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I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

latimes.com

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Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#31

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ep103 wrote: post #26
stretchwithme wrote: post #17

In Switzerland, any legislative action can be put on the ballot with enough signatures. Citizens can actually block what the Federal Assembly does. In the US, we get to comment on it. And they get to say "That's nice."

No, actually. If comments are largely against what a regulatory body is proposing to do, it can be used in court against the regulatory body in court to block the action. That just very, very rarely happens. When captured, regulatory agencies tend not to try to pass measures that very obviously go against public opinion, or are too complex to arise public wrath. This is a special situation that's only happening due t…

> This is a special situation that's only happening due to arrogance of the Trump administration

Pai was nominated by Obama on McConnell's recommendation [1]. Trump only elevated him to Chairman.

I'm curious about his personal motivations. Is it as simple as him having served as associate general counsel at Verizon? Is it a legalistic interpretation, that the FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate this? Or about the role of government in general?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajit_V._Pai

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#32

Post by ikeboy »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #30
dingo_bat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mob support for NN does not justify it. There's a reason we let domain experts make technical decisions.

Domain experts are overwhelmingly in favor of NN.

Actually, a weighted average shows 3 times as many against as for

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/net-neutrality-ii

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#33

Post by labster »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #19

"There is something not right about a few unelected FCC officials making such vast determinations about the future of the internet." Is she talking about 2015 or 2017?

2017, because in 2015 the FCC acted on the advice of the people. Now, they act opposed to 98.5% of the unique comments from the public.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#34

Post by ikeboy »

the_common_man wrote: post #27
_jal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...And you believe that's what is happening with this decision?

Well, people who are anti-NN would never voice their opinion in this climate. They will get downvoted to hell.

I recall trying to argue against NN years ago here and getting down voted.

It's interesting that economists largely are against NN as well.

http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/net-neutrality-ii

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#35

Post by faster »

mc32 wrote: post #4

Would someone outline the pros and cons of the FCC vs FTC overseeing regulation of the internet?

Net Neutrality prevents abuses; the FTC can step in after a violation reaches critical proportions. It's like the difference between parking in a locked garage in a bad neighborhood, and having a car alarm to let you know when your window has been broken and all your stuff stolen.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#36

Post by mc32 »

austincheney wrote: post #24
mc32 wrote: post #4

Would someone outline the pros and cons of the FCC vs FTC overseeing regulation of the internet?

You could make the valid argument that no matter how beneficial net neutrality may be it isn't within the regulatory authority of the FCC to define or enforce such according to the agency's definition per their charter. This is perhaps the best argument for killing net neutrality. The common consideration is that killing net neutrality poses a direct and immediate harm to consumers of potential discriminatory practic…

Thanks. I definitely agree that ad bloat is getting out of hand and users would benefit from leaner pages.

For now gone are the days Google thought load times longer than 600ms were a no go in germs of user experience --that legacy is definitely gone in Google Mail.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#37

Post by extra88 »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #11
exabrial wrote: post #7

Sorry I'm not buying into the panic. Between wide scale TLS deployment and larger swaths of bandwidth available, I'd rather see free market solutions so these regulatory powers can't be abused. Net neutrality only matters if your ISP can decrypt your traffic and there is a limited share of bandwidth available.

You are probably a little bit ignorant of how the internet works to make this comment. The big players are already peering with residential ISPs. That means there's a fiber line that connects Google to Comcast, to use an example. They pay for these arrangements. The little guys have to use transit. They don't have enough clout or money to peer. Without net neutrality, ISPs could start severely degrading those connect…

Yes. Comcast and other big ISPs think you belong to them, that other businesses should pay to get to you, despite the fact that you, the ISPs actual customer, already paid so you can get to those businesses and they can get to you.

And yes, TLS doesn't conceal the domain names from your ISP and that's all they need to pick winners and losers. It can somewhat conceal different kinds of connection (e.g. peer-to-peer protocols like BitTorrent) but those aren't hard to spot through traffic analysis and Ajit Pai explicitly thinks ISPs should be able to block them, as Comcast was doing to BitTorrent traffic.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#39

Post by xenadu02 »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #19

"There is something not right about a few unelected FCC officials making such vast determinations about the future of the internet." Is she talking about 2015 or 2017?

Bullshit is so easy to spread. People willing to peddle falsehoods often end up winning if they can just repeat the lies until everyone else gets tired of repeating themselves.

Network neutrality started in the early 2000s because some ISPs started blocking VPNs and other services. Network Neutrality was simply how the internet had always worked prior to that. The FCC wanted to take a light hand toward regulation but preserve neutrality so they imposed NN regulation. Verizon sued to overturn the regulations. The battle went back and forth several times. Eventually the courts said the FCC had the authority to impose the regulations but had to reclassify ISPs as common carriers to do so. That’s what the FCC did in 2015. Because the courts said so. Because Verizon sued to block network neutrality and overturn the way the internet had always worked up until that point.

The telco and cable companies all have handshake agreements not to “overbuild” - that is to lay lines in each other’s territory - because that would trigger competition. They hijack DNS queries to serve ads for mis-typed domain names. They hijack HTTP responses. They’re rolling out bandwidth caps.

If you think they aren’t going to exploit the rollback of NN for rent-seeking purposes then you’re naive at best.

P.S. they couldn’t exist without right of way to lay cables on other people’s private property! The internet and WWW were invented using government research money. ATT, Verizon, Comcast, et al are the ultimate welfare queens who exist thanks to suckling on the government teat.

Re: I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality

#40

Post by visarga »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #11
exabrial wrote: post #7

Sorry I'm not buying into the panic. Between wide scale TLS deployment and larger swaths of bandwidth available, I'd rather see free market solutions so these regulatory powers can't be abused. Net neutrality only matters if your ISP can decrypt your traffic and there is a limited share of bandwidth available.

You are probably a little bit ignorant of how the internet works to make this comment. The big players are already peering with residential ISPs. That means there's a fiber line that connects Google to Comcast, to use an example. They pay for these arrangements. The little guys have to use transit. They don't have enough clout or money to peer. Without net neutrality, ISPs could start severely degrading those connect…

Users need to get directly involved in protecting the content they desire. In the long run we need a cross between TOR and bittorrent to create a distributed cache to avoid throttling. Local "metropolitan" bandwidth is very fast, hard drives have expanded 10x in 10 years. An alternative is to use WiFi mesh networks.
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