Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

theverge.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 178 posts

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

#101

Post by weberc2 »

uw_rob wrote: post #70
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.

How would you respond to the fact that A lot of ISPs have local monopolies and they have 0 incentive to pass on any savings they materialize to customers? Also, many ISPs are also media companies, and sabotaging internet based entertainment is beneficial to them?

I think we should prohibit monopolies. Anyway the incentive isn't zero, we needn't exaggerate. ISPs aren't the only company to participate in multiple markets, I don't see why we should be more concerned about them than Amazon.

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

#102

Post by redial »

weberc2 wrote: post #97
redial wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The "because I say so" argument isn't very compelling. I probably agree with your conclusion, but the argument is lazy.

Cool.

I'm sorry you couldn't be bothered to read the whole thread and jumped to the end just to criticize instead of providing reasons, but whatever.

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

#103

Post by antoineMoPa »

waterphone wrote: post #25
tptacek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Porn makes up the majority of Tumblr's userbase?

Tumblr has a huge porn community, and always has. I don't have actual statistics, but it's huge. In general, people on tumblr might have a regular, personal blog, and then a side blog where they reblog and/or comment on/add captions to pornographic images, gifs and videos. In that sense, they can sort of curate porn that interests and appeals to them. The addition of this personal touch and intellectual component app…

Maybe your vision of tumblr's userbase is biased by the kind of people you follow. Personally, I'm on the "computer science/glitch art/study/science" part of tumblr and I don't see much NSFW content (Apart from some bots who follow me which I block automatically).

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

#104

Post by fiatjaf »

gech wrote: post #71
fiatjaf wrote: post #5

Net neutrality makes internet more expensive for everybody so Torrent and Netflix users can be subsidized. It looks right, but it is WRONG to "defend" it using law and force.

How many upvotes did this receive?

The score is at -4 now.

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

#105

Post by waterphone »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #103
waterphone wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tumblr has a huge porn community, and always has. I don't have actual statistics, but it's huge. In general, people on tumblr might have a regular, personal blog, and then a side blog where they reblog and/or comment on/add captions to pornographic images, gifs and videos. In that sense, they can sort of curate porn that interests and appeals to them. The addition of this personal touch and intellectual component app…

Maybe your vision of tumblr's userbase is biased by the kind of people you follow. Personally, I'm on the "computer science/glitch art/study/science" part of tumblr and I don't see much NSFW content (Apart from some bots who follow me which I block automatically).

The areas are kept quite separate, but that doesn't mean that there isn't still a huge porn userbase. Many people on tumblr have multiple blogs on different subjects, and deliberately keep their porn blog(s) separate from the rest.

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

#106

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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...

Make a tax-deductible donation to the EFF. Any influence you could have projected with a company you can likely outperform with its value in cash.

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

#107

Post by fiatjaf »

steego wrote: post #59
fiatjaf wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I apologize for calling your opinion vapid in my other post. Thank you for taking the time to articulate your ideas in this post. I too am a proponent for free markets, but I have to point out that the telecommunications industry could care less about free market principles. For the last hundred years telcos have consistently lobbied the federal government for regulations that lock out competition. They pretend regul…

Right, I understand that the telecommunications industry is not a free market in any sense.

But imagine that you think NN is wrong (I no longer believe that), but since it is better than the current state of non-free-markets-plus-telcos-doing-anything-they-want, you defend NN.

That just makes things worse, since it shifts the focus out of the real underlying problem (markets aren't free) and tells everybody the problem is this other one (no NN being enforced).

Since imposing NN will not solve all the problems, and may as well create some new problems, the next time a problem appears the State will be prompted to introduce a new regulation, and we'll be each time farther from the free markets. Regulation brings regulation.

I don't know if the above applies to this situation in particular or if we should oppose a measure that looks better just because in principle it is not the best measure.

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

#108

Post by skinnymuch »

f4rker wrote: post #53
jp_sc wrote: post #4

tl;dr: Verizon owns Yahoo now, so it owns Tumblr too.

Buying yahoo was a very dumb move for VZ unless they just want hold assets OR completely overhaul yahoo. Yahoo has been a losing brand since circa 2000. Soon as yahoo took over tumblr it started to suck more. source : I work on other peoples tumblrs site all the time

AOL does a lot of advertising. Yahoo has a ton of eyeballs. Verizon has data. That already is a good match for all three. Yahoo is still close to a top 5 site. Definitely top 10. Yahoo also owns some advertising infrastructure like Brightroll and Flurry. I have experience in Brightroll myself. It's not that rare to run across people spending close to $100K a week on Brightroll.

It wasn't a bad move at all. They were also able to take off a few hundred million from the price because of the hack. Made the deal even better.

Verizon will definitively be the 3rd biggest advertising platform after Google and Facebook. Not a bad place to be when you already make billions in profit from your Verizon Wireless oligopoly.

About Tumblr. Yahoo has already written off at least $700M of its original purchase price. So Tumblr isn't a big factor when buying Yahoo.

Note: In no way do I like what Verizon will be doing. Using their vast amounts of data on users via their internet/phones services and now all the web properties they own for advertising and targeting is awful for privacy and plain old decency. I just mean strictly business-wise, this is likely to be a great deal for Verizon.

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

#109

Post by PeterisP »

tptacek wrote: post #17
waterphone wrote: post #2

They're also forcing all adult-oriented content on Tumblr (which isn't limited to porn, although porn makes up the majority of their userbase) behind a logged-in-users-only wall, blocking it from non-Tumblr users and in turn, external search engine results. https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/20/tumblr-rolls-out-new-conte...

Porn makes up the majority of Tumblr's userbase?

Probably not, all the stats I've seen shown that it's something like 20-25% of total consumption, so certainly a lot, but not a majority.

There are reports of that upwards of 80% of Tumblr users have been "exposed to porn" occasionally or even accidentally, but that doesn't mean that the majority of Tumblr is porn.

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

#110

Post by nickpsecurity »

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...

Everyone is saying no. I'm going to speculate in opposite in case someone qualified reads the comment to tell us if it makes any sense. :)

My idea is to, either as terms of the sale or in a contract with a 3rd party, guarantee the company will continue doing a specific thing. If it's a contract, the company should be able to do with without much cost and get benefit in return for consideration. After the sale, they're still obligated to do what they said they would do. At the least, they could be sued. Maybe put the amount in the contract to be whatever profit they made for every year they were in violation so controlling company knows ahead of time non-compliance might cost them a lot of money.

So, this is a person that just took a college class in business law a long time ago brainstorming a solution. Needs peer review by more qualified people but that's how I'd at least attempt to do it. Probably in charter, contracts, and terms of sale altogether if I can get away with it.

Post reply on HN