One Step Closer to a Closed Internet

> The "let the market decide" shills don't seem to understand there's no market.

Oh, trust me, we understand that very well. What we want to do is expand competition by making it easier to compete. This largest barrier to competition at this time is local municipalities, which is a good place for the FCC to step in and tell them to back off and let the ISPs install their fiber.

I support the FCC regulating governmental entities, not so much private ones. Net neutrality should, if enforced by government, be legislated, not initiated by a regulatory agency. This issue was brought up by people on both sides of the issue for different reasons. On the pro- side because they new a regime change would just undo it, and on the con- side because they thought such a large change was unfit for unelected bureaucrats to decide.

The idea that we should introduce more regulation in order to fix bad historic policy is like government asking for a temporary tax. A long time ago my state asked for a new temporary tax for school renovations. Guess what, that tax never went away. It's the same thing with regulations. They just keep piling up.

"Mayor #{city_official} wants to raise YOUR TAXES to line the pockets of their friends at #{local_construction_firm}. Call your alderman and tell him to vote NO on Proposition #{proposition_id}!"

"Mayor #{city_official} wants to pass JOB KILLING REGULATIONS that could put #{comcast_employees.count} of your neighbors out of work! Sign this petition opposing Proposition #{proposition_id}!"

"Mayor #{city_official} wants the GOVERNMENT to take over YOUR INTERNET. Vote NO on Proposition #{proposition_id} to keep your internet free!"

It's not that hard if you don't care about fairness or accuracy.

Sure, the incident that caused the FCC to write the Net Neutrality rules.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/186576-verizon-caught-...

Basically the ISPs held one service for ransom by slowing down the traffic enough to make it run poorly until the service paid the demands.

We can probably expect to see more of this in the future. Amazon and Google should probably start setting aside a warchest for the inevitable shakedowns.

Open access rules like the ones that exist on phone lines could do the job. The problem is that we got those rules on phone lines by having the government heavily subsidize them back in the Ma Bell days. The cable and fiber networks were much less subsidized so it's a hard argument to make.

The ship has already sailed on treating broadband as a utility like it should be. Muni broadband projects can help, but they're few and far between, plus they suffer from tremendous political pushback from the well connected incumbents.

People forget sometimes that the ARPAnet was a closed Internet. And it didn't have some of the problems of todays internet like spam for that same reason. (you could be kicked off) And the thing that lived alongside of it was FIDOnet and Usenet which exploited another closed network (the switched network service known as the telephone network) to run a parallel and notionally "open" internet.

Then (as now) the challenge was that for long distance communication you needed someone who was paying for that infrastructure. The way it typically worked was that a big company like Xerox which nominally had a coast to coast telephone system that was being maintained for corporate reasons but had excess capacity, was notionally "ok" with a couple of engineers creating a 'tunnel' between the west coast and the east coast. Locally people would use their 'free calling zone' to call.

We have companies that have their own wide area networks, and we have things like software defined radios and ISM bands that allow for nominally low cost 'hops'. Is it time to dig up the old Usenet architecture?