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We wouldn't accept any federal agency enforcing "Printing Press Neutrality", requiring the owners of printing presses to submit to government rulemaking about w

by gojomo 14y ago

We wouldn't accept any federal agency enforcing "Printing Press Neutrality", requiring the owners of printing presses to submit to government rulemaking about what pamphlets, periodicals, and books are printed on their presses. We would understand, instinctively, that having government involved in such matters is inviting the fox into the henhouse. For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets lost. So we have the FCC, censoring broadcast media, and used via licensing and ownership rules to extract 'favors' for the political classes. And we have people who are ostensibly in favor of free speech inviting this censorious, political-establishment-subservient agency into Internet regulation. No, thank you. There's no need to tame the Internet to be safe and 'neutral'/neutered like regulated broadcast TV. It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened approach, which historically has included set-asides for certain favored classes of programming [1], moral crusades, and other benefits for the politically-connected [2]. [1] http://reason.com/blog/2008/06/17/the-fccs-obsolete-quotas http://reason.com/blog/2008/06/17/the-fccs-obsolete-quotas [2] http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/12/the-central-committee-is-in-se http://reason.com/archives/2008/06/12/the-central-committee-...

ericras 14y ago
Exactly, oftentimes regulation becomes a easy way for politicians and bureaucrats to extract money and power. Net Neutrality! All bits are equal! ...Well except we want our VOIP calls to be clear so maybe they need priority. ...And there's this new distance medical imaging tech that should have priority because lives are at stake. ...Oh, your industry/business wants help getting an exception written into the law? I'm in Congress, I can help you, pay me.
angersock 14y ago
For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets lost. You do realize that the same principle is hardly something that a free market would automatically support at reasonable price to the user, right? It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened approach You're not a Time Warner Cable customer, or Cox, or subject to throttling very much, are you?
- danielweber 14y ago
  I'm a Time Warner Cable customer. I haven't noticed any throttling ever on VoIP or Netflix or Skype. I am also in an area with competition, which probably plays a role.
- tptacek 14y ago
  What's a "reasonable price"? A penny taken off the monthly cost of Internet access by fiat is a penny subsidy granted to Internet service customers. In a competitive market for Internet service, providers can't gouge customers because they'd lose to competitors that didn't. You are making a stronger argument against local service cable, copper loop and RF monopolies than you are against the libertarian opposition to net neutrality.
  - beernutz 14y ago
    That is exactly the point though. Since there AREN'T enough competitors, the free market does not work. BEING a competitor means laying cable, getting right-of-ways, getting other permissions from local government, etc. It is not something where several competitors will spring up offering better service and/or better price when one bad actor decides to disallow skype on their network for instance. When the market fails to provide a fix, the government should step in to keep the public from being at the mercy of greedy monopolies.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      It's also very difficult to start a new car company. But we don't have "car neutrality".
- gojomo 14y ago
  Nobody's owed anything "at a reasonable price to the user". The right to free speech isn't conditional on books/newspapers/pamphlets being cheap. The kind of meddling that's most dangerous is government meddling. Simply keeping FCC rules out of the Internet delivers that "no meddling" benefit, for free. And if things are a little expensive, a little limited by private contracts, a little abused by current providers? The march of consumer demand and technology will fix that in a few years. I've been a Time-Warner customer, and Comcast, and AT&T, and RCN, and Sonic.net. I've hit throttling -- typically for peak total usage, rather than specific applications. But so what? A regulation from the FCC can't make more bandwidth. It can't keep up with even a year or two's needs in flexible new policies to handle changing traffic/application mixes. A competitive market with differentiated services, new technology, and new entrants can keep up. Way too much defeatism is inherent in the idea that the cable-DSL duopoly is all we'll ever have. That defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: encumber the industry with national pricing & transit regulations, tell everyone "we've made it so these two safe government-approved choices are all you'll ever need", and you might make that so -- just as the FCC stagnated things for decades with its power-concentrating telephony and broadcast industry regulations. Twenty years ago, we didn't have a broadband duopoly. We had a zero-opoly. So even a duopoly is an improvement. And it won't last. It's too easy to incrementally string more wires or deploy new wireless technologies, to precisely those customers who chafe under any current limits. The same competition that got us this far is still working, and doesn't require a bossy Washington DC agency staffed by censors and political-party hack lawyers to save us from ourselves.
snowwrestler 14y ago
This really shows a fundamental misunderstanding of not only the background of "net neutrality" regulation, but also of the very structure of the Internet itself. In your analogy to a printing press, you've misplaced the Internet layer. Time Warner is not the "printing press", Hacker News is the printing press. Time Warner is UPS--shipping the pamphlets, periodicals, and books to the end users. And in case you didn't know, shipping companies ARE regulated by the federal government in how they are allowed to decide what to carry. There is a set of rules called "common carrier" that specifies how shipping companies may advertise their rates, accept or decline customers, etc. It's a legal system that dates back, in the U.S. at least, to before the railroads, when stage coaches and barges were the best means of getting pamphlets from one town to another. The goal of common carrier law is ensure that members of the public are treated fairly--so that UPS does not sign a side-deal with Barnes and Noble to "accidentally" deliver all of Amazon's books 4 days late. This impetus for fair delivery is what is behind the push for net neutrality. Understand that without regulatory protection, it would be legal for Time Warner to (for example) sign a deal with Microsoft by which TW would deny passage of Linux files across the TW network. Or Verizon could sign a deal with Apple to block access to Google Play. Now--the opponents to net neutrality make a very good point that generally speaking these sorts of things have not actually happened. So one could argue that a compelling need for net neutrality has not yet been demonstrated. But your analogy is flawed.
- gojomo 14y ago
  All analogies are strained to the digital world. HN is not a 'printing press': it's not the mechanism of reproduction. Maybe the server is. Maybe the ARC code. But also the wires. HN is the editorial process. But I suggest that friends of free speech, and against government censorship, should adopt an expansive definition of 'speech' and 'press': everything that's part of the communication creation-delivery process. Quibbling about definitions and analogies with regard to fundamental rights helps those who want to grow and abuse their power. The FCC does censor. It enforces wiretap requirements. It has, through licensing and ownership rules, created market concentration in other media industries, and preferentially rewarded politically-connected entities. Its board members and staffers are the same kind of congressional-staff/lobbyist/political-partisan lawyers who draft things like SOPA/PIPA for big donors. Yes, I know there are federal shipping regulations too: and they're also unnecessary and abusive, benefiting large incumbents no matter their initial supposed pro-competition rationales. They are another example of how neutrality regulation will, no matter its initial form, be perverted over time by the political process. Let Time-Warner or Verizon try such blatantly discriminatory policies. They will be ridiculed, consumers will choose other providers, a blossoming of circumvention technologies will arise. Bits are bits, the Internet works, and it doesn't need an overbearing big brother at the FCC to protect it from such trifling (and still almost entirely hypothetical) provider-meddling.
dialtone 14y ago
This argument doesn't make complete sense. Not everyone can lay down cables or use phone lines or in general bring bandwidth to the house or peering with certain destinations. Bandwidth (intended as both the capability to transmit data and the infrastructure that enables it) is an essential (and limited) facility[1] and thus is susceptible to monopolies and it's hard to compete against those that have the infrastructure and agreements already in place. A similar case to net neutrality has already been ruled in the past, always from wikipedia: * The first case to use the idea was the Supreme Court's judgment in United States v. Terminal Railroad Association, 224 U.S. 383 (1912). A group of railroads controlling all railway bridges and switching yards into and out of St. Louis prevented competing railway companies from offering transportation to and through that destination. The court held it to be an illegal restraint of trade. * Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945), in which the Supreme Court found that the Associated Press bylaws which limited membership and therefore access to copyrighted news services violated the Sherman Act. * In Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, 342 U.S. 143, 146-49 (1951), the Lorain Journal was the only local business doing news and advertisements in town. The case was that refusing to place an ad for the customers of a small radio station was a Sherman Act violation. In the end, the court accepted an offer to simply accept the advertisements. If you hold a facility that can't be easily duplicated you are not really allowed to do as you please with it but you need to offer service to everybody equally or you'll violate the Sherman Act[2]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
- gojomo 14y ago
  So why not wait for someone who's harmed to bring a case like those above? Why preemptively invite the censorship-friendly, wiretap-friendly, incumbent-protecting FCC to start regulating even before there's any problem? If the US ever adopts a national website blacklist like China, Australia, the UK, and others, it would probably be the same FCC 'network neutrality' regulators who'd monitor ISP compliance. After all, how can the network be truly 'neutral' if it carries illegal information?
  - 14y ago

by gojomo 14y ago

ericras 14y ago

Exactly, oftentimes regulation becomes a easy way for politicians and bureaucrats to extract money and power. Net Neutrality! All bits are equal! ...Well except we want our VOIP calls to be clear so maybe they need priority. ...And there's this new distance medical imaging tech that should have priority because lives are at stake. ...Oh, your industry/business wants help getting an exception written into the law? I'm in Congress, I can help you, pay me.

angersock 14y ago

For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets lost. You do realize that the same principle is hardly something that a free market would automatically support at reasonable price to the user, right? It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened approach You're not a Time Warner Cable customer, or Cox, or subject to throttling very much, are you?

danielweber 14y ago
I'm a Time Warner Cable customer. I haven't noticed any throttling ever on VoIP or Netflix or Skype. I am also in an area with competition, which probably plays a role.
tptacek 14y ago
What's a "reasonable price"? A penny taken off the monthly cost of Internet access by fiat is a penny subsidy granted to Internet service customers. In a competitive market for Internet service, providers can't gouge customers because they'd lose to competitors that didn't. You are making a stronger argument against local service cable, copper loop and RF monopolies than you are against the libertarian opposition to net neutrality.
- beernutz 14y ago
  That is exactly the point though. Since there AREN'T enough competitors, the free market does not work. BEING a competitor means laying cable, getting right-of-ways, getting other permissions from local government, etc. It is not something where several competitors will spring up offering better service and/or better price when one bad actor decides to disallow skype on their network for instance. When the market fails to provide a fix, the government should step in to keep the public from being at the mercy of greedy monopolies.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    It's also very difficult to start a new car company. But we don't have "car neutrality".
gojomo 14y ago
Nobody's owed anything "at a reasonable price to the user". The right to free speech isn't conditional on books/newspapers/pamphlets being cheap. The kind of meddling that's most dangerous is government meddling. Simply keeping FCC rules out of the Internet delivers that "no meddling" benefit, for free. And if things are a little expensive, a little limited by private contracts, a little abused by current providers? The march of consumer demand and technology will fix that in a few years. I've been a Time-Warner customer, and Comcast, and AT&T, and RCN, and Sonic.net. I've hit throttling -- typically for peak total usage, rather than specific applications. But so what? A regulation from the FCC can't make more bandwidth. It can't keep up with even a year or two's needs in flexible new policies to handle changing traffic/application mixes. A competitive market with differentiated services, new technology, and new entrants can keep up. Way too much defeatism is inherent in the idea that the cable-DSL duopoly is all we'll ever have. That defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: encumber the industry with national pricing & transit regulations, tell everyone "we've made it so these two safe government-approved choices are all you'll ever need", and you might make that so -- just as the FCC stagnated things for decades with its power-concentrating telephony and broadcast industry regulations. Twenty years ago, we didn't have a broadband duopoly. We had a zero-opoly. So even a duopoly is an improvement. And it won't last. It's too easy to incrementally string more wires or deploy new wireless technologies, to precisely those customers who chafe under any current limits. The same competition that got us this far is still working, and doesn't require a bossy Washington DC agency staffed by censors and political-party hack lawyers to save us from ourselves.

snowwrestler 14y ago

This really shows a fundamental misunderstanding of not only the background of "net neutrality" regulation, but also of the very structure of the Internet itself. In your analogy to a printing press, you've misplaced the Internet layer. Time Warner is not the "printing press", Hacker News is the printing press. Time Warner is UPS--shipping the pamphlets, periodicals, and books to the end users. And in case you didn't know, shipping companies ARE regulated by the federal government in how they are allowed to decide what to carry. There is a set of rules called "common carrier" that specifies how shipping companies may advertise their rates, accept or decline customers, etc. It's a legal system that dates back, in the U.S. at least, to before the railroads, when stage coaches and barges were the best means of getting pamphlets from one town to another. The goal of common carrier law is ensure that members of the public are treated fairly--so that UPS does not sign a side-deal with Barnes and Noble to "accidentally" deliver all of Amazon's books 4 days late. This impetus for fair delivery is what is behind the push for net neutrality. Understand that without regulatory protection, it would be legal for Time Warner to (for example) sign a deal with Microsoft by which TW would deny passage of Linux files across the TW network. Or Verizon could sign a deal with Apple to block access to Google Play. Now--the opponents to net neutrality make a very good point that generally speaking these sorts of things have not actually happened. So one could argue that a compelling need for net neutrality has not yet been demonstrated. But your analogy is flawed.

gojomo 14y ago
All analogies are strained to the digital world. HN is not a 'printing press': it's not the mechanism of reproduction. Maybe the server is. Maybe the ARC code. But also the wires. HN is the editorial process. But I suggest that friends of free speech, and against government censorship, should adopt an expansive definition of 'speech' and 'press': everything that's part of the communication creation-delivery process. Quibbling about definitions and analogies with regard to fundamental rights helps those who want to grow and abuse their power. The FCC does censor. It enforces wiretap requirements. It has, through licensing and ownership rules, created market concentration in other media industries, and preferentially rewarded politically-connected entities. Its board members and staffers are the same kind of congressional-staff/lobbyist/political-partisan lawyers who draft things like SOPA/PIPA for big donors. Yes, I know there are federal shipping regulations too: and they're also unnecessary and abusive, benefiting large incumbents no matter their initial supposed pro-competition rationales. They are another example of how neutrality regulation will, no matter its initial form, be perverted over time by the political process. Let Time-Warner or Verizon try such blatantly discriminatory policies. They will be ridiculed, consumers will choose other providers, a blossoming of circumvention technologies will arise. Bits are bits, the Internet works, and it doesn't need an overbearing big brother at the FCC to protect it from such trifling (and still almost entirely hypothetical) provider-meddling.

dialtone 14y ago

This argument doesn't make complete sense. Not everyone can lay down cables or use phone lines or in general bring bandwidth to the house or peering with certain destinations. Bandwidth (intended as both the capability to transmit data and the infrastructure that enables it) is an essential (and limited) facility[1] and thus is susceptible to monopolies and it's hard to compete against those that have the infrastructure and agreements already in place. A similar case to net neutrality has already been ruled in the past, always from wikipedia: * The first case to use the idea was the Supreme Court's judgment in United States v. Terminal Railroad Association, 224 U.S. 383 (1912). A group of railroads controlling all railway bridges and switching yards into and out of St. Louis prevented competing railway companies from offering transportation to and through that destination. The court held it to be an illegal restraint of trade. * Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945), in which the Supreme Court found that the Associated Press bylaws which limited membership and therefore access to copyrighted news services violated the Sherman Act. * In Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, 342 U.S. 143, 146-49 (1951), the Lorain Journal was the only local business doing news and advertisements in town. The case was that refusing to place an ad for the customers of a small radio station was a Sherman Act violation. In the end, the court accepted an offer to simply accept the advertisements. If you hold a facility that can't be easily duplicated you are not really allowed to do as you please with it but you need to offer service to everybody equally or you'll violate the Sherman Act[2]. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

gojomo 14y ago
So why not wait for someone who's harmed to bring a case like those above? Why preemptively invite the censorship-friendly, wiretap-friendly, incumbent-protecting FCC to start regulating even before there's any problem? If the US ever adopts a national website blacklist like China, Australia, the UK, and others, it would probably be the same FCC 'network neutrality' regulators who'd monitor ISP compliance. After all, how can the network be truly 'neutral' if it carries illegal information?
- 14y ago