FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate” (opens in new tab)

Point of clarification: Pai was appointed to the 5 person FCC commission by Obama. He was named chairman by Trump. FWIW, the previous chairman, Tom Wheeler (ostensibly a Democrat), probably would've dismantled net neutrality if Obama hadn't come out strongly in favor of it.

I find it incredibly frustrating that people clearly see the need for referees in sports, but not in business. Nobody's saying that the NFL or the NBA would have better competition if there were no refs.

There isn't a "reasonable" party, the Democrats could have made this a law making repealing it difficult. They found the to give ISPs billions of dollars, and to legalize spying on their customers though.

Both parties are a joke, voting for either is an awful choice.

>They are un-interested in any semblance of reasonable governance, it's siphoning your money to their backers in the most direct and aggressive fashion, plain and simple.

They are uninterested in your view of reasonable governance. Reasonable people can and do disagree with things like net neutrality.

Its not the elections or the Republicans.

The US was under the impression that they were special snowflakes. Every country has rules about corporate involvement in political campaigns. But Americans knew better. Our politicians can't be bribed because America fuck yeah!

All citizens are equal but some are more equal than others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

Thank you for the bluntness, after taking a minute I cannot refute anything you said.

There are many complaints these days about the increasing level of political discourse on HN. But the way things are going, we’ll come to the point where we have to talk about things with the people next to us in the grocery store line. This is a dangerous road we are on.

The country in control of some deeply unhappy few that never queue for a checkout counter.

How do you determine which party an appointee belongs to? Why didn't Obama appoint someone from the green party?

>There's a good chance a federal judge will strike this down.

Is there any historical precedent for this? I'm trying to assess the resemblance between this case and such a hypothetical case.

I want to believe...

But what move comes after that? If congress intervenes next and its not in our favor, the outcome could be far worse and harder to reverse.

Well the consumer (us) cannot seem to define what we want other than "everything" or point to how the 2014 change fixed issues that were common place. Where is the list of events that were fixed with the change that had not been previously identified and corrected as overreach by an ISP?

Take a look at those pushing "net neutrality" and understand why. I am not saying they are not without merit but both sides have merit but one side is funded by very large monied interest for one reason, they know they can use net neutrality to force what they want to relieve costs on their business interest and never have to pass it on because all onus will be on service providers.

Service providers who have since the prior rule changes have reduced roll out of higher speeds including some very big names (google is one). Why should they? Where is the payoff for adding throughput if its going to get regulated.

I remember the last time it was all regulated, my choice was ISDN provided I could get it or T1 provided I could get it or just suck it up and stay on dial up. With lack of regulation new players came in with higher bandwidth and made it available to me increasing competition. With regulation on service people magically expect higher speed broadban but totally ignore the fact there is no incentive to provided it and once regulated it will be mired in delay after delay and only show where powerful politicians want it.

What is also means if with regulation of service providers they will tell you exactly what services you may use the regulated network for. welcome to China

Just a pedantic procedural point: The FCC is not an "agency", but a commission with 5 members. Once a commissioner is named, they cannot be removed by the President for any reason besides misconduct. The two of them besides Mr. Pai who are Republicans have been on for quite a while and their agreement is necessary for this scheme of his to work. He presumably has it, otherwise there would be no vote taking place, so it's not like this is merely a product of Trump’s unique intervention here.

Let's be clear about something here. These are most likely not organic Trump picks. This is about the biggest donors getting their quid pro quo in the form of cabinet picks due to regulatory capture... and leaks of the Obama admin indicate the same thing happened with him, the same with Bush before him, and likely with presidents for a long time. With Obama it was citigroup who got most of the picks if I remember correctly, but with Trump it seems to be a bit more varied. (Eg Eric Princes sister for Education Secretary, etc)

Edit: I'd appreciate dialogue instead of just down votes. To clarify, by saying Trumps picks were a bit more varied I wasn't saying it was any better than bankers picking almost all of them.

The realpolitik response I usually hear is how only industry experts at a high level can fill these positions, but I simply no longer buy this argument.

That really seems to be the case. See EPA or CFBP.

I highly doubt the next administration will do that, for a few reasons

1) Once the cat is out of the bag it's a pain in the ass to put back in. "Hey Comcast and Netflix, your fastlane agreement is now null and void". Tell that to every ISP and software company that made such an agreement.

2) It's hard to get the government to pay attention even when there are people sympathetic to your case. Getting Tom Wheeler to about-face was a huge effort.

This isn't to say it CAN'T happen. I'd just prefer for NN to not be removed in the first place.

We've had net neutrality enforcement from the FCC for 13 years; case-by-case until that was struck down in 2010; neutrality rules very similar to those later adopted under Title II adopted under Title I authority from 2010 until those were struck down by the courts in 2014, and Title II rules from 2015 till now.

And even prior to 2004, much of what then passed for broadband was regulated in ways which incidentally protected or encouraged neutrality, though that was piecemeal and incidental to regulation of the particular underlying phone or cable infrastructure, not part of a coherent internet-related policy.

The new rules would not seek to enforce neutrality as the new FCC majority claims enforcement is unnecessary, and that what minimal enforcement against anti-competitive practices should be done should be done by the FTC. This would be a condition which has not existed in the history of the publicly-relevant internet, not a return to the status quo of two years ago.

>>We've only had the rules for two years,

False. A form of NN was in place from 2010 to 2014. Then the courts rules the FCC exceeded its authority under Title I so the FCC moved the ISP to Title II and reapplied the NN Rules in 2015.

Also one should note that from the internet inception until 2005 Internet Services were Telecommunications Services regulated under Title II.

It is more accurate to state we were only with out the rules from 2005 to 2010.

Not only that, I haven't seen any improvement to consumers in the two years that we've had FCC oversight on this.

The only places I see improvement are in markets that have managed to create competition between providers. And that tends to only come from municipal players entering the market as the large ISPs (Comcast, Charter, ATT) generally avoid entering markets that have an established player as they'd actually have to compete.

That kind of regulatory uncertainty is bad for the industry. Congress really needs to act.

... hahaha ... congress ... act ... hahahahaha ...

In all seriousness though: I think it's a mistake to focus on the FCC even now. That's obviously a lost cause. Focus on Congress and the next election cycle. Network neutrality needs to be law.

"Between the resources at Google/ Yahoo/ FB/ Ycombinator alone they have the money, lawyers, know how, and have had since November of last year to do something about this"

They did. They petitioned, used their own money, tried to convince Pai that his changes were bad. They did their part and Pai ignored them - flat out ignores them as if they don't matter. So... what about your argument works?

Pai was "hired" to screw the Internet and help the big ISPs make more cash. Trump is only there to overturn everything Obama did, nothing more. So Pai is just there to overturn NN, nothing more.

Every last bit of the spectrum will be privatized and they will eventually make it illegal to use the Mesh.

Imagine the beginning of the new meshnet. It'll be like the internet was in the beginning. A bunch of computer nerds. I actually would kinda like that.

YC is unique in the list that you give insofar as they're likely to not benefit from a repeal of NN, whereas the consolidation of money and influence in the big four has made the repeal of NN very attractive to them, and they're not inclined to fight it. Wall street, private sector don't care, they can reason about the repeal of NN and migrate to where the lopsided gains will accrete as a result. The money and market share at stake for these big players creates a suicide pact that pits them against the sentiment of their users and the instincts about freedom of the Internet that brought them into tech in the first place.

Direct action is required. Go vote. Route around broken Internet. Hit them where it hurts them.

It's fine, the real innovation moves on. Telecommunication is a history of openness followed by control, radio, tv, internet and whatever comes next.

At least hopefully this isn't the end.

> comments being written by russian bots .

Let's tone down the McCarthyism a bit shall we?

Meh, yours is on point too.

If the red states want to have a crippled internet let them. They’re all for states rights so let’s just have our states put in their own net neutrality (which will likely happen on the west coast in some form).

That's why you need something municipal dark fibers that every ISP can cheaply rent. The last mile is the expensive part or a network which should be open-access and never belong to a single ISP.

Agreed. There is an additional simple point of view which I believe clarifies the situation, which is to look at the total costs and total "value created" ("social welfare") under different systems. In other words, you ask what is the "first best" and what system can achieve it.

Consider selling wheat. If one company owns all the wheat fields, or the wheat fields are evenly split among two companies, the total amount invested in growing wheat is the same. And since multiple companies means competition, lower prices, and more consumers served, having multiple companies is more efficient in the econ sense (higher social welfare = total value - total cost).

But with fiber infrastructure, having two copies of the infrastructure is a huge waste of total resources. It is far more efficient to only have one set of wires. The problem is if they are controlled by a monopolist, they will keep high prices and serve fewer people. So a single copy of infrastructure with a monopolist is sub-optimal, but so is multiple copies of infrastructure with competition. Optimal is a single copy of infrastructure along with regulation or some other means of keeping prices lower than monopoly.

Of course, you can still try to implement market competition over those wires via regulations that force companies to share the wires, etc.

Oh no, don't you read mises and vood^H^H^H^HAustrian Economics? Natural monopolies don't exist: https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly

Wireless doesn't really have the bandwidth for anything more dense than a suburb (and even that's probably really pushing it). Approaches like microwave are also less reliable due to LoS/weather problems.

2.4Ghz is noisy in cities/apartments, 5Ghz doesn't penetrate well.

All that on top of the fact that there's still not really a standard, easily set up protocol for that kind of mesh ISP arrangement.

His attitude outside of court is admissible to court. It likely would be brought up to show that the agency did not represent the consumer in good faith.

Federal court cases have already been influenced by the current administration's actions (speeches, interviews, tweets) outside of court documents and statements by attorney. What Pai says now can indeed be referenced within court proceedings. Whether that will be effective or not is unclear.

Project Fi also locks you into Android phones. Good luck running an iPhone, or Windows phone, or Sailfish OS phone on that.

> you pay for the amount of electricity you use, but you're free to plug in any appliance you want

You can get metered at different rates for different uses for electricity. A simple example I found just now is shown in https://www.eversource.com/content/docs/default-source/rates... (see Rate 1 vs Rate 5 vs Rate 18), but that sort of setup is pretty common.

Now, this is metering based on _type_ of use (heating vs hot water vs whatever else), not based on the manufacturer of your water heater. But to be a devil's advocate for a moment, this is the sort of thing ISPs _claim_ they want to do: prioritize certain _types_ of content over others. Now I don't believe them on this, of course...

But a priori, there is not necessarily a problem with an internet where you pay one rate for data streams that need certain bandwidth and latency guarantees and a different rate for ones that don't. That would be equivalent to the different-uses electrical billing above.

Your comparison with "electric neutrality" is a great analogy. Another one I've used is "road neutrality": you can be charged a toll for using a road, but what if your toll depended on what model of car you drove? Or what if you had to have a certain model of car to use the road at all?

OK, thanks. That's a great explanation. Now it's clear why everyone hates this. Fuck.

> 3. Censorship. This I think will start slow but is the biggest medium and long term threat.

We already have that under NN (the Daily Stormer incident a few months back).

With regards to exempting services from data caps, it's called "zero-rating" and as far as I am aware, the net neutrality laws we have on the books don't mention it (which is why mobile carriers have been doing it for years).

I do believe that if you exempted only your own services you would start to fall into anti-competition territory though.

So if I understand, they're disguising this as "Netflix eats up so much bandwidth" but really it's "we want an unfair advantage over Netflix"? Otherwise, I have no idea why republicans would support this.

> Metered usage is not a violation of neutrality

According to the document the FCC released trying to justify this stuff, ISPs can't always figure out how do that, so they need paid prioritization: "Without paid prioritization, ISPs must recover these costs solely from end users, but ISPs cannot always set prices targeted at the relevant end user".

See paragraph 252, which starts on page 142, of this document: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...

Here's the full paragraph in case the FCC site gets slow (their file hosting wasn't designed for a world where people are actually interested in FCC documents):

FCC> 252. Efficiency. We find that a ban on paid prioritization is also likely to reduce economic efficiency, also likely harming consumer welfare. This finding is supported by the economic literature on two-sided markets such as this one, and the record. If an ISP faces competitive forces, a prohibition against two-sided pricing (i.e., a zero-price rule), while benefiting edge providers, typically would harm both subscribers and ISPs. Moreover, the level of harm to subscribers and ISPs generally would exceed the gain obtained by the edge providers and, thus, would lead to a reduction in total economic welfare. The reasons for this are straightforward. Some edge services and their associated end users use more data or require lower latency; this may be the case, for example, with high-bandwidth applications such as Netflix, which in the first half of 2016 generated more than a third of all North American Internet traffic. Without paid prioritization, ISPs must recover these costs solely from end users, but ISPs cannot always set prices targeted at the relevant end users. The resulting prices create inefficiencies. Consumers who do not cause these costs must pay for them, and end users who do cause these costs to some degree free-ride, inefficiently distorting usage of both groups. When paid prioritization signals to edge providers the costs their content or applications cause, edge providers can undertake actions that would improve the efficiency of the two-sided market. For example, they could invest in compression technologies if those come at a lower cost than paid prioritization, enhancing efficiency, or, if they have a pricing relationship with their end users, they could directly charge the end user for priority, leading those end users to adjust their usage if the user’s value does not exceed the service’s cost, again enhancing economic efficiency. And to the extent an ISP has market power, antitrust law would only allow such ISPs to engage in pro-competitive paid prioritization practices.

The arguments I've read is that ISPs would like to investigate traffic priority solutions. e.g. I'm a business that needs low latency (maybe I'm League of Legends or something similar), so I could pay Comcast to prioritize my packets.

Opponents would argue that it's pretty much the same as a "slow-lane" by virtue of the fact that everyone else gets de-prioritized. Proponents would argue that companies like Netflix already put their hardware in ISP's data centers to get that advantage, so this is just a more accessible way to do the same thing.

Don't you think they've already anticipated lawsuits and have been working on their rebuttal? All they have to argue is that removing the regulations improves competition, or that broadband providers aren't subject to regulations. Net neutrality rules have only been around for a couple of years, they could easily be reversed in one or two more.

And if you live in a city, demand the election commission open more polling places/etc. Low turnout in urban areas is at least partially because people don't want to wait in lines for hours, while the poling places in rural areas have 0 wait times...

Give me candidates worth voting for first.

Not enough.

Wasn't Pai appointed by Trump instead of by election?

Didn't most of the voting Americans vote against Trump?

It seems like a better approach to US politics is to be rich.

Those educational networks still connect to the commercial networks, via commercial ISPs.