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Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

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Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#111
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just in Lima, Peru. This is what you see if you're on Facebook on someone's phone (I was tethering), and click a link that takes you outside of Facebook: https://s22.postimg.org/lilkrmo4x/Screen_Shot_2017-06-21_at_... What do you think your chances of competing against Facebook, or Facebook-based businesses, are, when clients see this before accessing your site?

Any viable competitor will necessarily have the resources to strike a similar deal. I think your argument boils down to "is unfair that Facebook has more resources than a competing startup", which is no truer without NN (in my mind, anyway).

Facebook competitor may be unlikely, but newspapers striking local deals with Facebook vs. newspapers which don't, is likely.

It's a huge, huge fallacy to claim "this thing would happen regardless, so who cares how difficult we make it for it to happen". Your mind is wrong.

I'm proud of India for rejecting Zuckerberg's ploy, and I wish Peru was wise enough to do the same.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#112
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to downvote you because of how intensely I disagree with everything you're saying, but you're saying it nicely so I won't. Instead - The major concern about losing NN is that instead of just paying for volume of data, I'll also be required to pay based on type and/or source of that data, and that the entities providing the data will also be required to pay based on type and/or destination. Do you think this co…

Thank you for not downvoting me. Free market would be part of my answer if I had one. I'm not well-informed enough to say much, but imagine you have a local link in a small rural town that only support some absolute number of packets or whatever: if you have one big consumer that is eating the major part of that every day, making the others miserable, isn't it reasonable to limit that consumer's bandwidth somehow? Th…

Hmm. Not a bad analogy / question.

I think -

So first up, the "types" metrics don't analogize well. AFAIK, there are legit types of traffic - high bandwidth, low bandwith; burst, continuous; high latency OK, low latency required. Seems pretty reasonable to charge based on this (although, slippery slope and all that.)

These types then correlate to food items; the steak, the veggies, the pasta.

The first issue you run into is that "brand" is not "type". Classic: Hulu should not be a different type of traffic than Netflix; Bing vs Google, etc (if there are any other pairs like those...). The follow-up problem here is then actually enacting categorization; Netflix is subscription only, Hulu has ads, and I wouldn't be surprised if the tech resulted in importantly different kinds of traffic (according to above metrics).

The second issue is that it's not analogous, because I don't pay the restaurant to attend, and the chefs don't pay the restaurant to cook. Now, you could twiddle these nobs - "internet" is free, but all offerings aren't (and then Yahoo! News becomes the free bread...); or the ISP pays the sites it makes accessible (TV cable style, with all it's flaws).

So I think the real issue with the comparison is that it either doesn't compare (restaurants), or it does compare and the other thing, well, kinda sucks (TV cable), and NN becomes the fight to keep this great thing we've got from becoming this mediocre thing we tried to abandon.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#113
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buying yahoo was a very dumb move for VZ unless they just want hold assets OR completely overhaul yahoo. Yahoo has been a losing brand since circa 2000. Soon as yahoo took over tumblr it started to suck more. source : I work on other peoples tumblrs site all the time

AOL does a lot of advertising. Yahoo has a ton of eyeballs. Verizon has data. That already is a good match for all three. Yahoo is still close to a top 5 site. Definitely top 10. Yahoo also owns some advertising infrastructure like Brightroll and Flurry. I have experience in Brightroll myself. It's not that rare to run across people spending close to $100K a week on Brightroll. It wasn't a bad move at all. They were…

This is how the Fox News of the internet is made.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#114
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we need diversity of opinion, perhaps you could up-vote someone that believes that the earth is flat or black is white. There are out there some readily determinable facts, and it is perfectly fine for all of our opinions to be the same as it concerns those facts. For example, almost everyone on earth will be of the opinion that fire is hotter than ice. Do we all suffer from group think? If someone believes that f…

Do you consider your position so weak that it can't withstand a debate? I've phrased this bluntly for effect. If you say an idea is mistaken, then you've said the worst thing you can say about it. Censoring it only pushes inquisitive minds further into their camp. If HN has become a place where mistaken ideas are no longer tolerated (in the sense that you can't lay out your reasoning without being attacked) then we'v…

Some things don't need to be debated every day.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#115
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to downvote you because of how intensely I disagree with everything you're saying, but you're saying it nicely so I won't. Instead - The major concern about losing NN is that instead of just paying for volume of data, I'll also be required to pay based on type and/or source of that data, and that the entities providing the data will also be required to pay based on type and/or destination. Do you think this co…

I'm not opposed to NN, but your phrasing piqued my curiosity: Why is it bad that ISPs charge us based on type/source of data? Should grocery stores charge us by volume (mass?) of food instead of by type/source/etc? If aggregating costs is indeed more moral, why should it be enforced by law (as opposed to the food example)? Providing robust answers to these questions should strengthen the NN position.

Oh, oh, this is good question!

And actually, I think an unusual answer is:

Grocery stores kind of suck, actually. I know I'm not able to get the best need/product fit, because of all the presentation that goes into it (display case arrangement, psychology of product locations...).

You can pay the grocery store to make me think your product is better, instead of having a better product. You also have to get your product into the grocery store in the first place, which is a serious hurdle.

On the other hand, 90% of everything is crap, and you actually need special skills to navigate the free-for-all street markets... which still have a lot of the same problems.

Under such a view, it's not that NN is great, it's that everything else (that's known) is worse.

The real answer is they're really not analogous enough to compare this way, even if comparing them yields interesting thoughts.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#116
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oi, I suppose archiving Tumblr is this weekend's project.

They currently have 150B posts ( https://www.tumblr.com/about ) so I expect that to be quite challenging. If you seriously make any progress though, it'd be cool to see.

Step 1: Hack into a supercomputing center with at least 1Gbps line.

Step 2: Massively-parallel downloading of all the sites using clustered nodes, compression of it, and resulting data stored into high-performance, clustered filesystem.

Step 3: Move it off of there when traffic is low or overnight if system doesn't go offline overnight.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#117
post #5

Net neutrality makes internet more expensive for everybody so Torrent and Netflix users can be subsidized. It looks right, but it is WRONG to "defend" it using law and force.

Could you explain yourself better? You make assumptions with no evidence.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#118
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oi, I suppose archiving Tumblr is this weekend's project.

They currently have 150B posts ( https://www.tumblr.com/about ) so I expect that to be quite challenging. If you seriously make any progress though, it'd be cool to see.

Maybe 1:100 of those (being incredibly generous) are actually unique posts and not someone else reposting something from someone else, so maybe it's not such a hard task...

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#119
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They currently have 150B posts ( https://www.tumblr.com/about ) so I expect that to be quite challenging. If you seriously make any progress though, it'd be cool to see.

Maybe 1:100 of those (being incredibly generous) are actually unique posts and not someone else reposting something from someone else, so maybe it's not such a hard task...

It's fairly common for commentary to be added to a reblog via tags rather than after the quoted post, so even reblogs without commentary may need saving.

Re: Verizon is killing Tumblr’s fight for net neutrality

#120
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for not downvoting me. Free market would be part of my answer if I had one. I'm not well-informed enough to say much, but imagine you have a local link in a small rural town that only support some absolute number of packets or whatever: if you have one big consumer that is eating the major part of that every day, making the others miserable, isn't it reasonable to limit that consumer's bandwidth somehow? Th…

I don't think your 'small rural town' metaphor is solved by removing net neutrality. From the provider's point of view, who cares if someone is using up 1000 packets of youtube or 1000 packets of nytimes? They cost the same from the provider's stand point (unlike 1kg lobster vs 1kg of bread for a restaurant). Filtering by content doesn't change anything, network providers can already charge by amount of traffic. If t…

Right.

> A start-up can't just 'interrupt' the market

...like they can on the Internet. Unless... Even on the Internet... They have to fight themselves into a preferable "package" as created as the result of no net neutrality.

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