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Ajit Pai is right

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Re: Ajit Pai is right

#171

Post by takeda »

pbreit wrote: post #123
zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Isn't Pai just advocating going back to the pre-2015 regulatory structure? Was the internet really so bad prior to 2015?

That's in theory, but I explained it here[1] why it won't be the same.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15799811

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#172

Post by npsimons »

zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

> if you believe in dreaming and creating something larger than yourself

Even if people don't give two shits about making themselves or the world a better place, most people do care about convenience, lower prices and whizbang new things, three things that would almost be guaranteed to disappear without NN. I can't even begin to imagine what the world would look like without NN, mostly because every website/webservice was small at one point. Try to imagine a world without Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, etc, etc, etc. And those are just the high profile ones that come to mind first. Need we even point out how things like the FCC comments page would probably be "too slow to use" without NN in place? What if you had to pay a "power user" surcharge every time you Googled a solution to a technical problem and it popped up on Stack?

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#173

Post by zaksoup »

nickpp wrote: post #163
zaksoup wrote: post #32

Re: food safety... > Ayn Rand and Ron Paul walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted alcohol. They die. The market reacts and the bar closes because nobody goes there anymore. Ayn Rand and Ron Paul are still dead.

The bar has some stairs where you could fall and break your neck. Do you need a government regulation outlawing stairs in bars? Bar furniture could break and impale you. Should the bar have a furniture-owning license where they need to learn how to maintain their chairs? And absurd made up examples can go on...

https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...

Well...

Also, let’s be clear that regulations about the bar for food quality you will commercially sell to others and what you do in your own home (the furniture example) is obviously a false comparison. Besides the OSHA case for handrails there is, in fact, rules and regulations around the quality of, for instance, mattresses and their potential for catching fire.

Ultimately my point is that there is a clear and fundamental difference between regulating what you can sell commercially and what you do in your own home. In addition there is plenty of precedent (and good reason) for regulation that you used as some sort of straw man but in fact actively reduces injury and makes businesses more accessible and available to more customers.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#174

Post by nobleach »

pbreit wrote: post #123
zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Isn't Pai just advocating going back to the pre-2015 regulatory structure? Was the internet really so bad prior to 2015?

I think the issue is that it was trending that way. Comcast was purposely slowing certain traffic that competed with their own product. Many that remember trying to use Netflix around 2014, remember the 5pm nightmare. This lead to the discussion about the difference between bandwidth and content. It's fair to charge for more bandwidth usage. It's not fair to charge based on _what_ is flowing through "the tubes".

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#175

Post by thehardsphere »

masklinn wrote: post #157
nickpp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason most regulations are made: to increase the government's power while pretending to protect you, but in fact increasing your dependence of said government.

That is funny, because the pre-2015 rules were only put in place in 2005, downgrading from a much more stringent regulatory environment than the post-2015 one. And by funny I mean nonsensical. Furthermore the 2015 move was undertaken because since 2005 the FCC had been enforcing Net Neutrality rules under Title I, but Verizon ultimately sued and in 2014 the courts decided the FCC did not have the authority to enforce…

Really? It was my understanding that this was part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Am I mistaken?

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#176

Post by apple4ever »

dd36 wrote: post #147
eksu wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like there isn’t much ‘clash’ (debate term) between what you’re saying and Ben Thompson’s article. Ben isn’t attacking the concept of Net Neutrality, he’s instead attacking Title II classification. Ben puts forward a few arguments. First, he starts off with an offensive piece of matter, that regulatory burden from the 2015 Title II classification has a cost, and that cost is felt innovators who want to enter t…

Pre-2015 rules were overturned by the courts in 2014. That’s why reclassification happened... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._... Apologies to those that have seen my comments 10x in this thread. It’s amazing how uninformed some people are about how this all came about. The FCC didn’t want to use Title II. It had a much lighter touch NN schema but Verizon destroyed it. The courts said the…

No, the solution isn't Title II, but a new law. Title II is terrible, and should be opposed both by NN supporters AND opponents.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#177

Post by apple4ever »

dd36 wrote: post #170
throwaway23497 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But he's making the same argument that you say he was making on his podcast. Regulation has a cost. The article literally states: "To believe that Chairman Pai is right is not to be against net neutrality; rather, it is to believe that the FCC’s 2015 approach was mistaken." The FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate ISP's as the law is written. To get around this in 2015 they "reclassified" ISP's from information…

The FCC is exempting the ISPs from those archaic rules. Who is going to challenge the FCC on that? So this guy is arguing that NN is bad under Title II so we should pass a different law to regulate it? So new regulations without a long history of case law? And that’s less burdensome?

Yes exactly. Then we have a properly written law to address the issue, not shoehorn in the issue into an old unrelated law. And that is much less burdensome.

The FCC is right now exempting the ISPs, but that could change under a new administration, and that should be greatly feared.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#178

Post by passive »

thehardsphere wrote: post #87
zbruhnke wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing you missed is that internet providers started to realize they may be able to squeeze more money out of both consumers and large corporates a few years back and that began to change their thoughts about how to make more money with a largely unregulated industry and Net Neutrality was put in place to preserve the internet's ability to innovate. Let's not forget Ajit Pai was just a few years ago a corporate at…

How did they "realize" that, suddenly a couple years ago? I am not doubting you, I am genuinely confused. I mean, human greed is a constant, and the rules didn’t change from 1996-2015, yet during the same period you said that Wal-Mart would have paid to destroyed Amazon, Amazon became one of the most wealthy and powerful companies in the world. So... it must be something more than the rules, right? Greedy companies w…

Well, there were regulations in place, but due to a technicality, they no longer officially applied once home internet started arriving over cable/dsl/fiber as a networked service instead of dial-up.

Lots of people pointed this technicality out, and wanted to update the regulations to account for it. The ISPs, naturally, weren't too keen on that, so they spent a lot of money on lobbyists to say "everything is fine, if you add more regulation you will break the internet". Thing is, they couldn't really do this on the one hand while simultaneously selling the Waltons the keys to the e-commerce kingdom. They had to adhere to the norms established by regulations, mostly.

But 20 years later, they can pretend that there never were any regulations, and that these norms magically enforce themselves, so why regulate?

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#179

Post by apple4ever »

dominotw wrote: post #116
zbruhnke wrote: post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Hope I don't immediately get downvoted for this comment. Wouldn't the right "fix" for the issue be encouraging more competition and figuring out why we only have 1 or 2 providers . That way we won't need an extra govt rule to protect neutrality and the market will solve this issue on its own? I live in a mid size indian city and we have about 8-10 providers ( not sure if they are just subcontractors or what).

Yes, that's exactly the solution. Its not more regulation, its actually less. Get rid of the barriers to entry.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#180

Post by nickpp »

cptskippy wrote: post #162
nickpp wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason most regulations are made: to increase the government's power while pretending to protect you, but in fact increasing your dependence of said government.

Couldn't something similar be said of companies? Companies what regulations repealed: to increase the company's power while pretending to protect you, but in fact increasing your dependence of said company. Why do you have more faith in companies than a government? Do you honestly believe that market forces can sway mega corporations?

Because I always have a choice with companies: they cannot be monopolies unless helped by governments. Startups and competitors will swiftly punish any bad player in a free market, thus compelling players to behave.

The proof is all around me: everything good comes from companies: cars, computers, my house, my heating furnace, restaurant food, hotels, etc.

Everything crappy and bad is related one way or another with govts: bureaucracy, dmv, borders, postal service, state hospitals, state schools.

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