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We’re About to Lose Net Neutrality
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoI find it amusing that those in favor of net neutrality consider themselves on the side of freedom.
- maaku 13y agoWhat makes that amusing?
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoSeriously? Because they're demanding the freedom of the telcos be overridden in favor of our own personal interests.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- dkuntz2 13y agoSeriously? Because we don't call them inalienable corporate rights, we call them inalienable human rights. Equating a corporation to a human is part of what got us in a whole host of messes.
- CamperBob2 13y agoWould these be the same telcos that operate as regional public utility monopolies, subsidized by your taxes and mine?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- djur 13y agoThe telcos make extensive use of common property like licensed portions of the RF spectrum and a great deal of land in order to do their business. The people have every right to enforce regulations on the use of their property.
- blhack 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly Read about natural monopolies.
- nightcracker 13y agoI strongly am in favor of freedom, but not a fully free market. And exactly for reasons like this: a fully free market destroys freedom.
- vacri 13y agoThe Free Market of libertarianism reknown doesn't exist and can't exist. For such a market to work, each participant needs perfect information and capacity. If you've had any involvement with business should be enough experience to understand that there's no such thing as perfect information once the product is more complex than say, an orange, and even then it'd be a stretch (grown where? what pesticides? which labour? which transport company? where are all the other places I can purchase this orange? ...)
- maaku 13y ago> Because they're demanding the freedom of the telcos be overridden in favor of our own personal interests. Imagine that someone was allowed to own the air, and then control / privileged what you are allowed to say (sound waves). Would your opinion be different?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- cheald 13y agoThe sticking point for me is that the market is already regulated such that it makes it very difficult for a competitor to challenge companies who engage in exploitative practices (and for similar reasons, the incentive to collude is extremely high). In a free market, net neutrality wouldn't need to be regulated because companies who attempted to enact business plans like the AT&T plan described in the article would rapidly find themselves losing marketshare to competitors. I'm not really okay with the idea of regulating net neutrality from an ideological perspective, but from a practical one, we're kind of stuck with the market we have - effective regional monopolies are granted to a very small number of companies, and there is very little space for counterbalance from competition (which is why Google Fiber is such a Huge Frickin' Deal!). Left unfettered, the end result would likely be that the AT&Ts and Comcasts end up leeching their customers dry on both ends of the pipe, because those customers don't have any alternative. In my ideal world, there would be no need to regulate net neutrality because I could penalize bad companies by refusing to do business with them, and getting my friends and family to do the same, but we don't have those options - choosing an ISP is a lot like choosing which knee you want to be hit in. In a market where companies have been granted regulatory monopolies, the invisible hand is rather ineffective.
- alexeisadeski3 13y agoThey may have been monopolies once, but they're not anymore. At least in the US. Most people already have two broadband subscriptions: home cable broadband and HSPA+ or LTE. The home cable broadband is in competition with ADSL throughout much of the nation, and the HSPA+/LTE providers are in fierce competition everywhere. Furthermore, what makes you say this: >In a free market, net neutrality wouldn't need to be regulated because companies who attempted to enact business plans like the AT&T plan described in the article would rapidly find themselves losing marketshare to competitors. I certainly would not expect them to lose market share.
- dkuntz2 13y agoWhy wouldn't you expect them to lose market share? They're actively hindering customers from their desired actions. Doesn't that typically mean customers will look for alternatives?
- dkasper 13y agoFreedom of telcos to do as they wish with their pipes vs freedom of users to use the pipes that they pay for access to as they see fit.
- wyager 13y agoThe telcos don't owe users anything more than is specified in the contract. The telcos are a company; there is no moral reason to force the ISPs to do anything more than they contracted to do. Instead of having everyone continue to be pissed off at the shitty monopolistic telcos, and having the telcos continue to be pissed off because we keep demanding that the government squash the telcos' rights to provide a shitty service, let's work to change the situation so that telcos don't get exclusive rights to public resources like land and spectrum.
- nitrogen 13y agoTelcos and cablecos that own the lines in the ground are not an ordinary company; they often have a monopoly granted by the city that prevents others from running a parallel physical deployment, which would be wasteful anyway. Further, the last mile physical deployments are often subsidized by taxes. As you say in your second paragraph, removing the exclusive rights held by telcos and cablecos would be one option, but since running parallel cables is physically wasteful, I'd prefer common ownership or regulation of the last mile to save companies and customers the expense of running a parallel cable, while ensuring competition beyond the last mile.
- nostromo 13y agoMost rights are a balancing act. In this case, the freedom of the ISP is contrary to the freedom of the subscriber, so whose freedom is supreme? I could understand opposition to net neutrality if there were competition in the ISP market. However, I have no choice but to use Comcast, so the idea that they can decide what sites I visit and how fast they are is very scary.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago>In this case, the freedom of the ISP is contrary to the freedom of the subscriber, so whose freedom is supreme? No, there is no conflict. This is black and white. I know that HN doesn't want to hear it. The subscribers freedom is to leave for another provider. The provider's freedom is to charge what it wants for whatever service it wants to provide. Only one's freedom is being infringed upon here.
- wmf 13y agoSure, if you don't admit or haven't heard of the concept of positive freedom.
- dkuntz2 13y agoBut what if there isn't another provider in your area?
- djur 13y agoThe government of the United States has the authority and the responsibility to regulate the commercial use of limited resources held in common. The freedom at stake here is the right of the people to regulate the use of public property.
- argumentum 13y agoI agree with you on principle, if there was a free market for providing internet services. However, this is totally not the case .. ISPs gain local monopolies by virtue of agreements with local governments. For example, Verizon struck a deal to provide fiber access a few years ago with my parents' hometown. Part of this deal was that no other provider could do the same. This impinges on the subscriber's freedom to leave for another provider, so your argument falls flat, unless you are ready to invalidate all such agreements with local governments.
- altcognito 13y agoI find it amusing that those think freedom is only about their ability to pay for things, not to be FREE from paying additional money for things they have already bought.
- FrankenPC 13y agoWhere I live, I only have one choice for internet provider (Comcast). One choice. And I should trust them with content censorship? I would be in idiot to believe this is anything but a terrible idea.
- super_mario 13y agoThe principle of net neutrality is directly related to freedom (or ability of a corporation to curb it, kill competition they don't like by throttling access to them etc). How net neutrality is put in practice is entirely a different matter. And for some reason you think if it is the government doing the enforcement, that it is somehow against freedom? I completely disagree. Government not allowing another private entity to abuse me is fine with me. In some countries net neutrality is the law already by the way.
- shmerl 13y agoDo you consider those who support antitrust regulations to be on the side of freedom? Monopoly is the opposite of freedom and is much closer to dictatorship.
- pnut 13y agoThe toothpaste is out of the tube already, people know what freedom online tastes like. Bad news for old money - the Internet has an appetite for rentier blood. This will not be tolerated long term.
- zobzu 13y agothats generally how that stuff starts to be tolerated. "it wont fly so i don't care". then since there is a HUGE financial interest, they try again, and again and again, and nobody's to block them, it eventually works.
- wycx 13y agoThe internet has an appetite for replace existing rent seeking with more scalable rent seeking.
- wmf 13y agoI just got an idea for a startup: it's like Uber for bandwidth.
- morgante 13y agoLikely nobody would even realize. It's not like the telcos would block sites. Instead, suddenly Netflix loads a lot slower than Comcast. Blame Netflix and move on.
- waterlesscloud 13y agoThat lasts right up until Netflix puts a big banner on their page for Comcast customers that explains the situation.
- morgante 13y agoNetflix might have the clout to do so, but a small startup which nobody has heard of never would. Ultimately, the consumer mindset is never to blame their provider. They blame the website. If you come to my site and it's throttled, there's a high chance you'll click away and never come back.
- itistoday2 13y agoThis article is over a month old. I'm interested in the current status of NN. Could someone informed fill us in on the latest?
- shmageggy 13y agoAfter some googling, I've concluded that the ruling hasn't happened yet. Every other source on this topic is from around the same time, and some of them mention that the ruling is expected sometime between then and early 2014.
- amarv1n 13y agoyeah, we're still waiting for the ruling. the only other thing that happened is that the current FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler made a comment that suggested he opposed net neutrality--arguing that Netflix should be allowed to pay carriers for better service. This framing (assuming companies want to pay, not that telcos are angling to get paid) is the framing placed by telcos, etc. Wheeler was once the head lobbyist for the cable industry, then the wireless telco industry, so there's been some concerns, particularly with those comments. some fear he'll do nothing meaningful if/when we lose the court case. See this ars technica article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/fcc-chair-isps-should-be-able-to-charge-netflix-for-internet-fast-lane/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/fcc-chair-isps-sh...
- wmf 13y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669298 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669298
- pvnick 13y agoI consider everybody here very smart. In many cases smarter than myself. Therefore, could somebody please explain why we would give the government, which has shown itself to be terribly incompetent with technology issues, the ability to enforce net neutrality? Seriously, I can't get over the dissonance here. If it's such a shitty idea, let consumers decide. Google Fiber et al will just eat the major telecoms' lunch sooner or later anyway. It may just take a little longer, but we'll avoid the possibility of letting the government crush Internet innovation forever.
- dkuntz2 13y agoWho would you have enforce net neutrality?
- ewillbefull 13y agoThe only thing that needs to be enforced is anti-trust law. Monopolies are what give ISPs the ability, and perhaps the incentive, to filter and editorialize the Internet. The FTC should be involved in defending consumers against those behaviors. Net neutrality arises naturally. It didn't need enforcement 30 years ago. In some contexts, like exotic network protocols, it may not even make sense. I wouldn't care much if it was a limited authority granted to the FCC, but they are claiming an authority which is limitless in scope and using net neutrality as an excuse to exercise it.
- dkuntz2 13y agoI suppose using it as a claim for unlimited authority isn't a good situation, but I don't know if I see breaking net neutrality as being a trust. Considering where the term anti-trust came from, ISPs who block certain sites without customer consent aren't really being monopolistic in nature. Which makes, to me, defending net neutrality a separate issue than breaking trusts and monopolies...
- wpietri 13y agoWait, 30 years ago? Actually, net neutrality needed substantial government help. The parallel at the time is the long distance market. Read about the history of Sprint, MCI, and the like. And it goes back further. At one point, you weren't even allowed to connect your own phone to the network, let alone an answering machine; AT&T claimed it was too dangerous. So you had to rent everything from Ma Bell. It wasn't until the Carterphone case in 1968, where the FCC told AT&T to knock it off, that you saw things get better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_decision http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_... As much as I would like anti-trust law to help here, you don't need collusion or a monopoly to ruin net neutrality. As long as you have an oligopoly, which is the general state of the US residential ISP market, then that's plenty. As we see in the article as soon as one ISP starts a shakedown, the other big ones will try the same thing.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- mars 13y agothis article is from april?!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- amarv1n 13y agoit's from nov.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- allochthon 13y agoI hate to say it, because I don't consider myself a radical, but the US congress is in the pockets of big business, US law relating to technology is broken, and US intelligence agencies have taken liberties beyond their mandate. The consequences seem fairly straightforward. The Internet will route around the damage to the system. The outcome is predictable and the dysfunction that is leading up to it is regrettable. I don't know what this bodes for US customers. Hopefully a coalition of forward-thinking companies will provide a genuine alternative to the US telcos.
- quadrangle 13y agoWhat you're saying is: you don't like admitting the truth if it makes you seem radical. I don't respect that attitude, but thanks for doing the right thing here anyway.
- jarjoura 13y agoIMHO, this isn't about Netflix, YouTube, or even Amazon having to pay for higher tiered access to customers. They have the deep pockets and smart lawyers to construct contracts that work out for them in the end. So I see that as the same grumpy story as California and New York forcing Amazon to collect sales tax. BUT, because this does force deals to be crafted behind closed doors, they will turn out looking a lot like the deals that HBO/Shotime have with Comcast and TWC. Plus, look at what's going on with Facebook already... phones in some countries have "facebook data" only plans. Sure, this is great for emerging markets to have access to family and friends for free, but at the loss of any other social network upstart that wants in on it. I don't see indie content ever being cut off, but I do see them becoming "premium" subscription level services that require people to pay more to access them. Want to play COD or GOW online? You will need this level access to play with any reasonable speeds. It will happen slowly too, as people become accustom to the idea that opening a Wikipedia page will take 1000 ms then to 5000 ms to fully finish rendering. Someone at Comcast will nudge slowly testing whether people notice or care. If we don't fight the good fight and force internet providers to remain dumb pipes, we are asking to have the most expensive internet on the planet. As cable TV dies in favor of watching what you want, when you want, they will naturally move to charge you for things you want to do on the internet instead. edit: autocorrect fail :-P
- akadien 13y ago> we are asking to have the most expensive internet on the planet Indeed, it will be unfortunate for the United States when internet services are akin to healthcare and prescription drugs.
- Houshalter 13y agoIs that necessarily a bad thing in all cases? I think it would be great if a company offered, say, really cheap or free access to wikipedia and other basic websites, but charged for actual service. Letting poor people access it or making it available to host cheaper free wifi. I think what people are afraid of is them throttling competitors, or charging more for normal service, but it doesn't have to be that way.
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- Lost_BiomedE 13y agoStill, this is all from the implications of messing with the 1996 telecommunications act, allowing duopoly, preventing cities from offering broadband, and crushing the small guys. Too bad so few spoke up then; the balance of power has been against us ever since.
- onedev 13y agoWe are getting hustled[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRNGCja9mRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRNGCja9mRo
- zmanian 13y agoAny thought on the effect increased programmability in telecom networks is going to be on Network Neutrality? It seems likely to me that regular IP routing is likely to become the "slow lane" on the Internet?
- ceph_ 13y agoThe freedom of the telcos to act as highwaymen? Consumer protections are necessary for basic utilities. Especially either the numerous de facto monopolies that exist in the consumer telco market.
- shawnee_ 13y agoIf net neutrality was truly working, nobody would need to renew their contracts with Verizon or TMobile or anybody else. Contracts would be deprecated and all the telecoms would be forced to compete on something other than lock-in and "whatever the latest trendy device is" promotions. But that's hard to do when you're selling what essentially amounts to a homogeneous product like bandwidth. They don't wanna do that. They like guaranteed income and they especially like it when people go over their contract data allocations. In 2013 there is absolutely _zero_ rationale for contracts to play a part in either the wireless or the pipeline infrastructure. Telecoms know this and are doing everything they can to drag out the death sentence, making it as painful and expensive as possible for everybody involved. If we let the telecoms do with fiber what's been done with mobile networks not only is the web going to be less neutral, the bias will naturally lead to the dissemination of news and information as being more easily controlled and piped to the masses in sinister ways.
- joncp 13y agoWhat's to stop everyone from setting up VPNs en masse? The difficulty alone?
- amarv1n 13y agoFrom what I understand, ISPs might be able to win the cat and mouse game, and uncover at least the type of traffic, whether p2p, streaming video etc. Not sure where the cat and mouse are with today's technology.
- Patrick_Devine 13y agoThis might not be very popular, but I'm going to say I'm in favour of the law being struck down. I'm totally on board with ISPs not throttling / extorting money out of web 2.0 companies, however, I'm not sure that trying to enforce a swiss-cheese law is the right way to do it. That and I'm kind of biased, because I founded a company which is trying to level the playing field and make net neutrality de facto for internet services instead of de jure. Information is like water. Put a barrier in front of it and it will always try to find a way to flow through it.
- dotori 13y ago>make net neutrality de facto how so?
- h1karu 13y agoLong ago the corporate oligarchy decided to let the Internet tech sector grow to the extent that it has in order to externalize the cost of deploying certain infrastructure and the cost of training the populous to become dependent on that infrastructure. Now that these tasks are complete what reason do they have to delay taking control of this particular DARPA project ? You have to be willing to show them that reason in order to save your business. You all have to innovate a solution. How are you going to join together with the other businesses in your sector to PIVOT TOGETHER in order to jolt ordinary people out of their careless stupor and educate them about how to force the hand of those corporations who could easily solve the problem ? Do you really think a black page background and a banner is anything more than a sloppy haphazard attempt to save your industry ? Aren't you risking shareholder value if your company is not engaging a significant percentage of it's resources towards engineering a plan to resist the takeover of the key infrastructure that your business needs in order to survive ? How can you justify that kind of risk taking to your board ? VC's what percentage of your fund's budget is set aside for the task of preserving the Internet that your portfolio will rely on ? Ordinary people won't care if a page is black or not or if some banner is present or not, but if twitter, instagram, and pintrest for example all go offline at the same time that would send a message. Or what about if all the major social startups started paying attention to HTTP referer headers and they started redirecting inbound visitors to educational splash screens based on their referred header? The splash screens would educate these people about how they should really change their default search engine or delete their Facebook account in order to help save the Internet. I'm not saying we should pick on Google or Facebook specifically per say, but I do think that if enough "social pressure" was applied Google alone could fix the problem by helping the Internet route around the entities who are engaged in a Denial Of Service attack on key Internet infrastructure. All Google has to do is punish a few corporate websites like they did to rapgenius the other day. That's a good start at least. Does your startup "scene" have a plan to help force google's hand ? If not then why not ? If all of the major web startups started doing this kind of thinking Google would have to take this stuff more seriously REAL FAST. Think about it! That's how you send a real "social signal". Why is this industry not trying to defend itself ? Ask yourself this question.. Who controls your company ? Who gets to decide how important preserving a free Internet is to the long term viability of your business? Has your company already sold out ? Founders, where do you stand ? How willing are you to be public about where you stand and how long are you going to wait ? How long can you afford to wait before you take action with others in order to save your business ? Why aren't you already more organized on this issue ? Why aren't you ready ? Why are you not taking this threat to your business more seriously ? Why do you apparently assume you are powerless ?
- alixaxel 13y agoI have a feeling that I've read this before, why is it making it's way back to the front page of HN? Any new developments on this matter?
- Aloha 13y agoThe solution in the end is to turn internet access into common carrier services.
- bennyg 13y agoWhat prevents a proxy-net from starting up and flubbing the recipients/senders of the data such that the ISP can't see what site/domain the traffic is coming from and can't enforce their 1s page-load "tax" on them?
- srl 13y agoSuch a proxy-net would intrinsically increase latency and lower bandwidth. Oops.
- dragonwriter 13y agoWell, first that would itself impose a page-load tax. Second, ISPs could just impose a page-load tax on data where it couldn't verify that the source was a one not subject to the tax, instead of imposing it on those that they could verify were subject.
- shmerl 13y agoNet neutrality should be extended to the mobile networks, not dropped for the landline ones. ISPs should be regulated like essential dumb data pipes.
- lowglow 13y agoIt's time for a new net then.
- declan 13y agoMarvin, the author of the Wired.com opinion piece, is a smart fellow. But what he ignores is that Congress never handed the FCC the authority to impose Net neutrality regulations on the Internet. Such legislation actually came up for a vote in Congress, and it came close to passage: it was reported favorably out of a Senate committee but was defeated in a House floor vote in 2006: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1028_3-6081882.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1028_3-6081882.html Even if you adore the principle of Net neutrality, it's reasonable to demand that federal regulatory agencies stick to what Congress authorized them to do. Otherwise you have illegal regulations and bureaucratic turf-grabbing that will not treat the Internet well. Remember Hollywood's successful efforts to lobby the FCC to impose "broadcast flags" on computers by bureaucratic fiat? A federal appeals court correctly struck it down as exceeding the agency's legal authority, as I wrote here in 2005: http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-5697719.html http://news.cnet.com/2100-1030_3-5697719.html That same appeals court is currently considering the FCC's Net neutrality regulations. BTW, it's also the same court that slapped down the FCC's first attempt to impose Net neutrality regulations without legal authority in 2010: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001825-38.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001825-38.html If Net neutrality violations become an actual problem, there's no shortage of publicity-hungry politicians in Congress (hi, Ed Markey!) who will hold hearings and push legislation forward. Obama will happily sign it. Until then, other government debacles including NSA domestic surveillance and Obamacare should make us wary of federal agencies exceeding their legal authority -- especially after Congress considered and rejected a law that would have given it to them in the first place.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago> Even if you adore the principle of Net neutrality, it's reasonable to demand that federal regulatory agencies stick to what Congress authorized them to do. Congress has already authorized it, the FCC is just trying to have its cake and eat it too. The FCC decides whether to classify last mile internet service as a "telecommunications service" that they have significant statutory authority over or an "information service" that they don't, and they picked the second one but are trying to impose regulations anyway, which is why they keep getting slapped down. Choosing that classification was so controversial at the time that they got sued over it, and the Supreme Court ultimately said that the FCC was allowed to make that classification, not that they were required to. Now that everything that was once classified as a "telecommunications service" is being offered instead over the top using "internet service" it seems reasonable for them to revisit the classification.
- scoofy 13y agoI highly suggest "The Master Switch" by Tim Wu to this entire thread. There seems to be a bunch of people here who don't understand common carrier services and why they are important.
- gtallen1187 13y agoWhile a well-intentioned article, i believe this author overlooks a few points that should be pointed out. As a consumer, i would obviously be a proponent of my current ISP giving non-discriminatory access to all sites. However, aside from voicing my opinion in the form of purchasing the services of a specific ISP, i do not believe we should have the power to do much else in dictating how these companies should run their business through the passing of laws. The author points out that the loss of net neutrality would hurt small-scale ventures - yet ignores the fact that these ISPs he wishes to regulate were once the same small start-ups that he wants to protect. Was the success of these businesses the single factor that moves them from protected status to regulatory target? The size of these dominant ISPs means that a great deal of the population relies on their services - but our "need" for these services does not give us the right to dictate how they should run their business. If enough of us feel that none of the dominant ISPs are adequate, then our need goes unserved, and sooner or later another ISP will arrive to serve these customers. Again - i am strongly in favor of net neutrality. But if we resort to regulatory means to get what we want, it will lead to vastly negative consequences down the road. Why start a business if this is the reward for success?
- vardhanw 13y agoWhat about all the new technologies like DPI and data analytics coupled with things like SDN and NFV which will easily technically enable any operator to have a very high level of granularity (e.g. application, user, site, device etc.) in controlling access to the network in the name of providing better QOE/S to the customer? These technologies will easily enable operators to enable complex policies which will be difficult to track and can be modified in very flexible manner to adjust to the current workarounds around any NN laws.
- wmf 13y agoThose technologies are expensive and I would hope that it's cheaper for ISPs to add capacity than to use that stuff. Unfortunately this thinking does not apply if ISPs see neutrality as a strategic threat.
- fuckpig 13y agoAfter basically 20 years of commerce dictating the needs of the net, I'd think we've already lost it. The internet model worked when subsidized by a military and academic community supported by a massive industry. Now that it's trying to pay for itself, it's looking a lot more like television or those free newspapers that are more ads than articles.
- staticelf 13y agoThe author seems to think the internet is all about America. We in Europe doesn't give a shit whatever your court decides. The best case scenario is if the US was disconnected from the rest of the worlds connectivity. Almost all evils that has generated hate from the public has been american corporations.
- quadrangle 13y agoWell, for those of us in the US, that's not the best case! Sheesh! Leave us to rot in our awful insular spoiled rotten hellhole? The best parts of the internet in the US are that we can interact with and engage people and culture from the rest of the world! Sorry about sending our garbage to you as a side-effect…!
- excellence24 13y agoThe best way we can get the attention of the companies is by causing them to lose profits. This is best done by an organized boycott of their goods and services. It will get their attention very quickly. But currently we don't have a central website to browse and search boycotts and other forms of protest. In addition to protesting, we should also consider building a free open source network thats protected and run by the community. (It could be run by the government, but until the government is 'for and by the people', we'll crowdsource the maintainance and seek to rapidly automate the work that nobody would volunteer for) We can give ourselves the best, but lets start with free gigabit internet wired and wireless for all of America! What would this 'cost' in terms of money? millions or billions? But the resources are here; just being hoarded until money is traded. Would AT&T build a free network for us? Not if it meant losing money to Verizon. But what if it wasnt about money? The value in having a fully connected country is priceless. Thankfully we have the government to protect us against trusts and monopoly's. But what if the trust or monopoly was a community one? If AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile colluded to give free gigabit internet to America, they could combine their separately walled gardens and use those resources to further the human race. But this would have to be a guaranttee so that once everyone put all their time and resources into this, some CEO cant just flip a switch and start charging. Once free, always free. So if they did this it would probably mean giving up their pride and names. I mean, would this free network be called Verizon? Why do they get their name on it? So we could crowdsource a new name for our free network so no one can boast. US Telecom, US Net, Free Net, the name can be anything, something we would all be proud to get behind. the most important part is the 'us' and 'US'. All of us in the US have the resources to take care of all of US(just focusing on America now, but eventually we could help the world). These telecom companies will either become part of the solution or they will precipitate out. Again though, this would be a huge project and there's currently no website we can go to in order to find and take part in these country and perhaps global initiatives. Imagine a mix of Kickstarter and Change.org. First a project or idea is petitioned to the community and if enough people like it and think it would be the best solution, then its opened up to a crowdsourcing page to collect funds and not just money but people can also donate the final resources that are ultimately needed, which is what the money would eventually be traded for anyways....more to come, working on this website...
- ryguytilidie 13y agoIt really seems a lot like CISPA and the Patriot Act. A popular outcry from the citizens of this country can stop it once, twice, three times, but how long can they hold out? Can we spread outrage about CISPA when its being voted on for the 500th time in lieu of any bill that might actually help this country? The fact that the citizens of this country are constantly having to fight their congressmen to actually do what they desire is the most clear example that our country is completely broken.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoHow is this different from Google charging bit guys for blackhat SEO, while those who don't pay - are penalised?
- orthecreedence 13y agoBecause Google doesn't have a monopoly on search. If you don't like the results, don't use Google. However, if you don't like your ISP, generally your only option is to move to a different city/state.
- dzhiurgis 13y agoIt's not a monopoly for me, but it is a monopoly for those who want to appear in search. It's not a monopoly for products, it's a monopoly for clients.
- Osiris 13y agoSome countries, like Japan, have addressed this issue by separating infrastructure from service. One company owns the network, several other companies provided the internet access. This creates a competitive market between service provides (competing on price, service quality, and customer service) while removing the high costs to enter that market. Infrastructure, as opposed to service, becomes the regulated market.
- grizzles 13y agoWe are doing a net neutrality IndieGogo campaign http://uplink.aero/project.html http://uplink.aero/project.html http://igg.me/at/aero http://igg.me/at/aero But based on our conversion rate, I don't think there is a market for it. Feel free to email us if you have any constructive criticism. contact@uplink.aero
- dublinben 13y agoI'm not surprised that your campaign hasn't succeeded. You do a very poor job of explaining how it works, or what the benefits are, and it largely duplicates the efforts of other existing mesh networking projects, and free software/hardware projects like FreedomBox.
- elefantindaroom 13y agoIs anybody noticing a pattern here. Every god damn 4 months.. They wont give up.
- koreapride 13y agoThis is not that important.
- asima123 13y agoReally?
- gasull 13y agoForget about Net Neutrality. What we need is Open Spectrum so everybody can share the waves and we stop needing the telcos altogether. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_spectrum As long as we have an oligopoly of telcos, they will lobby their way to destroy Net Neutrality.
- kenster07 13y agoIt would almost be comical if it weren't so sick: rent-seeking through a government-granted monopoly, under the premise that the providers would serve the public good.