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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

#471

Post by elihu »

pdabbadabba wrote: post #137
paulhauggis wrote: post #2

What scares me is that there are 700 regulations (that we haven't even seen) that got passed. I wouldn't sign a contract without reading it (and having the person on the other side telling me all of the reasons why I should), and neither should you. But apparently, the general population (and many here) will. I watched the entire live broadcast and the pros played only on emotion (safety, helping out the disadvantage…

This "we haven't even seen the rules yet" line is really just a meaningless talking point promoted by NN opponents. In the world of government regulation, is is absolutely the norm for regulations to be voted on before being made public. But that does not mean the process is not transparent: the Commission has been conducting an open proceeding for months (years, really) where they have explained their proposals to t…

Minor correction: the Administrative Procedures Act was enacted in 1946, which I wouldn't consider to be "almost 100 years ago".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act

I agree with what you say, though.

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

#472

Post by Agustus »

innguest wrote: post #72
paulhauggis wrote: post #2

What scares me is that there are 700 regulations (that we haven't even seen) that got passed. I wouldn't sign a contract without reading it (and having the person on the other side telling me all of the reasons why I should), and neither should you. But apparently, the general population (and many here) will. I watched the entire live broadcast and the pros played only on emotion (safety, helping out the disadvantage…

> the pros played only on emotion [...] Facts and rationality was only brought up by the opposition. That's my rule of thumb for knowing which side is right. There's always one side that makes emotional arguments, and another side that makes factual arguments. This simple heuristics is inaccessible to over half the population, who are collectivists. Also notice, most of those collectivists do not believe they should…

I have no idea why this is being downvoted, this is a legitimate comment. If there were ever a point that the emotional argument will try and force others out, this demonstrated it.

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

#473

Post by tptacek »

oceanstone wrote: post #435
rayiner wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> PS: The accusations of astroturfing on HN are a vile sort of rhetorical tactic. You sound upset about the accusation. What if it were true though?

Comments like this are what make musings about astroturfing so toxic.

I don't know what it is about us message board nerds that makes this so hard to grok, but you cannot suggest that someone is a shill without overtly calling their integrity into question. Questioning someone's integrity is intrinsically uncivil. Don't be uncivil.

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

#474

Post by dang »

chetanahuja wrote: post #76

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…

> Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign

HN users need to stop accusing their opponents in arguments of being astroturfers. Astroturfing may or may not exist, but sincere disagreement is common. It degrades the discourse badly when sincere disagreers are accused of being shills.

It's not that astroturfing isn't a problem. It's that the collateral damage of firing off such accusations indiscriminately is too great for that to be ok without evidence. People disagreeing with you isn't evidence.

If you suspect astroturfing in an HN thread, please email us at hn@ycombinator.com. Cracking down on that is part of our job. We will take your suspicions seriously. But we will do so by looking at actual data—something that isn't an option in the HN threads themselves and would mostly be off-topic there.

Within the threads, the HN guidelines and Principle of Charity [1] require you to assume that disagreers are arguing in good faith, and to deal with them not by calling names but by making better arguments.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

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

#475

Post by hawkice »

shmerl wrote: post #441
hawkice wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A rural Washington state regulatory and infrastructure organization, KPUD, is attempting to encourage access to the fiber they've added to the Kitsap county area. They have implemented this rule in a fairly watered down sense. The result is that, years after the large federal government grant to help high speed rural internet access, and almost two years after construction has been completed, no one in Kitsap county…

And other people will never have fiber Internet, lower prices and higher bandwidth because current monopolist in their area doesn't care to do any of the above. So how do you propose to fix that? Unbundling is the only way. Not sure about Kitsap, but unbundling worked well in Europe. How weren't they scared there of the same thing?

A lot of the difference in economics between Europe and rural Washington state has to do with the extremely high fixed cost of "last mile" internet connection in rural areas, which are, for a number of reasons, substantially more prohibitive in America. Trying to pay off $9000 in fixed costs with $30/mo internet simply isn't going to happen if a competitor can swoop in and offer the same service for $20/mo with no investment in infrastructure. If the cost is lower, due to having either higher population density or more available infrastructure to scaffold off of, this becomes a less-insane business prospect.

But I'm somewhat confused by your initial sentiment. At least four small, local ISPs have investigated installing last mile connectivity to the fiber, and all declined. The status quo (largely a single provider per household) has little to do with this.

Are you saying we need unbundling because otherwise we won't have both fiber internet and low prices? Without the rules regarding ISPs being unable to have ownership over infrastructure they pay 100% of the costs for, fiber could be provided profitably for less than $90/mo. to many portions of Kitsap county.

Additionally: There are some households in Kitsap that have never had internet access at all -- surely blaming "the monopoly" is nonsense for those customers, and yet they too are hurt by this local policy.

EDIT: I anticipate this being non-productive. Suffice it to say, I'm not trying to say "Unbundling is not the best policy." I'm saying, while we consider this policy, let us understand that it is not a pure, unalloyed good in all situations for all people. Policy decisions should not seem one-sided.

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

#476

Post by bobbles »

grecy wrote: post #463
xnull2guest wrote: post #158

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…

There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly. Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets. Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier. Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1? Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.

The headline could say that world hunger was cured but the top comment on HN would still be something like "yes, but X people are still dying in car crashes every year"

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

#477

Post by Anderkent »

chaostheory wrote: post #465
grecy wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are two problems, and the FCC has solved one of them perfectly. Problem 1: ISPs trying to charge to (de)prioritize packets. Problem 2: The two biggest ISPs suck, and should be broken up, and/or it should be mandated that competition is much easier. Would you be happy if they solved problem 2 without solving problem 1? Leave problem 2 for another day, and celebrate that problem 1 has been dealt with.

Wouldn't drastically increased competition solve problem one over time?

Probably not; ISPs don't do traffic shaping because they're evil, they do it because it saves them money. The average customer probably cares more about the price of their broadband and the big number in front of it, not whether they get full utilization.

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

#478

Post by scarmig »

baddox wrote: post #459
scarmig wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question: suppose a group of knowledgeable engineers and technicians in a city decided that they were going to run their geography's network infrastructure without the supervision of Comcast shareholders. They decide to stage a nonviolent sit-in overnight in Comcast offices to take over the extant and state-guaranteed monopoly of the network infrastructure in that area, and another group delivers food to them until C…

I suspect that Comcast would call the police. But imagine a similar situation happens in a hypothetical society with no state police, or better yet, in some area where there are no state police available in a reasonable time frame (plenty such areas exist, even in the USA). Don't you suppose that Comcast might have private security guards?

Of course! I'd go so far as to say that's the case in most of the USA--Comcast almost certainly has some level of private security at most of its locations, even (or perhaps especially) in urban areas.

I'm not sure, though, how that undermines the point that Comcast shares in the monopoly of violence with the government. It doesn't make its violence independent of government (at least in the USA): small matters can be dealt with most quickly by those private forces, but in more serious matters, Comcast would call on government violence to provide either a supporting or primary role. The people in conflict with Comcast could do the same, but the difference is that Comcast would actually get the government's help.

Note that this isn't a claim of fascist corporatism or anything: it's part of a healthy society, and really the only way I can imagine a civil society I'd want to live in working. But there's no reason to say that Comcast doesn't have the ability to be co-opted by special interests (its shareholders and affiliated unions, to be explicit about who I'm talking about) and use state-guaranteed violence to impose economic policy in the small on unwilling participants.

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

#479

Post by rayiner »

venomsnake wrote: post #355
rayiner wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all of the web-tech companies who support Net Neutrality rely utterly on other peoples' wires to deliver content to their users. They have a huge interest in regulating telcos into "dumb pipes." There's huge monetary incentives on both sides of this debate.

And I think dumb pipes open for everyone is best. After all ... it would be inconvenient if your utility company told you what can you use your electricity for.

It would be inconvenient if my ISP was keeping 100 year old infrastructure running like my power company. Or refusing to upgrade aging lead pipes leaking poison into the drinking water like my water company. The U.S. has a multi-trillion infrastructure deficit, and regulating utilities as dumb services is a huge part of that.

Legislating the wires into "dumb pipes" has certain advantages in terms of openness, but there's no money in building dumb pipes, and these pipes are expensive and must be continually upgraded, much more so than other kinds of utilities.

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

#480

Post by tptacek »

tzs wrote: post #279
rayiner wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 drop…

Semi-relevant nit: the FCC is not technically part of the administration.
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