Follow the money. Do you really think the biggest corporations in America support Net Neutrality because of some altruistic need for things to be "fair"?
Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
371–380 of 469 posts
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#372I am starting a small business. One of the decisions I must account for is network performance versus price. Perhaps I choose to partner with a company that my network deprioritizes. I am already at a disadvantage because I cannot afford to run my own lines or peer like large corporations. These same corporations can invest or purchase smaller new buisness and enhance their portfolio. Some already support network neu…
"Boo hoo it's so hard to do business!" is not going to cut it, I'm afraid. The government and all citizens do not exist to enable you to do business. The policy should be what's right, and it should preferably follow the basic principles of modern society: free market. Whether NN enables competition or kills it is debatable. But difficulty in business is not a reason.
Imo ISPs shouldn't be allowed to be a free market as they are monopolies. Whether they should be codified as monopolies like electricity/water is debatable. They absolutely should not be treated like a restaurant where you can just go next door if they start screwing you over though.
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#373I see a lot of shills posting their anti-Network Neutrality stuff here, so I wanted to chime in reminding folks of a few things: Telco's were forced at one point to share phone lines. Remember all those DSL startups? Remember speakeasy? This was called local loop unbundling. What did the Telco's do? everything possible to break or interfere with these startup service provides. The telco's felt that it was "their line…
Accusations of astroturfing and shillage aren't allowed here unless you have evidence, and someone else having a different opinion doesn't count as evidence. Please don't post like this to HN. For those who want to read further about HN's approach to this, there's another thread from today at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14753932 and links to much more from there.
my apologies. I wasn't aware of this rule.
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#374Net neutrality just helps the status quo, and forces the "evil greedy ISPs" to take your money. Yeah let's show them by giving them money and no competition to their business... wait. Vote for less regulation, not just getting rid of NN but getting rid of the monopolies that exist at the local level.
> forces the "evil greedy ISPs" to take your money
How?
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#375Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to point out that even if you disagree with this video that hearing it straight from the source is valuable. If you want to convince Ajit Pai that he's wrong, knowing what his current (public) opinion truly is (rather than just someone's strawman) makes it way easier.
Well, if he really believes it. I high doubt most people in these positions believe a fraction of what they say. They're being backed by major telecom firms to promote a narrative.
There is a supported narrative either way. At its heart the net neutrality argument is really a media versus delivery argument. You could arguably eliminate substantial amounts of network congestion, and thus the need for telecoms to throttle in the first place, by eliminating online advertising and data tracking.
Imagine, instead, if this were a choice between net neutrality or SOPA. If you had to choose one which would you find the be the lesser evil? In the end you are either playing the game media wants or the way telecoms want.
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#376I see a lot of shills posting their anti-Network Neutrality stuff here, so I wanted to chime in reminding folks of a few things: Telco's were forced at one point to share phone lines. Remember all those DSL startups? Remember speakeasy? This was called local loop unbundling. What did the Telco's do? everything possible to break or interfere with these startup service provides. The telco's felt that it was "their line…
Your post is good and I upvoted, but I had to fight the instinct to downvote when you automatically assume those with the opposite POV are "shills", implying they are not sincere contributors. We need more people who are entertaining a moderated dialogue that acknowledge the value of the principles on both sides of the aisle, as your post does: a role for commerce and a role for reasonable regulation. However, callin…
It was a bit of a knee jerk reaction - seeing so many posts flooding to the top that were "Pro Telco/Anti NN". I get angry when people say "regulation is bad - let market forces dictate." The point of my post was that 1. there are no market forces with these entrenched companies, and 2. they've already done everything they can to ensure their monopolies stand un-threatened. Therefore, their punishment is regulatory oversight. These companies (AT&T, Comcast etc) cannot have their cake and eat it too. Period.
If there were 4-6 choices of ISP in each town/area then sure - drop the NN/Title2 regulation and let them race each other to the bottom, just like the airlines. But they are terrified of that, because that sort of competition is _hard_.
Personally, I rank the well being of corporations well below individuals, towns, communities, the environment, space, etc. This might make me a weirdo, but I feel corporations have too much say in all aspects of our life.
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#377Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I am curious: what makes other browsers better for you? Real extensions? Yeah I know they will be less useful than they used to be but still way better than anything else it seems. The fact that it handles my browsing habits like a few hundred open tabs? Oh, and by now using almost any other browser than chrome give me a happy feeling. The limit goes somewhere between Edge and IE it seems :-P Then the news that…
A bit of hyperbole, but here's the reference: https://github.com/mozilla/addons-frontend/issues/2785
Wow. IMO it's not a "bit" of hyperbole to call that "Mozilla forces you into being tracked by Google Analytics".
Additionally, from the link "legal contract with Google" on that page:
> Mozilla went through a year long legal discussion with GA before we would ever implement it on our websites. GA had to provide how and what they stored and we would only sign a contract with them if they allowed Mozilla to opt-out of Google using the data for mining and 3rd parties.
> We now have two check boxes in our GA premium account that allows us to opt-out of additional usage of our data. Because Mozilla pushed Google so hard, those two check boxes are available to every other GA user in the world regardless if they have a premium account like we do.
When and where Mozilla caves to pressures they always stood against, I will not hold it against them more than against the ones putting them under pressure -- or against those trying to muddy the waters even more in these already trying times, for that matter.
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit. The net neutrality was not necessary early on because it was not feasible in the past to control it on such large scale. So betwee…
Thanks for the in depth reply. Great point about technical capability to actually impact usage - and I would imagine the regional monopoly is one of the reasons that is possible. Seems like breaking the local monopolies would solve all of these problems. Even with Title II it's still a huge problem and local ecosystems don't really benefit.
Since there's limited space and it's not only prohibitively expensive for companies to run their own fiber, but also impossible (due to limited space) for the city to allow every company to run their fiber, it would be great if city would create the infrastructure, maintain it and lease it to companies (of course at cost to cover the maintenance).
Although whenever city wanted to start providing internet access existing ISPs were fighting in courts to prevent that.
Another solution would be to do something similar to DSL that the cable companies are required to lease their fiber at reasonable price. The problem would be to determine what reasonable price is, and I'm sure the cable companies would fight against that.
But even then I still think net neutrality should be there. ISPs should just provide access to the Internet with parameters I agreed to paid for. They have no business to control what I can access (or even monitor my activity).
It's similar to electrical or water companies, they don't care what appliances you plug in[1], they won't charge you extra because you want to use 50" TV a dishwasher or add a water filter. All they care is how much electricity/water you consume, that's how it supposed to be.
[1] ok, with electricity there's thing called power factor (https://www.bchydro.com/accounts-billing/rates-energy-use/el...), which you should strive to be 1 (or 100% on the mentioned site) otherwise you might get charged extra if you're big consumer of electricity, but this is there to not waste energy
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Boo hoo it's so hard to do business!" is not going to cut it, I'm afraid. The government and all citizens do not exist to enable you to do business. The policy should be what's right, and it should preferably follow the basic principles of modern society: free market. Whether NN enables competition or kills it is debatable. But difficulty in business is not a reason.
Imo ISPs shouldn't be allowed to be a free market as they are monopolies. Whether they should be codified as monopolies like electricity/water is debatable. They absolutely should not be treated like a restaurant where you can just go next door if they start screwing you over though.
> they are monopolies
If being granted monopoly status is the problem, let's fix that. Instead of treating it as a given and imposing unneeded regulation on top.
Re: Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm afraid that you have misunderstood the Bloomberg article. Nothing in it is about checking the power of the president (it says itself the president determines when to end the meetings and whether to ignore advice). It is all about verifying that The President has issued the order, and then ensuring that order is carried out. The President is contacted in this scenario simply because he's the only one who can actua…
I was just describing the official process. Having spent 14 years in the military I can tell you that it's more complex than just that. The entire point of the US command and control system is to guarantee that the President and only the President is capable of authorizing nuclear war whenever he needs to. Yes, legally and formally. Informally though, as I said, it won't go down like that, especially if it's not comp…
this is not my understanding. there is no such checking because in a real threat the president only has about 7 minutes until the enemies nukes fall from subs off the coast. to be a credible deterrent it has to be assumed he can order the launch in less time than that. if verification of unambiguous threat takes more time than that then the enemy can just nuke us confident we'll all be dead before our pres can get his military to accept the order
http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-59-the-des...