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Comment by ComradeTaco | Hacker News Reader

You can't just say the regulations are old and therefore invalid because they're old.

Remember, the telephone industry was regulated because telephone companies merged and cooperated to create regional monopolies and destroy competition, all at the expense of consumers. Comcast, Time Warner and the like have all been doing the same.

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You also can't just say that the internet is the same as POTS.

The FCC has scarcely been better than these companies. It has a history of being a revolving door for companies. Consider what RCA/FCC did to Armstrong back in the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong

Just because the FCC does something doesn't mean its good, legal, or whatever. It's just what 3 of 5 unelected, unaccountable appointees cooked up. When the board changes, they can just as easily uncook it up.

With regards to this, I absolutely can.

You bring up a good point that many people might not have realized: relying on the FCC to regulate solely without the backing of legislation will not result in the kind of long-term stable regulations and consumer protections that we are looking for because what the FCC decides to do could change on a dime whenever the administration changes.

The FCC did have the backing of legislation, which is why it took an act of Congress to overturn it.

It had the backing of legislation to do whatever it wanted, leading to instability of regulation.

This law was written to prevent an overstep of a non legislative body's ability to legislate.

It's true the outcome sucks in this case, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the right thing to do from a balance of power perspective.

> It's true the outcome sucks in this case, but that doesn't mean it wasn't the right thing to do from a balance of power perspective.

HN, the only place on the internet for thoughtful/rational political discourse.

This is the only place I've seen having this conversation. That actually questioned the utility of the agencies to follow out the intended goal and whether this is the best policy to do thee job. It's sad it's not even being tapped on by the newspapers, even as an aside to their doomsday headlines they love to stir up.

As Thomas Sowell said: "Economics is not about hopes and good intentions, it's about cause and effect". The same applies to regulatory policy.

> It had the backing of legislation to do whatever it wanted, leading to instability of regulation.

This makes no sense. It's not true, for one thing--the FCC cannot "do whatever it wants." And independent rulemaking is the entire point of creating an independent federal regulatory agency in the first place.

Calling it a "regulatory overstep" is fine as a means of expressing an opinion about this rule, but the rule was legally promulgated. Again: that's why it took an act of Congress to reverse. Illegal rules get reversed in court.

I understand that a phone connection is different from an internet connection. But I couldn't think of two more similar industries. Wasn't dial-up,the first real consumer internet delivered through via telephone lines and switches?

More importantly, at the backbone level, the phone system has been run through the same type of SONET fiber optic networks as the internet for the last couple of decades, at least. In most cases the only reasons the two were isolated from one another were: - phone traffic was considered higher priority if an outage occurred (it used to be, but probably not any longer) - regulations on the internet (especially as pertains to giving access to ISPs, such as the cable companies) giving the phone companies incentive to segregate the two as much as possible

Another point regarding the consolidation of the two industries comes in the form of most of the cable companies now delivering home phone service through the internet.

POTS == Plain Old Telephone Service for those who didn't recognize the acronym

The FCC's reclassification of ISPs under Title II does not assume the internet is the same POTS. It's a classification, not an equivalance.

The national infrastructure for the internet and POTS is the same, and has been since the mid-1990s, if not always. Internet PoP sites and telephone PoP sites in the U.S. are housed in the same building, usually in the same rack. The fiber was run in separate trays and they used slightly different equipment for each (OC-48 vs. OC-192 in the mid-1990s), but at least from that point on the primary difference between POTS and internet has been that POTS usually runs through a slightly lower-bandwidth version of the same system. The same people built, maintained, and upgraded the cables and equipment on the backbone, whether it was POTS or internet. It's still run primarily by Level 3 (which swallowed up most of the companies that built it, or the infrastructure and employees that survived or spun out of those companies) and AT&T, and many of the fiber runs across the country are still marked with MCI's logo.

I don't think the FCC is the best place to fix the problems with the internet, but I don't see the "repeal and don't fix" method that seems to be so popular with the Republicans lately as a better way to deal with it.

As a communication mechanism I can say that some of the rules will likely apply.

Oh look, more whataboutism.

Well, calling them "old" is silly because these privacy improvements never went into effect.

Referring to this privacy exposure as "something that may/will happen because of Trump" ignores that it is already Federal law and has been since 2015. Yes, in removing FTC authority over broadband, the Obama administration created this privacy exposure in the first place. That tap wouldn't shut off until next December at the earliest if the current administration did nothing.

That privacy ship has sailed. Broadband providers can have been sucking this data up for over two years by the time this particular Obama regulation would kick in, even if left as was. The Obama administration could have timed the FTC authority removal to not happen until replacement protections were in place, but, no.

The EFF is oddly silent about why they've been so oddly silent about this exposure for over a year now. Their partisanship is showing.

The court decision (it was a court interpretation, not a particular executive action that led to the FTC's authority being removed) dates from August, 2016, and only applied to the 9th circuit. See https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2016/08/29/1... (The case was the FTC suing to prevent AT&T conducting data-throttling to customers who had bought unlimited data plans. AT&T claimed that the FTC no longer had jurisdiction, and the court agreed.

Given that circuit split, it's unlikely -- no matter how evil you imagine ISPs to be -- that they would start scooping up data and selling it immediately, and only in a narrow set of States. The FCC regulation was an attempt to restore an existing privacy situation, across the whole of the US market.

Again, it's extremely unlikely that with an impending privacy regulation being imposed, ISPs would proceed with monetising user browser histories for a short period of time before they were once again vulnerable to regulatory penalties for doing so.

If I may be less than oddly silent, I think we (EFF) didn't talk about this much because it seemed like various parts of the USG were (slowly) moving to fix a problem that came out of a court decision that could have gone either way.

You can read a little bit more about our work during the Obama administration (and before) on net neutrality here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/deep-dive-defense-neut... . One of the points we talked about during that administration, and this one, is the risk of FCC over-regulation, and regulatory capture. If you want to view these challenges in a public choice theory (ie generally Republican) model -- at the FCC, the risk is largely one of ISP dominance, as it is traditionally the telcos that stand to benefit from investing in moving the FCC to their position. In this case, you actually have Congress stepping into to push them even more that way. That's a problem under a Democratic or Republican administration, which is why I think you saw more Republicans move to oppose the repeal than Democrats support it.

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