Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

whitehouse.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 449 posts

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#401

Post by ajcarpy2005 »

>And then you encounter things like this by Senator Ted Cruz:

The biggest regulatory threat to the Internet is "net neutrality."

In short, net neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet. It puts the government in charge of determining Internet pricing, terms of service, and what types of products and services can be delivered, leading to fewer choices, fewer opportunities, and higher prices for consumers.

The Internet should not operate at the speed of government

>How does one even begin to engage with people that find this in any way intellectually valid?

>It doesn't even make sense and yet I have family that shares his status.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#402

Post by transfire »

If the FCC rules against Net Neutrality, there is only one thing to be done: All the network administrators in the country must band together and bring the Internet to a screeching halt. Neither the politicians, the lobbyists, nor the corporate suits have any idea how to keep these systems running. But all the system admins that do, they know full well what is at stake here. So I have no doubts about this. As long as all of the admins can organize in action, Net Neutrality will soon become the law.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#403

Post by MarkMc »

Can a net neutrality advocate please help me understand why the internet is different to physical roads and bridges?

UPS and FedEx are free to charge a different price when delivering a package from Amazon.com compared to Walmart.com.

So why should an internet service provide be prevented from charging a different price for delivering data from Amazon.com compared to Walmart.com?

Is it simply a case of there not being enough competition between internet service providers? If so, should net neutrality still be required in areas where there IS competition? For example, where I live in Australia I can get a 4G mobile data plan from any of 3 different providers (Telstra, Optus and Vodafone). Competition between them seems very effective, so is there really a need to require net neutrality in this case?

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#404

Post by redwood »

MarkMc wrote: post #403

Can a net neutrality advocate please help me understand why the internet is different to physical roads and bridges? UPS and FedEx are free to charge a different price when delivering a package from Amazon.com compared to Walmart.com. So why should an internet service provide be prevented from charging a different price for delivering data from Amazon.com compared to Walmart.com? Is it simply a case of there not bein…

because in your example any number of delivery services can go in and enter to compete for that business; but the realm of the broadband internet only 1, 2 or mayby at most 3 entities have been exclusively given the right to provide you with that access

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#406

Post by cortesoft »

warfangle wrote: post #273
AndrewHampton wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're correct and deep packet inspection is prohibited. The language being used still concerns me though. > If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. This implies that ISPs would be permitted to block illegal content. How can they know traffic is legal without some form of traffic monitoring/inspection?

Going from the court decisions, they would know that traffic is illegal if a court tells them it's illegal. Again, refer to People v. Brophy: the common carrier is not "authorized or required" to investigate. Probably meaning they can aid in investigation (e.g., supply information to police) but not perform an investigation (analyze said information themselves). In addition, Title II would probably put internet traff…

If a court decides it is illegal, they would need to tell an ISP to block... what? An IP address? Or the content?

If the former, we have issues because IP addresses are transient. If the latter, we have issues because that would require deep packet inspection.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#407

Post by guelo »

smsm42 wrote: post #395
guelo wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always considered the libertarian theory that corporate monopolies are caused by the government as very suspect and entirely unproven. Natural monopolies are obvious when you think about it a little bit. When your entire ideology depends on them not existing them maybe it's time for a rethink.

When you think a little bit, sure. When you think more than a little bit, it's not really that obvious. Remember how Microsoft was a monopoly and EU spent so much time and money on struggling with MSIE to no noticeable effect? Remember what happens now when the most wished for feature of MSIE is "please die already"? So what happened - is that EU that brought that most natural of monopolies down or was there somethin…

Not only EU, the US DOJ also sued Microsoft over their monopoly. Microsoft could have blocked Firefox, they could have banned dual booting Windows on Macs. There's a lot of things they could have done to lock down their monopoly permanently, but they didn't do them because they were afraid of government regulators breaking them up. It was a huge win for government regulation promoting innovation.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#408

Post by cortesoft »

Alupis wrote: post #293
feld wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Usenet is a common carrier service. However, they do make content inaccessible if there's a takedown request for copyright. But they don't filter anything that gets uploaded or block your downloads.

i don't think usenet is a common carrier service. if it were, it would be illegal to block or prohibit access to it... and currently a lot of ISP's explicitly block access to usenet.

Do they actually block it? I thought the issue was that ISPs stopped hosting usenet servers for their users. You can still access usenet hosted somewhere else.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#409

Post by aidenn0 »

MarkMc wrote: post #403

Can a net neutrality advocate please help me understand why the internet is different to physical roads and bridges? UPS and FedEx are free to charge a different price when delivering a package from Amazon.com compared to Walmart.com. So why should an internet service provide be prevented from charging a different price for delivering data from Amazon.com compared to Walmart.com? Is it simply a case of there not bein…

> Is it simply a case of there not being enough competition between internet service providers?

This is a big part of it (2/3) of the US have 2 or fewer options for broadband.

> UPS and FedEx are free to charge a different price when delivering a package from Amazon.com compared to Walmart.com.

This is the wrong analogy. A better one is probably a gated community (which Wikipedia tells me is rare in Australia, unfortunately, so it may not be a good one for you).

The cast of this little play is as follows:

Netflix (played by amazon).

L3, Akamai: Played by UPS and FedEx

Comcast: played by the community association

You live in the gated community. You pay the association that runs the gated community for upkeep of the roads within the gate. Part of this includes a guard who lets delivery vehicles in.

Delivery vehicles used to be relatively low volume, but Amazon becomes popular, and all of the sudden UPS trucks are coming in a lot; as in to the point where the association needs to hire a second guard to let them in. The association refuses to do it unless UPS pays a monthly fee.

Around this time, the community association starts its own online store which residents can by from without any shipping delays.

Meanwhile, FedEx (which enters the community via a different gate) is having no trouble with deliveries. Amazon notices this and starts using FedEx in addition to UPS to solve the problem. Unfortunately the same pattern as with UPS happens.

People start complaining to Amazon and UPS, which results in a blog article from UPS talking about how the Community Association wants them to pay extra for more gates into the community; this makes no sense for 2 reasons:

1) The CA is there to serve the residents, and the residents are the ones who ordered from Amazon

2) Traditionally the CA pays for any infrastructure improvements within the gate, primarily due to #1

So the CA which is supposed to be serving the interests of those living within it is now abusing its status as gatekeeper to charge Amazon for the privilege of delivering packages to it.

This finally gets resolved with Amazon, under protest, paying to put a shipping warehouse within the gate, which is something they had earlier offered to do without charge.

Re: President Obama Calls for a Free and Open Internet

#410

Post by dragonwriter »

fragsworth wrote: post #217
adevine wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Given the knee-jerk reaction of "Anything that Obama supports is bad", Ted Cruz is now tarring this as "Net Neutrality is the Obamacare of the Internet". I like how "Obamacare" has become the new Communism. A lot of people know hardly anything about it or what it's policies actually are, but it's baaaaad. I like the Digg headline about this: Ted Cruz is the Uber for stupid metaphors.

> Ted Cruz is now tarring this as "Net Neutrality is the Obamacare of the Internet". That is disastrous. If the Republicans unite against Net Neutrality just because Obama supports it, we could easily get a Republican president in the next election, and then the Internet in the U.S. will be doomed for a very long time.

> If the Republicans unite against Net Neutrality just because Obama supports it

The Republicans have been generally against Net Neutrality since before Obama became President. (Bills on the issue first started being submitted in 2006.)

Post reply on HN