
Tell HN: Andreessen, Thiel, Cuban, IBM, Intel Are Against Net Neutrality - please_choose
	I haven&#x27;t see any friends, Democrats, or Republicans (including comments on Fox News Facebook posts that I&#x27;ve seen) that weren&#x27;t pro Net Neutrality. Curious, I searched to see who was against it beyond AT&amp;T, Verizon, and Comcast.
According to Wikipedia (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Net_neutrality#Arguments_against): Individuals who oppose net neutrality include TCP&#x2F;IP inventor Bob Kahn,[172][173], Marc Andreessen,[174] Scott McNealy,[175] Peter Thiel,[168] David Farber,[176] Nicholas Negroponte,[177] Rajeev Suri,[178] Jeff Pulver,[179] John Perry Barlow,[180] Mark Cuban[181] and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai.<p>Corporate opponents of this measure include Comcast, AT&amp;T, Verizon, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Nokia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Juniper, D-Link, Wintel, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Panasonic, Ericsson, and others.[85][166][167]
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himom
It’s no great surprise greedy people are against the majority when it’s
convenient for them. What is troubling is our collective inability to restrain
their and our greed and consumption from destroying each other, destroying
ourselves and destroying the planet. Until that happens, nuanced, smart
regulation and enforcement will be as constructive as herding ants.

Either we stop us and them, or we all die.

~~~
jstewartmobile
I don't know if it's that simple.

We have the .coms like Facebook or Uber that made their money by inserting
themselves between an existing process, like journalism or cab driving, and
its customers, then extracting a profit from it.

From what I've read, repeal of net neutrality regs will basically allow ISPs
to re-insert themselves between the consumer and the .coms, giving the
Facebooks of the world a taste of their own medicine.

The question to me is, will the consumer now be double-f'ed, or will the
existing quantity of f-ery remain zero-sum to where the megacorps have to
reapportion the spoils? I don't know the answer. It's just that it looks more
like a battle between megacorps than any kind of great moral crusade to me...

------
tobaschco
Frankly I'm surprised our good friends Oracle or Larry Ellison aren't part of
that list.

~~~
warmfuzzykitten
Was that the obligatory Oracle-bashing comment? Can we agree it has no
technical substance and down-vote it?

~~~
hluska
Actually, Oracle came out as being against net neutrality several months ago.

------
Eridrus
Was a bit surprised by Marc Andreessen being on that list, turns out those
comments were made in 2014 when he thought Google Fiber would shake up the
market and competition would solve this issue.

Was also surprised to see Eric Schmidt on that page, though his argument was
you should be able to discriminate voice vs video, but not Hulu vs Netflix,
which makes some sense if you want to provide lower voice latency, but I think
you don't want ISPs to be able to sell you voice and video separately.

~~~
canttestthis
He also spoke out against the Indian government when they ruled against FB's
basic internet program iirc.

------
sachinprism
[https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-
ii/](https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/) \- I think
this article is a good overview of why the above individuals may be against
"net-neutrality". This was an eye-opening read in a filter bubble of "pro-net-
neutrality" which as it turns out used fear mongering and unverified news, as
the article shows.

~~~
Spooky23
This was a very disappointing article for me, as Ben didn’t really do the type
of forward looking analysis that he did in the past for other topics. He
didn’t do the depth of analysis that he spent a year on with respect to Uber,
for example.

Declaring concern about the loss of ISP neutrality is choosing to pretend that
the people who control ISPs won’t make rational decisions.

If you ran Comcast, why wouldn’t you make it easier for NBC properties? Why
would Comcast behave differently than MSN or AOL did in the dialup days?

The pro-net neutrality folks are motivated by self interest. But keep in mind
that there are _many_ of them. Think about why that is — you have a
competitive marketplace.

The anti-net neutrality folks are all in positions to extract tolls and “sell
shovels” to ISPs.

In my opinion, ISPs have consolidated and enjoy the ability to work in a
low/no competition market. They should not be given the privilege of rent-
seeking and inflating the cost of services that deliver value to the consumer.
They are a utility. If they don’t want to be treated that way, they need to be
compelled to allow competitors access to local loops.

~~~
jstewartmobile
...or compelled to stop blocking municipalities from building their own loops:

[http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-
cable-...](http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-cable-
municipal-broadband-20160812-snap-story.html)

------
klez
Wait, isn't it a bit of a stretch saying that John Perry Barlow is against net
neutrality by linking to the declaration of independence of cyberspace?

I mean, that seems to advocate against government intervention on the
internet, but not specifically net neutrality. Also, I'm pretty sure data caps
and stuff like that would be squarely against the principle outlined in the
declaration.

Am I just being naive?

~~~
lbotos
I was surprised by that as well, and the fact that when you go to the sourced
EFF site:

[https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence](https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-
independence)

You get a Net Neutrality warning leads me to believe that it's a tiny bit off
the mark.

EDIT: I re-read it today, and I think it could be mistaken as anti-NN, but is
very much for a free and open internet. In the spirit of the document we'd
like to believe we don't need meatspace government to define that, but in a
practical sense we absolutely do.

------
namlem
I mean, net neutrality is just a shitty duct tape solution to a bigger
problem. If we treated ISPs as common carriers the way they do in the UK, we
wouldn't need net neutrality.

~~~
jenny_say_qua
That's the entire point of ISPs being classified under Title II, which is
exactly what the FCC will be voting to repeal. Right now, ISPs are common
carriers in the US; soon, they will no longer be.

~~~
CodeWriter23
No, they’re not truly common carriers. Cable companies are exempt from leasing
access to their networks to third parties. Telcos on the other hand have to
lease such access.

------
sounds
Amazon and Apple are hard at work promoting Net Neutrality this time.

Here are some companies who are "sitting this one out," when they were very
actively pro-Net Neutrality 2006-2015. This is quite surprising:

• Facebook

• Google (not too surprising given Eric Schmidt's statement)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/technology/net-
neutrality...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/12/technology/net-neutrality-
fcc-tech.html)

(It is noted in that article that Microsoft is pro-Net Neutrality but being
fairly quiet about it. At least they have made a statement.)

------
oldsklgdfth
I don't entirely understand the issue, but something tells me that it has
little to do with having the best possible internet.

If a company needs a lot of bandwidth don't they pay mre for it? Why would you
charge me for wanting to use youtube? This is my very simplistic understanding
of the current state of things.

~~~
rjbwork
An ISP's job is to get data someone is sending me to me, and vice versa, their
ISP's's job is to get data i am sending to them to them.

Why should I have to pay my ISP and theirs for the connection not to suck?
They pay transit providers for us, and peer with other networks to facilitate
that job. Now they want a bigger slice of the pie.

------
fnwx17
these quotes go back as far as 2006. I'm curious whether the people above have
changed their mind meanwhile?

------
viggity
The internet flourished from the early 90's through 2015 when the first Net
Neutrality regulation came into place. Plenty of companies had peering
disputes, the internet routed around it. Net neutrality is a solution in
search of a problem. Keep the government out of my internet.

~~~
mywittyname
The government is "in your internet" regardless. The question is not whether
they regulate ISPs, but how they do so.

Also, the FCC has a long history of enforcing non-discrimination practices. In
the past, a investigation was enough to force ISPs to treat all traffic
equally. This worked until Comcast sued the FCC and won[0], forcing the FCC to
formerly reclassify broadband providers as common carriers.

Wanting the internet to be the "way it was in the 90s-2010" is a pro net
neutrality stance. As broadband providers were de facto common carriers as a
result of DSL networks operating over phone lines.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC)

