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Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

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Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#411

Post by J5892 »

mbroshi wrote: post #138

I am agnostic on net neutrality (ie. neither for nor against, just admitting my own lack of ability to assess its fallout). I read a lot of sweeping, but hard to measure claims on its affects (such as in the linked article). Are there any concrete, measurable affects that anyone is willing to predict? Examples might be: * Average load times for the 1000 most popular webpages will decrease. * There will be fewer inter…

Your examples are actually pretty spot on.

> * Average load times for the 1000 most popular webpages will decrease.

Absolutely possible if companies in the top 1000 pay for priority over other companies in the top 1000. Also possible if an ISP decides to make their own version of a top 1000 site, and throttles its competitors.

> * There will be fewer internet startups over the next 5 years than the previous.

When ISPs create an artificial barrier to entry such as paid prioritization, costs to start a business and become profitable will increase, which will absolutely reduce the amount of new startups.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#412

Post by feld »

dang wrote: post #407
feld wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright let me replay this conversation: Post: > the free market is broken. I have a choice between two providers but one is a slight inconvenience for me to have installed so I refuse to use it. YC Approved© Reply: > the free market is not broken. 🆒

This evades the point. The point is that you can't post things like "You're just being a prick" to Hacker News. We ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again.

I did not evade the point. You are choosing to to ignore it.

This comment is well within HN guidelines.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#413

Post by inyorgroove »

bhauer wrote: post #213
tps5 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual internet history if the website uses HTTPS. Your ISP can (and likely does) monitor your DNS queries, which (as far as I know) are not encrypted. Personally I think the net neutrality stuff is a tad overblown. I'd vote for maintaining it, but I've never been particularly convinced by the whole "surveillance state/beyond-orwellian/ISP censoring your speech" arguments…

> I think the problems with ISPs are more practical: they overcharge, provide shitty service, have no incentive to upgrade their infrastructure, and clearly collude with one another. Therefore they need to be regulated. Agreed. Though I would prefer that we do whatever we can to identify and implement mechanisms to increase competition. I want new ISP options, and several of them, rather than just marginally better b…

How about forcing ISPs to lease the last mile to help bolster competition, they did something similar in the UK [1]. Not quite sure how that worked out for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling#United_K...

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#414

Post by drawnwren »

PeterisP wrote: post #405
drawnwren wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used AOL and Compuserve, but after they had both expanded to allowing access to everything. What drove the expansion? It seems like the market worked as expected in this case...

The existence of the open internet made it beneficial to interoperate; lack of it would mean that the expected market interest would require them to not interoperate. For many markets, the natural consequence of unregulated free market conditions is to aggregate towards a monopolistic or oligopolistic market, which isn't a free market any more. The idealized economic free market isn't a stable equilibrium - it's a go…

What was the 'open internet'? I genuinely am not comprehending what drove AOL and Compuserve to tear their walls down.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#415

Post by massysett »

jhardcastle wrote: post #370
Imagenuity wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on your Compuserve comment? What happened?

Presumably OP is referring to the walled garden of CompuServe, Prodigy, and others where you could only talk to other CompuServe customers on their proprietary message boards. If you wanted to talk with someone else, it was impossible (until later) because the systems didn't interoperate. CompuServe controlled the message boards, and could control which ones were created (or not created) and thus controlled the messa…

"others where you could only talk to other CompuServe customers on their proprietary message boards."

In other words, Facebook and Twitter.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#416

Post by pc2g4d »

The top comments here seem to misunderstand net neutrality. It's not about companies selling your browsing history---that was recently approved by Congress in a separate bill[1]---but rather is about whether ISPs can prioritize the data of different sites or apps. IIUC net neutrality doesn't really provide any privacy protections, though it's likely good for privacy by making a more competitive market that motivates companies to act more (though not always) in consumers' interests.

1: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#417

Post by albertTJames »

Neutrality does not mean anything should be authorized... international law should allow ISP to submit to judiciary surveillance of individuals if those a suspected of serious crimes, terrorism, pedophilia, black hat hacking, psychological operations/fake news. I don't think because policemen can stop me in the street it is a violation of my freedom. Moreover the article is extremely vague and use argumentum ad populum to push its case while remaining quite unclear on what is really planned: "His goal is clear: to overturn the 2015 order and create an Internet that’s more centralized."

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#418

Post by chiefalchemist »

shawnee_ wrote: post #65

Net neutrality is fundamental to free speech. Without net neutrality, big companies could censor your voice and make it harder to speak up online. Net neutrality has been called the “First Amendment of the Internet.” Not just harder. Infinitely more dangerous. Probably the scariest implications for NN being gutted are those around loss of anonymity through the Internet. ISPs who are allowed to sell users' browsing hi…

I think if you read Chaos Monkeys and/or Dragnet Nation (and I'm sure, others) you'll realize the data privacy cat is out of the bag. It's likely such ISP data to be sold is already available via other channels.

Aside from that, the danger of the internet doesn't seem to be free speech, but free thought. The bar is much higher and deeper. Droves are being manipulated, nudged and misled. That's happening, nearly frictionless, now. Even Orwell would blush thinking, "My, I really underestimated what was going to happen."

Mind you a lack of NN isn't going to help. But with NN or without NN the root issue(s) aren't NN.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#419

Post by chiefalchemist »

guelo wrote: post #247
bmelton wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The common response to this is that ISPs have access to everything you do (which is true), and that they could sell that (which is false). The regulations being overturned here are ones that have only recently taken effect, and non-anonymized, non-aggregate selling of ISP data is still outlawed by the Cable Communications Act of 1984, which protects subscriber privacy is 47USC § 551[1]. Put simply, neither the most r…

So you're saying this most recent regulation does absolutely nothing, even though it was the highest priority for the incoming industry friendly regulator. Seems doubtful that some 1984 law is going to protect our browsing data.

You're correct. But only because - per Chaos Monkeys, Dragnet Nation, and the like - your data is already being captured, aggregated, and sold. If that's your concern, you're too late. On the other hand if your concern is specify to ISPs (as opposed to other entities you don't even know) then sure worry and complain. But at least your ISP has an incentive to not go too crazy, as the data they sell could be used to market to you to leave that ISP ;)

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#420

Post by chiefalchemist »

accountyaccount wrote: post #250
apexalpha wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not American, so please correct me if I'm wrong but I have yet to see any proof of this whole 'sell your internet history' complaint that seems to be blatently copied by everyone without any research. The way I understand it is that ISPs can sell anonymized data from groups of users. Like: people who visit news.ycombinator.com generally also visit stackoverflow. I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual…

If someone really wanted to, couldn't they buy that anonymized data and then make a series of inferences on which data is yours based on cross-referencing various information? (please correct me if this is wrong) Like say I run hackernews — couldn't I just cross-reference my own logs with that "anonymized" data and get a pretty good idea of what a specific users' traffic was? Based on some of the tools Uber has used…

Exactly. Gather a could sources - as is already happening - and with a graph DB and not even grad level algorithms you could get a pretty accurate picture of enough people, given enough data.
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