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

FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 674 posts

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#411

Post by agensaequivocum »

reefoctopus wrote: post #291
agotterer wrote: post #260

While this is disappointing news and I think it will take years before it gets better. My prediction is that this won't last. When the mobile internet was first getting it's roots most of the American mobile providers offered unlimited bandwidth. Once the network become constrained and consumers started overloading the networks with streaming content the industry moved to tiered bandwidth plans. Years later a few com…

I can change my cellphone provider, but there is only one ISP in my area. Competition doesn’t bring down prices when there is none.

So you need to work on removing local and possibly state regulations/codes to make it cheaper for startup ISPs to build infrastructure.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#412

Post by milofeynman »

dmix wrote: post #361
shmerl wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

John Oliver found a good way to explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.

> The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all. This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It w…

I see your profile says "data scientist in training"

I would love for you to use some of your training to supply your post with actual data or sources. Everything I see reported disagrees with so many of your assumptions.

Like your unstated assumption of some sort of fair and competitive market where they will lose money if they don't treat their customers right. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...

The internet is so vital to our modern world that it has become a human right in several countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access#Ensur...

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#413

Post by wavefunction »

wuliwong wrote: post #405
ghewgill wrote: post #89

For those who don't understand why net neutrality is important, it is worthwhile to read about the history of communications (telephone, radio, TV). There is an excellent book by Tim Wu called The Master Switch [0] which investigates the history of communications (with an American focus), describes how each industry start out open to all (farmers using fences for telephone, independent radio broadcasters), and each o…

There is a strongly contrasting view of the history of radio in the United States [1]. [1] https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-propert...

Though this strongly contrasting view is not mainstream by any measure.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#414

Post by woodrowbarlow »

imglorp wrote: post #101
ChicagoDave wrote: post #69

It's unlikely popular and profitable services will be hindered by the lack of net neutrality. But any new services that threaten existing ones will be hard-pressed to compete. Imagine I start a new streaming service. In order for my service to reach people, ISP's will charge me a higher price than Netflix, probably a _significantly_ higher rate. This will make it extremely difficult for my new service to reach enough…

> It's unlikely popular and profitable services will be hindered by the lack of net neutrality. Huh? Did you forget already that both Verizon and Comcast throttled services like Netflix? They both argued they should get a cut if they were going to carry the traffic to their customers. Now they're getting exactly what they wanted. 1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz... 2. https://consumeris…

the big companies will happily pay. for their money they are getting a promise that any potential competitor will have to climb over a wall before entering the ring.

the big companies just don't want to be the _only_ ones paying.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#415

Post by so33 »

IronWolve wrote: post #350
niftich wrote: post #137

Repealing net neutrality would only make sense if the layer underneath (the PHY consisting of fiber/copper/coax/wireless/whatever infrastucture including last-mile connections between every node) were subject to net neutrality instead [1], such that "anyone" could start an ISP that offers differentiated services on top of the same infra. Of course, today the last-mile infra and the ISP on top are tightly coupled, and…

True. Access (services) vs. censorship, you want to avoid the monopolies from restricting new access providers, but also don't want access providers from censoring the access. The right wants isp/telcos to be able to bundle and offer more speeds/services. Assuming it won't censor. The left assumes isp/telcos will offer services/bundles (tiers) but will censor its services/bundles. (Like it did with netflix.) As most…

In Canada, the CRTC requires the big internet providers to resell their broadband to smaller ISPs. Even then it took a decade for big ISPs like Rogers to give up on onerous bandwidth caps (which would be about 100GB a month, and, usually, worse).

Even with some competition and access, it can take a while for unfavorable conditions to resolve, partially because consumers don’t really care about things like censorship, lack of access, (or in my example) bandwidth limits.

Markets are eventually consistent, but in terms of net neutrality I really don’t think we can afford to wait.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#416

Post by artursapek »

XeO3 wrote: post #345

There was an article on techdirt which outlined the aftermath of killing NN in Portugal. The ISP started splitting net into several packages. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNGlrABUIAAr9RO.jpg:large

https://twitter.com/Sinius1/status/923982728424513536

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#418

Post by Brotkrumen »

bluetidepro wrote: post #203
Brotkrumen wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc the netflix CEO himself said in the beginning of this that net neutrality is good for small to medium upstarts and bad for incumbents. Netflix now is an incumbent with enough bargaining power to get a good price for that access and fastlane. Netflix future competitor won't have that bargaining power and will be forced to offer their product more expensively. Same with all the big e-businesses

So are you implying that the tech giants used in all the examples of why we should be saving this are the ones that don't actually even care, because this would help them stay giants and hurt new competition from rising to compete with them? ...If that's the case, I feel like the media should change their prospective in promoting awareness to fight for the companies that this is ACTUALLY going to effect more so then…

Those companies don't exist yet. What sounds better "If you don't save net neutrality, you will pay extra for Facebook!"

or

"Without net neutrality you might have to pay for a service that doesnt exist yet!"

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#419

Post by NegativeLatency »

mediocrejoker wrote: post #296
shanusmagnus wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) Do you think it would be okay for a hardware store to price a shovel differently depending on what the customer wanted to dig? 2) The telcos never seem to reflect on the fact that the only reason people want broadband at all is because there are services that they want to access. So just by existing they're already getting their cut. It would be just as reasonable for Amazon and Netflix to ask Comcast for a cut of…

I think hardware stores are maybe not the best comparison because if a hardware store was doing that then it would be pretty easy for a competitor to open a hardware store across the street and undercut the first on shovels and steal all the business. I think this might be a better solution than a law that specifically mandates the price at which a hardware store can sell shovels, since I think that law would only ad…

To agree with your initial point: hardware stores do sell different kinds of shovels, for different digging tasks.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#420

Post by outsidetheparty »

dmix wrote: post #388
skywhopper wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a choice of ISPs?

Yes, and if you are in the minority of people who don't this will incentivize every nerd in your area to create an ISP to offer unfiltered internet. But more importantly this doesn't depend on competition to make ISPs realize it's a bad idea either. The technical hurdles and push back from the tech companies, media, and public are being extremely underrated. This whole scenario is far more complicated than the ISPs m…

> At the FCC's 25Mbps download/3Mbps upload broadband standard, there are no ISPs at all in 30 percent of developed census blocks and only one offering service that fast in 48 percent of the blocks. About 55 percent of census blocks have no 100Mbps/10Mbps providers, and only about 10 percent have multiple options at that speed. ... these numbers overstate the amount of competition, because an ISP might offer service to only part of a census block. The percentage of households with choice is thus even lower[1]

I guess technically 48% is a minority. Sure is an awful lot of people, though.

(Yes, if you drop all the way down to DSL speeds then most people do have more than one choice of provider. Ever tried to stream video at DSL speeds? Or shudder satellite?)

[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...

Post reply on HN