Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 302 posts

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#261

Post by triceratops »

TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #214

Isn't the entire notion of NN outdated given the mass censorship that's sprung up the past 4-5 years? Isn't it vastly more important to ensure free speech on the internet than the speed of your netflix stream. Seems like a misguided battle.

> Isn't it vastly more important to ensure free speech on the internet than the speed of your netflix stream

If they can slow down your Netflix stream, they can also impair others' access to your self-hosted blog. I can't think of a more direct, fundamental threat to free speech than that. It's the same as the power company turning off service to your printing press.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#262

Post by josephg »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #215
Guvante wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 1 gigabit connection represents 384 Terrabytes of data over a month. You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. The question is what is excessive? 50%? 10%? For me it is 0.4% without up charges. Additionally on the topic of costs bandwidth is by definition free. Pretty much everybody is okay with $0/gb pricing for network traffic. Capacity costs money. How much capacity does an exc…

> You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally... Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can…

I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. If another user is using 40gb per month, it seems unfair to me that both users should pay the same amount of money for their connections.

The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the cost of connection is fixed. But some of it isn’t. The ISP at some point needs to upgrade their network links to handle the extra bandwidth going through their network. And I think it’s reasonable the person who’s using all that bandwidth pay more for the upgrade than people who aren’t using the bandwidth.

The nice thing about having a financial model around bandwidth is we don’t need judgemental words like “excessive” and “gluttonous”. You just pay for what you need. Simple as that.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#263

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

triceratops wrote: post #261
TheCaptain4815 wrote: post #214

Isn't the entire notion of NN outdated given the mass censorship that's sprung up the past 4-5 years? Isn't it vastly more important to ensure free speech on the internet than the speed of your netflix stream. Seems like a misguided battle.

> Isn't it vastly more important to ensure free speech on the internet than the speed of your netflix stream If they can slow down your Netflix stream, they can also impair others' access to your self-hosted blog. I can't think of a more direct, fundamental threat to free speech than that. It's the same as the power company turning off service to your printing press.

Who's "they"? Every ISP collaborating together to censor specific websites? Highly doubt that ever happens. Plus, companies like Starlink have made that practically impossible. Add in 5g internet options and I can't see how that could be practical. All of that has been added in the past 3-5 years too.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#264

Post by viraptor »

thehappypm wrote: post #260
jstarfish wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not in the right on this one. Your argument is drifting far away from what net neutrality even is. UPS does not care what what they're carrying unless it shits or explodes. Anything meeting most of your criteria, they simply will not ship in the first place. Net neutrality specifically mitigates rent-seeking behavior, implying if UPS knew there was something expensive in the box, they'd shake you down for mor…

Net neutrality is, quite literally, treating all packets of data the same, not caring about what type of data it is. An analogy that says it’s like UPS, because UPS will ship any box and it doesnt care about what’s in it, is a bad analogy because UPS will gladly refuse to ship many things—-it DOES care what’s in the box.

They care about own safety, not about the service segmentation here. If the packets themselves could be dangerous for some reason (for example exploits for the core routing hardware), of course net neutral ISPs would drop them too.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#266

Post by tzs »

thfuran wrote: post #258
tzs wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it. They do that. If your plan has, say, a 1 TB cap with no services that are exempt from the data cap you can pick any 1 TB from any mix of services you want without hitting your cap. If your plan has 1 TB cap but say Netflix is exempt from the cap you can still pick the exact same 1 TB from the exact same mix of services without hitting y…

>but say Netflix is exempt from the cap That's obviously and blatantly them putting their thumb on the scale. It'd be like if Burger King were to pay car manufacturers to make it so that the second half of the gas tank only works for driving to Burger King drive-throughs. That's not how cars should work and ISPs shouldn't pull the same kind of shit.

A closer analogy would be that its like if you go through a Burger King drive-through they also give you gas to bring your tank back up to what it was when you started on your trip to Burger King.

You said that "The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it".

My point is that if you have paid for a fixed amount of data per month, and you are going to use under that amount when you decide entirely on your own how to use it, then whether or not the ISP also gives you some free data with usage restrictions doesn't change that.

If your ISP does not have any exemptions and then adds some and you miss the announcement you would never even notice, except maybe if you track your usage throughout the month to make sure you aren't going to go over and you notice they are reporting lower usage than you expect.

Yes, it is putting a thumb on the scale, but I don't see how this is really different than any of the other ways companies often give free access to third party products to try to make the company more attractive to customers.

That may be anticompetitive, but if so it should be dealt with under antitrust. Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#267

Post by eindiran »

xenadu02 wrote: post #235
BurningFrog wrote: post #204

The internet developed without Net Neutrality. 2015-2017 there was Net Neutrality. 2018-2023 there was not. Empirically, the disaster that Net Neutrality claims to avoid, is hard to observe.

That is not correct at all. The internet developed with "net neutrality" because that's how ARPANET and later the internet had always worked. Peering agreements developed based on symmetrical traffic loads and providers regularly upgraded links as needed. NN was originally imposed by the FCC because Verizon started blocking VPNs, requiring customers to pay for a "business" plan if they wanted VPN support. That was th…

> The internet developed with "net neutrality" because that's how ARPANET and later the internet had always worked.

OP is making a claim about de jure net neutrality, you are making a claim about de facto net neutrality.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#268

Post by autoexec »

josephg wrote: post #262
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree. If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally... Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can…

I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow. If another user is using 40gb per month, it seems unfair to me that both users should pay the same amount of money for their connections. The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the…

> I don’t think that’s excessive either. But if one user is using 384 TB of bandwidth each month, the ISP needs to pay for that bandwidth somehow.

Subscription fees should be set to cover the costs of bandwidth. Right now ISPs want to advertise unlimited service for a certain (already excessive) price and then complain when users actually use the service they're paying for as advertised. They've changed their ads many times over the years as a result of being called out for their word games (see for example https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-d...)

If the ISP has a reasonably capable network the few users who are using tons of bandwidth will be more than made up for by the majority of users who barely use the service at all (the check email/weather/facebook/sports scores crowd)

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#269

Post by exabrial »

mcpackieh wrote: post #107
exabrial wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it hasn’t. We’re fighting a boogieman. Instead, we’re going to do is further entrench local monopolies, since only the large guys will be able to afford to comply with regulation. You literally can’t force corporate Americas to act beneficial to their consumers of incentives are misaligned. It takes literal FDA-levels of regulation to accomplish that, and even that has failures while generally making the entire pr…

> You literally can’t force corporate Americas to act beneficial to their consumers of incentives are misaligned. It takes literal FDA-levels of regulation to accomplish that, "Literal FDA-levels of regulation" demonstrably does not accomplish that. The FDA was fine with what the Sacklers/Purdue Pharma were doing; lawsuits filed by states and others got something (not enough) done about it, but the FDA and their regu…

For the most part it, it's successful, but often times it isn't (which was my point!) We can take the FAA and 787-MAX as another example! Mostly successful, but still not really 100%

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#270

Post by exabrial »

deltarholamda wrote: post #71
exabrial wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it hasn’t. We’re fighting a boogieman. Instead, we’re going to do is further entrench local monopolies, since only the large guys will be able to afford to comply with regulation. You literally can’t force corporate Americas to act beneficial to their consumers of incentives are misaligned. It takes literal FDA-levels of regulation to accomplish that, and even that has failures while generally making the entire pr…

Like many government regulations, it has a great name, "Net Neutrality," which, when it is actually implemented, will do much more than make the 'Net neutral. Maybe, at first, it will have something to do with "you can't throttle Web services," but it will morph into "you MUST throttle this particular Web service, it spreads disinformation, which makes the Net less neutral." It is what always happens. It is more reli…

precisely.
Post reply on HN