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For those who don't understand why net neutrality is important, it is worthwhile to read about the history of communications (telephone, radio, TV). There is an

For those who don't understand why net neutrality is important, it is worthwhile to read about the history of communications (telephone, radio, TV). There is an excellent book by Tim Wu called The Master Switch [0] which investigates the history of communications (with an American focus), describes how each industry start out open to all (farmers using fences for telephone, independent radio broadcasters), and each one collapsed into monopolies with a near-impossible barrier to entry for anybody else who wanted to do the same thing. Parallels are then drawn to the Internet, where if we're not paying attention to what is happening now, then the free and open nature of the Internet today will slowly vanish and be replaced by only the big sites who can afford to be on the Internet. [0]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/02/master-switch-tim-wu-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/02/master-switch-... (book review, you can find the actual book on Amazon or wherever)

antjanus 9y ago
Andre Staltz has a pretty good article[0] about how that collapse is already happening with the likes of Facebook, Google, and Amazon taking over every other site. [0]: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
bluetwo 9y ago
And our mistake here is not finding a way to explain it that doesn't require reading a book.
- shmerl 9y ago
  John Oliver found a good way to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.
  - dmix 9y ago
    > The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all. This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It wouldn't take much market research to see it's a terrible idea. Plus the huge technical challenge of filtering at the ISP level... this would be a huge boon for encryption and VPNs as well. No American ISP for the ~20yr timeframe before the FTC regulation was passed a few years ago had ever offered such an arrangement. Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either. Plenty of American ISPs have said they have zero intention of doing it either. This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, the technical hurdles, and obvious lack of business sense, etc has always been an adequate counter-balance to this idea. So I'm a bit confused why this is generating so much FUD over such a highly hypothetical and hand wavy scenario... as if the only thing stopping them from doing it was this three year old FTC regulation.
    - skywhopper 9y ago
      You're assuming that most people have access to more than one ISP (they don't), or that statements by ISPs about what they intend to do or not do are truthful (they aren't). Specifically statements promising they would never do anything that would break net neutrality rules, while arguing against the imposition of net neutrality rules, would not make sense. Why oppose something you have no intention of doing?
      - dmix 9y ago
        My counter point does not depend entirely on competition. That is merely one counter-balance available to much of the country who have more than one ISP available, of the many I mentioned (technical, marketing, business model). Why not create regulation in response to real scenarios that have actually happened instead of hypothetical ones that are already have plenty of other drawbacks?
- Mithaldu 9y ago
  Explaining isn't the crucial part. Everyone who hears it understands "ISPs get to decide which websites you can see with the basic package and more cost upgrades". The hard part is giving people something useful and worthwhile to do about it.
- CamperBob2 9y ago
  Tell them the story of Almon Brown Strowger, the 19th-century undertaker whose business mysteriously took a nosedive when the local telephone company hired an operator who was related to a rival funeral director. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through purely technical means. Even if there's not a word of truth to it, it's a completely realistic description of what consumers can expect in a world without net neutrality. It can be considered a modern-day Aesop fable. Once you've related the Strowger story, then you can speculate on how it might have unfolded if Ma Bell herself had owned the competing funeral home. That's basically where the Comcasts and Verizons of the world want to be.
  - rtx 9y ago
    Would it be any different than YC promoting its companies here.
    - CamperBob2 9y ago
      No, because YC doesn't take government subsidies to act as a dumb pipe. They also aren't a de-facto monopoly in any way, shape, or form. All of the incumbent ISPs are charged with stewardship of public resources to one extent or another, if only because they require right-of-way access. The fact that many Americans have a grand total of one decent broadband provider to choose from is another factor that has to be considered, but often isn't. Basically, net neutrality isn't a gift to the public, it's half of a longstanding bargain. The Trump administration proposes to unilaterally alter that bargain on behalf of corporate lobbyists who do not have consumers' interests in mind.
      - rtx 9y ago
        If wires are public resources the government should buy it outright instead of giving subsidies. Public resources should be publically owned.
frogpelt 9y ago
This Net Neutrality issue sounds similar to the issue America faced in the late 1800s with the railroads. Some shippers (Standard Oil) wanted to monopolize the rails or at least they wanted rebates for shipping their freight. Others argued that the rails should offer the same rates to all shippers since they were using eminent domain in some cases to obtain property and they should exist as a shared resource.
- himom 9y ago
  AT&T is rapidly becoming what it once was, especially if the TW merger goes through. We’d be renting Wi-Fi cards, access and with additional fees by the second and byte if they had their way.
  - Aloha 9y ago
    Worse. The old AT&T was heavily regulated, and provided lifetime employment with generous benefits to its employees. It was the largest employer after the Federal Government prior to divesture.
    - jfoutz 9y ago
      Also, 5 9s of uptime. They had many problems. Reliability was not one of them.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    AT&T is rapidly becoming what it once was... I'm more and more convinced that this was always the plan. The primary effect of the Telecom Act of 1996 has been to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from investors. All of the CLECs and other competitive types of telcos that sprouted in the spring of that law's optimism have gradually been wound back into the monopoly. Ma Bell (still for the moment two "Daughters Bell") has paid pennies on the dollar for equipment, marketing, vendor agreements, customers, etc. as these erstwhile competitors have gradually succumbed to the monopoly's failure to substantially abide by (and regulators' failure to enforce!) any of the pro-competitive measures in that law. In retrospect, it was inevitable. Therefore, it was planned from the beginning. Telco executives and bankers have personally extracted billions from all the mergers. Generations of citizens have swallowed the fiction that we ever tried telco competition in USA. Strictly regulated POTS has been replaced with totally unregulated "information services". Perennially-unprofitable operations like FairPoint and Hawaiian Telcom have been unloaded to fools like Carlyle. The inconvenient wall between local and long-distance is gone. The expensive nerds at Bell Labs got sold, so the world can look elsewhere for subsidized progress in basic technology. All in all, a pretty good deal for Ma Bell! Since it happened over the course of decades and Americans have short memories (and since the media that could remind us doesn't want to cross her), we didn't even notice it.
wuliwong 9y ago
There is a strongly contrasting view of the history of radio in the United States [1]. [1] https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-property-economics-history-and-future-wireless-technology https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-propert...
- wavefunction 9y ago
  Though this strongly contrasting view is not mainstream by any measure.
  - wuliwong 9y ago
    I think the Austrian school is considered legitimate school of economics though, right? It's not like these are amateur economists or anything.
    - wavefunction 9y ago
      I didn't say it's not a legitimate school of economics. I have 'The Road to Serfdom' sitting on my bookshelf among other works by members of the school. However I did claim that the thought that EM spectrum should be privatized is not a mainstream one. I imagine the more general idea that all public spaces and goods should be private is even less mainstream in the US, given the popularity of public roads, schools, parks etc.
    - wuliwong 9y ago
      @wavefunction I can't comment on your last message (I guess to prevent flamewars?), hopefully this doesn't get too confusing to follow. My understanding of the argument is that EM frequencies in a geography are a limited resource and therefore are best treated as property with "homesteading" giving the initial claim to that property. (Which re-reading what you wrote, I think you understand) The first time I heard that argument, I found it quite interesting. And in fact, I shared it because it appears not to be mainstream but well worth a look IMO. I do disagree with your characterization of the general discussion. I think parks and radio frequencies on the whole are treated differently by the govt. There are govt owned frequencies of radio which would be like a public park but I believe this discussion is more about the regulation of the private radio frequencies. There are lots of private frequencies, they are just distributed and regulated by the FCC. The question as I see it is would it have been better to let "homesteading" distribute the initial ownership or the FCC?
wang_li 9y ago
The problem with the current net neutrality debate is that it seems to stop at layer 3 of the ISO stack. There's no reason why we should have dozens of incompatible video calling apps, why media streaming only works with a particular vendor's application. Not to mention that many of the big players in silicon valley like to jump back and forth over the line of "is a provider" / "is not a provider". Twitter and Google and Facebook like to police the content on their systems, which is their right, but at the same time they like to hold up the DMCA safe harbor provision anytime someone finds copyrighted material on their networks. They have no problem banning unpopular parties from their networks while simultaneously profiting from clear copyright violations. We should insist that net neutrality extend all the way to layer 7.
- karmelapple 9y ago
  Focusing on even getting it to that point is important, though. I'd suggest let's focus our efforts on getting some bit of Net Neutrality written into law (not just a guideline by the FCC) to at least protect certain things, then move to improve that law over time. Let's not sacrifice the good for the perfect.
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Maybe, but it would be absolute folly to allow neutrality at layer 3 to be lost just to prove a point.
- zaroth 9y ago
  Wait, what? You think government regulation should dictate how I let competitors access my L7 application servers to host their own content in the name of "neutrality"? I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean. How could a "neutrality" argument possibly apply to my proprietary application stack?
  - isostatic 9y ago
    That's fine if you want to operate a proprietary platform, however you should be held liable for what your users do with it. Facebook etc want the control of a private operator but the protection of a common service, which seems wrong.
nerdponx 9y ago
Imagine having to fork over extra cash to your ISP in order to access your Bitcoin wallet. So much for radical decentralization.
slimshady94 9y ago
How would people react to the inaccessibility of porn sites? It is, after all, a huge part of many people's internet experience. And due to its taboo nature, it probably won't be publicly offered on the ISP plans.
- beardog 9y ago
  Porn is listed on most TV services list

antjanus 9y ago

Andre Staltz has a pretty good article[0] about how that collapse is already happening with the likes of Facebook, Google, and Amazon taking over every other site. [0]: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.html https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...

bluetwo 9y ago

And our mistake here is not finding a way to explain it that doesn't require reading a book.

shmerl 9y ago
John Oliver found a good way to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.
- dmix 9y ago
  > The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all. This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It wouldn't take much market research to see it's a terrible idea. Plus the huge technical challenge of filtering at the ISP level... this would be a huge boon for encryption and VPNs as well. No American ISP for the ~20yr timeframe before the FTC regulation was passed a few years ago had ever offered such an arrangement. Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either. Plenty of American ISPs have said they have zero intention of doing it either. This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, the technical hurdles, and obvious lack of business sense, etc has always been an adequate counter-balance to this idea. So I'm a bit confused why this is generating so much FUD over such a highly hypothetical and hand wavy scenario... as if the only thing stopping them from doing it was this three year old FTC regulation.
  - skywhopper 9y ago
    You're assuming that most people have access to more than one ISP (they don't), or that statements by ISPs about what they intend to do or not do are truthful (they aren't). Specifically statements promising they would never do anything that would break net neutrality rules, while arguing against the imposition of net neutrality rules, would not make sense. Why oppose something you have no intention of doing?
    - dmix 9y ago
      My counter point does not depend entirely on competition. That is merely one counter-balance available to much of the country who have more than one ISP available, of the many I mentioned (technical, marketing, business model). Why not create regulation in response to real scenarios that have actually happened instead of hypothetical ones that are already have plenty of other drawbacks?
Mithaldu 9y ago
Explaining isn't the crucial part. Everyone who hears it understands "ISPs get to decide which websites you can see with the basic package and more cost upgrades". The hard part is giving people something useful and worthwhile to do about it.
CamperBob2 9y ago
Tell them the story of Almon Brown Strowger, the 19th-century undertaker whose business mysteriously took a nosedive when the local telephone company hired an operator who was related to a rival funeral director. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through purely technical means. Even if there's not a word of truth to it, it's a completely realistic description of what consumers can expect in a world without net neutrality. It can be considered a modern-day Aesop fable. Once you've related the Strowger story, then you can speculate on how it might have unfolded if Ma Bell herself had owned the competing funeral home. That's basically where the Comcasts and Verizons of the world want to be.
- rtx 9y ago
  Would it be any different than YC promoting its companies here.
  - CamperBob2 9y ago
    No, because YC doesn't take government subsidies to act as a dumb pipe. They also aren't a de-facto monopoly in any way, shape, or form. All of the incumbent ISPs are charged with stewardship of public resources to one extent or another, if only because they require right-of-way access. The fact that many Americans have a grand total of one decent broadband provider to choose from is another factor that has to be considered, but often isn't. Basically, net neutrality isn't a gift to the public, it's half of a longstanding bargain. The Trump administration proposes to unilaterally alter that bargain on behalf of corporate lobbyists who do not have consumers' interests in mind.
    - rtx 9y ago
      If wires are public resources the government should buy it outright instead of giving subsidies. Public resources should be publically owned.

frogpelt 9y ago

This Net Neutrality issue sounds similar to the issue America faced in the late 1800s with the railroads. Some shippers (Standard Oil) wanted to monopolize the rails or at least they wanted rebates for shipping their freight. Others argued that the rails should offer the same rates to all shippers since they were using eminent domain in some cases to obtain property and they should exist as a shared resource.

himom 9y ago
AT&T is rapidly becoming what it once was, especially if the TW merger goes through. We’d be renting Wi-Fi cards, access and with additional fees by the second and byte if they had their way.
- Aloha 9y ago
  Worse. The old AT&T was heavily regulated, and provided lifetime employment with generous benefits to its employees. It was the largest employer after the Federal Government prior to divesture.
  - jfoutz 9y ago
    Also, 5 9s of uptime. They had many problems. Reliability was not one of them.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  AT&T is rapidly becoming what it once was... I'm more and more convinced that this was always the plan. The primary effect of the Telecom Act of 1996 has been to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from investors. All of the CLECs and other competitive types of telcos that sprouted in the spring of that law's optimism have gradually been wound back into the monopoly. Ma Bell (still for the moment two "Daughters Bell") has paid pennies on the dollar for equipment, marketing, vendor agreements, customers, etc. as these erstwhile competitors have gradually succumbed to the monopoly's failure to substantially abide by (and regulators' failure to enforce!) any of the pro-competitive measures in that law. In retrospect, it was inevitable. Therefore, it was planned from the beginning. Telco executives and bankers have personally extracted billions from all the mergers. Generations of citizens have swallowed the fiction that we ever tried telco competition in USA. Strictly regulated POTS has been replaced with totally unregulated "information services". Perennially-unprofitable operations like FairPoint and Hawaiian Telcom have been unloaded to fools like Carlyle. The inconvenient wall between local and long-distance is gone. The expensive nerds at Bell Labs got sold, so the world can look elsewhere for subsidized progress in basic technology. All in all, a pretty good deal for Ma Bell! Since it happened over the course of decades and Americans have short memories (and since the media that could remind us doesn't want to cross her), we didn't even notice it.

wuliwong 9y ago

There is a strongly contrasting view of the history of radio in the United States [1]. [1] https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-property-economics-history-and-future-wireless-technology https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-propert...

wavefunction 9y ago
Though this strongly contrasting view is not mainstream by any measure.
- wuliwong 9y ago
  I think the Austrian school is considered legitimate school of economics though, right? It's not like these are amateur economists or anything.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    I didn't say it's not a legitimate school of economics. I have 'The Road to Serfdom' sitting on my bookshelf among other works by members of the school. However I did claim that the thought that EM spectrum should be privatized is not a mainstream one. I imagine the more general idea that all public spaces and goods should be private is even less mainstream in the US, given the popularity of public roads, schools, parks etc.
  - wuliwong 9y ago
    @wavefunction I can't comment on your last message (I guess to prevent flamewars?), hopefully this doesn't get too confusing to follow. My understanding of the argument is that EM frequencies in a geography are a limited resource and therefore are best treated as property with "homesteading" giving the initial claim to that property. (Which re-reading what you wrote, I think you understand) The first time I heard that argument, I found it quite interesting. And in fact, I shared it because it appears not to be mainstream but well worth a look IMO. I do disagree with your characterization of the general discussion. I think parks and radio frequencies on the whole are treated differently by the govt. There are govt owned frequencies of radio which would be like a public park but I believe this discussion is more about the regulation of the private radio frequencies. There are lots of private frequencies, they are just distributed and regulated by the FCC. The question as I see it is would it have been better to let "homesteading" distribute the initial ownership or the FCC?

wang_li 9y ago

The problem with the current net neutrality debate is that it seems to stop at layer 3 of the ISO stack. There's no reason why we should have dozens of incompatible video calling apps, why media streaming only works with a particular vendor's application. Not to mention that many of the big players in silicon valley like to jump back and forth over the line of "is a provider" / "is not a provider". Twitter and Google and Facebook like to police the content on their systems, which is their right, but at the same time they like to hold up the DMCA safe harbor provision anytime someone finds copyrighted material on their networks. They have no problem banning unpopular parties from their networks while simultaneously profiting from clear copyright violations. We should insist that net neutrality extend all the way to layer 7.

karmelapple 9y ago
Focusing on even getting it to that point is important, though. I'd suggest let's focus our efforts on getting some bit of Net Neutrality written into law (not just a guideline by the FCC) to at least protect certain things, then move to improve that law over time. Let's not sacrifice the good for the perfect.
s73ver_ 9y ago
Maybe, but it would be absolute folly to allow neutrality at layer 3 to be lost just to prove a point.
zaroth 9y ago
Wait, what? You think government regulation should dictate how I let competitors access my L7 application servers to host their own content in the name of "neutrality"? I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean. How could a "neutrality" argument possibly apply to my proprietary application stack?
- isostatic 9y ago
  That's fine if you want to operate a proprietary platform, however you should be held liable for what your users do with it. Facebook etc want the control of a private operator but the protection of a common service, which seems wrong.

nerdponx 9y ago

Imagine having to fork over extra cash to your ISP in order to access your Bitcoin wallet. So much for radical decentralization.

slimshady94 9y ago

How would people react to the inaccessibility of porn sites? It is, after all, a huge part of many people's internet experience. And due to its taboo nature, it probably won't be publicly offered on the ISP plans.

beardog 9y ago
Porn is listed on most TV services list