FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

Oh, some kind of, "ISPs want to tailor a good service and do some clever optimisation but can't with NN"?

What we need is to move all last mile infrastructure to municipal broadband.

US ISPs have been an unmitigated disaster that have exposed everything wrong with how infrastructure is built under a capitalist organization of the economy. Monopoly franchise agreements, rent-seeking, bundling of cable channels, lobbying for laws against net neutrality, lobbying for laws against municipal broadband and lobbying for laws against "overbuilds" in general.

On top of that ISPs place significant hurdles over anyone who gets permission to build. This can be as simple as the process by which cables are strung up to poles. In some places each pole may require a separate planning application and existing cables may need to be moved. The owners may have 90 days to move their cables. They will take that. They may even take longer and just pay the fine. If several need to be moved they may be done serially so it may take 1-2 years just to get permission to put a cable up on a pole that the city technically owns.

We have service blackspots where ISPs are given huge sums to roll out service and simply don't. A lot of municipal broadband started because Comcat, AT&T, Spectrum or whoever simply refused to provide service or charged a ridiculous amount (eg $50k to connect).

The best Internet in the US is municipal eg Chattanooga.

Utilities are heavily regulated because we know what would happen if they weren't: inelastic demand would simply result in providers jacking up prices to increase profit. People would die from necessities like electricity, water and heating being withheld.

I support net neutrality but it largely wouldn't be necessary if we had municipal broadband and the infrastructure for virtual network providers. Some effort would still be required for peering arrangements.

> Net neutrality is wildly popular with the public.

I didn’t say it explicitly but I think this is the real reason that the ISPs largely haven’t changed their business practices independent of what the FCC says it can or can’t do. They don’t want the FCC in their shit, but they also don’t plan to do all of the worst case scenarios envisioned in say, this video from 2006: https://youtu.be/cWt0XUocViE

And one of the scenarios that did come to pass (high speed and slow speed lanes) was never even prohibited by the FCC back when it did pass net neutrality rules: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/01/netflix-is-so-bi...

> Netflix ultimately paid ISPs for interconnection but the dispute had an impact on the FCC's net neutrality proceedings. The FCC didn't ban interconnection payments but set up a complaint process so that companies like Netflix can challenge specific payment demands as being "unjust" or "unreasonable." There have been no major public disputes since then.

So I mean, I get it. In 2006 it was easy to see how turning the Internet into cable TV would be terrible, but if that was ever a danger, it probably isn’t now? And the internet is so much more important now that if it ever did look like that was going to happen, we could pass a real law then. In the mean time I’m going to enjoy listening to the court proceedings when the FCC is sued because they said they didn’t have the power to govern ISPs when they had a different set of commissioners.

It's not clear to me which party is more supportive of a 'free' internet. During the Trump and COVID era Democrats became much more aggressive in advocating for and explicitly pushing censorship regimes against what they consider to be misinformation.

Probably any political faction on earth is going to want to control information flows to their advantage. Whoever you vote for will probably want to censor or limit the reach of the speech of their enemies. The parties don't have actual principles on this stuff--vote for whomever has the same enemies as you I guess.

Leaving it up to what people are willing and capable of doing sounds as fair as can be to me. That's what competition is there for. It also is not perfect, but it is better.

I expect to get dogpiled on Hacker News though. The demographic here has a fondness of rules. We give computers rules. That fondness translates to non-technical fields, for better or for worse. In this case, worse.