The FCC voted to start the process of eliminating net neutrality rules | Hacker News Reader

The FCC voted to start the process of eliminating net neutrality rules

arstechnica.com

236 pointsSantosh8382 comments

Is this a surprise? Pai has made it abundantly clear he doesn't care what consumers think. Maybe I'm being too cynical, but the idea he would respond to their concerns always seemed naive to me.

Agreed. Even with service providers saying "we aren't trying to get rid of net neutrality", Pai himself has in numerous public forums said explicitly that he wants to get rid of net neutrality.

no it isn't a surprise but we should still be mad as hell, try to stop it, and punish those responsible.

He might not care, but big amount of negative responses can help beat him in court, when FCC will be sued for repealing Net Neutrality. If it will be demonstrated that FCC acted against public interest, courts can simply prevent this idiocy from happening. It also helps the Congress to understand that people pay attention aren't buying the monopolistic koolaid.

So, please comment if you care.

Be careful of wishing for judicial oligarchy, because when it happens you may not enjoy what it looks like.

You prefer the Rule of Pai? I think I'd prefer the multiple court of appeals process to determine whether the FCC discharged its duty, rather than an uncontested decision by Pai that clearly goes against what the people want, in defiance of the duty the FCC is charged with.

I prefer the rule of nobody but the consumer. That's what markets are for.

My understanding is that in most US cities there is only one choice of cable Internet provider so the consumer cannot choose a provider that offers neutral service.

So the FCC is required to force the providers to comply with the will of the people. And they're not doing it.

In case of monopolists, you get the rule of monopolists. Do you prefer that? That's part of what Net Neutrality is supposed to protect from.

Yeah, that would be great in the Ayn Rand's fantasy land. Unfortunately, back here in reality there is no ISP market. Consumers have little to no choice, and vertically integrated mega-corps have a stranglehold on everything. We all rely on our representative government to stand up to a titan like Comcast.

Yep, but worth reminding you at this point that in this case you are the commodity, the companies are the consumers and the Internet is the market. Free market will make more sense if you think about it that way.

the market only exists when there are multiple providers for services or goods. I have only one choice of ISP where I live, so basically i have to pay whatever they want for internet service, have no internet, or move.

This is also the case for many Americans, and with our FCC director also being pro-merger, it could also get a lot worse (your two options merge into one option). The ISPs have lobbied and colluded with each other to the point of making their regional monopolies legal in order to have no competition. This is why we need government oversight of this industry, as they've done a damn good job making sure you don't have the option to switch providers if you don't like them.

How can the online market function if some services are throttled?

That's exactly what net neutrality protects — consumer choice. Corporations aren't consumers, however, as they, Pai, and yourself are trying to argue that they are. This is taxation and extortion, plain and simple. You don't have to be a genius to see that. Arguments like yours are becoming a dime-a-dozen this decade; purposefully detracting from the issue and making it seem more complicated than it is to confuse people. Websites that are heavily trafficked already pay a premium to keep their services up and running — it's called infrastructure. ISPs want a piece of someone else's pie - have you seen "There Will Be Blood?" The internet is a milkshake, and Comcast, Verizon, and their disgusting ilk, to which you seem to want to be a party of, find it amusing to imagine having some very long straws, different from the kind that belongs to the man in your argument.

Jesus Christ, here we go again.

If you "free market" types figure out a way to get ten different companies competing on public fiber in 100 different cities across the US, then I'll finally listen to this argument. Until then, realize that there is no market. It's a monopoly.

Stop dismissing consumer protection with a wave of your magic market wand when you really have no idea what you're talking about.

I'm not sure what that commenter was suggesting, but one possible solution is to give the public the ability to vote.

Right now, the FCC has to receive comments from the public but does not have to listen to it. If the FCC were bound by the vote of the public, it would likely behave very differently.

Local loop unbundling seems to work pretty well in the EU (at least we appear to get cheaper, better internet).

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv:l...

This doesn't really help in low-population areas though, as there's little incentive for anyone to update the lines.

The result of the regulation is a mostly healthy market in consumer ISP service, which is weird.

At 5 different apartments in 2 different states, the only choice I've had for high-speed internet had been Comcast. There is no free market here. Starting a new ISP is a non-starter due to right-of-way, pile attachment, paid peering that the big players current force on Facebook, Google, etc.

You don't understand the word "oligarchy".

Kritarchy — rule by judges: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritarchy

In the context of his comment, as well has his other posts, it is clear to me that he objects to judges essentially limiting what people can and can't do. In my opinion, it's implied he applies that to those currently in power and their assumed mandate.

Unfortunately for that argument, we don't have rule by judges by any stretch. Judges (and police/prosecutors/etc) do have lots of power, but they are still bound by the law and therefore checked by the legislative branch of the government, should it come to that.

The courts don't have to examine whether or not they think a rule change is in the public interest, nor would they have to conclude that the public interest is proven by what position got the most individual comments in support of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act_(...

They could conclude that an agency unreasonably ignored specific arguments in public comments, but probably not that the fact that the agency wasn't swayed by the volume of the comments was unreasonable.

If the arguments were repeated multiple times, it's easier to point out that FCC intentionally ignored them, and it's not "we didn't notice" situation.

Pai, like most Republicans, have repeatedly shown their view that the profit of a corporation is always more important than human interests.

I'm a consumer and I think this is a good thing. Can't make all the people happy all the time.

Edit: Besides, government policies reflexively guided by consumer sentiment is called populism, which is dangerous.

Please explain.

Read this article by the brilliant Ben Shapiro: http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2014/11/10/7-reasons...

Edit: To those knee-jerk rejecting the argument based on the Breitbart domain, besides being intellectually lazy, you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author on matters of economics and politics (and indeed that Breitbart used to be a very respectable media outlet before the founder, Andrew Breitbart, passed away and the company was taken over by Steve Bannon)

Had to stop reading after this quote

"ISPs generally do not discriminate against highly-trafficked websites. If they did – holding a figurative gun to the head of those websites by throttling back speed to those websites – consumers would dump those ISPs in favor of others."

I'd believe this true if any of the large cities I have lived in actually had competition between ISPs.

Ok well you made it about 10% through the article - at least you made a modest attempt at understanding the other side of the debate.

Oh I get both sides of the debate. I also understand why we put regulations in place. Don't get me wrong, our government has fumbled the ball on a few occasions but generally regulations are only put in place once an industry habitually breaks the trust of our citizens.

That's the same phantasy they have in health care. They think there is a functioning market with choices where there simply isn't for most of us.

Interesting, I think an alternative to the net neutrality ruling might be to go the way that Canada and the UK did which largely prevented this from becoming a significant issue: force the major ISPs to lease last mile lines to the upstarts. Make a market that works. It also did great good for competition on speed grounds.

Well, there's a great way to ruin your credibility on Hacker News.

Already have net neutrality? Except we don't. ISPs are already prioritizing their own content over 3rd party content. Sometimes via bandwidth limitations, sometimes via throttling.

Companies putting a lot of bits on the net? Yeah, and they're paying for it! And the customers are paying to pull those bits down. Why, again, do those companies have to pay a third time on those bytes?

The Government Still Allows Discrimination In Traffic? Sure, they allow prioritization of (for example) real time traffic over web traffic. The key is that this is done equally across all real time traffic, not just the ISP's VOIP offering.

That article is shoveling BS pretty hardcore.

Citing Breitbart? Really?

Okay, fine. Let's pretend this is a credible argument.

"Companies won't prioritize traffic" - they do, and they have. Cell carriers routinely do, counting traffic to ~their~ paid services as not counting against their data cap.

"Or else consumers will just change providers" - there is very little choice in ISP in most of the country, and almost entirely owned by large, established players. 'Duopoly' it's called. And due to the costs, it makes it hard for a scrappy third party to come in. Also, Pai is pushing for "competitive" to literally mean "at least one other high speed provider providers service within half a mile of a residence". Meaning he'd say there was no monopoly even if you literally had choice of only one ISP. So trying to act like competition will save people, when he's actively trying to fight against competition being required, and the market is too expensive for a non-incumbent to enter, is really disingenous.

"Some companies take up more bandwidth". Actually, no. The -consumers- do. Netflix isn't using that bandwidth; consumers are. They're demanding to use the connection and bandwidth -that they paid for-, on whatever service they want to use it on. To correct Shapiro's analogy, this is like charging the person taking delivery of a truck a fee for a certain number of trucks, then turning around and charging the companies operating those trucks differing amounts -because you feel like it-.

Yes, the network can be 'reasonably managed'. If you want to clarify that, that's fine, and an -entirely different argument-.

"Create barriers to entry" - actually, the reverse is true. Again, see what has already happened with mobile carriers, and their prioritizing their own services (or services willing to pay them money) over others. This is obvious. Heck, the article even negates their own example (which is just...-one- example) by showing that Google has taken both sides of the issue.

"Technological stagnation" - whoa whoa whoa. This says the landscape isn't competitive; didn't this guy just say back in the first paragraph that consumers will just change ISPs, implying the landscape -is- competitive?! Otherwise this is a completely different issue; stagnation was there even before net neutrality. 2015, we were way behind everyone. You can't claim net neutrality is even related.

"Internet taxes could happen" - "could". Or Pai could just say "Hey, we totally support net neutrality, and we're not collecting fees". He's totally able to do that. Same as Wheeler was doing. We're done here.

"Content restrictions from the government" - I believe there's a couple of amendments here, that would lead to a legal showdown. And regardless there's nothing preventing, say, Congress, from passing legislation to mandate this anyway. Again, red herring.

Man you really destroyed that guy

Wonder if he's gutsy enough to change his mind.

I'm generally in agreement with you, but one minor criticism, cell carriers are not home ISPs and there's a lot more competition in the cell carrier business because cell carriers are not limited by physical lines.

The physical lines are what kills competition in the home ISP business and largely breaks the market. If you look at countries where they've freed the physical last mile lines, the issues are a lot fewer as there is greatly increased competition.

Oh, I know. Cell carriers -have even more competition than landline ISPs-. So when I can point at -their- having flouted net neutrality principles, you can't claim that competition in landline markets will ensure net neutrality principles will be upheld without regulation.

You need merely look at other countries where this is implemented like Canada and the UK though to see its success.

Cell carriers are a completely different case which isn't comparable - bandwidth costs them a lot more than it does to landlines due to air time costs and the associated impact on other customers, the sheer cost of spectrum also prices many smaller players out of the game altogether, limiting the real ability for competition in the cellular space.

Freeing those last mile lines results in plentiful and cheap bandwidth - something unavailable in the cellular space and an easy tool for small competition to use against the big guys.

EDIT: Sorry if that seems contradictory to what I said before, just trying to make the point that the cases are quite different and more appropriate examples would be better, I'd mistakenly oversimplified this before.

> To those knee-jerk rejecting the argument based on the Breitbart domain

Breitbart has destroyed their credibility, or more accurately never gained any, through constant lying and intellectual dishonesty (this is when the letter of something is true, but the spirit of it is false).

I can cite any number of disreputable sources saying anything and then demand you parse through them and disagree piecemeal, but that would be a waste of your time. Or we could be reasonable people and cite reputable sources to back our coherent arguments. I am unaware of any fact-based coherent arguments against Net Neutrality.

>you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author on matters of economics

Actually he's not.

"you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author..."

Honestly Breitbart has destroyed their name to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if they took a well-respected author's article, rewrote the whole thing, and then published it under false pretense.

> consumers would dump those ISPs in favor of others.

Competition does not exist in the US for ISPs.

> Some Companies Take Up More Bandwidth Than Others.

They pay for that bandwidth and we pay for the connection. Asking companies to pay more so they're not artificially throttled does not make sense in the actual world of the internet.

> The Government Still Allows Discrimination In Traffic.

Saying because there is vague language in NN we need to get rid of it entirely does not make any sense what so ever. You don't demolish a building because the window is broken.

> Barriers to Entry Are Created

NN removes barriers to entry for many startups that simply can't pay the "troll bridge" of the ISPs.

> Technological Stagnation

These ISPs that are for the removal of NN were given billions of dollars in tax breaks to make the internet better in the US. NN has nothing to do with development of the internet, and using Europe as an example is pretty stupid. Europe has NN, they also have heavy governmental regulation in terms of the last mile.

Saying NN is bad because it doesn't solve that problem is like saying oranges are bad because they can't power your car. It's a totally different matter.

> Internet Taxes Could Happen

If these taxes are used to deploy more public owned fiber lines, I'm all for it.

> Content Restrictions From The Government

NN has nothing to do with this.

> But Chairman Ajit Pai is making no promises about reinstating the two-year-old net neutrality rules that forbid ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful Internet content, or prioritizing content in exchange for payment.

Well, that's good, because it would make no sense if he was promising that. The current net neutrality rules from 2015 only work in the context of Title II classification; that's why they went together. The FCC already tried to do net neutrality under some more tenuous authority it had back in 2010, and it lost at the D.C. Circuit. This is why we got reclassification in the first place.

The article does actually say basically this much further down, when discussing Clyburn's dissent:

> Despite seeking public comment on whether to impose new net neutrality rules without the use of Title II, the Republican majority did not propose the use of any specific legal authority that could enforce such rules

My hope is that the highly tech dependent area I live in (Seattle) will force the market to keep an open internet. We have enough competition to ensure that, I think. However, that won't be the case for millions of Americans across the country. This is awful, but I think the outrage will eventually remedy the problem if telecoms overstep. Though telecoms may try more subtle means of manipulating traffic, which could be worse. Ugh.

Insufficient people will really notice, care, or act in synchrony to enact change as long as the abuses don't get overly egregious. This is how democracy works.

I live in a big apartment building in downtown Palo Alto, and I have the choice of cable company (fast) or phone company (slow). The % of Americans who have more choices is quite tiny... you're extremely lucky if you have even 2 fast choices!

That said, it would be awesome if Seattle did have enough competition to have a completely different market from elsewhere in the US: imagine the cable company trying to explain why they have wildly different offerings in places with and without competition.

That is, literally, the current situation. I moved from Baltimore to Seattle. I paid for Comcast for a time in both locations (in Baltimore it was the ONLY option, in Seattle you usually have 1-1.5 other options)

At least the year I moved, I went from 69$ for ~55 down 5 up to 50$ for something like 100 down 10 up. (Yes it was the "promotion rate" but I played that game on both sides.) Over the years Comcast played the same "Ratchet up the rates" game, and eventually I got a house specifically with the mindset to 'not have comcast' and moved to an area with I believe 3 broadband choices. I now pay 50$ for I believe ~400 down (was originally 250 but they've been sneakily upgrading their system, wave is fucking amazing). On top of that service reliability is MUCH better, support is _fantastic_ and I have much less concern that my ISP is doing something scummy.

Monoplistic local practices taking away any incentive for consumer friendly offerings is not a hypothetical, it is the reality for large swaths of america.

I also live in Seattle. I'm not sure what "competition" you're talking about, but most of the city just has Comcast and maybe some slow DSL from CenturyLink. CenturyLink is expanding their fiber coverage, but if we're counting on Comcast and CenturyLink to retain access to the internet, then we're fucked.

Newer MDUs have fiber from Wave G (there used to be several fiber ISPs but Wave G bought them up).

I hope that too. However, based on statements like this [1], I'm not sure that will be do-able unless the courts get involved and side with the masses.

1. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170517/05143337388/fcc-c...

Internet companies have a lot of social power and a lot of mind share and general good will among the population. They were a huge part of stopping SOPA. They could fight hard against non-neutral ISPs in the same way, blacklisting and banning non-neutral ISPs, serving banners that explain e.g. Comcast is degrading service and destroying the free web, suggesting alternatives. It could cause enough pressure for ISPs to change or competition to emerge (people might take a slower service that can go on twitter and facebook and youtube vs. a faster one where many websites people use are blocked), or even possibly for politicians to change the law by passing a bill. Politicians use Wikipedia and google and twitter too. Especially twitter.

Unfortunately I don't see this happening: large tech companies benefit from this arrangement and so it takes moral courage to do the right thing here on behalf of the leaders of these companies. There's some of that but not enough -- maybe I'm just being a pessimist.

General grassroots political outcry to stop the actual law changing is possible, but very unlikely to matter in this case either, I think. Unfortunately while SOPA was a law passed by votes, cast by human beings who are accountable to someone and can be threatened by angry citizenry, this is a regulatory decision literally nobody who is not a senior vice president at Comcast voted for or wants -- Pai has no constituents, all the power and none of the responsibility. He can sell the Internet to his friends at Verizon and then undoubtedly receive their gratitude in the form of a cushy job and $400,000 speaking gigs.

There's no market in Silicon Valley, why would there be one in Seattle?

Zero-Rating has always struck me as a blatant loophole in net neutrality. If an ISP throttles bandwidth on resources that are not zero rated due to overages, aren't they effectively skirting the core principle of net-neutrality? Bigger companies can buy more media and thus zero-rate more content than the little guys. This was the driving force between the AT&T/Time-Warner merger.

Zero rating is about billing (i.e. giving away for free certain content), not bandwidth throttling. It used to be called 1-800-Data in the early days because carriers likened the concept to toll free phone lines.

Conceptually, consumers aren't up in arms about toll free phone lines. I'm surprised Pai hasn't brought that up yet.

Bandwidth throttling specific sites would be a more serious concern (à la Netflix and Verizon). Bandwidth throttling certain types of content (e.g. steaming video) seems to be the border that carriers are willing to push.

I see what you're saying with the toll-free analogy but it seems fairly common for ISPs to throttle speeds after a monthly cap has been reached. Since the throttling wouldn't apply to zero-rated services(ie their own) isn't the end effect an unfair degradation in competitors services?

I understand why you are making the leap assuming zero-rated services would somehow be exempt from throttling, but that is outside the scope of zero-rating.

In cases of throttling (cap thresholds, adverse network conditions, etc), all content (zero-rated or otherwise) should be throttled. If zero-rated services are exempt then that's a whole new kettle of fish.

The idea of selective, named, service throttling vs. blanket throttling based on service type is surely bouncing around within network operator groups due to the Title II FCC vote, but that could apply whether content is zero-rated or not.

Selective throttling != zero-rating.

Ahh ok I see the distinction, good info. However, I know for a fact that AT&T does not count directv streaming as part of its data limits and therefore it is never throttled. I did a little more research based on your explanation and from what I can discern, it's technically against the law, but companies like T Mobile and AT&T continue to push the limits until someone confronts them. It still seems to be a very gray area.

R.I.P. Internet. It was great while it lasted. I did love you.

Maybe someone could automate a way to compare tests made on e.g. Netflix' speed test site[0] and speedtest[1]. If there's a huge discrepancy, then it'd be fair to conclude that the ISP is throttling specific connections.

[0] https://fast.com

[1] https://speedtest.net

Do we really think that huge tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, Google and Facebook, whom are not ISPs, but could be significantly impacted by a less open Internet will let this happen?

These companies have collectively far more power than Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T and Verizon, who really have been reduced to a bunch of "dumb pipes".

These companies have proven time and time again they are incapable of creating either consumer services, content, applications, ecosystems, or hardware.

And as new wireless standards take hold that are far more powerful and easy to deploy, their control will be greatly weakening. When you no longer need to lay significant fiber or have a lot of last-mile infrastructure to consumers, what value or leverage could they possibly have?

I would actually go to a live protest about this.

The invisible hand can not fix this. Its currently busy repairing a chinese ventilator i bought to fight the heat. Ran for five minutes, then the hand got stuck in it, loosing several fingertips and burning itself on the e-motor.

Its a horrible sight, invisible blood, invisible bone pieces everywhere, and this small thing in the cage i wont let out until it gets that damned thing fixed.

Seems the market radialinzkis are desperately trying to create good points for the socialism of tomorrow.

I wonder how long before some left leaning NGOs build their own zero-rated Basics-clone which then the GOP will collectively clutch pearls in horror. It'll be amusing to see them try to make a law that's patently dumb that even conservative judges will strike it down.

How does this affect the rest of the world?

Oh cool another discussion Hacker News can censor with flags.

When this kind of thing happens it's important to remember that both sides are exactly the same.

"The Internet was not broken in 2015" before the rules were imposed, Pai said today before the vote. "We were not living in a digital dystopia. Nonetheless, the FCC that year succumbed to partisan pressure from the White House and changed course."

100% accurate

Right. And 100% wrong. By 2015, it was clear that the telcos and cable operators were determined to use their positions to extract more rent. So while it might be true that up until 2015 the internet was not broken, there's no guarantee that will continue now that they've been given the greenlight.

There's also the minor detail that there were different net neutrality rules in force from 2010 to 2014, before they were largely struck down in Verizon v. FCC

The statement remains accurate if you change 2015 to 2017. What's really going on is we have a disagreement between relatively young, innovative tech companies and relatively old, relatively monopolistic communications conglomerates.

The question at hand is whether it's better for most folks if the tech companies or the communications conglomerates get their way.

Red herring.

Title II is how the FCC protected the AT&T monopoly.

Due to various regulatory goals (such as controlling telecommunications for cold war purposes) FCC found it much easier to deal with and regulate one corporate entity then a wide variety of different corporations.

Title II gives the FCC authority to regulate pricing in peering agreements and because of this they were able to essentially price AT&T's competitors out of the market and prevent new companies from being created.

There is no reason to believe that Title II common carrier rules would improve competition or prevent companies like Comcast from continuing to own huge government-protected regional monopolies.

More bad regulation is the wrong answer to the problem of bad regulation.

... the FCC said it would never use Title II to regulate Internet prices, and they did not. Nor have I ever seen anyone say that Title II was going to solve all of the problems caused by the un-competitive ISP market. So you're vigorously beating a strawman.

Uhh...

The ENTIRE POINT of Title II is common carrier.

Common carrier means they get to regulate peering costs. They don't regulate the costs ISP charge you personally. They regulate how peering agreements between businesses work.

That's why they call it 'common carrier'. That's the whole point to establishing common carrier in the first place. It gives FCC rights to step into a dispute and regulate. What other disputes are going to happen other then ones over pricing?

> Title II was going to solve all of the problems caused by the un-competitive ISP market.

It's not going to solve any of the problems and it never will.

The FCC said at the start:

"...As part of this decision, the Commission also refrains (or "forbears") from enforcing provisions of Title II that are not relevant to modern broadband service. "

The rules they were enforcing were:

"Bright Line Rules:

No Blocking: broadband providers may not block access to legal content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.

No Throttling: broadband providers may not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.

No Paid Prioritization: broadband providers may not favor some lawful Internet traffic over other lawful traffic in exchange for consideration of any kind—in other words, no "fast lanes." This rule also bans ISPs from prioritizing content and services of their affiliates."

I don't think three is a lot of evidence we will gain more competition or improve the quality/quantity of broadband by giving them up.

The Problem: Regulatory agencies not directly beholden to anyone. The FCC, EPA, OSHA, etc. act essentially unilaterally. This is a huge overreach. Second, regional monopolies on telecom services granted by the state. Third, the fact that people don't recognize the first two as a problem.

The solution: Break up regulatory agencies, do away with regional monopolies, and deregulate telecoms. Let the market sort it out, because the market is more beholden to consumer interests than the state ever will or can be.

Not the solution: more regulation on top of other regulations to prevent the problems caused by regulation.

Which regulations do you attribute to having caused the formation of monopolies?

First you fix the problem of ISP monopolies then. First you do that, then you can get rid of or relax net neutrality rules.

If you broke up the FCC, the wireless spectrum would get polluted and wireless device performance would be spotty at best.

Not to mention the loss of content restrictions - such as nudity or profanity on primetime TV.

It's like you don't even understand the concept of a natural monopoly.

The problem is that in many situations the market doesn't operate efficiently at all in it's natural state. There's a long litany of reasons markets are inefficient (imperfect information on either side, externalities, and monopolies, just to name a few). Interventions, such as regulations are there to protect the consumers in the case of these market failures. In this case a competative market protects consumers much better than a monopolistic one so regulations that foster a more competative market would be able to protect consumers better than no regulations. I'm not saying that these specfic regulations are amazing but there is definitely a good theoretical framework for regulations being good for consumers in certain cases.

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