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Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

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Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#111

Post by nkrisc »

anigbrowl wrote: post #35
djsumdog wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if he's just misinformed or if he's being intentionally deceptive. He talks about the "light touch" framework of the Bill Clinton era, which saw telecos profit immensely and never feed any money back into their system. I've know Comcast line who, back in the early 2000s, would tell me they'd take parts to their shop where people would resolder and reconstruct equipment that no one in the world manufactur…

One can never know other people's motivations, but one can certainly guess, and pretty much everyone agrees that Pai is smart enough to know better.

At some point you simply have to judge people on their actions.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#112

Post by anigbrowl »

pvnick wrote: post #107
anigbrowl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulatory capture seems to be much less of a problem at the FCC than it does at the state level, where ISP lobbyists have convinced various state governments to forbid the construction of things like municipal broadband networks. Get back to us after you've solved the smaller problem.

I think the influence that you and I both have to address either issue is limited to posting comments on threads that get flagged off the front page of a website whose readership is limited to nerds in Silicon Valley.

I move in other circles besides this one. I'm not sure what the point of your comment is; you want to promote your anti-federalist views, but when those are challenged you back off and say individuals are powerless to impact anything? Sounds hypocritical to me.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#113

Post by root_axis »

pvnick wrote: post #56

Good. The less federal regulation over ISPs the better.

Anyone who asserts "the less regulations the better" style arguments has automatically lost the debate. It's trivially easy to demonstrate that some regulations are good, so to start off the discussion with a blanket attack on regulations in general, without addressing any specifics regarding the actual regulation in question, broadcasts solid evidence that this is not an argument presented in good faith.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#114

Post by _archon_ »

Why do we call proposed Acts by the name their creators gave them, instead of choosing a more appropriate (and accurate) name?

  "Internet freedom Act" - Empowering Telecom Companies Act

  "SOPA" - Criminalize Ordinary Internet Behavior Act

  "Patriot Act" - Remove Guaranteed Rights In Favor Of Empowering Central Authority Act

  "Affordable Care Act" - Essentially Romneycare
etc. Why should these names not have colloquially adjudicated corrections applied to them the way anything else does?

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#115

Post by olleromam91 »

matt4077 wrote: post #5

It is bewildering how different these Senators' concepts of reality must be from mine to consider this a good idea. I wouldn't even consider it debatable... There's a reason, after all, that ISPs around the world have largely shied back from such practices in the past. Part of the problem may be that those most hurt don't even exist, yet. Depending on how blatantly ISPs would exploit their position as gatekeeper of t…

Money.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#116

Post by anigbrowl »

rayiner wrote: post #99
anigbrowl wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wish that we as a society would spend less time sitting around figuring out who to blame for shit and actually invest in the things we claim to care about. I am sick to the back teeth of bullshit free market ideologies that have an extremely poor track record in reality. That does not mean I am opposed to or deny the value of markets.

The issue in the U.S. is (and has historically been) that neither side wants to invest in telecom infrastructure--both want private companies to foot the bill. When you start from that premise, all your options are limited by the overriding need to ensure adequate incentives to invest. As a matter of personal ideology, I'd say: let's build a nationwide public system with a federal/state partnership, and import regula…

You know perfectly well that several states have passed laws forbidding municipal entities to construct their own broadband networks. The left has made some tentative moves towards articulating a goal of investing in national broadband infrastructure (citing the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a working example of public utility investment) but has understandably been scared off by the right's strident equivalence of any kind of public investment with communism.

I don't want to oversimplify the issue and don't disagree that everyone in politics would prefer if better broadband infrastructure just happened and all they had to do was show up and cut a few ribbons without investing any political capital. But I think you're being a tad disingenuous here. You are too smart and well-informed to buy this argument if I were to make it to you.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#117

Post by rhino369 »

mikhailt wrote: post #10
epistasis wrote: post #2

This is why politics is important, even in tech. We need some grownups to represent us. If you spend ~$50/month on home internet access, and $50/month on cell phone access, that's $1200/year for internet connectivity. How much do you spend on hardware per year? Do you buy a >$1200 laptop per year? How much money does Google make off of your info? The ISPs are rolling in cash. They have terrible customer service. They…

Wasn't there a bill back in 80s/90s to pay the ISPs to modernize the grid with 100mbps across the entire country? Politics isn't the sole problem, lobbying in the company interests instead of the customers is the other problem. There has to be strict federal laws to outlaw lobbying and any type of incentives for all federal employees including the politicians. No gifting, no promises for the future (job), and so on.…

>Wasn't there a bill back in 80s/90s to pay the ISPs to modernize the grid with 100mbps across the entire country?

No, it's a popular uban legend based on a misunderstanding of agreements between telecoms and the government. A telecom, IIRC Verizon, promised to upgrade their network to 45mbps access across their footprint.

People are now interpreting that to mean they promised to build build a FTTH residential network (capable of 45mbps) to each home for prices similar to what you pay for DSL or cable internet.

But that is a total misread.

Really, Verizon was promising to upgrade their Trunk lines (T-Carrier) from T1 to T3. A T3 line is 44.736 Mbit/s. And they weren't promising to deliver a trunk line to each house for 60 bucks a month. They were expecting to charge thousands a month. This was basically a service for businesses and datacenters. Not for residential use.

And they actually did do that upgrade.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#118

Post by rhino369 »

mikehollinger wrote: post #79

It's hard for me to empathize (in the literal sense of the word) with someone who dislikes net neutrality. What're the reasons / justifications for why the current laws and rules are wrong or insufficient?

I generally just don't see the point is making certain business models illegal when there wasn't anyhing that bad going on before the net neutrality laws were passed.

Tmobile is certainly violating net neutrality with it's binge on and free music streaming features. But it's generally good for the consumer.

All the arguments for net nuetrality sounds like slippery slope fallacies to me. "They'll block everything except their own AOL like service!" No, they very probably won't.

I'd rather have a wait and see approach. If the ISPs become abuse, then we should apply net neutrality.

But I see no reason why we shouldn't then apply "OS neutrality" to apple and google. Or search neutrality to google and bing. Or social networking neutrality to facebook and snap.

Facebook and google actually do the sort of stuff people are upset that ISPs might do.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#119

Post by rayiner »

anigbrowl wrote: post #116
rayiner wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue in the U.S. is (and has historically been) that neither side wants to invest in telecom infrastructure--both want private companies to foot the bill. When you start from that premise, all your options are limited by the overriding need to ensure adequate incentives to invest. As a matter of personal ideology, I'd say: let's build a nationwide public system with a federal/state partnership, and import regula…

You know perfectly well that several states have passed laws forbidding municipal entities to construct their own broadband networks. The left has made some tentative moves towards articulating a goal of investing in national broadband infrastructure (citing the example of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a working example of public utility investment) but has understandably been scared off by the right's strident e…

I disagree with those laws ideologically, but they're a footnote. The vast majority of people do not live in one of those states. My county (in Maryland) is building a fiber network and wiring up towns in the rural part of the county that's not served by FiOS: http://archive.aacounty.org/News/Archive2013/News%20and%20Up....

At the same time, I inserted the caveat of importing regulators from Scandinavia for a reason. Public infrastructure in the U.S. (outside of NYC/Chicago) mostly sucks and is poorly run. I say this because I've walked the walk: I used to commute on Metro North every day from Westchester to Manhattan, then on SEPTA from Wilmington to Philadelphia, then on Amtrak from Baltimore to DC, then (briefly) on the D.C. Metro. Metro North was fantastic, but the others are worse than Comcast.

The basic problem is that I don't have the choice to vote for Stockholm's fiber system run by Swedes. My only choice is between Verizon (which is actually pretty damn good in Maryland), or the same folks who run the D.C. Metro.

Re: Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority

#120

Post by rayiner »

forgotmysn wrote: post #105
jdminhbg wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never seen billions of dollars in profits dismissed so casually. Comcast has around 25 million customers [0], so that's around $65/year/customer. So if you cut that profit to $0, you can return $5/month on combined TV and internet to each customer. When people say "cable and internet are so expensive," they don't generally mean "if I got a $5 price cut I would be happy." [0]: http://expandedramblings.com/index…

I'm not suggesting that fast, consistent internet service is cheap to provide. However, I'm also not convinced that comcast's prices aren't as high as they are, and their margins as low as they are, only because its a costly service to provide. It's also because they are really bad at providing it. But that wasn't even my main point. My point is that Comcast is more interested in providing a return to their sharehold…

> It's also because they are really bad at providing it.

What makes you think that? A huge chunk of an ISPs' operating expenses go to paying people to move dirt around, and the metal and plastic they put in the dirt. How do you expect to disrupt that?

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