> Following the 2014 Notice and in the lead up to the Title II Order, Internet service providers stated that the increased regulatory burdens of Title II classification would lead to depressed investment.
To support this notion, they cite two reports that purport to show that capital expenditure by ISPs went down as a result of common carrier regulation.
The first [1] has data only from 2014 on, so has hardly any "before" data; and shows wild enough variability in the "after" data that it seems unreasonable to draw any conclusions from the average value over such a short time frame.
The second [2] is a convoluted enough statistical analysis that I'm not really able to evaluate it -- though it does appear to show that telecom investment in infrastructure appears to have grown at roughly the same rate as it had since the 1980s (save for some wild up and down swings prior to 2010) -- just not as fast as an invented "control group" of imaginary telecoms that never heard they might be classified as common carriers (see figure 3.)
That second link is extraordinary. They are claiming that
non-telecoms companies that have similar investment patterns to the telecoms industry before the Title II change can serve as a control.
That seems an awful lot like they're begging for a spurious correlation.
They might as well have generated a random walk that matched the investment levels.
They're all like that, as far as I can tell -- I got so frustrated just reading through the citations that I couldn't get any farther than the one with the dire warning that "broadband investment ticked down a billion dollars in 2015" after the net neutrality rules were introduced -- followed by a bar chart showing investment ranging mildly up and down by a billion or so per year for like a decade of stability.[1]
Maybe that's the strategy: to just cause all their opposition to expire from sheer outrage at their disingenuousness. If so, it seems to be working in my case at least!
> Maybe that's the strategy: to just cause all their opposition to expire from sheer outrage at their disingenuousness.
On this and everything. What on earth can we do about it?
It's like that Star Trek TNG where they defeated the Borg by showing them a paradoxical image whose explosion of contradictions was carefully designed to sabotage their entire logic subsystem, rendering them impotent. And we're the Borg.
ISPs, like all corporations, always have the best interests of their customers as heart. In the unlikely event that an ISP abuses their position another ISP startup will immediately spring up and start a brand new network.
This reminds me of the idea of the "irony flag" that I recall discussing with my fellow-immigrants when I arrived in the US years ago, to make its presence clear. But now, thanks to globalization, irony can be easily found in America, along with Marmite and Sam Smith's.
I apologize for the sarcasm Dboreham, I usually try to make arguments in better faith. The anti-consumerism is just so obscene that I feel like a bit of absurdity is necessary.
Ridicule and a good memmory are whats needed here. Because this is farce.
The ideal communication now would be spot on recall of previous bad behavior, interleaved with humor/abusrdity.
The current FCC's communication expects a certain context, and meta cultural structure. If those features are removed (corporate speak, governance speak), and the response are couched in absurdity+accurate facts, then they dont have much.
They're claim to authority is undermined and the legitimacy of the action is removed.
This is about the way the facts are communicated, as it is about the facts themselves.
Surely now with our newfound freedom the robust market conditions brought by Mr. Pai will usher in a new era, where the invisible hand will do its thing.
Well, that makes the gross assumption that customers don't like the abuse. Just because you think some abuse is wrong doesn't mean you should dictate what happens in a consensual agreement between the abuser and the abusee. If they don't like the abuse, they'd leave.
Newspeak for sure. Can't speak out against it without being ostracized from the establishment. It worked with the Patriot Act, among countless others, so why would they stop?
They keep using terms like "Internet Freedom" or "Open Internet", but this isn't so much about the internet as it's about ISPs. They are the gatekeepers of the internet and Net Neutrality requires them to keep the gate open and free of obstacles.
It seems like everyone would be better served by addressing the root problem, which is that ISPs enjoy local monopolies. This would be a free-market solution that ought to satisfy both free-market and privacy advocates would win. Of course, I don't know if there's a good solution for fixing monopolies that doesn't involve additional regulation...
We could eliminate regulation that makes it impractical to build competing networks. DC has three different broadband providers: Comcast, RCN, and Verizon. All three are in the process of rolling out gigabit service. That's possible because DC is pretty liberal about letting providers only build in the locations where they can make a profit (instead of demanding they cover the whole city in one go).
5G technologies in particular are going to make it extremely easy for startups to break into existing markets. I did a speedtest.net run the other day in Annapolis, and I got 150 mbps--what I get on my fiber connection at home. And that's just with LTE-A. Fiber might still be faster, but that doesn't matter. It's fast enough for plenty of people and would be meaningful competition for incumbents. Cities just have to get out of the way and let companies build those networks in an incremental and demand-driven way.
(I'm not free market fundamentalist--I think it would also be fine to just have to government build the networks. But this stuff is expensive and somebody has to write those billion-dollar checks, and you need to make sure they have the incentive to do so.)
If you're building in a place with electricity, the main relevant property right holder is the utility that owns the poles and conduits (and a regime exists for getting access to those, though it could be improved). Siting things like fiber cabinets isn't as big a deal because hold-out property owners have little leverage. If one won't let you build a node on their property, just build it across the street, and run the fiber along the poles and conduits that are already there.
The real hurdles are cable franchise and zoning boards. When AT&T tried to build fiber in SF, it wasn't individual property owners that tried to stop it from building fiber cabinets--it was NIMBY's acting to get the city to stop development. When Verizon tried to build fiber in Baltimore, it wasn't property owners that stopped it; it was the city, which wouldn't give it a TV license.
So DC doesn't have 3 different broadband options. Select parts of DC do. Go to the middle or upper class areas and you might be spoiled for choice, but how much choice is there in the lower income areas, where it probably matters more?
Also, wireless can be nice, but it is in no way a competitor to wired internet.
Broadband deployment is all about math: you calculate the per subscriber cost, and see if how much you can charge for the service is high enough where, after subtracting costs, you make a return Wall Street is happy with. The math doesn't care about social justice. And you cannot "opt out" of this math through municipal regulation. Because most of the cost of build-out is passing the house, your per-subscriber cost is driven by your uptake ratio: actual subscribers divided by houses passed. If you force providers to build in a lot of neighborhoods where few people can afford the service, you drive down the uptake ratio and drive up the per subscriber cost, making the investment unattractive.
Take a city like Baltimore: it has too many poor neighborhoods for competitors to commit to a city-wide build-out. It's also too poor for the government to be able to afford to build its own fiber network. The alternatives are some competition in wealthier areas (with hopefully knock-on effects everywhere else) or no choices at all.
If broadband deployment to poor neighborhoods is an important issue, then raise taxes and pay for it. Trying to get private companies to pay for it just creates a special tax on broadband. You impose extra taxes on products you want less of, like cigarettes or alcohol, not products you want more of.
As to wireless, it is absolutely a competitor to wired. Throughout Verizon's FiOS footprint, its uptake rate is under 40%. That means 60% of people who can get it choose to get cable instead, even though FiOS is vastly superior. (I don't know why--I think people like the TV packages better on cable.) 5G fixed wireless is absolutely as good as cable--hell, even LTE-A has better upload speeds than cable. Wireless doesn't have to be better than fiber to be a meaningful competitor; it just has to be good enough that it's a viable option for many people.
You said recently that the UK model (regulated last-mile monopoly) works well.[1] Is there a reason it wouldn't work well in the US?
5G fixed wireless is just entering trials. Maybe it'll be a game-changer, but relying on new technologies to create competition is why there isn't effective competition now.
FiOS upload speeds are vastly superior, but some Comcast plans offer higher download speeds at cheaper prices. Typical LTE-A upload speeds seem to be worse than cheaper cable plans.[2]
> You said recently that the UK model (regulated last-mile monopoly) works well.[1] Is there a reason it wouldn't work well in the US?
Two reasons. First, BT Openrearch was originally a government-owned monopoly that was later privatized under specific terms. U.S. networks, in contrast, were built almost entirely with private money in the first instance.
Second, the U.K. policy was designed and implemented by smart regulators at a national level, who did a lot of theoretical work on balancing the need to ensure adequate investment with the need to protect consumers. U.S. policy, in contrast, split up between the FCC and state/local regulators. The latter are the same folks responsible for our roads, subways, and other infrastructure being worse than those in comparable European countries.
Some,[1] but by and large the opposite is true: they pay extra taxes. The primary "subsidy" for rural deployment comes from a special 18% tax on telecommunications services. Additionally, there is typically a 5% gross revenue tax that goes to the municipality.
Telcos are expected to pay for building out to lower income neighborhoods in urban or suburban areas through cross subsidies (everyone pays the same price even though customers in neighborhoods with high uptake ratios cost much less to connect than customers in neighborhoods with low uptake ratios).
[1] There is a "$200 billion" number floating around that's completely false.
The only source I've found for 18% is a report from the Tax Foundation.[1] That includes all federal, state, and local taxes and fees. Do you have a source for your numbers?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund. The 18% rate is paid on some part of the total bill that the FCC deems to be related to interstate voice, with additional state USF fees paid on intrastate services. Historically, telcos didn't pay money into the USF for broadband (except to the extent they're offering telephone service over it), but historically they also couldn't get money out of it for broadband. Under Obama the USF started conversion into a broadband fund, and USF taxes on broadband will likely follow.
In the strip mall near my house, I can get 140 down/20 up/25-30 ms ping. 5G is supposed to bring that into the gigabit range and ping times below 10 ms: http://www.droid-life.com/2017/01/04/att-5g.
Obviously you're not going to get that on your phone in a crowded mall. But for fixed deployments you're talking about having about as much shared bandwidth per subscriber as cable at similar if not better latency. At vastly lower cost.
Even if the free market choice could do it, I would still want regulation. Because there's no reason to allow them to act in this manner, so just bar them from doing so altogether.
True, but that's a specious comparison, as taxation is always a forcible redistribution of wealth. No matter what you call a tax, people know it's a tax. It's very different when there are two opposing directions on an issue and you intentionally mangle language to hide your intent, or worse yet co-opt the language of the opposition to deceive.
Is it? I've heard it as a theory, but never as an actual example. I'm not aware of its ever being applied on a practical scale in modern history, and a quick google didn't turn up any obvious examples. Citations?
> Secondly, there absolutely are opposed viewpoints on the matter, and the use of euphemisms is partly responsible for the vast majority of the population not even considering alternatives.
I'm not saying that their aren't opposing viewpoints, I'm saying that the language isn't intentionally unclear to hide that. As things stand, any bill to do X is going to raise and/or reallocate taxes to fund doing X. Calling a bill "The X Bill" rather than "The bill that raises taxes to do X" isn't a euphemism, but just a practical use of language where the 'raise taxes' part is universally assumed and implied. Maybe there are better alternatives to that model, and I agree that people probably don't stop to consider such alternatives as much as they should, but there's still a fundamental difference between omitting something that is implied and being actively deceptive.
> I think that's our point of disagreement. Take e.g. the "Free Higher Education for All Act". "Free" in this context is pure Newspeak.
I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on the relevance. I think you're right in the strictest sense, but I just fundamentally don't believe that anyone is actually deceived even when you call something "free."
> It's just that this time you happen to disagree with the policy being given the Newspeak treatment.
This is about the third time in a week that someone has accused me along the lines of "you're only saying that because you disagree - you wouldn't say that if the politics were reversed."
First of all, you don't know jack about my beliefs, so stop projecting your BS psychoanalysis on me.
Secondly, I realize we may have gotten to the point that it's unfathomable that someone can actually be making a point because of the principle of it, and not just because it happens to align with their politics, but I still like to believe it's actually possible.
Okay. I'm sorry for psychologising. I shouldn't have speculated as to your motivations.
The fact remains that you're objecting to Newspeak in one case, but not another. That looks to me like a pretty perfect example of what you're decrying: lack of political principle.
Edited to add: which, given your complaint, suggests we're operating on different assumptions and principles. Perhaps you disagree that both are examples of Newspeak? I'd be curious to know why.
All government activities are forcible. You are forced to only be allowed to buy goods meeting safety, quality and health standards; forced to be protected from crime by the police, or from house fires by the local fire service. But do you call that out and include it in the way you speak and write about them every day? I would guess not.
I believe strongly in the power of free markets, but I also believe that free trade must be fair, which requires regulation to ensure that goods or services provided meet quality standards in order to protect the public. I see net neutrality regulations as exactly that kind of standardized level of quality. Just as a water utility must provide clean potable water; an electricity provider must meet current, voltage and supply stability standards; food vendors must meet food safety standards; so ISPs should have to meet basic standards of service quality in order to serve the needs and preferences of the consumer and not their own. They should be forced to do so, absolutely.
As Adam Smith wrote: "Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer."
The perverse part of this is that they're not just shaking you down, they're shaking down the services that you're using. Burning the candle at both ends.
Exactly this. "Internet Freedom" should really mean a decentralized, equally-distributed network in which my server gets treated the same as every other server in the network. By increasing the power of ISPs, the FCC is in fact increasing centralization, allowing Comcast et al. to determine who gets network traffic and who does not. Internet freedom isn't so much being eroded as it is being demolished.
And wasn't "Net Neutrality" supposed to be about "Internet Freedom" and "Open Internet"? I saw the exact same terms being thrown around back then, and I was just as suspect of that legislation as I am this one.
At the very least, it will provide an easy way to share links to specific pages of the documents (of course, you can add notes and annotations to the pages, and there's been some rudimentary fact extraction done already).
I just loaded the document a moment ago, so I haven't had a chance to scan through and make sure all the details are correct, but wanted to share it so folks can scan through it now.
Feedback is definitely welcome, and I'll hold off on doing non-critical deploys today so it stays up while people read it. I've only been working on it for a few weeks so there's still quite a lot to do :)
Here is a draft of a comment I plan to submit to the FCC regarding this notice:
The draft seeks comment on the analysis in Paragraph 27. This analysis purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the "capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." The argument given is that broadband Internet service allows users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as providing the capability to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does not provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users' computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.
Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do not provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are "information services". The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.
ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are separate from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP's choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them. The FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.
Your comment does not address the second clause of the sentence you quote: "...or making available information via telecommunications." Which is cited as a reason to classify it as an Information service.
Your third paragraph, "ISPs object to..." claims that the telecommunications portion is separable from the services provided (such as email, etc.), and yet the document you are critiquing claims the opposite in paragraph 11.
I'm trying to find the reasoning as to why they claim inseparability. It's worth reading a relevant supreme court opinion to get an understanding of the opposing viewpoint [10].
I find that paragraph 67 of the universal service report (USR) to congress from the fcc (Federal-State Joint Board on Universal Service, FCC 98-67 [20], seems to be a counterpoint to yours. Specifically, the idea of an ISP apart from the physical connection -- ISPs make use of telecommunications but are not themselves the telecommunications service.
"67. With regard to the lines leased by Internet
service providers to provide their own internal
networks, the analysis is straightforward. We
explain below that the Internet service providers
leasing the lines do not provide
telecommunications to their subscribers, and thus
do not directly contribute to universal service
mechanisms."
Paragraphs 80 and 81 of the USR states
"The provision of Internet access service
involves data transport elements: an Internet
access provider must enable the movement of
information between customers' own computers
and the distant computers with which those
customers seek to interact. But the provision
of Internet access service crucially involves
information-processing elements as well; it
offers end users information-service capabilities
inextricably intertwined with data transport.
As such, we conclude that it is appropriately
classed as an "information service."
In offering service to end users, however, they
do more than resell those data transport
services. They conjoin the data transport with
data processing, information provision, and other
computer-mediated offerings, thereby creating an
information service."
I think the report mostly agrees with the grandparent; it's just that the meaning of "ISP" has drifted over the past 20 years. Paragraph 63 lists "America Online, AT&T WorldNet, Netcom, Earthlink, and the Microsoft Network" as examples of ISPs. Paragraphs 66-68 assume that an ISP pays for service from a telecommunications carrier.
Paragraphs 75-76 use email and web hosting as examples of the services discussed in paragraphs 80-81, things the grandparent points out he doesn't use. They may be intertwined with data transport, but data transport isn't intertwined with them. Paragraph 75 does identify web access as an information service, but the same logic could be used to classify telephone service as an information service because you can use it to retrieve information from a PBX. Paragraph 81 repeats the assumption that ISPs consume telecommunications services.
In general, the report seems to assume that Congress expected information services to coexist with telecommunications services, not to replace them.
The Supreme Court opinion is interesting, but I don't see anything in the logic given that is not open to the same objections I raise in my comment. The key error I pointed out in the comment--that all the actual information services happen at endpoints, not in the network itself--is there in the court opinion's description of the Commission's logic. So I still think that error is a good point of attack.
> the document you are critiquing claims the opposite in paragraph 11
That paragraph describes a previous ruling by the Commission. That's not what they're requesting comment on, which is why I didn't mention that paragraph. But it might well be worth someone else submitting a comment that focuses on logical errors in that previous ruling.
Is it normal for these proposals to read like a plagiarized high school report?
They repeat "open internet" 43 times (disregarding the fact that the proposal is for quite the opposite) and copy-paste whole sections around the document, over and over again.
Romania is fantastic in this respect. Somehow during the first decade the government didn't take this internet thing all too serious resulting in a decade long free-for-all when it came to internet providers. You can have incredible speeds for very little money there.
I've been correlating this sort of anecdata with countries that meet other metrics I'd ideally have met on nomadlist (its 'internet metrics' don't really go into granularities like cost, net freedoms, or so on), I'll add Romania to the running list. Thanks
The aspect of this that people are mostly taking issue with is the ability for ISPs to try to extort money from hosts and more money from users by throttling traffic if they don't pay. The famous example is when Comcast attempted to force Netflix to pay more for the distribution bandwidth that they use (not the upload bandwidth necessarily, but the load that Netflix was imposing as users downloaded streams). This resulted in Comcast throttling data from netflix servers until some sort of deal was reached. The legislation this proposal would remove protects consumers from this behavior.
Comcast/NBC will be able to put things like Hulu in the "fast lane" and other services like Netflix will not. Unless of course Netflix is willing to pay Comcast/NBC more. In which case the ISP will be able to charge twice for the same service. The consumer pays the ISP to access the internet, and the service pays the ISP to deliver their content to the user.
Future lawsuit will refer to this NPRM as evidence. As a result, the FCC's lawyers spend a lot of time trying to protect themselves, which means the text of the NPRM is worded in an overly complicated way.
Although my data is very limited, I am beginning to suspect that quite a bit of new documentation produced by the current administration looks like high school work.
As admittedly minuscule evidence, I present the I-130 USCIS (was the INS) PDF form[1], which ballooned from 2 well-designed pages to a hideous 9 page effort, which has amateurish field validation and vast expanses of unfilled boxes into which one cannot even type "N/A" (because it's generally a bad idea to leave blank text fields on important forms)
The one question that I have is how do we stop this? Do I go somewhere to vote? Do I send a letter? Do I go to petition.org or something? Can I only donate to the EFF and that's it?
What do I need to do to have a concrete affect on the outcome of this instead of just commenting here or in some other thread?
What you can do now to stop a political process that ended last November is: nothing. It's in the past.
What you can do now to impact political processes in the near future (no policy is immutable, after all) is to work in your community to build consensus around policies you believe in, so that those policies are reflected in future decisions.
I don't know when, but at some point we as a country of citizens got really bad at understanding this, it seems like!
Exactly. The thing to do is to convince people you know that this is a bad idea. I think there are lots of pro-small-business Republicans who see this as a good reduction in regulation that will benefit the dynamic tech entrepreneurship sector, and who would be surprised at its unpopularity within the hotbed of exactly those entrepreneurial techies that is HN. Most Republican voters are no friend to regulatory capture, they just haven't been convinced that's what is going on in this administration.
Advice I've heard is to appeal to your audience's principles (moral reframing is the term I've heard it called: https://www.fastcompany.com/3067593/how-to-use-moral-reframi...). In this case which principles that republicans/conservatives/etc. hold dear would provide good arguments for opposing this proposal? I don't think I have a good answer for that yet. Here are some ideas:
- Personal Freedom: This change will allow ISPs to restrict or hobble sites you choose to go to.
- Free market: This is allowing entrenched ISPs to restrict competition in what web sites we visit. Only the big players will be able to afford access artificially restricting the free market.
- Purity: From what I understand this change hinges on the ability to define a broadband ISP as an information service rather than a telecommunication service. I could see an argument here that ISPs are attempting to use a loophole to skirt the law defining the service they provide.
Vote and campaign in your next election for a candidate you believe in, send letters to your representatives to not vote for anti-net-neutrality legislation, and donate to the EFF.
The petition.org thing is useless.
Like the other poster said, though, these are the consequences of last novembers election. You won't undo what is happening now. You can just participate to stop it from happening again and reverse the course to the best of your ability in the future.
Al Franklin apparently just came out against this pretty loudly. So yes, I'd say the same steps as before, donate to politicans that come out against this, write letters / emails to your senators / representatives, and lodge a comment with the FCC. We saw under wheeler that while they can ignore that type of community activism, it absolutely has effects.
Support anyone who wants to get rid of FPTP voting and introduce a more representative voting system (ranked choice, for example).
Right now, people have to vote for the least of two shitty candidates. Instead, we could vote for the ones who represent us the most without worrying about who will actually win.
This won't fix corporate corruption, which is the underlying cause of the attack on net neutrality, but it will certainly make representatives more beholden to their voters.
Like the channel 4 news gang, our good friends at Demand Progress have officially re-assembled the ol' gang to relaunch, "Battle for the Net" (www.battleforthenet.com), today. This is the same team that helped spearhead the 2015 campaign that successfully changed Chairman Wheeler's mind to protect the Internet as a Utility. They've already collected over 800 startup signatures (including our own) and is now gearing up for an intense war with Trump's administration and the ISP heavyweights.... again.
Call your Congressional representation, for starters. Another thing you can do is pressure your state legislature to reinstate the rules, similar to what some states did after Congress voted to remove ISP privacy rules.
From page 3, on the regulation of ISPs as utilities:
...the order has weakened Americans’ online privacy by stripping the Federal Trade Commission — the nation’s premier consumer protection agency — of its jurisdiction over ISPs’ privacy and data security practices.
That's pretty rich, coming from the government that just overturned an Obama-era privacy ruling.
$99/month Family Freedom package:
- 200GB "Streaming Gigs" for up to four authorized devices
- 100GB "Gaming Gigs" (with Super-Ping technology!)
- 25GB "Other"
- Unlimited email, Facebook and Snapchat!
Little glimpse in to our future, ladies and gents.
There's a giveaway in my opinion in the length the NPRM goes to in questioning the necessity of the existing rules, and the small space afforded to providing a legal basis for enforcing them should Title II authority be revoked as proposed.
The idea seems to be: if the rules themselves (no throttling, no paid prioritization etc) are not necessary (i.e. voluntary), neither is a legal framework to support them.
So statements that net neutrality is not under fire here, only the current legal basis for it, sound pretty hollow in my opinion. By failing to provide an alternative authority to support the existing rules, they're sentencing them to unenforceability and effective repeal. (edit: grammar)
This seems to be a common theme in this administration to "restore freedoms" to corporations with bald-faced lies that they restore freedoms to individuals. The current rhetoric surrounding the recent order to review many national monuments is steeped in very similar twisted logic - that somehow the land needs to be "returned to the people". But wait, wasn't that national monument set aside exactly for preserving a small chunk of pristine wilderness for "the people"?
I don't think I can put up with 4 more years of these bozos.
Since I'm a nice, law-abiding citizen, I can only suggest further unearthing and bringing into the light of day all the sleaze in these people's backgrounds and getting them disqualified and removed from office.
The 2008 financial crisis should have ended a lot of sleazy careers. Instead, here we are.
There are good people on both the "liberal/progressive/whatever" side of the arbitrary political fence, and on the "small-c-conservative/values/whatever" side.
Only, we don't want war. We want reasonably rational and emotionally mature discussion and the ability to get along and get things done. And enough trust in good intentions to invest in a variety of plans and figure out and measure what actually works.
And... it'd be nice to have an open network left to do this on. For a reasonable price.
P.S. Sorry for my "outburst." Just, exhausted with this whack-a-mole against moneyed self-interests that can afford to just keep trying again and again and again until they get their way.
Because, they aren't about creating the most (absolute) value. Just capturing the most (relative) value, for themselves.
"Restoring Internet Freedom" It reminds me of some Newspeak the government in 1984 would say. Just blatantly saying the opposite of what they are doing like that will make it true.
No, you are the one who has redefined freedom. Freedom originally meant that you could deal with whoever you wanted on whatever terms both parties could agree on. It didn't mean the government regulating private businesses to ensure some specific outcome.
I understand why HN wants net neutrality: the majority here think that ISPs have undeserved control, and so the government needs to step in to ensure a level playing field. Still, if someone advocated "search engine neutrality", arguing that the govt should regulate Google's search results to ensure everyone had a fair chance, there would be uproar. Similarly, if someone argued for "platform neutrality", holding that every startup that offered some kind of API had to register with the gov't to ensure their services were equally available to all others, the insanity would be obvious.
arguing that the govt should regulate Google's search
results to ensure everyone had a fair chance
Except they do. [1]
there would be uproar
No there isn't.
Additionally, you are completely free to use another search engine and the barrier to switch is minimal. ISPs have come to a détente where they do not build infrastructure in the territories of other ISPs, leading to situations where someone like me -- who lives in Berkeley, home of one of the original 4 'IMPs' of the protointernet -- has zero choice in ISPs if I want >20mbps, which means I have no recourse if my ISP chooses to deny me access to services that do not cowtow to their connection demands.
Freedom originally meant that you could deal with whoever you wanted on whatever terms both parties could agree on. It didn't mean the government regulating private businesses to ensure some specific outcome.
The idea that organizational entities, whose entire existence is a construct of law, should have the same "freedoms" as human beings is a fairly startling definition of the word. These constructs (aka businesses, etc.), by definition, are far imbalanced in perception, goals, power, and resources relative to individual humans. What "freedoms" we do allow them, are for laudable goals: so that organizations of humans can come together to do more for society than those individuals might do alone. But the idea that the same concept of freedom that applies to individual human beings also applies to a fictional construct created to serve society is preposterous. Such a laissez faire definition seems more like anarchy than any useful form of freedom.
ISPs benefit substantially from government regulation. Just one example: they have sued (successfully) to stop municipal broadband projects.
Were they not already benefiting from other forms of regulation that ensure their monopoly status, I would be more sympathetic to their "we are being regulated to death" arguments. As is, they are arguing for regulation only insofar as it enables them to extract rents.
The difference is a question of infrastructure. If your ISP trottles your connection you have maybe one local competitor (doing the same thing) or live without internet. Utilites are treated as public works; imagine if the power company charged higher rates depending on what electronics were used.
There simply is no comparison to regulation at a platform level and I wish people would stop using that straw-man every time they rush to defend the poor telecoms and their "freedom".
Power companies do charge different rates depending on what electronics are used.
Energy utility rate structures are both complex and unique to the individual company, but at a high level different classes of consumer pay different rate plans, such as residential vs. commercial/industrial vs. agricultural, and which is ultimately determined by the type of and quantity of certain electronic devices installed on premise as is normal for that class.
With that said, as a residential consumer there is little chance that you could ever legally or physically install one of the devices at your home that would necessitate being charged a CI or agricultural rate.
And interestingly enough those rates are all regulated by very heavy weight local/state and federal regulatory commissions.
That's tiered pricing based on quantity consumed, isn't it? Which is already very much allowed for ISPs.
Net neutrality is a completely different thing. Without it, it'd be as if the electric company could charge more if you used this 700 watt toaster than if you used that 700 watt toaster.
A power company can't charge you extra or give you a discount because you used an LG washer, because LG is a competitor to their sister company GE, or something like that. That's exactly what Net Neutrality regulations were trying to enforce. Without enforcement, you have things like Comcast or TMobile giving extra speed to their own streaming portals, or charge other service providers for higher speed tiers. I don't understand why there is so much contention regarding this, regardless of political affiliation.
Since when does "freedom" only apply to the government and not to any other powerful institutions? Are slaves free if they are held in captivity through a private slave owner's actions instead of through government enforcement?
Freedom doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dealing unless you redefine it with extremist libertarian ideology.
The freedom to make fair and reasonable contracts among parties that all fully understand the terms and do not have a massively imbalanced power dynamic is certainly one I, and many others support and think is fundamental.
The ability to force people into unfair contracts with you under duress by abusing your economic power is not and has never been "freedom" in any sense of the word (rather, it's the opposite of freedom, slavery or indentured servitude) unless you have some kind of sick Ayn Rand redefinition of it where it is nothing more than a code word for the notion that the people who happen to currently have wealth should not be questioned, stopped, or denied anything they wish no matter the consequences.
Freedom as another word for 'regulating to death'. I feel so free in modern society, as the body of law grows day by day, already being a completely incomprehensible mess that no human (or company) can abide by.
EDIT: Also, before you downvote, please try to find a fault in the following statement: 'as the body of law grows day by day, already being a completely incomprehensible mess that no human (or company) can abide by.' If you can, please post why. If you cannot, please go back to pondering about this.
I'd love to see some serious information and expert analysis about these kind of claims. How much regulation is there? Is it more or less? Where is it too much, where is it too little, and how do we decide? What outcomes does it produce and for what costs?
The talking points, such as those in the parent, are well-known and popular among large business and its advocates, but being often-repeated doesn't make them true (especially for political talking points).
Personally, I have had little experience with problematic regulations. Some businesses I work with have to follow them, but the ones I'm aware of seem to protect the public from injury and fraud. Certainly I'm glad my water, air travel, roads, financial system, legal system, etc. are regulated.
But neither my personal experience nor the talking points are useful knowledge. It shows how little we know about the subject - and how mindlessly politicized it is - that there is almost no commonly known, serious knowledge about it.
You see the benefits of regulation but not the costs. Eg, in a weestern country, most restaurants are hygienic with properly maintained premises - which seems great.
Until you compare to Asian countries where you can visit nice restaurants if you're so inclined, but you also have abundant choice of street food and little diners, which aren't super clean but are cheap and tasty. This also changes the economy - it doesn't take hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a restaurant and obtain the proper licensing, which means that new locations can spring up for cheap. Which means there's an extra source of jobs for people at the bottom of the economy, and so on.
Multiply that by every regulated industry and you start to see the real downsides to gov't control of private enterprise. This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post. As well as ample evidence, there's also the fundamental principle - govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value. All it can (and should) do is define laws to protect everyone - this covers things like fraud, but not decreeing what products can and cannot be sold.
> You see the benefits of regulation but not the costs
In my defense, I plainly asked about the outcomes and the costs. My point is that we need serious information, not more speculation.
The parent comment omits the costs of a lack of regulation, such as sickness for diners, spread of disease, injury for workers, etc. But the question is not can we speculatively come up with costs and benefits, but how much do these things actually cost and benefit us?
> This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post
I didn't say that. I said there is no well-known information. Could you point to some?
> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value
I don't agree at all. In fact, government performs much that helps business produce value. Look at the benefits from NASA, medical research, scientific research (Albert Einstein wasn't a private entrepreneur) ... fracking, IIRC, is the product of government research, as is much of the energy industry ... the entire foundation of the Internet and web is mostly from government institutions (ARPA, CERN, U of Illinois, and many more). And for much of the period of the West's greatest growth, the 1950s and 1960s, government ran businesses, and regulated and taxed at rates that seem astronomical today.
Government also provides (produces) systems of laws, regulations, roads, security, education, health, and other things that are absolutely necessary for and greatly enhance business. Without education and health, who would be working for the businesses and buying their goods? Without roads, how would they ship? Without law and regulation, who would feel safe buying from them and how would disputes be resolved? Without the military, how would international shipping lanes supply all those goods?
You speak in broad generalizations that miss many points and make many faulty assumptions. One example:
> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value
Governments can offer loans for small business, or work with banks to provide security to banks so that banks can issues loans to small business even though this might not be as lucrative as only focusing on large business.
Governments provide grants for research or results for research directly. Nasa has ton of stuff than just be used directly. There are also programs were an inventor can get money to do research and invent things. There are also government grants for research institutions that do research.
> but you also have abundant choice of street food
Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken. Also good luck having that meal without a side of cholera. Being healthy enough to work is might not be a government service, but a good government certainly encourages it.
> You speak in broad generalizations that miss many points and make many faulty assumptions.
Absolutely. Let's be specific.
> Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken.
That assumes everyone cares if the cheap tasty food is actually chicken. It also has the assumption that without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera.
With regulation, we need to talk about specific instances, and what the positive and negative effects of that instance are.
> assumes everyone cares if the cheap tasty food is actually chicken
Doesn't need to be everyone who cares Just someone with an allergy or a moral preference to not eat dog.
> without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera
All but the least effective governments have demonstrated an ability to stop cholera. Places with grossly ineffective government and poor education has shown a propensity to have cholera, look at Haiti.
I think these are both good. But if we want another example. There was a Chinese restaurant in Council Bluffs Iowa, a suburb of Omaha Nebraska (The city I am in now) that was serving stray cats. The owner thought it was a cheap alternative to chicken. The FDA shut them down, because stray cats don't get investigated for parasites, disease or poison.
In general it never gets this far because the FDA sets an absolute bottom line and most food businesses strive to be better than as can easy be seen with the whole organic and free range trend recently. But there will always be those trying to drive costs down at the expense of quality and safety.
EDIT - I just realized I skipped examples of value governments can add to business. How about seat belt fabric. Memory Foam, Rocket engine designs and satelite imagining for maps. That is just NASA. NOAA does a huge amount for mariners of all stripes. The SBA gives out loans. There are so many examples.
The point I was trying to make is that government isn't the only way to accomplish these things.
While the FDA does quite well at enforcing a standard, there is no evidence that the same practices could not happen as a natural occurrence of a free market.
Clearly, the vast majority of people care that those who prepare the food they buy do so in an educated and safe manner. If there were no law demanding such a standard, people would still want to live by that standard. Those people would still demand that those in the food industry find some way to prove that their business lives up to such a standard.
Such a scenario would still leave out the uneducated portion of the populace, who would unknowingly put themselves at risk. That is the only reason I can think of to prefer the current government-enforced methods.
TL;DR Food safety is an example of a problem that has many possible solutions, and while current government regulation is likely the best, there are other solutions that are possible, and even logical.
To bring this back to the discussion of net neutrality...
While there are logical reasons to support deregulation in most scenarios, I can find no honest logical reasons why not to regulate ISPs with the current net neutrality rules.
When we look at the specifics, we can plainly see that net neutrality is an edge case for popular conservative and libertarian ideology. I find it very important to consider it as such, and support net neutrality.
Oh man. I lived in a developing nation for a while. A couple of times, I had a week-long bout of food poisoning from "cheap and tasty" unregulated food.
It's a nice idea, loosing regulations because the market will decide, but after a couple days on the toilet, shitting your guts out because regulations hinder innovation or whatever, you know what I'd say? Fuck an unregulated marketplace. I will happily suffer the innovation-suffocating burdens of regulation if it means not having to endure that shit (literally) again.
So did I. The point of my comment was that you can avoid street food and eat at classier restaurants (or fast food outlets, or whatever) if you're so inclined. Me and a friend avoided street food during a month of travelling in India, and never had any stomach problems.
(Your gut fauna also adapts over time, which is why the locals don't get sick so often).
> because regulations hinder innovation or whatever
How did you get this from my comment? I said that in the case of food, regulations remove cheap options, and remove job opportunities.
To make it concrete: consider a low-income Western neighbourhood. Joe is a young single guy in his 20s working a low-wage job. He's tired after work and doesn't like to cook, but can't afford to eat out. Sally is a grandmother, in her late 50s, and needs a source of income that isn't too demanding. In an Asian country the Sallies could set up fried rice or noodle stalls selling cheap meals to the Joes, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. They've set up a mutual trade for mutual advantage, and they're both better off.
In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.
(Sometimes Westerners do make this trade. On my UK university campus, some local Indian stay-at-home mothers would cook up extra food and deliver meals to students for £2 ($3) a pop. They were breaking a ton of laws, of course).
"(Your gut fauna also adapts over time, which is why the locals don't get sick so often)."
Heh, this isn't actually true, or not meaningfully so. Where I lived, it was recognized that getting sick regularly was a fact of life. The place I lived had almost no tourism, so people getting sick were, in fact, just getting sick from an essentially unregulated food market.
> […] In an Asian country the Sallies could set up fried rice or noodle stalls selling cheap meals to the Joes, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. They've set up a mutual trade for mutual advantage, and they're both better off.
> In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.
So, if Sally can provide food cheaper than McDonald's, that means:
a. she is more efficient than McDonald's, she being a single woman, they being a multinational corporation, or
b. she doesn't conform to the same hygiene and nutrition standards, making less valuable products.
So eating establishments without proper food inspection and food safety laws is the new internet you desire? Brilliant. I'm sure all that money the Telcos save will go right back into the consumer's pocket and into increasing connection speeds too...
> This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post.
Are you saying the economic downsides to regulation have been studied? Or are you saying there is abundant scholarly research that shows the costs of government regulation of private enterprise clearly outweigh the benefits?
I just look at my Romanian friends. Basically they have 10x more internet speed at 10x less price, just so, despite living in a much poorer country. The reason: It's basically wild west and the state hasn't yet regulated ISPs to death. This is just one of many examples where you see such patterns. Just because my comments fit a narrative doesn't mean I cannot back them up, or they serve special interests of mine.
Alternative explanation: Romania is a comparatively teeny tiny country so the necessary infrastructure costs are a fraction of what they would be here.
Or: see the UK and Netherlands, where government regulation improved service by forcing more competition in the broadband market [1], i.e. exactly the opposite of your "regulated to death" claim.
In all three of those examples, increased competition seems to have been the real explanation for reduced prices and improved service, not deregulation as you claim.
That doesn't mean the same will happen if you deregulate the US. Most ISPs are already monopolies. Where would the competitors come from?
ISPs in countries like Romania blossomed because many small providers were able to compete with each other from the outset. In the US, the initially fragmented market (the "Baby Bells" etc.) have congealed into just a few major players that have no incentive to compete.
the same World Bank study that applauded Romania’s well-connected cities cautioned about a digital divide. A much larger share of Romanians have ultra-fast internet connections compared to other European countries, yet one-third of the country’s population has never used the internet. Half of all households have no broadband connection—half of households don’t even have a computer, for that matter.
Let's assume that they are. What predictions can we make from that assumption, given what happens to other utilities that are closely regulated by the government?
- Services would be tightly constrained by regulation. You should see all ISPs offering the same set of services in all locations, with the same bandwidths and guarantees.
- Services would be tightly constrained on price: the price for 100Mb/s bidirectional service in Philadelphia should be the same as in Pittsburgh or Punxatawny.
- Nobody would care who their ISP was, because the regulated service is about the same everywhere.
- All the ISPs would have mandated interconnection exchanges where they would be forced to settle traffic with each other. When they get to defined packet loss rates with any other provider, both sides need to improve their connection.
- Prices would change every few years, when the public utility commission approved a rate hike. The ISPs would ask for 8% and get 4% and complain that they were going to go out of business. Same as last time.
- ISPs would be very boring stocks, growing slowly and issuing a regular dividend.
- The big news this year would be that IPv6 routing was going to change from an optional extra-fee service to a built-in on everyone's bill.
Basically, look up the way that the Baby Bells acted between 1982 and 1996.
Yes. The number of things ISPs have to do is already ridiculous. I.e. data retention, etc. None of this has any benefit for the customers, and it is why growth is hampered.
When we conflate "all regulation" with "one regulation", we disregard any meaningful conversation about the "one regulation" with a mess of argument over "all regulation".
Please, help us stop doing that.
If you want to talk about any of the other regulations, I would love to have a conversation about them. Just be specific, please.
> In contrast, Internet service providers do not appear to offer “telecommunications,” i.e.,
“the transmission, between or among points specified by the user, of information of the user’s choosing,
without change in the form or content of the information as sent and received,” to their users. For one,
broadband Internet users do not typically specify the “points” between and among which information is
sent online. Instead, routing decisions are based on the architecture of the network, not on consumers’
instructions, and consumers are often unaware of where online content is stored. Domain names must be
translated into IP addresses (and there is no one-to-one correspondence between the two). Even IP
addresses may not specify where information is transmitted to or from because caching servers store and
serve popular information to reduce network loads.
This is absurd. Under this logic, telephones "do not offer 'telecommunications'":
* Telephone users never specify the 'specify the “points” between and among which information is
sent'. When I call a particular phone number, I can't choose which cell towers are used, or what internal routing is used to connect my call.
* Users are often unaware of 'where [content] is stored'. When I place a call, I don't know if I'm calling a SIP phone, landline, cell phone, or something else entirely.
* If the existence of DNS means that the ISPs don't provide 'telecommunications', then the existence of phone directory services (e.g. Version 411) should mean that telephone companies also don't provide 'telecommunications'.
* IP addresses are logical address, not physical addresses. Neither phone numbers nor IP dresses specify exactly where information will end up - a call could be handled by a phone company-provided voicemail service, or redirected to another phone entirely.
It gets worse. From the same page:
> For another, Internet service providers routinely change the form or content of the
information sent over their networks—for example, by using firewalls to block harmful content or using
protocol processing to interweave IPv4 networks with IPv6 networks
Again, all of those items are analagous (no pun intended) to similar parts of telephone networks. Phone companies can block calls by scammers (e.g. http://fortune.com/2017/03/24/how-t-mobile-plans-to-block-ph...), and can change the encoding and encapsulation of the call audio as many times as they want to.
These are good points; do you mind if I add them to the draft comment I am preparing (which I've posted--in two installments--in this discussion thread)?
Interesting wording in that paragraph too. The quoted extract says "the transmission, between OR among points" yet the following sentence refers to ""points" between AND among." That subtle change allows them to argue that the Internet isn't a telecommunications system because users don't explicitly specify ALL the points along a route. Gross.
To whom it may concern at the FCC, As the head of an ISP I must tell you that I am entirely dissatisfied with the billions of dollars I make providing a mediocre utility service with near zero competition to customers who pay for that service. I see the billions of dollars being made by Facebook and Google through innovation and user consent and I want to take that money with political and regulatory force. I'll need you to first make it entirely legal for me to capture and sell all data about my users. Not because they consent, not because they want this but because I want a new cash cow to slaughter. I'm going to use this information to become an alternative provider of targeted ads to my customers. Next, I'll need you to allow me to throttle back the speed by which customers can access my competitors services because mine aren't as good. This isn't so much a toll road as a team of aggressive traffic cops, pulling over any business making too much money on my big dumb pipe to slow them down... fine them and then let them slowly attempt to carry on. I need this all because I don't innovate, I don't like my customers or give a shit what they want. I am simply used to using raw power and corrupt regulatory force to act as a parasite extracting the maximum tariff from productive businesses, people and entrepreneurs possible while keeping some of my hosts alive... but killing the smaller ones. I am big business. I am angry because I am losing. The actual free and open internet is allowing actual free market capitalism and user choice in too many things. I used to fight this kind of thing in back rooms quietly but this fight has escalated so now I must come out in the open and ask the government publicly to please take from the poor and give to me in new ways... because the poor keep innovating their way out of the traps I set. Finally, I disrespectfully request that the rules I propose be named the exact opposite of what they stand for, so it's clear this isn't a discussion with reasonable people but a raw show of force. -Old Rich Guy
The funny thing is that this will likely lead to a lot more significant losses in online privacy. The ISPs will now extort money from Google/YouTube, Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon...at least two of whom will need to track users more in order to better target ads (since they're already at max-ad-display thresholds) to increase ad yields. So to generate more revenues to feed ISP extortion, it's likely to drive companies to track you further.
Time to build out those mesh networks, make sure you are in the loop when your town wants to grant favor to one or the other of the carriers. Consider this the step... that wont ratchet back anytime soon.
Is the argument here that if "net neutrality" goes away, carriers will provide service to "poor, rural area" because they are able to serve their content better than the generally available content on the internet? Not arguing for it, just trying to understand the argument for a less "equal" internet.
Also, I thought this was how it already worked, but it was just called home cable? Don't most homes in the US got a decent hookup to their home for "cable", that usually includes an internet package?
I think the argument is this: "The best possible service for customers always necessarily comes from unregulated free-market competition. Therefore, we should remove all regulations, even if they are removed one-by-one with potential imbalances occurring in the regulatory ecosystem. Removal of any regulation is at least closer to true free market. So, we'll start with removing the regulations that my lobbyist friends identify as the ones they most want removed. It's a step in the right direction. Since fewer regulations equals more market freedom, whatever happens will necessarily be an improvement overall compared with whatever would have happened with the regulation in place."
In short: "free markets are the best because whatever result we get from whatever we choose to call free markets is, by definition, the best result."
to preserve the future of Internet Freedom, and to reverse the decline in infrastructure investment, innovation, and options for consumers put into motion by the FCC in 2015.
There has been a decline in innovation since 2015? How did they determine that? I must be missing something...
Propose to reinstate the determination that mobile broadband Internet access service is not a commercial mobile service...
Really! Commercial must have a special meaning here.
>We propose to return jurisdiction over Internet service providers’ privacy practices to the
FTC, with its decades of experience and expertise in this area.157
We seek comment on this proposal.
Somehow I feel that their "decades of experience and expertise" is not the kind appropriate for dealing with privacy on the modern internet.
One thing is interesting is that Google Fiber rollout slowed down with the Net Neutrality rules. Maybe they did not see it as quite as vital to their business. Now with Net Neutrality gone, given they view an open Internet as vital to their business, they actually may give more priority to Google Fiber.
This document is so incredibly professionally framed and laced with layers upon layers of spindoktering that I can't help to conclude that the FCC is intentionally violating the congressional statutes forming their mandate. Perhaps the EFF or similar should drag them in front of a judge.
Here is an updated comment (thanks everyone for feedback!). Please feel free to pass this on to your elected representatives, or anyone else who you think should see it.
Re: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking – WC Docket No. 17-108
The subject notice seeks comment on the analysis provided. The following comments are hereby submitted.
Paragraph 27 purports to show that broadband Internet service is an information service because it provides users the "capability for generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information via telecommunications." The argument given is that broadband Internet service allows users to do all these things. However, this is not the same as providing the capability to do these things. To see why, consider that providing users Internet services over dialup phone lines also allows users to do all these things; but the phone lines themselves are telecommunications services, not information services. Why? Because providing the user dialup Internet, by itself, does not provide them the capability to do all these things. That capability is provided by the endpoints: the users' computers, and the computers hosting the Internet services that the users connect to.
Exactly the same is true of broadband Internet services provided by ISPs: by themselves, they do not provide users the capability to do all these things. They only provide connections between computers at the endpoints that provide those capabilities. It is the services provided by the Internet hosts that users connect to that are "information services". The broadband Internet services that allow users to connect to those hosts are telecommunications services, and should be regulated as such.
ISPs object to analyses like the one above because they claim that they also provide the actual information services--in other words, they also provide Internet hosts that function as email servers, web servers, etc. But it is obvious that those services are separate from the broadband connection services provided by those same ISPs, because users can make use of the latter without making use of the former at all. I am such a user: I use the broadband Internet connection provided by my ISP, but I do not use any of the information services they provide; I do not use their email, their web hosting, etc. I use other Internet hosts provided by other companies for those services. The fact that ISPs offer information services as well as telecommunications services does not make their telecommunications services into information services; an ISP's choice of business model cannot change the nature of a particular service it provides. Broadband Internet connections are obviously a telecommunications service, and should be regulated as such, regardless of what other services ISPs would like to bundle with them.
Paragraph 28 asks whether "offering Internet access is precisely what makes the service capable of 'generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information' to consumers?" The answer to this question, as noted above, is no, because all of those capabilities are not provided by the mere fact of Internet access; they are provided by the endpoint computers that implement those capabilities. The question of how those computers are connected to each other, which is the relevant question for the purpose of determining whether broadband Internet service is a telecommunications service, is a separate question from the question of what capabilities the endpoint computers provide.
Paragraph 28 also asks whether consumers could "access these online services using traditional telecommunications services like telephone service or point-to-point special access?" Obviously the answer to this question will depend on what connectivity the providers of such telecommunications services choose to provide. But that is a different question from the question of what the nature of a particular service is. Again, the question of how computers are connected to each other is separate from the question of what capabilities the endpoint computers provide.
Paragraph 29 attempts to argue, in effect, that if most Internet users rely on their ISPs for any additional service beyond the bare fact of Internet connectivity--for example, DNS--then broadband Internet service must be an information service. Paragraph 29 also claims that the ISP, not the user, "specifies the points between and among which information will be transmitted", because, first, users only specify domain names, not IP addresses, and second, users do not make the routing decisions that determine the specific path information packets take through the network. Neither of these considerations affects the proper classification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service. Users might only specify domain names, but the service of translating domain names into IP addresses is provided by an endpoint--a DNS server--not by the bare provision of an Internet connection. (And even if the ISP typically provides this endpoint, that is still a separate service from the service of providing an Internet connection, and, as above, bundling the two together cannot change the nature of the latter.) Once the DNS service has provided an IP address corresponding to a domain name to the user's computer, the user's computer, not the network, specifies that IP address as the target of information packets, so once again, it is an endpoint, not the network itself, that determines where the information goes. And routing information packets, in and of itself, is not an information service, because it does not change the information being routed; it just accomplishes the information transmission specified by the user, from one endpoint to another. The intermediate routers that pass on information packets are not endpoints: they are not specified by the user as the targets of any information, and they do not provide any of the capabilities that make an endpoint a provider of an information service.
The analysis of Paragraph 29 also fails to take into account that, if it were valid, it would apply equally well to traditional phone service, which is admitted to be a telecommunications service. Users specify phone numbers to dial, but that does not require knowledge of the physical location of the target phone (and the user will often not have such knowledge), nor does it specify the route that will be taken by the information transmitted by the call. Also, traditional phone service includes directory service (411) and other "add-ons" that go beyond the basic provision of a connection. What makes those "add-ons" telecommunications services rather than information services is that they are for the purpose of facilitating the connection (or facilitating the refusal of connections which are not desired), rather than acting on the information exchanged between the users at the endpoints.
Paragraph 30 attempts to argue that network management activities such as firewalling and IPV4 - IPV6 translation constitute changing the information being transmitted. This analysis fails in two ways. First, refusing to transmit information (e.g., a firewall blocking content deemed to be harmful) is not the same as changing it. Refusing to provide a connection to a user is not the same as changing the information transmitted by the user. Second, the "information" which is changed by such activities as IPV4 - IPV6 translation is not the information sent by the user; it is network management information which is added to the information packets specified by the user, outside the user's control and indeed without the knowledge of most users (since most users are not familiar with the technical details of IP networking). These network management activities are no different from the activities routinely performed by phone networks to route calls--indeed, today the same physical infrastructure is often used to perform both functions, since the phone service backbone and the Internet backbone are in many cases the same networks. Similar remarks apply to services such as filtering by firewalls: phone networks can block calls from certain numbers, for example. Again, the key distinction which the analysis in Paragraph 30 fails to make is between "add-on" services that are for the purpose of facilitating connections, and services that are for the purpose of manipulating the information exchanged by the users at the endpoints. Only the latter are information services; the former are part of the telecommunications service that provides the connection.
In the light of all of the above considerations, the FCC should continue to regulate broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service.
Another interesting element in Paragraph 29 is that by the logic from the analysis, if a phone company upgraded their 411 service to provide anything beyond information to facilitate communications (for example, giving the hours of a business in addition to the phone number), then the entirety of phone service could be considered an information service. This is incorrect on its face. Adding additional information to the 411 service would not change the basic phone connection service from telecommunications to information.
Thank you very much for the time you have spent analyzing and interpreting this spaghetti code of proposed regulations. I would greatly appreciate any advise you have on giving this a "thumbs up" and so law makers know my voice is being added. Much Thanks!
The draft also seeks comment in Paragraph 28 on whether "offering Internet access is precisely what makes the service capable of 'generating, acquiring, storing, transforming, processing, retrieving, utilizing, or making available information' to consumers?" The answer to this question, as noted above, is no, because all of those capabilities are not provided by the mere fact of Internet access; they are provided by the endpoint computers that implement those capabilities. The question of how those computers are connected to each other is a separate question from the question of what capabilities they provide.
Paragraph 28 also asks whether consumers could "access these online services using traditional telecommunications services like telephone service or point-to-point special access?" Obviously the answer to this question will depend on what connectivity the providers of such telecommunications services choose to provide. But that is a different question from the question of what the nature of a particular service is.
Paragraph 29 attempts to argue, in effect, that if most Internet users rely on their ISPs for any additional service beyond the bare fact of Internet connectivity--for example, DNS--then broadband Internet service must be an information service. Paragraph 29 also claims that ISPs, not users, "specifies the points between and among which information will be transmitted", because, first, users only specify domain names, not IP addresses, and second, users do not make the routing decisions that determine the specific path information packets take through the network. Neither of these considerations affects the proper classification of broadband Internet service as a telecommunications service. Users might only specify domain names, but the service of translating domain names into IP addresses is provided by an endpoint--a DNS server--somewhere, not by the bare provision of an Internet connection. (And even if the ISP typically provides this endpoint, that is still a separate service from the service of providing an Internet connection, and, as above, bundling the two together cannot change the nature of the latter.) Once the DNS service has provided an IP address to the user's computer, corresponding to a domain name, the user's computer, not the network, specifies that IP address as the target of information packets, so once again, it is an endpoint, not the network itself, that determines where the information goes. And routing information packets, in and of itself, is not an information service, because it does not change the information being routed; it just realizes the information transmission specified by the user, from one endpoint to another. The intermediate routers that pass on information packets are not endpoints.
Paragraph 30 attempts to argue that network management activities such as firewalling and IPV4 - IPV6 translation constitute changing the information. This analysis fails in two ways. First, refusing to transmit information (e.g., a firewall blocking content deemed to be harmful) is not changing it. Refusing to provide a connection to a user is not the same as changing the information transmitted by the user. Second, more generally, the "information" which is changed by such activities as IPV4 - IPV6 translation is not the information sent by the user; it is network management information which is added to the information packets specified by the user, outside the user's control and indeed without the knowledge of most users (since most users are not familiar with the technical details of IP networking). These network management activities are no different from the activities routinely performed by phone networks to route calls--indeed, today the same physical infrastructure is often used to perform both functions, since the phone service backbone and the Internet backbone are in many cases the same networks.
My (and many others') objections are that ISP's in the US have been known for a while to be lagging behind the curve across the world in terms of quality of service and pricing. On top of that, they actively lobby against competing startup ISP's and pull dirty tricks to prevent anyone else from entering the market. Now, they want to roll back laws preventing them from charging for traffic based on content. This will make it more difficult to guarantee consistent quality of service to consumers and may also prevent new technology businesses from getting off the ground. It may even lead to a de facto form of censorship if content that large players don't agree with can be throttled. I've heard the argument that it's their business and they can do what they want. The problem with this, however, is that they are providing a service that is essential and not a luxury. Historically, organizations whose main purpose is to benefit shareholders have not been very good at keeping the public's interests in mind. That's why the government needs to regulate services which are essential and why the ISP's have no argument here.
Because that would sound like foreign terrorists are the concern. For this issue, the goal is to present the enemy as being government and anyone who supports government regulation of any sort.
The OP linked to their daily feed which isn't quite an anchor. The actual docket landing page is at [0] and pdf at [1]. Their "Fact Sheet" is also at [2] and [3].
ISPs should be able to manage their networks without government incompetence.
As smart as everyone here is when it comes to building internet endpoints, most of these comments betray an utter lack of understanding of what goes on in the ISP level.
could you be specific about the "most of the comments"? Most of what I see isn't even relevant to the technical on-the-ground details about ISPs. Most comments are just about the idea of whether ISPs that have monopoly/oligopoly status will be permitted to violate net neutrality. What of "what goes on in the ISP level" that is even insightful to bring up?
He's saying that if he wants to sell "Chicken Noodle Soup" with zero chicken in it, that's his God given right and if we could only remove those pesky regulations the free market will set us free.
> Following the 2014 Notice and in the lead up to the Title II Order, Internet service providers stated that the increased regulatory burdens of Title II classification would lead to depressed investment.
To support this notion, they cite two reports that purport to show that capital expenditure by ISPs went down as a result of common carrier regulation.
The first [1] has data only from 2014 on, so has hardly any "before" data; and shows wild enough variability in the "after" data that it seems unreasonable to draw any conclusions from the average value over such a short time frame.
The second [2] is a convoluted enough statistical analysis that I'm not really able to evaluate it -- though it does appear to show that telecom investment in infrastructure appears to have grown at roughly the same rate as it had since the 1980s (save for some wild up and down swings prior to 2010) -- just not as fast as an invented "control group" of imaginary telecoms that never heard they might be classified as common carriers (see figure 3.)
That's shady, right? It sure seems shady.
[1] https://haljsinger.wordpress.com/2017/03/01/2016-broadband-c...
[2] http://www.phoenix-center.org/perspectives/Perspective17-02F...