10 ms·

Does the FCC really not get it about the Internet?

130 points by seansh 12y ago

venomsnake 12y ago
They do get the internet. But the future income of the top brass depends on not getting it right for the consumers.
- rectang 12y ago
  Maybe the general public can gofundme Tom Wheeler 40 or 50 million dollars to compensate him for for the bribe we're asking him to sacrifice.
  - venomsnake 12y ago
    Bribe is a dirty word. I think consultancy contracts are the appropriate terms lately.
  - mentos 12y ago
    I've had this thought before. I feel like if you changed the mechanism of donating to PACs to only be drawn if a goal is reached (like kickstarter) you'd have much more engagement. No one wants to donate a dollar if they feel like it is going to be alone. But I imagine something like this already exists?
    - calroc 12y ago
      Like Lessig's Super-PAC? https://mayday.us/ https://mayday.us/
    - sitkack 12y ago
      You have to actively prevent money getting from those with it to the politicians they want to bribe. Simply having other funding sources won't stop the cartels from installing their own puppets. *edit, this was actually directed @rectang
      - WildUtah 12y ago
        "You have to actively prevent money getting from those with it to the politicians they want to bribe. Simply having other funding sources won't stop the cartels from installing their own puppets." Exactly wrong. The solution to lies is not censorship, it is more truth. If censorship -- or prohibition of campaign money -- is the law, only the interested liars will control the machinery of censorship and they're not going to use it to promote truth. If all personal campaign donations were illegal, the telecom monopolies would be even more powerful and unaccountable. They have armies of employees, ex-employees, influential executives, relationships with regulators, no-show jobs for pols' shiftless cousins, charitable foundations for networking paid for with your fees, and everything it takes to exercise influence without campaign cash. Only the existence of public spirited and ideologically motivated and unrelated agenda private donations can empower the leaders that do question the insider power of the telecoms.
        sitkack 12y ago
        I agree, in part. Politicians do need to have a glass bank account. It was a metaphorical prevention, like not getting a job in an industry you just regulated. Corruption is American politics runs so deep, I don't know of an acceptable way to handle it.
marak830 12y ago
Their paid to not quite get it.
ck2 12y ago
Fast lanes are just one horrible side effect of our "everything capitalism" country. The fact that most cities in the USA are duopolies when it comes to wired internet means essentially everyone is screwed. Even if the FCC was strict with them, it wouldn't matter. I pay $45/mo for 5mbps in 2014. Higher speeds are available but at much greater cost, because there is no competition.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- icebraining 12y ago
  I agree - the socialist solution we have in my country of having multiple private companies compete a relatevily free market (as opposed to one where local governments have passed laws to limit competition, like the US has) is much better.
  - Noctem 12y ago
    This thread is all backwards. Cronyism/corporatism is being called capitalism, and capitalism is being called socialism. The socialist solution would be public ownership of one firm without private competition, and would be (at least in my opinion) disastrous.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      My post was sarcastic :)
      - sitkack 12y ago
        How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
      - Noctem 12y ago
        Oh good. I wondered if that was the case, but suppressed the urge to ask since people often don't take kindly to assumptions that their actual views must be sarcastic. There are also plenty of inaccurate conceptions of capitalism/socialism, and people tend to ascribe successes to their own preferred system, regardless of reality. I'm glad that's not the case here.
teddyh 12y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- MCRed 12y ago
  This is true for both sides of the debate. On one side you have the lobbyists and big cable companies (and telcos). On the other you have the people who want more regulation because these companies are too big-- but who ignore the fact that the only reason these companies are so big is that they are state granted monopolies in the first place. The "right" to run cable is a monopoly that the local municipality uses to extract money from the populace (via cable fees that the populace ultimately pays in cable bills) The "right" to operate a cell tower is a monopoly (or tri-opoly- only three providers are permitted per metropolitan area) that the FCC created when it "auctioned" off the spectrum. The reality is, both over cable wires and over the wireless airwaves, there is no natural monopoly. Spread spectrum technology (and the infinite variance in frequencies of light a single optical cable can carry) mean that there is no real scarcity of capacity. And while there are limits, there are huge swaths of spectrum that can be used, but that the government is keeping off the market to increase the revenue it gets from the "auctions". There's enough money in the industry to run separate cables. Many larger cities ran fiber rings and these could handle many, many competing providers. The cost of laying fiber to one cable complex is fixed, while the number of providers that could use it is pretty high (multiple providers per fiber and multiple strands per cable, and hundreds (thousands?) of wavelengths per fiber.) Further we've already seen what the government has done with the internet-- they tapped it. They started recording everything. They weakened cryptography. They have forced people to give up private keys. They have proven that they cannot be trusted with something as sacred as the internet. So, while "regulating" the internet might seem like a savior now-- we all get the bandwidth we're paying for-- and I'd certainly like that[1]-- I believe the end result will be further consolidation into ever larger, and fewer players, all of whome are very closely tied with the government, and even less privacy or security. Ultimately resulting in a return of an AT&T like monopoly which has no interest in innovation because it has no competition. Back in the "old days" of the internet, the primary impediment to getting good connectivity was AT&T and its remains after it broke up (into smaller still highly regulated and not-at-all-interested-in-what-you-wanted-to-do-with-THIER-phone-lines.) [1] I find it astounding that in south america, where the entire country has to share a single optical connection to north america I could watch netflix in HD, but here in a city that google is currently wiring for fiber, I can only get Netflix on SD over my "40 megabit" cable modem. So, yes, I've experienced this problem first hand. It pisses me off.
bsg75 12y ago
The FCC gets it. They also know where lobbying dollars come from, and its not consumers (individuals or companies other than carriers).
- vermontdevil 12y ago
  Exactly. And to ensure they get a cushy job at these companies when they leave FCC. The revolving door continues on.
- detcader 12y ago
  "Last week, the Obama administration announced its choice to lead the Federal Communications Commission: Tom Wheeler, who is not only a former telecom lobbyist but also a huge bundler for the Obama campaign. The New York Times Editorial Page today explains that this choice is "raising serious questions about [Obama's] 2007 pledge that corporate lobbyists would not finance his campaign or run his administration." It also notes that "given his background, it is almost certain that [Wheeler] raised money [for Obama] from people whose companies he would regulate, creating potential conflicts of interest." Last week, President Obama named another big bundler of his, the billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, to be his Commerce Secretary; at the Nation, Rick Perlstein details just some of the interesting questions about that choice that need to be explored. At this point, the only surprising thing is that there are any more bundlers left for Obama to appoint to important administration positions." - Glenn Greenwald, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/09/hawking-israel-manning-transparency-fcc http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/09/hawking...
barrkel 12y ago
This article doesn't get the internet. I think it's spurious and mendacious to suggest that consumers upload amounts of data that are in any way comparable to the amount downloaded by people who stream HD video for live consumption. I'm not particularly pleased about putting content consumers and content producers into two separate boxes, but the classifications of internet endpoints definitely exists in the usage patterns we have today. Unless the security and privacy problems of the cloud are fixed, people are unlikely to upload the kind of data required to make them comparable - the only thing I can think of that could make it happen is life streaming or continuous security footage across multiple cameras. But I think cloud storage's problems are increasing, not decreasing, and they'll continue to increase until we get to the bottom of the tension with government spying and commercial exploitation of user privacy. I think net neutrality, as it's naively presented, is highly unfair and subsidizes people who consume a lot of content at the expense of people who only use the internet occasionally. Flat rates for all you can eat downloads, combined with necessarily oversold capacity (since most people don't use all their available capacity all the time), inevitably means that high usage consumers are subsidized by low usage consumers. There's two ways to make this fairer. Charge people based on how much they download - i.e. caps and overage charges, as horrible as that sounds - or charge companies that upload data more, who can then pass on those costs to their customers. The market has generally rejected the first solution. It's now trying the second solution. But either way is better than network neutrality. And I say that as a person for whom "network neutrality" is in their interest. But I can see that it's plainly and patently unfair.
- altcognito 12y ago
  > Unless the security and privacy problems of the cloud are fixed, people are unlikely to upload the kind of data required to make them comparable You vastly overestimate people's concern over privacy and security. We still use email, http and insecure credit cards yet they have huge security and privacy holes. People will use what appeals to them and worry about security and privacy generally later.
- freshflowers 12y ago
  Your argument has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Charging people for consumed volume is something that can and does already happen, and continues to happen in places where net neutrality is law. Net neutrality is about not discriminating in what people consume or send. BTW, high volume traffic companies like Netflix and YouTube are outliers. Many ordinary end users create way more upstream traffic than the average commercial non-video content provider.
diafygi 12y ago
Here's a similar situation that turned out much better than expected. Back when I grew up in Texas in the 80s, the power utilities were regulated monopolies (like pretty much everywhere else). They owned both the power plants and the wires going down the street. Then in the 90s, the utility lobby convinced the state that it would be much better for "competition" if utilities were "deregulated". The state went along with it, split utilities in to "wires" and "production", and deregulated production[1] (i.e. let anyone build a power plant and sell power at any price). This was great for the current utilities because they were the only ones with existing power plants, so they could collude and jack up the rates[2]. However, in the early 2000s oil companies/prospectors started realizing that all this natural gas they were fracking could be used in power plants, and they could be the ones who owned the power plants. So there was a huge boom[3] of gas power plants in the 2000s as many non-utilities built and competed on the wholesale market to provide power. This drove the price in the late 2000s and early 2010s down significantly since gas was so cheap. Deregulation actually worked in eventually driving down the price due to competition! The difference between Texas utilities vs. FCC/ISPs is that the grid operators were still regulated and had to let anyone who sold power to use their grid. This effectively created the equivalent to the "Title 2" common carrier for the electric grid. The competition is fierce on the power production side, and the parts of the old utilities that were split off to compete are starting to go bankrupt[4]. So if the FCC wants competition, they need to follow the Texas system and split the cable company into regulated "wires" and deregulated "ISP" parts. Unfortunately, the existing monopolies have seen what happened in Texas, so I don't think they'll push for deregulation. [1]: http://www.ercot.com/about/profile/history/ http://www.ercot.com/about/profile/history/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_electricity_market#Electricity_prices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec... [3]: http://www.poweracrosstexas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/PAT-2013-Issue-Brief-Electric-Generation-Mix1.pdf http://www.poweracrosstexas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/P... [4]: http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/business/TXU-Oncor-Owners-Vote-for-Bankruptcy-257126791.html http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/business/TXU-Oncor-Owners-Vote-fo...
- lbotos 12y ago
  So in this model, you are saying we should have companies that are responsible for just laying literal wires to connect houses to some type of neighborhood switch and then from the switch side on is "ISP" territory and they are responsible to connect to the "greater internet"? I'm just wondering how the physical roles would be split and literally where.
ep103 12y ago
They get it, they're just corrupt. What I want to know is why mozilla pushed such a proposal.
- doctorshady 12y ago
  The ISPs seem just as mad about the proposal as we do. I'm convinced after watching Wheeler that he isn't so much corrupt as he is some combination of stupid and corrupt. I guess that's what makes him an "inspired choice" as Comcast put it. As for Mozilla, it's possible they were convinced the FCC was going to go for section 706 entirely at the time, and pushed for something to increase the chance that they wouldn't be completely fucked.
drawkbox 12y ago
I am glad the article mentions discrimination. I think the net neutrality debate should be framed this way. There are no fast lanes. We don't want slow lanes designed to segregate and discriminate against traffic from individuals content or demanded content, essentially creating a virtual caste/class system. What class are you in? What class will areas/countries be put in? Who will be our privileged new kings? What part of the internet bus can you sit in? People don't realize what they have until it is gone sometimes. When you have some freedom, hold onto it because it takes fighting to get it back. Nothing we have on the internet now would exist like it does with internet segregation.
arh68 12y ago
I think the FCC is responding to industry pressure that the Internet, in its p2p form, is a dead experiment. Cable worked better. Never had to worry about Napster before, just descramblers (but switched networks eliminate that). Read-only, receive-only, don't produce anything, just consume. Put the content distribution servers next to the backbones, but squeeze the small players & independent creators. (Netflix, Twitch..) Charge them more for slower access to the same fiber. Throttle any peer-to-peer protocols, encourage server->client protocols and traffic. Merge content creation & distribution into large conglomerates. Crush the companies who won't be acquired. The question is: is the open nature of the Internet worth preserving at all? We're already forbidden to run 'servers' on domestic IPs. Can they now destroy the notion that the Internet was ever a peer-to-peer thing?
discardorama 12y ago
I think the converse can also be asked: Does the Internet really not get it about the FCC? Time and again, these government agencies (e.g. FDA) have shown that they care more about the companies than the general public.

130 points by seansh 12y ago

venomsnake 12y ago

They do get the internet. But the future income of the top brass depends on not getting it right for the consumers.

rectang 12y ago
Maybe the general public can gofundme Tom Wheeler 40 or 50 million dollars to compensate him for for the bribe we're asking him to sacrifice.
- venomsnake 12y ago
  Bribe is a dirty word. I think consultancy contracts are the appropriate terms lately.
- mentos 12y ago
  I've had this thought before. I feel like if you changed the mechanism of donating to PACs to only be drawn if a goal is reached (like kickstarter) you'd have much more engagement. No one wants to donate a dollar if they feel like it is going to be alone. But I imagine something like this already exists?
  - calroc 12y ago
    Like Lessig's Super-PAC? https://mayday.us/ https://mayday.us/
  - sitkack 12y ago
    You have to actively prevent money getting from those with it to the politicians they want to bribe. Simply having other funding sources won't stop the cartels from installing their own puppets. *edit, this was actually directed @rectang
    - WildUtah 12y ago
      "You have to actively prevent money getting from those with it to the politicians they want to bribe. Simply having other funding sources won't stop the cartels from installing their own puppets." Exactly wrong. The solution to lies is not censorship, it is more truth. If censorship -- or prohibition of campaign money -- is the law, only the interested liars will control the machinery of censorship and they're not going to use it to promote truth. If all personal campaign donations were illegal, the telecom monopolies would be even more powerful and unaccountable. They have armies of employees, ex-employees, influential executives, relationships with regulators, no-show jobs for pols' shiftless cousins, charitable foundations for networking paid for with your fees, and everything it takes to exercise influence without campaign cash. Only the existence of public spirited and ideologically motivated and unrelated agenda private donations can empower the leaders that do question the insider power of the telecoms.
      - sitkack 12y ago
        I agree, in part. Politicians do need to have a glass bank account. It was a metaphorical prevention, like not getting a job in an industry you just regulated. Corruption is American politics runs so deep, I don't know of an acceptable way to handle it.

marak830 12y ago

Their paid to not quite get it.

ck2 12y ago

Fast lanes are just one horrible side effect of our "everything capitalism" country. The fact that most cities in the USA are duopolies when it comes to wired internet means essentially everyone is screwed. Even if the FCC was strict with them, it wouldn't matter. I pay $45/mo for 5mbps in 2014. Higher speeds are available but at much greater cost, because there is no competition.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
icebraining 12y ago
I agree - the socialist solution we have in my country of having multiple private companies compete a relatevily free market (as opposed to one where local governments have passed laws to limit competition, like the US has) is much better.
- Noctem 12y ago
  This thread is all backwards. Cronyism/corporatism is being called capitalism, and capitalism is being called socialism. The socialist solution would be public ownership of one firm without private competition, and would be (at least in my opinion) disastrous.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    My post was sarcastic :)
    - sitkack 12y ago
      How can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat?
    - Noctem 12y ago
      Oh good. I wondered if that was the case, but suppressed the urge to ask since people often don't take kindly to assumptions that their actual views must be sarcastic. There are also plenty of inaccurate conceptions of capitalism/socialism, and people tend to ascribe successes to their own preferred system, regardless of reality. I'm glad that's not the case here.

teddyh 12y ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” — Upton Sinclair

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MCRed 12y ago
This is true for both sides of the debate. On one side you have the lobbyists and big cable companies (and telcos). On the other you have the people who want more regulation because these companies are too big-- but who ignore the fact that the only reason these companies are so big is that they are state granted monopolies in the first place. The "right" to run cable is a monopoly that the local municipality uses to extract money from the populace (via cable fees that the populace ultimately pays in cable bills) The "right" to operate a cell tower is a monopoly (or tri-opoly- only three providers are permitted per metropolitan area) that the FCC created when it "auctioned" off the spectrum. The reality is, both over cable wires and over the wireless airwaves, there is no natural monopoly. Spread spectrum technology (and the infinite variance in frequencies of light a single optical cable can carry) mean that there is no real scarcity of capacity. And while there are limits, there are huge swaths of spectrum that can be used, but that the government is keeping off the market to increase the revenue it gets from the "auctions". There's enough money in the industry to run separate cables. Many larger cities ran fiber rings and these could handle many, many competing providers. The cost of laying fiber to one cable complex is fixed, while the number of providers that could use it is pretty high (multiple providers per fiber and multiple strands per cable, and hundreds (thousands?) of wavelengths per fiber.) Further we've already seen what the government has done with the internet-- they tapped it. They started recording everything. They weakened cryptography. They have forced people to give up private keys. They have proven that they cannot be trusted with something as sacred as the internet. So, while "regulating" the internet might seem like a savior now-- we all get the bandwidth we're paying for-- and I'd certainly like that[1]-- I believe the end result will be further consolidation into ever larger, and fewer players, all of whome are very closely tied with the government, and even less privacy or security. Ultimately resulting in a return of an AT&T like monopoly which has no interest in innovation because it has no competition. Back in the "old days" of the internet, the primary impediment to getting good connectivity was AT&T and its remains after it broke up (into smaller still highly regulated and not-at-all-interested-in-what-you-wanted-to-do-with-THIER-phone-lines.) [1] I find it astounding that in south america, where the entire country has to share a single optical connection to north america I could watch netflix in HD, but here in a city that google is currently wiring for fiber, I can only get Netflix on SD over my "40 megabit" cable modem. So, yes, I've experienced this problem first hand. It pisses me off.

bsg75 12y ago

The FCC gets it. They also know where lobbying dollars come from, and its not consumers (individuals or companies other than carriers).

vermontdevil 12y ago
Exactly. And to ensure they get a cushy job at these companies when they leave FCC. The revolving door continues on.
detcader 12y ago
"Last week, the Obama administration announced its choice to lead the Federal Communications Commission: Tom Wheeler, who is not only a former telecom lobbyist but also a huge bundler for the Obama campaign. The New York Times Editorial Page today explains that this choice is "raising serious questions about [Obama's] 2007 pledge that corporate lobbyists would not finance his campaign or run his administration." It also notes that "given his background, it is almost certain that [Wheeler] raised money [for Obama] from people whose companies he would regulate, creating potential conflicts of interest." Last week, President Obama named another big bundler of his, the billionaire heiress Penny Pritzker, to be his Commerce Secretary; at the Nation, Rick Perlstein details just some of the interesting questions about that choice that need to be explored. At this point, the only surprising thing is that there are any more bundlers left for Obama to appoint to important administration positions." - Glenn Greenwald, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/09/hawking-israel-manning-transparency-fcc http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/may/09/hawking...

barrkel 12y ago

This article doesn't get the internet. I think it's spurious and mendacious to suggest that consumers upload amounts of data that are in any way comparable to the amount downloaded by people who stream HD video for live consumption. I'm not particularly pleased about putting content consumers and content producers into two separate boxes, but the classifications of internet endpoints definitely exists in the usage patterns we have today. Unless the security and privacy problems of the cloud are fixed, people are unlikely to upload the kind of data required to make them comparable - the only thing I can think of that could make it happen is life streaming or continuous security footage across multiple cameras. But I think cloud storage's problems are increasing, not decreasing, and they'll continue to increase until we get to the bottom of the tension with government spying and commercial exploitation of user privacy. I think net neutrality, as it's naively presented, is highly unfair and subsidizes people who consume a lot of content at the expense of people who only use the internet occasionally. Flat rates for all you can eat downloads, combined with necessarily oversold capacity (since most people don't use all their available capacity all the time), inevitably means that high usage consumers are subsidized by low usage consumers. There's two ways to make this fairer. Charge people based on how much they download - i.e. caps and overage charges, as horrible as that sounds - or charge companies that upload data more, who can then pass on those costs to their customers. The market has generally rejected the first solution. It's now trying the second solution. But either way is better than network neutrality. And I say that as a person for whom "network neutrality" is in their interest. But I can see that it's plainly and patently unfair.

altcognito 12y ago
> Unless the security and privacy problems of the cloud are fixed, people are unlikely to upload the kind of data required to make them comparable You vastly overestimate people's concern over privacy and security. We still use email, http and insecure credit cards yet they have huge security and privacy holes. People will use what appeals to them and worry about security and privacy generally later.
freshflowers 12y ago
Your argument has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. Charging people for consumed volume is something that can and does already happen, and continues to happen in places where net neutrality is law. Net neutrality is about not discriminating in what people consume or send. BTW, high volume traffic companies like Netflix and YouTube are outliers. Many ordinary end users create way more upstream traffic than the average commercial non-video content provider.

diafygi 12y ago

Here's a similar situation that turned out much better than expected. Back when I grew up in Texas in the 80s, the power utilities were regulated monopolies (like pretty much everywhere else). They owned both the power plants and the wires going down the street. Then in the 90s, the utility lobby convinced the state that it would be much better for "competition" if utilities were "deregulated". The state went along with it, split utilities in to "wires" and "production", and deregulated production[1] (i.e. let anyone build a power plant and sell power at any price). This was great for the current utilities because they were the only ones with existing power plants, so they could collude and jack up the rates[2]. However, in the early 2000s oil companies/prospectors started realizing that all this natural gas they were fracking could be used in power plants, and they could be the ones who owned the power plants. So there was a huge boom[3] of gas power plants in the 2000s as many non-utilities built and competed on the wholesale market to provide power. This drove the price in the late 2000s and early 2010s down significantly since gas was so cheap. Deregulation actually worked in eventually driving down the price due to competition! The difference between Texas utilities vs. FCC/ISPs is that the grid operators were still regulated and had to let anyone who sold power to use their grid. This effectively created the equivalent to the "Title 2" common carrier for the electric grid. The competition is fierce on the power production side, and the parts of the old utilities that were split off to compete are starting to go bankrupt[4]. So if the FCC wants competition, they need to follow the Texas system and split the cable company into regulated "wires" and deregulated "ISP" parts. Unfortunately, the existing monopolies have seen what happened in Texas, so I don't think they'll push for deregulation. [1]: http://www.ercot.com/about/profile/history/ http://www.ercot.com/about/profile/history/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_electricity_market#Electricity_prices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation_of_the_Texas_elec... [3]: http://www.poweracrosstexas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/PAT-2013-Issue-Brief-Electric-Generation-Mix1.pdf http://www.poweracrosstexas.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/P... [4]: http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/business/TXU-Oncor-Owners-Vote-for-Bankruptcy-257126791.html http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/business/TXU-Oncor-Owners-Vote-fo...

lbotos 12y ago
So in this model, you are saying we should have companies that are responsible for just laying literal wires to connect houses to some type of neighborhood switch and then from the switch side on is "ISP" territory and they are responsible to connect to the "greater internet"? I'm just wondering how the physical roles would be split and literally where.

ep103 12y ago

They get it, they're just corrupt. What I want to know is why mozilla pushed such a proposal.

doctorshady 12y ago
The ISPs seem just as mad about the proposal as we do. I'm convinced after watching Wheeler that he isn't so much corrupt as he is some combination of stupid and corrupt. I guess that's what makes him an "inspired choice" as Comcast put it. As for Mozilla, it's possible they were convinced the FCC was going to go for section 706 entirely at the time, and pushed for something to increase the chance that they wouldn't be completely fucked.

drawkbox 12y ago

I am glad the article mentions discrimination. I think the net neutrality debate should be framed this way. There are no fast lanes. We don't want slow lanes designed to segregate and discriminate against traffic from individuals content or demanded content, essentially creating a virtual caste/class system. What class are you in? What class will areas/countries be put in? Who will be our privileged new kings? What part of the internet bus can you sit in? People don't realize what they have until it is gone sometimes. When you have some freedom, hold onto it because it takes fighting to get it back. Nothing we have on the internet now would exist like it does with internet segregation.

arh68 12y ago

I think the FCC is responding to industry pressure that the Internet, in its p2p form, is a dead experiment. Cable worked better. Never had to worry about Napster before, just descramblers (but switched networks eliminate that). Read-only, receive-only, don't produce anything, just consume. Put the content distribution servers next to the backbones, but squeeze the small players & independent creators. (Netflix, Twitch..) Charge them more for slower access to the same fiber. Throttle any peer-to-peer protocols, encourage server->client protocols and traffic. Merge content creation & distribution into large conglomerates. Crush the companies who won't be acquired. The question is: is the open nature of the Internet worth preserving at all? We're already forbidden to run 'servers' on domestic IPs. Can they now destroy the notion that the Internet was ever a peer-to-peer thing?

discardorama 12y ago

I think the converse can also be asked: Does the Internet really not get it about the FCC? Time and again, these government agencies (e.g. FDA) have shown that they care more about the companies than the general public.