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Keep the Internet Open

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: Keep the Internet Open

#331

Post by nickpsecurity »

eldavido wrote: post #327
aero142 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 munic…

I agree 100%. Do you know of academic/scholarly articles or books on this topic? Net neutrality strikes me as a topic with a lot more scope for disagreement on both goals and policy than the hardcore pro net-neutrality crowd admits. It's somehow taken as an article of faith that a non-market solution would be best, even as we're living in a time with more last-mile competition than ever before (due to wireless). Furt…

" It's somehow taken as an article of faith that a non-market solution would be best,"

It's not taken as an article of faith: we have decades of evidence showing what private players do. It's always same stuff that hurts consumers. They get as much territory as possible. They ensure through cut-throat competition, consolidation, and lobbying that there's little competition. Then they keep speed, innovation, and customer service as low as they can with prices as high as the market will sustain. This goes back to MA Bell.

Then, some pro-consumer regulations and billions in broadband subsidies made things better for a time. They also started upping their speed in areas where utilities or Google deployed high speed. As in, they could do it whole time but all big players chose to gouge customers instead. Obviously, one scheme works and one doesnt.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#332

Post by intended »

aero142 wrote: post #283
OriginalPenguin wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 munic…

This whole chain is the opposite of reddit, because it's the one place where networking and comp sci professionals tend to gather.

And there is a whole world of working ISP models - which America specifically chooses to ignore and instead follows it's usual free market/competitive religion.

Your ISPs are playing your country like a fiddle. I have personally taken notes and look for firms making the same moves as them as it is an excellent signal of market weakness and, political backing and weak regulators.

I mean, your guys hid post codes in bids for territory during auctions, so that they wouldn't have to compete.

American ISPs are in the business of making money with the least amount of outlay. Buy telecom stock, because looking at the disarray even places like HN, is clear who is going to be winning.

By the by - google/tech firms- will never buy an ISP, they aren't interested in a single business in America which is not their core competency. Instead ~~they will let NN fall,~~ edit: it is in their interest to, collude/pay ISPs their price and use their deeper moats to purchase other firms or services at even better prices than they can afford now.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#333

Post by noobiemcfoob »

TOMDM wrote: post #318
noobiemcfoob wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Don't get me wrong, I certainly understand that power is anything but binary in it's function, however, as far as how consumers interact with it, very very few care as to what the copper in their walls is doing, only that it turns on the lights. To extend the argument of net neutrality in this direction, I think an important distinction needs to be made, because surely you could argue LED's over florescent bulbs due…

> as far as how consumers interact with it

Right. Because of deep penetration of market standards, a mix of government regulation and industry standards, consumers interact with power in this very limited fashion.

I don't believe users of bandwidth would want to behave in a similar fashion. Is it so crazy to imagine a dynamic bandwidth market, largely automated for pay per use? I worry about the impacts of such a thing, but it like any other has its benefits and plagues.

/To be honest, I have no idea what you mean by your extended metaphor...

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#334

Post by intended »

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…

>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.

This is too insidious and must be killed

Firstly - google offers free, complete internet via wifi at train stations in India. This solves multiple problems at once and actually makes an impact. (No last mile issues, at a major node where millions of people interact every day)

Secondly - Zero rating as proposed in India, would allow for a small curated list, which of course would be done by Facebook.

As zero rating stood, it was used by college kids who wanted free Facebook. Not by Kanta Bhen, in the middle of no where trying to find medical advice.

Thirdly-importantly: Wikipedia is not the internet. Facebook is not the internet. Google is not the internet.

These are fundamentally sites on the internet, and while hugely important to the English speaking world, the real value is the place where these things were made possible. And that is the internet.

That is what India risks losing, at a time in its development when it's more prepared to make pong than it is to make candy crush.

Sure, theres huge English speaking populations in the cities.

But rural India speaks a whole menagerie of local languages, many of which don't share a common root language.

So removing the chance for people to actually see that open, flat network, connecting everyone around the world is a massive short sighted loss.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#335

Post by intended »

bifrost wrote: post #167
guelo wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "net neutrality" extremism So the NN side are the extremists. Not the side that wants to radically change the way the internet has worked for 40 years. Not the side that wants to upend the most innovative segment of the economy in favor of dinausour monoplies, radically reshaping the foundations of billions of dollars in investment and billions more in created wealth. Those guys are "conservative" right?

I think you misunderstand - NN is new, the internet worked fine on its own prior to it. NN is not a colloquial "neutrality" agreement, its a "lets force carriers to do things because we don't understand how it works". I've worked on the carrier side, on the last mile side and on the consumer side and I'm not a fan of most of the proposed legislation. We need to prevent anticompetitive practices, but thats about it.

I was a financial analyst, and I had the chance to cover the telecom sector.

I know how the market works, NN is not new, it is how the world worked.

Anti NN is new. It's hugely anti competitive and anti consumer.

If it gets close to getting passed, I'll be really happy for the segment. Wouldn't be happy being a consumer.

Edit: IMO, the American telecom industry is shafting its consumers regularly and has been underinvesting for years. (Investing in regulatory capture is a lot more), there's many other nations with significantly better networks and speeds, and it's a joke stock for the rest of the world to see the country which created the internet writing the book on how to not enjoy it.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#336

Post by ozaark »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #264
d--b wrote: post #251

Like Altman, I am amazed that this is not inflaming the community again. In order to pass an unpopular law, you just need to try to pass it several times, until the public gets tired of protesting?

I suppose the next question is: should the voice of protesters matter more than the overall opinion of the populace, which come election time is that Net Neutrality isn't even worth talking about?

Sanders did fwiw [1] https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sande...

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#337

Post by dkarapetyan »

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 best part is that it was all enabled by people who did not like politics and just enjoyed solving problems. Sometimes I wonder if focusing on technology is the technologist's equivalent of putting one's head in the sand.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#338

Post by E6300 »

hueving wrote: post #323
E6300 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that same logic, there should be no laws governing radio broadcasting, since the equipment that emits the photons is located in a private building, not in the public airspace through which the photons travel. Yet the FCC still exists.

The reason the FCC needs to regulate public airspace is because transmissions interfere with each other. If there was a magical way to have no possible way to hijack or interfere with entities' assigned frequencies, the FCC would not need to exist.[1] By your logic, the FCC should regulate a conversation two people were having in person just by virtue of them being on public land. Yet the FCC does not. The FCC also d…

> The reason the FCC needs to regulate public airspace is because transmissions interfere with each other.

It's the exact same situation with net neutrality. If an ISP decides to give traffic from some hosts higher priority than my traffic, then that other traffic is interfering with my communications in the exact same way as an antenna that transmits a 50 GW signal on nearly all frequencies.

> By your logic, the FCC should regulate a conversation two people were having in person just by virtue of them being on public land. Yet the FCC does not. The FCC also does not regulate the signs on the sides of buildings, even though light is reflected from them to public airspace.

It's not that the government must regulate everything that happens in the public sphere. The government should regulate things if it's for the good of everyone (or most everyone), and if those things happen in the public sphere, then it has legitimacy to do it.

So, to address your examples, the FCC should regulate that conversation if those people are so loud that no one else in the city can speak, and it should regulate a sign on the side of a building if it emits such intense light that things in its path catch fire.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#339

Post by asher_ »

vvanders wrote: post #75

I love the electricity company/appliance analogy. That seems fairly accurate and something that's easily relatable to the layman who doesn't understand the details of the internet.

Can you explain? The analogy seems like a terrible one to me.

We are not talking about charging different amounts of money depending on the brand of device you are consuming the data on. NN is about not differentiating the cost or quality of bits based on their source. In the US, can you not opt to pay a slightly higher rate for renewable energy? (This happens in Australia).

I'm all for NN, but the analogy Sam used doesn't hold in my opinion.

As an additional thought from someone outside the US: NN doesn't exist in places like Australia, and has actually overall led to better services, especially in the early days of the internet, because overseas data is significantly more costly to provide than local data. The difference is that we have more robust competition and we can more easily switch providers, where is seems in the US (purely based on things I've read on the internet) that the near-duopoly cuts consumer choice, so if NN was not in place, people would have little ability to switch providers, and they would be stuck with it.

Is the lack of competition the real issue here? If people in the US had a choice of many providers and it was easy to switch, then people would likely switch to services that are Net Neutral.

Re: Keep the Internet Open

#340

Post by api »

simplehuman wrote: post #110
xatan_dank wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture and many of the "free" social networks are not profitable at all. Very few of them are actually succeeding. Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by 'distracting' people. I don't think any of this is true and that the argument you make here is…

> I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture Huh? Just see all the gmail ids. Just ask any company as to how many email ids are gmail and prepared to be stunned. Same goes for GitHub, medium. Even so called "decentralized" projects are happily hosting code on github and blogging on medium. (I am not judging the users here by any means. I am just saying they are "happy"). > Also, you say activism…

A major factor is the unbelievable pain of doing one's own IT work.

Even hosting a blog with Wordpress or Ghost can be a pain, let alone hosting your own git infrastructure. Then you have the whole sign-on / password / account management nightmare. Nobody wants to (sigh, grumble) create yet another (grumble, grumble) account on yet another site.

If there were some kind of open SSO standard that actually worked and was actually low-friction for users, that would go a long way.

That being said I don't have a problem with it. We (ZeroTier) are kind of a decentralization effort, and we use GitHub and Slack because they work and they save time. Use the present to build the future.

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