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Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

arstechnica.com

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Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#91

Post by CamperBob2 »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #83
danielweber wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> rich get preferential treatment It's comments like these that make me not like net neutrality. There is no way you are going to stop people who spend more money from being able to enjoy better Internet connections. On the other hand, ISPs ought to be stopped, in general, from discriminating against traffic based on a) their desire to sell their own service that competes with it, or b) who you are connecting to.

Why should ISP 's be stopped from discriminating? A company that blocked Google would find its competitor's saturation bombing ads for "Google compatible" Internet service. Followed by the tort lawyers saturation bombing ads for class action lawsuits alleging breach of contract and tortious interference in contracts.

What competitor?

Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#92

Post by nitrobeast »

Quote from the linked article, "(net neutrality rules) forbid ISPs from blocking services or charging content providers for access to the network." But that is confusing. ISPs are already charging content providers for access to the network. Netflix and Google need to pay for their bandwidth.

Actually, web neutrality means the ISPs should treat all data in their network equally.

Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#93

Post by BrainInAJar »

rayiner wrote: post #80
dasil003 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's terrifying enough to think of congress today deciding the fate of the internet, much less the congress of 1996.

The Congress of 1996 did more or less what technologists wanted at the time: told the FCC to not regulate the internet.

I'm excited to see what kind of crazy side-effects the stuff we the technologists of today are demanding (like net-neutrality) have

Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#95

Post by DannyBee »

rayiner wrote: post #87
DannyBee wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both. The last time anything like this was proposed (and then it had the support of Google, etc), there was a huge showdown . The problem you have here is simple: The messaging is very hard to get to politicians in a way that makes it clear what a big deal this is, and how bad it's been. They have no concept of things like "broadband speeds". On one side, they get told by the telecom union, verizon, comcast, ex-FCC c…

You touch on a lot of good points, but I'd argue that there are some overarching issues as well. Fundamentally, our legislators and our regulatory bodies do not share certain values in common with a certain subset of technology companies. "Open" and "neutral" are words that have self-evident value to your typical Google engineer, but mean nothing to most people in government. The langua franca in regulatory circles t…

I don't disagree with you at all. You are completely correct that the message people want to use here just isn't going to resonate right now.

When you say " To this day, they crow about how abstaining from applying the heavy-handed common carrier regulations to internet service allowed it to blossom into what it is today."

You hit the nail on the head here. Of course, this mixes up correlation and causation, but yes, the FCC somehow believes they played some role in all of this, when in fact, things happened despite them, not because of it...

The carrier have no reason to negotiate any regulation at all. Everyone is willing to give them everything they want, for nothing. The only thing that scares them is the uncertainty of courts, and they are doing wonderfully there :)

Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#96

Post by ganeumann »

macspoofing wrote: post #69
atmosx wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I understand your point, but I just don't see the ethical implications. Net neutrality, may be important, but it is a legal directive. Not supporting, or actively working to abolish net neutrality, isn't unethical. So, according to you allowing a light weight to fight a heavy weight is ethical? In my view, it is not. Big corporations enjoy already great advantages that come from their size. If we let this go, we'll…

>So, according to you allowing a light weight to fight a heavy weight is ethical? It's neither ethical nor unethical, that's all I'm saying. It's like saying "tax-cuts are unethical because of one thing or another". You can try to argue that, sure, but I think it'd be irrational. By the way, I do support Net Neutrality because it's a good policy that makes everyone better off.

>By the way, I do support Net Neutrality because it's a good policy that makes everyone better off.

In some philosophical traditions making everyone better off is the actual definition of ethical.

Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#98

Post by declan »

saalweachter wrote: post #46
declan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DC Circuit may have three vacancies (I'll trust your representation) but it also has the lightest workload per judge in the country: http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230393690... "For the 12-months ending in September, the D.C. Circuit had 149 appeals filed per active judge. By comparison, the 11th Circuit had 778 appeals filed per active judge for the same period... The national average of appe…

That is entirely irrelevant. I say outright that the exact reason I want to see more judges appointed to this court is to pack it with judges who are more likely to produce decisions I agree with. You respond by accusing my of wanting to do exactly what I want to do. So? As an aside, why do you say that the DC Circuit is "underworked" instead of saying that the 11th Circuit is "overworked"?

Points for honesty, but unless other HN readers share your own particular political preferences, saying "I want it!" isn't exactly a compelling policy argument. I mean, I want ponies.

If you're right that the 11th Circuit is overworked, then that point actually cuts against your argument: let's put more judges there where they need more help, and not the DC Circuit.

Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#99

Post by declan »

chii wrote: post #97
declan wrote: post #20

This is a duplicate of another thread started an hour earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057495

it's a different article, about the same topic.

Different article, but same court opinion!

Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules

#100

Post by macspoofing »

zem wrote: post #85
macspoofing wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>without net neutrality we get an internet where the rich get preferential treatment Net neutrality does nothing for rich or poor. The rich already benefit from better connectivity and internet access. Net neutrality doesn't automatically make internet cheaper either, in fact, it may make it more expensive because the telecoms cannot complement their internet fees with money collected from Youtube and Netflix for pri…

see my reply to macspoofing - this is not about how fast your home internet is, it is about your ability to send stuff in the other direction. i'm not particularly concerned about cable tv because there isn't much leverage in having better access to tv shows; however, being better able to participate in a two-way flow of information potentially carries huge leverage abilities, and the people who already have influenc…

I think you may have a warped view of the problems that lack of Net Neutrality would bring. Content creation, and ... errr.. "participation in a two-way flow of information" is not particularly served by Net Neutrality. Writing and consuming blogs, IMs, twitter comments, emails, forum posts and reddit comments would be virtually unchanged since those are all bandwidth-cap friendly activities and don't particularly need a large pipe anyway ( A basic 5MB connection is more than enough ). Communication apps such as Skype and Hangouts may be affected (though they don't consume that much bandwidth and also don't require a particularly fat pipe). However most are controlled by big conglomerates who would be willing to pay the telecom toll and so may actually work better in a non-neutral internet.

HD Video streaming services and software downloads (e.g. via Steam or Xbox) are probably the things most affect by Net Neutrality, especially since telecoms have competing services and those types of services benefit immensely from unlimited caps and lots of bandwidth.

So I'm still confused as to what argument you're trying to make. You're hand-waving quite a bit trying to position it as a grave ethical issue and I just don't see it. Again, I think Net Neutrality should be the law of the land. It benefits everyone (except telecoms) and it's been a huge success so far. Let's keep it.

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