Stop the FCC from Breaking the Internet

http://www.savetheinternet.com/sti-home

by moonlighter • 12 years ago

208 56 12 years ago

aylons• 12 years ago

In related news [1], Brazil has just sanctioned net neutrality law : http://www.engadget.com/2014/04/23/brazil-passes-internet-bi...

Not only that, but also the telcos tried to smooth it out, saying they could still charge differently, and the president herself said "no, you can't".

[1] Really, no sarcasm here.

Fuxy• 12 years ago

And this is why the US won't be a super power for much longer however they will resort to insanely crazy laws in a desperate attempt to exploit and suppress their own population before they die.

happyscrappy• 12 years ago

Some technical people are amazingly inept in world affairs. For the foreseeable future you will have to suffer under Pax Americana.

laurent123456• 12 years ago

It's funny that a website apparently dedicated to this issue doesn't mention:

- which rules are supposed to kill net neutrality.

- how do they kill it? (by "picking winners and losers online"???)

Well hopefully Wikipedia will be more informative.

r0h1n• 12 years ago

Except that it's not funny. There is a menu choice called, "Issues", under which lies this: http://www.savetheinternet.com/net-neutrality-resources

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

I thought this was an interesting article on the subject - "The FCC’s New Net Neutrality Proposal Is Even Worse Than You Think":

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/24/fcc_s_new...

gojomo4• 12 years ago

The Internet is not a delicate flower that must be either rescued by, or rescued from, the 5 national-political-party functionary lawyer/lobbyists on the FCC.

It's a fluid force of nature unleashed by digital technology. Companies that add tolls that don't come with commensurate value will be washed away by alternate-path competition.

Government should punish deception and break up monopolies (especially those its own rules and franchising have created). It should open more wireless spectrum. It shouldn't be designing service packages or determining what's "commercially reasonable".

kansface• 12 years ago

What competition?

gojomo4• 12 years ago

20 years ago, no one had any broadband options. Now, most places have at least 2 wired options, plus 2 or more increasingly-competitive wireless options.

Policy on spectrum and wires should aim to increase those options, not dictate the technical workings of ISPs, or limit the contractual design-space of private companies.

If abuse materializes, so will opportunity. There's a glut of capital to build more paths - towers, blimps, drones, fiber loops - if there's profit to be made and no local or federal barriers to new models.

blazespin• 12 years ago

What we need is more competition not more regulation.

rhizome• 12 years ago

Too bad competition went anti-customer and killed open peering 15 years ago.

sounds• 12 years ago

Agreed!

The US's existing FTC regulations are plentiful and relevant.

New "Net Neutrality" legislation that does not address existing regulations but seeks simply to impose government between Carriers and Customers doesn't help much.

necubi• 12 years ago

How do you propose we get competition without regulation?

sk5t• 12 years ago

Or, we could take the entirely reasonable step of declaring ISPs to be the common carriers that they obviously are.

icebraining8• 12 years ago

That just changes the question from "why should we regulate ISPs" to "why should we regulate common carriers".

thenmar• 12 years ago

How so? The capital investments are too high. Regulation is the only thing that has successfully created competition to monopolies in our economic history.

logicchains• 12 years ago

Regulation also created some of the most successful monopolies in our economic history: AT&T, for instance.

shmerl5• 12 years ago

Sure we need it. It's hard to provide it though, because the cost of entry into ISP business is immense (for example Calyx failed to create a privacy oriented ISP: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-calyx-institute see also https://calyxinstitute.org). Add on top of that various crooked laws bought by big ISPs which make it even worse (i.e. practically forbidding competition). So regulation wise there are things which can be fixed and improved.

icebraining8• 12 years ago

Add on top of that various crooked laws bought by big ISPs which make it even worse (i.e. practically forbidding competition)

But removing those laws is removing regulation, not adding it. Regulation is not just the "good" laws.

smtddr• 12 years ago

That's the thing with businesses like ISPs. The barrier to entry is insane and rigged and just a mess.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/04/one-big-reason-we-la...

josho2• 12 years ago

This Planet Money podcast does an excellent job explaining the current situation, why there is not more competition, and what other countries did that worked out well.

[1] http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/04/04/299060527/episode-...

nemo• 12 years ago

You say that as though those things are exclusive, rather than complementary.

001sky• 12 years ago

Seems there is zero chance the incumbents will spurn the TV-monopoloy people in an election year.

rdl6• 12 years ago

There is a reasonable argument for not wanting the FCC involved in setting technical policy for how a carrier runs its own network. It is at best disingenuous to claim "net neutrality regulation" is the only way to save the Internet.

Yes, I want the initial effects of net neutrality (mainly cheap access to comcast by CDNs and major hosting providers)

If someone builds a non-monopoly network, perhaps via multi-dwelling metro ethernet or fixed wireless, I want that network to be able to implement whatever QoS they want. If that means 155M links to buildings with 500 subscribers and some kind of local CDN node for video content which is "free" and QoS on other traffic, that's a win for consumers.

The correct place for requiring neutrality is when local governments negotiate with carriers for any monopoly rights. In exchange for a geographic monopoly on laying infrastructure, it would be reasonable to demand reasonable-and-non-discriminatory access to the network.

From a practical perspective, local governments are probably too technically and generally incapable of negotiating with big companies like Comcast, but that's a problem we're already facing. Model contracts would probably help with that, or state regulators.

api• 12 years ago

In exchange for a geographic monopoly on laying infrastructure, it would be reasonable to demand reasonable-and-non-discriminatory access to the network.

Unfortunately state and local regulatory capture is often far more egregious than Federal due to lack of attention and oversight. Having the FCC whack the whole thing with one big mallet may be the only option we have.

gojomo4• 12 years ago

Leaving it to localities also enables more experimentation and inter-locality competition (as with Google Fiber rollouts)... while national rules create a premature uniformity.

rdl6• 12 years ago

One of the experiments I'd like to see is someone getting either a highly-regulated utility (possibly even municipality-owned) or some level of highly competitive market correct.

I don't think a local government should be in the business of delivering IP to residential/business customers, but having an exceptionally easy process for trenching might work, or conduit, or dark fiber (or even lit fiber to areas).

After a century, we're still innovating on the power networks (net metering, etc.). We might even be in the Edison vs. Tesla days for IP.

josho2• 12 years ago

You've got my up vote for your argument on giving a new network the right to choose to do QoS. But, I disagree on your conclusions.

The FCC's previous decisions to keep the existing carriers from becoming common carriers was supposed to incentive new broadband service. New broadband service did not happen, your theorized metro ethernet never came about. So, since we are stuck with regional monopolies granting them further privileges is blindingly stupid.

You are correct as well to say that it is "disingenuous to claim net neutrality is the only way to save the 'net". Another option was to open up the infrastructure & allow competition on it, like other countries have successfully done. But, the FCC has already chosen not to do that leading us to where we are today.

rdl6• 12 years ago

There's metro ethernet for businesses in a lot of markets. And weird stuff like Sonic's flexlink, and of course things like Cogent.

The residential market is horrible, but I think the economics of providing good networking to suburban homes are difficult. In cities like SF, the city itself is a major impediment. In a place like Austin, there should be a lot more options than there are (thank you, Google!). Business service and multi-dwelling building service is where I think there's a lot of untapped potential.

brokenparser4• 12 years ago

There may be some misconceptions here, so I'll clarify a few things just in case:

1) Net neutrality doesn't mean everyone gets the exact same speed. ISPs are free to offer a plethora of offerings each with their own price, speed and extras (if any). There are also no new guarantees to subscribers, i.e. if the wiring is crap deal with it.

2) CDNs have nothing to do with net neutrality. A typical large ISP will offer co-location services and content providers may use the service the same as any other customer. There can even be other arrangements as they see fit, but the important thing is that no one messes with the tubes.

3) Again, just in case because this is brought up a lot, ISPs can still offer filtered subscriptions. There's a market demand for filtered subscriptions and catering to that demand is fair game.

4) ISPs are still free to apply filters on traffic in the interests of maintaining their network. This is important for example when dealing with (D)DoS attacks or worm outbreaks.

Net neutrality levels the playing field for content providers, so if you get VoIP from your ISP the service may still be better than that of a given competitor by virtue of having less latency. But what the ISP cannot do is artificially inflate their advantage, as doing so would be in violation of a free market on the Internet.

EDIT: disambiguated things

icebraining8• 12 years ago

But what the ISP cannot do is artificially inflate their advantage, as doing so would be in violation of a free market on the Internet.

Can we please stop using this term, please? It's pretty clear that we can't agree on a definition of "free market"(¹), so we might as well stop using it.

(¹) For many people, the idea that one must restrict the ISP and subscriber's freedom of contract to preserve the free market is a logical contradiction.

ataggart• 12 years ago

Terms like "net neutrality" and "reform" are often used to trick an audience into agreeing with the speaker by having the listeners fill-in-the-blank with their own favourable definitions.

So, when it comes to state action, "net neutrality" will mean whatever the government says it means. Your definitions won't matter once the bill is passed and/or the regulatory interpretation is promulgated.

rdl6• 12 years ago

If my network has huge connectivity between end users and individual cable head-ends, but contended bandwidth between the head-end and major internet interconnection points, I absolutely want to give customers an incentive to use the cable head end to customer bandwidth, rather than Internet to customer bandwidth.

(As far as I can tell, net neutrality only matters in the context of video (or possibly bulk file sharing of video); virtually no other traffic on wired networks is meaningful enough in scope, scale of bandwidth used by users, or performance/latency sensitive enough to be an issue. This is essentially a Comcast vs. YouTube/Netflix argument.)

Colocating equipment at head ends isn't a solution, because 1) not every provider will colocate, so if you can't preference colocated streams over non-colocated streams from other similar services, there's much more impact on other users

2) it might not be feasible to offer third-party colocation in every part of your network where there is bandwidth oversubscription.

virb• 12 years ago

Only Nixon could go to China; only Obama could establish a tiered internet.

theexpedience• 12 years ago

Government control of the internet. It's like government control, but on the internet.

I am bewildered when I see freedom types suggesting that a federal agency (!) is going to grant them more freedom by controlling the services they use.

kumbasha3• 12 years ago

I don't see why that's so hard to believe at all. The federal government, at least in theory, is accountable to its citizens since the citizens vote for their government. The Board of Directors of Comcast, however, is something that no citizen anywhere has any power over whatsoever. Why would you choose the latter scenario, in which you have zero power in principle and in practice, versus the former scenario where you have some power both in theory and in practice?

bowlofpetunias• 12 years ago

I'm getting deja vu... http://savetheinternet.eu/

tomelders• 12 years ago

Perhaps the us should consider unlimited terms for presidents. That way you don't have situations where incumbents have nothing to lose in their second term and no incentive to fulfill their promises. Or maybe not, I'm just throwing that out there.

rdl6• 12 years ago

Or, one of the two houses of Congress could have strict term limits (e.g. 3 x 2 year terms of the House), so Representatives are more willing to act in the interests of constituents or the greater public rather than re-election at least periodically.

(Or a single, possibly six year term for the President). I think political scientists have proposed and analyzed all of these variations.

zimbatm• 12 years ago

Didn't the FCC lack the authority to enforce net neutrality laws ? Why would it be different now.

http://mediafreedom.org/2013/08/net-neutrality-governing-via...

icebraining8• 12 years ago

This title sounds like those who write "keep your government hands off my Medicare!"

Net Neutrality regulations may be good, and they may even "save" the Internet, but it's not their inaction that will break it. If anything, it's the ISPs' actions.

Stop the FCC from Breaking the Internet

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