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Typical Megan McArdle libertarian "thinkpiece". Acknowledges the problem... 'Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful

Typical Megan McArdle libertarian "thinkpiece". Acknowledges the problem... 'Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear and read.' Yet refuses to blaspheme the Lord our free market: 'Is this a problem? I think it is. But that doesn’t mean that the internet would get better if Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon were required to make every decision with a regulator hanging over their shoulder to decide whether it was sufficiently “neutral.”'

jquery 9y ago
Well, when relatively few people in favor of NN are in favor of regulating content (under the shield of "they're private businesses, they can censor what they want!"), it's hard to criticize McArdle for taking the side of the free market with ISPs as well. I largely believe the problem isn't ISPs anymore, it's content-providers. Content is getting increasingly centralized by so-called "content providers" instead of ISPs. People's experience of online censorship is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater when it comes to the increasingly restrictive rules of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Pinterest/YouTube/etc.* (all in the name of being advertiser friendly). My one and only experience with ISPs censoring content was a long time ago when my torrents were throttled. I've never had the ISPs (short of government intervention) block a tweet, a status update, a video, or an online service since then. So when people's experience of online censorship is with content providers, not ISPs, how can we expect to sell the public on Net Neutrality when it doesn't touch the largest experiential part of online censorship? There's an elephant in the room and we're screaming about the mouse in the corner. *EDIT: Let's not forgot the app stores which give two companies the power to essentially erase you from mobile devices if they decide to.
- wfo 9y ago
  Yes censorship by content providers is a (relatively small while Tor exists) problem, and it happens currently in real life. Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility. Because something is not currently happening does not mean we should not be concerned about it, rather, the opposite.
  - jquery 9y ago
    > Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility. They're both devastating and difficult to circumvent, are they not? I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage. I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever. No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC. So if Gab is limited to technically savvy people, do VPNs really require much more savvy? Basically my point is that the results of the censorship seem to be roughly equivalent, which is a de-platforming of an online voice.
    - jacalata 9y ago
      > I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage. You mean "while net neutrality is the law", right? Because that's exactly what you will lose if net neutrality is no longer required.
      - jquery 9y ago
        Don't condescend. My prediction for the odds of Netflix or other major site getting blocked by a major ISP still hovers at roughly 0% with the new FCC ruling. Even without Title II classification, there are other ways for the government to intervene in anti-competitive behavior (and indeed, they have). EDIT: It's worth pointing out that ISPs in general have shown much better behavior w/r/t censorship than content providers.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Personally speaking--ISPs, content providers, backbones, etc--regulate them all! We can have "optimized", where we economy-of-scale everything into a few (or one) efficiently centralized provider(s) that can quickly make whatever micro-decisions they deem best in an opaque and unaccountable manner, or we can have "accountable" where everything has to grind through disclosure and review and due process and liability--like almost every other field of engineering and business. A big part of why the big 4 have revenues on par with small countries is that we just let them do whatever the hell they feel like.
refurb 9y ago
Not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying her question is not a reasonable one?
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  TR busted the trusts all those years ago, and contrary to popular belief, our plutocrats were spared the guillotine. A few decades later we got Glass-Steagall, then the New Deal, yet somehow capitalism managed to survive. Her premise that inaction in the face of immense private, unelected, and unaccountable power is preferable to government intervention because a bunch of bureaucrats are going to turn us into a technologically stagnated eastern bloc is BS. Plain and simple.
  - twblalock 9y ago
    She didn’t make that argument. Your interpretation of the article is uncharitable at best. If I were to interpret your comments as uncharitably as you have interpreted her article, I might think you were intentionally presenting a strawman version of her argument.
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      I admittedly took a liberty with "eastern bloc". Aside from that, where did I do her wrong?
      - twblalock 9y ago
        Her point is that the true threat to net neutrality is large content providers and social networks, e.g. Google and Facebooks, not ISPs. That means net neutrality regulations aren’t going to solve the real problem, and also that solving the real problem is not straightforward because regulating content providers for neutrality is far more problematic than preventing ISPs from favoring some traffic over other traffic. Problematic enough that maybe governments could not do it well or fairly, and that such regulation might do more harm than good in the end.
ouid 9y ago
it's not even true. ISPs have a much greater ability to unilaterally shape what americans see than google or facebook.
ivanhoe 9y ago
And how would you regulate Google, by whom? US government? EU, China, Russia? Who is in charge of the Internet, and why would the rest of the world obey that? Do we create some UN body to regulate it? Put some international professional bureaucrats in charge of it, who would then be open to corruption and day-to-day political games of power, like we see in every other aspect of UN work. It's not enough to say "I don't like the way it is", we also need to come up with some sort of solution that has a chance of working better. And I haven't heard it yet...
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Multinationals already comply with a litany of different market-specific regulations, so the country listing is more rhetoric than substance. Civilization depends on rules. Some are written, some aren't. The best rules are the ones that have evolved through trial-and-error. Trial is the first part. We've stopped doing that out of fear of offending the invisible hand, so we end up with guys like Schmidt just dropping a site off the face of the earth without any form of due process. China has already shown that capitalism is not the guarantor of freedom, so now it's either the rule of law or bust.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    Yeah, personally I'm happy having multinationals regulated in multiple countries. It gives us laboratories of different regulatory regimes, allowing trial and error to iterate more rapidly. If anything, I think we need more of that.
    - jstewartmobile 9y ago
      Only danger is if Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" thesis holds, and we all end up conforming to Chinese regulation. There were several articles about Hollywood self-censoring for that market. Aside from that, great point! https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/8/how-chinese-censors-are-influencing-american-movie/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/8/how-chinese-...
- 9y ago
AnthonyMouse 9y ago
That's not even half of it. It's just a complete misunderstanding of the problem. > Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs The difference is that the markets are entirely different. It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it, the canonical examples being email or the web. It's not a natural monopoly. It isn't even a real monopoly at all. There is Twitter, Tumblr, the Google thing(s), the Microsoft thing(s), actual unaffiliated web pages, email, etc. Most people use Facebook and Twitter. Basically nobody uses Comcast and Charter. There is a fair argument that we should adopt policies to bolster open systems like web/email over closed systems like Facebook so there is more vigorous competition. But the idea that we should enshrine Facebook as a permanent monopoly and then have the government regulate its content is the complete opposite of that. It's ludicrous. And that isn't what network neutrality is anyway. Network neutrality doesn't regulate content. It says nothing about what anyone can print, it just says that everyone can buy ink on the same terms.
- jMyles 9y ago
  > It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it The same is true of the general topology of the internet. We don't need any of these layers (CAs, Room 641As, long bus-runs to carry messages seven times around the country before arriving at their destination). There are distributed solutions to all of these problems (examples for the above, respectively, including NameCoin, CJDNS, and mesh networking), but legislated "net neutrality" enshrines the current model and blocks these decidedly non-"neutral" alternatives.
  - wvenable 9y ago
    > legislated "net neutrality" enshrines the current mode I don't see how that's the case. It doesn't prevent distributed solutions from existing it just makes them less necessary.
    - 9y ago
Trump4America 9y ago
Typical ad hominem. Copies parts from the text.. Yet refuses to comment on it, attacking the author.
ironchef253 9y ago
Typical ad hominem attack on writer which refuses to propose the actual solution that you are planning: “government censorship of the internet.” Let’s be very clear about what you are alluding to when you are blaming the free market - You are saying the government needs to “do something” to ensure that Google and Facebook surface “correct” and “fair” results. Do you really want that? Megan is VERY rightly not stepping farther than what she said because the next step is to install government officials who attempt to tweak search algorithms and review what gets ranked in Google and what doesn’t. This is exactly what China is doing, it is the exact opposite of Net Neutrality. Are you able to articulate a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve creating a censorship department that is embedded into every major tech company? Once again, this is how China does things currently. The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death, the combination of lack of awareness and obedience to what they see on Twitter is genuinely frightening and dangerous.
- grzm 9y ago
  > "The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death..." Please leave sentiments like this out of your comments. Hacker News is a community you choose to participate in: you are "people in Hacker News comments". Make Hacker News the type of place you want it to be. Post good, substantial comments. Submit articles you think are worth discussing. Leave generalizations of the community out of it.
- jstewartmobile 9y ago
  Take off the mainstream ideology glasses. I'm talking about good old fashioned civil law. Just being able to sue them in court for damages (even if it's only small claims) and work out some form of legal precedent on where the rights and responsibilities are would be a huge start. As-is, if AT&T defrauds you, or Google just takes your stuff down without warning, I hope you're happy with the $5 check you get from the class action suit three years later. Almost every other profession is constrained by more regulation and liability than tech companies, and last I checked, we're still not communist China. edit: Unlike McArdle's point that it's all just too hard to do anything.

jquery 9y ago

Well, when relatively few people in favor of NN are in favor of regulating content (under the shield of "they're private businesses, they can censor what they want!"), it's hard to criticize McArdle for taking the side of the free market with ISPs as well. I largely believe the problem isn't ISPs anymore, it's content-providers. Content is getting increasingly centralized by so-called "content providers" instead of ISPs. People's experience of online censorship is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater when it comes to the increasingly restrictive rules of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Pinterest/YouTube/etc.* (all in the name of being advertiser friendly). My one and only experience with ISPs censoring content was a long time ago when my torrents were throttled. I've never had the ISPs (short of government intervention) block a tweet, a status update, a video, or an online service since then. So when people's experience of online censorship is with content providers, not ISPs, how can we expect to sell the public on Net Neutrality when it doesn't touch the largest experiential part of online censorship? There's an elephant in the room and we're screaming about the mouse in the corner. *EDIT: Let's not forgot the app stores which give two companies the power to essentially erase you from mobile devices if they decide to.

wfo 9y ago
Yes censorship by content providers is a (relatively small while Tor exists) problem, and it happens currently in real life. Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility. Because something is not currently happening does not mean we should not be concerned about it, rather, the opposite.
- jquery 9y ago
  > Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility. They're both devastating and difficult to circumvent, are they not? I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage. I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever. No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC. So if Gab is limited to technically savvy people, do VPNs really require much more savvy? Basically my point is that the results of the censorship seem to be roughly equivalent, which is a de-platforming of an online voice.
  - jacalata 9y ago
    > I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage. You mean "while net neutrality is the law", right? Because that's exactly what you will lose if net neutrality is no longer required.
    - jquery 9y ago
      Don't condescend. My prediction for the odds of Netflix or other major site getting blocked by a major ISP still hovers at roughly 0% with the new FCC ruling. Even without Title II classification, there are other ways for the government to intervene in anti-competitive behavior (and indeed, they have). EDIT: It's worth pointing out that ISPs in general have shown much better behavior w/r/t censorship than content providers.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Personally speaking--ISPs, content providers, backbones, etc--regulate them all! We can have "optimized", where we economy-of-scale everything into a few (or one) efficiently centralized provider(s) that can quickly make whatever micro-decisions they deem best in an opaque and unaccountable manner, or we can have "accountable" where everything has to grind through disclosure and review and due process and liability--like almost every other field of engineering and business. A big part of why the big 4 have revenues on par with small countries is that we just let them do whatever the hell they feel like.

refurb 9y ago

Not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying her question is not a reasonable one?

jstewartmobile 9y ago
TR busted the trusts all those years ago, and contrary to popular belief, our plutocrats were spared the guillotine. A few decades later we got Glass-Steagall, then the New Deal, yet somehow capitalism managed to survive. Her premise that inaction in the face of immense private, unelected, and unaccountable power is preferable to government intervention because a bunch of bureaucrats are going to turn us into a technologically stagnated eastern bloc is BS. Plain and simple.
- twblalock 9y ago
  She didn’t make that argument. Your interpretation of the article is uncharitable at best. If I were to interpret your comments as uncharitably as you have interpreted her article, I might think you were intentionally presenting a strawman version of her argument.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    I admittedly took a liberty with "eastern bloc". Aside from that, where did I do her wrong?
    - twblalock 9y ago
      Her point is that the true threat to net neutrality is large content providers and social networks, e.g. Google and Facebooks, not ISPs. That means net neutrality regulations aren’t going to solve the real problem, and also that solving the real problem is not straightforward because regulating content providers for neutrality is far more problematic than preventing ISPs from favoring some traffic over other traffic. Problematic enough that maybe governments could not do it well or fairly, and that such regulation might do more harm than good in the end.

ouid 9y ago

it's not even true. ISPs have a much greater ability to unilaterally shape what americans see than google or facebook.

ivanhoe 9y ago

And how would you regulate Google, by whom? US government? EU, China, Russia? Who is in charge of the Internet, and why would the rest of the world obey that? Do we create some UN body to regulate it? Put some international professional bureaucrats in charge of it, who would then be open to corruption and day-to-day political games of power, like we see in every other aspect of UN work. It's not enough to say "I don't like the way it is", we also need to come up with some sort of solution that has a chance of working better. And I haven't heard it yet...

jstewartmobile 9y ago
Multinationals already comply with a litany of different market-specific regulations, so the country listing is more rhetoric than substance. Civilization depends on rules. Some are written, some aren't. The best rules are the ones that have evolved through trial-and-error. Trial is the first part. We've stopped doing that out of fear of offending the invisible hand, so we end up with guys like Schmidt just dropping a site off the face of the earth without any form of due process. China has already shown that capitalism is not the guarantor of freedom, so now it's either the rule of law or bust.
- wpietri 9y ago
  Yeah, personally I'm happy having multinationals regulated in multiple countries. It gives us laboratories of different regulatory regimes, allowing trial and error to iterate more rapidly. If anything, I think we need more of that.
  - jstewartmobile 9y ago
    Only danger is if Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" thesis holds, and we all end up conforming to Chinese regulation. There were several articles about Hollywood self-censoring for that market. Aside from that, great point! https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/8/how-chinese-censors-are-influencing-american-movie/ https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/8/how-chinese-...
9y ago

AnthonyMouse 9y ago

That's not even half of it. It's just a complete misunderstanding of the problem. > Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs The difference is that the markets are entirely different. It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it, the canonical examples being email or the web. It's not a natural monopoly. It isn't even a real monopoly at all. There is Twitter, Tumblr, the Google thing(s), the Microsoft thing(s), actual unaffiliated web pages, email, etc. Most people use Facebook and Twitter. Basically nobody uses Comcast and Charter. There is a fair argument that we should adopt policies to bolster open systems like web/email over closed systems like Facebook so there is more vigorous competition. But the idea that we should enshrine Facebook as a permanent monopoly and then have the government regulate its content is the complete opposite of that. It's ludicrous. And that isn't what network neutrality is anyway. Network neutrality doesn't regulate content. It says nothing about what anyone can print, it just says that everyone can buy ink on the same terms.

jMyles 9y ago
> It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it The same is true of the general topology of the internet. We don't need any of these layers (CAs, Room 641As, long bus-runs to carry messages seven times around the country before arriving at their destination). There are distributed solutions to all of these problems (examples for the above, respectively, including NameCoin, CJDNS, and mesh networking), but legislated "net neutrality" enshrines the current model and blocks these decidedly non-"neutral" alternatives.
- wvenable 9y ago
  > legislated "net neutrality" enshrines the current mode I don't see how that's the case. It doesn't prevent distributed solutions from existing it just makes them less necessary.
  - 9y ago

Trump4America 9y ago

Typical ad hominem. Copies parts from the text.. Yet refuses to comment on it, attacking the author.

ironchef253 9y ago

Typical ad hominem attack on writer which refuses to propose the actual solution that you are planning: “government censorship of the internet.” Let’s be very clear about what you are alluding to when you are blaming the free market - You are saying the government needs to “do something” to ensure that Google and Facebook surface “correct” and “fair” results. Do you really want that? Megan is VERY rightly not stepping farther than what she said because the next step is to install government officials who attempt to tweak search algorithms and review what gets ranked in Google and what doesn’t. This is exactly what China is doing, it is the exact opposite of Net Neutrality. Are you able to articulate a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve creating a censorship department that is embedded into every major tech company? Once again, this is how China does things currently. The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death, the combination of lack of awareness and obedience to what they see on Twitter is genuinely frightening and dangerous.

grzm 9y ago
> "The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death..." Please leave sentiments like this out of your comments. Hacker News is a community you choose to participate in: you are "people in Hacker News comments". Make Hacker News the type of place you want it to be. Post good, substantial comments. Submit articles you think are worth discussing. Leave generalizations of the community out of it.
jstewartmobile 9y ago
Take off the mainstream ideology glasses. I'm talking about good old fashioned civil law. Just being able to sue them in court for damages (even if it's only small claims) and work out some form of legal precedent on where the rights and responsibilities are would be a huge start. As-is, if AT&T defrauds you, or Google just takes your stuff down without warning, I hope you're happy with the $5 check you get from the class action suit three years later. Almost every other profession is constrained by more regulation and liability than tech companies, and last I checked, we're still not communist China. edit: Unlike McArdle's point that it's all just too hard to do anything.