack 10y ago
  It's a terrific plea from Sam. He speaks for Ycombinator and by proxy, independant hackers like myself. But there is just so much peace of mind in it for the big boys.
• michaeljbishop 10y ago
  Am I the only person frustrated that this article contains a call to arms and then no actionable items? I'm on board, but what should I do about it? Put that in your article!
• ChefDenominator 10y ago
  Net neutrality, as promoted by this article's author, requires the elimination of an open Internet because it requires a central authority which will determine who can charge what and what they can charge for.
  • AlexandrB 10y ago
    There's already a central authority for most places - it's called Comcast/AT&T/Verizon and you don't even get a say in this authority's leadership (unlike government). By eliminating net neutrality these local monopolies now want to extend their control not only to what customers will pay but also to what internet services they wish to provide/favour.
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > There's already a central authority for most places - it's called Comcast/AT&T/Verizon and you don't even get a say in this authority's leadership (unlike government). Not to contradict your basic point with a this, but, technically, you do: through government. Corporations are creatures of law, and their governance is ultimately itself governed by rules set by the chartering government, and further constrained by the governments of jurisdictions in which the corporation seeks permission to operate.
      • AlexandrB 10y ago
        > Not to contradict your basic point with a this, but, technically, you do: through government. Yes, that's the point of net neutrality. Whereas an internet with no net neutrality regulation means that corporations have final say.
        • ChefDenominator 10y ago
          An Internet with no net neutrality regulation means no one has a final say. An Internet with net neutrality regulation means the same people who enjoy slaughtering brown people will be in charge of the entire Internet.
• trcollinson 10y ago
  I love the political and ethical debate surrounding this, both in this thread and elsewhere. As a technologist and a software developer I think we should use every means available to stop these sorts of laws from taking effect and harming what should be a completely neutral internet. With that being said, I would like to ask from a technical perspective, what can we do if this does go into effect? I remember a quote, I want to say it was by Sit Timothy Berners-Lee, but I can't find it. So I will just state it myself. Any lack of neutrality within the internet network is not a feature or a regulation but is in fact a bug within the system. When a bug is found, software engineers find ways around those bugs. So, if ISPs finally succeed in causing our internet to no longer be neutral, how will we be moving around that bug?
  • wu-ikkyu 10y ago
    >So, if ISPs finally succeed in causing our internet to no longer be neutral, how will we be moving around that bug? It wouldnt be easy, but mesh networks are the best option I'm aware of.
    • frabcus 10y ago
      The protocol cjdns and its distributed deployment at Hyperboria is the largest scale starting point I'm aware of. I think doing this might have advantages increasing freedom at the other end of the stack too - if you can drop out to cheap Internet on a mesh network with local traffic free, you might find the advantage of having a Nextcloud Box in your house (instead of Dropbox) clearer.
• pasbesoin 10y ago
  Work on physical layer redundancy and independence. Even if you want one, primary, default network, you're going to need competition to keep it healthy. And I for one want alternatives that work around the damage of current chokeholds.