> Pai is also expected to call for an initial vote in December to rescind rules that say one company may not own stations serving more than 39 percent of U.S. television households, two people briefed on the matter said.

Despair seems like an appropriate response here, but hardly useful. This is probably as bad for society as any of the changes to the net neutrality laws.

Getting out into the streets, blacking out websites, commenting on the FCC site... those things are just meaningless it seems and weren't even a response to these last two pieces.

How in the hell is monopoly ownership of the press still considered a free press? Shouldn't this constitutionally protected industry have its own set of anti-trust laws? In the Information Age, how can we be so careless about the management and structure of our core information distribution systems?

Are there any movements to combat this and prevent more local papers and tv stations from becoming smaller delivery mechanisms for the same partisan bullshit?

Because in the US, the 'free press' is an extension of the First Amendment, which protects individuals from government interference with speech. It has no bearing on the behaviors of private parties.

FWIW I'm not taking a pro-monopoly stance here. Just think it's important to educate the public that the First Amendment is a lot more limited than the average American believes that it is.

Not true. While the First Amendment does provide many protections for free press and there are no national press shield laws, many states in the US provide additional free press protections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shield_laws_in_the_United_Stat...

Please stop trying to hijack discussion of free speech and free press (both of which are human rights / social institutions that extend beyond the scope of protections provided via the court due to the First Amendment) into being discussions of the First Amendment in the name of "education".

>Please stop trying to hijack discussion of free speech and free press (both of which are human rights / social institutions that extend beyond the scope of protections provided via the court due to the First Amendment) into being discussions of the First Amendment in the name of "education".

At the end of the day, whatever you choose to identify as "human rights / social institutions that extend beyond the scope of protections provided via the court due to the First Amendment" don't really matter unless they're institutionalized and codified. Rights that have explicit protections written into law are the only rights that are backed by the State's right to use of coercive force.

reminds me of 15 year olds born after the PATRIOT ACT exclaiming "this isn't the America I grew up in"

Because, sadly enough, in this day and age the average American doesn't know and doesn't care. When the people who want this to pass are the people you get your information from, you walk away with a very, VERY different viewpoint than hearing from someone who doesn't have a horse in the race.

Playing devil's advocate, possibly the most populist-friendly protection is the 2nd amendment, in that there's a school of thought that says escalating the conflict to put the pressure on the people pulling the trigger - rather than letting them just forcefully disband an unarmed protest - is what it would take to get the soldiers of the government to refuse to carry out death sentences against their fellow citizens. However, historically the US government has not been shy about coming down hard on armed resistance, so it's unclear that it is any real use.

One of the more interesting (and either depressing or hopeful, depending on your perspective) lessons of a study of early American history is it's not some ideal period with no discontent and everything since has been decay. In many ways it's definitely better now. Human history, globally, is not pretty.

Which isn't to say we should stop trying to improve, but important to recognize that it will, and has always, taken a lot of struggle.

    > On Thursday the FCC will vote on Pai’s proposal to eliminate 
    > the 42-year-old ban on cross-ownership of a newspaper and TV 
    > station in a major market.

Under current regulations, BuzzFeed can buy WNBC in NYC but The NYTimes cannot? Unfortunately, Pai's logic seems to make some sense.

    > more than 39 percent of U.S. television households

    > The agencies generally consider markets in which the HHI is between 1,500
    > and 2,500 points to be moderately concentrated, and consider markets in 
    > which the HHI is in excess of 2,500 points to be highly concentrated.

I see every loss that occurs as a step back and no progress only side stepping afterwords...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996

Not sure about movements, but maybe build products and systems and infrastructure that would enable smaller newspapers and tv stations to make money while staying independent? Better crowdfunding, micropayments, better paywalls, better media distribution channels, tools for local communities to get involved? Bottom-up solutions like these are hard to implement, because they are decentralized and require an active base, but can be done.

https://vine.co/v/hMiITBPJUlw

Contrary to some state-level efforts and laws; companies are not people.

The problem is that political success in the US depends on a successful marketing & sales campaign, which in turn costs a lot of money. Legislating campaign events out of existence seems to be a non-starter, but with a progressive supreme court paid political advertising could be curtailed or stopped, in return opening up debate and equal-time promo slots on network TV that uses licensed slices public airwaves. Journalists and opinion-swayers could still report on candidates as they did before, but the need to have millions of dollars to run a senate campaign would be dramatically reduced. Of course there's a big free speech juggling act that would have to be performed, but it's not an insurmountable problem.

Couple this with some relatively lightweight voting reform (IRV or something more sophisticated, plus data driven auto-districting or even proportional representation at a state level to combat gerrymandering) and a good deal of the problems with the system go away, since politicians would have to spend much less of their time seeking donations (and politicians who were still doing a lot of fundraising would stand out more and could be investigated more thoroughly.)

Our current system predominantly favors white, rich, cis-gendered male christians who are good at manipulating their constituents and getting rich people and corporations to give them money. This seems like such an awful set of criteria that it is hard to see how just picking randomly could fail to be better. (There is evidence that sometimes it is better to choose randomly than relying on ineffective criteria: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/10/random-...)

Even if you eliminate the problems of campaign finance and winner-takes-all in elections we are still left with the distorting incentives of re-election (though enforced single terms could help with that.)

State representatives that want to be successfully re-elected, need to bring home the pork and this incentives wasteful government spending. They also need to avoid taking political stances that might cost them the election, even when it has popular support and would be beneficial to our society (e.g. gun laws, criminal reform and the legalization of marijuana).

Removing perverse incentives of re-election and moving to random selection for one of our chambers of representatives would mean less pointless pork barrel spending, reduce the incentives for corruption, and lead to a more representative demographic sampling with a better personal understanding of the economic and social challenges we face as a society.

Certainly a risk, but we have already have a similar shadow government of congressional aids and special interest lobbyists today. I think this can be mitigated to some degree by providing funding and resources for self education, but this is something that would need to be taken under consideration as the system was designed and measured as the system was implemented.

This kind of stuff is why I see America more as a corporate oligarchy than a democracy anymore. Gerrymandering, lobbying/bribery, and lack of contact with our government means it doesn't represent the people any longer.

1) Donations to politicians from companies/foreigners need an absolute ban.

2) Personal donations should be capped at what a average politically interested person could afford.

3) A company can either lobby or hire government employees, not both. If a company lobbies government they cant hire senior government employees for 7 years. Likewise if a company hires senior government staff they cant lobby for 7 years. This way if a business is lobbying government then that person knows there is no cushy job for them at the end and your not hiring someone for their relationships that can directly influence government.

I know these will have loopholes and need more detail etc. Not least super pac issue in US (I am Australian so different challenges). I do believe something around this framework would significantly change the face of politics towards working for their constituents. Especially with the internet today and its ability to spread information and ideas.

IMHO, if it weren't for reddit, imgur, news.ycombintor, etc. Net Neutrality would have been killed the first time. Now Ajit is just hoping that if the battle is drawn out, we'll fatigue, and he won't be eviscerated by his corporate overlords. And, unfortunately, he's probably right.

We don't have to include them if they want to let Comcast and others restrict the web. Black out Wikipedia, Reddit, Facebook, Netflix.. Do not serve them - because they are not serving us.

If they learn to get around this - well then they'll be more informed anyway. It would be more hilarious to see Comcast come out with its own VPN service to help them get back "online".

I think my empathy skills are good, but I struggle to understand Ajit Pai. What is redeeming to this course beyond some dollars to a negligible number of people compared to the number of voters supposedly represented?

Bribery works for most people, but is often much more subtle than simple quid pro quo. Things like offering a child of bribee business deals, etc. Jack Abramoff has talked about this pretty openly since his conviction.

Now, when bribery doesn't work, it gets darker. Blackmail, extortion, threats against family members, and worse.

I'll leave it there for now, but in general most people in DC seem to just be thinking "I'm gonna get mine for me and my family, fuck everyone else."

This is true in some way about all positions of power. An unfortunate consequence is that resources spent on helping people are resources that could have been spent buying loyalty. The way the people can benefit is if they are a key supporter that needs to be paid for their support (e.g. by having a strong electoral system). CGP Grey made a very good summary of how this works, "The Rules for Rulers"[1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

It defines stupidity in an interesting way:

> A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

The point is that if someone is doing something that's detrimental to others, it's a mistake to assume that they must be getting some kind of advantage by their actions. Making life a little worse for themselves and others might just be their way of interacting with the world.

I don't know if that descrbes Pai. He might actually be getting a significant personal advantage for what he's doing. I just think we should consider the possibility that the things he's doing don't have a rational reason.

While certainly missing plenty of nuance, his view is that rules should be written as necessary instead of creating an enormous rule book based entirely on today's tech. And to some degree, I think this has a lot of merit. Take for instance SpaceX and Google's variations of widespread air-based internet. If the throughput for these systems starts to become an issue would it be so unreasonable for them to throttle or block sites consuming disproportionate resources? And yes, this could absolutely be used in an anti-competitive fashion. What Pai is saying is deal with specific bad behaviors as they arise instead of building an encyclopedia of rapidly dated laws against many actions - which in some cases could be completely justifiable and beneficial.

Maybe the most basic argument is that it should be clear that net neutrality has not really achieved anything. Many people seem to think we always had net neutrality and stripping it away is some radical shift. In reality the government had no formal regulatory role on the internet until 2015. What was the state of the internet beforehand? Has it worsened or improved since then?

[1] - https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-chair-dishes-on-plan-to-rewrit...

[2] - https://www.recode.net/2017/5/5/15560150/transcript-fcc-chai...

[3] - https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/05/05/52...

No this is not appropriate. Sites do not 'consume' resources, users do. Let the market do it's normal job of supply and demand. If millions of users want to match netflix at the same time and the network cannot supply that, then raise the prize and invest in more infrastructure as any company with a demand surplus would. Markets _work_ in such situations, there's room for competitors, investments, increased profit margins and all those other good things. There is little information asymmetry: either netflix works when you want to chill or it doesn't. People _will_ vote with their money. Protecting a company from a demand surplus?? MADNESS!

Instead of nitpicking further on this flawed example instead turn your argument against itself. Why create rules of which you _know_ (as you yourself mention) that they are going to be abused, only to later 'deal' (take more 'campaign' money) with them. There is a very clear conflict of interest between ISPs that are also content creators and their content creating competitors.

I too ascribe to the notion that, whatever the legal code might say, companies are not people. They should not be able to abuse the rights that people have to achieve their business agenda. Their customers' bytes on their switches are not 'speech'. They should be dumb pipes, selling access to their dumb pipes and compete with other designers or dumb pipe networks, and that should be it.

I agree with your point in general, but careful with this argument as it can favor those wanting to remove rules instead of add them. When it's phrased as "what if there is market demand for a cheaper internet package for lower-byte-producing sites or specialized-cheaper sites only?" You might say "Whoa, wait, I didn't mean let the market do its normal job of supply and demand, I meant require X regardless of demand."

Of course we can all agree that the market can't do its job anyways if a new ISP can't be easily built to satisfy consumer demand requirements.

I admit that it requires actually thinking for a moment to see how regulation in this case can actually promote competition, and you'll have trouble getting many politicians to admit that or even understand it (when, as someone or other said, their paychecks depend on not understanding it).

Saying that the market can effectively limit demand for something that was a limited supply (air waves) is VERY different from saying that anything that there is market demand for is good for society or the economy as a whole and should be allowed.

You're drawing an arbitrary distinction between push and pull. Nexflix uses resources by sending content in the same way I use resources by uploading a file. Internet communication is a two way street. Far more resources are used when you talk to Netflix than when you talk to the NYT and someone's paying for them. Users don't think it should be them so why not the other end?

> raise the price and invest in more infrastructure as any company with a demand surplus would

Right, so they'll charge extra if you want to use Netflix and use the profits to fund that network. Err... "We charge an additional fee to access sustained video content as that puts a large strain on our network and reduces the quality of service for your neighbors." You could charge everyone more across the board but but that's unfair to people who aren't streaming.

> There is a very clear conflict of interest between ISPs that are also content creators and their content creating competitors.

Perfect, so fix the conflict of intersts and there's no need for NN. If my network oeprator is using QoS I can be reasonably sure it's to provide the best service to everyone.

> They should be dumb pipes.

Not possible. Cross-network traffic is inherantly political and even without that benevolent network operators still need to have policies to mediate allocation of a shared resource. Unless you're paying for a dedicated line between your source and target your traffic is being governed by some set of policies.

>You're drawing an arbitrary distinction between push and pull. Nexflix uses resources by sending content in the same way I use resources by uploading a file. Internet communication is a two way street.

You both seem to be laboring under a misunderstanding. Both Netflix and the customer are consuming resources and paying for them. Netflix pays for it's access and usage of the network, and so does the customer. Their networks have peering agreements to pass the data between networks. The question isn't if both should be paying, but if either one should have to pay more depending on where in the network the other one is or on the 'flavor' of the packets that are being sent. Net neutrality is supposed to protect Netflix from having to Pay Comcast for access to Comcast customers (in addition to what they pay for their network access), and it protects customers from having to pay Comcast for access to Netflix (in addition to what they pay for their network access).

> You could charge everyone more across the board but but that's unfair to people who aren't streaming.

Or you charge people for the capacity they use and charge more during peak times. This protects the problem without allowing the granting the current oligopolies massive market distorting power.

> Perfect, so fix the conflict of intersts and there's no need for NN.

Ok, fix those conflicts of interest first, then we can consider taking a look at crafting exceptions to the laws that protect us from.

The current effort isn't to make exceptions for QoS, the current effort is the repeal of the framework that allows ANY legal protection for Net Neutrality.

> Not possible. Cross-network traffic is inherantly political and even without that benevolent network operators still need to have policies to mediate allocation of a shared resource.

In what way is it not possible to create fair rules for who pays to build connections between networks and to mandate fair treatment in the creation of peering agreements between networks? Perhaps perfect fairness is not possible but you are saying that we shouldn't even be allowed to try.

But they do. Netflix has peering agreements with Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and a lot more [1].

https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/peering-locations/

> Or you charge people for the capacity they use and charge more during peak times.

It really doesn't matter. Since NN really only matters in the content delivery game this is just more directly giving ISPs what they've been asking for. It might make some people feel better but it's still a surcharge for competing video services.

> In what way...

Because it's still just as political, now the negotiation just takes place in government offices and lobbies. You might as well let companies hash out the agreements between themselves because the law will still be written to favor large incumbent players but now it's even harder to change. If things get dire the gov't can still step in.

Comcast's anticompetitive rent seeking behavior was a strategy of deliberately degrading Netflix's network access to Comcast customers to the point where Netflix was forced to pay Comcast or start losing customers.

This is the EXACT reason we we need better net neutrality protections, so that this type of oligopolic rent-seeking behavior is illegal.

>Comcast was the first large terminating access network to successfully implement a “congest transit pipes” peering strategy to extract direct payment from Netflix, but it is not the only one to do so. Since agreeing to pay Comcast, Netflix also has agreed to pay TWC, AT&T and Verlzon for interconnection. [Redacted section.] Netflix is not the only edge provider to encounter Comcast’s peering strategy. In a 2011 filing with the Commission, Voxel, a hosting company relying on Tata for interconnection with Comcast’s network, noted that “[w]here broadband ISPS typically ensure that links connecting their customers to outside networks are relatively free from congestion, Comcast appears to be taking the opposite approach: maintaining highly-congested links between its network and external ISP.” The letter concludes that Comcast, through its “interconnection relations,” had “deployed an ecosystem in which hosting companies such as Voxel are effectively forced to pay Comcast to serve its broadband subscribers.” https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...

> It really doesn't matter. Since NN really only matters in the content delivery game this is just more directly giving ISPs what they've been asking for. It might make some people feel better but it's still a surcharge for competing video services.

What are you talking about? Charging customers more to a specific streaming provide is anti-competitive since they are at a disadvantage compared to other streaming providers. Charging customers more to access any streaming provider directly benefits Comcast's competing cable bundles and is also anti competitive.

Network neutrality is important for all kinds of stuff. From allowing the development of new P2P protocols, to the experience people have on different websites. Latency in browsing has a HUGE effect on how people perceive the comparative quality of sites.

>> In what way...

>Because it's still just as political,

You said it was NOT POSSIBLE, please back that up. Nothing you have said about negotiating peering agreement negotiationss and network interconnections makes dumb pipes not possible.

> Netflix attempted to address congested routes into Comcast by purchasing all available transit capacity from transit providers that did not pay access fees to Comcast.

And Netflix apparently knew they couldn't afford the traffic if they actually had to pay for it so they tried to route around it. And when they saturated those connections they had the audacity to tell Comcast it was their fault and they should foot the bill for infrastructure upgrades.

Netflix went to an all-you-can-eat restaurant, ordered two of everything on the menu, complained that the food didn't come out fast enough, tried to pay everyone else in restaurant for their seats, and then demanded the restaurant hire more chefs.

> “it is simply not possible for competing external providers to deliver gaming, or streaming video services to Comcast’s broadband subscribers” without directly or indirectly paying Comcast"

Well no shit since any company providing those services is going to push so much asymmetric traffic that either they or the companies they buy transit from are not going to be able to negotiate settlement-free peering agreements.

This isn't a "I send you some traffic, you send me some, no biggie" kind of agreement, this is a "I'm going to use 70-90% of your bandwidth at peak".

This article is trying really hard to paint Comcast as the bad guys but I actually don't think that's the case here. Netflix/Cogent had a similar spat with Verizon.

> What are you talking about?

I'm saying that allowing companies to price by volume and on/off-peak is really just a surcharge for streaming video which could be used to hurt competitors. It's not really a solution. So I think we're in agreement.

> You said it was NOT POSSIBLE...

I think we need to agree on what 'dumb' means. Connections between networks are inherently political no matter what entity presides over the negotiations. And since network access is a shared resource there will always be a need for network management policies to maintain service, respond to incidents, prevent spam, stop attacks, etc.. Both of these things make networks 'smart'.

Second, lots of what he says are clear lies or contradictions. "I don't have predetermined views on where this will go" ... he announced many times exactly where he wants it to go! "I just want a competitive marketplace" ... he is trying to remove limitations on size of marketshare!

Third, we've seen his "arguments" over and over and they don't hold up. His main argument completely lies in revisionist history. The idea that somehow there was a "bipartisan light-touch" approach that was carefully applied and managed to grow the Internet, therefore imposing NN will destroy growth. The truth is very simple, that NN has almost nothing to do with infrastructure investment, it will just allow them to exploit their position as middlemen, and the truth is that large ISPs don't invest in infrastructure because they are unregulated near-monopolies and abolishing NN won't change that.

The "wait-and-see approach" is a classic vague generality that applies very poorly to this situation. There's a specific thing that the vast majority of consumers don't want these companies to do (discriminate traffic), and they have past histories of trying it only to widespread outrage, so we got a very simple, general regulation in place to stop them from doing it.

If anything, the wait-and-see approach he claims to support would be the one that leads to "an encyclopedia of rapidly dated laws". He says he wants to play whack-a-mole with laws, when we already have one extremely simple law that will age just fine: when a consumer pays for traffic, they get that traffic treated equally regardless of content or source.

Apologies if I seem angry at you but it really galls me when people are taken in by this.

You sound so sure, and you just take Pai unskeptically at his word, but is there a specific reason to think that this will actually happen? If you look at the most famous recent case of deregulation (in the financial markets), what eventually happened was that all the bad behaviours enabled by deregulation just continued without any regulatory action until the whole thing blew up. That's no model for governance.

If there isn't a specific reason (like a plan with some details, so that it's actionable), then it's also quite reasonable to think it's a bit of an excuse, intended to give cover, and a fairly transparent one at that.

What evidence do we have that the US Government will do this? What mechanism has Pai proposed we put in place to ensure that we address them?

It's true that I don't understand his position. And that is a fundamental failure of Pai and his team. A failure to properly explain to the American internet-going public the benefit of his position beyond "it isn't our job to police the Internet." Sorry to reduce his stance to a meme, and one that might not even accurately encapsulate his positions, but I'm a reasonably well informed individual and all I can see is higher prices for Internet ahead.

They tend to be quite reactionary (to our detriment in many cases). I don't necessarily agree with Pai, but many of his ilk can point to preemptive restrictive regulations as bad.

If there is a side effect, it might just be that those clamoring for unrestricted internet access force their municipalities (and states) to publicly commoditize ISPs. But yes, you are more likely to see a "internet basic package" come through at a lower price at first.

Force them? Here's an example of his ilk pre-empting that:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/another-state-la...

I do appreciate that he's at least trying to increase infrastructure investment, and I guess I'll have to think some more before I have an opinion on whether the proposed rules are likely to do that. I do know of one small ISP that supports his approach.

As others have said here in discussions like this one, I think that net neutrality is something of a second choice. What we really need is meaningful competition among ISPs. I would be happy if we could take all this political energy being spent opposing Pai and channel it instead toward removing barriers to municipal broadband.

DSL started out regulated under Title II as a common carrier as an extension of the regulation for the phone network. Common carrier status automatically applies a limited form of network neutrality as it doesn't allow arbitrary blocking or discrimination of access. In 2002 the FCC decided the relatively new cable internet access should be regulated under Title I and then moved DSL to Title I in 2005 to match.

Also in 2005, the FCC give its definition of the requirement for an "open internet". These essentially described network neutrality. In 2010 the FCC issued their Open Internet Order which made the requirements for an open internet mandatory for ISPs.

In 2014 the DC court of appeals struck down the most important requirements from the FCC order in Verizon v. FCC. In doing so the court informed the FCC these regulations could only be applied to services covered by Title II. In response in 2015 the FCC moved all ISP services under Title II, back where they had started.

Relevant (and far from all encompassing) cases:

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Cable_%26_Telecommuni...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....

In your first source the case United States Telecom Association, Et al., v. Federal Communications Commission is mentioned, where the ruling was made in _favor_ of the FCC by a 2-1 margin. Additionally, the decision you cite in your third source was a loss for the FCC, but clearly their authority to regulate the internet was not in question, to whit, "The court upheld the FCC's authority to regulate broadband providers to encourage nationwide broadband deployment, agreeing with the FCC's interpretation of section 706 of the 1996 Telecommunications Act."

This is because Pai’s comments are made in bad faith.

https://gizmodo.com/the-worst-lies-from-yesterdays-anti-net-...

"We should throw out the rule book and wait for people to break rules that no longer exist and then make rules to stop them"

While I appreciate this sentiment, it really only applies to arguments that are being made in good faith.

Pai may be saying "rules should be written as necessary instead of creating an enormous rule book based entirely on today's tech.", which is a supportable position that I can reasonably defend despite not agreeing with.

However, the action they are taking includeds removing any legal ability for the FCC to write and enforce these rules. Now congress can create these types rules without the FCC having title II authority, but relying on congress to write the rules as needed in response in innovation is going to be MUCH SLOWER to respond to innovation and bad behavior than giving the FCC the authority to adjust and enforce rules as necessary.

> What he actually says, and the implications of the headlines and comments snipped by third party organizations tend to be quite different indeed!

This is because what they say they are doing (and why) is quite different from the actual actions and motivations.

Pai keeps saying "we've got to remove title II to help small ISPs", yet the is the big ISPs that are constantly pushing for it's removal, Title II was put in place to regulate large monopolies just like them (Ma Bell), and many small ISPs actually favor maintaining Title II status. It is hard to take someone's arguments in good faith when they consistently misrepresent the issues.

> If the throughput for these systems starts to become an issue would it be so unreasonable for them to throttle or block sites consuming disproportionate resources?

Yes it is unnecessary. If they can't scale those systems to match supply to demand, they can increase the amount charged to limit that demand to match supply. Giving them

> Maybe the most basic argument is that it should be clear that net neutrality has not really achieved anything. Many people seem to think we always had net neutrality and stripping it away is some radical shift.

We have had network neutrality (mostly anyways) for a long time and proponents argue that net neutrality (and it's resulting competition) is what has caused the internet to innovate as such an amazingly rapid pace. That neutrality was not enshrined by law in the US until 2015 but that doesn't mean that the principle itself wasn't being followed by convention.

I hope your misleading arguments were made in good faith rather that being a deliberate attempt to mislead people like so much of the anti net neutrality rhetoric. (There is misleading pro net neutrality rhetoric too but I see more proponents making good faith arguments)

So it's up to the EU now to lead the way, and then we went ahead and started the process of making it legal for national governments to block IP-addresses. Which great power is left to fight for net neutrality? China? Russia?

It seems to have empowered Americans who were previously apathetic about the political process to get involved!

I think the parent was implying that large telco interests have a dubious track record when it comes to the balance between investing in capacity vs. rent-seeking.

You couldn't connect a phone to Verizon's network unless Verizon sold it to you.

The phones they sold had the firmware configured to prohibit adding content from any source other than their store, which sold it at an extremely high cost.

All 435 seats in the United States House of Representatives and 33 of the 100 seats in the United States Senate will be contested. 39 state and territorial governorships and numerous other state and local elections will also be contested.

Yes, showing that this [FCC fuckery] is bad is important, but it is possible because there is no legislation, no statute regulating this.

Tell people they can get zero rating on their favourite services, and the result of such a referendum will be uncomfortable for many.

I'm really tired of seeing people everywhere thinking net neutrality is "unquestionable", "universally good" and "the will of the people". Ever bothered to ask anyone outside the tech circles? Or you simply think you know what's best for everybody?

As a smaller ISP we are constantly asked for cheaper plans for - typically - older people who "just want to check their email." Thanks to net neutrality we cannot offer these people anything.

We are forced to compete DIRECTLY against the comcast's and AT&T's in our region. A competition where our only weapon is cost. And if we lower our costs we only get a bunch of power users who consume 10x more bandwidth than typical users - the big business marketing departments eat our budgets for breakfast.

Without net neutrality the first thing we'd do is setup a "email only" plan - charge $5 a month and literally knock on doors in retirement homes and sign up swaths of people. We could probably oversell the single line by an order of magnitude more than usual.

Net neutrality directly prevents any sort of choice for the consumer as to what level of internet access they want or need. And yes that might sound scary - but the VAST majority of people in certain age groups just simply dont WANT to pay $80 a month to check their email.

Eliminating NN will make competition even worse for smaller and medium sized ISPs because the big ISPs have disproportional leverage to extract subsidies from media companies and make all sorts of deals. In some cases, the ISPs even own the media companies (for example, Comcast owns NBC). How can you possibly expect to compete with that?

Under current net neutrality rules, is it possible to sell a data capped plan (but content agnostic), with overages, where the data capped portion is below rival “uncapped” plans?

That way it seems like one could attract that demographic without the downside you highlighted.

A low-speed broadband plan (or even dialup) would serve those customers fine, no?

> As for caps - which do you think would sell people better: "You have full access to anything on your email" vs "You can download 500 mb of data a month"

What if those emails link to some other site on the internet? Or contain photo or video links? Does it still count as “full access” if things slow to a crawl in those cases? With email being so small anyway, how does that differ in practice from just a low speed plan? It could still be marketed as “access to everything in your email.”

> And what will happen to their service when the grand kids come over and want to watch netflix?

This question itself seems to undermine your point. What would happen in that situation, on a plan like the one you’d like to sell?

Otherwise, without NN, we have to rely on ISPs "word" they won't just start forcing cable packages on us. No fucking thanks.

Comcast's of the world can oversell their lines by 4x what we can because they can simply get the word out to low-traffic users better than we can. Thats 4x the revenue smaller ISPs just don't get directly because of NN.

Being able to do so is great for the company in charge of the utility, but literally everybody else immediately loses hard.

There's nothing stopping them from doing this now, but the fact of the matter is ISPs don't want competition.

> Comcast's of the world can oversell their lines by 4x what we can because they can simply get the word out to low-traffic users better than we can.

So NN prevents you from getting the word out? Huh?

That is an utter baldfaced lie. NN is not what is keeping competition down, not even close.

If you want sympathy and understanding for your position, it helps if you be honest with the rest of us.

They think that they only want email, but what they really want is to access the internet via their email.

Also, I don't think I've ever heard such a misuse of the word "simply"

What? What constitutes a "link"? This doesn't make any sense.

Sorry, not interested in giving it up so you can bilk and spy on the elderly.

I guess people actually would need to be able to still install software updates etc, which might be tricky if strictly capped?

2. If you are not providing last mile, you are not competing with comcast, verizon, at&t or whoever else owns that infra.

I care far, far, far more about net neutrality, and not having the internet get fucked, than about your company making money.

In theory you'd think we could make motorized land vehicles with all random power outputs just like boats, but in practice they're all within an order of magnitude, how odd.

From an engineering standpoint I'm not sure what we could take away from a modern car to make a "Sunday church only" car that would still be street legal and not result in immense staggering levels of customer dissatisfaction. In addition, I'm kinda claiming old people saying all they want is email, are lying. The instant you sell that "email only" product the instant the phone lines light up with support calls. They don't actually want it, they want cheaper prices and they're hoping that stereotype will sell their request. They have no idea that "email only" would be costlier to provide, they just think its an inferior position so gimmie a lower bill. In summary, we can't sell it because it would be a support nightmare and its maybe not possible to engineer without significant extra expense.

The thing about market segmentation is that its very expensive to implement legacy long distance telco style era billing infrastructure... we aren't gonna split product prices from current price X into X/2, X/3, X/4 for inferior products. To fund the billing infrastructure we're going to split into 2(X+100), 0.75(X+100) etc. Both a VERY high offset to fund the billing costs, and an additional medical insurance style monopoly increase to multiples of higher price, not lower. Killing net neutrality is about monopoly middlemen raising prices, never about lowering them.

An even closer although more stretched analogy is a modern car that can drive across the country at high speeds is going to cost almost exactly as much as a car that can just barely drive to the post office. Its not like turn signals or air bags are any cheaper. Certainly there's no such thing as single mode fiber optic lasers that are only rated for email checking vs 10G multiplayer gaming use.

I've noticed watching my kids that bandwidth use has stopped increasing. Thru my life bandwidth use only increased, over many orders of magnitude. That era is over, and we're raising kids who have constant BW use over the course of their lives. For context my daughter is the same age as Youtube and nothing has happened since then WRT BW use. Everything other than streaming video is a rounding error and trillions of hours watched show resolution and quality are totally optional for video consumption despite decades of broadcast engineers and professional producers claiming the contrary in the legacy media.

Something as easy as allowing email + 3-4 links past email would solve virtually all problems and support calls and a bit of usage monitoring would eliminate the fraud

Ask people if they like being more-or-less forced to use some companies over others, or if they like paying a premium for online gaming. Ask people how they'd feel if Optimum decided to slow down traffic to Fox News if Fox News released a story unfavorable to Optimum. Ask people how they'd feel if a startup that intended to compete with Netflix was effectively shut out of the market by deals like theirs with TMobile.

Better yet, show them an image of internet packages ala cable. That'll make them change their tune.

Free up the protectionism we're granting to major telcos and let the consumer choose what they are willing to pay for.

Edit: Ultimately the consumer must own the "last mile" that is feeding their residence. In that way, ISPs would lease space in the residential IDF to tie willing customers in that neighborhood in.

You're gonna have to do a much, much better job of explaining why zero rating is a good thing.