I don't know if the issue is the internet, I think it's the platforms that make up the internet. Google search has gone down the drain for me. 10 years ago I would find content from many sources, in depth blog posts and articles well written.
Now every search is results from a small hand full of websites, full of top 10 lists you have to click through and one paragraph articles where I learn nothing.
Don't believe me? Try to Google any medical condition.
We were just talking about this same thing on /r/seo today. The search results are getting poorer and poorer and pbn’s are eating relevant search results.
An seo company will buy a bunch of recently expiring domains related to a specific topic, and do it in a way that hides who the owners are. They build blogs on these sites, and fill them with the lowest grade content. I've see stuff that's "spun" (plagiarized content where a percentage of words have been replaced with synonyms, so that it appears original) and other stuff that's farmed out to writers in developing countries who work for pennies (A lot of articles with no real substance, written in poor english.)
The owner then links all the blogs to each other, so they appear to have domain authority. Then they sell back links to their customers. This fools Google into thinking your website is trustworthy (because everyone is linking to it) and you get better placement in search results.
In short, its a way anyone can buy popularity online.
Back in the old days, the internet was run by government agencies and universities. Universities invented the protocols. Companies provided only the hardware.
Nowadays, companies run the internet and own our data.
Let's go back to the old model. Let universities research federated protocols/algorithms and such. Let the government own the fiber. And let companies build the hardware.
Exactly right. When I enabled IPv6 on my home LAN, I made very sure that only those hosts (and ports!) I wanted open were available to the outside world. Otherwise, incoming IPv6 is DROP by default.
This is strange, oft-repeated, mostly incorrect argument. Almost every modern router, if it handles IPv6, handles IPv6 without NAT but with a firewall. Most consumer routers just have ALLOW ALL outbound, ALLOW EXISTING inbound, default firewall rules that would be just fine for IPv6.
Whatever is happening in America these days is tipped in balance towards whoever owns the gun. If the gun owners say "no net neutrality" what the other 99% say doesn't matter. A confidence by way of vote in the next election might reverse this but it is no mystery that the weight of a bullet is still much higher than that of a vote. Basically, choosing between death vs. a shepherd.
I wouldn't be surprised if a flip of tyranny has already occurred earlier this year. After all the reporter in her natural discourse did mention about the two dictators meeting in Singapore.
It was an honest mistake from her, but the thought has crossed our minds. It probably happened sometime ago.
[reverting]
- no delete method here anymore? @dang please help remove this thread. -
If you are worried about tyranny - the primary reason for the second amendment was to deter tyrannies of excessive regulation and authoritarian imposition (quartering of troops, etc).
> Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.
You, as the consumer, aren't making the choice. The ISP is picking which companies get the privileged position. It is in effect king-making certain services.
As a European: T-Mobile is charging companies for their music zero rating. If you love paying twice for things it might be a good thing. Zero rating is crap.
You're being deceived. The price you pay is either baked into your monthly bill or comes in the less tangible form of reduced competition for those zero-rated services (i.e. startups have a much harder time entering the stage).
ISPs really only started abusing their power in 2011-12, hijacking connections to point to their own stuff, blocking video, etc. They got sued. Then the FCC got tired of wasting money in court so they made it a rule.
Given his past actions, why give him the benefit of the doubt? He has proved to be a liar and a shill for the telcos.
He lied about the FCC's fake DDoS attack and refuses to investigate all the bots on the FCC's comment site as the NN open commenting period was coming to a close.
This. He has shown no reason to trust him, exactly the opposite. To actively disregard bot comments (of which my name was on the list saying exactly the opposite of what I believe), but they lies. He should be fired in my opinion and any actions taken under him reversed.
He could only be right if there were real broadband competition - there's no point in the ISP disclosing how it's going to screw me if I have no choice.
In the past few places I've lived (in Seattle and the SF Bay Area), there has been only a single high speed broadband provider (2 of those places had a DSL provider that promised "up to 1.5mbit" speeds), but that's barely enough for standard def streaming, and not nearly enough for HD streaming -- 1.5Mbit DSL was "high speed" 20 years ago.
Given that the US ISP industry has shown that it is wholly on-board for zero-rating their own services, have been questioning "why should YouTube get free access to our pipes", and have displayed an active interest in tiering the internet by site and not bandwidth... No. Ajit Pai is not right.
The information to make an informed choice between service providers is meaningless when most of us in the US have no practical choice.
I did consider it, but at least for me, it's only a negative. The key quote:
> [The repeal] will protect consumers and promote better, faster Internet access and more competition
First of all: I think the "competition" in question is along an axis that I'm not interested in; e.g. does this plan give me faster Netflix or unlimited Facebook. So now I have one more thing to worry about when picking a plan, which is very likely going to make me less happy with my choice.
The better/faster internet he's talking about is probably along these lines too, e.g a deal being struck with Netflix to make just Netflix faster.
So, for me as a consumer, I think this is terrible. I'm going to be spend more time thinking about my plan and be less happy it. It will also be worse in the sense that ISPs are spending time and money on a feature that I didn't want in the first place.
I also think this is terrible for new companies, but that's for another post.
His main point is that by allowing corporations to use abusive practices, there will be incentive for competition.
First of all, there is practically no competition to start with. Six ISPs control the majority of the market, and the majority of customers have only one ISP to choose from. Getting rid of net neutrality will not make other companies suddenly appear.
Secondly, one company doing worse does not make a competing company better. It makes it relatively better. That doesn't matter, especially if there isn't another company to begin with.
Put these together, and it's trivial to see that getting rid of net neutrality will not bolster competition. Pai's conclusion is nonsense. In our reality, we are only left with worse options.
He removed the consumer protection. I now know with full confidence he will lie to my face just like certain other politicians. All of his words are now and in the future are automatically hollow.
Title II was a consumer protection. It is removed. We have less. The only thing now is a lack of competition unless you count a convenient redefinition of competition to include wireless.
To quote another FCC commissioner:
> Internet service providers now have the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content. They will have the right to discriminate and favor the Internet traffic of those companies with whom they have pay-for-play arrangements and the right to consign all others to a slow and bumpy road. Plain and simple, thanks to the FCC's rollback of net neutrality, Internet providers have the legal green light, the technical ability, and business incentive to discriminate and manipulate what we see, read, and learn online.
What do we have left? Well truth in advertising. But that just requires lies by omission and half truths to bypass. "Speeds up to 1 Gbit" is truthful. 0.01 mbit is within the advertised "truth", except when browisng websites that not paid Comcast's now legal extortion fee. Then they'll get less.
We have a protection that was removed! Full stop. The existing protection of truth in advertising did not change. So we went down.
There is a city here with a six lane freeway running right through the middle of many previous residential areas.. It might seem obvious that a six lane freeway produces constant noise, heavy particulate matter in the air all year, and a constant blanket of heavy matter downwind on every surface, the soil, your clothes, etc..
The benefit of this heavy motorway is that areas far from the city became the new (wealthy) suburbs and shopping malls.
It is a matter of record that some local politicians made speeches about how the new freeway would benefit the original city it runs through. I think they use the phrase "tortured truth" to express how these statements reflect what actually happened. I expect somewhat similar rise in fortunes, and drop in privileges, associated with the new "un-Net".
> It is a matter of record that some local politicians made speeches about how the new freeway would benefit the original city it runs through. I think they use the phrase "tortured truth" to express how these statements reflect what actually happened.
Does anyone have any more info on the meaning and usage of the term "tortured truth."
I've been looking for new, concise ways to refer to a dishonest use of selectively chosen truth to mislead.
"I expect somewhat similar rise in fortunes, and drop in privileges, associated with the new 'un-Net'."
I wonder if the rise of "un-Net" could provide an incentive for people to get involved in alternative ways of connecting with one another, such as something like mesh networking.
The FCC actually changed the definition of an ISP so that cellular and satellite providers are included. Meaning according to official FCC statistics your area is swarming with competition, in spite of having just a single wired ISP.
In fact according to official statistics, even rural areas with zero wired internet options have a great competitive landscape. Let that sink in...
> The FCC actually changed the definition of an ISP so that cellular and satellite providers are included.
Wireless providers are competition for home internet service the same way the gas station down the street selling water bottles for $3/each is an alternative to running water.
You aren't going to get a $300 water bill just because some company in another state spent several days secretly filling your in-ground pool with the garden hose without permission, nor would anyone tolerate having that happen repeatedly while being told they can only brush their teeth but not flush the toilet for the rest of the month.
A while back, the DSL here was not working for a few days, so I connected my iPhone to my Macbook. Normally that's not an issue while away from home or in a car for an hour or two, as there are limits to how much data anything could use in that amount of time.
Apple's Photos app proactively downloaded something like 25GB of old stuff from iCloud Photo Library that I didn't ask to download, didn't browse through, or even remember having, simply because the local drive had free space and Apple decided that both the space and the bandwidth were freely available for it to waste.
If wireless providers were forbidden from imposing ridiculous data caps I would be fine with calling them competition, because we do have multiple high speed providers here, they're just not usable because they'd rather be selling water bottles.
Its important for everyone to know that the existence of non-existence of the Obama-era NN rules had no bearing on what most people think net neutrality did. (read: Those rules did nothing for consumer protection). ISPs were free to opt-out of those rules if they so chose to do so.
It's important for everyone to know the author of that linked article is a senior fellow at, "The Mercatus Center at @GeorgeMasonU is the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas." and is actively passing off FUD cover for the deregulation today: https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/commentary/10-things-you-nee...
That's a legal theory that was never challenged (i.e. that ISPs could fall outside of Common Carrier status and bypass Title II). It was likely never challenged because not being a Common Carrier might make them liable for the content traveling over the wire.
This article is ruminating on what might occur, not what actually occurred.
an ISP
making
sufficiently clear
to potential customers that it
provides a filtered service involving
the ISP’s
exercise of
“editorial intervention.”
Id.
¶ 549.
For
instance, Alamo
Broadband, the lone broadband provider that raises a First
Amendment challenge to the rule, posits the example of an
ISP wishing to provide access solely to “family friendly
websites.” Alamo Pet. Reh’g 5. Such an ISP, as long as it
represents itself as engaging in editorial interventi
on of that
kind, would fall outside the rule.
See U.S. Telecom Ass’n
, 825
F.3d at 743; FCC Opp’n Pets. Reh’g 28
-29; FCC Br. 146
n.53
. The Order thus specifies that an ISP remains “free to offer ‘edited’ services” without becoming subject to the rule
’s
requirements
. Order ¶ 556.
I simply want a free market for the internet. Stop with government intervention on both sides. Simply protect the consumer and let the free market take over.
Who cares if companies like netflix get charged more? It will allow another competitor to bubble up since Netflix will start adjusting their prices. This works. Its called capitalism.
In theory, simply look at Lasik. Lasik 5 years ago, used to be 5k an eye. Now I can get it from a Pandora commercial for just $200.00. Thats capitalism. It drove prices down. I expect the same thing to happen with this. Competition will drive prices down quickly. It also allows the providers like Cox or Verizon to invest in their infrastructure. EVERYONE knows we are way behind Japan and other countries with our infrastructure.
Let people decide with their dollars, rather than the government deciding.
>Let people decide with their dollars, rather than the government deciding.
Government is people deciding with their votes, because letting people decide with their dollars means whoever has the most dollars gets to make all the decisions.
> In theory, simply look at Lasik. Lasik 5 years ago, used to be 5k an eye. Now I can get it from a Pandora commercial for just $200.00. Thats capitalism. It drove prices down. I expect the same thing to happen with this. Competition will drive prices down quickly. It also allows the providers like Cox or Verizon to invest in their infrastructure. EVERYONE knows we are way behind Japan and other countries with our infrastructure.
Neither of your comparisons is on point. (a) A market like surgical services doesn't have significant barriers to entry. But the need to lay last-mile fiber or cable is a significant barrier to market entry. (b) Japan did not get its digital infrastructure through laissez-faire policies.
That would be fine if there were any competition to begin with.
Allowing incumbents to abuse their customers does devalue them, making their competitors relatively more valuable. The problem is that there are no competitors!
What we are left with are incumbents who can devalue themselves via customer abuse without consequence, which simply boils down to customer abuse.
By your logic, no competitive market can ever arise because somebody is always the first, and incumbents can't possibly be competed with. Why isn't everything a monopoly?
If lack of regulation allows for an incumbent to engage in anti-consumer behavior, it opens a huge door for a more consumer-friendly competitor to sweep the market.
No, my logic is that no one can compete with an already present oligopoly.
Opening that door is fruitless, because it is still impossible for a small business to compete with the oligopoly.
ISPs are already very difficult ventures. There is a huge upfront cost, including infrastructure and land rights, that incumbents have already either paid or had paid for by government aid. There has also been huge support from government for incumbents. New ventures are risky, so incumbents are almost always chosen for tax spending.
And let's not blow this out of proportion: That door is not huge. It is barely significant in ideal circumstances. Infrastructure quality and price matter more than net neutrality to most consumers.
I think that in a competitive market you and Pai are right, there would be competition that drives prices down(see cities where Google Fiber entered). Unfortunately wired ISPs is a natural monopolistic market, the cost of entry is extraordinarily high, and with incumbents making it even harder for competition to enter[1] only really wealthy companies can enter (like Google).
I think with the advancement of Wireless last mile reducing deployment costs we will see more competition in the space (if incumbent ISPs do not keep them out with lawsuits). But at the current time most Wireless ISPs can't match the speeds of wired ISPs and the average consumer does not care enough to check every so often if a new competitor enters the ISP market, and probably won't change unless they have a serious problem with their current provider.
So in summary I think that soon we may not need government oversight with enough competition, but in our current market saturated by incumbents we do.
How do you "protect the consumer" without laws and regulation? The new competitor will already be at a higher price since Comcast can limit that new entrant to 56K speeds unless they pay an extortion fee.
76 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadNow every search is results from a small hand full of websites, full of top 10 lists you have to click through and one paragraph articles where I learn nothing.
Don't believe me? Try to Google any medical condition.
An seo company will buy a bunch of recently expiring domains related to a specific topic, and do it in a way that hides who the owners are. They build blogs on these sites, and fill them with the lowest grade content. I've see stuff that's "spun" (plagiarized content where a percentage of words have been replaced with synonyms, so that it appears original) and other stuff that's farmed out to writers in developing countries who work for pennies (A lot of articles with no real substance, written in poor english.)
The owner then links all the blogs to each other, so they appear to have domain authority. Then they sell back links to their customers. This fools Google into thinking your website is trustworthy (because everyone is linking to it) and you get better placement in search results.
In short, its a way anyone can buy popularity online.
Nowadays, companies run the internet and own our data.
Let's go back to the old model. Let universities research federated protocols/algorithms and such. Let the government own the fiber. And let companies build the hardware.
So instead of getting the backdoor they always wanted they literally have the entire house, foundation and all.
Secondly, refer to other comments re: firewalls
I wouldn't be surprised if a flip of tyranny has already occurred earlier this year. After all the reporter in her natural discourse did mention about the two dictators meeting in Singapore.
It was an honest mistake from her, but the thought has crossed our minds. It probably happened sometime ago.
[reverting]
- no delete method here anymore? @dang please help remove this thread. -
http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/06/22/americas-complex-r...
If you are worried about tyranny - the primary reason for the second amendment was to deter tyrannies of excessive regulation and authoritarian imposition (quartering of troops, etc).
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating#/media/File:Screen...
The now-repealed rules were a codification of the pre-2014 status quo.
https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-thrott...
They've even been blocking legal speech, so:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/us/27verizon.html
You know
All is good. Keep following orders!
He lied about the FCC's fake DDoS attack and refuses to investigate all the bots on the FCC's comment site as the NN open commenting period was coming to a close.
He's the Scott Pruitt of the FCC.
In the past few places I've lived (in Seattle and the SF Bay Area), there has been only a single high speed broadband provider (2 of those places had a DSL provider that promised "up to 1.5mbit" speeds), but that's barely enough for standard def streaming, and not nearly enough for HD streaming -- 1.5Mbit DSL was "high speed" 20 years ago.
The information to make an informed choice between service providers is meaningless when most of us in the US have no practical choice.
> [The repeal] will protect consumers and promote better, faster Internet access and more competition
First of all: I think the "competition" in question is along an axis that I'm not interested in; e.g. does this plan give me faster Netflix or unlimited Facebook. So now I have one more thing to worry about when picking a plan, which is very likely going to make me less happy with my choice.
The better/faster internet he's talking about is probably along these lines too, e.g a deal being struck with Netflix to make just Netflix faster.
So, for me as a consumer, I think this is terrible. I'm going to be spend more time thinking about my plan and be less happy it. It will also be worse in the sense that ISPs are spending time and money on a feature that I didn't want in the first place.
I also think this is terrible for new companies, but that's for another post.
A great book on this is The Paradox of Choice
First of all, there is practically no competition to start with. Six ISPs control the majority of the market, and the majority of customers have only one ISP to choose from. Getting rid of net neutrality will not make other companies suddenly appear.
Secondly, one company doing worse does not make a competing company better. It makes it relatively better. That doesn't matter, especially if there isn't another company to begin with.
Put these together, and it's trivial to see that getting rid of net neutrality will not bolster competition. Pai's conclusion is nonsense. In our reality, we are only left with worse options.
To quote another FCC commissioner: > Internet service providers now have the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content. They will have the right to discriminate and favor the Internet traffic of those companies with whom they have pay-for-play arrangements and the right to consign all others to a slow and bumpy road. Plain and simple, thanks to the FCC's rollback of net neutrality, Internet providers have the legal green light, the technical ability, and business incentive to discriminate and manipulate what we see, read, and learn online.
What do we have left? Well truth in advertising. But that just requires lies by omission and half truths to bypass. "Speeds up to 1 Gbit" is truthful. 0.01 mbit is within the advertised "truth", except when browisng websites that not paid Comcast's now legal extortion fee. Then they'll get less.
We have a protection that was removed! Full stop. The existing protection of truth in advertising did not change. So we went down.
The benefit of this heavy motorway is that areas far from the city became the new (wealthy) suburbs and shopping malls.
It is a matter of record that some local politicians made speeches about how the new freeway would benefit the original city it runs through. I think they use the phrase "tortured truth" to express how these statements reflect what actually happened. I expect somewhat similar rise in fortunes, and drop in privileges, associated with the new "un-Net".
Does anyone have any more info on the meaning and usage of the term "tortured truth."
I've been looking for new, concise ways to refer to a dishonest use of selectively chosen truth to mislead.
I wonder if the rise of "un-Net" could provide an incentive for people to get involved in alternative ways of connecting with one another, such as something like mesh networking.
The one that's best for me is literally the only one that's available in my area, so my informed decision is whether to have the internet or not.
In fact according to official statistics, even rural areas with zero wired internet options have a great competitive landscape. Let that sink in...
Wireless providers are competition for home internet service the same way the gas station down the street selling water bottles for $3/each is an alternative to running water.
You aren't going to get a $300 water bill just because some company in another state spent several days secretly filling your in-ground pool with the garden hose without permission, nor would anyone tolerate having that happen repeatedly while being told they can only brush their teeth but not flush the toilet for the rest of the month.
A while back, the DSL here was not working for a few days, so I connected my iPhone to my Macbook. Normally that's not an issue while away from home or in a car for an hour or two, as there are limits to how much data anything could use in that amount of time.
Apple's Photos app proactively downloaded something like 25GB of old stuff from iCloud Photo Library that I didn't ask to download, didn't browse through, or even remember having, simply because the local drive had free space and Apple decided that both the space and the bandwidth were freely available for it to waste.
If wireless providers were forbidden from imposing ridiculous data caps I would be fine with calling them competition, because we do have multiple high speed providers here, they're just not usable because they'd rather be selling water bottles.
Why is it always "removing regulations" == "removing things that protect the average person from predation"
The small government/less regulations argument is just a dog whistle for unfettered corporatism.
https://techliberation.com/2017/07/12/heres-why-the-obama-fc...
This article is ruminating on what might occur, not what actually occurred.
https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/06F8BFD0...
an ISP making sufficiently clear to potential customers that it provides a filtered service involving the ISP’s exercise of “editorial intervention.” Id. ¶ 549. For instance, Alamo Broadband, the lone broadband provider that raises a First Amendment challenge to the rule, posits the example of an ISP wishing to provide access solely to “family friendly websites.” Alamo Pet. Reh’g 5. Such an ISP, as long as it represents itself as engaging in editorial interventi on of that kind, would fall outside the rule. See U.S. Telecom Ass’n , 825 F.3d at 743; FCC Opp’n Pets. Reh’g 28 -29; FCC Br. 146 n.53 . The Order thus specifies that an ISP remains “free to offer ‘edited’ services” without becoming subject to the rule ’s requirements . Order ¶ 556.
I simply want a free market for the internet. Stop with government intervention on both sides. Simply protect the consumer and let the free market take over.
Who cares if companies like netflix get charged more? It will allow another competitor to bubble up since Netflix will start adjusting their prices. This works. Its called capitalism.
In theory, simply look at Lasik. Lasik 5 years ago, used to be 5k an eye. Now I can get it from a Pandora commercial for just $200.00. Thats capitalism. It drove prices down. I expect the same thing to happen with this. Competition will drive prices down quickly. It also allows the providers like Cox or Verizon to invest in their infrastructure. EVERYONE knows we are way behind Japan and other countries with our infrastructure.
Let people decide with their dollars, rather than the government deciding.
Government is people deciding with their votes, because letting people decide with their dollars means whoever has the most dollars gets to make all the decisions.
Neither of your comparisons is on point. (a) A market like surgical services doesn't have significant barriers to entry. But the need to lay last-mile fiber or cable is a significant barrier to market entry. (b) Japan did not get its digital infrastructure through laissez-faire policies.
Allowing incumbents to abuse their customers does devalue them, making their competitors relatively more valuable. The problem is that there are no competitors!
What we are left with are incumbents who can devalue themselves via customer abuse without consequence, which simply boils down to customer abuse.
If lack of regulation allows for an incumbent to engage in anti-consumer behavior, it opens a huge door for a more consumer-friendly competitor to sweep the market.
Opening that door is fruitless, because it is still impossible for a small business to compete with the oligopoly.
ISPs are already very difficult ventures. There is a huge upfront cost, including infrastructure and land rights, that incumbents have already either paid or had paid for by government aid. There has also been huge support from government for incumbents. New ventures are risky, so incumbents are almost always chosen for tax spending.
And let's not blow this out of proportion: That door is not huge. It is barely significant in ideal circumstances. Infrastructure quality and price matter more than net neutrality to most consumers.
I think with the advancement of Wireless last mile reducing deployment costs we will see more competition in the space (if incumbent ISPs do not keep them out with lawsuits). But at the current time most Wireless ISPs can't match the speeds of wired ISPs and the average consumer does not care enough to check every so often if a new competitor enters the ISP market, and probably won't change unless they have a serious problem with their current provider.
So in summary I think that soon we may not need government oversight with enough competition, but in our current market saturated by incumbents we do.
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/att-and-comcast-...