
FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate” - adidash
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/fcc-chair-refuses-to-delay-net-neutrality-vote-despite-pending-court-case/
======
grokas
After reading about Pai, it seems like he was hand selected to be the figure
head with which the ISPs would finally take down Net Neutrality.

This whole situation sucks, and no matter how much noise we make and activism
we take part in, if Pai has the legal footing to ruin the internet, he will.

~~~
paulmd
> After reading about Pai, it seems like he was hand selected to be the figure
> head with which the ISPs would finally take down Net Neutrality.

He's not. He's a generic Republican, appointed by Obama (since the commission
is obligated by Congress to have no more than a simple majority of appointees
from any one party).

The problem is, this is what all Republicans are like nowadays. Any other
person that Obama could have appointed would be doing the exact same thing in
these circumstances. And in fact, virtually every other regulatory agency and
department _is_ doing the exact same thing thanks to Trump appointees. They
are un-interested in any semblance of reasonable governance, it's siphoning
your money to their backers in the most direct and aggressive fashion, plain
and simple.

Elections have consequences. A lot of prominent Silicon Valley figures backed
Trump figuring it would be an easy tax cut for them, and this is the result.
What's that story Trump liked to tell around the campaign trail, the frog and
the scorpion?

Everyone fantasizes they'd be the ones to come out on top (Ayn Rand wrote a
whole book about it!), but there is always a bigger fish. Welcome to laissez-
faire capitalism, where buying the government is part of the game. Free
Markets are not a stable social structure by themselves, they need government
regulation to keep the playing field level.

The truth is not in the middle, and not all viewpoints have equal merit. We
have one reasonable party whose positions you may or may not like, and one
batshit insane party that begins tearing everything down as soon as they're in
power. Shame it takes a lesson like this for people to realize that.

Sorry to be blunt, and sorry to bring politics into this forum. But that's the
way it is.

~~~
boomboomsubban
There isn't a "reasonable" party, the Democrats could have made this a law
making repealing it difficult. They found the to give ISPs billions of
dollars, and to legalize spying on their customers though.

Both parties are a joke, voting for either is an awful choice.

~~~
Delmania
That's a lie, plain and simple. 2017 is the year that the claim that both
parties are just as bad went from being a somewhat valid commentary on
American politics to the cries of the intellectually lazy.

One party would not attempt to ram throw a bill that took away health
insurance for millions without a back plan. One party would not attempt to ram
through a tax reform bill that was literally being amended on the floor before
the vote. One party would not let a federal agency make a sweeping change that
the overwhelming majority of Americans do not support. One party would not
allow the president of the United States to use Twitter to incite violence and
spread out racist messages. I can go on, but the point is that had Clinton
won, this year would not have been such a mess as the Republican party bungles
it's way around trying to pillage and loot America for the benefit of its
donors.

~~~
gt_
Be careful who you call “intellectually lazy.”

~~~
Delmania
Anyone who claims both parties are the same after the past year is
intellectually lazy.

~~~
boomboomsubban
Intellectual laziness is reading "both parties are a joke" as "both parties
are the same."

------
imgabe
If ISPs are going to gut net neutrality, we need a way to introduce real
competition into the market. I wouldn't care if Comcast wanted to sell me
access to 5 websites for $99 or whatever crap they're trying to pull if I had
the option to switch to a better deal somewhere else.

Strong state and local laws protecting the right to form municipal ISPs would
be a good start. Those seem to scare Comcast & friends the most. If corporate
ISPs become significantly restrictive, I think we'd see a big upsurge in
interest for municipal broadband.

~~~
c3534l
Telecommunications tend to form a natural monopoly. It's a bit like roads and
railroads, only you're transporting information rather than people. I looked
online and it's got all the common characteristics: there are few close
substitutes, the product is non-storable (although, maybe if it gets bad
enough in the US we'll start seeing services that mail us USBs full of last
week's Hacker News posts), supply is all about location, and fixed costs are
unusually high relative to variable costs.

~~~
masklinn
Oh no, don't you read mises and vood^H^H^H^HAustrian Economics? Natural
monopolies don't exist: [https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-
monopoly](https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly)

~~~
logfromblammo
Natural monopolies exist, but they don't perpetually persist. They can
fluctuate between monopoly, single firm with pricing power plus challenger(s),
unstable market, and complete market collapse with no suppliers.

Legally protected monopolies are intended to avoid the latter state,
especially where interruptions of service could have ripple effects on other
industries.

I believe the legislative goal was never about costs or overbuilt
infrastructure, but to ensure that at least one provider was always available.
So they chose to mandate that there could never be more than one. For the sake
of having a dial tone 99.99% of the time, they made the choice for everyone
that phone service would cost more, for everyone, every day, forever.

Talking about "natural monopoly" is just a distraction. The _de jure_ monopoly
is about the difference between "no choice" and "zero choices". You may have
made the same choice on a smaller scale when designing code that expects
exactly one input instead of zero to N inputs. An alternate solution would be
to operate a state-owned, not-for-profit utility, as the supplier of last
resort, but that has its own problems, which may be more or less difficult
than the monopoly problems, depending on specific circumstances.

Von Mises is a good economics resource for libertarian-leaning folks, but you
can't trust any single macro-economist to get everything right. I'm actually
not sure any single one of them is more than 50% correct, or even if their
amount of correctness is stable over time. Markets have this annoying habit of
integrating all information, whether true or false, and reacting to it. This
includes everything that all economists in all schools have ever written. It
truly is a dismal science.

------
falcolas
Well, he's not wrong. We are desperate - desperate to keep our internet free
from corporate greed.

~~~
bo1024
Right? "Genocidal conqueror won't delay massacre, says civilians are
'desperate'"

------
shmerl
His smug attitude of showing how he doesn't care about the public he is
supposed to serve, will be his downfall in court.

~~~
fotbr
No, it won't be.

Anything involving this will be handled by gov't lawyers, not by him, and you
can bet if he does end up in front of the court, his responses will be 100%
coached by those lawyers.

~~~
pwinnski
Federal court cases have already been influenced by the current
administration's actions (speeches, interviews, tweets) outside of court
documents and statements by attorney. What Pai says now can indeed be
referenced within court proceedings. Whether that will be effective or not is
unclear.

~~~
craftyguy
The court system seems to be looking the other way with this current
administration though, so I wouldn't get your hopes up too high that his
actions would have any effect on any court case.

------
peterwwillis
Does anyone remember when Jack Valenti was widely mocked for his being
instrumental in abusing the rights of consumers? There were huge campaigns
against the MPAA and Valenti.

Where's the PR push back from the techno-intelligentsia? Why aren't we
pointing out Pai's attacks on the rights of American citizens? Why aren't we
pointing out to regular people why this is clearly an attack on one of the few
freedoms they have left? Where are the "Put this in your Pai hole" t-shirts
and bumper stickers?

~~~
redler
By now they're probably suffering from nihilistic-destruction-of-institutions-
failure-of-imagination fatigue.

------
TYPE_FASTER
What are our alternatives for wireless and wired ISPs? I'm done with the
incumbents.

I'm familiar with Republic Wireless and Google Fi, but I'm a long-time iPhone
user who doesn't really want to switch. Are there any similar carriers who
fully support iOS?

Given the control wired home ISPs have, what are the alternatives? Is there a
good, reasonably affordable wireless alternative?

~~~
super-serial
I was thinking of Project Fi but Google just buys the data from
TMobile/Sprint/US Cellular. So the same carriers just get richer, giving them
more power. There's really no way to hurt the carriers or ISPs bottom line.

The only thing I can think of is supporting municipal broadband. I wish there
was some generic nation-wide municipal broadband fund I could pledge to donate
to if net neutrality is revoked. I'd even pledge the same monthly amount I pay
my ISP.

~~~
skykooler
Project Fi also locks you into Android phones. Good luck running an iPhone, or
Windows phone, or Sailfish OS phone on that.

~~~
mmagin
As I understand it activation requires using an android phone, but it's
entirely possible to then use it with an iPhone.

------
dgritsko
So, suppose everyone's worst nightmares come true - the FCC proceeds down the
path it's currently on and ISPs begin to implement arbitrary
throttling/blocking of content. How will something like SpaceX's planned "mesh
network" of thousands of internet-providing satellites affect the landscape?

------
jordigh
"Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom"

This phrase bugs me so much. I can't believe they're calling the end of net
neutrality "internet freedom".

~~~
elsurudo
There is an argument to be made that hijacking the word "freedom" for this was
already half the battle for repealing net neutrality. Good luck battling
"freedom" in America... If only the other side could have gotten there first.

------
artursapek
Honest question, what changes can we expect as ISP consumers if this happens?

A follow up, if all it is is them charging customers more for using more
bandwidth, how is that any different from any other fundamental resource like
water, electricity, etc? Why should I pay as much money for my SSH and Hacker
News as the guy down the street streaming Netflix all day?

~~~
legoforte
That's a good question. Net Neutrality is _not_ about whether an ISP can
charge you more for using more bandwidth. It's about whether an ISP can charge
your more (or restrict your usage) based on _which websites you communicate
with_.

One way to think of it is that we already have "electric neutrality" (not a
real term), which is to say, you pay for the amount of electricity you use,
but you're free to plug in any appliance you want. Losing "electric
neutrality" would mean that, for example, your utility could charge you more
or less for plugging in an Apple microwave than a Microsoft microwave. That
would be insane. Can you imagine trying to start a company selling a new
appliance if you had to pay a special fee to an electric company to stop them
preventing your customers from plugging it in?

Net neutrality supporters want the internet to be treated like a utility. We
are willing to pay for the _amount_ of data we use, but we are not willing to
let an ISP decide which websites should have their data made cheaper or more
expensive.

An internet with net neutrality is one where you pay for access to the _whole_
internet (perhaps per Gb or perhaps your ISP chooses to sell you a plan with
unlimited data). An internet without net neutrality is one where you might pay
$X for a connection that only talks to Facebook, and connecting to Gmail costs
$Y more. A brand-new startup in a world without net neutrality is at a huge
disadvantage if they aren't included in the package of websites that a
customer buys. That's the end of the internet as we know it.

~~~
bzbarsky
> you pay for the amount of electricity you use, but you're free to plug in
> any appliance you want

You can get metered at different rates for different uses for electricity. A
simple example I found just now is shown in
[https://www.eversource.com/content/docs/default-
source/rates...](https://www.eversource.com/content/docs/default-source/rates-
tariffs/ct-electric-rates.pdf) (see Rate 1 vs Rate 5 vs Rate 18), but that
sort of setup is pretty common.

Now, this is metering based on _type_ of use (heating vs hot water vs whatever
else), not based on the manufacturer of your water heater. But to be a devil's
advocate for a moment, this is the sort of thing ISPs _claim_ they want to do:
prioritize certain _types_ of content over others. Now I don't believe them on
this, of course...

But a priori, there is not necessarily a problem with an internet where you
pay one rate for data streams that need certain bandwidth and latency
guarantees and a different rate for ones that don't. That would be equivalent
to the different-uses electrical billing above.

------
tempodox
On the verge of being sold out by a corporate shill? You can bet we are
desperate.

------
thrillgore
I feel more helpless now than I did on November 9th, 2016.

~~~
rocketpastsix
Make sure you are registered to vote if you are in the United States. And vote
in every election. Even something that seems small like school board has more
implications then we know.

~~~
craftyguy
Give me candidates worth voting for first.

~~~
ConceptJunkie
This is the most important issue. The system is rigged in favor of the
incumbents in many, many ways.

~~~
rocketpastsix
Nothing stopping you from running, even if it is to just push the conversation
in a certain direction.

------
kstrauser
Yes, we are desperate for a representative government. May we have one please?

------
cmurf
It's really unlikely anyone is going to convince a Republican to vote for a
Democrat, or vice versa. It's not like politics in other countries were people
are willing to switch parties when it's obvious the representation isn't
working to their interests. The U.S. is stuck in tribalism for the foreseeable
future, if anything it probably gets worse before it gets better.

The motivation though, should be on the ~55% of eligible voters who don't
vote. If nothing else I think we'd get a better signal to noise ratio in the
actual election results, which is exactly why Republicans make up lies about
voter fraud, in order to make it harder for citizens to vote. Notice how they
aren't running to secure old voting systems and make them auditable. No they
go directly to voter suppression and gerrymandering. And it makes complete
sense, because if they stop doing that, they lose.

------
PhrosTT
Are there any tools we should download before half the internet is blocked?

(Can't believe I had to just write that).

~~~
ateesdalejr
Get Tor while it still lasts. And just about anything on gnu.org's ftp
servers.

------
Blaiz0r
Is there really no alternative to using an ISP for a connection?

Is it possible to build a decentralised and encrypted network on our mobile
phones? I guess we still have to run traffic through mobile service
providers...

~~~
CompuHacker
<speculation> Use an educational or national institution for an Internet
connection, bypassing commercial networks.

~~~
jlgaddis
Those educational networks still connect to the commercial networks, via
commercial ISPs.

------
YouAreGreat
Well. _Maybe_ it's really just about allowing ISPs to run the same
exploitative business models as Google's intimate personal information empire,
Google/Apple's 30% tax app stores with far from neutral content policy, etc.

But how about giving them some credit? Maybe the plan is to temporarily allow
ISPs to suck on some of Google/Youtube monopoly rents (weakening their
defenses) while regulators look into regulating the _whole_ pile of internet
monopoly garbage?

It's possible. And it would be so good.

