90 replies
1d
I'm fully in support of net neutrality, but I'm somewhat surprised they're restoring it, as I have not really heard a peep about it since it was repealed in the first place. From my perspective, nothing about the internet changed since then (my experience did not upgrade or downgrade). People stopped talking about it, there weren't major protests, news about it even largely disappeared from the front page of HN (!). So, I would be beyond shocked if this was an election year issue of substance. What, then, is the impetus for restoring the net neutrality rules, given there is always some political cost to any action like this? Has the lack of net neutrality caused issues that I just have not heard about?
there's usually some principled people in the government, and every now an then when an issue is obscure enough they can manage to get something done without the other side caring too much.
what's the impetus for blocking this?
it's not needed, the fcc doesnt have the authority, keeping the government away from internet is a good thing
In some libertarian dream the FCC lacks authority...
The American libertarian dream confuses me because unlike libertarians abroad (where it's a synonym with "anarchist") they stop with political authority, and seem to have no issue with corporate authority. The ISP business in the USA is very clearly an oligopoly with the top players colluding. Not sure how a rugged individual is supposed to fight back against that.
The usual claim in right libertarian circles is that monopolies only arise because they can bribe the government into passing laws that enable them to exist.
Or everyone is happy with the monopoly.
Or the flip side, local ISPs that a government can't block.
Monopoly ISP in your region the Government can't stop? Fine, start your own, The monopoly can't stop it either by lobbying.
Yep, the Peter Thiel school of thought. But people like that tend to not stay libertarian in any meaningful sense for long; to quote Thiel himself, "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". That's how you get neo-reactionaries, basically.
The usual claim in right-libertarian circles is that it is only possible for monopolies to arise through government action (bribery is sometimes a means to encourage that action, but its not always intentional or that kind of specific corruption, but it is, in most libertarian explanations, always government action.)
And for this purpose, “government action” excludes protection of what the libertarian in question thinks of as proper property rights, which almost dogmatically have no adverse consequences.
libertarians are a subgroup of classical liberalism; limited government and socially liberal, or at least the right to live as one wants within reason in a society. Anarchists, at least to Americans, have so many subgroups I don't even know where to start, it always seems completely watered down to me other than the "no central government" part.
No, they aren’t. There is some overlap between “libertarians” and groups from left to right (in the modern sense) that are grounded primarily in classical liberalism, and those include the bulk of what tend to get labeled “libertarians” in America (which are mostly the center-to-right subset of the classical liberal subset of libertarians.)
But “libertarian” also encompasses anarchists, libertarian socialists, and a number of other left-libertarian ideologies that are not particularly grounded in what would usually be regarded as classical liberalism (most of them are grounded in newer philosophies which could reasonably be viewed as later developments from or reactions against – but not in a reverse direction – classical liberalism.)
It's just another system of control. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires and all that. And once the desire for freedom has been transmuted into support for corporate authoritarianism, the money flows and the political hacks get to work shoring up the platform for the sponsors.
I don't think 'libertarian' has to be synonymous with 'anarchist', but US libertarianism desperately needs an analog of anarchism-without-adjectives and to drop the axiomatic-fundamentalist approach that ends up fooling so many into supporting authoritarianism. Coercion is not some binary thing, but rather a matter of degree based on power differentials.
See, I would have agreed more with this if most of our internet infrastructures were not controlled by three megacorps with more power than many small to medium sized economies in the world. As it stands, the only valid option is to fight fire with fire.
And what has happened after the Trump FCC un-wound the previous net neutrality rules? Did the internet go to hell?
No, because California and 12 other states, as well as quite a few local governments, passed their own net neutrality laws. The larger, national ISPs were pretty hamstrung: they couldn't really follow the NN laws in the places where they existed, but then impose non-neutral terms in the places where they didn't, without running into lots of trouble.
A federal rule is good, though, to harmonize things, even if the state/local laws were more or less already doing the job.
No, likely in anticipation of the rules being changed back.
Better question for you. Why did ISPs attempt to fake support for repealing Net Neutrality [0][1], as well as spend money lobbying Congress? You'll note in that article that there were also fake comments in support of Net Neutrality, apparently mostly generated by one individual, but many, many fake comments against it from ISPs that even used real people's identities [2].
These aren't the actions a company takes if they don't have incentive.
[0] https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2017/11/29/public-comme...
[2] https://mashable.com/article/fake-net-neutrality-comment-fcc
Is keeping the government away from roads a good thing? From helping poor people with basic necessities of life? Keeping children out of workhouses?
Where did anyone say that?
I think the point the person you're replying to was trying to make is that the line drawn between things the government should have a hand in vs. things they should leave alone is fairly arbitrary, and is a matter of opinion. So saying the government should be kept away from the internet is just one place to draw the line, and it's perhaps interesting to know of other places where someone might draw that line, in order to get a baseline, and determine if it's even worth trying to have a productive discussion with them about government regulation.
Ah yes, keeping the US government away from the thing they created in the first place. That's seems workable, sure.
The proponents of net neutrality thought without it ISPs would just arbitrarily block data and require bribes from data providers to even serve up their data. In reality, no net neutrality would mean things like Netflix not counting as data on your mobile plan through some kind of sponsorship, or free basic internet like Wikipedia and news at a lower cost.
I don't support legislation that bans something undertaken voluntarily unless it proves to be very harmful and the last few years have proven that we don't need this legislation.
I'd genuinely like to understand why you think corporations, whose success is measured by profit and basically nothing else, are more likely to do things that are good for people than governments, whose success is measured at least a little bit by the wellbeing of their constituents.
I really want to better understand the thinking of people who hold opinions like yours.
It’s easier for me to switch which business I give my money to than it is for me to move or change governments. Most of the services I use are provided by private industry and I have choices. Everything from food, clothing, shelter. All private corporations I choose to buy from. I guess I can go get my food from a government soup kitchen or apply for government housing but my experience is these services are not competitive with private market even at the lower price (or free)
Interesting. Personally I believe people should have total freedom to change governments, but I'm a utopian thinker so /shrug though I wonder in such a world whether you'd feel the same way. "Too Like the Lightning" explored this if you enjoy sci-fi.
I'm hung up on something though - in this specific subject, there's been massive market capture in the USA by one to four ISPs, depending on region. For most of rural america (something insane like 80% of the geography) there's only one provider. In these situations, the provider provides subpar service, often asking for handouts from the government before being willing to build more infrastructure (hm.. is that still "private?").
On the other hand, some local governments have simply built their own broadband networks, with far better results: https://communitynets.org/content/community-network-map and they have some of the highest satisfaction ratings in the nation https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/teleco...
If the private market is better, why does Comcast, which routinely wins "worst company in america" awards, still exist, despite providing abysmal service to its customers? Surely a private enterprise could have eaten their lunch by now?
If the private market is better, why are local governments providing the highest rated internet services in America?
So basically, your feeling rests in the belief that you have more choice when it comes to private options - but in telecom, that doesn't seem to be the case, and of the options available, they're all widely considered to suck. Perhaps this isn't true for every industry, Stalin and Mao certainly showed us that it doesn't work for food, but does that mean the private option is better for everything we use? What does it mean to have a "private highway" system, or a "private fire department?"
I dont there's anything inherently different about Internet delivery. There's some last mile problems and some services no market exists because the cost would be higher than people are willing to pay. Internet service is expensive and maybe the high fixed cost makes it so only a few people can deliver and they can charge monopoly prices. There are also regulations that could make this expensive to provide too
But you can't just look at final price with a lower price being good. If some municipal service costs half the price but it costs taxpayers the other half, is that better? Maybe if you think they have a right to this service and you're okay with subsidizing it. But there is no free lunch, someone is paying.
I think ultimately you want it to be provided by private market if possible. So leaving it open at a high price encourages others to try and innovate. Think about starlink. If government was providing Internet to everyone for below market prices, no innovation would happen because they essentially crowded out private industry. So in the long run it would be much more expensive and opaque. You lose a market signal through artificially low prices
Because you have such limited experience with the world. Did you know there are countries out there — dozens of them even! — which are not American?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/realestate/paris-france-h...
In theory, if people don’t perceive corporations as improving their well-being, they will stop being customers. Also in theory, if people don’t perceive governments as doing so, they will vote in different politicians.
In practice, both effects exist, but are not perfectly efficient for lots of different reasons. That’s why neither Stalinist planned economies nor right-libertarian total lack of regulation work well overall, and the correct approach is somewhere in the middle and different for different sectors (and different countries).
I can't comprehend why you think ISPs would feel compelled to be so altruistic without any government intervention.
Except, since when was free wi-fi an impossible thing to find? Ever been to a coffee shop? Even in the "free shitty half-internet for everyone" pipe dream, the costs of such a service don't just magically disappear. Either way, someone's paying for that free internet, and it isn't the ISP.
Telecoms likely didn't deploy anything because this was obviously going to get overruled by the next non-Trump FCC. Even Ajit Pai has a long record of advocating for modernizing the FCC, which would explicitly involve the regulation of internet services. Abolishing net neutrality is only universally popular among communities where the underlying philosophy is "government is bad, and I'm gonna prove it by running it badly."
The internet, in it’s current non-net-neutral form, is very popular.
So the Internet before 2016 wasn’t popular because it had net neutrality? That’s definitely a new one. Is that you Pai?
Price discrimination. No altruism necessary. Kind of like my isp offering me different speeds.
Meta tried to offer free limited internet to poor rural Indians but idealistic tech workers from wealthy neighborhoods opposed it on moral grounds since it was against net neutrality so then they got no internet
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-india-rejected-facebooks-...
Given that large states like California and New York passed independent net neutrality laws and there were continuing legal battles in almost half of all US states I don't think you can draw many conclusions. ISP behavior very likely never changed because they knew they were just one decision away from having to comply. Sort of proven by this very decision we're commenting on.
Here is something I found. Seems like "unfair" since they're favoring their videos but as a user its okay by me since I get something for free and preventing them from not counting their content doesn't mean they'll necessarily just drop their data cap.
If ISPs just behave because it's always just a ruling away, then I'm fine with that status quo. I don't want unintended consequences from invasive legislation that could eventually be used to control what ISPs can show us
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/veriz...
What specific legal principle do you think would lead to this? Network neutrality is the polar opposite of that - it’s like arguing that we shouldn’t have restaurant health codes because the government could start requiring us to eat peas.
It's a precedent that government can tell ISPs and others what they can provide you. Once they have that in place, it's not a stretch to imagine them furthering that power for political purposes.
Think about surveillance legislation after 9/11. None of it applied to domestic population originally
You seem pretty pro-free-market, so here's the free-market angle: things like zero-rated Netflix on your mobile plan and free "basic" internet are market distortions. Companies are abusing the lack of net neutrality to engage in bundling, discounting, and collusion practices, which are bad for you as a consumer - these are anti-competitive practices!
Everyone likes getting something for cheap/free, but that doesn't mean that it's actually good for you, other people, the market, or society as a whole.
I agree that most of the bad things that net neutrality advocates predicted would happen wouldn't, but the things that did happen are still bad.
What's wrong with bundling or discounting?
There's two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling. Zoom and slack unbundled video chat from places like Google workspace and similar software suites. A company like clickup tries to bundle all that stuff as a one stop shop (tagline is one app to replace them all)
If anything more offers would increase competitiom as it's a bigger vector to make a sale.
Another hypothetical: your isp zero rates the news sites with a given political leaning, but not yours. Reading the news that they want you to costs nothing, whereas reading the news that you want, or getting an alternative perspective on a story costs you something.
Because it isn't an election year issue. This has been in the works since at least 2022.https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/net-neutrality-will-make-...
The rule making process takes time!
IMO it seems likely ISPs knew the rules were likely to come back so they avoided most of the practices that would generate outrage (throttling streaming and other popular services unless you pay an additional fee). I have no doubt if they could get away with it they would haha. Many providers did roll out zero rating programs.
As for why this is important just because ISPs aren't currently doing it on a large scale doesn't mean steps shouldn't be taken to prohibit it. We already know what happens in the long run when ISPs are allowed to double dip https://restofworld.org/2024/south-korea-twitch-exit-problem...
No, it doesn't take this much time. It's just that net neutrality wasn't a priority for the Biden administration, so they dragged their feet until the very last minute. IIRC, there's been a flurry of rule-making just now because they are running up against a Congressional Review Act deadline.
The FCC was deadlocked until September 2023 and started this process a few days later. Maybe they could have started in 2022 if Biden had nominated someone else after Republicans blocked his 1st choice. But Democrats believed Republicans would block anyone who would restore net neutrality.
I am aware of that.
And they were proven wrong, and didn't even try to test their theory until half his term was over. That counts as "not a priority" in my book.
That’s not entirely what happened. The prior candidate didn’t withdraw until March 2023. Biden nominated Gomez in May 2023. Presumable the two months intervening included negotiations and background. That doesn’t sound like a priority issue.
I think you expect that government works "fast" and that is usually not the case unless it's a dire emergency. The wheels of government are just slow. Net Neutrality is important to codify/enact and that's what they've done, I'm certainly not going to complain about it. There are a lot of other nits I have to pick with Biden's policies but this isn't one of them, better late than never like it was going to be under a second Trump term, and could be again.
It really didn't have to in this case. It would have been perfectly acceptable to crib California's NN law, ctrl-r "California" "United States of America" and call it a day.
They couldn’t seat the fifth person (democrat) because the GOP was blocking it. As soon as the person was seated, they moved forward with restoring net neutrality. Hands were tied until then because they couldn’t get the 3-2 vote. They didn’t have 5 until September 2023 so it’s been just over half a year
Republicans and Manchin.
The FCC has a legally mandated process (see Administrative Procedure Act) including a public comment period that is open to judicial review. They can’t just copy California’s law and call it a day, they have to actually take public comments into consideration. If they don’t follow this process the courts will overturn the rules.
No, literally, there is a legal requirement for certain process; debates over whether it was properly followed tied the Trump repeal up in court for a while though it was eveentually resolved in favor of the Administration.
Not even bothering to follow the clear objective formal requirements of that process (the question about Trump was more about good faith in the substance) would make it trivial to defeat in court.
And several states passed their own laws.
... and then these same ISPs complained that there was no single "law of the land". We heard it would be an "unnecessary burden" for these ISPs to have to deal with Net Neutrality in a state-by-state basis.
As a group, they sure do love to complain. They voted to get rid of the national standard in the first place! Then when real solutions are being voted on they love to yell and screech about how it's "THE END OF THE INTERNET AS WE KNOW IT!!!" yeah... Bunch of whiners.
This isn't a hypothetical, this is the case now and it's not happened. The reason is because of public backlash which is a market effect.
It had nothing to do with market effects. Some states and even quite a few local governments made their own net neutrality laws once the Trump admin nixed it federally. Complying with NN laws in some places but not others would have been way too complicated, so they just let it be.
NN being saved by consumer backlash doesn't really make sense in the US, anyway, where many (most?) people only have one or two choices for internet service. ISPs don't really need to care if their customers don't like their policies.
What changed for me is that my home internet provider (Comcast) implemented an overly-burdensome impossible data cap that I can only get rid of if I agree to use their router with deep packet inspection, ad injection, and more.
Fwiw you can set their router to bridge mode and use your own. It is probably still doing some traffic analysis but certainly no ad injection. This is what I do to get unlimited data without paying their exorbitant standalone fee.
This is a completely out of reach solution for most people.
If configuring a router into bridge mode is too burdensome of a step, then Comcast is actually providing that person a service by forcibly managing equipment for them at that point. If only the stalking component of it could be made illegal with proper privacy laws instead of piecemeal app bans.
What a weird way to think about it. I often wonder why I have to take those brain-dead ethics courses at work, then someone like you comes along and reminds me. Comcast can only fully take advantage of people who don't have the technical skills to not get fucked, that is what is happening.
I doubt it's out of reach for someone who already wants to use their own equipment, like the person upthread who brought up this topic.
How does it work, because there is no way to inject anything to HTTPS connections?
ISPs can monitor what you're browsing through DNS requests and SNI host headers and sell that data to advertisers who then inject personalized ads into ad supported websites.
The thing I don't get is why they need a spyware router in everyone's home. They own the infrastructure and know where all the traffic is coming from. They can do this with their own hardware outside people's homes.
I do wonder if they're sucking up LAN traffic data too, though, some of it which might be unencrypted, like smart devices talking to each other.
Not sure where you're located, but in California at least, I was able to add unlimited data for an extra $30/mo. I am still using my own modem and router.
It's incredible bullshit that they can pull this crap, but... well, at least it's possible. Here, anyway. Dunno if they offer that everywhere.
That sounds absolutely horrendous. I keep getting surprised by how shitty Comcast can be, and at this point I don't know how. I'd get a 5G hotspot before I use somebody else's router.
Because California saved it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P...
If any of the companies that wanted to exploit the lack of FCC enforced net neutrality did business with California they would have had a big problem.
the neutrality rule would be applying to ISPs. Those would be local to California. Outside of California, we would see the effects of no net neutrality
I believe a side effect of the way the legislation was written included that if they weren't neutral, then they couldn't do business with the State of California either or anything the state runs, like pension plans.
How much can you make doing business with or in CA vs. grifting the rest of the nation and bad press? It's very risky move. CA won and Verizon et all blinked.
There were lawsuits over the repeal under Trump raising uncertainty. That lawsuit wasn't resolved until 2019.
California adopted it's net neutrality law in 2018. 12 other states adopted net neutrality laws or executive actions, and over 100 local governments also did so, some before and some after the lawsuit over the federal repeal was resolved. Democrats in Congress in 2019 moved to legislatively reverse the repeal, and that passed through one house. Biden was elected in 2020, and either a legislative or executive reinstatement of net neutrality was expected.
All of this made meant that big ISPs would have to have patchwork rules in different jurisdictions if they wanted to skirt net neutrality and face a significant risk of having to unwind them. So, generally, no one did much that would go against net neutrality.
Yes, but the big ISPs would have a much harder time explaining the difference. Imagine them going into court or Congress having to explain why they needed to shakedown Netflix in NYC but not LA or explain why it suddenly became cost-prohibitive to run a network when you cross the border into Oregon or Arizona.
This, and that it is far more profitable for ISPs to aggregate our traffic patterns and sell them to ad companies and governments than to drive people to VPNs by raising awareness of the reasons we can't trust them.
This can't be stated enough.
They could not get away with it. Otherwise, they would. There is little to no competition in the segment. And that must change.
I had an extended outage and could not contact my ISP. They kept sending me to a bot, and I had no idea if anyone actually knew about the outage or was doing anything to fix it.
That has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality.
If you read the article, it does have to do with the ruling. Part of regulating ISPs as a utility is that they can regulate/enforce rules on how ISPs handle outages.
I got downvoted heavily years ago on HN for predicting this when it was making the rounds
There is almost no evidence of a tiered model either working or being legitimately attempted, even globally in places without these rules. The only evidence I was ever given was some tiny Portugese mobile network entirely serving the lowest end of the market, and even that barely made a dent in the local market.
I want a free internet as much as anyone but people like to fear monger scenarios they invent in their heads, and pointing at vaguely defined wealthy people conspiring to do so behind the scenes, even when theres little evidence it was ever a plausible market nor technically coherent scenario.
But I guess people fear that sort of chaos where every detail isn't in a neat box clearly defined by the government, even if it means finite regulatory time/resources gets redirected from pre-existing tangible issues like privacy and spam.
This rule does, however, effectively regulate the prices that broadband providers charge consumers, as it disallows high-volume customers from being charged a higher periodic rate than lower-volume consumers. If that's not regulating prices, it's not at all clear what might be.
Just like Obamacare, another gift from the left that has worked out so well...
It does not disallow charging consumers for traffic used. But why should they be able to charge for it twice?
This reminds me when I got a “survey” email from ERCOT, the entity that oversees Texas’ “deregulated” energy provider racket. I was ready to lay into them hard, but starting with the second or third questions, it was clear that all they were concerned about was to _sell_ new products — ZERO interest in hearing feedback of how terrible the system for end users, they just want to sell some sort of outage insurance product (“would you pay $5 to be protected from a 30 minute or less outage one time?”).
I wouldn’t be surprised if there isn’t a less than noble ulterior motive behind this push, although I’m hoping for the best. Sounds like the main reason it may actually make sense to bring it back from their PoV is because ISPs have to deal with individual state laws.
"Oh your power is out? Guess you should have purchased a ElektriciT+ subscription! YOUR FAULT!"
I was one of the "peeps" testifying to the California Assembly committee that promptly made Net Neutrality a CA thing even if not yet Federal.
Which is why most consumers didn't notice.
CA making something a rule makes it a very strong incentive to follow it nationwide.
I believe they are only restoring it to enact “security” aka more spying. I would like to see what the actual text of these policies are. The administration has its tentacles into too many tech companies already.
They aren't a secret:
https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401676A1.pdf
> What, then, is the impetus for restoring the net neutrality rules, given there is always some political cost to any action like this? Has the lack of net neutrality caused issues that I just have not heard about?
The rule was always going to get reversed eventually. Several major factions within the Democratic party are strong supporters of net neutrality and they've become increasingly more powerful over the last two decades, at the expense of its detractors like the media conglomerates and ISPs.
It only took this long because of the Administrative Procedure Act [1] which regulates how agencies make rules. They can't just flip flop the second a new political party gains power because of judicial review - they have to follow a process (though they probably also timed this for an election year).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act
ISPs predicted this would happen and didn't want to have to revert back everything.
This should be a reminder that almost all dire consequences from any government action are overblown. I also think the net neutrality was an important thing 15 years ago for how the internet worked then it has little practical value now.
It feels like everyone has short memories. Net neutrality abuse did indeed happen, a few notable incidents,
— Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile slowed down YouTube + Netflix traffic. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/youtube-a...
— Verizon throttles so much that the Santa Clara County Fire Department’s ability to provide emergency services during the California wildfires. "The fire department experienced slowed down speeds on their devices and had to sign up for a new, expensive plan before speeds were restored." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle...
— CenturyLink blocked content to insert their ads, https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/centurylink-bloc...
Claiming that nothing happened is false. A lot did happen. A lot of people have been fighting very hard to preserve internet access and the internet has been degraded.
I have a friend in Texas who had some issues because of net neutrality being gone (huge throttling on some sites)
given it's all still just regional ISP monopolies, there is decided _not_ a lack of issues
I wouldn't be surprised if your experience hadn't changed: Net neutrality rules were gutted at the same time as the internet has been largely consolidated, so major players paying for "fast lanes" and the ISPs throttling other kinds of traffic is, statistically, likely to have gone mostly unnoticed by you as an end user. If you have internet use cases beyond that which is endorsed by corporate tech, you will likely have noticed a stark difference. I've found that things like SSH tunnels have been less reliable, that there is noticeable slowdown when I find myself on a smaller website (Like those maintained by a shrinking minority of local vendors and artists who don't do everything on instagram). The most obnoxious thing about shady degradations of infrastructure in the name of profit is that these changes are often made in a way that's hard to specifically pinpoint, and by entities that make it somewhere between infuriating and futile to address any kind of complaint to.