
Mozilla Fights On For Net Neutrality - DiabloD3
https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2018/11/16/mozilla-fights-on-for-net-neutrality/
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dangjc
Hooray for Mozilla for joining this cause. They’re definitely one of the
better companies around protecting the original ideals of the internet.

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Kaveren
The claim that getting rid of net neutrality rules is unlawful is an
interesting one. I can find the repeal being called illegal in multiple
places, but what law specifically are they breaking in particular?

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azernik
Administrative law has all kinds of requirements regarding process and
motivation. For the most part, the arguments in the legal brief
([https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/as-
filed...](https://blog.mozilla.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/as-filed-
Mozilla-v-FCC-Joint-Reply-Brief-16Nov2018.pdf)) are about decisions being
"arbitrary" e.g. not properly justified by public interest.

This is part of why the Obama era's regulatory changes in e.g. telecoms and
finance reform took so long to get through the system - they dotted all the
i's and crossed all the t's. This is a much more durable way of changing
things than an executive order, since it can't be overturned on the whim of
the next president.

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betterunix2
It is also worth pointing out that Tom Wheeler's decision making _was_
impacted by public comment -- his proposal went from weakening net neutrality
rules to a fundamental shift in how ISPs are regulated after a public outcry.
Ajit Pai was never going to be affected by public comment and completely
dismissed the comments people submitted.

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mothsonasloth
Fighting for net neutrality is like fighting the wind with your fists.

Mozilla does great work in raising awareness of these issues however until
every Joe Bloggs and Susan Someone takes their own stand against companies,
governments and other centralised organisations, then it's going to be a very
hard battle.

How do we do that? Maybe start by not making it an issue that only geeks or
tech savvy types are outraged about.

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metildaa
Working together is the only way to take back tech from the corporate
overlords. We need to support Mozilla's efforts to liberate critical
technologies like Voice to text via Mozilla DeepSpeech.

Building the Common Voice corpus is critical to generating highly accurate
transcriptions, check it out at
[https://voice.mozilla.org](https://voice.mozilla.org)

If we do nothing, there will be no large organization standing up to build
foundational technology outside of corporate siloes.

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emerongi
I think a big problem in general with big corporates is that we are moving
more in to the era where huge companies crush their competition just by having
more data. The more data you have, the better user experience you can provide,
killing competition, through which they start getting less and less data of
their own, eventually dying out.

I guess in a way it's similar to having capital. If you don't have any money,
it's hard to start a business. Similarly, if you have no data, maybe in the
future it will be hard to start a business as well.

There's still a long way to go to reach that point, but I think we are seeing
the start of it. For example, it's pretty hard to build an alternative to
GMaps/Apple Maps. Even if you have a novel take on how mapping data could be
used, you'd still first need the data to build the technology around it.

How do you fight that? Should it be fought? Or should we just accept it as a
new requirement of building a business? In addition to starting with a good
team (i.e. industry experts) and having money, you now need to immediately
start building as wide of a dataset as you can.

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pdpi
> The more data you have, the better user experience you can provide, killing
> competition, through which they start getting less and less data of their
> own, eventually dying out.

The more data they have, the better-targeted advertising they can provide,
because that data is more or less volunteered by their users even if conpanies
don’t know to ask for it.

For most of the big companies, I’d say their UX is stuck in local maxima and
can’t really become orders of magnitude better due to risk aversion — you’ll
never collect the data that there’s a bigger maximum somewhere else that way.
A smaller company willing to take risks can find those bigger maxima much more
easily.

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wtetzner
Honestly, UX is probably the easiest thing to do better than the big
companies. Their UX is usually terrible.

Just look at how much worse Google recently made the GMail UI.

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occam65
My biggest beef is with the idea of trying to control something that doesn't
need to be controlled for it to work, just because it'll increase profit
margins. The web does not need to be regulated or controlled by ISPs for it to
work. We've known this for decades. It's unfortunate that it's necessary to
have a law in place in the form of net neutrality to keep ISPs from finding
and using this as an avenue of revenue generation, but capitalism isn't
perfect.

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benlorenzetti
Private organizations are of course able to take and support political
opinions, especially since there are competitors in the browser space.

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happertiger
Mozilla seems to have integrity. It’s great to see.

They should take the momentum of these values and launch an alternative to
gmail.

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bobcallme
Interesting that they would fight for this, but yet they push malware, HTML5
EME, CloudFlare DNS, ADs with Pocket and to be the gate keeper of the truth
[1]. Mozilla. The Mozilla Project and Foundation have become quite toxic and
this two-faced stance that it cares about its useds is quite appalling.

[1]The Mozilla Information Trust Initiative :
[http://archive.is/jcJWg](http://archive.is/jcJWg)

Edit: censored

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sp332
You know Pocket is owned by Mozilla right? They were planning to include a
similar feature and decided it was easier to use an exciting product. And they
only included EME after losing a years-long fight against it.

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bobcallme
> You know Pocket is owned by Mozilla right?

That does not make it any better. So what if they did finally release the
sources for the plugin (only took them a year or two to do). They have not
released the server component. They are also using it to push ADs that I don't
want. I should not have to toggle 50 different things and remove a bunch of
stuff before I can use Firefox and then the next update undoes all of that.

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sp332
That is annoying but not what I would call toxic. And yes I trust Mozilla not
to hand my data over because they've worked to earn that trust. Anyway who
would they hand it to?

