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FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

washingtonpost.com

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Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#31

Post by sjm-lbm »

spystath wrote: post #9
edwhitesell wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beleive it's part of the NPRM [0] issued in May. [0] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344614A1.p...

I can't decide if titling it "Restoring Internet Freedom" is a perverse sense of humour or just blatant effrontery.

Certainly not humor. I've met with my republican legislators (well, met with staffers at one, called others) - their official position really is that Net Neutrality is BigGovernment(tm) and they need to get rid of it to protect the little guy.

The problem is that it is working. It drives me up a wall to try to explain this to nontechnical conservatives. They actually think that this is a good thing that will increase the amount of liberty they have in their lives.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#32

Post by pneill »

Maybe I'm lone dissenter, but I don't understand the push back on this. People who read hacker news should be among the elite technologist, do we really all believe that every packet should be treated the same?

Should an E911 call or tele-surgery packets really be treated the same as Netflix? Net neutrality forces the ISP to do that and that seems like madness to me.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#33

Post by xienze »

tclancy wrote: post #28
cwyers wrote: post #22

I don't know, the Internet got on fine without those rules for a lot longer than we've had those rules, I feel like the gloom-and-doom over this is highly overstated.

There wasn't money to be made for most of that time. Once there was and utilities discovered they wouldn't get much of it and started to mess about, rules were introduced.

No money to be made in say, 2005-2015?

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#34

Post by ams6110 »

fokinsean wrote: post #18

Tweet in article: >On December 14, the FCC will vote on Chairman Pai's plan to repeal President Obama's heavy-handed Internet regulations and restore Internet freedom. I love how these laws are veiled with patriotic sentiments, e.g. "Internet Freedom". Just like the "Patriot Act", it is reasonable to assume anything with these sort of labels will likely be an encroachment on your freedoms. Also >"The job of the FCC i…

People are dropping cable due to the heavy-handed control and lack of choice. Why would ISPs want emulate that failing model?

If Comcast is going to try to charge me more to be able to access Netflix, I'm gone.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#35

Post by everyone »

tashmat wrote: post #25
coloneltcb wrote: post #2

I love how political posts (particularly about this corrupt, incompetent administration) get flagged on HN because they're not "on topic" Well here you go, turns out politics affects real life, and even the tech industry.

And when they don't, a lukewarm middle-of-the-road comment will inevitably rise to the top, contributing nothing to the discussion other than perhaps a milquetoast industry anecdote.

Has the word 'milquetoast' recently increased in usage by several orders of magnitude? I seem to be seeing it a lot. I suppose words go viral like any other meme.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#36

Post by mtgx »

cwyers wrote: post #22

I don't know, the Internet got on fine without those rules for a lot longer than we've had those rules, I feel like the gloom-and-doom over this is highly overstated.

It's not overrated. Comcast and Verizon were already caught drastically slowing down Netflix and Youtube the last time around, before the net neutrality rules passed, until those companies "paid up".

Netflix and Youtube are probably safe from such actions now, but what about the much smaller services that try to compete with Youtube or Netflix, or podcast platforms, and so on?

Also this recently happened in Portugal, where technically there are some net neutrality rules now, but the current Commission canceled the previous Commission/Neelie Kroes' proposal to ban zero-rating. And since that meant they were allowed to do this sort of stuff, they went right ahead and did it:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNGlrABUIAAr9RO.jpg:large

This is way more likely to happen in the U.S., where internet companies have local monopolies.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#37

Post by busterarm »

Used to work for a local ISP (ILEC). "Deregulation" isn't a real thing until they remove the incumbent local exchange carrier (ILEC) and competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) regional monopolies enforced by law.

Until that happens, all this does is screw consumers. Honestly, internet service needs to be declared a public utility.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#38

Post by dragonwriter »

cwyers wrote: post #22

I don't know, the Internet got on fine without those rules for a lot longer than we've had those rules, I feel like the gloom-and-doom over this is highly overstated.

The rules (both the current ones and the prior effort that was struck down) were adopted in responses to changes of behavior by ISPs from their historical, basically neutral, behavior which the FCC first tried and failed to address by lighter-touch, case-by-case action. The Comcast BitTorrent-blocking case is perhaps the best known of the early cases.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#39

Post by falcolas »

EnderMB wrote: post #14
ryanmarsh wrote: post #11

This fight will not end until we enact legislation codifying net neutrality into law. This issue is to important for a notice to simply be overlooked in the federal register before a ruling is made.

I'm not American, so I don't know how this works, but would it not be a good idea to fight lobbying with lobbying? Create a lobbying group, funded by a mix of regular people and businesses that push towards the ultimate aim of net neutrality being a part of national and international law. I think a lot of people are sick of having to contact their representatives, or don't do it because it's a burden. I imagine many…

To just equal Comcast's estimated lobbying budget of $20 million, it would require somewhere north of 300,000 people all contributing $5 a month. Given you'd also be fighting against Verizon, Google, Netflix, and any number of other companies, you'd probably need a member count close to a million to make anything resembling headway.

A million members making reoccurring contributions is beyond what is realistic, IMO.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#40

Post by dinoleif »

"Net neutrality" is one of the most Orwellian terms in modern usage.

It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.

Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations? Whose lives have been made better? Compared to what?

Net neutrality advocates are utterly unable to give convincing answers to these questions.

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