I get my Internet through CZFree, a non-profit community mesh network that covers Prague. The legal structure is the same as a non-profit private club. Members can vote for administrators. A membership fee pays for those who put the large expensive multi-directional Ubiquity routers on their roofs and also for a number of symmetric high bandwidth tier 1 fiber-optic connections throughout the city. Anyone can join the network and contribute by putting a multi-directional antenna on their roof. Or they can simply become clients to the network by using a directional antenna pointed at a multi-directional antenna.
Overall, the speed is much faster than with commercial Internet, and the bandwidth is symmetrical.
In my opinion, this is a good example of the two faces of the left. One person forms a union and tries to bully their employer into giving them better conditions, or petitions the state to create laws which will benefit them. The other face of the left creates co-ops and gives the corporate world the finger.
I personally believe that the second approach is superior to the first, and rather than trying to twist Comcast's arm into being nice, Americans should focus on building community networks, at least in the cities where such a thing is possible.
Corporations have twisted community politics to make such things very difficult. In my community, a municipal fiber optic network was built throughout the area but lobbying and politics made it nearly impossible to finish, so there are very few homes connected.
So to maintain net neutrality we have to fix democracy first? Makes sense, as that would fix more than NN. The irony is, we need the internet (sans the cats photos and Kardashians) to do that.
The best way to fix democracy is to adopt the Singapore system and raise politicians salaries so the people can collectively outbid the corporations for power. Trying to say politicians should be indifferent to money is like saying communism works, but was just never implemented properly.
I up-voted you for the interesting opinion, however, I strongly disagree with you. Why would well paid politicians be less corrupt. Is there some kind of maximum amount of money that a person can gather? In Czechia politicians are extremely well paid, and we have a "founding myth" that states that a "well paid judge cannot be bribed". This has been conclusively proven to not be the case.
Singapore is surrounded by far more corrupt countries yet has one of the least corrupt governments in the world according to Transparency International. A head of a ministry there can earn more than 3 million dollars. They also have one of the most efficient, as a percentage of GDP vs health outcomes, healthcare systems in the world. Think of all the subsidies that go to corporations from the government. If they just paid 1/10th of those subsidies to politicians that regulate them, they'd cut out the middleman and save taxpayers a lot of money due to greater competition and more efficiency among the businesses and industries they oversee. Political rivals would have a huge incentive to point out corruption so they could get their job. If they were expecting to benefit from the corruption, they would instead attack on unrelated issues in order to preserve the corruption cash cow.
> Singapore is surrounded by far more corrupt countries
It's funny you say because I have my favorite counter-example from one of those surrounding countries. I was in Thailand when Thaksin Shinawatra with his ThaiRakThai party was first elected into power. Many people I spoke to had voted for him because "he's the richest man in Thailand, he doesn't need any more money so he cannot be corrupted!". Fast-Forward five years and he changed laws that allowed him to sell a larger share of his own company as well as evade paying taxes for the sale. He was ousted by the military for being too corrupt for Thailand!
Interestingly, many people (including Trump) said the same thing about Trump in the States. He's so independently wealthy, he can finance his entire campaign himself and not be controlled by anyone because he doesn't owe them anything. Turns out that couldn't be further from the truth.
What magnitudes are you taking about? The Czech Republic has much lower wages and costs of living than its developed European neighbors. Are the judges paid well-for-Czechia, or well-for-Germany? And are the bribes large by Czech standards or German ones?
Well, the average top male manager in CZ in 2015 made 67 769 CZK monthy [1] or $3,080USD.
The average person in parliament in 2016 made around 100 000 CZK or $4,545USD. The head of parliament made 200 000 CZK or $9,091USD a month.[2]
The judges are paid by years on the bench. A judge started with 78 500CZK a month and after 18 years on the bench made 104 900CZK in 2015. And the judges also get money on the side for all sorts of things, so you can think of their pay as being like "spending money", their basic living expenses are already paid by the state. It's not an extreme amount of money, but it is generally true that politicians and judges are the best paid professions in the country. [3]
* Objective civil service exam which establishes competency in the position the person is applying for
* Once a person demonstrates basic competency, they can be entered into a pool and the final candidate chosen using sortition : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
* The selected person can only serve in that position once
* The person will be well compensated above average
Sortition seems to be a good idea, however it still puzzles me how the Athenians managed to sentence poor Socrates to death (with all their clever notions) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apology_(Plato)
Also i wonder there were any other trials in Athens similar to the trial of Socrates.
Corporate lobbying is essentially bribery and should be illegal. Any attempt at corporate lobbying needs to be backed up by mandatory double digit jail sentences for the CEO and anyone else complicit in order for any law banning it to be effective. We're a long way from that becoming a reality.
Yes. But those who make the laws are the direct beneficiaries of the system. The odds of them changing - especially at the disconnect Federal level - are about as good as a cat barking.
I'm not yet sure of the solution. I do know our collective belief in barking cats doesn't help.
We need more competition. What we have now are two parties that act as one. Candidates outside that cartel are squashed. Sure we get to vote, but for what? Another cookie cutter?
It would be interesting to go the other way: a politician must give up all property upon entering office, is given a stipend during service, and then is given a reasonably generous "retirement" package upon leaving. Assume obvious loopholes have been accounted for.
That's the Tibet model. I've thought that it might be a good one, especially if made more democratic and if the burden of theocracy was removed. However, it shouldn't be taken to the extreme of the Janeist model where the monk/leaders deprive themselves of all personal comfort. I've tried doing that myself, and I now know that my thinking is far more rational when I'm well fed and warm.
What we need is a undercover police unit, that is allowed to inpersonate any cooperate persona and trying to bribe politicians. If caught in the act- the career of both sides end instantly.
We have that. The problem is the bribery is much more subtle, much more institutionalized.
Look at Obama. He got $400,000 to speak on Wall Street. That was for one day. His salary as POTUS for a year isn't that much.
I'm not picking on Obama. He's just the example. The point is no one cared that it happened. Why? Because both parties, as well as The Fourth Estate are complicit in the scam.
Luckily, the internet itself has provided us with the means for knowing how to get the message out the the masses. For example, consider the following:
This is an important message about "Net Neutrality". The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation wishes to support the fight for "Net Neutrality". If you forward this message, either through social media platforms or email, my friends at Microsoft will track the message and I will send you USD $100 (ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS) by post. Originally the internet, through the DARPA (Domestic Animal Recreational Photo Archive) project, was created to share amusing pictures of cute animals; primarily cats. Later, Senator Al Gore reinvented the internet to be a series of "tubes". Not only did this slow the growth of global climate change, but it also allowed the introduction of services such as YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Tinder. Unfortunately, the telephone and cable industry are not content to simply charge you for access to the internet, they also want to charge for access to content that they don't even own. "Net Neutrality" will ensure the continued freedom to get free and unfettered access to cat pictures and news about the Kardashians. Please join me in sending a strong message to congress about the importance of "Net Neutrality". And remember that to be eligible for your USD $100 (ONE HUNDRED US DOLLARS), you must forward this message via social media or email within the next 3 days. Regards, Bill.
If true, it seems unlikely that marches and protests in recent days would be reaching record numbers. As it stands, the largest ever American march was the Women's March earlier this year. Other notable marches include the March for Science, the March for Women's Lives, the Armenian March for Justice, etc.
Sure, the internet allows armchair protestors the luxury of 'protesting' from home, but it's also a great tool for raising awareness, organizing, and it could be argued that even some amount of armchair protesting is beneficial, as it at least makes the cause visible to those who might not have seen it otherwise.
Let's face it, it would have been very hard to get the ~4 million protestors to march in DC without the internet.
"According to some experts, the initial excitement over the role of social media in political processes in the countries of the Maghreb and the Middle East has diminished. As Ekaterina Stepanova argues in her study concerning the role of information and communications technologies in the Arab Spring, social networks largely contributed to political and social mobilization but didn’t play a decisive and independent role in it. Instead, social media acted as a catalyst for revolution, as in the case of Egypt, where the existing gap between the ruling elite and the rest of the population would eventually have resulted in some kind of uprising."
That said, Malcolm Gladwell agrees with you -- that the low-risk protesting that social media provides is also basically without reward [1]
How many more successful, country wide, democratic movements would there have been in the history of humanity if there had been a means of communication and coordination as effective as the internet?
"Need" is distinct from "makes far, far easier and likely". It can be done without the internet, obviously, but the circumstances in which it can be done are undoubtedly far more rare.
For coordinating, I’ll grant the internet +10. For effectively and meaningfully communicating, it gets -100. The state of public discourse is abysmal, and the modes of internet communication do not substantially improve this. Sure, you can use the internet to get a group of tiki torch-wielding people into the same area pretty easily. But there’s no substance or depth of consideration in the public sphere. Everyone immediately opts for vitriol, vilification, and rage-stoking simplistic phrasing to make everything black and white. It’s far more satisfying to the masses, it seems, to absolve themselves of the responsibility to recognize and grapple with nuance.
Well, the Arab Spring, at the time, was seen as the emergence of the internet in the world of democratic revolution. Now we know it was a total failure. Not a single country came out better. Perhaps that is just a coincidence, but I think that it is possible that the speed and shallowness of the communication actually played a big role in the failure of the revolutions. Real, stable, democratic social structures cannot form in such a short time.
There are more forces required than the call-to-arms for a revolution to end in a net success for the people initiating it.
I think it's unfair to task 'the internet' with the entire task of establishing a fair government.
The communications channel succeeded. The call-to-arms was heard. The failure wasn't with the use of the internet, it was with everything that went on after dissent began.
People expected 'internet = democracy' and overburdened the whole concept. Free and wide communications is just a stepping stone, one of many, that edges a governing body into fair-practice.
We did the same thing here in CHA. Luckily, we won the battle of lobbying and politics—and even a court case against Comcast. We fibered up the whole county. Sadly, telcos then lobbied for legislation to prevent expanding outside our service area, and they won. Now our legislators have given Comcast & AT&T $45M what our municipal broadband could do at zero cost to taxpayers. It’s ridiculous.
What laws exist against a 5ghz ubiquity mesh network? I know that such laws can be challenging. Here, there was a proposed law to charge money for the use of that wireless band. The law was very unpopular however, and was not passed. But I can understand that happening.
What laws exist against a 5ghz ubiquity mesh network?
That easy: make you liable for what people do on your network. Make it hard to register as an official network provider that would forfeit some of the liability.
(AFAIR, in Germany there are some changes now, but it's a good example how Internet sharing is made difficult for anyone without a large legal department.)
I'm not sure what to say to this. I don't think that these challenges make my opinion wrong or invalid. They make me sad, and I'd like to fight against such challenges. But from an idealistic point of view, I don't think that they raise a fundamental problem with my belief in "community networks", merely a legal one which might be able to be fixed through protest and civil-disobedience, and all else failing, revolution (I guess you have to leave revolution on the table, despite the bad results revolutions have had in recent years, if democracy in your country really doesn't work at all).
Mesh networking is cool, but it doesn't scale without at least some cable connected nodes routing the traffic. And those will be impacted by network neutrality.
On an unrelated note, incredibly shady things are currently being done by US corporations in regards to the 5GHz unlicensed spectrum being used for commercial LTE [1]. This is obviously a very slippery slope and would need strong regulation from the FCC. However, the FCC just approved it for live use in February (Pai got into office in January).
We've added a price metric, route verification and low overhead payments to babel. You guys probably don't need it because you have a business structure in place, but it could allow for more anarchic, decentralized mesh "ISPs"
I take it you take issue with my writing "one person" because you think it is usually multiple people? If so, I agree with you. That is simply poorly written. I should have written "a group of people". Sorry.
You don't like the idea that unions try to bully their employers into having better salaries and work conditions? Would you prefer the word "pressure" to "bully"?
Bully is defined as someone in a position of power harming or intimidating someone weaker. Unions are a reaction to the power imbalance of the employer/employee relationship, and at best make that equal. Characterising what Unions do as bullying is nonsense.
Of course, it is becoming common for people in positions of privilege to complain that others demanding equality are bullying them by expecting the same rights they get to enjoy, so it isn't surprising.
I understood it to mean what wikipedia says it means:
"Bullying is the use of force, threat, or coercion to abuse, intimidate, or aggressively dominate others." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying
Look, I'm not on the side of the employers and against the unions. I just find the whole conflict to be "heading no where". Because it doesn't fundamentally change the relationship, it just pushes back against the power disbalance.
> One essential prerequisite is the perception, by the bully or by others, of an imbalance of social or physical power, which distinguishes bullying from conflict.
Employers "bully" their employees all the time to lower their salaries and work conditions under threat of unemployment. It's only fair that employees would union to balance things a little bit in the other direction.
I'm not an admin, just a user. However, this is the Czech Republic, so such things aren't the end of the world here. I'm sure the police would investigate child porn in much the same way they would with any other ISP, by investigating the user...
I want to setup something like this where I live as well. So the nodes are connected via 802.11s? Who provides the internet access? I'm guessing a few users still need access to the local ISP?
I'm also very interested in CZFree. Is there anywhere I can read up more on the technical setup ? I couldn't find anything in English. I'm specifically interested in what kind of connection to the 'main internet' you guys use.
If you are one of the people who wants to end "Fake News," you are also on board with ending Net Neutrality.
What do you think ending Fake News involves? The only way to do it is to have the government, Google, Facebook and probably these same ISPs you hate deciding what can and can't be put online.
You simply want to replace one giant beaurecratic gatekeeper with another one.
Anyone dumb enough to think Fake News resulted in the election results (please, show me the data) while rushing online to scream about Net Neutrality is a pawn in the game.
I'm tempted to make a sarcastic, hyperbolic reply to this hyperbolic and aggressive comment, but in the spirit of hacker news I'll address the content directly.
You imply that the only way to mitigate the problem of fake news (no need for scare quotes, we're talking about news that is fake here) is to hand over total control of the internet to some single entity. You have failed to make any case that every other action that could be taken to mitigate fake news would be insufficient. This is far from clear to me. I think there is a great deal that could be done to mitigate fake news aside from that. Note that I say mitigate because I do not think it would need to be eliminated entirely to be effectively made powerless.
Further, it's an old propagandist trick to claim that people who disagree with you are "screaming", to make them seem less rational and thus wrong. The language you choose to use in this post undercuts your points. Show me the data that fake news didn't affect the election results in any way. The probability of some effect is much greater than the probability of no effect at all, given the complexity of the system and the obvious mechanism. I think the burden of proof is on you.
The 4chan poison has been spreading. The poison is when these oh-so-smart culture hackers take advantage of our open systems to constantly act in bad faith "trolling" all of us with fake propaganda across all information channels. It used to be just for the lulz, but the laugh has become organized, funded, and gained much wicked intent behind it. It is a new aggressive societal disease that is taking advantage of our openness and freedom. Similar to external terrorists these internal terrorists are causing society to recoil in horror and become less free as we look for ways to protect ourselves.
"The internet" or "the web" is already dead, in the sense that most people use a handful of sites run by a handful of large companies. The internet could essentially be a native app run by a corporate governing body and more than 95% of people wouldn't notice.
Net neutrality is an irrelevant issue given that situation. And if you want to change that situation, pay-to-play is the least of your worries: convincing people to change their walled garden habits will be far more pricey.
> Net neutrality is an irrelevant issue given that situation.
No, it most certainly is not, because those of us who do not belong to the 95%, those of us who are trying to build new Internet services or new products that need fast, reliable Internet service in order to work, need net neutrality as a core principle in order to have a fair chance at competing. Innovators are always a small percentage of the population, but that does not mean their needs are irrelevant.
Starting a web business is already massively cheaper than in any other industry, and that won't change anytime soon. Your innovation is not going to fail because you have to pay extra money for bandwidth -- you're probably already paying Amazon's massively marked up $0.09/GB because it's slightly more convenient. If Comcast/Verizon decide they want a couple cents on top of that, you'll either optimize slightly and come out net-even, or continue not caring about bandwidth costs because you have bigger problems like building a user/customer base.
This comments shows a surprising lack of knowledge of the arguments for net neutrality.
The threat of Non-Net-Neutrality isn't some arbitrary increase in costs for starting a business that gets paid, and filed with other nuisance.
It's that by virtue of their position in the market, the providers can extract all the added value any company makes with their customers. That's because the startup isn't the one choosing their customers' internet access. What the provider charges for access to the customers that signed up with them doesn't factor into the decisions of the market, because the customer doesn't pay it, and likely will never know about it.
And "the market" will not solve this. There are maybe three or four companies large enough to cause significant backlash when they can't be reached. But besides Facebook, YT and Amazon, everyone will have to pay up.
And when faced with the decision to pay or not to pay, the rational decision will be to accept any price that leaves you with a single cent of profit. The power imbalance is staggering, and the potential for success with content startups on the internet will suffer dramatically.
On the practical side, your startups' second to tenth employee better be contract lawyers. Because you don't just have to pay Comcast and Verizon. You will have to make arrangement with every single one of tens of thousands of providers around the world if you want to reach customers connected via their network.
Of course, you probably won't bother with some of them. Or decide against, say, reaching potential customers in Montana. That will kill off several of the best features of the web. Namely the long-tail of default-accessible content that ordinarily nobody would think were interesting to someone of your age in your location.
No ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages. No one is even going to throttle video streaming, unless the ISP can demonstrate that the bandwidth consumed times some small per Gigabyte fee is worth far more than the postage and accounting costs (which for a handful of >0.1%-total-traffic-volume sites like Netflix, it will be).
Your prediction is like a Terry Gilliam movie (which I love!), but it's not actually going to happen that way.
You seriously need to learn about the history of the telecoms industry, going back to the days when they did exactly what you say they're not going to do.
Yes, they throttled Netflix and Youtube, two sites that account for ~30% and ~13% of total traffic volume, respectively. This is consistent with what I said.
So what? That's traffic that the ISP's customers requested. That isn't Netflix using some shared resource. Customers are paying Verison to transfer data, and if 30% of that data is NetFlix, that's fine. Throttling denies the customer the service they are paying for.
Should FedEx or UPS throttle the number of Amazon packages per address they will deliver on time since Amazon represents a very large percentage of their business?
(If this isn't compatible with a business model based on oversubscription, that's the ISP's problem)
> No ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages
Of course not, because that isn't what Network Neutrality is about. Obscure ferret jousting fan pages are not competing with Verison. However, ISPs are* often involved in various aspects of "media" production and distribution, which is a conflict of interest.
wouldn't the result be all of these companies (or at least new ones) moving outside the US if they have the chance? Then US internet customers would be in a precarious situation compared to the rest of the world.
It's not only about a potential small per gigabit price though. Imagine instead that in order for your new website idea to be reachable by possible customers, you had to apply and then negotiate with business-development people at a cable company prior to being able to launch at all.
What makes you think they'll stop there? Once you give them that power, do you think they won't use it to make more and more? To squeeze every last dime from your pockets?
I don't get your argument, is it that we should be fine with paying large corporations money for something they're already paid for by their customers, just so they can improve their bottom line?
My argument was practical. Practically I think you will be fine, the title is wrong.
I think the fact that many ISPs have local monopolies is not fine. I don't think net neutrality is related to that, and I think we're basically talking about a corporation billing another corporation for data transfer, which is pretty ok as business models go (and certainly doesn't justify this level of outrage).
>a corporation billing another corporation for data transfer, which is pretty ok as business models go (and certainly doesn't justify this level of outrage)
STRONGLY disagree! The corporation already billed their subscribers for the data transfer, why should they be paid twice for the same thing?
> Do you normally get up in arms about large scale B2B arrangements?
No but this is not 'B2B arrangements' were talking about here, this is 'pay us protection money or we'll effectively eliminate your business'
I do get up in arms when a company buys a drug that used to cost $10, makes no improvements to it and ramps up the price to $700, but this is even worse, since in the former case there's at least still only the customer being charged for the product, not also the delivery driver for the right to deliver it.
What value are the ISPs adding that the customers are already not paying for?
> Are you upset that magazines and newspapers collect payment (twice!) from both readers and advertisers?
The cost of a newspaper doesn't usually cover all its production costs via customer sale, so the ads fill the rest, whereas here Comcast is already a hugely profitable company from customer sales anyway.
There's Amazon Kindle 'with special offers (ads), but the device is cheaper than the version without ads. I don't think the plan is for ISPs to make broadband any cheaper for customers by starting to charge businesses for the thing they already were paid for.
I don't think my argument should be this hard to understand, unless you're a Verizon lawyer.
Extremely disappointed this is the top comment. You are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. As other comments point out, you need net neutrality to even have a chance of fixing the situation you're describing.
This is silly. Just because most people spend their time on the same handful of platforms, doesn't mean there's not plenty of traffic going to smaller websites. (In fact, in absolute terms, more traffic than ever.)
Nobody today is stopping you from hosting a forum about hobby endangered snail breeding from a Raspberry Pi in your closet if you want. I'm sure you've met people who make decent money off of niche websites -- and even giants like YouTube and Gmail have modest competition. Sure, not competition that's gonna eat their lunch, but does every business have to Take Over The World™ to be considered a success?
A few websites capturing most of the public's attention is to be expected to a certain extent: for better or worse, it's always been the case that a handful of media companies lead the conversation (that's why it's called "popular culture").
AWS increasingly monopolizing the web's hardware is something to worry about much more IMO; but so long as they don't get special treatment they can be circumvented.
No it's not. Just because most people's use of the Internet can be summed up by visits to X, Y and Z.com doesn't mean I can't create W.com to take them over. You can still compete.
Why? I just don't see it. It makes no sense that telecoms companies are going to go after startups that anyway don't have money. But I can imagine YouTube, for example, is another story, given how much bandwidth must be consumed by it.
The net providers and Ajit Pai's would sell it as a 'premium feature' being made available to poor start-ups at a discount. FTC can't go after Amazon for giving out large AWS servers to start ups for some equity.
>"The internet" or "the web" is already dead, in the sense that most people use a handful of sites run by a handful of large companies. The internet could essentially be a native app run by a corporate governing body and more than 95% of people wouldn't notice.
Even if true, an open Internet provides a hedge/fallback/alternative to corporate overreach and therefore is necessary.
I don't care where and how majority of people in the USA use the internet. Net Neutrality provides a safety net and thus a sort of "free market guarantee" that as soon as these "handful of sites" start getting too comfortable in their monopolistic positions and start sacrificing quality or cost for higher profits, that a new service can very quickly spring up to compete.
Net neutrality is what allowed these sites to exist in the first place and push aside the Altavistas and Myspaces of the earlier Internet!
Exactly! Was just about to write something similar.
Going one further, after hearing "ending net neutrality is going to kill the internet" one too many times, I got interested in hear what the other side was saying. Populist arguments always make me want to question them and find out more. It's almost a taboo so not be anything but 100% _for_ net neutrality. I resent being told what my opinion should be.
In fact it's pretty interesting to listen to Ajit Pai the FEC chairman talk about it eg https://youtu.be/6Q5_oV4JB10
His point that a "flat internet" disincentives telecoms companies to invest in infrastructure makes some sense. Google, Facebook et al. have completely cut them out of the "applications" part of the Internet (voice, messaging etc) so now all that's left is flat data provision to a stable / not growing customer base which leads to them going on "cruise control", cutting costs and investments.
What if feels at the moment is there's big money behind propping up net neutrality. That's why it's getting so much air time. Would like to follow the money...
It's quite standard political hogwash saying how net neutrality is disincentivising investment. What is really curbing investment is the monopoly of the few network providers. There are a lot of net-neutral countries in the world with significantly better infrastructure than the US.
Yes, in this case what is good for public also aligns with what is good for GOOG and FB. So what? It's like saying you're not convinced about children getting good education because it aligns with 'big money'.
No kidding, right, but the problem as usual is, how do we get these assholes (the FCC, an unelected body) to do the will of (77% of) the people? I'm so sick of wheedling and cajoling and writing letters and asking pretty-please...
Vote for a president who’ll appoint a less mad head of the FCC, perhaps? It’s not a directly elected position, but it’s not like it’s totally outside electoral politics.
Everything that we think of as new technology is founded through ground breaking innovation. As citizens, our networks have been subsidized (through tax) for public access. If you're viewing this that innovation has affected you.
Having control handed away from the populous that paid for the infrastructure is wrong. Net neutrality maintains continued public innovation.
> If Pai’s majority permits fast lanes for the biggest internet service providers (ISPs like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T), companies could speed up or slow down the sites and services they prefer.
Is the slow down part a real thing? I'm familiar with local peering to speed up last mile services (ex: Netflix hubs) but I'm not aware of ISPs targeting specific companies to slow down their bandwidth. Beyond generic packet shaping to slow down or limit your overall connection, is targeted throttling like that for real? IANAL but I'd imagine the latter would get an ISP's ass handed to them in a lawsuit.
> Fast lanes or “paid prioritization” create anticompetitive incentives for ISPs to favor their own services over those of their competitors.
A better solution is to require that ISPs be only ISPs. If they don't have their own content mills to push then you don't have this problem. While you're at it, split out the physical maintenance of the pipes from the companies providing the ISP services so that the latter can compete as well.
Ah fuck it, just let the municipality run it and be done with this. Then we can all go to our local townhall meetings and listen to irate neighbors rail at our local representatives for throttling their porn downloads.
I agree with one thing you said: if the barriers to municipalities providing broadband internet are removed, then the current monopolies will discover what true competition feels like, and a lot of customers, especially those in underserved rural communities, will discover what true world class broadband internet service feel like.
They don't necessarily have to slow down competitors. They can just leave them at today's available bandwidth and speed. So ten years from now only companies who pay the toll, or ISP's own content, will stream over multi-gigabit connections. All others will be stuck at 2017 rates.
Slow down is real. When I was in uni the network admins had the Internet configured so that there was a throttle down for any connection longer than a minute and anything that looked like P2P. Browsing was fast, but when you clicked a download link you'd see the bandwidth go from 250kbs to ~40kbs right at the minute mark. Very frustrating. I used to pause and resume downloads manually to get around it.
> A better solution is to require that ISPs be only ISPs. If they don't have their own content mills to push then you don't have this problem.
That train left the station long time ago. Today almost all of them are tripple-play providers, meaning that will want competing TV and phone services to be "worse".
Some European mobile ISPs briefly degraded Skype service on their cheaper plans (Skype being the big VOIP thing at the time). Stopped pretty quickly; I assume they got a nasty letter from the EC.
One use case that I'd like to see that runs contrary to the spirit of net neutrality is the ability to buy a 'data transfer' service tier. I.e. lots of data has to move from somewhere to the public cloud and most telecom infrastructure sits under-utilized especially at night. I would more believe the telcos that net neutrality is innovation stifling if any of them had ever taken our money when we wanted to buy intentionally low priority service, but at huge throughput, for cheap.
That's essentially what most residential internet is all about... all the data is being moved at low priority at lowest cost and no penalties whatsoever for broken service.
Business internet is different, with much different SLAs but for the most part without serious penalties. For the critical data stuff, look into banking SLAs etc where penalties are severe.
Have you ever tried to read a thousand tapes? Weeks.
I was once involved in a project to copy old Stanford SAIL backup tapes. They just needed people to load tapes on a drive, wait, unload, and go on to the next tape. Reading a tape took 20 minutes. Transfer time over the Internet to a file server took under a minute.
I haven't, but I'd like to. Anyone who's reading a thousand tapes nowadays must be doing something interesting. :)
Well, probably.
There was a stack of floppy disks sitting on a shelf in an old thrift store. I couldn't help but buy it for $1. What could they contain? They're sitting on my desk right now. I still haven't bought a floppy disk reader, but I'm really curious. I assume a USB floppy disk drive + linux will be enough to dump the raw bytes, but I haven't looked into it. Spelunking around old tech is fascinating for unknown reasons.
Good luck pulling off any usable data, I still remember going through over 100 flopies as a teenager looking for files I had backedup and seeing so many damn read errors.
Although now I'm interested to know what's on those disks you have :-p
Interesting how similar the Amazon and Microsoft offerings are, while Google's seems more like just another rack unit aimed at sitting at the customer for an extended period.
If you care about a free and open Internet, you'll work on the next generation of physical layer. One that is not subject to self-serving corporate and government control.
All the rest is just asking for something they've already made clear they don't want to give you. (And won't, using physical force as a last resort.)
(I originally wrote "interest and manipulation", but in that regard, how are they any different than the rest of us? But "control"? No, not that.)
Or push for what we have here in Japan? One government company owns all the lines, but isn't allowed to sell bandwidth to customers, but has to allow any changes npany to resell that bandwidth.
Competition is pretty damn good here (coming from Aus), and speeds are amazing.
My last connection was 2gb/s for around $40 us/month with no cap or throttling.
Net neutrality includes a clause that places ISPs into the category of "common carrier," which allows the government to regulate the internet as a telecommunicationa company.
This makes me nervous, I'd much rather the government stay out of the internet. Legislation is painfully slow to both make and unmake, and legislators will almost certainly be out of touch with the technology and there is a real risk of a restricted, heavily regulated internet which is far worse than what we have today. Not to mention that such a classification opens up ISPs to equal time laws, where the government decides who is or is not a candidate and forces telecom companies to play equal ad time for all candidates. Here's a great example of how this law would have already broken down: how many Republican candidates were there last election? Would you have wanted your ISP to be responsible for shoving political ads down your throat? How could you even enforce equal time laws on ISPs?
Net neutrality is a power grab by the U.S. government, and the propaganda has been well executed IMO; but I really hope that we will leave the internet to the markets. I dont trust our government to make something as enormous and complex as the internet any better, and it's been going quite well so far.
You would instead leave governance of the internet in the hands of business execs that care for little more than extracting as much value as possible for themselves and their companies?
Yes, because when entities compete, consumers typically win.
The government in the U.S. has already regulated ISPs to the point that an enormous artificial barrier has arisen to market entry.
We need deregulation. Approval for the major carriers in the U.S. is low enough[0] that someone could probably disrupt the entire industry, except it is next to impossible to enter.
You're also aware of regulatory capture, right? This regulation was premature, and, as is typical of government, overreaching.
Imagine even further expanding the power of the last three administrations, especially with the disaster that is the patriot act. Regulations are bad for business and bad for innovation, outside of monopoly laws, and those give me pause as well.
> The government in the U.S. has already regulated ISPs to the point that an enormous artificial barrier has arisen to market entry.
At the behest of telco lobbying.
> We need deregulation. Approval for the major carriers in the U.S. is low enough[0] that someone could probably disrupt the entire industry, except it is next to impossible to enter.
Small carriers are starting up, I just read an article chronicling several successful municipal broadband carriers in isolated pockets, and in each of their stories they are essentially boxed in by .... guess.... lobbying from larger telcos. (I think it may have been on HN, but if not just google 'successful municipal broadband')
Every step of the way it is the large telcos that prevent their growth. Perhaps if there were no incumbents in the ISP space deregulation might actually see improvements, but as it is the last thing we need is AT&T/Comcast/et al given free reign. The more we staple their balls to the chair the closer we get to a truly shared internet commons.
Seems this move would leave the free-for-your-soul business models to BigIT (bigger target for regulation/politics) and force the NewCos to actually build a different Internet. Unfortunately, "NewCo is changing the world..." is so 2012.
Net neutrality in the USA affects everyone because it will shape the future of competition on the web in one of the largest and most important markets. Basically, entrenched giants will be much harder to disrupt across the globe, because of their huge incumbent advantage in the USA.
A startup trying to disrupt Google, Facebook, Netflix, etc. will have a much harder time succeeding if it doesn't have equal/fair access to the American market. Added to the fact that historically most web startups come from the USA, and you're talking about a potentially huge decrease in total innovation on the web.
The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate jurisdiction of U.S. law.
I don't understand. Net neutrality was the default state of the early internet. The internet wouldn't exist as we know it without this guiding principle. It is only the recent deviations of this principle by providers that has prompted the movement to codify these ideas into laws.
There were no "net neutrality" regulations in the US till 2015. Nevertheless none of the horror scenarios net neutrslity proponents like to cook up came to pass, and in fact the 'Net grew to "the Internet as we know it" precisely in an era of no net neutrality regulations. That's ample proof (if any were needed) that all the net neutrality FUD is just that.
In a free market, if an ISP was to mess with the traffic going through its pipes, that would just encourage anyone who cared about this to switch to a competitor.
The real problem is the lack of a free market, which is the direct result of over-proliferation of laws and regulations, which discourage and stifle innovative businesses. Net neutrality regulations are just another layer of these, and will further cripple innovative competition and lead to increased monopolization of Internet infrastructure by big crony-statist corporations.
More fundamentally, it is a violation of basic individual rights and property rights for the government to tell any private enterprise how to operate its business. That's the economics of fascism.
>This is a core issue for our civil society. Americans of every political persuasion depend on the internet to educate themselves on the issues of the day, speak their minds, and organize for change. Mass mobilizations on all sides of the climate, health care and immigration debates illustrate the point.
The authors talk as if the ISPs will suppress political opinion. However, I am not aware of a single case where ISPs suppressed political opinions. However, there are cases where the dominant search monopoly may have suppressed political opinion (https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-sear...). Also, several registrar services together made it impossible for a website to have a domain. Also, the major consumer DDOS protection company removed the above website from their protection because of content, there making it easy for someone opposed to the website to DDOS them and keep their message from getting out.
This is why Net Neutrality is getting limited traction with the public. If we talk about net neutrality from a business perspective, they don't see any real harm. For example, a lot of the cell companies are offering zero rated music and movie streaming from select companies. Net Neutrality would end that. You could argue that net neutrality would prevent competitors from forming. However, my guess is that obtaining music and movie rights would be far more expensive and difficult than signing deals with ISPs to get on the fast lane.
And, if you try to bring the political opinion angle, it is far more likely that your speech will get suppressed by search engines, domain registrars, and DDOS companies than the ISPs.
I would guess people might be more receptive to Net Neutrality for those companies.
Speech advocating violence and hate isn't illegal, but no one is required to provide a platform for it, either. That isn't part of net neutrality, and never will be. Net neutrality is about carrying data regardless of origin/destination. That's it. No one is ever required to be the origin or destination of any particular traffic by the rules of net neutrality. If you don't want to host a particular customer, for any reason, no rights of theirs are being violated if you say "I'm sorry, you're going to have to find another host."
As for ISPs, there have been a bunch of high profile cases of them violating net neutrality that seem to be constantly ignored by people who choose to attack it.
Time Warner cable intentionally degraded traffic to servers owned by Riot Games until they caved in and paid off the ISP in order to get back to average traffic quality. A quote from the NYAG filing [1]:
> Data from Riot Games confirmed that from at least September 2013, when Riot Games started to maintain this data, through August 2015, when Riot Games agreed to pay Spectrum-TWC for access, Spectrum-TWC subscribers did not enjoy a “good network experience.”
And let's not forget the multiple times Netflix has been shaken down by ISPs. Comcast [2] and Verizon [3] were trivial to find writeups for.
They may call those "peering" agreements, but the data is pretty solid. In both cases, the problem was the ISP refusing to allow Netflix to upgrade interchange capacity, despite having plenty of bandwidth available on both sides of the interchange. Netflix only got to improve the situation by paying the ISP for access to their customers. This is a very clear violation of net neutrality.
These are a set of events that actually happened. They aren't vague warnings about worse cases, they're violations that already have been observed. I do not believe the practice will magically never happen if it becomes legal again.
Overall, the speed is much faster than with commercial Internet, and the bandwidth is symmetrical.
In my opinion, this is a good example of the two faces of the left. One person forms a union and tries to bully their employer into giving them better conditions, or petitions the state to create laws which will benefit them. The other face of the left creates co-ops and gives the corporate world the finger.
I personally believe that the second approach is superior to the first, and rather than trying to twist Comcast's arm into being nice, Americans should focus on building community networks, at least in the cities where such a thing is possible.