ISPs Aim to Use Facebook Fracas to Saddle Silicon Valley with Crappy New Laws

You're right, of course, but as scottie_m points out, the main issue here is one around messaging.

The enemy of getting this fixed is complexity. Once we start targeting individual companies, types of internet connections, or hardware devices? We've lost. It's all over.

It's not these things don't need fixing, it's that we have about ten words or so to put into a slogan. That slogan needs to be repeated over and over again. I am a firm believer in Net Neutrality -- but that's not the right slogan to march under. If we get Net Neutrality and everything else stays the same, it's a complete loss.

By shifting the focus to each user, we can talk more directly about benefits. And by making penalties perhaps draconian, we can leave the management of the complexities to the vendors, where it belongs, instead of the public debate, where the lawyers win.

Privacy and anonymity are much bigger fish to fry than whether YouTube costs more than Instagram. If we could come up with a simple slogan to cover both of them, sign me up. Otherwise? We gotta stop everybody from putting telemetry on every detail of our lives.

Before the 60s in the U.S., there was pervasive and deeply-held racism, but most people didn't see it, even those who wanted to be morally superior to everybody else. (See the movie "The Help"). Many times I think of what that issue is for us. What will we look back on in 50 years as being barbaric and evil? What is our current equivalent to the Civil Rights campaigns?

It's storing tracking data about the minute parts of people's lives. We will either morally overcome this or we will enter a new Dark Ages. There's no middle ground. Here. Here is the moral battle.

Apples meet oranges.

"Net neutrality" is a line in the sand, not a goal. Actual net neutrality would make their ToS clauses regarding webservers on consumer connections, invalid. IF they did allow this, people could have better choices to route around Google, Amazon, etc. Business class connections can be advertised where not available within a certain mileage of service. This harms the middle classes' ability to offset costs using assets by restricting business models that distribute compute power such as European companies that use compute to heat water. Fears of malicious activity and spam are already covered under other laws such as the can spam act and CFAA.

-- The ISPs created their own problems --

A webserver can exist without a public good but not publicly without the ISP. The ISPs require many layers of PUBLIC easements and PUBLIC airwaves. Both use water and electricity. Electricity in 1931-1934 was spoken of in a similar way, notably by Hoover(Against). The ISP is a foundation, the requested server is the roof. Satellite ISPs harm the rights of landlords with an FTC exemption for sat dishes https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/installing-consumer-own... .

ISPs propagated due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone , yet now setup cable modems in a similar way. In 1996 people warned about this after the ISPs abused the NSF as a tier 1 network, never paying their bills. Then around 2000, Lessig released "The End of End to End" and everyone crapped on him and the ISPs said that would never happen. It did.

The point is that in terms of timeframe, scope of utilized public resources, and tiers of broken promises... they aren't comparable but both should be regulated for different reasons. An ISP fighting muni broadband is horrible and Google pretending to be a newspaper is also horrible. These however are not the same things or even the same layer of things.

I agree with you. It is too bad that the white-knights on this forum are elitist af.

> they are trying to leverage that trusted position to sell you other things

Which is what everybody is doing. Doesn't Amazon try to sell you Prime or Amazon Video or Prime Now or Echo or whatever else they have? Doesn't Facebook try to sell you advertising and promotion services? Doesn't Whole Foods, being just bought by Amazon, now try to sell you grocery delivery service by Amazon? Don't thousand of organizations have branded credit cards, branded insurance policies, branded merchandise, etc.?

Cross-sells are as old as commerce itself. I don't see anything evil in that. What's wrong in offering you a deal? If you don't want it, you don't buy it.

> Your oil/steel/water company isn't trying to get you to sign up to HBO or some discounted bundle

Water company regularly sends me insurance solicitations. Gas companies have affiliate networks with all kinds of cross-sells. I don't buy steel beams so no idea what's up there :)

> they won't because they are in the bribing/milking it/monopoly laziness phase not the competitive innovative phase

Wait, so you're complaining about ISPs offering you various "other things" for sale and at the same time you're complaining they are not offering you enough various other things for sale?

BTW, how you easy do you imagine for ISPs to innovate if they'd be tightly regulated on what they can charge, who they can charge and which traffic they can price in which way - based on fixing the current model of doing ISP business?

To innovate, you need to try various things - sometimes crazy things, sometimes wrong things, sometimes wildly unusual and controversial things. But any unusual move by ISP is commonly seen as yet another step in the evil plot of oppressing their customers - how you expect to see innovation in this space with such approach? If every new website would be considered only as a plot to steal your private data and your money - how many e-commerce startups could survive in such an environment? What if the government would crack a whip anytime somebody builds an unusual site or charges customers using a novel pricing scheme?

"good for the consumer" is sufficient reason for regulating government granted monopolies, within reason. In general it is NOT sufficient justification to regulate a company in the free market. The bar for regulation in general is substantially higher, at least in the United States. There is a bar, of course (environmental regulation preventing dumping waste or emitting carcinogenic fumes, for example) and we will likely spend millions of person hours over the next decade figuring out where it is for large content companies (which Facebook is), but saying "it's good in both cases, therefore we should regulate both types of companies" is not correct (which was your argument).

Which is to say, regulation might be justified in a less free-market oriented country, like France, on equivalent grounds, but there is a substantive moral and legal distinction to be made in the minds of many who enjoy a free market economy.

And no, Netflix is not a straw man. My argument applies just as well to Facebook, StackOverflow, Ebay (which is regulated as a commerce platform), Google, Amazon, etc., as it does to Home Depot, Walmart, etc. etc.

We default in these cases to not regulating.