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

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

#361

Post by syril »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #50
luckydude wrote: post #38

I feel helpless. In this and in many things that this administration has brought on. Vote? Yeah, right. Sign a petition? Yeah, right. I feel like unless there are real ramifications to the people doing this stuff, nothing we do matters.

You're a dope if you don't vote. It's impolite to mention this, but it is not a political problem, but a Republican problem. A Democratic administration's FCC enacted Net Neutrality, a Republican one is attempting to dismantle it. Vote for Democrats at every level of government, in every election possible. This will change some day, but today the Republican party has lost its mind and morals. To be clear, I'm not cal…

eat shit you communist slime

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

#362

Post by dahart »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #50
luckydude wrote: post #38

I feel helpless. In this and in many things that this administration has brought on. Vote? Yeah, right. Sign a petition? Yeah, right. I feel like unless there are real ramifications to the people doing this stuff, nothing we do matters.

You're a dope if you don't vote. It's impolite to mention this, but it is not a political problem, but a Republican problem. A Democratic administration's FCC enacted Net Neutrality, a Republican one is attempting to dismantle it. Vote for Democrats at every level of government, in every election possible. This will change some day, but today the Republican party has lost its mind and morals. To be clear, I'm not cal…

> You're a dope if you don't vote.

Are we all dopes if we buy that voting on this issue is going to once and for all solve the problem of corporations continuing to take more control and extract more money from the internet?

This "vote" has come up for discussion every year for a decade at least. Some years I vote and some, I admit, I haven't bothered. But it keeps coming back. No matter how many times we vote no, it keeps re-appearing.

The elephant is the room is privacy & encryption. We're asking elected officials to protect our freedoms for us, when we have the technical means to protect ourselves. ISPs shouldn't have the right to look at the contents of traffic at all. The issue of whether they get to charge more for some routes is a side-show compared to the issue of whether they have the right to look at our traffic.

If we focused on privacy, and built a system that encrypted routing information and blocked it from prying commercial interest eyes like ISPs, we wouldn't need to have a debate, and we wouldn't need to vote.

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

#363

Post by rconti »

luckydude wrote: post #38

I feel helpless. In this and in many things that this administration has brought on. Vote? Yeah, right. Sign a petition? Yeah, right. I feel like unless there are real ramifications to the people doing this stuff, nothing we do matters.

I'm just tired. I'm tired of fighting all these pro-tech and pro-freedom fights going back decades, to the Clipper chip and the CDA. I'm tired of trying to figure out if the hyperbole (this time it's CRITICAL you act!) is deserved, whether the issue is that serious, and whether we're really on the right side of the issue in the first place.

I'm tired of trying to figure out if contacting my (Democrat) lawmaker will make a difference if they've already signaled opposition anyway. I'm tired of wondering if an angry tweet to a Chairman who clearly doesn't have my best interests at heart anyway will make a damn bit of difference. And anyway, somebody's twitter bot army is already doing the opposite of what I'm doing, times a million, and the FCC comments stuffing is doing far more than I would ever choose to do (legally, morally, and ethically).

More generally, with regards to this atrocious administration, I know the entire point is to just go after everyone who opposes 'them' in the most craven, cynical, and childish manner possible, to wear 'them' down and rub 'their' face in it for daring to suggest they're terrible people, but all of this internet freedom stuff vastly predates most of the people in power.

I read just the other day that, if enacted, this will almost certainly be declared unconstitutional in the courts anyway, so what's the point?

I'm just tired.

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

#365

Post by shostack »

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…

Will it go into effect while the court battle is going on? Or will it be put on hold until a decision is reached?

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

#367

Post by marcosdumay »

em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #356
marcosdumay wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. Then go ahead and call it "corporate freedom". The network isn't getting any more free without neutrality.

An ISP doesn't necessarily have to be a corporate entity. It could be a municipality (e.g. city of Chattanooga) or hypothetically owned by residents directly.

Is any of those interested on the end of neutrality?

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

#368

Post by sologoub »

revelation wrote: post #310
lclarkmichalek wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should not have needed the Snowden documents to learn about the existence of peering agreements. The issue is ISPs requiring compensation for the peering agreement.

This is where we get into the difficulty of what is net neutrality . Taking compensation for a peering agreement is perfectly fine if it's imbalanced. What net neutrality should prevent is, ceteris paribus, asking for $X from YouTube and $Y >> $X from Netflix because you figure your dying cable business will benefit from less competition. Ideally, net neutrality would be FRAND for peering agreements: you can't deny a…

It’s absolutely not fine if your customers are already paying you specifically to connect to Netflix, which is an extremely common use and why we have the bottleneck in the first place.

The imbalance of the traffic has little to do with what we have here, since the telco is specifically paid to deliver that traffic by consumers. Charging on both ends is very profitable, but is definitely double-dipping.

Your phone provider doesn’t charge you more to receive calls from large customer care call centers when you have a problem and request a call back. The call center may get charged more by their provider if their call pattern is problematic, but your provider doesn’t stop the call from going through. It is really not any different with internet networks and why common carrier rules make a lot of sense.

These same rules also provide a lot of liability protection for the carriers, which I’m guessing they have negotiated to keep somehow.

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

#369

Post by throwanem »

omon wrote: post #355
Delmania wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make no mistake, Pai is a former Verizon lawyer, he's not misled as he is intentionally misleading. He knows very well the ISPs will exploit as much as they can and then rely on a slow legal system to keep it going. He knows very well the ISPs want the benefits of being a monopoly with none of the regulations. Why do you think he prematurely said the states will not be able to pass their own net neutrality laws? The…

He is specifically talking about blocking web traffic, "The answer to the first is we're not sure", not fast lanes. Repealing NN will do that, every time you have regulations you have to hire another team of lawyers and accountants; which only large corporations can afford––it's just another barrier of entry to market.

The barriers to entry in the ISP market right now are the large corporations, which keep doing adorable things like suing would-be municipal competitors out of existence. The claim that regulation is the problem here, rather than a matter of mere ideological opposition, is a claim desperately in need of some kind of substantiation. And the idea of empowering oligopolists even further, by relaxing restrictions designed to prevent them engaging in rentiership, is an idea in desperate need of anything concrete to show it's worth implementing.

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

#370

Post by ikeboy »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #291
dingo_bat wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 41% are Uncertain, which suggests they recognize that they don't know much about the subject > comments by Agree and Strongly Agree respondents indicate they don't understand the subject fully So according to this reasoning no matter what answer you give, you don't understand the issue. > Those appear to be economists, not Internet domain specialists. NN is about regulating the internet. Economists are experts in t…

> NN is about regulating the internet. Economists are experts in the domain of regulation. Wait, what? Knowing a lot about regulation in general doesn't mean you know shit about any given subject of regulation in particular. By your logic we should fire the doctors and scientists at the FDA and replace them with economists.

We should, and then they'd probably stop killing tens of thousands of people every year (cf http://www.fdareview.org/05_harm.php and studies cited within)

Or at least have an economist in charge.

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