15 ms·
To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet
- thisisit 9y agoWhen I was reading this, I was reminded of a company - Blockstream. These guys are have a satellites which broadcasts bitcoin blockchain: https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/ I can be wrong but I wonder - what might be the impact of a non-neutral internet on cryptocurrencies? Obviously any impact will depend on how much of bitcoin or any cryptocurrencies volumes are from US. I tried to look it up and found this page: https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins
- xellisx 9y agoI would love to create my own neighborhood wired network, but up front cost would be a problem, and I don't think my neighbors care that much.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zanedb 9y agoDefinitely true. Supposedly Motherboard will be publishing some guides on this, so I'll have to wait and see how helpful those are.
- xellisx 9y agoI keep seeing stuff about using VPNs, but that be throttled easily. Wireless is just a mess and just that much more insecure/unreliable.
- tbabb 9y agoNo. To save the internet, we have to make the most gigantic stink the world has seen since the Trump election. The solution is not "give up and let this pass, and then quietly try to work around it." It's "make the people in power pay DEARLY for their transgressions."
- visarga 9y agoYour solution needs to be refreshed with each election, we need a permanent solution that won't be reversed 2 years later.
- aaronbrethorst 9y agoStep 1: Try to convince the FCC to not vote to kill NN. Step 2: Call your members of Congress and tell them to enshrine NN into law. Step 3: Vote your Rep out next year if they refuse to do what you ask for. Step 4: Vote out the President in 2020 if he vetoes NN. Pretty straightforward, imho.
- imglorp 9y agoTrouble is, Ajit gets up there and talks about competition being good for the consumer, and then all the rightwingers echo that "Bigly". As wrong as this is, it will be hard to vote someone out if the facts are muddled.
- tbabb 9y agoI think this can easily be made a bipartisan issue, in that it's the common man vs. big, rich, controlling corporations. If I were the telecoms (and telecom lackeys), that's the movement I'd be scared of.
- aaronbrethorst 9y agoI agree. It's a purely populist play, and we're in a populist mood as a country.
- tallanvor 9y agoYes, and the Republicans conveniently ignore that most consumers in the US have very little choice in ISPs. These days you probably have the option of DSL from your phone company or the offering from your cable company. Luckily some communities are setting up their own broadband services, but the telecom monopolies are doing their best to make it illegal for communities to do this.
- drewcon 9y agoAll revolution aside... I wonder if this might actually be the kick out of the nest for services like Starry need. https://starry.com https://starry.com Out helplessness on the choice side of internet service is almost entirely a function of paying to run wires under roads. Remove the wires and... Has seemed liked a nice to have most days...but now... negates the need for physical infrastructure to develop a network. The market could actually work as intended.
- rmason 9y agoI've met some of these people and they were very inspiring to me. Detroit has become a leader in mesh networking they have helped setup mesh networks in the US and overseas. If we want faster net connections that cost less they've shown us the path.
- rdtsc 9y ago> A future in which ISPs are owned by local governments, small businesses, nonprofit community groups, and the people they serve are the path forward and the only realistic way of ending big telecom’s stranglehold on America. I'd like that. These day internet access is more like a utility. It helps people telecommute, do banking, grocery shopping even, pay bills, etc. If municipalities can handle providing water and sewage they should be lay some cable or provide a wireless solution in a more rural area. At least there should be some provision where the big telecom companies cannot go around suing and bullying municipalities. Maybe have a Federal ban on states banning municipal ISPs. If Verizon or Comcast want to come in and sell super-premium FIOS packages with fast transfer rates, they should be able to, but they shouldn't be able to squash or fight against the municipal internet. The free market competition among the providers is just not happening and will probably never happen in a lot of areas. It has been enough years already, fiber technology is here, wireless as well, but hasn't helped enough. Time to stop pretending and using it as an excuse.
- Consultant32452 9y ago>The free market competition among the providers is just not happening and will probably never happen in a lot of areas. It has been enough years already, fiber technology is here, wireless as well, but hasn't helped enough. Time to stop pretending and using it as an excuse. It's important to remember that the FCC is our nation's censor, and will be far more cozy to government censorship of the internet than what we're used to. You're right that free market competition hasn't been as strong as it could/should be in the ISP market, but I doubt that the FCC piling on a bunch of regulations, increasing the barrier to entry even further is going to help. I fear whatever benefits we see will be only temporary and that overzealous FCC regulators will stifle internet innovation the same way it stifled telecommunications for over a century, resulting on Bell. TLDR: I'm generally for net neutrality, but I think the FCC taking over regulating the internet is going to have a lot of unintended consequences.
- apple4ever 9y agoExactly this. In fact, even if you support NN, you should oppose Title II NN. It literally does the opposite of what NN supporters think, plus it allows strong government regulation of the internet. I’m oppose to NN on principle (because it goes against the basic operation of the Internet and restrict innovation), but I’d much rather see a modern law passed than A law written 80 years used to implement it.
- djmetzle 9y agoI have a proposition: You know how Tor works? Onion routing? Send traffic encrypted multiple times through a list of nodes before exiting at an edge? What if everyone sent their traffic back and forth to eachother. One hop, encrypted, and then forwarded. Just like Tor, but a single hop. Not anonymized, just peer-to-peer distributed. If everyone did that (build it into browsers) the internet would function _full-mesh_. I mean, that's how IP works, right? Full mesh, peer-to-peer? Hey ISPs! Good luck filtering on the entire internet.
- dest 9y agoI guess they would put all P2P traffic on the low priority lane. Some part of the people would try the fast lane, because the slow one is too slow and they do not care enough about NN. In the end the P2P people would lose.
- curtisblaine 9y agoAnd that's precisely why Europe will be affected too. I'm thinking of distributed systems, like ipfs or tor, that would be impacted as a whole by slow p2p traffic.
- djmetzle 9y agoYep. It's a shame that everyone just wants to binge netflix and facebook. The _rest_ of the internet is inherently peer-to-peer.
- wav-part 9y agoI was just posting this. Its also low latency routing as tor router routes only for directly connected nodes where as internet router routes for all nodes. After certain network size, internet router will become too inefficient.
- awalton 9y agoIt's really, really easy for ISPs to just start making peer-to-peer connections of any kind slower than molasses while making white listed IPs from people who've paid the "High Speed Lane" tax travel at normal speeds. That kills your "Hey use a VPN/Tor/Other-Alternative-Routing-Mechanism" ideas dead. If you could manage to tunnel traffic through [Huge Internet Company], like if they started offering a VPN service, then maybe... but there's not a lot of incentive for any of them to host such a service. It'd almost be cheaper for them to build their own, second Internet altogether at that point - something I'm sure Google is kicking themselves over on the Google Fiber scaleback.
- jarcoal 9y agoMy ISP is a local mom-and-pop shop that is using fixed point wireless, which seems like a great solution because it doesn’t require digging up pavement, massively reducing startup costs.
- EGreg 9y agoHow about a decentralized internet software that works on local wifi and mesh networking and only needs to send its signals to the cloud when absolutely necessary? Watch this video to see what I mean: https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/the-future-of-decentralization/ https://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2017/08/the-future-of-decent... And this architecture: https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0 https://github.com/Qbix/architecture/wiki/Internet-2.0
- voycey 9y agoDecentralising the Internet is the only way we are going to be able to stop corporations from lobbying (aka bribing) the government to make decisions in their favour. Check out https://substratum.net/ https://substratum.net/ - they have an idea to do just that. As our computers get more and more powerful then there is no reason why we cant distribute more of what forces the internet to be centralised, if no one controls it then it can be free and open (which also raises a whole new set of problems but one step at a time!)
- whataretensors 9y agoIt would be really cool to see the rise of mesh networking from this + IOT. I also like the idea of using IOTA for metering mesh networks.
- pmilot 9y agoUnless I'm misunderstanding it, the Substratum project you've linked is attempting to implement a decentralized WEB, not a decentralized INTERNET. From what I gather, Substratum would still be running on the same internet backbone, and be subject to the same consequences if Net Neutrality is repelled.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y agoHypothetically a project like substratum could include internet bandwidth itself as another resource which is rewarded with substratum.
- pyvpx 9y agothe whole reason "net neutrality" is even a thing in the United States is because how one is able to access internet bandwidth. it's an duopoly at best and the majority have exactly ONE option for broadband internet access. without an access network (be that copper, fiber, or radio) internet bandwidth can't be delivered. the choke point is the modem. access networks are a natural monopoly and infrastructure to support an access network MUST be regulated like one in order for "market solutions" to prevail. but ATT, it's descendants, and the CableCo's have spent tens of millions on lobbying efforts to make sure that never, ever happens.
- henrixd 9y ago...with Blackjack and hookers.
- kenning 9y agowhoa am i on reddit?
- indubitable 9y agoThe somewhat ironic thing is that this is literally the core reason for the ideology of government being more hands off. Bad behavior enables competition. Google Fiber is an interesting case study. There are indeed major barriers to entry to competition in telecoms, both financial and regulatory, yet Google managed to overcome them in a variety of areas. However, after 6 years in business they only managed to obtain 0.07 million television subscribers and 0.45 million broadband subscribers. They've put all expansion plans on hold and have been downsizing current operations. The reasons for their failure are complex (for instance they discovered that in poorer regions, families were inexplicably not even willing to sign up for the free option - they responded with grants for digital literacy) but the fundamental problem is simply that they didn't get anywhere near the marketshare they expected. So thus in spite of what every inclining would lead us to believe, people didn't really feel incentivized enough to go through the hassle of moving away from Time Warner/Comcast. The masses move like molasses. And people only really feel incentivized to change things when actions against them become particularly onerous. I think we should not really make this sort of 'onery' unlawful, but instead embrace the positive change such negative actions can foster. Make companies consider not only profit, but ethics and consequences of unethical activity. The recent events with EA are a similar example. There are no real regulations in video games and so you ended up with EA turning a major franchise title into a burdensome 'fee-to-pay' style game and it finally resulted in real action from the consumers. Now people want to try to get laws stopping companies from including loot crates. In other words stopping companies from engaging in behavior that actually gets the masses to do the one thing that gets actual change from companies - speak with their wallet. Granted, this is uncomfortable given the monopolistic nature of Comcast/Time Warner. If no competition does emerge then instead you're getting screwed by the one and only real option you have for service. But as I think this article is showing, so long as companies know they can get the marketshare - options will emerge. The one major condition on all this is that companies must also be allowed to fail, regardless of any possible consequences. 'Too big to fail' means 'too big to ever be held accountable' which, in turn, means 'too big to exist.'
- debt 9y agoSneakernet
- jhoechtl 9y agoIsn't IPFS already there to fill that need? https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
- beardog 9y agoYou're getting the web confused with the net. Decentralizing the application layer is different from decentralizing the physical infrastructure, which is what is needed to maintain net neutrality.
- curtisblaine 9y agoYep, I think that ipfs, being peer to peer, would be actually negatively affected by p2p traffic being in the slower lane. Globally.
- gigama 9y agoI don't quite buy this suggestion. ISPs would easily be able to identify and block VPN traffic running over their lines. The best action here is to act while there is still time to change course. Another pressure point besides contacting your gov representatives (or visiting their offices in person!) is to contact Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and let them know that you, your friends and family will cancel contracts and boycott their services if they continue to support Pai and his dangerous agenda. What he is proposing would be like giving your telephone company discretionary control over which calls they let in or out and relegating the rest to busy signals.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- colejohnson66 9y ago> Another pressure point besides contacting your gov representatives (or visiting their offices in person!) is to contact Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and let them know that you, your friends and family will cancel contracts and boycott their services if they continue to support Pai and his dangerous agenda. The rep on the line might not even know what you’d be going on about and would just cancel your line without relaying the message.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- gigama 9y agoThen take it as an opportunity to patiently explain the issue to them. Perhaps they do not realize they are working for the Dark Side. And perhaps your explanation will enable them to understand similar calls from other customers.
- madshiva 9y agoLike net neutrality will come from U.S. or with President of U.S. Don't forgot, it's your boat that are sinking. Do you see U.S. falling down? because it's what happen.
- sctb 9y agoWe've already asked you to stop posting like this, so we've banned the account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll follow the guidelines in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Feniks 9y agoNN will always be under constant threat. My own country had it all enshrined in law only to be overruled by Brussels. You're fighting against an entire industry who will stop at nothing to expand profits.
- danetch 9y agoBrussel actually enforces nn.
- Zenka 9y agoThe EU enforces a less strict interpretation of NN. The Netherlands stricter law was therefore overruled with a softer version. This came to light when the ACM (The Dutch FCC if you will) fined T-Mobile for applying a zero rating on music streaming. T-Mobile argues in court they are allowed to do so by EU rule. The Judge agreed. https://www.wirelessweek.com/news/2017/04/t-mobile-netherlands-scores-zero-rating-win-court https://www.wirelessweek.com/news/2017/04/t-mobile-netherlan...
- tpxl 9y agoAs far as I know country law can be more strict than EU law, is that not so? In that case, the stricter law could not have been overruled with EU laws.
- pyvpx 9y ago"zero rating" is not conducive to neutral treatment of network traffic.
- danetch 9y agoYou can argue all this mess is about not enforcing trust laws in the first place
- libraryatnight 9y agothe nihilism that's infected HN is so disheartening. we're so screwed if this is what the conversation looks like on a forum for technologist entrepreneurs. Everything from, "protests don't matter," to "eh, it's not my country." This place used to be interesting. "Hacker" news, not really. "Grumpy programmers by trade" news fits better.
- craftyguy 9y agoWhen is the last time a protest stopped determined politicians/policy makers? Maybe the 1970s? These days, protests are a dime a dozen, and are only convincing to the protestors and no one else.
- drvdevd 9y agoYes we should be looking for technical solutions even if they seemingly don’t exist. I know political solutions do ... but this is Hacker News. There’s always a way.
- Nokinside 9y agoOn Last mile in copper or fiber networks becomes easily a market failure due to large capital cost. In many European countries (Finland for example) the last mile is divided by law into two services cable providers and internet provider. It can be the same, but other ISP's can get into business by making deal with the customer and renting the network. There are regulations for the maximum price of the rent.
- chx 9y agoIsrael implemented this long ago. Check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Israel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Israel > Every ADSL or cable Internet user has to pay separately to the infrastructure provider and to the ISP, due to competition laws. When I was there in 2007, I needed to struggle with getting PPTP and L2TP going on Linux. It was quite interesting! Now of course that's done by routers and you have wifi.
- frik 9y agoDuring dotCom era there was a Internet2 project. I remember PR statements dubbing it as the "new internet", replacing an decades old network with new infrastructure and modern protocols. It seems Internet2 project is still around, but pivoted a bit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet2
- apple4ever 9y agoNo, we shouldn’t save Net Neutrality. To save the internet, we must end it and realize it’s the best way to destroy the free and open internet.
- featherverse 9y agoRather than "build our own" we should take back what used to belongs to us in the first place. They say there's a shortage of qualified I.T. people. If you work for telecoms who support a non-neutral internet, then quit. Go on strike. Work only for companies who support Net Neutrality. Kill the enemy using free market capitalism.
- Ygg2 9y ago> If you work for telecoms who support a non-neutral internet, then quit. Go on strike. For shame Peter! That's class warfare.
- jcadam 9y ago> They say there's a shortage of qualified I.T. people. Whoever told you that is lying to you.
- featherverse 9y ago> Whoever told you that is lying to you. No. The key word in the statement is "qualified". The marketplace is flooded with unqualified candidates with 4 year degrees. Capability in the tech industry can't be taught in 4 years. It's a life-long passion. And those people are extremely rare. This is why you keep seeing preventable security breaches in giant corporations. They can't find competent employees.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago> "take back what used to belongs to us in the first place" Could you elaborate about how we used to be the owners of the ISPs? Are you referring to the use of eminent domain laws to lay cable?
- droidist2 9y agoI think they mean the internet in general, built originally by the US government.
- 9y ago
- notacoward 9y agoI'm in favor of network neutrality myself. My main criticism is that it doesn't go far enough, in that it only requires neutrality from network providers to content providers but not vice versa or like-to-like. But I do have a serious question for other supporters. How can so many of those who are usually anti-regulatory "free market" extremists also be so strongly in favor of this regulation? * This is their theory, not necessarily mine * Internet service is a market. In theory, without network-neutrality regulation, providers can charge extra for certain services but market forces will limit how bad that can get. You can't charge for something that people won't buy. Customers will go to competitors who offer what they think are more favorable terms, including competitors who claim no limits at all (even if the promises are misleading or impossible to keep). This already happens in other countries. People post the price sheets as support for network neutrality regulation, but those same price sheets are also evidence that lack of such regulation does not mean the end of the internet as we know it. As long as the content differentiation is explicit and subject to consumer choice, not behind-the-scenes discrimination, there should be no problem. * Now, back to my own thoughts * If somebody believes (as I do not) that markets are fully capable of regulating themselves in all necessary ways, why would they support regulation in this one case? Is it just because this particular regulation is seen as benefiting them personally? Is it because their "free market" beliefs are really pro-corporate beliefs, and network neutrality as currently defined benefits the corporations they like at the expense of the corporations they don't? Can anybody provide a convincing alternative free-market justification for network neutrality?
- jrs235 9y ago>How can so many of those who are usually anti-regulatory "free market" extremists also be so strongly in favor of this regulation? Because in the US, network providers (at least the last mile providers; those charging end consumers) are local monopolies. Most people in the US have one legit high speed internet option, a few have two. There is little competition and the barriers to entry for new comers is very high (cost of obtaining easements and running cable to every house). In situations like this, monopolies are to be regulated.
- notacoward 9y ago
- mparramon 9y agoguifi.net is already doing it in Catalonia and other parts of Europe: https://guifi.net/en/node/2413/view/map https://guifi.net/en/node/2413/view/map
- chx 9y agoNot wanting to tout my own horn but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15760556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15760556 I posted this exact thing as an answer to the developments yesterday.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- m3kw9 9y agoYou own internet will eventually be regulated if enough critical services creeps on it, the you could be back to square one
- omon 9y agoIf we could easily build our own internet then there would be no need to regulate the internet at all.
- haliax 9y agoThis isn't a solution by any stretch but I am curious, what's the stop me using a VPN provider (or an EC2 tunnel, etc) and tunneling all my traffic to prevent slowdowns? Yes, the ISP could throttle anything they don't recognize, but that seems incredibly risky, given that VPNs are used widely across enterprises in the US, and degrading people's work internet seems like a really terrible idea...
- HugoDaniel 9y agoThat could work on the "slow" option. The thing is that they will make money by forcing you to pay for what you want to see (not by forcing you to pay in their "everything" package). Say you buy their "netflix" package. Then you won't even be able to turn on your VPN because you will only be allowed to watch netflix. Now here is the deal: this kind of business model they are forcing does not work on the current switching model of the internet (but does on the phone/tv), because you can circumvent it down on the stack. Either by setting up a fake netflix server and/or forcing the routing table on your own machine, or some other kind of weird tunneling/workaround with packets to a supposed netflix server. Net neutrality is a hoax.
- droidist2 9y agoBut doesn't the ISP know what the Netflix servers' IP addresses are? How could you fake a Netflix server?
- awalton 9y agoAs much as I love the idea of locally building network infrastructure and making it a true commonly owned system... it doesn't work for rural areas. As soon as you hit the city limits, it's no longer the city's problem. We gave hundreds of billions of dollars to AT&T/Verizon to build infrastructure for everyone, and they took that money and told their shareholders "look how well we scammed the US!" What we should do is go back to those companies, tell them they've failed and owe us it back plus interest, and use that money at a federal level to build an internet backbone for every single US citizen, period - like the Federal Highway Administration, but for broadband. But, alas, the GOP will start screaming "Socialism" and that will never happen...