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

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

#41

Post by Coincoin »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #30
deelowe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Late 90s/early 2000s when there were tons of smaller isps offering a variety of solutions. This was back when operating a CLEC was a viable option before the incumbents found a way to fix that issue.

I really miss these days. Sure the internet speeds were painfully slow, but I knew my ISP. I could go have lunch with them. I could borrow compute resources during slow times. I think when the cable companies started monopolizing the internet and the web because commercialized, that's when we lost a lot of computing's early "innocence". I'm sure someone will say I'm romanticizing that period, but darnit, just let me…

For a while, the best and cheapest ISP in Montreal was a beauty products company. They had a shit ton of modems in a back store and a very good admin I guess.

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

#42

Post by alehul »

ryandrake wrote: post #32
drawkbox wrote: post #20

The ISPs are in an all out attack on competitors like Facebook/Google/Netflix/others. ISPs bought their way into the market with the ISP privacy protections being removed [1][2] and net neutrality being killed rather than innovating. The privacy protections being removed helped lessen the FCC grip on privacy and helped their case, with legislators not the people, to remove FCC net neutrality protections. It is obviou…

I’d rather have 10 ISPs competing but NOT innovating than one ISP bent on innovating. Innovation, to an ISP, means: ads, data collection, pushing their own content; basically everything except being a dumb pipe that gets bits from elsewhere into my home.

What about throwing capital at developing a better way to route traffic than BGP? Or trying to further increase bandwidth and be a faster 'dumb pipe'?

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

#43

Post by 908087 »

testvox wrote: post #40
908087 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISPs are going to have a hard time competing with the data gathered by Google Analytics and similar services given the accelerating push towards most sites being encrypted. If DNS encryption becomes more prevalent (edit: and users start taking advantage of privacy-conscious DNS providers outside of the control of their ISPs), they'll have an even harder time still. connected to and transferred at just isn't that valu…

Because it doesn't make sense. Why would they ISPs care that you are encrypting your dns requests in transit? The vast majority of people still use whatever DNS servers their ISPs tell them to use. So the ISP controls the other side of the encrypted communication, making the encryption useless for preventing them from reading it.

I specifically said "If DNS encryption becomes more prevalent". Obviously this point becomes null if the user is using the ISP's own DNS servers. I guess I should have said, "If DNS encryption becomes more prevalent and users start taking advantage of privacy-conscious third party DNS providers".

You've also chosen one very specific part of my post and used it to attempt to claim the entire post doesn't make sense. What about the rest? Even if you ignore the entire DNS-related portion of my post, there's no way you can claim that ISPs are able to access anywhere near as much data as GA/etc when users are mostly accessing encrypted sites.

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

#44

Post by jerf »

Reedx wrote: post #26
mtgx wrote: post #16

Silicon Valley brought this to itself. I used to warn of this before, too, that they can't continue to do "evil stuff" and expect to have people's backing when the governments will come after them to regulate them for whatever reason. But they continued because they saw that nobody leaves them over the crap they pull so they thought there must be no consequences to their anti-consumer moves. The only downside I see i…

That's like what the game industry went through in the early 90s. When Mortal Kombat and the like were generating controversy and getting the attention of regulators, the industry proactively created the ESRB.

There's a big difference though. "The video game industry" wasn't really in the business of creating video games that offended cultural norms. It had a subcomponent of that industry that did it, sure, but even that subcomponent would have survived by making different games with regulation.

There is a lot of Silicon Valley right now whose core business is doing the things that are very likely to be regulated out of existence.

So I'd say self-regulation isn't an option at this point, as "self-regulation" is asking Facebook to return to unprofitability with no prospect of profit in the future, the destruction of huge swathes of the ad industry, any number of other companies based around data mining and selling and abusing information asymmetries... there's no way the wolves are going to self-regulate themselves into dogs.

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

#46

Post by TAForObvReasons »

wgerard wrote: post #39
TAForObvReasons wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single regulation starts from an "untenable place", almost by definition. What happens in every industry is "abuse" -> "collective realization that there's a problem" -> "close the hole that allowed the abuse to happen". Self-regulation is only a solution if the industry at large addresses the concerns early and acts in good faith. That did not and is currently not happening with SV and data privacy. The fact t…

> Every single regulation starts from an "untenable place", almost by definition. I guess I'd disagree with that. Many environmental regulations are highly defensible, for example, especially when they arise in light of new evidence. I could also be wrong, but I don't believe most environmental regulations are proposed by powerful, monopolistic competitors of oil companies (which is a big part of what makes this prop…

Environmental regulations are a great example because large parts of the US population are in communities tied to industries that were eventually saddled with environmental regulations. Many of those people believe that the regulations are part of why their industries declined. For them, the environmental regulations are not highly defensible.

Similarly in tech, many of the people arguing against regulations are economically incentivized to minimize the regulations. FB knew exactly what they were doing, third party developers at the time sounded the alarm [1] about how FB's API structure guaranteed that abuse would happen. What we're seeing now is the digital equivalent of BP Deepwater, where people warned about the safety before the incident and no one cared.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-...

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

#48

Post by s73v3r_ »

mkirklions wrote: post #17

As someone that is programming a finance tech app, every regulation is bad for the future. I am not afraid of regulation but its an annoying burden to keep big players big, and small players non-existent. Most people do not have the money or motivation I have, and those people lose out because of regulations. Never let a good tragedy go to waste.

I mean, if people are deterred by regulation from making apps that don't respect people's data and privacy, I'd consider that a win. For far, far too long, the ethos has been to not worry or care about your users; to not protect their privacy, and to just vacuum up all their data so you can sell it. I'll be more than happy to see those days go away.

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

#49

Post by ethbro »

drawkbox wrote: post #20

The ISPs are in an all out attack on competitors like Facebook/Google/Netflix/others. ISPs bought their way into the market with the ISP privacy protections being removed [1][2] and net neutrality being killed rather than innovating. The privacy protections being removed helped lessen the FCC grip on privacy and helped their case, with legislators not the people, to remove FCC net neutrality protections. It is obviou…

I find it ironic that two classes of monopolies (ISPs and Big Web) are being discussed here with diametrically opposed recommendations.

For ISPs, the council is that they should be regulated (e.g. net neutrality, data privacy).

For Facebook, Google, et al. the council is that they shouldn't be regulated (e.g. EU GDPR).

I have yet to see a cogent argument justifying that difference. My suspicion is that it ultimately falls down to "ISPs are unpopular, web companies are popular."

When it comes down to it, regulation promoting consumer privacy, price and TOS transparency, and access by new entrants to the market is almost always beneficial... to the consumer.

Because let's not kid ourselves that Facebook or Google are fundamentally different than someone who owns the last mile of your network connectivity.

Their current behavior might be (mostly) benevolent, but the centralization they've engineered means if they want to maximize monetization tomorrow...

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

#50

Post by cwyers »

This article feels so slanted it's unreadable. Conceding that Facebook and Google probably actually do need to be regulated happens near the very bottom of the article; until then you'd be forgiven for thinking that the ISPs made all their concerns about those companies up.
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