Keep the Internet Open • Hacker News Board

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#191

Post by rdl » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:21 PM UTC

rybosome wrote: post #180

rdl wrote: post #58

While I like the Internet being open, I don't like "net neutrality" extremism. 1) While I dislike monopoly carrier antics, I'm even more unhappy about the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs. If you build a network with caches/content servers close to users, and expensive backhaul back to your network core, you can offer essentially unlimited traffic to users hi…

> ...I'm even more unhappy about the idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to carriers and ISPs. Why? Government bureaucrats dictate aviation engineering standards to airplane manufacturers, automobile engineering standards to car manufacturers, radio engineering standards to electronics manufacturers, and so on. These are generally good things: they ensure that citizens can have a re…

Your examples are all safety (including public safety), or shared-resources (radio spectrum).

Fiber I lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, and no one's safety is impaired by prioritizing my on-network traffic over off-network traffic.

A more direct analogy is government regulation of something like how food tastes or how entertaining TV shows are.

There's some justification for regulating carriers who have an enforced monopoly in a region, but the problem is the monopolies are local government monopolies, and the regulation here would be national.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#192

Post by patrickmclaren » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:21 PM UTC

mehaveaccount wrote: post #172

confounded wrote: post #49

Because of the massive amount of consolidation over the last few years, the death of Net Neutrality would be the best competitive moat imaginable for Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. While all their CEOs will make faint noises in favor of Net Neutrality, SV outspends Wall Street 2:1 on lobbying[1], the goal of which is to cement monopoly status, not to make the world a better place. Most of it goes to Republicans. Thin…

> the death of Net Neutrality would be the best competitive moat imaginable for Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. While all their CEOs will make faint noises in favor of Net Neutrality, SV outspends Wall Street 2:1 on lobbying[1], the goal of which is to cement monopoly status, not to make the world a better place. Most of it goes to Republicans. The leaders of Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc are NOT Republicans. Most of…

The parent comment didn't make the case that the CEOs of these companies are Republicans - they were referring to the beneficiaries of the lobbying.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#193

Post by beefman » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:22 PM UTC

blhack wrote: post #130

This is a difficult question. Emotionally, I am a net neutrality absolutist, but I think I can talk myself out of it, which to me means that the conversation is complex. Should the power company be able to offer you a discounted rate if you host equipment that offsets their cost (for instance: a powerwall)[1]? I think that the answer to that question is yes. Well okay, then should your ISP be able to offer you a disc…

Scalia gives this example in a 2005 minority opinion.[1]

If a Powerwall saves the utility money, then any discount flowing from that is just returning money to the customer. My watching a video on Facebook instead of YouTube does nothing like that.[2]

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/net-n...

[2] As an aside, neither do Powerwalls. Utilities sell commodities, so any savings must be realizable as reduced usage. E.g. if solar were cheaper but for storage, utilities could buy storage themselves.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#194

Post by mcbits » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:23 PM UTC

bo1024 wrote: post #59

seibelj wrote: post #37

Net Neutrality absolutists need to tone down their rhetoric. When NN activists say zero rating is unfair, they are speaking from an ivory tower. It is better for a poor Iraqi to get free Wikipedia even though that hurts other upstart wikis, than for poor Iraqis to have no Wikipedia at all. Once you accept this premise, you must then accept that exceptions to NN exist. Once you accept that, you must then take every si…

> It is better for a poor Iraqi to get free Wikipedia even though that hurts other upstart wikis, than for poor Iraqis to have no Wikipedia at all. I don't accept this premise. This is a false dichotomy because these are not the only two options. There is a third, better option: to get access to the entire internet. A company offering you that choice is using a classic game-theoretic bargaining approach: commit to on…

I remember a progression going something like this:

1. Local folks taking turns calling a handful of BBSes.

2. BBSes synchronizing some messages with each other, even long-distance.

3. BBSes providing some limited Internet services (email, newsgroups).

4. Quasi-Internet services like Prodigy, Compuserve, AOL.

5. Slow but "real" Internet access. All content available but still had to ration use.

6. Fast, ubiquitous, unmetered, unthrottled Internet.

7. An ISP that doesn't care if you run a server.

While I strongly sympathize with anyone sitting at #6 or #7 who views a move to any previous step as a huge regression, I can't sympathize with denying people any kind of connectivity unless they can snap their fingers and manifest the infrastructure to enable #5. All of those previous steps served a purpose at the time.

Developing economies have an opportunity to learn from our mistakes as first mover, and leapfrog ahead to something more robust against all these threats we're facing today (centralization, stratification, eavesdropping, denial of service, walled gardens...).

BBSes were an artifact of the old phone infrastructure, so that's not a necessary phase, but otherwise the story would look roughly the same: Local communities gradually connect peer-to-peer and then interconnect. This time wirelessly, securely, without entrenched middlemen.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#195

Post by XorNot » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:25 PM UTC

wonder_er wrote: post #162

Arizhel wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There shouldn't, unless you're wiling to be responsible for all the bits that pass through your network. So if one of your subscribers transfers some CP on your network, you need to automatically to go prison for life for that. Is that OK with you? Sounds good to me.

My default heuristic is "anytime someone uses "think of the children" as an argument for protection, they have chosen one of the slipperiest of slopes to stand upon." I doubt I'm the only one. I recommend picking a better argument than CP to defend net neutrality.

How about any criminal activity of any kind? Do you plan to be held liable for spammers/scammers using your network? Why was your vetting process for new users so poor? Why are you controlling unsolicited SIP telephony traffic?

You either follow net neutrality or you can try and get along without common carrier protections.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#196

Post by nocman » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:25 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #151

nocman wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty broad brush you are painting with. Do you have some hard data that says things break down so clearly along party lines? I'd particularly like to see data about non-politicians, if it is available, since the way Congress votes on such things is not necessarily driven by the way their constituents view the issue (if they are even aware of it).

> That's a pretty broad brush you are painting with. Do you have some hard data that says things break down so clearly along party lines? They do on the FCC, for the whole time since net neutrality and internet privacy have become an issue. Congress is a little fuzzier but mostly along the same lines. In the electorate it might be blurrier, but clearly the distribution of views of the relevant politicians shows that…

"They do on the FCC"

Not sure what you mean by that, you mean the breakdown of Republicans vs Democrats at the FCC?

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#197

Post by dreamcompiler » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:25 PM UTC

We probably need a grassroots effort for VPNs like "Let's Encrypt" is for https. It will eat our batteries faster, but it's worth it.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#198

Post by noobiemcfoob » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:26 PM UTC

TOMDM wrote: post #161

blhack wrote: post #130

This is a difficult question. Emotionally, I am a net neutrality absolutist, but I think I can talk myself out of it, which to me means that the conversation is complex. Should the power company be able to offer you a discounted rate if you host equipment that offsets their cost (for instance: a powerwall)[1]? I think that the answer to that question is yes. Well okay, then should your ISP be able to offer you a disc…

In a way, I'd say what your describing as far as power utilities is already in effect. There are a good number of people that charge their batteries off peak when the power is cheaper such that they can either use it later on peak when they would have to pay more, or even sell that power back to the grid when it's in more demand. I think the issue here is that power is binary as far as the argument here is concerned,…

> power is binary as far as the argument here is concerned, you have it or you don't

Power is not binary. It is fundamentally analog. You can certainly have different degrees of power. See brownouts. Consumers only tend to see power as binary because of deep standards penetration in the electronics market.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#199

Post by DannyBee » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:27 PM UTC

nnutter wrote: post #164

DannyBee wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Things have changed fast; Google hardly even had lobbyists back during the SOPA blackout. " Errr, the DC office had 100+ people at that point, so .... (IE i'm not sure why you think that, and given it's completely wrong, i'm going to go with 'you just have no idea what you are talking about')

It was the rhetoric at the time and it might even be somewhat true, https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00002200...

Depends on how you define lobbyist, i guess, but that's the set of external folks, not internal ones.

In any case, i was second person to start in the DC office (after the policy director), so i can assure you i know precisely how many people it had at working on government affairs/lobbying/etc at a given point in time :)

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#200

Post by rb808 » Tue, Mar 14, 2017, 9:30 PM UTC

gz5 wrote: post #56

The utility should be the fiber (or spectrum). Regulate that; leave the ISPs to then compete openly. Today's software can enable multiple ISPs to share the fiber/spectrum. I could then have 10 ISPs today and 15 ISPs tomorrow. I might use ISP #1 for certain content, and ISP #2 for certain services. ISPs essentially become a function of the services and content they provide, and how they provide it, in an ultra-competi…

This is a great model and is done in a number of countries eg UK. I know NZ too the govt created the environment for a single utility to build last mile fiber and then ISPs compete on the that connection.