House of Representatives Passes Net Neutrality Protections

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/victory-house-representatives-passes-net-neutrality-protections

by glitcher • 7 years ago

111 47 7 years ago

eff.org

zachwood• 7 years ago

Mitch McConnell has already stated that he will refuse to allow the Senate a vote. Because he is trash.

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/438133-mcconnell-net-neu...

JosephHatfield• 7 years ago

In the last election cycle, McConnell received: $99K from Comcast, $66K from Verizon, and $49K from AT&T.

mywittyname• 7 years ago

Maybe he should receive 214,000 complain letters and phone calls from his constituents.

educationdata4• 7 years ago

There is no reason to believe this small amount of money is the explanation of his position.

sampleinajar• 7 years ago

I'm not sure where you are getting those numbers from, but according to Open Secrets, in 2018 a Democrat was top receiver from Comcast. McConnell is fairly low on this list. Can you share your source?

https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=D000000461&ty...

jandrese• 7 years ago

I would have expected him to just rush it to the floor without debate so it could be voted down. Either way there was never a chance this legislation was going to make it through the Senate. There was a definite feel of "you can go back to eating the paste now House, the big boys of the Senate know what is best."

Mikhail_Edoshin2• 7 years ago

Is that kind of speech permissible on HN nowadays?

mekane8• 7 years ago

Why do the Republicans hate Net neutrality so much?

wmf3• 7 years ago

Because Republicans are "pro-business" and favor "small government" while net neutrality is "anti-business" and "large government".

zigzaggy• 7 years ago

Funny that you put all these “issues” in quotes. Gave me a smile. :) Because as we know: Government spending is growing at an unprecedented rate under current POTUS, and corporate welfare is alive and well.

AnthonyMouse5• 7 years ago

That doesn't really ring true. If they were actually in favor of those things then they would also be eliminating build-out requirements and other regulations so that it would be easier to start a small ISP with e.g. 500 customers in one section of town, without having to raise enough capital to cover an entire region or being sued into bankruptcy by the incumbents under existing laws.

This is less ideology and more corruption.

korethr• 7 years ago

The Republican party typically has been the party which favors the interests of businesses; governmental regulation of various industries (expensive and needless interference from their perspective) is anathema to them. Well, a law forbidding any of the various things protested under the banner of Net Neutrality does amount of the terrible bugaboo of Regulation. Therefore, It Must Be Stopped.

This is a bit of an oversimplification and the principles behind it are a bit more nuanced than presented here (regulatory capture is a thing and it can suck), but it's a good first approximation.

paulgb2• 7 years ago

> This is a bit of an oversimplification

If anyone is interested in getting into the weeds, this conversation gave me a more nuanced view on the subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKD-lBrZ_Gg

seabird• 7 years ago

It's bad for business. You do have to remember that a lot of movers n' shakers (Cisco, Juniper, Alcatel, Ericsson, Qualcomm, Broadcom, IBM, and a slew of other companies that have a product other than advertising/user data and need hardware and support to keep expanding to stay afloat) see net neutrality as a large threat, so politicians that are opposed to it are in good company in terms of corporate donors.

onepremise• 7 years ago

It's bad for large cap corporations looking to establish monopolies. It's great for small businesses.

nintendo95• 7 years ago

Please, could someone more knowledgeable explain to me. I have used computers since mid 1980s. Started with Atari 800XL. I have used Internet since mid or late 1990s. So first thing: please forget what the name of the Act is. Forget it. Not Net Neutrality. Let's call it "Act ABC". I know, ridicilous, but I want you to look at the issue... hmmm... in neutral manner. I remember the Internet that the ABC Act is supposed to protect us from. Internet in which you pay for the data used. I used a modem and was paying for my time online. So websites that took forever to load or didn't employ caching (looking at you youtube without cashing just streaming, but wth). This was much much more diverse internet. That was the internet that forced p2p sharing and p2p platforms. Non-existent now because the current system where you don't pay for the data privilleges big oligopolies, big corporations that have the most data. Google (with its subsidaries), Facebook, Twitter are like what 70% of the internet now? Why? How is that good? I want my crazy websites back. I want diversity. I want copyrighted streaming to be kicked in the stomach. I want competition. I don't want Google, Facebook and Twitter monopolizing the internet. Look, ISPs have never censored the content. Google, Facebook, Twitter do it all the time. On the one hand they say, oh we're platform. On the other they edit content. So which one is it? Obviously you can't have both at the same time.

Paying for data would disrupt Google, i.e. it would kill youtube (owned by google) overnight or at least far reaching changes in it. Facebook also, spending 3-4 hours a day on it, and paying ? Noow, wouldn't it be better to spend 20 minutes there and then browse for other locations? Just to spend your expensive online time more wisely. With free cost of bytes send developers, and I'm sorry to say it, I'm a developer too though, can be lazy. No optimization what-so-ever. Building websites to make sure they are small, load fast, put important content up-front, don't waste users time... now how this could be bad?

Net Neutrality is the step in the future. Future of Googles, Twitters and Facebooks, Amazons, 3-4 oligopolies taking all traffic, killing all the innovation and competition in the process. This isn't the future I hoped for. I hoped for neevr ending 1990s internet. With dozens of websites I visited regularly. And these dozens changing every year too. Future of the internet looks so regulated now. The last step will be the Government taking over, or rather regulating, FANG. This is death of the innovation for this Industry.

And make no mistake: if Republicans won't pass Net Neutrality then Democrats will surely do it. But still they seem to recognize the same problem, Ms. Elizabeth Warren wants to break-down Google, Twitter, Facebook into smaller competing companies -- employing anti-trust laws against them via Department of Justice action. So I think we see the problem on both sides of the aisle. The thing is that solving the problem of big corporations governing the Internet like their own turf might be better done via making time on the internet or data sent paid again. Just seems more natural than taking Judical action against the offenders.

wmf3• 7 years ago

I agree that metering Internet access would cause far-reaching changes but I don't think we can predict what those would be. It could easily make the Internet much worse. And of course everyone hates it: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html

We accept metering for electricity and water because human intuitions still apply; this isn't the case for data. Two Web pages that appear similar could have vastly different transfer sizes. I'm reminded of the criticism of Xanadu that said "imagine an odometer that's taking money out of your pocket; now imagine it turning really fast".

bo10242• 7 years ago

First, thanks for writing this post. I find it very hard to understand because you don't say what you think net neturality is. It sounds very different from mine.

My definition is roughly "price you pay only depends on how much data you want and how fast you want it, not what that data is or who it comes from."

So metering the internet is totally in line with net neutrality, as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others. In fact, this definition pretty much fits everything you say is good and avoids everything you say is bad. But you seem to say net neutrality does the opposite. Now I don't know the details of this exact bill but can you explain what you think it's doing and how that relates to your post.

wmf3• 7 years ago

There's a significant group of people adjacent to and overlapping with net neutrality advocates who are opposed to any form of bandwidth metering. https://stopthecap.com/

kevin_b_er• 7 years ago

The key in your last statement: "as long as you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others."

But they will and do. Bandwidth caps and overage charges are a key way corporations like Comcast put fear uncertainty and doubt on watching things like Netflix. What if you go over? You can't with their Cable TV offering, but you can with Netflix, a competitor to Comcast.

What you will see is the corporations, and their proxies, will scream about the inability to "innovate". What they mean is the inability to find new ways to discriminate and double-dip.

They explicitly do NOT want a water bill system, when they can charge you much much more for water that comes out of the bathroom faucet than the garden hose.

ineedasername2• 7 years ago

I don't know why you think people aren't paying for data. I pay for data every time I pay my cable/internet bill, and every time I pay my cell phone bill. Both even refer to what I'm purchasing as "data", unlimited data in the case of broadband, capped 5gb/month in the case of my cell plan.

What you describe from the early internet days is simply the transition from data plans that charged by units of time instead of a flat fee.

Thants• 7 years ago

You seem to be extremely confused about what Net Neutrality even is. It has nothing to do with whether you pay for data or not.

Yes, Google and Facebook being so large is concerning, but it has nothing to do with this subject.

If anything, the entrenched players are helped by a lack of Net Neutrality. Say Facebook makes a payment to ISPs and suddenly all it's competitor websites are unreliable and slow to load.

logicallee• 7 years ago

Do you think you should be charged the same for charging a Macbook as for just turning on some lights, just because they use "the same" amount of elecricity? We figure if you can afford a Macbook you can afford to pay a little more! That's all. We just want the right to discriminate based on what you'll use electricity for, as opposed to how much of it. Electricity neutrality would remove our ability to do so. -your electrical company.

carnagii3• 7 years ago

This net neutrality is far from it when Google, Amazon, etc have their own private networks to which net neutrality rules don't apply. If carriers are prevented from offering differentiated services, which are required for next Gen products like self driving cars, video games in the cloud, Tele presence, and even just reliable video conferencing, then the only companies that will be able to offer these services will be the ones with existing multi billion private networks. Or you have to run your business on aws or gce and pay them 10X and they get all the profit. The only way a true competitor could get started is if they can buy the network service they need from an independent carrier. The fcc is right on this and Google is full of bs.

AnthonyMouse5• 7 years ago

Network neutrality applies to last mile providers like Comcast and Verizon, and only to the extent that one of the endpoints is one of their last mile customers.

You're talking about transit providers like Cogent and Level 3, which it doesn't apply to any more than it does to Google.

It also applies to Google to the extent that they have Google Fiber last mile customers.

It's true that GCE and AWS have expensive bandwidth prices, but then buy from someone else. It's not as if they have no effective competition, unlike Comcast.

carnagii3• 7 years ago

Correct, but suppose one company has hundreds of edge's to their private network very close to the last mile and they run 10-20% of all internet traffic going across that last mile. If you are Google or Amazon and push a lot of low priority streaming bandwidth, a neutral last mile dedicates a lot of capacity to you, so when you prioritize high value data on your own network that priority ends up applying to the last mile as well.

The only way a new company without a massive nationwide network could compete with Google or Amazon is if they could pay a carrier for prioritized service. If you prevent the carriers from offering prioritized service then you are reducing competition because Google and Amazon can and do offer this.

Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional telcos. They are already vertically integrated hardware/software/media/everything companies. If some innovative startup builds a killer product that requires their network to function then they will either buy it, or create their own competitive product and kill it.

AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are relatively small companies now and they are in direct competition with Google and Amazon on many fronts, including this one. The Google version of net-neutrality is nothing more than an attempt to stifle what little competition they have left.

House of Representatives Passes Net Neutrality Protections

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