
Keep the Internet Open - firloop
http://blog.samaltman.com/keep-the-internet-open
======
confounded
Because of the massive amount of consolidation over the last few years, the
death of Net Neutrality would be the best competitive moat imaginable for
Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

While all their CEOs will make faint noises in favor of Net Neutrality, SV
outspends Wall Street 2:1 on lobbying[1], the goal of which is to cement
monopoly status, not to make the world a better place. Most of it goes to
Republicans.

Things have changed fast; Google's lobbying spend has increased by over 50%
since the SOPA blackout.

The technology industry serves the interests of capital/share-holders, not
technologists.

[1]:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/outspendi...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-18/outspending-
wall-street-2-to-1-silicon-valley-takes-washington)

EDIT: "Google hardly even had lobbyists back during the SOPA blackout." >
"Google's lobbying spend has increased by over 50% since the SOPA blackout."
h/t DannyBee below.

~~~
guelo
I don't think that's right. It will be a major shift of power from
Google/Facebook/Amazon to the ISPs. Comcast could charge Google or Facebook
extortionate prices to keep their websites fast. Theoretically there would be
nothing stopping Comcast from completely blocking a website. Cable vs TV
channel negotiations periodically end up with blackouts for the channels.

~~~
dsr_
Google and Facebook now run networks larger than most major ISPs -- among the
largest on the planet.

Demand for Youtube and FB are so high and ubiquitous that pretty much any ISP
will immediately cave in.

Comcast is the most disliked company in the USA. Guess what happens when G
runs a banner under each search or Youtube video mentioning that performance
is bad because Comcast is blocking things, here's Brian Roberts's phone
number?

~~~
mmanfrin

      Demand for Youtube and FB are so high and ubiquitous that 
      pretty much any ISP will immediately cave in.
    

Yep, Comcast better be careful lest I leave them for the 6mbps competitors I
have as options in the backwater community I live in called Berkeley, CA.

I utterly fucking _loathe_ Comcast, and yet they get thousands of my dollars
because of an unspoken of oligopoly among ISPs that has grown out of the tacit
agreement to not enter in to each others fiefs.

~~~
jff
Does Sonic.net not provide service in Berkeley? Back when I lived in the Bay
Area, I switched from Comcast purely because Sonic.net isn't an utterly
loathsome company. Turns out with Sonic I didn't have to reboot my modem every
other week either.

~~~
kbar13
sonic speeds in many parts of the bay area (even in SF) is not competitive
with comcast. they are rolling out fiber in select neighborhoods and can't
wait until they come to my part of town.

~~~
mbreese
I had to switch from Sonic (to Comcast) for just that reason. I had a bonded
DSL connection from Sonic that could just barely get 10Mbps. And the bonding
really wasn't even worth it because one line was at 8 and the other at 2. And
it was all due to the unmaintained copper coming from AT&T. I agree with their
new strategy though - the only way to have any control over their service
quality was to own their own fiber.

Now, I'm in Cincinnati and have excellent fiber service from Cincinnati Bell,
so it's possible to have good quality from the incumbent carrier.

------
azundo
We see the consequences of a non-open Internet every day where we work in
Uganda. It is common there for people to have "social bundles" that only work
for Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc. Our users believe they have Internet
access but don't understand why data from our app is not syncing when Facebook
is working. It's a large barrier for us and adds a huge moat for the
incumbents. We're considering more integration over WhatsApp or Facebook
Messenger so we too can benefit from the cheaper data but that only locks us
into those platforms and strengthens their position.

~~~
MarkSummer
> We see the consequences of a non-open Internet every day where we work in
> Uganda. It is common there for people to have "social bundles" that only
> work for Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, etc.

This is an important perspective. Recommend sharing this insight with the
article author to consider appending to their original article.

------
rdl
While I like the Internet being open, I don't like "net neutrality" extremism.

1) While I dislike monopoly carrier antics, I'm even more unhappy about the
idea of government bureaucrats dictating network engineering standards to
carriers and ISPs. If you build a network with caches/content servers close to
users, and expensive backhaul back to your network core, you can offer
essentially unlimited traffic to users hitting the cache, and still provide
more limited access to other stuff. I'd prefer high bandwidth everywhere, but
that isn't always an option. It should be a market decision, not a national
government decision.

2) The real problems with lack of NN are due to lack of competition in the
access provider market. Focus on fixing that. A lot of this is due to local
governments requiring providers cover entire markets to cover any of a market
-- if someone wants to build another WebPass or CondoInternet and only serve
high-density developments, that's great! Trenching fiber to single family
homes is marginal anyway, but if you have low take-up in a neighborhood it is
even worse. If you are going to push for regulation, have it be regulation to
empower actual competition in the network access market.

3) Zero-rating in emerging markets (e.g. FB in India) is really the only way
for many lower income users to afford services at all -- particularly for
video services.

~~~
guelo
> "net neutrality" extremism

So the NN side are the extremists. Not the side that wants to radically change
the way the internet has worked for 40 years. Not the side that wants to upend
the most innovative segment of the economy in favor of dinausour monoplies,
radically reshaping the foundations of billions of dollars in investment and
billions more in created wealth. Those guys are "conservative" right?

~~~
bifrost
I think you misunderstand - NN is new, the internet worked fine on its own
prior to it. NN is not a colloquial "neutrality" agreement, its a "lets force
carriers to do things because we don't understand how it works".

I've worked on the carrier side, on the last mile side and on the consumer
side and I'm not a fan of most of the proposed legislation. We need to prevent
anticompetitive practices, but thats about it.

~~~
intended
I was a financial analyst, and I had the chance to cover the telecom sector.

I know how the market works, NN is not new, it is how the world worked.

Anti NN is new. It's hugely anti competitive and anti consumer.

If it gets close to getting passed, I'll be really happy for the segment.
Wouldn't be happy being a consumer.

Edit: IMO, the American telecom industry is shafting its consumers regularly
and has been underinvesting for years. (Investing in regulatory capture is a
lot more), there's many other nations with significantly better networks and
speeds, and it's a joke stock for the rest of the world to see the country
which created the internet writing the book on how to not enjoy it.

~~~
ChefDenominator
Which Internet rule is it which states that we can all claim we have been any
occupation that suits the discussion, and without any additional evidence to
support such claims?

~~~
intended
The assumption of honesty on HN. I really don't get anything out of this
place, and afaik I'm not even contactable.

But yeah, if you don't believe me, feel free to look at a bunch of financial
statements and lavish over as many models as you like. Check ARPU numbers or
read up on the history of your own markets. In true finance fashion, do your
diligence and reach your own conclusions.

It's a lot less morality based once you look at the numbers. It's just
business.

~~~
ChefDenominator
More non-points.

To summarize your statement: "I am correct because I have read the data. Since
you have not read the data, you should go read the data, because then, and
only then, will you see that I am correct. Until then, just accept that I am
correct."

I still reject your claims because you have not provided any meaningful
measure of support for them.

~~~
intended
Feel free to reject them. You'll still only truly know when you see the data.

If I knew the world was round, and you kept saying it was flat - why would I
have any reason to do more than let you know it wasn't so?

------
gz5
The utility should be the fiber (or spectrum). Regulate that; leave the ISPs
to then compete openly.

Today's software can enable multiple ISPs to share the fiber/spectrum. I could
then have 10 ISPs today and 15 ISPs tomorrow. I might use ISP #1 for certain
content, and ISP #2 for certain services.

ISPs essentially become a function of the services and content they provide,
and how they provide it, in an ultra-competitive, granular market. The way it
should be.

~~~
danielweber
Isn't that what happened to the DSL market? No one will bother laying new
infrastructure because anyone can use it.

~~~
rbanffy
You can always make the government take care of what is becoming increasingly
fundamental infrastructure.

But then you'll be called a communist.

~~~
marknutter
And rightfully so, since taking care of it would mean the Ministry of
Communications has deemed the current available bandwidth sufficient for
serving the government's approved content (propaganda), thus eliminating the
need for improved infrastructure. People should be in the fields growing food
for their comrades anyways, not sitting on the internet.

~~~
rbanffy
How are the Ministries of Firefighting, of Police and of Roads going?

------
blhack
This is a difficult question. Emotionally, I am a net neutrality absolutist,
but I think I can talk myself out of it, which to me means that the
conversation is complex.

Should the power company be able to offer you a discounted rate if you host
equipment that offsets their cost (for instance: a powerwall)[1]?

I think that the answer to that question is yes.

Well okay, then should your ISP be able to offer you a discounted rate to use
services that offset their cost (youtube, which has an cache near you, vs
vimeo, which doesn't)? If the power company can do this, then why can't the
ISP?

Again, I don't _like_ this, but I can't think of a consistent explanation for
why they shouldn't be allowed to dynamically charge you based on their cost.

[1]: I don't know enough about the electrical grid to know if a powerwall
could actually be used in a way that offsets the cost to a power utility or
not. I don't think that the correctness of this statement matters to the
example. Substitute "a powerwall" for "equipment that saves the power company
money".

~~~
reggieband
I think a closer analogy would be: Should the power company be able to offer
you a discount based on the brand of appliance you use. e.g. If you had a GE
fridge in your house should you get a discount on your power usage (all other
things being equal). So if you have a GE fridge you pay $0.10 per kilowatt,
but a Samsung fridge will cost you $0.15

From my perspective, along the last mile a bit is a bit. The fact that they
may have some back-bone infrastructure that optimizes delivery of traffic to
an edge-node for youtube or Facebook doesn't really apply to me (e.g. it is
not something I control). The fact that e.g. Comcast and Facebook can do a
deal that monopolizes in their favor vs. other social networks/ISPs is not
exactly to my benefit. I can't control that deal like I can control adding "a
powerwall" in my house.

~~~
blhack
I really want the electricity analogy to be good, but the reality is that it
isn't.

A bit is _not_ a bit. Some bits actually are cheaper to deliver than others.

~~~
grotsnot
How so?

~~~
blhack
Because net neutrality already doesn't exist for ISPs:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_transit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_transit)

Also, because of things like edge caches, there are bits that have to travel a
shorter distance, and interact with less hardware, than other bits.

Your GE microwave doesn't require that it gets electricity from a GE power
turbine. All watts are the same in that sense. The watts can come from a GE
generator (in the town over) or a westinghouse generator (in the local town).
It doesn't matter.

But a youtube application _does_ require that the bits come from youtube
servers. Youtube cannot use bits from vimeo, and because of network topology,
the vimeo bits might be more costly for the ISP to deliver than the youtube
bits.

------
brothercolor
The internet is what makes Silicon Valley go round. Everyone, including Sam
Altman, needs to be an activist. Asking for someone else to take point on
something so fundamental is like asking Natives to take point on water prot--
wait.

~~~
sama
I am happy to help, and honestly if I had more time right now I'd take this on
directly--right now is an unusually busy time for me. I agree with you it's
critical to Silicon Valley.

~~~
saycheese
Given Elon & Thiel are both in contact with Trump, if you haven't already done
so, it would be worth mentioning it directly to both that this is important to
you.

For that matter, maybe this is a chance to you yourself reach out to Trump on
an issue and invite him to meet at the White House or come to the Bay Area to
meet the next batch of YC startups.

~~~
throwaway399
If anyone does this in the bay area and it's public, they will likely be burnt
at the stake.

~~~
saycheese
You mean like Elon, Thiel, etc.? If so seems to me as if they're all doing
just fine. [1]

Beyond that, point of engaging Trump would be on a topic I would assume
everyone agrees is important - and if you think hidding and hoping things will
magically get better, well, good luck!

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-meeting-photo-jeff-
bezo...](http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-meeting-photo-jeff-bezos-elon-
musk-tim-cook-2016-12)

~~~
throwaway399
Thiel was attacked nonstop and people were organizing to stop using PayPal
which he is only tangentially affiliated with.

Uber CEO had to stop his collaboration as Lyft started catching up for the
first time in a long time.

Elon also faced a lot of heat and had to qualify his statements. Negative
reactions towards him were counteracted by his accomplishments and clean
energy contributions.

I think people should collaborate but in a clandestine fashion.

Inviting Trump to Bay area would unleash all the rage against Trump towards
the startup community. I'm just afraid it would be a bigger "throw stones at
Google buses"

~~~
saycheese
Be afraid all you want, doesn't matter to me.

Thiel knew he'd be attacked, took a risk, and there's zero reason to believe
he's not happy with the results; if you think Thiel cares what the "Bay Area"
thinks, I'd be interested in your reasoning.

Uber's not even worth covering, they're currently a cluster F$&@ waiting to
happen and the idea that it was somehow born of talking with Trump is what it
is.

Bay Area and for the matter the greater tech community needs to engage the
world, not withdraw from it.

~~~
rfrank
>Bay Area and for the matter the greater tech community needs to engage the
world, not withdraw from it.

> Be afraid all you want, doesn't matter to me.

One of these things is not like the other.

~~~
saycheese
Right, one is addressing a single person that's said they afraid of talking in
public for fear of blowback and another is directed to the Bay Area and
greater tech community asking them to engage the world.

What am I missing?

~~~
rfrank
That the blowback from tech employees is a real thing which directly
contributes to lack of dialog between people with different political
opinions, and not caring about the individual while imploring the community at
large to engage is a ridiculous and contradictory position.

A pair of riots in Berkeley within a month, San Jose during the election, the
Brendan Eich situation, myriad letters from CEOs post election. To quote
sama's recent post [1], "Almost everyone I asked was willing to talk to me,
but almost none of them wanted me to use their names—even people from very red
states were worried about getting “targeted by those people in Silicon Valley
if they knew I voted for him”. One person in Silicon Valley even asked me to
sign a confidentiality agreement before she would talk to me, as she worried
she’d lose her job if people at her company knew she was a strong Trump
supporter."

Care as much or little about the concerns of people not like you as you want,
just don't act like you want to have a conversation with them too in the same
breath.

1\. [http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-
supporters](http://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-heard-from-trump-supporters)

~~~
saycheese
There is no contraction, engaging the world, especially those that may not
agree with you, is potentially dangerous and if you're afraid to do so, then
don't.

~~~
rfrank
> going out and engaging the world is potentially dangerous

Do you think this is reasonable in the context of expressing your support for
the leader of your nation at your workplace? I certainly don't think so.

------
Alex3917
> Doing this allows the government to ensure a level playing field

In theory this is a good argument. In practice, my experience is that this
argument causes people to write off net neutrality as just being something
that's about letting tech bros make lots of money. I've even heard this from
folks in the tech industry, who really should know better.

An argument that may be more convincing is that the Internet is the only media
channel where we don't get all of our information from the same three or four
mega conglomerates. But if net neutrality is eliminated then ISPs are going to
pull a Martin Shkreli, and overnight your cost of hosting a Wordpress blog is
going to go from $5 a month to $25,000 per month or whatever.

When this happens the only way to have a blog will be to host your content on
Facebook, who will be able to decide which points of view are allowed and
which are banned. If we lose the Internet, the last free media channel, then
there is no going back. Not just on this issue, but on _every_ issue.

~~~
pharrlax
The best argument I've found for convincing conservatives is to stress that
the internet is a platform for commerce, and healthy commerce requires
equality of opportunity -- specifically, the opportunity for consumers to
access your business.

ISPs literally "own the road", to create an analogy for internet businesses.
If the only road company in town installs a toll booth or a series of speed
bumps in front of McDonald's because Burger King paid them to, it artificially
distorts the market in a way that allows successful companies to pay to
entrench themselves and fend off competition.

Innovation and disruption inherently require free and fair access to the
storefronts of upstarts, whether physical or digital. To slant the playing
field with throttling or zero-rating is tantamount to a big box corp having
the ability to pay someone to install a toll booth in front of my competing
mom and pop business.

~~~
crazy1van
> If the only road company in town installs a toll booth or a series of speed
> bumps in front of McDonald's because Burger King paid them to

This kind of thinking will lead to a big debate about what exactly is a speed
bump -- how high can they be? Do rumble-strips count? What about potholes?

A better solution would be to just let more companies build roads in your
town. Then all the people who want to go to McDonalds will take their business
to the other road companies.

~~~
pharrlax
>A better solution would be to just let more companies build roads in your
town.

That sounds great, except the roads have all been built. It's prohibitively
expensive and risky to try to build out your own parallel set of
infrastructure, whether it's roads or cable. I mean, if _Google_ tried and
failed to do it, who else is going to be able to succeed?

------
SAI_Peregrinus
I don't think that NN legislation is the answer. It's a social solution to a
technical problem. We shouldn't be making it illegal to discriminate between
traffic types, we should be making it impossible. Encrypt everything by
default, encrypt and anonymize DNS, and generally get rid of the ability for
ISPs to tell one data stream from another. Unfortunately this requires re-
architecting quite a lot of the Internet, so it's even less likely to happen
quickly than getting a bunch of politicians to stop listening to lobbyists or
ISPs to actually compete with one another.

~~~
nebulous1
I don't think that will solve the problem. Even if the ISP can't tell where
most of your traffic is going after it leaves their network, they're still
going to be able to be able to differentiate between that traffic and traffic
destined for a service they control or a third party service that cooperates
with them. It stops them from penalising a particular third party service, but
not from penalising everything they don't recognise in favour of what they do.

------
d--b
Like Altman, I am amazed that this is not inflaming the community again. In
order to pass an unpopular law, you just need to try to pass it several times,
until the public gets tired of protesting?

~~~
erikpukinskis
I suppose the next question is: should the voice of protesters matter more
than the overall opinion of the populace, which come election time is that Net
Neutrality isn't even worth talking about?

~~~
ozaark
Sanders did fwiw [1] [https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/sande...](https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-
releases/sanders-statement-on-net-neutrality)

------
cb21
> But this idea is under attack, and I'm surprised the tech community isn't
> speaking out more forcefully. Although many leading tech companies are now
> the incumbents, I hope we'll all remember that openness helped them achieve
> their great success. It could be disastrous for future startups if this were
> to change--openness is what made the recent wave of innovation happen.

Is it surprising? What organization is supposed to speak up? Tech workers
don't have a union so nobody is lobbying for us in DC. We have to hope that
enough huge companies and their leaders will act in the way we want and I
don't exactly expect Zuckerberg and Thiel to represent me and my interests in
Washington.

~~~
WillPostForFood
If there was a tech workers union, presumably it would cover employees at
Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and many other companies they are not pro net
neutrality. So it wouldn't even be in the self interest of the union to get
into the battle.

It needs to be the consumers who speak up, and the businesses that would be
negatively affected.

~~~
fragmede
The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the biggest communications labor
union, covers workers at Verizon and AT&T, but last time around they sided
with AT&T and Comcast back in 2014.

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/naacp-union-net-
neu...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/07/21/naacp-union-net-
neutrality_n_5606854.html)

~~~
WillPostForFood
Isn't that mostly call center workers, and installers?

------
EGreg
As I have said before during previous net neutrality "crises", this is just a
symptom of _extreme centralization_.

The same thing that caused the Indian public to reject internet.org curated by
Facebook.

Once we get massive consolidation, whether of banks, telcos, cable companies,
social networks, phone makers or whatever else is "too big to fail" then your
choice is illusory in the first place. Title I vs Title II isn't the most
meaningful choice.

Originally the Internet was designed with no single point of failure, but now
email, the web, streaming video, etc. has been centralized.

What we need to do is greenlight technology to enable decentralized:

\+ Social Networking _instead of server farms whose engineers post on
highscalability_

\+ Mesh Networking _instead of cellphone carriers whose networks go down in an
emergency_

\+ Power Generation _instead of a power grid that can cut you off anytime_

Bitcoin decentralized money. Git decentralized version control. Look at how
the power and trust dynamics shifted. That's what we need.

The best way to do that is to fund open source hardware and software projects
that will enable this technology to be widely available, and then regulators
will have to expand their frameworks to allow it, as they did with bitcoin.

Disclaimer: I am the architect of
[http://github.com/Qbix/Platform](http://github.com/Qbix/Platform)

------
finkin1
I think the tipping point last time (SOPA/PIPA protests) was when Reddit,
Wikipedia, Google, etc. went dark. It's sad we don't have Aaron Swartz to help
this time around. It's good to see Sam offering help, but who is actually
going to step up?

~~~
RangerScience
What's needed for "another Aaron"? I know he had a pre-existing following; is
that required? Do you think someone could fill those shoes this time around,
starting from scratch?

~~~
ryandrake
> What's needed for "another Aaron"?

Courage. The cynic in me answers "Someone who doesn't mind being becoming a
target?" I notice nobody is jumping up and down volunteering to be "another
Assange" or "another Snowden". Different topics but similar level of fortitude
needed.

~~~
simplehuman
And best of luck finding these in immigrant rich silicon valley who are
already petrified of losing their visa with the new government change.

~~~
Derrick_Blake
That's a whole nother issue and equally messed up.

~~~
simplehuman
Sorry, to put that comment in context.. There was an article a couple of days
back of how immigrants are creating massive value by starting startups in the
valley. Well, these guys have the most incentive to stand up for an open
internet but they won't/can't.

------
simplehuman
I don't think activism is the answer to these problems. Instead, we need to
show consumer benefits of an open internet. Right now, people are totally
loving the mono-culture and the internet silos that the mega corps are
building (facebook, whatsapp, gmail, google, chrome, apple app store, github
to name a few). It's going to hard to convince them unless you can show them
tangible benefits.

I think the big companies have totally nailed it. They have kept things free.
And they have kept the population sufficiently distracted that there is no
time for 'activism' or thinking of society. This means that the big corps can
now push reforms unquestioned in their favor.

~~~
xatan_dank
I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture and many of
the "free" social networks are not profitable at all. Very few of them are
actually succeeding.

Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies have
succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening by
'distracting' people. I don't think any of this is true and that the argument
you make here is self-contradictory.

I really just don't think your comment holds any water at all.

~~~
simplehuman
> I don't know how many people are totally loving the mono-culture

Huh? Just see all the gmail ids. Just ask any company as to how many email ids
are gmail and prepared to be stunned. Same goes for GitHub, medium. Even so
called "decentralized" projects are happily hosting code on github and
blogging on medium. (I am not judging the users here by any means. I am just
saying they are "happy").

> Also, you say activism is not the answer, and then say that the companies
> have succeeded in part because they have prevented activism from happening
> by 'distracting' people.

Keeping products free is the distraction. People give away all sorts of things
and start rationalizing in curious ways to get freebies.

~~~
api
A major factor is the unbelievable pain of doing one's own IT work.

Even hosting a blog with Wordpress or Ghost can be a pain, let alone hosting
your own git infrastructure. Then you have the whole sign-on / password /
account management nightmare. Nobody wants to (sigh, grumble) create yet
_another_ (grumble, grumble) account on yet _another_ site.

If there were some kind of open SSO standard that actually worked and was
actually low-friction for users, that would go a long way.

That being said I don't have a problem with it. We (ZeroTier) are kind of a
decentralization effort, and we use GitHub and Slack because they work and
they save time. Use the present to build the future.

------
pgodzin
The tech community rallied pretty hard in favor of net neutrality last go-
round, they were just lucky that Wheeler (head of the FCC) agreed with them.

I think there isn't anything specific to fight against now as there was with
SOPA. Once a specific legislation/regulation appears, I think the tech world
will strongly oppose again. I also suspect the large tech companies are trying
to use their lobbying power behind the scenes preemptively again.

------
johnwheeler
To the folks on HN who don't vehemently, _vehemently_ oppose a non-neutral
system, your line of thinking puzzles the hell out of me. Is the idea that
government regulation is bad in all cases but corporate regulation is OK in
all cases? Why? Because you've bought into free market forces making _all_
things better _no matter what_?

Those forces only make things better unless they don't. To me, it's crazy
that's not immediately clear.

In this case, the regulation is for keeping the system free unless you're a
monopoly or part of an oligopoly. Your future chances of being in that camp
are so minuscule and even smaller if you support killing off Net Neutrality.
Are you fighting on behalf your future self that will likely never exist?
That's arrogant and delusional.

This is not what Ayn Rand meant by espousing the public good is best served
when people are self-interested. That's not the same thing as being
delusional.

~~~
protomyth
How about I don't know if I support or oppose net neutrality because depending
on the source it means something different.

I would love to see an actual technical, written definition so that I could
tell my Congress folks to put it in a bill.

------
saycheese
Interesting reviewing the list of organizations that signed the letter sent to
the FCC by the ACLU & EFF on keeping the internet open:
[http://www.commoncause.org/policy-and-litigation/letters-
to-...](http://www.commoncause.org/policy-and-litigation/letters-to-
government-officials/letter-to-chairman-pai-protect-net-neutrality.pdf)

Really makes you wonder what's going on, since Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.
are nowhere to be found on the list.

~~~
dragonwriter
I think there was deliberate selection of the type of organizations and the
interests they represent for this letter; I don't think it's an accident that
it doesn't include tech firms and content hosts, but political advocacy groups
and content creators.

------
no_protocol
> There's an argument that Internet Service Providers should be able to charge
> a metered rate based on usage. I'm not sure whether I agree with this, but
> in principle it seems ok. That's how we pay for public utilities.

I can monitor and control the power usage of my electrical appliances.

I can control outgoing network requests from my networked devices.

I cannot control what is sent to my network from the outside. It doesn't make
much sense to be charged for what someone else sends to me. Even if I shut off
my network device, a particularly rude service might just continue blindly
sending data my way, running up my costs with no way to opt out.

Typical postal mail delivery is paid for by the sender, not the recipient. It
becomes complicated here.

~~~
Karunamon
Telecom companies, in general, have no scruples about charging you for what
other people send you unsolicited. Up until they got the memo that SMS was on
its way out, they used to charge downright extortionate rates for text
messages. Same for minutes.

------
beefman
I was convinced in favor of net neutrality by a 2007 study at the University
of Florida.[1] When ISPs are allowed to charge content providers individually,
there is less incentive to improve overall bandwidth. There's also an
incentive to cripple the free tier, especially if it can be done subtly or by
neglect over time. So net neutrality seems like good policy.

[1]
[http://web.archive.org/web/20130602210518/http://news.ufl.ed...](http://web.archive.org/web/20130602210518/http://news.ufl.edu/2007/03/07/net-
neutrality/)

------
koolba
If the physical line itself was separated from the ISP providing you service
on the line, this problem would solve itself through natural competition. We
_almost_ saw this happen with ADSL but it lost out to the fatter pipes of coax
and fiber.

Most people have either one or zero options for coax (i.e. cable) or fiber.
That leads to a monopoly where you either have to take whatever Comcast / Time
Warner / Verizon offer or live with craptacular DSL. Get rid of that monopoly
and have the maintenance of those pipes be run by the local municipality. Then
you can have real competition.

------
enknamel
>What's clearly not OK is taking it further--charging different services
different rates based on their relationships with ISPs. You wouldn't accept
your electric company charging you different rates depending on the
manufacturer of each of your appliances.

This does happen though. Electric companies, phone companies, etc all charge
different rates based on who is using the service. Based off of different
programs and income based subsidies who is using the service determines the
cost paid. This also effects what producers sell to the low end of the
spectrum. If electricity is substantially cheaper for lower income consumers,
they will care less about paying for better energy efficiency. So you are
technically paying a different rate based off what your appliances are.

------
ABCLAW
Those involved in technology are often confronted with brutally kafkaesque
situations wherein the human and the machine are starkly opposed. Fighting
against the machine is often demoralizing, depressing, and dehumanizing - but
not always. Not today.

Thank you, Sam, for the mote of hope.

------
bo1024
I think the appliance analogy is a pretty good one. But now imagine that on
top of being able to charge different amounts for different brands of
appliances, the electric company happens to manufacture their own line of not-
so-quality stoves, refrigerators, etc.

------
LeicaLatte
"I really hope an activist or tech leader will step up and organize this
fight."

Sums up America 2017. Outsource everything, even your fights.

------
tehwebguy
Ajit Pai is public enemy number one.

~~~
Keverw
I do agree net neutrality is a good thing, only major thing I disagree with
gutting net neutrality as the internet is the future network for everything.
But overall I support Ajit Pai because he wants to cut down on regulations it
seems from reading some transcripts.

For example there's people who want to regulate Netflix, Amazon Instant video,
Playstation Vue, YouTube TV as if they are a cable system, with all the extra
regulations the major cable and satellite companies have to follow, and were
created way before IP based networks became popular. I feel like the free
market should always win, a kid in their basement should be allowed to create
competitors.

I personally feel like everything should move to IP Based networks. You don't
have to worry about a limited number of stations, as IP based is pretty much
unlimited.

So even if people disagree with him on net neutrality, I do believe he's doing
good work. Maybe if regulations are cut and made modern we'd have more options
in the market. Maybe Google Fiber could be nationwide at some point if
regulations were out of the way. Google already owns a bunch of dark fiber.
I'd really love if the internet was just one dumb pipe.

For example I have satellite TV and cable internet. When you watch on demand
content they use your internet connection to download/stream the shows instead
of being beamed down by the satellite. My ISP does not have a cap, but maybe
if I lived in another part of the US served by one that does it would be
metered as internet traffic, compared to using cable's TV service and watching
on-demand which is locally within their own network(and not counted in the
internet meter).

I'd love in the future if we had internet only providers but It seems like one
is so hard to get going I doubt we'll have that. I know some communities have
done their own Fiber, but even were sued to stop it by the major players.
Google "communities fiber lawsuit" for example. I don't know why but it seems
like depending on your area there's only one cable company, one phone company,
and if you are lucky one fiber company. So I really wish it was easier to do
ISP startups and compete. I'm not even sure if it's possible to share the
lines. The regulations, and politics around it are probably why we aren't
really having new entries in the market.

TESTIMONY OF COMMISSIONER AJIT PAI, FEDERAL COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION-
[https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-336418A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-336418A1.pdf)

Commissioner Pai Remarks Before the Churchill Club
[https://www.fcc.gov/document/commissioner-pai-remarks-
church...](https://www.fcc.gov/document/commissioner-pai-remarks-churchill-
club)

~~~
wfo
Yeah, like those pesky regulations that stop your ISP from selling your entire
internet history at will without telling you or your permission. Pai will
finally get rid of it so ISPs can be free and the market can decide. By which
I mean the ISPs can decide, since they own the market.

Public enemy number one is a pretty fair assessment as far as anyone in tech
is concerned.

[https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/ad-industry-
lobb...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/ad-industry-lobbyists-
celebrate-impending-death-of-online-privacy-rules/)

~~~
rfrank
Why not Google or Facebook founders, executives, and employees whose salaries
are paid with the profits of selling other peoples' information? Why not the
C-suite of the ISPs who will happily sell user data? Why not the entire adtech
industry? Ajit Pai is one actor in a very corrupt system, and a lot of that
system is based in San Francisco.

~~~
Keverw
Do Google and Facebook really sell data? From my understanding, they keep the
data for ad targeting, feature/content recommendations. Like if I place an ad
on Facebook I could put 18 to 35, who likes travel, etc to promote a hotel
booking site as an example. Even if you do retarget with Facebook advertising,
they don't even show you the names of the people. You have like a retargeting
list, it tells you how many people but not much information on them.

Even third party developers get an ID number per user associated to that app
only(think of it as a proxy to your real id number). It seems like Facebook
and Google cares a lot more about privacy than people think. If they just sold
me the data, I could run off with it but by keeping the data to themselves and
letting marketers pay them to make use of it they make recurring revenue.

From my understanding, LexisNexis and other data brokers were the ones that
are selling the data. Here's a 60 minutes clip on it
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAT_ina93NY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAT_ina93NY)

I don't have any relationship with LexisNexis, I never agreed to anything yet
they have information on me. Another example is I was looking at my credit
report, and it even lists addresses from childhood. I never had a credit card
back then, why do they have information on me? At least with Google and
Facebook, I gave consent and I see a benefit. You can even buy lists of people
and their medications(sounds like a HIPPA violation but the data brokers know
this stuff)

~~~
rfrank
Yes. Giving the NSA direct access to their databases doesn't seem like caring
about user privacy to me. I don't perceive the 'consent' issue the same way;
sending an email or uploading a picture to the internet shouldn't require 100
different data points on my device and location. YMMV, but I find working for
companies who's business model is to exploit other people's personal
information for profit is an enormously distasteful thing to do.

The whole discussion is a farce at this point. Tech workers who literally
created the incentive to make clickbait content, filter bubbles, and data
silos are now upset with "fake news", social polarization, and a "closed" net,
while flatly refusing to acknowledge their role in getting us here over the
last 20 years. Ajit Pai is the last person to blame when wondering who broke
the net.

~~~
Keverw
I haven't been following the whole NSA/CIA stuff as much lately, but from my
understanding Google, Facebook never directly sold people's information. Yes,
they monetize it I knew that but It was from my understanding companies mostly
"rent" the data without getting a copy of the data(just using it).

> YMMV, but I find working for companies who's business model is to exploit
> other people's personal information for profit is an enormously distasteful
> thing to do.

For the record, I don't work for any company's that abuse people's personal
information. I do have a bit of knowledge on how Facebook ads work because
I've used them before.

I don't even view Google or Facebook as doing bad compared to the large data
brokers.

~~~
rfrank
I work in marketing. Not selling data direct to people like you or I does not
mean they don't sell data. Depending on how hard you try, you can get
enormously specific with just the data you are supplied by them. I perceive
their business model as fundamentally bad (I would use the word wrong or
repugnant), and their willingness to comply with us intelligence agencies is
worse. I realize this is an increasingly uncommon sentiment in the bay, that
sort of idealism died here a long time ago.

[https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-
pranking...](https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my-
roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

------
no_protocol
> You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates for
> each of your appliances.

I can get cheaper electricity for my water heater if I choose to attach it to
a source that can be interrupted at times of peak load. I'm not quite sure
this line of reasoning will stand.

Edit: It appears the linked article has been updated since I originally posted
this. The new text is:

> You wouldn't accept your electric company charging you different rates
> depending on the manufacturer of each of your appliances.

This makes the argument much clearer and my concerns no longer seem important.

~~~
ygjb
Your comparison is invalid. Consumers generally tolerate that network
management for some things is ok, for example, constraining the transfer speed
of users at peak times.

This is a different scenario - the comparable scenario would be that your
electricity company charges you a variable rate depending on which
manufacturers appliances you buy, for example, if you buy and use only samsung
appliances, you get a cheaper rate (and the electric company gets a kickback
from samsung).

When you pay for an internet connection the only practical matter that I
expect my ISP to care about is the speed I expect to get, the latency of the
network, and the volume of traffic I am permitted over a period. Everything
else is a congestion issue, and if they are going to manage what I can access
to and modify the parameters of my connection based on resources I access, I
am not buying Internet access, I am buying access to a curated online service.

~~~
no_protocol
> the comparable scenario would be that your electricity company charges you a
> variable rate depending on which manufacturers appliances you buy

The scenario you introduce is different from the specific line I was
responding to. My intention was to show that some more consideration and
rework of the idea could bring more clarity. You have helped refine Sam's
point and now I understand it better, but as I read it, it seemed like
something that should be addressed.

> Consumers generally tolerate that network management for some things is ok,
> for example, constraining the transfer speed of users at peak times.

I could have a switch to change my water heater to the non-interruptible
service if I needed to use it during a time of peak demand. How does "pay more
for priority" fit into the net neutrality picture? Is it okay as long as the
user is the one choosing which of their traffic is in the fast or slow lane?

~~~
ygjb
>The scenario you introduce is different from the specific line I was
responding to. My intention was to show that some more consideration and
rework of the idea could bring more clarity.

In your example you are choosing to accept interruption of service in exchange
for a preferential rate.

Net neutrality preserves the integrity of internet access by stating that ISPs
may not interfere with traffic based on it's origin or destination for
competitive reasons (e.g. to coerce payments from service providers a consumer
may choose to access). The core premise of Internet access is that a consumer
is paying for access to the Internet. If a consumer chooses to permit the
service provider to modulate service at the consumer side in order to gain
preferential treatment (better price, etc), then this is a consumer choice.

> I could have a switch to change my water heater to the non-interruptible
> service if I needed to use it during a time of peak demand. How does "pay
> more for priority" fit into the net neutrality picture?

There are numerous ways to "pay for priority"; even with electricity you can
pay a supplier to upgrade capacity in your area to ensure that you have the
ability to more consistently draw power, especially at peak times (granted
this is not a trivial process). With Internet access the same thing is
available - if I want a 10Mbps connection, that has minimum bandwidth of 1Mbps
at peak times, and 99% uptime, then I could reasonably expect to pay more than
someone who only wants a 1Mbps connection, can tolerate a minimum bandwidth of
512Kbps at peak, and only needs 90% uptime.

This is not a net neutrality issue, and this should be consumer choice (I am
old and from Canada, so the numbers above are low :P); allowing lower cost
terms of service for less guarantees is a time honored tradition in delivering
utilities and services, but most utilities in many parts of the world have a
minimum standard that must be met to achieve regulatory compliance for
consumer services (e.g. water pressure upper and lower limits, natural gas
line pressure, electricity amperage and voltage, etc). Anything above that
regulation-blessed "consumer grade" is an opportunity to extract value for
priority, and is compatible with net neutrality.

The Net Neutrality issue is that your provider can then regulate the service
which you have bought and paid for (network access to your ISPs network peers,
and via those access to the Internet) to prevent you from access resources
from specific sites and resources, and deliberately applying QoS to degrade a
users experience with those third party sites and services in order to coerce
the upstream services to pay the ISP.

This is why I say that a service that does this is not Internet Service, but
rather a curated network service.

------
michaeljbishop
Am I the only person frustrated that this article contains a call to arms and
then _no actionable items_? I'm on board, but what should I do about it? Put
that in your article!

------
vvanders
I love the electricity company/appliance analogy. That seems fairly accurate
and something that's easily relatable to the layman who doesn't understand the
details of the internet.

~~~
asher_
Can you explain? The analogy seems like a terrible one to me.

We are not talking about charging different amounts of money depending on the
brand of device you are consuming the data on. NN is about not differentiating
the cost or quality of bits based on their source. In the US, can you not opt
to pay a slightly higher rate for renewable energy? (This happens in
Australia).

I'm all for NN, but the analogy Sam used doesn't hold in my opinion.

As an additional thought from someone outside the US: NN doesn't exist in
places like Australia, and has actually overall led to better services,
especially in the early days of the internet, because overseas data is
significantly more costly to provide than local data. The difference is that
we have more robust competition and we can more easily switch providers, where
is seems in the US (purely based on things I've read on the internet) that the
near-duopoly cuts consumer choice, so if NN was not in place, people would
have little ability to switch providers, and they would be stuck with it.

Is the lack of competition the real issue here? If people in the US had a
choice of many providers and it was easy to switch, then people would likely
switch to services that are Net Neutral.

~~~
crazy1van
> Is the lack of competition the real issue here?

Yes. Governments -- from federal to small towns -- created rules giving de
facto local monopolies to certain ISPs and making market entry of competition
very difficult. And yet, people want to solve this created problem with more
rules about how ISPs are allowed to compete.

------
tomcam
I think Sam needs to clarify some terms.

> The internet is a public good

Black's Law says a public good is "An item that taxation is used to finance,
the consumption of which has been decided by the whole of society. It is not
an item for consumption that an individual has decided upon."

Does Sam want to tax all of us for net access, then have the government decide
how it should be allocated? Do ISPs disappear under this scenario? Does Sam
want the same government that has gone insane collecting personal data to have
further control over net our access? Does he trust them to do the right thing
with it? If so, does he have any evidence it would do so?

> I believe access should be a basic right.

"Basic right" is not defined and doesn't have a legal tradition, so I'm not
sure what it means. Is it meant to be a constitutionally delineated right like
(in the USA) freedom of the press, or to worship, or to bear arms? Because
none of these require that we have the government confiscate our money in
order that others may exercise those rights.

------
pizzetta
Not to put a fly in the soup, but don't utilities charge different rates for
different customers? for Example PG&E might have one rate for residential, one
for small biz and one for large biz?

Not to say that net neutrality is different but comparing it to utilities may
not be appropriate given diff classes of customers are granted different kinds
of rates and service.

~~~
ryandrake
But they don't have one rate for powering refrigerators, a different rate for
washing machines, one rate for computers, etc. Nor do they have one rate for
Kenmore refrigerators, a different rate for Maytag refrigerators, one rate for
Samsung refrigerators.

~~~
rdl
They do charge discounts for certain types of equipment (cars, medical
devices). I don't think there are any differences between equipment vendors,
though.

------
Not31337
Charging per volume of traffic would eliminate the net neutrality issue.

If I use Netflix on Comcast I would pay Comcast for my use of their network.
Comcast would pay Netflix's ISP for the use of that network (at negotiated
rate lower than my rate because of volume). Netflix would pay their ISP For
their usage as well.(also priced for volume)

The two end point rates would have to be set so carriers make a profit and the
responsibility of traffic is shared between the sender and receiver. (people
who get thing for free tend to treat it as worthless).

This model has to be worked out to completion to understand all the
implications.

The key thing is if Comcast was getting reasonable revenue from moving Netflix
traffic it would not need to throttle other people's traffic to bully
consumers to buy on demand TV from Comcast.

As side effect this may reduce usage by people who download stuff just because
they can because its free/already paid for. This is related to free things are
treated badly concept I mentioned earlier.

~~~
Keverw
It's an interesting idea, but unlimited is nice. This idea kinda reminds me of
how the telephone network works. Basically everything a call is connected,
there's a "dip" fee.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_Routing_Number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location_Routing_Number)

------
seibelj
Net Neutrality absolutists need to tone down their rhetoric. When NN activists
say zero rating is unfair, they are speaking from an ivory tower. It is better
for a poor Iraqi to get free Wikipedia even though that hurts other upstart
wikis, than for poor Iraqis to have no Wikipedia at all. Once you accept this
premise, you must then accept that exceptions to NN exist. Once you accept
that, you must then take every single exception to NN and weigh it on a case-
by-case basis about whether it's "fair" or not.

Barring some government oversight panel that bans or allows anti-NN practices
on a case by case basis, I think it's better for the market to decide. ISP's
shouldn't be able to extort businesses to be allowed in at all, but offering
premium speeds (as Netflix has paid for years), free data, etc. are within the
realms of anti-NN practices that I feel are acceptable.

The net neutrality issue is not black and white.

~~~
bo1024
> It is better for a poor Iraqi to get free Wikipedia even though that hurts
> other upstart wikis, than for poor Iraqis to have no Wikipedia at all.

I don't accept this premise. This is a false dichotomy because these are not
the only two options. There is a third, better option: to get access to the
entire internet.

A company offering you that choice is using a classic game-theoretic
bargaining approach: commit to only allowing a restricted set of
possibilities, of which the other person's best option is the one you want to
happen. This makes it sound like the company has no chioce in the matter: they
are just presenting you with the options, and you are the one who has to
choose between eliminating this poor Iraqi's internet or giving her partial
access. In reality, the company has stacked the deck by presenting you with
this particular pair of options.

I'm not saying it's completely illegitimate for a company to want to sponsor
free partial internet for those who don't have it in some places of the world.

But I am saying it is opposite from the ideal we should be working towards in
already-developed countries like the USA. Ideally, the company providing
internet should not at all be vertically integrated with the company providing
websites on it and should have no incentive to prioritize one over the other.

~~~
seibelj
If you are a poor American on a Lifeline phone (free phone provided by the
government) with a very limited data plan, no one is (at this time) willing to
subsidize unlimited services for this user. But maybe some companies, for
their services, are willing to subsidize them. And in my opinion, it's better
for the poor person to have access to some services than no services.

~~~
grthrowaway
There is no limit on my truconnect phone for calls texts or data. There are
multiple companies set up outside the general relief office and I am eligible
for a phone from each one; so, even if there wasn't a generous data plan, a
combination of phones would solve that. As does using free wifi which is
available at all libraries and police stations where I live.

Posting garbage about poor people's situations that is untrue only serves to
hurt everybody. Please stop.

~~~
seibelj
I have never heard of a government provided phone with unlimited data plan. I
don't think the government should be providing a "combination of phones" for
free to each poor person. I am happy you can use free WiFi. I think that if
you want to watch YouTube and google is willing to pay for your data, that's
OK and no one will be hurt.

------
trcollinson
I love the political and ethical debate surrounding this, both in this thread
and elsewhere. As a technologist and a software developer I think we should
use every means available to stop these sorts of laws from taking effect and
harming what should be a completely neutral internet.

With that being said, I would like to ask from a technical perspective, what
can we do if this does go into effect? I remember a quote, I want to say it
was by Sit Timothy Berners-Lee, but I can't find it. So I will just state it
myself.

 _Any lack of neutrality within the internet network is not a feature or a
regulation but is in fact a bug within the system. When a bug is found,
software engineers find ways around those bugs._

So, if ISPs finally succeed in causing our internet to no longer be neutral,
how will we be moving around that bug?

~~~
wu-ikkyu
>So, if ISPs finally succeed in causing our internet to no longer be neutral,
how will we be moving around that bug?

It wouldnt be easy, but mesh networks are the best option I'm aware of.

~~~
frabcus
The protocol cjdns and its distributed deployment at Hyperboria is the largest
scale starting point I'm aware of.

I think doing this might have advantages increasing freedom at the other end
of the stack too - if you can drop out to cheap Internet on a mesh network
with local traffic free, you might find the advantage of having a Nextcloud
Box in your house (instead of Dropbox) clearer.

------
subverter
I don't think anyone here is going to argue that the internet _shouldn 't_ be
open.

The real question behind that – and where we differ – is how the role of
government fits into that.

If you believe government is inherently good and necessary to enable a "basic
right" like the internet, then yes, of course, government should be the one to
keep the internet open. This is Sam's view.

On the other hand, if you distrust government and believe their own interests
for power and control are always in play, then handing them even more control
of the internet is absolutely _not_ the solution.

Knowing what we know of the NSA's mass-surveilance and CIA's targeted hacking
and surveillance for unclear-at-best purposes, doesn't that at least give you
pause about whether government should be the one to keep the internet open?

~~~
AlexandrB
> If you believe government is inherently good and necessary to enable a
> "basic right" like the internet, then yes, of course, government should be
> the one to keep the internet open. This is Sam's view.

I don't believe that the government is inherently good, but at least the
government is _democratically elected_. The CEOs at Comcast/Verizon are not.
Allowing them to exert control over internet content while participating in a
market that is inherently NOT FREE is a recipe for disaster and a closed
internet.

------
dahart
What are the technical, business & political hurdles that prevent routing
level encryption from providing enough privacy that neutrality falls out
automatically and the question of net neutrality legislation becomes moot?

------
matchagaucho
If Telco Carriers continue to invest in their wireless infrastructure, then
data "fast lanes" will emerge naturally.

In the Carnegie model, 2G and 3G towers could be subsidized for accessing
Wikipedia (for example) while new 5G towers are only available to premium
subscribers.

Look at the Millions be spent dismantling the 2G network. That bandwidth could
be subsidized by the FCC for the common good.
[https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM10696...](https://www.att.com/esupport/article.html#!/wireless/KM1069631)

------
soheil
Other than below what are some of the other arguments against NN? I also have
a number from 0 to 5 next to each indicating how plausible I find these
arguments, please shed more light on this if needed as well:

\- 3 caching, if you're closer to a cache edge you pay less.

\- 1 we give you a heavily discounted data plan but show you only content we
want to make money off of you, argument being at least you get something
instead of nothing if you're very poor.

\- 2 regulations are mostly bad, you don't want government sticking its nose
in everything.

\- 0 monopolies want their moat to grow.

------
joeblow9999
pro NN: "Oh my god some service I want may charge me with a pricing scheme I
don't understand/like! Let's get government bureaucrats to control that for
me!"

anti-NN: "If you let the federal government dictate how packets are
treated.... then you let the federal government dictate how packets are
treated. Perhaps you are familiar with Ed Snowden, Wikileaks and recent
revelations about the NSA etc? no concern at all eh? You just want your
Netflizzzzzz. Ok then"

~~~
problems
Yeah... it's sort of a lose-lose honestly, I think the model used in Canada
and the UK is quite good - the government forced the big ISPs to lease last-
mile lines. Keeps a working free market with competition, many people started
switching to smaller ISPs with lower rates and unlimited bandwidth caps, a few
years later the big guys increased their speeds, increased their caps and made
it relatively cheap to go to unlimited.

It fixes more than just the net neutrality problem, it also fixes the lack of
infrastructure improvement by making big ISPs have a monopoly on last mile
improvements for the first year or two - they're greatly incentivized to keep
improving infrastructure and speeds or lose customers to the smaller guys who
can run leaner. It's a pretty clever regulatory model that manipulates
incentives quite well.

I'm sure there are flaws, regulatory models are rarely perfect, but from what
I've seen over the last 10 years going from 5mbit DSL to gigabit fibre for
only about 1.5x the cost, I'd say it's doing a pretty good job, without any
net neutrality enforcement or any complicated legislation - just by giving the
regulatory authority the ability to compel ISPs to lease lines.

------
ctack
It's a terrific plea from Sam. He speaks for Ycombinator and by proxy,
independant hackers like myself. But there is just so much peace of mind in it
for the big boys.

------
gist
> What's clearly not OK is taking it further--charging different services
> different rates based on their relationships with ISPs. You wouldn't accept
> your electric company charging you different rates depending on the
> manufacturer of each of your appliances.

Some electric companies do charge different rates to different types of
customers depending on what type of business those customers are in and w/o
regard to actual usage (which can also vary rates).

------
andy_ppp
Why would anyone buy internet access from people charging like this/breaking
their services? Are ISPs monopolies in the US and if so wouldn't stopping
these monopolies be the surest way, allowing the market to decide a free
Internet is what gets you customers?

All that this will do is move people towards obfuscation of their Internet
access through technology. I say let them try to break the web; there will be
technological solutions to stop this immediately I bet...

~~~
pdonis
_> Are ISPs monopolies in the US_

In many parts of it, yes, they are, because of deals that ISPs have struck
with local governments.

 _> wouldn't stopping these monopolies be the surest way_

Yes, and every time it's been tried, the ISPs go to court and, since they have
much deeper pockets, end up getting the attempts shot down.

~~~
andy_ppp
Okay so maybe YC should be funding a few clever ISP startups in the US?

There really is decent competition for Internet in the UK, it's surprisingly
successful at stopping this type of stupid stuff from happening.

~~~
pdonis
_> maybe YC should be funding a few clever ISP startups in the US?_

I think that would be a great idea.

------
animex
If only Sam knew someone that had the President's ear...

------
billions
In my opinion, the Internet is the best modern day example of something
working fairly with minimal regulation.

------
h4nkoslo
This is all very rich coming from someone who also wants a totalitarian
government regime dedicated to suppressing machine learning research.

[http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-
part-2](http://blog.samaltman.com/machine-intelligence-part-2)

------
pasbesoin
Work on physical layer redundancy and independence. Even if you want one,
primary, default network, you're going to need competition to keep it healthy.

And I for one want alternatives that work around the damage of current
chokeholds.

------
hammerandtongs
Part of the problem is that "the internet" has not provided a technical
solution yet to the claimed problem (the laziness and shiftiness of ISPs not
upgrading simple crossconnects is bs though).

If someone wants to stream netflix, youtube or grab something from a torrent
why not have a content agnostic(safe harbor) block cache distributed around
the internet?

This is most concretely expressed by ipfs [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)
but it's an old idea -

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_centric_networking)

Bittorrent itself is a limited form of it. On some level AMP from google and
CDNs are trying to make up for its lack.

As long as the ISP doesn't actively force this on their users but instead its
something companys and people actually want I think its a net good to make
this a thing.

We should mature and adopt IPFS AND fight the net neutrality battle.

------
bluetwo
Those looking to roll back net neutrality are better organized, better funded,
and better connected.

I hate to say it, but this battle seems lost.

We don't need to squander our time arguing over the finer points of the
policy. We need a simple way to explain it to the masses.

------
0xdeadbeefbabe
I think lobbyists should solve this problem, but here's an idea anyway: what
if we synchronized our fireworks to go off on the 4th of July at 4:04 AM in
protest?

------
beat
The problem is that the Big Four (or five, if you count Microsoft) just aren't
that interested in it. There's a lot of benefit to them to end neutrality.

~~~
dragonwriter
I don't think there's a net benefit to them (which is why they've been mostly
pro-Open Internet); OTOH, they are _better_ positioned than smaller players to
deal with it, so they aren't _that_ motivated.

------
plandis
My entire life I have had access to only one ISP. I want very clear
competition before give up on net neutrality. That's not going to happen
though :-/

------
dreamcompiler
We probably need a grassroots effort for VPNs like "Let's Encrypt" is for
https. It will eat our batteries faster, but it's worth it.

------
bambax
Do not put two spaces after a period. Please.

[http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/two-
space...](http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/two-spaces-after-
a-period)

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/01/space_invaders.html)

------
no_wizard
> There's an argument that Internet Service Providers should be able to charge
> a metered rate based on usage.

For home Utilities, this is based on the fact that, indeed, your usage pattern
is a couple of things

1) In the best of Utility markets, electricity has no real elasticity.
Electrical demand is a constant game of just simply keep pace with existing
demand as much as possible. There is no excess capacity problems per say, as
the game is trying to be as efficient as possible.

2) For the most part, people's usage patterns are routinely predicable and
stable, so the demand cost associated can be metered reasonably and with
_relative_ transparency (Not to say, its completely transparent, because its
not, though its very well regulated in comparison to say, internet service
access & quality). This allows a relatively consistent and low variable cost
of delivery of this service, however its not a 'fixed' cost, with the
exception usually of the wiring the house itself to the grid.

3) The device in which a home uses, in fact, can be measured in absolute
terms. For instance, your appliances can be calculated to the letter how much
they will cost to run (see here, for instance:
[http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html](http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html)).
I would argue that this is not true of internet usage, which can vary
EXTREMELY widely. The EIA gives a nice summary on this too:
[https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electrici...](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=electricity_used)

Now, often people will say, reasonably, that in an environment maintained much
like the power utilities, if things could be achieved to this level of
usage/monitoring/charging for use would make sense. Transparent pricing, easy
ways to calculate usage based on the app or app(s) or some other methodology
for chunking the pricing structure so its really transparent and stable to
price out a month to month usage pattern for the average person. Sounds cool
right? Well, here is some notable differences:

(As an aside, for fun, imagine a world where the app had to tell you how much
on average it cost to use for an hour on a metered connection, like how energy
star rated appliances tell you their yearly cost)

Broadband is a completely different story

1) Wired service has a fixed cost and tons of excess capacity. The cost, while
not _cheap_ is fixed, per house or neighborhood, and that infrastructure
doesn't have to be changed out for many years, in some cases a decade or more.
Once the wired service has been installed to a house, thats it. the ISP then
can flip the service on and start delivering product to the homes at virtually
no cost after that. There is no ongoing 'generation' of bandwidth to closely
meet demand. The technology itself, after all, takes care of all that. All the
ISP has to do is run the ship smoothly, but they don't have to build a new
bandwidth power plant to make more bandwidth.

2) Which leads me to my second point. There is a ton of bandwidth in the
system already. WE know this. The system not only has a fixed cost, but the
actual capacity of the wired services being deployed already have a ton of
extra bandwidth capacity, in particular if we are talking about home users.
From DSL Reports [https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Deconstructing-The-
Exafl...](https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Deconstructing-The-Exaflood-
Myth-97440) we get this great line (i encourage everyone to read the full
report):

 _Andrew Odlyzko is one of the nation 's top experts on global Internet
traffic. Stationed at the University of Minnesota, Odlyzko posts all of his
data to his website, and notes that while growth is strong, it doesn't
necessitate drastic new pricing model shifts (metered billing), or wailing to
the heavens about the dire menace that is P2P traffic. "There is not a single
sign of an unmanageable flood of traffic," Odlyzko says. "If anything, a
slowdown is visible more than a speedup," he says_

And thats just from 2008, and the situation for bandwidth excess capacity has
actually improved:

Tech Dirt reports from 2012
([https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable-
industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-
congestion.shtml)):

The relevant bit, in response to a Michael Powell, a cable industry lobbyist:

 _If usage caps were about "fairness," carriers would offer the nation's
grandmothers a $5-$15 a month tier that accurately reflected her twice weekly,
several megabyte browsing of the Weather Channel website. Instead, what we
most often see are low caps and high overages layered on top of already high
existing flat rate pricing, raising rates for all users. Does raising rates on
a product that already sees 90% profit margins sound like "fairness" to you?_

Even as far back as 2008, they tried to push the bandwidth hog myth
([https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-
a-M...](https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-
Myth-117230)):

relevant quote:

 _Assuming that if disruptive users exist (which, as mentioned above we could
not prove) they would be amongst those that populate the top 1% of bandwidth
users during peak periods. To test this theory, we crossed that population
with users that are over cap (simulating AT &T’s established data caps) and
found out that only 78% of customers over cap are amongst the top 1%, which
means that one fifth of customers being punished by the data cap policy cannot
possibly be considered to be disruptive (even assuming that the remaining four
fifths are). Data caps, therefore, are a very crude and unfair tool when it
comes to targeting potentially disruptive users. The correlation between real-
time bandwidth usage and data downloaded over time is weak and the net cast by
data caps captures users that cannot possibly be responsible for congestion.
Furthermore, many users who are "as guilty" as the ones who are over cap
(again, if there is such a thing as a disruptive user) are not captured by
that same net._

Also see this: [https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/myth-
bandwid...](https://www.publicknowledge.org/news-blog/blogs/myth-bandwidth-
hog)

3) [Opinion piece here]: Fair and open internet access is in my mind, is going
to become a first amendment issue, or at least should be treated as one. The
growth and power of being able to be seen, heard, and read on the internet is
quickly, as we all know, supplanting most if not all other forms of media. And
for the media it is enabling, other mediums that carry forward, like video,
are quickly consolidating onto the internet in great numbers. This makes it
_the_ place for public speech. While the space may be non-physical (virtual),
the ability for ISPs to pick winners and losers to access will have inevitably
terrible political and economic consequences, and not just for start ups.
Imagine if employees who got cancer from working in an industrial facility
could not publish their stories to say, Medium, because a large ISP like
Comcast will refuse to carry medium's traffic in and around that issue, or at
all, if it becomes a hot bed for other interests that are willing to pay vast
sums of money to filter that traffic from ever being delivered or surfacing.
Does this sound farfetched? I don't think so. We know groups have tried to do
this with newspapers in the past, and of course groups have also tried to do
things like pressure individual websites from publishing things to. If you
open the internet and mandate its traffic is treated equally regardless, it
largely negates the ability for this to happen on that level, as in an ideal
implementation, the ISPs would be stripped (and monitored to ensure) that they
aren't reading _any_ traffic in the wild that they don't have an _explicit_
reason to do so (Say, a warrant to tap into a connection of a suspected murder
looking at their network traffic or something)

4) While we are talking about this, there is no damn spectrum crunch either,
its a nice myth that wireless carriers/ISPs are using to justify their
underhanded tactics here, because physics dictates there _can_ be a spectrum
crunch. that doesn't mean there _is_ or _soon will be_ a spectrum crunch:

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130118/17425221736/cable-
industry-finally-admits-that-data-caps-have-nothing-to-do-with-
congestion.shtml)

[https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-
a-M...](https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/The-Bandwidth-Hog-is-a-
Myth-117230)

[https://gigaom.com/2012/01/30/is-the-spectrum-crisis-a-
myth/](https://gigaom.com/2012/01/30/is-the-spectrum-crisis-a-myth/)

[https://gigaom.com/2012/10/21/the-myth-of-the-wireless-
spect...](https://gigaom.com/2012/10/21/the-myth-of-the-wireless-spectrum-
crisis/)

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507486/the-spectrum-
crunc...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/507486/the-spectrum-crunch-that-
wasnt/)

[http://www.androidauthority.com/wireless-industry-flipped-
bu...](http://www.androidauthority.com/wireless-industry-flipped-business-
model-3-myths-407068/)

[https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20121004/024...](https://www.techdirt.com/blog/wireless/articles/20121004/02434820589/now-
that-we-know-telcos-exaggerated-about-spectrum-crunch-how-about-some-more-
open-spectrum.shtml)

------
diminish
If a carrier has a "social" data plan which gives access to only Facebook, is
this against net neutrality?

~~~
mozumder
yes.

------
plainOldText
I haven't yet made up my mind on net neutrality. But Sam says: _" I believe
access should be a basic right"_.

My question is: How can something be a human right if you need to pay for it?
Because as of today you still need to pay an ISP for internet access.

~~~
rrdharan
A lot of folks would consider personal security a basic right, but someone
still has to pay for the police.

Some folks believe that healthcare should be a basic right, and people
definitely have to pay for that.

~~~
plainOldText
I won't get into the healthcare topic as it's still a mess in my opinion,
however, regarding one's right to security, as far as I know police do not
have a duty to protect someone. [1]

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-
pol...](http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/28/politics/justices-rule-police-do-
not-have-a-constitutional-duty-to-protect.html)

------
ChefDenominator
Net neutrality, as promoted by this article's author, requires the elimination
of an open Internet because it requires a central authority which will
determine who can charge what and what they can charge for.

~~~
AlexandrB
There's already a central authority for most places - it's called
Comcast/AT&T/Verizon and you don't even get a say in this authority's
leadership (unlike government). By eliminating net neutrality these local
monopolies now want to extend their control not only to what customers will
pay but also to what internet services they wish to provide/favour.

~~~
dragonwriter
> There's already a central authority for most places - it's called
> Comcast/AT&T/Verizon and you don't even get a say in this authority's
> leadership (unlike government).

Not to contradict your basic point with a this, but, technically, you do:
through government. Corporations are creatures of law, and their governance is
ultimately itself governed by rules set by the chartering government, and
further constrained by the governments of jurisdictions in which the
corporation seeks permission to operate.

~~~
AlexandrB
> Not to contradict your basic point with a this, but, technically, you do:
> through government.

Yes, that's the point of net neutrality. Whereas an internet with no net
neutrality regulation means that corporations have final say.

~~~
ChefDenominator
An Internet with no net neutrality regulation means no one has a final say. An
Internet with net neutrality regulation means the same people who enjoy
slaughtering brown people will be in charge of the entire Internet.

------
tbabb
Does anyone else think this thread smells astroturfed?

------
rbanffy
Not exactly surprising.

------
dsschnau
I'm afraid we can't do the SOPA/PIPA protests again :(

~~~
Zikes
The enemies of the open internet only have to win once, but to fend them off
we have to win every single time. SOPA/PIPA protests had a lot of momentum,
and they "won", but within weeks the same intrusive, anti-consumer practices
were injected into some other bill that just got pushed through anyways.

I just don't see how we can win. Not without some seriously strong top-down
consumer protection laws. Net neutrality needs to solidify into law, and get
some serious teeth. And I'm talking Amendment-level protections, not something
the next chump-in-chief can come along and pull the rug out from under like
they're doing with health care right now.

~~~
OmarIsmail
There is no "winning" the war as long as there is disagreement - of which
there always will be.

That's why the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. To overturn this law, or
to make consumer protection laws force neutrality you only have to win "once"
where the other side has to keep defending.

The net result is that both sides are always constantly fighting for what they
want and one side wins sometimes, and the other side wins other times.

~~~
Zikes
When's the last time consumer protection on the internet "won" though?

My browsing history is about to go up for sale. My emails are fair game for
the US government with no warrant. My ISP is free to double-charge for
peering, driving my Netflix subscription costs up. My mobile operator is
streaming certain services without it counting against my data, while services
I want to use still do. I have to pay ridiculous amounts of money to my ISP
for a decent connection, despite the government giving telecoms huge subsidies
(our own tax dollars) in exchange for building nationwide fiber, most of which
went straight to the company's own coffers with no repercussions.[1]

If there was at least _some_ back-and-forth, I would see your point, but as it
stands I only see one failure after another.

[1]
[http://newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm](http://newnetworks.com/ShortSCANDALSummary.htm)

------
adewhurst2
you are a good hacker since you are good i'm going to call you "CODER 52" good
job.

------
981283192
I don't understand why a basic "pay for what you use" principle is so evil
while Facebook is a much bigger threat (worse than AOL in its day).

Does 'sama have a Facebook account?

------
DaTruthHurts
Sam Altman is the Ycombinator version of Steven Anthony Ballmer you can see
failure on the horizon. Its just a matter of time.

~~~
simplehuman
What do you mean by this? Otherwise, this should be flagged.

