Live data from Hacker News

F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

nytimes.com

121–130 of 1001 posts

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#121
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would anything stop the next administration from re-instating net neutrality? Money from the even richer companies that want to prevent it from happening. Think of the ad campaigns: "Since have been able to charge content providers for their use of our network, we've kept our costs low - that's why you pay only $99.99/month for your ultra fast 10 mbit connection , f net neutrality comes back, your rates will skyrocke…

Many of those big, rich companies (Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc.) are in favor of net neutrality.

Huh, wonder why they didn't make that clear leading up to today.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#122
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-voters / people on the “there’s no difference” train also deserve a moment of reflection about whether their reality is true.

No. Give me a candidate worth voting for, and I will vote. The current "pick the lesser of two shitheads" is ridiculous. Both parties in the US are to blame. The two party system in the US today means that voting for anyone that is not a Democrat or Republican is a complete waste of time.

This is how democracy crumbles. No, both parties are not to blame.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#123

This is proof positive that the current FCC commission has ignored the will of the voters on this issue. Support for Net Neutrality was overwhelming and bi-partisan, yet Ajit Pai just plowed forward without consideration for what the citizens demanded. This is government at its worst.

Which is exactly what cracks me up... Republicans, moreso than Democrats, are always talking about government screwing over the people and yet this vote was completely on party lines. I wonder how they're going to figure out that dissonance.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#124
post #28

This has been asked a few times but never fully answered, can someone explain why this vote in particular is a problem? I understand net neutrality and I am all for it, but there was considerable public doubt before reclassification that this was the proper way to go about it. It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster. Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing com…

It's more of an issue now just because our usage of the internet has become increasingly fundamental to day-to-day life. It was, of course, already on this trajectory pre-2015, but corporate and government understanding of the internet was still very much in its infancy.

Few providers abused the privileges they had, because of some combination of uncertainty about backlash, historical precedent, and lack of organization and understanding.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#125
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-voters / people on the “there’s no difference” train also deserve a moment of reflection about whether their reality is true.

We live in an electoral system. For almost all of the states of the U.S. it's actually factually correct that there's no difference for whom you vote in the Presidential elections. In many locations, it also doesn't matter who you vote for in Congressional ones thanks to gerrymandering drawing boundary lines around you before you even get to the polls. We can discuss ideologically what the differences are between the…

You could have said the same about Arizona

And there's "no difference" for the average candidate, not for outliers.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#126
post #91
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, the FCC's mandate isn't to poll the public and do whatever most of them want. Strange how people seem to think it's a numbers game, at least when they feel the numbers are on their side

Why did they solicit public feedback then? And why did they misrepresent public feedback and refuse to acknowledge that most people want net neutrality? Obviously they aren't beholden to what the public wants, but the latter is clearly scummy, is it not?

They are required to solicit comments and to consider them. Many comments are cited in the Order.

Could you give examples of them "misrepresenting public feedback"?

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#127
The voters elected a Republican government. That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine. Anybody who told you that lobbying the FCC was going to make a difference here was, whether they meant to or not, selling a bill of goods.

As someone who respects but mostly profoundly disagrees with principled Republican laissez-faire regulatory strategy (at least, once we got past 1991 or so), it is more than a little aggravating to see us as a community winding ourselves in knots over market-based regulation of telecom at the same time as the (largely unprincipled) Republican congress is putting the finishing strokes --- literally in ball-point pen --- on a catastrophically stupid tax bill that threatens universal access to health insurance, not just for those dependent on Medicare but on startup founders as well.

If you care deeply about this issue, stop pretending like filling out forms and putting banners ads is going to persuade Republican regulators to act like Democrats. "Net Neutrality" isn't my personal issue --- I worked at ISPs, have backbone engineer friends, and candidly: I think this issue is silly. But if it's yours... sigh... fine.

But do it right: get out there, to your nearest seriously threatened D districts or to the nearest plausibly flippable R district (the suburbs are great for this), open up your damn wallets, and donate.

The FCC may very well be right that it's not their job to impose our dream portfolio of rules on Verizon (certainly, a lot of the rules people are claiming NN provided were fanciful). It doesn't matter how dreamlike the rules are: Congress can almost certainly enact a law, which the FCC can't revoke.

But otherwise, be clear-eyed: elections have consequences. We elected the party of deregulation. Take the bad with whatever the good is, and work to flip the House back.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#128
post #54

Is anyone working on market based routing over mesh networks with crypto currencies? Would that have been disallowed under the network neutrality rules?

No, net neutrality just makes it so ISPs can't throttle/block/charge-extra-for particular websites, like they do in Portugal: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#129

This has made me feel pretty damn powerless, as pretty much every site/person of significance has stated their opposition to such a repeal, and yet they went through it anyway. Just a gut feeling that our democracy isn't working properly when such a loud and clear, great majority of the population messaging is completely ignored.

Did you submit a comment on this proceeding, beyond just clicking on some site that auto-generated a comment?

I spent several days working on my comment; it was a dozen pages long, it included relevant citations, and it addressed specific questions asked in the NPRM. I took the time to correct a few falsehoods in the NPRM's technical analysis.

Now imagine what it is like to see that comment being specifically cited and totally dismissed in the draft rules that were just approved. In a way it is worse than just being ignored -- someone took the time to read my comment and comments by like-minded experts, saw the part where we corrected falsehoods, and then replied with, "Well, ISPs say $X so $X is true and your comment wrong."

I am not going to give up on civic engagement but I am sure some of those like-minded engineers and researchers might.

Re: F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

#130
post #28

This has been asked a few times but never fully answered, can someone explain why this vote in particular is a problem? I understand net neutrality and I am all for it, but there was considerable public doubt before reclassification that this was the proper way to go about it. It also doesn't seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster. Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing com…

Except it was a disaster. The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix. There's no reason to suspect they won't go back to it as soon as they can.

If there was ISP competition then a Verizon customer could switch ISPs if they disagreed with the throttling of Netflix. I would compare it to wireless which never had these net neutrality rules. Is wireless a disaster? It seems like mobile plans are constantly including more data at faster speeds at a cheaper price. Some (all?) of the carriers have various anti-net neutrality policies but consumers at least have the option to pick which set of policies they are willing to agree with.
Post reply on HN