The voters elected a Republican government. That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine. Anybody who told you that lobbying the FCC was going to make a difference here was, whether they meant to or not, selling a bill of goods.
As someone who respects but mostly profoundly disagrees with principled Republican laissez-faire regulatory strategy (at least, once we got past 1991 or so), it is more than a little aggravating to see us as a community winding ourselves in knots over market-based regulation of telecom at the same time as the (largely unprincipled) Republican congress is putting the finishing strokes --- literally in ball-point pen --- on a catastrophically stupid tax bill that threatens universal access to health insurance, not just for those dependent on Medicare but on startup founders as well.
If you care deeply about this issue, stop pretending like filling out forms and putting banners ads is going to persuade Republican regulators to act like Democrats. "Net Neutrality" isn't my personal issue --- I worked at ISPs, have backbone engineer friends, and candidly: I think this issue is silly. But if it's yours... sigh... fine.
But do it right: get out there, to your nearest seriously threatened D districts or to the nearest plausibly flippable R district (the suburbs are great for this), open up your damn wallets, and donate.
The FCC may very well be right that it's not their job to impose our dream portfolio of rules on Verizon (certainly, a lot of the rules people are claiming NN provided were fanciful). It doesn't matter how dreamlike the rules are: Congress can almost certainly enact a law, which the FCC can't revoke.
But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back.
"That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine."
That is not why this is shocking. This proceeding is shocking because the legal basis for this change is dependent on a false statements about the technology involved. It goes beyond just, "Republicans prefer deregulation," or, "Republicans favor market-based approaches." There is plenty of room and a general need for debates about what policy approaches are best, but there is no room for debate about the answer to technical questions.
Engineers and researchers submitted hundreds of comments to the FCC trying to correct the falsehoods presented in the NPRM. The FCC did not simply ignore those comments. The draft rules specifically cite those comments and totally dismiss them as "not persuasive." Only commentary from ISPs was "persuasive" in this proceeding, and the ISPs omitted facts that were inconvenient for them (the point of public commentary is in part to fill in the omissions that lobbyists would obviously make).
Sorry, but I do not buy the "what do you expect from Republicans" argument. I expect Republicans to be pro-markets, even pro-big-business; I expect Republicans to favor deregulation. It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation. It is one thing to interpret facts -- for example, the draft rules interpret the fact that edge services can be accessed via ISP networks as ISPs providing a capability to their customers, which is bizarre but within the bounds as far as policy debates go. To simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.
Yes, I expect the party of deregulation to base its policy goals on facts, as interpreted through the lens of a pro-business/pro-markets approach, and not some convenient fantasy.
>It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation
Your entire premise can be rebutted with the policies around climate change. If something as catastrophic and irreversible as climate change can be subject to partisan nonsense, twisting of facts and delegitimization of experts; what makes anyone think that Net Neutrality would be looked upon with logic, facts, and reason.
I personally lean towards preserving NN.
I hope at some point we can return to some semblance of governance based on facts, logic, and pragmatism rather than ideology.
Or, we can accept that ideologies are how we all make the majority of our decisions and then work to create a convincing ideology which combats the systems of power/corruption we're currently dealing with. None of this going to go away with facts and logic.
Change never happened because someone spouted a couple damning facts and shamed people with power.
We're in the sh*tshow we are today not because of a lack of ideologies: Libertarian, Conservative, Liberal, Progressive, Evangelical, Green, and on and on... So clearly, there's no lack of 'convincing ideology' for any single individual's belief system and ideals.
The problem as I see it, is that the majority of people have retreated into their ideologies and just started tossing grenades and stones behind their respective walls, rather than having dialogue, understanding, and compromising.
And if your counter is that we're just lacking an even BETTEREST ideology that somehow rules them all, I think that's fallacy. Ideology is neither the solution, nor the problem.
It's the fact that ideologies have become ending points, rather than starting points of discussion. Which leads me back to my original point that we need leaders who will govern by listening to ideas, facts, counterpoints, and making tough compromises and decisions based on that.
I really want to agree with you. And in times past I absolutely would have. But I think something that's become clear over time, worldwide, is that getting incorruptible, good, and objective people into office is not really possible - certainly not on a regular basis. Really it's unclear if such people even actually exist. I think most of us believe our decisions are driven by objective merit, yet we all view most of everybody else as subjectively driven. The latter view is probably the correct one.
What we need is systems themselves that take human nature into mind. The founding fathers of the US set out to create this exact sort of system. And they really did. Lacking a super majority, literally a single senator can prevent a political appointment. So on this issue, if the senate really did not want to put into appointee into the FCC who was in favor of dismantling net neutrality - they had that power. When Pai was appointed by Obama in 2012 his views were no secret. The senate could have said no. McConnell could have proposed a new person, Obama formally nominates him, and again the senate could reject. They are under 0 obligation to approve any nominee - ever.
Yes, this would be incredibly dysfunctional - but that is precisely how the US government was envisioned. The whole checks and balances thing we learn about in elementary social studies is specifically about preventing something from happening unless there is mass consensus. The founding fathers did not want a huge, powerful democratic government - they wanted a small accountable republic driven to progress only on issues where there was minimal to no opposition.
You can even see this in things like the bill of rights. The bill of rights does not, for instance, guarantee you the right to free speech. It says you already inherently have that right - it is inalienable. The bill of rights does not grant you a right - it prevents the government from infringing on your natural rights. In other words the view is that governments cannot grant rights, but they can take them away. A dysfunctional government maximizes the freedom of the people by preventing the infringement of such freedom except in cases such that there is a mass consensus of its merit.
The problem is that the doomsday scenario of all of congress falling into one clique happened. Politicians all need money to get elected and stay in office. Corporate donors (and influence) is where that money comes from. And this is where I think the problem is. But I also don't think there's any solution to it. Imagine you take all money out of political campaigns. That don't stop already famous individuals from running for office and their advantage in these cases would be monumental. There are radical ideas like treating political duty the same as jury duty, but I'm unsure how well that would be publicly received.
The point here is that I don't think 'just get better politicians' is something that's necessarily workable in the longrun. We need to create systems that readily accept the realities of corruption, cronyism, and general pettiness -- but then operate in a publicly desirable way regardless of this.
Why do Americans believe trying to interpret the Founding Father's intent is a reasonable way to debate policy? If the opinions of 18th century wealthy men have merit today it should be because we believe their reasoning applies to current circumstances, not because they were the Founders of anything.
I'm not saying I necessarily disagree that "a small accountable republic driven to progress only on issues where there was minimal to no opposition" is desirable today, but you have put forward no valid argument for it.
What the grandparent comment did was bring the Founding Fathers into the discussion, took an idea from them, and then presented it in light of current events. You can evaluate the grandparent comment's idea without including the Founding Fathers; the reference is relevant only to show the changes that have occurred in the last 200 years.
...because we have documents (e.g. the Federalist Papers [1]) that explain their philosophy and arguments. Moreover, significant technological advances aside, our basic psychology / neurobiology remains virtually unchanged, and so many of their initial insights into mitigating the risks of human political systems still pertain.
For instance: they foresaw the problems powerful interests acting in bad faith could cause, and so we now enjoy judicial recourse when politicians or appointees make arbitrary, capricious, or corrupt decisions. The fact that we're discussing legal challenges to the FCC's decision as even a possibility underscores this point.
We understand more about human psychology / neurobiology now, of course, so this is one limitation of uncritically accepting their advice. We also have the benefit of over two centuries of additional hindsight. Still, I think there is good reason to at least consider the opinions of people who would, by any reasonable reckoning, count as political systems design experts of their time.
"government maximizes the freedom of the people by preventing the infringement of such freedom except in cases such that there is a mass consensus of its merit" seems pretty clear. The argument is that the freedoms the founding fathers wanted to preserve are protected by making it hard for corrupt politicians to take them away. The vision of the founding fathers is taken seriously because they were very smart and America has been very successful in many respects.
>> The problem is that the doomsday scenario of all of congress falling into one clique happened. Politicians all need money to get elected and stay in office. Corporate donors (and influence) is where that money comes from. And this is where I think the problem is. But I also don't think there's any solution to it. Imagine you take all money out of political campaigns. That don't stop already famous individuals from running for office and their advantage in these cases would be monumental.
Many countries such as the UK have legally enforceable limits to the amounts parties can spend on elections. This helps, the UK government is not totally in the packet of big business. The only celebratory I can think of having been elected is Glenda Jackson. Of course big business still owns most of the "popular press".
> getting incorruptible, good, and objective people into office is not really possible - certainly not on a regular basis.
How about we make these people complete a PhD in three different fields. After that, they will be humbled enough to be fit for politics. (Of course, experimentation needed for validation of this claim; anecdotal: Merkel has a PhD and she did pretty well so far).
The way to reduce the impact of money in elections is to make elections smaller, i.e. shrink the federal government and go full blown State's Rights. So much money is needed because there are so many people to reach and marketing costs a lot. Fewer people to reach = less money being deployed in any particular election.
I can't agree more with you and wish so much we as a nation would see the wisdom the founding fathers had when they wrote all rights not given to the federal government belong to the states. They were weary of powerful central governments and introduced competition throughout the system to stay the power of wicked men in centralized systems.
Going back to such a system would require incredible tolerance on both "conservative" and "progressive" sides. We would have to accept that within one nation there would be other states regulated in highly different fashions than our own.
Which leads me back to my original point that we need leaders who will govern by listening to ideas, facts, counterpoints, and making tough compromises and decisions based on that.
Good luck raising billions of dollars or marshaling millions of volunteer hours to elect candidates that may or may not follow through on promises on any given issue. Where are these wise leaders going to come from that they're immune to the vagaries of party politics and voting blocs?
Honestly, at least some of these issues can be addressed game theoretically... But having a well educated populace is key to most of those strategies.
If people can't (or won't) critically evaluate claims, and vote, then how can we expect the system to work in their favor?
Take Trump as an example of that latter point: I had friends who believed that because he was a businessman he would be able to run the country better than Hillary. They assumed this was true, and even when presented with his poor performance in that role they didn't yield. I didn't even receive a counter-argument. The conversation ended.
As a side note: we already raise billions of dollars every year in the form of taxes.
The only protest that makes a damned bit of difference is the vote.
Once in a long while citizens clean house. Major parties dissolve, etc, and fresh leadership emerges. This will happen again once rank-and-file on the left and right begin to find consensus on some key issues like diminishing freedoms, privacy, and corrupt leadership.
It's my opinion that ideology gives one tunnel vision and shouldn't be encouraged. There are things we can ALL be pissed about, let's talk about those things. Above all, we should agree that "incumbency" and "party affiliation" are nasty things.
Unfortunately, world history has clearly shown that by the time rank and file realize they need to reach consensus, they have lost their freedoms, privacy etc. (For their own good as so many dictators have said.)
By being passive and blindly listening to your party's claims -- in this case Republicans and Democrats mainly -- you have conceded your power to extremist groups (see gun control, extreme right, racists), corruption (anything to do with lobbying in the U.S. (in other parts of the world it would be called legalized corruption)) and politicians passing last minute illegible bills to laws. If you have under 20% turnover something is ridiculously wrong with the system.
Kid yourself not. It is your choice. You have the obligation as a citizen in a democracy to pay attention, vote and yes put your foot down when they feed you bullshit, like the FCC report. Otherwise, you are being ruled, you have conceded your power and it is democracy only in name. Thus I think this must be a wake up call -- see how many people on e.g. Twitter accepted this deregulation as totally ok and for "our own good". How many people know about title I and II classification? Or why FCC was forced in 2015 to finally classify ISPs as title II? Search what happened in 2005 here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S... . It is not like ISPs are playing nicely or care about our rights. And us accepting their blatant lies and this farce is the defeat of the day.
The worst thing is you teach the next generation of voters that this is ok and natural. It is not.
And you are lowering the bar by saying "oh it is Republicans they can do that." No -- if Republicans followed their advertised mantra to the letter they should be totally against this deregulation. Don't lower the bar of what you are demanding from your representatives. If you care for your country and your life stay informed.
There are many other useful forms of protest. What makes you think that?
I genuinely challenge you to come up with a form of civic protest that solves a problem, then commit to solving it. Big or small; doesn't matter. Just get out there and do something.
(Disclaimer: I've never voted and don't plan on it, but I spend much of my free time attempting to fix some niggling problems at local and state levels)
No, though I've tried working with campaign teams before in Chicago. The ruthlessness (and by proxy, the system that enables such ruthlessness) of political candidates and their campaigns is something I'd rather not support.
> I hope at some point we can return to some semblance of governance based on facts, logic, and pragmatism rather than ideology.
This is a great point. We're in this NN shit show because of ideology. The GOP tried to work with the Democrats to craft NN legislation, but the Democrats only wanted a Title II designation and nothing else. Now the GOP has effectively stripped away any NN protections. Both sides holding firm on ideology have landed us here.
No, they haven't, not yet. There is lawsuit being filed by multiple state attorneys general stating alleging the FCC violated the Administrative Review Act, and there is reason to believe they have a strong case.
During this whole process, the Republican commissioners have done many mistakes. They stated they do not need to mind the public's comment period. They even stated they would not pay heed to the public's comments. They cited technological reasons for this, were told they were wrong, and then tried to dismiss those reasons. They refused to work with investigators on the fraudulent comments. They refused to listen to Congress's requests to delay the vote. There have been statements and leaks of Pai acting openly hostile towards the public and catering to Verizon. The other thing is that there is no compelling proof the ISP landscape has changed enough since 2015 to warrant repealing these rules. There is a very strong case that if skillfully argued can demonstrate Pai was acting in an arbitrary fashion against the consumer's best interests, which is the mandate of the FCC.
It's not a sure guarantee, but as I said, the FCC has given the AGs more then enough fodder. It's what happens when you hand the reigns over to people who don't understand the limitations of their office.
Why wouldn't the dems just go along with the GOP and enact NN legislation? Why is Title II so important? This is what I mean by ideology getting in the way. If it wasn't about ideology, then the dems would be working with the GOP to get NN done.
"Why wouldn't the dems just go along with the GOP and enact NN legislation?"
IIRC it would have prevented the FCC from enforcing net neutrality rules at all, which makes no sense. Title II is not an ideological position.
(Edit: Thune's compromise would not prevent the FCC from enforcing net neutrality of some form, but it would restrict the FCC and prevent it from adapting to future net neutrality challenges. For example, it might have prevented the FCC from dealing with new kinds of NN violations like zero-rating.)
If Republicans introduced a new regulatory framework for the FCC to apply to ISPs, which gave the FCC the power to enforce net neutrality rules without the parts of Title II that have nothing to do with this issue, many Democrats would probably support it. The problem is that Republicans have not yet introduced that, and have instead tried to introduce watered down traps that would prevent a future FCC from enforcing strong net neutrality rules.
It's not ideology getting in the way, it's pure corruption. If the Republicans truly believed in free market competition, they would seek to end the agreements between ISPs and local governments that create monopolies. They would put a stop to the ISP's usage of the legal system to hamper competition (Google and Nashville, for example). They would find ways to use federal money to incentivize people to create new ISPs, increasing competition.
As it stands, though, the Republicans are doing none of that. Their only goal has been to undo Title II and then do nothing about the state of broadband access in the United States.
Also:
> Why is Title II so important?
Because right now, it's the only tool we have to enforce NN. I'd love to have more ISP choices and not have to rely on the government to ensure fair play, but money, politics, and business are a hell of a drug for people.
>> Why is Title II so important?
>
> Because right now, it's the only tool we have to enforce NN.
We have plenty of tools to enforce a thing. We have existing legislation, and we have the power to enact new legislation. We have existing regulation, and we have the power to effect new regulation. We have voices, and we have votes. I am not entirely convinced that Title II vs Title I is the best way to move forward, but I am entirely convinced that it is not the only.
The Telecommunications Act was enacted in 1934, then updated in 1996. That's more than twenty years ago. With significant change in politics and the creative ways in which ISPs have quashed neutrality in the name of network management, Congress has had plenty of opportunity to take notice and offer something more substantial than "Oh, no, how did this happen?"
> We have plenty of tools to enforce a thing. We have existing legislation, and we have the power to enact new legislation. We have existing regulation, and we have the power to effect new regulation. We have voices, and we have votes. I am not entirely convinced that Title II vs Title I is the best way to move forward, but I am entirely convinced that it is not the only.
The current administration and Congress have shown a blatant disregard for the voice of the American citizens beyond a wealthy few. Any legislation they enact will to further enrich themselves and their donors, and only continue to selling of America. Our system is rigged so our votes don't matter in general. The current president ran a "populist" campaign and still lost the popular vote by 3 million. The system is setup so that when Democrats win, they need to win big, and when Republicans lose, they still win. Title II is the best we're going to get in this regime.
> I expect Republicans to be pro-markets, even pro-big-business; I expect Republicans to favor deregulation. It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation. It is one thing to interpret facts... to simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.
From where I sit, the particular observation you're making about how policy has been treated when it comes to Net Neutrality issues looks exactly like how the Republican party behaves generally. Whether it's about net neutrality, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, climate change, stimulative effects of tax policy, health care -- it sure looks like many Republican positions are primarily arrived at and founded in the profit and power aspirations of a narrow constituency rather than observation and study, and that "deregulation" and "market-based" approaches are primarily invoked as tools or even just fig leaves where they appear useful.
Net Neutrality just happens to be one example where the audience here is predominately familiar enough with the relevant practical issues that it's easy to see.
> Who appointed Ajit Pai to the FCC in the first place?
The FCC by law cannot have more than three commissioners from the same party. The sitting President therefore finds himself in the position of having to appoint up to two commissioners who are NOT from his own party.
I don't think that there is any actual requirement for how the President picks such nominees--so a Democratic President needing to appoint a non-Democrat could in theory choose someone from some left-leaning non-Democrat party like the Green party, and a Republican President could choose someone from a right-leaning non-Republican party, such as the Libertarian party.
In practice, though, what Presidents of both parties usually (always?) have done is ask other party leadership [1] for a name, and then the President nominates that person.
When the nominee comes up for confirmation in the Senate, generally the Senators from each party pretty much automatically vote to confirm the nominees from the other party unless there is something that actually disqualifies them. They don't vote no just because they disagree on ideological grounds.
So yes, Obama originally put Pai on the FCC, but you can't really read anything into that as far as Democrat positions goes. Pai was the choice of Republican leadership for one of the two seats that could not go to a Democrat.
People are too focused on Pai here. Getting rid of net neutrality is in the freaking GOP party platform. By winning the White House, Republicans won a majority on the FCC. It didn't matter which existing Republican commissioner they elevated to the chairmanship (Pai or O'Reilly) or if they made their new, third guy chair (Carr). Whoever they picked was going to do this.
[1] Usually whoever leads the other party in the Senate, I believe.
More broadly the point is that Republicans are not alone in their idea that a bunch of things should be privatized or deregulated; they're just more enthusiastic. The Democrats have been scorning and ignoring their core constituencies (because what are they going to do, vote for Republicans?) for decades. On countless issues both parties march in lock-step with each other and against the wishes of a majority of voters. Simply scolding people for voting for not turning out hard enough for the Democrats seems to miss the point.
From what I've seen Democrats seem to look at the data and studies on the situation to figure out what works best for the economy and the people. Republicans tend to vote on ideology regardless of who it benefits (turns out it mostly benefits those who sponsor their compaigns, surprise surprise).
As for "voting in lock-step", nope not even close. Good analysis of many major votes here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cantmisslists/comments/7gaq5z/both_... Democrats vote to keep the government transparent, honest and benefiting the people way more than Republicans.
>That is not why this is shocking. This proceeding is shocking because the legal basis for this change is dependent on a false statements about the technology involved. It goes beyond just, "Republicans prefer deregulation," or, "Republicans favor market-based approaches." There is plenty of room and a general need for debates about what policy approaches are best, but there is no room for debate about the answer to technical questions.
Haha. Try working in education or, gasp, environmental science, if you think that the contestability of simple facts is shocking.
One could argue that the democrats have an anti-science view on gender. The newest argument from the far left is that there are no physiological differences between man and woman. Biology says otherwise.
The best thing you can do is realize everyone is an idiot and think for yourself rather than the party.
There is no doubt that Democrats sometimes ignore facts and expert opinions. That is a normal part of the political process.
The problem is that in recent months Republicans seem to always ignore the facts being presented to them. That is beyond "politics as usual" and is dangerous and destructive to our country.
Which Democrat/s said this? A blog / site claiming to be far left != Democrats. Saying those in government believe what the some member of the general public believes is not a logical train of thought.
What I expect from republicans is the opposite of evidence based policy making. None of their policies are supported or motivated by evidence. Pick one from taxes to gun control to sex education.
All politicians occasionally lie about the facts; that is the nature of politics. Yet it was not that long ago that Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to base their policy proposals on (actual) evidence. The decline has been happening for a long time, but in the past decade Republicans have completely abandoned the idea of interpreting (actual) facts from a conservative perspective and have instead come to rely only on "alternative facts" (I believe in Canada you would say "fantasies" but I am not Canadian).
Put another way, I like to remind people that it is possible to be an intelligent conservative, despite the image the Republican party has been projecting lately.
> Put another way, I like to remind people that it is possible to be an intelligent conservative, despite the image the Republican party has been projecting lately.
It's an inevitable truth, with half the country on "either side", that any given side will have a bevy of smart, reasonable, sane people... It's high time to start distinguishing the corporatists, the fascists, and outright liars from "conservatism".
At the same time: with the crusade against reality, common sense, and collective action on long term problems the GOP has wholeheartedly embraced since the 90s (along with the media barons), I think it's high time we remembered that before the 90s we had liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats who weren't afraid of those labels.
The problem isn't that conservatives are "dumb" or "crazy". The problem is that smart conservatives haven't put the GOPs feet to the fire, or changed party affiliation en masse, or primaried the teapartiers to a degree that the tribalism FOX News fosters is offset.
Informed gun advocates can actually make a pretty compelling case against gun control, but few are interested in listening. Canada's gun control IIRC isn't that much stricter than the US's, yet there's significantly less gun crime. As Michael Moore pointed out in "Bowling for Columbine" culture seems to play a significant part.
That's interesting but I haven't heard any of these compelling cases. All I see is fear mongering from the NRA.
I'd argue that there isn't a good argument against gun control. The 2nd amendment gives US citizens the right to bear arms but pretty much any sane person will agree that there should be control over some arms. You aren't allowed to build a nuke or make sarin gas in your back yard. If everyone agrees that control over some weapons is a good idea then why would guns specifically be exempt from regulation?
Here are a few questions I'd like to see answered by someone who is against gun control:
Should we allow the sale of devices that modify guns to fire at a rate of 100s of rounds a minute? Should we allow the sale of guns to people with a history of violent crime? Are there mental illnesses that should prevent someone from owning a gun? Should we require a cooling down period between when a person decides to buy a gun and when the actual purchase goes through? Are there any places we should not allow people to go while armed with a gun?
The party of deregulation cannot base its policy goals on facts, by definition. Because the idea that regulations and government intervention are universally bad and all sectors should be deregulated is a dogma that has been disproven by facts many times. So any party with that ideology goes against facts.
For example, in healthcare, it's more than proven by countless studies that countries that provide universal healthcare not only provide better healthcare by almost any metric, but also spend much less in it than e.g. the US. So anyone that defends the broad idea that government intervention is bad goes against facts, period (as does someone that defends the idea that it's always good, of course - the only position compatible with facts is that some sectors may need more regulation and some may need less, on a case-by-case basis, with some individual cases arguable).
So what you are saying is that the republican party in its current form is unvotable. I agree. Even people holding dear republican aligned beliefs should take note and realize that the party is not able to act aligned with their own interest.
I guess partisanship might simply be a huge problem because democrats can‘t recognize republicans as republicans any more - still because there are only 2 relevant parties - republicans don‘t see an alternative to the GOP and still go for the „in theory better aligned“ party. That should give any American pause to think and highlight the importance of choice when it comes to politics. Why not create a new republican party?
The system is heavily weighted in favor of the duopoly (televised debates, etc.). Fixing that might increase the odds a third party would be able to be a genuine contender, rather than simply splitting one side's vote.
Among other things, the rules claim that DNS is an integral part of the service ISPs provide. The rules also claim that using a third party server requires unusual configuration on the part of consumers. That is false: an ISP could choose not to provide any DNS service and configure their customers' equipment to use a third party server.
(Amazingly enough, DNS is one of the central points in the FCC's argument that ISPs provide an information service.)
If that's the best example of a 'falsehood' the ISPs presented then I'm not surprised the ISPs won. What kind of consumer ISP doesn't provide DNS servers? And in which universe would it be acceptable to sign up for a new ISP and discover DNS resolution didn't work?
Yes, in theory ISPs can outsource it, in theory a company can outsource everything. That doesn't make any difference to arguments about whether it's an integral part of the service though.
Your argument is equivalent to saying that ISPs can "outsource" email to third-party services like Gmail and Outlook. That is an awfully stretched interpretation of what it means to "provide" or to "outsource" a service. ISPs do not need to coordinate with third party DNS servers to have their customers use those servers, any more than they must coordinate with third party email providers.
There are plenty more falsehoods in the order. The order states that DNS is analogous to a gateway server that translates addresses and not analogous to a directory service. The order claims that transparent caching is a critical aspect of ISP service that users have come to depend on, and dismisses comments pointing out that numerous modern web standards break transparent caching. The order states that the service an ISP provides is a "multi-user computer server" through which consumers access the Internet and ignores the fact that most consumers receive public IP addresses and are technically connected directly to the Internet (and that, technically, it is possible to host edge services using a broadband connection, even if doing so is rare). You can go read the order if you want more examples.
While I suppose if you are in to nitpicking it's technically wrong but it's a generalisation that is excusable. It's not as if they are saying something inexcusably erroneous, like for example that JSON is the protocol used to route packets.
In effect I'm pretty certain that the vast majority of ISPs are running their own DNS servers. Making this point rather unimportant.
"It's not as if they are saying something inexcusably erroneous, like for example that JSON is the protocol used to route packets."
They also suggested the DNS is like a proxy server (in their words, a "gateway") rather than a directory service. Does that count?
"Any other technical inaccuracies?"
That consumers continue to rely on transparent caching and that caching is a core ISP service. The FCC dismissed comments pointing out that TLS breaks transparent caching on the basis that there are websites that do not use TLS.
The order also claims that because people are able to access websites via an ISP network, the ISP provides people with the capability of whatever those websites do (e.g. under the order's reasoning, Verizon is providing me with the capability to have this conversation with you). You can argue that is an opinion and not a fact, but the order does not apply it consistently; for example, it does not assert that a phone company is providing an information service by virtue of its customers' ability to use a dialup ISP.
The order claims that by connecting to your ISP's network, you are receiving, "...computer access by multiple users to a computer server...that provides access to the Internet." Maybe that is just how the FCC interprets routers, but again it is not being consistently applied e.g. to the phone system.
If you want more, go read the order; the technical analysis is not very long.
Yes referring to a DNS server as a gateway is obviously wrong.
I'm not aware of how much caching is used, but to my knowledge is not that common as it would introduce a lot of problems for developers. This is also wrong.
How much of their arguments are based on DNS and caching?
"Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), Congress's nonpartisan scorekeeper, predicted that the Senate tax bill would add about 0.1 percent more a year to growth over the next decade, far less than what Treasury says. JCT took into account the economic effects of the tax cuts on individual and business taxes, but not other policy changes advocated by the administration, such as welfare reform. The JCT says the Senate bill's total cost would be $1 trillion after considering growth effects.
> To simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.
That makes it sound like you can sue the FCC for not meeting their legal obligations here. Is that viable?
That's a silly expectation for a party that denies science whenever it's inconvenient. Climate change, the war on drugs, abortion, and more are all examples of this. This is the party of anti-intellectualism and anti-science, yet somehow you expect them to treat the Internet differently?
Are you saying that it's good to base drug and abortion policies on values even though science indicates that those value based policies do more societal harm than good?
Is it a good policy to harm people as long as you are faithful to some set of values?
Science can't really measure 'societal harm', it's not a well defined concept. The moment government delegates what 'societal harm' and 'societal benefit' mean to a bunch of self-proclaimed scientists they've effectively given up on democracy and delegated to a dictatorship of doctorates. But history shows us that having a PhD is hardly a magic talisman against dangerous or delusional thinking.
Ok. What about the cases when value based policies have scientifically measurable effects exactly opposite to stated also value based goals of the policy?
I.e. to reduce teen pregnancies we create policy of abstinence only sex education. You can measure that this policy causes exactly opposite effect yet value based lawmakers cling to it.
As for scientific inability to objectively define societal harm...
That's what's beautiful in science. You can define it any way you like and then measure how well policy causes the effects fulfilling the definition. You can define it as "less people addicted" or "less addicts homeless" or "less addicts without steady jobs" or "less people jailed for non violent crime" or "less violent crime". Definitions are plenty. But if you ignore any measurements by any definitions and make laws just based on your values then you are doing favor to noone.
They are presumably evaluating the benefit in ways that are wider than just teen pregnancy rates (i.e. they probably assume that other policies would cause fewer pregnancies but more teenage sex and their real goal is to reduce teenage sex).
Not that I agree with teaching abstinence to teenagers, that's daft. But I've learned over the years that simplifying an apparently rational adult's views down to a single factor "it's so obvious they must be idiots" analysis usually leads to poor analysis.
I don't get it. When they are in position of power they secretly want teenagers to have less sex, but they don't tell that anybody, instead they enact policy that they think will do that loudly claiming it is to reduce teen pregnancies despite the scientific fact it does exactly opposite thing....
This is beyond silly scenario. Way simpler explanation is that they simply ignore the facts when they counter their believes and cultivate illusion they will still be right in the end despite available and mounting evidence to the contrary.
Everyone agrees teen pregnancy is bad. It's a bipartisan issue. Not everyone agrees teen sex in general is bad. So it makes sense for them to hang their preferred policy on that issue.
Yes, you can assume your opponents are just thick as bricks and randomly generate policies with no basis. You aren't ever going to make political progress that way though. You'll just irritate them and build support for them: "you're too stupid to have an opinion" is a vote winning position in no democracies ever.
Apparently they don't agree, at least not as bad as teen sex since they are willing to, under false pretense, enact policy that factually increases teen pregnancy rates just to possibly decrease teen sex.
They are willing to lie to their constituents to gain support of their opposition. Not to mention that they harm both sides on yhe issue of teen pregnancy, not to mention actual teens.
No matter how you spin it it still doesn't sound good. Even worse. I'd prefer to think my opponent as misguided not machiavellian and malicious towards his own supporters.
Whether there are mistakes in the official documents doesn't change anything about the policy. They weren't persuaded because they didn't receive a persuasive argument about why net neutrality is supposed to help. That doesn't mean they weren't persuaded that some of the "facts" were wrong, it means that they weren't persuaded in terms of opinions. The arguments of the ISP are obviously biased and that should surprise nobody. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume the same thing about tech companies. Is e.g. Netflix unbiased when the net neutrality question pretty much came up in regards to Netflix? You would have to be insane to claim that Netflix (or Google, or Facebook, or Reddit) aren't supporting this (at least to some extent) for the sake of increasing their own profit margins.
The Right is arguing for a free market economy and decreased regulation not because they are "going against the facts." There is no fact stating that "net neutrality is necessary for the world to function" or "internet is a human right" or whatever. All of these things are opinions. You have the opinion that net neutrality is needed, but there is no fact backing that statement.
> It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions
Here's what you're missing: they don't oppose net neutrality because of what the ISPs said about it. They oppose it because it is a regulation that limits the free market. There is no fact or fiction to this opinion, it's like saying "because there's facts to show that speech can hurt people, free speech should be restricted." I agree that speech can hurt someone, but I disagree that it should be restricted. Does that mean I'm fighting the facts here?
"That doesn't mean they weren't persuaded that some of the "facts" were wrong"
Why did they repeat the false statements from the NPRM in the final draft is that is true? Why did they dismiss comments correcting falsehoods in the NPRM as not persuasive?
"it means that they weren't persuaded in terms of opinions"
I am not talking about opinions. I am talking about the details of core Internet technologies like IP, DHCP, DNS, etc. The rule change was based on an argument that ISPs meet the legal definition of an "information service." To make that argument the FCC's NPRM and the final draft make several false statements about the technical details of the Internet.
Whether or not net neutrality regulation is proper is a different matter. This order actually removes net neutrality requirements as a side effect. What the order actually does is change the FCC's official legal classification of broadband Internet service from "telecommunications service" to "information service." The 2015 rule change also involved changing ISP classification, in response to a successful court challenge to earlier net neutrality regulations that were based on the "information service" classification. Basically, the courts determined that an "information service" cannot be subject to net neutrality rules, because that is a "common carrier" requirement that can only be imposed on a "telecommunication service."
"they don't oppose net neutrality because of what the ISPs said about it"
Maybe so, but in terms of the technical details this entire order is predicated on, the FCC for the most part cites the comments of ISPs as the truth, and dismisses everything else.
The core issue here is surely not Dems vs Reps but rather that there's a meaningful difference in law between "information service" and "telecommunications service". This is the kind of vague regulatory language that causes so many fights in the halls of power.
Can someone reasonably argue an ISP is an information service? Hell yes! The internet started out by being called "the information superhighway", I guess some of us here are old enough to remember that. The internet is literally used to retrieve information, that's all it does. If an ISP is the on-ramp to the information superhighway then it can obviously be classified as an information service.
Can someone else reasonably argue an ISP is a telecommunications service? Hell yes! ISPs move packets around, they may also provide other forms of information on top, but their core service is the movement of data over wires: surely the essence of being telecoms.
In such arguments it's important to take a step back and realise it can legitimately go either way. The problem is not the players, it's the game. And the only way to fix that is to change the rules of the game. Instead of bickering about the exact bucket into which ISPs fall, pass a new law that is explicitly targeting ISPs and say explicitly what they can or cannot do.
"The internet is literally used to retrieve information, that's all it does."
That is false. The Internet supports communication between the end points; information retrieval can be built using communication, but the Internet itself is more than that. For example, it is also possible to use the Internet for two-way voice communication (VoIP).
What is important to remember about the "information service" classification is that it has a specific legal meaning that was meant to capture the service provided by AOL, Compuserve, and other early consumer ISPs. At the time Internet access was just one of many features provided by online services, and some truly acted as "gateways" and did not us IP for the last-mile connection. Obviously that is not what ISP service looks like today; the FCC had to really dig to even find examples of ISPs providing something that meets the "information service" definition (the best they could come up with is DNS and transparent caching).
> The rule change was based on an argument that ISPs meet the legal definition of an "information service."
It was an excuse and as such it doesn't have to be real. ISPs donated 100mil$ to the congress. The only reason for an excuse is that they couldn't say "Hey, NNaggers, you haven't paid us nearly as much as ISPs"
ISPs are just more aware than idelistically arogant silicon valley what it means to enter public political discourse. You do it with cash, arguments are secondary and just a way of spinning the decision that has already been made with money.
1. voters did not elect a Republican government. Gerrymandering has given Republicans wins in many places where Democrats would have won in any other universe. Likely rigged electronic voting machines that have no audit trail have given Republicans votes they would not have had. *Targeted voter suppression campaigns have prevented people from voting who would have tipped the scales in favor of Democrats.
2. Republicans (and many Democrats) do not "under-regulate". They regulate in favor of paying corporations. Those regulations are not all typical visible regulations; many are special provisions or loopholes. That is not laissez-faire.
3. Since you re-iterate, I re-iterate. Republicans are not a party of deregulation. They are a party that supports monopolistic, bully-capitalist behaviors.
The only real solution for the US is that it suffer a slow decline in global and economic relevance until it becomes desperate for a change in behavior. Only then will the shit be flushed out of the government and campaign finance rules put in place to prevent another corrupt government that serves a very limited few people at the cost of 330million others.
> 1. voters did not elect a Republican government. Gerrymandering has given Republicans wins in many places where Democrats would have won in any other universe. Likely rigged electronic voting machines that have no audit trail have given Republicans votes they would not have had. *Targeted voter suppression campaigns have prevented people from voting who would have tipped the scales in favor of Democrats.
Regardless of the other points, _millions_ of voters selected Republican. Fixing gerrymandering, voter suppression, voter turn out, etc, doesn't change the fact that of those who did vote, picked republican. Fixing those issues may change the _result_ of the election but it won't change millions of people's individual minds.
Millions picked this government and I would guess the primary reason is abortion law as this party seems to like laws that favor corporations over people.
Eh, there’s a difference between the parent comments (“voters elected...”) and yours (“voters selected ... [regardless of] the result of the election”).
Your statement is technically still true if only 1% of voters chose a given party. The discussion above is whether a given party was given a democratic mandate to enact its policies. When the fundamental idea of a democratic election is rule by popular consent, the fact that the minority has rigged the system to give them wins despite lacking majority popular consent undermines the very idea of election.
That some portion of the people still “selected” a given party is irrelevant. Entirely.
>Targeted voter suppression campaigns have prevented people from voting who would have tipped the scales in favor of Democrats.
And the Democrats have spun reasonable measures, such as requiring some sort of identification to vote, as "suppression", possibly so those who aren't citizens can vote. Who cheats more? Who knows.
The low-hanging fruit for the Democrats is, however:
1) Prioritize lower/middle class economic concerns over progressive identity politics
2) Push the DNC not to scuttle candidates, like Bernie, that people don't universally loathe
If those two things get done, the Democrats have a good chance going forward. Otherwise, who knows.
No, in person voter fraud is well studied and considered so uncommon that it is a red herring. If it were truly considered a problem then mail in ballots would require some proof that the correct person voted. That's the low hanging fruit for vulnerability of voting, why isn't it fixed? You can't even catch the perpetrator! Because rural voters who support them would scream, they don't care about fixing the gaping security hole.
1) has identity politics has been shown to be such a loser for republicans?
2) since more people voted for Hillary than Trump, is "universal" loathing actually a problem for presidential candidates?
Saying that someone won the popular vote but not the election is identical to saying that someone won in the more densely populated area but lost in the more sparsely populated areas. It don't prove gerrymandering, which is the intent to arrange voting districts to manipulate elections. The intent is the key here and not the result.
Having seats allocated by area rather than population is an very old tactic to unify a large number of small provinces into a single nation. Rural voters votes need to still feel like its worth to vote, even if they are outnumbered by 10 to 1 to the voice and needs of the more populated areas. Similar how people view voting of third-party to be a wasted vote, so is it believed that people in low population areas would feel if election was purely based on the popular vote. This is not the definition of gerrymandering, but rather policy that is designed to prevent splintering of nations and civil war.
Did Roy Jones or his party rearrange the district to orchestrate a election win? If so then that is gerrymandering. If not then the idea of having voting districts rather than popular vote is really just the trade that happened a long time ago between low and high populated areas being applied to all levels.
For reference, the previous commenter was talking about AL's 7 congressional districts. US congressional districts are defined based on population (they're suppose to be equally sized intra-state).
>has identity politics has been shown to be such a loser for republicans?
Pretty much, which is why they didn't really do it. Trump stole from Bernie's playbook - if you take his last few ads as a representative sample - they pushed the class warfare angle pretty hard - starring Lloyd Blankfein, ironically enough.
That played really effectively off Hillary's "business as usual ; government is hard ; I work hard" angle, and was probably responsible for her losing Michigan - not exactly a state that has done well out of the status quo or the trade deals she championed.
>2) since more people voted for Hillary than Trump, is "universal" loathing actually a problem for presidential candidates?
Yes, because the numbers that stayed home in disgust outnumbered both candidates. Voter turnout is what killed Hillary's chances, not "white supremacists" or "fake news" or whatever, and that voter turnout was because she was such a thoroughly loathed individual - which was actually largely her doing.
Re: 2 - that's an inaccurate way of representing it. Hillary had an 0.1% difference in voter turnaround relative to Obama in 2012. What actually won the election for Trump was (a) the distribution of votes across the landscape and how that translates to Electoral College votes and (b) demographically speaking, white people (at every income level).
Are you claiming this is about racism? If this was a race issue, the black man would've lost (instead he won both times) and the white woman would've won. Or am I missing something?
> Are you claiming this is about racism? If this was a race issue, the black man would've lost (instead he won both times) and the white woman would've won. Or am I missing something?
I don't claim either side of that question, but I just have to say that your statement is patently false.
Hypothetically all racists could vote one way, and still lose an election (or turn the tides), depending on the size of that group.
Pointing out that "white people won Trump the election" does not really mean anything to me. Which is why I asked for clarification from OP. I feel like I'm supposed to understand some veiled inference, but I'd rather OP explicitly say what they mean.
> Roy Jones won 6/7 districts and lost the popular vote. Pretty much the definition of gerrymandering
No, it's a common consequence of the fact that partisan leanings aren't uniformly distributed that will be able to occur in almost any situation where districts aren't artificially drawn to compensate form that fact, which even most proposals to use blind algorithms for districting wouldn't do.
Now, in the case of Alabama, it's absolutely the case that the Congressional districts are the result of a partisan gerrymander, but simply the fact that a party can lose a statewide vote while winning in the vast majority of districts doesn't prove that; the way democratic voters are often hyperconcentrated in urban centers makes that quite plausible, especially for a Republican statewide loss, without gerrymandering.
Which is why we need to eliminate FPTP for House elections, not just limit the ability to.deliberately distort districts.
Requiring ID often is voter suppression. Democrats repeatedly offer to support these requirements if ID is free and easy to obtain. Of course, republicans often actively work against that. In 2015 in Alabama, DMVs in predominantly black (and therefore democrat) areas were going to be closed closed by republicans in power, making it harder to obtain ID for democrats. Republicans have repeatedly been caught talking about how voter ID law is pushed only for partisan advantage. Is it really surprising the democrats are wary?
Yes, voter ID requirements, while not necessary by any metric I can see, sound reasonable, but they are being abused as a tool for suppression. If republicans truly care, they just need to include law that enforces free and easy access to ID for everyone.
In the Netherlands we require ID to vote and having an ID is not free but it is compulsory. In most cities there is only 1 place where you can get an ID. You also automatically get a hard to forge letter in the mail that you have to bring with you. Seems like common sense to me. The idea that anybody can vote (multiple times, even) seems crazy to anybody outside the US. Don't you need an ID many times in your life? How do you prevent people from getting married / applying for welfare / getting a job in somebody else's name? How do you verify somebody's age for age restricted activities?
All over Europe they have a requirement that you carry ID at all times. It's very handy for governments.
It is also a hangover from Nazi occupation. The UK has no ID that you have to carry at all times, nor does the US.
So where as requiring ID in the Netherlands is a non issue it's a massive issue in the US, especially as many people don't need a passport if they never leave the US.
Personally I prefer the US and UK systems. I like the basic level of anonymity that you have from not having to carry ID.
> All over Europe they have a requirement that you carry ID at all times.
This varies country by country. I would say roughly half the countries require one and the other half not (and even less require it for foreign citizens)
There is some other weirdness though. As we are in the Schengen area there is no border control and thus the police have been given the authority to look for people here illegally and thus they are allowed to ask anyone to identify themselves basically without any reason. If you can't identify yourself they can take you to the police station to verify who you are.
And in some places (like Finland) you can vote without one if you can prove who you are in some other way (for example have a relative with you who has one and the police give out temporary free ID cards for voting). Though as the drivers license works as a valid id in Finland it usually isn't much of an issue (very few actually have the official id card thingie).
Also everyone registered to vote automatically. For early voting you can use any polling station (on the actual election day you have to use the one assigned to you)
The question is not whether you have to carry an ID on you at all times, but whether you have to show your ID to vote. Having an ID does not really change anything with respect to anonymity, unless you have to carry it. Something that really impacts anonymity and privacy: mobile phones.
>The question is not whether you have to carry an ID on you at all times, but whether you have to show your ID to vote.
No, but it is nontheless relevant: in the Netherlands one is compelled to carry ID. Absolutely no such requirement exists in the US. So it's a different situation where an ID is required to vote in a country where carrying ID is already compelled compared to requiring an ID to vote in a country where no such ID-carrying requirements exist and many find the notion of compelled ID-carrying odious.
That would be a good point if an ID was not required for many other activities. I don't understand why people think it's voter suppression that you need an ID to vote, but not, say, marriage suppression that you need an ID to marry.
Requiring an ID isn’t in itself voter suppression. Actions taken that reduce (ease of) access to obtaining that ID is suppression.
A marriage also isn’t as time-sensitive as a vote, so that’s somewhat different. If someone who lacked ID goes to the poll to vote and is rejected for not having ID, this is different from going to the City Hall to register a marriage. You can do the marriage on another day. The vote, not so much.
Voting multiple times doesn't happen, at least not easily. The U.S. voting system requires people to register ahead of time. They are assigned a specific voting location. When that person arrives s/he must verify their address/some info.
Certainly not fool-proof, but enough hurdles to weed out fraud. Seems to work as voter fraud is minimal.
Funnily enough the few reported instances of actual voters voting multiple times this past election were (almost?) all people attempting to vote multiple times for Trump.
I'm actually from the UK - but either way, I feel like my post made it clear that I don't think having ID is a problem, the problem is attempt to increase friction on voting for a subset of the population by making getting that ID harder in areas where your opposition has more supporters.
The issue is that the republicans keep trying to push through legislation that requires ID to be shown, while providing no guarantees on ID availability. If they want it to go through, they just need to add the guarantee and then it can't be used for partisan gain. They refuse to do so, and have repeatedly abused ID requirements when passed by restricting access in democrat-supporting areas.
No, that is not an excuse. They will not let you vote if you do not have an ID. Why should it be an excuse anywhere? I just looked it up; getting an ID is cheaper in the US than in the Netherlands. If it is somehow extremely difficult to obtain an ID in the US, then surely the fact that this would make it difficult to vote is the least of the problems, since you presumably need an ID for lots of other things, like opening a bank account and getting married. Why is the outcry only about voting?
Because the party in power is actively restricting access in areas that predominantly vote for their opposition. While it may still be possible to get IDs, increasing friction will definitely result in some not getting them. Should that kind of gamesmanship be legal when it comes to voting?
It's worth noting that another example specifically is legal in the US - you are legally allowed to gerrymander for political gain. Most people I talk to agree this is wrong too.
The reason it's mainly focused on voting is because the idea of voting as an enshrined right is very important, especially in the US. Everyone is meant to get a vote, and attempts to stop people from voting are seen as an attack on the core principles and foundations of the country.
Why is the focus almost entirely on not requiring identification for voting then, and not on making it easier to get an ID? It seems to me that, unless the point is to allow people to vote illegally, getting people an ID is a far more important issue since you need it for most important actions in your life (getting a job, getting married, etc.), and many unimportant actions too. How hard is it really to get an ID? From a European perspective this discussion makes no sense at all. If somebody proposed no longer requiring an ID to vote they'd be laughed out of the room, and if somebody proposed to set up a system to make it hard for a specific party's voters to get an ID there would be a huge outcry.
"I lost my ID, I need a new one", "Sure. Please show me your ID so I can ensure you are who you say you are and issue you a new one", "I can't do that, I lost it", "Then please wait until you receive the certified letter attesting to the fact you are who you say you are", "But I need to vote", "You'll need ID for that", "I know, but I lost it", "Then you need to get a new one".
I don't understand the problem. If you do not have an ID you do not get to vote. The reason why you do not have an ID is irrelevant; without an ID they cannot verify that you are casting your own vote. Without this requirement it would be possible for people to buy other people's "stempas" (the letter that you get in the mail that allows you to cast one vote). That would be very bad because it allows wealthy people to cast multiple votes. This is also why there are strict rules about only one person entering into a voting booth, and why you are not allowed to take a picture of your ballot.
How do you know that voter fraud rarely if ever happens if you don't ask for an ID? Why does requiring an ID disenfranchise people? If people are prevented from getting an ID then surely the issue is that people are prevented from getting an ID, which is necessary for lots of important actions, and not that you can't vote without an ID? Making it about voter suppression makes it seem like the only thing that matters is that these people vote for the right party, and not how not having an ID impacts their lives.
FYI, the current laws in Alabama provide voters with free ID and will give them a free ride to obtain that ID. Pretty reasonable, and if you look at the latest election, voter suppression (if that is a goal) must have been pretty ineffective!
I don't see any reason why we can't have BOTH high election integrity and nearly universal access. Personally I'm in favor of both sensible, easy to obtain voter ID and measures to increase turnout, such as making election day a national holiday. (High participation vs election integrity is not an either-or choice. Why do so many people insist on having one but not the other? Is there any reason other than seeking partisan advantage?)
That makes Dems really, really reluctant to support those laws.
Now, objectively, is it fair to require ID if it's free, and easily obtainable? Probably. But those are both more complicated than you think. Per your Alabama example; do people know about it? How do they arrange a free ride if they don't have internet access (such that they can find the number to call)? For the working poor, are these IDs availabile "after hours", i.e., on Sundays and outside the hours of 8-5 (answer: no, the only locations are governmental offices)? Is the process from departing from their home, to the location, and back again, sufficiently short that a working mother with her kids will be able to take that amount of time? And what about the trip to the social security office to get their SS card, and etc (because the process of getting an ID is a pain in the ass if you don't have anything to start with).
Alabama, which you mention, still doesn't have mobile ID units, which was talked about as part of the bill that required voter ID (in 2011...), and which is still listed on their governmental website ( http://sos.alabama.gov/alabama-votes/photo-voter-id/mobile-i... ). The technology exists to know when no adult at a given address holds a photo ID, and to send out a letter to ask if any resident wishes to get one, and if so to please send in a reply letter with a date and time they'd like the mobile unit to show. But we don't do that anywhere, and none of these proposals suggest doing so (because these proposals generally aren't willing to actually spend that much money to prevent voter fraud, because, again, it's a non-issue)
I understand the reluctance on the part of Dems, for the reasons you point out.
I disagree that voter fraud is a non-issue, mainly because it gets brought out every time a Republican candidate loses. It is technically a vulnerability in the process, even if it isn't currently being exploited. Why not patch it? If nothing else it will stop those specific complaints. If we fix enough holes in the process then voters will start to feel more confident that results are legitimate. This is important if we don't want to descend further into political tribalism and violent conflict.
I think I was clear in my post that I agree that giving free ID to everyone is the preferred solution. The issue is that whenever laws are passed requiring voter ID, the law doesn't tend to come hand-in-hand with equally strong requirements on ID availability.
There have been a lot of attempts to use it to gain partisan advantage, so why would the democrats support it without guarantees it won't be used for that purpose? After you have had your wallet stolen three times, you get pretty wary of the guy going "please just put your wallet here", but refuses to promise he won't touch it.
> The issue is that whenever laws are passed requiring voter ID, the law doesn't tend to come hand-in-hand with equally strong requirements on ID availability.
I completely agree. Typically Republicans propose these laws, and they are usually filled with half-considered measures that are ripe for abuse.
Neither party really seems to want to "solve" these issues properly. Democrats typically oppose all forms of voter ID and Republicans typically oppose measures that increase participation (including early voting, easier registration, etc). Even worse, BOTH parties resist increased ballot access for independents and third parties, and neither party seems to be interested in improved auditing of election systems.
The only bright spot recently is Colorado, which just launched formal post-election audits to validate election results. Every district should be doing this!
So much is on the line when it comes to free and fair elections. The worst part about the status quo is that the populace increasingly believes that the game is rigged -- and they aren't entirely wrong -- leading to generally low turnout and even less motivation to tackle the hard problems. It's an ugly feedback loop.
Are you serious? With all the allegations of election fraud you seriously think it's okay to go to the voting station without identifying yourself? Do you have any idea how crazy this sounds to the rest of the developed world?
I doesn't sound crazy at all. In Australia no one shows ID, we have a voter roll. You walk up and say your name, which is found on the voter roll and you then go an vote.
The name is checked off, as it is compulsory to vote in Australia, so you get rid of all the shannigans about turnout, and actually find out what all the people want rather than a subset.
Australian here. If often wondered if anyone checks those rolls. What's to stop a motivated person from going to several polling booths and casting multiple votes? I suspect this doesn't happen much.
Sure, but you need to register in advance for the electoral roll, and that registration is linked to an actual known identity (usually via your National Insurance number). And if you arrive at the polling station and someone has already "stolen" your vote, I'm sure you can contest that, no?
That is why your UK credit score has "being on the electoral roll" as a major component - private companies trust the registration process required to vote.
In the USA you have to register in advance for the electoral roll (which is tied to your SSN or DMV number) and show up with photo ID in these states. If voter fraud were occuring people would, as you say, notice that their vote had been stolen. This is why the photo ID requirement seems superfluous.
Yes, you need to register in advance in both places. However, SSNs are known to be fairly easy to use fradulently. Much more so than the UK's NI number, which is far better managed, tracked, and linked more closely to employment and social services. In the US, there have been many instances where the SSNs of dead people have been abused for a variety of reasons [1].
As to photo ID - there is no federal mandate to have photo ID for voting, and only 15 states require voters to show up to polls with a photo ID [2]. And those states that do are routinely accused by democrats of voter suppression for this requirement. That's kinda the point. One side argues that SSN verification is ripe for abuse, the other side argues that requiring ID is voter suppression.
In order to claim that the system is not ripe for abuse, I think you'd need to prove that SSNs are secure, which is gonna be a major problem because they are definitely not.
> According to the data provided in the report, there were 51.4 million votes cast across the UK in 2015, with 26 allegations of voting fraud relation to in person voting and 11 relating to proxy voting, a total of 37.
Except the allegations all have no proof, despite being investigated, and meanwhile voter suppression has happened, repeatedly. Courts have forced states with voter ID laws to reopen DMVs, for example, where they were closed in predominantly black areas.
You are also completely ignoring the core part of my post, where I say there is literally no issue with requiring ID, provided you ensure that everyone has easy access to it at minimal cost. If you want to require one, require the other - it's hardly a big ask.
To those downvoting this comment, please think hard about whether you're just downvoting because you disagree with them. The comment wasn't inflammatory, and does counter the comment that it's replying to in a logical manner.
We need to allow for civil discourse between people we disagree with, or else we'll form an echo chamber.
It's a response to a comment saying "Black people's votes are routinely suppressed" with "Black people don't vote enough, that's the real problem!" - yes, at least in part, because they are being suppressed!
It's just like when people quote the percentage of black people in prison as some kind of proof of inherent black immorality. They are ignoring the root causes that aren't the fact those people are black: average wealth, systematic racism, etc...
The comment is getting down voted because it's just logically stupid - it's like someone coming to you with the problem that they don't have any food, and you going "Well, you haven't eaten a meal all week! Maybe start there." - it's not useful or a "counter", it's just restating the problem and pretending it's the fault of the victim.
Compare that voting figure to the national average for people in a similar socio-economic class to the average black person, and then consider they are having votes suppressed as well. Not to mention a political history of being ignored, discriminated against and lied to that would likely reduce anyone's faith in the system.
The idea that it's somehow their fault they are being targeted for systematic suppression or that we shouldn't care about the issue because they, as a population, have low turnout, is just flat-out stupid.
>And the Democrats have spun reasonable measures, such as requiring some sort of identification to vote, as "suppression", possibly so those who aren't citizens can vote. Who cheats more? Who knows.
Everyone knows: it's the Republicans, and it's not close. Voter fraud is not real. It doesn't happen. It's kind of amazing that it doesn't, but that's the facts.
Voter ID laws and stringent voter registration laws do disproportionately suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning subpopulations; that's also a proven fact that's not up for debate. Poor and non-white voters are less likely to have acceptable identification readily to hand, and even when they do, poll workers in certain areas have a bad habit of suddenly changing the rules or not accepting identification for certain voters.
If people don't have ID how can you know that there's no fraud? That seems kind of circular. It's kind of amazing that this is even a debate, what kind of voting system doesn't require you to prove you're a citizen?
I'm not sure you should be so trusting of studies of ID fraud. For the longest time it was claimed in Europe that migrants who 'lose' their ID and commit asylum fraud are a tiny proportion of the total. Now there are large scale medical studies being done and it turns out in some countries that maybe 70-80% of the asylum seekers who claimed to be children are in fact over 18. Many of the lost ID documents were deliberately lost or destroyed to enable this sort of thing.
Because the FBI has repeatedly investigated these claims and found them lacking in merit. Various academics have studied it. Police departments have been called in. There’s never anything noteworthy there. It’s one of those things for which there’s no evidence of meaningful fraud, which everyone who has -bothered looking into the issue- knows, rather than proclaiming “but there must be.”
That's if you only fake one vote, yes. But it would be relatively easy to visit a whole bunch of polling stations (even on foot you could do 15-20 in a day). And also easy to get a whole bunch of people doing this.
(I'm surprised this hasn't actually been tried before now.)
> But it would be relatively easy to visit a whole bunch of polling stations
That would make it harder. If you try it for one vote in one place there's a decent chance you might get away with it. You have to hope that the person isn't voting at the same time you are, that the poll workers don't recognize the person, that others voting there don't, etc. It's quite possible you'll get caught, considering these are local areas, but there's enough people that you might get away with it once. But try it 10-20 times, and the likelihood that you're going to get caught increases a lot. And even trying it 10-20 times doesn't mean 10-20 votes, since if the person already voted you'll get a provisional ballot.
So even trying to get a handful of extra votes is extremely risky. If you tried to organize a dozen people to do the same, the chance you're going to get caught goes up massively - both because of the possibility of getting caught in the polling place mentioned before, and the fact that if you try to organize a group like that there's a good chance something will leak out/someone will tell people.
You're in a situation where it's very likely to be caught and, even in the off chance that you succeeded, you wouldn't even be creating enough votes to impact the vast majority of elections. This is why in person voter fraud is so rare.
I don't think you can't quite compare asylum ID fraud with voter ID fraud.
From what I understand, for people with some moral sense (so every non-psychopath), to be motivated enough to commit fraud, a mixture of selfishness and self-justification is required. The latter part is where the two examples differ here.
Regardless of what anyone thinks of asylum seekers, from an objective, rational point of view, asylum fraud comes down to trying to maximize one's chances of success against a system set up to act as a gatekeeper.
It is not hard to see why asylum seekers would find it very easy to morally justify committing fraud to themselves. From their POV, said system has xenophobic and racist elements to it, and the gatekeeping is purely intended to separate the haves from the have-nots. If rules feel unfair, people are less likely to respect them.
And that's not even taking into account the factor of "being sent back would put your life in danger".
By the way, I'm not saying that all asylum seekers are saints; a typical example are the guys from countries that have no political problems, and simply ask for asylum knowing that the application will be rejected (they're pretty easy to spot: they're the bored guys not worried about family back home, harassing the female asylum seekers). They exploit the time it takes for administration to prove out that they have no reason to leave, using the asylum seeking center as some kind of motel. This is obviously a problem, and it takes away resources for people from warzones who genuinely need asylum.
But if anything that just shows how ridiculous this system fails: when rejected they get a plane ticket home. There is zero incentive for them not to do this (except moral incentive of course).
Anyway, voter fraud requires stealing someone's identity to cast one extra vote for the party that you want to win. If voter fraud happens it's systemic and large scale, not individual; the impact is too small, the risk too great, the self-justification not remotely comparable to the things I just mentioned, and it's not gameable for immediate personal gain like with the fraudulent asylum seekers I just mentioned either.
I don't speak Swedish, so I had to translate it (the site I found the link from[0] after Googling seems like it has an axe to grind).
They indicate that, of ~2400 refugees where the National Medical Board rendered an opinion, some ~2000 were estimated to be eighteen years of age or older, with ~400 estimated to be under eighteen years of age (so ~5/6).
This may be different from the patterns in general because these are cases where the board was asked for and subsequently rendered an opinion.
It might be that (contra the headlines) this sort of misrepresentation is relatively rare, and the rate for the subset of the population where no questions were raised is substantially lower.
It is, perhaps, useful to take into account the context here.
These are people who have risked their life to escape from areas in which they are being persecuted, and are taking every step they can to avoid being forcibly returned to those areas.
As implemented thus far, they close stations (and post offices, as far as ID requirements go) in democratic districts. Travel plus hour limits mean Democrats from democratic districts literally can’t get to a voting station in time unless they take off a full day of work to accommodate it.
1) Prioritize lower/middle class economic concerns over progressive identity politics
This. This right here. And I can't get any Dems to pay attention to this.
In the '90s it became popular to "brand" the Democrats as the "liberal elite." I had no idea what they were talking about (and neither did most of the people who were using the term).
But now there is a new term going around- one that makes much more sense: Coastal liberals. I grok this term because I now live in MA. These are Democrats who (although they mean well and have a heart of gold), they truly don't understand a lot of the middle-class, working Americans. They live in white neighborhoods and their kids go to private schools. Nobody in their family every mined coal or built Fords. They really, truly, do not understand what those people are going through. And because of that, they aren't talking to them and they lost them in the election.
This is why we still have an electoral college, and why I actually favor it. It was put in place to help ensure that everybody has a chance of being heard, and the large cities wouldn't be able to run roughshod over the smaller (but very important to our country) areas.
The Dems still aren't talking to those folks. If you watch left-tv (which is damn near unwatchable, I must say), nobody is talking about how to help middle America. Everybody is still talking about "anything but Trump." They should be doing both, and if they don't then Trump is going to win again in 2020.
Because they are all funded by corporations who want, as Alan Greenspan put it, "worker anxiety" to keep profits high. They gave Trump 37 billions more in the military budget than he asked for - authorising a level spending on par with the height of the iraq war, but will balk at Bernie Sanders's suggestions for universal healthcare or free tuition because it's unaffordable.
It also helps that the republicans are horrific towards anyone who isn't a straight white male: Roy Moore overwhelmingly won the white vote despite talking about how America was greatest during the times of slavery, how he believes all the amendments after the tenth were mistakes(these include allowing woman and black people to vote), not to mention the rampant homophobia.
Trump is the absolute worst thing that can happen to middle America. His policies hit the middle and lower class whites the worst. But they will _feel_ safe and secure with a giant wall and a ban on refugees.
>It also helps that the republicans are horrific towards anyone who isn't a straight white male
There are women in all rungs of the Republican Party, from local to federal levels. The GOP has also followed the general trend of growing diversity (1) and I believe in 2013 were MORE diverse than the Democrats (although this isn't true today).
The Democrats are more diverse, but the idea that the GOP is just some old boys club is outdated.
Also, what do you mean by horrific? Certainly many are not as progressive on the issue as Coastal-Elite-White Democrats (and I'm being very specific there), but homophobia is extremely prevalent among the democratic base, especially among African-Americans (2) and Latino Americans (3).
>Roy Moore overwhelmingly won the white vote despite....
I agree with you, Roy Moore was an absolute disaster.
> And the Democrats have spun reasonable measures, such as requiring some sort of identification to vote, as "suppression", possibly so those who aren't citizens can vote. Who cheats more? Who knows.
Do you really want to suggest the listed examples to targeted voter suppression is comparable to overreaching when complaining about what is and isn't voter suppression? Because it is blatantly obvious "both sides"-ism nonsense that should not pass the smell-test with anyone, unless they've been desensitized from being neck-deep in shit for ages perhaps.
>Because it is blatantly obvious "both sides"-ism nonsense that should not pass the smell-test with anyone, unless they've been desensitized from being neck-deep in shit for ages perhaps.
The idea that one side is lily white and the other is wholly corrupt doesn't pass the smell-test. Politics is a dirty game and confirmation bias is especially easy when folks stay in partisan bubbles.
You're assuming both sides have equal opportunity to cheat. Democrats' base is composed largely of minorities who are easier to disenfranchise. Republicans' base is largely middle class white people.
Sure, if Democrats could prevent middle class whites as a group from voting, they would; they can't. Replublicans absolutely can price poorer black people out of voting.
Democrats' base is also composed of a huge population of over ten million illegal immigrants. They are often well-integrated with Democrat-aligned political organizations, and many have family or friend connections to citizens who can vote legally. And given the political climate, it's obvious they massively favor Democrats.
They don't have to do anything as complex as voting at several polling places. They just have to go vote once. That's easy to justify to yourself.
How exactly are they registering to vote? Have you ever actually talked to, or worked with, someone in this country without a visa? I have and without exception they stay as far from official government interactions as they possibly can. They don’t fly, they mostly don’t have health care, they don’t get welfare, food stamps, disability or any other kind of government assistance — all they do is work and eat and pay rent. In many ways they are the ideal Republican fantasy!
They definitely do not vote! There are more published examples of Republican politicians illegally voting than there are of illegal immigrants voting.
Um, that may be true in you local experience, but statistically it is really, really false.
There are lots of places where illegal immigrants can receive drivers' licenses and other forms of government assistance. And they do. For example, just in California, there are now a million illegal immigrants with driver's licenses. [1]
"Through June 2017, the Department of Motor Vehicles has issued approximately 905,000 driver’s licenses under Assembly Bill 60, the law requiring applicants to prove only their identity and California residency, rather than their legal presence in the state."
In California, a driver's license is enough to vote. In fact, it automatically registers someone to vote.
If identification were readily accessible and free then it would be a reasonable measure. But we don't live in a country like that-- instead we live somewhere where banks and credit unions get away with using SSNs for identification they weren't meant to provide. Once /federal/ IDs are free, readily accessible, and easy to replace when lost/stolen we will be ready to ID voters at the booths; that just isn't going to happen for a long time.
I really don't understand this, as a non American. Don't nearly all Americans outside major cities drive cars? It's been almost mandatory to drive any time I've been there outside of Manhattan. And doesn't that require a driving license? Driving license issuance clearly works, it must do, otherwise you'd get lots of poor people who are poor only because they couldn't renew their license and couldn't drive to work. But I never heard of anything like that.
More to the point if nobody is checking that voters are eligible to vote how does anyone have any confidence in the outcome at all? What stops people voting multiple times or stops illegal immigrants from voting?
>>What stops people voting multiple times or stops illegal immigrants from voting?
Let's face it. In the US the problem is getting people to vote at all -- not stopping them from voting multiple times.
But, to answer your question, when you go into a voting station you have to tell them your name. You don't get to vote anonymously, at least not in New Jersey! They look you up in the register and then you sign the register. No one there is a handwriting expert, so I assume that you could actually vote as someone else, but then that person would not be able to vote when they got to the voting station. There would be trouble.
Also, in the 99% of the voting stations not in big cities, these stations are small, local affairs. You couldn't vote multiple times because the people there would see you and notice that you had been there before. I suppose you could come back and try to vote later in the day again, but you would have to be a pretty dedicated fiend to do so.
> If those two things get done, the Democrats have a good chance going forward. Otherwise, who knows.
Otherwise, I hope the US political system gets an upheaval and more than just the lesser of two evils have a fighting chance in the elections. The two-party system is one of the problems that the US has. A lot of left-leaning HNers support the Democrats, but I'm fairly sure a lot of those are because it's the lesser of two evils.
Had DNC not effectively shut Sanders out, I daresay he could have won. Despite that possibility, Congress would still be full of members funded by corporate interests. That's not likely to change no matter who is president.
>The low-hanging fruit for the Democrats is, however:
>
>1) Prioritize lower/middle class economic concerns over progressive identity politics
>
>2) Push the DNC not to scuttle candidates, like Bernie, that people don't universally loathe
I wouldn't say that these are really "low hanging fruit". I think it's difficult to overstate just how much the DNC insiders truly loathed him - he represented a threat to them that even Trump doesn't. They can potentially win back power from Trump in 4 years; they wouldn't stop Bernie from unseating them and replacing them with progressive allies.
A similar pattern occurred in the UK's Labour party and the depths to which the insiders stooped in order to unseat him were, if anything, even more extreme. The only thing that kept him in power during the coups, was a grass roots organization set up to lobby for him. It functioned similarly to the Tea Party (only non-crazy), and not only let him cling to power but let him reshape the party into something more democratic and member led.
Well, Corbyn's story isn't quite that simple. He's reshaped the official opposition into something dominated by a tiny segment of the population with outlier views, and set things up in such a way that from now on the sort of MPs who actually won votes in non-safe seats won't be ideologically pure enough to be selected. Thus guaranteeing a hard-left Labour whether it wins elections or not in perpetuity. Before Corbyn the party wasn't left-wing enough for some, but it did hold power for a long time, so it was clearly acceptable to many.
As for it being "non crazy", that is surely your own political filter at work. Corbyn and his allies routinely do and say crazy things. McDonnell was caught on video saying "I'm a Marxist" and then when questioned on TV, he said "I'm not a Marxist". When the questioners pointed out that he'd said the exact opposite, on film, and anyone could find it on YouTube he doubled down and claimed he'd never said that! So anyone can go see that the man is willing to baldly lie about his own political beliefs.
He also keeps getting asked how much his spending plans would add to the national debt, and he keeps saying he doesn't know the answer because it's irrelevant for him to know, on the grounds that however much his plans cost they will pay for themselves. This didn't just happen once, it keeps happening. He's shadow chancellor! And as for Diane Abbott's grasp of numbers, well, let's not go there.
Finally, McDonnell also talked about how elections don't work and how he wants to seize power through insurrection. Every so often a similar statement crops up: he talks about using violence to achieve his political ends. Not surprising for a self-avowed communist.
In the US, the Republicans and Democrats at least pretend to care about the costs of policies, even if it's often a bit of theatre. And I don't recall any US politician literally threatening to overthrow the government in violent revolution. Labour has dispensed with the theatre entirely, its shadow cabinet happily and publicly revels in not knowing or caring about the cost of anything they propose.
>tiny segment of the population with outlier views
I knew a comment like this was coming.
This was essentially the story that the insiders played non-stop from the moment he was elected leader.
He was going to destroy the party.
He has views that are "so far left" that was they are crazy and would render the Labour party unelectable for a generation because that's not what the public would ever vote for.
The media dutifully followed this line, and at one point every single major media outlet in the UK - including the BBC and the Guardian and "traditionally" left wing (although billionaire owned) media like the Independent attacking him nearly non-stop.
The most common complaint I got about him at the time wasn't that people disagreed with his policies (his policies were rarely talked about in the media until the election manifesto was leaked), but that they read that he was unelectable so they believed he was unelectable. At that point he was polling very low because of this.
Then Theresa May called an election and completely pulled the rug from underneath this illusion. Labour insiders rallied behind him out of fear for their jobs and the media followed suit. His polling climbed so quickly it gave Theresa May whiplash, causing a hung parliament in the end.
So much for destroying the Labour party and so much for unelectable.
That's the point it became clear to everybody that it was much, much more than just a tiny segment of the population that shared his views.
And, today, they poll much better than the ruling party. Nothing says "tiny segment of the population" like that, right?
What this all demonstrates is the sheer power of propaganda to shape people's perceptions - yours included - because your line was the most common talking point, right up until it was proven so utterly, completely wrong that even Alastair Campbell - the consummate Blairite Labour party insider - was forced to grovel for being so wrong.
Incidentally, this whole process was mirrored in America with Bernie Sanders. The only difference is he never got to prove that he was electable.
I would note that whilst Corbyn does have a few policies that are popular, he still lost despite facing perhaps the weakest Tory candidate in a very long time. Theresa May: "the naughtiest thing I've ever done was skipping through a field of wheat" wat?
The objections to him aren't usually about the specific policies raised in the last manifesto (which I disagree with but reasonable people can differ on things like railway nationalisation). They're more that people don't trust his government would actually stick to the manifesto. The habit he has of surrounding himself with liars who try to hide their extremist views - and yes, in the UK thinking Marxism is great is an extremist view - engender a deep suspicion that if he won on a moderately left wing platform he'd immediately go off the deep end.
today, they poll much better than the ruling party
The latest polls don't show Labour polling better at all, although this many years into an administration the opposition would normally be polling much better. Actually the Tories are slightly ahead at the moment:
Of course the polls will drift around all over the place between elections. That doesn't mean much about what would happen if there was another snap election.
What this all demonstrates is the sheer power of propaganda to shape people's perceptions - yours included
Given that you just made a claim that's provably false, I'd be careful about tossing around accusations that those you disagree with are all brainwashed, although I realise this is a very common belief amongst Corbynites.
>he still lost despite facing perhaps the weakest Tory candidate in a very long time.
Or, to look at it another way, he triggered a hung parliament in spite of:
* 60% of the PLP openly and covertly sabotaging him.
* The entire mainstream print and broadcast media attacking him relentlessly ("left wing" Independent and Guardian included) until the day the election was called.
>Given that you just made a claim that's provably false
I was talking specifically about the claim made in 2015 that Corbyn was "unelectable" and would "render the Labour party unelectable for a generation" by members of the media and Blairite members of his own party.
They were arguing that the UK was going to become essentially a one party state with Labour polling similarly to the Lib Dems in all of the following elections for a generation (~25 years).
What followed was the largest vote gain in history by any UK party since 1945.
That is not provably false, it is provably true.
>I'd be careful about tossing around accusations that those you disagree with are all brainwashed
I'm not arguing that people who disagree with me are all brainwashed. I'm arguing that people who agreed with that specific idea were brainwashed. What else do you call people who buy into ideas promoted heavily in the media that are so divergent from reality?
Number 2, I think, really hurt Dems in the last election. Enough Dem voters didn't like Clinton's "I deserve to win" attitude[0]. Those voters would have voted easily for Bernie.
If you believe that gerrymandering renders the election of Congressional representatives moot, what on Earth could possibly be the point of lobbying the FCC? They're two steps removed from accountability in that analysis.
"The purest form of insanity is to leave everything the same and the same time hope that things will change." -Albert Einstein.
I mean, to be frank, I think that both major parties are playing a role in this illusion that you, the voter, have control over the government without grabbing pitchforks and heading to their office in your preferred form of communication. We live in a country where you can decide your own fate. You can work for what you want, no one will stop you. The government seems to have forgot what "govern" means. They get their hands into things they shouldn't be in, and then make the every-man look like a criminal. Why do we continue to rely on a capitalistic fascist society? One that pays us in non-backed currency as well. This is literally alchemy and everyone buys into their bullshit.
> But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back.
What I'm bitter about is that my vote, as a californian, is worth a tiny fraction of a vote in a swing state. Republican lawmakers have zero incentive to care about me, and red states are overrepresented in congress in relation to their small population.
The American people from a popular vote standpoint didn't want any of this, but they can be safety ignored by people who are abusing a flawed system. The voices of individual Californians count for very little unless they have money that they can spend on PACs and political campaigns. How is that democratic?
Republicans aren't pushing deregulation of the internet to make swing states happy. They are pushing for deregulation because that's what several billionaire campaign contributors want them to do.
Again, per OP's suggestion, if everybody got one vote, instead of the current formula "<effective votes> = f(<net worth>)" with f' > 1, we would not be in this situation.
That's more than a little bit off the mark. Both the U.S. and Europe are in the middle of a multi-decade economic boom resulting from deregulation. Telecom, airline, etc., deregulation isn't something we did on our own. Pretty much the whole developed world has massively deregulated these industries, and continues to do so, and continues to benefit from those policies.
To me, the litmus test for whether deregulatory (or really, any other) argument can be assumed to be in good faith is to ask: what do other developed countries do? Pai's self-regulation approach is being mocked as disingenuous in the U.S., but for example, Japan and Denmark also rely on self-regulation in this area.
The US at least, has been in an economic boom since the Subprime Mortgage Crisis in 2010, which was partly caused by deregulation of banks and lenders. Can you provide some examples of why this world wide boom is credited to deregulation?
I'm talking about longer-term trends. Post New Deal, government regulation didn't just mean things like safety standards. The government was micro-managing the economy, telling companies where they could build telephone lines or what routes they had to fly and what prices they had to charge. Getting rid of all that was hugely beneficial: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/PB_Dere.... And these market reforms weren't just adopted in the U.S. European countries engaged in massive deregulation themselves.
This is kind of a silly example, but in France, the government used to regulate the open hours of bakeries to ensure adequate supply of baguettes: https://econlife.com/2017/07/tbt-throwback-thursday-french-b.... There was a time when this sort of government intervention in the market was completely common, even in the U.S. But everyone realized that less invasive methods of regulation were preferable. (Though France has always been slow on the uptake--Macron got rid of the baguette regulations only in 2015.)
Why is it so hard for people to take the other side at their word? Republicans push deregulation because they think it's the right thing to do, because they believe the market is a better regulatory mechanism. Perhaps you think this view is mistaken. Good, great, fine! Then argue against it.
But there's no crazy hidden motive here. Republicans just disagree with you.
Invoking the term "deregulation" carries with it the connotation that this is a policy decision. But given the active efforts to avoid engaging with the topic on a policy level made by the FCC in this case, it's obvious that it's not a policy decision at all.
They don't disagree, they just don't care.
And that's before we get to the signs of influence/interest contact points.
I don't know what to tell you. They do disagree with you. Setting everything else aside -- money and influence in politics, etc -- you really need to start by accepting that there are people who disagree with you in good faith. Not just on this issue, but in general.
If you can't even do that, then I'm not sure there's really any conversation that's likely to be fruitful.
> you really need to start by accepting that there are people who disagree with you in good faith.
Certainly, such people exist. I respect them and even enjoy talking to them sometimes.
But that's off topic. We're talking about the current/recent incarnation of the Republican Party. The idea that they believe, "in good faith", in deregulation implies that they have some kind of tested framework for believing it, that they've actually spent any time at all observing and thinking out issues where they intersect with relevant policy areas. And when it comes to how Net Neutrality debate (and now, recent policy changes), there is no evidence that's happened, and absolutely ample evidence of bad faith scattered all over both the process and the transparently poor arguments deployed to give a pretense of engagement.
Or what, exactly, does "good faith" really mean in your mind? Is honest belief enough? If I were to say, honestly believing it, "I think the earth is flat, not round" or "I think the gold standard has been behind the most stable and prosperous economies," or "I think a hot air balloon is a reasonable way to provide transport between the earth's surface and the moon," would my honest belief be enough to really give grant me "good faith?"
Also, why should anyone "set aside" money and influence in politics, particularly on this issue where the fingerprints are pretty clearly visible?
"Also, why should anyone "set aside" money and influence in politics, particularly on this issue where the fingerprints are pretty clearly visible?"
I'm not asking you to set it aside forever and in all contexts. I'm asking you to set it aside when evaluating the claims of Republicans against net neutrality, because it seems to be blocking you from accepting that they genuinely and in good faith disagree with you.
There is plenty of evidence that regulation is required. Even before yesterday there is a laundry list of violations. Verizon has even explicitly stated in court that the neutrality rules are what is preventing their plans to block websites that don't pay their tolls.
Except this just isn't true. In NN in particular, the GOP tried to push legislation through, but the Dems only wanted Title II as the method. The disagreement is really less about NN and more about how to accomplish NN.
They disagree with me because I’m not giving them money for their reelection campaign. Same goes with Democrats. It’s a problem that needs to be fixed and one that’s really obvious to spot.
Removing money from politics will take a constitutional amendment. And it will take a different breed of politician to make that happen at either the Federal (Congress initiated amendment process) or state (convention initiated process) level. It will be difficult and there will be many other distractions that the moneyed class will put up, and has always put up to prevent the country from becoming more of a democracy.
This country and its constitution only prescribe a polyarchy instead of a monarchy. And from the outset participation and benefit was primarily meant for white, male, land owners. The discrimination is stacked into the system still, despite multiple amendments to make it incrementally more of a democracy.
1. What reelection campaign are you talking about? The chairman of the FCC is appointed, not elected.
2. Second, these two issues aren't mutually exclusive. Let's get some of the money out of politics? Sure, great, fine! But the Republicans still just disagree with you on net neutrality.
I know my post was very cynical. I agree open and free markets are very valuable and need to be protected. But in this case, anti-NN policies are so hugely unpopular, I can't see how anyone would think that they will be good for business as a whole.
That makes no sense. If california voters did anything other than voted for the candidate with the D next to their name, not everyone would assume their massive pile of votes will always go Democrat. California voters matter way more than any swing state, it's just so predictably one-sided that nobody bothers to waste time there.
The same thing would happen in a pure democracy. No candidates would spend time placating any large population centers that consistently vote one way. LA/SF/NYC issues would be irrelevant because everyone will just pick the D each time anyway so it will still come down to appealing to groups that might change their minds.
Gill v. Whitford will be heard in the current term of the U.S. Supreme Court to look at this issue again. It has the potential to make an explosive difference in 2018.
Look at the recent Alabama election. A Democrat won most of the votes in the state, and also won most of the votes in every single urban area. And yet applying that state wide vote to the House of Represenatives district map in Alabama, would have still sent one Democrat and six Republicans to House of Representatives in Congress (had it been an election for HoR rather than Senate). Even in the case were Democrats made double digit gains in most counties from the 2016 election, it still would not affect the representation in the House. This is a massive case of voter disenfranchisement.
And while both parties gerrymander, only one party engages in the most obvious and egregiously unfair form of it while benefiting overwhelmingly and disproportionately, hence the lawsuit before the Court. And in the Alabama case, it is blatantly racist as well.
"And while both parties gerrymander, only one party engages in the most obvious and egregiously unfair form of it while benefiting overwhelmingly and disproportionately"
i like that you said that. ive always said that it wouldn't surprise me if d's try suppress vote if it benefitted them. its just that they are fortunate enough that enfranchisement benefits them and is also the right thing to do. i dont mean to equate r's and d's, but just to reinforce the idea that all parties seek to consolidate power and preserve themselves.
It's quite convenient that the Democratic party happens to benefit from Democracy. That means their policy positions are correct, and for as long as that continues, they deserve to win.
That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies
Holding it as "under regulating" seems like it's falling for the doublespeak. It is also Republican governments at every level that are almost universally responsible for the (over) regulations that led to the current monopolies of providers in most areas (often a single `choice'). If a city or region or even second party looks to install alternative feeds, overwhelmingly opposition comes from Republican governments, and there is already threats that this federal government will prevent States from passing their own rules on this (it would be too obvious if red states lived in a shitstorm while blue states lived in the modern world). It is profoundly corrupt.
I'm not trying to be partisan, but the Republican party in the US are the voice of a oligarchy. This FCC decision is the perfect example of it -- something they are profoundly incapable of building the slightest justification for, and that can only possibly benefit already overwhelming providers.
>I'm not trying to be partisan, but the Republican party in the US are the voice of a oligarchy. This FCC decision is the perfect example of it -- something they are profoundly incapable of building the slightest justification for, and that can only possibly benefit already overwhelming providers.
Net neutrality is 100%, unequivocally favorable for every tech company (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Microsoft, etc.). Are you sure the Democratic party is not the "voice of the oligarchy" here? You say that Republicans are incapable of building justification for this decision, but it fits exactly to the pillars of the Republican party -- deregulation, a free market economy, and a small government. Their argument is that NN is unnecessary regulation that limits the free market and oversteps the boundaries of a reasonable government. You may disagree with this, but that argument is a subjective one and not an objective one. It may benefit the providers but it also hurts the tech monopolies (which is why they oppose it so adamantly... unless you really think that Alphabet, inc. is on the side that opposes big businesses).
Net neutrality is 100%, unequivocally favorable for every tech company (Google, Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Microsoft, etc.).
Net neutrality favors any entrant equally, and thus is unfavorable to the large tech players (all of whom can financially overcome any obstacle).
deregulation, a free market economy, and a small government
Right, and that is total bullshit. State rights is a supposed principal of the Republican party, until a state wants to do something in opposition (seen time and time again, and already evident with net neutrality -- if California and New York state demand NN, it will turn the whole thing into farce leaving the hillbilly states reaping what they sow). Republicans love free market, unless it's the free market threatening the incumbents.
unless you really think that Alphabet, inc. is on the side that opposes big businesses
This profoundly and comically misreads the motives of the big tech players.
If it's unfavorable to large tech players, why does every single one campaign for it? These are the companies that make up most of the bandwidth use, which is why ISPs want to slow them down if they don't pay for a "fast lane." Either way, losing NN will decrease their profit margins.
The GOP is for states rights, and they are also for the general decrease in government size. They are against state-level NN because that is increased regulation in those states. There are legitimate exceptions (gay rights, abortion rights, war on drugs, etc.), but those apply more to social issues than to economic ones. In terms of free market policy, the Republican party has a pretty reasonable track record of supporting it. For example: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-do....
This is hilariously naive. You're essentially pointing fingers and laughing at people who you esteem to be less intelligent than yourself while making pretty absurd statements that have little to no basis in actual fact
For instance the original, and probably fatal, blow to net neutrality was the 1996 Telecommunications act that was passed mainly to encourage "wire to wire competition", which has since become a total farce. In exchange for this absurd concept we not only gave the telecoms huge tax cuts (nominally so they could expand infrastructure) that they then directly plowed into dividends, share buybacks, and bonuses, we also allowed the sale of wireless spectrums (another public good). But most importantly we enshrined local monopolies into law. Almost every single fight we've had for net neutrality since then has stemmed from this legislation. Guess who signed it into law? Bill Clinton, a democrat. And while the Senate and House both had Republican majorities the bill was passed with largely bipartisan support (less than 20% of the Senate and less than 5% of the house voted against it) and heavy support from the Clinton administration.
But lets say you don't buy that, lets take a look at the current political climate. The largest recipients of telecom dollars in the Senate have been overwhelmingly Democrats (it's about 50/50 over the past 8 years in the House), the telecoms have extremely influential Democrats in their pocket like Nancy Pelosi (who laughably claimed that the ISPs would save us from the Republican bill to allow ISPs to sell your internet traffic history), and even ex-Obama administrators are largely applauding today's ruling. Don't for a second think you or anyone else is somehow above this just because you identify with a certain tribe.
Also it's pretty odd that you think name dropping engineering friends means you have an informed opinion on this extremely non-technical matter, as if an RF engineer would have an informed opinion on the intricacies of economic repercussions of spectrum auctions.
But you do have one very good point, elections have consequences. Vote out anyone who takes a dime from telecoms, ISPs, interconnect providers, or even tech companies. The issue here is not ideological, it is monetary. Corporate influence has completely taken over our political system and regardless of party we are helpless to stop it until we take a principled stand and refuse to vote for the representative who's trying to sell us to the highest bidder simply because they wear the same color shirt as the people we associate with.
Yes, people are quick to forget that Obama's FCC was not anxious to implement these rules and did not do so until the very end of Obama's term, presumably because they knew it wouldn't hold up very long and by getting it done in the administration's final gasp, they could keep it as a feather in their political cap and pass the burden of "net neutrality repeal" onto the next guy.
Interestingly, amidst the jokes about Tom Wheeler leaving babies to the dingos, I don't recall much of a lament over the "consequences" of electing Obama. It wasn't until after this point that Wheeler reversed course, likely after the party realized this issue had teeth with one of their important constituencies. This "you asked for it" anti-Republican line is pure opportunism.
> Yes, people are quick to forget that Obama's FCC was not anxious to implement these rules and did not do so until the very end of Obama's term, presumably because they knew it wouldn't hold up very long and by getting it done in the administration's final gasp, they could keep it as a feather in their political cap
Nothing but damn lies.
Obama's FCC set up the Open Internet Order in 2010 (to formalise the informal 2005 rules which had been judged no basis for governance), they moved towards Title II following that being mostly invalidated by the courts in 2014 (the courts ruled that the 2010 rules couldn't be applied under Title I), the new rules were proposed in May 2014, the public comments period was opened in July, closed in September, and the FCC passed Title II rules in February 2015.
> pass the burden of "net neutrality repeal" onto the next guy.
What burden of net neutrality repeal? There was no burden because there was no requirement to repeal NN.
Please review the civility guidelines. If nothing else, mischaracterizing a clearly-labeled presumptive statement as a "damn lie" reveals your malice and discredits your POV.
As I alluded to in the grandparent, it was not at all obvious that the FCC or other elements of the Obama administration were working toward net neutrality when the jokes about Obama leaving the baby to the dingos were getting flung around. [0]
> What burden of net neutrality repeal? There was no burden because there was no requirement to repeal NN.
It was clear that ISPs did not fit the legal definition of Title II carriers which is why they weren't just classified as such at the beginning. It was clear that it was not likely that they would retain this classification, whether a Democrat won the next cycle and a successful lawsuit overturned the rulings or whether the FCC undid it as is the case now with Ajit Pai (whose primary contention, by the way, is not that net neutrality shouldn't exist, just that Title II is not an appropriate regulatory framework in which to cast it).
Of course, in politics, all that really matters is brownie points, so as long as the public sees you as the good guy, then you win and it doesn't matter if a judge overturns everything you've done.
Obama made liberal use of this principle, and in some cases his staff would openly discuss the expectation that some executive action would not survive judicial review. Obama was pretty bad about his respect for legal structure and processes, but Trump takes it to such an extreme that saying this about Obama seems like a joke now. :P
> If nothing else, mischaracterizing a clearly-labeled presumptive statement as a "damn lie" reveals your malice and discredits your POV.
Oh come off your high horse,
> FCC was not anxious to implement these rules and did not do so until the very end of Obama's term
is not presumptive, and it's a bald-faced lie.
> It was clear that ISPs did not fit the legal definition of Title II carriers which is why they weren't just classified as such at the beginning.
Oh look, an other lie. DSL ISPs were classified under Title II until 2005 when Bush's FCC reclassified them.
> It was clear that it was not likely that they would retain this classification
It was not clear at all, and regardless there is no "burden of net neutrality repeal" following a court order.
> whose primary contention, by the way, is not that net neutrality shouldn't exist, just that Title II is not an appropriate regulatory framework in which to cast it
And that's a bullshit assertion, as I told you in my previous comment the only reason Obama's FCC reclassified ISPs under Title II is that the courts ruled net neutrality could not be enforced otherwise.
And regardless of judicial review risks, the only alternative would have been a brand new Telecommunications Act. In 2015. With a GOP legal majority.
But funnily enough, "concerned Ajit Pai" has been hard at work reclassifying ISPs without either waiting for the court decisions you state was clearly coming, and without putting any effort into building a new regulatory framework.
How much of that do you believe is simply taking the other side by democracy’s because they hate republicans? Versus if the dems has the WH and both houses they would appoint another telecom shill and have done exactly the same thing?
That’s the party that tried to bring us the Clipper chip my friend. Think about that.
> How much of that do you believe is simply taking the other side by democracy’s because they hate republicans?
Approximately zero; the areas of partisan difference, and the details of disagreement in those areas, have drifted a bit over time, but were largely similar 25-30 years ago, when, despite campaigns being hard-fought, relations were much more collegial then today. It's not personal hatred driving the policy differences.
One of the two parties thinks my gay and trans friends should have human rights, and the other party has fought tooth and nail against it, so "they're exactly the same" is bullshit for that alone. The Democrats aren't nearly good enough, but they're by far the lesser of two evils.
Don’t relocate. Stay in your damn house. Go talk to the people who are actually running in those districts. If you can write them even the cost of a ps4, they want to hear from you.
In particular for Democrats running against entrenched Republicans, these people aren’t evil corporate fat cats. They own restaurants, teach high school, are small-town mayors, or nurses. They need help to compete. The DNC is not going to help candidates who don’t show viability on their own.
NOW is the time to get involved, before the primaries.
>> Go talk to the people who are actually running in those districts. If you can write them even the cost of a ps4, they want to hear from you.
You propose this as a solution, but for the average person it makes no sense. Suppose that in the worst case scenario, the big ISPs did eventually start throttling certain content and offering tiered pricing for unfettered access to the entire Internet. Would the extra cost of upgrading to a higher tier really be worse than the cost of making political donations and taking the time to participate in lobbying activities (even if it were as simple as mailing a printed letter or making a phone call)? I am going to guess that for the average person it is not worth it.
I am not sure if this is the right equation.
Should we accept something wrong just because it costs (financially) us (personally) less than fighting for fixing it ?
Are we becoming more apathetic than the previous generations ? (real question)
Should the cost of right be priceless ?
Yes, Citizen United and unlimited corporate monetary donations to political candidates is at the core of many of our political problems. The only fix I see is to use the system to fix itself. Wolf-PAC goal is to end the corrupting influence of money in our political system.
If you can write them even the cost of a ps4, they want to hear from you.
Isn't this the problematic issue, though? If you have some disposable cash, politicians will pay attention to you even if you come form outside their district. If you don't, they won't. Sure, they want people to vote for them but that's basically a function of how much money they can throw at the problem.
You say "politician". I say "registered nurse running in a district where the R would be effective unopposed otherwise, needing straightforwardly to raise $100k before the end of the year to get taken seriously by the DNC".
You can not like that the system works this way (I hope you do like the idea of more RN's and school teachers as reps!), but compared to lobbying the Republican FCC, it has the virtue of being plausibly effective.
I love the idea of more regular people (especially non-lawyers) running for office, I'm just more pessimistic than you about the wisdom of throwing more money into the campaign finance machine.
Any suggestions about how to find this type of person running in this type of district? I agree that supporting this type of person could be disproportionately effective, but how do you find them when still in the early stages?
Maciej Ceglowski of Pinboard has been traveling the country meeting candidates for races that professionals helped identify as underserved by the DNC, and came up with a "Great Slate", which is a good starting point:
But: if you live in a major metro area: you're probably in a D district, where just a few miles from you there's a suburb in an R district. Find that district and see who's running in it.
Are you sure that the time to be involved wasn’t say... a couple of decades ago? This feels like the terminal end-stage. It was time to be involved when Reagan was ending the hope of public education or mental health, during three or more decades of scientists and environmentalists screaming bloody murder, or at some point during our decades of failed adventurism abroad.
This isn’t new, this is the sharp end of an edifice people have allowed to be built underneath them, complete with extralegal security apparatus. It’s only when an orange clown is in charge and his henchmen are sharpening their regulatory knives, or 75% of the insect biomass vanishes that people start to notice.
I like how you think donating to politicians is the answer. Money in politics is why we're in the situation we're in. Those with insufficient money to donate should be heard as well as those with money. The system needs a change. It can happen peacefully or not. Seems to be going in the not direction.
I personally find the whole donating money to politicians thing in the US mind bending. I’m from a country where no ordinary people donate to politicians and everyone is doing just fine (we don’t have the party that we’d like, but throwing money at them won’t fix that).
Yes, I think the biggest take away of this is to push the fact that republican legislators did not listen to their constituents. At all. They did not put their constituents first. At all. The chairman actually talked about consumers working with the FCC to enforce regulations as a bad thing.
I do not agree. I believe Republican voters do not in fact want the government extensively regulating the Internet. It is very difficult to argue in 2017 that the Republican party is the party of a pragmatic, consumer-protected regulatory state. The Republicans believe that the market will take better care of Internet users than any regulatory agency. On this one issue, it's possible they're even right.
"The Republicans believe that the market will take better care of Internet users than any regulatory agency. On this one issue, it's possible they're even right."
There is a pretty significant problem with this reasoning: what market are you referring to? Most Americans have zero, one, or two broadband ISPs they can receive service from. In most cases where there is any choice, it is between cable and DSL, which have very different technical characteristics and are not always interchangeable.
I could get behind a market-based approach if there was some kind of proposal to foster a market. What happened to the line-sharing requirements that gave us competition among DSL services in the late 90s? That was a market-based solution and it worked well; that approach continues to work well in other countries.
Instead, the current approach is to leave the monopolies and duopolies in place, and to do nothing to reduce barriers to entry for competing services or otherwise foster a competitive market.
We could sit here all day and argue about net neutrality regulation all day. But "let the market decide"? I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face.
It's not a straight face, it's a smirk, and they'll keep saying it so long as it bothers you. They'll happily eat dog shit if the opposition has to smell their breath.
This is how populism works, and it's only going to get worse.
1) Republican voter support is broad for net neutrality. Multiple sources have shown this pretty consistently.
2) The Republican deregulatory ideal (if it works at all) only works if competition exists. It doesn't. The market can only have a chance to work if it exists.
Can you back that up with something specific?
I'm Paul Ryan's party platform put out last year they specifically mentioned deregulating the internet. Not sure how you can overlook that
You do know that TCP/IP packet data delivery is handled by network protocol right? Protocol is designed to work, not to please Verizon lawyers.
Internet only works when neutral.
Here is your argument: Regulation bad - Deregulation good. Don't you think that's a bit overly simplistic?
What part of this are you missing? Either you have the Internet with protections in place or simply you don't have an Internet at all.
Your world view is AOL and Compuserv. That's what a world without NN looks like.
And when a market doesn't take care of itself the people are the ones to suffer, no matter which party they are part of or voted for.
Mortgage industry was self-regulated and politicians just balled out the bad actors.
It is about "finding" simple and reliable regulations, since there is no true "etched in stone" regulations.
Regulations have a shifting baseline. Say 100 fish are in a lake. Regulate that only 20 maybe harvest a year. This goes on for 10 years and in the 11th they are all gone. Write once regulations do not account for changes in the environment / market environment.
Actually the voters elected a Democrat. The electoral college elected the Republican.
Not your issue? I've followed your account for years. This is exactly your issue, and everyone in this community's issue.
Without the Internet you have no chance of fighting against things like the new tax bill. It takes away your voice. It takes away all of our voices.
This might not be 'your' issue, but make no mistake, it is more important than all of the issues you mention, in that without a free and open Internet, your free speech is essentially gone, and that severely handicaps any efforts to organize and protest against the other issues you talk about.
Err, no. Winning the most votes is not "one of the ways you can slice it" -- it's the natural criterion that almost universally comes to mind when you ask somebody how democracy should be implemented.
Well, maybe if you founded a federated republic and wanted each state to decide independently how to cast their votes for the president it might make sense.
It really doesn't matter what's "natural" though. It's like talking about who had more pieces on the board at the end of a game of chess. You knew the rules and you still lost by them. If you had changed the rules the entire matchup would have gone differently.
Winning the most votes is irrelevant if the contest was something different. I‘m sure the campaigns would have looked differently if the contest had been about the number of votes.
Yes! If everyone knew it was a popular election, the results would be drastically different. Candidates would actually campaign and get out the vote in states they never even think about now, and voters in states that are not swing states would be more motivated to vote.
Saying Clinton won the popular vote is just wishful thinking.
How ever did society function without the Internet? Were all leaders just dictators leading up to the 90s? It's hyperbolic crap like claiming this is the very foundation of free speech that leads people with opposing views to disengage, leave you to your echo chamber, and then surprise you when they pass regulation that represents their views.
You've been breaking the HN guidelines more than once in this thread. We've had to warn you about this before. When this keeps happening and people don't stop, we ban them, so please stop.
Please tell me how I broke the guidelines with this comment. Please keep in mind this is the level of hyperbole I replied to that you did not warn against.
>Without the Internet you have no chance of fighting against things like the new tax bill. It takes away your voice. It takes away all of our voices.
That type of comment ignores thousands of years of civilization through extreme hyperbole and you have felt the need to call my hyperbolic response out instead?
I've seen you complain about this community falling apart but this blatant partisanship on your behalf as a moderator is one of the reasons this happens. Anyone who disagrees with the main stream silicon valley politics is treated like a child.
> Please tell me how I broke the guidelines with this comment.
"Hyperbolic crap" and "leave you to your echo chamber" are name-calling, times 10 when bubbling in the stew of indignation.
> this blatant partisanship on your behalf as a moderator
If I can say this respectfully and not just about you: it always feels like blatant partisanship when oneself or something one likes is moderated, and it always feels like decency and even-handedness when someone from the other side gets the moderation. This is one of the dominant cognitive biases I see on HN.
That doesn't mean we aren't biased in our own right. Inevitably we are. But we do try not to let that govern moderation here, and have put in a lot of hard practice at the effort. Many things that might look like bias outwardly are actually attempts to preserve certain qualities for the community. They're not attempts to promote one view over others, and there's little if any information in there about what we personally agree or disagree with.
But because most HN readers don't know that, they reach for the readier explanation of 'blatant partisan bias'. Combined with only considering the data points that fit this theory and ignoring the other ones, that is a potent bias cocktail in its own right. I'd love to know some effective things to do about this but we are where we are. And to repeat, I'm not talking about you except insofar as you're one of everybody.
Paradigm shifts makes previous systems obsolete. That's why it's not a great time to sell landline telephony or newspapers, and why relying on pre-internet political organizing technology is to cripple oneself straight out of the gate.
FALSE. The voters were sidelined by both old (electoral college) and new (mechanically-assisted gerrymandering) methods. Just look at Texas:
"The redistricting had a revolutionary effect. Today, the Texas delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives includes twenty-five Republicans and eleven Democrats—a far more conservative profile than the political demography of the state. The Austin metropolitan area, the heart of the Texas left, was divvied up into six congressional districts, with city residents a minority in each. All but one of these districts are now held by Republicans. I’m currently represented by Roger Williams, a conservative automobile dealer from Weatherford, two hundred miles north of Austin."
Republicans have used these tools to cook up an unprecedented constitutional challenge to our republic. MULTIPLE suits are presently being heard by the Supreme Court regarding their shenanigans.
> FALSE. The voters were sidelined by both old (electoral college) and new (mechanically-assisted gerrymandering) methods.
More of them voted, for the House of Representatives, for Republicans than for any other party.
It's true that the actual representation of Republicans is outsized for that vote, and gerrymandering played a role, but they also got more votes. (And an outright majority voted for anti-NN parties.)
Good point on the Presidency, though (but even there, it's a hairs breadth either way on whether pro- or anti-NN candidates got a majority of votes.)
I agree with your points in broad strokes, so please don't think I'm being argumentative when I point out one quibble I have with your post:
The lack of Net Neutrality is not an example of "market-based regulation."
Although government regulation can, for better or worse, hamper the operation of a free market, that isn't the case here. The point of Net Neutrality is to keep Internet infrastructure free from being feudalized. A feudal government where massive policy changes impacting people's everyday lives are decided by power players and their arcane web of alliances is still a government, and it is definitely not one conducive to a free market.
Anyone who favors free markets cannot oppose Net Neutrality. It would be like opposing antitrust laws and claiming to be free market.
Voters != Electoral College. It's an important distinction because this particular issue is very clearly a national issue (and even a global one). And yet at a national level the one person one vote principle does not apply to U.S. presidential elections. Some people's vote counts more than others in this system even though it should not count more on this issue.
Unquestionably elections have consequences, but do not say we (voters/citizens/individuals) voted for this person or party or policy outcome. The Electoral College that did that. This president didn't get a majority of the votes, and much more relevant is he didn't even get a plurality of the votes.
This was an unpopular administration from day one by definition. It could have tried to grow its base. It hasn't. There's no national mandate for this policy change. Could the administration have supported stronger competition law while also deregulating net neutrality? Sure. But it didn't try to make this case at all.
> The FCC may very well be right that it's not their job to impose our dream portfolio of rules on Verizon (certainly, a lot of the rules people are claiming NN provided were fanciful)
That^ Too many people are trying to shove things that are covered by antitrust into net neutrality. This makes it a much harder sell.
I'm convinced many Republicans could be convinced to support net neutrality if it didn't have that extra baggage attached.
Keep it to:
1. No blocking of legal content,
2. No throttling of legal content,
3. Must deliver the speed and bandwidth that the customer pays for.
Many Republicans do support those principles, today. They simply believe that the FCC doesn't need to impose Title II regulations on ISPs to accomplish it. For instance: the Republican component of the FCC strongly believes it's already unlawful to block legal content to consolidate and exploit ISP market positions, and that the FTC already has the power to enforce that regulation.
Yeah. We probably would have been better off if people had accepted Wheeler's first proposal for the 2015 Order. That was the one that stayed under Section 706, and so would not have been able to do everything that had been done under the 2010 Order because of the court decision that struck down the 2010 Order. It would have had to allow "fast lanes".
But I don't see any net neutrality issue with "fast lanes" AS LONG AS the ISP does not slow other things down in order to force the use of "fast lanes" to get normal advertised speeds. Paid "fast lanes" might be anti-competitive in some cases, but that should be handled under antitrust law.
ISPs probably actually do belong under Title II as far as actually providing internet access goes --I don't see anything fundamentally different from a policy point of view about the internet compared to, say, the telephone system. But that should probably be done by Congress, not the FCC.
For those in California, Josh Butner (D) is trying to flip Duncan Hunter (R)'s seat. This is the same Duncan Hunter Jr who basically rolled into the seat when his dad, Duncan Hunter, Sr, rolled out. Voters never even noticed. This is the same Duncan Hunter who vaped in Congress and spent something like $1300 of his campaign funds on Steam games.
Josh is a retired Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander. Spent 23 years in the Navy including combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, raised his family in Jamul, and continues to serve on the local school board.
Go help Josh. https://joshbutnerforcongress.com/
Not the majority though, as far as I understand, they won even though they don't have a majority of the voters, just a majority of the districts. Or something along those lines which simply confuses (and amazes) us non-US residents.
I'm also a bit impressed / curious about how much power the President has; he appoints FCC the chairman, and that chairman ends up taking these sort of decisions? Sounds a lot like something that the legislative branch should pick up, not [transitively] the executive one.
Not precisely. The proportion of people who voted in a gerrymandered electoral system with potentially widespread voter suppression produced a preponderance of Republican legislators and an outcome of the electoral college that produced a Republican president. I'm not sure that this qualifies as an "elected" government.
Those same gerrymandered districts and electoral college elected Democrat Congresses and a Democrat president for the last 8 years. To suggest that it's completely rigged when they lose the following election is absurd. This coming from someone who also hates the current outcome, but come on now. If the Democrats ran someone who most of the country didn't hate, they would have won easily. If they hadn't fought themselves in the primary and nominated a much better candidate, they would have won.
We've had this same electoral college in place for a long time, and everyone knew the rules ahead of time. It certainly has flaws, and you can argue a popular vote would be better, but it is the system we have and everyone knew it going into the election. It absolutely qualifies as an elected government.
I'm willing to take the risk that creating a better electoral system would not benefit my party. Even if we ended up with exactly the same government, I think it would be preferable if that government could credibly claim legitimacy.
I completely agree the tax bill is also terrible. but this conversation started around the FCC NN rules and due to _lack_ of competition anything we have is better than this form of deregulation. I'm happy to entertain a _separate_ conversation about the tax bill but I feel like you are saying because that is so much worse that NN does not matter... I believe that way of communicating is very dangerous because it can be applied to anything and everything. for example ISPs being able to store/mine and sell data on their users which was another law passed this year and caused me to donate to the eff.
my point is, I do not think you comment contributes to NN fairly by correlating the tax law as more important, I believe they are both very important.
> it is more than a little aggravating to see us as a community winding ourselves in knots over market-based regulation of telecom at the same time as the (largely unprincipled) Republican congress is putting the finishing strokes --- literally in ball-point pen --- on a catastrophically stupid tax bill that threatens universal access to health insurance, not just for those dependent on Medicare but on startup founders as well.
Yeah. It was nice to see people coming together to fight for net neutrality, but it would have been nicer to see some of that energy and excitement used to fight something that will actually kill people.
This is not republican vs democrates. It's simply corporate donor money at work. You might remember that FCC tried exact same thing during Obama administration as well and they had to turn back because of huge backlash. This time I think backlash wasn't super aggressive and Trump administration thinks they can get away with anything as long as they are tough on border and other party is weak on border.
> The voters elected a Republican government. That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine.
Even less surprising as the GOP has been opposing Title II all along, and a GOP FCC is how ISPs got moved to Title I in the first place.
True, but net neutrality is also broadly popular. Granted, they won't lose any votes but I know several staunch conservatives who are pissed about losing NN. I don't know if they are pissed enough to change their voting habits though and thats probably the real problem.
The Electors elected a Republican government. The voters elected a Democrat by 2,868,691 votes and there was Russian meddling on top of even that. Associating any popular mandate with that is shear nonsense.
I’ve seen no proof of Russian meddling that had any provable effect on the election. Only theoretical.
Second do you have ANY idea how many elections the US has “meddled” in? Let alone how many leaders we have literally overthrown?? Get some perspective. If you don’t like other nations pissing in our oatmeal I seriously suggest we stop pissing, shitting, and vomiting in theirs. Golden rule and all. Let the booing begin.
Even if that’s accurate how does that negate what I said about all of the Russian BS is just that BS. No proven election fraud, no voter fraud, nothing provable to russians.
Republicans don't support deregulation per se. That's just the cover story. Republicans just support big business, that's it. If regulations make businesses better? Why the hell not?
If you're going to make blatant conspiratorial statements about the motivations of nearly half of the US population you are going to need to back that up with evidence.
That would be the biggest 'cover story' in the history of humanity
Obama was required to appoint a Republican to the commission per the rule whereby the agency's commissioner seats must be split between the parties, with the tie breaking seat going to the party in control of the presidency.
Following these rules, when a Republican seat opened on the commission, Obama asked Mitch McConnell for an recommendation, and he suggested Pai. When Trump took over, Obama's FCC chairman Wheeler left the position, and Trump put Pai in his place, and replaced his former seat with another Republican, Brendan Carr.
Your statement is factually right, however the only way someone can treat this statement is by assuming you are trying to refute the OPs republican claims. Since I can't downvote you, ill just include an explanation for others on why this comment holds no merit.
Ajit was appointed to the chair under Trump (Republican). Ajit was a recommendation from Republican minority lead (at the time) Mcconnell. Ajit has (to my knowledge) always been a republican member of US FCC.
This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies. If there was competition in this space, then there would be incentive to improve the infrastructure and Internet speeds. However, ISP's kill competition by making legal arrangements with local governments to only do business with them, and by cutting competitors' cables. Since we have no way to guarantee reasonable speeds to small time websites now, we should pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in this space. Comcast didn't realize it, but net neutrality was their own safety net.
I've been thinking this over for the past couple months, because I was pretty sure this would be the outcome - that we would lose our net neutrality protection.
So let's play out the worse case - Comcast, AT&T etc wait out the shitstorm and then start throttling traffic and packaging the internet, releasing cable-esque "plans."
Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs? I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this? Do I need to be incorporated to do it? What would it take to start a new ISP with the premise "unthrottled, unmonitored traffic, charged by the gigabyte - an internet utility service"?
As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to "plug into" it or whatever?
Hmm. I should see if there's some "How the Internet Works: for Dummies" book.
> As a private citizen, can I (snip) just lay a super long fiber cable straight to (the internet).
Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It's actually really easy to do :
1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.
2) Run fiber cable from there to your customers. (You can also use wireless gear instead for a WISP. I don't like this approach, it's very 1990s despite all the newer better gear, but it's much cheaper than fiber and if your careful it can work out OK)
3) Setup some light network management.
Some cities / municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service.
The land between you and your customers is owned. You'll need space in public property (or 'right of way') to connect to them. This also varies based on city/county/state/local laws, but in Michigan there are somewhat decent rules around this. (Set rates for underground conduit access or utility pole access, rules about what can/can't be blocked, etc).
The only real roadblock is money. Fiber ISPs are super cheap at scale, but are effectively impossible to bootstrap unless you are already a millionaire. In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50/month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your very first customer is somewhere north of $50k/each, and prices don't become reasonable until your in the thousands.
In most areas, the only thing you really need to start an ISP is (1) Lots of money, and (2) perseverance. There's not really any rules that prevent it, and the regulations aren't unreasonable. But the upfront cost is so high, it rules out basically any honest person from having the chance to do it.
"Some cities / municipalities have signed agreements for monopoly rights to a telephone or cable provider. Many (but not all) of them can be worked around by simply not selling telephone or TV service."
Isn't it ironic that the only way for a startup ISP to get around the local monopoly agreement is to not provide services which are regulated by the FCC?
Yet somehow, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have convinced most young people that FCC regulation of ISPs is a good idea.
The sad part is, the only thing between a mass of young voters and 1984-style internet is just 3 more years of Trump/Pai, who most of them hate. Hopefully the FTC's renewed authority over "information service" can be demonstrated for the virtue it is before it's too late.
What not offering telephone or television service gets you is avoiding the need to negotiate with the city for a television franchise. These agreements are usually stuffed with grab-bags for the municipal government (e.g. per-user fee, 5% of revenue off the top, offer XYZ public-access channels, build out to XYZ neighborhoods). All of this is imposed by the local government, not the FCC.
If you just want to run an ISP, build out where you think you can make a profit, and don't want the city to skim off the top, you can avoid that by not offering television or phone service. On the other hand, not offering television makes it hard to compete. People really do care about television service. I lived in an apartment building in Baltimore that had both cable and FiOS. FiOS was internet-only, because Verizon couldn't get a television franchise in the city. I found out I was the first one on my floor (of dozens of apartments) that had subscribed to fiber since the building was built 4-5 years before. All because people really love their television bundles. (There is a reason Google Fiber offered television service.)
Probably not. Franchising authority extends only to television. Municipalities aren't permitted (under federal law) to leverage their authority over the television side to regulate the broadband side.
I suspect the best thing municipalities can do is to make it easy to build competing systems. Take the list of concessions that Google Fiber cities made in return for getting service and commit to doing that for any potential entrant. Adopt one-touch make ready rules, maintain city-owned ducts in good shape and make it easy to get permits. Lay dark fiber every time the city digs things up to put in sewers or roads. Even a little bit of competition can have significant effects. E.g. in the D.C. metro area Comcast has no data caps because it's in competition with Verizon, RCN, and Cox. At the state level, municipal networks can provide a backstop for places (e.g. rural Maryland) that can't support sufficient private competition.
I would really like to see a business case study of building out and operating an HFC network in a single average suburb, and how that varies with how cooperative the suburb is.
Could any of the economies of scale enjoyed by the huge/evil ISPs be recaptured by using some kind of franchise-model where the locals can own an ISP like they would a McDonalds?
I think towns might be more willing to make those concessions if at least some of the competitors were local small businesses rather than giant corporations like Google.
Google Fiber failed because being a telecom network operator means tying up billions in capital assets in your infrastructure and then only making 10% margins.
Google’s business model is built around low capex and 35% margins. It’s simply a terrible fit for the other side of the company. Exponential growth becomes logarithmic growth and drags down their financials if they scale out too far.
The opposite is true: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-.... Google got tons of concessions from Fiber cities that other providers don't get, such as free power and free use of public property. There was nothing special about Kansas City--cities were falling over themselves to offer Google concessions in return for getting Fiber.
That's laughable. If Google was to take a VZ, there would be no VZ. Same goes for Comcast, AT&T etc.
The reality is that Google has no interest in taking on carriers. There's nothing sexy is digging treches and hiring Fat Joe, who belches, farts in a workplace, drinks a litter of coke, votes Trump and goes to work at -4C to splice fiber. You won't get accolades. You would only get shit if fiber is out and Paris Hilton can't watch her Netflix.
Here in Seattle our condo building is in the middle of something insane - Comcast is actively installing their network in our building; previously we were only served by Wave Broadband. The local government has finally pushed back on what used to be de facto "gentlemen's agreements" to not allow competition in buildings. Excited to see what this brings!
Do you think the "monopoly" concept may still apply when looked at through the Net Neutrality argument that ISPs may throttle/block services which compete with their own (possibly franchised) services?
I too live in the DMV area and am on the lookout for an apartment with decent internet.
Sure. You can have market power in the antitrust sense without being a legal monopoly.
I don't know where you work, but I'm personally loving the Annapolis area. (As I like to say, VA won't let you have weed, DC won't let you have guns, but MD will let you have both.) I also have two fiber providers to my house, and the state is building municipal fiber in the more rural counties that don't have FiOS.
Ahhhh Annapolis... Home to a big naval academy & supporting infrastructure/economy. That sounds great. My hope is to find a sweet/similar deal somewhere between Laurel & Crystal City.
If your view of the Second Amendment runs more towards militias than self defense, MD isn't bad. For long guns, there is no permit required, and either concealed or open carry is allowed without a permit. The ban on "assault style" weapons just means the state police runs a website listing all the semi-auto rifles you can legally buy (which is a lot). You can get your 30-round magazines in Virginia and bring them in with no trouble.
For long guns (which is kind of pointless, I suppose). The point is that there is nothing preventing you from stocking up on arms for when MD/DE/PA have to become their own country.
You’ll need to shoot for constitutional carry. Here in KS (least gun laws in the nation) there is statewide open & concealed carry, no license required, at schools, bars, university. Though there would be a trespassing charge if you refuse to leave if asked. Still need a CCH license to get around federal Gun Free School Zones. No NICS if you have CCW.
The recent Firearms Protection Act says firearms and accessories (suppressors) made in KS are exempt from federal regulation. Though a couple of guys lost their federal case when they built a suppressor and sold it; at least no prison sentence.
I wonder how much this has changed recently. We have PS Vue, sling, Youtube XYZ. Could you partner with one them to provide a discount to their services? Do the same with Vonage/etc?
Municipal Monopoly agreements are not illegal. No monopoly is illegal. _Abuse_ of monopoly power is illegal. Cable TV is a government granted m.onopoly
> Isn't it ironic that the only way for a startup ISP to get around the local monopoly agreement is to not provide services which are regulated by the FCC?
Isn't it telling that the FCC is repealing the consumer-protecting regulations, and not the monopoly-protecting ones?
What the heck are you getting at? You don't seem to be making a clear point. Federal regulation of most common monopolies is a good idea, and the internet has thrived under the net neutrality regulations.
The “everyone who disagrees with me is a paid shill because I surround myself in an echo chamber and can’t fathom of a legitimately dissenting opinion” mindset on the internet is more toxic and disturbing than actual astroturfing (insofar as it is far more prevalent at this time). It adds nothing to the discussion, stifles the sharing of unpopular opinions, and only reinforces the echo chamber. Please consider the ramifications of such accusations and in cases where you have proof, present it in lieu of the substance-less attack.
Crowdsourceable? If you need a couple thousand users, would it be possible to run a marketing campaign, get pre-purchase commitments of $100-200, and give some rewards to early adopters? If you raise enough funding, you're good, if not, just cancel the campaign.
> Google Fiber works better when communities are connected together. So we’ve divided Kansas City into small communities we call “fiberhoods.” We’ll install only where there’s enough interest, and we’ll install sooner in fiberhoods where there’s more interest.
I have a gigabit connection, and regularly verify my bandwidth. It's usually not actually in four digits, but I see 800+ megabit on a pretty regular basis.
It amuses* me that the rural Northwest and Yorkshire Dales can get orders of magnitude faster yet cheaper broadband than my parents in suburban Manchester.
I wonder if this would be feasible at the neighborhood level via Home owners association. The neighborhood gets a tower and microwave link to a backhaul station, and provides internet via wifi or wires to the neighborhood.
I think our neighboorhood is about 130 houses. probably not enough to make it cost effective.
On the flip side, maybe starting a local company to provide LOS microwave hookups to the various neighborhoods in the area could make it work.
If you can somehow convince your HOA to let you put up a tower, then yes, it's feasible. And if you are doing microwave link only, it's pretty cheap.
You can rent space on a nearby cell tower for a pricy-but-not-insane monthly fee, and they'll usually have decent backhaul already present. (American Tower had a WISP sales program specifically for this at one point, I'm not sure if they still do). Run point-to-point from there to your neighborhood via some microwave WISP gear.
If you had a volunteer from the HOA willing to setup and manage it (a bigger ask than it sounds like), and if all 130 houses would agree to pay $50/month, then the math would work out OK (at least, using pricing I got in suburban Michigan about 4 years ago).
> If you can somehow convince your HOA to let you put up a tower.
You don't have to convince them, let the FCC do that. I lived in an area with a heavy handed HOA. The only decent broadband was a WISP. They had a few go rounds with the HOA, but they can't regulate antennas. In the end the WISP put a tower on my roof - I never heard a word. They may try, but they don't have authority to regulate it.
> They had a few go rounds with the HOA, but they can't regulate antennas.
That's a little bit of an overstatement. HOAs can regulate antennas unless the FCC (or Congress) makes an exception.
In the case of WISP, there is an exception that applies: 47 CFR 1.4000 [1]. WISPs would fall under the exception for antennas for "fixed wireless signals". A "fixed wireless signal" is "any commercial non-broadcast communications signals transmitted via wireless technology to and/or from a fixed customer location".
I think you have a flawed assumption that the big telcos that own the tower and backhaul aren't going to charge content providers for access to that tower.
> you have a flawed assumption that the big telcos that own the tower and backhaul
Most cell towers are owned by a third party (not a big telco), and they'll lease to anyone if you have the cash, and the site has the capacity (physical space, weight/wind requirements, etc). You can lease from American Tower, Crown Castle, SBA, etc.
The existing backhaul is often owned by existing monopoly telecom providers. But not always. And competitive non-big-telco commercial operators will often install service to a site for you, if you are willing to pay for it. For example, I'm looking at a cell site in Michigan right now, that's deep in AT&T territory, but Sprint fiber is actually the installed backhaul provider, and four other commercial providers will install service there for a price.
You can know all of this upfront, before you sign anything, so there's very little risk in terms of tower space or backhaul availability. People have been doing this for decades now, it's not as ill-defined as it might seem.
Speaking from today's perspective, you're correct. But it won't be long until all the third parties et. al figure out they too can get into the paid access game. Contracts will be revised. Rents will be extracted. Because there are no regulations to put a check on greed.
Contrary to the claims made if one is to remove municipal blocks fiber is very easy and very cheap to install. What makes fiber installation expensive is municipal regulations
Clearly I’m not the guy to talk to about tor/onion. I’m wondering if a network could be set up across thousands of homes somehow and that network could purchase priority of its traffic. Basically there’s always a way to add another layer of abstraction to circumvent a lower layers restrictions.
Yes, a mesh network would work for that, then you just need a method to measure how much traffic each node serves then pay the node operators for that.
I know there were mesh networks with wireless microwave transmitters deployed in some rural areas, but I can't find the articles. It's probably going to get more and more attention though, along with distributed electricity and similar things as technology progresses.
About the wireless approach, Monkeybrains (https://www.monkeybrains.net/residential.php) in SF seems to do this. I believe I read somewhere that they're planning on replacing the wireless stuff with fiber for areas where they have high customer density. They're awesome, the service is good (except when it rains. Thanks california), it's cheap ($35) and I've been pretty happy with it.
I wonder if that could work to bootstap an isp. Obviously the wireless thing won't work in less dense areas and is subject to weather but maybe a successful business in the city could provide enough capital to expand to the suburbs.
Thank you maxsilver, this is one of the most informative posts I've seen on HackerNews.
Question, you said: This is usually a phone companies central office
Are there risks involved with that? Like for example, they could start playing games with you by saying 'sorry we're doing construction for a week, you can't access your office' ? Maybe a bad example, but I mean, would it make more sense to do it outside of their office?
> Are there risks involved with that? Like for example, they could start playing games with you by saying 'sorry we're doing construction for a week, you can't access your office' ?
Probably? I've never written up a plan using an actual monopoly telco's CO, exactly for this reason. It's easier to find anywhere else to start from, and usually cheaper too.
I only mention it because my experience is mostly suburban / small city related, and I know the majority of small ISP / WISP guys are hyper-rural. They may not have any other options available to them.
I'm having trouble finding it now, but didn't the FCC overturn the rule that says ISP's have to sell bandwidth to other ISP's? If they do not, or they are able to make it to where they do not have to, they could pretty easily prevent people from doing this or charge some huge amount for a contract to connect directly to a backbone.
Yes absolutely, but it's not really a problem on the commercial market because there's enough competition there.
In my small city in Michigan, for example, there's exactly one phone company and one cable company for residential uses. But there are 4 different local companies selling commercial bandwidth backhaul, in addition to nationwide major providers like Level3 and AT&T.
If you're somewhere truly rural, this can be an issue, the local monopoly might not let you buy commercial (re-sellable) bandwidth. But in most cities -- even small ones, it's probably not a major issue.
At the moment, commercial ISP services are still somewhat competitive. It's the residential ones that are completely monopolized.
This is cool, thank you for explaining. It never occurred to me that it would be so different for commercial offerings. The main question I have with ideas like this is where the shitty pricing scams are going to be happening—if it's the residential companies, then yeah, this is perfect. But if it's Level3 that's shaking down Netflix for more money, for example, then the "fork" isn't happening high enough up the chain. Do you have any insight into this part of the equation?
Please don't be offended, I am only pointing this out because you are obvious very intelligent and expert in the field.
>If your somewhere
*you're
I only point it out because I know some people discount comments that have grammar and spelling errors.
Thanks for the super informative posts!
Edit: I guess I offended, based on the downvotes. I only pointed it out since it was used incorrectly in the posts. I was trying to be helpful, apologies if I was being a dick.
I didn't downvote you, but you might have gotten downvotes because the beginning of your post built up anticipation by making it sound like you had some amazing point/rebuttal to drop, and then seeing only an `s/your/you're` was a huge disappointment ;-)
Based only on this description it sounds like a Kickstarter-esque model might work. E.g. get tens to hundreds of dollars from thousands of would-be customers, then start building once the funding goal is reached. Contributors would get X GBs or Y months of service once the utility is operational.
People in Michigan are getting fed up with this situation. Lyndon Township passed a 20 year millage to fund a municipal fiber network. The vote passed 2-1 with almost 50% turnout in a non-general election year. The tax will cost every $200K household about $300/year; $6000 total. That's on top of the monthly fees they intend to pay for the service.
People want good fixed broadband Internet. They are willing to pay for it. The telcos and cable operators don't care; they're happy with the customer base they have and their horizon is measured in quarters, not decades, so they're entirely uninterested in the effort and investment needed to build out such systems. They want the low hanging low effort fruit.
This NN outcome won't change any of that; whatever ambition these companies have is now focused on the windfalls they'll make from the peering agreements they're going to negotiate with Netflix et al. and none of that money will find its way to build outs.
You've covered the "last mile", but there is the upstream world to take into consideration.
1) Connecting into a CO is one thing, but your fiber is going to need to connect into something. Who is paying for your optics, is there a port or line card that can accept those optics? Does the CO actually have enough bandwidth upstream? This is a real issue.
Back in the 90s, I helped set up an ISP in Boston proper and our main competition had well over a 1000 customers attached to a single T1 (1.5mb/s) link. Everyone wanted 28.8k speeds (lol), but would normally get ~300 to 2400bps. The competition had a bunch of modems with a single upstream link. No one wanted what we were selling - guaranteed bandwidth / true 28.8 bandwidth all the time. People wanted $19.99/unlimited all you can eat. People still want that today.
Back to the CO, maybe you are lucky and they have some open ports. Worst case scenario, they want you to plop down a router and you'll do 10gb/e between. You can go with a homemade box and hope that it is stable, or you can buy expensive network gear.
2) To your customers, that "CO" is the "internet", but to that vendor/telco, it is just a single point of presence (POP). That CO has to connect to other POPs that are owned by them, and that costs real money. Eventually through a unknown number of hops, your traffic will hit an exchange point or carrier hotel. This is where your traffic exits their network and is taken up by another provider and/or company (google has their own fiber plan, for example). The amount of bandwidth at these peering/access points is finite and providers choose to peer with each other, usually at no charge, if there is an equitable distribution of traffic. The last thing that you want is for one company to take up all of the (finite) bandwidth at a peering point.
An ISP connects to multiple carriers (l3, cogent, comcast, att,verizon, etc) so that your customers have quick access to the websites/services that they want to visit - which most likely have to traverse one of those other providers. Similarly, their customers will want to access services that you are hosting, so you will take in a similar amount of ingress traffic.
With the fiber network that you are connecting your customers to, they'll most likely want to access bandwidth intensive services. You better hope that your CO has upstream capacity and a fast path to netflix/hulu/facebook/google/akamai/etc.
Or you, as a internet service provider, try and peer directly with the content providers if they allow it. If there are only 2-3 hops between you and Netflix, your users will love you. If they have to bounce around the country a couple of times, your customers will go back to Comcast (because they have a well connected backbone).
3) This doesn't even cover where you are going to get your IP addresses, if your upstream provider will announce them in BGP for you, etc. Or maybe you connect in to two carriers, get an ASN and announce your networks yourself. You are still at the mercy of your upstream providers.
I think a lot of these details are often overlooked when someone talks about network neutrality. I think network neutrality is a glib term for a number of issues:
- filtering of traffic and/or inability to access a service
- loss of freedom to host stuff "for free" on the internet
- lack of competition in "the last mile".
The FCC/TitleII stuff, from what I've heard, negatively impacted small WISPs that were trying to start up, by assuming that they were the same size as major wireless providers. A $20k fine because your lawyer failed to properly submit paperwork can wipe you out if you are a simple provider that is trying to provide access to a small community. You aren't AT&T, but title II will assume that you are - and penalize you accordingly.
For more information, read some of these filings/papers:
Say you have a HOA with 100 houses and you got the last mile wired with fiber. There is probably some place ( such as community center ) that is owned by HOA itself. You get 100 pairs to that building. 10G LR SFP+ are $40 a pop all day. So you need $80 per link once. 48x 10G port switches are $3k all day. So it is 24x edges with a reasonable fabric oversubscription - so you need 5 of those because you want to oversubscribe core rather than the edge as edge requires interaction with a customer while core requires simple internal upgrades. In reality we are goig to do 1Gbit/sec to every drop delivered over 10G so we only need 100Gbit/sec to the edge. Lets spend another $10K on the "core switches" - which in reality are going to be the same as the edges but we will provision them in a way where should this take off we could replace core with 40 and 100G. All of this is going to cost us very little money. Hell, lets pretend it costs us $50K just for the sake of the argument because we like buying really expensive stuff
We can ride a single fiber pair ( remember, this is a residential service, so screw redundancy ) to one of the major interconnect centers because we can drop DWDM gear on our side ( prisms are cheap as hell ) and rent a rack in that interconnect location.
Monthlies:
$10K/mo ( worst case scenario ) DF to interconnect point
$2.5K/mo ( rack at the interconnect point )
This gives us the L2 access. But that's not a problem. The problem is that 100Gbit/sec of non-congested IP transit is abou 55c per mbit/sec so that is $55K/mo.
So your cost is $67K/mo to provide 100 houses in a HOA with 1Gbit/sec of IP.
Lets say that you are in a magic place called say... NYC and it just happened that this wonderful thing is a building located right next to one of the big interconnect points and the developer who developed this highrise owns both buildings. You nuke dark fiber monthly cost. Hell, lets even pretend that the developer who owns both buildings lives in a building that we are wiring and he wants high speed internet connectivity to be able to watch NetFlix and PornTube. So there's not only no cost for dark fiber but there's no rack cost.
You are still at $55K/mo of non-congested IP to provide 1Gbit/sec access to every one of those 100 apartments.
Kind of insane to not oversubscribe residential or small/medium business connections, it's extremely rare that 100 houses would saturate a 10Gb line or even half that.
When you pay $50/mo for an internet connection you aren't paying for guaranteed bandwidth, you're just hoping the ISP has enough capacity to meet peak demand - not much different from your local electric provider.
It'd cost me roughly ~$3000/mo for a 10Gb point-to-point link from Boise to Equinix in Seattle from Zayo, and about another $2500/mo for a 10Gb transit connections from Hurricane Electric. You could serve quite a lot of households from that, 50-100:1 oversubscription is pretty common for residential/small business service - so that 10Gb connection could pretty safely serve 500 households reducing your fixed costs to $11/customer/mo.
What we need a boatload of small regional networks ( like the one with 100 houses of HOA ) that have an open peering policy. If you can peer out 50% of your traffic at $0.01 per mbit ($100/mo PNIs to CloudFlare, JoeSchmoeNet, FLIX etc) then you have the same non-congested non-oversubscribed exit for 50% less.
And this is where you are getting into some really interesting stuff:
what you want to do is be an ISP and content originator. In that case you effectively are double-selling your bandwidth since eyeball networks are bringing content in while web farms are pushing content out.
Oversubscription is a reality but it transparently works only on a very large scale - which is why Verizon and Comcast should be able to provide extremely high speed connections ( they don't due to their peering and interconnect policies but that's a separate thing ).
> Who is paying for your optics, is there a port or line card that can accept those optics? Does the CO actually have enough bandwidth upstream? This is a real issue. (snip) You better hope that your CO has upstream capacity and a fast path to netflix/hulu/facebook/google/akamai/etc.
Yes and yes. I don't want to dismiss this, it's a real need, but this is what you pay your upstream for. I've never seen a provider not take care of it.
I suppose if you cheap out on your upstream, this can be an issue. I can't imagine someone doing all the work to build a Fiber ISP, and then cheap out on the actual internet service, but I suppose anything is possible.
> This doesn't even cover where you are going to get your IP addresses, if your upstream provider will announce them in BGP for you, etc. Or maybe you connect in to two carriers, get an ASN and announce your networks yourself. You are still at the mercy of your upstream providers.
I don't know how common this is, but my upstream providers would just sell me the IP addresses and were flexible enough to handle either scenario.
> You are still at the mercy of your upstream providers.
Absolutely. This is always true, until you get large enough to be the upstream provider yourself and peer with others directly. But since upstream is competitive, and carries heavy contracts with teeth, you are mostly shielded from the worst atrocities.
It's kind of like forming a union. Sure, you're still "at the mercy of the employer", but you have way better bargaining power to prevent major problems, when you represent 10,000 internet users instead of just one. It's not perfect by any means. But it's worlds better than anything folks are used to on the residential side.
> The FCC/TitleII stuff, from what I've heard, negatively impacted small WISPs that were trying to start up,
Yes, fines should be lower for small business. But these guys could also just not break the law.
The complaints I've seen from some small WISPs are from people who are cheap and lazy, and want to do some pretty sketchy things. (Intentionally throttle Netflix to save upstream bandwidth, for example, because they want to sell 20mbps but can only provide 2mbps). These are blatant violations of Net Neutrality that would cause a shitstorm when AT&T/Comcast does it. But because they are 'small businesses', they want a bunch of sympathy despite doing the same slimy stuff.
I'm guessing there's probably an honest reason for some of the complaints, but the ones I've heard myself were all pretty shady. These providers give honest ISPs a bad name, and play into the false "everyone's just as evil as Comcast anyway" narrative.
> Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence.
Me too :) I think it was easier for Longmont as it's part of "Longmont Power and Communications" - they were able to run a lot of fiber in existing infrastructure, and right of way was essentially a non-issue.
power companies seem to be in the best position to offer awesome internet. a local provider here has 1000/1000 for $99/mo. but unfortunately they haven't laid fiber in all of the neighborhoods, especially the older ones. so it's only the newer subdivisions that are getting it. :/
i'd be all over it. one less bill to worry about too. (just bundle internet + power)
Acenteck has been doing this in Michigan for the past few years in the Grand Rapids area. They keep pulling lines to new rural neighborhoods coming in. Basically get everyone on the block in one shot because Comcast/Charter have such a bad name.
> In Michigan, I could easily offer everyone residential 500mbps to the home via fiber for $50/month and cover all costs, no problem. But only after we already had a few thousand customers. The cost for your very first customer is somewhere north of $50k/each, and prices don't become reasonable until your in the thousands.
Sounds like you could benefit from and ICO to gauge interest and raise the capital necessary for infrastructure development ;)
No, it isn't. I live in NYC. I have access to exactly one broadband provider. So, if Spectrum starts blocking Vonage because they want you to pay for their VoIP instead (ISPs in the US have done this in the past), I'll have to drop Vonage and use Spectrum's VoIP. Repeat for blocking P2P, Google Wallet, Facetime, Netflix, etc (all of which have previous incidents in the US).
As someone from a country without net neutrality, I have to say this hasn't happened. Generally you get very cheap or free plans that are sponsored by Facebook or others that give priority to Facebook, but ISPs are always happy to take a little bit more money for an unlimited plan that gives you full access. And at least in my country, they're not unreasonably priced.
Even without net neutrality, your single monopoly ISP could triple their prices and there would be nothing you could do about it. The fact that they haven't seems to show that net neutrality probably isn't going to affect you all that badly. No sane company is going to block Google Wallet or Netflix.
Feels like net neutrality isn't the problem - it's Spectrum that is the problem. If repealing net neutrality gets your country to fix your real problem, then I'd say it's going to be a massively good thing in the long run as top parent on this comment chain implied.
It's not entirely clear whether they blocked it from being installed on their carrier locked phones, or if they blocked it from communicating with Google servers at the network level. Back in 2011 it was relatively uncommon to buy unlocked phones, particularly for use on CDMA networks. It sounds to me like they just blocked the phone from installing the application, rather than anything that net neutrality would prevent.
There's no legal reason that a carrier has to allow you to use an unlocked phone on their networks. My cable ISP doesn't allow me to bring my own modem, for example. From what I can tell, the net neutrality rules wouldn't have changed this situation at all.
edit: This article[1] is extremely informative; Verizon was not blocking anything at a network level, they were disabling the OS from accessing the necessary "secure element" (TrustZone) in some of their carrier locked phones, which made the Android APIs that Google Wallet relied on cease to function. Due to this, Google chose to not show the app on the Play Store to customers on Verizon because they didn't want people to try the app and have it fail.
So in conclusion, this "blocking" (if you can even call it that) is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand about net neutrality.
How long did it stay blocked? I bet they unblocked it as soon as customers complained.
Definitely an interesting example though. Nothing like that has ever happened in my country without net neutrality, but then we have a fairly competitive market where a single carrier trying that would lose their customers very quickly.
> That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?
The vast majority of people in the US only have access to a single broadband ISP. I live in NYC and only have access to one. My other options are slow DSL (under 15Mbps download and under 1Mbps upload), dialup, or using a hotspot that is generally limited to 15GB download (3 Netflix movies) for $90 a month.
That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?
EDIT: After reading more replies, it seems like you guys actually have no choice. Serious red flag that it sounds like net neutrality was covering up. I think you will be better in the long run with it removed, but you all need to get active and fix your ISP problem and create a free market.
In many regions in the U.S. you don't have any other ISPs. Cable & telecom companies have de-facto monopolies in most places; your only competition is often a reseller that uses the exact same pipes as the local telecom and so is subject to the same throttling.
Internet speeds are also ridiculously slow. In the heart of Silicon Valley, I'm on 5 MBPs/sec, even though the equipment can easily do gigabit. (How do I know this? Because if you pay several hundred bucks a month, they will upgrade your speed to gigabit without anyone coming out.)
Yeah you definitely have bigger problems than net neutrality. I'm in the middle of Africa, 30km from the CBD of a small city, and I have 1gb local / 100mb international fiber with no caps or throttling for the equivalent of ~$85/month. Plus I can WhatsApp the tech support if something goes wrong and they'll drive over and fix it within 30 mins or so.
I also have a choice of about 8 different ISPs offering me fiber lines to my door who seem to be in a price war with each other at the moment.
I don't have net neutrality though. But surely the problem you're facing is ISP/government monopoly related, not the net neutrality bit? Or do you think it's something else causing the ISP issues there?
It's totally ISP/monopoly related, but convincing the government to keep net neutrality regulations is generally viewed as easier than convincing them to break up monopoly telecoms. It was hard enough getting them to block the AT&T/T-mobile merger. The last time a company's been threatened with being broken up was Microsoft in the late 1990s, and they got off with a slap on the wrist (albeit one that made them reluctant to enter new markets, which opened the door for Google & Facebook, and Apple's resurgence, in the early 2000s).
Is that 100 up as well as down? How's the roundtrip latency to get a packet to a US server and back? In any case you have better internet than me for cheaper, and I'm two miles from downtown Bellevue, WA USA not out in the sticks of a flyover state. :(
Generally speaking though I'm also not particularly sad that this NN regulation has been repealed, I agree with the assessment that our problems are not from NN, lack of NN is merely one of many unpleasant possibilities with the current system so even if it was fully fixed there's still all the other problems, most of which have no workarounds. Lack of NN has a workaround. The fact that many employees at many businesses require using a VPN to work from home means that most ISPs will have no choice but to accept extra money to give those people unthrottled / uncensored lines that they take for granted right now as part of the base fee.
Speaking of flyover states, I'm in Kansas and have symmetrical gigabit from Google Fiber. They've recently moved in and I think that if net neutrality is really an issue, competitors like Google will be able to handily out compete the existing companies that already exist here. I tried to get AT&T Fiber for almost a month before finally giving up and getting Google Fiber.
Have you considered that maybe your internet is bad in the heart of silicon valley for the same reason your public transit, housing, etc., is bad? Symmetric gigabit is ~$80/month where I live, and I'm having 2-gig installed in a couple of weeks for $150/month. We've got all our utilities on poles, zoning variances are a breeze to get, and nobody cares that my house never got its final inspection. But we've got lots of Trump lawn signs around so people in Silicon Valley would never stoop to moving here.
Just as a counterpoint, I'm also in the heart of silicon valley. I have 125Mbps internet, with a few other options available, at a not-unreasonable cost.
I recently redid our garage to create a laundry area, and the inspector collaborated with me to identify the most efficient (and safe and legal) way to implement the plumbing, drainage, and electrical. It was neither confrontational nor onerous; I truly got value from a helpful, knowledgeable person that wanted the project to succeed.
We have more jobs than houses, our local schools are some of the best in the state, I have 3 parks in walking distance and a network of bike paths that run through the city. Miles of protected open space, with trails, farms, and facilities are all nearby.
I'm more than happy to pay the taxes to live here and to support the regulatory regimes that protect all of the above.
Certainly considered it - I'm a political moderate, my political views are generally a mishmash from both parties (really all parties, I've been known to vote Libertarian and Green as well, sometimes on the same ballot).
But I'll say that my sister lives in Houston, TX, which has a basically diametrically opposite political philosophy. And it's fucked up in entirely different ways. Traffic and public transportation both suck here, but public transportation is basically nonexistent in Houston, and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage (which actually happened in my sister's neighborhood - some woman with a small child in the back seat cut off a guy in a pickup truck, so he pulled out a handgun and opened fire). Our house prices are ridiculous, but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves, while Houston's public parkland exists but is nowhere near as easy to get to or enjoy. Our Internet sucks, but PG&E is pretty reasonable and actually fixes outages fairly rapidly (even if it does have a tendency to burn down Santa Rosa), while my sister's electric bill goes through half a dozen companies, each of which tries to extract as much money from the customer while providing as little service as possible.
On balance I prefer the Californian system, though I'm open to compromise systems that combine the best of both worlds. (We're both initially from Boston, BTW, which is kinda in the middle of those two politically but fucked up in its own special charming way. At least the streets in both Silicon Valley and Houston are laid out in a grid, with more than one lane apiece and traffic lights in the appropriate places, and they can build a new public works project without the ceiling caving in.)
> and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage
Sorry, but yeah, you do. no major city is immune from crime, sadly.
> but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves
We can do that here too. I'm not in Houston, though, but Houston isn't representative of Texas. Neither is Dallas, though.
I found that I had more internet options when I moved away from San Jose and landed here. I had FIOS, Cox, Charter, wireless ISPs, even had that Clear service for a while. Now I live out in the cow fields and have Suddenlink for cable. My other internet options would be DSL or wireless. 200/20 down for $140/mo, business package with a static IP.
Most cities don't have poles, especially up here in the Northeast (snowstorms and such), so it's not like another cable company can come along and just string another wire to an existing pole.
> The thing is, these rules don't even apply in the case of Google Wallet, because Verizon isn't blocking anything. Why'd I bother explaining them, then? So you can see exactly how they don't apply.
> Unlike the tethering app that requires root access, Verizon isn't actively preventing the Wallet app from being installed on phones. That's all Google. If Google wanted to make the Wallet app compatible for every Verizon phone in the Play Store such that you could download and install it, it could. There is absolutely nothing to stop that happening - but the app wouldn't actually work.
All of the services you mention were founded in the US on NN principles. We wouldn't have services like Netflix or Facebook or Google if NN had not been in place.
What web services & startups have come out of your country recently that are house hold brand names? Can you name any?
Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015. All three of the companies you mentioned were up and running prior to that. So net neutrality enabling them doesn't seem to be correct to me.
EDIT: As for my country.. c'mon, low blow. Most of the people in my country are having some difficult problems with simpler issues than video streaming. We're getting there though, hopefully!
> Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015.
You are off by 10 or more years, depending on how you count. Some modes of internet service were under regulations which promoted something like neutrality before they were regulated specifically as internet service rather than ancillary to telephone service, but the FCC adopted a formal net neutrality policy (the Open Internet Policy Statement) in 2005 which was enforced through case-by-case action without general regulations from then until 2010 when that approachbwas struck down by the courts; at the time, the FCC was already developing net neutrality regulations under Title I, which it adopted also in 2010. Those rules were struck down in 2014, with the court saying that rules of that style could only be adopted under Title II authority. The FCC then initially drafted slightly weaker rules under Title I (on the theory that they could avoid crossing the line requiring Title II reclassification), but after the robust public comment period on that draft adopted, in 2015, regulations under Title II.
Net neutrality has been FCC policy since 2005, and every enforcement avenue except Title II regulation has been foreclosed by the courts.
> Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015.
The 2015 regulations were a replacement for 2010 regulations. The 2010 regulations were struck down in court on the grounds that they exceeded the FCC's powers under Title 1 of the Communications Act; the court told the FCC they would have to classify ISPs as Title 2 Common Carriers in order to enforce net neutrality.
2015 was when official rules were put into place to protect Net Neutrality. But before that, ISPs had generally worked in a way favorable towards Net Neutrality. But then they started to act against Net Neutrality and then the rules were put into place.
So, you could argue that we've have net neutrality in principle since the internet existed (or at least up until 10 or so years ago when ISPs started to push back) but we have only had Net Neutrality enshrined in regulation for a couple years.
It appears that going forward we will have neither.
No. The entire history of the internet has been built and developed under NN principles. It was merely codified by the FCC in 2015. Companies regularly violated these principles in the past, and the FCC has previously intervened on behalf of customers. Now, there are no protections, with the FCC stating that it will no longer intervene for these violations.
My point was that the innovation from NN was a HUGE deal for the US economically and all the innovation came out of that, i.e. Netflix, Google, Amazon. If a country like yours has no NN protections then you probably won't see innovation like this in your country.
That misses the point. NN protections were enforced even if they were not codified by the FCC, through the courts. Once they were hard coded it made it a lot harder for ISPs to cheat. That's all 2015 was about, making it harder for ISPs to throttle so we didn't have to sue every time. It wasn't about putting practices into place that weren't there before, it was about hard coding practices that were enforced for years so that it was simpler to enforce. That's all.
The new ruling by the FCC does the opposite. It encourages the ISPs to cheat in a blatantly obvious way.
The current regulations around Net Neutrality have only officially existed for that long. Previous attempts at regulation happened before that, and the principles around net neutrality were how the Internet worked for a long time until ISPs began to go a different direction.
So, we've had lowercase net neutrality for basically the entire existence of the Internet. But the uppercase Net Neutrality has only been around for a couple years, but came into existence because we were losing the lowercase version.
exactly. before 2015, you had to pay Comcast extra if you wanted a package that included access to Google, and even more if you wanted reasonable speeds to get to your Facebook feeds
those were the golden days that created the internet. remember when Microsoft payed out to isps to close down access to altavista so they could get more users to use Bing?
Every example I gave in my comment you are replying to are things that a US ISP did prior to the implementation of net neutrality. Even during net neutrality multiple ISPs were caught artificially throttling Netflix to attempt to get payouts.
Ho! Amazing, thanks for clarifying. Your ISPs are pretty messed up. Are they government monopolies? I think your problems are far, far deeper than net neutrality, and just re-affirms my belief that net neutrality was a band-aid that needed to come off for you guys to wake up and fix your problems directly at the source. I wish you well in the fight ahead!
Well yes, most of the US's problem stem from the fact that Corporations Are People (when it suits them to be), and can thus give unlimited amounts of money to politicians because Money Is Free Speech.
It’s been getting worse and worse over the past few decades because of this, and we may be near the point of violent revolution. Except probably not because hey, who has time for that when they gotta put in forty hours a week plus overtime, or three part time jobs, just to barely fail to make ends meet?
What type of competition do you have among your ISPs? I think this is a fear in the US because many people are locked into a single ISP because of geography.
Tons of competition. I have a choice of multiple different fiber line providers, government copper phone line provider, a bunch of different wireless options, and then multiple different ISPs who run over those different fiber or copper lines or 4G towers.
Generally small towns would only have access to 1 fiber or copper line provider (generally Telkom our useless government supplier), but multiple ISPs running on that line so it's not that bad, but I live in the suburbs near a city so I have a lot more choice.
I wanted to add that I think everyone's case is different. I had a tenure in Chicago and all of the apartment buildings I lived in were locked to a single ISP. This is very much so a YMMV.
I'm definitely not going to be that guy who says his ISP is the exception, but Spectrum, basically the evolution of Time Warner Cable, hasn't even dabbled in paid prioritization. Time Warner Cable didn't start fiddling with fast and slow lanes when Comcast tried it and never put out any such policy. That's why I liked living in a TWC city and not a Comcast city (ever noticed there are barely any cities that have both TWC and Comcast? That's intentional)
However, I will say that the management of TWC left once Charter completed the purchase, and as such they might start new prioritization policies and anti-net neutrality stuff. But from what I've seen, Spectrum doesn't seem to be publicly expressing interest in that stuff.
Unless I see it in a policy change on their website I won't be concerned.
(Okay now time for the part where I tell you that I am completely for net neutrality and think that Ajit Pai is a piece of excrement for gutting net neutrality laws because judging from how I worded my message it probably seemed like I supported the repeal. In short, screw Ajit Pai.)
If the thrown-together design of TWC's official app is any indication, I find it more likely that the previous leadership knew that software wasn't their specialty and (rightfully) shied away from building software businesses before they became worth prioritizing in the first place. Now that they can amortize the costs of such development over the entire Charter-TWC group, it may very well become worthwhile... not to mention that they'll be looking for new profit centers given the demise of cable [0]. So our insulation from this may be short-lived.
To your parenthetical point, I actually find it fascinating from a psychological perspective that someone like Ajit Pai can present himself as, and very possibly believe himself to be, a "man of the people" while simultaneously literally making a mockery of their interests [1]. Someone with a mind so ungrounded that it can function under that level of cognitive dissonance is as deserving of pity as they are of ire. (Or perhaps that's what I tell myself about most politicians so that my veins don't burst.)
I think TWC didn't implement any of the anti-consumer technical measures not due to altruism, but due to a lack of technical acumen. They implemented anti-consumer human measures because they had that ability.
> As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it? Who do I have to pay at the node to get to "plug into" it or whatever?
You'll have to buy transit from someone, which will most likely be terminated at a neutral internet exchange / data center. You'll pay the transit provider (e.g. Hurricane Electric) for the bandwidth, and monthly fees to the data center for colocation and the cross-connect.
To get that transit back to a point of presence from where you'll branch out service to end users, you'll either have to bury your own fiber (very expensive - tens of thousands of $ per mile even in rural areas not to mention maintenance costs), lease fiber through someone else (e.g. Zayo) (also very expensive), or use wireless backhauls (cheaper but wireless comes with its own set of headaches).
Also you'll have to get a CCNA yourself or pay someone to manage your network since a carrier network is nothing like a home network.
Now by the time you get service back to your point of presence, you'll have to figure out how to get it to people. Burying fiber is extremely expensive, no way around it. Fixed wireless is a simpler option but getting a line of sight to the customer isn't always feasible, and you'll never have the bandwidth of fiber.
That's assuming people even want it. Out in a semi-rural area there may not be much competition, but the population density is so low putting up a tower or burying fiber may not be viable. In any city you're likely to have cable or DSL companies already there, with a price point that may be difficult to convince people to switch. Most people won't care about philosophical arguments about net neutrality, or be willing to pay a lot more for higher speeds.
In my opinion your best bet is to rally a coalition of people in your area to petition the municipality to bury the fiber and provide it as a utility. If you're uncomfortable with the gov't being an ISP, there is a very interesting model where the city provides an open access network which lets private ISPs plug in as virtual network layers, letting customers easily switch providers: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/06/what-...
> As a private citizen, can I purchase a bunch of land between me and, I dunno, a DNS node or whatever and just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it?
I'm sure you can, the issue is do you have a couple million $ in your bank account to do this?
This is the route I'm thinking - crowdfunded. Problem is how do you crowdfund "unfettered, utility-style access to the internet" when your funders are spread across the country? It would have to be municipality by municipality. Much harder to get a concentrated volume of funding.
Could go the VC route, are there other companies doing this right now? Is the profit model not sellable to a VC yet?
It might not be feasible until the actions of other ISPs drive demand high enough for new ones.
This is essentially how cable worked in the beginning[0]. In lots of rural areas, it is still the case that communities band together into co-operatives to provide power, cable, and broadband[1].
Co-Ops (at least mine) are awesome. I have fiber to my home and I live in the "middle of nowhere". The other two are the power company and the propane company. They act like a company - except they only try to provide a service and provide jobs, not reap huge profits.
> I want to learn more about the internet and what it would take to bypass the ISPs. Can I do this?
Fwiw, a group called Toronto Meshnet [1] was investigating the opportunity for a community mesh project (which lacks incorporation and know-how of how to run an ISP) to partner with a non-profit ISP [2] (that lacks capacity, constantly gets shut out of the last-mile to new condo developments, but understands the ISP side) to have mesh accommodate the last-mile into homes.[3]
I think they're in a slow-down phase right now as they didn't get funding, but I imagine there's legs in this approach, and they'll ramp up again :)
In San Francisco there's local ISP called MonkeyBrains that uses microwave tech to create a wireless network in the city. They put a receiver on top of your apartment/building and then run cat5 or use existing cable. It's pretty awesome and fast. So it can be done. I'm hopeful that people will be inspired to create their own local ISP in light of the new rules.
Mostly what you need is a lot of money and a legal team. There are some government granted monopolies in certain municipalities, but by and large I understand it's just a money problem. The incumbents have tons of established infrastructure; you're starting from scratch.
Along the same lines, curious, what if it was a WiFi mesh network connected to a gateway node. You could bridge cities/regions by gateway. Inspiration stemming from Havana’s 50mi mesh intranet.
There are currently small operations that offer wireless broadband by putting the receiving equipment on your roof (sometimes they give you a discount if you serve as a repeater) and they purchase wireless data from larger companies' cell towers.
Building a mesh network* is a much cheaper, more realistic alternative.
Also, with regard to your point about "starting an ISP", I don't know the legalities and IANAL, but NYC Mesh goes out of their way to state that they _are not_ an ISP - there's probably a reason for that.
Fundamentally, mesh network is a shared medium. Think of it as ethernet over hubs. As long as there are not lots of talkers it works just fine. The more talkers you get the worse it becomes.
If those "talkers" all had hubs which were participants in the mesh, would that help the network "scale"?
Also, _what is_ the "scale" issue? Network congestion? Latency introduced by the need to relay a message from node A1 to node Zn? Something else entirely?
I sent a message to our mayor, to which he responded, regarding muni fiber... It seems the best way to approach it is via a public-private partnership - meaning, we (the residents of our 50,000+ city in SoCal) pay for the buildout, own the fiber infrastructure that should be good for at least 3-5 decades, while someone like Cox, GFiber or whomever provides billing/maintenance/operations.... that way it's a win win and the city doesn't have to get involved in becoming a full blown ISP.
In his response he said the topic's been brought up before. If I get his and the council's blessing, the next thing is to hit the ground and get probably 3000-5000 signatures and put this up on a ballot in 2018 November to see how the city feels. I'm optimistic however cause I've been hearing multiple complaints, on-goingly about bad service from ISPs (and we have Cox here, and I don't think they're that bad as opposed to Comcast) and probably a pet peeve is data caps... Sure, we've 1TB caps which is plenty, but w/advent of 4k TV and IPTV ... that may be very low.
Here's to hope that in a few years we all have FTTH where I live (crossing my fingers!)
> Is it feasible to just start running our own fiber to hubs?
It is, on the city level. Some created municipal broadband, and showed crooked monopolists and their paid shills to the door. To be clear - Comcast and their ilk fear municipal broadband way more than net neutrality rules. So expect fierce opposition, especially attempts to bribe local legislature to write laws forbidding or obstructing municipal networks.
> As a private citizen, can I ... just lay a super long fiber cable straight to it?
The other responses offer far more technical details than I can, and probably also a better long-term strategy, but here's a small thing you can do right now: knock on your neighbor's door, and offer a six-pack of good beer and half his internet bill in exchange for his WiFi password. If he says yes, cancel your service. Say you are moving to Bhutan and becoming a monk to make their "customer retention specialists" go away.
From my apartment in a fairly spread-out "city," I can see about ten wireless networks, half with a pretty good signal. I can only imagine what things are like in SF/NY, where techies are stacked on top of each other like dogs in a no-kill shelter.
It's quite expensive to start a fiber network. You might want to consider using wireless with a mesh network. In Detroit there's an organization that has become the leader:
In Detroit it's not real high speed because they're using foundation money to provide basic access, but there's no reason I know of that it couldn't be.
Here's more information on the mesh network in Detroit:
Back when the last mile was a real problem, people got pretty inventive with using directional antennas to establish links over vast distances using unlicensed spectrum, which as far as I know is totally legal still.
I did this for a few years in the late 90's, before anything better than POTS was available in my area. Used a 2.4 GHz 24 dBi antenna on my roof to reach an access point on a mountain about 7 miles away. This worked well; the network operators were competent and the service was more reliable than some of the systems I've had since.
Depends on where you live. Every city has different laws about how to run cable underneath the ground. The first cost you pay is figuring out where everyone's cables are. The second cost you pay is convincing the city to let you do it. The third cost you pay is doing the digging.
If you spin it off as a service to your block, then it might be possible...?
IMO the way to go if the ISP monopolies start getting unreasonable is to start single-issue voting for free municipal broadband. Possibly also run a campaign or grassroots organization for it as well. Comcast can't screw with you if nobody is using Comcast.
Besides the costs, getting all those easements takes a lot of time, and often legal work. This is why crowdsourcing fiber hasn't taken off, it's a nice idea but you'll go through a ton of money on permits and legal filings before you buy a single spool of cable.
The more likely next step is not cable-esque plans. It is ISPs shaking down Internet companies to try to get huge sums of money at the source.
As such, what you'll see as a consumer is just higher prices from _other_ companies, as they're forced to pay for access to bandwidth which you paid for.
This also means that most people won't understand the problem, and won't get upset with the correct people.
This is a travesty, akin to if every appliance manufacturer had to pay a recurring tribute to the electric company.
But hey... at least the Libertarians are all quite excited.
I so desperately wanted to use either of those, but MonkeyBrains would require me to mount something outside my building which wasn't going to be possible at either place I've lived in the city... and Sonic... well I got Sonic.
Sonic runs on AT&Ts lines. It was slow and had lag spikes. After about a year it got to be where the modem (and Internet) would cycle for a couple minutes about once every 2 hours. The (Sonic!) tech came out, found a fault on the line, and his advice was to get Comcast.
I also tried getting Wave, but couldn't.
I went through a similar runaround with my previous building (also in SF), where I tried to avoid Comcast. Eventually I caved.
Comcast was terrible and shady from the very beginning. They sold me an internet package they later claimed didn't exist(!) even though I had the offer in writing from the sales guy. So they just adjusted my bill to what they thought I should pay.
They eventually backed down after I kicked up a huge fuss (and took it to social media), but they also threw a bunch of free stuff I didn't want in to my package as "compensation", and guess who was paying for that when my promotional rate expired before they promised it would? My rate was constantly going up if I didn't fight them tooth and nail. I had to check every bill and almost every one had a new surprise. I have never worked with such a perfidious organization.
So after all that I wanted Anything But Comcast, which I already disliked before that experience. I've seriously considered tethering to Verizon Wireless as better...
But I like to do online gaming and Comcast is the only vaguely reasonable option at this point. They're a little less shady if you avoid ALL television service.
10 friends sharing a t1 falls apart if more than 1 friend wants to stream a movie at the same time. Or if just one friend wants to stream a HD movie. A t1 is 1.54mbit.
Ah, the good old days - when I had DSL with 1.1 Mbps up AND down, guaranteed. My ISP didn't even have a policy against resale so I shared with 15 units in 6 different buildings - all wired. I was always amazed how much better my dedicated 1.1 felt compared other plans boasting up to 5.
The "last mile" is a utility, and by its very nature will always result in monopolistic control.
It is impractical and irrational to wire up a home to multiple ISPs with their own fiber channels. Each channel could cost tens of thousands to install.
Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels. The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it. The ISP is responsible for everything that happens from the exchange upon up (inc. pricing, support, peerage agreements, interconnects, etc).
This way you can still choose Comcast if you wish but may also have several local ISPs competing for your business. When you choose to change no engineer needs to come to your house, they just plug and unplug you at the exchange.
This is done quite successfully in other countries around the world, like New Zealand where we mainly have one infrastructure provider (selected and monitored by the Government), who must offer fair and standard pricing to any ISP who wants to add value to the network.
As a result, we have many ISP options throughout the country and competition between providers is high.
What value do the ISPs actually add to the market?
It seems like a government granted middleman position to me, where I'd rather just purchase service from the government or the government's selected infrastructure manager.
Presumably there's already some base price for service that this infrastructure provider is charging everyone (a controller monopolist), what are you gaining on top of that by having a second middleman that is presumably also making a profit?
> What value do the ISPs actually add to the market?
They're the main point of contact for the end customers; as a typical customer, you only interact with Chorus (the public company that provides the fibre/copper in most of NZ) when they send technicians out to work on the connection upstream from your house.
So, the ISP handles billing, tech support, DNS, email, liaising with Chorus, etc. Different ISPs offer different service tiers, billing arrangements, options for buying/leasing the modem, etc.
Our residential electricity works similarly, which leads to retail companies offering both - for example I get one bill each month to pay for both fibre and electricity.
Given the government's track record with some big projects like healthcare.gov which is still a nightmare to use, I would not trust them to be an ISP. In fact, in the past, some states did (or still do) have their own ISP that they use at a lot of schools and public facilities. Ours was always slow with frequent outages.
I think a hybrid approach with the government managing and maintaining the physical lines and allowing isps to plug in and pay rent is the way to go. The ISP rent should be enough to cover the cost of physical line maintenance.
What are your specific complaints about healthcare.gov? I was out of the country when it initially rolled out, but have had no problems with it the past 2 years since I've moved back and needed to get it.
Washington State exchange is notoriously terrible in terms of downtime, availability, and customer service. I won't go into what I dealt with for six months using their service vs. my previous low-cost insurer that left the market due to regulations, but it was an absolute nightmare for me and my family. Small business owners got absolutely screwed in our state.
packet transit, installation, maintenance, customer service. Also most less technical ISP customers get a lot of value out of ISP managed equipment rental and don't want to buy and maintain a router-AP themselves.
Local loop unbundling for phone and DSL service was extremely successful in the US, there's not a lot of reason to think a government bid process would have done better than CLECs did.
> The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it.
What incentive does a non-profit have to invest the billions of dollars required to do these things? If you use public dollars to do it: what do you think happens when investment into upgrading from GPON to NGPON2 is competing for taxpayer dollars with roads and schools? I can't imagine that anyone in say San Francisco would rather have SFMTA running their internet than Comcast.
1) You get the government you deserve. If you're worried it would be mismanaged, become active.
2) I would absolutely rather have an unbiased and fair agency installing utilities than a rent seeking public company that is beholden to shareholder value.
You get the government your neighbors want. I'd vote in a heartbeat to raise water and sewer rates to upgrade our water systems so we could stop dumping untreated sewage into the Chesapeake Bay: https://www.baltimorebrew.com/2017/08/01/baltimore-released-.... But my neighbors won't do that. Do you think they'll be more forward looking when it comes to broadband? Or will all the retirees who dominate the voting decide that 50 mbps ought to be good enough for everybody?
Since my parents first got fiber 10 years ago, Verizon has spent a ton of money upgrading from BPON to GPON, and now is working on NGPON2. If a public utility were in charge, even if they were willing to raise the money to install fiber in the first place, there is no way in hell they'd have made those upgrades.
You can see this in practice. Here in Maryland, the only upgrade in transit service I can think of in my lifetime is running the Penn line from Baltimore on weekends. More typically, the public authorities run the transit systems on the edge of collapse. Simply maintaining existing service levels in the face of under-maintained infrastructure is considered a victory.
That has been tried in a few places, and I'm not sure that it has succeeded anywhere. Municipal fiber was laid where I used to live in Provo, UT and it had huge funding problems. ISPs could compete, but all the value is in the last mile not in the gateway.
Eventually Google bought it out, but the city had to increase taxes to help pay for the current bond, and was looking at more bonds to pay for it before Google stepped in.
It has definitely succeeded. For example, New Zealand uses this model, and we're actually in the middle of rolling out fiber to almost every house in the country.
Okay, so technically in New Zealand the last-mile infrastructure is owned by a utility company, not a non-profit. However, the utility companies are selected by the government and tightly regulated, so they act more like non-profits than typical companies. Also note that they aren't allowed to actually sell internet access to consumers; they only maintain the infrastructure.
When I lived there, I had 200mbps up and 200 down for $70 a month and it was great. This was before Google came to town. But since I didn't own property, I guess I was out of the loop on property taxes.
I had it as well at 100Mbs before Google fiber. The service itself worked great, but it had to be subsidized by taxpayers throughout its lifetime - it never broke even after the subscribers fees.
> The "last mile" is a utility, and by its very nature will always result in monopolistic control.
This is THE central point. Everyone saying that they would be OK with the latest FCC regs if there were only more competition need to consider this. In what bizarro world would anyone actually want ISPs competing for the last mile?
Coming in 2019, electric companies monitor your usage profile to tell when you turn on different appliances and charge you a higher rate for running your TV or charging your electric car. But don't worry, the free market will fix it.
In California you do get different rates if you get an electric car. You also get different rates (higher) if the State thinks you don't "need" air conditioning.
Is that because electric rates are heavily regulated as utilities, or because the free market let the only electric supplier do whatever they wanted to with your rate structure?
I think that would be a good value proposition for a city that does not already prefer one ISP over another. Interesting idea to spin something like this up.
> Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels.
That's an interesting idea, kinda like Interac for telecom. From what I hear, Interac has a bit of an issue with being fairly closed to new peering agreements, so I wonder how that could be solved for the telco space, maybe constitute the maintenance corporation to be open to bids from new ISPs.
Instead the "last mile" should be a non-profit funded by ISPs who lease the channels. The non-profit is responsible for installing the "last mile," upgrading it, and repairing defects in it.
Yes, that's called "government".
We do that with roads and mail, we can do the same with communications.
Even if you avoid the last mile cluster F*, you still need to rent physical space to ISPs for setting up their network equipment. With multiple ISPs, its not clear who should "own" the space. I doubt individual homeowners want to deal with that headache.
cars cost "tens of thousands" yet personal automobile ownership has been feasible and has a huge positive impact on the economy. If that 10-90K ballpark cost estimate is accurate then accessing the information superhighway could be a similar situation.
Right, but not being able to afford a car severely limits people's' access to jobs, care, entertainment, groceries, etc. And this would be worse; access to the Internet is starting to be assumed here in the US. If it's going to be it should be treated as a right.
I'm always surprised that folks on here don't think about the future of last mile connectivity being wireless, instead of wired. Next generation wireless networks (5G) are poised to have broadband like speeds, faster latency, and high bandwidth. Wireless operators have been pretty explicit in that their plan to get into the home broadband game. These networks are a few years away from a broad roll out, AT&T is starting next year. I predict there will soon be much more competition in the home broadband game and much of these net neutrality debates will seem pretty silly. Other cities like Boston already have a wireless broadband provider and are moving in this direction.
Wireless is inherent issues that fiber and copper does not.
1. Wireless is burst not pure data streams, latency issues.
2. High probability of interference.
3. High probability of collisions, wireless spectra bouncing off one another and objects, requiring multiple transmissions.
Big difference between Wireless and Wired / Fiber. Pokeman GO event in IL is a prime example of inherent issues.
So we shouldn't worry about the monopoly because it should "go away soon". How does that make any sense? You know, these same companies started out as multi-decade cable monopolies before they were providing monopolized internet service. You really think that will change? If it wasn't for the DoJ blocking mergers 90% of the country would already have a single internet provider.
Wireless internet for everyone will never be realistic. There's a theoretical limit to how much data you can send wirelessly, the "Shannon limit". On many bands we're already close to it, 90% of "5G" is just about using the rest of our bands more effectively. Once we're using all the frequency bands that penetrate far enough to be useful theres nothing you can do in increase wireless bandwidth. Theres more hope with satellites and narrow beams but these technologies are a decade away. 5G isn't going to do anything noticeable to ISP competition and I think you need to do more research on how 5G works if you think otherwise
I don't think I said that. Emotions seem to be running really high today! I admit my comment was a bit rash. I'm not against all government regulation of the industry, your comment is a bit lost on me. DoJ anti trust enforcement isn't the same as net neutrality debate, so I really don't disagree with your point.
Yea I don't think it will be realistic for everyone, especially folks outside of the city. I understand the concept of the Shannon limit. But I still think there is still plenty of opportunity for it to be useful in real world applications. I think you need to do some more research on some of the wireless breakthroughs going on and start ups in this space if you think otherwise.
I just don't think you see the net neutrality debate from the stance of someone that had shit internet for 10 years and could nothing about it because there were zero local competitors. And this is the norm nowadays, more than 50% of Americans have a single option for high speed home internet. DoJ enforcement is directly related to to introduction of net neutrality law. They couldn't get ISP's to compete effectively anymore.
Considering 4g just muddies the waters because there's no way we'll ever be able to provide the data allocations needed to make a realistic competitor. There's a good reason wireless has data-caps, it's all about limited spectrum. 4G/5G/wireless is, at this point and for the near future, a classic straw-man argument.
I was a lifelong moderate small-government republican until we elected the orange clown, and I still see telecom monopolies as a defiance of antitrust. Internet service is just as important and power or water hookups these days. It's a government utility and natural monopoly. The fact that we don't treat it that way is disturbing.
As a Webpass customer in Boston, you really hit the nail on the head. More than twice the speeds of Comcast's best offering at less than half the price, better reliability and none of the bullshit - no outages, no slowdowns, no rate hikes, no forced modem upgrades, no shitty customer service, just 500Mbps up/down for $45 a month.
The amount of people who argue that this tech isn't possible is astonishing! I show them it's literally happening now and they don't believe me. I show them how wireless mobile and traditional companies have plans to create wireless home broadband networks and they don't believe me. We are at the early stages of this and it's pretty clear to me that this industry is about to be massively disrupted.
Why would wireless lead to more competition? Wireless spectrum is monopolized in much the same way that the right to lay fiber/wiring is. FCC auctions sell exclusive use of the spectrum to these companies for billions of dollars. The switch to wireless would be nothing more than a chance for these companies to save on the expense of physical infrastructure, not a way to increase competition. Unless you're suggesting that high speed internet could be delivered on unlicensed bands, we'd just be trading one monopoly/duopoly situation for another, and likely with the same obstinate companies that we currently lament having to depend on for internet service.
The best hope for competition in the home broadband market is municipal ownership of last-mile infrastructure. We need to lay last-mile fiber and it needs to be owned by the public, though network maintenance can be contracted out.
Because wireless spectrum is finite. Anyone who's been on LTE since it started rolling out can tell you how degraded the network has become since more people came on to it.
Snow can be effectively invisible to a beam when wavelengths are larger than snowflakes (i.e. microwave range: broadly defined as lengths between 1mm and 1m.)
What confounds line-of-sight isn't "until it snows" but "until something/someone has to move around". :)
I agree, to some extent, but I'm not sure if wireless will ever be able to give me gigabit speed with sub 10ms latency. If that's possible, then I'm ready to sign up right now!
Wireless can give you gigabit speed with sub 10ms latency, for sure! With a few assumptions and caveats. You have to work out a compromise involving spectrum width, power usage, transceiver positions, etc. etc. etc. to get optimal performance, for all the various definitions of optimal.
And there are lots of games you can play with QAM, channel-hopping, frequency division, and I am sure that future DSP experts will invent still more ways of getting more data to more people faster with less power. But the basic compromises still need to be dealt with. Using a wired link, you can blast data as fast as you want to yourself without messing with other people, on wireless things are more complicated.
But enough of that, to answer your question: here's a product that can get you 20 Gbps and 0.2 ms latency over hundreds of kilometers:
Easy as that! ...but you're not about to mount one of those on your cell phone.
In an ideal world, all wireless access points could adjust their configurations as required. They'd share information on their physical locations, transceiver capabilities, power status, and bandwidth usage, with the data flowing across the landscape like electrical current in a sheet of metal or water in the shallow riffle of a stream. And of course all these devices would contain unimaginably brilliant and complex software that would manage all this with high efficiency, and they'd all interoperate seamlessly. And since this is the ideal world, no one would ever use the transceiver information from the network for nefarious purposes, and we'd all share the burden of keeping adequate transceiver power available, and the power would be generated from renewable energy sources.
But that ideal wireless world would still have far less capacity than the ideal wired world. The question is whether you think a user-driven wireless setup can be superior to the crappy wired situation we have now.
http://beta.speedtest.net/result/6880152186 - That's last mile wireless. Throughput is hampered by my crappy usb NIC because all of my thunderbolt ports are in use. With thunderbolt ethernet I'm getting the full 500Mpbs that I pay $45/mo for.
I totally agree. Who cares if the worst case scenario is tiered pricing, as long as their is REAL competition, a competitor can come along and say "we offer it all for one flat fee because our infrastructure is better." Boom, done. These municipal exclusion deals are the real problem.
I also think this is going to backfire and bite the telco's in the ass if they try to roll out tiers. The legislative outcry when joe schmo is affected could become so deafening that congress will be likely be forced to get up off their ass and intervene which is exactly what they don't want. If they were smart they would only go after the Netflix and Face-books of the world and leave the consumer out of it.
Can you imagine the 2020 campaign slogan of "Donald Trump ruined the internet." Ignoring this issue was stupid but I don't think they thought this through.
I predict the first package is going to be a gamer package. Image a low latency / high bandwidth connection tuned for gaming. Lots of people would pay $10 or $15 per month for that if it would give them an advantage in gaming.
I am concerned they'd go farther and use such demands to subsidize consumer rates. Then people would get complacent while losing the freedom of choice.
But going after Netflix, for instance, will result in a price increase for the consumer, no? When Netflix's costs for bandwidth go up, they are going to pass that cost on to you.
I worry the average consumer's reaction to that is going to be as follows: "All the tech nerds were worried about this net neutrality thing, but since it got revoked my Comcast bill is cheaper than ever. In completely unrelated news, those bastards at Netflix have hiked their prices again!"
Isn't this really the point? Netflix consumes a lot of resources and are the sole reason for a lot of ISP infrastructure upgrades. Why shouldn't Netflix and by proxy their subscribers be on the hook?
There's a microwave based ISP in SF called Monkeybrains. From their about us page:
"Monkeybrains is primarily a WISP (Wireless Internet Service Provider). What this means is Monkeybrains uses microwave technology to create a wireless network covering much of San Francisco. We deliver internet service to individual locations by placing an antenna on the roof. This antenna picks up an encrypted wireless signal from one of our network access points which can be found on over 1000 buildings city-wide.
From the roof, we run a Cat5 Ethernet wire either to the unit, telecom closet, or the property's Ethernet patch panel. We are happy to comply with any building wiring guidelines or work with the building's riser company if required."
Los Angeles is too big for that over the entire area but parts of LA like North Hollywood could become an opportunity to setup a microwave wireless ISP that covers an entire neighborhood in LA like North Hollywood or Santa Monica.
I live in SF and I used to use Monkeybrains, but I switched to Comcast about 12 months ago. It felt like using MB was taking the moral high road, but there are some things that a wired connection just does better. MB would have very spotty signal during rainy days. A few of us play competitive games (eg Overwatch) and MB had too many latency spikes.
> This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies.
It would still be a problem for startup companies. If TimeWarner gives exclusive preferential pricing to Vimeo and Verizon gives exclusive preference to YouTube, your video-streaming startup still has an extra uphill battle even if there is competition among the established players.
I thought he meant TimeWarner -- the content company that owns TBS and Warner Bros-- not Time Warner Cable which was bought by Charter?
(For the sake of correctness, the two companies are written as Time Warner Cable and TimeWarner, Inc)
Agreed. And corporations like AT&T that not only provide ISP services but actually serve original content, they are uniquely positioned to push their services over their competitor's. Perhaps we'll be seeing streaming services like Netflix become slower, while, say, DirecTV Now runs at full speed.
Hopefully when sanity takes office, we don't repeal the changes in net neutrality, but rather repeal the laws that created these insane corporate monopolies in the first place!
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are de facto monopolies and we don't do anything to improve competition in that space either. Ironically they were the leading advocates of net neutrality. We should also pursue antitrust legal and foster competition in their space as well. In the meantime, we are back to the status quo that was present in 2015.
This is incorrect on several points. Most importantly, the idea that this move returns to some "deregulated" 2015 is a myth and has been refuted so many times throughout the net neutrality discussion. The short version is that NN has always been roughly in place and has been enforced with legal action by regulators for many years prior to 2015.
ISPs, like power network companies, and road and rail network operators, are natural monopolies. There is no theoretical or practical reason to believe that free markets are the appropriate tool to organize them.
It would still be a problem. Maybe if one of those providers is benevolent enough to have a sanely priced "package" that promises to treat all data neutrally there'd be a shot, but I think greed would prevent that from lasting if things start moving away from neutrality.
When I emailed my Senator this was essentially his response. Whether genuine or not he said he wants to see a permanent solution that creates more competition. Who knows if he's being truthful but it is an argument I've seen for a long term solution.
If a Senator says he wants to see something as an alternative to a concrete option that exists (either as status quo policy under threat or a concrete proposal under debate) he's making excuses for not supporting the thing you care about.
If a Senator says he's actively working on something and points you to specific legislation he sponsors or supports, well, that might also be political theater, but it's at least possible that there is real substance behind it.
5G networks could very well change that. Right now people rely on LAN, however it's very possible that with the growth of 5G people will just use over the air internet rather than having their own setups everywhere they go.
Not being sarcastic, but is this honestly better? There are only a few major cell providers that can roll out 5G, so it seems to me that instead of Comcast-TW-Cox we would have ATT-Verizon-Tmo.
I guess it would be easier to set up municipal ISPs, since minimal wiring would be needed. But the lack of real competition in the cell market seems to indicate that the problems are pretty similar for small startups.
What's special about 5GHz? What about 700MHz-2100MHz?
Even with its high latency, packet loss, data caps, etc, LTE internet fits the need of a huge segment of casual internet users and has been doing so for some time now.
Oh, whoops. I wasn't joking. I never realized that there's actually a definition of 3G/4G/5G that isn't just made up marketing lingo. Thanks for the link.
Comcast and TWC did that literally all the time.
I can't back this up with a specific website link, but I have anecdotal evidence. When they tried to merge a couple of years ago a Comcast exec said in one interview that the move wouldn't affect consumers and isn't something intended to incite "anticompetitive" behavior because TWC and Comcast already do not compete.
Ever noticed how a city is EITHER a Comcast or TWC city, and not both?
This. I wish something was done about the regulations that are de-facto monopolizing franchise agreements and such at a city level for telecom services. Not much better in Canada either.
If Comcast re-enable Sandvine and start tinkering with P2P and VPN traffic, will that be enough to start the conversations around anti-trust? Or is there already a precedent?
Local governments have been legally prohibited from making exclusive ISP franchise agreements for quite a while now. IMHO the only thing really preventing local competition is the economic aspects of laying multiple physical wires to residences giving the setup strong natural monopoly conditions.
Source? Every single city I've lived in has such an agreement. One cable provider, one phone(DSL) provider. There might be smaller, internet only companies.
Do they have an agreement with the local city, or is it a natural monopoly? It's unclear what causes that condition of a lack of choices in a given area.
>In streamlining the franchising process and preempting (Local Franchising Agency) LFAs from taking action inconsistent with its reforms, the FCC relied primarily on its statutory authority to carry out the Cable Act’s mandate that LFAs “may not grant an exclusive franchise and may not unreasonably refuse to award an additional competitive franchise.” The FCC interpreted that mandate to cover not only the unreasonable denial of a cable franchise, but also unreasonable delay in action on a franchise application and the conditioning of a franchise on unreasonable terms.
Now local cable/isps do mess with the process of permitting and right of ways as much as they can when competitors arise, and local governments are susceptible to both corruption and being overwhelmed by the large corporations deploying such tactics. Just maybe not in that specific way of signing monopoly franchise agreements. So I'm under no illusions that this prohibition of monopoly franchise grants goes very far...
For power users on websites like HN and reddit, this might seem true. But if you take a step back and realize that the large majority of Americans don't use the internet like you do, and maybe never will use the internet like you do, I think this argument holds far less water.
Consider that it's estimated that 13% of Americans don't use the internet-- at all, for anything, ever.[1] Think about how many people probably exclusively use their $60/mo cable internet to use Facebook, read news websites, and send emails. They don't use Netflix, they don't watch YouTube, they only do what they know and they're happy with it. Is it accurate to say that someone with these needs has no choice in their ISP?
Where I am right now, in the middle of central Wisconsin surrounded by acres of farm fields in every direction, I have fiber all the way to my house. In addition, there is reliable LTE coverage on multiple carriers. There's also satellite internet. For the average internet user as of 2017, I really think it's inaccurate to imply that consumers lack choice.
What you're really saying is that there's no competition in the very high end segment of consumer ISPs. And I'd agree with that, there is little choice when it comes to a provider that is willing to offer you a highspeed DOCSIS plan without a data cap, or fiber internet, etc. Most homes probably only have one provider that meets the needs of power users.
And to that I say, "tough shit!" If you're an outlier as a consumer, you're going to pay through the nose for it and you're not going to have a ton of choice. It's not some giant conspiracy to milk consumers dry, it's a matter of business. ISPs don't want to invest billions into infrastructure that some trivial portion of their consumer market really would utilize. It would be fiscally irresponsible to spend all that money for such little return. If posing it that way doesn't appeal you, let me put it another way: it would be bad for the long term growth of the internet to spend all that money to appease a small portion of internet users. That money is better saved and spent later.
You might say, "Consumers will certainly desire faster internet as years pass, so it's an investment they'll have to make eventually, and the taxpayer has subsidized this expansion, so they should be doing it now, anyway."
I believe you'd be wrong to say that. ISPs shouldn't be obligated to be spending money now if they're meeting the majority of needs of their customers. I know online it maybe doesn't seem that way with all the "Comcast-are-Nazis memes", but it's just a matter of overlap between poweruser segment with high bandwidth requirements also being active on the social media you frequent. Elsewhere on the internet, there's a majority of casual internet users who are not coming close to being meaningfully impacted by technical limitations of their connection.
If you're interested in stable growth of the internet as time goes on, you should root for them to save their money now so they can spend it later when demand from the average consumer catches up. Doing anything else would mean spending a lot of money on infrastructure that sits unused, that is antiquated by the time people want it. Think of China and their crumbling empty cities, let's not make the same sort of mistake with internet infrastructure.
These are just the top links in the search results, not cherry picked at all. You seem to be extrapolating from your experience with ISP choice. I've lived in supposedly very high-tech American cities with only one choice of ISP over 2Mbps. Compare US prices and service to places like Scandanavia. What's the difference? Over here ISPs can extract a much larger fraction of value while providing smaller total value (worse service). This is a natural result of lightly-regulated monopolies and oligopolies. It doesn't mean that their choices not to invest are somehow best for the long-term growth of the internet, in any way shape or form. Their monetary incentives are not aligned with long-term growth of the Internet.
> Netflix has 52 million subscribers in the United States.
Put another way, about five of every six Americans doesn't subscribe to Netflix.
> 55% of Americans watched Netflix in the last year.
That article is based on a "study" whose source is an online survey (surveymonkey) with 1046 respondents.
> 98% of Americans think internet speeds need to be improved.
Blogspam article which cites, though does not link, to an alleged study from Cambium Networks. Cambium Networks sells WISP equipment.
> Roughly 50% are 'satisfied' with their home internet speeds but this is according to the FCC, which has lied to me a lot recently.
Wow, that's a serious misrepresentation. It says that 50% are "very satisfied" with their internet speeds, but you conveniently left out the line that follows: an additional 41% are "somewhat satisfied" with their internet speeds. So it's really saying that 91% are 'satisfied' with their home internet speeds.
The broader point you can take from that document is that, between two different studies, only 20% of homes had respondents who were aware of their network speed... It's not a tremendous leap to assume that most people are not savvy enough to understand whether their network issues are caused by their ISP, or whether their network issues are caused by an old and flakey combo-WAP-router-modem that lacks modern developments in things like traffic shaping. A lot of hatred for ISPs probably comes from misinformed consumers cursing their ISP for network slowness that is actually due to wireless congestion or old/slow computers running a virus scan.
> This is a natural result of lightly-regulated monopolies and oligopolies. It doesn't mean that their choices not to invest are somehow best for the long-term growth of the internet, in any way shape or form. Their monetary incentives are not aligned with long-term growth of the Internet.
My argument is that there is no real monopoly, the average internet user has a lot of choices that meets the needs of their usage patterns-- usage patterns that seem completely alien to HN readers and reddit users.
I don't have time to dig deeply into sources for all these things because I'm not a lobbyist by profession, but I think your assessment is way off. Somewhat satisfied also means somewhat dissatisfied, so by your reasoning 50+% are "dissatisfied" with their internet speeds. There also have been tons of studies on the level of monopoly service, but you seem to not count those because you think 1Mbps is acceptable in 2017.
You seem to be saying that we should be thrilled with this wonderful world where lots of people are "somewhat" satisfied and pay much higher prices than other countries and get 1Mbps level service. That's the status quo you want to hang on to? Is that where you want America to still be in 20 years?
If we never serve people a better internet, there will be tons of opportunities they'll never get. As just one example, right now there is a huge crunch of millenials moving to big cities where the jobs are at, but that's also where housing prices are highest. If only we had the Internet service to allow large numbers of good paying jobs from home in rural areas, it would be huge for our country's economy. But I worry that the attitude you present, that most people don't need good internet anyway, will never get us there.
Google is useful to everyone no matter if you're just a casual internet user or very technical, but a google page is like 80kb so it's not relevant in the conversation about what usage patterns are pushing the need for improvement of internet infrastructure.
Things like streaming media, file sharing, big game downloads, etc. are what's contributing meaningfully to filling up pipes and making it necessary to improve the links. And my point is that HN readers are far more likely to take part in these usage patterns, and underestimate how many Americans have zero interest in using the internet that way. They think that because their usage patterns could not be met by a cellular or satellite internet plan that it means that it wouldn't fit the needs of most everyone else, either. It's just not true.
It is what google leads to that matters. Google is the main way that laypeople find alternatives to Netflix, etc.
> HN readers are far more likely to take part in these usage patterns
One group being "more likely" does not make the other group "less likely".
File sharing, game downloads, etc. are still areas that are not very centralized, and that is why average people do care about net neutrality, whether or not they understand that to be the case.
Don't overestimate how many Americans "have zero interest in using the internet that way".
> They think that because their usage patterns could be met by a cellular or satellite internet plan that it means that would fit the needs of most everyone else, too.
Sure, there are a lot of people in that situation, here on HN, and elsewhere.
When file sharing sites, youtube, steam, etc. were new, they showed the limitations most people had with bandwidth, etc. It wasn't until later that most people found themselves with more bandwidth than they needed.
I think it's important that we reverse that order. I believe that if most people have significantly more bandwidth, that new services that use it will appear that wouldn't be possible with the bandwidth currently available to most people.
It's difficult, with many people, to convince them that should be the case, and ISPs seem to be working hard to convince people that providing more bandwidth is unfeasible. I don't believe that.
The reason ISPs are monopolies is because if they were unregulated, you'd have a thousand phone lines outside of everyone's house, from every single private phone network provider. You'd have a bunch of phones in everyone's houses, one for each network.
An unregulated ISP market is a safety hazard and ugly. Because of these issues, government eventually decided that only one phone company can serve each house, forcing a monopoly situation because of that. But that monopoly has to allow every other network access to that line so that callers can call anywhere. This is the origin of net neutrality.
You're never going to go back to the situation where you have a thousand different lines to everyone's houses, so you're better off regulating them properly with net neutrality.
Unpopular opinion: Title II is not a great solution to Net Neutrality. The only thing I disklike is there isn't a better option already in place.
I would rather see the FTC address EULAs. If a company says, "we may from time-to-time limit your bandwidth" I think they should be on the hook to produce a report every month when and why they limited you. This is not much different than the report you get from your investments, or your cell phone carrier report when you place a call or send a text message.
Limiting bandwidth is one thing. My local Cable company is proish-NN (they have publicly stated that they have no plans to implement prioritization even if the FCC passed this vote), they still impose data caps and network management practices on consumer plans. While I hate these practices (hence paying extra for a business connection), that's not what the NN issue is about.
Comcast refused to upgrade their peering connections to the networks used by Netflix (Level3 I believe was one of them?) to extort money from them. Netflix doesn't get service from Comcast, yet Comcast decided it could charge them to get access to their customers.
The internet is built upon no-fee exchanges between Tier 1 providers, but since Comcast (and some others like CenturyLink, Verizon, AT&T) is both a consumer ISP AND a major transit provider they try to make arguments like "you're sending us more traffic than we send you, this isn't fair" even though their customers are the ones requesting the data. It's total bullshit, and they will milk this for everything it's worth.
Comcast isn't a Tier 1 provider. Cogent, the netflix ISP at issue, claims to be, but that is very debatable. The internet isn't built on two T2 or T3 providers doing no-fee exchanges.
Comcast is by all intents a tier 1 provider. They have a huge national backbone they own and operate, have settlement-free interconnects with many other providers, etc. Just because a majority of their revenue (as far as data transit is concerned) comes from consumer services doesn't change anything.
You're right NN doesn't necessarily solve peering disputes, but one could argue extortion like this falls right in line with it (under a proper regulatory framework crap like this wouldn't fly, "no we aren't throttling netflix, we're in a peering dispute" would be seen through by the courts pretty quickly when documentation of them demanding money from netflix is submitted).
Major CDNs don't use Tier 1 providers to reach major eyeball networks in the United States. There are no ISPs who have sufficient capacity to the other networks. I'll cover why later.
Netflix is what... 37% of Internet traffic? They aren't sending anything to Comcast other than Comcast traffic, guaranteed. Same with Verizon, AT&T, Cox, etc.
Also, Comcast's backbone isn't large enough for someone like Netflix to inefficiently deliver data. Netflix is delivering the data locally, not using Comcast's national backbone.
So sure... Comcast might offer "Tier 1" internet services, but they don't have enough connectivity to other ISPs to matter to major CDNs.
Why?
Because the other major eyeball networks in the US employ the same tactics as Comcast! They all want to force major CDNs to connect directly, for different reasons. Some ISPs do it to avoid paying "tier 1" internet providers, allowing CDNs to peer settlement free. Others do it to extort CDNs.
As with any other system where a product is delivered over someone else's product, a negotiation will take place, money will change hands, and business will resume. That's normal.
Google and Netflix wanted to implement rules prohibiting a perfectly normal transaction in business because it would cost them money, and framed it as the public good. I'm entirely okay with the two giants having to pay more, it provides Google and Netflix's competitors additional room to breathe and innovate.
>As with any other system where a product is delivered over someone else's product, a negotiation will take place, money will change hands, and business will resume.
I don't think this is always true, is it? The price of a phone call isn't contingent on the contents of the call. Regarding the internet, though, I'd feel better if there was any guarantee at all that these "negotiations" would be on a level playing field. If you're a startup that wants to complete with some Comcast streaming service, the Comcast ISP side of things can kill you day one. There's no negotiation possible when one party has all the power. Maybe that's the system working as intended, but if that's the case, then the system creeps me out.
You're right Google and Netflix et al will cut a deal with the major US ISPs to get their traffic delivered, they have the money to do so.
But innovation... the next up and coming netflix (or any other data heavy service) isn't going to have a good time. Start-ups can't afford to pay for the same as rich incumbants, so they have no chance.
Why would a US ISP agree to carry a data heavy service without recompense now, when they can charge incumbants with deep pockets for the same bandwidth.
This seems very likely to hurt innovation , not help it.
The mistaken concept that startups would have to pay "for the same" seems to hinge on not understanding that bandwidth cost is relative to bandwidth use. Nobody else even sits on the same order of magnitude as Google and Netflix: These are the only two companies who will need to pay extra. (Combined, Google and Netflix together account for up to 70-80% of all US Internet traffic.) If anyone else was ever to be charged extra, comparatively, it would be ridiculously minimal in comparison.
You are working on an assumption that any charges would be based off of usage in a logical manner.
In reality Netflix might offer to pay a little more to comcast if comcast is willing to up the costs on their competitors, or other such arrangement. The problem with removing NN is that we're inviting oli/monolopy forming to occur, which the free market cannot deal with.
Title II actually exempts telecoms from FTC regulation. Rather than pushing for special-cased laws to mandate how the Internet is operated (which bans a lot of things I don't think are justifiable to actually ban), we should be pushing for a reawakening of antitrust enforcement. Anticompetitive behavior is already illegal, and the tools already exist, in law, to deal with it. Let's get the FTC back in the business of busting up monopolies and fining anticompetitive behavior, regardless of what industry they are.
Anticompetitive behavior is a problem that exists well beyond just telecoms, and getting back into trustbusting would do wonders across the board for consumers.
Google, one of net neutrality's principal backers, obviously is not fond of this approach.
Nope that's not a mistaken understanding on my part at all.
Obviously you pay for what you use. but say a start-up starts blowing up and in the way of things isn't making money yet (as many early stage start-ups don't)
If their niche happens to be a bandwidth heavy one the ISPs can and probably will start levying charges on them as they grow, which the start-up will be in a poor position to pay.
and that doesn't even touch on the possibly anti-competitive aspect.
Say an ISP has a competing service, do you really think they won't try to throttle start-ups in that area using bandwidth charging? Given that US ISPs already have a record of doing exactly that.
First of all, Google and Netflix together are around 80% of all bandwidth use. The amount of cost on them is so insurmountably higher, by the time anyone could ever rival their bills, they would be in a better position to pay it.
And it doesn't have to touch on the anti-competitive aspect: The FCC is not an antitrust regulator. The FTC is. And revoking Title II places ISPs back under the FTC's purview. Anticompetitive behavior should be addressed by the agency charged with ensuring competition.
You appear to be overlooking that the ISP's customers already pay the ISP for bandwidth.
I pay Comcast for 1 TB/month. Why should Comcast be allowed to say that I cannot use some of my 1 TB/month on Netflix and Google unless Netflix and Google (who are NOT customers of Comcast) pay Comcast?
Isn't this kind of arbitrary? You frame it as "paying twice". What about the framing that you're normally "paying half"? If Comcast had Google's margins, we could argue that they're pricing unfairly. But Alphabet has 2-3x Comcast's profit margins. I feel about this argument the way I feel about militancy over airline baggage handling fees. Sure: it's obnoxious. But the airlines used to bake that directly into the fare.
I'm not saying Comcast should hold other video services for ransom; I'm just pointing out an oddity of the argument you're using.
Does it really cost Comcast more if I use my 1 TB to watch YouTube videos or Netflix videos than it does if I use it to watch, say PornHub videos, or instructional chess videos at chess.com?
If it actually does cost them more, then shouldn't they be trying to bill their own customers for what it costs? (I don't believe Pai for a second when his document claims that ISPs cannot figure out how to bill users for bandwidth).
What will they do if Netflix tells its customers on Comcast that their bill is going up unless they switch to accessing Netflix via a VPN? Will Comcast then start blocking VPNs? So then I cannot work at home? (My office went 100% work from home a couple months ago, so that would be very irksome).
How is their cost basis on specific part of their business relevant? We're obviously not entitled to any one price point, much as HN threads seem to believe we are. Comcast's margins hover around 10-12%. If they need to keep them there, they can raise their consumer prices, or find alternative revenue streams. Why is it better that they raise prices for consumers?
My beef is that they sold me what purports to be internet service, not some kind of CompuServe or Prodigy or GEnie like service.
Finding alternate revenue streams is fine...but I don't see why they should be allowed to stop me from using the service they sold me in order to try to convince some entity, which they have no relationship with other than that they and that entity have mutual customers, to pay them something.
I'm fine with it if my ISP wants to find alternative revenue by establishing some kind of relationship with outside sites and selling them something, just as long as the ISP continues to provide the service they sold me, on the terms they sold it to me.
For example, something like AT&T's "sponsored data" is fine. That lets sites pay AT&T to not count data AT&T users exchange with those sites against those user's AT&T plan data limits.
That's fine because AT&T's customers get the service they paid for. If a site buys "sponsored data" some AT&T customers get more than they paid for. If a site does not buy "sponsored data", those AT&T users that use the site still get what they paid for.
The EFF and other leading net neutrality proponents would probably disagree with me on "sponsored data". This is the kind of thing I was thinking of in another comment when I talked about trying to shove things into net neutrality that do not belong there. Yes, "sponsored data" favors bigger, established content providers, so could harm competition. We've got antitrust law to deal with that.
I'd argue Netflix has a more clear impact on their business. As 30% or more of their traffic, any given business decision by Netflix can have a significant impact on an ISP's business. A change by Netflix (like switching to 4K) could have huge impact on Comcast's need to rapidly upgrade lines to handle it. Whereas a smaller provider wouldn't affect them or their priorities as much.
When an airline charges you extra to check bags, they are charging you for a service they provide. This is annoying, but we as a society agree that people generally have the right to do this and it is in society's interest that they have that right.
When an ISP charges a service provider to get access to their customers, they are leveraging their monopoly on those customers to extract rents from other service providers. What is the social value of this behavior?
The main problem with this line of argument is that is can be applied to anything an ISP does, because there is of course no functioning market for last-mile connectivity in most areas. A real fix would be unbundling or something else that split allowed there to be a functioning market over shared infrastructure. That doesn't mean we can't stop them from rent-seeking from other firms in the "short" term. Doing so is in line with Republicans' claimed pro-business stance.
I'm certainly not 'overlooking' it. I just don't find it particularly compelling of an argument. A business can certainly charge on both the downstream and upstream ends of their own network if they so choose. As long as they aren't operating in an anticompetitive fashion, of course.
And while Google is much less public about their special peering agreements and CDN setups, Netflix is pretty public, so let's talk about Netflix Open Connect. Netflix Open Connect boxes are hosted "at no charge to the ISP" at various ISPs, as if it's a charitable offering. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
But essentially, Open Connect boxes are colocated. If anyone but Netflix were to ask for free colocation, they'd get laughed right out of the room. A startup trying to compete with Netflix could never get what Netflix gets for free. Net neutrality effectively removes Comcast's negotiating power to demand Netflix pays for the service, because things like throttling their peering traffic isn't allowed. The irony is, in this instance, net neutrality is actually granting Netflix an exclusive advantage (by the nature of their size and customer demand for them) that smaller players can't hope to match.
Once again, net neutrality regulations help big monopolies and hurt smaller players.
Actually the competitors would have trouble competing with Google and Netflix in this scenario due to the fact that they would be harder for them to beat out what Google and Netflix would pay.
This also ignores the fact that consumers have paid the ISP for general internet access, no where did it stipulate some services you want to access should pay extra for us to carry their data to you.
> Title II is not a great solution to Net Neutrality. The only thing I disklike is there isn't a better option already in place.
Sure. But it was an attainable solution, which is much better than no solution at all. It's not like Pai is going to find some other way to protect NN.
I think Title II is a fine solution (why shouldn't internet be a utility?). There are a ridiculous amount of people in these comments that are trying to thread the needle between "I support NN," but saying "it is fine that they reversed Title-II classification" (which I guess is their cool contrarian point of view, but functionally tripe)
Title II is an 80 year old telephone rule that was stretched and deformed to fit the internet. Congress needs to pass real legislation that's specific to the needs of the internet.
The 4th amendment is a 270 year old rule that is "stretched and deformed" to fit personal electronic devices too. In either case, we don't need a specific law for each use-case as technology evolves.
Yes. Congress-critters try to have their cake and eat it too by punting to the regulators and claiming to the voters it is out of their hands. Dereliction of duty.
(Not that I would necessarily like to see the horse-cum-camel design-by-committee solution these grifters would negotiate their way too...)
I wasn't convinced by that article when it first came out, due to it's using several arguments in bad faith, and simply mischaracterizing many things (you can check back to the HN thread when that article was released for examples). I'm less inclined to believe it now.
You'll get the "vote with your wallet" speech. Which for most people, and like myself, your only other option in order to do just that is to buy an LTE wifi or get satellite internet.
There was a discussion about all this during NPR's Morning Edition.
The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration. And this should be a model for regulation of the ISPs going forward.
Except that the world was quite different in 1996. You actually had a lot of competition with ISPs, because most people were doing dialup. If I didn't like AOL, I could just switch to Prodigy (yes, I know), or one of the local ISPs. That was easy.
People like me can and did switch ISPs on a regular basis. In my case, looking for a reliable Net News feed.
Compared to today, where there is only one (or if you are lucky) two ISPs for the area. You don't have a choice, so these ISPs are defacto monopolies.
The reasons given for repeal are just wrong, and this is a transparent attempt by the big ISPs to make more money, without benefit to the average citizen or even the other Internet companies which made the Internet awesome to begin with.
It does remind me a bit of the trickle down economics. They are making it sound like that the only thing holding them back from massive innovation is profits lost to regulations and as soon as we get rid of those the floodgates will open - but they never do. The ISPs are going to use that money to consolidate their power, buy more companies that depend on their infrastructure and shovel money back to their shareholders and drive their stock price up. This is exactly what is going to happen with the tax bill (and is already happening due to the expectation of a tax bill), we're being sold that companies have been right on the cusp of increasing wages and hiring if it weren't for those pesky taxes they had to pay. When the jobs and wages don't come, they'll blame something else and down the road they'll take away another important thing, like labor protections or something. And we'll fall for it (collectively), its like a mystery box or something, we can't resist the idea of the free market as this chained beast that just has to be released and it will solve everything with no oversight or maintenance.
This is exactly what is going to happen with the tax bill (and is already happening due to the expectation of a tax bill), we're being sold that companies have been right on the cusp of increasing wages and hiring if it weren't for those pesky taxes they had to pay.
Exactly.
I know business. Extra profits are extra profits. Wages won't rise unless there is a labor supply shortage.
> The FCC chair talked about how there was very loose regulation of the Internet back in 1996 during the Clinton Administration
Of course, the web was a few years old and the internet was just becoming used by the general public. Pointing to the state of broadband regulation in 1996 is kind of like pointing to the state of automobile safety regulation in 1912.
Verizon fought against those loose regulations and won. IIRC, a judge on that case said (I'm paraphrasing) that the Obama-era FTC couldn't use legally achieve what it was attempting to under those rules, but might (wink and a nudge) under Title-II.
Slowly but surely, our open internet will get choked. This is just one step in horrible path that will lead to our largest corporations controlling almost everything in our lives with very little competition.
I am blaming the tech giants for this ruling. They are the only ones with enough power to challenge this horrible ruling and they sat idle and watched it happen.
They may have given lip service to net neutrality, but their lack of enthusiasm and almost zero effort speaks volumes on their true opinions.
Microsoft crossed over to the dark side a long time ago.
Now, Google, Apple, Facebook join them in completely abandoning the ethos upon which the companies were founded.
I have been skeptical of their true intentions for years, and facebook has probably been corrupt since day one, but I thought if they were able to keep net neutrality, then I would think there was a chance for them.
No longer. They are gone. Truly sad day for the world.
Seriously, silicon valley playing the role of "poor ole me" content provider that's "with the people" trying to defeat the big bad telecoms was completely absurd. I mean good lord, I am supposed to believe GOOG and APPL and FB and AMZN couldn't match lobbying efforts? Please.
The other absurd thing is people worried about Netflix, which as far back as I could remember is a big reason why this whole debate started in the first place. How about, if you want to watch TV, get TV. Leave the internet to information that doesn't have an alternative.
They were fine with Uber operating in an unregulated manner while dominating highly regulated competition. Soon I wont be able to hail a cab in Manhattan and we will all be crying about muh monopolies again.
All you needed to know about GOOG was the fact that it ever crossed their minds to make their motto "Don't be evil."
Hopefully there is opportunity to return to decentralization with the blockchain and projects like Substratum.
> Seriously, silicon valley playing the role of "poor ole me" content provider that's "with the people" trying to defeat the big bad telecoms was completely absurd. I mean good lord, I am supposed to believe GOOG and APPL and FB and AMZN couldn't match lobbying efforts? Please.
What's not clear is how much money Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix put into firing up the keep net neutrality campaign, but I'd assume there was quite a significant war chest available, judging by the size of the outcry. There were "viral" vids showing up on Reddit for example where the channel looked a lot like it was run by a think tank or similar.
"By a 3-2 vote, the FCC concluded that Comcast monitored the content of its customers' internet connections and selectively blocked peer-to-peer connections in violation of network neutrality rules. The selective blocking of file sharing traffic interfered with users' rights to access the internet and to use applications of their choice, the commission said."
Net neutrality has been the status quo since the start of the internet. First from the threat of regulation, then from Title I, then from Title II after Verizon's lawsuit.
Net Neutrality is the default position, so in a sense has always existed from the inception of the internet. Only within the last 10 years have telcoms begun a series of intentional efforts to begin throttling, and manipulating traffic in a way that falls outside of the bounds of Net Neutrality.
Common response on HN for the past two months has been nothing short of hyperbolic. "The world will end if NN is repealed".
Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse.
I have no reason to believe this is "the beginning of the end" of anything. Life will carry on as normal.
Disproportionate reactions (like HN is doing right now) is not good for anyone. Take a step back from politics. Take a deep breath. Take a walk outside. This isn't the end of the world.
The ACA was actually a conservative plan that is actually good for people. In some sense, you could argue that everybody agreed with it until it became a partisan issue.
NN is also good for people and also has bipartisan support (from constituents) but just got repealed. Yes, the sky won't fall but it is now a little darker.
Depends on how you spin it. Yes it was a conservative plan originally. The reasoning went something like:
"Too many poor people are showing up to hospitals without health insurance and getting treated for free, driving up the cost for everyone else. We need to FORCE them to buy health insurance or else there is a penalty!"
Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got. Change the way you talk about it, sprinkle in a couple keywords like "affordable", mix in some coverage for pre-existing conditions, and suddenly its more palatable to liberals.
> Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got.
Imho, many solutions don't benefit from a partisan branding. Some things are just good ideas. If research shows it's simply cheaper to hire a bunch of people to offer the homeless free apartments and a simple job no-questions-asked than to keep cleaning up after them, keep designing the city to be anti-homeless and keep paying for the all the police time to deal with them.. Well, you'd have to be pretty damn stupid not to put that idea into law. But if you put a partisan stamp on it (‘We have to help people’ or ‘We need to keep poor people from bothering us’) all of the sudden you have the other camp against you.
I didn't mean that statement as my own opinion, I'm simply pointing out how the same legislation can be demonized or embraced based on how its spun. But you can't tell a Republican that it was actually another Republican that came up with the idea of ACA, they simply can't get passed the fact that its coming from terrible horrible Obama so it must be bad! Just as Democrats don't want to hear that it was a Republican idea.
Principled doesn't mean stupid. You can research and calculate all you want to show someone that it's cheaper to euthanize their retarded child instead of raising them. Some people will still never do it.
As unpalatable as you think that sounds, it's also exactly what we do with car insurance, and has worked mostly fine there for decades, excluding enforcement problems and illegals.
It works for car insurance because it’s actually, you know, _insurance_. Health insurance is more of a weird discount club for an industry where there’s zero price transparency and competition.
And also because costs are relatively predictable with Auto Insurance, unlike Medical, where costs skyrocket very quickly. Also, Car Insurance requirements also stipulate clear minimums that the insurance must carry.
IMO Auto Insurance is a lot closer to Dental than Medical.
Not saying its unpalatable to me, I actually agree it was necessary to force everyone to buy health insurance. I'm simply pointing out how the SAME legislation can be demonized or embraced, depending on how its spun. I bet if this were some alternative universe where Republicans were pushing ACA, it would get demonized as an attack on the poor by the other side.
I totally agree with you. I believe group polarization [0] causes forums on the internet such as this one to exaggerate how bad something is going to be and this is one of those times. My biggest concern is if something actually world-ending were to be about to happen it would be sort of hard to tell by reading Reddit and Hackernews. Because the users of those collectively dial the alarm severity up to "catastrophic" several times per year, and it is a case of crying wolf almost every time.
That's not an argument, that's bulverism. How about you explain why repealing Net Neutrality is necessary in the first place? Who actually benefits from it?
There's not any point in debating it in the comments right here and right now. Time will tell if my enjoyment of the internet is severely degraded to the degree predicted by the most upvoted comments on Reddit/HN. I was simply expressing my prediction that it won't be.
That's precisely why I'm NOT in a frenzy over this decision. Immediately, it means nothing to anyone, and even though I don't like seeing protections removed, it's possible that consumers may just win at the end of the day. IMO the big tragedy here is that we even needed NN in the first place, violators of the original Internet openness philosophy should be campaigned at the corporate level to bring them in line.
Just to make sure I understand, conservatives said that it would be a disaster if the ACA signed into law?
Assuming that is what you meant: just because that was not true doesn't mean that NN is not important. Granted, there is some fear mongering and worst-case thinking going on, but in the end I think that there is valid reasoning behind NN fears, just like the claims about the ACA were provably exaggerated at the time.
This kind of reminds me how the Iraq war is being used to sow distrust of the intelligence services now. Because there were mistakes made during a republican administration that was hell-bent to go to war in Iraq, we shouldn't trust them now when there is immense agreement about the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.
The pro-NN crowd have turned this complex debate over an imperfect policy to a good-versus-evil battle over flipping a single legal switch and Ajit Pai is completely fueling that.
The hyperbole around NN on here and reddit has been annoying. My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like.
I do think the market for ISPs has failed. Regulatory patching won't always be able to stay up to date. The government should make it easier to start an ISP.
> My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like.
Like what? You do realize that we're all paying $1 more a month for Netflix because Comcast decided to go "rent seeking" and throttled their traffic until they paid up? Our Netflix bills were increased shortly after. You're being fucked by anti-NN, whether you realize it or not.
You can just add it to all the other hyper insane responses going around in the US right now, including:
- Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously finally.
- Tax cuts are going to destroy the country and impoverish the middle class. In fact, the middle class will see their already staggeringly low taxes go even lower. The lower US corporate income tax rate will finally make the US more competitive with dozens of other major economies, including Britain, Ireland, China, Canada, Sweden, Finland, etc.
- Hillary lost because of Russian collusion with Trump. Over a year later, zero evidence of any of that. The only election tampering that looks to have gone on, is high ranking FBI agents & officials that were looking to throw the election in favor of Hillary. The fact is, Hillary lost because she took voters in the blue wall states for granted and refused to aggressively court them as advisers close to her recommended. It was educated white women that threw the election in Trump's favor.
- Trump wants to be a fascist dictator. No, there's zero evidence of that sort of behavior. He's a jerk, he may be a mediocre President, there's absolutely no indication he can or is in the position to seize more power. He is wildly unpopular both among the majority of polled voters and his own party (which he only joined to run for President). The odds are pretty good he's a one term President, and that one term will deliver the Senate to Democrats and rebalance things in DC.
- Trump's environmental policies are going to get us all killed and make global climate change dramatically worse. No, the few policies he has rolled back from the Obama era, will not in fact do anything meaningful as it relates to global climate change or harming the environment in the US. The dramatic shift from coal to natural gas, will continue to reduce CO2 emissions in the US, and the gradualy move to solar, wind and electric vehicles will continue with or without Trump.
- "Zero evidence of any of that" is a completely ridiculous thing to say. Get out of your bubble. Try to see the world from the other POV, there are many pieces of evidence that point in this direction. If you step back from moment-to-moment politics and try to look at what's already publicly known, from a historical perspective, it's already an unbelievable scandal.
- I don't think he consciously wants to be a fascist dictator, but it's again completely ridiculous for you to say there's "zero evidence of that sort of behavior". He does many things that point in that direction, if only you look. And, concretely, he's destroying norms that keep us not-fascist, barriers are being torn down right now. That degrades our system and populace and will make it easier for future people to transgress further.
- I don't know enough about what regulations he's rolled back. But dropping out of the Paris agreement and simply not taking action for the next four years have a significant impact.
It's not failing. North America is fine; people still want to move from other places to our place. Let's not be drastic. Let's sit down and listen and be calm.
The comment you replied to mentioned the USA. North America is a continent that includes 23 countries, only one of them is the USA. Living in one of the other 22 countries and looking at the USA, I would tend to agree with the comment that you were replying to, as the USA is becoming more and more an oligarchy, and less like a democracy.
Fair enough, I should not be saying North America when it includes so many other countries, I should be saying USA and Canada which is what I mean.
Look, it's not an oligarchy, it is a democracy. It seems to me that everyone thinks that just because Trump won the election that it is somehow not a democracy. I fear that the heavy anti-republican, anti-business sentiment will morph into a call for communism which will absolutely destroy the future of the human race.
> I fear that the heavy anti-republican, anti-business sentiment will morph into a call for communism which will absolutely destroy the future of the human race.
This statement is insanely detached from reality. People are "heavy anti-republican" because modern Republican policies tend to be more about throwing humanity (or just poor people) under the bus for a quick money grab under the obviously misleading and fake pretense of family values and fiscal responsibility.
I think my statement is not insanely detached. Let's consider that the progressive culture of the bay area more or less throws men and western culture under the bus, what with our constant pursuit of sexual misdeeds perpetrated by the same men who bring us prosperity. Or that we take random ethnic groups, or women as a whole, and make them into victims of the "patriarchy", which translates into victims of western society, thus perpetuating the idea that western values are inherently evil.
How about the fact that your company can get ripped apart for not having enough employees of certain races, or that conservatives either shut up or get ousted at big co's? There are invincible, roving SJW gangs with Google Sheets filled with names and details of tech workers that have been blacklisted for not being liberals. They enforce the ideology.
Now, on to the republicans. You're saying that they're throwing poor people under the bus, and I think you're right, a lot of their policies are downright dangerous. But I cannot listen to anti-trump, anti-republican statements anymore because the real arguments are lost in the hysteria. I believe that traditional, western values are very important. They are what brought us to the promised land we are currently in - It was our colonialism and christian morals that allowed our society to blossom. I'm not going to budge on that. Now, I do want to receive good criticism from you and to improve my viewpoint, but the problem is that criticism often devolves on the part of the liberals to claims of being a racist, homophobe, transphobe, or xenophobe; that I'm some redneck who's uneducated and does not hold a valid opinion. That's why I'm worried.
Communism worked by throwing anyone "against the state" into gulags, and against the state was a very low bar to pass. You basically had to have an uncommon or "off limits" opinion, which is what most all republicans have from the perspective of a progressive. Taken to the limit, perhaps this means that no republicans are allowed to get jobs at tech companies, they are unanimously attacked in the media, and slowly a mono-narrative emerges: Welcome immigrants, don't be straight, never express your innate male energy and aggression, and of course, if you're a woman, never have children and focus solely on your career. My imagination tells me that will happen, because the flame of that ideology has been lit and it is hard to snuff it out when the people confronted with it all hold tech jobs that they will lose if they speak out.
Now I wish that you and I could have a real discussion about this because I know I haven't adequately addressed your central points, and I know my viewpoint is terribly flawed. But I think that shit gets fucked up a lot faster and a lot harder than any of us think, especially the rich ones of us in the bay.
It is a democracy quickly turning into an oligarchy. In a democracy, people's voices get heard. In an oligarchy, $$ gets exchanged. This is exactly what is happening. Rich donors and lobbyists are buying Republican votes so they can avoid paying taxes and screw the middle class. The middle class has been shrinking for decades now. The rich gets richer and poor gets poorer is the best sign that oligarchy government is happening.
Also, as other poster mentioned, socialism != communism. Grab a book, read about it.
Milwaukee WI in the early 1900s had a Socialist Major and administration. Voted in to help stop corruption. Turns out his legacy is alive and well today. Summerfest is one of the worlds largest musical festivals. Original grounds for Summerfest was factories along the lake. Him and his administration turned it into a park. Everyone benefits from a park while factories come and go.
Good politicians make a difference not the party. And by no means is the President of China a good politician.
It is an oligarchy though. just because Trump has an official position now doesn't mean he didn't have much more political power than other citizens before that. just listen to how he speaks about senators and congressfolk, who will "do anything for campaign contributions"
> I fear that the heavy anti-republican, anti-business sentiment will morph into a call for communism
I wish. I wish every conservatives fear about socialists / communists actually came true. Unfortunately, I fear the West will quickly slide into fascism waaaay before we actually start taking alternative economic systems seriously.
Listen to what? Work more, receive less pay and benefits, and give up safety nets. Sounds exactly like something people would vote for in a functional democracy.
You SHOULD be work more, and you should be glad to work more. Your work supports the best, most free, most prosperous country that has ever existed. You want to be mad and thrash around, like a bull in a China shop. I understand, but your reaction to negative outcomes is itself much more negative. You must be positive, listening, constantly productive and at your best behaviour. You must do this yourself because you need other people to do it, and we must all lead by example.
I know you're mad, and that things aren't going the way you want to, but the truth is that things in USA and Canada are excellent and we should be very careful to get mad and start breaking things because we want to keep our promised land pristine.
You're like a man with a blindfold and a baseball bat, and our democracy is the pinata. You can only do damage by swinging your bat around. You cannot help democracy that way.
1: Let us know when you start working 18 hour days and consent to getting nickel and dimed by grubby companies who continually raise rates because they know you don't have a better option.
2: USA/Canada are great, but that doesn't mean they can't be improved.
3: You whole argument is doing nothing = everything will be fine. That's ridiculous.
What I'm saying is that you don't know enough to improve the system. You think you can just swing your blaming stick around like you know who's wrong and who is right. But you don't know that, and I don't know that, and the system we live in that is constantly producing prosperity is much too complex for anyone to understand.
But you and I both know this one thing. We both know how to improve ourselves. We know things that we are both doing wrong. I know my problems, and I'm going to fix those before I start tearing down the beautiful, harmonic system that I've inherited.
Yes I agree! The majority of citizens are stupid and should not have a say in how a society operates!.
My pride will be all I need when my livelihood is stripped away by those more powerful than me. I will fight against them all by myself until I become the most powerful! That's how everyone else has done it! Going solo.
You should work more to support a country is an line that would come straight from a Communist country.
We as humans are not born to work. That's a false idea being propagated by people who want to use you for their own gains. We are born to find ourselves, to realize our best potentials, to follow our dreams.
> Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse.
(You need to find better people to listen to.)
And when things get bad, what do you expect that will look like? Mad Max-style desert hellscapes?
No: It'll look pretty much like now. Except things will be a little worse. You'll have less money. Less freedom. You'll find yourself making a few more trade-offs and concessions than you were before. Harder work. Less money. And you'll wonder why there's a small ruling class that seems to get all of the gains of society. You'll wonder why things never ever seem to break in your direction anymore. Always towards them.
Oh, and fun fact:
Much of the country is already in this position. Especially in minority communities. You just happen to not be feeling it. But make no mistake that that is the future the Republican Party has envisioned for this country and is currently enacting piece by piece. Breaking net neutrality -- something that will affect the poor and downcast of society much more than it will affect you or I -- is just a piece of the puzzle.
Repealing NN benefits the Telecom companies and the large content companies (ie. Disney).
We know the telecom companies were dumping money into the republican party to repeal NN, but I think if the Democrats were in power then Content companies would be dumping money into them. The dems just have the option of playing as sheep because they don't have enough voting power anyway.
I'm cynical that either party cares that much about the public and think that pointing fingers just allows the elites to continue their games.
Then, shortly after Netflix agreed to pay Comcast's extortion money, they had to raise rates by $1 a month. So, we're all paying extortion money to Comcast. Learn some recent history before you form an opinion.
Good, all of the damn Netflix traffic is affecting my online gaming. /s
People can bluster all they want about price increases, but this is something that's been a long time coming. Netflix has increased the scope and variety of their offerings over their lifetime, especially the addition of Netflix originals (the real ones, not the per-market-originals). I would expect an increase in price.
ACA was a mechanism for private insurers to grow their market share with the side effect of increasing coverage and saving lives.
NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce.
Not completely applies and oranges, but if you don't think this is very very bad, you're not thinking.
> NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce.
This has been asked a few times but never fully answered, can someone explain why this vote in particular is a problem? I understand net neutrality and I am all for it, but there was considerable public doubt before reclassification that this was the proper way to go about it. It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster. Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing competition among ISPs? The major problem in all the pre-2015 net neutrality issues was that people often did not have any other ISP to use if their current ISP introduced a policy that was anti-consumer.
Except it was a disaster. The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix. There's no reason to suspect they won't go back to it as soon as they can.
If there was ISP competition then a Verizon customer could switch ISPs if they disagreed with the throttling of Netflix. I would compare it to wireless which never had these net neutrality rules. Is wireless a disaster? It seems like mobile plans are constantly including more data at faster speeds at a cheaper price. Some (all?) of the carriers have various anti-net neutrality policies but consumers at least have the option to pick which set of policies they are willing to agree with.
Google tried to roll out becoming an ISP and the costs were too great for the potential revenue they'd make back. You should read the article below, but not only is laying new cables down costly (which isn't helped when AT&T and Comcast use the legal system to stop Google), but many Americans buy their internet as part of a package that includes TV and/or phone service too. Meaning to be a serious competitor that can get enough customers to be profitable, you have to also offer TV and phone service to compete with the incumbents.
If becoming a successful ISP is too difficult for Google... then who is going to be able to do it? Who is going to provide the competition to the monopolies of Comcast, AT&T, and Time Warner?
In a system where preventing a monopoly (and ensuring consumer protection) through competition isn't possible, then that's where regulation is needed.
If you feel there is a better way, I'd be interested to hear about it.
As a Verizon customer, I'd rather live in this magic world where I can switch ISPs than have net neutrality, but there is no meaningful competition in my building that doesn't suck more.
There is an incredible up front cost for wired infrastructure and even Verizon was unable to turn a profit in the long run. Go pull their earnings reports and look at the performance of their wireline division (phone, internet, tv, etc...). It always lost money except for one year where they turned a million or two profit. That's why they sold it off to frontier who will invest the bare minimum and just run it until it breaks. This cost is what's preventing competition. Providers are betting hard on 5g wireless, it requires much less last mile infrastructure (you don't have to run and maintain connections to people's houses).
That is an argument that screams for municipal ISPs. However half the country has laws that hinder municipal ISPs. This is the exact type of thing I was talking about in my initial post. Why not put the energy that was behind this movement behind allowing and setting up municipal ISPs?
The municipal ISPs I've heard of (from AMA's on Reddit and such) still have to create a peering contract with Comcast/AT&T because those companies own the lines. And granted, RIGHT NOW, it's not that expensive to peer with them. However, it's my understanding the new FCC just relaxed the rules on how much Comcast can charge businesses that need to use their lines???
"The two specific items to be voted on Thursday include a plan to make it easier for broadband providers to charge other businesses higher prices to connect to the main arteries of their networks." - From a pre-vote article. The vote passed. It includes a link to the document.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/19/technology/ajit%2Dpai%2Df...
Ok, so assuming the monopolies aren't just going to let you steal away their business by creating a municipal ISP that uses their lines... You could try and lay your own lines to get around this. However, that's the exact problem Google ran into. Google required cities pass ordinances that allowed them to move Comcast/AT&T lines on the utility poles so that Google could add their own, but the existing ISPs sued saying that the cities did not have the right and won in court. This means Google had to wait for Comcast techs to come out and move the lines for each and every pole, a process which could take months and the ISPs were dragging out just to make Google's life miserable. This battle over the utility poles is something you can research.
So, assuming we're not better than Google, and that laying new lines will be a regulation nightmare, we're left with the option of renting the existing ISP's lines... of which I already stated I don't think would work either because the same anti-regulation mentality that caused the FCC to deregulate NN has also caused them to deregulate pricing protections for business peering.
I would imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, but a muni isp that started tomorrow wouldn't have a mountain of legacy copper lines that are quickly deteriorating, and cost a ton of money to maintain and replace. They could start right out of the gate running fiber to the home.
There's only one ISP (Xfinity) that provides 25+ mbps in my area (Bay Area). If they decided to throttle, it would be very hard for people in this area to not simply live with it...
Based on my limited knowledge of the ISP market, there's significant barrier of entry in each area for a new ISP or even an existing one like AT&T or Wave G.
> The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix.
No that's inaccurate. Title II reclassification happened in 2015. Verizon Netflix "throttling" (controversial what actually happened there) happened in 2017.
Edit: I'm having multiple people reply with basically the same thing which is: look here's what happened in 2014. I'm just going to reply to all of you here:
What happened in 2014 was not throttling in the last mile, which is what the 2015 Title II re-classification protects against, so this would've been legal even without the repeal (and more importantly did not meaningfully contribute to Title II classification, like parent is implying). What happened in 2017 probably wasn't either, but could more reasonably be construed that way because it was all happening inside of Verizon's network.
The Netflix Verizon case illustrates what makes Net Neutrality law so difficult to describe in technical terms. Verizon was not slowing down netflix packets, netflix was so big that it fully saturated multiple links. You can argue about what this implies for the peering agreements that are setup, but regardless this area is simply not something that net neutrality covers. Net neutrality says the last mile needs to treat all content it receives the same way. If the congestion is further up the network, NN has nothing to do with it.
If Verizon/others start throttling Netflix again they (Netflix) should just start making ISPs the butt of the joke in some of their original content, or make content directly calling them out.
> It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.
This is a common inaccurate argument I have seen pushed by the telcos to justify repeal.
There are many well-documented cases of how the "big 4" ISPs were increasingly blocking, redirecting (Charter's DNS redirection), interfering (injecting javascript and/or ads) and throttling traffic to internet services (Netflix) from their networks before the Title II reclassification of 2015.
All these abuses happened during a small window of a couple years between the previous FCC's Net Neutrality regulations were thrown out by the courts and 2015, when the Title II reclassification happened.
It's not that the state of the internet pre-2015 was a disaster but, prior to the 2015 reclassification, we were already starting to see abuses of net neutrality. When ISP's and telecoms started to block VoIP traffic because it cut into their phone services, it was unprecedented because no one had really prioritized data based on the content up until that point. Once that started happening and more companies caught on to it, it became a point of contention. While the 2015 reclassification wasn't a perfect solution, it did encapsulate the gist of the argument by saying that, like phone calls, we can't prioritize data based on content.
> It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.
From 2010-2014 similar rules to the 2015 rules were in place, citing a different statutory basis; these ruled were struck down in 2014, with the court pointing to Title II, be basis of the 2015 rules, as the available statutory basis for the kind of rules adopted in 2010.
From 2014-2015 there were no open internet rules in place, but the industry was operating in awareness that he FCC majority was drafting new rules with similar objectives.
And FCC net neutrality policy existed from 2004-2010, working on yet a different mechanism, which was struck down by the courts in 2010.
And before that, things get complicated, because even though there was no net neutrality policy for broadband in general, there was also very little broadband of any kind, and what there was often, for much of the pre-2004 period, fell under different regulatory regimes based on the underlying technology (cable as cable, DSL under telephone related rules.)
So, perhaps none of the pre-2015 regulatory states were a disaster, but repealing the 2015 order doesn't returns us to any of those states, or even to a condition where the law would allow the FCC to reimplement them. In fact, it gets us farther from any of the 2004-2015 states than the 2015-2017 state was.
Pre 2015, the FCC was enforcing NN through other means.
In late 2014, a court case declared the method they were enforcing didn't fall under the scope of their powers, but strongly suggested, while noting that the ISPs could and would be a danger to the internet if left to their own devices, that they had other means to enact the same regulations.
There were net neutrality regulations before 2015! The idea that neutrality is this novel thing invented during the Obama administration is as toxic as it is ridiculously false.
Pre-2015, the FCC still had regulations to enforce net neutrality, just different ones. It was active in punishing ISPs for violating neutrality under those provisions. Verizon managed to get a court to say that those regulations were inappropriate, but the court also pointed out that if ISPs were regulated under Title II, then the FCC would have the power to set the regulations that had been de facto in place for the past decade. The FCC under Tom Wheeler immediately did just that.
The problem with this vote is that it removes all protections without replacing them with anything else. All we have now is "yeah, the FTC might look at it if it's egregious... also the ISPs promise really hard to behave themselves." It's not just that the FCC has removed the rules (although that's still incredibly important), it's that they've totally abdicated their position as the regulatory body for telecommunications.
The fear of Non-Net-Neutrality goes far beyond the usual "there's only two ISPs where I life and they both offer the same deals".
It's something in completely its own category of nefariousness because they could be as anticompetitive as they want, and the market could not solve it.
That's because the injured party isn't their customers, who could take their business elsewhere, or at least loudly complain on the internet (if they have any).
It's someone not part to the ISP<->customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They're going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs' customers. And there's no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they've never heard about.
The result could be ISPs capturing almost every cent of value created by new startups. We will also have a fractured internet, because small companies will have to negotiate contracts with every single ISP. Also want to reach those 500,000 people in eastern Montana? That'll cost you $2,000 per week.
Anyone not living on the US coasts, and people in other countries, will constantly run into "HTTP Error 469: go suck a bag of.."
This doesn't appear to be a problem in any other industry. If I am a farmer, I don't have some inalienable right to have my produce on the shelves of the local grocery store. If am selling widgets through a catalog, I don't have some inalienable right to have my catalogs delivered to customers without paying a fee.
So why don't the results you predict occur in those industries? No one worries about grocery stores capturing all of the excess value from farmers because grocers have plenty of competition. No one worries about postage carriers refusing to deliver their goods because the government has promised to provide that service as a public good for a small fee.
It seems like you could solve your concerns by increasing competition among ISPs or by increasing the number of government run ISPs. I think this is still a "there's only two ISPs where I live and they both offer the same deals" type of problem.
> This doesn't appear to be a problem in any other industry. If I am a farmer, I don't have some inalienable right to have my produce on the shelves of the local grocery store. If am selling widgets through a catalog, I don't have some inalienable right to have my catalogs delivered to customers without paying a fee.
You are paying a fee: for your side of the Internet connection.
Can you make the same argument about a telephone? Should business be able to call their customers and their customers them without having to worry about who has which phone provider? Should the business have to pay the customer's provider?
Don't forget that ISP's have been buying up media companies and vice versa, this hasn't always been the case. We now have a situation where huge amounts of media have moved from traditional networks (cable, UHF, satellite etc) to the internet. This makes it incredibly appetizing to own the networks being used and offers a huge financial incentive to prioritize your own goods over others.
Factor in the way that corporations have been operating over the last decades (shareholder value is the number 1 priority) and you really do have a recipe for disaster for the consumer and small businesses.
It's more of an issue now just because our usage of the internet has become increasingly fundamental to day-to-day life. It was, of course, already on this trajectory pre-2015, but corporate and government understanding of the internet was still very much in its infancy.
Few providers abused the privileges they had, because of some combination of uncertainty about backlash, historical precedent, and lack of organization and understanding.
There definitely is a competition problem. Without net neutrality, you will be even more screwed as a consumer when your only good ISP decides to offer you bullshit media packages with fast SNAPCHATZORZ access. Sure net neutrality doesn't help the fact that there just isn't enough competition, but it has the potential to make things a lot worse.
> Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing competition among ISPs?
The answer is, of course, yes. But people like to think in terms of black and white, ingroup and outgroup, friend and enemy. The public is now thoroughly convinced not only that the reclassification had the intended effects (and it's not clear that's the case), but that reinstating the reclassification is the only way to address the issue. Anyone who says anything against this norm will be hounded until they shut up.
Actually, the public has been convinced that regulation on ISPs is a good thing, and that repealing that regulation without replacing it with anything is a bad thing. And I think that's a pretty fair thing to think.
The way I look at it, the existing regulation only really held things back a bit from getting much worse. For things to get better, there needs to be an impetus.
I talk with a number of Americans (especially on Freenode and over mailinglists) whose only options are satellite (which explains partly why they're still on IRC) or installing their own point to point radio network. All the current rules mean is that their only available ISP has to tell them explicitly that they'll be sabotaging BitTorrent traffic. Leased highway conduit space or leased dark fiber, and a loosening of (other, more administratively significant) regulations would have an outsize impact on the cost of the last miles of radio and/or fiber backhaul, instead of just adding pages to the subscriber agreement.
"It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster."
The internet regulatory state before 2015 was pretty much a disaster. The early internet was de-facto neutral with a bizarro patchwork of idiosyncratic local regulations (see the quote "the internet treats censorship as damage") and a general distaste from network operators for wide-area multicast (with good reason). Neutrality became an issue with major commercialization and particularly when internet services began to compete directly with non-internet services like TV and phones.
"As detailed in the survey below, nearly every operator places
limits on “commercial” use, sometimes including limits on Virtual
Private Networks, as well as limits on acting as a server. Why
might an operator put such a restriction on usage? Doing so
obviously makes the service less attractive to consumers who
might want to act in a commercial way, even in a fairly casual
manner.
"The simple answer is price discrimination. That this is the
case is not just intuition, but can be confirmed by company policy.
As evidence we can consider Comcast’s reply in 2001 to a user
who had complained about the ban on VPN usage on Comcast’s
network:
"Thank you for your message.
High traffic telecommuting while utilizing a VPN can
adversely affect the condition of the network while disrupting
the connection of our regular residential subscribers.
"To accommodate the needs of our customers who do
choose to operate VPN, Comcast offers the Comcast @Home
Professional product. @Home Pro is designed to meet the
needs of the ever growing population of small office/home
office customers and telecommuters that need to take
advantage of protocols such as VPN. This product will cost
$95 per month, and afford you with standards which differ from the standard residential product.
Sometimes network providers got in trouble with their restrictions. Sometimes they were changed via customer and public pressure. Sometimes the complaints went to the government, usually the FCC. Sometimes they were addressed there, sometimes they weren't. Some providers were prevented from restrictions by agreements with the FCC, some weren't. Sometimes, something you wanted to do was impeded by your ISP or an upstream provider. Sometimes you could pay more to avoid the impediment, sometimes you couldn't. Sometimes you could change providers to avoid the restrictions. Usually not, though. (Strike that; try "Essentially always not.")
Increasing competition is a dandy idea, and it was the primary argument at the time. Unfortunately, there are two ways to do it, mostly: force utility-infrastructure plant operators (the phone network, the cable TV network, whatever) to be neutral with regards to actual service providers (which sort of worked for long-distance telephone providers, I guess), or to destroy all of the streets in America by laying more cables. Again.
Competition hasn't worked before in the US, and I'm unaware of anywhere in the world where it has worked.
Net neutrality was a band-aid from the start for a larger problem that was unaddressed. ISP's, big telecom, etc. are/were committing acts that are illegal under existing law. For example, they were blocking certain sites/services that were competing with their own. That's a clear cut felony of restraint of trade. And possible other felonies related to monopolistic and anti-competitive practices.
The correct solution to this was to put the people responsible for approving those actions in jail for those crimes. But we didn't do that. Instead, we got net neutrality. The Rule of Law continues to be ignored in the US and with net neutrality the offending companies were simply forced to wine and dine us with a fancy dinner before deciding to fuck us whenever they wanted.
Pai says he is "helping consumers and promoting competition".
Unfortunately, half of the states have laws and regulations that hamper efforts of local governments to build out municipal broadband [1] to take their own broadband access into their hands.
Republican politicians are often [2][3] at the forefront of these state bans, despite citizens of all political leanings in favor of localities being allowed to do this [4][5].
Here are the salient quotes from the repeal which, I think, indicate the tech reaction to it might be overblown and might be "encouraged" by big tech players who aren't doing this for altruistic reasons. The key here is that the repeal allows the FTC to regulate things, and it's better at breaking monopolistic practices. (I'm still not sold on the argument that this will push innovation, though.)
> 500-504 The FTC’s unfair-and-deceptive-practices authority “prohibits companies from selling consumers one product or service but providing them something different,” which makes voluntary commitments enforceable. The FTC also requires the “disclos[ur]e [of] material information if not disclosing it would mislead the consumer,” so if an ISP “failed to disclose blocking, throttling, or other practices that would matter to a reasonable consumer, the FTC’s deception authority would apply.”
> 507-508 Many of the largest ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Cox, Frontier, etc.) have committed in this proceeding not to block or throttle legal content. These commitments can be enforced by the FTC under Section 5, protecting consumers without imposing public-utility regulation on ISPs.
> Invokes Sherman Antitrust acts
FCC also reserves the right to return to Title II classification, which AT&T tried to block in this:
> 176. We also reject AT&T’s assertion that the Commission should conditionally forbear from all Title II regulations as a preventive measure to address the contingency that a future Commission might seek to reinstate the Title II Order.647 Although AT&T explains that “conditional forbearance would provide an extra level of insurance against the contingency that a future, politically motivated Commission might try to reinstate a ‘common carrier’ classification [2015 Net Neutrality Regulations],”648 we see no need to address the complicated question of prophylactic forbearance and find such extraordinary measures [are] unnecessary.
Edit: the vote also keeps the government from classifying the internet as a public utility. I think that's a good thing because the govt could otherwise step in and "regulate" content it doesn't agree with.
I can't be both heavy handed regulation and something that when removed, won't change industry behavior. Also, the commitments provided are not eternal and unchangeable. They committed to treat all content equally when it was the law of the land. Now that it's not, they can easily change that stance.
I'm not very familiar with their history, honestly. But aren't you excluding two very good examples? Abstractly, I consider their effectiveness as separate from whether this should be under their purview. If they're ineffective, they should be fixed instead of having other agencies subsume their responsibilities.
I'm actually referring to one example. The reason why I don't count it is because it looks a LOT like it's being blocked for partisan reasons, rather than concerns about an actual monopoly. TWC owns CNN and the federal government wants them to divest it.
Democrats controlled both for a very short amount of time. Al Franken was part of their majority but had his membership delayed by a recount. Ted Kennedy then died and his seat went to a Republican. They never actually had a true supermajority.
Due to the way contemporary news media works, I think that Democrats (for the time being) have rapidly depreciating political capital after any election. Last time they regulated health care, despite knowing it would cost them many seats in the coming election. To say that 'they had a chance' I think ignores a few important facts about the contemporary US electorate.
I'm curious how this could impact the cryptocurrency space. If the government is effectively showing willingness to hand the Internet over to moneyed interests, does that damage the assumption that the Internet is a failsafe medium for cryptocurrency networks to operate? Should we also fear the banks using similar leverage to protect their interests if it looks like cryptocurrencies stand a reasonable chance of circumventing their oligopoly?
Anybody counting on the Internet for their disruptive future plans should hear this message loud and clear.
Here is my prediction: they will begin slowly, but eventually ISP's will be priortizing the traffic of their shitty versions of various internet services (youtube.com, DropCam, etc...)... This will impact small new businesses the worst because large entities will be able to afford to pay... So, we'll just have less new internet startups... Will be quite hard to quantify.
Some bad policy there from the FCC. The best outcome now would be if Google + Facebook + AWS, etc partnered and started charging domestic ISPs a price to access their content. Amazon is the elephant here because they can introduce a clause in the AWS agreement giving themselves the power to negotiate like this.
If they did it now, at the outset of this policy, it would be hard for ISPs to claim "antitrust" since the four horsemen would effectively be protecting smaller websites.
The alternative is the charge going the other way, with ISPs gaining the power to slice and dice the internet up, with small websites possibly having to pay more than one ISP.
Can someone clarify this for me? Perhaps my assumptions are incorrect:
> 1. Bandwidth is limited
> 2. Real-time streaming services, such as video, consume much more bandwidth (by sending more packets through the pipeline) than non-streaming services
> 3. Net neutrality guarantees that each packet is delivered with the same priority
Say Netflix takes up 20% of the bandwidth through its streaming services - each packet must have the same priority as any Netflix or non-Netflix packet. That leaves 80% for everyone else.
People begin streaming more Netflix and it now takes up 40% of the bandwidth. This means 60% for everyone else - fewer of their non-Netflix packets are making it into the pipeline. This means their download speeds slow down.
ISPs can either (1) increase bandwidth in order to increase the amount of non-Netflix packets get through, (2) throttle Netflix or (3) neither increase bandwidth nor throttle Netflix, resulting in non-Netflix content slowing down.
Is my analysis incorrect here? Perhaps I am missing something obvious?
To me, it looks like Net Neutrality is (3). In this case, streaming services (and those consuming them) get a free ride to due to the rule mandating that packets must be delivered at the same time (so you benefit if you simply stuff the channel with a ton of your packets, a la Netflix). It would also make sense why Big Tech would support this (they receive the benefit), while Big Telecom would oppose this (they incur the costs). In an economic sense this would seem to be an inefficient market (as regulation tends to do).
However there are always noble reasons behind regulation (even if they are not implemented properly). I don't see (2) as particularly bad in an economic sense, but because these telecoms are notoriously anti-competitive, perhaps the ideal of a competitive market goes out the door?
A. The rule isn't that packets must be delivered at the same time, the rule is that you can't shape based on source (but you CAN shape based on other things - so, you can prioritize VoIP for example).
Basically it means the telecoms can't favor their own streaming services over Netflix.
B. The clients are literally paying the telecoms in order to get access to Netflix. That's what they use their internet connection for, that's what they pay the monthly bill for. Why shouldn't they be able to stream?
I don't know about the specific rules in the US. But in Eurpean hacker circles when talking about net neutrality the strong definition is used. Meaning the provider should not be allowed to change quality at all.
Some think it would be fine as long as the user indicates the quality level he wants, others are against it completely.
There have been a number of debates of the years, at the Chaos Communication Congress for example.
In the US, under the OIO/Title II, an ISP could do basic network management (e.g. blocking ddos attacks, holding people to the bandwidth limits they paid for) and basic QoS, though I'm not exactly sure how that was defined or implemented.
Because objectively there is a limit on bandwidth that grows slower than streaming business and it is unfairly distributed among users in general. You can think of 10 items or less as an analogy. If I try to use my LTE from 17:00 to ~19:30, my bandwidth is almost dead because everyone returned from work to watch their feed. The only way to return my fairness is to storm the network with millions of torrent packets or video read-aheads. If ISPs would sorry me and charge less (I get exactly the same bill, btw), then it is equivalent for them to simply charge heavy users more or throttle them down.
Edit: it is worth noting that ISPs hugely oversell their bandwidth.
Missing from your equation is the important fact that people usually pay for the bandwidth they use, and that that's how bandwidth is split amongst people. Once they paid for it, I'm sure you'll agree it's really their business how they use it.
Net neutrality prevents the ISPs from selling bundles where some sites are discounted, and from throttling or blocking some sites.
Its not so simple. NN is not political, its commercial, and partly technical. One main sticking point is that ISPs don't want to pay for asymmetric peering. If you're sending more traffic on my network and I'm sending you almost none, I need to have larger 'pipes' to accommodate your traffic, but you don't, for my outgoing traffic. So, If peering were 'settlement free', as Netflix wants, that is beneficial for Netflix but not for Comcast. Also, any network, already has several routes for any given packet. By default, you HAVE to do some prioritization. Traffic internal to the ISP will always be prioritized. So if I were an ISP and I became a content provider, obviously my packets will be "cheaper/faster" to route than incoming NetFlix/Hulu, etc etc.
The above is just a supersuper simplified summary of some points off the top of my head. There are tons of nuances, which are more suitable for a detailed blog post, and not a comment. I'm sure someone has done that already.
Networks drop packets once they become over-saturated. You can either drop specific packets (e.g. netflix) or you can drop packets indiscriminately (e.g. everyone, including netflix, experiences degraded service). This is a pretty normal, planned-for part of the internet - it's one of the main problems TCP/IP tries to solve (it intentionally slows down traffic if it notices packets are getting dropped) and hasn't been a problem so far in the xx years the internet has been a thing.
Net neutrality covers that, and then also charging for use of some services but not others (imagine Comcast charging for bandwidth to netflix, which it does not own, but not Hulu, which it has a sizable stake in - there are a handful of examples of this having happened before the NN regulation went into place) and blocking certain traffic (see: Verizon blocking facetime) and allowing services of large companies to pay for prioritized traffic.
The end game NN proponents fear is something similar to Cable now, where you have to buy access to websites or protocols ala cart. I don't think that's necessarily going to happen, but I'm 100% sure ISPs will start abusing their monopoly/duopoly to further their vertical integration efforts by favoring content they own or news sources that cover them favorably over indirect competitors or detractors.
you seem to assume that the bandwidth used by netflix is fixed. however, what actually happens on network saturation (given net neutrality) is that both netflix and non-netflix content will slow down. netflix watchers will see buffering or will get a lower resolution.
that is the point of net neutrality: handling packets on a non-discriminatory best-effort basis. if the "channel is stuffed", then a certain percentage of all the packets in the channel, including the netflix ones, will be dropped.
> ISPs can either (1) increase bandwidth in order to increase the amount of packets that get through, (2) throttle Netflix which they can't do under net neutrality, (3) charge Netflix (and Google, Facebook, etc.) to not get throttled which they can't do under net neutrality either, or (4) neither increase bandwidth nor throttle Netflix, resulting in all content slowing down and them losing customers to ISPs that will invest in new bandwidth as they should.
You’re missing the fact that telecom is less profitable (compared to ads/sub streaming) and when new cool ISP will try to return some investments by charging more or throttling, you’ll throw them over a dick exactly as you did with an old one. ISPs are no fools and will not jump into this trap.
It is your bandwidth that is increasing, not theirs.
You're paying $XX every month for Y amount of bandwidth, it shouldn't matter whether it's used by netflix or viewing text. People however fear that ISPs will start charging you extra for every popular site you want to use, no matter its bandwidth usage (e.g. HN, Reddit, Facebook).
Your assumptions of how the internet works are incorrect.
Comcast wants you to believe you are buying an amount of data from them. In reality you are paying for a pipe that has a given throughput. If the ISP oversold that capacity that's their problem. Yes, bandwidth is limited but that's why you pay for a big enough pipe to do what you want. bandwidth is also limited because ISPs like Comcast do not want to invest in their infrastructure and feel little market pressure to do so.
Streaming services are not getting a free ride. Big tech is simply using the internet. This concept that somehow people are using the internet too much is absurd.
My analogy of us all using a shared pipeline (eg. the ISP infrastructure) is not a great one. Rather, that pipeline is partitioned based on how much people pay to access parts of it - the more they pay for their bandwidth, the more of the pipeline they get.
And how they choose to fill their part of the pipeline is their right, and should affect only them. If the latter part is true (that it affects only them), then I think my questions are answered.
This would be a valid concern if, and only if, the growth of the bandwidth consumed by the streaming services exceeded the growth of the available bandwidth, which is not the case.
Its a very intersting issue and sadly the debate is always very limited.
Fundamentally it makes absolute sense to have different priorities for different packets. Just like in any logistics you have different priorities for different application. In logistics usually the costumer demands some level of services and if he pays the needed amount he can get what he wants. Most people don't think this is bad. So fundamentally there is nothing wrong.
The IP protocol has this idea backed in already, and inside controlled organisation this is already pretty standard.
The problem happens when you have ISP who without their costumers input make arbitrary choices about the importance of packets. Not only because they don't really know what my needs are also because it requires the ISP to open up each package and analyse what is inside.
Even that might still be OK if there were a truly competitive market in ISPs. If one ISP does not suit you you can move on, enforcing discipline in the whole system. That would still be problematic because applications would then have to make specialised deals with the ISP to get high quality service for specific application rather then making that choice when you send a package.
In practice however ISP for historical, regulatory and economic reason are in a monopoly position allowing them sit in the middle and make money on both sides. This primary what Net Neutrality tries to fix. Providers that are in these positions, like Comcast, would like nothing more then to have Net Neutrality removed. Providers that are in a highly competitive market have far less to gain.
Even worse, then strictly about net neutrality, once the technology is in place ISP also start to act in other ways, for example injecting advertisements into your websites, breaking TLS and so on.
So really I am against Net Neutrality in general, but I would still not have removed it in the current situation.
The solution for me is actually a different one. Quite simply, ISP should not be allowed to open up your packages, just like the post office is also not allowed to do so. They should be allowed to sell you different quality of service in whatever pricing model they wish but it is the costumer who makes the choice about what he wants to do.
Monopoly would still be an issue in that case the potential damage would be way lower.
The alternative is government power realizing that limiting internet access under the guise of free markets is a great a censorship and control tool, and getting used to that and never doing anything about it regardless of who is in power.
Is this one of those things that is just never going to work? It seems like our system can't execute on things that are all-or-nothing. We shoot for the all, water it down with compromise, and then we're surprised when things fail.
This happens in many situations, such as public transit. Build half a subway line so that it goes to nowhere and it fails, thus getting ridiculed as a failure from the start. How are we supposed to accomplish anything big or complex in this system?
> No, nor will the next congress (likely Democratic or leaning that way) be prevented from passing laws that reinstate it at the legislative level.
Merely leaning Democrat isn't enough when the president can veto legislation. (I'm also not so sure it will be leaning Democrat in the first place, but that's secondary.)
Edit: To everyone downvoting: what did I say that was wrong...?
Would anything stop the next administration from re-instating net neutrality?
Money from the even richer companies that want to prevent it from happening.
Think of the ad campaigns: "Since have been able to charge content providers for their use of our network, we've kept our costs low - that's why you pay only $99.99/month for your ultra fast 10 mbit connection , f net neutrality comes back, your rates will skyrocket"
Of course Netflix is in favor of net neutrality, I seem to recall when this was first being proposed they were responsible for something like 10% of all network traffic.
Do you really think they'd be opposed to a plan that basically subsidizes their bandwidth?
Same for all the other internet giants, net neutrality pretty much cemented their spot in the status quo.
> Do you really think they'd be opposed to a plan that basically subsidizes their bandwidth?
no it's not subsidizing.
Basically I pay X amount to the ISP to ACTUALLY VIEW NETFLIX.
Basically the ISP gets more out of the deal by having access to netflix, not the other way.
I understand you're being sarcastic, but pro-NN folks like the OP are claiming that big business will shut down attempts to reinstate NN. That's an incorrect claim; some of the largest, richest, most powerful companies on the planet are pro-NN. It's dishonest to characterize big companies as the driving force behind anti-NN legislation.
It's just a bit strange that there was less protest from the giants this time than in past Net Neutrality battles. It's beginning to seem like a number of these large web companies have become ambivalent to the issue.
My prediction: One of the first actions ISPs will take will be to block ads from specific DNS names and IP addresses. Opposition to this will be fairly limited since nobody likes ads, but after the precedent is set they'll then allow ad providers who pay a toll to the ISP, and from there it'll spread to blocking/throttling of other content.
Net neutrality is the solution to a sub problem. Content companies having a monopoly on the last mile. We should really be pushing for structural separation and ownership rules of communications infrastructure, which I suppose is the end game of net neutrality anyways.
Like roads, it doesn't necessarily make sense to have competition in the last mile space, two fibers/cables/etc running to the same dwelling. New Zealand and Australia have created infrastructure companies for creating a whole sale last mile network. Like deregulated electric or gas, the infrastructure provider is responsible for handling the physical connection while service provider provides the actual service over the infrastructure. In the case of internet in Australia, the NBN provides the fiber connection and the ISP provides network connectivity. It is even possible to have two ISPs over the single fiber.
Got a terrible ISP. Churn and burn. However, if all the ISPs are terrible, then you probably still need net neutrality.
Really, you need both. Structural separation, so at least there is some choice. Net neutrality rules, so companies can't monetize their customer.
Disclaimer: Australia's NBN is a bit of a mess due to politics, but New Zealand did it right with UFB.
> We should really be pushing for structural separation and ownership rules of communications infrastructure, which I suppose is the end game of net neutrality anyways.
Right: eliminating the synergies between owning content and owning ISPs makes it so there is little reason for a firm to want to be both an ISP and a content provider; it won't instantly cause existing combined entities to split up, but firms seeking to concentrate on lines of business with natural synergies will eventually head that way.
Ben Thompson who writes Stratechery, which is often posted here, had a piece on Net Neutrality a few weeks ago which was quite controversial. Thompson is pro neutrality, but anti-title II.
> Net neutrality is a fiction. Hire Akamai (et al.) to mirror your servers worldwide to speed content to your users.
- David Autor
this is an infuriating argument. distributing your content throughout a network of servers to decrease rtt and increase cache hits is how the internet is supposed to work. giving priority to powerful corporations in an already congested network infrastructure, on the other hand, is anti-consumer and promotes monopolization.
In a fully capitalist market for broadband, I would indeed feel net enforced neutrality is not quite as necessary and would agree with the pro-market economist comments more. Generally speaking, I would expect that consumers could have a choice between various tiers and qualities of service. I'm fairly sure a "net neutrality" type tier would be one of the options here (there's enough for demand for it.)
The current marketplace is a different story. In many places in America, Internet service is a defacto monopoly. And the current legal landscape is anti-competitive and protects the big players. States can't experiment with their own net neutrality policies [1]; heck, legislation is in place in many states to defacto prevent municipal broadband alternatives [2]. And even with private players like Google Fiber, the "big players" show every willingness to use nuisance lawsuits in attempt to delay that pesky capitalist competition from coming into play. [3]
I did notice that a lot of the comments in that survey of economists brought up both the anti-competitive nature of the current broadband market, as well as the worry about vertical integration (which also is a monopoly concern). So it's not like they aren't aware of some of the strongest reasons (MHO) for needing net neutrality style regulations at the moment.
Exactly. So many people don't get that. Really 'net neutrality' is sort of the wrong battle. I want to be able to write soft real time application on the internet.
You are right, the market economist are basically just misinformed about the structure of the market. Most of them are not actually people that know much about the internet or work in that space specifically.
My attempt at a solution is to equate packets with real live postal services. The postal service is not allowed to open your packets but they are allowed to look at the stamp. This is how the IP protocol was designed to work, and it would work, but that requires a change in how IP do pricing and so on and so on.
yeah....i mean i feel a big part of this is because these people made it without the internet and feel it's not as necessary as people rely on it today.
No, actually it's not. You can pay for a better connection yourself, but "paid prioritization" essentially slows down other people for the person connecting to you, through no fault or issue of theirs.
They are also in favour of letting people starve, on environmental externalities to be ignored and to nickel and dime people for short term profit ignoring long term consequences
Your public lands? Under attack. Your Internet? Under attack. Your government funding? Under attack. What do you get? Nothing. Prepare to get f$cked over by your friendly republican majority.
As I've previously said: for people that believe Pai acted according to good faith, are you willing to bet that, as soon as he is legally allowed to do so, Pai won't be given a VP-level sinecure at Verizon or Comcast?
I was thinking the same thing. If they can then this doesn't seem to as big of a deal as I originally thought.
They can enforce NN which will ensure that entrepreneurship on the internet flourishes in those states, which will encourage more entrepreneurial Americans to move there, which will make them more prosperous.
From my perspective, the positive to this is that it will incentivize tech giants to accelerate the development of the web platform (WebRTC, WebGL, Web Assembly, Web Torrent and the like) as stuffing everything in HTTP and using encryption will protect them from the dirty blocking of services, and will allow them to focus their efforts on fighting throttling. For this reason, I hope Comcast and others will scare the hell out of them and do some big time media-covered dirty throttling.
I can already see for-a-better-web.org where Apple, Microsoft, Google and others explain why they have finally decided to move their ass and get serious about implementing the modern web in their browsers. With their level of funding, the time all of this is taking is ridiculous. When Netflix and YouTube get their first bill from tier 1 providers, Web Torrent and libtorrent will receive a pull request within a week and chrome will be patched overnight.
I do not think that the small guy will be hit by these rules, mostly because I think that by the time it comes to that, politics will have changed. The end result will be that everybody will benefit. Implementing the modern web seriously is the one thing that web giants can do to protect themselves, as it would enable a fully decentralized web. The difference between that and NN is that the modern web would actually help the small guy by making it easy to for example start a decentralized YouTube. So it's easier to cry fool on NN, and look like you're concerned about the small guy when in reality you too are concerned about protecting your interests in the most convenient way possible.
Not saying all of this is a conspiracy, just saying tech companies are far from being disarmed, they also have their monopolies they want to protect. Keep it in mind before crying over this vote, or spending money and time on volunteering. Let Tier 1 dudes give them the hardest time of their life and watch. If it gets to hitting the average Joe, do something but my take is it won't have the time to get to that.
Sorry but none of what you said really makes sense.
1) Websites work using FQDNs. ISPs can just throttle on that irrespective of whether the traffic is encrypted or not or what web technology is used. VPNs make that traffic somewhat hidden. But we could just see those banned outright unless you purchase a "business plan".
2) Apple, Microsoft, Google etc have already implemented the modern web. They have deviations in certain areas but there isn't some magical technology that makes it "modern".
3) The small guys absolutely will be hit the hardest. You will pay more as Netflix, Hulu etc are asked to pay more and it translates to higher subscription prices. Likewise you are going to see the richness and diversity of the web suffer as it becomes harder for startups to compete.
You may disagree but saying that it doesn't make sense is quite a stretch. I will nonetheless address your points :
1) Throttling is addressed by decentralizing the web with technologies such as Web Torrent. If every user is a seeder, there is not much the ISP can do. At the same time, the reason tech giants may not be happy with this approach can be understood, but then it is their choice and ISPs should not be blamed. Once this category of heavy traffic is out of the way, with regards to FQDNs if the traffic is lightweight, then throttling wouldn't make anysense. My guess also is that discriminating based on FQDNs provided lightweight packets would be blatantly anti-competitive. It would be similar to denying access based on race. Also, keep in mind that the only thing ISPs are saying is that companies driving more traffic (namely streaming companies) should pay more. So the chinese-like firewall you described is highly unlikely.
2) Too slowly, you can't make a product based on any of the disruptive features as of today. Support is barely existing and not mature enough. If they really wanted it, it would already be done because while the modern web is progressing slowly, these companies manage to iterate much more complex features on their other products. For example, while we've been struggling with the shitty Internet Explorer, Microsoft managed to literally roll out their very complex enterprise cloud business and scale it from zero to a multi-billion dollars segment. This and the .NET Core stuff. Similar things can be said of Apple and Google. Let's be real. In 2017, we should be at the stage where all the backbones are long done and they are rolling out their implementations of the bluetooth spec.
3) Prices may go up on Netflix, but they'll go down on comcasttube.com (if the service is not outright included in the ISP subscription price). Then they'll go down again on Netflix. Regarding the point on the richness of the web, this is not the way I think it will pan out for the reasons I explained. And part of my point was that, with this regard, tech giants getting real with the modern web has much more to do with it than NN, despite the rational currently being pushed by the valley.
I think all comments so far have missed the point. So called "net neutrality" is really just a big government handout to Google, Facebook, Amazon and others who want a free ride on the infrastructure built over decades by private company investments of billions of dollars. Putting a chokehold on the telcos has made it so these large companies don't have to make similar investments and put large infrastructure assets on their balance sheets that would depress their stock prices dramatically. If Google, FB, etc. want a free rider internet, they can go pay for it themselves. All of these companies have enough cash on hand to make the investment right now if they wanted to -- it would just make the billionaire ceos a lot less wealthy. I'm surprised nobody has pointed this out yet.
You have it backwards. These companies can benefit financially from the repeal. But that's short-sighted, and they know it. Innovation will suffer without Net Neutrality, and these companies are more worried about that long-tail loss than any short-term windfall that this would cause.
Congress can override the FCC using the Congressional Review Act. Simple majority in each house. The CRA also prohibits the agency from introducing similar regulations ever again. Call your Congressperson! Particularly if your members are on the Energy and Commerce Committee.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that 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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness"
If "nothing is going to change" then why the repeal? What benefit will this repeal actually bring? Either they pushed for this to be petty and undo an Obama era bill or something dastardly is in the pipeline.
We have years worth of instances of telcoms already trying to throttle and filter traffic to their choosing. They were blocked each time. So we know exactly what they will do now that they are legally off the hook.
I’m in Thailand right now and everywhere I go I see about 100 wires being routed along each telephone pole. 3 utility lines across the top for power, then the most incoherent mess of cables I’ve ever seen. One pole I saw had become a literal birds nest. These are fiber and copper lines for individual ISPs. That’s what the internet looks like in a free market.
I wish this image of free choice of ISP was used as an argument against repealing net neutrality. Nothing speaks to republicans more than showing them how their decision will fuck up their nice neighborhoods.
The argument of NN being a preemptive regulation on hypothetical future problems and thus could lead to unintentionally hurting "good" entities got me thinking why there can't be a new regulation scheme.
I'd call it "conditional enactment".
Basically, let us assume we want to regulate A because of a, b, and c reasons. We'll create a "conditional enactment" where it states the regulation proposal with reasons for regulating and the penalty for not abiding by the regulation. This basically acts as a save point where if some entity eventually does do A and qualifies one of those a,b,and c reasons, we'll continue on from that "save point". Now that we'll have more info, we can talk about what the pros and cons of regulating A are, adjust the regulation terms, adjust the punishment, and vote on the revised proposal. If the regulation passes, that entity is now subject to punishment even if the regulation passed after the entity's action was done. Any other entities that did A before the regulation passed is not subject to punishment.
This would potentially prevent the unintended side effects of the regulation and allow us to evaluate the state of the regulation while still putting the entities that could create harm in check.
Does anyone know about grassroots efforts to provide internet in major cities? Any links to follow updates or just for more info?
Being completely ignorant, it should be feasible with so many people in a few square miles.
I would absolutely contribute to an internet coop in Chicago were such a thing to get going. Even just to avoid the annual two hour phone calls to Comcast when I discover they added $100 worth of shit I didn't order to my bill without asking me.
It should have been impossible to make a decision on something like this without first solving the fundamental problem of giving users control over data consumption.
Just try visiting a web site or installing an app on your phone, while using a limited-data or pay-per-use plan (such as a typical cell phone plan or international “data roaming”): you will rack up insane costs BEFORE you have any idea how much data was going to be required for what you wanted to do! That’s insane!!
There is no practical way to find out how much data an action will take, no regulation of web sites and apps, etc. to force them to invest in minimizing their data footprint, and tools such as content blockers are fought tooth and nail in the name of “revenue” and other such crap.
Ironically, the idea of paying more for an Internet “fast lane” is exactly what companies should have done — to their own employees, investing in R&D to make their sites smaller, faster, with better experiences for everyone. Instead, those same companies will probably shovel the same money or more, except into ISPs and other entities to make their bloated experiences “fast”.
This seems like a last gasp attempt to tighten the monopoly, and it's doomed to fail. If nothing else, this will set the wheels in motion to bypass the established ISPs altogether, whether it's via node distribution or banking on Musk's satellite network. Or holding out hope that Google will pick up their fiber business again. Whatever happens, it's going to be interesting.
Unfortunately telcos have had a great year in power consolidation in spite of everyone's opinions or demands. Representatives in government have represented the ISPs/telcos over individual demands, voting in favor of their bribes over what nearly everyone wants.
Jeff Flake started this destruction in the senate where he pushed through the ISP privacy bill that allows them monopoly power and first rights to users info that they have no choice in excluding. Google/Facebook/Amazon earned your data by giving you a service you wanted, ISPs just default get it first now and you have NO CHOICE in the matter.
Ajit Pai has now handed the keys to the ISPs further in removing title II protections and common carrier status. Net neutrality is now gone.
Underneath all the madness of 2016/2017, telcos/ISPs have been slashing and burning the internet and privacy. They better hope competition is held back for some time because people will not forget this.
ISPs are not a service friendly to consumers who want fair internet or small/medium business that want fair representation in the markets.
Satellite internet is coming fast and and from people who want you to hate your local provider and their PR will say 'we will give you free access'. Hope it will work out, the plans SpaceX and OneWeb have announced are pretty crazy.
Call your Congressperson and Senators today and tell them that you want them to enshrine NN into law. And then vote against them next time they’re up for re-election if they don’t. In the case of your Congressperson, this will be next November.
I think the cable guys just awakened the sleeping giant. By making sure they can tighten the screws on Silicon Valley they have spawned out a multitude of startups that will topple them one day. The cable companies make money by making something scarce. They will milk every penny of their investment and give it back to the investors without much reinvesting it back to create cheaper broadband for the masses. Silicon Valley’s whole business model is based on cheap access to the internet that's why google Facebook etc is investing so much to connect the third world. I believe they were hedging against net neutrality dying someday. I can't imagine after winning the first battle they took a timeout. The investments in the 3rd world internet may ultimately lead to newer cheaper ways to connect the world. Cabel companies clocks started to run out the day they attacked net neutrality. Let's see how they survive in about 10 years’ time.
Is there anything that can be done at the protocol level to make the anti-NN goals of the ISPs unfeasible? Would a sudden surge in IPV6 adoption make the databases used to locate and label certain traffic useless? What about at the DNS level? BGP? Perhaps the best way to enforce net neutrality is by forcing the adoption of protocols that ensure it.
This whole discussion is missing one point. Why are FCC members supposed to represent some parties, instead of being independent experts? It's the root of the problem. Instead of objectively addressing the issue, FCC is dominated by dumb partisan politics.
How do you expect those independent experts to be chosen? Even then, how do expect these experts to "objectively address" the issue? I don't agree with partisan politics, but the solution isn't demanding independent, magical objectivity, because that doesn't exist, regardless, everyone would claim to have it, the liars and the idiots especially.
If we want better representation of the facts and the People's opinion, we need better representation. The current system lacks nuance and seems to be subject to Elite interests over popular ones.
I haven't seen anyone else post anything along these lines, but doesn't this make it legal for the the government to ask/force/pay ISPs to hide sites (e.g. wikileaks, etc)? Maybe that is why politicians didn't really try to stop it?
This is one of my biggest medium-to-long-term fears with net neutrality. I doubt that is explicitly in many politician's current game plan, but they will catch on to the possibilities sooner or later. It will start with ISP voluntary censorship of some high-profile clearly controversial sites, probably the Pirate Bay will be the first one to go. Then there will be a gradual creep (not sure what time scale to predict here), and eventually politicians will start reasoning that if ISPs are blocking sites anyway, we might as well order them to block certain others.
Here's my question: why was such a momentous decision decided by a board of five people? A decision that will affect hundreds of millions of people was decided by five people. Isn't that insane? Whatever happened to democracy in America?
I find it hard to believe that the will of the people is adequately represented by five people. Not that it really matters--with the massive split between the Republicans and Democrats basically the party with the most board seats will win.
People need to stop pretending that 'the people choice' about everything when they got to vote once. Even that one vote was basically sounded with lots of pre-voting and all sorts of other things.
If you look into the actual political economy of the situation it is quite clear that 'the will of the people' has little to do with the outcome of the political process. That is just a reality.
The fundamental problem is not the alt-right on twitter but the american political system with its layers of Byzantine rules and insane bureaucracies.
What's a person to do if you're generally for the concept of net neutrality (knowing the mendacity of outfits like Comcast), but you're also generally against regulating ISPs like telecoms (knowing the slowness, quantity of bureaucracy, and general incompetence of the federal government when it comes to tech)?
The FCC's Open Internet Order was damn good, and had it survived legal challenge, was one of the better and realistic options (aside from local loop unbundling which is never gonna happen). I think that legal decision was one of the worst ones in recent memory.
I don't think any Net Neutrality advocates have yet addressed the fact that last mile ISPs can't find new ways to subsidize broadband roll-outs and upgrades. The only way to pay for it is to charge you more. So while the internet access stays "fair" (which is already questionable at best), you pay more money, and service roll-out continues to be slow and crappy.
Some form of compromise regulation is needed to both retain the fairness of access, but also allow ISPs to find new ways to monetize. But most people don't seem open to talking about this.
So can someone explain what this could mean on the consumer side? I've been mostly thinking about it from the producer side and how tech companies will have to pay a premium for fast service to be delivered to users, but I'm seeing the packages and wondering if as a consumer I would have to call up my ISP to add a random site that I want to access to my service. How would like aggregation sites like Reddit or Ycombinator even work then? I dont know enough about what ISP's can and cannot do to answer this question for myself.
The argument that net neutrality protects the little guy, the small startup, etc is backwards. Internet giants like Facebook, Google, Netflix et al. only want net neutrality so that their current business model is protected through government force.
There are plenty of mechanisms in place to keep telcos in check. (e.g. FTC, customer choice).
If we really want to reform Internet policy create more competition in the marketplace by making it easier to start an ISP not harder.
Lobbying and money can do anything? American policy makers are more messed-up than I thought. How worst could it get?
Interesting to watch it's impact in US in the long run. At least the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India listened [0]. If not the situation in India would be really bad.
why everyone thinks ISP will start to sell internet as tiered tv channels? this is not happening and will not happen.
what will, and is happening for the last 3 decades, is that ISP charge to do something they used to beg for: co location of high traffic services.
contente providers, lets pick netflix as an example, uses ton of bandwidth. but they already paid for their uplink. now, customers pay for the downlink. and ISP now see their oversold pipes actually being used (what a surprise). so they beg netflix to pretty please place some edge servers on their data centers so they dont pay the expensive outbound traffic. and netflix gladly did that because that cut latency from 300ms to 2ms for those customers. everyone happy.
then ISPs started to sell that as a feature for the reduced latency. but if nobody bougth, they would still fall back to begging for them to do that for free. and everyone still happy.
now they can outrigth limit how much expensive outbound bandwidth they will spend on netflix content. no matter that the ISP own customers already paid for bandwidth for that service or another. so netflix and all other providers will have to pay a huge premium for colocation (for that great latency reduction feature) or a still high premium simply to not be blocked!
the client will just see that they can't connect to netflix. the isp doesnt even have to warn their own users, because there is nothing they can do. netflix is the one who have to pay up. so they will have to charge more and pass that to ISPs. and that is the ISP end game. they can still be afloat after cable cutters moved to streaming platforms they dont own and operate (which is the likely outcome, since all their attempts are falling flat on their faces)
I'm surprised I haven't heard anything along the lines of Ajit being hacked or receiving death threats.
My only hope from this is that as soon as cable companies start their bullshit, people become aware of how this all happened and maybe we can reverse the damage in the long run. I'm also hoping things like Google Fiber get more aggressive or Musk keeps his promise of launching his internet satellite.
How often do we see a person from a 3rd world country being installed at the top of an organization with the intent to subvert it? I have seen it happening in at least 3 corporations that tanked a year-two after that. It seems like natives don't want to do dirty work (nobody wants to be Elop), so external ones with a different philosophy and conscience are brought in.
We don't know yet. You might have almost no change, you might find half the internet censored by default.
If ISPs wanted to make it cheaper for you to access a simpler level of services, they could have already done so by offering you lower internet speeds and small data caps. They kept prices high because you were willing to pay them and there wasn't (much) competition. They're not going to give up those profits willingly unless the new pricing plan can make them more money overall. So I wouldn't get too optimistic.
They absolutely have the technical ability, and now they have the legal ability as well. If a page is http, not https, then they can arbitrarily modify the page in transit. Otherwise, they can simply decide not to serve pages from any site they want.
> On the other hand, I'm not opposed to censoring some things, like porn.
This is how censorship tends to start. Porn, copyright, and/or terrorism. You are opening yourself and your country up to a world of abuses by those in power once you start letting them censor. (Also, why is it any of your business or mine if other people watch porn? And if it is, the path to change practices we disagree with is through dialogue and education, not authoritarianism.)
Porn has horribly messed up our society. Have you been watching the news and all the sex abuse scandals? Plus all the stats regarding broken families, abuse of minors, etc. It's just all bad, and all due to porn. Cutting off porn would fix a whole lot in our society.
Someone help me find better information on this. Regardless of how "good" the NN regulation is, I think it's a very fair point that this is a regulation for a preemptive and hypothetical scenario that had so far not occurred.
Are there enough proof that the scenario isn't hypothetical, and companies have already been doing something unfair?
Even after the NN rules were in place, I saw absolutely no difference in my area (I live in a major metro area in the midwest) and saw no advantage either way. The gloom and doom stuff people talked about prior to NN I never experienced, and post NN being enacted, I didn't experience any of the benefits either.
Perhaps this will only spur the global do gooders of the world to come up with better (more permanent) solutions for promoting privacy, free speech and innovation.
As a reader of HN I feel like there is already great work being done here (eg/ lets encrypt).
ahem pineapple fund, if you are a real thing, maybe you can put something under EFF's tree for xmas?
"We are helping consumers and promoting competition," Mr. Pai said in a speech before the vote. "Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas."
Are the big companies really in favor of neutrality? At least in the short mid-term I believe it’s more helpful for them to get their silos even more consolidated...
Also... they haven’t been super loud for neutrality and this happened. It almost felt as if they did not care.
Demand for Cisco SCE and similar will explode. These boxes are specifically tailored for per-user traffic management on carrier scale, and can throttle and account traffic per URL per user. Network vendors producing carrier grade equipment should profit.
> Ajit Pai, the F.C.C. chairman, said the rollback of the net neutrality rules would eventually help consumers because broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast could offer people a wider variety of service options.
Soon more and more people will have access to Facebook & such stuff only, but not the real Internet? It'll get simpler, in the next presidential election in the US, for Trump and Putin to win again, via Facebook propaganda & ads?
Heres a thing, I see a lot of comments about starting an indie-ISP of sorts.
Simple question: if the monopolies were finally able to break net neutrality laws, don't you think they can likely introduce some bullshit legislation to kill indie-ISPs?
Can't we just interconnect our routers using wifi and deliver the content ourselves? Using our own network. Using a blockchain to deliver p2p data like Ethereum does. I wish we could do that and screw the telecoms.
All I have to say is this is no longer a free market society. You can buy whatever you want not excluding popular vote... I can't believe we have come to this, but revolution may be the only way out.
It’s a lot of hang wringing over nothing. Google, amazon, even Apple and Msft rely on a healthy internet. They represent over 2 trillion market cap. They can easily compete with the telecoms.
First, it's not an issue of "competing with" unless they start their own ISPs or, in the case of Google, restart development on their ISP. Water doesn't compete with the pipe. It just hopes the pipe decides not to squeeze.
Second, I doubt many people are crying over Google, Amazon, or someone like Facebook. They already are working on walled gardens and are happy to pay to eliminate competition. They actually don't rely on a healthy (in the sense of open, competitive, or free) internet at all. Small startups and free speech on the other hand does.
Most of the time you really only have one ISP to choose from, so it is kind of monopoly already in practice, now with this brain-dead repeal, what will happen then? Don't like this at all.
Write to your governor and ask them to propose net neutrality protections at the state level. Text RESIST TO 50409 and you can have your letter written and faxed to them in <2 mins for free.
It may be for the best over time - the innovation that comes from the decision is likely an increment over where we are now - and possibly have wider benefits that just enabling NN.
This is the darkest day of the Internet. We the customers are now accused for not buying better services, instead of being treated equally and anonymously.
Can someone explain the rebuttal to/flaws in this article? I'm sure the EFF and many other large organizations wouldn't back NN if it weren't truly a good idea, but then again this article also seems to make some good points.
Interesting read with some interesting points, some make some sense, and I'm all for a fresh look. The article lost me on this quote:
"What we need to understand is that while ISPs aren’t currently regulated by the government, they are already severely regulated. Not by government. They are regulated by YOU. You are their customer. You are the boss. You hold the checkbook. ISP companies are regulated by profits. That’s right, profit is the regulator. Like every company that is in business for profit, they have to answer to their customers. All successful businesses are constantly sniffing; trying to figure out what customers want. Profit makes them care about you. Customers will only voluntarily hand over money if it’s worth it. Right now we have de-facto Net Neutrality, because that’s what you want. That’s what we all want."
This is the same worn-out saying around "the invisible hand" and "competition will force ISPs to keep net neutrality"
Well, it's not like they never tried... there rules are there for a reason.
I mean, maybe it will work, but if all ISPs start offering "internet fast lanes" and "social package" (and it's not like companies didn't collude before) then the invisible hand will be infeasible.
I'm picturing some kind of euware/(non-mal)ware for personal routers that will route unthrottled traffic on the side in some sort of peer-to-peer manner.
Is anyone working on market based routing over mesh networks with crypto currencies? Would that have been disallowed under the network neutrality rules?
The lawsuits have already started. The lawsuits will be covered by consumer interest groups, tech blogs, and tech news sites. So we will in fact be hearing a lot about this for the foreseeable future.
It's funny, the FCC's mandate isn't to poll the public and do whatever most of them want. Strange how people seem to think it's a numbers game, at least when they feel the numbers are on their side
Logician and Philosopher Raymond Smullyan had a story about this in one of his books. He had gone on a trip with a woman with a little girl. The adults wanted to eat at colorful local cafes, while the girl wanted to eat at McDonalds. He suggested that they vote, and the little girl replied, "That's no fair. I'd lose!"
Our republic isn't designed just to do what the people want. It's intentionally designed so that good people can sometimes do something unpopular in the public interest. For this to work, it's incumbent on the voting public to elect good people.
Yep, there's a reason populism is commonly derided even in democratic societies. The founding fathers and "The Federalist Papers" [1] talked heavily about this problem (aka the influence of the "lowest common denominator" in popular voting).
Where these popular ideas do matter is in the marketplace. The entire tech industry, including some of the wealthiest companies in the world, will most certainly rebel against any attempt by ISPs to threaten net neutrality. And there will similarly be a revolt by customers.
Google Fiber was created merely to promote the deployment of fiber, Net Neutrality is a far bigger issue than fiber to both the tech industry and ISP consumers.
Even without FCC rules it will still be very dangerous for any ISP to make any significant changes to how the internet works.
The most likely scenario is that a few mobile internet providers may offer niche small packages of limited internet to mobile users for $5-10/month (which so far is the only real world example of "net neutrality" being violated in the world, by a Portuguese ISP)... basically a way to offer cheaper packages to some users who can't afford full broadband. This is basically the only thing I could see ISPs getting away with. I highly doubt any ISP would risk limiting the internet for any average home broadband users. Most American ISPs are public companies who still have worry about their bottom line.
The backlash even without FCC laws will be a significant deterrence.
ISPs already do incredibly unpopular things, but it doesn't hurt their bottom line because their customers don't have other provider options. What are they going to do, go without internet?
Comcast is one of the most hated companies in the US, but you wouldn't know it by looking at their stock price. The free market is not a solution here.
That's not the problem. The problem is that this is not a free market. The ISPs have effective control of the federal government and many state governments, and use that control to block competition from e.g. municipal ISPs. If the free market were actually allowed to operate, it would very likely solve the problem.
I didn't say the free market is a problem. I'm not a communist; I like the free market and I agree with your comment.
However, like you said, it's not a free market and it won't be for the foreseeable future. Fantasizing about that changing isn't a solution either. At the moment, government regulations are the best tools we have to protect consumers.
Have they pissed off the entire tech industry and attempted to fundamentally change how the internet works?
Having poor customer service, high fees, etc seems like a far cry from completely changing how internet billing works and whitelisting websites/throttling the entire internet.
What is the "entire tech industry" really going to do when the ISPs decide to fundamentally change how the Internet works? It seems like access to consumers, which the ISPs control, is pretty important for a large segment of the tech industry.
But first the ISPs have to actually do the things that we were warned they would do if the FCC scraped these laws. No ISP has yet announced or even proposed any specific future changes.
I'm not even sure what being "wrong" here will look like in practical terms:
- Are average home broadband internet plans going to have their internet filtered unless they pay more for 'unlimited'? With TV-style "grouped" packages?
- What websites (tech companies) will be included in these hypothetical filtered packages?
- Will they (Netflix/Disney/Facebook/Google/etc) let the ISPs include their brand(s) in marketing these new non-neutral plans? Will they let the ISP include their website in any throttled package in technical terms?
- Will ISPs be launching the new plans perfectly in sync with other ISP companies, for the 80% of Americans who have more than one ISP option, so they won't hemorrhage customers to competitors when they completely revamp their billing? Will they grandfather existing users?
...there are far too many questions to properly give you a answer about how the industry will respond.
When/if that actually becomes a reality then it will be easier to guess how the trillion dollar industry will react and if the ISP customers will sit idly by with no recourse... at the moment I'm confident there will be plenty to do to make business/life for Comcast/ATT shareholders uncomfortable if they ever were dumb enough to mess with how the internet works for the average American.
Three days and no answer to my questions? This is the third time I've posed these questions on HN/Reddit and not a single 'activist' has given me an answer.
That's exactly why I'm not buying this idea that these FCC policies were what's stopping ISPs from disrupting 'net neutrality'.
If you actually dig into the details it doesn't make much sense and is extremely risky. Yet I seem to be one of the very few who is actually challenging this stuff on rational grounds rather than "herr derr I support republican policies and want to be a contrarian".
The reality is that not every situation calls for government intervention. Especially extremely hypothetical situations which have never even been tried in the market place.
This is equivalent to regulatory "pre-crime" enforcement...
In the past, people getting really mad at ISPs has not changed anything. I don't see any reason to believe that people getting really really REALLY mad is going to change anything either. There's no mechanism for it to.
Customers "being mad" at ISPs is hardly what I'm saying is stopping them. It's merely a minor part of the problem. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15926116
The customers revolting is not a matter of influencing Comcast/ATT/etc, it's a matter of influencing Google/Apple/HBO+Disney/Netflix etc etc etc.
People love to trivialise this counter-point as merely "oh ISPs dont have competition therefore the market can't fight this problem", which is incredibly reductive and misses the forest for the trees.
Why don't you consider T-Mobile's "Binge On" plan to be a violation of net neutrality? I recall it being something like: Netflix data is free, other data is $10/GB.
It seems exactly the same as that widely-quoted Portuguese example, which also let you pay a data rate for sites that weren't in their special packages. This happened in the US because net neutrality was weak and never really applied to mobile carriers.
Apologies, I should clarify, my Portuguese ISP example is the only real world example of the "TV-style limited internet packages" being deployed by a real-world ISP (which is the primary scenario nearly ever pro-net neutrality article warns about).
> Comcast's throttling of bittorrent
Were these FCC laws blocking Comcast from throttling Bittorrent traffic?
Canada was also the first country to throttle bittorrent traffic as well and the adoption of encryption in Bittorrent clients was largely able to bypass this issue AFAIK (I haven't experienced any slow downs in years in Canada since I toggled "force encrypted peers").
> Rogers throttling of all encrypted traffic in Canada
Source? I used Rogers for years and I've never heard of this problem.
""Comcast's practices are not minimally intrusive, as the company claims, but rather are invasive and have significant effects," the commission said, demanding an end to the practices by year's end."
This was under the Title I classification that was struck down by the verizon lawsuit, where the court said that the way to enforce these rules within the FCC's existing powers was via Title II.
Comcast and Verizon both throttled netflix for a while, before getting smacked. What do want to bet that's back in force, as soon as tomorrow perhaps? They've got all the code from last time ready to go.
> The entire tech industry, including some of the wealthiest companies in the world, will most certainly rebel against any attempt by ISPs to threaten net neutrality
Have you noticed not many tech companies have complained? Did telecom win by attrition, or did they negotiate after the last failure?
I think you are ignoring the main financial motive for this change - ISPs want to shake down Google, Facebook, and other successful internet companies. Customers won't see this directly. It will have indirect effects by increasing costs for the companies they use, but not in an obvious way that will cause a revolt. In financial terms, this dispute is mainly about these giant companies battling over who gets the fat profits Google and Facebook are currently taking home.
This is pretty disingenuous because one elected official is oftentimes overloaded with multiple responsibilities. In this case the FCC chairman was appointed by the president (Barack Obama). Are you implying that the REAL way to deal with the Net Neutrality issue is that we need to become single-issue voters with respect to net neutrality next presidential election cycle? That seems a bit silly, and yet seems like the only reasonable way to affect change in this situation by "playing by the rules". It would be a lot less anxiety producing if people had a more direct way of affecting FCC rules without having to possibly sacrifice some other completely unrelated issue they care about (such as Supreme Court appointment, or health care direction, etc. etc.).
It would be a lot easier to get behind the idea that we should elect "good people" if we weren't concentrating so many responsibilities to the one magic "good person" we get to choose.
To further clarify, the FCC rules state that Only three commissioners can be of the same political party at any given time. Pai was Obama's nomination but he was not Obama's choice. He was McConnell's choice.
Are you implying that the REAL way to deal with the Net Neutrality issue that we need to become single-issue voters with respect to net neutrality next presidential election cycle?
No. I'm not trolling either. Raymond Smullyan's stories are meant to be like Zen Koan. My factual and historical observations are much the same. It's more like a Rorschach blot.
It would be a lot easier to get behind the idea that we should elect "good people" if we weren't concentrating so many responsibilities to the one magic "good person" we get to choose.
Our world is considerably more complex than it was in 1800.
While technically correct, your comment is misleading because the seat legally belonged to the Republicans and he was chosen by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Obama could have rejected the nomination but anyone that the Republicans have a say in will be anti-net neutrality.
That's not true. He was appointed in 2012 by Obama and confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Trump merely renominated him to keep the position for another 5 year term.
No, Trump selected him to be the chair, he didn't merely renominate him.
But, in any case, Obama nominated him but did not choose him so much as he choose not to violate long-standing precedent as to how the seats that cannot (because the 3 members of one party limit has been reached) be from the President’s party are selected.
Now, he could have violated that precedent, but that wouldn't have likely gotten someone else into the seat, just given up any chance of Senate confirmation.
Obama still made the decision to nominate him. Plain and simple. And Trump did renominate him for another 5 years. Yes, he elevated him to chairman, but he still gets the same 1 vote, so it doesn't matter. Not quite sure what point you were trying to make.
Yes, but I took the OP to mean that you could press your congressional rep to sponsor or support a Net Neutrality bill that would override agency regulations.
Appointed by President Obama allegedly as a sort of "Olive Branch" to the Republicans.
I really wish the Democrats had just started firing broadsides at Republicans in the last decade, given that the Republicans clearly can stomach the lowest of the low political gamesmanship.
> Appointed by President Obama allegedly as a sort of "Olive Branch" to the Republicans.
It was an “olive branch” to Republicans in much the same sense as the British sovereign offering the leader of the party that has secured a majority the opportunity to form a government is an “olive branch” to that party; it is, through combination of law (limiting the number of members of one party, and mandating Senate
confirmation before a nomination becomes an actual appointment) and established custom (as to how nominees that are not of the President’s party are chosen), a requirement that, if violated, would produce a major crisis.
It's not an olive branch. The President is required to appoint no more than 3 members of one (his own) party, and 5 total. The chair is then designated by the President.
People keep saying this like he's the person who chose Pai. The way these commissions work is:
- it's staffed by members of each party
- each party's leaders (typically in the Senate) choose the people who will be appointed
- the President typically rubber-stamps those appointments
- the President at the time really only gets to choose which member of the commission is the Chairman
So if you want to blame someone for Pai, you should be blaming Senator McConnell for telling President Obama "here's the Republican we want you to put on the commission".
Not disagreeing with you - I'm taking issue with the parent poster who wanted to blame this on trump. There's plenty of blame to go around in our government, but it doesn't all fall on Trump (as the post I replied to implied)
Ajit Pai was appointed to the FCC by Obama, your elected official, and was designated FCC Chairman by Trump, your other elected official. So it looks like you voted wrong twice in a row!
Sure, it's easy to drown people with a link and a 210 pages document, but can you briefly explain it with your own words and voice your opinion for us?
"Considering both distributional effects and changes in efficiency, it is a good idea to let companies that send video or other content to consumers pay more to Internet service providers for the right to send that traffic using faster or higher quality service."
I believe Netflix and YouTube and what-not already pay their service providers for the bandwidth they use.
Neither Netflix nor YouTube would exist if they had to pay for bandwidth at the rate consumers do. If Netflix was sending everything over the regular internet, it would literally break - the only reason Netflix can stream as much as it does is because of caching close to consumers.
Well, I’m a sucker. I just read your very lengthy first link and learned absolutely nothing. The entire statement is questionable anecdotes, unreasoned conclusions and baseless declarations of what is good.
What about this text did you find valuable? Please share.
>So it’s no surprise that the Wireless Internet Service Providers Association, which represents small fixed wireless companies that typically operate in rural America, surveyed its members and found that over 80% “incurred additional expense in complying with the Title II rules, had delayed or reduced network expansion, had delayed or reduced services and had allocated budget to comply with the rules.” Other small companies, too, have told the FCC that these regulations have forced them to cancel, delay, or curtail fiber network upgrades. And nearly two dozen small providers submitted a letter saying the FCC’s heavy-handed rules “affect our ability to find financing.” Remember, these are the kinds of companies that are critical to providing a more competitive marketplace.
And you believe that Ajit Pai is "one of the good people" doing the "good thing" against public interest?
Funny because I believe Ajit Pai is a corporate shill doing what his Friends at Verizon wanted and I am sure he is hoping the land a nice 6 figure job in the private sector in a couple years....
This move today for the FCC has absolutely nothing to with public interest
Why did they solicit public feedback then? And why did they misrepresent public feedback and refuse to acknowledge that most people want net neutrality? Obviously they aren't beholden to what the public wants, but the latter is clearly scummy, is it not?
It's required because it's supposed to help inform the FCC of pending legal challenges. FCC and other government agencies are supposed to take those comments seriously to avoid implementing bad rules and attracting expensive lawsuits in order to save the government (and ultimately the peoples') money.
I'm not sure I'd use the term "direct feedback mechanism" to describe voting for an elector who votes on a President who appoints a commissioner to a five person committee for five year terms.
The direct feedback mechanism is voting, for people who draw maps that determine who get's elected to have the power to determine the composition of the rule-making bodies.
You could even argue it's how people spend their money that determines who has money to chose who get's to draw the maps etc.
Yes, the intent is to let the public weigh in, help the committee make an informed decision as opposed to a capricious and arbitrary one. The decision is clearly arbitrary, as Pai has stated from the beginning he's going to do this, has blatantly ignored everyone, and is now on record as having insulted us. In terms of capricious, that's harder to prove. Between the EFF and the various attorneys general, this will be tied up in federal court.
The intent is to let different parties bring their concerns to the attention of the FCC. It is not a vote. Every public comment could advocate for one thing, and the FCC is perfectly in its right to do the other.
The only federal elections are for the President, Senators, and Representatives. This is not a direct democracy.
It also means due to personal whim. I don't think it was this either. Pai has reasons for his choice. Many, of course, disagree with these reasons or think they are bad reasons but they are reasons nonetheless. It wasn't an arbitrary decision.
It's "arbitrary" because Pai, on multiple occasions, indicated he will not take the comments into effect. Even after the reports of the faked comments, the calls to delay the vote by some senators, the faked DDoS attack, he still went through with it. There's also allegation he violated the FCC's process. He was determined to ram this through no matter what. That's arbitrary.
No, that just means it's not a democracy. One can listen to a bunch of comments, disagree with them, and choose to do the opposite of what they say without being arbitrary.
His determination actually demonstrates the lack of arbitrariness. Arbitrary choices are held lightly and easily changed. This was the opposite.
That's capricious, not arbitrary. If Pai wanted this to go by the book, he would have pushed the vote out until the investigations into the fraudulent comments was completed, at the least. Someone who was determined to see this go through, but not in an arbitrary fashion, would have waited until the various issues with the process were resolved, and then held the vote. Pai was determined to hold this vote no matter what, that's arbitrary.
Capricious means "given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior."
AFAIK at no point during the process did Pai change much at all. He made it clear what he was going to do from the beginning and stuck to it the whole way through.
"The term arbitrary describes a course of action or a decision that is not based on reason or judgment but on personal will or discretion without regard to rules or standards."
Most of Pai's arguments are half-truths or out right lies. There have been several instances where his claims were fact checked against the data and proved to be false.
Furthermore: "In many instances, the term implies an element of bad faith, and it may be used synonymously with tyrannical or despotic."
I think there's a good case that Pai's actions and statements could be shown to be despotic.
Soliciting and addressing public feedback is; ignoring and/or misrepresenting it is not (and may, in fact, help support a finding that the act was arbitrary and capricious in the light of the information available to the agency at the time of the decision, though that's—even with that fact established—a fairly difficult case to make.)
The FCC has dismissed the public's feedback[1]--they never considered it and did a poor job of soliciting it in the first place. The servers went down during the feed back process, the interface for solicitation was confusing and there wasn't much effort to prevent spam. There were 22 million replies (the previous record was 3.7 million during the last net neutrality debate). Even if you write most of that off as spam or duplicate, form-comments, that's still an immense amount of feedback. To dismiss it all is misrepresenting it.
You're complaining about servers going down while acknowledging that the number of comments was unprecedented?
And your link doesn't support your claim:
>The Pai staffer who spoke with reporters acknowledged that there were legitimate comments from both sides in the net neutrality docket. In Pai's draft order, the FCC comprehensively addresses all the serious comments that made factual and legal arguments, the official said.
> You're complaining about servers going down while acknowledging that the number of comments was unprecedented?
Yes I am. My point is that they did a poor job at soliciting feedback--not that they didn't get a lot. The fact the volume was so high just shows how important it was for this issue. If servers are going offline, then you can show good faith by extending the comment period or addressing it in some other manor.
Being "required to solicit comments and to consider them" doesn't mean you only consider a subset containing legal arguments.
This isn't exactly true. There is a reason that the FCC must accept submissions from the public before it makes a major decision -- it's part of the FCC charter to consider the input of the public. If a prosecutor can argue that the FCC did not take the public's comments into account (or did not take them seriously or the public commenting process was not done properly), then a court should overturn the FCC's decision.
You're right that it's not a referendum. But the public poll was not "yea or nea?" it was "if we did this, what sort of problems would it raise for you?" And if they had substantive answers to the problems raised, then it would be logical for them to override the outcry. But it was instead as if the answer was, "Yes, the feedback solicited was merely our bureaucratic obligation but we are not obligated to follow through."
What do you suppose the purpose of government agencies is then?
Looking at their mandate it seems pretty clear that they are there to serve the interests of American citizens and should be acting in citizens best interests.
I think that's pretty clear in the use of the phrase "the people of the United State" here:
The FCC's mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (amendment to 47 U.S.C. §151) is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."[1]
This is true with some caveats. "The judiciary" can overturn a decision in some cases. See [0] for a very detailed explaination. Comments to the FCC do MATTER. If half of America says that Net-Neutrality is good and then it gets repealed, then the judicial branch can accept a case examining the decision. Or something, IANAL, but the the dude who wrote [0] is.
Specifically, the paragraph which starts with "Another way they'll drop their deference" is roughly the section which covers the caveats.
That's just not true. The FCC are appointed by our elected representatives. Why do you think they even have to pretend they are accepting public comments on things like this? If the FCC does something bad, like this, we have the ability to elect better representatives, who will throw out these telco stooges and appoint people who represent us, not the large telco monopolies.
I was about to say people think in Democracy every vote counts the same. It doesn't. Imagine quality of people's life in big cities if majority living outside would be playing first violin. The latest Presidential race is great example how Democratic election works.
> Imagine quality of people's life in big cities if majority living outside would be playing first violin.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here - that's exactly what happens in the US. People in rural Nebraska or Wyoming's vote is often up to three times more "effective" than someone in NYC or LAs.
Let us agree that what you said is True. Let us also agree that this statement is true, and perhaps becoming increasingly at odds with our federal government:
> Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed
The structure is such that people elect representatives and those representatives sometimes appoint other people to roles because it's not feasible for people to elect 10's or 100's of thousands of public employees with decision and regulatory making power.
Also, all of these people are still humans. Meaning that they have their own closely held beliefs. If you are honestly expecting non-elected officials to violate their own beliefs based on public feedback simply because "majority rules", you aren't living in reality. That virtually never happens. When it does happen, it usually happens on issues that are not hot-button issues and those being hounded by the public don't have a strong opinion so they are willing to switch sides if necessary.
And the US is not and has never been a majority rule democracy. It's a constitutional republic and that's a critical difference. Part of that structure is ensuring that in some cases (like the electoral college), the majority don't get to make the rules simply because they decided to band together or live close to each other. The electoral college exists precisely for the situation the US is currently in - where the more liberal areas are all clustered in relatively small, high density areas. They now account for more than 50% of the population but far less in the electoral college because the system was built to prevent that density issue where these small areas by land mass could force feed laws upon the rest of the country, enabling those areas to effectively have control over money and resources which they otherwise would not.
Which is exactly what cracks me up... Republicans, moreso than Democrats, are always talking about government screwing over the people and yet this vote was completely on party lines. I wonder how they're going to figure out that dissonance.
"The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work, and then they get elected and prove it."
Well, by saying that Title II was an overreach of the government and stifles competition. (Not my opinion. Just stating that it's not exactly inconsistent with their ideology. Just another example of ideology over common sense preventing people from doing what's right)
Right... I just think its curious that their statements are so meaningless and have such little substance that you could replace "government" with "oligarchy", "corporations", or any other term that describes are large, organized group of people.
This move decreases the government's regulatory power in this area; it completely follows republican ideaology. The government cant screw over citizens if they aren't touching an issue.
Nature fucks them over because the government doesn't protect them from nature. The government does not fuck them over. There's a very distinct difference, and recognizing that difference is one of the fundamental things that separates Democrats and Republicans.
In this case, it is an act of government, repealing an existing regulation, which is allowing the fucking over. Hence, government fucking over citizens.
Is it? Republicans were voted by the public into Congress, into the presidency. They are acting just as anyone voting for them could expect. In that sense they are representing the will of the people who duly elected them.
The FCC ignored the will of a small % of technology-oriented, predominately liberal voters. Just because all the media that you might tend to consume and the people you tend to converse with are vocally against this repeal, doesn't mean that that represents the will of the majority. That same sort of ideological bubble is what caused everyone to be so shocked when Trump actually won, despite all the polls and predictions to the contrary.
When you explain what Net Neutrality is, an overwhelming majority of people supported it, including republicans. This isn't just a tech-literate liberal issue.
A majority of people support Democrat's economic policies...even though Republicans hold a majority of the seats at both the state and federal level. It seems like people aren't necessarily voting for the party that represent's their positions--or, more likely, there are wedge issues that cause them to vote another way.
From everything I've seen, net neutrality seems to have broad voter support, regardless of party, and even many Republicans in office have voiced concerns. So are they really acting the way voters would expect?
In an ideal world, people vote in the government they want, and the elected representatives follow the will of the people. We all know such a world doesn't exist [1]. In practice:
* Most voters don't even know what net neutrality is. How will they care if they don't understand that they should care? It's a complicated, nuanced subject even for tech people.
* It wasn't part of the Trump/republican platform at the time of the election. As far as I can recall, it didn't even come up during the presidential debates. Voters might want net neutrality, but they might not have known that voting for Trump/GOP would cause a repeal.
* The last couple of decades show that Congress (and politicans in general) overwhelmingly goes where the money is. There's a huge amount of money and lobbying power on the pro-repeal side, and the current FCC is a classic example of regulatory capture [2], with every indication that the FCC (and the Trump administration) is now stocked with industry insiders.
Hate to say "I told you so", but conservatives (sometimes) and libertarians have been warning the country for ever about the pitfalls of centralizing important things like this under an unaccountable federal bureaucracy. If you're opposed to this ruling, you're most likely reaping what you sow.
What? If you're a staunch libertarian who wants the FCC to go away, how would the absence of FCC help net neutrality?
We only have (had!) net neutrality and other important regulatory protections because the FCC exists.
Something needs to exist as a protection against corporate abuse. If it's not a centralized agency, then what? There's no self-correcting mechanism in capitalism that magically prevents companies from screwing with consumers.
Never said I was an opponent or proponent of 'Net Neutrality'. I was merely commenting on the interesting turn of events where the obvious ramifications of a centralized bureaucracy 'hurt' the perceived well being of the people who typically argue FOR centralized power. For all my ill feeling towards the Trump administration, it has been extremely fruitful in providing situations which exhibit this hilarity.
As for your statement and question;
> Something needs to exist as a protection against corporate abuse. If it's not a centralized agency, then what? There's no self-correcting mechanism in capitalism that magically prevents companies from screwing with consumers
Couple points...
First, "There's no self-correcting mechanism in capitalism that magically prevents companies from screwing with consumers" gave me a solid laugh. Little thought experiment: let's say there are two alternate realities. In one of these realities, somehow, Starbucks is the ONLY way for you to get coffee. Somehow, they've completely ensured other coffee shops can't open (it's either too expensive for them to open or literally illegal). In the other reality, opening a coffee shop is easy! Starbucks hasn't colluded with any government agency to make coffee shop ownership too expensive or difficult to pull off. In which one of these realities do you think (the) coffee shop(s) would abuse their customer base(s), charge inflated prices, or provide lackluster serviced that rarely if ever are innovated on? I'm hoping for the sake of discussion, you understand my point. Scenario 1 is hardly a far stretch from exactly what has happened over the years in the ISP industry. The FCC is HARDLY innocent in creating our current dismal ISP situation. Open markets are THE system that prevents abusive actions towards consumers.
The second point, I am far from against the government protecting consumers from abuse by corporations. Fraud or anti-competitive behavior should be met with a stern legal response. But when the government played a huge role in creating an environment where we can't protect ourselves, I'm extremely dubious of any power grab attempted in the name of "we'll protect you". In an open market, I have a perfectly good mechanism for protecting myself which also happens to stimulate innovation, lowers prices, and improves the product/service.
So yea, an artificial monopoly has now been given more leeway in how they provide services to an already abused customer base... it's a bummer. However, I'm not keen on providing more power to the very people who helped get us here so that they can control the problem they created. Let's fix the root of the issue. Decry crony capitalism always - not just when it's 'the other guys' doing it.
And one last point... ISPs provide an extremely expensive and complex service to their customers. In what world are price controls and artificial monopolies a good idea? We need innovation in this space, not uniformity of service and centralized decision making. It's the internet, not the DMV. We should make it so ISPs have to win our usership by providing the best most valuable service, not by wielding the legislative process more effectively then there would be competition.
If you're interested in further reading I found this analysis [1] of the gap between GOP policy and GOP public positioning pretty interesting. However, it's certainly couched as a screed. Depending on your politics that may make it difficult to wade through.
We live in an oligarchy, the will of the voters hasn't been relevant for a long time:
> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
This is objectively true. There are studies that show that the opinions of American voters have a near zero, statistically insignificant effect on policy:
Republican legislators are pretty uniformly against net neutrality. The Republican public is not, with one recent poll showing 3 out of 4 Republicans familiar with the issue voicing opposition to the rollback of regulations. [1]
That's because you don't get to choose your issues one at a time. You get to choose a basket of issue positions at the same time as a legislator's personality. Normally from a choice of two.
Because people voted for someone, doesn't mean they fully agree with the elected person's whole program. In an election you have only a few candidates for a large number of possible combinations of positions. If you mostly agree with republicans except on a few things, you're probably still going to vote republican.
Exactly. For example, if you believe very strongly in Second Amendment rights, most Democratic candidates are not an option on election day. Additionally, Hillary Clinton was a very polarizing candidate even among registered Democrats.
As a prolific (and I mean prolific) gun owner, I've yet to see evidence of mass-Democrat candidate opposition to the 2nd amendment in general. "Gun Grabbing" hasn't been a party-wide concept despite Republican propaganda otherwise.
Stupid gun rules, like magazine size limitations, sure, but they almost never "come for my guns." Often the suggestions are perfectly reasonable in my mind - national gun registry, for example.
What purpose would a national gun registry serve other than to set the stage for eventual confiscation? I'm genuinely curious, because I can't think of any crime it would prevent, while being a big affront to privacy.
Considering that guns keep being sold to people they absolutely should not be, a registry makes it easy for the FBI or ATF to get flagged when an "unallowed purchaser" attempts or succeeds to make a purchase. Then they can know to either confiscate (because of an illegal purchase) or start monitoring heavily. Previous mass shootings were by people who should not have been able to purchase, but lack of a registry allowed them to "slip through the cracks."
Another scenario - the FBI is monitoring radicalization in a small community. They check the gun registry to see which of the people in the community becoming radicalized are actual potential threats and zero in their investigation on those individuals, to prevent a shooting.
Etc. Basically just makes law enforcement's jobs more feasible.
The government doesn't have the resources to "confiscate" every registered gun owners' guns at the same time, and so we would be well aware if a confiscation by a tyrannical government is coming, and all of us weirdo militia folk and preppers would already be putting the sandbags out. Trust me, some of these guys are practically wishing for it.
The intent behind a gun registry is to empower courts, and potentially police. A judge would be able to identify that someone owns several more guns when considering whether to grant bail for an armed robbery, and the surrender of those weapons until trial might be a condition of bail. It might be useful information for a judge who is crafting an order of protection in a case of stalking or domestic violence.
Similarly, police who are serving an arrest warrant might be able to serve the warrant with the knowledge that person of interest has several firearms on the property. Sometimes police know this today, but not because of government records.
(I'm not arguing a personal position one way or the other, just explaining the rationale.)
If an opinion isn't important enough to affect what politicians you vote for, you shouldn't be surprised that the government you elect doesn't represent your view on that issue.
This has made me feel pretty damn powerless, as pretty much every site/person of significance has stated their opposition to such a repeal, and yet they went through it anyway. Just a gut feeling that our democracy isn't working properly when such a loud and clear, great majority of the population messaging is completely ignored.
Democracy doesn't work through public declarations, it works through elections. One year ago, the states chose Donald Trump as president, knowing they he would end Net Neutrality [1]. If a population wants to send a different message, they must do it in the next election [2].
> One year ago, the states chose Donald Trump as president, knowing they he would end Net Neutrality
More charitably, they chose Donald Trump on the suspicion that he would do "better" than Hillary Clinton on: abortion, immigration, the economy, leading in "the culture wars", and maybe a few other issues. Net neutrality was a litmus test for basically nobody.
US democracy has many more choices because so many issues (marijuana legalization, divorce laws, tax rates, etc.) are state issues.
To some degree, this whole mess is due to pushing ostensibly state-level laws (abortion regulations, for example) to the national level, which leaves much less room for genuinely national issues, like internet regulations, defense spending, immigration law, etc.
It might seem unnecessarily inflammatory to bring up abortion in a net neutrality discussion, but it's hard to get around the fact that appointments to the Supreme Court (which basically sets abortion policy) might have been the thing that convinced enough people to vote for Trump.
So I guess I agree that a lack of choices results in outcomes like this, but U.S. democracy provides other mechanisms for political diversity. They're just not being utilized on certain key issues at this point in history.
> I think you’re looking for the term populist, not extremist.
Actually, I meant extremist. The "Trump" party is full of people who want to roll back amendments to the 1940s or earlier.
These are extremist views, in my opinion, and don't represent the average American. Bannon and those who would raise white supremacist marches chanting against Jews can go suck a lemon.
I'm not sure the electorate sees elections the same way.
I think most of them are true Republicans in the sense that they want to elect people they think are trustworthy and then let them make decisions as their proxy. In that case, a candidate can have policies and platforms to convince people to let her be their proxy, but she doesn't need them. She could just have a "trust me, I'll make the right decision" pitch.
Besides, if Trump is an ideologue, what is that ideology? At best it's a new (or at least renewed) nativist spin on identity politics. That's not an ideology; that's a team.
I'll respectfully disagree. Trump doesn't really care about limited government, balanced budgets, traditional values, federalism, reducing abortion, market-based solutions to societal problems, etc.
He does have a laundry list of issues he tweets about, a subset of which he picks at with executive orders (which, itself, is unconservative) but that seems more like raw appeasement of his political base than anything coherent (or even consistent!).
There are a few exceptions, I guess. He's, at least in rhetoric, for a strong military. Though we're nowhere near a "Trump doctrine" that proposes a coherent framework for that desire. It's, again, more of an id-driven move than anything rational.
> Time will tell whether electing an extremist candidate was a good idea or not.
And in the meantime, who cares if the country is lit on fire? That's the future elected officials' problem.
Sarcasm aside, I actually agree that we need to speak with our vote. I just wish we didn't have such large swings of the deregulation penis in the meantime, and instead we had cool-headed, logical people at the helms of these agencies and our Executive branch. I suppose it's too naive of me.
Our democracy is hardly a democracy. I kind of wish people would stop discussing it as such. The opinion of the population matters very little to the outcome of legislation, and for those whose opinions it does matter (legislators), they are bought and paid for.
Also, if you really think that people who voted for Donald Trump understood the intricacies of net neutrality you must be an incredibly optimistic individual.
Having a good memory is the singularly best way to combat the money corrupting politics.
The people just proved with the Alabama special election that they can change the establishment if they feel strongly enough about it.
Sadly I think the effects of repealing Net Neutrality will be felt more like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water, and no single change is going to entice the majority of the population to vote. It's not the tech industry that needs to be convinced that repealing neutrality is bad, it's the general non-tech population that needs to be convinced to care.
Alabama didn't prove anything really. It demonstrated that the bar for getting elected to a national office in Alabama is a minuscule amount above "accused of sexually assaulting minors".
It also demonstrated that the established incumbent party can lose if they ignore the will of the people. They could have easily found another Republican (even another judge) that wasn't accused of numerous sexual misconducts. They chose not to bother because why swap out a yes-man with a person that might have principles when Alabama is a guaranteed win?
Eventually both parties are going to realize that they would be better off putting forward a candidate that the people like instead of putting forth an establishment yes-man (in the Dems case from the presidential race, a yes-woman).
You're just saying your democracy isn't working properly, just for different reasons.
Most Trump supporters did not elect trump "knowing ... he would end Net Neutrality", and a statement from 2014 does not disprove that (a cursory glance at r/TrumpCriticizesTrump/ kinda makes the point).
The US public is atrociously misinformed as a whole, either due to lack of education or bad media incentives or both. In order to function, a democracy requires an informed public.
Thankfully we don’t live in a democracy. America is a democratic republic. As the public is naturally under-informed, this is arguably a good thing; regardless of your views on Net Neutrality.
E.g. has Trump been able to build the wall that arguably half the population approved of? No, because his budget approval process has been checked by other elected representatives.
I think his very-well-known inconsistencies on policy matters makes it hard to argue that he won on the merits of his policies. His personality, attitude, and his not being Hillary Clinton seemed to be more important.
While I do not think Donald Trump is turning out to be a great president, his competition was not any better for different reasons. I think there is also a problem with how our Democracy elects people as well.
I don't like Hillary at all and think the Democrats would've easily won if they hadn't used establishment tactics to put thru their establishment candidate over Bernie, but..
>his competition was not any better
Really? Hillary was going to carry on a lot of Obam-ian policies. Net neutrality would still exist, pedophiles would not be publicly endorsed by her, and a 'tax cut' that is actually just a confusing mess that only clearly benefits the super-rich would not have happened.
So what exactly would she have done to be as bad as Trump? The guy is incessantly mired in scandals; says things that a centrist family would barely tolerate their old, crazy, racist uncle saying around holiday dinners; and is basically a narcissist.
I don't like Hillary at all and don't see how you can say "she's not any better than Trump" with a straight face.
Probably because of political leaning, but statements Trump made like wanting to incentivize companies to return to the US, deporting illegal immigrants, and decreasing military spending. Were some of the main reasons I thought Trump was even worthy of being considered.
Trump has been wishy washy on his immigration and military spending statements since being in office.
I an pretty far away from you guys, but from where I’m sitting trump seems like a utter maniac, lying even when people can clearly prove it is lies. Alternative facts etc etc. I have a hard time understanding how he can be compared to pretty much anyone and come out on top.. I know the Media paints their own picture of him, but still?
Clinton has been demonized for decades by the right. Right wing media turned her into the boogie woman who elicits a visceral, emotional response from Republicans. It's so ingrained, they're still talking about her daily on Fox News, because they understand the effect she has on the Republican base.
Did you submit a comment on this proceeding, beyond just clicking on some site that auto-generated a comment?
I spent several days working on my comment; it was a dozen pages long, it included relevant citations, and it addressed specific questions asked in the NPRM. I took the time to correct a few falsehoods in the NPRM's technical analysis.
Now imagine what it is like to see that comment being specifically cited and totally dismissed in the draft rules that were just approved. In a way it is worse than just being ignored -- someone took the time to read my comment and comments by like-minded experts, saw the part where we corrected falsehoods, and then replied with, "Well, ISPs say $X so $X is true and your comment wrong."
I am not going to give up on civic engagement but I am sure some of those like-minded engineers and researchers might.
Please don't. I mean that very sincerely. The fact that you took the time to do this is very inspiring to me. It reminds me of this guy: https://professional-troublemaker.com
It kind of blows my mind to think of how much individuals who are focused and determined can really accomplish.
The effort's appreciated. I'd commend you for it even if I disagreed with your position — to take the time to directly express concern and raise issues is key, in my opinion, to enacting real change.
Same, so as a petty man I've made a personal vow to send Ajit Pai a card every Christmas reminding him he sold his soul to Comcast and that I will never forget or forgive him for it.
Totally pointless right now when the whole country is calling for his head and he gets to play the haughty "I don't give a fuck, I'm set for life now, suck it plebes" card.
But in 2040, when he has long since moved on, and the rest of the country has forgotten, and he's an old man that just wants to spend time with his grandkids and ensure a good future for his family or whatever, every Christmas, still, a card from me - "Hey shithead, remember when you sold out the American people for cash? Fuck you."
Keep in mind the FCC is not accountable to the public – we don't vote them in. However, we as the public still have power to push our representatives to encode NN as law. Now that NN has unfortunately been repealed, we can cue in Congress to act.
In this instance, it's working as intended. Based on the election results, this is pretty much expected.
I suspect it's more that all the people of significance who have stated their opposition also share the same core political ideology as you, which doesn't match that of the party currently in power. So you view the system as not working because you didn't get what you wanted by having everyone on your side yell louder.
This isn't a democracy, this is a republic. While we have some power in who we elect, those elected are representing us, and can choose to vote how they want. Whether that screws them in future elections is another story.
This is false. The United states is a representative democracy, AND a republic. A democracy can be direct (As in parts of ancient Greece), or representative (As in... Every democracy that is not in ancient Greece.)
The only criteria for being a republic is that you don't have a monarch. The USSR was a republic. China is a republic. Canada is not a republic. Yet, Canada is also a representative democracy, while neither China, nor the USSR are.
It's not democratic. It's republican. Remember that America is a republic, not a democracy. Each state has 2 senators/electoral votes because this country was founded as the United States. It was supposed to be more of a coalition of states united under a federal government, than a single nation.
Also, California has a huge population with tons of representatives, and basically every elected official is democratic. I don't think you should complain.
> Remember that America is a republic, not a democracy
Republic. Aka, Res Publica. "Thing of the people". A form of government where all political power originates with the people, directly or indirectly.
Democracy. Demos Kratia. "Rule by the people". A form of government where all political power originates with the people, directly or indirectly.
These two terms are not about how decisions are made. They do not discuss who elects whom, and how, or if everything is directly chosen. They exist to differentiate the systems from previous feudalistic rule, where the power came from the fact that the leader had the power to protect you from other leaders (the power was justified through the strength), and from monarchies (including both earlier ones, e.g. the ancient egyptian dynasties, and later ones, e.g. french absolutism – both justifying their power as being chosen by a god, or descended from one).
Now, the US itself has a governmental form called "Representative democracy", meaning that all choices are made by representatives, chosen by the population, and whose power comes from the people, who have to respond to the people, and who have to represent the will of the people.
Also, what you’re thinking of is the question between direct nation-wide rule, or a federal rule.
Germany is a federal republic, and also representative democracy. Yet it manages to solve this exact issue – by electing the first chamber of parliament, the Bundestag, entirely with MMP, meaning it is chosen independent of states, and the second chamber of parliament, the Bundesrat, represents each state.
This guarantees that all decisions have to be backed by > 50% of states, and > 50% of population. This guarantees both the democratic principle, that power has to come from all the people, and also the federal principle, ensuring that states also have power.
TL;DR: You’ve misrepresented everything you’ve said, and your argument isn’t even conclusive. You can have a more representative system without losing the power granted to the states, e.g. the German system.
I just want to correct this now and say the United States of America is a constitutional democratic republic form of government. This distinction matters.
Perhaps you should spend a little of time reading about the US form of government because what you described is very similar to the purpose of the House and the Senate. Barring gerrymandering issues, the house members are populous elected representatives with each state given weight based on its population. Then each state gets 2 senate seats which are elected within the states by popularity as well.
Tldr; you've essentially described how the law making arm of the US is already elected and have pretended it's something new.
I’ve described what the US model would be ideally. But that’s not what it is today. The German system was designed after the US system (due to WWII, and everything after), but improved.
Gerrymandering is a real issue (the German model doesn’t have that), the house seats are effectively arbitrarily distributed, etc.
There's no double standard, just randomness. We don't come close to seeing everything. When a bad post hasn't been moderated, the likeliest explanation is simply that we haven't seen it yet.
We've scolded kuschku plenty of times for breaking the guidelines in the past, and you're quite right that he did so there with that uncharitable swipe.
By the way, I (the user you had replied to) fully support your phrasing, and even your comment — my original comment was a bit unstructured, so your question was valid, as it was easy to miss if someone doesn't know the German system.
So I am especially disappointed by the downvotes and the unasked for moderator action your comment got — it asked a valid question.
what does the lack of a monarch have to do with how much representation an area has.
truly, the US is an oligarchy. regardless of what votes say, actual decision making and power rests with the wealthy nobles, like the Trumps and Kochs.
> It's not democratic. It's republican. Remember that America is a republic, not a democracy.
"Democracy" and "Republic" aren't part of a formal system where they're mutually exclusive.
America is a Democracy, and was meant to be without any question. It's a Republic, too. If a programming metaphor helps, it inherits traits from both. It's democratic republic with elected representatives. It's a lot of things. Including some mistakes which we've eventually recognized with official amendments and court rulings and other forms of change. One of the principles of the American system is that any part of the system is open for review, criticism, and even rewriting.
Maybe the way we elect the executive branch is one area that needs change.
> Each state has 2 senators/electoral votes because this country was founded as the United States. It was supposed to be more of a coalition of states united under a federal government, than a single nation.
The "coalition of states" thing was tried first, and it wasn't working out super well, so we got a new system that actually made a single nation and it's worked out better.
Giving states 2 senators and electoral votes wasn't done just because it was Totally The Best Ideal Thing Ever For Everybody. It was done in large part because it had to be done to get buy-in and make the actually working single nation happen.
Now, the practice does have some other merits. Rural areas shouldn't just be resource colonies for metropolises and regional voices are important and hiding 100 extra electoral vote easter eggs around the country could help everybody get attention and in principle be part of ensuring the POTUS is a reasonable representative of a plurality across the whole country.
But the thing that's manifestly un-representative (and doesn't serve any clear purpose as far as "Republic-ness" goes) is the whole winner-take-all approach to awarding electoral votes.
We could fix that as a country and have a more representative presidential election by requiring states to award their electoral votes proportionally to how the population votes.
If the principle you care about when you say "we're a Republic" is something along the lines of avoiding the tyranny of the majority, awarding proportional electoral votes to the candidate that came away with the minority state-by-state is right in line with that.
Washington state will act under our own authority and under our own laws and under our own jurisdiction to protect the very important measure of net neutrality for all Washington citizens,” he said. “We are not powerless.
It'll be interesting to see how that goes, whether other progressive states adopt similar rules, and whether we end up for some time in a country where some states are much more attractive to internet users and startups.
My mother lives in a rural part of Kentucky. While staying with her over the summer, I visited the office of the local DSL broadband provider, ‘Brandenburg Telephone’ and it was like a step back in time. This is one of the areas Comcast deemed unworthy of serving and the result is very affordable max 5mbps internet with top notch customer service.
I wonder how this region will be affected. Anyone have predictions?
When I first moved to Portland, Oregon about 10 years ago, the inner sections of the city has free city-wide wireless. I was broke and in school, but still basking in what I believed the future would be like. 2 years later, they pulled the plug so I had to get a Comcast account and forgo having internet at my art studio. And now this.
Please don't post political flamebait to HN. Even assuming you're right, posting like this destroys this site. Everyone commenting here needs to take responsibility for not doing that.
Just like it's even more important to guard against sparks when the forest is already dry, it's even more important to take this responsibility when the topic is already politicized.
I'm a little shocked that you removed and commented on this fairly benign comment but apparently don't have time to remove outright bigotry that I've flagged in the past. It feels like the moderation here is very much in the pocket of the alt-right.
We live in an electoral system. For almost all of the states of the U.S. it's actually factually correct that there's no difference for whom you vote in the Presidential elections. In many locations, it also doesn't matter who you vote for in Congressional ones thanks to gerrymandering drawing boundary lines around you before you even get to the polls.
We can discuss ideologically what the differences are between the parties, but as those of us in CA, NY, NJ, etc. well know - it's purely academic.
[edit:] Folks, it's a winner-take-all capital-E Electoral system in the vast majority of states, and in the vast majority of states, the demographic votes consistently in the same way. Thus very few states swing the entire Presidential election process, meaning that they matter. In California, for example, 3 million Democrats could have stayed in bed all day and not voted at all, and still it would have not touched the end result there.
We just had an election in Alabama that proved this view incorrect. Even in seemingly "safe" districts your vote can matter. That's how safe districts become safe.
Howard Dean pursued an explicit "fifty-state strategy" as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in the mid-2000s, putting resources into building a Democratic Party presence even where Democrats had been thought unlikely to win federal positions, in hopes that getting Democrats elected to local and state positions, and increasing awareness of Democrats in previously conceded areas, would result in growing successes in future elections.
The strategy was gradually abandoned after Dean stepped down from the DNC, and I believe that a large part of the Democrats' losses since then is exactly a result of your mindset, since abandoning red states or districts as lost causes only allowed the Republican Party to grow even stronger in areas where it was unchallenged, resulting in lopsided losses for Democrats in even more races and killing any ability to lay the groundwork for future victories.
>We just had an election in Alabama that proved this view incorrect. Even in seemingly "safe" districts your vote can matter. That's how safe districts become safe.
It's kind of counter-intuitive, but the election of a Democrat in Alabama actually provided a lot of discouraging data about gerrymandering. While a Democrat won the state-wide popular vote, if those votes had been cast in the House districts, Republicans would have won six of the state's seven seats. Gerrymandering doesn't really help as much in a Senate race, but in House races, it's everything.
This topic is very much in legal flux right now and will be going before the Supreme Court. I think election results like in Alabama can feature prominently in arguments but even more persuasive are more academic models which can compare degrees of gerrymandering. Anthony Kennedy was looking for just that kind of rigor and now it’s available.
What is unquestionable is that in a very tangible way, Garland would have provided a crucial vote here. He would have been on the court with a Clinton presidency, instead a partisan extremist is. The path to progress is by participating in the current system so that you hold power to make things better. Things would have gotten better directly on this issue with a Clinton presidency. So if you’re not participating because you think that’s the quicker path to progress, I think this issue provides a large point against that logic.
Same goes for the recent Virginia election. Democrats outvoted Republicans by a wide margin in November, yet they might not even gain control of the house of delegates.
I can't substantiate or refuse your Deanian Loss Theory here, but I do agree we abandoned swaths of voters (we being Hillary Clinton, I say while suddenly experiencing acid reflux). But where did the machine fail most? The swing states, the states that 'matter' for these elections. As per my parent comment.
Not sure how you can still have this "it doesn't matter" view after the 2016 election. If there was any proof at all that the masses had the power to give away their power, it was given November 10, 2016.
Great. So, I live in NY State. Tell me what the people that stayed home 'did wrong' being that it was an overwhelmingly Democratic Electoral win here?
It does matter, but it only matters in small sliver of states, as those states literally can swing elections.
Whether Republicans and Democrats have the same, slightly different, medium different, or wildly divergent views is secondary to the fact that for most Americans, the choice has already been made.
As an example, take Wisconsin - it was a blue state for 8 cycles before swinging to Trump in 2016. Democratic turnout was paltry, in great part because Democrats assumed that Hillary would win without them.
When a policy issue comes up, politicians look at their constituency. An issue may be very important to certain demographics, but if those demos don't vote, they don't care.
One of the single best ways to get your voice heard is to vote. Even if it doesn't have direct impacts, it drastically changes what politicians look at. They won't vote to your every whim just because if it, but they'll try to gain your vote at any opportunity they can. Lots of small decisions add up.
Gandhi said, "Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it."
You are technically correct. Almost no election is changed by the result of a single person. However, if everyone who thought this way chose to vote anyway, they could collectively swing every election.
I was tempted to not vote seeing as I live in Idaho, I don't even have anyone running for local/state seats I want to vote for (our state district had republicans running unopposed for house/senate) and though I hate the phrase my vote literally meant nothing in the federal elections last year.
I still did it, because I firmly believe it's my duty (and I personally would go so far as to say we should have Australia-style penalties for NOT voting) - though I did get to protest vote both Hillary and Trump since the latter was going to win my state anyway.
I too am from Idaho and voted for a third party candidate because I didn't feel comfortable voting for either Trump or Clinton. I know my vote will likely never change Idaho, but I still vote for who I think is right.
The problem with most voters is that they choose an identity and then vote according to how they think that identity votes. It's why you end up with people who vote Republican even if it is not in their best interests. I try to vote for people that I think have strong moral character and will be willing to do what's right (in my opinion) rather than what's likely to get them elected.
I did not vote, and I see that as a "vote of no-confidence."
At some point, a president will be elected with only like, 10% of the population having actually voted for them, and that'll be a crisis that forces us to overhaul some things.
It really won't. See Brazil. The president was elected with less support than that[0], and they are overhauling nothing. Don't think that things would be different in USA, don't fall to American exceptionalism. I recommend that you take a few minutes and honestly ask yourself what is different in the USA that would cause such a poor election to have a different consequence. A 10% will be taken as a sign of apathy, not of opposition, and as an opportunity to do whatever because people clearly don't care.
I'm not "falling to American exceptionalism" - I just don't think that because something happened once, in another country, in a particular way, means that it'll happen exactly the same way, in every other country, forever.
I abstained from voting. I'm still happy with my decision. People actually care about politics again [1]. Maybe next time don't railroad my candidate (Sanders) during the primaries. I will never vote for a neoliberal or corporate Democratic candidate, even if you hold my country hostage.
[1] Alabama has a Democratic state senator for the first time in decades.
>Maybe next time don't railroad my candidate (Sanders) during the primaries. I will never vote for a neoliberal or corporate Democratic candidate, even if you hold my country hostage.
This isn't a game where you earn points for purity. You can pat yourself on the back for not voting for "a neoliberal or corporate Democratic candidate" all you want, but the election had consequences, one of which is Trump becoming President. Presumably as a supporter of Sanders you oppose most if not all of the policies Trump is pursuing, yet your refusal to vote against Trump helped enable everything he is doing whether you intended or like that. Real-world consequences happen regardless of how you think or feel about them.
You're putting your own vanity over actual beliefs. If you truly stand for what you claim, you'll fight for it any way you can, even if that's not personally appealing or ideal.
Electing Trump makes Americans look like fools, but Congress is where the action happens (ACA repeals, despicable tax bills, etc). Repealing the clean power plan? Natural gas and renewables are crushing coal and nuclear, and nothing is going to stop that. Rolling back net neutrality? Citizens get involved in local municipal broadband deployments (as it should be!) where governance is controlled by the local electorate.
I'm putting principles (edit: autocorrect fixed) first. I don't fault you if you don't, but what I "stand for" (people taking an active interest in the political landscape) is still going to come to pass, even faster than previously with Trump having been elected (while notably, he has very little control over actual policy). Congress will see more tilting towards progressives under a Trump administration than it ever would have under Clinton.
>Congress is where the action happens (ACA repeals, despicable tax bills, etc). Repealing the clean power plan?
Congress drafts legislation, true, but it would be much harder for Republican legislation to pass if they didn't also control the White House. You'll recall that legislation needs to be approved by the President to become law, and at the very least a President Clinton would not be assisting a Republican Congress and Senate in passing all these things you oppose.
>I'm putting principals first.
They do work hard to lead their schools and deserve admiration for that, but we should probably be discussing principles.
> I don't fault you if you don't, but what I "stand for" is still going to come to pass
Maybe, but faux-religious certainty of future victory ignores the very real suffering that comes between now and the glorious future. People losing access to food or healthcare today thanks to Republican policies, for example. That could have been avoided with a different electoral outcome, and telling someone who can no longer afford to eat or get the medication or treatment they need that some day we'll have universal healthcare or UBI or whatever isn't exactly helping.
>Step 1: Set fire to house
>Step 2: "Do we have your attention now?"
>Step 3: Progress
Step 1: Set fire to house
Step 2: You are homeless and have nothing
Step 3: Some day this situation will fix itself, I guess? In the meantime you are starving and living in the street.
> People losing access to food or healthcare today thanks to Republican policies, for example. That could have been avoided with a different electoral outcome, and telling someone who can no longer afford to eat or get the medication or treatment they need that some day we'll have universal healthcare or UBI or whatever isn't exactly helping.
How quickly we forget that Bill Clinton was responsible for dismantling welfare in the 1990s. [1] Hillary would've done better? I don't believe so. Nor does Hillary Clinton think she could get universal healthcare done [2].
> Step 3: Some day this situation will fix itself, I guess? In the meantime you are starving and living in the street.
Step 3 is in progress. Step 2 was beyond our control due to Republican majorities. Excuse our dust while we fix our country.
>How quickly we forget that Bill Clinton was responsible for dismantling welfare in the 1990s.
No one forgot, it's just not relevant to this conversation. The choice was between Hillary Clinton and Trump. Whatever Bill did can be discussed on their merits.
>Nor does Hillary Clinton think she could get universal healthcare done
And she's right by your very own admission: the Republicans currently control Congress. Universal healthcare isn't happening anytime soon. What could have been done is limiting the damage the Republicans could do while working to take back the legislature. You chose to exchange that real chance for idealistic fantasy.
>Step 3 is in progress. Step 2 was beyond our control due to Republican majorities.
But, again, there didn't have to be a Republican President to implement their policies. It was very much within our control. You are, again, ignoring reality.
>Excuse our dust while we fix our country.
We who? The Republican majorities you seem to oppose are now both in power and have a President who works with them. The "dust" is the human misery currently being caused by them while your glorious Golden Age beckons just over the horizon. I'm not happy calling that suffering "dust" or accepting it as the price to pay for some nebulous future, and I don't think "you have to break some eggs to make an omelette" is very principled at all, especially when those affected in the meanwhile are the poorest and most vulnerable, exactly the people you claim to want to help.
Hillary would have been far worse.. Trump is under every microscope waiting for an impeachable offense.. Hillary would have had full immunity to take bribes as she pleases.
Trump is under a microscope only in the sense that people can point out how corrupt he is acting, but without any power to actually stop that corruption.
And the idea that Hillary wasn't under (and wouldn't continue to be under) a microscope it absolutely ridiculous.
I remember reading an article about Trump v. Clinton, and how no matter who won, it would reinvigorate the opposition for a generation.
I'm not quite sure if that was true if Clinton had one, we'll never know, but one thing is for certain: The opposition to the current government and policies seems reinvigorated, and the generational aspect of it could be true as well. Perhaps this country really did need an enema.
I think the reinvigorating the opposition thing already happened when Obama was elected. That is how we got the Tea Party and how we got Trump. The Democratic party that Clinton ran under wasn't that different than the party of her husband. The Republican Party of Trump is drastically different than the party of GW Bush.
Alabama's new Democratic Senator won because the choice was literally "this guy or a pedophile?" That seat'll almost certainly go overwhelmingly red again in 2020. Sessions won the seat in 2014 with 97.3% of the vote.
There's probably a Democratic wave happening nationally, but the Alabama special election is really poor evidence to use for it.
Alabama's race was "Democrat or pedophile" and going into the race, _everybody thought Moore was going to win because a Democrat was considered more unelectable than a pedophile in Alamabama_. It's easy to say "Well the republican candidate was uniquely terrible, and that's why the Democrat won". But if Moore had won, nobody would have been surprised. Plenty of people would have been disappointed, sure, but nobody would have said "Well, I for sure thought Alabama would go for the D over the R in this case".
Yes, there's definitely some unusual factors that went into this race, and the Republican party made a lot of unforced errors that let the race be competitive. But the fact that it was even possible for it to be competitive seems like evidence of a wave to me, especially when you pair it with the recent Democratic wave in Virginia.
> Sessions won the seat in 2014 with 97.3% of the vote
Which sounds impressive, except that he was running unopposed (not just no Democratic opponent but no other candidates filed for the election at all) in both the primary and general election.
The fact that a Republican can run unopposed in a state-wide election of national importance is probably the best evidence it'll turn back to red at the earliest opportunity.
That a Republican incumbent could run opposed for a Senate seat that Democrats had written off based on decades of losses, in a midterm election (which is generally bad for the President's party) under a Democratic president is not a strong sign of how a Democratic incumbent will fare six years later in a Presidential election year.
No. Give me a candidate worth voting for, and I will vote. The current "pick the lesser of two shitheads" is ridiculous. Both parties in the US are to blame.
The two party system in the US today means that voting for anyone that is not a Democrat or Republican is a complete waste of time.
However you feel about the system, it's the system that exists. Refusing to make a choice in the system also has consequences, whether you like or want them. This action by the FCC is one of them.
Cute but demonstrably false. If Trump weren't President, this action would not have happened. Your failure to oppose Trump contributed to that.
Vague discussion of "a broken system" obscures the concrete reality and the results of your choices, which is likely why you choose to discuss the matter in this way.
> If Trump weren't President, this action would not have happened.
Source? Because you likely don't have some magical crystal ball, which means you're just 'hoping' that whoever won the election in Sangermaine's alternate universe would have let this ride.
No one in the previous administration had the spine to make Net Neutrality permanent, and you can't hide that no mattery how much gloss you throw at it. Keep dreaming, buddy!
Your comment does not demonstrate an accurate recollection of history nor the stances of the candidates.
Clinton would not have repealed Net Neutrality. Keeping Net Neutrality was one of the Democratic platform planks. So right there, we know that this action would not have happened.
Second, the idea that no one in the Obama administration wanted to make Net Neutrality permanent is absolutely idiotic. The only way something like that could be made permanent would be through an Act of Congress. And the opposition party controlled Congress, so you're not getting that to happen.
Honestly, given your deliberate misunderstanding of the issues, it's probably best you don't vote. Let the adults make the decisions.
> No one in the previous administration had the spine to make Net Neutrality permanent
The previous administration spent all their political capital passing Obamacare. After that, they lost the house and senate and were stonewalled at every opportunity by Mitch "Let's make him a one term President" McConnell.
> Source? Because you likely don't have some magical crystal ball
We don't need a crystal ball, we have the statements of the candidates during the election. Trump was, from the beginning, anti-Net Neutrality. As for Clinton:
2015:
>Hillary Clinton is vowing to enforce strong net neutrality rules if she is elected president....
“Closing these loopholes and protecting other standards of free and fair competition — like enforcing strong net neutrality rules and preempting state laws that unfairly protect incumbent businesses — will keep more money in consumers’ wallets, enable startups to challenge the status quo, and allow small businesses to thrive,” she wrote in an op-ed in Quartz.
>Hillary Clinton has indicated support for net neutrality. She gave two thumbs up to FCC chairman Tom Wheeler’s proposal for strong net neutrality rules, though admitted it was only a “foot in the door.” Clinton has expressed concern that regulations could mean stagnant competition among service providers, saying “we’ve got to do more about how we incentivize competition in broadband.” And she’s committed to fighting broadband monopolies, citing Google Fiber in Kansas City as a perfect example of what she wants to see everywhere in the US.
>Hillary Clinton gave a shout-out to a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission for her rallying call to "raise a ruckus" to save net neutrality, which the Republican-led FCC is poised to dismantle next month.
>"Time to call foul. Time to raise a ruckus. Time to save #NetNeutrality," Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats on the five-commissioner FCC, tweeted Wednesday.
>In response, Clinton tweeted: "You go girl! This is important; costs will go up, & powerful companies will get more powerful. We can’t let it slip through the cracks"....
>Net neutrality was not a major issue often brought up during the 2016 campaign. However, Clinton, who served as former President Barack Obama's first secretary of state, has shown support for net neutrality in the past. She said she would vote for it back in 2015, calling it a "foot in the door," and characterizing it as a starting point in the broader Internet regulation discussion.
It's simply a statement of fact that the FCC would not be repealing Net Neutrality right now, or ever, under a Clinton administration. You can argue about the nature of Clinton's support for NN, but she has always consistently voiced support for the policy.
You've so committed to your fantasy of both sides being the same that you've become unhinged from reality.
You could have voted for Evan McMullin, a CIA officer for over 10 years and all around stand up dude. There were plenty of other candidates. If you threw your hands up and did not vote, you're part of the problem. Period.
You're obviously trolling, but if enough people did this, we would in fact be a three (or more) party system, hence breaking the stranglehold the two current parties currently have over us.
While I mostly agree, it's not about picking a perfect candidate... It's about moving the bar of acceptance over a little bit at a time. You elect the people that represent your values and, eventually, those values become the norm. I fear that America just doesn't agree with the same values as I do.
This thread is about Net Neutrality. The rules being rolled back by the current Republican administration were put in place by the previous Democratic administration.
Not voting is just a vote for whoever wins. You voted through inaction for the candidate that supported removing these protections.
You're totally ignoring the fact that the previous administration had the power to make Net Neutrality permanent... but did not. They took the 'easy' FCC route, just as the current administration is doing right now.
A half-assed effort, at best from your 'good guys'
Swamps have a lot of standing water which creates a lot of mosquitoes that carry diseases. Draining a swamp reclaims land and prevents kids from dying.
Yeah but in fairness, the other candidate was someone who was also a proven liar, had the Benghazi scandal under her belt, and had the FBI declare publicly that she violated laws related to the handling of classified information.
As South Park put it, it's the choice between "Giant Douche vs Turd Sandwich".
Pai was appointed by Obama and confirmed by the Senate as a Republican under law limiting the number of members of one party to a bare majority and a long-standing, strong tradition that the President defer to the leadership of the other party in the Senate in appointing members filling the seats which must be filled by members not of the President's party. (Which Trump slow followed when renominating Democratic former commissioner Rosenworcel.) [0]
Blaming Obama for Pai being on the committee, rather than the Republican Party, is like blaming Elizabeth II for acts of the British Government rather than the parliamentary majority party.
OTOH, where no such legal or traditional constraint limited his choices, Trump selected Pai as FCC Chair, so blaming Trump for Pai’s current position and his reasonably direct endorsement of Pai’s long-overt goals for the FCC is appropriate.
Look I understand what you're saying, but it's complicated. Obama chose to respect a tradition and he did so at the cost of allowing anti-NN people into the FCC. He could've found a republican that was pro-NN, but he didn't. You can argue about what tradition dictated, but as the president I think you have to take some responsibility for the choices being made, even if they are hard ones. Obama broke a lot of traditions and he suffered for it, especially in his first term, so I'm not saying this is a simple decision, or one that would've cost a reasonable amount of political capital, but he did have the actual, legal choice, and he did make it. This enabled Trump to select Pai as chair. So without Obama's decision Pai would not be chair either. It's ComplicatedTM.
The entire world is made up of divisive politics. Unless you want this to be a place where nothing of substance is discussed, ever, then you cannot escape it.
You say this as if Hillary would have been so much better.. No, this ones on all the people who continue to stick their head in the sand and try to blame the other team.
> The FCC is required to be split with the Executive Office filling in the gap for the Commissioner. 2 R, 2 D, and 1 whichever party wins the Presidency. (from pythonboi)
2 democrats voted against repealing NN. If we had 3 D's in the FCC, if we had Hillary, you would have seen the opposite result.
Please stop peddling this "there's no difference" narrative. It's clearly untrue in this case. Otherwise, why would the split be on party lines? Republicans voted to repeal NN, not democrats.
Every FCC vote on net neutrality since the 2010 rules has been straight party-line. The Republican majority is a direct result of having a Republican President. It's pretty clear that a Democratic administration would have been different on this issue, whatever other areas there might be where that question would be murkier.
The FCC is required to be split with the Executive Office filling in the gap for the Commissioner. 2 R, 2 D, and 1 whichever party wins the Presidency.
Pai was recommended by the Republican party; the FCC has two commissioners for each party, plus the chairman who decides split votes. Obama's chairman was in favor of NN, Trump's was solidly against, and that's all that matters.
Awesome. I really appreciate how professional Ajit Pai has been through all the internet hate. Finally a step in the right direction for government policy.
NY AG Schneiderman had a good response to this in the earlier AMA (which I've pasted below).
"As a preliminary matter, it’s important to recognize that net neutrality principles and protections in different forms have actually been around since 2005 and even earlier. So the flourishing of the internet and everything relying on it during that time occurred under the protections. A few years ago, however, the courts struck down one form of net neutrality protections (those that had relied on Title I of the Communications Act), so then in 2015 the FCC put net neutrality protections back in place under Title II instead (they also expanded the earlier protections, e.g., to include protections against abuses related to interconnection, which had not been the subject of net neutrality protections before 2015). Now, in 2017, the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to repeal net neutrality protections altogether (and the courts’ earlier decisions effectively foreclose a return to net neutrality protections under Title I). So that would be entirely new territory for the internet.
Why do we think that’s bad? Well, as I explained in my own public comment in the current proceeding (https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10717583023587/FINAL%20RIF%20Co...), we’ve seen how companies behave in the absence of net neutrality protections, specifically in the area of interconnection before it was regulated in 2015, and their unregulated conduct harmed consumers. In essence, they made a deliberate business decision to let the quality of internet access degrade, knowing that it hurt consumers, to try to squeeze revenue out of edge providers like Netflix and backbone providers like Cogent and Level 3. Plus, we know that many consumers have few ISPs to choose from, so competition isn’t as effective a check as in other markets. So I believe strong net neutrality regulations are needed to avoid harms to consumers."
Correct, a place where innovative companies like Netflix were blocked and throttled by ISPs due to conflicts with their legacy business models.
I don't know how anyone could honestly say that taking away an important consumer protection is going to help innovation, outside of innovative new billing practices by ISPs.
This is OT but I don't see the innovation of Netflix. It's TV on the Internet. They were actually a more innovative, or at least weirder, business when they were mailing DVDs around.
It's like Russ Hanneman (Mark Cuban, right?) on Silicon Valley. We can take this thing called the "radio" and put it on this new thing called the "Internet". Not as mind blowing as he believes.
Just so we are clear this is what is happening. Removal of regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content.
Did they do that before 2015, there are cases of it, but not really that much. Providers mostly want to slowly introduce it now or at least the option to introduce it. I don't think they want to switch it quickly, but giving them this power is very dreadful.
So saying it will go back to 2015 (basically not really an issue), is looking at things a bit closed minded.
Net neutrality wasn't instituted in 2015. It was made law in 2015. Prior to that, Net Neutrality was the standard since it was classified as an information service. It wasn't until telecom companies started blocking VoIP traffic that it changed.
Net neutrality has never been made law, as the 2015 FCC Open Internet Order is not a law. The FCC cannot write laws. Full net neutrality, as defined here [1], has also never been mandated in the US.
The 2015 Open Internet Order mandated "net neutrality protections", not net neutrality itself.
A lot of questionable stuff happened before 2015 and net neutrality was put in place to prevent more of that in the future. Thinking that it will be eternally 2015 is optimistic.
I can also see some of the four horsemen (AAPL, GOOG, AMZN, FB) discussing something along these lines: "We have enough cash and/or market cap to buy some of these last-mile companies AND we can block our competitors. Shall we pull the trigger?"
They're free to do so; companies exist to make money. Cable internet carriers probably will attempt something like this.
The next thing that will happen is, when Comcast goes too far, another provider (cable? wireless carrier? satellite broadband? something new from a startup?) disrupts the market by offering an alternative to Comcasts' egregious policies. Comcast loses subscribers and is monetarily forced to be more consumer-friendly.
Great! So the competitor can rely on leasing municipal broadband networks to avoid expensive, wide-spread fiber buildout? No, because that’s illegal in many cities thanks to lobbying from Comcast and friends.
Ok, so the competitor can build their own fiber network. That’s very expensive and time consuming, but it can be done...if local legislators approve it. Sure hope Comcast and friends don’t have any influence there! This is one of the suspected reasons for the failure of Google Fiber, but hey, maybe it’ll work next time.
Incidentally my two options for internet service are:
1) Comcast
2) A local competitor offering sub-1MBPS
You're thinking too small. Disruptive technologies are disruptive so often because they bypass the current infrastructure. Ford didn't need horses, Lyft didn't need a fleet of taxis. Maybe the next disruptive broadband company doesn't need to lease existing wire infrastructure.
As for internet service options today, yes, it's not great. But it's getting better. We already have several options; here are two examples. Some wireless carriers already allow unlimited tethering; no cables needed. Broadband via satellite is available virtually everywhere in the US; again, no cable infrastructure needed.
In the last ten years, I've lived in 6 different localities and have had a total of 4 options for ISP, never more than 2 at any given time. In at least some of those cases, I've watched as potential competition to those options was shut down by ISP-lobbied local regulation. At whatever point there's a possibility of competition in this space, I'll readily buy the free-market argument that they should be de-regulated.
Are you counting wireless as an option? We're beginning to see some folks use their mobile carrier + tethering as their home internet, often times with better speeds than their cable internet.
And what does the future hold? Undoubtedly more competition: the internet already plays a huge role in our lives, and that's likely to only increase. A startup that can disrupt the cable company stranglehold would tap a huge market and force cable companies to be more consumer-friendly.
Wireless is the only plausible competitor. Currently, the costs are still too high and the reliability too low. However, looking 1-2 years forward this will be a very attractive option.
Except due to regulatory capture and lobbying of enough municipalities this has become harder
Selling a plain service and doing it well for a fair price should have won most consumers but they will switch companies for minor discounts or the shiniest cellphone then complain they get shafter
Yes, you're right, regulations make it more difficult.
But if startups have taught us anything, it's that businesses find a way to disrupt existing economies even in the face of regulations.
Ironically, Net Neutrality (NN) is itself a regulation. One of the reasons we reject NN is because creating regulations often has unintended consequences. We believe it's better to not have the regulation and let the free market and open competition sort out the details.
Europe has it's problems, but I don't regret moving to London. Not one bit. The innovation here is real and tangible, by and large unencumbered by this kind of crap.
I really should get the paperwork going for my wife's Italian citizenship, the US national archive sent me an un-certified copy of her grandfathers naturalization papers even though I requested a certified copy and I've been too lazy to try again.
Anyone have advice on tech hotspots in the EU that are willing to put up with English-speaking engineers? I've thought about Finland a couple times, good schools for my daughter, ample hunting and fishing opportunities and from what I can tell pretty good broadband infrastructure.
In no particular order: Berlin, Lisbon, London, Paris (might need a little bit of French), Amsterdam, Dublin.
Each one has different pros/cons depending on whats important to you: type of work, money, work/life balance. All of them are good (and, aside from London soon, easy to move between once you're resident in Europe or here on a long visa).
> In no particular order: Berlin, Lisbon, London, Paris (might need a little bit of French), Amsterdam, Dublin.
Thanks, I'll have to take a look. Still debating whether I'd want to move across the pond from my family, especially with a 5 year old in tow - but I've thought about moving to the EU for roughly 10 years at this point.
> (and, aside from London soon, easy to move between once you're resident in Europe or here on a long visa).
That part's pretty easy for me, my wife inherited Italian citizenship through her bloodline - we just need to get all the paperwork taken care of to get it recognized.
I'm not totally up on this (since I'm English and my wife is French, so Europe is easy for us) but a friend of mine (also English) married an American and I remember it took quite a bit of effort for her to become a dual British citizen and gain full residency. Basically, I'm not 100% sure the fact your wife could gain Italian citizenship will automatically give you full residency/rights too.
I might be talking crap but worth checking out. In any case, it's definitely do-able and you should give it a go! Europe's awesome (and v. kid friendly)
My thoughts are similar to yours, but not due to innovation but rather a functioning, humane welfare state. My wife and I have been eyeing up Sweden or Denmark for years. If family wasn't here, we'd have left already.
Whenever I become angry about something here in the US and look into emigrating (mostly looking at first-world English speaking countries: CAN, UK, NZ, etc.), my research usually turns up compelling evidence that no country with any sort of socialized health care system (which is pretty much anywhere in the developed world) will accept a person with special needs children.
Just don't move to those regions. The United States is the third or fourth largest country in the world by land mass. There are properties you can buy which are inside the range of only one terrestrial ISP, or none at all. Don't do it if access to more than one terrestrial ISP is important to you.
Also, I don't know if you're referring specifically to the UK. I happen to have some experience with the ISP situation in Canada, and I can tell you that there are places smack-dab in the middle of the largest city in the country where you only have access to one ISP. There are really only about four, maybe five, functioning terrestrial ISPs in Canada, and in a given city, usually only two operate. I have no idea how sparse it gets out in the sticks, cottage country at least gets LTE. Generally the only terrestrial ISP competition in Canada is between monopolies on roughly either side of the continental divide in telephone DSLs (Bell or Telus, depending on region) and modems on the cable TV infrastructure (Rogers or Shaw, depending on region), a fifth is coming up just in Toronto (Beanfield), time will tell if they can manage to expand the fiber infrastructure enough to grow their business.
Please don't turn HN threads into partisan fights. That leads to information heat death, something we're all here to avoid.
This topic is already highly partisan, of course, so it's all the more important not to make it more so. This is very much a collective responsibility.
Yes I tried to mitigate that in my child comment. It is, as you mentioned, a highly partisan matter though and has been beaten to death on this forum and others. I don't know how else to approach the subject when there is such clear malfeasance coming from one side of the debate. Perhaps "not at all" would be the correct choice.
Maybe, or maybe there's a different way to do it if you're patient enough to wait for a new idea. I know how hard that is; I deal with it every day myself.
There's literally nothing partisan about this topic. The technical and academic worlds are virtually unanimous on the support of net neutrality. Even political support for net neutrality is around 83% across both parties. Don't shut down discussion because you personally feel ashamed that your party is complicit in this thing. It's not political.
It's surreal to read comments like this, because it makes one realize how much of what people see in each other is pure imagination.
I don't have a party, and net neutrality is one of the few political issues Hacker News has officially done something for, including quite recently. I don't fault you for not knowing that, because most people see only a tiny slice of what passes through here and no one sees all of it. But the dynamic of jumping to a view of someone as your enemy is a thing we all need to work on.
Most people don't fit into either party's value system. I hardly think boiling it down to R vs D is going to help anyone, we need to inform our populous.
Despite how my above comment appears, I really don't want to turn this into partisan shit-flinging. I am no Democrat, I fall well to the left of where they live, and I disagree about gun rights and a number of other things.
That being said, I think it's pretty clear that more harmful policies proposed in recent times have come predominantly from a single source, and I think it's more important to work in opposition to that harmfulness than to find a group that perfectly represents you. Especially with a first past the post electoral system in which fractiousness dilutes the value of your vote.
Amen, may the ranked ballot reign supreme one day. First past the post always trends towards Bicameralism, and if we could rank our options on the local, state, and national level I think we would see a lot more accurate reflection of our ideals in our representative government. Ranked Ballot Choices means no more wasted votes. Thanks for your comment, these are strange and exciting times. May peace prevail
Yes but any Republican would have taken this action. Pai was appointed because by convention (or possibly requirement) the commission is composed of two Democrats and two Republicans, and is chaired by a commissioner of the President's choosing.
Saying Pai is Obama's fault is disingenuous, because he had to appointment a Republican, and any Republican chair would implement Republican policy.
Saying this is the Republican's fault is just as disingenuous as saying it was Obama's fault. Quite literally this was caused by Obama by the appointing of Ajit, who then was promoted by Trump. Ajit, as we know has been spearingheading this whole thing.
So Republicans don't have any agency? They don't have any accountability for making this part of their platform?
That's pretty rich for being the "party of personal responsibility".
Ajit Pai has the confidence of Republican leadership and was appointed by Obama at McConnell's behest, again because of requirement. I'm sure if Obama could have appointed a political ally he would have.
Ajit Pai certainly is responsible for this, but he is acting on behalf of the GOP and has their full backing. I think it's fair to hold them accountable for that.
Attempting to blame Republicans or Democrats for this collectively is silly. The point is that both are responsible (by differing, unquantifiable amounts), as noted by the fact that Pai was appointed by Obama, a democrat and promoted to a point where he could influence Net Neutrality by Trump.
If we stage a nation-wide boycot of Amazon, Walmart.com, and a few other big retailers (and stop using Google, Bing et al) I can almost guarantee it that they will move mountains to bring back net neutrality. You have to get the big corporations a profit motive to get anything done in this country.
If they start losing money they will have a much stronger motivation to act. I feel like they say they are for it but they are not spending considerable resources (they should be) to stand up to the FCC.
Sorry, baser instincts got the better of me. I did not know how to flag; I thought I had not reached the Karma threshold. I appreciate the link with instructions.
If you don't restrict yourself to civil, substantive comments from now on, we will ban you. Any good-faith view you have is possible to express thoughtfully, and that's what you owe to the community here in exchange for the right to post.
Instead of posting like this, flag it yourself by clicking the comment's timestamp to go to its page, then clicking 'flag' at the top. In egregious cases like the above, you're quite welcome to alert us at hn@ycombinator.com too. We catch up with the flagged comments eventually, but email is the hotline.
While the fight rages on for the major providers to commit to being open and fair, I believe it is probably very prudent to simultaneously begin sorting out how we could go about 1) fostering competition and 2) creating community-backed local networks and making them appealing enough (even if just to us tech folks at first) that they start to catch on. If we start at the foundational level (i.e. getting peoples’ homes connected or connectable on a locally-controlled network, wireless or otherwise, regardless of whether that network still links up to a major provider’s backbone in turn, which it would), then we are in a better position to then start looking at linking up those local networks directly to one another (forming regional networks, etc) and also to backbones provided by companies/organizations that commit (in writing) to an open and fair internet. To that last point, I think it might be worthwhile to also explore the possibility of a non-profit organization with values similar to Mozilla finding a way to purchase, build, or otherwise control some of the internet backbone/internet access in America (forgive me, I know very little of what’s all involved at that level, I'm sure it's a herculean task).
In any case, this all seems daunting. But I propose that the initial approach is to start small, start local, but use a multi-pronged strategy (e.g. crowdfunding for projects, raising up wireless community networks, advocacy and marketing help for fair and privacy-conscious ISPs, exploration of non-profit backbone formation, etc), and pick up momentum.
If there is no real market competition, and we’re subject to monopolies, and those monopolies directly go against the loudly voiced will of their customers and what appears to be the majority of American citizens, then let’s give ‘em hell. It’s not a short-term project. But everything starts somewhere…
On my soapbox
-------------
We are talking about who controls access to free speech here. As benign as it may seem to some people that an internet provider might be allowed to throttle some bandwidth and block some sites, their monopoly nature means that, under these new rules, they pose a threat of direct censorship of speech that reaches the masses, which in turn directly threatens the liberty of the American citizen. It’s important, both for us and for future generations, to fight this tooth and nail and to even go so far as to rebuild internet access ourselves over the course of years under a new charter if that’s actually what it takes. The internet is the greatest free speech tool we have as citizens. And regardless of whether we believe in regulation or de-regulation, the reality is that a group of monopoly controllers of internet access pushed hard for rules allowing them to throttle, censor, and use our data in ways that make many of us feel uneasy. They wouldn't push that hard if they didn't intend to use these allowances in some way. It’s a legitimate threat.
Overcoming this threat is a cause that’s worth thinking about, and acting on behalf of, in big and bold ways. And perhaps we could also solve for some of our ongoing privacy concerns along the way. Because, my god, what person does not wonder if we are slowly sliding away from being citizens who are truly free to speak our minds and not be spied on arbitrarily with a privacy situation such as we are facing, a situation which is already unreasonable and is getting worse.
Aren’t you tired of being leveraged against?
Hope is not lost. We just have to take it into our own hands and fight the fight. Because that’s what happens when you’re tired of it.
In the interim…
...while this gets started, we need to compile a list of internet service providers who will commit in writing on their customer agreements that they will not block or throttle access to content which is lawful. Perhaps we could also find providers willing to commit in writing that they will treat their users’ data as private, not sell our data to third parties, etc. We then need to become loud advocates for these companies. We need to effectively help them with their marketing by raising their visibility up and by encouraging people to switch to them. Imagine how many people would be interested in starting an ISP if they knew that they would get free marketing!
In other words, I propose that we mourn the state of things quickly and then transition into action. If nothing else, that might just be the most effective form of protest we could engage in. In fact, I think this might be the form of protest that works best today in a variety of realms...don’t just hold signs and march, don’t just voice frustration in venues, instead simply begin creating what you want to see...and don’t give up.
As I've grown older I've realized more and more that this is the only way for citizens voices to be truly heard. You aren't going to outspend the big donors and you aren't going to out influence the lobbyists. If you want a particular rule set or laws to be enacted you'd better vote for the politicians who agree with your worldview.
Mad that the FCC has repealed net neutrality? Vote for congress members who are pro-NN.
Mad that national parks have had their land area significantly reduced? Vote for pro national park congress members.
Mad that we're giving a huge tax cat to billionaires and corporations and yet the middle class gets a temporary reprieve? Vote for congress members who want to deliver true tax reform.
I could go on and on but I think you get the point.
Ideally you pick all your issues and find at least one candidate on your side.
Unless it's the same candidate (lucky you), you'll need to prioritize your issues.
We quickly arrive at the status quo: wedge issues drown out everything.
The answer isn't to just VOTE, the answer is electoral reform. More speficially, prioritize electoral reform as the top wedge issue.
It's like this country has been in a 200 year sprint and refuses to have a retro.
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Even Hacker News doesn't know what the fuck they are talking about? You people too huh? Can't be bothered to read the regulations that you supposedly give a shit about, you too?? Fuck man, the amount global social media companies can brainwash people is STUNNING!! READ THE FUCKING DOCUMENTS!
The Net Neutrality regulation passed on Feb 26 2015:
http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015...
The 2015 regulation that allows global tech companies to monopolize all information on the internet, strips the FCC of its power to prevent censorship and monopolization, and hands control of the internet to the EU.
The Net Neutrality repeal set to be decided on Dec 14 2017:
https://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/201...
The 2017 repeal of the 2015 NN regulation reverts all the bullshit from the 2015 regulation, eliminates global tech companies control of internet, prevents censorship, and returns the FCC its previous powers(the powers they had for the 20 years before 2015 and never once abused or censored or blocked or throttled with, just like theyve done with radio & phone for 83 years and tv for 50 years).
As someone who respects but mostly profoundly disagrees with principled Republican laissez-faire regulatory strategy (at least, once we got past 1991 or so), it is more than a little aggravating to see us as a community winding ourselves in knots over market-based regulation of telecom at the same time as the (largely unprincipled) Republican congress is putting the finishing strokes --- literally in ball-point pen --- on a catastrophically stupid tax bill that threatens universal access to health insurance, not just for those dependent on Medicare but on startup founders as well.
If you care deeply about this issue, stop pretending like filling out forms and putting banners ads is going to persuade Republican regulators to act like Democrats. "Net Neutrality" isn't my personal issue --- I worked at ISPs, have backbone engineer friends, and candidly: I think this issue is silly. But if it's yours... sigh... fine.
But do it right: get out there, to your nearest seriously threatened D districts or to the nearest plausibly flippable R district (the suburbs are great for this), open up your damn wallets, and donate.
The FCC may very well be right that it's not their job to impose our dream portfolio of rules on Verizon (certainly, a lot of the rules people are claiming NN provided were fanciful). It doesn't matter how dreamlike the rules are: Congress can almost certainly enact a law, which the FCC can't revoke.
But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back.