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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

#91

Post by natch »

"Let me be clear: we need a bright-line, per se rule against discrimination, access fees, and paid prioritization on both mobile and fixed."

It would be hard to be less clear than this. When you have a comma-separated list of things you want a rule against, you need to either repeat the word "against" or risk having people at the FCC, who may just be dumb enough to make the mistake, think that you mean you want a rule against only the first thing you mention.

A naive reading of this (again, this is the FCC) would be that you mean we DO need access fees and paid prioritization, which I guess is the opposite of what you mean.

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

#92

Post by vidarh »

EGreg wrote: post #87
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…

I'm always curious as to why people think politicians are more motivated by reelection prospects that, say, their legacy or actually representing their personal views or convictions. I mean, I can understand why the ones that make it into office are the ones that fight hard to get elected in the first place, but once they are there, why wouldn't you expect a lot of them to take pride in actually representing their di…

Some do. But consider some simple mechanics of it:

It you care about your legacy, and your opponent only cares about getting (re-)elected to benefit from the position, your opponent is at an advantage: Your opponent does not need to "waste" time, money and effort on things that does not improve their chances at (re-)election.

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

#94

Post by jdoliner »

natch wrote: post #91

"Let me be clear: we need a bright-line, per se rule against discrimination, access fees, and paid prioritization on both mobile and fixed." It would be hard to be less clear than this. When you have a comma-separated list of things you want a rule against, you need to either repeat the word "against" or risk having people at the FCC, who may just be dumb enough to make the mistake, think that you mean you want a rul…

I think it's pretty unlikely that the FCC is going to try to follow this letter exactly only to make a semantic slipup like the one you describe. I don't know why you think the people at the FCC are dumb. They do seem to be an organization with several conflicts of interest, but I think they're capable of figuring this sentence out.

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

#95

Post by snogglethorpe »

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.

Isn't the issue really those square quotes? Maybe the U.S. nominally has such competition, but based on what I've read, it sounds like most people don't feel they have much actual choice.

Compare this to a place like Tokyo, where there's a vast number of real competitors for both last-mile infrastructure (wires / low-level communication) and ISP services, and perhaps even more critically, those two components seem to be largely decoupled. That decoupling seems like it would go a long way in helping to avoid the sort of net-neutrality shenigans than seem to be occurring with U.S. ISPs these days, by dramatically decreasing barriers to entry for new ISPs.

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

#97

Post by azernik »

jobu wrote: post #18
sundance0 wrote: post #6

> Y Combinator is Silicon Valley’s premiere early stage investor. Shouldn't it be 'premier'? I know, not a big deal, but a mistake on the first line doesn't scream 'Best in the Business' if you ask me.

In a letter like this is it typical to state credentials before stating the intention of the letter? I'm not an expert in persuasive writing, but the form I learned was something like this: 1. question, concern or objection 2. bona fides and background information 3. vision for change or outcome 4. call to action There are probably a multitude of theories on how to persuade or influence people, so I'm genuinely curio…

American political writing, especially to courts and legal bodies but in some cases also public appeals (like campaign ads and ballot statements on propositions in CA) tend to swap 1 and 2; I believe this is with the intent of making the statements on the issue a more coherent and concise message.

I believe that in legal writing, there's the additional intent of making it easier for a professional to skip over the boilerplate introductions of the bona fides and jump straight to the relevant content - and make no mistake, this is absolutely a legal filing, intended to persuade a small group of professionals, with their careers and maybe also some actual principles at stake. The effect on the broader public is kind of incidental.

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

#99

Post by edoceo »

larrys wrote: post #48
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.

"I can't tell you how many times I and others read over that" From years of being in the graphics business I noted that people tended to miss words that weren't particularly difficult but at the same time (and same people) usually caught difficult words. My reasoning was that people "chunk" the easy frequent words but slow down and think about every letter in the difficult words. Some of the most common errors were a…

I've read that when not perusing the text we are only looking at the first and last letters of a word and in some cases the general shape of the word to determine which word it is, leading to frequent typos by otherwise very intelligent thoughtful people. Cheers to YC.

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

#100

Post by m12k »

benihana wrote: post #55
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.

The vibe I've been getting from Tom Wheeler is that he would probably personally prefer reclassifying ISPs as common carriers, but there's a ton of powerful forces leaning on him not to, and his half-assed proposal is the best he could get. But if he could point to an "anti-SOPA-like" grassroots movement and go "There's a ton of bad PR if you mess with these people, we better give them what they want", he might be allowed to reclassify after all. Though I'll be the first to admit, the sudden disappearance of half a million comments from the FCC site doesn't really corroborate this theory...
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