Hacker News Reader

My country's net neutrality law seems to be a great blueprint, and something that can be easily understood. No need for all the "bytes" and "throttling" terminology:

"ARTICLE 56. - Network Neutrality. Each user shall be guaranteed the right to access, use, send, receive or offer any content, application, service or protocol through the Internet without any type of restriction, discrimination, distinction, blocking, interference, hindrance or degradation.

ARTICLE 57. - Network neutrality. Prohibitions. ICT Service Providers shall not:

a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any content, application, service or protocol except by court order or explicit request of the user.

b) Fix the price of Internet access by virtue of the contents, services, protocols or applications to be used or offered through the respective contracts.

c) Arbitrarily limit the right of a user to use any hardware or software to access the Internet, as long as they do not damage or harm the network."

Harm the network means?

1. Dos/ddos ?

2. Hacking?

3. Some sort of device /software you can install to do stuff like you can do to an electrical network like overload and circuit breaker bypass? Can those things be done to a fiber network? Beyond congestion, what'd the worst you can do to a ISP?

I'd say 3.

> Beyond congestion, what'd the worst you can do to a ISP?

Nothing much, which is why that exception is not very strong.

It should be 3. The problem with it is that it's ambiguous, and then the ISP will want to read it broadly to let them restrict anything they please.

Then the regulator will take them to court and case law will disambiguate the boundaries. Counterintuitively it’s the very prescriptive laws that allow companies to more easily come up with loopholes because legislators can’t possibly conceive of every scenario in advance, whereas the vague laws allow the courts to decide each new situation case by case as it arises.

> Counterintuitively it’s the very prescriptive laws that allow companies to more easily come up with loopholes because legislators can’t possibly conceive of every scenario in advance, whereas the vague laws allow the courts to decide each new situation case by case as it arises.

If the law uses the words "purposely harm the network" instead of "harm the network" then it's harder to claim it applies to services that e.g. increase congestion by sending a lot of legitimate data. Being clearer narrows the scope of the excuses their lawyers can emit.

I'm not sure it should just be 3! ISPs should be held responsible (and able to) selectively block DDoS traffic originating from their customers. Especially with the proliferation of symmetric gigabit+ connections...

Last mile ISPs are the wrong place to do anything like that. The middle of the network is no place for traffic mangling because it already requires state of the art equipment to transfer that much data whatsoever, much less do packet inspection on it to try to guess what's a DDoS and what's just a lot of real traffic, and then get it wrong and block legitimate flows or new applications.

What's needed is a way for recipient endpoints to tell upstream networks that they (temporarily) don't want traffic from particular sources. But that requires a new network protocol, not some arbitrary policy judgement on the part of random ISPs.

You can be part of a DDOS attack on a third party, and cause their ISP to threaten to cut your ISP off if they don't curtail the malicious traffic.

It's saying that you can limit a DDoS which is harming your network but you can't limit non-malicious traffic.

>> too many major net neutrality advocates in the US tried to bundle too many things under the "net neutrality"

This is the folly and downfall of all social causes and political movements. Take any subject that gain political power and inevitably other movements will attempt to latch on to it diluting the message, expanding the focus, and in the end destroying the support.

One common one I see here is the anti-ICE or anti-car crowd trying to combine EVs with better housing so people wouldn't have to drive everywhere.

It'd be a lot easier to for people to start supporting, e.g. markets closer to home, if it wasn't conflate with (1) the push for EVs, (2) the push to reduce emissions vis renewable energy.

I can support pedestrian-trips without it all being about the EV evolution or about some vague altruistic goal about less emissions. Make it more about my health (more walking), neighborness (seeing people around you that live next to you), convenience (I don't need to drive 15 minutes for a gallon of milk) and cost (may not need 2 cars or even any cars evebtually).

It's not quite that simple. A too-niche cause won't likely receive sufficient support, so it probably needs to absorb just the right amount of adjacent causes.

When you frame net neutrality as "users pay the same for all network traffic" people love it and when you frame it as "Facebook cannot subsidize your mobile data usage on Facebook" people hate it even though those mean the exact same thing.

because it's not the same thing when users pay the same for all types of traffic, except facebook

What started the whole net neutrality discussion in the late oughts was Netflix wanting to run its own fiber to Comcast so Comcast users wouldn't have to pay for data used watching Netflix. That's what this has been about: companies that want eyeballs subsidizing those eyeballs' data when using their services.

yea, and next thing carriers want 'subsidizing' from every content provider and internet (as tech ppl know it) is relegated to an unmaintained dirt road.

>2. The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion.

That leaves a pretty huge loophole as to when it's "necessary"

Legislating for the difference between genuine QoS traffic management, and traffic shaping because the ISP mis-sold what little peering bandwidth they have (or have extracted a bribe from a competitor of a service being artificially throttled, or both), is difficult to do in few words.

i'd say it's impossible without heavily regulating network layout and peering agreements by wich point we could probably do away with commercial isp's altogether

The mistake in this situation is not following the money. Whenever dealing with anticompetitive behavior, you also need to address the rules etc that allows it.

It's not a messaging issue. It's systemic.

> The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion.

IMO, this is not specific enough. The ISP should also not be able to give “bonus speed” to certain companies or sites. Otherwise the goal will just be to set a standard that’s above the normal speed, and use bonus speed as your artificial barrier to entry.

Net Neutrality advocates were always going after the wrong solution. They never focused on the root of the problem, local competition. Specifying a quality ISP service in a dynamic market over a long period of time is a hopeless endeavor.

If you fix the root issue (competitive market), like the EU did with local loop unbundling, or voiding local govt issuing monopoly contracts to ISPs, then you don't need to try and specify a bare minimum for internet access.

The other thing naive leftists don't realize is complex regulation always favors corporations over consumers. Sure you may get a headline "win" in year 1, but by year 10 history has shown regulatory capture will set in. The rules will be so complex, the FUD will be so thick, consumer interests will not be protected. The lobbyists love complex regulation.

This makes absolutely no sense in the context of the actual real-life NN debate. The proposed national NN regulation existed to supersede the fact that the federal government can't force states/cities/towns to unbundle their loops and get local govts out of the exclusivity contracts they signed. That kind of reform is a stretch goal while in the mean time you can pass a law that obviates the major pain point for everyone instantly.

You're right about complex positive-rights regulations but the proposed NN regulation was a small set of restrictions on what ISPs aren't allowed to do. Once the various execs cry it out over lost future profits the regulation costs nothing and turns internet service into a known quantity you can purchase from anyone who offers it and know what you're getting.

your response presumes that lobbying / citizen action can only happen at the federal level, which is not true (in fact citizen movements are at a large disadvantage in big $$ federal politics). NORML and the marijuana effort shows that local/state can be very effective in actually get results in policy change.

I also believe that the "federalization" of all issues is bad for the country and bad for culture. It makes everything super high stakes, and doesn't allow for the country to have a range of options to match citizen policy preferences. There are very, very few issues 350M+ people have strong policy alignment on. The rest of the issues should be sorted out at the state & local level. Going federal on every issue just increases the concentration of power in our society.

The net neutrally rules are actually not intrusive. They don't require ISP's to do something, just refrain from complicating something.

Wheres local loop unbundling, etc., is extremely intrusive in terms of telling businesses what they must do, and then courts handling lots of practical and legal requirements to make it work, with respect to many different build outs of varying costs, local laws, etc.

It does make me happy to think that every local monopoly or duopoly is getting new competition from Starlink, and potentially other low orbit satellite constellations.

But we also have laws for the first part. It’s just breach of contract.

With that wording, can't they justify throttling a user that has already downloaded too much from Netflix a way to deal with congestion?

3. The ISP will not zero-rate sponsored sites.

You're directly disagreeing with the parent comment though.

Looks like I didn't read the parent comment closely enough before replying.

Yes, I disagree with it. Zero-rating is just as much of a net neutrality issue as throttling is.

I disagree. Throttling concerns the actual operation of the network. Zero-rating concerns prices and billing.

The former involves things that are specific to networks so it makes sense to have network specific regulations to cover them. There's nothing really network specific about the kind of concerns people raise over zero-rating so there isn't a need to handle them different than we handle pricing and billing concerns in everything else.

I'm reading this as a difference between US and European style laws. It's my observation that Europe creates tighter legal frameworks with fewer loopholes. The US always seems to target specific bad behaviors and then acts surprised when corporations exploit the swiss cheese loopholes.

Previously disagreeable behaviors suddenly look acceptable because they were not specifically made banned when new legislation was passed. By allowing zero rating, ISP's could craft plans where you get "packages" of sites and then anything not under a subscription falls into a more austere X bytes at S speed bucket. Yes, they're doing that yet but such a thing could happen by not specifically stopping it in advance.

3. B is infinite unless it's mobile internet.

B is practically bounded by ~20736000 * S. You're just asking for ISPs to play games with S.