Hacker News Reader

This really shows a fundamental misunderstanding of not only the background of "net neutrality" regulation, but also of the very structure of the Internet itself.

In your analogy to a printing press, you've misplaced the Internet layer. Time Warner is not the "printing press", Hacker News is the printing press. Time Warner is UPS--shipping the pamphlets, periodicals, and books to the end users.

And in case you didn't know, shipping companies ARE regulated by the federal government in how they are allowed to decide what to carry. There is a set of rules called "common carrier" that specifies how shipping companies may advertise their rates, accept or decline customers, etc.

It's a legal system that dates back, in the U.S. at least, to before the railroads, when stage coaches and barges were the best means of getting pamphlets from one town to another. The goal of common carrier law is ensure that members of the public are treated fairly--so that UPS does not sign a side-deal with Barnes and Noble to "accidentally" deliver all of Amazon's books 4 days late.

This impetus for fair delivery is what is behind the push for net neutrality. Understand that without regulatory protection, it would be legal for Time Warner to (for example) sign a deal with Microsoft by which TW would deny passage of Linux files across the TW network. Or Verizon could sign a deal with Apple to block access to Google Play.

Now--the opponents to net neutrality make a very good point that generally speaking these sorts of things have not actually happened. So one could argue that a compelling need for net neutrality has not yet been demonstrated. But your analogy is flawed.

All analogies are strained to the digital world. HN is not a 'printing press': it's not the mechanism of reproduction. Maybe the server is. Maybe the ARC code. But also the wires. HN is the editorial process.

But I suggest that friends of free speech, and against government censorship, should adopt an expansive definition of 'speech' and 'press': everything that's part of the communication creation-delivery process.

Quibbling about definitions and analogies with regard to fundamental rights helps those who want to grow and abuse their power. The FCC does censor. It enforces wiretap requirements. It has, through licensing and ownership rules, created market concentration in other media industries, and preferentially rewarded politically-connected entities. Its board members and staffers are the same kind of congressional-staff/lobbyist/political-partisan lawyers who draft things like SOPA/PIPA for big donors.

Yes, I know there are federal shipping regulations too: and they're also unnecessary and abusive, benefiting large incumbents no matter their initial supposed pro-competition rationales. They are another example of how neutrality regulation will, no matter its initial form, be perverted over time by the political process.

Let Time-Warner or Verizon try such blatantly discriminatory policies. They will be ridiculed, consumers will choose other providers, a blossoming of circumvention technologies will arise. Bits are bits, the Internet works, and it doesn't need an overbearing big brother at the FCC to protect it from such trifling (and still almost entirely hypothetical) provider-meddling.

This argument doesn't make complete sense. Not everyone can lay down cables or use phone lines or in general bring bandwidth to the house or peering with certain destinations. Bandwidth (intended as both the capability to transmit data and the infrastructure that enables it) is an essential (and limited) facility[1] and thus is susceptible to monopolies and it's hard to compete against those that have the infrastructure and agreements already in place.

A similar case to net neutrality has already been ruled in the past, always from wikipedia:

* The first case to use the idea was the Supreme Court's judgment in United States v. Terminal Railroad Association, 224 U.S. 383 (1912). A group of railroads controlling all railway bridges and switching yards into and out of St. Louis prevented competing railway companies from offering transportation to and through that destination. The court held it to be an illegal restraint of trade.

* Associated Press v. United States, 326 U.S. 1 (1945), in which the Supreme Court found that the Associated Press bylaws which limited membership and therefore access to copyrighted news services violated the Sherman Act.

* In Lorain Journal Co. v. United States, 342 U.S. 143, 146-49 (1951), the Lorain Journal was the only local business doing news and advertisements in town. The case was that refusing to place an ad for the customers of a small radio station was a Sherman Act violation. In the end, the court accepted an offer to simply accept the advertisements.

If you hold a facility that can't be easily duplicated you are not really allowed to do as you please with it but you need to offer service to everybody equally or you'll violate the Sherman Act[2].

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_facilities_doctrine [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

So why not wait for someone who's harmed to bring a case like those above?

Why preemptively invite the censorship-friendly, wiretap-friendly, incumbent-protecting FCC to start regulating even before there's any problem?

If the US ever adopts a national website blacklist like China, Australia, the UK, and others, it would probably be the same FCC 'network neutrality' regulators who'd monitor ISP compliance. After all, how can the network be truly 'neutral' if it carries illegal information?

So, instead of preserving the neutrality of the essential facility, which allows anyone to prosper and reduces unfairness (as demonstrated by laws and past rulings), we should allow somebody to harm smaller competitors who may or may not have enough capital to develop themselves and, at the same time, keep up a lawsuit against a bigger and more loaded incumbent.

It doesn't seem good for the free market (which is captured by a monopolist), not good for the competition, not good for the consumer, not good for the public good, not good for technological advancement and not good for business itself since new discoveries create new economies.

In essence, ignoring network neutrality is a net loss for everyone except the incumbents. Somehow they also managed to make you believe that it's for your own good, and without any theoretical or practical basis.

Whether the US adopts a blacklist is a matter of policy regarding criminal activities rather than its economic policy. What I believe is right or wrong in this case doesn't change the fact that, violating network neutrality for economic reasons is a huge fallacy.

Personally I believe these blacklists are useless. I'm also not completely sure why you think that carrying 'illegal information' makes the network not neutral... Does it stop carrying legal information afterwards?

Exactly, oftentimes regulation becomes a easy way for politicians and bureaucrats to extract money and power.

Net Neutrality! All bits are equal!

...Well except we want our VOIP calls to be clear so maybe they need priority.

...And there's this new distance medical imaging tech that should have priority because lives are at stake.

...Oh, your industry/business wants help getting an exception written into the law? I'm in Congress, I can help you, pay me.

  For some reason, with newer media, the simple principle of
  "no meddling in private communications/publishing" gets 
  lost.

You do realize that the same principle is hardly something that a free market would automatically support at reasonable price to the user, right?

  It's working just fine without the FCC's enlightened 
  approach

You're not a Time Warner Cable customer, or Cox, or subject to throttling very much, are you?

I'm a Time Warner Cable customer. I haven't noticed any throttling ever on VoIP or Netflix or Skype.

I am also in an area with competition, which probably plays a role.

What's a "reasonable price"?

A penny taken off the monthly cost of Internet access by fiat is a penny subsidy granted to Internet service customers.

In a competitive market for Internet service, providers can't gouge customers because they'd lose to competitors that didn't.

You are making a stronger argument against local service cable, copper loop and RF monopolies than you are against the libertarian opposition to net neutrality.

That is exactly the point though. Since there AREN'T enough competitors, the free market does not work. BEING a competitor means laying cable, getting right-of-ways, getting other permissions from local government, etc. It is not something where several competitors will spring up offering better service and/or better price when one bad actor decides to disallow skype on their network for instance.

When the market fails to provide a fix, the government should step in to keep the public from being at the mercy of greedy monopolies.

It's also very difficult to start a new car company. But we don't have "car neutrality".

Nobody's owed anything "at a reasonable price to the user". The right to free speech isn't conditional on books/newspapers/pamphlets being cheap. The kind of meddling that's most dangerous is government meddling. Simply keeping FCC rules out of the Internet delivers that "no meddling" benefit, for free.

And if things are a little expensive, a little limited by private contracts, a little abused by current providers? The march of consumer demand and technology will fix that in a few years.

I've been a Time-Warner customer, and Comcast, and AT&T, and RCN, and Sonic.net. I've hit throttling -- typically for peak total usage, rather than specific applications. But so what? A regulation from the FCC can't make more bandwidth. It can't keep up with even a year or two's needs in flexible new policies to handle changing traffic/application mixes. A competitive market with differentiated services, new technology, and new entrants can keep up.

Way too much defeatism is inherent in the idea that the cable-DSL duopoly is all we'll ever have. That defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophesy: encumber the industry with national pricing & transit regulations, tell everyone "we've made it so these two safe government-approved choices are all you'll ever need", and you might make that so -- just as the FCC stagnated things for decades with its power-concentrating telephony and broadcast industry regulations.

Twenty years ago, we didn't have a broadband duopoly. We had a zero-opoly. So even a duopoly is an improvement. And it won't last. It's too easy to incrementally string more wires or deploy new wireless technologies, to precisely those customers who chafe under any current limits.

The same competition that got us this far is still working, and doesn't require a bossy Washington DC agency staffed by censors and political-party hack lawyers to save us from ourselves.

It's actually harder to string more wires as a new company, because so much is already owned by a few very big players. So you have to buy access to the infrastructure from your competitors before you can even compete with them as an ISP. The opposite is true in the UK where the government owns the Tier 1 network (and possibly Tier 2, I forget). There, startup companies offering competitive services and prices don't have nearly the trouble flourishing as they do in the US.

You seem to think that essentially any role the government has in a market economy is going to be negative for consumers overall, and that is patently false.