I don't know why Mozilla thinks it's okay to politically align themselves. Shouldn't they stay neutral if they want to make a browser for everybody and all of that? Reminds me of the Tor project calling themselves a "human rights project"
I am not from the US so I don't know if it's a partisan issue, but I don't agree with NN, so them implying everybody agrees on that because it's the common good is completely bonkers.
>A company is free to align themselves with any goal they wish to have. They see that their strategy aligns with the majority of their users and the user's they wish to attract. You have the freedom to not use their product if you don't align with them.
They are just virtue signalling.
>If you're not from the US what country are you from that would have a benefit from eliminating net neutrality? What are your reasons for not supporting it?
I am from a country in the EU. I don't support NN because I want to have access to zero-rated services. As a consumer, they make my life easier and my bill lower. I want to have the freedom of choosing whether I want NN in my connection or not. I don't want the government to take that freedom away from me.
>Are you saying the only companies that can take a stance are ISPs? And they can lobby governments but an independent company cannot?
They surely can. I was just surprised because Mozilla pride themselves so much in diversity and the common good. I suppose their diversity does not include diversity of thought.
They've filed court cases against the FCC.
They're activly trying to change legislation.
If that's virtue signalling then it's a stupid phrase that means nothing.
>I am from a country in the EU. I don't support NN because I want to have access to zero-rated services. As a consumer, they make my life easier and my bill lower. I want to have the freedom of choosing whether I want NN in my connection or not. I don't want the government to take that freedom away from me.
An ISP zero rating facebook, Netflix or Spotify just entrenches a big player in their dominant position.
That's bad for the market and shouldn't be encouraged.
How can a new entrant into a market compete when the ISP or mobile operator is giving the major player preferential treatment.
As a consumer sure you don't care but these are exactly the scenarios that a government should ensure a level playing field in.
Even in the sense of if a mobile operator is Zero rating a music provider then the operator must allow a choice and all music vendors must be able to easily join the programme.
Hacker news is quite focused on startups, creating barriers for market entry isn't very startup friendly.
>I suppose their diversity does not include diversity of thought.
LOL. So a company can't stand for anything because they might upset someone?
Have a bit of self awareness.
Having a persecution complex when you're on the winning side is pathetic.
>They've filed court cases against the FCC. They're activly trying to change legislation.
Of course... they have to spend the donations on something. Anything but improving Firefox or Thunderbird, lol
>An ISP zero rating facebook, Netflix or Spotify just entrenches a big player in their dominant position.
No because in the EU by legislation ISPs are forced to zero-rate all services in the same category. If they zero-rate Netflix they have to zero-rate YouTube and everything in between.
>LOL. So a company can't stand for anything because they might upset someone?
Exactly. They should not alienate possible users or customers.
>Have a bit of self awareness. Having a persecution complex when you're on the winning side is pathetic.
I, and all customers, are on the winning side by now. But we have to keep fighting so evil doesn't win, :)
>"No because in the EU by legislation ISPs are forced to zero-rate all services in the same category. If they zero-rate Netflix they have to zero-rate YouTube and everything in between."
Which is government regulation, which you claim to be against.
Why not just enforce neutrality, eliminate the silliness that is zero rating, and offer reasonable data allowances instead?
> No because in the EU by legislation ISPs are forced to zero-rate all services in the same category. If they zero-rate Netflix they have to zero-rate YouTube and everything in between.
You know what the technical term for that kind of legislation is, right? Yeah, you guessed it, that is net neutrality regulation!
So, I suppose you are against this type of legislation then, correct?
Mozilla as a website, and as a service, can be completely effected by NN, so why can't they advocate for or against? It's like saying to anyone else effected laws 'Why are you politically aligning yourself?'. Because laws, and the lack of laws, has effects. We can agree or disagree on those effects, but the argument should not be discussing some merit of opinion.
Mozilla's mission is not to make a browser for everybody and all of that, it's to make the internet open and accessible to all. See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/mission/
So... people who are lobbying for a neutral infrastructure supporting their browser for everybody are not being neutral?
Every software project has values, even if they're only implicit in the idea that the function of the software will have value for people. So even if there were something wrong with a non-profit having a set of other values (and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with Mozilla having such values any more than there's anything wrong with the EFF having such values), it'd be perfectly consistent for someone making software to facilitate a given activity to also have a position about what kinds of legal, social, and economic policies facilitate that activity.
Mozilla makes a web browser based on a vision of the web. Net neutrality is a policy that serves that vision of the web, and there's a boatload of well-considered argument that vision facilitates a lot of economic enterprise and personal freedom better than the alternatives.
It was a technical project with the goal of proxifying your stuff via the onion network. They made it about human rights. Accessing forbidden websites is just one of all the things you could ever use Tor for. You could also use it to buy drugs or hire a hitman or troll online or watch child pornography. Why not call it a "hitmen for everybody" project?
The goal is to make an uncensorable method for everyone to send and receive information with. Without it, thousands of people in authoritarian regimes would be disadvantaged.
> I don't know why Mozilla thinks it's okay to politically align themselves.
Being pro equal access to internet for every party is not politically aligning themselves anywhere else in the world, but in the U.S. where the right-wing has been successfully co-opted into thinking that every bit of regulation is a communist plot to take over Nebraska.
It's amazing how "politicized" net neutrality has become in the last 6 months. A year ago I couldn't find anyone honestly arguing to repeal it. Reddit, HN, everywhere I looked people (and companies) besides ISPs said repealing net neutrality was bad.
In comes Trump and Ajit Pia, and suddenly there is another side, the "against government regulation". It's a talking point anyone who watches Fox News or reads the Wall Street journal can proudly stand behind. Now we have a side, Net Neutrality is a "liberal thing" and ISPs determining what content we can get at what speed is up for debate.
Linked in is a horrible platform to get news on, and especially to read comments on, but the top comments for a NN article were all PRO-REPEAL, what a reversal! And looking at comments on HN & Reddit you can actually see people who fell for the bait and took it as a "government encroachment" argument.
It's truly sad, this particular debate was beautiful for a bit because of the the political spectrum united behind it, that has crumbled to the perennial partisan debate of left vs right.
The worst thing that ever happened was liberals wrapping their arms around Net Neutrality and claiming it as “their” issue. This immediately caused a knee jerk reaction in conservatives who will oppose anything liberals will support and thus the coalition to repeal Net Neutrality was born and ultimately triumphed.
I think that's a very partisan way of looking at a complex issue. 'liberals wrapping their arms around net neutrality' is not why net neutrality is being repealed, and not why the coalition to repeal Net Neutrailty was created. You can look towards the significant amount of contributions to various politicians and individuals in government that have come from ISP's and see quite a clear picture of the source of NN being repealed.
It's not necessarily always true that corporate donations are simply to bribe politicians into doing their bidding (which is what I took away when I read your commend). Companies will give money to politicians who are already aligned with their interests.
I watched a video once which tried to address the idea that Ted Cruz was being bribed by Comcast. Once of the arguments put forward was, sure, he may have received donations from some Comcast employees. However we shouldn't conflate that to mean Comcast was paying him money. Other politicians like Hillary and Bernie also would have received donations from Comcast employees.
Also, opponents of Net Neutrality actually do make some good points against the role of government in regulating the internet. Here's a debate where Nick Gillespie (a libertarian) and Michael Katz argue against Mitchell Baker and Tom Wheeler on whether NN is good. By the end of the debate, Nick and Michael are able to convince more people to consider opposing NN than to support:
The difference between giving money to change alignment, and 'already being aligned', is appearances. It's still money being sent, and that absolutely influences the individual being funded. It's a complete conflict of interest, and especially in this case it's an absurd amount of money being sent to many politicians, not just one.
I think there are some good points against NN. Such as the FTC's role in investigating unfair practices. But the FTC is always playing catch-up when it comes to the myriad of bad practices ISP's get up to. With the repeal of NN there has been no real replacement to prevent the ISP monopolies from being unfair, as they have done in the past. I generally side with libertarian arguments and that markets can do a better job. But in the U.S, we have monopalies. ISP's grew under non-NN rules, and there are significant anti-competative practices to blame rather than the easy one of 'regulation'.
Is this what politics has come to? If liberals want conservatives to help with an important issue, they have to pretend to be against it so conservatives won’t have a tantrum?
I'm from a country with a reasonable voting system that allows more than two parties to exist. This allows more than two political idea clusters to oppose each other. This might surprise US citizens, but the big parties here don't have polar opposite positions on every issue. Quite the opposite, but once the become similar a voter can actually choose smaller competing party without hurting his own position.
It disturbs me how rarely US citizens criticize their FPTP voting system, even though I understand how hard it would be to get rid of it (only FPTP winners could get rid of it). But still it seems so dangerous, especially now where people more than ever can live their own media environment without common consensus. Anything but FPTP.
It truly is a terrible thing when people want "less regulation" without pausing to think whether the particular bit of regulation benefits them or not. "Regulation" has become a bogeyman you can invoke to reliably get people rallying against it.
As a customer, NN does not benefit me. The opposite. I will lose access to zero-rated services if it's implemented. I don't want that to happen because then I will have to pay more money for the same service.
I don't understand this. Can someone explain to me the argument of "ISPs in the US are monopolies, so more regulation is worse for the customer"?
If your ISP is a monopoly, they can do whatever they want if left unregulated. They can literally charge you whatever they want.
Zero-rated services are zero-rated because you pay for them indirectly. I guess losing access to them would be a downside, and would prevent Facebook from becoming even more entrenched, which they certainly don't want. It doesn't do anything for internet freedom, though. You might as well say "well the internet to me is Facebook, so I don't care if the internet is free, I just want it to run Facebook".
I live in the first world so I have many many choices to get a wired or 4G connection. The government forces ISPs to share their infrastructure. I understand that kind of stuff does not apply to countries like the US, but I'm talking about my own case here.
As you rightly pointed out, ISPs are monopolies in the US. That's the issue. Break them up, force them to compete, remove the monopolies. Trying to fix the monopoly problem, that arose due to government interference, with more government regulation is not right.
PS: an advice: If you cannot think of a single argument against your own position you're not ready to have a dialog.
Breaking them up does not do anything. If there is one cable to your house, breaking up the company that owns it does not change that there is one cable to your house. Last-mile networks are natural monopolies. You wouldn't expect breaking up your local utilities would lead to a choice in sewer pipes, would you?
You do understand that ISPs do implement zero-rated service because it makes them money, right? Who do you think this money comes from if it's not from you? Who is the nice person who decided they wanted to subsidize your internet connection?
If you think that zero-rated services save you money, all that is happening is that you don't understand how you pay for it. So, maybe it is time to find out how you do pay for it?
> Yup, how horrible that people actually want less regulation.
You want less government regulation, in favor of more corporate 'regulation'. That does indeed sound horrible to me.
It seems that some people just hear REGULATION and freak out, without realizing that they rely heavily on regulation every day to get safely to work and not have their house confiscated.
I still find it amazing that everything has degraded from the independent hacker culture of the 90s to continually begging for the government to control and regulate the Internet. If you ever posted “what the Internet could really use is for the US Congress to control it!” to Usenet or 1999 Slashdot you would have gotten flamed to a crisp.
I mean, God knows I’m not going to use a Google product, so I’m sticking with Firefox anyway, but Mozilla certainly doesn’t do themselves any favors.
Without net neutrality ISP's can start prioritizing traffic and block others at their digression. With the massive consolidation of ISPs people don't have the option to punish companies for pulling such crap.
Since many ISPs also have cable bundles they have an active interest to block services like Netflix. So... do you see the horrendous picture? Shouldn't we, as citizens, be able to tell ISPs they have to provide everything to us EQUALLY and not block content?
The libertarian fantasy of 90s internet is dead and buried, repealing Net Neutrality is just pissing on it's grave.
There's not enough independent hacker spirit to cover the whole country in decent internet. The big ISPs depend on government-enforced franchise agreements and all the public money they can get to eliminate competition. That said, hackers are citizens too, and we can at least fight for protections from the ISPs that exist.
You can't separate NN from being government control of the internet. Even if the government made some bad deals with ISPs isn't really relevant. And you can try to do mental gymnastics to get around it, but what NN supporters basically say is, "the companies that provide our access the internet can't be trusted to act in the best interest of the consumer, so we need the government to tell them how to do their job".
And the same thinking has led to GDPR and FOSTA, and to ignore that is to ignore a pretty sad change in people's opinion: the government is now more trustworthy than tech companies in protecting people's use of the internet.
And maybe sadder is that this new thinking is probably warranted, but let's not make excuses. Warranted or not, NN needs to be called out for what it is.
The internet has always been controlled by the government from day 1. And while you may wish to work toward a more independent net, wishing won't make it so overnight. We've go to do what we can with what we've got.
Local governments make deals with ISPs to get coverage to a certain % of the population in exchange for exclusivity. Adding NN to the deal is just negotiating terms in an existing agreement. If we had a free-r market or some competition that might be a better way to get what we want, but we don't.
> If we had a freeR market or some competition that might be a better way to get what we want, but we don't.
So why aren’t we fighting for that? My problem with NN is not the idea, but the pro-government politics of those so loudly supporting it. I trust free markets far more than I trust governments. If Nancy Pelosi or Maxine Waters were in charge of American internet — I find that pretty horrifying.
Because it is an inherently unstable equilibrium. Having two communication networks (of the same level of service, so this does not apply to adding a next-generation network with far higher bandwidth than the exiting network) is as economically sensible as having two power grids or two competing sewer pipes: It necessarily almost doubles the costs (because what dominates the costs is laying the cables, not buying the uplink). A link that is unused because the house is using the competitor's network still has nearly the same costs for the network owner as if the house were using their network. Which means the best strategy for the established network is to undercut the new competitor in order to kill it. The marginal costs of connecting a customer are minimal, while losing too many customers to the competition would allow them to do the same thing to you. That's why people generally wouldn't invest in such a network in the first place.
Competition works at the backbone level, as there is enough traffic overall to fill the pipes of multiple competitors. But last-mile networks consist of links that are either used and paid for, or unused with no option to sell the capacity to somebody else, so there is a natural tendency towards a monopoly (which is also in a way in the interest of the customer: Building two networks necessarily doubles the cost, which ultimately the customers have to pay for).
Also, they are in charge of the American internet anyway. One law regulating some aspect of the internet does not in any way change how much power people have over some other aspect. If people can make a law banning hacker news, they can do so without NN regulation existing beforehand.
The Internet was a government network, fully controlled by the government until the transit links were privatized. Once that happened, it took government-granted monopolies to connect ordinary people to it. The fact is that the Internet has been government regulated since day one and deregulating it without a plan in place to ensure the deregulation goes well for the users of the Internet is sheer lunacy, especially since the ISPs have already shown what they plan to do.
>"the government is now more trustworthy than tech companies in protecting people's use of the internet."
Yes, it absolutely is! Just like other basic utilities, such as water, power and sewers. I wouldn't trust private companies with those services, either.
> continually begging for the government to control and regulate the Internet
Some of what government does is formalize things people come up with on their own and provide various institutions for reinforcing and administering those things. Property itself, for example.
The relevant policy proposals where net neutrality is concerned mostly formalize the operating considerations that the "independent hacker culture of the 90s" came up with. When some private stewards of net infrastructure defect from those considerations to plans that have significant drawbacks and no plausible benefits beyond profit margins, it seems reasonable to trust institutions that are accountable to the public in a different way.
"Government control" also doesn't seem like a particularly apt characterization of net neutrality policy, but who knows, maybe you also characterize the FDA as government control of what you eat and assault laws as government control of your actions.
I suppose asking for laws to prevent people from controlling and regulating the internet is technically asking the government for more control and regulations, but that's a rather weird way of putting it.
If you are talking about regulatory capture, I’d need some concrete examples of how you think this constitutes RC.
Complex laws around data recording and reporting might count as RC because of the resources involved (S-O for example). But net neutrality? Not seeing it.
Independent hackers need net neutrality; otherwise access to their innovations and startups will be limited, and their access to the Internet from which they get ideas, inspiration, and collaboration, will also be limited. I wonder how that spirit would survive if people only had access to major commercial websites. EDIT: Imagine the FOSS project with no budget to buy access, and any project that challenges the status quo (political, corporate, etc.) and is given no or minimal access. Where would hacker culture and the world be without those projects?
I agree that it's a loss that we have to turn to government, but it's better than no net neutrality at all. Net neutrality used to be accomplished by cooperation, good faith, and maybe even enlightened self-interest (something U.S. corporations often lack). But the stakes on the Internet are now in the trillions of dollars and (long ago) it has attracted the greedy and power-hungry, who are not going to cooperate and act in good faith. That's why democratic government exists, to give that power to ordinary citizens, distributed fairly via the vote. At least that's the theory in some places:
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
> begging for the government to control and regulate
That would be, desiring all citizens to control and regulate via their representatives, rather than having a few powerful citizens make the decisions on their own.
They'd still need to pay the corporate ISPs to carry or to not completely deprioritize traffic from hackerISP, or else nobody else could reach the hackers' great websites, services, ideas, etc. If hackerISP carried things the corporates didn't like, they could still throttle or kill access to it or to individual domains, protocols, etc.
And how will hackerISP pay for nationwide infrastructure? That's going to need a pretty wealthy independent hacker. Maybe if Linus, Woz, Paul Allen (is he a hacker?), and a few others committed their fortunes to it, they could buy and deploy the fiber and the hardware ... but then there are operations, maintenance, upgrades ...
> "And how will hackerISP pay for nationwide infrastructure?"
Depending on where you live, ISPs do not need to own their own infrastructure. For a bit more information into how this can work, I'd recommend taking a look at local loop unbundling:
Also, GP is alluding to things that have already happened in the past, in the wild west days of the Internet it was more common for small ISPs to get started (even with competition from the big ISPs like AOL and CompuServe).
He says nationwide infrastructure and you link to regulations on last mile issues. I think you misunderstood “nationwide”, and made his point for him by citing governmental intervention in internetworking.
> Depending on where you live, ISPs do not need to own their own infrastructure. For a bit more information into how this can work, I'd recommend taking a look at local loop unbundling:
So, you are in favor of regulation forcing last-mile operators to allow competitors to use their infrastructure at a competetive price set by the regulator without any discrimination based on the data transmitted, right?
> Also, GP is alluding to things that have already happened in the past, in the wild west days of the Internet it was more common for small ISPs to get started (even with competition from the big ISPs like AOL and CompuServe).
Which didn't compete on the last mile, as the access medium was a telephone line. Consumer ISPs in those days didn't have to have a last mile, they simply used the monopoly's last mile of telephone wire.
> "So, you are in favor of regulation forcing last-mile operators to allow competitors to use their infrastructure at a competetive price set by the regulator without any discrimination based on the data transmitted, right?"
Perhaps you're unaware, but there's a long history of government grants to fund telecommunications infrastructure, the growth is not solely due to private companies. Here's a recent example from my country (the UK), I'm fairly confident I could find equivalent stories from where you live:
They definitely are capable of regulating traffic to/from you, based on its content and source/destination, and charging you differently based on how much regulation you want to endure.
My ISP is capable of determining the services it offers to me, its customer. Your ISP is capable of determining the services it offers to you, its customer. No ISP is capable of mandating behavior from third parties who haven't chosen to engage in an economic exchange with it, meaning that no ISP is capable of regulation.
My country is capable of determining the services it offers me, its citizen. Your country is capable of determining the services it offers to you, its citizen. No country is capable of mandating behavior from third parties who haven't chosen to engage in a citizenship relationship with it, meaning that no country is capable of regulation.
If you are an US-american I would like to point out your president just regulated how other companies, citizens and countries have to interact with Iran.
My ISP is capable of denying services to me, its customer, based on principle (e.g. it conflicts with their business model). Ergo, they regulate what I can/cannot do. Without government regulation to say "bad ISP, bad", they can regulate my ability to access services and charge me more to slowly peel back that regulation.
In case you are still confused, here's the definition of 'regulation':
> to control or direct by a rule, principle, method
Well it's a widely accepted definition[1], so it's a bit ironic that you fail to understand there's more to the word, particularly in context. Popular synonyms include things like "restrict", "restrain", "control".
For your own sake I really hope you are able to regulate your own fingers.
The term gatekeeper is maybe relevant in the context of the more serious side of this conversation. ISPs are gatekeepers and have the say what comes through their gate. They can regulate the flow of information.
Competition is only the best regulation if the majority of the customers both know and care about correcting for the issues that regulation would usually cover, which is not true here (a maximum of 16 million legitimate comments were filed by the public on the FCC's decision, less than 10% of the 280 million or so internet users in the US), and so your comment is irrelevant, even ignoring the government-enforced regional monopolies that many ISPs have as a result of buying off local politicians.
Yeah, true. The best way towards safe food and drugs certainly is by relying on the expertise of the average customer to figure out what's dnagerous and what is not. Who is better equipped to judge the biological long-term effects of some mislabeled, contaminated food than your average customer?
Counterpoints: Tobacco. Cocaine. Morphine. Heroin. Laudanum. Alcohol. Car seatbelts. Leaded gasoline, paint, and glassware. Mercury (in hats, as a toy). Radon (in water), X-rays (for shoe fitting!), and Uranium (dentures).
When there are basically two ISPs in most municipalities, there is no independent third party. And this is before we get to what happens when people start inserting these ideas into peering a la the money grab on Netflix.
The ISPs can filter what you request and host, simple as that. And if you want to start a business, better hope it doesn't compete with any of the ISP parent company's holdings, because they have every right to scuttle access to it. Want to make the best new Netflix? Stay away from any ISP even tangentially associated with Hulu - which might be every ISP in your area. Even if you pick a small, independent ISP, the peering issue remains.
> The ISPs can filter what you request and host, simple as that.
Within the SLA.
It all depends on whenever you can be rejected as a customer or not, and whenever the offering must be public or each peer negotiates for their own terms, though.
Any proof this is happening now? Is there any proof that services aren’t actually getting better now? Or does the NN crowd feel like FUD is warranted?
I’m just waiting for all of the dystopian horror we’ve been promised, but still not seeing it. When are the ISPs going to start charging small websites to allow their traffic? When has legitimate traffic been throttled because of the content? Citations and examples needed — and post-NN examples are all that count.
Any proof at all that someone making the next Netflix is getting harmed? Because NN is already gone. So where is all of this horrible stuff happening. We were promised an internet catastrophe and it hasn’t happened yet. And before NN— what happened then? That was when the actual Netflix was getting started and somehow Netflix was able to be born without NN.
But prices seem to be going down.
Stop spreading FUD. It isn’t happening. Things are getting better in fact. Markets are more powerful than governments.
I was paying for 100 Mbps from my ISP back when this was going on, but YouTube and Netflix were unusable in prime time. Those were the two high bandwidth services I was paying my ISP for, but my ISP held my video streaming for ransom and got away with it because I had no other choice for high speed Internet.
While I understand the sentiment, I don't believe the "independent hacker culture" faced the same issues we do today with regards to accessing the internet.
It's hard for me to imagine this comment having been made in good faith. Do you have any credible affirmative proposal/suggestion to preserve the essential qualities of the Internet that government-mandated net neutrality achieves, or are you being willfully ignorant and myopic? When "independent hacker culture" finds a way to fund an 'independent' alternative national/global Internet infrastructure to the tune of hundreds of billions (trillion(s)?) of dollars, please do let me know. (Perhaps you've forgotten or never realized that that the Usenet/Slashdot of old you so wistfully refer to would never have even existed without ARPANET, a government-funded project.)
How specifically are freer markets going to solve the problem? Free markets only work when there's competition. Seeing as nobody can replicate the essential physical infrastructure that ISPs/telecoms own, not even investors with billions upon billions of dollars (see: Google Fiber), I fail to see how your glib answer of "freer markets" is at all credible.
A powerful (oligopolistic) corporation can set low prices / reduce margins in order to prevent other potential companies to enter into the market. And they are also pushed to innovate
Someone can't just "enter" the internet service market. It takes billions of dollars. All the incumbent has to do is temporarily lower prices to keep people from switching and raise prices again once the new player goes bankrupt.
Because cable companies and phone companies got local government approved monopolies like the electric companies and phone companies. They were thus guaranteed to have a return on investment. They also had to be given right of way privileges by the government to install cable.
The current free market situation has created monopolies in many areas. How would you propose that "freer markets" would solve this?
What we are seeing now is that people literally have to build their own non-profit mesh networks (as in NYC), just to get around the monopolies. If there was actual competition, that would have been necessary.
Countless cities and towns where there is only one ISP, or a duopoly in cahoots to keep prices high and service low, and freezing competitors such as Google Fiber out of the market.
This isn't exactly new information, if you haven't noticed the problem by now, you must have been living under a rock.
There are hundreds of credible reports and articles about this problem.
More deregulation would provide the threat of having more competition later, so it would be a factor of development. There are others factors at play too of course, and net neutrality doesn't seem to be going in the right direction.
So, deregulating sewer pipes will cause a second set of sewers to be built, which will lead to more competition and cheaper prices?
Last-mile networks are natural monopolies, building even only two networks necessarily causes half of the capacity to be unused, which is extremely inefficient, which is why it doesn't happen (among other reasons).
It makes absolutely no sense to build multiple redundant last mile feeds. It doesn't make sense for water, it doesn't make sense for electricity, it doesn't make sense for sewers and it doesn't make sense for internet connections.
ISPs that own the last mile connections obviously don't want to share infrastructure with their competitors, because that would break their de facto monopolies. The only sensible solution is to regulate them into selling access to competitors.
It has worked extremely well here, fostering genuine competition, based on pricing and features, not just simple access.
What I find amazing is that there are still people on this planet who oppose anything a government does, so they end up at the perils of corporations. I guess, according to you, GDPR is also a Bad Thing (tm)? Hint: it is a response to an industry which failed to regulate itself.
When corporations cannot manage themselves, the government must interact by rule of law. An example of that is the sale of frequencies such as 4G. Or the prohibition of usage of certain frequencies because the government uses them for military purposes. You may agree or disagree with some of these, but they serve a purpose which in the end can be deducted to being useful for the people (ie. the military, in the end, serves the purpose to protect the people).
If the government protects the interest of the [all] the people, equally, which they do in the case of net neutrality then the government uses its vast power to keep the corporations on a leash so that [all] the people can benefit. That is not anarchism, true, because the government uses its authority against very powerful monopolies/duopolies or other power vacuums with commercial interests. It is akin to the old GPL vs BSDL debate. And if you had that debate on Usenet or Slashdot there was no consensus precisely because there's the camp who believes in an authority and the anarchistic one.
> Hint: it is a response to an industry which failed to regulate itself.
Hint: maybe stop being condescending.
Also, I'm from EU and I'm split on GDPR. On one side I acknowledge its benefits and where it's coming from (the industry is known for highly morally dubious practices), on the other hand I don't agree on principle with the implication that users don't/can't have free will to enter into (however unfair) contracts these companies wish to use.
> on the other hand I don't agree on principle with the implication that users don't/can't have free will to enter into (however unfair) contracts these companies wish to use.
In a capitalist society such apathy leads to a survival of the fittest.
I can give many examples of contracts which would be unfair. For example, a minor cannot consent to a contract because they're a minor. That is fair to protect minors (at age of ~20 a person is physically an adult and around ~25 the brain is fully grown). I can apply your logic "on principle" there as well. Principles like these lack nuance which realistic situations demand because they are not black and white.
> I don't agree on principle with the implication that users don't/can't have free will to enter into (however unfair) contracts these companies wish to use.
These companies have lawyers who spend 40+ hours a week crafting contracts from which it's impossible to determine what are your rights for the average person. Good for you for not having a bad experience yet, but once you do you'll want a recourse that's more than just 'tough luck'.
I know where this thinking comes from - is this absolutist "I should be free to do whatever" mentality, which ignores the fact that you rely on the fact of people not being able to do that daily.
Are you of the opinion, for example, that simply leaving your house gives anyone who dares a free pass to enter it? I mean, you're technically free to take it back from them once you get back and if they're stronger, better equipped so you don't manage to? Well, tough luck, I guess.
it is a response to an industry which failed to regulate itself
Pretty much everything websites do with your data are from voluntary exchange. We decide to subscribe to a website a visit it regularly and give to it your data. We decide to surf some website without ad blockers / web trackers extensions, and we don't want to pay for social medias and some of us actually like well targeted ads. I fail to see what the corps should have done to regulate themselves
If you want to productively engage in a conversation, it isn't helpful if you use the weakest possible example for the other side's position to then dismiss it. That is just a slightly less obvious version of straw-manning.
Also, your definition of "voluntary" as "the victim could conceivably have done something to prevent it but didn't" is very unusual and completely useless. By that definition, if someone poisons your food with a poison that is detectable with a test known in the literature, and you then eat it without testing it first, you have voluntarily let yourself be poisoned. If you get shot because you didn't wear bullet-proof clothing, then you voluntarily let yourself be shot. That's neither what "voluntary" normally means, nor would it in any way be a useful definition, as essentially everything that happens to you would have to be considered voluntary.
> So if all my friends and family are on facebook, I am ~forced~ to use facebook ?
"The classic example is the telephone, where a greater number of users increases the value to each. A positive externality is created when a telephone is purchased without its owner intending to create value for other users, but does so regardless. Online social networks work similarly, with sites like Twitter and Facebook increasing in value to each member as more users join." [1]
Permission was implied when you sent your data to them. Website you visit send you webpages that your browser parse and connect to every tracking widgets present in the html. If you don't like it, configure better your browser.
YOUR computer sends your data. YOU let it do that. If you don't want your computer to do it, don't surf internet or configure your browser / install extensions
That's not how opt-in or JavaScript works together with law. If a hostile website serves hostile JavaScript code, it won't be "it was your computer who ran it"; THEY served it.
The standard experience will need to adhere to privacy laws. GLHF with GDPR in 2 weeks :)
Your message makes me think that if there's a responsibility involved in theses issues, websites that have tracker widgets obviously shares a part of it
> I fail to see what the corps should have done to regulate themselves
Being transparent, opaque, and using opt-in.
> Pretty much everything websites do with your data are from voluntary exchange.
Not at all. If it were voluntary, I'd visit a website and it'd say: "by using this website, you consent that we sell your profiled data to company A for purpose X."
1) They don't word it like that, they word it extremely vague.
2) Its obfuscated and opt-out (adblocker is opt-out).
3) If we knew beforehand what exactly was done with our data we could knowingly consent. We don't know exactly what is being done with our data. To whom is it sold? For what purpose?
4) On the websites where I bought a subscription/premium the ads are turned off but the tracking is NOT.
> Pretty much everything websites do with your data are from voluntary exchange.
Are you joking or are you in denial that much? We have no control most of the time, especially "normal" users. Ad blockers or JavaScript blockers may help, but they are not normal.
> What I find amazing is that there are still people on this planet who oppose anything a government does, so they end up at the perils of corporations.
Well, no, because if they oppose everything government does, they'd oppose corporations, too, since they are a thing government does.
If you want to be this pedantic over it, it's that they oppose every piece of government regulation, regardless of merits, so basically everything the government does that isn't unchecked capitalism.
I don't think it's pedantic to point out that many (but not all) people who voice “anti-government” attitudes are fine with particular government interventions.
> it's that they oppose every piece of government regulation, regardless of merits
That doesn't really change the issue; corporations (and even more the only motivation to form them) are products of government regulation.
> so basically everything the government does that isn't unchecked capitalism.
This, on the other hand, is spot on; it's just the idea they it somehow corresponds to the absence of government activity (or even particularly regulatory activity) that is wrong: the service of capitalism is an active, regulatory pursuit of government.
Capitalism only works because of regulation, otherwise you'd have a society resembling a dystopian novel. In the 90s, there were many small ISPs, who were themselves run by enthusiast, so net neutrality was sort of implicitly preserved. In an age where many don't have a second choice for an ISP, net neutrality seems like the only way to at least somewhat preserve an equal playing field on the internet.
If you have a better solution, I want to hear it.
EDIT: Also, this whole U.S. right-leaning libertarian, (assumed based on your comment), thing of not wanting to involve the government in anything ever is so strange to me - you rely on them every day to enforce your property rights, ensure you have clean water in your tap etc. I understand that in many ways it can be very dysfunctional, but you have to evaluate on a case by case basis. Involvement in foreign military interventions, most would agree is pretty bad, firefighters are very good, so are roads etc.
Ultimately, if we accept that the government has a monopoly on the use of force, then we must also see that if something positive is to be destroyed by the 'free' market, then we must redirect that government monopoly to enforce that that doesn't happen.
Please stop saying “Europe has plenty of competition.”
I am in France and have exactly 1 ISP where I live. Not everyone in Europe is in a big city. And even in big cities, not every ISP is available at your house even though they advertise that they are in the area.
So, how exactly do you have access to a lot of different ISPs?
1. There are a lot of competing networks in the ground. Like, there are five cables reaching your house owned by five different ISPs that you can choose from.
2. There is one cable reaching your house, but the owner doesn't care too much about making money themselves, so they allow competitors to use it at a price where they can compete with the owner.
3. There is one cable reaching your house, but the government regulates the price at which the owner must rent it out to competitors without any restrictions on what the competitor may transmit over it.
(I work at a former state monopoly telco/ISP, specifically with wholesale business, where we sell other service providers access to our networks, as mandated by government regulation)
I don't know if you are intentionally trolling but I'll bite.
Independent hacker culture is the exact thing at risk here without government intervention. Else, you'll end up with the fragmented Verizon hacker culture and the Comcast hacker culture and the... Goddess forbid Google / Facebook / Amazon hacker culture, each with its own non-independent thought.
As an aside, Why are regulations that prevent bad actors from damaging society, thought of as unnecessary control in the US (see the other big ___ control issue)?
Because regulations that “prevent” bad actors actually have unintended consequences that the big-government people never seem to grasp. And free markets are far more powerful and adapt far more quickly than regulation — while preserving freedom for people to make their own choices.
Certain European governments in the past century made regulations to “protect” society — and that resulted in millions of people killed or displaced. China’s Firewall is design to protect society against “bad actors,” and it instead suppresses the free speech of an entire nation.
“Bad Actors” to you are innovators, hackers and freedoms fighters to someone else.
Trust in government is the stupidest thing a society can ever do. We need governments for sure, but it should be a government with extensive limits to their power and it should be viewed with an attitude of suspicion. But, it seems like people instead are relying upon government to be replacements for parents instead.
>"free markets are far more powerful and adapt far more quickly than regulation — while preserving freedom for people to make their own choices."
That is absolute nonsense, especially for last-mile services, such as electricity, water, sewage, cable and internet.
Nobody is going to dig redundant infrastructure, because the entrenched monopoly will simply freeze out any new competitors. It even happened to Google Fiber, despite their gigantic moneybags and public support.
There is no choice when an entrenched monopoly can eliminate all competitors, thanks to the monopoly position.
Free markets are not the solution to every problem, or even to most problems.
> And free markets are far more powerful and adapt far more quickly than regulation — while preserving freedom for people to make their own choices.
Wrong.
> Trust in government is the stupidest thing a society can ever do. We need governments for sure, but it should be a government with extensive limits to their power and it should be viewed with an attitude of suspicion
Right. And this is where the devil lies in the details. It is not impossible to define clearly the extent and limits of government regulations. It isn't rocket science. Hell, some countries already have these.
But if you're mind is already made up and you firmly believe America is the greatest damm country in the universe and every principle it holds dear (or claims to hold dear, via gratuitous mental gymnastics to rationalise the opposite), there's no point in convincing you otherwise.
> And free markets are far more powerful and adapt far more quickly than regulation
Agreed, but free markets rarely exist. There are almost always market forces that prevent them from being free. The broadband internet market is Exhibit A. Most consumers have only one choice of broadband, and very few have more than two choices. In many markets, there is effectively no competition, which allows the utility to act as a monopoly and due whatever it wants.
I would be okay with dropping net neutrality if every American had 5 choices for internet service. But that's not what happening here. In the US we have a handful of companies that act as monopolies (the exact opposite of a free market), and exert the market control power for richer profits.
Any free market proponent would agree that this is not just unfair, but economically inefficient.
If I pirate your software, or use your patents,trademarks, copyrights then the companies,startups will appeal to government to put me in place instead of appealing to free market.
So maybe some rules,laws are needed, just that the ones you do not agree are bad and the ones you agree with are essential.
Didn't you hear in school a story where some guys went to live in a forest and they agreed to have no rules, then some started to do some bad things and they started added a few rules, then more rules because there were needed to prevent bad things, in the end they got similar rules as in the place where they started.
If I pirate your software, or use your patents,trademarks, copyrights then the companies,startups will appeal to government to put me in place instead of appealing to free market.
Depends on the jurisdiction of your his company and yours. It might well happen that Asian companies are stealing our technologies and we let them do that, and let our fellow citizens buy their cheap products. It's all about voluntarily exchange, and as long as governments impose monopolies on usage of force and on judicial systems you are bound to rely on the governments to protect your so-called intellectual property rights.
I doubt there were IP rights back in the days for hammer, wheels, farming tools etc..
My point was addressed in special for business type people, startups people, they complain that regulation affects their ability to innovate so government is bad but on the other hand the government should do even more to protect them from pirates or China or emigrants. Same person wants 2 contradictory things but there is always a rationalization.
The free market has it's benefits but you always need some regulation so it stays free and balanced, otherwise you can get in a not that free market situation (and you can't always blame the government because of missing competition)
So have a free market, but keep the eye out, if an monopoly appears break it, if FB tries to buy a small competitor, don't allow it, if company X is playing by the laws but it does damage to the society you change the law so the damage stops.
Net neutrality is almost the opposite of government or anybody else "controlling" the internet. That's like opposing the Second Amendment as being government trying to control guns, since it's a federal law that has to do with guns.
They strongly opposed it[1], but there are fewer options available to fight it. With net neutrality, a lawsuit attacks how the FCC are interpreting a 1934/1996 law, and they can show that violating that law is hurting Mozilla. With FOSTA, there's no clear damages and any lawsuit would need to argue the passed law is unconstitutional.
If you want to understand Mozilla's actions, just treat them like a proxy for Google. Things google cannot publicly speak about, Mozilla does it for them.
In this case, nn by design takes power away from infrastructure companies (ISPs) and gives it to internet services companies (google, facebook, etc.). So Mozilla is very actively supporting it.
In no way can Mozilla's actions be taken as a proxy for Google. Yes, most of their revenue comes from Google now, but this is a recent change and there's no reason to think that contract gave Google any control.
Next, Google has already voiced their support for net neutrality. They even have a real "proxy," the Internet Association, pledging to support lawsuits like the Mozilla one.
> but this is a recent change and there's no reason to think that contract gave Google any control.
You're not thinking hard enough then I guess. Mozilla gets 97% of its funding from Google. That's implicit control right there. Google can fail to renew the contract and Mozilla goes poof!
Mozilla doesn’t get 97% of it’s funding from google, and until very recently it didn’t get very much at all from them — it’s primary revenue source was yahoo.
>Royalties of $503k out of total revenue $520k. Almost 100% of the Royalties are from thier search engine agreement with Google.
That report is from 2016, when Yahoo had the search engine deal with Mozilla in the US and paid most of the royalties. Now Google presumably pays the most, I doubt that immediately turned Mozilla into their stooge.
Plus, Google is already publicly favoring net neutrality. Some backroom conspiracy to hide things doesn't seem to benefit them.
If Google doesn't want that place anymore, there are competitors who would pay similar amounts. Obviously a little less, Google was the highest bidder, otherwise they wouldn't have that space, but not so much less that Mozilla would go poof.
> Erm, this is not about whether the internet is regulated or not.
Then you are in the wrong place, this discussion is about applying the Title 2 regulations on ISPs. I'm not sure which "net neutrality" you are referring to which is not about regulation.
People often pick and choose their fights. Common utility companies like power and water are pretty different from regulating ISPs.
They're controlled locally, by the state or municipality. So changes in policy don't affect the entire US. The utility companies have their own problems, like not being incentivised to innovate much. Power companies have also pushed for onerous regulations on solar power in the past to maintain their monopoly on providing power.
How many months has it been? I'm quite sick of hearing about net neutrality. Europe has it so if it's so necessary, vote with your feet (hosting and VPN wise) and they'll get the message. And if they block vpns, I've heard great success stories of community Internet which is supposedly faster and cheaper. You might even be able to get net neutrality by just running your own ISP rather than trying to get huge corps in line.
Can we stop repeating the same thing over and over again? We're all well aware that it's something everyone wants except those who stand to make money off of it.
And no. We can't just stop talking about it, clearly. Some of us feel this is the issue (who controls the flow of information) that will decide all other issues moving forward.
How about you vote with your "feet" and go find some other online forum where you can converse with your fellow defeatists? Oh, you like this place and want to stay? Maybe you love it and are invested and want to fight for it? I see.
I haven't given up: we already won. That things are crap in freedom country doesn't make me want to scroll past headlines about HELP US for months on end.
this is tangentially related but what are mozilla's plans for autoplay in Firefox?
Chrome just effectively broke net neutrality in Chrome by whitelisting a bunch of websites. They claim chrome will learn your preferences and auto-magically whitelist others sites you run videos on but that hardly seems fair. Why did the other sites not have to pass that hurdle? Worse, it only works if you're logged in where as whitelisted sites work always. Use a public computer or an incognito window and non-whitelisted sites stop autoplaying.
Consider youtubecompetitor.com trying to autoplay videos like youtube. Users have a bad experience because the videos don't autoplay so they are unlikely to ever do as well as youtube.
Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that net neutrality is trying to avoid, picking winners and losers. I want to make youtubecompetitor.com do I now have to pay off Chrome (and Firefox, and Safari, and Edge) to get them to whitelist my site for autoplay? Why does youtube get a pass? Similarly if Firefox doesn't use a whitelist then users will have a worse experience on may sites vs chrome so there's certainly an incentive for Firefox to use the same or similar whitelist to Google.
I don't know what the best solution would be. Off the top of my head I'd prefer browser disallow autoplay by default and let me manually give sites permission to autoplay via a butterbar or other prompt "Can this site autoplay? Yes/No". One click and youtube gets whitelisted. One click and youtubecompetitor gets whitelisted. That seems far more "neutral"
In any case I'm curious what Mozilla's response is to Chrome's whitelisting winners.
Chrome != The Net. Huge difference here. People have a choice when it comes to browser, social network, news, search engine, ecommerce... As long as what's coming down the pipe is equal. Net neutrality is about the pipe, which is a layer above Chrome.
That is one strange whataboutism. Why would you ask that here unless you want to change the conversation to something else, something that suits the corporations more? Net neutrality is more important than autoplaying videos, without it you won't be able to decide what you autoplay.
I am one of a few people currently working on this feature and while a whitelist was on the table, very much trying to push against it, especially after seeing the reaction to chromes implementation landing.
I think comparisons to net neutrality are fair, I have made the same argument however it is worth mentioning it isnt equivalent, obviously we wouldnt be crippling peoples experience unless they paid us money
I expect Mozilla to do a much better job at educating the public on the pros and cons on a complex topic like this. Seems like they're just blindly taking a side. I expect Mozilla has a team of Lawyers who should all be able to speak intelligently on the topic. So where are they?
Mozilla tell me...
- Why does classifying internet as Title 2 make sense?
- Why is the Sherman Act (1890) not adequate for preventing ISPs from picking winners?
- Why do we want ISP to have to apply for broadcasting licenses and thus giving the government the power to shut down content without court order?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 202 ms ] threadThey see that their strategy aligns with the majority of their users and the user's they wish to attract.
You have the freedom to not use their product if you don't align with them.
If you're not from the US what country are you from that would have a benefit from eliminating net neutrality?
What are your reasons for not supporting it?
The argument is whether net neutrality is for the common good or not.
Are you saying the only companies that can take a stance are ISPs? And they can lobby governments but an independent company cannot?
They are just virtue signalling.
>If you're not from the US what country are you from that would have a benefit from eliminating net neutrality? What are your reasons for not supporting it?
I am from a country in the EU. I don't support NN because I want to have access to zero-rated services. As a consumer, they make my life easier and my bill lower. I want to have the freedom of choosing whether I want NN in my connection or not. I don't want the government to take that freedom away from me.
>Are you saying the only companies that can take a stance are ISPs? And they can lobby governments but an independent company cannot?
They surely can. I was just surprised because Mozilla pride themselves so much in diversity and the common good. I suppose their diversity does not include diversity of thought.
They've filed court cases against the FCC. They're activly trying to change legislation.
If that's virtue signalling then it's a stupid phrase that means nothing.
>I am from a country in the EU. I don't support NN because I want to have access to zero-rated services. As a consumer, they make my life easier and my bill lower. I want to have the freedom of choosing whether I want NN in my connection or not. I don't want the government to take that freedom away from me.
An ISP zero rating facebook, Netflix or Spotify just entrenches a big player in their dominant position.
That's bad for the market and shouldn't be encouraged. How can a new entrant into a market compete when the ISP or mobile operator is giving the major player preferential treatment.
As a consumer sure you don't care but these are exactly the scenarios that a government should ensure a level playing field in.
Even in the sense of if a mobile operator is Zero rating a music provider then the operator must allow a choice and all music vendors must be able to easily join the programme.
Hacker news is quite focused on startups, creating barriers for market entry isn't very startup friendly.
>I suppose their diversity does not include diversity of thought.
LOL. So a company can't stand for anything because they might upset someone?
Have a bit of self awareness. Having a persecution complex when you're on the winning side is pathetic.
Of course... they have to spend the donations on something. Anything but improving Firefox or Thunderbird, lol
>An ISP zero rating facebook, Netflix or Spotify just entrenches a big player in their dominant position.
No because in the EU by legislation ISPs are forced to zero-rate all services in the same category. If they zero-rate Netflix they have to zero-rate YouTube and everything in between.
>LOL. So a company can't stand for anything because they might upset someone?
Exactly. They should not alienate possible users or customers.
>Have a bit of self awareness. Having a persecution complex when you're on the winning side is pathetic.
I, and all customers, are on the winning side by now. But we have to keep fighting so evil doesn't win, :)
Which is government regulation, which you claim to be against.
Why not just enforce neutrality, eliminate the silliness that is zero rating, and offer reasonable data allowances instead?
You know what the technical term for that kind of legislation is, right? Yeah, you guessed it, that is net neutrality regulation!
So, I suppose you are against this type of legislation then, correct?
Great, I would be fine with that. So, how do we ensure then that I have the option of choosing NN for my connection?
Another thing is it is their domain (Internet) they are not fight for global warming or wars in syria or anything else.
Every software project has values, even if they're only implicit in the idea that the function of the software will have value for people. So even if there were something wrong with a non-profit having a set of other values (and I don't think there's anything necessarily wrong with Mozilla having such values any more than there's anything wrong with the EFF having such values), it'd be perfectly consistent for someone making software to facilitate a given activity to also have a position about what kinds of legal, social, and economic policies facilitate that activity.
Mozilla makes a web browser based on a vision of the web. Net neutrality is a policy that serves that vision of the web, and there's a boatload of well-considered argument that vision facilitates a lot of economic enterprise and personal freedom better than the alternatives.
It fundamentally is a human rights project.
Being pro equal access to internet for every party is not politically aligning themselves anywhere else in the world, but in the U.S. where the right-wing has been successfully co-opted into thinking that every bit of regulation is a communist plot to take over Nebraska.
In comes Trump and Ajit Pia, and suddenly there is another side, the "against government regulation". It's a talking point anyone who watches Fox News or reads the Wall Street journal can proudly stand behind. Now we have a side, Net Neutrality is a "liberal thing" and ISPs determining what content we can get at what speed is up for debate.
Linked in is a horrible platform to get news on, and especially to read comments on, but the top comments for a NN article were all PRO-REPEAL, what a reversal! And looking at comments on HN & Reddit you can actually see people who fell for the bait and took it as a "government encroachment" argument.
It's truly sad, this particular debate was beautiful for a bit because of the the political spectrum united behind it, that has crumbled to the perennial partisan debate of left vs right.
It's not necessarily always true that corporate donations are simply to bribe politicians into doing their bidding (which is what I took away when I read your commend). Companies will give money to politicians who are already aligned with their interests.
I watched a video once which tried to address the idea that Ted Cruz was being bribed by Comcast. Once of the arguments put forward was, sure, he may have received donations from some Comcast employees. However we shouldn't conflate that to mean Comcast was paying him money. Other politicians like Hillary and Bernie also would have received donations from Comcast employees.
Also, opponents of Net Neutrality actually do make some good points against the role of government in regulating the internet. Here's a debate where Nick Gillespie (a libertarian) and Michael Katz argue against Mitchell Baker and Tom Wheeler on whether NN is good. By the end of the debate, Nick and Michael are able to convince more people to consider opposing NN than to support:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAJabAjoK08
The difference between giving money to change alignment, and 'already being aligned', is appearances. It's still money being sent, and that absolutely influences the individual being funded. It's a complete conflict of interest, and especially in this case it's an absurd amount of money being sent to many politicians, not just one.
I think there are some good points against NN. Such as the FTC's role in investigating unfair practices. But the FTC is always playing catch-up when it comes to the myriad of bad practices ISP's get up to. With the repeal of NN there has been no real replacement to prevent the ISP monopolies from being unfair, as they have done in the past. I generally side with libertarian arguments and that markets can do a better job. But in the U.S, we have monopalies. ISP's grew under non-NN rules, and there are significant anti-competative practices to blame rather than the easy one of 'regulation'.
Maybe. Stealth liberalism.
It disturbs me how rarely US citizens criticize their FPTP voting system, even though I understand how hard it would be to get rid of it (only FPTP winners could get rid of it). But still it seems so dangerous, especially now where people more than ever can live their own media environment without common consensus. Anything but FPTP.
Yup, how horrible that people actually want less regulation. Everyone should just agree with you and we'll all get along splendidly!
If your ISP is a monopoly, they can do whatever they want if left unregulated. They can literally charge you whatever they want.
Zero-rated services are zero-rated because you pay for them indirectly. I guess losing access to them would be a downside, and would prevent Facebook from becoming even more entrenched, which they certainly don't want. It doesn't do anything for internet freedom, though. You might as well say "well the internet to me is Facebook, so I don't care if the internet is free, I just want it to run Facebook".
PS: an advice: If you cannot think of a single argument against your own position you're not ready to have a dialog.
If you think that zero-rated services save you money, all that is happening is that you don't understand how you pay for it. So, maybe it is time to find out how you do pay for it?
The zero-rated services themselves.
You want less government regulation, in favor of more corporate 'regulation'. That does indeed sound horrible to me.
It seems that some people just hear REGULATION and freak out, without realizing that they rely heavily on regulation every day to get safely to work and not have their house confiscated.
I mean, God knows I’m not going to use a Google product, so I’m sticking with Firefox anyway, but Mozilla certainly doesn’t do themselves any favors.
Since many ISPs also have cable bundles they have an active interest to block services like Netflix. So... do you see the horrendous picture? Shouldn't we, as citizens, be able to tell ISPs they have to provide everything to us EQUALLY and not block content?
The libertarian fantasy of 90s internet is dead and buried, repealing Net Neutrality is just pissing on it's grave.
And the same thinking has led to GDPR and FOSTA, and to ignore that is to ignore a pretty sad change in people's opinion: the government is now more trustworthy than tech companies in protecting people's use of the internet.
And maybe sadder is that this new thinking is probably warranted, but let's not make excuses. Warranted or not, NN needs to be called out for what it is.
Local governments make deals with ISPs to get coverage to a certain % of the population in exchange for exclusivity. Adding NN to the deal is just negotiating terms in an existing agreement. If we had a free-r market or some competition that might be a better way to get what we want, but we don't.
So why aren’t we fighting for that? My problem with NN is not the idea, but the pro-government politics of those so loudly supporting it. I trust free markets far more than I trust governments. If Nancy Pelosi or Maxine Waters were in charge of American internet — I find that pretty horrifying.
Because it is an inherently unstable equilibrium. Having two communication networks (of the same level of service, so this does not apply to adding a next-generation network with far higher bandwidth than the exiting network) is as economically sensible as having two power grids or two competing sewer pipes: It necessarily almost doubles the costs (because what dominates the costs is laying the cables, not buying the uplink). A link that is unused because the house is using the competitor's network still has nearly the same costs for the network owner as if the house were using their network. Which means the best strategy for the established network is to undercut the new competitor in order to kill it. The marginal costs of connecting a customer are minimal, while losing too many customers to the competition would allow them to do the same thing to you. That's why people generally wouldn't invest in such a network in the first place.
Competition works at the backbone level, as there is enough traffic overall to fill the pipes of multiple competitors. But last-mile networks consist of links that are either used and paid for, or unused with no option to sell the capacity to somebody else, so there is a natural tendency towards a monopoly (which is also in a way in the interest of the customer: Building two networks necessarily doubles the cost, which ultimately the customers have to pay for).
Also, they are in charge of the American internet anyway. One law regulating some aspect of the internet does not in any way change how much power people have over some other aspect. If people can make a law banning hacker news, they can do so without NN regulation existing beforehand.
Yes, it absolutely is! Just like other basic utilities, such as water, power and sewers. I wouldn't trust private companies with those services, either.
Some of what government does is formalize things people come up with on their own and provide various institutions for reinforcing and administering those things. Property itself, for example.
The relevant policy proposals where net neutrality is concerned mostly formalize the operating considerations that the "independent hacker culture of the 90s" came up with. When some private stewards of net infrastructure defect from those considerations to plans that have significant drawbacks and no plausible benefits beyond profit margins, it seems reasonable to trust institutions that are accountable to the public in a different way.
"Government control" also doesn't seem like a particularly apt characterization of net neutrality policy, but who knows, maybe you also characterize the FDA as government control of what you eat and assault laws as government control of your actions.
Complex laws around data recording and reporting might count as RC because of the resources involved (S-O for example). But net neutrality? Not seeing it.
Independent hackers need net neutrality; otherwise access to their innovations and startups will be limited, and their access to the Internet from which they get ideas, inspiration, and collaboration, will also be limited. I wonder how that spirit would survive if people only had access to major commercial websites. EDIT: Imagine the FOSS project with no budget to buy access, and any project that challenges the status quo (political, corporate, etc.) and is given no or minimal access. Where would hacker culture and the world be without those projects?
I agree that it's a loss that we have to turn to government, but it's better than no net neutrality at all. Net neutrality used to be accomplished by cooperation, good faith, and maybe even enlightened self-interest (something U.S. corporations often lack). But the stakes on the Internet are now in the trillions of dollars and (long ago) it has attracted the greedy and power-hungry, who are not going to cooperate and act in good faith. That's why democratic government exists, to give that power to ordinary citizens, distributed fairly via the vote. At least that's the theory in some places:
all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
> begging for the government to control and regulate
That would be, desiring all citizens to control and regulate via their representatives, rather than having a few powerful citizens make the decisions on their own.
They'd still need to pay the corporate ISPs to carry or to not completely deprioritize traffic from hackerISP, or else nobody else could reach the hackers' great websites, services, ideas, etc. If hackerISP carried things the corporates didn't like, they could still throttle or kill access to it or to individual domains, protocols, etc.
And how will hackerISP pay for nationwide infrastructure? That's going to need a pretty wealthy independent hacker. Maybe if Linus, Woz, Paul Allen (is he a hacker?), and a few others committed their fortunes to it, they could buy and deploy the fiber and the hardware ... but then there are operations, maintenance, upgrades ...
Depending on where you live, ISPs do not need to own their own infrastructure. For a bit more information into how this can work, I'd recommend taking a look at local loop unbundling:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling
Also, GP is alluding to things that have already happened in the past, in the wild west days of the Internet it was more common for small ISPs to get started (even with competition from the big ISPs like AOL and CompuServe).
So, you are in favor of regulation forcing last-mile operators to allow competitors to use their infrastructure at a competetive price set by the regulator without any discrimination based on the data transmitted, right?
> Also, GP is alluding to things that have already happened in the past, in the wild west days of the Internet it was more common for small ISPs to get started (even with competition from the big ISPs like AOL and CompuServe).
Which didn't compete on the last mile, as the access medium was a telephone line. Consumer ISPs in those days didn't have to have a last mile, they simply used the monopoly's last mile of telephone wire.
Perhaps you're unaware, but there's a long history of government grants to fund telecommunications infrastructure, the growth is not solely due to private companies. Here's a recent example from my country (the UK), I'm fairly confident I could find equivalent stories from where you live:
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/07/uk-gov-start-4...
So no, I have no problem with local loop unbundling when it's partly tax payer money funding the network improvements.
In case you are still confused, here's the definition of 'regulation':
> to control or direct by a rule, principle, method
Or maybe there's more to the word, particularly in context, than the shortest dictionary definition you were able to find.
1) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regulate
The term gatekeeper is maybe relevant in the context of the more serious side of this conversation. ISPs are gatekeepers and have the say what comes through their gate. They can regulate the flow of information.
It was said a few gajillion times, but let me repeat it once again. Here is the real problem: it's singular.
My ISP works reasonably well for me, because I have at least 5 other non-wireless options whom I can pay if I'm not satisfied.
It is this simple, and I've heard that it works not only where I've lived but in other cities and countries as well.
And if all my options collude, then there is government to call.
The ISPs can filter what you request and host, simple as that. And if you want to start a business, better hope it doesn't compete with any of the ISP parent company's holdings, because they have every right to scuttle access to it. Want to make the best new Netflix? Stay away from any ISP even tangentially associated with Hulu - which might be every ISP in your area. Even if you pick a small, independent ISP, the peering issue remains.
Within the SLA.
It all depends on whenever you can be rejected as a customer or not, and whenever the offering must be public or each peer negotiates for their own terms, though.
I’m just waiting for all of the dystopian horror we’ve been promised, but still not seeing it. When are the ISPs going to start charging small websites to allow their traffic? When has legitimate traffic been throttled because of the content? Citations and examples needed — and post-NN examples are all that count.
Any proof at all that someone making the next Netflix is getting harmed? Because NN is already gone. So where is all of this horrible stuff happening. We were promised an internet catastrophe and it hasn’t happened yet. And before NN— what happened then? That was when the actual Netflix was getting started and somehow Netflix was able to be born without NN.
But prices seem to be going down.
Stop spreading FUD. It isn’t happening. Things are getting better in fact. Markets are more powerful than governments.
I was paying for 100 Mbps from my ISP back when this was going on, but YouTube and Netflix were unusable in prime time. Those were the two high bandwidth services I was paying my ISP for, but my ISP held my video streaming for ransom and got away with it because I had no other choice for high speed Internet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service
There were no incumbents.
The current free market situation has created monopolies in many areas. How would you propose that "freer markets" would solve this?
What we are seeing now is that people literally have to build their own non-profit mesh networks (as in NYC), just to get around the monopolies. If there was actual competition, that would have been necessary.
This isn't exactly new information, if you haven't noticed the problem by now, you must have been living under a rock.
There are hundreds of credible reports and articles about this problem.
Last-mile networks are natural monopolies, building even only two networks necessarily causes half of the capacity to be unused, which is extremely inefficient, which is why it doesn't happen (among other reasons).
ISPs that own the last mile connections obviously don't want to share infrastructure with their competitors, because that would break their de facto monopolies. The only sensible solution is to regulate them into selling access to competitors.
It has worked extremely well here, fostering genuine competition, based on pricing and features, not just simple access.
When corporations cannot manage themselves, the government must interact by rule of law. An example of that is the sale of frequencies such as 4G. Or the prohibition of usage of certain frequencies because the government uses them for military purposes. You may agree or disagree with some of these, but they serve a purpose which in the end can be deducted to being useful for the people (ie. the military, in the end, serves the purpose to protect the people).
If the government protects the interest of the [all] the people, equally, which they do in the case of net neutrality then the government uses its vast power to keep the corporations on a leash so that [all] the people can benefit. That is not anarchism, true, because the government uses its authority against very powerful monopolies/duopolies or other power vacuums with commercial interests. It is akin to the old GPL vs BSDL debate. And if you had that debate on Usenet or Slashdot there was no consensus precisely because there's the camp who believes in an authority and the anarchistic one.
Hint: maybe stop being condescending.
Also, I'm from EU and I'm split on GDPR. On one side I acknowledge its benefits and where it's coming from (the industry is known for highly morally dubious practices), on the other hand I don't agree on principle with the implication that users don't/can't have free will to enter into (however unfair) contracts these companies wish to use.
In a capitalist society such apathy leads to a survival of the fittest.
I can give many examples of contracts which would be unfair. For example, a minor cannot consent to a contract because they're a minor. That is fair to protect minors (at age of ~20 a person is physically an adult and around ~25 the brain is fully grown). I can apply your logic "on principle" there as well. Principles like these lack nuance which realistic situations demand because they are not black and white.
These companies have lawyers who spend 40+ hours a week crafting contracts from which it's impossible to determine what are your rights for the average person. Good for you for not having a bad experience yet, but once you do you'll want a recourse that's more than just 'tough luck'.
I know where this thinking comes from - is this absolutist "I should be free to do whatever" mentality, which ignores the fact that you rely on the fact of people not being able to do that daily.
Are you of the opinion, for example, that simply leaving your house gives anyone who dares a free pass to enter it? I mean, you're technically free to take it back from them once you get back and if they're stronger, better equipped so you don't manage to? Well, tough luck, I guess.
All my friends and family live in my state so I guess I don't have a choice and have to live my whole life in my motherland
Also, your definition of "voluntary" as "the victim could conceivably have done something to prevent it but didn't" is very unusual and completely useless. By that definition, if someone poisons your food with a poison that is detectable with a test known in the literature, and you then eat it without testing it first, you have voluntarily let yourself be poisoned. If you get shot because you didn't wear bullet-proof clothing, then you voluntarily let yourself be shot. That's neither what "voluntary" normally means, nor would it in any way be a useful definition, as essentially everything that happens to you would have to be considered voluntary.
"The classic example is the telephone, where a greater number of users increases the value to each. A positive externality is created when a telephone is purchased without its owner intending to create value for other users, but does so regardless. Online social networks work similarly, with sites like Twitter and Facebook increasing in value to each member as more users join." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
I know people who are not on facebook. They made the decision. They have free will.
I never gave Facebook permission, directly or implied, to track my circle of past friends or make assumptions about my personal interests.
The standard experience will need to adhere to privacy laws. GLHF with GDPR in 2 weeks :)
Being transparent, opaque, and using opt-in.
> Pretty much everything websites do with your data are from voluntary exchange.
Not at all. If it were voluntary, I'd visit a website and it'd say: "by using this website, you consent that we sell your profiled data to company A for purpose X."
1) They don't word it like that, they word it extremely vague.
2) Its obfuscated and opt-out (adblocker is opt-out).
3) If we knew beforehand what exactly was done with our data we could knowingly consent. We don't know exactly what is being done with our data. To whom is it sold? For what purpose?
4) On the websites where I bought a subscription/premium the ads are turned off but the tracking is NOT.
Are you joking or are you in denial that much? We have no control most of the time, especially "normal" users. Ad blockers or JavaScript blockers may help, but they are not normal.
Privacy issues are not (yet) a billion dollar business
Well, no, because if they oppose everything government does, they'd oppose corporations, too, since they are a thing government does.
I don't think it's pedantic to point out that many (but not all) people who voice “anti-government” attitudes are fine with particular government interventions.
> it's that they oppose every piece of government regulation, regardless of merits
That doesn't really change the issue; corporations (and even more the only motivation to form them) are products of government regulation.
> so basically everything the government does that isn't unchecked capitalism.
This, on the other hand, is spot on; it's just the idea they it somehow corresponds to the absence of government activity (or even particularly regulatory activity) that is wrong: the service of capitalism is an active, regulatory pursuit of government.
If you have a better solution, I want to hear it.
EDIT: Also, this whole U.S. right-leaning libertarian, (assumed based on your comment), thing of not wanting to involve the government in anything ever is so strange to me - you rely on them every day to enforce your property rights, ensure you have clean water in your tap etc. I understand that in many ways it can be very dysfunctional, but you have to evaluate on a case by case basis. Involvement in foreign military interventions, most would agree is pretty bad, firefighters are very good, so are roads etc.
Ultimately, if we accept that the government has a monopoly on the use of force, then we must also see that if something positive is to be destroyed by the 'free' market, then we must redirect that government monopoly to enforce that that doesn't happen.
I am in France and have exactly 1 ISP where I live. Not everyone in Europe is in a big city. And even in big cities, not every ISP is available at your house even though they advertise that they are in the area.
1. There are a lot of competing networks in the ground. Like, there are five cables reaching your house owned by five different ISPs that you can choose from.
2. There is one cable reaching your house, but the owner doesn't care too much about making money themselves, so they allow competitors to use it at a price where they can compete with the owner.
3. There is one cable reaching your house, but the government regulates the price at which the owner must rent it out to competitors without any restrictions on what the competitor may transmit over it.
(I work at a former state monopoly telco/ISP, specifically with wholesale business, where we sell other service providers access to our networks, as mandated by government regulation)
https://www.arcep.fr/
But don't be surprised if you find that the competition is a result of a sort of network neutrality regulation.
Independent hacker culture is the exact thing at risk here without government intervention. Else, you'll end up with the fragmented Verizon hacker culture and the Comcast hacker culture and the... Goddess forbid Google / Facebook / Amazon hacker culture, each with its own non-independent thought.
As an aside, Why are regulations that prevent bad actors from damaging society, thought of as unnecessary control in the US (see the other big ___ control issue)?
Certain European governments in the past century made regulations to “protect” society — and that resulted in millions of people killed or displaced. China’s Firewall is design to protect society against “bad actors,” and it instead suppresses the free speech of an entire nation.
“Bad Actors” to you are innovators, hackers and freedoms fighters to someone else.
Trust in government is the stupidest thing a society can ever do. We need governments for sure, but it should be a government with extensive limits to their power and it should be viewed with an attitude of suspicion. But, it seems like people instead are relying upon government to be replacements for parents instead.
That is absolute nonsense, especially for last-mile services, such as electricity, water, sewage, cable and internet.
Nobody is going to dig redundant infrastructure, because the entrenched monopoly will simply freeze out any new competitors. It even happened to Google Fiber, despite their gigantic moneybags and public support.
There is no choice when an entrenched monopoly can eliminate all competitors, thanks to the monopoly position.
Free markets are not the solution to every problem, or even to most problems.
Wrong.
> Trust in government is the stupidest thing a society can ever do. We need governments for sure, but it should be a government with extensive limits to their power and it should be viewed with an attitude of suspicion
Right. And this is where the devil lies in the details. It is not impossible to define clearly the extent and limits of government regulations. It isn't rocket science. Hell, some countries already have these.
But if you're mind is already made up and you firmly believe America is the greatest damm country in the universe and every principle it holds dear (or claims to hold dear, via gratuitous mental gymnastics to rationalise the opposite), there's no point in convincing you otherwise.
Agreed, but free markets rarely exist. There are almost always market forces that prevent them from being free. The broadband internet market is Exhibit A. Most consumers have only one choice of broadband, and very few have more than two choices. In many markets, there is effectively no competition, which allows the utility to act as a monopoly and due whatever it wants.
I would be okay with dropping net neutrality if every American had 5 choices for internet service. But that's not what happening here. In the US we have a handful of companies that act as monopolies (the exact opposite of a free market), and exert the market control power for richer profits.
Any free market proponent would agree that this is not just unfair, but economically inefficient.
So maybe some rules,laws are needed, just that the ones you do not agree are bad and the ones you agree with are essential.
Didn't you hear in school a story where some guys went to live in a forest and they agreed to have no rules, then some started to do some bad things and they started added a few rules, then more rules because there were needed to prevent bad things, in the end they got similar rules as in the place where they started.
I doubt there were IP rights back in the days for hammer, wheels, farming tools etc..
The free market has it's benefits but you always need some regulation so it stays free and balanced, otherwise you can get in a not that free market situation (and you can't always blame the government because of missing competition)
So have a free market, but keep the eye out, if an monopoly appears break it, if FB tries to buy a small competitor, don't allow it, if company X is playing by the laws but it does damage to the society you change the law so the damage stops.
I feel like NN is basically just a diversion to deflect attention and energy from things that are actually restricting freedom on the internet.
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2017/08/02/fighting-crime...
In this case, nn by design takes power away from infrastructure companies (ISPs) and gives it to internet services companies (google, facebook, etc.). So Mozilla is very actively supporting it.
Next, Google has already voiced their support for net neutrality. They even have a real "proxy," the Internet Association, pledging to support lawsuits like the Mozilla one.
https://www.google.com/takeaction/action/net-neutrality/
You're not thinking hard enough then I guess. Mozilla gets 97% of its funding from Google. That's implicit control right there. Google can fail to renew the contract and Mozilla goes poof!
They do. Look up Mozilla's latest annual report.
Edit: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/foundation/annualreport/2016/
Royalties of $503k out of total revenue $520k. Almost 100% of the Royalties are from thier search engine agreement with Google.
That report is from 2016, when Yahoo had the search engine deal with Mozilla in the US and paid most of the royalties. Now Google presumably pays the most, I doubt that immediately turned Mozilla into their stooge.
Plus, Google is already publicly favoring net neutrality. Some backroom conspiracy to hide things doesn't seem to benefit them.
In fact, there might even be 'pro net neutrality' regulation.
Imagine you paid more for electricity when using your geyser.
Then you are in the wrong place, this discussion is about applying the Title 2 regulations on ISPs. I'm not sure which "net neutrality" you are referring to which is not about regulation.
They're controlled locally, by the state or municipality. So changes in policy don't affect the entire US. The utility companies have their own problems, like not being incentivised to innovate much. Power companies have also pushed for onerous regulations on solar power in the past to maintain their monopoly on providing power.
Can we stop repeating the same thing over and over again? We're all well aware that it's something everyone wants except those who stand to make money off of it.
And no. We can't just stop talking about it, clearly. Some of us feel this is the issue (who controls the flow of information) that will decide all other issues moving forward.
How about you vote with your "feet" and go find some other online forum where you can converse with your fellow defeatists? Oh, you like this place and want to stay? Maybe you love it and are invested and want to fight for it? I see.
Chrome just effectively broke net neutrality in Chrome by whitelisting a bunch of websites. They claim chrome will learn your preferences and auto-magically whitelist others sites you run videos on but that hardly seems fair. Why did the other sites not have to pass that hurdle? Worse, it only works if you're logged in where as whitelisted sites work always. Use a public computer or an incognito window and non-whitelisted sites stop autoplaying.
Consider youtubecompetitor.com trying to autoplay videos like youtube. Users have a bad experience because the videos don't autoplay so they are unlikely to ever do as well as youtube.
Isn't that exactly the kind of thing that net neutrality is trying to avoid, picking winners and losers. I want to make youtubecompetitor.com do I now have to pay off Chrome (and Firefox, and Safari, and Edge) to get them to whitelist my site for autoplay? Why does youtube get a pass? Similarly if Firefox doesn't use a whitelist then users will have a worse experience on may sites vs chrome so there's certainly an incentive for Firefox to use the same or similar whitelist to Google.
I don't know what the best solution would be. Off the top of my head I'd prefer browser disallow autoplay by default and let me manually give sites permission to autoplay via a butterbar or other prompt "Can this site autoplay? Yes/No". One click and youtube gets whitelisted. One click and youtubecompetitor gets whitelisted. That seems far more "neutral"
In any case I'm curious what Mozilla's response is to Chrome's whitelisting winners.
I think comparisons to net neutrality are fair, I have made the same argument however it is worth mentioning it isnt equivalent, obviously we wouldnt be crippling peoples experience unless they paid us money
Mozilla tell me...
- Why does classifying internet as Title 2 make sense?
- Why is the Sherman Act (1890) not adequate for preventing ISPs from picking winners?
- Why do we want ISP to have to apply for broadcasting licenses and thus giving the government the power to shut down content without court order?