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Comment by 52-6F-62 | Hacker News Reader

"The internet is the greatest free market innovation in history." - Ajit Pai

Someone needs a history lesson. I'm sorry, America, some of the talking points of the commissioners in support of repeal are maddening.

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At this time last year the CRTC made broadband internet access a basic service in Canada: http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/crtc-internet-essential-serv...

edited a word for accuracy. Also:

>> 'Until now, local landline telephone service was the only service deemed "basic" or essential by the CRTC, although Blais has previously called internet service "vital" and essential to life and success.' (referring to CRTC chairman Jean-Pierre Blais)

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I'm ready for the ignorance of Americans on the internet to get a wake up call. It will be painful and difficult but a decision to revoke NN will force people to become familiar with meshnets/decentralization/encryption if they want any sort of freedom.

However, most will just accept the cattle feed and roam the fenced pasture.

There will be no wake up call because nothing is really going to change for the end user. All of this slippery slope nonsense about a walled off internet is just hysteria stoked by social media.

That's not the only effect the de-regulation can have.

See Comcast/BitTorrent: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/22/16691794/net-neutrality-...

See, Indosat in Indonesia: https://imgur.com/gallery/nKZ2yeq

Better yet, MIT does a better job explaining:

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609594/the-demise-of-net-...

Comcast could also just throw a 10 gig cap on your line regardless of whether net neutrality. It is not in Comcast's interest to cripple your internet usage as they'll just bleed customers to the wireless providers (who don't fall under net neutrality to begin with anyway).

I see the logic a bit with MIT's article, but at the same time most smaller startups are probably just piggy backing off of AWS anyway. Harvard business review has a good write-up here if you don't want a hyper-politicized Chicken Little take on it. https://hbr.org/2017/03/the-tangled-web-of-net-neutrality-an...

Maybe Wireless could be a solution, but maybe if one group leads the way, others may follow. The events that brought on the regulation were small, and increasing in influence and frequency.

I don't follow the "Chicken Little" take. I see it more as a downward slope. It will be introduced as a benefit at first—and whatever allows these kinds of companies a significant increase in margin, they will ultimately pursue. If there's something to be counted on in the whole mess it's greed (and, in turn, stock performance). In this way, corporate bodies have one permissible direction.

The wireless situation here in Canada would be more dire, as the same companies operating cable/sat television packages, internet, and wireless tend to be one of 4 conglomerates who own and operate a few subsidiaries. Outside of a small number of independents, we would ultimately be stuck. Considering those same conglomerates own most of the infrastructure, we might be stuck regardless who operates our consumer-level services. (edit) Should something like this occur in Canada.

Wireless. Interesting observation. I have often considered trying to startup a wireless isp or wireless mesh network to provide fast net for cheap. But the wireless tech has never scaled well and the speeds have never kept pace with wired.

Even the latest MM wave hardware rolling out would be ok for now but tomorrow? Who knows how much of an upgrade path you will have in terms of speed and capacity.

Wireless doesn’t need to be gigabit to the home. 200mb/s would do a few streams of 4K and then handle most of everything else you need. Throw in caching and I don’t think you would need to offer gigabit speeds. If you did you couldn’t support many folks per station.

I wish wireless was a silver bullet but it’s shaky at best imo.

It’s clearly the ONLY option for breaking the back of the incumbents. Especially if you only rely on private building access and bypass street lights and utility poles.

Thoughts?

Thank you for illustrating my metaphor

Moo.

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