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Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

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Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#81

Post by kijin »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #34
RangerScience wrote: post #11

If you're a founder and looking to sell your company, is there anything you can do to guard yourself against these kinds of situations? I imagine it might be some particular part of a golden handcuff / golden parachute deal, but making it work for everyone involved sounds super hard...

Sure. Don't sell your company. Don't take it public, either. Principled moral stands are not compatible with making as much money as possible.

Or to be more precise, making as much money for other people as soon as possible.

Net neutrality is supposed to help small- to medium-sized internet companies do better. Taking a stand on net neutrality is therefore not incompabitible with maximizing profit in the long term. It is, however, usually incompatible with maxmimizing quarterly returns for myopic investors.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#83

Post by toomuchtodo »

fake-name wrote: post #77
toomuchtodo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use grab site, which is a spiritual successor to ArchiveTeam's ArchiveBot. I have to be careful to give my scraping methods away, as I've had digital targets attempt countermeasures.

I've had similar problems. At this point, I basically run a botnet, albeit one I pay for. I have a rolling swarm of DigitalOcean and Vultr VMs that act as RPC clients for a custom system I wrote.

We should collaborate.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#84

Post by redial »

drdaeman wrote: post #74
redial wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not bad per se, but it is not what the internet is. The moment they start charging based on content is the moment that it becomes something different. Right now is like a public road, with free and equal access for every body, and thus, an economy can be built around it. If you change it to the store model, it morphs from an economy to a business, and businesses are not capable of supporting an entire economy b…

Ahem. I think public roads sometimes have, e.g., limits for heavy vehicles or various dedicated lanes. ;) My actual point is, analogies just don't work.

Roads have the limits of the infrastructure and the law, not "limits" determined by the current operator of the road (that can be bypassed with payments, and thus not limits in the same sense).

The grocery store analogy doesn't work. The road or electric grid analogies are perfectly apt.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#85

Post by weberc2 »

dpark wrote: post #75
weberc2 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that reduced upstream costs typically translate into reduced downstream costs, and that regulation typically increases downstream costs, I think the onus is on NN-proponents to prove why the reverse is true.

> regulation typically increases downstream costs This is a common claim that is rarely supported with data. Why does enforcing net neutrality increase downstream costs? If you mean that it shifts costs (you pay more for Netflix because they have to pay Comcast for fair service), then sure. I don't see any evidence that net neutrality actually changes the underlying cost of net service, though. There's a great counte…

I didn't posit that NN will increase costs; only that the onus for demonstrating otherwise lies with NN-proponents. I don't have data to support conventional wisdom; only that the conventional wisdom is reasonable given that compliance adds overhead.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#86

Post by weberc2 »

bsurmanski wrote: post #57
weberc2 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a very good argument, since Comcast (or whoever) wants to charge Netflix more --a challenger wouldn't have to pay the Netflix premium. Maybe in some hypothetical scenario ISPs would charge incumbents less, but the real-world scenario is the opposite.

Not if Netflix makes a special exclusivity deal. You can bet that some businesses will make as many deals as possible to keep down the competition, if it's legal.

Yes, this would be the hypothetical scenario which is the opposite of the current scenario that everyone is so concerned about.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#87

Post by weberc2 »

jedberg wrote: post #54
weberc2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not opposed to NN, but your phrasing piqued my curiosity: Why is it bad that ISPs charge us based on type/source of data? Should grocery stores charge us by volume (mass?) of food instead of by type/source/etc? If aggregating costs is indeed more moral, why should it be enforced by law (as opposed to the food example)? Providing robust answers to these questions should strengthen the NN position.

It's not quite the same though. It would be more like if the store said you could pay $50 to enter and fill a cart with whatever you want, but you can use as many other carts as you want but only for their store brand items. Then the local government comes in and says that they are the only store allowed in town. Now, is it fair to General Mills that they have to compete with the store brand cereal when the store bra…

My thoughts are that the proper solution would be to outlaw regional monopolies, and that a store is entitled to whatever pricing model it sees fit.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#88

Post by _delirium »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #61
lumisota wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Modern corporate law does not require for-profit corporations to pursue profit at the expense of everything else, and many do not.": http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/13-354.html

However, if you do not, your investors can sue you and win, no?

They can sue yes, less likely to win. Modern courts really don't want to second-guess management strategies, and instead focus on things like fraud, conflicts of interest, and misrepresentation. If the company openly said that they are going to pursue policy X because they think this is in the long-term best interests of the company, and some shareholders sue to argue that it isn't, courts are rarely going to step in and try to determine that management should've pursued some other strategy. For one thing, they aren't really equipped to determine what would be the right course of action (valuing things like "goodwill" is not really an exact science), and for another, shareholders already have a mechanism for resolving those questions among themselves: shareholder votes.

Instead, to win a shareholder lawsuit you usually need much more of a smoking gun, things like being able to show that the CEO pursued a certain deal because his brother owned the other company, or that a group of controlling shareholders are having their chosen board take certain actions that deliberately screw over minority shareholders, that kind of thing.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#89

Post by zanny »

jameskegel wrote: post #45
rhizome wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, you could sell the biz outright and wash your hands of the whole thing once the check clears.

I dream of that moment but can't help but feel I'd be doing something or someone wrong if I just disappeared to a small island somewhere expensive. Is it really possible to just disconnect after a sale? I'd be interested in hearing supporting anecdotes as well as to the contrary; I want to believe!

The company you sell to cannot legally bind you to working for them - that is indentured servitude. You can always leave any contract or job any time you want. The OP mentions "once the check clears" for good reason - because when making acquisitions your payout is usually contingent on staying around for the transition for a fixed amount of time - you don't get your payout until that deadline, and if you leave before then you void the obligation.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#90

Post by wmf »

fiatjaf wrote: post #19
RangerScience wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to downvote you because of how intensely I disagree with everything you're saying, but you're saying it nicely so I won't. Instead - The major concern about losing NN is that instead of just paying for volume of data, I'll also be required to pay based on type and/or source of that data, and that the entities providing the data will also be required to pay based on type and/or destination. Do you think this co…

Thank you for not downvoting me. Free market would be part of my answer if I had one. I'm not well-informed enough to say much, but imagine you have a local link in a small rural town that only support some absolute number of packets or whatever: if you have one big consumer that is eating the major part of that every day, making the others miserable, isn't it reasonable to limit that consumer's bandwidth somehow? Th…

if you have one big consumer that is eating the major part of [the pipe] every day, making the others miserable, isn't it reasonable to limit that consumer's bandwidth somehow?

The "somehow" is key here. There is a neutral solution called per-customer fair queueing but most equipment doesn't support that so some ISPs end up using non-neutral "solutions" like just banning Netflix and BitTorrent.

Also, I want to caution people about reasoning by analogy since ISPs aren't analogous to restaurants or grocery stores or really anything else. A real argument doesn't require analogies.

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