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F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules

nytimes.com

671–680 of 1001 posts

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

#671

Common response on HN for the past two months has been nothing short of hyperbolic. "The world will end if NN is repealed". Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse. I have no reason to believe this is "the beginning of the end" of anything. Lif…

You can just add it to all the other hyper insane responses going around in the US right now, including:

- Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously finally.

- Tax cuts are going to destroy the country and impoverish the middle class. In fact, the middle class will see their already staggeringly low taxes go even lower. The lower US corporate income tax rate will finally make the US more competitive with dozens of other major economies, including Britain, Ireland, China, Canada, Sweden, Finland, etc.

- Hillary lost because of Russian collusion with Trump. Over a year later, zero evidence of any of that. The only election tampering that looks to have gone on, is high ranking FBI agents & officials that were looking to throw the election in favor of Hillary. The fact is, Hillary lost because she took voters in the blue wall states for granted and refused to aggressively court them as advisers close to her recommended. It was educated white women that threw the election in Trump's favor.

- Trump wants to be a fascist dictator. No, there's zero evidence of that sort of behavior. He's a jerk, he may be a mediocre President, there's absolutely no indication he can or is in the position to seize more power. He is wildly unpopular both among the majority of polled voters and his own party (which he only joined to run for President). The odds are pretty good he's a one term President, and that one term will deliver the Senate to Democrats and rebalance things in DC.

- Trump's environmental policies are going to get us all killed and make global climate change dramatically worse. No, the few policies he has rolled back from the Obama era, will not in fact do anything meaningful as it relates to global climate change or harming the environment in the US. The dramatic shift from coal to natural gas, will continue to reduce CO2 emissions in the US, and the gradualy move to solar, wind and electric vehicles will continue with or without Trump.

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

#672
Net neutrality is the solution to a sub problem. Content companies having a monopoly on the last mile. We should really be pushing for structural separation and ownership rules of communications infrastructure, which I suppose is the end game of net neutrality anyways.

Like roads, it doesn't necessarily make sense to have competition in the last mile space, two fibers/cables/etc running to the same dwelling. New Zealand and Australia have created infrastructure companies for creating a whole sale last mile network. Like deregulated electric or gas, the infrastructure provider is responsible for handling the physical connection while service provider provides the actual service over the infrastructure. In the case of internet in Australia, the NBN provides the fiber connection and the ISP provides network connectivity. It is even possible to have two ISPs over the single fiber.

Got a terrible ISP. Churn and burn. However, if all the ISPs are terrible, then you probably still need net neutrality.

Really, you need both. Structural separation, so at least there is some choice. Net neutrality rules, so companies can't monetize their customer.

Disclaimer: Australia's NBN is a bit of a mess due to politics, but New Zealand did it right with UFB.

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

#673
post #365
post #135

This wouldn't be a problem if ISP's weren't de facto monopolies. If there was competition in this space, then there would be incentive to improve the infrastructure and Internet speeds. However, ISP's kill competition by making legal arrangements with local governments to only do business with them, and by cutting competitors' cables. Since we have no way to guarantee reasonable speeds to small time websites now, we…

Local governments have been legally prohibited from making exclusive ISP franchise agreements for quite a while now. IMHO the only thing really preventing local competition is the economic aspects of laying multiple physical wires to residences giving the setup strong natural monopoly conditions.

Source? Every single city I've lived in has such an agreement. One cable provider, one phone(DSL) provider. There might be smaller, internet only companies.

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

#674

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a private citizen, can I (snip) just lay a super long fiber cable straight to (the internet). Yes. I worked on a startup ISP for a few years, which attempted to do this. It's actually really easy to do : 1) Pick a point where you can get connection to the internet. (Backhaul). This is usually a phone companies central office, but it can also be at a data centre or other point of presence. 2) Run fiber cable from…

Crowdsourceable? If you need a couple thousand users, would it be possible to run a marketing campaign, get pre-purchase commitments of $100-200, and give some rewards to early adopters? If you raise enough funding, you're good, if not, just cancel the campaign.

Yes.

https://muninetworks.org/

https://b4rn.org.uk/

https://www.electric.coop/co-op-bringing-fastest-internet-ru...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/exq3ne/zen-and-the-art-of...

https://www.google.com/search?q=internet+coop

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

#676

Net neutrality is the solution to a sub problem. Content companies having a monopoly on the last mile. We should really be pushing for structural separation and ownership rules of communications infrastructure, which I suppose is the end game of net neutrality anyways. Like roads, it doesn't necessarily make sense to have competition in the last mile space, two fibers/cables/etc running to the same dwelling. New Zeal…

> We should really be pushing for structural separation and ownership rules of communications infrastructure, which I suppose is the end game of net neutrality anyways.

Right: eliminating the synergies between owning content and owning ISPs makes it so there is little reason for a firm to want to be both an ISP and a content provider; it won't instantly cause existing combined entities to split up, but firms seeking to concentrate on lines of business with natural synergies will eventually head that way.

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

#677

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 la…

> 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)

That^ Too many people are trying to shove things that are covered by antitrust into net neutrality. This makes it a much harder sell.

I'm convinced many Republicans could be convinced to support net neutrality if it didn't have that extra baggage attached.

Keep it to:

1. No blocking of legal content,

2. No throttling of legal content,

3. Must deliver the speed and bandwidth that the customer pays for.

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

#678
post #398

Edit: You know what, fuck it. I don't think I can say anything here that hasn't been said a thousand times already.

Please don't turn HN threads into partisan fights. That leads to information heat death, something we're all here to avoid. This topic is already highly partisan, of course, so it's all the more important not to make it more so. This is very much a collective responsibility.

There's literally nothing partisan about this topic. The technical and academic worlds are virtually unanimous on the support of net neutrality. Even political support for net neutrality is around 83% across both parties. Don't shut down discussion because you personally feel ashamed that your party is complicit in this thing. It's not political.

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

#679

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 la…

"That a Republican-led FCC would err on the side of under-regulating telecommunications companies is about the least surprising outcome you can imagine." That is not why this is shocking. This proceeding is shocking because the legal basis for this change is dependent on a false statements about the technology involved. It goes beyond just, "Republicans prefer deregulation," or, "Republicans favor market-based approa…

> I expect Republicans to be pro-markets, even pro-big-business; I expect Republicans to favor deregulation. It is not acceptable to pursue that agenda by ignoring expert answers to technical questions, regardless of party affiliation. It is one thing to interpret facts... to simply dismiss facts that are being presented to you by experts, when you have a legal obligation to receive and consider such facts, is another matter entirely.

From where I sit, the particular observation you're making about how policy has been treated when it comes to Net Neutrality issues looks exactly like how the Republican party behaves generally. Whether it's about net neutrality, weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, climate change, stimulative effects of tax policy, health care -- it sure looks like many Republican positions are primarily arrived at and founded in the profit and power aspirations of a narrow constituency rather than observation and study, and that "deregulation" and "market-based" approaches are primarily invoked as tools or even just fig leaves where they appear useful.

Net Neutrality just happens to be one example where the audience here is predominately familiar enough with the relevant practical issues that it's easy to see.

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

#680

Common response on HN for the past two months has been nothing short of hyperbolic. "The world will end if NN is repealed". Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse. I have no reason to believe this is "the beginning of the end" of anything. Lif…

You can just add it to all the other hyper insane responses going around in the US right now, including: - Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously fina…

>> Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea

That's actually quite probable, because:

- both countries are openly hostile towards each other

- both have leaders that are mentally unstable and unpredictable.

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