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Doesn't Team Internet include Cisco, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and IBM, and other tech companies who came out against the NN regulations that were passed yeste
by qwerty85344324 12y ago
Doesn't Team Internet include Cisco, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and IBM, and other tech companies who came out against the NN regulations that were passed yesterday? Or does Team Internet just include Tumblr and Etsy?
- venomsnake 12y agoAll those are hardware companies if you notice.
- bhauer 12y agoHardware companies are involved in making the Internet work.
- danielweber 12y agoYeah, but they aren't cool like a car-sharing network. This reminds me of the power grid discussion on HN, where the cool thing is hooking up independent solar arrays, and the boring thing is running the existing grid that we depend on for life. Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career. People have abstracted away how much work it takes to keep society running. For the most part that is okay, because it gives them more time to specialize in their chosen field, but then they think because something has been abstracted away that it's easy to make some "minor change" without knowledge of the cost either in dollars or in lives.
- toomuchtodo 12y ago> Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career. Any home inverter that feeds power back to the utility is required by code to island itself when it detects a loss of utility power. Also, I have a close friend who is a lineman, and has worked in every state between Illinois and New York. He says (over the beer we're having right now) that all lineman assume lines to be live, and they routinely perform service on hot lines without removing power. Its not the newest fad we're after; we're excited by any prospect of the status quo shifting. History shows us technology getting cheaper and better at a constantly faster rate (I won't say exponential, but close enough). This is where the excitement comes from, perpetual destruction and creation with a higher quality of life the continual result.
- badsock 12y agoWell yeah, those were the companies that were lined up to build the infrastructure for the multi-tiered Internet. How could you expect them to take any other position?
- bhauer 12y agoWhile I feel it's clear that you are on the opposite side of this discussion from myself, I nevertheless would like to pose the following to you. Proponents of this FCC Title II reclassification have argued that this action will not curtail investment in network infrastructure and that Internet bandwidth will continue to improve unimpeded. After all, if they do not argue that, they would concede one of the points presently being dismissed as FUD hawked by the anti-Title II people such as myself: that reclassification will reduce innovation and ultimately hurt end consumers in the long run. So an underpinning assumption of pro-Title II is that investment in networks will continue unabated and network bandwidth will continue to increase in spite of Title II regulation. Why, then, are the hardware companies that stand to profit from this unimpeded continued investment concerned? Is it because the regulation will require them or their customers to disable support for IPv6 Quality of Service flags on packets? That seems like a fairly trivial configuration change. It seems more plausible that they fear their customers (ISPs and backbone providers) will see less incentive to upgrade to the next generation of network gear to continuously improve the aggregate performance of their network. After all, the hard part of network R&D is steadily increasing bandwidth/performance at prices the ISPs and backbone providers can afford. Implementing IPv6 QoS bits isn't going to show up as a significant line item in the R&D budget or Intel, IBM, Cisco, and Qualcomm. So yes, these companies were lined up to build the bogeyman "multi-tiered" Internet, assuming such a thing was ever going to come to pass (aside: we'll never really know if such a thing might have ultimately been a boon for consumers, because we took away the opportunity for the market to experiment with that preemptively). But more importantly, these companies were and have been lined up to continuously build the always-evolving "next" generation of Internet network hardware, full stop. And for some reason they are worried that their profits are now in jeopardy. I for one find that a bit alarming. I want network companies to get rich selling my ISP ultra high-performance network gear because that ultimately improves my bandwidth. I don't want to still be at 30 Mbps five or ten years from now. I don't want asynchronous connection speeds to persist through my lifetime. I want more hardware and network innovation, not less. All that said, I don't suspect much of anything to happen in the next few years because network R&D isn't a fast-moving process in any event. But in five or ten years, we should be able to assess whether the pace of innovation has been curtailed. I worry that in 2020 I'll look back with a tinge of regret.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rayiner 12y agoNo. On HN, "internet company" only refers to websites.