As a Republican I think this is a repugnant idea. ISPs should be treated as utilities in this age. They should simply be dumb pipes. They should not be allowed to monitor, track, and snoop through your data. This is all the more reason that websites should be using HTTPS to prevent eavesdropping and modification of data in transit.
> ISPs should be treated as utilities in this age.
"Treating ISPs like utilities" involves more than just making them do things we want for free. I live in the Annapolis suburbs, and our house just got public water/sewer in 2015. We're paying off the county assessment at $3,000 per year for 10 years (http://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits/...). That gets baked into every new house.
If we did treat ISPs like utilities and impose a $30,000 levy on every house built, we'd have fiber everywhere.
The thing is, we already paid that bill years ago. Taxpayers gave something like $200 Billion to the Baby Bell telcos in exchange for the promise of building a broadband network. We paid, then they didn't build it.
The number is computed by comparing Baby Bell profit margins after deregulation to "utilities" as a whole and calling anything above the average for "utilities" as "excess profits" that were a "taxpayer subsidy" to the Baby Bells. It is based on two fundamentally incorrect ideas:
1) That the expected rates of return of companies in an industry with exploding demand, like telecommunications was in the 1990s, should be comparable to the rates of return for your water or power company. But water and power utilities use 50-100 year old infrastructure to cater to extremely stable demand. That's exactly the opposite of what was happening in the telecom sector in the late 1990s.
2) That regulating telecom rates so those companies were no more profitable than water or power companies would not have affected investment. There is a reason our water system gets a "D" from the American Society of Civil Engineers: http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/water-infrastructure.
Imagine comparing the profit margins of smartphone manufacturers in 2007-2017 against the average profits of "phone manufacturers" before that time, and calling everything over that average a "taxpayer subsidy." Alternatively, imagine telling phone companies that they could not make any profits beyond the average profitability of the phone industry from 1995-2005. Do you think we'd have iPhones today?
I'd be surprised if the real number was even a net subsidy rather than a net tax. We impose all sorts of extra taxes and costs on the telecommunications that we do not impose on other industries. For example, state and local cable TV franchise fees alone (typically 5% of gross revenue) amount to $5-6 billion per year in the U.S. In comparison, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act had $7 billion in telecommunications subsidies, and that was a one-time shot.
Then there is the economic deadweight loss created by implicit and explicit cross-subsidies. There is a 17-18% tax on telecommunications services.[1] That is not a net tax, because the money is redistributed within the industry, but it increases prices, which decreases demand, which causes a net deadweight loss. Then there is implicit cross-subsidies in the form of build-out requirements. In nearly every city, you are not permitted to only build out in the neighborhoods where you can count on having enough subscribers to recoup the cost of that part of the build. You have to build out everywhere. The end result is that prices go up in neighborhoods with more potential subscribers in order to subsidize the deployment to neighborhoods with fewer potential subscribers. Again, making the product more expensive decreases demand and imposes a deadweight loss.
The ideas behind these policies are mostly well-intentioned. We want as a society to provide connectivity to rural areas and poor neighborhoods. But the implementations are driven by politics rather than any attempt to achieve the desired end result in the most economically efficient way. We don't pay for SNAP benefits with a tax on supermarkets. We impose a general tax on everybody, to avoid distorting the economy in favor or against any particular industry.
[1] That tax pays for almost all the "subsidies" you hear telecom companies getting. It's like imposing an 17-18% tax on all smartphones, and giving the money to companies building cheap smart phones for poor people. Nobody would call that a "subsidy" to the smart phone industry (it's a cross-subsidy within the industry).
No, more likely we'd see "record profits" from all the carriers because it's not in their best interest to give you the "best available" at construction time. It's in their best interest to check the box. Then later, when you want an upgrade, charge you the extra amount.
Short of having a pool, people use public water/sewer pretty much the same in any given area. Connectivity and bandwidth vary wildly by person. The normal non-technical person is quite happy as long as their Netflix doesn't buffer and their games aren't laggy.
Jesus, it's $3k per YEAR now? My house built in 1995, also AA county, is only $300 per year, but it is for 30 years. Still quite a significant difference, and not fully explained by inflation alone.
It's not about ideology, it's about the distortionary investment incentives that result from government policies. If you regulate one industry more heavily than another, you'll drive investment out of that industry into less regulated industries. Likewise, if you want to discourage investment into an industry, you tax its products. That's why we add extra taxes to cigarettes and soda (and likewise why health experts oppose subsidies on things like corn).
When you regulate the wires more heavily than the stuff flowing through them, you drive investment into content and away from infrastructure. Likewise, when you impose a special 20% tax on telecommunications services (as we do), you dampen demand for those products.
This sounds like a canard. If by "regulate more" you mean the available profit margins are smaller, then yes. However, if profit margins are very high, you can place quite a lot of expensive regulation (not all regulations are expensive, some of them tell you not to do injurious things) and people will still invest.
By its nature, content will drive a huge amount investment. Funneling bits at high speed is an interesting business, but the recombination of those bits has a universe of more possibility in it. I'd be surprised if (after the ecosystem reaches critical mass) content investment always dominates infrastructure investment.
In any case, the case for neutrality is stronger than an abstract argument against an arbitrary regulation. The promise of the internet is that of decentralized many-to-many content generation, i.e. the strong airing of many different opinions by large and small operations. When the people that own the pipes can pick favorites, the strong voices will over time winnow to the favored ones.
This is a pattern that happens over and over again in US media where large corporations are able to pick ideological favorites and narrow the spectrum of discourse to suit themselves. Network neutrality being knocked down is a strategy of corporate dominance over public discourse. Note that very few, very rich, cable companies provide most of the telecommunications for the entire population. Granting them this power allows small groups of individuals with many common interests to pick favorites to a startling degree.
> This sounds like a canard. If by "regulate more" you mean the available profit margins are smaller, then yes. However, if profit margins are very high, you can place quite a lot of expensive regulation (not all regulations are expensive, some of them tell you not to do injurious things) and people will still invest.
The idea that telcos are "very rich" is an alternative fact. Look at the actual operating profit margins of the wireline divisions of the big telcos. Huge amounts of money comes in, and almost all of it goes right back out because maintaining physical wires is expensive.
Wireline has been on the decline for a while now though, why would you look at that alone?
And a high ROIC is.., odd when comparing it to industries like software, or even to F&B.
And if those numbers are American numbers, it's pretty amazing, given that American telcos have historically underinvested in their infra building duties.
What's more interesting is an ARPU comparison with multiple countries. That would be a more apples to apples comparison.
For reference: AT&T 2015 net income was 13 billion.
Which isn't the only source of revenue for these firms, since we are talking about the whole firm.
Even if we did want to talk about just wireline, you would still have to do an ARPU comparison and see how other nations do. The last time I had to analyze a telecom firm was many years ago, but American firms do very well.
Edit: ended up finding a decent primer for the America telecom industry.
Telecos are a weird example. They're more like a utility than a product one can live without. This, combined with the massive duplication of effort competition would entail, is the reason why they are so intensively regulated. Oftentimes the government provides funding & loans[1][2], and tax incentives for telecom infrastructure buildout.
For what its worth, the reason telecoms have such low margins is that they are a commodity (which in my opinion, is what they should be). Their lobbying to get the ability to give non-neutral lanes is to give themselves a way to not be a commodity. I don't really see the upside for society as a whole for them to be essentially granted a state monopoly and then decommodify themselves to make things that were cheap more expensive and risk the internet in the process.
Their profits are nearly risk free even if they're relatively low. According to your link, the average return was between ~2% and ~11%. We're not talking about fractional percentages here. A small low risk margin on a lot of money... is still a lot of money. Notice that the ROIC in exhibit 3 lines up nicely with utilities.
I'm not sure where you were getting your info from about wireline divisions, but I found this interesting report: http://marketrealist.com/2015/01/wireless-telecoms-key-indic... It looks like investment in wires has declined by about 40%, but investment in wireless has increased tremendously. I don't know what the absolute numbers are though. I imagine wireless is much cheaper to deploy.
The utility analogy is superficially attractive but makes no economic sense. Utilities have far lower investment needs and stable rather than exploding demand. Also, even then our utilities are massively underfunded. Regulated rates are just too low, resulting in aging water and sewer pipes and transmission lines. Our power grid is crumbling: http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90321. Our ancient sewer systems are dumping raw sewage into our waterways every time it rains. Old lead pipes are poisoning our kids.
The government funding you point to is a drop in the bucket compared to the costs imposed on the industry. The USF tax is $8 billion per year. State and local governments levy $6 billion in franchise fees annually (for a franchise that is by law non-exclusive). Your report points to a few hundred million in one time payments here and there. Also, remember that those payments are against the background of a universal service obligation. The government can legally prevent a telecom from exiting an unprofitable market. They may or may not provide some subsidy, but the obligation to provide service isn't contingent on getting a subsidy.
ehh well they are rich in that they own actual infrastructure, not just say a digital infrastructure. They often own content networks and of course plenty of IP, so they do fine. When you see telecom failing it's generally them letting themselves get raped due to contracts that serve people internally that they've enjoyed passing off to their customers without care.
The profits one makes should not impact the number of regulations they endure. The regulations should have merit on their own and be only out of necessity for the replenishment of the common goods utilized by the individual or corporation.
You're right to some degree, but there's a practical reality too. If a regulation would make it impossible to do business, and society would like that business to continue then they'll live without the regulation even if it would be good. There's always a cost-benefit tradeoff, and good regulators work with their charges (without getting too cozy) and the public (without listening to the shrillest unsubstantiated voices) to make smart ones.
If there were a regulation that would make it impossible to do business(the war on drugs) and society would like that business to continue (the revenue of cocaine sales were approximately 9 times that of Microsoft last year), then they'll live without the regulation (sweet where do I buy?)
Telecom is a classic example of an industry which will always have imperfect competition because of high barriers to entry and large fixed costs.
You will always need government intervention to ensure that telecom firms don't abuse their position.
American telecom firms are genuinely pieces of work, truly innovative in their means of colluding. They managed to insert pin codes in their bids for spectrum. Thus letting other bidders know they should step out.
I believe there won't be any people around here that vote Republican that will support this. The GOP (we can discuss when it happened, but it definitely) has gone off the rails in terms of supporting their constituents. They feed them red meat in terms of social issues, and then do what they want on economic and other issues, which are almost always completely pro-business and anti-labor.
I disagree with your assessment that Republican voters are primarily motivated by social issues, yet implicitly opposed to "pro-business and anti-labor" things. There are quite a few Republican voters who prefer them on (stated) economic issues and hold their nose when it comes to the social stuff.
Really, the problem (or benefit, depending on your point of view) is that the two party system creates very broad coalitions of people with differing interests. The problem with the Republican coalition is that many of its constituents want things which are contradictory. Like, say, free market economic policies and stricter immigration (which is a form of labor market regulation).
The Democrats have their own versions of these problems, but they're usually less obvious because their coalition is more explicitly transactional.
Yes, well said. I consider myself more of a Peter Thiel type of republican who supports the party on an economic basis but would really love to see the party abandon its culture wars.
The following is less an attempt to start a partisan argument than to clarify the lines along which such arguments have taken place previously.
>The GOP (we can discuss when it happened, but it definitely) has gone off the rails in terms of supporting their constituents. They feed them red meat in terms of social issues, and then do what they want on economic and other issues, which are almost always completely pro-business and anti-labor.
Isn't that, well, normal? I was under the impression that anti-labor Republicanism started around the time of Ronald Reagan and continued indefinitely since then. If anything is especially original about what the Republican Party are doing now, it's that their Presidential candidate ran on an atypically liberal economic platform (no cuts to entitlement programs, major infrastructure spending, rebuilding the blue-collar jobs base in the Midwest), while their Congressional majority continue the traditional Reagan Republican legislative program.
Precisely this division on economic issues, more than anything else, is what has always stopped me from voting Republican. It has done so even when I thought that some or another Republican, especially a moderate, had a valid point or two, or just seemed like a decent and honest person. For example, I always thought that John McCain seemed like an honorable, patriotic Senator who stood up for civil liberties and veterans, but oh well, 2008 was the middle of an economic crisis and the Republicans are anti-labor. So I voted a firm Obama instead of being a swing voter.
What's the perception on the Republican side of the divide? That the party was originally pro-labor in its own way, but conservative on social issues? That there was an appropriate time in our history to be anti-labor?
This isn't about opposing privacy. There is a reasonable expectation to privacy people have but the privacy laws adapted by the FCC in the past have only been applied to ISPs and not other edge providers, such as Google or Skype. So in short, they are just bad laws.
The regulations placed on ISPs place an undue burden on them but not on other Internet companies. Firstly, this means that users have to understand a lot about the networks they use to understand how privacy laws affect them. Second, it also means that edge providers(Yahoo, Skype, Google) have an unfair advantage. The justification given for this is that ISPs see much more data than edge providers. But this does not appear true and in fact a great deal of personal information and network-usage data appears to be available to other parties besides ISPs. You can search headlines to see that. So it doesn't make sense to single out ISPs for privacy laws but not other Internet companies that have access to user data. Also, it makes the law more complicated regarding user data privacy.
I also want to point out that, in my personal opinion, there is a tendency to view ISPs as malicious actors but not for other edge providers which biases the debate on Internet privacy laws.
"..the privacy laws adapted by the FCC in the past have only been applied to ISPs and not other edge providers... So in short, they are just bad laws."
I feel that builds the argument that they should be implemented more widely, not abandoned. Also, ISPs are targeted specifically not because people believe they are malicious actors, but because they are literally the gateway to everything, impacting you just about any time you use the internet. Think how much it would say about you as a person in detailed logs from your service provider.
Yes, the argument that they should be widely implemented is definitely implied and valid.
Regarding your analogy, end to end encrypted content is not readable by the ISP, they can see metadata for encrypted content, but not the content itself. Whereas webmail providers can see the content[1]. Another example is Google who run a public DNS server. Another example is Apple keeping all phone numbers[2]. So the data that edge providers have access to(in theory) is fairly significant. I think definitely to be consistent the law has to be an all or nothing kind of thing.
There's a competitive market in online services. FastMail scans only for spam, and you can opt out.[1] Microsoft claims not to use email for ad targeting.[2] Google DNS is a standalone service with a reasonable, detailed privacy policy.[3] iMessage is optional even if you choose to use Apple platforms.
Meanwhile, most US households have only one option for 25+ Mbps Internet service because the FCC dismantled competition among residential ISPs. If ISPs don't want the responsibilities that come with monopoly power, they should stop fighting to preserve it.
Im interacting with edge providers, so I understand to some degree that I'm exposing information. Take phone calls as an analogy; obviously the person on the other end of the line can hear me, but I don't want a stranger at the telephone company listening in.
I cannot accept that statement at face value. Supporting this is absolutely about opposing privacy. You are supporting a move whose only purpose is to lessen privacy.
"There is a reasonable expectation to privacy people have but the privacy laws adapted by the FCC in the past have only been applied to ISPs and not other edge providers, such as Google or Skype. So in short, they are just bad laws."
No, they aren't. They are very good laws. They're just not as broad as they could be. The proper response, if you feel this way, is to expand those privacy laws, not to remove the little protection consumers have.
" Second, it also means that edge providers(Yahoo, Skype, Google) have an unfair advantage. "
No, it absolutely does not. Mainly because ISPs are not competing with them. There is absolutely, positively zero reason why any ISP should need that data. None.
The rationalization I've heard is something along the lines of "anything that the free-market is a better regulator than the gov't; gov't regulation reduces competition and creates monopolies like those that exist in the ISP biz today". Please don't shoot the messenger. :)
The point also includes that Facebook and Google which are effective duopoly of on-line advertisements are not restricted but the owners of the pipes are. It also includes interpretation of FCC's core mission and how expansive the powers of application are.
I am more worried about advertising duopoly than ISP eating my data. If you have smart phone, you have pretty much given a heck lot of privacy, including where you go etc. Your android phone sucks so much data about your spatial movement, it can predict when you got sick or about to get sick.
The problem with this comparison is that, while it's not remotely easy, it's far easier to compete with Facebook or Google than to compete with an ISP.
Facebook barely existed 10 years ago. And it wasn't until maybe the last five years that it was recognized as a competitor to Google.
Just because the FCC is 15 years behind the times on this doesn't make it a bad idea.
Google, Facebook, and advertising networks with over a certain percentage of the market should absolutely be subject to privacy regulation as well (and likely will be in another 15 years).
> I'd love to hear from some Republican supporters who think this is a good idea
What idea, exactly? Doing what the title of the article claims?
Obviously nobody wants to reduce privacy except perhaps serious proponents of IAs. You can't even really judge that based on intent or claims, and Obama is a great example of why. He always claimed to be fighting them but in reality he expanded and affirmed their power in ways that make him look more like Bush than a liberal-minded Democrat.
I'm not even comfortable putting a political party label on myself (it just so happens more libertarian and classical liberal minded people like me seem to be more favorable of some people in the Republican party as of late, largely due to the disturbing trends going on in the Democratic one), but I personally don't find the idea of repealing laws that protect privacy very palatable. That's a gut reaction, because I'm not aware of what other plans are in place because the media doesn't appear to be reporting those, nor do I have any confidence it would if that news would conflict with what they've set out to do: to vilify Ajit Pai and the FCC under new administration.
What's more important to me, however, isn't necessarily the clickbait-tier quality of the title presented here, but the larger strategy. If you opened a code review and saw someone removed a critical piece of code as part of a much needed refactoring and immediately yelled "THIS IS A REALLY BAD IDEA!" but ignored the part where that critical function was maintained and improved upon further down, you'd be seen as a bit of a reactionary focusing far too narrowly on specifics. I think that's a genuine risk here, and all too often in politics in general.
Why am I not outraged? Because I don't think I'm getting the whole picture.
Did you apply your genuine curiosity to reading the rules in detail and formulate why you specifically think the entire rules' contents are important to retain and have no downside?
Did you then ask yourself if the need for this rule, as written, is so compelling, why did the Obama Administration only sneak it in the week before Trump was elected?
It's pretty simple. If you have a technical understanding of the topic and have no vested interest then you'll almost certainly be against overturning privacy rules regardless of politics. If you don't have a technical understanding then you'll just take your cue from your political tribe.
It doesn't necessarily matter that an arbitrary member of the republican party has sponsored this resolution, at this time, republican values among the masses are totally subject to Trump's opinions (which are not always in-line with republican orthodoxy), so Trump's position on this will ultimately dictate whether or not republicans constituents are ok with this.
2) Individual freedom is about not restricting your actions, not about defending you from others.
3) Privacy is something of the past anyway. In a 100 years we will know every word you say, every thing you buy, every breath you take. You're defending the right to spit tobacco on the street.
4) In a few years when something happens everybody is gonna turn around and blame the government about not knowing enough. It is good for PR for that reason. "We tried, you didn't want to."
I will try to counter your counter-counter arguments.
1) Security versus privacy is a trade-off and should be respected as such. There can be lives at stake. If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email I would immediately sign up and travel to the US for it. The difficulty is that in reality this trade-off is not transparently made. However, this does not mean that there is no such trade-off.
2) To protect someone from others can be done in multiple ways. You can create laws that protect someone from having others reading his/her letters, protect someone from having others entering their home, protect someone from others saying bad things about them, protect someone from others stealing from them. Although recommendable, all these laws are restrictive and not necessarily promoting individual freedom.
3) In the future there are so many sensors in the (virtual) world that they will find it ridiculous that people in the past thought that there were things private. Are you an owner of the photons that bounce of you? Are you an owner of the audio waves generated by those neurons formed by interactions with you? The concept of privacy is arcane and in certain situations criminal.
4) Blaming the government is gonna happen. This is a cynical argument. However, the political parties that have political fitness will survive. In the end a party should reflect would its majority want. If that is enough data collection to prevent 9/11s, then that is what it should try to do.
1. "If I can save 1000 lives by having a border patrol guy reading my email..."
So we're going to train all the border patrol people to be intelligence analysts? That sounds really expensive.
If we're not going to do that, then they're not going to have the training required to make sense of that material. It's a pointless invasion of privacy. They're going to put innocent people in jail and be completely oblivious to actual bad actors who know how to hide their tracks.
Remember, September 11th was avoidable but because the information channels were clogged with too much garbage the real threat information got lost in the noise. The real priority here should be to collect less information and ensure it's of a very high quality.
I am also curious about how one can vocally defend freedom to carry guns but not care too much about having surveillance and censorship free communication.
From what I can tell, they believe that the FCC regulating the ISPs is an overreach of government, which should be as small as possible.
I think they are either ignorant on the topic of surveillance and its breadth and implications, or they have some kind of belief that the intelligence community is fighting for our country.
I'm conservative on a lot of issues, including 2nd amendment rights, and my family is full of "right-wingers." None of them would support spying on our own citizens or the violation of the privacy of American citizens.
The Republican party at large does not reflect the values of most modern conservatives that try even a little bit to not have hypocritical views.
However, while conservatives tend to believe in small government, they have never believed in small military/intelligence/etc.
Why does anyone think allowing ISPs to collect and operate on customer information with impunity is a good idea for the general public, who often have no alternatives?
It's a proxy war in a battle between industry sectors.
> Telecoms unsurprisingly object to the rules. They feel they're subject to more stringent regulation than many of the websites you visit, and believe that an opt-in requirement hurts their ability to target you with personalized ads.
Silicon Valley would similarly chafe at the idea of opt-in requirements before being able to use customer data. You can raise the competition issue, and that's fair to a degree. But I have more realistic choices for say my cell phone plan than I do the search engine I use. And I have every little choice in, e.g., whether or not I send emails to gmail/yahoo/etc. users.
As for why Republicans take up this particular mantle, there is a cynical take and a charitable one. Telecom companies employ hundreds of thousands of people, and are geographically dispersed. Silicon Valley is highly concentrated and doesn't employ that many people. AT&T, for example, has thousands of employees in Tennessee. Google has a few hundred. Does Facebook have any?
IMHO, everybody making Internet infrastructure should be required to get opt-in consent before using private customer information.
> But I have more realistic choices for say my cell phone plan than I do the search engine I use. And I have every little choice in, e.g., whether or not I send emails to gmail/yahoo/etc. users.
If I don't want to use Google because of their tracking, I can use DuckDuckGo.
If I don't want to use Comcast because of their tracking, my other options are Comcast, Comcast, Comcast, and Comcast. I think you're being a bit disingenuous by focusing on cellular carriers and not mentioning wired broadband providers where we have no competition, no consumer choice, and no market solution to abuses by the service provider.
Your criticism of email is somewhat more fair. While there are alternative services available that you could use, the majority of your contacts are going to choose to fork over all of your information to Google. But if you're really concerned about that, you can find other channels to contact them. That's still a better situation than the ISP market that most Americans are stuck with.
Trotting out DDG and Yahoo is kinda like saying satellite and fixed 4G are competition in almost every market. In practice, nobody sees them as real competition. In practice, the markets look quite similar:
Also, I am skeptical of this focus on wireline. There are 3x as many wireless broadband subscriptions in the U.S. (more than there are people!) than wired broadband. Wired broadband penetration has actually plateaued and is now shrinking.
I don't know about your comparison. Scientifically speaking Google search results and Bing's are nearly identical. And this is born out in the fact that Google's cost of acquiring traffic is going up while their ad CPMs on search are going down. They've been disguising it by increasing ad units on the search pages, oftentimes breaking their own ad placement guidelines. That Google's search is commoditized is the entire reason why Google became Alphabet and has been cleaning house on all their frivolous products. To be clear, Bing doesn't have the brand Google has, but in terms of the actual technical result of the product, it is virtually identical. The other issue with your comparison as approached above, is that comcast and the other ISPs have gov't granted monopolies, and end users cannot move to another carrier. They were granted these in exchange for building out massive cable/broadband networks with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. What happened is that the regulators fell asleep at the wheel or turned a blind eye and almost none of that money was actually spent upgrading the network.
How are those numbers figured? If you have a family of four living in a house (alternately, college students or professionals sharing an apartment), I'd assume you're counting that as 4 wireless broadband subscriptions? Or if you're talking about adults working jobs with business numbers, maybe 6? Regardless, it would be a lot more meaningful to look at whether a given person has access to a wired connection at home, instead of an apples and oranges count of subscription numbers.
If I had to guess about data consumed, that single wired connection probably handles more data than four mobile plans put together, thanks to mobile data caps and Netflix.
As far as broadband having "plateaued," it's not too surprising that something with a theoretical cap of 100% penetration would eventually stop growing. There are only so many houses to connect.
I don't have any particular problem with mobile broadband, my LTE connection on T-Mobile is actually faster than my cable. But there are a lot of people who use more than a couple of gigs a month, so cable isn't going away any time soon. And in the meantime, I'm not thrilled with Comcast having free reign to do whatever they want just because "the market will solve everything." It won't.
EDIT: At 20 Mb/s, it'd take me about half an hour to burn through my entire month's 5GB data allowance
I'll just note that you framed it very narrowly as "wired broadband" so the argument works; someone who takes the opposing view might consider dialup, 4g, satellite, or other services to be competition you could switch to. They likely have more market share than DuckDuckGo compared to Google/Bing.
I guess my criteria is "things I can binge Netflix on." Neither dialup or 4G fits the bill due to low speed or small data caps.
Gaming is a slightly smaller niche that rules out satellite on account of the >0.5 second latency.
And that "niche" is still enormous. With very few exceptions, every person playing any realtime online games from an Xbox, PlayStation, other console, or PC is doing it over a wired broadband connection and can't consider other services to switch to.
Telecoms have a huge amount of infrastructure that serves as a massive barrier to entry for new participants.
Silicon valley companies in general don't have this. If you don't like Google, someone else can come along and make a new search engine. And in fact that's exactly what DuckDuckGo did, and I strongly recommend using them if you care even the slightest bit about the privacy of your online searches.
But if you don't like what Comcast is doing with your data, who can you switch to? In most markets there's no viable competitor, and even if you include things like satellite (which in general isn't actual a good competitor to wired internet), I'd have to imagine the satellite internet companies (I don't actually know who they are) aren't likely to be much better than Comcast when it comes to protecting your privacy.
You have in fact virtually no chance of building a new search engine to compete with Google, and were you to try I think you'd discover that the effort would be both incredibly capital-intensive and also involve pretty staggering up-front operational expenditures as well, since the number and caliber of developers you'd need to accomplish that feat would be extremely high.
I think it'd be an interesting exercise to tease apart how much it would cost to build out a new nationwide optical network versus building a competitive search engine.
What about if you used Googles cloud infrastructure?
I agree that it's probably crazy but I think it is possible that large organizations can miss on their core value propositions once a certain time/size has passed.
Running a search engine is capital-intensive in the sense that to have a search engine, you have to maintain an index: a copy of all the text of the publically viewable internet, updated regularly. This requires a lot of network bandwidth and a whole lot of disk space.
If you tried to run an index on GCE it would cost you 5x or 10x what it would to do on servers you own. If you managed to create a viable product with this incredibly onerous constraint, to the point of posing an actual business threat to Google, then they would just shut you down, since all your stuff is on their servers.
I think most interestingly, in order to create a competitive search engine, you would need not only a nationwide, but indeed a globe-spanning optical network.
I don't agree with the stance, but I suspect the answer would be something like - "This would allow the companies to make more money which grows the economy and shareholder value which is good for the general population."
Sadly engadget is not a reliable source, so there's really nothing to take specifically from this article at face value (not that it said much other than FUD anyway). Lately they've been caught making or repeating way too much fake news related to politics and even entertainment topics.
Other than that, write to your representatives and tell them in no unambiguous language that they are sacrificing liberty for a feeling of security. Remind them that their own internet use could be monitored by their political opponents because once the framework is in place it is far too easy to abuse it.
>There's been a groundswell recently, and the GOP response: they are not in my district, they are liberals causing trouble, etc, etc.
We're seeing this in my congressional district right now (NY21). A lot of people here are upset because our representative has basically been in hiding since last year's election (which she won handily as a young republican incumbent in a very red, rural district). She has held no announced public events, has canceled some that were scheduled, and only communicates through sound bytes provided by her staff.
So there have been protests and groups have formed that regularly march at, write to, and call her offices, asking for town hall meetings where they can actually discuss the issues at hand. [0][1]
So how has she responded? She put out a statement on Facebook that included the following [2]:
>Many members of various protest groups have repeatedly harassed my hardworking staff and have personally targeted specific staff members. This type of intentionally disruptive behavior is unacceptable and unhelpful to civil public discourse. If it gets out of hand, we will continue to contact local law enforcement and U.S. Capitol Police.
>It is imperative that my staff is able to continue to focus on federal casework on behalf of the constituents of New York’s 21st District, and that my constituents understand that despite the efforts from these organized disruptors, we will always continue our work to best serve you.
Two points:
1. I've met these protesters and been to their rallies. I'm part of the facebook group they use to organize the events. They're everyday people, of all political parties, who have gathered civilly and clearly care about the issues our district faces. Maybe there are some bad actors, but I haven't met them. If they're guilty of anything it's being a little annoying, and that's not a crime.
2. Her comments in that statement very clearly are trying to paint the protesters as somehow working against her and her constituents. But we are her constituents!
Stories like this really, really make me question my opposition to violence. Some of these people seem like they won't listen to their constituents without some alternative persuasion. And that's sad.
I'm not sure I would personally ever resort to violence unless things get really out of hand and atrocities start occurring.
I will say, however, that I've met our representative when she toured our company last year and wasn't particularly pleased with the interaction. She was an air head, especially with respect to the issues that we (as a software company) care about. When I wasn't satisfied with her responses she said, "You're just one of those guys who hates politicians, huh?"
I wouldn't say that's true. In fact, her predecessor also toured our office in 2012, right around the time when SOPA/PIPA were being debated, and he seemed very well informed and appeared to take our comments to heart, despite actually being a SOPA co-sponsor.
Not to intentionally continue rambling but his departure that led to Stefanik's election was kind of fishy too. He was a locally raised, pretty well-liked democratic lawyer and retired Air Force captain who helped revitalize one of the cities he was stationed at during his service when the air base there was shut down. Then all of a sudden he just says he's not running for re-election. A friend of mine pointed out that due to the unexpected nature of his retirement it's within the realm of possibility that he was forced out in some way (blackmail?)
So Stefanik -- a young, female career politician and former Paul Ryan staffer rolls in and given the overall right-leaning nature of the area, people vote along party lines and she wins. Her only tie to the district is that her family owns a seasonal home here, which apparently was enough for her to meet residency requirements. She's spent most of her adult life in Washington. Barely anyone in her "hometown" in our district has even seen her [0]. On the campaign trail for her first election, she notoriously just walked away from reporters in the middle of a press event[1], so the "run away and hide" political strategy seems to have some precedent with her.
And, unfortunately, in most cases, any legitimate criticism you give with respect to her and her job performance often gets dismissed by her supporters as sexism. It's all very frustrating.
HN probably isn't the place for my ranting. Sorry about that.
I know you're being facetious, but did Bernie really have a stance on internet privacy? It was pretty clear the main platform he had fleshed out was just economic policy.
That's too many words. Simply tell them that if they don't do something to stop this, that they will not be able to count on your support at the next election.
If you can't trust your ISP, use a VPN. If you're working with trusted peers, there's no need to trust other parties. Otherwise, you can run your own VPN server on a VPS, or use a commercial VPN service. But then you need to trust the provider, and their ISP. Still, you can choose providers with good reputations, and those that are less likely to pwn you. And you can distribute trust by using nested VPN chains, so that compromise requires collaboration.
So did I, when I lived in the Bay Area and actually had a choice. In my corner of Seattle, my only choices are Comcast and CenturyLink, which appear to be equally despised by people.
Comments like this aren't allowed on HN regardless of how ignorant someone else is, so please don't post them. When someone is mistaken, show them how (and more importantly, the rest of us) by adding information. If you don't want to do that or don't have time, posting nothing is a fine option too.
Why do people seem so obsessed with privacy on the net?
I mean, I get that privacy is important. I would not like the walls of my house to be transparent, for instance. But that's the thing : they're not, and this law would not change that.
What I mean is that I, for better or worse, make a clear distinction between privacy in the physical word and privacy online. I basically don't consider anything I do online "really" private. The only reason I assume nobody knows what I do there is that I presume nobody cares. And if I really wanted to hide what I'm doing I'd use TOR, GnuPG or something like that.
>I basically don't consider anything I do online "really" private. The only reason I assume nobody knows what I do there is that I presume nobody cares.
Thats for /You/ though. Laws are for /everyone/. Also, everyone does private things on the net. Any credit card transaction should be a private dealing. If all your google searches were put up for the public to see, I don't think you'd be too happy about that. For others, they could have very negative social consequences.
I would argue hard privacy laws are more important on the internet, because you can mass collect data and make infinite copies, but in real life you can't mass collect the contents of homes and where things have been. The physical barrier is by itself a natural privacy maker, something that is important to try to replicate in communication with data.
If you can see the exchange happen, then it is not really private. You don't need to know how much I spent, but just that I spent something. That already is enough to not make it private anymore.
Republicans, FBI, and NSA tried to do exactly that during the Crypto Wars. Their next proposal was an escrow scheme where secret people in government agencies with history of corruption & targetting dissidents would get copies of all our secrets. They eventually relented on the ban and partially on exports.
Now, they're back at it again scaremongering about the Four Horsemen being reason to give them our secrets again:
Such false equivalence is harmful if you're a proponent of strict privacy laws.
Even if Democrats were exactly as bad as Republicans in every regard, you could actually choose to randomly thank them for their dedication to privacy. Do that often enough, you'll soon see Democratic politicians adopting pro-privacy positions.
In reality, it seems quite obvious that despite all, there is at least a marginal difference between the parties with regards to not only privacy, but many other closely-linked issues, i.e. net neutrality.
If you get frustrated because these measures don't go far enough and buy into the "they're-all-corrupt-each-worse-than-the-other"-narrative, you're removing all incentives for them to act in your interest.
They're both currently anti-privacy. It was Clinton Administration that originally compromised with escrow and then allowing crypto. Also expanded FOIA use. The conservatives in the military, esp running NSA, wanted it banned. Then conservatives passed Patriot Act and issued State of Emergency creating a lightweight, selective form oc martial law with bulk surveillance and indefinite detention without trial. Also reduced public access to government info. Obama reversed Democrat accomplishments in privacy by expanding on those conservative policies and laws. New Republican President is trying to crank them up to the next level on top of showing himself to be a threat to individuals or companies for arbitrary, unpredictable reasons motivated by ego.
So, both parties suck at privacy but one did something for it once under pressure. Republicans are consistently in favor of trading liberty for temporary, limited security if it's not their firearms, speech, or press.
> Republicans are consistently in favor of trading liberty for temporary, limited security if it's not their firearms, speech, or press
That's a pretty big "if". Trading guns, speech, and press in exchange for security seems like a much bigger deal than trading internet privacy for security.
It's the digital versions of 1st, 4th, and 5th Amendments. They want the physical but not digital versions despite the ideology behind one justifying the other.
Might even be able to add the 2nd Amendment here on the self-defense angle. It takes crypto, privacy, and endpoint protection technologies to stop hackers and online criminals effectively. The conservatives, esp military, classified high-assurance security as "munitions" since they disrupt their spy operations. They remained classified as "munitions" after the crypto wars. And, yet, we really need information security to stop all kinds of daily threats instead of them trying to ban it to hope they spot rare threats [they often fail to spot].
The internet encompasses so much of what was once in the physical world that it would be better that your walls were transparent: then they would only have access to your activities at home, instead of your every question asked of google, every communication you have with another person not face to face, everywhere you go with your phone, everything you buy, all your contacts, and all the information they have.
Even if you forgo the internet for all those activities it will still be possible to triangulate much of what you do by tracking any of your contacts who do not. And most of them will not.
And as people in the tech industry, we should be selfishly invested in privacy online, because either we will make products worth sacrificing privacy for and increase total surveillance, or people will not use our products because their privacy is not guaranteed.
And while I agree technical tools such as TOR should be used to further assure privacy, they should not be the first and only safeguard - strong legislative and civic support is required, or you end up sliding further into repression, e.g. requiring people to give up passwords, requiring backdoors in software, etc.
Before you criticize this argument as slippery slope, know that it is only a fallacy in the absence of a cause why one should slide down this slope. I hope the ample history of legislative and technical erosion of privacy can serve as proof the danger is real.
> I would not like the walls of my house to be transparent, for instance. But that's the thing : they're not
Do you have an Amazon Echo or Google Home (or even a "smart" TV)? If so (and with no privacy regulation to protect you) the walls of your house are now basically transparent to sound. As net-connected cameras become more plentiful, visual "transparency" is not far behind.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems you're making the "If you're giving Google your information, why do you care if the government gets it too?" argument.
Services that you have mentioned are voluntary. You can control which organizations have access to your data by purchasing or not purchasing certain products, though one can't be sure who within the company is actually looking at your data or who they are selling information to.
In the future, will there be any consumer technology services that do not collect and store your information? Possibly not. If enough people give up their own privacy in favor of convenience, the free market will provide. However, it will still remain a decision of the individual whether or not to utilize those services - despite there potentially not being more private alternatives.
Republicans and the current administration want to be able to be able to monitor individuals unwarranted, unchecked, and with legality. (Yes, I know the NSA exists) The difference here is that individuals don't have a decision in the matter.
There are two ways that I can think of to stop both of the above situations:
1. Implement federal policy that disallows companies from collecting and storing customer data except that which is explicitly provided by the customer.
2. Develop methods that make it financially beneficial for politicians to protect the privacy of those they are meant to represent.
I tend to be discrete when discussing any medical issues with my doctor or pharmasist as it's no business of anyone elses. Why should any online conversations I have be any different? I don't want third parties listening in and swapping my personal medical (or any other) details amongst themselves like juicy gossip, thank you.
Couple that with selective enforcement and you can put away anybody for any length of time.
So privacy matters, if only because you never know what the administration after the one you were still ok with will be up to. Case in point: the present.
Because infomation is power in the hands of government or malicious, private parties. Lots of personal information ends up online due to how so many people rely on digital communications. For government, there's concern about anything from hiding dissenting behavior (eg gag politician in Red state, organizing protests) to reducing risk of being caught violating one of the thousands of laws/regulations we can't keep track of (eg cops didnt like you or had quotas). For private parties, we already see extortion schemes, identity theft, stalking, fraudulent use of credit cards, discrimination via profiling tech, and so on.
Many, many threats are blocked when Internet tech is private by default. Even selective privacy can block a lot of them. People fighting against privacy online don't care abouf any of that. They'd sacrifice or risk it all for what benefits surveillance state allegedly brings. So far no proof of those benefits either despite billions spent. They should just invest in good-old, police work and HUMINT that got the best results consistently going back before computers were invented.
Would you also consider mailing your lawyer or your doctor not private? I mean, there are certain services that are per definition public, twitter for example. But on the other hand there are lots and lots of things you can do on the net that should be considered private.
What if all your web requests were automatically mined by your ISP, by advertising networks, and by the government?
What if through some really badly implemented semantic analysis you're flagged as a terrorist and thrown in jail without trial on "evidence" that, only if examined closely, makes no sense? This is the Brazil outcome.
What if everything you do online haunts you forever? You searched for bullets once. Your employer finds out about this because at work you're being served ads about bullets. They fire you for some bullshit reason that's legally air-tight because they don't want you going postal.
You really don't understand what a world with no privacy looks like.
Such rules don't need to be 100% perfect or 100% effective to be beneficial, and the so called downside is that they block companies from building a business selling information that users may not be aware they are collecting.
If you actually want to know, each party markets to the grassroots concerns of the people in their audience. After they get in power, what they actually implement is the agenda of their corporate sponsors.
If you want to understand the situation:
1. Try suppressing your immediate visceral reaction to issues that grassroots Republicans care about. Open your mind, tune into some decent red media, and ask yourself "what if there is some truth in this?"
2. Avoid being drawn into the groupthink that condones the actions of your own team as altruistic. Open your mind and ask yourself "what if there is some oppressive agenda behind this?"
Unfortunately, you will have to find media from back when Democrats had power. Now that the other team is the aggressor and your team is the opposition, it will be impossible to perceive (your team is now only "fighting the good fight", as they lack power to implement their sponsors' policies). But my message goes equally for the red team as well, reversing the parties.
I don't understand it either. Instead of voting 40 times to abolish Obamacare they could have introduced changes to make it better. Or if there are problems with some regulations they could improve them instead of just getting rid of them like they want to with Dodd-Frank.
Making everything shittier is the "pay back the plutocrats" phase of a reciprocating strategy that begins with "use funds from plutocrats to firehose hate-crazed medieval minds with lies so that they vote us in to work for the plutocrats".
I don't mean to start a flame war, but am genuinely curious.