8 ms·

Pretty impressed with the negativity here. Just a year ago, I remember all the stories on HN with people lamenting that the FCC doesn't have the guts to regulat

by jkn 12y ago

Pretty impressed with the negativity here. Just a year ago, I remember all the stories on HN with people lamenting that the FCC doesn't have the guts to regulate broadband as a utility under title II [1,2,3] (admittedly with a minority speaking against title II, most prominently rayiner, whose comments I generally look forward to for an interesting contrarian view). Y Combinator even published an open letter[4]. Quoting: Title II of the Communications Act seems the most appropriate way to properly define broadband ISPs to be offering telecommunications. Speaking on behalf of Y Combinator, I’m urging you to adopt such a rule. And here we are. It seems to me that the community has always been complaining about the different FCC approaches on the subject, and in favor of title II, until the FCC yielded. Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750036 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057634 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057634 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637147 [4] http://blog.ycombinator.com/y-combinator-has-filed-an-official-comment-with-the-fcc http://blog.ycombinator.com/y-combinator-has-filed-an-offici...

marcosdumay 12y ago
Look at it this way: People that want FCC to classify ISPs as a utility got what they want, and are pretty secure that things won't change, so they stopped making noise. People that don't want it didn't got what they want, and are at the last moments they can do something before it's definitive, so they are making a LOT of noise.
- d23 12y ago
  Hmm, that's an interesting way of looking at it. What I fear is more accurate though is there's a certain subset of people who equate complaining and criticizing with critical thinking. These people are less concerned with what ultimately happens, so much as they are concerned with how they can signal their discontent. They are the pedants at the party, picking apart conversations until everyone around them slowly moves to other parts of the room.
jarin 12y ago
Let's not forget that political sock puppet accounts are on basically every social media site these days.
- walterbell 12y ago
  An interview with the author of Grassroots for Hire, based on his doctoral thesis, https://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/q-a-with-ed-walker-on-grassroots-for-hire/ https://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/q-a-with-ed-wa... "Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes."
wmeredith 12y ago
>> Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with. Spoiler alert: the tech community is made of people. And yes, they are frustrating beasts to work with.
lomnakkus 12y ago
I'd also add that there's at least a couple of suddenly-prolific "green" commenters here today... which is interesting (but definitely not conclusive) as to what exactly is going on. Personally, I'd go from the assumption that suddenly-prolific "green" commenters have some special interest in the topic. These days -- since HN has become mainstream -- I'd lean towards astroturfing or some other monetary interest.
- walterbell 12y ago
  We need a statistical analysis of HN userids, thread topics and posting times.
  - jsprogrammer 12y ago
    Does HN expose raw data? Or must one resort to scrapping?
    - walterbell 12y ago
      These are the APIs I've seen (not used): Official: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api Unofficial: https://hn.algolia.com/api https://hn.algolia.com/api & https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI
MCRed 12y ago
Bottom line is that net neutrality comes out of the desire for people to be able to access any site they want without penalties due to traffic shaping or other shenanigans. The reason they are concerned is that the cable companies and to a lesser extent wireless and DSL companies are doing this. And why do they have the power to do this? Why don't people just vote with their feet and switch to a competitor? Because they are all monopolies. Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees. Every provider of POTS service to your houses and apartments is a regulated monopoly. And while they have to let DSL companies access the lines and long distance competition, the barriers to entry are still there, and the level of regulation is stifling making it hard to compete. Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them. And while multiple bands were sold, only 3 max bands were sold for mobile in any metro area, reducing competition. (The government claimed that they had to reduce competition to boost the prices that the spectrum sold for-- probably true-- monopolies are very valuable!) So, in response, these companies engage in rent seeking, to cover the massive taxes they pay to the federal government but also to maximize the value of the monopoly they paid so much to establish. And as a result, people get mad at this rent seeking and demand net neutrality. And what do they propose as a solution? Regulation! Treat it like a utility! Well, I worked in the electric industry. Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a monopoly over its area. People pay way too much for electricity in this country as a result. And we have a poor service level-- like the brownouts in California a decade ago that were created when regulations made it illegal to both make and sell electricity, literally prohibiting the provisioning of additional supply. (which naturally the left decided to characterize as "de-regualtion". How making it illegal to provide electricity by regulation is "de-regulation" I'll never know.) Seeing a lot of green accounts? probably people who know their karma will be killed for daring to speak out against the leftist desire to regulate everything, despite the fact that, once again, regulation is the cause of the problem. (I consider granting a monopoly and prohibiting competition to be "Regulation", though an extreme form of course.) Nothing better exemplifies the old saying "Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure" then the calls for more regulation to fix the problems of regulation. Most people won't subject their karma to the onslaught of down votes that daring to take a non-leftist position results in on this site. But sometimes you have to take a stand. And really, it's just astounding that people talk about net neutrality and pretend like these aren't government granted monopolies. Such denial!
mbrubeck 12y ago
The new FCC proposal is also similar to the Mozilla Foundation's proposal from a year ago: In the key to our argument, we then ask the FCC to designate remote delivery services as telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/mozilla-offers-fcc-a-net-neutrality-plan-with-a-twist/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/mozilla-offers-fc... The EFF is in favor: If the FCC is going to craft and enforce clear and limited neutrality rules, it must first do one important thing. The FCC must reverse its 2002 decision to treat broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” This is what’s known as Title II reclassification. According to the highest court to review the question, the rules that actually do what many of us want — such as forbidding discrimination against certain applications — require the FCC to treat access providers like “common carriers,” treatment that can only be applied to telecommunications services. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/white-house-gets-it-net-neutrality-will-fcc-0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/white-house-gets-it-ne... Google’s Austin Schlick (Director, Communications Law) says that Title II reclassification will help Google Fiber compete on a level playing field with cable and phone companies: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/google-to-fcc-if-you-go-with-title-ii-dont-forget-our-favorite-part/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/google-to-fcc-if-... This is a huge step forward for net neutrality, and it's based directly on work by people in “our” communities (Y Combinator, web businesses, tech non-profits...) who care a lot about protecting and growing the internet.
shmerl 12y ago
Who would want to be negative about it except monopolists' shills who are paid to do it?
- MCRed 12y ago
  People who recognize that the internet has been a free market for most of its existence, and has consequently resulted in a massive economic boom. Without which, by the way, there would not be the startup culture we have now. (prior to the internet it was all semiconductors.) YC people here are advocating literally killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Do I sound like a shill for comcast? If so, you're not really listening.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    > People who recognize that the internet has been a free market for most of its existence? Really? I didn't notice any freedom in places where the only choice are some colluded monopolistic ISPs which in addition write state laws which ban competition. It's not called a free market. It's the opposite of it. All that talk about the magic "invisible hand of the market" is a pile of trash when monopoly is in place and turns that hand into a suffocating iron grip.
  - fpgeek 12y ago
    > People who recognize that the internet has been a free market for most of its existence Really? ARPANET and NSFNET were big free market bastions, were they?
    - thoughtpolice 12y ago
      LOL, it's even better than that, AFAIK. ARPANET was a (D)ARPA project that to my knowledge was started to have computers start interoperating with each other so researchers at universities could easily and generally transfer data and information with each other, e.g. research papers. You may have noticed the 'start' bit. The reason it was 'starting' is because prior to that, corporations did NOT want you to have computers that could talk to each other. That would weaken their grip on the market and ability to lock you in; when no computers can talk to each other, and your business depends on computers from Corp X, this is good for them: you can't go to anyone else. Printers, sockets, none of these are interoperable - you rely on them for everything. As far as I understand, this is exactly what companies like GE did in those days. ARPANET was completely against everything they wanted, because it meant consumers were freed from their lock in. You could mix and match computers (perhaps cheaper, not-GE ones) with your GE machines, and you weren't beholden to their whims (oh, you need a better mainframe? Gotta upgrade all your machines so they can talk to each other!) And it's unlikely the 'free market' would have ever bore out the same result, and if it did, it probably would have only happened decades later. Of course, good luck explaining this shit to a libertarian-infested hellhole like HN: they all believe they're on the cusp of Gettin' Big Bucks, so they don't want a market that allows competition, or a government that regulates anything they do. They want one that allows them to strangle competition with no repercussions or limits - they're just about to make it big after all as Uber Millionaires, and why do you want to steal their money!???!! Like said elsewhere, Americans believe themselves to be impovershed millionaires, so they don't want to limit their future greatness. And of course, to build on what Carlin said: this is a part of the 'American Dream' because you have to be asleep (or braindead) to believe in it.
tomphoolery 12y ago
"Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with." Smart people are less predictable than those they have been marketing to previously. The biggest downside to this decision comes from the following line: "But Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, will advocate a light-touch approach to Title II, they say, shunning the more intrusive aspects of utility-style regulation, like meddling in pricing decisions." To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs (which is not surprising), yet it seems they're claiming to do this for the benefit of the country. I'm not sure I believe that what benefits the massive ISP/entertainment conglomerates is by proxy beneficial to the rest of us. The state of the video broadcasting industry, for example, would be one piece of evidence to my skepticism of this theory. Over-the-top linear broadcasting via the internet has been possible, at least technically, for a long time now. And we have the bandwidth in this country to pull it off. The roadblock are the major cable companies who are making far too much money in their complete dominative ownership of the infrastructure to deliver video (currently), as they do not want to lose that business. So even if television stations wanted to move to deliver completely over the internet (and apps), they would not be able to due to contractual obligations. Plus, the cable companies have so much money they can literally buy out anyone who tries to compete with them. It's not enough of a monopoly to be illegal, because these companies don't own each other (yet), but there's definitely a lot of collusion and back-room deals happening. So, while it's not surprising to me to find this little difference in the laws between electricity/gas/water delivery and internet service delivery, it does make me feel a bit sad inside. Because I know, deep down, this law is made for the Comcast/Cox/Charter's of the world, not the people who use the service. Again, we are reminded that the loudest voices in politics are that way because they are the richest. That said, the idea is correct...the Internet should be a utility, something you definitely need to have but also need to pay for. It's the next logical step to allow the government to provide more services over the Web, which is cost-effective for them, a better experience for us, and ultimately makes the government a much cheaper beast to run. Almost everyone wants the government to cost less, especially with the debt we accrue every year as a country...
- mariodiana 12y ago
  > To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs The established players are quite often in favor of regulation, since it stifles up-and-comers who might out-compete them.
acdha 12y ago
It shows how effective the huge marketing push has been: not just the ads which are showing up everywhere but the concern-troll op-eds and faux-libertarian blog posts sprouting up all over the place from ideologically-negotiable writers who are coincidentally all suddenly very concerned about the possibility of prices going up and lauding the hyper-competitive free market we currently enjoy. A lot of tech people think they're too smart to fall for propaganda but there are other people making a lot of money proving you just have to find the right spin.
wmeredith 12y ago
Contrarianism to a fault runs rampant on this board.

by jkn 12y ago

marcosdumay 12y ago

Look at it this way: People that want FCC to classify ISPs as a utility got what they want, and are pretty secure that things won't change, so they stopped making noise. People that don't want it didn't got what they want, and are at the last moments they can do something before it's definitive, so they are making a LOT of noise.

d23 12y ago
Hmm, that's an interesting way of looking at it. What I fear is more accurate though is there's a certain subset of people who equate complaining and criticizing with critical thinking. These people are less concerned with what ultimately happens, so much as they are concerned with how they can signal their discontent. They are the pedants at the party, picking apart conversations until everyone around them slowly moves to other parts of the room.

jarin 12y ago

Let's not forget that political sock puppet accounts are on basically every social media site these days.

walterbell 12y ago
An interview with the author of Grassroots for Hire, based on his doctoral thesis, https://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/q-a-with-ed-walker-on-grassroots-for-hire/ https://qualpolicomm.wordpress.com/2014/10/06/q-a-with-ed-wa... "Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes."

wmeredith 12y ago

>> Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with. Spoiler alert: the tech community is made of people. And yes, they are frustrating beasts to work with.

lomnakkus 12y ago

I'd also add that there's at least a couple of suddenly-prolific "green" commenters here today... which is interesting (but definitely not conclusive) as to what exactly is going on. Personally, I'd go from the assumption that suddenly-prolific "green" commenters have some special interest in the topic. These days -- since HN has become mainstream -- I'd lean towards astroturfing or some other monetary interest.

walterbell 12y ago
We need a statistical analysis of HN userids, thread topics and posting times.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Does HN expose raw data? Or must one resort to scrapping?
  - walterbell 12y ago
    These are the APIs I've seen (not used): Official: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api Unofficial: https://hn.algolia.com/api https://hn.algolia.com/api & https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI

MCRed 12y ago

Bottom line is that net neutrality comes out of the desire for people to be able to access any site they want without penalties due to traffic shaping or other shenanigans. The reason they are concerned is that the cable companies and to a lesser extent wireless and DSL companies are doing this. And why do they have the power to do this? Why don't people just vote with their feet and switch to a competitor? Because they are all monopolies. Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees. Every provider of POTS service to your houses and apartments is a regulated monopoly. And while they have to let DSL companies access the lines and long distance competition, the barriers to entry are still there, and the level of regulation is stifling making it hard to compete. Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them. And while multiple bands were sold, only 3 max bands were sold for mobile in any metro area, reducing competition. (The government claimed that they had to reduce competition to boost the prices that the spectrum sold for-- probably true-- monopolies are very valuable!) So, in response, these companies engage in rent seeking, to cover the massive taxes they pay to the federal government but also to maximize the value of the monopoly they paid so much to establish. And as a result, people get mad at this rent seeking and demand net neutrality. And what do they propose as a solution? Regulation! Treat it like a utility! Well, I worked in the electric industry. Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a monopoly over its area. People pay way too much for electricity in this country as a result. And we have a poor service level-- like the brownouts in California a decade ago that were created when regulations made it illegal to both make and sell electricity, literally prohibiting the provisioning of additional supply. (which naturally the left decided to characterize as "de-regualtion". How making it illegal to provide electricity by regulation is "de-regulation" I'll never know.) Seeing a lot of green accounts? probably people who know their karma will be killed for daring to speak out against the leftist desire to regulate everything, despite the fact that, once again, regulation is the cause of the problem. (I consider granting a monopoly and prohibiting competition to be "Regulation", though an extreme form of course.) Nothing better exemplifies the old saying "Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure" then the calls for more regulation to fix the problems of regulation. Most people won't subject their karma to the onslaught of down votes that daring to take a non-leftist position results in on this site. But sometimes you have to take a stand. And really, it's just astounding that people talk about net neutrality and pretend like these aren't government granted monopolies. Such denial!

mbrubeck 12y ago

The new FCC proposal is also similar to the Mozilla Foundation's proposal from a year ago: In the key to our argument, we then ask the FCC to designate remote delivery services as telecommunications services under Title II of the Communications Act. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/mozilla-offers-fcc-a-net-neutrality-plan-with-a-twist/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/mozilla-offers-fc... The EFF is in favor: If the FCC is going to craft and enforce clear and limited neutrality rules, it must first do one important thing. The FCC must reverse its 2002 decision to treat broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” This is what’s known as Title II reclassification. According to the highest court to review the question, the rules that actually do what many of us want — such as forbidding discrimination against certain applications — require the FCC to treat access providers like “common carriers,” treatment that can only be applied to telecommunications services. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/white-house-gets-it-net-neutrality-will-fcc-0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/white-house-gets-it-ne... Google’s Austin Schlick (Director, Communications Law) says that Title II reclassification will help Google Fiber compete on a level playing field with cable and phone companies: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/google-to-fcc-if-you-go-with-title-ii-dont-forget-our-favorite-part/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/google-to-fcc-if-... This is a huge step forward for net neutrality, and it's based directly on work by people in “our” communities (Y Combinator, web businesses, tech non-profits...) who care a lot about protecting and growing the internet.

shmerl 12y ago

Who would want to be negative about it except monopolists' shills who are paid to do it?

MCRed 12y ago
People who recognize that the internet has been a free market for most of its existence, and has consequently resulted in a massive economic boom. Without which, by the way, there would not be the startup culture we have now. (prior to the internet it was all semiconductors.) YC people here are advocating literally killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Do I sound like a shill for comcast? If so, you're not really listening.
- shmerl 12y ago
  > People who recognize that the internet has been a free market for most of its existence? Really? I didn't notice any freedom in places where the only choice are some colluded monopolistic ISPs which in addition write state laws which ban competition. It's not called a free market. It's the opposite of it. All that talk about the magic "invisible hand of the market" is a pile of trash when monopoly is in place and turns that hand into a suffocating iron grip.
- fpgeek 12y ago
  > People who recognize that the internet has been a free market for most of its existence Really? ARPANET and NSFNET were big free market bastions, were they?
  - thoughtpolice 12y ago
    LOL, it's even better than that, AFAIK. ARPANET was a (D)ARPA project that to my knowledge was started to have computers start interoperating with each other so researchers at universities could easily and generally transfer data and information with each other, e.g. research papers. You may have noticed the 'start' bit. The reason it was 'starting' is because prior to that, corporations did NOT want you to have computers that could talk to each other. That would weaken their grip on the market and ability to lock you in; when no computers can talk to each other, and your business depends on computers from Corp X, this is good for them: you can't go to anyone else. Printers, sockets, none of these are interoperable - you rely on them for everything. As far as I understand, this is exactly what companies like GE did in those days. ARPANET was completely against everything they wanted, because it meant consumers were freed from their lock in. You could mix and match computers (perhaps cheaper, not-GE ones) with your GE machines, and you weren't beholden to their whims (oh, you need a better mainframe? Gotta upgrade all your machines so they can talk to each other!) And it's unlikely the 'free market' would have ever bore out the same result, and if it did, it probably would have only happened decades later. Of course, good luck explaining this shit to a libertarian-infested hellhole like HN: they all believe they're on the cusp of Gettin' Big Bucks, so they don't want a market that allows competition, or a government that regulates anything they do. They want one that allows them to strangle competition with no repercussions or limits - they're just about to make it big after all as Uber Millionaires, and why do you want to steal their money!???!! Like said elsewhere, Americans believe themselves to be impovershed millionaires, so they don't want to limit their future greatness. And of course, to build on what Carlin said: this is a part of the 'American Dream' because you have to be asleep (or braindead) to believe in it.

tomphoolery 12y ago

"Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with." Smart people are less predictable than those they have been marketing to previously. The biggest downside to this decision comes from the following line: "But Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, will advocate a light-touch approach to Title II, they say, shunning the more intrusive aspects of utility-style regulation, like meddling in pricing decisions." To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs (which is not surprising), yet it seems they're claiming to do this for the benefit of the country. I'm not sure I believe that what benefits the massive ISP/entertainment conglomerates is by proxy beneficial to the rest of us. The state of the video broadcasting industry, for example, would be one piece of evidence to my skepticism of this theory. Over-the-top linear broadcasting via the internet has been possible, at least technically, for a long time now. And we have the bandwidth in this country to pull it off. The roadblock are the major cable companies who are making far too much money in their complete dominative ownership of the infrastructure to deliver video (currently), as they do not want to lose that business. So even if television stations wanted to move to deliver completely over the internet (and apps), they would not be able to due to contractual obligations. Plus, the cable companies have so much money they can literally buy out anyone who tries to compete with them. It's not enough of a monopoly to be illegal, because these companies don't own each other (yet), but there's definitely a lot of collusion and back-room deals happening. So, while it's not surprising to me to find this little difference in the laws between electricity/gas/water delivery and internet service delivery, it does make me feel a bit sad inside. Because I know, deep down, this law is made for the Comcast/Cox/Charter's of the world, not the people who use the service. Again, we are reminded that the loudest voices in politics are that way because they are the richest. That said, the idea is correct...the Internet should be a utility, something you definitely need to have but also need to pay for. It's the next logical step to allow the government to provide more services over the Web, which is cost-effective for them, a better experience for us, and ultimately makes the government a much cheaper beast to run. Almost everyone wants the government to cost less, especially with the debt we accrue every year as a country...

mariodiana 12y ago
> To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs The established players are quite often in favor of regulation, since it stifles up-and-comers who might out-compete them.

acdha 12y ago

It shows how effective the huge marketing push has been: not just the ads which are showing up everywhere but the concern-troll op-eds and faux-libertarian blog posts sprouting up all over the place from ideologically-negotiable writers who are coincidentally all suddenly very concerned about the possibility of prices going up and lauding the hyper-competitive free market we currently enjoy. A lot of tech people think they're too smart to fall for propaganda but there are other people making a lot of money proving you just have to find the right spin.

wmeredith 12y ago

Contrarianism to a fault runs rampant on this board.