What. If. Every. Thing. You. Did. On. The. Internet. Took. This. Long.
Give me a break. There were no “good guys” in this debate, just corporations scrambling to control the popular narrative to suit their business interests.
Of course Google and Netflix were going to pay for peering and priority. The question was if everyone else who wanted to get into the video business should have to do so. Comcast wanted to basically double-bill for traffic: they wanted their customers to pay, and then they wanted the services on the other end to also pay.
This is all a moot question nowadays, because the video market is dramatically different than it was a decade ago. "Free-to-air" content is basically all handled by YouTube and Twitch, both of which are services run by companies with the money to afford the storage costs. "Premium" content fragmented into a bunch of different exclusive providers that already have business relationships with cable companies. So there really isn't a competitive video market being stymied out of existence purely because Comcast wants them to pay in order to compete with cable. The barriers to entry in video got a lot higher than just getting double-billed on bandwidth.
(As an example of this: Floatplane, an early-access "premium" platform for people already on "free-to-air" video platforms, had far more problems getting onto iOS than paying for bandwidth. Apple was their existential threat more than Comcast.)
With distributed computing & peer-to-peer storage networks such as IPFS, this may not be moot.
I could give a —- expletive — about what the corporations think. What about normal people?
It feels like we need a better audio mix for public policy discourse.
Let's re-emphasize: the dire predictions of removal of net neutrality didn't come to bear. They didn't pass the sniff test either. The dire predictions were fake news - however they are now the official record in the media, and won't get corrected.
Why would they start to use that power while the process is still ongoing, and there's (as can be seen in this very article) still active investigations of fraud in the underlying process?
That also brings up why do they want (and spend millions on) the removal of net neutrality if they didn't plan on violating net neutrality in the first place?
>No, we're not setting out to throttle Netflix. (We won't need to, because use will go up, and it's already in the contract we reserve the right to traffic shape anyway, and given we won't improve infrastructure, it's a given it will happen).
The stuff in parentheses is the unsaid part that would upset the normal people. The Network Engineers in the crowd heard it loud and clear though .
If Net Neutrality (and the incentive it creates through forbidding QoS to dynamically prioritize traffic), should have lead to investment in the infrastructure to increase network throughput to meet actual demand. Instead, POTS got torn down, broadband stagnated as ADSL lines were milked for every possible cent, Unlimited data plans disappeared and were replaced with caps...
We have more IP addresses than we should ever need, yet the biggest hurdle to robust connectivity is no one wants to spend money to actually get the wires strung/buried/overhauled. Why? because screw y'all. We're near if not de facto monopolies now, wires cost money, and they'd subtract from the exec bonus that gets cut.
https://www.cnet.com/news/verizon-throttled-california-firef...
When you start resorting to rationing (data caps), you have an infrastructure problem. Fix it. Don't embrace it.
(If anyone in their respective industries is in a position to benefit over their competition by making deals with ISPs, it is likely them)
This is reflected in the Netflix CFO's comments in 2015, among others: https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-says-it-still-supports-net...
One of the most successful was the John Olivers Last Week Tonight piece. I saw some evidence later that the ‘evidence’ provided in that piece (claims from Netflix about throttling) were either fabricated or exaggerated, although I did not look into it too much.
Net neutrality would say no - they are a defacto utility and need to treat the traffic objectively and fairly without prioritizing their own at the expense of others.
Reprioritizing say ALL video traffic? Perfectly fine. Peering arrangements at the network link layer that would benefit some players due to locality and not others? Perfectly fine as long as they don’t do it explicitly to penalize a competitor (and even then probably fine).
Targeting certain services or protocols because they are a threat to their own products? Or asking for upsell money to get useful speeds for certain protocols not due to network management/bandwidth and handled objectively, but for revenue extraction? Not fine.
Would you like USPS or UPS to be able to charge you extra (the package recipient) to ACTUALLY deliver Amazon’s packages at the rate Amazon paid those companies already to deliver them, since they know you’re buying expensive things a lot and obviously have money? The extra load on their trucks from these packages is awfully expensive after all. Surely once a week deliveries will be fine for now unless you want to kick in? Don’t worry, the spam mailers will still be free.
* Can an ISP have charge for access to Spotify but not YouTube Music (and presumably get a kickback from YT)
* Can an Mobile phone forbid you tethering on you unlimited use plan?
* Can an ISP ban you using bittorrent?
Peering is for fellow ISPs. Netflix, as you may or may not be aware, is not, in fact, an ISP. They already pay for their internet access. Do they pay enough? That's between them and their provider. Does their provider need to pay more for peering with its fellow ISPs? That's between the provider and its fellow ISPs.
What we do not need is for me to need to pay for my internet access and a Netflix subscription, and then pay extra just to let Netflix's internet traffic actually reach me.
> The report said investigators had not found evidence that Broadband for America or the lobbying firm it used for the campaign were aware of the fraud. But, the attorney general said, several “significant red flags” had “appeared shortly after the campaign started, and continued for months yet still remained unheeded.”
> The attorney general’s office said it had reached agreements with three “lead generation” services that were involved — Fluent, Opt-Intelligence and React2Media, companies that gather customers for clients as part of marketing efforts. Under the agreements, the companies said they would more clearly disclose to individuals how their personal information was being used. The companies also agreed to pay over $4 million in penalties.
Maybe the tanking stock price that results will force the Board of Directors to replace the top brass at these companies with someone much less brazen. If not, whelp, maybe there was some truth in those rumors.
How could they NOT have known? I mean... surely they were seeing these fraudulent comments, and the internet was stirring about it because we all knew they were fraud. Claiming that the ones who paid the fraudsters were unaware seems like a stretch. Did they not look at what they paid for?
I find it hard to believe these investigators truly think Broadband for America had no idea.
Nope. Plausible deniability is a thing. It's not uncommon corporations and lobbying firm to pay contractors large sums of money for 'image management' and intentional ask no questions about how it gets done.
Everyone knows what's happening, but as long as no one explicitly asks (in a documented form), the benefactors can feign innocence.
> I find it hard to believe these investigators truly think Broadband for America had no idea.
The individual investigators likely know full well that Broadband for America knew what was happening, at least in broad terms. But knowing something and being able to prove it in a legally actionable way are two completely different things.
Internally, they would never say the word, "AT&T" but had a client code #, like client 750, or something like that. It was always sketchy and everyone in the firm knew it was sketchy but they tried their best to keep the details from the employees.
What they would do is work with "community outreach groups" to create fake outrage about certain "bad" legislation that, people participating in such protests, problem didn't even know who was ultimately behind it.
Overall, pretty disgusting behavior and the fact that we let corps behave like this with no repercussions, speaks a lot to where we're at as a country and why. The US rewards sociopathic behavior.
The PR firm: Jasculca Terman strategic communications. I believe their contract with AT&T was severed many years ago but I don't know the reasons why. So, I doubt that particular firm worked on this astroturfing but it doesn't matter because companies like AT&T have a whole bevy of companies at the ready to do this work for them.
As time passes we see more and more groups intentionally exploiting this and exploiting it more often, and it feels like it will only get worse, especially since we can see it happening overseas in major political referendums or elections. The impact only grows bigger as these systems are exploited to put people in lifetime positions, so that the damage can't be undone for decades.
It's really unfortunate because the knowledge that the system works this way makes it very easy for people to make false claims about a particular election being stolen or the methods used - people seriously making claims that "fake ballots were flown over from China" [1] or things like that when the reality is that theft is simple and not the work of foreign spies, illegal immigrants, or hugo chavez [2] - it's our neighbors, fellow citizens, elected officials, etc
1: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/goofy-az-republican-vote-a...
2: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/18/fac...
Incredibly, what they're doing isn't cheating at all. Lobbying (newspeak for corruption) is 100% perfectly legal.
NOTE: I'm not saying I agree with at at all - I'm just saying this is what it's come to. The people with all the power and the money are making the rules to suit themselves.
Out of curiosity, what election or elections are you speaking of?
.... Right. Overseas. Wink. [Cries in Bernie Sanders.]
The lead generation companies paid the fines. See how it works?
If not, let me give another example that's more familiar, from movies: The mobster wants someone dead. The mobster tells the head of their criminal syndicate, who talks to another criminal syndicate who specializes in this sort of thing, who hires some outsiders to do the job. The police catch the outsiders, who take the fall; the DA prosecutes and convicts them, and says 'justice has been done!'
Why was FCC head Ajit Pai able to get away with citing fraudulent evidence? How can we stop such blatant corruption of the FCC's policy-making process in the future?
It is also worth mentioning that Ajit Pai differed from his predecessor Tom Wheeler. Wheeler had intended to introduce rules that allowed various NN violations but changed course in response to public comments and went with the stronger regulations. Pai never cared what the public had to say and made that very clear in his public statements, where he basically said that the only thing that would change his mind would be comments concerning the FCC's legal authority (not that there was any serious dispute about that legal authority).
To be clear, I don't believe Wheeler's statements about his motive for changing course; I think he changed because the administration believed it would be politically advantageous.
If they wanted to make legal or technical points, it doesn't even matter who they are, the points are true (or not) no matter who said them.
So I just don't see what the big deal is here, because someone spammed meaningless comments into a comment form and it's not like they really took any of our opinions into account when making the ruling to begin with.
I could get 400mb or 1gb if I wanted but 200mb has been more than enough.
I assume there's just very different issues in other parts of the country, but where I live I haven't seen any need for NN so it makes me wonder if there will be some negative effect to my currently good experience?
If ISPs were just a dumb pipe, this wouldn't be a problem. But most of the major players are part of massive media conglomerates and have incentive to throttle/restrict certain content.
https://i.insider.com/5887a523f10a9a2a768b6ac9?width=700&for...
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/186576-verizon-caught-...
https://time.com/2871498/fcc-investigates-netflix-verizon-co...
"See? Without NN, the speeds keep going up! This is great! NN sucks!"
Congrats on being bamboozled.
The NN debate online was a massive propaganda warfare campaign between two teams of huge corporations, neither of which had any of our interests in mind. We were squeezed in the middle of it and everyone was pressured to take sides.
And I will also admit that I DID OPPOSE NN regulations, as they were "specified" (if any one remembers, they were only released AFTER being accepted by the FCC). Specifically in the "why fix what's not broken?" sense (ref stratechery for a more detailed consideration than I can give: https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/) . It was not clear to me that they would provide any benefits that propaganda claimed. It was also clear to me that the quite reasonable thing of Netflix to pay Comcast (and other Tier 3 providers) to skip interconnect issues, which was being done before the whole argument came up, would also possibly come under scrutiny by the new regulation. And so I threw up my arms and said "If real technical solutions are going to be abandoned because of some misunderstanding of technology, I'm not on board".
The vitriol that still exists over this from people who this never really effected nor even understood the technical problem. Moreover, I was appalled at the lack of care here to even consider this from a technical perspective. Complete blindness to consideration due to tribalism.
Now were people wrong to use other's info without consent, sure! I 100% agree there.
Downvotes, commense!
The propaganda framed it like sites like Netflix would be really fast because they could afford to pay for it and startup competitors would be very slow, but economic incentives would have actually caused the exact opposite. A startup video hosting site is of relatively no burden to an ISP compared to a behemoth like Netflix so they would have no reason to slow down the startup speeds. If the startup succeeds because it has a competitive advantage to Netflix, then when they become big they get a new customer they can bully into keeping their speeds high.
Yes ISPs will take a cut of the fees they charge content providers, but they will also be able to pass those savings onto the average consumer because the Netflix customer, who is already using most of the internet bandwidth, is helping pay for the service connection. Market forces would force streaming services to go up in price and ISP costs to go down. It would be generally fairer.
"Investigators also found 9.3 million comments supporting net neutrality that used fictitious identities, most submitted by one California college student majoring in computer science."
For those who don't think that would be possible, then you haven't had the pleasure of watching a law with good intentions ban you from using Drop Box.
Like seriously, who has time to write an opinion to the FCC? Not even most people on HN who might even have real, honest opinions about net neutrality. And probably 99.5% of society doesn't have a clue what net neutrality might even be. Is it possible that there's one honest opinion in the batch? I suppose so, but it's probably like Ajit Pai's mom.
[0] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
b) This is an article in the NYT that came out today, about findings by the NY AG released today. Yes, we all more or less "knew" that most of the comments were bogus all along, but having an official finding that says that is still extremely important, and is news in its own right.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but would Net Neutrality effectively subsidize high bandwidth providers, such as Netflix & torrent providers, presumably creating latency across the network? It may no longer be an issue, as rate-limiting can be applied to the consumer.
The context of the Net Neutrality debate is different today than it was a few years, as content providers have more capitalization compared to ISPs, technology has improved, & new markets are in play. A big benefactor to NN nowdays seems to be distributing computing platforms such as IPFS, cryptos, Holochain, etc; which I find beneficial.
But then, as systems are designed, where does Net Neutrality stop? If there were a bill that includes NN, would it be written in a way where lawfare can be abused to require any load balancer or proxy service to provide NN? Which leads back to the primary legitimate (IMO) concern of regulation being abused by entrenched powers to stifle competition. Is regulation better or is less more? At this time, what harm is being perpetrated that NN would solve?
Yeah, this is wrong. Netflix is already paying it's ISP, and both sides of a BitTorrent connection are paying theirs.
Someone like Comcast wanting to charge Netflix just because too many of Comcast's customers are requesting Netflix traffic is ridiculous. Comcast already got paid... by their customers.
And I would argue that that is good. It creates an incentive for Netflix to invest into encoding, compressing and developing new tech in general. It also provides openings for competing platforms with better technology.
Take that away, and we could have a race to 8K@120fps or whatever with the whole internet as losers.
I don't have a preference who gets paid what in this situation as both are multi-billion dollar companies. Netflix serves as a middleman in a big machine as does Comcast. I have to care about my direct interests instead of spending energy on a crusade on behalf of a big tech company with the liability of the cost & making sure that the legislation does have any unintended consequences. Knowing politicians & lobbyists, there are always unintended consequences to any piece of legislation.
From what I'm seeing, the argument for NN is moot, heavy-handed, & rife with unintended consequences; Unless you can provide information about how somebody like me is adversely affected by something that only NN legislation would solve, why should somebody like me support NN when there are many alternatives that would be better for me? With NN, Comcast, Verizon, etc. are only going to capture the regulators to crack down on their competition (e.g. independent ISPs).
Focusing on providing better competition for underserved markets, included distributed networks & community wifi, would probably be more effective at keeping the quality of ISP market high. Improving distributed tech & removing (or rendering obsolete) legislation that limit competition to 1-2 ISPs in a region would also truly be beneficial. I also care about distributed systems. Is there something that regulation would do that the free market would not?
I'm a wee bit tired of NN being an oxygen-sucking rallying cry wedge issue that does not solve the root issues that affect me personally, but instead could be another regulatory tool to crack down on independent providers & distributed platforms.
NN is another of a long list of schemes to crack down on independent providers to capture yet another set of markets by the govt, lawyers, technocrats, etc. I wouldn't put it past Comcast to act as the heel in this charade.
Your link seems to point to the correct article, but it is paywalled.
This particular attack seems less familiar.
I'm wondering whether we'll deliver such a firm corrective "no" on this attack, that actors decide not to do anything too similar in the future.
But, I'm guessing there will be no firm corrective "no". The parties involved will get away without any consequences. Maybe a slight slap on the wrist for one or two of the minor corporations involved.
In effect, we had net neutrality in all but name until the Internet started to move to other, more vertically-integrated forms of infrastructure like DSL and cable.
I would really love to see a Ted Cruz or Dan Crenshaw or some other disingenuous right-wing hack try to argue that, had it not already been illegal to do so, AT&T wouldn't have done the exact same things to AOL that Verizon and Comcast have gotten caught doing to Netflix.
(EDIT: At least, it would amuse me in theory. In practice, my blood would probably start boiling about 30 seconds in.)
There's also the time he suggested that setting basic standards for ISPs amounted to "Obamacare for the Internet"[2], a patently ridiculous statement clearly designed to pander to a base that thinks any government is too much government. (Crenshaw has made similar comments, claiming that "They want to do it by classifying the Internet under a law from 1934"[3] - referring to the Communications Act, literally the one that established the FCC and gave them the power to regulate the aforementioned phone lines. It was also superseded by the Telecommunications Act, passed in 1996, but who's counting?)
There's also that whole thing where he's spent the last several months pretending that he didn't spread lies about the 2020 election that led directly to a terrorist attack, but now I'm getting off topic.
Except not entirely, because there's also the time three days later that he called Donald Trump's Twitter ban "Big Tech's PURGE, censorship & abuse of power"[4] as if it weren't already well-documented that the only reason it didn't happen sooner - given his numerous violations of their ToS up to and including calls to violence - was his status as a head of state.[5][6] (I would link to examples of some of those violations, but... you know...) Which, specifically, also flies in the face of the same laissez-faire capitalism bit that he would throw around over topics like Net Neutrality - since, if he really believed that, a more logically consistent position would be that Twitter is a private company and is allowed to make its own policies.
In a broader sense, the GOP spent the entire Reagan administration maligning the Office of Technology Assessment, a Congressional office whose literal job was to educate lawmakers so that they have more knowledge about these topics than Ted Cruz displays in public, before eventually defunding it in the mid-90s - an act which directly contributed to a Congress which has issues like this, or like "Senator, we run ads,"[7] or like that time AOC apparently had to explain to colleagues what Twitch even is while they were attempting to legislate about it.[8]
[1] https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/941489723901665280
[2] https://twitter.com/SenTedCruz/status/531834493922189313
[3] https://twitter.com/RepDanCrenshaw/status/111600513626921779...
[4] https://twitter.com/tedcruz/status/1347919674101657602
[5] https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2019/worldlead...
[6] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/06/bot-banned-from-...
[7] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/10/17222062/m...
edit: I'd love a net neutrality bill or order, but I'd prefer net neutrality + prison time for those responsible for the fraud.
However I don't see the report linked anywhere in the article, but I do see sporadic statements from the NY A.G. which were made 5/6/2021.
If these were criminal actions created by the previous FCC chair, e.g. using a citizen's name to submit a false comment, the actors at the FCC and at "Broadband for America" should to be held accountable.
Especially at this particular time: good luck trying to incite an anti-NN right-wing response right now when the primary rhetoric among the right currently is about internet censorship.
The fact that some other corporate actors might be doing similar shit in the other direction is totally irrelevant; if they got caught, we should all want to bring the hammer down on them too.
We're in this incredibly undesirable place where instead of debating something, we have this meta debate. "Net neutrality is valid because it's opponents astroturf."
It's pretty funny, because I have the same opinion, but in reverse. Net Neutrality disappeared off the radar, and now all of a sudden it's on HN every other week. Looks like astroturfing to me! "No, you're a towel!"
But you know what? Whether or not something is being AstroTurfed is entirely irrelevant, and debate is fruitless. We can have a debate on Net Neutrality without pointing fingers at who has genuine interest, and who is astro turfing.
And yes, that includes "they should be allowed to do the above Because Freedom".
Analysis here: https://www.gravwell.io/blog/discovering-truth-through-lies-... (disclaimer: I work for Gravwell)
The Francis Wilhoit definition of conservatism as a form of aristocracy seems applicable:
“There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
It seems to me that there should be “social media neutrality” — the very real effects of corporate-sponsored censorship have caused more harm than a lack of NN.
