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Nick Gillespie: Your plan will, according to a write up in Politico, and I think this is accurate, it quote, "will jettison rules that prohibit internet service

Nick Gillespie: Your plan will, according to a write up in Politico, and I think this is accurate, it quote, "will jettison rules that prohibit internet service providers from blocking or slowing web traffic or creating so called paid internet fast lanes." Question for you, do you think fast lanes will become a thing? What is the value of a internet fast lane? Ajit Pai: The answer to the first is we're not sure. We've never seen them before and that's part of the reason why I thought the rule in particular was, that was adopted in 2015, was very premature banning something that's simply didn't exist. I took the time to read Ajit's argument here. It's completely mislead. If murder hadn't happened in a certain area yet, would it be "too preemptive" to outlaw it? Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. This is outrageous.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
> "If murder hadn't happened in a certain area yet, would it be 'too preemptive' to outlaw it?" But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). > "Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now." But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem.
- jackmott 9y ago
  >But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. yes we do
- saulrh 9y ago
  > But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. I think that this is the part that I can't comprehend. The railroads misbehaved so badly that the government had to break rail transportation as an industry to kill them. Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. Bell's abuse of its monopoly was similarly severe. How do people hold this belief without becoming laughingstock?
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. No. There's actually a very healthy cargo rail system and relatively little trucking is truly long haul.
    - saulrh 9y ago
      According to the DOT [1] it looks like my intuition is a bit out of date. Right now US freight about even, trucking still a little bit ahead by ton-mile. Ten years ago rail carried 2/3 as much freight as trucks. Last-mile delivery on trucks (from the rail station to the point of use) is taken care of by the unit of measurement (one ton of freight traveling one mile), so I think that those numbers are relatively reasonable. So I'll admit: fair enough, the rail industry is still healthy and carrying a good amount of cargo. I'll withdraw the wording; we do not in fact use long-haul trucks for everything. The fact that trucks are competing with rail at all, however, given the geographical extent of the US and how horrible long-haul trucking is, I believe makes me stand by my claim that the US rail industry was broken and never recovered. It frankly astonishes me that driving something down the highway is even remotely financially effective in comparison to rail freight. And, of course, none of this is relevant to my original point: the railroads abused their powers to an astonishing degree and the government was forced to smash them for the good of the economy. Is it obvious to me that today's ISPs are following in the footsteps of yesterday's railroads and telephones and I don't understand how people convince themselves otherwise. [1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_50.html https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
      - thinkloop 9y ago
        It's wasn't obvious to me that trucking is much less energy effecient than rail. According to treehugger.com rail achieves "400 ton-miles per gallon whereas trucks currently hover around 130 ton-miles per gallon" [1]. I wonder why that would be - rubber tires vs steel-on-steel? Traffic? There isn't much traffic during the majority of a long-haul and the last few miles have to be done by truck anyway. [1] https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-the-greenest-freight-carrier.html https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-th...
- rectang 9y ago
  But the beneficiaries of your "net freedom" are a handful of regional monopoly ISPs who are protected by regulations that realistically won't ever be rolled back.
  - jquery 9y ago
    Pre-2015 - keep the govt out of our internet! 2017 - save us government we need your kind regulations! No thanks. It’s amazing what a little bit of polishing a turd and renaming it will do.
    - extra88 9y ago
      Wrong. Net neutrality proponents have been advocating for the FCC's pro-NN actions long before 2015, the problem was courts kept shooting them down because they said (probably correctly) that they didn't use their authority the right way.
      - jquery 9y ago
        Most people want NN, when it comes to censorship (this is why I use Sonic.net). They don't want NN when it comes to gaming latency vs. email latency. There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. This is why we should punt to Congress that ensures NN applies to the First Amendment but not to voluntary trade.
        comex 9y ago
        > There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. No it doesn't. The FCC's net neutrality orders have always included an exception for "reasonable network management", most recently defined as: > (f) Reasonable network management. A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service. (emphasis mine; source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2) Prioritizing gaming latency is clearly a "primarily technical" concern rather than a matter of "business practices" - at least as long as the ISP didn't try to charge game publishers for the service. So it would be fine.
- veidr 9y ago
  A lot of proponents of what you call "net freedom" lie about fast lanes or wave their hands and pretend that won't happen, though, because they are deeply unpopular with a huge majority of internet users.
- badestrand 9y ago
  > But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen At least in Germany planning a murder is illegal. Just like preparing a terrorist attack is - otherwise the police wouldn't be allowed to stop it. Also Wiki: "In some jurisdictions, the very act of preparing for a crime is a criminal offense in itself" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation) For the US, interesting read: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-basics/incomplete-crimes-conspiracy-attempt-solicitation.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-bas...
  - Endy 9y ago
    "Conspiracy to commit murder" is a crime. So, there's that.
- cmurf 9y ago
  What sort of idiotic nonsense is this? The law absolutely provides for law enforcement intervention to stop a murder from happening, and to charge the perpetrator(s) with attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder. And I'm sure some people think murder is not a problem, but most of the rest of us think they're also crazy. You know, if the ISPs were better at selling this particular turd sandwich, or turd polishing it at least, what they'd do is say they intend to charge astrometric tons more per unit of spam, email and crappy ads, that slow down people's machines and disproportionately suck up internet resources. But they aren't. So why do they want this? To do exactly the same f'd up shit they've been doing with cable TV.
  - sctb 9y ago
    We've asked you several times to stop breaking the guidelines. Would you please try to do better? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- zamalek 9y ago
  > Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. It's called shaping and you easily pay 2x the price to avoid it. Everyone above the poverty line pays.
  - notyourday 9y ago
    No, it is called PNIs to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks where whoever puts the PNIs still pays to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks to reach their eyeballs over those PNIs.
    - ReverseCold 9y ago
      PNIs?
      - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
        Private Network Interconnect "With peering, there are two methods that connectivity is formed on. The first is where direct connectivity is established between individual networks routers with multiple 10Gigabit Ethernet or 100Gigabit Ethernet links. This sort of connectivity is known as “private peering” or PNI (Private Network Interconnect)."[0] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-and-traffic-engineering/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-a...
  - another-dave 9y ago
    Is traffic shaping website specific? I thought it was just related to packet size, etc. — as in, British Telecom may throttle bandwidth at peak times for data that looks like it may be videos, torrents etc. In my mind, this is very different to allowing YouTube load faster than Vimeo
    - dx034 9y ago
      Haven't heard of shaping before in the UK. I'm not aware there's any form of payment for prioritised traffic, at least not for broadband. On the contrary, BT participates heavily in LINX, the London network exchange. Speed differences will happen though, e.g. I notice that Netflix sometimes tends to be a bit slower but that doesn't improve using a VPN so that I guess it's not BT's fault.
- Griffinsauce 9y ago
  Wait, "net freedom" seriously? That's a cynical name considering what that choice entails. If you called it "corporate freedom", sure.
- tambienben 9y ago
  >But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. And they literally wouldn't be if internet service was delivered in a free market. The problem is that the market isn't free. ISPs have spent years rigging the market in their favor, politically. The landscape is already hostile to the consumer--they intend to make it more so.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    That's why the law should dissociate the "tubes" from the service providers. Let any company operate on the infrastructure with their own policies as long as they rent the lines, and the lines should be traffic agnostic by definition.
    - alansammarone 9y ago
      That's by far the best solution.
    - tambienben 9y ago
      What happens when the highest bidder rents up all of the infrastructure? I believe your suggestion is already practiced with phone carriers. The infrastructure is finite & there are physical bandwidths limitations, at least currently.
- Joeri 9y ago
  Even the language is wrong. Getting rid of net neutrality doesn’t introduce fast lanes, it introduces slow lanes. Nobody will get faster service than today, but some will get slower service.
  - derefr 9y ago
    Some people could get faster service than they do today, in the sense that a given flow (e.g. VoIP data) might go from having equal QoS priority to having higher QoS priority, meaning that under congestion, their flow might go from being slow (before) to being the-speed-they're-paying-for. Of course, that would come at the expense of other flows (e.g. BitTorrent) having lower relative QoS priority, making them slower under congestion. It's zero-sum. This type of flow management is already how VoLTE flows are prioritized on LTE (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); I wouldn't be surprised to see land-line ISPs implement it.
    - nerdponx 9y ago
      It's zero-sum Not so fast. It's zero-sum if and only if call Internet subscribers have the same ability to pay for the service. If any user has a very high willingness to pay, but does not have the resources to pay it, then this amounts to a transfer of "wealth" (i.e. bandwidth) from that user to another who might not value it as much. It's not hard to construct utility curves in which this decreases total welfare. That said, QoS is probably not the concern here. This is very much not a zero-sum proposal.
    - Fnoord 9y ago
      The net neutrality in the EU isn't perfect, but it does allow for QoS for things like VoIP. EDIT: Example: Free Music Streaming by T-Mobile [1] is active in EU as well. So if you stream from Spotify its "free" yet when you stream from your home server, via a VPN, or an unsupported service it isn't "free". [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-data-used-with-spotify-pandora-itunes-radio-and-certain-other-music-services/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-da...
    - 9y ago
- ikurei 9y ago
  > But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). Murders are punished after they happen. But a plot to murder is in itself a crime. Also, the fact that punishments come after the fact has nothing to do with this. Murder isn't banned after it happens. It's banned before it happens. Lastly, you say "the law only acts retroactively". The main purpose of punishing past actions is to disuade people from doing them in the future. If I hate my boss but I decide not to murder him because I don't want my child to grow with me in prison, the law has stopped a crime before it happens.
- Molaxx 9y ago
  Murders are illegal "upfront". The regulator declared it illegal. The police would definitely stop a murder attempt.
- loup-vaillant 9y ago
  Wait a minute, the opposite of net neutrality is called "net freedom"? This is sick (the lack of net neutrality is more likely to reduce freedoms than to promote them). If you remotely support net neutrality, please never use that term again. This is self defeating.
  - Angostura 9y ago
    The freedom in this case is for the ISPs.
  - sambe 9y ago
    I'm pro-net neutrality and I'm against dishonest marketing, but I think overall it's important to take the higher ground and remain intellectually honest. Doing otherwise results in a mud-slinging contest. Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. That is undeniable. There many cases where we restrict freedoms for the greater good, but I don't like to pretend we are not doing so in those cases. I'd also add that freedom is not the right to demand other people give you something you want. I wouldn't say that I've lost my freedoms if there are no good ISPs left after the regulatory change. Everyone involved can still either choose an existing provider or set up their own. We have monopoly/anti-trust laws when that ceases to be the case. Of course, this may not be the efficient path to a world that a huge majority of people want - which is why I slightly side with net neutrality.
    - marcosdumay 9y ago
      > Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. Then go ahead and call it "corporate freedom". The network isn't getting any more free without neutrality.
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        An ISP doesn't necessarily have to be a corporate entity. It could be a municipality (e.g. city of Chattanooga) or hypothetically owned by residents directly.
- musage 9y ago
  > But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, No, but it does outlaw it before it happens. The question isn't "is it happening at the moment", but "should it ever happen".
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. But the reply was in reply to Ajit's position that "we don't know what will happen because we don't have them".
- mosselman 9y ago
  " proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem." Don't care whether there will be a problem with how the internet works as they will become filthy rich. That is why they want to kill net neutrality; dollar dollar bills. They couldn't care less about the user experience.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. “network freedom” was the FCC’s original name for net neutrality before it shifted to “open internet”; because it protected end-user freedom. Using “net freedom” to refer to the abolition of that protection is, well, about as honest as the rest of the anti-neutrality effort.
  - libertyEQ 9y ago
    Is the internet network infrastructure not owned by corporations, and isn't this giving them the freedom to do with their asserts as they see fit?
- likelynew 9y ago
  > But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). In a way the law tries to accomplish this by limiting ways like guns, bombs and sometimes doing checks randomly or based on suspicion.
of 9y ago
> Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. Which countries?
- xpac 9y ago
  Portugal. https://mobile.twitter.com/rokhanna/status/923701871092441088 https://mobile.twitter.com/rokhanna/status/92370187109244108...
  - dingaling 9y ago
    As was pointed-out repeatedly yesterday, those are add-ons for mobile data. You pay your base fee ( to access anything ) and you can then add particular bundles to get flat-rated access to certain websites. Or you can just continue to pay by the MB.
    - xpac 9y ago
      You're right on that. One could draw a comparison between what these packages mean - they only bundle the big services, making it even harder for small alternatives to compete. Same would be possible if ISPs would start to play the big money game the other way round - serving faster access on cable lines, which I would view essentially as the "landline" version of free traffic on mobile connections.
    - freeflight 9y ago
      > As was pointed-out repeatedly yesterday, those are add-ons for mobile data. I don't see how that changes anything about the situation. Just because mobile providers have already been far more ruthless doesn't suddenly excuse these practices, some would argue that mobile providers have pretty much normalized this in the very first place. I consider the vast majority of mobile plans, with data volume caps, straight up rip-offs: The moment you go past your volume cap you might as well not have any plan at all, as the throttled bandwidths usually ain't even fast enough for just regular browsing on the www. Yes, I realize there are differences in the medium, mobile being shared and all, I still can't shake the feeling that the vast majority of mobile providers use this as an excuse for not expanding capacities and instead nickle&dimming everybody trough data volume.
Nokinside 9y ago
The net neutrality laws prohibit anti-competitive blocking and "throttling" of Internet services or discriminating by protocol, ip-adress, application, etc. What should be outside net neutrality laws are protocols that leave the customer and applications in control. There is nothing wrong with using Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP), DSCP and IPv6 flow labels to get QoS that differ from the dumb pipe. Many future applications require it. - Online games might want to request low lag. - Streaming services might want constant bandwidth with less strict lag requirements. - File downloads might be OK with bursts and pauses as long as the best effort throughput is good. - Safety-critical applications like, robot cars, remote surgery or emergency messaging, need guarantees that discriminate against other uses.
- lbstr_ftw 9y ago
  > Safety-critical applications like, robot cars As someone who worked on robot cars before it was cool (Urban Challenge, wut up), I can assure you, Net Neutrality has ZERO to do with safety in autonomous cars. And if you think it has anything to do with it, you need to be kept far, far... very far away from ever working on them.
- dtech 9y ago
  But who is going to determine what gets which priority at what price? The only one who can is the ISP and I don't trust them.
  - Nokinside 9y ago
    Customer determines by requesting QoS for connection. ISP sells service with fixed price that states what kind of QoS requests it can fulfill. Net neutrality prevents the ISP from setting them on their own.
  - drvdevd 9y ago
    If any positive effect will come from the rollback of net neutrality, it's that more people in the US may realize that ISPs are generally adverserial. They have been for a while.
- 9y ago
VeronicaJJ123 9y ago
I support Ajit's argument here. Fast lanes exist in other countries and it is saving money for them.
- libraryatnight 9y ago
  i don't know if it's saving money, I can't find information on that right now, but it does seem like a horrible situation to be in if you want to start a competing service with a company that's already established and included in an ISP plan. The fact that he is trying to sell this as a repeal of regulatory overreach makes me kind of sick to my stomach. And, it's apparently an overreach because it solves a problem that didn't have a chance to come about? I feel like he's bullshitting me. Regardless, I like my internet access right now, so what problem is he solving for me or the rest of the public by doing this? If it's that these fast lanes will save us money it better be an enormous chunk of money to merit a such significant shift in the way I experience the internet.
- takeda 9y ago
  Saving if you mean they are even less incentivised to increase their capacity, because less capacity means more people will purchase those fast lanes? Don't you understand that the capacity issue was artificially created to push this agenda? There was blog article from level3 showing the capacity issue was coming down to enabling another port[1], perhaps purchasing extra transciever that costs just few thousand (level3 offered to even purchase one for them if they can't afford it) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140907021805/http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140907021805/http://blog.level...
duckMuppet 9y ago
Pai gave a pretty complete interview with Tech Policy Podcast yesterday and went in depth with much of what he was thinking. Tech Policy Podcast: #206: The Future of Internet Regulation w/ FCC Chairman Ajit Pai http://podcast.techfreedom.org/e/206-the-future-of-internet-regulation-w-fcc-chairman-ajit-pai/ http://podcast.techfreedom.org/e/206-the-future-of-internet-... But, I think Robert Graham summed it up pretty well when he said "you believe the FCC should allow companies to bend the rules when it's in the interests of customers, then you don't believe in NetNeutrality." Lots of politics and emotion in the hysteria, very little sound reasoning.
akerro 9y ago
He's also lying, there are fast lanes in US already: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2226901/opensource-subnet/netflix-is-already-speeding-along-comcast-s-internet-fast-lane.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2226901/opensource-subn... We learnt about this from Snowdens documents in 2014.
- lclarkmichalek 9y ago
  You should not have needed the Snowden documents to learn about the existence of peering agreements. The issue is ISPs requiring compensation for the peering agreement.
  - revelation 9y ago
    This is where we get into the difficulty of what is net neutrality. Taking compensation for a peering agreement is perfectly fine if it's imbalanced. What net neutrality should prevent is, ceteris paribus, asking for $X from YouTube and $Y >> $X from Netflix because you figure your dying cable business will benefit from less competition. Ideally, net neutrality would be FRAND for peering agreements: you can't deny anyone if they are happy to pay market rate, and market rate is what you charge everyone else, plus minus.
    - sologoub 9y ago
      It’s absolutely not fine if your customers are already paying you specifically to connect to Netflix, which is an extremely common use and why we have the bottleneck in the first place. The imbalance of the traffic has little to do with what we have here, since the telco is specifically paid to deliver that traffic by consumers. Charging on both ends is very profitable, but is definitely double-dipping. Your phone provider doesn’t charge you more to receive calls from large customer care call centers when you have a problem and request a call back. The call center may get charged more by their provider if their call pattern is problematic, but your provider doesn’t stop the call from going through. It is really not any different with internet networks and why common carrier rules make a lot of sense. These same rules also provide a lot of liability protection for the carriers, which I’m guessing they have negotiated to keep somehow.
Delmania 9y ago
Make no mistake, Pai is a former Verizon lawyer, he's not misled as he is intentionally misleading. He knows very well the ISPs will exploit as much as they can and then rely on a slow legal system to keep it going. He knows very well the ISPs want the benefits of being a monopoly with none of the regulations. Why do you think he prematurely said the states will not be able to pass their own net neutrality laws? The main ISPs in this nation are some of the most corrupt, unethical, and anti-consumer organizations around, and because there's no competiton (and they do work hard to keep it that way). While I agree with Pai that we need more competition, repealing NN will not do that.
- omon 9y ago
  He is specifically talking about blocking web traffic, "The answer to the first is we're not sure", not fast lanes. Repealing NN will do that, every time you have regulations you have to hire another team of lawyers and accountants; which only large corporations can afford––it's just another barrier of entry to market.
  - throwanem 9y ago
    The barriers to entry in the ISP market right now are the large corporations, which keep doing adorable things like suing would-be municipal competitors out of existence. The claim that regulation is the problem here, rather than a matter of mere ideological opposition, is a claim desperately in need of some kind of substantiation. And the idea of empowering oligopolists even further, by relaxing restrictions designed to prevent them engaging in rentiership, is an idea in desperate need of anything concrete to show it's worth implementing.
  - twhb 9y ago
    He was asked two questions then began his response with “the answer to the first is”, I think it’s much more reasonable to interpret that as the first question.
  - ytpete 9y ago
    Except we have seen cases of blocking before in the US, so even by that interpretation he's misleading people: in 2005, North Carolina-based ISP (and phone company) Madison River blocked customers from using Vonage. More recently, Verizon blocked its customers from installing Google Wallet on their phones and AT&T tried to block its customers from using Skype on iPhones...
dragonwriter 9y ago
> The answer to the first is we're not sure. We've never seen them before You’ve (the FCC) seen abd addressed seen and acted against selective slow lanes, (intentionally inhibited traffic) which are the same thing as fast lanes, just with which side is the “default” switched. And you've seen paid prioritization fast lanes in foreign markets without the FCC’s 13-year history of pro-neutrality policies. So this is either misleadingly selective or just plain outright lying, but then that's true of basically everything Pai has said about neutrality since joining the FCC.
cholantesh 9y ago
Source, for those wondering: https://reason.com/archives/2017/04/26/fcc-ajit-pai-net-neutrality-internet/ https://reason.com/archives/2017/04/26/fcc-ajit-pai-net-neut...
kakarot 9y ago
I thought the rule in particular was, that was adopted in 2015, was very premature banning something that's simply didn't exist. If I had to start a new society tomorrow and I needed a quick list of things that should be illegal, I think I could figure out things like "Don't rape, murder, or steal" before having to actually witness someone rape, murder, or steal.
kelnos 9y ago
The bottom line is that he's flat-out lying. Pre-2015, ISPs weren't classified under Title II. The unspoken (and occasionally spoken, when disagreements came up) agreement was that the ISPs wouldn't violate net neutrality principles, and the FCC would leave them alone and not classify them under Title II (which introduces more pain for ISPs than just net neutrality concerns). In 2015, Verizon decided not to play ball anymore, and start violating net neutrality principles. They won a court case saying that the FCC couldn't regulate them in this way without Title II. They thought they had the political/lobbying clout to avoid the Title II classification despite that. Turns out they were wrong. So clearly Pai has his agenda and is just lying to support it. ISPs have absolutely tried to do fast-lane-style bullshit in the past, and were stopped first by the threat of Title II, and then later by Title II itself.

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago

> "If murder hadn't happened in a certain area yet, would it be 'too preemptive' to outlaw it?" But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). > "Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now." But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem.

jackmott 9y ago
>But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. yes we do
saulrh 9y ago
> But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. I think that this is the part that I can't comprehend. The railroads misbehaved so badly that the government had to break rail transportation as an industry to kill them. Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. Bell's abuse of its monopoly was similarly severe. How do people hold this belief without becoming laughingstock?
- ghaff 9y ago
  >Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. No. There's actually a very healthy cargo rail system and relatively little trucking is truly long haul.
  - saulrh 9y ago
    According to the DOT [1] it looks like my intuition is a bit out of date. Right now US freight about even, trucking still a little bit ahead by ton-mile. Ten years ago rail carried 2/3 as much freight as trucks. Last-mile delivery on trucks (from the rail station to the point of use) is taken care of by the unit of measurement (one ton of freight traveling one mile), so I think that those numbers are relatively reasonable. So I'll admit: fair enough, the rail industry is still healthy and carrying a good amount of cargo. I'll withdraw the wording; we do not in fact use long-haul trucks for everything. The fact that trucks are competing with rail at all, however, given the geographical extent of the US and how horrible long-haul trucking is, I believe makes me stand by my claim that the US rail industry was broken and never recovered. It frankly astonishes me that driving something down the highway is even remotely financially effective in comparison to rail freight. And, of course, none of this is relevant to my original point: the railroads abused their powers to an astonishing degree and the government was forced to smash them for the good of the economy. Is it obvious to me that today's ISPs are following in the footsteps of yesterday's railroads and telephones and I don't understand how people convince themselves otherwise. [1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_50.html https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
    - thinkloop 9y ago
      It's wasn't obvious to me that trucking is much less energy effecient than rail. According to treehugger.com rail achieves "400 ton-miles per gallon whereas trucks currently hover around 130 ton-miles per gallon" [1]. I wonder why that would be - rubber tires vs steel-on-steel? Traffic? There isn't much traffic during the majority of a long-haul and the last few miles have to be done by truck anyway. [1] https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-the-greenest-freight-carrier.html https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-th...
rectang 9y ago
But the beneficiaries of your "net freedom" are a handful of regional monopoly ISPs who are protected by regulations that realistically won't ever be rolled back.
- jquery 9y ago
  Pre-2015 - keep the govt out of our internet! 2017 - save us government we need your kind regulations! No thanks. It’s amazing what a little bit of polishing a turd and renaming it will do.
  - extra88 9y ago
    Wrong. Net neutrality proponents have been advocating for the FCC's pro-NN actions long before 2015, the problem was courts kept shooting them down because they said (probably correctly) that they didn't use their authority the right way.
    - jquery 9y ago
      Most people want NN, when it comes to censorship (this is why I use Sonic.net). They don't want NN when it comes to gaming latency vs. email latency. There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. This is why we should punt to Congress that ensures NN applies to the First Amendment but not to voluntary trade.
      - comex 9y ago
        > There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. No it doesn't. The FCC's net neutrality orders have always included an exception for "reasonable network management", most recently defined as: > (f) Reasonable network management. A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service. (emphasis mine; source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2) Prioritizing gaming latency is clearly a "primarily technical" concern rather than a matter of "business practices" - at least as long as the ISP didn't try to charge game publishers for the service. So it would be fine.
veidr 9y ago
A lot of proponents of what you call "net freedom" lie about fast lanes or wave their hands and pretend that won't happen, though, because they are deeply unpopular with a huge majority of internet users.
badestrand 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen At least in Germany planning a murder is illegal. Just like preparing a terrorist attack is - otherwise the police wouldn't be allowed to stop it. Also Wiki: "In some jurisdictions, the very act of preparing for a crime is a criminal offense in itself" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation) For the US, interesting read: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-basics/incomplete-crimes-conspiracy-attempt-solicitation.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-bas...
- Endy 9y ago
  "Conspiracy to commit murder" is a crime. So, there's that.
cmurf 9y ago
What sort of idiotic nonsense is this? The law absolutely provides for law enforcement intervention to stop a murder from happening, and to charge the perpetrator(s) with attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder. And I'm sure some people think murder is not a problem, but most of the rest of us think they're also crazy. You know, if the ISPs were better at selling this particular turd sandwich, or turd polishing it at least, what they'd do is say they intend to charge astrometric tons more per unit of spam, email and crappy ads, that slow down people's machines and disproportionately suck up internet resources. But they aren't. So why do they want this? To do exactly the same f'd up shit they've been doing with cable TV.
- sctb 9y ago
  We've asked you several times to stop breaking the guidelines. Would you please try to do better? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
zamalek 9y ago
> Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. It's called shaping and you easily pay 2x the price to avoid it. Everyone above the poverty line pays.
- notyourday 9y ago
  No, it is called PNIs to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks where whoever puts the PNIs still pays to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks to reach their eyeballs over those PNIs.
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    PNIs?
    - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
      Private Network Interconnect "With peering, there are two methods that connectivity is formed on. The first is where direct connectivity is established between individual networks routers with multiple 10Gigabit Ethernet or 100Gigabit Ethernet links. This sort of connectivity is known as “private peering” or PNI (Private Network Interconnect)."[0] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-and-traffic-engineering/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-a...
- another-dave 9y ago
  Is traffic shaping website specific? I thought it was just related to packet size, etc. — as in, British Telecom may throttle bandwidth at peak times for data that looks like it may be videos, torrents etc. In my mind, this is very different to allowing YouTube load faster than Vimeo
  - dx034 9y ago
    Haven't heard of shaping before in the UK. I'm not aware there's any form of payment for prioritised traffic, at least not for broadband. On the contrary, BT participates heavily in LINX, the London network exchange. Speed differences will happen though, e.g. I notice that Netflix sometimes tends to be a bit slower but that doesn't improve using a VPN so that I guess it's not BT's fault.
Griffinsauce 9y ago
Wait, "net freedom" seriously? That's a cynical name considering what that choice entails. If you called it "corporate freedom", sure.
tambienben 9y ago
>But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. And they literally wouldn't be if internet service was delivered in a free market. The problem is that the market isn't free. ISPs have spent years rigging the market in their favor, politically. The landscape is already hostile to the consumer--they intend to make it more so.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  That's why the law should dissociate the "tubes" from the service providers. Let any company operate on the infrastructure with their own policies as long as they rent the lines, and the lines should be traffic agnostic by definition.
  - alansammarone 9y ago
    That's by far the best solution.
  - tambienben 9y ago
    What happens when the highest bidder rents up all of the infrastructure? I believe your suggestion is already practiced with phone carriers. The infrastructure is finite & there are physical bandwidths limitations, at least currently.
Joeri 9y ago
Even the language is wrong. Getting rid of net neutrality doesn’t introduce fast lanes, it introduces slow lanes. Nobody will get faster service than today, but some will get slower service.
- derefr 9y ago
  Some people could get faster service than they do today, in the sense that a given flow (e.g. VoIP data) might go from having equal QoS priority to having higher QoS priority, meaning that under congestion, their flow might go from being slow (before) to being the-speed-they're-paying-for. Of course, that would come at the expense of other flows (e.g. BitTorrent) having lower relative QoS priority, making them slower under congestion. It's zero-sum. This type of flow management is already how VoLTE flows are prioritized on LTE (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); I wouldn't be surprised to see land-line ISPs implement it.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    It's zero-sum Not so fast. It's zero-sum if and only if call Internet subscribers have the same ability to pay for the service. If any user has a very high willingness to pay, but does not have the resources to pay it, then this amounts to a transfer of "wealth" (i.e. bandwidth) from that user to another who might not value it as much. It's not hard to construct utility curves in which this decreases total welfare. That said, QoS is probably not the concern here. This is very much not a zero-sum proposal.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    The net neutrality in the EU isn't perfect, but it does allow for QoS for things like VoIP. EDIT: Example: Free Music Streaming by T-Mobile [1] is active in EU as well. So if you stream from Spotify its "free" yet when you stream from your home server, via a VPN, or an unsupported service it isn't "free". [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-data-used-with-spotify-pandora-itunes-radio-and-certain-other-music-services/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-da...
  - 9y ago
ikurei 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). Murders are punished after they happen. But a plot to murder is in itself a crime. Also, the fact that punishments come after the fact has nothing to do with this. Murder isn't banned after it happens. It's banned before it happens. Lastly, you say "the law only acts retroactively". The main purpose of punishing past actions is to disuade people from doing them in the future. If I hate my boss but I decide not to murder him because I don't want my child to grow with me in prison, the law has stopped a crime before it happens.
Molaxx 9y ago
Murders are illegal "upfront". The regulator declared it illegal. The police would definitely stop a murder attempt.
loup-vaillant 9y ago
Wait a minute, the opposite of net neutrality is called "net freedom"? This is sick (the lack of net neutrality is more likely to reduce freedoms than to promote them). If you remotely support net neutrality, please never use that term again. This is self defeating.
- Angostura 9y ago
  The freedom in this case is for the ISPs.
- sambe 9y ago
  I'm pro-net neutrality and I'm against dishonest marketing, but I think overall it's important to take the higher ground and remain intellectually honest. Doing otherwise results in a mud-slinging contest. Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. That is undeniable. There many cases where we restrict freedoms for the greater good, but I don't like to pretend we are not doing so in those cases. I'd also add that freedom is not the right to demand other people give you something you want. I wouldn't say that I've lost my freedoms if there are no good ISPs left after the regulatory change. Everyone involved can still either choose an existing provider or set up their own. We have monopoly/anti-trust laws when that ceases to be the case. Of course, this may not be the efficient path to a world that a huge majority of people want - which is why I slightly side with net neutrality.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. Then go ahead and call it "corporate freedom". The network isn't getting any more free without neutrality.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      An ISP doesn't necessarily have to be a corporate entity. It could be a municipality (e.g. city of Chattanooga) or hypothetically owned by residents directly.
musage 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, No, but it does outlaw it before it happens. The question isn't "is it happening at the moment", but "should it ever happen".
mgkimsal 9y ago
> proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. But the reply was in reply to Ajit's position that "we don't know what will happen because we don't have them".
mosselman 9y ago
" proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem." Don't care whether there will be a problem with how the internet works as they will become filthy rich. That is why they want to kill net neutrality; dollar dollar bills. They couldn't care less about the user experience.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. “network freedom” was the FCC’s original name for net neutrality before it shifted to “open internet”; because it protected end-user freedom. Using “net freedom” to refer to the abolition of that protection is, well, about as honest as the rest of the anti-neutrality effort.
- libertyEQ 9y ago
  Is the internet network infrastructure not owned by corporations, and isn't this giving them the freedom to do with their asserts as they see fit?
likelynew 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). In a way the law tries to accomplish this by limiting ways like guns, bombs and sometimes doing checks randomly or based on suspicion.

of 9y ago

> Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. Which countries?

xpac 9y ago
Portugal. https://mobile.twitter.com/rokhanna/status/923701871092441088 https://mobile.twitter.com/rokhanna/status/92370187109244108...
- dingaling 9y ago
  As was pointed-out repeatedly yesterday, those are add-ons for mobile data. You pay your base fee ( to access anything ) and you can then add particular bundles to get flat-rated access to certain websites. Or you can just continue to pay by the MB.
  - xpac 9y ago
    You're right on that. One could draw a comparison between what these packages mean - they only bundle the big services, making it even harder for small alternatives to compete. Same would be possible if ISPs would start to play the big money game the other way round - serving faster access on cable lines, which I would view essentially as the "landline" version of free traffic on mobile connections.
  - freeflight 9y ago
    > As was pointed-out repeatedly yesterday, those are add-ons for mobile data. I don't see how that changes anything about the situation. Just because mobile providers have already been far more ruthless doesn't suddenly excuse these practices, some would argue that mobile providers have pretty much normalized this in the very first place. I consider the vast majority of mobile plans, with data volume caps, straight up rip-offs: The moment you go past your volume cap you might as well not have any plan at all, as the throttled bandwidths usually ain't even fast enough for just regular browsing on the www. Yes, I realize there are differences in the medium, mobile being shared and all, I still can't shake the feeling that the vast majority of mobile providers use this as an excuse for not expanding capacities and instead nickle&dimming everybody trough data volume.

Nokinside 9y ago

The net neutrality laws prohibit anti-competitive blocking and "throttling" of Internet services or discriminating by protocol, ip-adress, application, etc. What should be outside net neutrality laws are protocols that leave the customer and applications in control. There is nothing wrong with using Resource ReSerVation Protocol (RSVP), DSCP and IPv6 flow labels to get QoS that differ from the dumb pipe. Many future applications require it. - Online games might want to request low lag. - Streaming services might want constant bandwidth with less strict lag requirements. - File downloads might be OK with bursts and pauses as long as the best effort throughput is good. - Safety-critical applications like, robot cars, remote surgery or emergency messaging, need guarantees that discriminate against other uses.

lbstr_ftw 9y ago
> Safety-critical applications like, robot cars As someone who worked on robot cars before it was cool (Urban Challenge, wut up), I can assure you, Net Neutrality has ZERO to do with safety in autonomous cars. And if you think it has anything to do with it, you need to be kept far, far... very far away from ever working on them.
dtech 9y ago
But who is going to determine what gets which priority at what price? The only one who can is the ISP and I don't trust them.
- Nokinside 9y ago
  Customer determines by requesting QoS for connection. ISP sells service with fixed price that states what kind of QoS requests it can fulfill. Net neutrality prevents the ISP from setting them on their own.
- drvdevd 9y ago
  If any positive effect will come from the rollback of net neutrality, it's that more people in the US may realize that ISPs are generally adverserial. They have been for a while.
9y ago

VeronicaJJ123 9y ago

I support Ajit's argument here. Fast lanes exist in other countries and it is saving money for them.

libraryatnight 9y ago
i don't know if it's saving money, I can't find information on that right now, but it does seem like a horrible situation to be in if you want to start a competing service with a company that's already established and included in an ISP plan. The fact that he is trying to sell this as a repeal of regulatory overreach makes me kind of sick to my stomach. And, it's apparently an overreach because it solves a problem that didn't have a chance to come about? I feel like he's bullshitting me. Regardless, I like my internet access right now, so what problem is he solving for me or the rest of the public by doing this? If it's that these fast lanes will save us money it better be an enormous chunk of money to merit a such significant shift in the way I experience the internet.
takeda 9y ago
Saving if you mean they are even less incentivised to increase their capacity, because less capacity means more people will purchase those fast lanes? Don't you understand that the capacity issue was artificially created to push this agenda? There was blog article from level3 showing the capacity issue was coming down to enabling another port[1], perhaps purchasing extra transciever that costs just few thousand (level3 offered to even purchase one for them if they can't afford it) [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140907021805/http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140907021805/http://blog.level...

duckMuppet 9y ago

Pai gave a pretty complete interview with Tech Policy Podcast yesterday and went in depth with much of what he was thinking. Tech Policy Podcast: #206: The Future of Internet Regulation w/ FCC Chairman Ajit Pai http://podcast.techfreedom.org/e/206-the-future-of-internet-regulation-w-fcc-chairman-ajit-pai/ http://podcast.techfreedom.org/e/206-the-future-of-internet-... But, I think Robert Graham summed it up pretty well when he said "you believe the FCC should allow companies to bend the rules when it's in the interests of customers, then you don't believe in NetNeutrality." Lots of politics and emotion in the hysteria, very little sound reasoning.

akerro 9y ago

He's also lying, there are fast lanes in US already: https://www.networkworld.com/article/2226901/opensource-subnet/netflix-is-already-speeding-along-comcast-s-internet-fast-lane.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/2226901/opensource-subn... We learnt about this from Snowdens documents in 2014.

lclarkmichalek 9y ago
You should not have needed the Snowden documents to learn about the existence of peering agreements. The issue is ISPs requiring compensation for the peering agreement.
- revelation 9y ago
  This is where we get into the difficulty of what is net neutrality. Taking compensation for a peering agreement is perfectly fine if it's imbalanced. What net neutrality should prevent is, ceteris paribus, asking for $X from YouTube and $Y >> $X from Netflix because you figure your dying cable business will benefit from less competition. Ideally, net neutrality would be FRAND for peering agreements: you can't deny anyone if they are happy to pay market rate, and market rate is what you charge everyone else, plus minus.
  - sologoub 9y ago
    It’s absolutely not fine if your customers are already paying you specifically to connect to Netflix, which is an extremely common use and why we have the bottleneck in the first place. The imbalance of the traffic has little to do with what we have here, since the telco is specifically paid to deliver that traffic by consumers. Charging on both ends is very profitable, but is definitely double-dipping. Your phone provider doesn’t charge you more to receive calls from large customer care call centers when you have a problem and request a call back. The call center may get charged more by their provider if their call pattern is problematic, but your provider doesn’t stop the call from going through. It is really not any different with internet networks and why common carrier rules make a lot of sense. These same rules also provide a lot of liability protection for the carriers, which I’m guessing they have negotiated to keep somehow.

Delmania 9y ago

Make no mistake, Pai is a former Verizon lawyer, he's not misled as he is intentionally misleading. He knows very well the ISPs will exploit as much as they can and then rely on a slow legal system to keep it going. He knows very well the ISPs want the benefits of being a monopoly with none of the regulations. Why do you think he prematurely said the states will not be able to pass their own net neutrality laws? The main ISPs in this nation are some of the most corrupt, unethical, and anti-consumer organizations around, and because there's no competiton (and they do work hard to keep it that way). While I agree with Pai that we need more competition, repealing NN will not do that.

omon 9y ago
He is specifically talking about blocking web traffic, "The answer to the first is we're not sure", not fast lanes. Repealing NN will do that, every time you have regulations you have to hire another team of lawyers and accountants; which only large corporations can afford––it's just another barrier of entry to market.
- throwanem 9y ago
  The barriers to entry in the ISP market right now are the large corporations, which keep doing adorable things like suing would-be municipal competitors out of existence. The claim that regulation is the problem here, rather than a matter of mere ideological opposition, is a claim desperately in need of some kind of substantiation. And the idea of empowering oligopolists even further, by relaxing restrictions designed to prevent them engaging in rentiership, is an idea in desperate need of anything concrete to show it's worth implementing.
- twhb 9y ago
  He was asked two questions then began his response with “the answer to the first is”, I think it’s much more reasonable to interpret that as the first question.
- ytpete 9y ago
  Except we have seen cases of blocking before in the US, so even by that interpretation he's misleading people: in 2005, North Carolina-based ISP (and phone company) Madison River blocked customers from using Vonage. More recently, Verizon blocked its customers from installing Google Wallet on their phones and AT&T tried to block its customers from using Skype on iPhones...

dragonwriter 9y ago

> The answer to the first is we're not sure. We've never seen them before You’ve (the FCC) seen abd addressed seen and acted against selective slow lanes, (intentionally inhibited traffic) which are the same thing as fast lanes, just with which side is the “default” switched. And you've seen paid prioritization fast lanes in foreign markets without the FCC’s 13-year history of pro-neutrality policies. So this is either misleadingly selective or just plain outright lying, but then that's true of basically everything Pai has said about neutrality since joining the FCC.

cholantesh 9y ago

Source, for those wondering: https://reason.com/archives/2017/04/26/fcc-ajit-pai-net-neutrality-internet/ https://reason.com/archives/2017/04/26/fcc-ajit-pai-net-neut...

kakarot 9y ago

I thought the rule in particular was, that was adopted in 2015, was very premature banning something that's simply didn't exist. If I had to start a new society tomorrow and I needed a quick list of things that should be illegal, I think I could figure out things like "Don't rape, murder, or steal" before having to actually witness someone rape, murder, or steal.

kelnos 9y ago

The bottom line is that he's flat-out lying. Pre-2015, ISPs weren't classified under Title II. The unspoken (and occasionally spoken, when disagreements came up) agreement was that the ISPs wouldn't violate net neutrality principles, and the FCC would leave them alone and not classify them under Title II (which introduces more pain for ISPs than just net neutrality concerns). In 2015, Verizon decided not to play ball anymore, and start violating net neutrality principles. They won a court case saying that the FCC couldn't regulate them in this way without Title II. They thought they had the political/lobbying clout to avoid the Title II classification despite that. Turns out they were wrong. So clearly Pai has his agenda and is just lying to support it. ISPs have absolutely tried to do fast-lane-style bullshit in the past, and were stopped first by the threat of Title II, and then later by Title II itself.