

An eloquent comment about FCC's Net Neutrality proposal - breadtk
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/comment/view?id=6017885222

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jones1618
Not so eloquent broadband propaganda:

Curt Overcash seems to be acting as a mouthpiece for Broadband Illinois (a PAC
for the broadband industry) by restating their party line: Any regulation will
kill investments in the Internet. This is just coded language for "Net
Neutrality will hamper our ability to milk profits from our near-monopoly on
broadband."

His only other argument is that "you don't want the Internet to become another
utility like the outdated phone company, do you?"

Why, yes we do. The phone company can't charge you more if you decide to talk
about one thing vs. another. Also, the phone company is required to lease
bandwidth on their lines at competitive rates so that 3rd parties can innovate
and compete for your business, something that scares the pants off of
broadband providers.

~~~
roganp
I have to disagree. The "last mile" problem will require deep pockets, and
investments like those are not made when the upside is restricted by
regulation. There are those on HN who get excited by Google Fiber.
Reclassification of broad band makes that investment by Google less profitable
and therefor less likely.

~~~
thaumaturgy
You seem to assume that private companies are willing to invest in the last
mile.

They are not.

I live in an area that's been trying to solve its last mile problem for over a
decade now. It looks like it might finally be happening, too!

...thanks to a federal grant.

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jmcqk6
The potholes comment really gets under my skin. Why not point out any of the
thousand bad things about private companies? It we want to limit it to ISP's
why not just point to the comcast service rep thing making the rounds today?

It's an elequent comment. To be honest I'm not sure that classification under
title II is a good choice. Unfortunately it seems like it's the only choice we
currently have to protect the internet. Lawmakers are unwilling to work
together to solve the problem. Private companies aren't fixing the problems.
If there was any other practical way we could do this, wouldn't we have done
it by now?

There are lots of theoretical solutions. This is the only one I've seen that
looks like it's actually doable.

~~~
thaumaturgy
The potholes comment is especially hilarious to me. I live in a rural area
where there are a lot of county and unincorporated roads where the residents
are supposed to do the "collective private investment" thing to maintain the
roads.

Those roads are almost without fail the worst roads in the area.

The city roads might not be great, but they're a heck of a lot better than
private roads.

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sebular
There's nothing eloquent about this argument, it's a sound byte that reflects
a typical "durrr free market" knee-jerk reaction. They sound like the words of
a man who's been intentionally duped by the ISP lobby.

First, we've got an Illinois farmer claiming "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
when clearly there's something massively broken about the cost / performance
ratio of our internet service.

Second, he's also confusing innovation in the ISP world with innovation in the
tech startup world. He uses the example of improvements in farming (tech
startups) as a reason why we need the internet (ISPs) to be de-regulated. This
makes no sense.

Because we've completely forgotten the meaning of antitrust laws, deregulation
these days doesn't mean competition and innovation, it means monopoly. If
we're not going to fix antitrust, then the next best thing we've got is
declaring the internet a utility.

Where we absolutely need to continue nurturing innovation is in the tech
world, which relies on internet service being stable and fast and universally
available.

Since when have we been hurting for a lack of innovation in the water,
electricity, and phone utilities? The services that these companies provide to
customers haven't changed in decades, and that's fine.

It's the businesses which depend on utilities that are in need of constant
competition and innovation, and they can't do that if they and their customers
can't have a guarantee of service.

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jholman
I totally buy the argument that discriminatory "fast lanes" are a potential
danger to internet startups. I mean, at least, at a hand-wavy level.

But I also buy the argument that regulation can disincentivize competition. At
the same hand-wavy level as above, it's easy to imagine regulations that would
make an ISP say "fine, if we can't charge more for an improved product, we'll
just focus on cutting our costs... like our customer service costs".

So, is it more important to protect innovation in startups (a few of which are
transformative, but the overwhelming majority of which have no social value),
or to protect innovation in connectivity (which everyone uses, so benefits
everyone)? I dunno.

Of course, all the foregoing assumes that there current exists meaningful
competitive pressure in the ISP space. That doesn't appear to be the case very
often (both in U.S. markets and elsewhere). I think this is a far bigger issue
than net neutrality will be, in practice.

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donall
I'm not convinced that it's a choice between innovation in connectivity and
innovation in startups. I think, in particular, the connectivity innovation is
unlikely to happen. The current monopolies offer _terrible_ connectivity (as
compared to most other developed countries). Preserving that status quo is not
going to do anything to help that. Allowing for "fast lane" connectivity will,
in the best case, provide acceptable connection speed for a small number of
services. In the worst case, they will offer current speeds and just degrade
the slow lane. Because monopoly.

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twic
He grows astroturf, i assume.

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lstamour
Let's put it this way: here in Canada we've got competitors using cable lines
the same way they would use existing DSL infrastructure. Cable companies still
have the upper hand for 6-12 months by rolling out new modems with better
encoding to provide faster speeds. While third-parties focus on cost, customer
service, installation issues and eventually getting those faster modems. The
big cable companies are happy -- they still make profits off the cable
customers that aren't theirs and can raise the wholesale prices whenever they
introduce new speeds. It's a win-win compromise. ;-) Now... This arrangement
doesn't involve net neutrality for any provider, with the exception that even
third-parties pay for their customer's line access and therefore get
unfiltered access to it. What they do from there to connect you to the open
internet, as a third party, is their business.

~~~
avdempsey
I'm willing to trade away regulated net neutrality for honest-to-goodness
competition. But it doesn't seem like there's anyone in Washington willing to
deal with our serious monopoly problem.

Stay Canada as long as you can.

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spiralpolitik
I find the "heavy hand of regulation" comment amusing given that it's the
"heavy hand of regulation" that makes my European cellphone bill cost 5 times
less than my US cellphone bill.

And don't get me started on my Broadband bill...

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daveloyall
The comments on this post motivated me to search a little, and I found this.

    
    
        Title II includes more than 100 pages of regulations
        that common carriers must follow
        to ensure they act "in the public interest."
    

...From [http://www.dailydot.com/politics/what-is-title-ii-net-
neutra...](http://www.dailydot.com/politics/what-is-title-ii-net-neutrality-
fcc/)

~~~
morgante
Honestly, that seems totally reasonable. 100 pages is shorter than many
company operating plans—considering that broadband is an essential utility, I
fully expect regulations to be as complicated as their business model.

~~~
greyfade
These regulations are pretty straight-forward, too. As messy as the FCC tends
to be, their rules are generally easy to follow. 100 pages is _nothing._

~~~
daveloyall
I think that I accidentally took the quote out of context. I think it was
meant to indicate that the legislators of 1934 actually cared about the public
good. As in: 'This stuff is pro-consumer, and there's 100 pages of it!
Awesome! Let's use it against Comcast, posthaste!'

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Govannon
"If the FCC successfully reclassifies broadband under Title II, private
investment and important innovation would come to a standstill."

My big issue with this was that within the context of this comment, the above
quote is unfounded speculation? As far as I can tell at least.

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eglover
He's right. 'Nuff said, a lot of the comments here come from people who
seriously think socialization = free and better, but never have anything to
say about the economic side effects of "net neutrality" which has never
existed anyway.

"I hate this debate. It's mostly politics and buzzwords with 0 cost/benefit
analysis. Google already buys last mile access and if people keep acting like
profits don't already come from customer choice they're going to end up with
slow socialized internet and you'll never see 4k video. Net neutrality helps
competition... In what world? That's like saying public schools increase
competition in education."

