6 ms·

While Pai and the FCC will do whatever they can to repeal Net Neutrality, the FCC operates with well defined stipulations. Once the FCC repeals Net Neutrality,

While Pai and the FCC will do whatever they can to repeal Net Neutrality, the FCC operates with well defined stipulations. Once the FCC repeals Net Neutrality, it will be sued. And when it is sued, the burden will be on the FCC to prove that they had good reason to repeal Net Neutrality. That is why these public comments are so important, not because of Pai's actions, but because of the court case that will follow. If the prosecutors can show that the FCC did not act within the best interest of consumers, there is a very good chance that Net Neutrality will remain law. Congressman Don Beyer did a very helpful town hall on the subject along with former Chairman Wheeler and former FCC General Counsel Jon Sallet: https://www.facebook.com/RepDonBeyer/videos/1940174359562352/ https://www.facebook.com/RepDonBeyer/videos/1940174359562352... (the video is long but very informative).

shmerl 9y ago
Pai and his ISP masters know that. That probably was their plan all along. Get sued, then ask the Congress to pass a "law" that would "put the debate to rest", while not actually preventing any anti-competitive abuse because of all the holes in that law. Given current situation in the Congress you should expect that. The same Congress just voted for Pai.
- r00fus 9y ago
  GOP needs a solid defeat in 2018 or the Internet will become a lot more "comcastic".
  - EGreg 9y ago
    That's what they said in 2016 but fewer people turned out to vote against Donald Trump than against Romney or McCain. And also GOP picked up a lot of senate seats.
  - shmerl 9y ago
    I think the only way to really prevent that is strong and disruptive competition that will spook all the current slumbering monopolists. Google Fiber pretended to aim at that, but now it slowed to a crawl (it did cause some good ripple effects). Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it? Who knows, but I have little expectation from the Congress to do anything of value about it. When was the last time they did something good about technology polices? DMCA-1201 and CFAA aren't repealed. There is no meaningful copyright reform on the horizon, and so on. Net Neutrality will be another victim of this dysfunction.
    - X86BSD 9y ago
      Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into. And their cloud-based TV service is a tire fire.
      - shmerl 9y ago
        > Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into. They should have known it's a very long term investment. Why were they surprised that it takes time to build up the network? I'm more upset about their reaction, than about the fact that they didn't plan it better. They can make it all successful, but it's long term. Looks like they are affected by short term investors more now.
        X86BSD 9y ago
        That has been a problem for them for some time. How many projects have they killed they folks relied on? Some engineers inside create an app or service and then they must move on internally and the app or service suffers from neglect for years then they kill it. You can't count on them to finish anything. They are bound to be replaced. They have nothing but ad revenue.
        matt4077 9y ago
        They tried is as a test balloon and, with the new data they got, saw that they can't get the numbers to where they would need to be to be profitable. The alternative here isn't that they would run something of that size indefinitely, knowing that it will lose them money. It's Google behaving like every single other company currently in existence: deciding up front that it's too risky and not even trying. At least it created some nice data showing how the legacy ISPs react to competition. Just in case anyone ever needs to prove that this market isn't working.
        shmerl 9y ago
        Legacy ISPs managed it somehow? So I don't see why Google can't. Especially since technology has improved (microtrenching and etc.). If anyone, Google has enough money to pull it off and seriously compete with incumbents.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    Internet neutrality is not a hot button issue for most of the voting demographic, nor should it arguably be. Definitely an upper middle class problem.
    - MBCook 9y ago
      Really? You don’t think middle or lower class people should worry about getting locked into an Internet where they have to pay extra to access the ‘good’ job sites or alternate media or where they have to pay $10/mo simply because everyone ‘has to have Facebook’ and that costs extra? The rich can afford to pay their way around stupid Comcast tiers.
      - vkou 9y ago
        That's all a problem, but a lot less important then whether or not you'll have health insurance next month, or whether your cousin will be shipped off to fight yet another war in the Middle East, or whether there will be coal jobs in your state (The answer is no, regardless of who you vote for, but at least one side will tell you that there will be.)
      - kobeya 9y ago
        Hrm, maybe I should explain. “Hot button issue” is actually a technical term in political science that has a relevant meaning here. One of the great quantitative results that has come out of political science in the last half century is the ability to model voter preferences, predict election outcomes within available uncertainties of measurement, and evaluate campaign strategies using the tools of linear algebra. The first-order approximation would be: assign a dimension to all issues on which candidates differ, for each voter assign a preference, and also for each preference assign a weight representing the priority the voter places of that issue over the others. Assume the candidate achieves all that they promise, so the outcome if they win is whatever their campaign platform says they will do. For each voter, calculate the magnitude of the difference between the voter’s preference vector and each candidate’s outcome vector, weighted by the voter’s priority vector. The candidate whose weighted outcome difference from the voter’s preferences is smallest gets their vote. You’ll have to either trust me this works, or delve into the polisci literature yourself. Barack Obama was one of the first presidential candidates to seriously use quantitative modeling of this sort, and it helped him win the election. Donald Trump’s campaign took it even further. The current state of the art, exemplified by the Trump campaign, is able to aggregate data from many sources including especially social networks and advertising profiles to build ridiculously detailed and fairly accurate predicted preference vectors for most of the voting population. They then segment these populations and serve them hyper-optimized political ads, sometimes even individually tailored, aimed to emphasize points of agreement between the candidate and the voter and points of disagreement between the voter and the other candidates, for the purpose of generating a second-order correction where each voter has a different view of the candidate designed to make him/her more agreeable to them. All interesting tech, albeit somewhat Orwellian in its consequences. Anyway, one outcome of this modeling validated by experimental data is that most voters’ priority vectors follow a power-law distribution, or something like it, meaning that a point of agreement or disagreement between the voter and the candidate on that issue trumps all others. If Alice thinks that abortion is baby murder, or if Bob is gay in a non-rainbow state and wants that to change ASAP, then it almost doesn’t matter on what other points the candidates differ. Alice will vote for the pro-life candidate, and Bob will vote for the gay-marriage candidate. Or as will often happen, voters who are suffering (no job, expensive health care, bad retirement benefits, etc.) will vote in the way that they think will better their lives, other factors be damned. These issues which dominate a voter’s choice, are hot-button issues. So back to the point I was making. I’m not saying that net neutrality is not important. What I’m saying is that in an election there are many different issues at play, of which net neutrality is one. Nearly every voter is driven by a small number of hot-button issues, and these are often things like their jobs, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and foreign policy generally, taxes, immigration, cost of education, cost of health care, etc. You’re going to have a veeery hard time convincing me — or more importantly, Joe Q. Public — that net neutrality trumps these issues. And that’s what you have to do for net neutrality to matter AT ALL at the ballot box. That’s not to say it can’t be done. That effectively what organizations like the National Rifle Association, or the National Right To Life have done with gun control and abortion, respectfully. Two issues which probably wouldn’t dominate the ballot box if not for some very clever and very expensive engineering of the public debate.
rhino369 9y ago
The Supreme Court already heard this issue in the mid 2000s and found the FCC could regulate ISPs as title 1. They could reconsider, but I doubt they will.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
dpierce9 9y ago
Not a lawyer but I worked for a different agency. The burden is incredibly high here because courts provide a considerable amount of 'deference' (See Chevron Deference or Chevron v NRDC) to agencies as long as they follow the rules of the Administrative Procedures Act and their interpretation of the law is not off the wall.

shmerl 9y ago

Pai and his ISP masters know that. That probably was their plan all along. Get sued, then ask the Congress to pass a "law" that would "put the debate to rest", while not actually preventing any anti-competitive abuse because of all the holes in that law. Given current situation in the Congress you should expect that. The same Congress just voted for Pai.

r00fus 9y ago
GOP needs a solid defeat in 2018 or the Internet will become a lot more "comcastic".
- EGreg 9y ago
  That's what they said in 2016 but fewer people turned out to vote against Donald Trump than against Romney or McCain. And also GOP picked up a lot of senate seats.
- shmerl 9y ago
  I think the only way to really prevent that is strong and disruptive competition that will spook all the current slumbering monopolists. Google Fiber pretended to aim at that, but now it slowed to a crawl (it did cause some good ripple effects). Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it? Who knows, but I have little expectation from the Congress to do anything of value about it. When was the last time they did something good about technology polices? DMCA-1201 and CFAA aren't repealed. There is no meaningful copyright reform on the horizon, and so on. Net Neutrality will be another victim of this dysfunction.
  - X86BSD 9y ago
    Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into. And their cloud-based TV service is a tire fire.
    - shmerl 9y ago
      > Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into. They should have known it's a very long term investment. Why were they surprised that it takes time to build up the network? I'm more upset about their reaction, than about the fact that they didn't plan it better. They can make it all successful, but it's long term. Looks like they are affected by short term investors more now.
      - X86BSD 9y ago
        That has been a problem for them for some time. How many projects have they killed they folks relied on? Some engineers inside create an app or service and then they must move on internally and the app or service suffers from neglect for years then they kill it. You can't count on them to finish anything. They are bound to be replaced. They have nothing but ad revenue.
      - matt4077 9y ago
        They tried is as a test balloon and, with the new data they got, saw that they can't get the numbers to where they would need to be to be profitable. The alternative here isn't that they would run something of that size indefinitely, knowing that it will lose them money. It's Google behaving like every single other company currently in existence: deciding up front that it's too risky and not even trying. At least it created some nice data showing how the legacy ISPs react to competition. Just in case anyone ever needs to prove that this market isn't working.
        shmerl 9y ago
        Legacy ISPs managed it somehow? So I don't see why Google can't. Especially since technology has improved (microtrenching and etc.). If anyone, Google has enough money to pull it off and seriously compete with incumbents.
- kobeya 9y ago
  Internet neutrality is not a hot button issue for most of the voting demographic, nor should it arguably be. Definitely an upper middle class problem.
  - MBCook 9y ago
    Really? You don’t think middle or lower class people should worry about getting locked into an Internet where they have to pay extra to access the ‘good’ job sites or alternate media or where they have to pay $10/mo simply because everyone ‘has to have Facebook’ and that costs extra? The rich can afford to pay their way around stupid Comcast tiers.
    - vkou 9y ago
      That's all a problem, but a lot less important then whether or not you'll have health insurance next month, or whether your cousin will be shipped off to fight yet another war in the Middle East, or whether there will be coal jobs in your state (The answer is no, regardless of who you vote for, but at least one side will tell you that there will be.)
    - kobeya 9y ago
      Hrm, maybe I should explain. “Hot button issue” is actually a technical term in political science that has a relevant meaning here. One of the great quantitative results that has come out of political science in the last half century is the ability to model voter preferences, predict election outcomes within available uncertainties of measurement, and evaluate campaign strategies using the tools of linear algebra. The first-order approximation would be: assign a dimension to all issues on which candidates differ, for each voter assign a preference, and also for each preference assign a weight representing the priority the voter places of that issue over the others. Assume the candidate achieves all that they promise, so the outcome if they win is whatever their campaign platform says they will do. For each voter, calculate the magnitude of the difference between the voter’s preference vector and each candidate’s outcome vector, weighted by the voter’s priority vector. The candidate whose weighted outcome difference from the voter’s preferences is smallest gets their vote. You’ll have to either trust me this works, or delve into the polisci literature yourself. Barack Obama was one of the first presidential candidates to seriously use quantitative modeling of this sort, and it helped him win the election. Donald Trump’s campaign took it even further. The current state of the art, exemplified by the Trump campaign, is able to aggregate data from many sources including especially social networks and advertising profiles to build ridiculously detailed and fairly accurate predicted preference vectors for most of the voting population. They then segment these populations and serve them hyper-optimized political ads, sometimes even individually tailored, aimed to emphasize points of agreement between the candidate and the voter and points of disagreement between the voter and the other candidates, for the purpose of generating a second-order correction where each voter has a different view of the candidate designed to make him/her more agreeable to them. All interesting tech, albeit somewhat Orwellian in its consequences. Anyway, one outcome of this modeling validated by experimental data is that most voters’ priority vectors follow a power-law distribution, or something like it, meaning that a point of agreement or disagreement between the voter and the candidate on that issue trumps all others. If Alice thinks that abortion is baby murder, or if Bob is gay in a non-rainbow state and wants that to change ASAP, then it almost doesn’t matter on what other points the candidates differ. Alice will vote for the pro-life candidate, and Bob will vote for the gay-marriage candidate. Or as will often happen, voters who are suffering (no job, expensive health care, bad retirement benefits, etc.) will vote in the way that they think will better their lives, other factors be damned. These issues which dominate a voter’s choice, are hot-button issues. So back to the point I was making. I’m not saying that net neutrality is not important. What I’m saying is that in an election there are many different issues at play, of which net neutrality is one. Nearly every voter is driven by a small number of hot-button issues, and these are often things like their jobs, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and foreign policy generally, taxes, immigration, cost of education, cost of health care, etc. You’re going to have a veeery hard time convincing me — or more importantly, Joe Q. Public — that net neutrality trumps these issues. And that’s what you have to do for net neutrality to matter AT ALL at the ballot box. That’s not to say it can’t be done. That effectively what organizations like the National Rifle Association, or the National Right To Life have done with gun control and abortion, respectfully. Two issues which probably wouldn’t dominate the ballot box if not for some very clever and very expensive engineering of the public debate.

rhino369 9y ago

The Supreme Court already heard this issue in the mid 2000s and found the FCC could regulate ISPs as title 1. They could reconsider, but I doubt they will.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

dpierce9 9y ago

Not a lawyer but I worked for a different agency. The burden is incredibly high here because courts provide a considerable amount of 'deference' (See Chevron Deference or Chevron v NRDC) to agencies as long as they follow the rules of the Administrative Procedures Act and their interpretation of the law is not off the wall.