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The idea that the providers will never change to the much feared models is poppycock. If they didn't want to run that way they never would have fought so hard to change the regulations. The question isn't if it's when, and the repeal of net neutrality is (without getting to political) one of the recent slew of policy changes that basically no one wanted but that we got anyway. Until people stop caring so much the changes probably won't happen, but that's just a matter of playing the waiting game and multi-billion dollar monopolies always win the waiting game.

We need democrats to run on re regulating the net.

JUST A FRIENDLY REMINDER:

Politics as such is a banned topic of discussion on this board. Feel free to continue chatting about the technical aspects of this topic, including policy critique ...

BUT

... this thread will be locked and offending parties will have their accounts suspended if this devolves into partisan bickering.

Thanks!

How exactly are we supposed to discuss a political issue being debated by US politicians without mentioning politics at all? Are we supposed to pretend that policies just happen with no agency behind them, and ignore all the "who" and "why" questions? Are we also supposed to pretend that we aren't aware that net neutrality in the US is a partisan issue, with strict party-line votes with the democrats in favor and republicans opposed? TBH you might as well just lock this now instead of leaving it open as a ban trap until someone decides (with no personal bias, I'm sure) that it has become "too political" and starts banning people.

(This of course reinforces the fact that the politics ban is absurd, but I won't bother trying to have that argument again here.)

 Peregrine wrote:
How exactly are we supposed to discuss a political issue being debated by US politicians without mentioning politics at all?

You're not.

You can, however, discuss the technical and practical aspects of net neutrality. Just not the politics involved.

If you feel that you are unable to separate the politics from the discussion, feel free to not participate in the thread.



Edit for the hard of hearing : this is not the place to discuss the politics ban. And posts demanding that the thread be closed because you personally can't see any way to discuss the topic without including politics will be treated as off-topic and removed.

 LordofHats wrote:
The idea that the providers will never change to the much feared models is poppycock. If they didn't want to run that way they never would have fought so hard to change the regulations. The question isn't if it's when, and the repeal of net neutrality is (without getting to political) one of the recent slew of policy changes that basically no one wanted but that we got anyway. Until people stop caring so much the changes probably won't happen, but that's just a matter of playing the waiting game and multi-billion dollar monopolies always win the waiting game.

Many of them were previously caught doing the things people are worried they will do now. That was why the net neutrality rules were put it place to begin with.

It's like the people who rail against health and safety laws. They fail to remember that those laws requiring safe practices and explicitly stating what those safe practices must be were paid for in blood. Before the sinking of the Titanic there was no legal requirement for a ship to carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board, for example. The Titanic in fact had more lifeboats than was legally required and it still had only 1178 lifeboat spaces for 3330 people.

The only real reason that ISP's haven't jumped in and throttled the heck out of any site that doesn't bribe them not to is because several states are working on laws preventing them from doing so, and it's quite likely Democrats will at some point start pushing for said laws on the national level.

They just don't want to change their business model to take full advantage of a lack of net neutrality and then have to change back if the law passes.

But be assured, they are fighting - and will continue to fight - those laws right up to the moment the Supreme Court rules one way or the other.

There's definitely been a bit of 'funniness' going on. My internet speeds which used to be consistent are now being wildly variable at certain hours.

Without getting specifically partisan or political, I think most people would agree that we need something like an internet bill of rights to maintain the free flow of information, communication and commerce over the internet. At this point it's comparable to the printing press or the public square itself and the Constitution was written with the intent of protecting the utilization of those things for everyone. In that spirit, letting the most important and common means of communication fall entirely under corporate control is something the framers of the Constitution would probably have wanted to avoid.

Well said.

I'm more concerned with the algorithm's being pushed by activist groups.

 Luciferian wrote:
Without getting specifically partisan or political, I think most people would agree that we need something like an internet bill of rights to maintain the free flow of information, communication and commerce over the internet. At this point it's comparable to the printing press or the public square itself and the Constitution was written with the intent of protecting the utilization of those things for everyone. In that spirit, letting the most important and common means of communication fall entirely under corporate control is something the framers of the Constitution would probably have wanted to avoid.

Er...it's still regulated and there's been some government movement to look at busting up some monopolies.

The internet was doing perfectly fine before NN was put in place only a few years ago, and it'll improve just fine without unneeded government control.

unneeded government control.

So... how many rubles you make?

It's not "government control" to say that corporations shouldn't be the determiners of what content you can look at online. To me that seems like plain old freedom, just like Comcast can't tell you what newspapers to read or where you can live.

Yeah, I'm definitely a small government type, but having multinational corporations in total control of speech and commerce doesn't strike me as any better than having those things be under the direct purview of the government. Especially considering how, much of the time, they both work together to promote each other's interests against our own. Information, speech, association and commerce should just not be something that corporate entities can flick a switch and shut off (or slow down, or bury under an algorithm etc). It's anti-competitive and monopolistic if you need a free-market justification.

Concentrating that kind of power in the hands of what are at this point unaccountable megaliths just seems like a bad idea. The issues behind net neutrality itself are just one tiny aspect; even net neutrality doesn't go far enough at all. Who cares if your ISP can charge you a few extra bucks for the bandwidth to view your favorite media source, when that media source can just be deleted or have its income frozen in case it turns out to be too competitive or uncomfortable for any number of reasons.

The internet needs to be regulated in order to remain as free as possible, there's simply no way around it. Just as our Constitution gives us negative freedoms by laying out what the government can't do to us, those same protections must be applied to ISPs, search engines, social media sites, payment processors, and all of the other companies that now have more power over our daily lives than any government conceivably could have when the Constitution was written.

Imagine China's burgeoning Social Credit system, but under the control of Comcast, Google, Facebook and PayPal. It's almost worse than having such a thing under state control, because we can elect many of our government officials, but we can't elect board members to multi-billion dollar, multinational corporations. Without some kind of restriction, it's only a matter of time before massive tech companies become the de facto state, anyway.

 BuFFo wrote:
The internet was doing perfectly fine before NN was put in place only a few years ago, and it'll improve just fine without unneeded government control.

You mean 10 years ago for explicit requirements of net neutrality, 15+ years ago for establishing the general concepts, and 100+ years ago for the concept of common carriers and applying it to communication lines. The internet was only "doing fine" prior to the explicit adoption of net neutrality rules because the internet was still in its very early days and the business models that can exploit the absence of net neutrality rules didn't exist yet. It would be incredibly naive to think that the situation now is like it was in 1995, and that eliminating net neutrality rules is going to turn out well for anyone but the shareholders in major corporations.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Luciferian wrote:
The internet needs to be regulated in order to remain as free as possible, there's simply no way around it. Just as our Constitution gives us negative freedoms by laying out what the government can't do to us, those same protections must be applied to ISPs, search engines, social media sites, payment processors, and all of the other companies that now have more power over our daily lives than any government conceivably could have when the Constitution was written.

This, however, is going way too far. Common carrier rules apply to infrastructure, not content producers, and the arguments for them make no sense when applied outside of that line. An ISP or power company or similar infrastructure providers have de facto monopoly power, usually supported by the state picking a single provider for a region. Competition is extremely difficult, if not impossible. So it makes sense that if you're going to have a single company with a monopoly over internet/power/water/etc that company has to provide service equally to everyone, since anyone treated unfavorably has no option to go to a competitor. But the same doesn't apply for content producers like social media sites or search engines. There is no monopoly power and customers are free to move to a different product if they aren't happy with their current service. If Google or Facebook or whatever have a large market share it's because their customers feel that it's a superior product, not because the state has set such high barriers to entry that nobody can attempt to provide an alternative.

(Payment processors are kind of in a gray area. They aren't strictly infrastructure in the monopoly sense, but they sure do function like it in a lot of ways. TBH I'd be fine with the government treating bank to bank wire transfers as a common carrier service, and Paypal as an ordinary service.)

 Luciferian wrote:
Yeah, I'm definitely a small government type, but having multinational corporations in total control of speech and commerce doesn't strike me as any better than having those things be under the direct purview of the government. Especially considering how, much of the time, they both work together to promote each other's interests against our own. Information, speech, association and commerce should just not be something that corporate entities can flick a switch and shut off (or slow down, or bury under an algorithm etc). It's anti-competitive and monopolistic if you need a free-market justification.

Concentrating that kind of power in the hands of what are at this point unaccountable megaliths just seems like a bad idea. The issues behind net neutrality itself are just one tiny aspect; even net neutrality doesn't go far enough at all. Who cares if your ISP can charge you a few extra bucks for the bandwidth to view your favorite media source, when that media source can just be deleted or have its income frozen in case it turns out to be too competitive or uncomfortable for any number of reasons.

The internet needs to be regulated in order to remain as free as possible, there's simply no way around it. Just as our Constitution gives us negative freedoms by laying out what the government can't do to us, those same protections must be applied to ISPs, search engines, social media sites, payment processors, and all of the other companies that now have more power over our daily lives than any government conceivably could have when the Constitution was written.

Imagine China's burgeoning Social Credit system, but under the control of Comcast, Google, Facebook and PayPal. It's almost worse than having such a thing under state control, because we can elect many of our government officials, but we can't elect board members to multi-billion dollar, multinational corporations. Without some kind of restriction, it's only a matter of time before massive tech companies become the de facto state, anyway.

I really feel a kinship with you for this post. You seem a reasonable man and not a free market fanatic. I wish there were more like you.

Please breed.

 Peregrine wrote:
But the same doesn't apply for content producers like social media sites or search engines. There is no monopoly power and customers are free to move to a different product if they aren't happy with their current service.

How are you supposed to outcompete Google? The barrier to entry for a new search engine is absolutely gargantuan.

Tyranny is tyranny, fascism is fascism. Whether it's imposed by a government or a corporate conglomerate is irrelevant. Free market oppresion of individual liberty and freedom is still oppression.

I'd like to reply to that but it'd be discussion politics, but suffice it to say that you're ludicrously wrong and leave it at that.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:
But the same doesn't apply for content producers like social media sites or search engines. There is no monopoly power and customers are free to move to a different product if they aren't happy with their current service.

How are you supposed to outcompete Google? The barrier to entry for a new search engine is absolutely gargantuan.

By making a better product. Yeah, it's a difficult task, but it's not the same as the barriers to entry for making a new internet (or other utilities). A new search engine is difficult to make because Google has created a really good product that, for most people, does exactly what they want from a search engine and doesn't have any room for improvement. A new utility company is difficult to make because the government is not going to use its eminent domain power to seize land to install the new power lines/fiber optic cables/roads/etc you need to build to duplicate the existing service. That's a regulatory barrier to entry, the government saying "you are not welcome". So yeah, the company benefiting from the state-sanctioned monopoly should face different rules compared to a company that has a near-monopoly because it's very successful on its own merits.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Tyranny is tyranny, fascism is fascism. Whether it's imposed by a government or a corporate conglomerate is irrelevant. Free market oppresion of individual liberty and freedom is still oppression.

Why post constructive discussion when you can post absurd memes that only angry 16 year olds find insightful?

Peregrine, you're totally correct from a legal standpoint as things currently are. ISP's and other utilities are basically chosen by municipalities because they have to use public infrastructure, and it's a totally different regulatory landscape from any kind of service or content provider.

However, tech companies such as Google aren't really any easier to compete with, even if there is no regulatory barrier. Google has something like a 98% market share, and each of the major social media companies is not far behind that in their respective areas of focus. As such, nearly all content, speech and commerce on the internet must flow through these services as a matter of fact, and I think that is largely due to momentum rather than quality of service per se. If you want to have a voice or market your own business, you don't have a choice but to use these services. Google, Facebook, PayPal, Amazon etc. have reached a critical mass of market share and user base to the point where it's all but impossible to compete with them, and they will and have leveraged their positions to further stamp out any competition or content that they or their partners find disagreeable.

The result is no different, even though the legal and regulatory status is. Like I said before, what difference does it make if the site you want to visit takes a few seconds longer to load or eats into a bandwidth cap when the major content providers that would be the ones paying up for fast access can just muscle it off the internet completely anyway?

 Luciferian wrote:
However, tech companies such as Google aren't really any easier to compete with, even if there is no regulatory barrier. Google has something like a 98% market share, and each of the major social media companies is not far behind that in their respective areas of focus.

That's on the one hand wrong and on the other short sighted.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/

Google is at about 90%, still a lot but not nearly everything and DuckDuckGo is, for example, a smaller competitor who provides some features that Google doesn't (and you can also ask it to search on google for you, if you need that). They grew slower but are slowly adding features and are for some people better (or just preferable) to Google.

And when it comes to major social media companies they you should remember that a few years ago myspace was the big social media community everybody used. Things can change quickly in that space and Facebook, for example, is losing users (old people being the ones who are not interesting into looking for something new). Making your own social network that can scale is easier than before. It's still not as simple as setting up an email server, for example but the barriers are slowly falling and people's distrust for the bigger social networks (or their missteps, like facebooks privacy issues, or tumblr's recent "porn" ban, the twitter diaspora to mastodon) lead to some people abandoning them and opting for smaller (and less convenient) options despite all those negative points.

There are also still old school forums and email newsletters that have gained some popularity recently due to all this issues (and those being simpler and just so much less creepy than big social networks). And there also quite competent open source options/remakes of certain apps/networks (for stuff like Dropbox and Slack). All that takes some more work but for some of those there also exist options that are provided by other people where you (as an user) can just log in like in a regular, big social network.

If you are still using those old services then it's a combination of being satisfied, ignoring their negatives for convenience, and/or you just not caring enough to shift your habits. The big (social networks, search, internet) companies have some sort of excessive power but that's normal (under capitalism) at that level. They always get to push everybody else around. But this might offer you some peace of mind. It's all fake: https://twitter.com/chronotope/status/1078003966863200256 and at some point it'll start crumbling more and more.

Oh, I'm well aware of alternatives such as Duck Duck Go. I use Duck Duck Go instead of Google, and there's a reason I do my hobby posting here instead of Facebook. Still, there's simply no comparison between how much business they get compared to the big fish.

Duck Duck Go gets 30 million queries per day, which sounds like a lot until you hear that Google gets 3.2 billion per day. Likewise, the amount of traffic going through the main social media sites absolutely dwarfs that of all their alternatives combined. Nearly all traffic on the web goes through FANG.

I'll believe there's a chance for market competition when I see it, or when the regulatory environment changes such that monopolies are not tolerated.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I'd like to reply to that but it'd be discussion politics, but suffice it to say that you're ludicrously wrong and leave it at that.

Such a well reasoned, thought our argument...


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 NinthMusketeer wrote:
I'll believe there's a chance for market competition when I see it, or when the regulatory environment changes such that monopolies are not tolerated.

As is most american laws are written to empower and protect monopolies, making it easier for hem to crush or simply starve out any competition.

 Techpriestsupport wrote:

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
I'd like to reply to that but it'd be discussion politics, but suffice it to say that you're ludicrously wrong and leave it at that.

Such a well reasoned, thought our argument...

Yes it is. As was noted by a Mod earlier in the thread politics is not a subject that is allowed to be discussed on dakka. If you wish to continue discussing politics please do so here;

http://otzone.proboards.com/

Further political discussion will see this thread locked.
Thanks.
Ingtaer

The issue with monopolies is not just some pure moral principle that monopolies are bad, it's that we don't want them when they have negative effects on society and start to act against the best interests of their customers with no available alternative. For example, if your power company decides to raise its rates 10x there's nothing you can do about it, they have a state-granted monopoly and it's impossible (and bad for society) to create an entire separate power grid to attempt to compete with them. Therefore we accept the monopoly but introduce common carrier rules, regulated prices, etc, so that even in the absence of competition the monopolizing company has to behave. This is how the internet works under net neutrality, and it's a good thing. We recognize that it's effectively impossible to build an entire second internet and that ISPs have been granted public resources to build their infrastructure, so we treat them as a common carrier and require them to move all data packets from source to destination with equal treatment. This becomes even more true in the case of wireless internet, where the state is literally giving a company exclusive use of a portion of the frequency spectrum and it is illegal for anyone else to use those frequencies.

In the case of Google/Facebook/etc it's not at all the same. They don't have market dominance because the state has granted them exclusive access to a limited resource, they have it because they are offering a product or service that the vast majority of the market wants and their competitors aren't. Over and over again people have made alternatives (often for ideological reasons), and the market has collectively shrugged and said "no thanks". But anyone is free to start a competing company if they have a better product, there is no barrier to entry other than convincing people to buy it. Likewise, if the market leaders screw up and stop keeping their customers happy those customers are free to leave and find a replacement. Market forces are keeping them from doing anything too bad, and government regulation isn't necessary. And in any case, how would government regulation even work as a general principle? If your product/service becomes too popular, defined by some arbitrary standard, you forfeit ownership of it and the state gets to decide what content you publish? Are you going to compensate the owners financially for this seizure?

Finally, it's worth a reminder that free speech does not mean that you are entitled to have an audience listen to you, and a free market does not mean that you are entitled to have people buy your stuff. The audience is free to ignore you, and the customers are free to decide that your product sucks.

Fine! Next time someone say s"You're wrong!" as a well reasoned argument, I will devastate him with an even more logical one" "I knw y'are but what am I?"

 Techpriestsupport wrote:
Fine! Next time someone say s"You're wrong!" as a well reasoned argument, I will devastate him with an even more logical one" "I knw y'are but what am I?"

This does nothing to promote the conversation and is thus spam. If you can not add to the discussion with out making such comments please remove yourself from it.