Net neutrality was dead the moment Trump won the election. Pai was specifically chosen in order to repeal it. Public comments and hearings and reports are all theater.
While Pai and the FCC will do whatever they can to repeal Net Neutrality, the FCC operates with well defined stipulations. Once the FCC repeals Net Neutrality, it will be sued. And when it is sued, the burden will be on the FCC to prove that they had good reason to repeal Net Neutrality. That is why these public comments are so important, not because of Pai's actions, but because of the court case that will follow. If the prosecutors can show that the FCC did not act within the best interest of consumers, there is a very good chance that Net Neutrality will remain law.
Pai and his ISP masters know that. That probably was their plan all along. Get sued, then ask the Congress to pass a "law" that would "put the debate to rest", while not actually preventing any anti-competitive abuse because of all the holes in that law. Given current situation in the Congress you should expect that. The same Congress just voted for Pai.
I think the only way to really prevent that is strong and disruptive competition that will spook all the current slumbering monopolists. Google Fiber pretended to aim at that, but now it slowed to a crawl (it did cause some good ripple effects).
Will Starlink from SpaceX fix it? Who knows, but I have little expectation from the Congress to do anything of value about it. When was the last time they did something good about technology polices? DMCA-1201 and CFAA aren't repealed. There is no meaningful copyright reform on the horizon, and so on. Net Neutrality will be another victim of this dysfunction.
What we really need is some hardcore trustbusting. The Media companies must be split off from advertisers, which must be split off from ISPs, which must be split off from the software companies, which must be split off from the hardware vendors.
Unless something changes, there is so much vertical integration and so many conflicts of interest at play that the Internet will soon become Cable TV 2.0. A walled garden, proprietary, pay to play network where the only innovation that takes place is in new ways to separate the subscribers from their money.
Investors won't like it, but they can eat shit. An economy which only serves large mega-corporations is an unhealthy one. If the masses get nothing out of it, they will eventually bring the whole thing to a screeching halt.
> Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into.
They should have known it's a very long term investment. Why were they surprised that it takes time to build up the network? I'm more upset about their reaction, than about the fact that they didn't plan it better. They can make it all successful, but it's long term. Looks like they are affected by short term investors more now.
That has been a problem for them for some time. How many projects have they killed they folks relied on? Some engineers inside create an app or service and then they must move on internally and the app or service suffers from neglect for years then they kill it. You can't count on them to finish anything.
They are bound to be replaced. They have nothing but ad revenue.
They tried is as a test balloon and, with the new data they got, saw that they can't get the numbers to where they would need to be to be profitable.
The alternative here isn't that they would run something of that size indefinitely, knowing that it will lose them money. It's Google behaving like every single other company currently in existence: deciding up front that it's too risky and not even trying.
At least it created some nice data showing how the legacy ISPs react to competition. Just in case anyone ever needs to prove that this market isn't working.
Legacy ISPs managed it somehow? So I don't see why Google can't. Especially since technology has improved (microtrenching and etc.). If anyone, Google has enough money to pull it off and seriously compete with incumbents.
These "legacy ISPs" have, since they first got started and became entrenched, purchased enough legislation to make it effectively impossible for any real competition to take root. Google Fiber's failure was not a technological failure, it was a political failure.
So, Google could spend the money to purge that political garbage. They kind of tried, with pushing "one touch make ready" policy. The stated goal of GF was to increase competition in ISP market. So far their service was while positive, far from sufficient.
I was going to write "the ISP market is a natural monopoly", but then I noticed that's missing the point in this case.
Because the fear of Non-Net-Neutrality goes far beyond the usual "there's only two ISPs where I life and they both offer the same deals".
It's something in completely its own category of nefariousness because they could be as anticompetitive as they want, and the market could not solve it. Even if SpaceX did its thing and broke the speed limit on light.
That's because the injured party isn't their customers, who could take their business elsewhere, or at least loudly complain on the internet (if they have any).
It's someone not part to the ISP<->customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They're going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs' customers. And there's no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they've never heard about.
Satellite internet sucks because it's in Geosyncranis orbit at ~26,200 miles and you need to make the trip 4 times. LEO satellites would add ~250 miles worth of ping x4 which is a massive difference. Still not low enough for pro gamer doing FPS games, but just about anything else should be fine.
The problem is need a lot more satellites and your receivers need to be able to track satellites.
It's someone not part to the ISP<->customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They're going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs' customers. And there's no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they've never heard about.
This is the problem with every truly great crime -- once it's fait accompli, the harm becomes impossible to prove. Whether it's MS of the 1990s with anticompetitive OEM agreements, or ISPs of today, we simply never get to experience the richer, more vibrant world that never was.
If Starlink can drive costs into the ground, relatively speaking, we can talk about other factors. The capital outlay for a satellite internet setup is currently astronomical. This is the allure of the Facebook balloons - minimal expenditure per home.
Have they solved both the low-bandwidth and high-latency issues? I tried HughesNet "broadband" last year visiting family, and it was substantially more expensive than cable/fiber on a monthly basis, had more expensive equipment (satellite dish vs. cable modem), latency high enough to be obvious even on regular web browsing, low enough bandwidth for Netflix streaming to be an issue, and had a cap. It's a viable option only if you insist on living in a truly rural area.
I'm not sure about bandwidth; however, Starlink sats will be much lower than current internet sats. This equates to less lightmilliseconds. The fact that the light us travelling along a larger sphere than the ground (presumably resulting in larger international latencies) is less of a problem than you would think: there are fewer switching devices between devices - how that actually pans out is a big question.
I really think that it's simply a gamble beyond the enormous costs that you confirmed.
Really? You don’t think middle or lower class people should worry about getting locked into an Internet where they have to pay extra to access the ‘good’ job sites or alternate media or where they have to pay $10/mo simply because everyone ‘has to have Facebook’ and that costs extra?
The rich can afford to pay their way around stupid Comcast tiers.
That's all a problem, but a lot less important then whether or not you'll have health insurance next month, or whether your cousin will be shipped off to fight yet another war in the Middle East, or whether there will be coal jobs in your state (The answer is no, regardless of who you vote for, but at least one side will tell you that there will be.)
Hrm, maybe I should explain. “Hot button issue” is actually a technical term in political science that has a relevant meaning here.
One of the great quantitative results that has come out of political science in the last half century is the ability to model voter preferences, predict election outcomes within available uncertainties of measurement, and evaluate campaign strategies using the tools of linear algebra. The first-order approximation would be: assign a dimension to all issues on which candidates differ, for each voter assign a preference, and also for each preference assign a weight representing the priority the voter places of that issue over the others. Assume the candidate achieves all that they promise, so the outcome if they win is whatever their campaign platform says they will do. For each voter, calculate the magnitude of the difference between the voter’s preference vector and each candidate’s outcome vector, weighted by the voter’s priority vector. The candidate whose weighted outcome difference from the voter’s preferences is smallest gets their vote.
You’ll have to either trust me this works, or delve into the polisci literature yourself. Barack Obama was one of the first presidential candidates to seriously use quantitative modeling of this sort, and it helped him win the election. Donald Trump’s campaign took it even further. The current state of the art, exemplified by the Trump campaign, is able to aggregate data from many sources including especially social networks and advertising profiles to build ridiculously detailed and fairly accurate predicted preference vectors for most of the voting population. They then segment these populations and serve them hyper-optimized political ads, sometimes even individually tailored, aimed to emphasize points of agreement between the candidate and the voter and points of disagreement between the voter and the other candidates, for the purpose of generating a second-order correction where each voter has a different view of the candidate designed to make him/her more agreeable to them. All interesting tech, albeit somewhat Orwellian in its consequences.
Anyway, one outcome of this modeling validated by experimental data is that most voters’ priority vectors follow a power-law distribution, or something like it, meaning that a point of agreement or disagreement between the voter and the candidate on that issue trumps all others. If Alice thinks that abortion is baby murder, or if Bob is gay in a non-rainbow state and wants that to change ASAP, then it almost doesn’t matter on what other points the candidates differ. Alice will vote for the pro-life candidate, and Bob will vote for the gay-marriage candidate. Or as will often happen, voters who are suffering (no job, expensive health care, bad retirement benefits, etc.) will vote in the way that they think will better their lives, other factors be damned. These issues which dominate a voter’s choice, are hot-button issues.
So back to the point I was making. I’m not saying that net neutrality is not important. What I’m saying is that in an election there are many different issues at play, of which net neutrality is one. Nearly every voter is driven by a small number of hot-button issues, and these are often things like their jobs, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and foreign policy generally, taxes, immigration, cost of education, cost of health care, etc. You’re going to have a veeery hard time convincing me — or more importantly, Joe Q. Public — that net neutrality trumps these issues. And that’s what you have to do for net neutrality to matter AT ALL at the ballot box.
That’s not to say it can’t be done. That effectively what organizations like the National Rifle Association, or the National Right To Life have done with gun control and abortion, respectfully. Two issues which probably wouldn’t dominate the ballot box if not for some very clever and very expensive engineering of the public debate.
To summarize - current politics became a sophisticated brainwashing scheme, that uses science and technology to achieve if not mind control, then something on the way towards it. Disgusting and rather scary, but not surprising.
The scary turning point in history is when political science became an actual science, with predictive models and falsifiable theories. Once the political scientists had that, the electorate no longer owned their government.
The next expected step would replacing the government with purely virtual one. I.e. since algorithm can potentially calculate it much better, shouldn't it produce the strongest brainwashing effect?
Oh, interesting tidbit from the Trump campaign: they had literally thousands of variants of a political ad made, changing timing, what images or overlays were shown, different voiceover tracks, etc. If a cable network would let them stream a different ad to different circuits they would, but mostly this came into play online. Your facebook feed would be filled up with these ad variants or fake news machine matched and customized to your advertising profile. If you visited the campaign website, the slogans emphasized and even the color trim (red, blue, green) was customized based on your voter profile predicted from tracking cookies/geoip/UA.
The company that did this, btw, was a British political consultancy, and the same one that worked the Leave campaign:
That's what they said in 2016 but fewer people turned out to vote against Donald Trump than against Romney or McCain. And also GOP picked up a lot of senate seats.
Not a lawyer but I worked for a different agency. The burden is incredibly high here because courts provide a considerable amount of 'deference' (See Chevron Deference or Chevron v NRDC) to agencies as long as they follow the rules of the Administrative Procedures Act and their interpretation of the law is not off the wall.
The Supreme Court already heard this issue in the mid 2000s and found the FCC could regulate ISPs as title 1. They could reconsider, but I doubt they will.
Really, this shouldn't be even decided by the President. It should be the matter of law. The problem is that Congress is completely dysfunctional in this regard, so we shouldn't expect any improvement here.
It's a very perverted situation, when policy on anti-trust is drafted by the executive branch.
Net Neutrality is part of Freedom of Speech and I will not waive my right so thoughtlessly simply because a different human sits behind a respected desk.
Honestly, I feel that the repeal of net neutrality protections is basically a foregone conclusion at this point. It's fairly clear that Pai has known what he plans to do all along and is perfectly willing to ignore and/or fabricate evidence.
Update: To be clear, I'm not saying people shouldn't comment. I did, in fact, submit a comment (perhaps even two) during the comment period to the FCC arguing in favor of net neutrality rules.
That's definitely what those in favor of repealing the protections want you to think. Silencing dissenters by creating the illusion that their voice means nothing is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
This might be the worst thing he's done so far, but it's not even the stupidest thing he's done this week.
Five days ago he put out a statement congratulating himself for demanding that Tim Cook turn on an imaginary iPhone radio to help the people of Puerto Rico.
That’s less far-fetched than it sounds when you know that the iPhone did have FM tuners in the hardware for every model prior to the iPhone 7, which removed the headphones used as an antenna, and groups like http://freeradioonmyphone.org/ have been trying to get the FCC to mandate opening up hardware access for many years.
That entire organization appears to be built on a misconception. This is the most detailed description I can find:
> I’ve dug around, and what I’ve been told is that there is an FM radio chip in older iPhones, but it’s not connected, and there’s no antenna designed for FM radio. The chip is just part of a commodity component part, and Apple only connected the parts of the chip that the iPhones were designed to use. No iPhone was ever designed to be an FM radio, and there is no “switch” that can be “flipped” — nor software update that could be issued — that could turn them into one. It’s a complete technical misconception.
Yeah, I’m definitely not endorsing them, only noting that this isn’t a new issue Pai came up with recently. Gruber’s theory certainly sounds plausible and I’d assume that if this was doable in software one of the jail breaking teams would have done it by now since that community loves to find cases where they remove Apple’s limitations.
I'd say he doesn't operate with data at all. His claims that deregulating the anti-competitive ISP market helps innovation is some toxic Kool Aid. And politicians who repeat it with glee while voting for Pai are simply disgusting.
This is hardly news; I pointed out as much in the comment I submitted a few months back. The fact is that Ajit Pai had decided to repeal net neutrality and only accepted public comment because the law requires him to do so. His NPRM is riddled with half-truths and outright falsehoods; cherry-picked examples; and false dichotomies. The commentary he sought was a litany of leading questions meant to support his decision to end net neutrality (ironically, some of the questions did not even accomplish that despite clearly being intended to do so, likely because his decision making process never involved a serious effort to understand the technical details of the Internet).
This is one incidence where I feel proud that India is better than the US. FB tried bribing its way into India for their Free Basics which was kicked off by the TRAI.
Am I the only one bothered by the reclassification of ISPs as telecommunications companies? For this reason, net neutrality drastically expands the reach of the federal government, and opens up the internet to legal regulations drafted decades before the internet was even an idea.
Ad-hominin attacks don’t have a place on hn, something you no doubt know because of the throwaway account. Please resist the temptation next time, since now gp is only left with the impression you are rude instead of an opportunity to change someone’s opinion (maybe even yours), and arrive at common understanding.
Wow, excuse me for trying to have an objective discussion and consider the possible downsides of this legislation.
Perhaps you'd care to explain why you think my comment justifies being called an idiot?
Edit: do you really want to give the Trump administration the power to decide what is and is not neutral content delivery? This is the kind of consequence I am attempting to discuss.
Are you familiar with the concept of regulatory capture and how expanding the laws of a government which has been captured destroys competition, creates artificial barriers to market entry, and enables dangerous abuse of power?
Do you really want a guy like Pai to have his powers expanded?
Why won't anyone actually answer any of my questions? Especially if the answers are so obvious.
Try starting an ISP, or go read about how it is nearly impossible to enter the market and compete with the likes of Comcast et all because of regulations. These are companies with ~50% approval ratings, ripe for disruption, and we are stuck with them because of regulations.
The principle of net neutrality makes sense, but I have yet to see anyone attempt to convince me that there isn't some danger to at least consider in this implementation.
I am bothered by it, but I don’t think lack of regulation is going to fix the issue, because an ISP is a natural monopoly. The rights they have acquired from the government and from the private sector to lay all those wires provide too big a hurdle in the absence of regulation, and passing laws to make to easier to lay wires for competition would have to have all sorts of negative externalities for property owners and cities, not to mention the inefficiency of building the infrastructure twice. So that leaves regulating the current ISPs as a public utility, like is done successfully in much of the world, or leaving the market in the hands of monopolists.
I think one overlooked factor here is the next move for companies should Net Neutrality remain in force. Reading the Telco act that NN is based on, it allows the FCC to decide which ISPs to be burdened with the regulation(the intention being that small ISPs aren't affected).
The next natural move for ISPs would be to lobby that their competitors are regulated but they are not. Since clearly ISPs have a strong lobby arm, wouldn't this be a great tool to use to essentially end any competition among ISPs? It'd be very much MAD - don't infringe on our turf or we will start a NN war with you.
I think that's one of the unintended consequences of NN.
They'll have even less incentive to improve their current offerings, which I don't think many people are satisfied by. Will the end goal here be to essentially nationalize ISPs?
There are so few competitors making it already that ISP’s clearly have sufficient tools to bully the smaller players out of buisiness currently, and there aren’t any tools for government officials to stop them.
I don’t know enough about how infrastructure fairs when it is nationalized but besides that being a dirty word in American politics I’m not apposed on priciniple. My cursory understanding is that it seems to work for other nations, and since I already have to treat anything I send my ISP as sent to the NSA as well I’m not sure what I would be giving up.
If we wanted Net Neutrality to stick around, we shouldn't have elected a President who openly opposes it (https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...).