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Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

blog.ycombinator.com

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Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#51

Post by troygoode »

3rd3 wrote: post #45
harrystone wrote: post #10

I appreciate what Alexis is trying to do here but I hope he isn't assuming that the FCC just doesn't understand the problem. That's how this reads to me. Maybe the idea is to be diplomatic. I don't think the FCC cares. The FCC understands what is going on and it wants to do whatever is best for the FCC. The best thing for tech companies to do is to start destroying some political careers. That's the only thing the ma…

How would one go about destroying someone’s political career?

By financing their opponent in the primaries.

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#53

Post by joelhaus »

nikanj wrote: post #24
joelhaus wrote: post #16

Todays FCC commissioners have a unique opportunity; they can choose to shirk their responsibility to the public and kill the promise of the internet or they can go down in history as its saviors... the commission that preserved the internet as an economic engine of growth for generations to come.

Preserved it until next year anyway, when the next version of the "we like money and power" bill is introduced. The problem with fighting big corporations is that we only need to lose once, and they have a non-trivial amount of highly motivated people on payroll just to do the fighting.

A title II classification would be a huge deal. Not that people could rest on their laurels, but my sense is that it would be more difficult to undo than you are letting on.

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#54

Post by gibsonf1 »

juliangamble wrote: post #37
alexqgb wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the essence of contemporary lobbying. Most legislators can be persuaded with campaign contributions (the carrot) but those that can't get threatened with the stick, which comes in the form of a previously unheard of but suddenly flush primary opponent. Add gerrymandering to the mix, and this tactic becomes even harder to resist, since the effective sidelining of an opposing party means that no matter what else…

Lawrence Lessig is working on a people-power initiative to fix the problem of getting private finance out of elections: https://mayday.us/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC

Eric Cantor proved that you can't buy an election with money. Ideas ultimately are what count in an election, and to the extent that any good ideas are removed from the public realm with this scheme, we all lose. The last thing we want is the government regulating money spent on political speech - the corruption potential is absolutely enormous - hence the First Amendment.

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#55

Post by benihana »

harrystone wrote: post #10

I appreciate what Alexis is trying to do here but I hope he isn't assuming that the FCC just doesn't understand the problem. That's how this reads to me. Maybe the idea is to be diplomatic. I don't think the FCC cares. The FCC understands what is going on and it wants to do whatever is best for the FCC. The best thing for tech companies to do is to start destroying some political careers. That's the only thing the ma…

The FCC has specifically asked people to comment on their proposal. Either they do care, or they're staging some very bizarre and pointless PR stunt because it really doesn't matter if anyone likes them or not.

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#56

Post by parkovski »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #43

What about other forms of "neutrality"? The BBC is required to maintain "balance" over political issues. Should Google return the same results to all queries (ie no search bubble allowed?) Should Facebook (indeed any advertiser) be required to serve the same advert no matter what the profile of the incoming request? I mean Billboards are public broadcasts not private to me, why should online advertising be different?…

I think the problem is with choice. I can get either CenturyLink or Cox where I live, and if they both decide to throttle certain services, I just have to live with it.

If I don't like Google, I can use Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc. Same with Facebook.

Or I can start my own. Starting a search engine or social network is easy. Getting any market share is hard, since Google and FB are doing a good job, but they know how easily they could be overtaken if they screw up.

I can't start an ISP because I can't use the existing infrastructure and I can't afford to build my own. But Google Fiber shows that if I could start one that doesn't suck, I'd probably have a relatively easy time getting customers, because the competition is so bad.

I agree though, Google and FB make some choices we probably don't like, but it's impossible to regulate everything (and most people wouldn't want to), so we leave it for cases where the free market has proven not to work.

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#57

Post by sdenton4 »

zmanian wrote: post #23

A lot of folks on the legal/policy side of this debate believe that a regulator can distinguish between network administration that is monopolistic rent seeking and that which is value added services. I'm very suspicious of this as an engineer. I suspect it is very hard to tell the difference. In a competitive environment, we can more easily discover the difference. I strongly prefer imposing competition at the last…

Right. We've had 'competition' in the last mile for the last twenty years, and it's led to terrible service and slower broadband than anywhere else in the developed world. Because that 'competition' leads to lots of local monopolies of the worst sort. We've already discovered the difference on this issue.

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#58

Post by [deleted] »

gibsonf1 wrote: post #54
juliangamble wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lawrence Lessig is working on a people-power initiative to fix the problem of getting private finance out of elections: https://mayday.us/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayday_PAC

Eric Cantor proved that you can't buy an election with money. Ideas ultimately are what count in an election, and to the extent that any good ideas are removed from the public realm with this scheme, we all lose. The last thing we want is the government regulating money spent on political speech - the corruption potential is absolutely enormous - hence the First Amendment.

[deleted]

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#59

Post by vacri »

jacquesm wrote: post #20
alexis wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fixed. Thanks. I can't tell you how many times I and others read over that and somehow missed it. So it goes with typos.

Typos tend to materialize when you hit 'submit', 'publish' or other similarly labeled buttons. Very annoying. At least we've left the days of lead type behind so fixing is a bit quicker.

Sometimes I wonder if those buttons have some kind of 'scramble grammar' logic built into them...

Re: Y Combinator has filed an official comment with the FCC

#60

Post by daxelrod »

sdenton4 wrote: post #57
zmanian wrote: post #23

A lot of folks on the legal/policy side of this debate believe that a regulator can distinguish between network administration that is monopolistic rent seeking and that which is value added services. I'm very suspicious of this as an engineer. I suspect it is very hard to tell the difference. In a competitive environment, we can more easily discover the difference. I strongly prefer imposing competition at the last…

Right. We've had 'competition' in the last mile for the last twenty years, and it's led to terrible service and slower broadband than anywhere else in the developed world. Because that 'competition' leads to lots of local monopolies of the worst sort. We've already discovered the difference on this issue.

Wait, who has been pretending that what we have now is competition? Most places I've lived have had a choice of the local phone monopoly or the local cable monopoly.
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