Part of the problem 'net neutrality' faces is its name. The average US citizen has no idea what 'net neutrality' means when they hear it, and can't be bothered to learn about it.
If it had been branded 'internet freedom' then we wouldn't even be having this discussion because it would be toxic for politicians to mess with something called 'internet freedom.'
Source: Sat through way too many focus groups testing communications concepts in my life...
Calling this concept anything but "internet freedom" once it crossed from "concept" to "mainstream political debate" is a little bit like shooting your horse in the hoof before it leaves the gate.
Sticking to "net neutrality" seemingly resulted in ISP's treating the phrase like courts treat jury nullification and the FCC making this an across-the-isle issue about corporate investment and infrastructure costs rather than regional monopolies, tiered access, slow lanes, etc.
I'm not naive enough to blame this on the name alone, but I'm also curious to see how net neutrality might fair when pushed onto ISP's and mobile carriers alike as "internet freedom."
Isn't this what happens when you do everything through the executive, rather than legislative, branch? If net neutrality were required by law, the FCC chairman would to some degree be compelled to enforce it.
Weird, I seem to remember the legislative branch repealing some regulations that nearly all Americans support exactly on party lines in order to make the Internet worse recently...
It doesn't matter at all in this particular instance because the people who want to remove NN own both branches and can do it just as easily no matter where the rules come from. The only things that can persist in the face of a 1 party lockstep government like this is a constitutional amendment, or something that is so widely popular and easily understandable that repealing it is political suicide, like health care.
There is a good chance you are right. With that said, privacy isn't important to Google and Facebook, but net neutrality is important to their business. I think if net neutrality repeal were in a congressional bill, a lot of big companies would come out to lobby against the repeal. That has a chance of making a difference, whereas in this case everything is up to Ajit Pai.
Also, if it didn't make a difference if you used a bill or not, why wouldn't the conservative FCC commissioners just strike down the privacy rules at the FCC and be done with it? My guess is because they want to make it harder to bring privacy rules back if a democrat president were elected.
Yeah, the republicans would have to take an extra couple weeks to slash and burn if it was legislated instead.
You are still correct that regulation is more flexible. It's a double edged sword. Without the FCC to regulate would we have even gotten net neutrality in the first place? Would we be able to adapt to changing conditions easily?
When things are just rules or policies, they can be enacted and removed with a stroke of a pen or by a handful of people voting. When it's the law, they at least have some external pressure to enforce it..
No. The FCC is an independent (not executive) federal agency, and ultimately serve at the pleasure of the Congress. Congress granted FCC their statutory authority to regulate (and can revoke it).
FCC commissioners go through presidential appointment and senate confirmation, and almost always has as a 2-1 or 3-2 party split. This DOES make the Commission's direction subject to different political winds than just the executive, or just the Congress. But that doesn't make them under the executive any more than that confirmation process makes the judiciary part of the executive.
> No. The FCC is an independent (not executive) federal agency, and ultimately serve at the pleasure of the Congress. Congress granted FCC their statutory authority to regulate (and can revoke it).
While this is generally an important distinction, I'm not sure it really matters in this case. The point is we have a new president and thus new FCC chairman and commissioners, and thus a new FCC policy. If Obama and the democratic congress he had had passed a law mandating net neutrality, Ajit Pai would have a much harder time "fast-tracking" a repeal of net neutrality.
It's amazing how much money influences these politicians. I would be amazed if any of the people who voted for this bill even fully understand what it is.
It's also amazing how little it costs to buy them. It's on the order of a hundred thousand dollars. Check out campaign contributions and you'll see. It needs to be at least 10-100x more expensive to really make a difference. It'd be hilarious / depressing is politicians started colluding to squeeze companies for orders of magnitude more in bribes (sorry, "campaign contributions").
I wonder if it would be possible to make some kind of "internet superpack". Like a collection of registered voters who would crowdfund more money than they are getting.
As a total outsider - it's amazing that a place as huge as the US has a two-party system. splitting everything into one camp or the other makes for groupings that don't always work.
In Tennessee Comcast emailed our state house asking if they want free TV political advertising, this was the day after blocking the expansion of municipal owned broadband. They know what they are doing.
> It's amazing how much money influences these politicians.
I don't understand the hand-wringing[1], why don't the well-paid technologists use their money to influence politicians too? Where is the copyleft-equivalent judo move to Citizens United? Are techies so savvy that getting involved in politics is beneath us? Or is Slacktivism enough 'engagement'? Black site banners can only take you so far.
Yes, but this was decades ago. Pai's tenure was more recent. On top of that, he has a few years in as an FCC commissioner where he's consistently voted down every pro-consumer act, and even outright refused to meet with Tom Wheeler during his time there.
For every bill we manage to push back, they just make another one with a slightly different name. They are taking advantage of the fact that people can only get up in arms so many times.
Part of me wants to make a really nice website to shine a spotlight on these corporate shills and track their offenses. Obviously, we can legitimately argue about the merits of some laws and regulations, but others are obvious corporate power grabs that objectively leave us worse off. And to officials who sell us out but are sure to be re-elected, like Marsha Blackburn, she needs to know that there are people who recognize her as a traitor to the interests of the American people.
If something like this existed, with the source code on Github with a detailed contributing.md document, I would spend time on it. We have great tools available to do this and it is a worthy cause.
Is there anything that can be done here? Pai and his little buddy O'Rielly have an easy majority on the FCC here, and I doubt they'll listen to any comments. Short of like, the Trump government being dismantled before then, how do you get rid of such a transparently corrupt head of a federal agency?
Let them do their thing until people are so mad that they go after them. At the end of the day, if politicians aren't scared of armed mobs, we don't have real democracy anymore. Because a real militia capable of overthrowing DC in 2017 is laughable, I'm not sure how we keep the power of politicians in check anymore.
They do whatever they want, and the people have little recourse. Call and complain all you want, they'll still do whatever they want for the next three and a half years. Start a riot and you'll get zip-tied up into jail, blasted with a water cannon, get on watchlists and have trouble flying + re-entering the country, and they'll still do whatever they want.
> if politicians aren't scared of armed mobs, we don't have real democracy anymore
I've never accepted that idiotic premise. If your ultimate trump card is armed mobs ousting a 'regime' if it occurs, you're just inviting your ruling class to start acquiescing to draconian measures in the name of 'national security' for their own safety.
You already see this with "freedom spaces" or whatever the hell you americans call them. If the 'right to petition' is a basic right, you'll just start seeing courts "define" and restrict when and how you can petition in the name of public safety - because when is a court ever going to rule that a potentially violent mob is the correct solution to a problem?
"Real democracy" is a laughable term to use while you're shrugging your shoulders and looking around to see who has the biggest rocks. If 'might makes right' is your only remaining fallback, you might need to stop lying to yourself about your 'democracy' first.
> Call and complain all you want, they'll still do whatever they want for the next three and a half years.
One and a half years. There are congressional elections every other year. There are local elections every single year. Don't forget this! Vote every year!
Voting in the midterms is equally as important! If we can regain some balance in either the house or the senate we can block, or at least slow these terrible bills down
None of those ideas solve the problem of campaign financing being legalized bribery, the problem of politicians lying and flip-flopping to gain votes, or the problem of wealth, power, and the establishment deciding who can't win by manipulating the press.
The only system I know of that avoids these problems is to hold randomized lotteries for government positions and skip the election process entirely.
Simples steps, clearly communicable steps, and one step at a time.
Start by Reducing the impact of money on elections. Politicians themselves will thank you.
The ability to flog oneself on the airwaves, to call and reach out to people and keep targeting newer and newer potential voters. These abilities force politicians into a monetary arms race.
The easiest thing here is funding, and curtailing it.
The issues are creative ways to get on the air without resorting to using money.
It does not directly address those, but it does allow people to vote for a candidate that they may think has little chance. Their vote is not "wasted" when it falls back to the next-best candidate, and gives a third party more potential to be taken seriously.
The changes are not mutually exclusive, either. Let's reform voting and reduce influence by money in elections.
You can work to promote the issue and elect people supportive of it in the next Congressional and Presidential elections in 2018 and 2020. With enough promotion of the issue, you might get Congress to do something now in principle, but that seems unlikely; this isn't a matter of a corrupt individual at the FCC, it's the clear and long-standing policy of the party that now has a majority in Congress and control of the Presidency, and also, largely a consequence of holding the Presidency, a majority on the FCC.
If the FCC were dismantled, the knock on effects would be worse than the disease. No radio frequency regulation (bye bye wifi and cell phones, let alone amateur radio). No enforcement of TV content. Prepare for all the "fucks" and breasts your prime time show can fit in. Say good bye mandatory landline coverage (and the emergency capabilities thereof) for rural America (about 98% of the country, land wise).
This is, for better or worse, a very minor aspect of what the FCC provides.
Can we have another day without most common internet sites?
No facebook/google/netflix/amazon/youtube. 2 days if necessary. Show a video explaining what net neutrality is and why many of the arguments it are so dumb.
these are the incumbents and even though these companies would not have been build without net neutrality, they can afford loosing net neutrality and paradoxically it might be in their interest. Loosing net neutrality will hurt startups and small sites who won't be able to afford payments to ISP's "fast lanes."
Bingo. It'll only be a minor cost to the large companies that'll end up writing it off anyways. And they'll probably end up signing more peering deals to make their content even faster.
This is a somewhat unpopular opinion on HN, but I think net neutrality is only a mediocre local optimum. We can do much better without it.
Look at Denmark; they top the global ITU ITC ranking for internet service, and how do they do it? By totally deregulating ISPs while setting government policy to allow for competition (instead of trying to force ISPs to follow some arbitrary notion of good behavior in the abject lack of competition). They removed many ISP regulations (nominally antitrust regs) back in 2006 and it worked so well that they completely dissolved their rough FCC equivalent (NITA) in 2011.
We don't need the FCC ham-fist to improve or preserve the quality of our internet services. All we need is to set local and regional line lease policy to encourage actual ISP competition. Every X years, have an open auction to sell shared cable leases to Y different ISPs or something. Now instead of having to force net neutrality, some of the Z different ISPs that now service your house will use privacy guarantees as a cheap competitive advantage.
I don't know about you but in my town ISP competition is practically nonexistent. Usually it's a choice between Comcast and maybe one other local ISP. It's practically a monopoly right now, which is why treating internet as a utility and treating huge ISPs like Comcast as a "government regulated monopoly" makes sense.
This would be just like what we already have with our local power companies. It's technically a monopoly, but it's heavily regulated so that they can't raise prices on your electricity for no reason. It's also very easy to argue that internet is every bit as much of a necessity as power or water is these days.
In Texas, one can choose their electrical utility, but the transmission line are obviously the same for all of them. Public Utility Commissions (PUCs) work differently in different states.
BTW, reading some other comments of yours on this submission indicates you believe this action has something to do with a law and/or legislators; it does not.
I do understand that this isn't an affect of any legislation. But if we were to have legislators who (as bombastically unrealistic as this sounds) had the best interest of the people in mind and who made informed decisions about technology, they could have passed legislation protecting net neutrality. I believe Obama tried to do something like this.
This might work if we had government policy allowing for competition. Instead we prop up existing monopolies and prevent competition from springing up when the incumbent interests lobby (read: bribe) accordingly.
Hey, your roof is leaking. I'll help you demolish it. Then you can rebuild a new roof with state-of-the-art insulation and integrated solar! Of course, I'll only help with the demolition, not the rebuilding, but surely that's OK. When do we start?
Snark aside, it looks like the current government is interested in repealing net neutrality, but not in increasing competition. So, at the end of the day, instead of a leaky roof we're going to end up with no roof at all. I doubt AT&T and friends would have supported the repeal of net neutrality if they thought it would lead to meaningful new competition.
Denmark is also small, dense, and wealthy. What works there won't necessarily work in a country like the US.
There are multiple good competitive ISPs in small, dense, wealthy areas of the US like San Francisco. That isn't true elsewhere, even including much of Silicon Valley which isnt that far away.
Cable television periodically has "channel blackouts" where the cable operator feuds over price with the content provider. I guess we can expect to see this now for internet. Imagine going to Netflix to find an error 5xx instead: unavailable until they agree on payments to the cable company.
IIRC a well thought out idea has long been to have privacy, in various forms, handled by the FTC. Then the recent change for the FCC was to go ahead and get the FCC out of privacy and move, hand over, transfer what the FCC was doing on privacy to the FTC.
I have read nothing and have no idea what the consequences will be for privacy. E.g., maybe the FTC will, net, give us better regulation of privacy or maybe worse.
My understanding is that once these companies were deemed common carriers, the FTC was prevented from regulating them at all. State attorneys general will still be able to prosecute civil cases where harm can be shown, however.
Please don't post inflamed political rants here. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully. Otherwise please don't comment here.
It is saddening to see the HN moderator being downvoted for requesting substantitive discussion. Why not just rename this site 'Left-wing Propoganda Hacker News' and get it over with ?
Relevance isn't the only concern. When you send a message you probably don't want a response, however relevant, blasted through your window by bazooka.
If you think Verizon, ATT, and Comcast don't look at all the money sloshing around the SV/SF tech scene with envious eyes then you're a fool.
They started with Netflix. They will proceed to squeeze the big players like Google. Soon the average startup will be forced to pay a per-ISP toll to reach that ISP's customers.
Specifically, all non-Clinton voters and non-voters in a tiny number of relevant states. For everyone else, their votes never counted.
To blame it on Stein specifically is of course insane and purposely incendiary without any other purpose really; the number of non-voters who just let it happen or "are not into politics" is orders of magnitude more significant and they are much more responsible. Stein voters at least voted against Trump, they just chose not to vote strategically so that their votes were expressive of their preferences but ineffective. Non-voters couldn't even be bothered to express their preference. Geeks love to avoid politics and pretend they are above it, or they aren't interested in it because it involves people not technical facts and this is what happens when we do.
The above poster is referring to the lopsided representation of voters due to the electoral college and the degree of contestedness of particular states. For instance, I can be comfortable not voting in California because it is so overwhelmingly blue that, in effect, my vote "didn't count". The same is not true of many midwestern states, where the two major parties are in a dead heat.
Only one office uses the electoral college. There are a whole lot more offices than that one. Your point is also obviously nonsense on its face: if no one voted, then the results would be different. So surely some votes must count. Do no votes count unless the result is N vs N+1?
You are correct that other offices matter and do not use the electoral college but the one office that does use it is exactly the one that we are discussing in this thread (recall, it began with "thanks Jill Stein voters").
It's also the case that many other offices are intentionally gerrymandered (US House, state congress) to ensure voters' choices do not matter, whereas the presidency is gerrymandered by happenstance due to a compromise made centuries ago that is no longer relevant.
And yes, opposition votes in deep red states or blue states are counted as cute protest votes much in the way votes for "Mickey Mouse" or "George Washington" or "Jill Stein" are. Votes in line with the state past 50% + 1 simply do not effect the final total or outcome of the election at all, they are thrown away, and what's important is that they never could assuming, e.g. California going blue is a foregone conclusion. Democrats have to do the bare minimum and show up to win California, and Republicans with Alabama, but voting for president doesn't really mean much in those states. We have a scheme were elections are extremely close most of the time, but as far as your vote is concerned it is with overwhelming probability literally thrown away and not counted towards that total. It essentially guarantees voter apathy.
It's amazing to me that you blame people for choosing differently (and not for the current admin). Who you would rather than a) the people who actually supported the current admin and b) the people too apathetic to bother.
That's really how you want to make your mark? Going after people for disagreeing with you in a non violent, democratically sanctioned way?
When it comes to net neutrality, all I can think of is what Jimmy Wales once said about the lesson he learned from Neupedia: "Don't make rules people are not breaking."
No one has really broken net neutrality principles yet. But there are ideas out there and innovation out there, where this net neutrality is turning out to be a hindrance to it all.
Why cannot cable company provide cable TV over cable Internet? Because of net neutrality! Why cannot T-mobile provide TV experience on its network for everyone without breaking its network? Because of net neutrality. Why cannot Verizon offer free stuff for its customers over its network? Because of net neutrality.
Net neutrality was not supposed to prevent ISPs from doing great stuff. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from making alliances with certain companies and enemies with other companies. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from harming innovation. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from hurting content providers and content types.
Yet, now it is preventing ISPs from offering better services.
> When it comes to net neutrality, all I can think of is what Jimmy Wales once said about the lesson he learned from Neupedia: "Don't make rules people are not breaking."
The first Open Internet (the then-majority at FCC's term for net neutrality) Report and Order was drafted and issued after the FCC's use of "ancillary authority" action against Comcast for blocking use of peer-to-peer file sharing software was struck down in FCC v. Comcast [0]. People were breaking the rules that became the FCCs Open Internet rules before they were adopted, so the "Don't make rules people aren't breaking" line, however valid it might be as a general principle [1], is inapplicable.
> But there are ideas out there and innovation out there, where this net neutrality is turning out to be a hindrance to it all.
No, it's not.
> Why cannot cable company provide cable TV over cable Internet? Because of net neutrality!
False. Open Internet rules don't prevent this. They so prevent the cable company from blocking access to third-party video services also provided over the internet, though.
> Why cannot T-mobile provide TV experience on its network for everyone without breaking its network? Because of net neutrality.
Again false, of something is really necessary to prevent breaking the network, it falls under the ambit of the reasonable network management exception in the Open Internet Order.
> Why cannot Verizon offer free stuff for its customers over its network? Because of net neutrality.
The Open Internet Order does not prevent ISPs, mobile or fixed, from providing free stuff to subscribers. So, again, this is false.
A part of me wonders if net neutrality ending would be unintuitively beneficial. Right now we are depending on policy decisions to protect the internet's privacy and neutrality. This has been a flawed approach for over a decade.
At some point we need to solve this with technology in a similar way that E2E encryption is a step toward solving chat privacy. Maybe the selling of browser histories and then end of net neutrality will be the kick that finally gets us moving.
How does encryption solve the problem of Verizon squeezing Netflix to degrade its service in favor of its own offerings?
Net neutrality isn't about consumer surveillance (which is a problem too, just a different one). It's about access to markets and the ability to choose the services you use on the internet.
Why stop at just squeezing them? Why not just cut off access entirely unless customers pay their ransom? It's not like they'll get any pushback from the FCC. Now that's innovation!
Squeezing is much less likely to incite riots from their customers. Cut off access to the latest season of "Orange is the new Black", and people will riot. Degrade the connection, and people will blame Netflix and move on.
When was the last time you heard someone gripe at Verizon for YouTube slowness, and not YouTube/Google?
I'm not saying encryption is the solution. The solution to internet neutrality and user privacy may be something entirely different. Maybe it is mesh networks of an open source wifi solution. I'm not an expert in networking, but it doesn't take much to understand the policy-first approach is fundamentally flawed.
>I'm not an expert in networking, but it doesn't take much to understand the policy-first approach is fundamentally flawed.
Why is policy first flawed? An analogy:
Imagine if your county sold the rights to build and maintain (or not maintain) all the roads, highways, and public transportation in your county to Car Company X. Vehicles from competitors Y and Z were then forced to pay tolls.
If government policy isn't the solution this, what is? "The free market" is not the answer.
Bad car analogies aside, "lets just build our own internet, with WiFi meshes and encryption or something" isn't the answer to internet service either.
The alternative to network neutrality is a highly competitive ISP market, i.e. municipal fiber leased wholesale to dozens of competing retail ISPs. The problem is the incumbent ISPs lobby against that too.
> it doesn't take much to understand the policy-first approach is fundamentally flawed.
While this is a popular belief, it represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how politics works. Ignoring policy doesn't mean it won't happen; you're simply allowing other people to define policy without your input. In this case, congress should have acted to preserve neutrality and privacy by passing the necessary laws or regulations.
Unfortunately the people that should have been educating congress and pressuring them to act were more interested in complaining about congress's lack of education in technical areas and/or working on technical workarounds. Without any real competition, Comcast et al bought politicians easily and cheaply.
Yes, politicians will pass imperfect laws even when they have the best intentions. You fix that by participating in politics and applying an opposing force to corruption. Ignoring the problem isn't neutral; it's announcing that you aren't going to stand in the way of corruption.
> Maybe it is mesh networks of an open source wifi solution
Once mesh networks threaten the profits of telecom companies, How quickly do you think the laws to make mesh networks illegal (or onerous to set up) will be enacted? You can't solve political/legislative problems with technology, unless you are prepared to go to jail.
Policy is technology. Technology is not just engineered artifacts but the cognitive models and social practices surrounding them. Policy is a vastly powerful technology that mediates the social and economic resources necessary for technologies like the internet to be created, have utility for society, and thrive.
So, yes, we need to solve this with technology -- policy itself, technology for improving the creation of policy and the selection of those who turn it into legislation, technology for combating disinformation and educating the public on protecting their rights, technology for detecting and disseminating information on relationships between entrenched interests and policy makers. Networking technology of the kind you mention may be part of that, but on its own it can never be a panacea. Policy will always necessarily exist, and it will never be solved -- it's a dynamic system.
I agree. People are finally waking up to the fact that government policy is just a wool over their eyes and that they need to start giving a shit about their own safety and privacy on the internet.
If it had been branded 'internet freedom' then we wouldn't even be having this discussion because it would be toxic for politicians to mess with something called 'internet freedom.'
Source: Sat through way too many focus groups testing communications concepts in my life...