Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality • Hacker News Board

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#61

Post by thomastjeffery » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 8:08 PM UTC

spoiledtechie wrote: post #43

Can I be the antagonist here? I simply want a free market for the internet. Stop with government intervention on both sides. Simply protect the consumer and let the free market take over. Who cares if companies like netflix get charged more? It will allow another competitor to bubble up since Netflix will start adjusting their prices. This works. Its called capitalism. In theory, simply look at Lasik. Lasik 5 years a…

That would be fine if there were any competition to begin with.

Allowing incumbents to abuse their customers does devalue them, making their competitors relatively more valuable. The problem is that there are no competitors!

What we are left with are incumbents who can devalue themselves via customer abuse without consequence, which simply boils down to customer abuse.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#62

Post by tempuser24 » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 8:11 PM UTC

spoiledtechie wrote: post #43

Can I be the antagonist here? I simply want a free market for the internet. Stop with government intervention on both sides. Simply protect the consumer and let the free market take over. Who cares if companies like netflix get charged more? It will allow another competitor to bubble up since Netflix will start adjusting their prices. This works. Its called capitalism. In theory, simply look at Lasik. Lasik 5 years a…

I think that in a competitive market you and Pai are right, there would be competition that drives prices down(see cities where Google Fiber entered). Unfortunately wired ISPs is a natural monopolistic market, the cost of entry is extraordinarily high, and with incumbents making it even harder for competition to enter[1] only really wealthy companies can enter (like Google).

I think with the advancement of Wireless last mile reducing deployment costs we will see more competition in the space (if incumbent ISPs do not keep them out with lawsuits). But at the current time most Wireless ISPs can't match the speeds of wired ISPs and the average consumer does not care enough to check every so often if a new competitor enters the ISP market, and probably won't change unless they have a serious problem with their current provider.

So in summary I think that soon we may not need government oversight with enough competition, but in our current market saturated by incumbents we do.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/att-and-comcast-...

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#63

Post by bthrm » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 8:15 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #52

bthrm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a European: he’s right. You’ll love zero-rating. I do. :-)

You love this[0]? Ick. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating#/media/File:Screen...

Yes, paying extra to get unlimited traffic to certain services is good. It’s good there’s choice.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#64

Post by kevin_b_er » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 8:19 PM UTC

thomastjeffery wrote: post #61

spoiledtechie wrote: post #43

Can I be the antagonist here? I simply want a free market for the internet. Stop with government intervention on both sides. Simply protect the consumer and let the free market take over. Who cares if companies like netflix get charged more? It will allow another competitor to bubble up since Netflix will start adjusting their prices. This works. Its called capitalism. In theory, simply look at Lasik. Lasik 5 years a…

That would be fine if there were any competition to begin with . Allowing incumbents to abuse their customers does devalue them, making their competitors relatively more valuable. The problem is that there are no competitors ! What we are left with are incumbents who can devalue themselves via customer abuse without consequence, which simply boils down to customer abuse.

Ajit Pai has redefined "competitors" to include wireless. Poof! There's now more competitors.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#65

Post by kevin_b_er » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 8:25 PM UTC

spoiledtechie wrote: post #46

kevin_b_er wrote: post #11

He removed the consumer protection. I now know with full confidence he will lie to my face just like certain other politicians. All of his words are now and in the future are automatically hollow.

Cite your claim. He strengthened it. Obama admin didn't actually implement any consumer protection.

Title II was a consumer protection. It is removed. We have less. The only thing now is a lack of competition unless you count a convenient redefinition of competition to include wireless.

To quote another FCC commissioner: > Internet service providers now have the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content. They will have the right to discriminate and favor the Internet traffic of those companies with whom they have pay-for-play arrangements and the right to consign all others to a slow and bumpy road. Plain and simple, thanks to the FCC's rollback of net neutrality, Internet providers have the legal green light, the technical ability, and business incentive to discriminate and manipulate what we see, read, and learn online.

What do we have left? Well truth in advertising. But that just requires lies by omission and half truths to bypass. "Speeds up to 1 Gbit" is truthful. 0.01 mbit is within the advertised "truth", except when browisng websites that not paid Comcast's now legal extortion fee. Then they'll get less.

We have a protection that was removed! Full stop. The existing protection of truth in advertising did not change. So we went down.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#66

Post by kevin_b_er » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 8:27 PM UTC

spoiledtechie wrote: post #43

Can I be the antagonist here? I simply want a free market for the internet. Stop with government intervention on both sides. Simply protect the consumer and let the free market take over. Who cares if companies like netflix get charged more? It will allow another competitor to bubble up since Netflix will start adjusting their prices. This works. Its called capitalism. In theory, simply look at Lasik. Lasik 5 years a…

How do you "protect the consumer" without laws and regulation? The new competitor will already be at a higher price since Comcast can limit that new entrant to 56K speeds unless they pay an extortion fee.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#67

Post by mrsteveman1 » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

Someone1234 wrote: post #44

pavel_lishin wrote: post #20

> ISPs' required disclosures "will allow consumers to make an informed decision about which Internet service provider is best for them The one that's best for me is literally the only one that's available in my area, so my informed decision is whether to have the internet or not.

The FCC actually changed the definition of an ISP so that cellular and satellite providers are included. Meaning according to official FCC statistics your area is swarming with competition, in spite of having just a single wired ISP. In fact according to official statistics, even rural areas with zero wired internet options have a great competitive landscape. Let that sink in...

> The FCC actually changed the definition of an ISP so that cellular and satellite providers are included.

Wireless providers are competition for home internet service the same way the gas station down the street selling water bottles for $3/each is an alternative to running water.

You aren't going to get a $300 water bill just because some company in another state spent several days secretly filling your in-ground pool with the garden hose without permission, nor would anyone tolerate having that happen repeatedly while being told they can only brush their teeth but not flush the toilet for the rest of the month.

A while back, the DSL here was not working for a few days, so I connected my iPhone to my Macbook. Normally that's not an issue while away from home or in a car for an hour or two, as there are limits to how much data anything could use in that amount of time.

Apple's Photos app proactively downloaded something like 25GB of old stuff from iCloud Photo Library that I didn't ask to download, didn't browse through, or even remember having, simply because the local drive had free space and Apple decided that both the space and the bandwidth were freely available for it to waste.

If wireless providers were forbidden from imposing ridiculous data caps I would be fine with calling them competition, because we do have multiple high speed providers here, they're just not usable because they'd rather be selling water bottles.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#68

Post by voidwtf » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 9:37 PM UTC

barneygumble742 wrote: post #25

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #2

Part of me really hopes the internet heads into the crapper within the next couple years. It's time for a reboot anyway, to clear the cruft.

Reboot the internet with IPv6 and now all your internal devices will be openly addressable to the internet. I see nothing good coming from that.

This is strange, oft-repeated, mostly incorrect argument. Almost every modern router, if it handles IPv6, handles IPv6 without NAT but with a firewall. Most consumer routers just have ALLOW ALL outbound, ALLOW EXISTING inbound, default firewall rules that would be just fine for IPv6.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#69

Post by flyinghamster » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 9:40 PM UTC

phinnaeus wrote: post #32

barneygumble742 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reboot the internet with IPv6 and now all your internal devices will be openly addressable to the internet. I see nothing good coming from that.

NAT is not a firewall. There's no reason you can't hide your LAN from a WAN connection with IPv6.

Exactly right. When I enabled IPv6 on my home LAN, I made very sure that only those hosts (and ports!) I wanted open were available to the outside world. Otherwise, incoming IPv6 is DROP by default.

Re: Ajit Pai says you’re going to love the death of net neutrality

#70

Post by Someone1234 » Mon, Jun 11, 2018, 10:02 PM UTC

bthrm wrote: post #63

Someone1234 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You love this[0]? Ick. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating#/media/File:Screen...

Yes, paying extra to get unlimited traffic to certain services is good. It’s good there’s choice.

You, as the consumer, aren't making the choice. The ISP is picking which companies get the privileged position. It is in effect king-making certain services.