
Wozniak and Copps: Ending net neutrality will end the Internet as we know it - doener
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/29/ending-net-neutrality-will-end-internet-we-know-steve-wozniak-michael-copps-column/704861001/
======
timthelion
I get my Internet through CZFree, a non-profit community mesh network that
covers Prague. The legal structure is the same as a non-profit private club.
Members can vote for administrators. A membership fee pays for those who put
the large expensive multi-directional Ubiquity routers on their roofs and also
for a number of symmetric high bandwidth tier 1 fiber-optic connections
throughout the city. Anyone can join the network and contribute by putting a
multi-directional antenna on their roof. Or they can simply become clients to
the network by using a directional antenna pointed at a multi-directional
antenna.

Overall, the speed is much faster than with commercial Internet, and the
bandwidth is symmetrical.

In my opinion, this is a good example of the two faces of the left. One person
forms a union and tries to bully their employer into giving them better
conditions, or petitions the state to create laws which will benefit them. The
other face of the left creates co-ops and gives the corporate world the
finger.

I personally believe that the second approach is superior to the first, and
rather than trying to twist Comcast's arm into being nice, Americans should
focus on building community networks, at least in the cities where such a
thing is possible.

~~~
zerohp
Corporations have twisted community politics to make such things very
difficult. In my community, a municipal fiber optic network was built
throughout the area but lobbying and politics made it nearly impossible to
finish, so there are very few homes connected.

~~~
chiefalchemist
So to maintain net neutrality we have to fix democracy first? Makes sense, as
that would fix more than NN. The irony is, we need the internet (sans the cats
photos and Kardashians) to do that.

~~~
narrator
The best way to fix democracy is to adopt the Singapore system and raise
politicians salaries so the people can collectively outbid the corporations
for power. Trying to say politicians should be indifferent to money is like
saying communism works, but was just never implemented properly.

~~~
timthelion
I up-voted you for the interesting opinion, however, I strongly disagree with
you. Why would well paid politicians be less corrupt. Is there some kind of
maximum amount of money that a person can gather? In Czechia politicians are
extremely well paid, and we have a "founding myth" that states that a "well
paid judge cannot be bribed". This has been conclusively proven to not be the
case.

~~~
narrator
Singapore is surrounded by far more corrupt countries yet has one of the least
corrupt governments in the world according to Transparency International. A
head of a ministry there can earn more than 3 million dollars. They also have
one of the most efficient, as a percentage of GDP vs health outcomes,
healthcare systems in the world. Think of all the subsidies that go to
corporations from the government. If they just paid 1/10th of those subsidies
to politicians that regulate them, they'd cut out the middleman and save
taxpayers a lot of money due to greater competition and more efficiency among
the businesses and industries they oversee. Political rivals would have a huge
incentive to point out corruption so they could get their job. If they were
expecting to benefit from the corruption, they would instead attack on
unrelated issues in order to preserve the corruption cash cow.

~~~
amag
> Singapore is surrounded by far more corrupt countries

It's funny you say because I have my favorite counter-example from one of
those surrounding countries. I was in Thailand when Thaksin Shinawatra with
his ThaiRakThai party was first elected into power. Many people I spoke to had
voted for him because _" he's the richest man in Thailand, he doesn't need any
more money so he cannot be corrupted!"_. Fast-Forward five years and he
changed laws that allowed him to sell a larger share of his own company as
well as evade paying taxes for the sale. He was ousted by the military for
being too corrupt for Thailand!

~~~
narrator
He wasn't being paid by the government though. His government salary was
probably trivial compared to his other sources of income.

~~~
rtpg
So do we need to pay the US President billions?

If there was a "pay $10 billion to get a law" corruption system in the US, all
the big companies would spend that money. Nothing is more valuable

We don't need to reward politicians for not being terrible. Having a strong
independent judiciary is good enough.

Sure, in the US there's super PACs and whatnot, but when the bribery is
explicit enough, politicians go to jail.

~~~
chiefalchemist
"Sure, in the US there's super PACs and whatnot, but when the bribery is
explicit enough, politicians go to jail."

Most of them are not that stupid. Why risk jail when there are countless ways
to be compensated and not get caught.

Sure I agree with you. But that still leaves a pretty big hole in the system.

~~~
stevew20
Here's a thought: give people the right to vote for the public execution of
their immediate representatives.

If you represent people faithfully you prosper, if not you get a foot shorter.

------
evangelista
If you are one of the people who wants to end "Fake News," you are also on
board with ending Net Neutrality.

What do you think ending Fake News involves? The only way to do it is to have
the government, Google, Facebook and probably these same ISPs you hate
deciding what can and can't be put online.

You simply want to replace one giant beaurecratic gatekeeper with another one.

Anyone dumb enough to think Fake News resulted in the election results
(please, show me the data) while rushing online to scream about Net Neutrality
is a pawn in the game.

~~~
telchar
I'm tempted to make a sarcastic, hyperbolic reply to this hyperbolic and
aggressive comment, but in the spirit of hacker news I'll address the content
directly.

You imply that the only way to mitigate the problem of fake news (no need for
scare quotes, we're talking about news that is fake here) is to hand over
total control of the internet to some single entity. You have failed to make
any case that every other action that could be taken to mitigate fake news
would be insufficient. This is far from clear to me. I think there is a great
deal that could be done to mitigate fake news aside from that. Note that I say
mitigate because I do not think it would need to be eliminated entirely to be
effectively made powerless.

Further, it's an old propagandist trick to claim that people who disagree with
you are "screaming", to make them seem less rational and thus wrong. The
language you choose to use in this post undercuts your points. Show me the
data that fake news didn't affect the election results in any way. The
probability of some effect is much greater than the probability of no effect
at all, given the complexity of the system and the obvious mechanism. I think
the burden of proof is on you.

------
oconnore
"The internet" or "the web" is already dead, in the sense that most people use
a handful of sites run by a handful of large companies. The internet could
essentially be a native app run by a corporate governing body and more than
95% of people wouldn't notice.

Net neutrality is an irrelevant issue given that situation. And if you want to
change that situation, pay-to-play is the least of your worries: convincing
people to change their walled garden habits will be far more pricey.

~~~
pdonis
_> Net neutrality is an irrelevant issue given that situation._

No, it most certainly is not, because those of us who do _not_ belong to the
95%, those of us who are trying to build new Internet services or new products
that need fast, reliable Internet service in order to work, _need_ net
neutrality as a core principle in order to have a fair chance at competing.
Innovators are always a small percentage of the population, but that does not
mean their needs are irrelevant.

~~~
oconnore
Starting a web business is already massively cheaper than in any other
industry, and that won't change anytime soon. Your innovation is not going to
fail because you have to pay extra money for bandwidth -- you're probably
already paying Amazon's massively marked up $0.09/GB because it's slightly
more convenient. If Comcast/Verizon decide they want a couple cents on top of
that, you'll either optimize slightly and come out net-even, or continue not
caring about bandwidth costs because you have bigger problems like building a
user/customer base.

~~~
matt4077
This comments shows a surprising lack of knowledge of the arguments for net
neutrality.

The threat of Non-Net-Neutrality isn't some arbitrary increase in costs for
starting a business that gets paid, and filed with other nuisance.

It's that by virtue of their position in the market, the providers can extract
all the added value any company makes with their customers. That's because the
startup isn't the one choosing their customers' internet access. What the
provider charges for access to the customers that signed up with them doesn't
factor into the decisions of the market, because the customer doesn't pay it,
and likely will never know about it.

And "the market" will not solve this. There are maybe three or four companies
large enough to cause significant backlash when they can't be reached. But
besides Facebook, YT and Amazon, everyone will have to pay up.

And when faced with the decision to pay or not to pay, the rational decision
will be to accept any price that leaves you with a single cent of profit. The
power imbalance is staggering, and the potential for success with content
startups on the internet will suffer dramatically.

On the practical side, your startups' second to tenth employee better be
contract lawyers. Because you don't just have to pay Comcast and Verizon. You
will have to make arrangement with every single one of tens of thousands of
providers around the world if you want to reach customers connected via their
network.

Of course, you probably won't bother with some of them. Or decide against,
say, reaching potential customers in Montana. That will kill off several of
the best features of the web. Namely the long-tail of default-accessible
content that ordinarily nobody would think were interesting to someone of your
age in your location.

~~~
oconnore
No ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or
visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages. No one is even going to throttle
video streaming, unless the ISP can demonstrate that the bandwidth consumed
times some small per Gigabyte fee is worth far more than the postage and
accounting costs (which for a handful of >0.1%-total-traffic-volume sites like
Netflix, it will be).

Your prediction is like a Terry Gilliam movie (which I love!), but it's not
actually going to happen that way.

~~~
marak830
Actually, as to the throttling of video:

[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/07/veriz...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2017/07/verizon-wireless-apparently-throttles-streaming-video-
to-10mbps/)

~~~
oconnore
Yes, they throttled Netflix and Youtube, two sites that account for ~30% and
~13% of _total traffic volume_ , respectively. This is consistent with what I
said.

~~~
pdkl95
> ~30% and ~13% of total traffic volume

So what? That's traffic that the ISP's customers requested. That isn't Netflix
using some shared resource. Customers are paying Verison to transfer data, and
if 30% of that data is NetFlix, that's fine. Throttling denies the customer
the service they are paying for.

Should FedEx or UPS throttle the number of Amazon packages per address they
will deliver on time since Amazon represents a very large percentage of their
business?

(If this isn't compatible with a business model based on oversubscription,
that's the ISP's problem)

> No ISP is going to stop rural Montanaians from looking up Yelp reviews or
> visiting obscure ferret jousting fan pages

Of course not, because that isn't what Network Neutrality is about. Obscure
ferret jousting fan pages _are not competing with Verison. However, ISPs_ are*
often involved in various aspects of "media" production and distribution,
which is a conflict of interest.

------
rdiddly
No kidding, right, but the problem as usual is, how do we get these assholes
(the FCC, an unelected body) to do the will of (77% of) the people? I'm so
sick of wheedling and cajoling and writing letters and asking pretty-please...

~~~
notadoc
> how do we get these assholes (the FCC, an unelected body) to do the will of
> (77% of) the people?

Hire lobbyists.

Whoever pays the most wins.

------
ozaark
Everything that we think of as new technology is founded through ground
breaking innovation. As citizens, our networks have been subsidized (through
tax) for public access. If you're viewing this that innovation has affected
you.

Having control handed away from the populous that paid for the infrastructure
is wrong. Net neutrality maintains continued public innovation.

------
koolba
From the article:

> If Pai’s majority permits fast lanes for the biggest internet service
> providers (ISPs like Comcast, Verizon and AT&T), companies could speed up or
> slow down the sites and services they prefer.

Is the slow down part a real thing? I'm familiar with local peering to speed
up last mile services (ex: Netflix hubs) but I'm not aware of ISPs targeting
specific companies to _slow down_ their bandwidth. Beyond generic packet
shaping to slow down or limit your overall connection, is targeted throttling
like that for real? IANAL but I'd imagine the latter would get an ISP's ass
handed to them in a lawsuit.

> Fast lanes or “paid prioritization” create anticompetitive incentives for
> ISPs to favor their own services over those of their competitors.

A better solution is to require that ISPs be only ISPs. If they don't have
their own content mills to push then you don't have this problem. While you're
at it, split out the physical maintenance of the pipes from the companies
providing the ISP services so that the latter can compete as well.

Ah fuck it, just let the municipality run it and be done with this. Then we
can all go to our local townhall meetings and listen to irate neighbors rail
at our local representatives for throttling their porn downloads.

~~~
an_account
ISPs have already been caught throttling services, including Netflix.

~~~
rhino369
They've been caught not upgrading peering links that are saturated by Netflix.
Net neutrality doesn't really protect against that.

------
terravion
One use case that I'd like to see that runs contrary to the spirit of net
neutrality is the ability to buy a 'data transfer' service tier. I.e. lots of
data has to move from somewhere to the public cloud and most telecom
infrastructure sits under-utilized especially at night. I would more believe
the telcos that net neutrality is innovation stifling if any of them had ever
taken our money when we wanted to buy intentionally low priority service, but
at huge throughput, for cheap.

Anyone know where we can buy said service?

~~~
sillysaurus3
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQmTZTq7nw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQmTZTq7nw)

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes barreling
down the highway at 70mph."

~~~
Animats
Have you ever tried to read a thousand tapes? Weeks. I was once involved in a
project to copy old Stanford SAIL backup tapes. They just needed people to
load tapes on a drive, wait, unload, and go on to the next tape. Reading a
tape took 20 minutes. Transfer time over the Internet to a file server took
under a minute.

~~~
sillysaurus3
I haven't, but I'd like to. Anyone who's reading a thousand tapes nowadays
must be doing _something_ interesting. :)

Well, probably.

There was a stack of floppy disks sitting on a shelf in an old thrift store. I
couldn't help but buy it for $1. What could they contain? They're sitting on
my desk right now. I still haven't bought a floppy disk reader, but I'm really
curious. I assume a USB floppy disk drive + linux will be enough to dump the
raw bytes, but I haven't looked into it. Spelunking around old tech is
fascinating for unknown reasons.

~~~
marak830
Good luck pulling off any usable data, I still remember going through over 100
flopies as a teenager looking for files I had backedup and seeing so many damn
read errors.

Although now _I 'm_ interested to know what's on those disks you have :-p

~~~
sillysaurus3
The six disks say:

Lotus 2/22/93

Lazarus, (formatted) WP

LAZ6

Backup 13

Backup 12

Backup 11

All the backup discs are scratched out with pen though. I hope they didn't
wipe them!

~~~
marak830
I wonder if lotus still works, and if those backups are sequental. Good luck
getting the data!

------
pasbesoin
If you care about a free and open Internet, you'll work on the next generation
of physical layer. One that is not subject to self-serving corporate and
government control.

All the rest is just asking for something they've already made clear they
don't want to give you. (And won't, using physical force as a last resort.)

(I originally wrote "interest and manipulation", but in that regard, how are
they any different than the rest of us? But "control"? No, not that.)

~~~
marak830
Or push for what we have here in Japan? One government company owns all the
lines, but isn't allowed to sell bandwidth to customers, but has to allow any
changes npany to resell that bandwidth.

Competition is pretty damn good here (coming from Aus), and speeds are
amazing.

My last connection was 2gb/s for around $40 us/month with no cap or
throttling.

------
nnfy
Net neutrality includes a clause that places ISPs into the category of "common
carrier," which allows the government to regulate the internet as a
telecommunicationa company.

This makes me nervous, I'd much rather the government stay out of the
internet. Legislation is painfully slow to both make and unmake, and
legislators will almost certainly be out of touch with the technology and
there is a real risk of a restricted, heavily regulated internet which is far
worse than what we have today. Not to mention that such a classification opens
up ISPs to equal time laws, where the government decides who is or is not a
candidate and forces telecom companies to play equal ad time for all
candidates. Here's a great example of how this law would have already broken
down: how many Republican candidates were there last election? Would you have
wanted your ISP to be responsible for shoving political ads down your throat?
How could you even enforce equal time laws on ISPs?

Net neutrality is a power grab by the U.S. government, and the propaganda has
been well executed IMO; but I really hope that we will leave the internet to
the markets. I dont trust our government to make something as enormous and
complex as the internet any better, and it's been going quite well so far.

~~~
tomc1985
You would instead leave governance of the internet in the hands of business
execs that care for little more than extracting as much value as possible for
themselves and their companies?

~~~
nnfy
Yes, because when entities compete, consumers typically win.

The government in the U.S. has already regulated ISPs to the point that an
enormous artificial barrier has arisen to market entry.

We need deregulation. Approval for the major carriers in the U.S. is low
enough[0] that someone could probably disrupt the entire industry, except it
is next to impossible to enter.

You're also aware of regulatory capture, right? This regulation was premature,
and, as is typical of government, overreaching.

Imagine even further expanding the power of the last three administrations,
especially with the disaster that is the patriot act. Regulations are bad for
business and bad for innovation, outside of monopoly laws, and those give me
pause as well.

0\. [http://www.fiercecable.com/cable/comcast-still-ranks-last-
cu...](http://www.fiercecable.com/cable/comcast-still-ranks-last-customer-
experience-survey-focused-top-pay-tv-companies)

~~~
tomc1985
> The government in the U.S. has already regulated ISPs to the point that an
> enormous artificial barrier has arisen to market entry.

At the behest of telco lobbying.

> We need deregulation. Approval for the major carriers in the U.S. is low
> enough[0] that someone could probably disrupt the entire industry, except it
> is next to impossible to enter.

Small carriers _are_ starting up, I just read an article chronicling several
successful municipal broadband carriers in isolated pockets, and in each of
their stories they are essentially boxed in by .... guess.... lobbying from
larger telcos. (I think it may have been on HN, but if not just google
'successful municipal broadband')

Every step of the way it is the large telcos that prevent their growth.
Perhaps if there were no incumbents in the ISP space deregulation might
actually see improvements, but as it is the last thing we need is
AT&T/Comcast/et al given free reign. The more we staple their balls to the
chair the closer we get to a truly shared internet commons.

------
thelock85
Seems this move would leave the free-for-your-soul business models to BigIT
(bigger target for regulation/politics) and force the NewCos to actually build
a different Internet. Unfortunately, "NewCo is changing the world..." is so
2012.

------
Feniks
Wow talk about Americentrism. I will be just fine, the FCC has no authority
here.

~~~
justherefortart
Good thing you don't use any .com sites, like google, facebook, netflix, or
even news.ycombinator.com.

Wow, talk about disconnect.

~~~
Feniks
.com isn't an American domain.

~~~
ionised
It is unfortunately;

 _The domain was originally administered by the United States Department of
Defense, but is today operated by Verisign, and remains under ultimate
jurisdiction of U.S. law._

from;

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

------
moretai
Who are some of the thought leaders that are trying to fight or find a way
around this eventual neutering of the internet?

------
yellowapple
"One of us is the inventor of the personal computer"

I didn't realize Woz invented the Kenbak-1:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1)
;)

------
ianai
Then again, we’re seeing massive amounts of hacking and propaganda on the
current internet. Change is probably over due, but not this kind.

------
qengho
Riiight.. because when there was no net neutrality there was no Internet as we
know it.

Oh wait.

~~~
c22
I don't understand. Net neutrality was the default state of the early
internet. The internet wouldn't exist as we know it without this guiding
principle. It is only the recent deviations of this principle by providers
that has prompted the movement to codify these ideas into laws.

~~~
qengho
There were no "net neutrality" regulations in the US till 2015. Nevertheless
none of the horror scenarios net neutrslity proponents like to cook up came to
pass, and in fact the 'Net grew to "the Internet as we know it" precisely in
an era of no net neutrality regulations. That's ample proof (if any were
needed) that all the net neutrality FUD is just that.

In a free market, if an ISP was to mess with the traffic going through its
pipes, that would just encourage anyone who cared about this to switch to a
competitor.

The real problem is the lack of a free market, which is the direct result of
over-proliferation of laws and regulations, which discourage and stifle
innovative businesses. Net neutrality regulations are just another layer of
these, and will further cripple innovative competition and lead to increased
monopolization of Internet infrastructure by big crony-statist corporations.

More fundamentally, it is a violation of basic individual rights and property
rights for the government to tell any private enterprise how to operate its
business. That's the economics of fascism.

------
danjoc
>Wozniak, Apple co-founder

>net neutrality

>Apple Siri promotes Google search engine in favor of Bing for billions of
dollars.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-siri-google-
bing-2017-9](http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-siri-google-bing-2017-9)

lol. Good one Woz. You're a riot.

~~~
ionised
You know Wozniak has nothing to do with how Apple is run these days, and
hasn't for a long time?

------
RcouF1uZ4gsC
>This is a core issue for our civil society. Americans of every political
persuasion depend on the internet to educate themselves on the issues of the
day, speak their minds, and organize for change. Mass mobilizations on all
sides of the climate, health care and immigration debates illustrate the
point.

The authors talk as if the ISPs will suppress political opinion. However, I am
not aware of a single case where ISPs suppressed political opinions. However,
there are cases where the dominant search monopoly may have suppressed
political opinion ([https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-
sear...](https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-
claims.html?referer=https://www.google.com/)). Also, several registrar
services together made it impossible for a website to have a domain. Also, the
major consumer DDOS protection company removed the above website from their
protection because of content, there making it easy for someone opposed to the
website to DDOS them and keep their message from getting out.

This is why Net Neutrality is getting limited traction with the public. If we
talk about net neutrality from a business perspective, they don't see any real
harm. For example, a lot of the cell companies are offering zero rated music
and movie streaming from select companies. Net Neutrality would end that. You
could argue that net neutrality would prevent competitors from forming.
However, my guess is that obtaining music and movie rights would be far more
expensive and difficult than signing deals with ISPs to get on the fast lane.

And, if you try to bring the political opinion angle, it is far more likely
that your speech will get suppressed by search engines, domain registrars, and
DDOS companies than the ISPs. I would guess people might be more receptive to
Net Neutrality for those companies.

~~~
chowells
Speech advocating violence and hate isn't illegal, but no one is required to
provide a platform for it, either. That isn't part of net neutrality, and
never will be. Net neutrality is about carrying data regardless of
origin/destination. That's it. No one is ever required to _be_ the origin or
destination of any particular traffic by the rules of net neutrality. If you
don't want to host a particular customer, for any reason, no rights of theirs
are being violated if you say "I'm sorry, you're going to have to find another
host."

As for ISPs, there have been a bunch of high profile cases of them violating
net neutrality that seem to be constantly ignored by people who choose to
attack it.

Time Warner cable intentionally degraded traffic to servers owned by Riot
Games until they caved in and paid off the ISP in order to get back to average
traffic quality. A quote from the NYAG filing [1]:

> Data from Riot Games confirmed that from at least September 2013, when Riot
> Games started to maintain this data, through August 2015, when Riot Games
> agreed to pay Spectrum-TWC for access, Spectrum-TWC subscribers did not
> enjoy a “good network experience.”

And let's not forget the multiple times Netflix has been shaken down by ISPs.
Comcast [2] and Verizon [3] were trivial to find writeups for.

They may call those "peering" agreements, but the data is pretty solid. In
both cases, the problem was the ISP refusing to allow Netflix to upgrade
interchange capacity, despite having plenty of bandwidth available on both
sides of the interchange. Netflix only got to improve the situation by paying
the ISP for access to their customers. This is a very clear violation of net
neutrality.

These are a set of events that actually happened. They aren't vague warnings
about worse cases, they're violations that already have been observed. I do
not believe the practice will magically never happen if it becomes legal
again.

[1]
[https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/summons_and_complaint....](https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/summons_and_complaint.pdf)
[2] [https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/24/5541916/netflix-deal-
with...](https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/24/5541916/netflix-deal-with-the-
devil-why-reed-hastings-violated-his-principles) [3]
[http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-
agreement...](http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-agreement/)

