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> independent hacker culture Independent hackers need net neutrality; otherwise access to their innovations and startups will be limited, and their access to t
by forapurpose 8y ago
> independent hacker culture
Independent hackers need net neutrality; otherwise access to their innovations and startups will be limited, and their access to the Internet from which they get ideas, inspiration, and collaboration, will also be limited. I wonder how that spirit would survive if people only had access to major commercial websites. EDIT: Imagine the FOSS project with no budget to buy access, and any project that challenges the status quo (political, corporate, etc.) and is given no or minimal access. Where would hacker culture and the world be without those projects?
I agree that it's a loss that we have to turn to government, but it's better than no net neutrality at all. Net neutrality used to be accomplished by cooperation, good faith, and maybe even enlightened self-interest (something U.S. corporations often lack). But the stakes on the Internet are now in the trillions of dollars and (long ago) it has attracted the greedy and power-hungry, who are not going to cooperate and act in good faith. That's why democratic government exists, to give that power to ordinary citizens, distributed fairly via the vote. At least that's the theory in some places:
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
> begging for the government to control and regulate
That would be, desiring all citizens to control and regulate via their representatives, rather than having a few powerful citizens make the decisions on their own.
- erikpukinskis 8y agoHackers don’t need anything, that’s the point. Hackers find a way.
- earenndil 8y agoWould not the 'independent hacker culture' be to found its own, independent ISP?
- forapurpose 8y agoThat sounds a bit challenging: They'd still need to pay the corporate ISPs to carry or to not completely deprioritize traffic from hackerISP, or else nobody else could reach the hackers' great websites, services, ideas, etc. If hackerISP carried things the corporates didn't like, they could still throttle or kill access to it or to individual domains, protocols, etc. And how will hackerISP pay for nationwide infrastructure? That's going to need a pretty wealthy independent hacker. Maybe if Linus, Woz, Paul Allen (is he a hacker?), and a few others committed their fortunes to it, they could buy and deploy the fiber and the hardware ... but then there are operations, maintenance, upgrades ...
- ZenoArrow 8y ago> "And how will hackerISP pay for nationwide infrastructure?" Depending on where you live, ISPs do not need to own their own infrastructure. For a bit more information into how this can work, I'd recommend taking a look at local loop unbundling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling Also, GP is alluding to things that have already happened in the past, in the wild west days of the Internet it was more common for small ISPs to get started (even with competition from the big ISPs like AOL and CompuServe).
- hinkley 8y agoHe says nationwide infrastructure and you link to regulations on last mile issues. I think you misunderstood “nationwide”, and made his point for him by citing governmental intervention in internetworking.
- ZenoArrow 8y agoYou only need to connect to the local exchanges, by and large the deeper routing nodes are not run by commercial ISPs.