Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Tom Wheeler was a cable lobbyist from 1977 through 1984. He was a cable lobbyist before the consumer Internet existed, let alone cable Internet. His status as an anti-neutrality lobbyist is a powerful Internet meme based, so far as I can tell, on very few facts.

It's sad how much force a tiny factoid can pick up in a public policy debate on the Internet. Public policy facts are about as reliable on the Internet as Google symptom search results.

View on HN

agree with your argument--but also important to note that once you start digging into the broader context of the current administration's financial and other relationships with Comcast, the sentiment becomes more understandable, even if it's not accurate or supported by direct evidence.

not exactly correct. The Internet that we know today existed long before 1977. Around 1987, a freshman in college, I could ftp and gopher with other Universities. I was tickled pink when I found out I could query a time server in Japan from my dorm room of a Michigan University!

The advent of the consumer Internet occurred at the point where most major metro areas had a commercial ISP from which you could buy dial-in access. That was not the case in 1984.

That's not exactly correct either. Around 1984 I was in Highschool and you could get "on line" via Compuserve. It was dial up but it used T1 and leased lines with other locations like the Airlines so you could, for example, view flights book a trip via Compuserve. I believe AAA (a travel service in the US) as also linked up this way too. It was not an always-on connection, but then neither was the Internet for many in the early 1990s. I ran a BBS in the 80s on a Commodore computer and I would use a dial-up feature to log into other BBSes to trade data and make it available on my site. One commercial service was called Don Best Sports that offered betting spreads (aka football lines). Don Best Sports, just to pick on one example, is now available with your Web browser but in the 1980s I could get Las Vegas spread data through a coax connection (data connection) from a local telephone or certain participating cable companies. This was all available in the mid to late 80s via an always on connection like the Universities were. Don Best Sports, in particular, would give you a cable modem that had a DB9 connection for serial data and it was a live feed in 1985 when I was involved with it.

I'm in Chicago. I had a BBS in the late 1980s, Compuserve before then, and access through a shared university account in the early 1990s. I did not have access that I could simply write a check for to consistently get access to, say, IRC and Usenet, until MCS started in ~1993.

Obviously people were on the Internet before 1993, but I chose the term "consumer Internet" specifically to avoid this debate. I think it's clear that the Internet wasn't on Group W Cable's mind in 1983.

no but you did write a check to your telephone company which everyone used at the time. And the problems were identical. You either got a busy tone or "all circuits are busy" message. Not trying to split hairs here, I agree on one hand that the technology is different but I am suggesting the problem is the same. We're talking about capacity issues and lobbyist. Although, telephone lines were subsidized where as I have a friend who lives just on the outskirts of local cable service and the cable company told him it would cost $30K just to run some coax down the street and under some railroad tracks. He's still stuck with dial-up as a result. Anyway...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com