> When U.S. President Donald Trump’s critics have demanded to know what his supporters got in exchange for voting for the genital-grabber-in-chief, thus far those supporters have had only one concrete achievement they could really point to: the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.
I like opinion articles as they make it easier to understand the perspective of the author. At least as long as at least some facts are present, but that does not seem to be a problem here.
So while I do not necessarily share the authors opinion, I find his opinion a valuable context.
I have followed this but not that much since I'm not American.
I'm wondering, if the laws pass, can people use Tor to keep the actual site they visit hidden, and avoid caps?
Also, of course this would create a precedence--although I doubt we would pass such a law in Europe since companies here are not as infiltrated into the government as in the States--, but would the end of Net neutrality in the States directly affect other countries, and how?
It’s possible. One way people have demonstrated that ISPs were throttling services like Netflix is by showing that you get better performance when streaming over a VPN.
"I'm wondering, if the laws pass, can people use Tor to keep the actual site they visit hidden, and avoid caps?"
Tor will also be capped. So far ISPs seem to be interested in a strategy of capping everything by default, then removing caps for select services. Tor, VPNs, etc. are unlikely to be selected for non-capped service, especially once ISPs start charging for caps (not only is the Tor project in no position to pay countless ISPs, but if it were not capped then as you suggested people could evade caps and reduce the benefit of paying to be exempted).
"would the end of Net neutrality in the States directly affect other countries, and how?"
In the long run it will be a benefit to those countries that maintain net neutrality, by fostering the innovative environment of a neutral Internet. In the short term it will probably have no particular impact on anyone outside the US, other than reducing the rate at which new ideas are brought to market in the US.
I'm curious--why do you argue Tor will be capped? Let's assume ISPs will cap traffic in an effort to extract extra revenue for particular types of traffic. Tor is used by a relatively small percentage of people and carries a small amount of overall network traffic. [1] It does not seem worth the marketing effort (let alone network administration) to extract revenue from its users.
If I were an ISP I would be much more likely to try to extract revenue from video downloads. It's a vastly bigger market that uses far more network bandwidth, hence seems like an obvious target. It's also a big market for mobile users.
I think the most likely outcome, which is already the case for mobile, is that all traffic will be capped by default and that exemptions will be given to specific services that pay for the privilege or that meet requirements set by ISPs (e.g. what T-Mobile has been doing). Since nobody will pay to exempt Tor, Tor will count against the cap just like everything else -- this is already the case for mobile ISPs. The goal is to charge for exemptions to data caps (or throttling), and that means everything has to be capped (or throttled) until someone will pay.
Thanks for the patient explanation. I should have read your original comment more carefully.
One could argue that capping effectively exists in many US regions due to the limited competition in the US broadband market. So one outcome might be that current home users will see little or no change but ISPs will sell value-added uncapped video, etc. As far as I can tell the line capacity already exists in many locations.
On the whole it would be vastly better for consumers to introduce more local competition.
>I'm wondering, if the laws pass, can people use Tor to keep the actual site they visit hidden, and avoid caps?
I guess:
Keep sites visited hidden? Sure.
But: It will be obvious that [i]something[/i] is being kept hidden.
It would help avoiding blacklists (slowing Netflix),unless/until known tor nodes get blacklisted, then cat n mice to get non-blacklisted tor access.
It would not help avoiding whitelists (caps on everything except the "partner" sites)
There is something rather ironic about a white supremacist site using the TLD of an Asian country well known for its extensive censorship. (Yes, I know Hong Kong is somewhat special, but it has been a part of China since 1997.)
Especially ironic considering they're based in the U.S., which used to be the home of free speech.
"OMG, they're nazis! Shut 'em down!" is the sadly unironic position of most who live in what was once the epicenter of the free speech movement, and is now the epicenter of censorious impulses.
Doubly ironic in that their conservative brethren endorsed NN, or the wishes of the corporations over the notions of free speech or data equality, regardless of content or source.
I get the impression that a lot of white supremacists specifically fetishize the legacy of colonialism, either per se or as symbolic of white superiority stabbed in the back by political correctness. I've seen them invoking defunct colonial names and symbols for now-independent nations, e.g. "Rhodesia" [1] (which I encountered "in the wild" when looking for a good recording of Warren Zevon's "Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner" on YouTube).
Rhodesia is a powder-keg but I'll tread carefully and try to give my angle.
I know ex-Rhodesians, they still call themselves that since they left up until March / April 1980 when it became Zimbabwe. Their passports say Rhodesia or, from 1978, the transitional Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Why would they call it by any other name?
I would be careful about invoking the term 'colonial' when speaking with them. Many Rhodesians felt stabbed in the back by the 'colonial' power, the UK.
Outside former residents, there is an apparent romanticism amongst some demographics about Rhodesia in much the same way as the Wild West; tough pioneers taming the environment and making a previously barren land wealthy. Like the Wild West, I haven't seen that being based on a notion of supremacism; certainly Rhodesians of whom I've heard that went to South Africa were shocked at the much greater degree of discrimination in that country.
My post isn't really about Rhodesia per se, and I don't intend to suggest that the whole concept of Rhodesian identity is illegitimate. The kind of people I'm talking about tend to be very keen on apartheid South Africa as well, usually without showing any signs of intimate familiarity with either country (many of them are also apparently too young to have direct experience). This is part of a larger pattern of appropriation. There are many, many examples of white supremacists latching on to iconography and terminology from other places and cultures and declaring themselves the "true" Christians/Pagans/Nordics/Celtics/Aryans/Israelites/etc..
'Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear and read.'
Yet refuses to blaspheme the Lord our free market:
'Is this a problem? I think it is. But that doesn’t mean that the internet would get better if Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon were required to make every decision with a regulator hanging over their shoulder to decide whether it was sufficiently “neutral.”'
TR busted the trusts all those years ago, and contrary to popular belief, our plutocrats were spared the guillotine. A few decades later we got Glass-Steagall, then the New Deal, yet somehow capitalism managed to survive.
Her premise that inaction in the face of immense private, unelected, and unaccountable power is preferable to government intervention because a bunch of bureaucrats are going to turn us into a technologically stagnated eastern bloc is BS. Plain and simple.
She didn’t make that argument. Your interpretation of the article is uncharitable at best. If I were to interpret your comments as uncharitably as you have interpreted her article, I might think you were intentionally presenting a strawman version of her argument.
Her point is that the true threat to net neutrality is large content providers and social networks, e.g. Google and Facebooks, not ISPs. That means net neutrality regulations aren’t going to solve the real problem, and also that solving the real problem is not straightforward because regulating content providers for neutrality is far more problematic than preventing ISPs from favoring some traffic over other traffic. Problematic enough that maybe governments could not do it well or fairly, and that such regulation might do more harm than good in the end.
Repealing ISP rules = good. Making new rules for tech companies = bad. Doing something = hard.
Inaction.
We've had laws, OLD laws, regulating things that are far more subjective than bandwidth (which is quantifiable), or even "free speech", yet civilization continues to hobble along...
That is entirely redefining what net neutrality actually is, then arguing that because it's not 100% effective at solving the redefined problem, we shouldn't do it at all.
Net neutrality is mostly about last mile.
If your town has five restaurants but one has signed contracts so it's the only one that serves your favorite type of beer, you can argue that it's unfair and beer regulation is necessary, but that's an entirely different problem than if a cop stands at the end of your driveway and physically prevents you from leaving if you are even thinking of going to one of the other restaurants. Or maybe worse, only allows you to go to one of the other restaurants. It's not a stretch to say once the cop is there, they can also regulate what other stores you go to, what products you bring into your house, what delivery companies are allowed, or what type of car you can drive.
Net neutrality mainly prevents that cop from standing there. It doesn't attempt to solve all possible ways your freedoms can be restricted, but it does try to tackle a pretty damn invasive and wide reaching one you otherwise can't do much about.
And how would you regulate Google, by whom? US government? EU, China, Russia? Who is in charge of the Internet, and why would the rest of the world obey that? Do we create some UN body to regulate it? Put some international professional bureaucrats in charge of it, who would then be open to corruption and day-to-day political games of power, like we see in every other aspect of UN work. It's not enough to say "I don't like the way it is", we also need to come up with some sort of solution that has a chance of working better. And I haven't heard it yet...
Multinationals already comply with a litany of different market-specific regulations, so the country listing is more rhetoric than substance.
Civilization depends on rules. Some are written, some aren't. The best rules are the ones that have evolved through trial-and-error. Trial is the first part. We've stopped doing that out of fear of offending the invisible hand, so we end up with guys like Schmidt just dropping a site off the face of the earth without any form of due process.
China has already shown that capitalism is not the guarantor of freedom, so now it's either the rule of law or bust.
Yeah, personally I'm happy having multinationals regulated in multiple countries. It gives us laboratories of different regulatory regimes, allowing trial and error to iterate more rapidly. If anything, I think we need more of that.
Only danger is if Taleb's "The Most Intolerant Wins" thesis holds, and we all end up conforming to Chinese regulation. There were several articles about Hollywood self-censoring for that market.
> And how would you regulate Google, by whom? [...] Who is in charge of the internet, and why would the rest of the world obey that?
But we're not talking about Google. We're talking about ISPs and Net Neutrality.
- The absence of solution to problem B (Google & Friends are hugely influential) does not imply the existing solution (Net Neutrality) to problem A (ISPs can be hugely influential) is moot.
- An imperfect solution is better than a less-perfect solution.
It seems to me you are just arguing that multinational corporations should be able to ignore all laws from every country because none of them have the global authority to regulate a global company, which is ridiculous and the opposite of how things have ever worked.
Break the law in the US, get punished in the US. Break the law in the EU, get banned from the EU. Companies have to comply with the law in a country if they want to do business there. Governments beat corporations as they should, every time -- any system in which this is not the case is corporate oligarchy.
No, I'm arguing that trying to micro-manage Internet with local laws is just not gonna work, and will hurt small companies in the process, because they don't have the resources to come up with a legal workarounds and political pressure like the big guys.
That's not even half of it. It's just a complete misunderstanding of the problem.
> Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs
The difference is that the markets are entirely different. It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it, the canonical examples being email or the web. It's not a natural monopoly.
It isn't even a real monopoly at all. There is Twitter, Tumblr, the Google thing(s), the Microsoft thing(s), actual unaffiliated web pages, email, etc. Most people use Facebook and Twitter. Basically nobody uses Comcast and Charter.
There is a fair argument that we should adopt policies to bolster open systems like web/email over closed systems like Facebook so there is more vigorous competition. But the idea that we should enshrine Facebook as a permanent monopoly and then have the government regulate its content is the complete opposite of that. It's ludicrous.
And that isn't what network neutrality is anyway. Network neutrality doesn't regulate content. It says nothing about what anyone can print, it just says that everyone can buy ink on the same terms.
> It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it
The same is true of the general topology of the internet. We don't need any of these layers (CAs, Room 641As, long bus-runs to carry messages seven times around the country before arriving at their destination).
There are distributed solutions to all of these problems (examples for the above, respectively, including NameCoin, CJDNS, and mesh networking), but legislated "net neutrality" enshrines the current model and blocks these decidedly non-"neutral" alternatives.
I don't think that's so. These technologies are decidedly non-net-neutral. A mesh network by its nature most have packet-gnosticism as a first principle.
I think it's very likely that if a "net neutrality" framework becomes US law, that municipalities and small organizations who launch their own mesh networks will be told that, in order to comply with the law, they need to deliver Fox News and Netflix at the same bandwidth and latency with which they deliver locally available curated content.
In other words, I suspect that "net neutrality," well-intentioned as it may be today, will be a way to silence alternative internet topologies tomorrow.
That doesn't make any sense. To violate network neutrality you basically have to be either turning away peers or sticking them up for money. A mesh network wouldn't be doing either. If Fox News wants to plug a local node into the mesh network so their viewers have lower latency, you just let them. Why wouldn't you?
> they need to deliver Fox News and Netflix at the same bandwidth and latency with which they deliver locally available curated content.
Why would the speeds be different? If it's because longer links are more saturated/throttled, and nothing else, that's valid in the presence of net neutrality. Is there any other reason that should be protected?
I asked for something they should be able to do, that net neutrality regulations would stop. You answered with something they shouldn't be able to do, that net neutrality regulations wouldn't stop?
I think that a misguided or malicious regulator might certain be able to read that physical interconnects represent a "non-neutral" topological configuration, because they allow neighbors to share with each other at speeds faster than those outside their subnet.
> I think it's very likely that if a "net neutrality" framework becomes US law, that municipalities and small organizations who launch their own mesh networks will be told that
That's not how net neutrality works; you're arguing against a straw man. If network operators are blind to the packets on their network -- they have no idea where they came from, where they are going (except to route them to next hop), or what they contain then you have a neutral network. Your argument is participated on the idea of neutrality requiring perfect knowledge but instead it's perfect ignorance.
I think it's a legitimate concern that this definition of net neutrality doesn't consider that different networks have different costs associated with them. If a service offers peering for free at the local internet exchange which adds little additional cost for the provider I have a hard time seeing why you should have to treat that traffic the same as the traffic the provider has to pay for.
That means that someone on a community network, that isn't using the Internet very much, can't take advantage of that free peering. Instead they would have to join the same "traffic pool" as heavy users.
I completely agree and that's totally fair. What isn't far though is charging more for (or slowing) traffic that could be 20 hops away (and thus not directly connected to your network) just because the packets happen to be labeled "Netflix".
As it is everyone pays for their own connectivity. Netflix pays to connect to their ISP. You pay to connect to your ISP. The ISPs pay to connect to each other. They have agreements on traffic levels and bandwidth. But an ISP shouldn't be able to double-dip and "tax" certain services for which they have no direct connection with. It effectively amounts to extortion.
"net neutrality" is the term for the body of existing law, as it has been enforced for the past couple of years since classifying ISP's as "title II" common carriers. That classification was to clarify and enable enforcement of already-existing law, and had bipartisan support. The FCC is currently in the process of dismantling existing policy to abandon "net neutrality".
"Net neutrality" is a concept that long predates anyone dreaming of ISPs as title II.
My concern is that "net neutrality" as a topology concept - important as it has been to the growth of the internet so far - may be both subject to deprecation in favor of something more anarchic (ie, better) and at the same enshrined by law as the result of the current zealotry.
Perhaps I did not word my comment clearly - I was trying to emphasize that the existing body of law, going back for many years, is all considered to be "net neutrality". That is the way it has been discussed by journalists, lawmakers, and pundits for years (It is true that some agitators have tried to make the definition so broad as to include both sides of the argument, presumably to confuse voters). Courts had difficulty enforcing laws in some jurisdictions, and the title II classification two years ago enabled these arguments to be put to rest (thus making "net neutrality" a legally unambiguous interpretation of existing law). Current efforts by the FCC, under the current administration, are to remove that classification and make it once again impossible to enforce existing neutrality law as it has been understood by lawmakers and which "long predates anyone dreaming of ISP's as title II".
Well, because the way that mesh networks (at least mesh-toplogy networks) function is to route packets to neighbors. Nodes don't blindly and neutrally route packets along; they select specific packets to route to specific neighbors.
Any useful network uses routing. Comcast is not defying net neutrality by delivering all the packets addressed to your IP to you. Net neutrality is not breached until Comcast or your mesh network starts handling the packets differently based on who they came from and the business decisions about that source.
Right, sure. But on a bus, routers blindly route all packets. They don't discriminate.
On a mesh (at least in OSLR or BATMAN), nodes only route certain packets. They are also free to drop packets for any reason, be they geographical or economic. Nobody can demand that a node perform routing.
I can absolutely imagine a malicious regulator claiming that the law requires every node on a small-town mesh to cart Fox News to the other side of town with just as much priority as packets originating from within the town. And that's not really sustainable for a mesh.
> And that isn't what network neutrality is anyway. Network neutrality doesn't regulate content. It says nothing about what anyone can print, it just says that everyone can buy ink on the same terms.
What do you make of the case of Gab then? They're a competitor to Facebook, Twitter etc. They're not allowed on either app store and they've had their site taken down by multiple domain registrars. Are they being allowed to buy ink on the same terms? No, they're not, I guess we explain that away by saying: "well... they're hate speech." That's going to convince some people, some other people will take a look at that and say: "Wait, if they're hate speech maybe I'm hate speech too, maybe this whole net neutrality thing isn't actually meant for me." Which is why net neutrality has suddenly become a much more partisan issue.
The app stores are monopolies. The FTC absolutely should be slapping them for half the stuff they're doing.
But the app stores still aren't natural monopolies. They wouldn't be monopolies if people could install apps the same way they do on desktops. There is no need to regulate their content, what's needed is to restore normal competition to those markets.
That is at best a misreading of the parent comment. Try quoting whole sentences and see if you can identify the parts of the argument that you chopped out.
Only on iOS. There are several alternative app stores for Android, and you can install apps the same way you do on desktops (after flipping a switch in settings).
Would have been true if the largest manfactureres of Android phones didn't put their own browser and other apps. Samsung has its own browser and Chinese manufacturers use Chinese browsers. So chrome is rarely the default in more than half the android phones releases every year.
Network neutrality is about networks, not apps. It simply says that you can't block or prioritize traffic purely based on the identity of the endpoints. That's all. It does not regulate app stores. It does not prohibit QoS. It has nothing to do with Gab, that's several layers up the stack.
It does have something to do with Gab- if net neutrality goes away then Comcast can block their site exactly the same way Apple can refuse to put their app in the App Store.
Well, your hypothetical moron is apparently unable to understand net neutrality at all, even the very simple version that "net neutrality means that the ISP can't block one company. If net neutrality goes away. Then it doesn't matter if Gab gets their site registered - Comcast will be allowed to block it. What you are arguing for is extending net neutrality principles to App Store providers and domain registrars, instead of just ISPs". And yes, the existence of so many idiots on one side of politics is exactly why this is a partisan issue.
> The difference is that the markets are entirely different. It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it, the canonical examples being email or the web. It's not a natural monopoly.
Many different things give rise to natural monopolies. High fixed costs and strong economies of scale tend to give rise to market power among utilities, while for something like Facebook, network externalities give rise to market power. The two kinds of effects aren’t categorically different. They’re both just features of the market or products that enable firms to exercise market power. It ultimately boils down to a question of how much market power can a firm accrue before government intervention is justified.
> Many different things give rise to natural monopolies. High fixed costs and strong economies of scale tend to give rise to market power among utilities, while for something like Facebook, network externalities give rise to market power. The two kinds of effects aren’t categorically different.
They are different because network effects aren't inherently monopolized. Fax machines, email, rail gauge, all have network effects but no one has a monopoly on them. Even the internet itself in the sense that people on Comcast can communicate with people on Verizon.
But the last mile monopoly isn't due to network effects, it's due to high fixed costs.
The difference determines what kind of government intervention is justified. When you have a natural monopoly, the government can't make it go away, they can only regulate it as a utility. A non-natural monopoly can actually be eliminated and replaced with a competitive market that needs no further government intervention.
> They are different because network effects aren't inherently monopolized.
Natural monopolies arising from network effects aren't "inherently monopolized" any more than natural monopolies arising from high fixed costs. Two of the most powerful monopolies in the last few decades (Windows and x86) arose due to network effects.
> A non-natural monopoly can actually be eliminated and replaced with a competitive market that needs no further government intervention.
Both network effects and high fixed costs can cause an industry to tend towards natural monopoly. The government can split up Facebook, but network effects would cause one of the resulting companies to eventually dominate the others.
Well, when relatively few people in favor of NN are in favor of regulating content (under the shield of "they're private businesses, they can censor what they want!"), it's hard to criticize McArdle for taking the side of the free market with ISPs as well.
I largely believe the problem isn't ISPs anymore, it's content-providers. Content is getting increasingly centralized by so-called "content providers" instead of ISPs. People's experience of online censorship is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater when it comes to the increasingly restrictive rules of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Pinterest/YouTube/etc.* (all in the name of being advertiser friendly). My one and only experience with ISPs censoring content was a long time ago when my torrents were throttled. I've never had the ISPs (short of government intervention) block a tweet, a status update, a video, or an online service since then. So when people's experience of online censorship is with content providers, not ISPs, how can we expect to sell the public on Net Neutrality when it doesn't touch the largest experiential part of online censorship? There's an elephant in the room and we're screaming about the mouse in the corner.
*EDIT: Let's not forgot the app stores which give two companies the power to essentially erase you from mobile devices if they decide to.
Yes censorship by content providers is a (relatively small while Tor exists) problem, and it happens currently in real life. Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility. Because something is not currently happening does not mean we should not be concerned about it, rather, the opposite.
> Censorship by ISPs is devastating, competition cannot help, and it is impossible to circumvent and is a real possibility.
They're both devastating and difficult to circumvent, are they not? I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage. I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever. No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC. So if Gab is limited to technically savvy people, do VPNs really require much more savvy? Basically my point is that the results of the censorship seem to be roughly equivalent, which is a de-platforming of an online voice.
> I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage.
You mean "while net neutrality is the law", right? Because that's exactly what you will lose if net neutrality is no longer required.
Don't condescend. My prediction for the odds of Netflix or other major site getting blocked by a major ISP still hovers at roughly 0% with the new FCC ruling. Even without Title II classification, there are other ways for the government to intervene in anti-competitive behavior (and indeed, they have). EDIT: It's worth pointing out that ISPs in general have shown much better behavior w/r/t censorship than content providers.
I didn't make a statement either way about likelihood of it happening, I replied to your naive hope that the FCC would still jump in and stop Comcast from doing so after net neutrality rules are abandoned. If you think that this would still be illegal, please do explain which laws and regulatory bodies would be involved and how it would be enforced. Also, it is not at all worth noting that a group who are legally barred from a behavior engage in it less than a group that is not legally barred. Why on earth would it be?
>Even without Title II classification, there are other ways for the government to intervene in anti-competitive behavior (and indeed, they have).
You don't actually believe this will happen or can be relied upon do you? There are ways for them to do it but we are at the mercy of whoever is in charge of the executive that particular year. This administration will never step in. Maybe if we get a new administration and never have a Republican in office again and the Democrats completely restructure their priorities and come out in favor of trust busting in contrast to their decades of moving right and doing favors for corporate power this is a feasible assumption.
Also, maybe ISPs will just choose to leave money on the table after they gut NN and do nothing because they really care about having a free and open Internet /s
>I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order,
What? What has possibly ever lead you to believe this? The FCC is doing everything in its power against massive popular demand to ensure that Comcast can do exactly this even though everyone is screaming about hating it. Perhaps Netflix would accept paying massive bribes to prevent this from happening, but the current FCC will never step in.
>I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever.
I agree with you here, the monopoly and walled-garden system we use for phones is very bad. Users should have ultimate control over their own machines. And this should perhaps be mandated by law, i.e. mandatory jailbreak switch.
>No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC.
There is no consumer outrage because nobody cares about Gab, it is a niche service for extremist conservatives who were kicked out of other platforms for doxxing, horrifying racism and advocating and organizing violence and genocide. The twelve people who would use it connect through Tor to the daily stormer and are just fine.
If you can't download the Gab app, you can still connect through the web to the service. Iphones don't ban visiting certain websites. Your problem is that Apple controls what you can install on your phone, because the Apple ecosystem is closed and censored, but the web is open. But not for long. If your ISP blocks your connections to the Gab servers, it doesn't even matter what you can put on your phone.
It seems to me you want NN and also something stronger than that, which I'm completely on board with.
Personally speaking--ISPs, content providers, backbones, etc--regulate them all!
We can have "optimized", where we economy-of-scale everything into a few (or one) efficiently centralized provider(s) that can quickly make whatever micro-decisions they deem best in an opaque and unaccountable manner, or we can have "accountable" where everything has to grind through disclosure and review and due process and liability--like almost every other field of engineering and business.
A big part of why the big 4 have revenues on par with small countries is that we just let them do whatever the hell they feel like.
Typical ad hominem attack on writer which refuses to propose the actual solution that you are planning: “government censorship of the internet.”
Let’s be very clear about what you are alluding to when you are blaming the free market - You are saying the government needs to “do something” to ensure that Google and Facebook surface “correct” and “fair” results.
Do you really want that?
Megan is VERY rightly not stepping farther than what she said because the next step is to install government officials who attempt to tweak search algorithms and review what gets ranked in Google and what doesn’t.
This is exactly what China is doing, it is the exact opposite of Net Neutrality.
Are you able to articulate a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve creating a censorship department that is embedded into every major tech company? Once again, this is how China does things currently.
The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death, the combination of lack of awareness and obedience to what they see on Twitter is genuinely frightening and dangerous.
> "The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death..."
Please leave sentiments like this out of your comments. Hacker News is a community you choose to participate in: you are "people in Hacker News comments". Make Hacker News the type of place you want it to be. Post good, substantial comments. Submit articles you think are worth discussing. Leave generalizations of the community out of it.
Take off the mainstream ideology glasses. I'm talking about good old fashioned civil law.
Just being able to sue them in court for damages (even if it's only small claims) and work out some form of legal precedent on where the rights and responsibilities are would be a huge start. As-is, if AT&T defrauds you, or Google just takes your stuff down without warning, I hope you're happy with the $5 check you get from the class action suit three years later.
Almost every other profession is constrained by more regulation and liability than tech companies, and last I checked, we're still not communist China.
edit: Unlike McArdle's point that it's all just too hard to do anything.
I'm agnostic on the rightness or wrongness of net neutrality, but net neutrality makes cord cutting more viable... something Trump supporters who dislike being forced to subsidize certain types of content through bundled packages should be able to appreciate.
"In a world without net neutrality, your ISP may offer one video service for free while charging for Netflix, which eventually means you pay more. Oh wait, Comcast, among others, already tried that trick in 2014. In 2017, the ISPs will get away with it."
The article gives good background about FCC attempts to regulate ISP and the troubles of finding the right framework for it. Where it all falls apart, at least for me, is when it tries to use The Daily Stormer as an example of how net neutrality is "already lost".
And I'm not even sure where to start to voice my problems with that framing. For example, the claim that there's "nothing illegal" about it, which is factually wrong as lots of the content on Daily Stormer would easily break a couple of German laws, and probably laws of a few other countries, as Germany isn't the only country with laws in regards to Holocaust denial.
While I don't know the specifics about the hosting situation of TDS, I doubt what happened there was "a small number of private companies decided to exercise their considerable control over what we’re allowed to read", like the author claims.
That sentence pretty much stylizes TDS as a kind of victim by some ominous international conspiracy, I'm quite certain that's not at all what happened, just like I'm very certain that TDS is still around and reachable for anybody who would want to read it.
> For example, the claim that there's "nothing illegal" about it, which is factually wrong as lots of the content on Daily Stormer would easily break a couple of German laws
This isn't an argument that an American ISP could use to censor content under our current regulation, why should a CDN be allowed to?
> I doubt what happened there was "a small number of private companies decided to exercise their considerable control over what we’re allowed to read"
In the words of Cloudflare's CEO: “I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.” So I'd say your doubt is misplace, that's a pretty accurate description of what did happen.
Whether or not you consider TDS a victim of some ominous international conspiracy is up to you. But they're certainly not a beneficiary of a regulatory environment in which the internet is neutral and views can't be silence. At least not the American internet, as you pointed out, they're still up but they had to move their hosting to Hong Kong to stay up. So I think it's fair to say that American net neutrality failed them.
Now, of course, you may be of the mind: "Who cares? They're Nazis they deserve what they got." But as soon as you go down the path of "we treat sites neutrally... we just treat some sites more neutrally than others." It begins to erode your support as people wonder if they'll eventually be part of the excepted group that doesn't get net neutrality.
Because CDNs don't have monopoly/oligopoly power over most US consumers. The major ISPs do.
Indeed, the reason we can let CDNs decide what to host is precisely that we have neutral networks that will connect consumers to many CDNs with all sorts of hosting policies.
> This isn't an argument that an American ISP could use to censor content under our current regulation, why should a CDN be allowed to?
I think most people would agree that the most fragile piece of the Internet ecosystem deserving of protection in the US is the end-user's eyeball network providing them with service. It's the component which is most often affected by monopoly providers, and where most of the hijinks have occurred. (Ad injection, http header injection, protocol inspection & blocking, etc.)
There may be problems with other large social networks and hosting providers - Facebook, YouTube, Cloudflare, whoever - but if neutral IP transit for end-users isn't available those problems seem much less important.
> This isn't an argument that an American ISP could use to censor content under our current regulation, why should a CDN be allowed to?
Considering that CDN usually have hosting hardware all over the globe, they would most likely want to cover their asses everywhere, not just in the US. The US isn't the whole and only standard here, even if it's the center of discussion right now.
It's also not like any of this would be unheard off, there's other content all over the Internet that we (as in "pretty much the whole world") take no issue removing if we find it, mostly if it involves children. But there's also a whole global infrastructure in place to lock you out of "the visible internet" without you having broken any actual laws anywhere: Copyright
DMCA's and ChillingEffects have been abused plenty of times for making wrong claims, but it's all in the name of "profits" so we just accept that kind of "censorship" without question or much of a debate. Even tho that would probably also have made a better angle for "The Internet lost it's neutrality long ago" compared to trying to lionize literal neo-Nazis as the champions of free speech.
> In the words of Cloudflare's CEO: “I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.” So I'd say your doubt is misplace, that's a pretty accurate description of what did happen.
Is it really tho? [0] I mean, even if that's what actually happened, I still don't see the issue because Cloudflare doesn't hold any monopoly on hosting content on the Internet. It can influence its visibility quite much, sure, but nobody is getting locked out of the Internet over "bad moods".
> At least not the American internet, as you pointed out, they're still up but they had to move their hosting to Hong Kong to stay up. So I think it's fair to say that American net neutrality failed them.
No offense, but to me "American internet" is an oxymoron, just like net neutrality isn't a mere national issue.
> Now, of course, you may be of the mind: "Who cares? They're Nazis they deserve what they got." But as soon as you go down the path of "we treat sites neutrally... we just treat some sites more neutrally than others." It begins to erode your support as people wonder if they'll eventually be part of the excepted group that doesn't get net neutrality.
Disclaimer: I'm German, as such this whole situation feels quite familiar because in Germany the government has been actually trying to go after similar themed content, with a legal framework to back it, for over a decade now.
Guess how successful they've been, even with the content being deemed illegal by German law? Not very. Just like there's still plenty of (in most places illegal) nasty children content on the Internet.
To me that says a lot about the resilience of "net neutrality" in the global picture. Maybe that's where this is poised to lead to anyway; "Controversial" content only gets hosted in certain regions but is still reachable from everywhere. Which has been the de-facto way it's been working for as long as I can think anyway, the only new thing here is that some people/companies in the US started overthinking their standards as to what constitutes as "controversial content"
> While I don't know the specifics about the hosting situation of TDS, I doubt what happened there was "a small number of private companies decided to exercise their considerable control over what we’re allowed to read", like the author claims.
Actually, that's exactly what happened. I think it involved Google, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and a couple others. Yeah, Cloudflare, Champions of Free Speech -- until they're not.
> For example, the claim that there's "nothing illegal" about it, which is factually wrong as lots of the content on Daily Stormer would easily break a couple of German laws, and probably laws of a few other countries, as Germany isn't the only country with laws in regards to Holocaust denial.
And somehow that means it's something for the FCC to regulate with regard to an American company? I'm pretty sure that it is actually Germany's problem to keep it from coming over the wire into their country. And if that sounds agreeable, then I don't expect we'll hear any more complaints about the way China censors the Internet inside their borders.
Actually, TDS is just fine. They used Tor to get around these restrictions, because if what you are posting online is so disgusting that nobody is willing to host you, yes, you have to use some niche service.
It's just like if you are openly a nazi in real life, you'll find your life is a whole lot harder because everyone hates you and refuses to work with or do business with you. It's called having a society and it's an extremely good thing. If you're so disgusting nobody wants anything to do with you, we are magnanimous in the US; we don't lock you in jail or execute you, it's just a whole lot harder for you to participate in a society that on the whole thinks you are inhuman scum.
Well conservatives/populists definitely think so.
They have been quite clear on social media, that they are angry at being censored on youtube, google, facebook etc.
Some even went as far as saying they trust Comcast to be more neutral than silicon valley.
I fear net neutrality is over, unless we can get bipartisan support, but that won't happen unless more parts of the internet ecosystem get enforced neutrality.
They're right to think so. The big 4/5/6 etc. are politically charged and smart enough to cover their tracks. Comcast is so ham-handed they'd leave a fluorescent blood trail if they even thought about pulling something.
This is an important point. Now that the chance of losing neutrality, and therefore the possibility of censorship is affecting everyone, there is an expectation from conservatives, who are routinely silenced on the internet, to join hands to preserve the "neutral" status quo.
It isn't even just purely politically conservative folks either. For example, Dr. Gad Saad spoke at a Free Speech event in Toronto very recently, and the video was demonetized on YouTube before it had even been published. I have disposable income, I watch Dr Saad's videos. I wouldn't mind viewing ads before his videos. Why would I think less of an advertiser whose ad showed up as a preroll? Am I not the intended audience? Or is it that my impressions aren't allowed because I enjoy Dr. Saad's content? What if I was highly critical of his content and I wanted to watch it, are my video views still not worth anything? The only reason I am on YouTube.com for the duration of the video is because of Dr. Saad. If YouTube is making money off my presence, why can't Dr. Saad? For the advertiser, I am the product, so what does he have to do with anything?
> our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook
Exactly why we need to keep net neutrality.
It helps keep the marketplace fair by preventing carriers from charging extra for preferential treatment; something that Big Tech Co. will effectively set the price of, but most upstarts won't be able to afford.
> Those regulations [Title II common-carriers] were more concerned about things like controlling market power than, say, promoting innovation.
Why is a strength of the approach being presented as a weakness? The only kind of "innovation" that could suffer is the kind that involves extortive payment plans and anti-competitive business deals... exactly what people were worried about.
> Those of us old enough to remember the telephone service looked like in the 1970s, before the FCC unwound a little
WTF? It's not that the FCC "unwound" from some kind of pro-consumer zeal, it's that the breakup of the "Ma Bell" mega-conglomerate began.
The argument "We've lost net neutrality because some people refuse hosting / claim domains" misses the definition of net-neutrality.
Specifically, net-neutrality is about treating all traffic the same.
It would be horrible if ISPs refused, on their own initiative, to serve certain traffic. However, this is a case of people refusing to host.
Now maybe hosting at `web-scale' is only possible with such a small set of providers as to be an issue, but that is not relevant to the net-neutrality discussion.
But all of the supposed goals of net neutrality, competition, everyone having a voice, etc. seem to be impinged at the hosting / domain layer. So if the justification for net neutrality is that we might lose those things... and people feel like they already don't have those things, why would they care about net neutrality?
> people feel like they already don't have [a perfectly free Internet where everyone has a voice], why would they care about net neutrality?
The Internet is dominated by Tech Giants, but deregulating ISPs will probably only make the problem worse by allowing Tech Giants to set the price for preferential treatment by ISPs, thereby raising the barrier to entry for competitors and raising prices for regular consumers.
Hopefully you can see how "this will probably only make the problem worse" doesn't quite stir people's stumps the way "this will create a new problem that we've worked very hard to avoid up until this point."
I'm saying people will be less likely to care that repealing net neutrality will hurt them if they feel like they're already experiencing the ill effects while it's law.
The difference is that there's competition in the hosting/domain business. So if you're denied services from one of them, you can still get hosting by going elsewhere. If you can't go elsewhere, then we can all be assured that dozens of people at various companies have looked at it and chosen not to host it.
And if you don't want to accept that, you can probably still get it hosted (with enough money) by building a data center in some place that doesn't care.
In the ISP space, there's no competition for a good many people. One person looks at content, decides it's not worthy, and it's blocked period. No appeal, no asking others for their opinion. And if the end user doesnt like it, they can move, sell their house, find a new job in another area.
I like her writing, but it would be fun to lock her in a room with the old ARPA guys, let her tell them how the government is going to stifle technology, then watch what happens.
The argument in the article is deeply flawed. It goes like this:
With net neutrality, ISPs would be over-regulated, and competition/ease of market entry would be hampered.
The article then goes on to claim this competition is needed, because Google and Facebook already have so much power over the internet.
But this is deeply flawed, because big compabies will only have more power over the net without net neutrality: they can just pay for the net to behave as they want.
The article says that Title II is pointless over-regulation which creates danger for ISPs, which it is. Imagine if I created 700 rules for what you can do every day and promised to “selectively apply” those rules based on how I feel today. Would you be ok with that? Any mood change on my part (correlating with a change in FCC leadership) and I could ruin your life. Those are not good conditions under which to build a long term business. If you had that hanging over your head, you wouldn’t be happy either.
People have been brainwashed to think that Net Neutrality == Title II regulation. That is incorrect. The principal of Net Neutrality is far more important than Title II. Title II is just the wrong tool for the job and causes a lot of additional damage in addition to supporting Net Neutrality.
Watching Facebook, Google and Twitter demoting and removing opinions and websites they don’t like (aka not advertiser friendly) is much more sinister than what the ISPs are able to / are likely to do.
Censorship by search algorithm is far more dangerous than removal of Title II, which has downsides but is not anywhere near as apocalyptic as what people are saying about it online.
I am frustrated at how many people on here do so little research into their own opinions, they just look online and see what Twitter or reddit are saying and say: “ok, sounds good I believe that.”
Please take the approach of trying to poke holes in your own opinions before adopting them.
Thanks for your comment. I agree it is important to distinguish between title II and net neutrality.
However, I fail to see how the power of Google & Facebook to "curate" the internet is an argument against net neutrality.
To me it seems that if ISPs are not bound by net neutrality, then the power of big companies will be even greater.
Just another example is a startup competing with Netflix. Without net neutrality, one most likely has to buy a premium Netflix packet from the ISP on top of the Netflix subscription to be able to stream the whole month in high quality. You can look at Portugal, where at least on mobile such packages are already available. Now I don't see how a startup can compete, if its users also have to buy another premium package from their ISPs to use the startups services (in addition to the Premium package the already pay to be able to watch Netflix).
Title II is the only tool the FCC currently has to enforce net neutrality. It's also what was in place until the mid-2000s. It doesn't change the FCC rulemaking process, which often takes years from start to implementation, is subject to judicial review, specifically disallows arbitrary and capricious changes, and can be overridden any time Congress likes. The claims that Title II classification did/will stifle investment and Section 706 classification did/will encourage it aren't supported by the record of the last 20 years.
Following the same logic of this article's line of argumentation, I'd say hacker news lost its entire value because it allowed such a horrid submission to gain 75+ points.
Ugh this article was so frustrating to read. To say “oh look a nazi website can’t find a hosting service” == the internet is already not neutral is such a straw man argument. Even if hosting services were censoring everything it clearly doesn’t help the problem to allow ISP’s to censor what traffic goes through their infrastructure on top of that. This article misses the key point of NN - it’s that ISP’s already will not have competition due to high barriers to entry (case in point Google is even winding down their fiber investments). To compare ISPs to Facebook, G and amazon is apples and oranges - it currently takes very little upfront cost to host a website and “compete” with them. Their monopolies are purely because they provide good quality services that consumers want. ISPs on the other hand have zero competition in most areas and are natural monopolies due to the amount of money (and lobbying) required to build network infrastructure. Using that power to force people to use their services or pay a fee to access others is classic vertical integration and shouldn’t be allowed.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 44.2 ms ] threadI hate opinion articles like this one.
Opinion pieces, clearly marked[0], are probably better than the alternative of nothing.
[0] https://puu.sh/ytqSJ/1b73204b14.png
So while I do not necessarily share the authors opinion, I find his opinion a valuable context.
I'm wondering, if the laws pass, can people use Tor to keep the actual site they visit hidden, and avoid caps?
Also, of course this would create a precedence--although I doubt we would pass such a law in Europe since companies here are not as infiltrated into the government as in the States--, but would the end of Net neutrality in the States directly affect other countries, and how?
Tor will also be capped. So far ISPs seem to be interested in a strategy of capping everything by default, then removing caps for select services. Tor, VPNs, etc. are unlikely to be selected for non-capped service, especially once ISPs start charging for caps (not only is the Tor project in no position to pay countless ISPs, but if it were not capped then as you suggested people could evade caps and reduce the benefit of paying to be exempted).
"would the end of Net neutrality in the States directly affect other countries, and how?"
In the long run it will be a benefit to those countries that maintain net neutrality, by fostering the innovative environment of a neutral Internet. In the short term it will probably have no particular impact on anyone outside the US, other than reducing the rate at which new ideas are brought to market in the US.
If I were an ISP I would be much more likely to try to extract revenue from video downloads. It's a vastly bigger market that uses far more network bandwidth, hence seems like an obvious target. It's also a big market for mobile users.
[1] https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/tor-dark-net-study-size/
One could argue that capping effectively exists in many US regions due to the limited competition in the US broadband market. So one outcome might be that current home users will see little or no change but ISPs will sell value-added uncapped video, etc. As far as I can tell the line capacity already exists in many locations.
On the whole it would be vastly better for consumers to introduce more local competition.
I'm assuming you meant "not" instead of "now," otherwise your comment doesn't make sense.
I guess:
Keep sites visited hidden? Sure.
But: It will be obvious that [i]something[/i] is being kept hidden.
It would help avoiding blacklists (slowing Netflix),unless/until known tor nodes get blacklisted, then cat n mice to get non-blacklisted tor access. It would not help avoiding whitelists (caps on everything except the "partner" sites)
Yeah can we at least pretend to be neutral and not editorialize on the first sentence of an article?
[1] https://dailystormer.hk/
That said, they still have ways to influence the elections.
"OMG, they're nazis! Shut 'em down!" is the sadly unironic position of most who live in what was once the epicenter of the free speech movement, and is now the epicenter of censorious impulses.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhodesia
I know ex-Rhodesians, they still call themselves that since they left up until March / April 1980 when it became Zimbabwe. Their passports say Rhodesia or, from 1978, the transitional Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. Why would they call it by any other name?
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/peek_01/15570965/39590/39590...
I would be careful about invoking the term 'colonial' when speaking with them. Many Rhodesians felt stabbed in the back by the 'colonial' power, the UK.
Outside former residents, there is an apparent romanticism amongst some demographics about Rhodesia in much the same way as the Wild West; tough pioneers taming the environment and making a previously barren land wealthy. Like the Wild West, I haven't seen that being based on a notion of supremacism; certainly Rhodesians of whom I've heard that went to South Africa were shocked at the much greater degree of discrimination in that country.
Acknowledges the problem...
'Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear and read.'
Yet refuses to blaspheme the Lord our free market:
'Is this a problem? I think it is. But that doesn’t mean that the internet would get better if Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon were required to make every decision with a regulator hanging over their shoulder to decide whether it was sufficiently “neutral.”'
Her premise that inaction in the face of immense private, unelected, and unaccountable power is preferable to government intervention because a bunch of bureaucrats are going to turn us into a technologically stagnated eastern bloc is BS. Plain and simple.
Inaction.
We've had laws, OLD laws, regulating things that are far more subjective than bandwidth (which is quantifiable), or even "free speech", yet civilization continues to hobble along...
Net neutrality is mostly about last mile.
If your town has five restaurants but one has signed contracts so it's the only one that serves your favorite type of beer, you can argue that it's unfair and beer regulation is necessary, but that's an entirely different problem than if a cop stands at the end of your driveway and physically prevents you from leaving if you are even thinking of going to one of the other restaurants. Or maybe worse, only allows you to go to one of the other restaurants. It's not a stretch to say once the cop is there, they can also regulate what other stores you go to, what products you bring into your house, what delivery companies are allowed, or what type of car you can drive.
Net neutrality mainly prevents that cop from standing there. It doesn't attempt to solve all possible ways your freedoms can be restricted, but it does try to tackle a pretty damn invasive and wide reaching one you otherwise can't do much about.
Civilization depends on rules. Some are written, some aren't. The best rules are the ones that have evolved through trial-and-error. Trial is the first part. We've stopped doing that out of fear of offending the invisible hand, so we end up with guys like Schmidt just dropping a site off the face of the earth without any form of due process.
China has already shown that capitalism is not the guarantor of freedom, so now it's either the rule of law or bust.
Aside from that, great point!
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/8/how-chinese-...
But we're not talking about Google. We're talking about ISPs and Net Neutrality.
- The absence of solution to problem B (Google & Friends are hugely influential) does not imply the existing solution (Net Neutrality) to problem A (ISPs can be hugely influential) is moot.
- An imperfect solution is better than a less-perfect solution.
Break the law in the US, get punished in the US. Break the law in the EU, get banned from the EU. Companies have to comply with the law in a country if they want to do business there. Governments beat corporations as they should, every time -- any system in which this is not the case is corporate oligarchy.
> Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs
The difference is that the markets are entirely different. It's possible to have a Facebook-like system with no Facebook-like entity in control of it, the canonical examples being email or the web. It's not a natural monopoly.
It isn't even a real monopoly at all. There is Twitter, Tumblr, the Google thing(s), the Microsoft thing(s), actual unaffiliated web pages, email, etc. Most people use Facebook and Twitter. Basically nobody uses Comcast and Charter.
There is a fair argument that we should adopt policies to bolster open systems like web/email over closed systems like Facebook so there is more vigorous competition. But the idea that we should enshrine Facebook as a permanent monopoly and then have the government regulate its content is the complete opposite of that. It's ludicrous.
And that isn't what network neutrality is anyway. Network neutrality doesn't regulate content. It says nothing about what anyone can print, it just says that everyone can buy ink on the same terms.
The same is true of the general topology of the internet. We don't need any of these layers (CAs, Room 641As, long bus-runs to carry messages seven times around the country before arriving at their destination).
There are distributed solutions to all of these problems (examples for the above, respectively, including NameCoin, CJDNS, and mesh networking), but legislated "net neutrality" enshrines the current model and blocks these decidedly non-"neutral" alternatives.
I don't see how that's the case. It doesn't prevent distributed solutions from existing it just makes them less necessary.
I think it's very likely that if a "net neutrality" framework becomes US law, that municipalities and small organizations who launch their own mesh networks will be told that, in order to comply with the law, they need to deliver Fox News and Netflix at the same bandwidth and latency with which they deliver locally available curated content.
In other words, I suspect that "net neutrality," well-intentioned as it may be today, will be a way to silence alternative internet topologies tomorrow.
Why would the speeds be different? If it's because longer links are more saturated/throttled, and nothing else, that's valid in the presence of net neutrality. Is there any other reason that should be protected?
I think that a misguided or malicious regulator might certain be able to read that physical interconnects represent a "non-neutral" topological configuration, because they allow neighbors to share with each other at speeds faster than those outside their subnet.
That's not how net neutrality works; you're arguing against a straw man. If network operators are blind to the packets on their network -- they have no idea where they came from, where they are going (except to route them to next hop), or what they contain then you have a neutral network. Your argument is participated on the idea of neutrality requiring perfect knowledge but instead it's perfect ignorance.
That means that someone on a community network, that isn't using the Internet very much, can't take advantage of that free peering. Instead they would have to join the same "traffic pool" as heavy users.
As it is everyone pays for their own connectivity. Netflix pays to connect to their ISP. You pay to connect to your ISP. The ISPs pay to connect to each other. They have agreements on traffic levels and bandwidth. But an ISP shouldn't be able to double-dip and "tax" certain services for which they have no direct connection with. It effectively amounts to extortion.
"net neutrality" is the term for the body of existing law, as it has been enforced for the past couple of years since classifying ISP's as "title II" common carriers. That classification was to clarify and enable enforcement of already-existing law, and had bipartisan support. The FCC is currently in the process of dismantling existing policy to abandon "net neutrality".
"Net neutrality" is a concept that long predates anyone dreaming of ISPs as title II.
My concern is that "net neutrality" as a topology concept - important as it has been to the growth of the internet so far - may be both subject to deprecation in favor of something more anarchic (ie, better) and at the same enshrined by law as the result of the current zealotry.
Why?
On a mesh (at least in OSLR or BATMAN), nodes only route certain packets. They are also free to drop packets for any reason, be they geographical or economic. Nobody can demand that a node perform routing.
I can absolutely imagine a malicious regulator claiming that the law requires every node on a small-town mesh to cart Fox News to the other side of town with just as much priority as packets originating from within the town. And that's not really sustainable for a mesh.
What do you make of the case of Gab then? They're a competitor to Facebook, Twitter etc. They're not allowed on either app store and they've had their site taken down by multiple domain registrars. Are they being allowed to buy ink on the same terms? No, they're not, I guess we explain that away by saying: "well... they're hate speech." That's going to convince some people, some other people will take a look at that and say: "Wait, if they're hate speech maybe I'm hate speech too, maybe this whole net neutrality thing isn't actually meant for me." Which is why net neutrality has suddenly become a much more partisan issue.
The app stores are monopolies. The FTC absolutely should be slapping them for half the stuff they're doing.
But the app stores still aren't natural monopolies. They wouldn't be monopolies if people could install apps the same way they do on desktops. There is no need to regulate their content, what's needed is to restore normal competition to those markets.
> There is no need to regulate their content
Is there or isn't there a need to regulate them?
Only on iOS. There are several alternative app stores for Android, and you can install apps the same way you do on desktops (after flipping a switch in settings).
Many different things give rise to natural monopolies. High fixed costs and strong economies of scale tend to give rise to market power among utilities, while for something like Facebook, network externalities give rise to market power. The two kinds of effects aren’t categorically different. They’re both just features of the market or products that enable firms to exercise market power. It ultimately boils down to a question of how much market power can a firm accrue before government intervention is justified.
They are different because network effects aren't inherently monopolized. Fax machines, email, rail gauge, all have network effects but no one has a monopoly on them. Even the internet itself in the sense that people on Comcast can communicate with people on Verizon.
But the last mile monopoly isn't due to network effects, it's due to high fixed costs.
The difference determines what kind of government intervention is justified. When you have a natural monopoly, the government can't make it go away, they can only regulate it as a utility. A non-natural monopoly can actually be eliminated and replaced with a competitive market that needs no further government intervention.
Natural monopolies arising from network effects aren't "inherently monopolized" any more than natural monopolies arising from high fixed costs. Two of the most powerful monopolies in the last few decades (Windows and x86) arose due to network effects.
> A non-natural monopoly can actually be eliminated and replaced with a competitive market that needs no further government intervention.
Both network effects and high fixed costs can cause an industry to tend towards natural monopoly. The government can split up Facebook, but network effects would cause one of the resulting companies to eventually dominate the others.
Copies parts from the text..
Yet refuses to comment on it, attacking the author.
I largely believe the problem isn't ISPs anymore, it's content-providers. Content is getting increasingly centralized by so-called "content providers" instead of ISPs. People's experience of online censorship is probably a couple orders of magnitude greater when it comes to the increasingly restrictive rules of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Pinterest/YouTube/etc.* (all in the name of being advertiser friendly). My one and only experience with ISPs censoring content was a long time ago when my torrents were throttled. I've never had the ISPs (short of government intervention) block a tweet, a status update, a video, or an online service since then. So when people's experience of online censorship is with content providers, not ISPs, how can we expect to sell the public on Net Neutrality when it doesn't touch the largest experiential part of online censorship? There's an elephant in the room and we're screaming about the mouse in the corner.
*EDIT: Let's not forgot the app stores which give two companies the power to essentially erase you from mobile devices if they decide to.
They're both devastating and difficult to circumvent, are they not? I'm at least confident if my ISP started blocking Netflix because they made a deal with Comcast, the hammer of the FCC or FTC would fall on them in short order, and there would be consumer outrage. I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever. No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC. So if Gab is limited to technically savvy people, do VPNs really require much more savvy? Basically my point is that the results of the censorship seem to be roughly equivalent, which is a de-platforming of an online voice.
You mean "while net neutrality is the law", right? Because that's exactly what you will lose if net neutrality is no longer required.
You don't actually believe this will happen or can be relied upon do you? There are ways for them to do it but we are at the mercy of whoever is in charge of the executive that particular year. This administration will never step in. Maybe if we get a new administration and never have a Republican in office again and the Democrats completely restructure their priorities and come out in favor of trust busting in contrast to their decades of moving right and doing favors for corporate power this is a feasible assumption.
Also, maybe ISPs will just choose to leave money on the table after they gut NN and do nothing because they really care about having a free and open Internet /s
What? What has possibly ever lead you to believe this? The FCC is doing everything in its power against massive popular demand to ensure that Comcast can do exactly this even though everyone is screaming about hating it. Perhaps Netflix would accept paying massive bribes to prevent this from happening, but the current FCC will never step in.
>I have no such confidence that Google or Apple will be forced to allow, say... Gab... ever.
I agree with you here, the monopoly and walled-garden system we use for phones is very bad. Users should have ultimate control over their own machines. And this should perhaps be mandated by law, i.e. mandatory jailbreak switch.
>No consumer outrage nor any movement by the FTC or FCC.
There is no consumer outrage because nobody cares about Gab, it is a niche service for extremist conservatives who were kicked out of other platforms for doxxing, horrifying racism and advocating and organizing violence and genocide. The twelve people who would use it connect through Tor to the daily stormer and are just fine.
If you can't download the Gab app, you can still connect through the web to the service. Iphones don't ban visiting certain websites. Your problem is that Apple controls what you can install on your phone, because the Apple ecosystem is closed and censored, but the web is open. But not for long. If your ISP blocks your connections to the Gab servers, it doesn't even matter what you can put on your phone.
It seems to me you want NN and also something stronger than that, which I'm completely on board with.
We can have "optimized", where we economy-of-scale everything into a few (or one) efficiently centralized provider(s) that can quickly make whatever micro-decisions they deem best in an opaque and unaccountable manner, or we can have "accountable" where everything has to grind through disclosure and review and due process and liability--like almost every other field of engineering and business.
A big part of why the big 4 have revenues on par with small countries is that we just let them do whatever the hell they feel like.
Let’s be very clear about what you are alluding to when you are blaming the free market - You are saying the government needs to “do something” to ensure that Google and Facebook surface “correct” and “fair” results.
Do you really want that?
Megan is VERY rightly not stepping farther than what she said because the next step is to install government officials who attempt to tweak search algorithms and review what gets ranked in Google and what doesn’t.
This is exactly what China is doing, it is the exact opposite of Net Neutrality.
Are you able to articulate a solution to this problem that doesn’t involve creating a censorship department that is embedded into every major tech company? Once again, this is how China does things currently.
The people in Hacker News comments scare me to death, the combination of lack of awareness and obedience to what they see on Twitter is genuinely frightening and dangerous.
Please leave sentiments like this out of your comments. Hacker News is a community you choose to participate in: you are "people in Hacker News comments". Make Hacker News the type of place you want it to be. Post good, substantial comments. Submit articles you think are worth discussing. Leave generalizations of the community out of it.
Just being able to sue them in court for damages (even if it's only small claims) and work out some form of legal precedent on where the rights and responsibilities are would be a huge start. As-is, if AT&T defrauds you, or Google just takes your stuff down without warning, I hope you're happy with the $5 check you get from the class action suit three years later.
Almost every other profession is constrained by more regulation and liability than tech companies, and last I checked, we're still not communist China.
edit: Unlike McArdle's point that it's all just too hard to do anything.
"In a world without net neutrality, your ISP may offer one video service for free while charging for Netflix, which eventually means you pay more. Oh wait, Comcast, among others, already tried that trick in 2014. In 2017, the ISPs will get away with it."
http://awfulannouncing.com/streaming/proposed-net-neutrality...
And I'm not even sure where to start to voice my problems with that framing. For example, the claim that there's "nothing illegal" about it, which is factually wrong as lots of the content on Daily Stormer would easily break a couple of German laws, and probably laws of a few other countries, as Germany isn't the only country with laws in regards to Holocaust denial.
While I don't know the specifics about the hosting situation of TDS, I doubt what happened there was "a small number of private companies decided to exercise their considerable control over what we’re allowed to read", like the author claims.
That sentence pretty much stylizes TDS as a kind of victim by some ominous international conspiracy, I'm quite certain that's not at all what happened, just like I'm very certain that TDS is still around and reachable for anybody who would want to read it.
This isn't an argument that an American ISP could use to censor content under our current regulation, why should a CDN be allowed to?
> I doubt what happened there was "a small number of private companies decided to exercise their considerable control over what we’re allowed to read"
In the words of Cloudflare's CEO: “I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.” So I'd say your doubt is misplace, that's a pretty accurate description of what did happen.
Whether or not you consider TDS a victim of some ominous international conspiracy is up to you. But they're certainly not a beneficiary of a regulatory environment in which the internet is neutral and views can't be silence. At least not the American internet, as you pointed out, they're still up but they had to move their hosting to Hong Kong to stay up. So I think it's fair to say that American net neutrality failed them.
Now, of course, you may be of the mind: "Who cares? They're Nazis they deserve what they got." But as soon as you go down the path of "we treat sites neutrally... we just treat some sites more neutrally than others." It begins to erode your support as people wonder if they'll eventually be part of the excepted group that doesn't get net neutrality.
Because CDNs don't have monopoly/oligopoly power over most US consumers. The major ISPs do.
Indeed, the reason we can let CDNs decide what to host is precisely that we have neutral networks that will connect consumers to many CDNs with all sorts of hosting policies.
I think most people would agree that the most fragile piece of the Internet ecosystem deserving of protection in the US is the end-user's eyeball network providing them with service. It's the component which is most often affected by monopoly providers, and where most of the hijinks have occurred. (Ad injection, http header injection, protocol inspection & blocking, etc.)
There may be problems with other large social networks and hosting providers - Facebook, YouTube, Cloudflare, whoever - but if neutral IP transit for end-users isn't available those problems seem much less important.
Considering that CDN usually have hosting hardware all over the globe, they would most likely want to cover their asses everywhere, not just in the US. The US isn't the whole and only standard here, even if it's the center of discussion right now.
It's also not like any of this would be unheard off, there's other content all over the Internet that we (as in "pretty much the whole world") take no issue removing if we find it, mostly if it involves children. But there's also a whole global infrastructure in place to lock you out of "the visible internet" without you having broken any actual laws anywhere: Copyright
DMCA's and ChillingEffects have been abused plenty of times for making wrong claims, but it's all in the name of "profits" so we just accept that kind of "censorship" without question or much of a debate. Even tho that would probably also have made a better angle for "The Internet lost it's neutrality long ago" compared to trying to lionize literal neo-Nazis as the champions of free speech.
> In the words of Cloudflare's CEO: “I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the internet.” So I'd say your doubt is misplace, that's a pretty accurate description of what did happen.
Is it really tho? [0] I mean, even if that's what actually happened, I still don't see the issue because Cloudflare doesn't hold any monopoly on hosting content on the Internet. It can influence its visibility quite much, sure, but nobody is getting locked out of the Internet over "bad moods".
> At least not the American internet, as you pointed out, they're still up but they had to move their hosting to Hong Kong to stay up. So I think it's fair to say that American net neutrality failed them.
No offense, but to me "American internet" is an oxymoron, just like net neutrality isn't a mere national issue.
> Now, of course, you may be of the mind: "Who cares? They're Nazis they deserve what they got." But as soon as you go down the path of "we treat sites neutrally... we just treat some sites more neutrally than others." It begins to erode your support as people wonder if they'll eventually be part of the excepted group that doesn't get net neutrality.
Disclaimer: I'm German, as such this whole situation feels quite familiar because in Germany the government has been actually trying to go after similar themed content, with a legal framework to back it, for over a decade now. Guess how successful they've been, even with the content being deemed illegal by German law? Not very. Just like there's still plenty of (in most places illegal) nasty children content on the Internet.
To me that says a lot about the resilience of "net neutrality" in the global picture. Maybe that's where this is poised to lead to anyway; "Controversial" content only gets hosted in certain regions but is still reachable from everywhere. Which has been the de-facto way it's been working for as long as I can think anyway, the only new thing here is that some people/companies in the US started overthinking their standards as to what constitutes as "controversial content"
[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
Actually, that's exactly what happened. I think it involved Google, GoDaddy, Cloudflare, and a couple others. Yeah, Cloudflare, Champions of Free Speech -- until they're not.
> For example, the claim that there's "nothing illegal" about it, which is factually wrong as lots of the content on Daily Stormer would easily break a couple of German laws, and probably laws of a few other countries, as Germany isn't the only country with laws in regards to Holocaust denial.
And somehow that means it's something for the FCC to regulate with regard to an American company? I'm pretty sure that it is actually Germany's problem to keep it from coming over the wire into their country. And if that sounds agreeable, then I don't expect we'll hear any more complaints about the way China censors the Internet inside their borders.
Oh shit, that's actually coming true already.
It's just like if you are openly a nazi in real life, you'll find your life is a whole lot harder because everyone hates you and refuses to work with or do business with you. It's called having a society and it's an extremely good thing. If you're so disgusting nobody wants anything to do with you, we are magnanimous in the US; we don't lock you in jail or execute you, it's just a whole lot harder for you to participate in a society that on the whole thinks you are inhuman scum.
I fear net neutrality is over, unless we can get bipartisan support, but that won't happen unless more parts of the internet ecosystem get enforced neutrality.
It isn't even just purely politically conservative folks either. For example, Dr. Gad Saad spoke at a Free Speech event in Toronto very recently, and the video was demonetized on YouTube before it had even been published. I have disposable income, I watch Dr Saad's videos. I wouldn't mind viewing ads before his videos. Why would I think less of an advertiser whose ad showed up as a preroll? Am I not the intended audience? Or is it that my impressions aren't allowed because I enjoy Dr. Saad's content? What if I was highly critical of his content and I wanted to watch it, are my video views still not worth anything? The only reason I am on YouTube.com for the duration of the video is because of Dr. Saad. If YouTube is making money off my presence, why can't Dr. Saad? For the advertiser, I am the product, so what does he have to do with anything?
Exactly why we need to keep net neutrality.
It helps keep the marketplace fair by preventing carriers from charging extra for preferential treatment; something that Big Tech Co. will effectively set the price of, but most upstarts won't be able to afford.
Why is a strength of the approach being presented as a weakness? The only kind of "innovation" that could suffer is the kind that involves extortive payment plans and anti-competitive business deals... exactly what people were worried about.
> Those of us old enough to remember the telephone service looked like in the 1970s, before the FCC unwound a little
WTF? It's not that the FCC "unwound" from some kind of pro-consumer zeal, it's that the breakup of the "Ma Bell" mega-conglomerate began.
It would be horrible if ISPs refused, on their own initiative, to serve certain traffic. However, this is a case of people refusing to host. Now maybe hosting at `web-scale' is only possible with such a small set of providers as to be an issue, but that is not relevant to the net-neutrality discussion.
The Internet is dominated by Tech Giants, but deregulating ISPs will probably only make the problem worse by allowing Tech Giants to set the price for preferential treatment by ISPs, thereby raising the barrier to entry for competitors and raising prices for regular consumers.
Sorry, could you elaborate? Not sure what you meant here.
Do you just mean to suggest that the "net-neutrality-is-good-for-competition" argument will not persuade the average person, or something else?
And if you don't want to accept that, you can probably still get it hosted (with enough money) by building a data center in some place that doesn't care.
In the ISP space, there's no competition for a good many people. One person looks at content, decides it's not worthy, and it's blocked period. No appeal, no asking others for their opinion. And if the end user doesnt like it, they can move, sell their house, find a new job in another area.
That's a much harsher, draconian result.
Anyone see any problems with that argument?
With net neutrality, ISPs would be over-regulated, and competition/ease of market entry would be hampered.
The article then goes on to claim this competition is needed, because Google and Facebook already have so much power over the internet.
But this is deeply flawed, because big compabies will only have more power over the net without net neutrality: they can just pay for the net to behave as they want.
The article says that Title II is pointless over-regulation which creates danger for ISPs, which it is. Imagine if I created 700 rules for what you can do every day and promised to “selectively apply” those rules based on how I feel today. Would you be ok with that? Any mood change on my part (correlating with a change in FCC leadership) and I could ruin your life. Those are not good conditions under which to build a long term business. If you had that hanging over your head, you wouldn’t be happy either.
People have been brainwashed to think that Net Neutrality == Title II regulation. That is incorrect. The principal of Net Neutrality is far more important than Title II. Title II is just the wrong tool for the job and causes a lot of additional damage in addition to supporting Net Neutrality.
Watching Facebook, Google and Twitter demoting and removing opinions and websites they don’t like (aka not advertiser friendly) is much more sinister than what the ISPs are able to / are likely to do.
Censorship by search algorithm is far more dangerous than removal of Title II, which has downsides but is not anywhere near as apocalyptic as what people are saying about it online.
I am frustrated at how many people on here do so little research into their own opinions, they just look online and see what Twitter or reddit are saying and say: “ok, sounds good I believe that.”
Please take the approach of trying to poke holes in your own opinions before adopting them.
However, I fail to see how the power of Google & Facebook to "curate" the internet is an argument against net neutrality.
To me it seems that if ISPs are not bound by net neutrality, then the power of big companies will be even greater.
Just another example is a startup competing with Netflix. Without net neutrality, one most likely has to buy a premium Netflix packet from the ISP on top of the Netflix subscription to be able to stream the whole month in high quality. You can look at Portugal, where at least on mobile such packages are already available. Now I don't see how a startup can compete, if its users also have to buy another premium package from their ISPs to use the startups services (in addition to the Premium package the already pay to be able to watch Netflix).