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AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

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Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#141

Post by charleslmunger »

freedomben wrote: post #118
omg_ketchup wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should treat the internet like they treat electricity. It doesn't matter if you're using it for a hair dryer or a work light or to charge your phone- you get it the same as everyone else for the same price. Why aren't we de-regulating power companies too?

Do you also extend this to allow for pay-for-what-you-use? I don't disagree with charging people more for how much they use, but a lot of net neutrality proponents lose their minds at the suggestion that somebody who uses 5 GB a month should pay less than the kid streaming 10 TB of torrents every month.

I think the overlap between those is muddled for a few reasons:

1. Zero rating. Wikipedia+facebook is free, everything else counts towards the cap. This was a subject of major debate in India.

2. First party zero rating - YouTube and Vonage count towards the cap, your ISP's streaming video or VOIP service does not.

3. Negotiated zero rating. "binge on" and similar, which is basically vendor neutral but limits the type of content excluded from the cap.

4. Extremely small caps. If YouTube counts toward the cap and TV doesn't, you won't cancel your cable package. This gives cable+ISPs a big incentive to keep caps low.

I view #1 and #2 to be clear violations of NN, and #3 as borderline. #4 is just a consequence of ISP monopoly - but it's not NN.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#143

Post by retromario »

AGSchneiderman wrote: post #91
gregwtmtno wrote: post #19

Hi Mr. Schneiderman: As a constituent, thank you for your work. I can't help but notice that your office is the only state AG vocally supporting net neutrality. Has your office attempted to coordinate with/gain support of other state's AGs?

Fortunately, it's not just my office that’s publicly supported net neutrality. (My office did submit its own public comment in support of net neutrality because we had an issue we wanted to address that was unique to our experience.) Several other state AGs submitted a comment in support of net neutrality as well (available here: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10717283141719/2017.07.17%20Att... ) You are right that a b…

For those like me wondering which states (pulled out of the pdf above):

Illinois, California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oregon, Vermont, Washington

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#144

Post by Clanan »

RpFLCL wrote: post #130
AGSchneiderman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Congress: Many members of Congress have already spoken up and called on the FCC to halt the process until the problems with public comments can be investigated. I hope more of our elected officials in Washington take up that call. If enough members of Congress support net neutrality, especially if it is a bipartisan group, then I believe the FCC is less likely to repeal the strong Title II net neutrality protectio…

So it's not a matter of demanding my representatives create new legislation, so much as it is trying to convince them to make my voice (our voices) heard on the national stage. That makes sense.

The AG is glossing over the roles of the different institutions here. Put simply, the FCC isn't delaying the vote because it doesn't take a democratic approach to rule-making. (There are also unknown ramifications of allowing DDoS attacks on comments to delay/"de-legitimize" policy decisions). Like many other agencies in the Executive branch, its leaders have broad powers to enact policies. The AG, like any clever politician, is scoring political points by yelling "think of the children!" instead of explaining how the process actually works and how constituents can actually impact the situation. This will not delay the vote, just like the Senate phone systems going down wouldn't delay a Senate vote.

If you value Net Neutrality, don't waste time with the FCC - it's simply not set up for constituent influence. Instead, focus your efforts on Congress. Congressional legislation would overrule the FCC, just as it was intended to. Congresspeople are far more likely to consider voter opinions too.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#145

Post by wandernotlost »

tooltalk wrote: post #127
nerfhammer wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Please explain how is the very same government who allows the communication monopolies to exist, supposed to also ensure that they are "neutral"? It seems awfully convenient that the solutions to problems that government creates is to have more government. The government "allowing" monopolies to exist is an example of the government NOT doing something. Besides the matter of conflating federal anti-trust, state gov…

No, what he means is, in NY for instance, cable operators must agree to state, city franchise agreement to do business there and that's how we end up with the communication monopolies/oligarchy locally. It's an artificial barrier erected by gov't that ultimately inhibits competition -- all in the name of public interest.

So you're cool if I dig up your street very few months? I want to offer service to your neighbor.

The government doesn't create local communication monopolies. Anyone who suggests otherwise is either lying or hasn't thought very hard about the subject.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#146

Post by avivo »

FYI, there are some folks at http://datafordemocracy.org / http://www.startuppolicylab.org/ coordinating a study of this, including Jeff Kao, whose work on this was cited in https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/11/24...

If you want to help analyze the data and see what happened, it could be worth checking that out (I’m not involved, but it seems like valuable work).”

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#147

Post by jerkstate »

DiThi wrote: post #121
jerkstate wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given perfect reliability, faster (lower latency) doesn’t matter for streaming video because all of the traffic is pipelined (even for live, encoding lag would dominate the few hundred ms maximum delay from light speed). And the user already paid their ISP for the bandwidth, so why would distance factor into the cost?

The user paid for internet access, but streaming video services pay too. The more distance there is, the more effort may be required to guarantee some minimum speed, and in some cases may not even be possible. Internet sea cables are not unlimited. Net Neutrality means you treat packets equally[0], not that you can put an unlimited amount of them. But if the user can get a faster speed through a VPN than without (as…

An end-user ISP is going to have a lot of different pipes for a lot of different transit providers, which are going to have unequal utilization and different data. Internet bandwidth is not fungible in the way that, say, electricity is.

Each network provider that the packet is passed thru inspects the destination address in order to determine which pipe to send it on to get it closer to its destination. If that pipe is congested, the packet can't turn around and find another route. It has to be dropped and retransmitted. This is true for streaming video packets as well as others like email, video game, etc (although most video games use UDP which cannot retransmit, if it's dropped, the game jitters)

So if I'm an ISP downstream from a congested pipe that happens to be transiting a lot of streaming video, I know that all of the users of that pipe who are not streaming video are having a bad experience - slow text web page loads, jittery video games, garbled voip calls, etc. So what I can do is selectively drop some of packets from the video streams (I can tell which ones the heavy users are if I record the source IP and count the # of packets per stream), and those streams will generally gracefully downgrade to the next lower streaming quality. This relieves the inbound congestion because the sender stops sending as much data to users downstream of me, and allows my other customers to play video games without lag, make voip calls, load web sites without long delays, etc.

So clearly the pipe needs to be upgraded, the question is, who should pay to have that pipe upgraded? That's between the ISP and the transit partner, they have peering agreements to determine how that cost is shared. I think it's important to look into who failed to live up to their contractual obligation to shoulder the shared costs.

BTW - going thru a VPN on Verizon just means that the traffic is getting to the customer through a different upstream provider than the one that BGP specifies because it originates from a different network, one that isn't as congested as the BGP route from Netflix. You would need to look at a traceroute to figure it out.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#148

Post by AGSchneiderman »

JCharante wrote: post #60

> Approximately 1 million of those comments may have been submitted using real people’s stolen identities--including those of as many as 50K New Yorkers, such as a dead person and a 13 year old child. I'm not familiar with the story about the 13 year old child. Has anyone gotten in touch with them to see if they submitted it? Maybe they're the next Aaron Swartz.

This comment was submitted under the name and address of someone we will call Jill, in Rochester, New York.

As it turns out, Jill’s father wasn’t very happy about that submission because the real Jill is only 13 years old and never submitted any comment.

We also saw a woman in Albany who supposedly submitted a comment in July of 2017. Sadly, her son reached out to us to say that was impossible because she had died in June.

Even right here in my office, my assistant press secretary had a phony comment submitted under her name using the address of her childhood home.

These are just a few of the thousands of comments that have been reported to my office.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#149

Post by DiThi »

bifrost wrote: post #138
DiThi wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Regulatory and compliance costs are regressive - they target small businesses because they're aimed at large businesses but tend to adversely affect smaller ones at a greater rate.

Are we talking about net neutrality here? Because I don't think NN can be costly. Net Neutrality is the _natural_ state of computer networks, you don't have to do anything special.

Re: AMA: NY AG Schneiderman on net neutrality and protecting our voice in government

#150

Post by jerkstate »

jachee wrote: post #132
jerkstate wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There used to be a time when content companies needed to carefully select their network transit partners in order to make sure the bits their customers were paying them for had the best chance of reaching them (see: the existence of the CDN industry). It seems that those times are over, and the internet will be legislated to be 100% reliable and capacious..

I don't think the internet should be any less-regulated than the power industry. Westinghouse (e.g.) can't charge me more for power to run GE (e.g.) appliances. Comcast (e.g.) shouldn't be able to extort customers for access to (e.g.) Netflix.

False analogy. Westinghouse can either make their own power or buy it as a fungible commodity from anyone else who does. Comcast can't make Netflix packets.
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