Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Keep the Internet Open

blog.samaltman.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 415 posts

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#281

Post by sleepyhead »

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…

"It should be a market decision, not a national government decision."

Funny how you call other extremists. This is a pure ideological viewpoint that has proven to be wrong in how internet and telecommunications evolved. It was built on standards and it was built on national and international regulations. It's why you can take a phone used in Germany and use it in India.

"3) Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for video services."

What are you basing this on? Data is very cheap and cost has been decreasing rapidly the last years. If you can afford a device that can play internet video then you can afford the data. Having lived in Cambodia over a few years I have witnessed the extreme uptake in mobile phones in a developing country (a very poor one too). A GB of data is about one dollar. It's used by garment factory workers earning about $130/month. It's used by women selling their own produce at the market. We are seeing the same in Myanmar with mobile phones being used along nearly all income groups. It's really obnoxious to see Facebook and supporters making arguments of farmers earning a dollar a day when they try to introduce a closed network. Poor people got 99 problems and paying top dollars for watching a video online isn't one of them. Those who cannot afford data cannot afford a usable phone. If Facebook wants to help these people in India then there is a bunch of ways of doing so that doesn't lock people and countries into a walled garden from a tech giant.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#283

Post by aero142 »

OriginalPenguin wrote: post #176
guelo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some price that they couldn't pay. Comcast would try to find what price that is.

And once they found it, they'd charge exactly one cent less.

This whole chain is just parroting reddit comments without thinking it through. You act as though there is nothing that happens with market forces other that monopoly corruption. Let's start with the fact that by market cap, Google is 590B and Comcast is 177B, so simply buying ISPs is a real possibility. You also just out of hand dismiss any other possible outcomes. So, here some off the top of my head.

* Local municipalities own the last mile, making ISP competition have less of a natural monopoly.

* Cities add regulations that don't require universal coverage which results in more competition over profitable locations. Poor or underserved areas could be subsidized in other ways if that was the goal.

* ISPs charges a toll to all the big companies, which makes installing lines more profitable, which increases competition and results in faster more available networks overall.

Net neutrality might be the best option on the balance, but talking about the alternatives as though there isn't a whole wide world full of ISPs that have different regulatory structures and different incentives is just silly to me.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#284

Post by saycheese »

rfrank wrote: post #274
saycheese wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be afraid all you want, doesn't matter to me. Thiel knew he'd be attacked, took a risk, and there's zero reason to believe he's not happy with the results; if you think Thiel cares what the "Bay Area" thinks, I'd be interested in your reasoning. Uber's not even worth covering, they're currently a cluster F$&@ waiting to happen and the idea that it was somehow born of talking with Trump is what it is. Bay Area and for…

>Bay Area and for the matter the greater tech community needs to engage the world, not withdraw from it. > Be afraid all you want, doesn't matter to me. One of these things is not like the other.

Right, one is addressing a single person that's said they afraid of talking in public for fear of blowback and another is directed to the Bay Area and greater tech community asking them to engage the world.

What am I missing?

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#285

Post by woah »

JediWing wrote: post #208
rsync wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What do you mean by extremism? I view net neutrality as the requirement to treat all bits equally regardless of source, which is kind of a binary one." It should be possible for me to build some kind of public network, somewhere, for some purpose ... and dictate bits/traffic any way I see fit. Now maybe I can't do that with CATV because common carrier. And maybe I can't do that with public spectrum because public re…

Sure, "some kind of public network", but then it can't be advertised as "Internet access" because at that point you're providing access to your public network, not access to the Internet as a whole. The issue is ISPs, who by definition are supposed to provide Internet access. Throttling and filtering for profit are not compatible with the Internet as we know it.

Do the net neutrality laws say anything about "Internet access"?

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#286

Post by tracker1 »

dsr_ wrote: post #100
guelo wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's right. It will be a major shift of power from Google/Facebook/Amazon to the ISPs. Comcast could charge Google or Facebook extortionate prices to keep their websites fast. Theoretically there would be nothing stopping Comcast from completely blocking a website. Cable vs TV channel negotiations periodically end up with blackouts for the channels.

Google and Facebook now run networks larger than most major ISPs -- among the largest on the planet. Demand for Youtube and FB are so high and ubiquitous that pretty much any ISP will immediately cave in. Comcast is the most disliked company in the USA. Guess what happens when G runs a banner under each search or Youtube video mentioning that performance is bad because Comcast is blocking things, here's Brian Roberts…

I'd add Amazon in there by nature of Netflix as much as anything else.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#287

Post by acdha »

rdl wrote: post #247
acdha wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some CDNs already do but this would at least make that more open and less of a back-room deal, too, so someone like Fastly doesn't suffer because the Akamai negotiator was in the same frat as the Comcast person they're negotiating with. I think the regulated monopoly model makes the most sense for the last mile connection: make it like what we had with DSL where anyone can rent the wire and competition happens at the…

The downside of removing competitive pressure on the physical last mile is it removes the incentive to invest in building it. Fiber to the Home is an extremely marginal economic proposition today. It's not deployed today. Without strong economic drivers for it, it won't get built. I'd accept that once FTTH exists (bringing fiber back to a neighborhood point), that might be good enough to not require more competition…

Regulated monopolies are profitable, just capped to prevent abuse, and I'd be surprised if there was trouble finding investors for a guaranteed return even if it's not as big as it could be.

Also, not sure you've looked at FTTH recently enough: Verizon alone has 32 million customers according to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_in_the...

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#288

Post by plainOldText »

rrdharan wrote: post #154
plainOldText wrote: post #141

I haven't yet made up my mind on net neutrality. But Sam says: "I believe access should be a basic right" . My question is: How can something be a human right if you need to pay for it? Because as of today you still need to pay an ISP for internet access.

A lot of folks would consider personal security a basic right, but someone still has to pay for the police. Some folks believe that healthcare should be a basic right, and people definitely have to pay for that.

I won't get into the healthcare topic as it's still a mess in my opinion, however, regarding one's right to security, as far as I know police do not have a duty to protect someone. [1]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-pol...

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#289

Post by dahart »

What are the technical, business & political hurdles that prevent routing level encryption from providing enough privacy that neutrality falls out automatically and the question of net neutrality legislation becomes moot?

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#290

Post by none_for_me_thx »

freeone3000 wrote: post #205
wonder_er wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

reasonable political ideologies can lead to "extreme" outcomes. (I consider an extreme outcome to be one that requires human nature to change, in order to be successful.) Since I think bureaucrats are gonna bureaucrat, handing them power over anything is a terrible idea. Are companies good? no, many of them are terrible. But if enough people don't like a company, the company ceases to exist. I've yet to see a similar…

They have fewer resources and are easier to ignore.

I encourage you to ignore the IRS, then. Or, hey, even the FCC.
Post reply on HN