The battle is all but over, and Net Neutrality lost. Republicans control every branch of the government.
Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
281–290 of 388 posts
Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually I've just stumbled across a very(!) active HN poster that seems to be against it on a popular micro blogging platform.. The common counter argument seems to be that "Regulation is bad for the open market" and that "Better options would come up if an ISP starts doing weird shit, if the market demands it". It's interesting to me that the very same people seem to be pro Freedom of Press/Freedom of Speech (as a…
> It's interesting to me that the very same people seem to be pro Freedom of Press/Freedom of Speech (as a German, the US Freedom of Speech is something I'm not used to, something that doesn't align with my culture/upbringing), but feel different about this subject because it involves a "market"? That's Libertarianism. Everything done by government is bad, everything done by businesses is good. Looking at the actual…
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Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#283Earlier quoted context omitted.
my first question would be how the prices of the unlimited plan compares to the regular plans of other ISPs. In other words, are these ‘walled garden’ plans aimed towards people who would otherwise buy a regular data plan or are they aimed at people for whom the choice is a walled plan or no plan.
The screenshot in OP's post and this[0] comment, make me think that cheap plans will mostly allow you to use apps/sites where the companies pay the ISP. These will be things like YouTube and Netflix, who need visitors for profit. Things that will be blocked by default are sites like HN, company websites, personal websites and anything else that isn't a huge company. So in the cheaper plans, the one being visited pays…
Do they actually block any of those things? What makes you think they would start blocking HN?
Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've posted this comment before in another thread: I oppose net neutrality regulation. In principle, I don't think there's anything wrong with an ISP prioritizing certain kinds of traffic over others, so long as it does not have an anti-competitive effect. For example, I don't see how Netflix paying Comcast to zero-rate Netflix traffic is fundamentally different from Amazon contracting with mail carriers to subsidize…
Everything you talk about is contrary to the current reality, and it boggles the mind the mental gymnastics you are putting yourself through to get there. ISPs should be dumb pipes, the end.
so you think the government should be allowed to regulate it?
Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
>However, it is "merely" a symptom of the US political system not being sensitive to the citizens' wants and needs. No. Stop saying this. It completely muddies the water on what's actually going on here. People DID vote for this. They voted for their reps. And they voted for reps of a very particular political bent. Elections have consequences. The electorate chose this. Freely and willingly. The electorate being com…
I get where you're coming from, but in reality more people voted for Clinton than Trump. More people voted for Dems in the House than Republicans. More people voted for Democratic Senators than Republican Senators. So while a large voting bloc did vote for these people, it's not the will of the majority. It's just that America's democracy is kind of broken (not completely broken, but it's getting there).
I used the term electorate for the reasons you outlined. And the electorate is still a substantial part of the population. The difference between the "majority" and the "minority" is astoundingly small in terms of Republicans and Democrats.
Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#286Earlier quoted context omitted.
There really isn't a sound argument against net neutrality. Many do argue that the FCC shouldn't have the authority to regulate the internet, and often argue that idea to subtly change the subject. If someone argues to abolish something, they should either argue in favor of a replacement, or argue that that thing should not exist at all. Unfortunately, I haven't heard even a flawed version of either argument. Another…
I think there is a more nuanced libertarian argument that you haven't mentioned, and that is not so much "I am against all regulation" as much as "I think regulation is generally bad for efficiency and/or disagree with it on moral grounds so I want to be convinced why it is necessary." In other words, I want to be convinced that: 1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introd…
You're right, a lot of this is an education problem.
Many (including myself) have for years thought that this wasn't a problem. How did we get along before this?
But there are dozens of cases before NN was codified, where ISPs were blocking and slowing down traffic. One of the most high profile was how Comcast was slowing down Netflix in the NY Metro Area.
After the rules went into place, Netflix speeds just magically increased, and Comcast said it was a coincidence. Uh huh, sure.
Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#287China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back. They do have a vibrant tech economy though. So they have their own Google (Baidu). They have their own Twitter (Weibo), WhatsApp(WeChat), Amazon(Tao Bao). So in the future of no net-neutrality, we'll see ISPs being value-added resellers of their own regionally partitioned versions of these…
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Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#288Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fair but you also have to ask what's in it for them to screw their users in this way. Why would an ISP want to prevent some small, unrelated startup from gaining exposure?
> Why would an ISP want to prevent some small, unrelated startup from gaining exposure? Once the startup takes all the risk to demonstrate market demand, the ISP can come in with their own offering and use the ISP monopoly to destroy the competition.
You mean like Google or Facebook?
Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#289Earlier quoted context omitted.
> So the costs of compliance are low, if not zero. How could this possibly be zero? If a town's ISP has a bandwidth of 100Gb/s and has a demand of 200Gb/s by their customers, they can: - prioritize certain bits such as live streaming that can't be slown down without degrading user experience, unlike text (current solution) - slow down everything as forced by FCC's Net Neutrality (which would make live streaming unwat…
For the record, Net Neautraility does not and is not a legal framework for telling ISPs about how to manage their bandwidth. In its most simplistic terms: Net neutrality is simply tha concept of treating access to the network (in this example the ISP and the greater internet it connects to) where it does not prioritize one set of bits and simultaneously and purposefully (and typically for the exchange of money) slow…
I think what the parent comment was referring to in regards to government censorship is the fact that the legislation in question (the one the current government is trying to repeal) is the classification of ISPs as "common carriers" under Title II of the communications act of 1934.
This has the effect of enforcing net neutrality, which is why everyone is in favour of it. However it also gives the FCC the power to censor content, like they did with television and radio in the past.
Re: Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
#290Why isn't Google fighting this? They have a backup plan?
More and more we need to stop thinking of a lot of these SV giants as some kinds of liberal bastions that care about the internet and free speech.
They are fortune 500 companies that ONLY care about their bottom line. Every now and then, the bottom line accidentally aligns with the public good (like spectrum auctions).