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FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

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Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#271
My initial instinct is to be excited for this, but to be honest I have only a very cursory understanding of the issues.

Reflecting on my motivations, I would say 90% of my support comes from the signal of Comcast squealing about it, and 10% comes from WMF and EFF support. Which I grant is arational, but it's probably a major driving force behind much of the support in the tech community.

So, to opponents: you're likely to have a more effective argument if you can convince me that this isn't correcting a government-guaranteed fiefdom of monopoly power to Comcast, and that the political forces opposing it aren't pawns of Comcast.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#272

Unfortunately the Net Neutrality 'debate' was another lose-lose situation for the United States. What we wanted wasn't for the big telecom duopoly to be forced to either run their business as a tiered service or as a regulated utility. What we wanted was for the US Government to exercise its Anti-Trust capabilities and bust the universally hated Comcast and Time Warner into a bunch of small companies, and set "Goldil…

Why couldn't we just get congress to pass a law stating that ISP's cannot throttle one type of content in favor of another? Why this heavy handed approach?

You mean Title X? The vaguely-worded proposal, hand-written by the telecoms, to castrate the FCC's ability to regulate, and to impose a set of exploitable loopholes that are difficult to reverse once in effect?

After seeing the absolute ignorance congress has of the internet, how it works, who uses it, how it benefits the country/world, and why it's important, the last thing I want is those people voting on new internet regulations.

I'd rather have an organization regulating the internet that has been set up precisely to understand the issues. Yes, it's removed from direct voting influence, but at least the people there understand what the internet is and are willing to listen to people who know what they're talking about.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#273

Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates. The main gist of the the new regulations is the classify broadband access as a utility under Title II of Communications act. This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing... and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US. Reading commen…

> This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing. This is revisionist history. Up until very recently, Title II was the "nuclear option."[1] There's plenty of people who are pro-net neutrality who were skeptical of Title II. That's why they originally threw their support behind the FCC's last attempt at net neutrality, which tried to impose neutrality without reclassification. The EFF o…

What exactly makes Mark Cuban tech savvy other than: 1) He's loud 2) He's reasonably well known

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#274
post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it that nobody thinks forcing people to obtain a license for broadcasting isn't censorship, and/or forced monopoly? Like how do you reason yourself into believing those two things are false? Like, the biggest problem is that people are unhappy with comcast and there's no alternative. Then they get the bright idea that making entry into the market harder will fix this problem?

There's very limited spectrum and if everyone is fighting to see who can broadcast the loudest the entire system will fail.

There's also very limited land but land is not tightly controlled by an unelected government agency the same way radio waves are.

If what you say is true then we should be able to buy and sell radio wave frequencies from each other. But radio waves are treated specially by the government because they're a long range means of communication. Same with the internet. That's why the FCC wants in. Not because "it's limited". Land is limited, where is the FCC for land? Gold is limited, yet we can freely buy and sell. Everything is limited but the FCC only has eyes for LONG RANGE MEANS OF COMMUNICATION. Why?

EDIT for temporal:

Please explain this:

"One of our troubles in getting legislation [to nationalize the airwaves] was the very success of the voluntary system we had created. Members of the Congressional committees kept saying, 'it is working well, so why bother?'" -- Herbert C. Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: The Cabinet and the Presidency 1920-1933, at 142 (1952). Cited in Hazlett, 1990.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop being so cynical. Not sure what is up with this community. When FCC was reluctant to do anything on net neutrality everyone here was up in arms. Now that FCC has passed something, you are still up in arms. So much cynicism - for all you know most of the regulations passed might be pro-consumer. At least I would like to believe that it is better than the current model - which in itself is a good step forward.

You're referring to HN as though it's one person. There's wide disagreement over net neutrality. There's wide disagreement over allowing the FCC to pass a large framework for regulating the Internet without allowing the public to see what's in it. It's outrageous the FCC did this. Who knows what new powers were just granted to the government. You have no idea, because you were not allowed to see it. Recognizing that…

> It's outrageous the FCC did this. Who knows what new powers were just granted to the government. You have no idea, because you were not allowed to see it.

Are you outraged at every FCC regulation? They're pretty much all passed before publication.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#276

Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates. The main gist of the the new regulations is the classify broadband access as a utility under Title II of Communications act. This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing... and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US. Reading commen…

I have looked hard at the issues & I'm not on any campaign. Paid prioritization is not a bad thing. Blocking websites is. There is a whole nascent standard called LTE direct that suddenly becomes pointless if you can't distinquish traffic priorities. There are innovations that are being cut out of the picture for entirely new m2x flows & peer to peer flows because of the desire to remove paid prioritization. It is no…

> Paid prioritization is not a bad thing. Blocking websites is.

Paid prioritization can be effectively used to block websites at the will of the providers. "We offered that website our paid tier, but they refused our $1,000,000 demand and are now capped at a bit per second."

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have looked hard at the issues & I'm not on any campaign. Paid prioritization is not a bad thing. Blocking websites is. There is a whole nascent standard called LTE direct that suddenly becomes pointless if you can't distinquish traffic priorities. There are innovations that are being cut out of the picture for entirely new m2x flows & peer to peer flows because of the desire to remove paid prioritization. It is no…

At what point does "prioritization" effectively become blocking? People navigate away from websites that take a long time to load or have advertisements.

Is your use of the Internet limited to websites?

If you play video games, use realtime video services like facetime, or use a VPN for mission critical work, do you really want your traffic flows to be identical to something that delivers content to a rendering engine?

Different traffic has different requirements & performance characteristics. From a pure engineering perspective, this is a very poor decision and treating all traffic equally provides artificial and often unnecessary constraints.

I have never experienced any situation where prioritization has effectively become blocking.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#278
post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just went through your recent comment history and it's pretty clear you're interested in no such thing. You've been blindly repeating Fox News style > Seeing your ad-nauseam repetition of the same talking points Attack the argument -- not the person.

My thesis is that these accounts are not here for legitimate argument. They are here to spread FUD via talking points. I attempted to prove the futility of attacking the arguments by showing that they have been clearly countered before while failing to budge this account from their fixed talking points.

> My thesis is that these accounts are not here for legitimate argument. They are here to spread FUD via talking points

If you feel anyone's opinion that isn't your own is somehow FUD, that's a problem.

For example, you are unlikely to change my viewpoint or opinion on a great number of things, even through well thought-out and concise arguments. I also happen to believe Fox News isn't as terrible as a lot of people like to think (they are, after all, the news network with the most viewership and highest ratings year after year).

Point being, you shouldn't attack individuals because they don't agree with you (or the popular opinion). You should attack their argument.

And clearly someone who's invested enough time into getting 1K+ upvotes isn't a drive-by-night account. I get suspicious when new accounts post that were created on or around when the article was posted, and/or accounts with very long account history but almost no comments and no upvotes (why go 500 days with no comment but now you post?).

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#279

Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates. The main gist of the the new regulations is the classify broadband access as a utility under Title II of Communications act. This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing... and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US. Reading commen…

> This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing. This is revisionist history. Up until very recently, Title II was the "nuclear option."[1] There's plenty of people who are pro-net neutrality who were skeptical of Title II. That's why they originally threw their support behind the FCC's last attempt at net neutrality, which tried to impose neutrality without reclassification. The EFF o…

> Conservatives don't like it because it allows the FCC to do things like rate-setting, even if this administration chooses not to use that power.

I don't understand this fear. Let's consider two hypotheticals in which this administration does not want to do rate setting but a future one does.

Hypothetical one:

• This administration uses Title II with forbearance of rate regulation for NN.

• Later administration drops the forbearance and imposes rate regulation.

Hypothetical two:

• This administration finds some way to do NN without using Title II (perhaps not being able to do as strong a version of NN as they want).

• Later administration wants to do rate regulation. They reclassify as Title II and impose rate regulation.

I don't see how the later administrations ability to impose rate regulation is significantly easier under hypothetical one. It just changes the specific rule they have to write. Since they have the power to impose Title II, they can drop that into their rule if it hasn't been done by an earlier administration.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have looked hard at the issues & I'm not on any campaign. Paid prioritization is not a bad thing. Blocking websites is. There is a whole nascent standard called LTE direct that suddenly becomes pointless if you can't distinquish traffic priorities. There are innovations that are being cut out of the picture for entirely new m2x flows & peer to peer flows because of the desire to remove paid prioritization. It is no…

> Paid prioritization is not a bad thing. Blocking websites is. Paid prioritization can be effectively used to block websites at the will of the providers. "We offered that website our paid tier, but they refused our $1,000,000 demand and are now capped at a bit per second."

The thing I have hated the most about the last 20 years of the internet is how often I have been blocked access to a website due to caps.

This has happened exactly 0 times.

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