I think you misunderstand - NN is new, the internet worked fine on its own prior to it. NN is not a colloquial "neutrality" agreement, its a "lets force carriers to do things because we don't understand how it works".

I've worked on the carrier side, on the last mile side and on the consumer side and I'm not a fan of most of the proposed legislation. We need to prevent anticompetitive practices, but thats about it.

I was a financial analyst, and I had the chance to cover the telecom sector.

I know how the market works, NN is not new, it is how the world worked.

Anti NN is new. It's hugely anti competitive and anti consumer.

If it gets close to getting passed, I'll be really happy for the segment. Wouldn't be happy being a consumer.

Edit: IMO, the American telecom industry is shafting its consumers regularly and has been underinvesting for years. (Investing in regulatory capture is a lot more), there's many other nations with significantly better networks and speeds, and it's a joke stock for the rest of the world to see the country which created the internet writing the book on how to not enjoy it.

Which Internet rule is it which states that we can all claim we have been any occupation that suits the discussion, and without any additional evidence to support such claims?

The assumption of honesty on HN. I really don't get anything out of this place, and afaik I'm not even contactable.

But yeah, if you don't believe me, feel free to look at a bunch of financial statements and lavish over as many models as you like. Check ARPU numbers or read up on the history of your own markets. In true finance fashion, do your diligence and reach your own conclusions.

It's a lot less morality based once you look at the numbers. It's just business.

More non-points.

To summarize your statement: "I am correct because I have read the data. Since you have not read the data, you should go read the data, because then, and only then, will you see that I am correct. Until then, just accept that I am correct."

I still reject your claims because you have not provided any meaningful measure of support for them.

Feel free to reject them. You'll still only truly know when you see the data.

If I knew the world was round, and you kept saying it was flat - why would I have any reason to do more than let you know it wasn't so?

> Which Internet rule is it which states that we can all claim we have been any occupation that suits the discussion, and without any additional evidence to support such claims?

Translation: I don't really have good arguments against NN except for a couple one-liners I'm reading off some Free Market (tm) blog, so I'll attack who you are instead of what you're saying.

It seems notable that you consider an unverified attempt to be an expert as acceptable, but pointing out someone engaging in this behavior is not.

NN was never codified but it has always been the agreed upon practice. Except for a few exceptional breaches (like the netflix/comcast deal https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/24/business/media/comcast-an...) it's just what carriers have always done. It's only now that they're getting greedy that they demand to be paid to deliver content to their customers.

I've worked in big ISPs, I know exactly how it works, and it's never to the benefit of the customers. Especially when there's zero competitive pressure.

Out of curiosity (by someone who doesn't know exactly how it works), is there no way for society to go completely off-grid with respect to ISPs, like power customers do with solar panels? Couldn't we then people build an inexpensive wireless black box server/partial cache nodes that everybody owns (stronger ones or bridges for rural users), and that communicate as a smart distributive network - physically detached from the existing GIG and ISPs?

Wireless doesn't scale. Municipal delivered internet is the feasible option, which Comcast has sought to prevent via regulations.

The state should file antitrust charges and use the fines to erect new infrastructure that any ISP can lease, restoring competition.

Here's a 'mostly wireless' open/neutral network that seems to be scaling: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guifi.net

Your characterizing of the net is disingenuous. The net never had the dollar or technical pressures it has today; television, streaming, large traffic, advertising dollars. Just because you don't see the regulatory problems doesn't mean they are not there; lawyers have been dealing with people and business for a very long time and you talk like they are a bunch of stupid noobs. Remember the Bell monopoly? They do as well as I, and you are wrong.

> "lets force carriers to do things because we don't understand how it works"

Are you suggesting pro-NN people don't understand how it works? This is a strange summary of NN to me.

What do you think about YouTube and Facebook's edge servers?

reasonable political ideologies can lead to "extreme" outcomes. (I consider an extreme outcome to be one that requires human nature to change, in order to be successful.)

Since I think bureaucrats are gonna bureaucrat, handing them power over anything is a terrible idea.

Are companies good? no, many of them are terrible.

But if enough people don't like a company, the company ceases to exist.

I've yet to see a similar mechanism work for changing something about a bureaucrat i don't like.

I.E. the same thing that causes you to distrust a company (human nature) plays out just the same with a government body. What is it about being a bureaucrat that fixes human nature?

Comcast is one of the most hated companies ever but they only keep getting bigger.

"Bureaucrats" are ultimately responsive to the politicians which are ultimately responsive to us, as we see with Trump now getting the power to reshape Obama's FCC policies. I'll tell you this, if they really go through with giving the web over to the ISPs for them to ruin with nickel and dime schemes voters will eventually force your new favorite bureaucrats to back down.

Comcast is now a massive company that offers a lot more than telecommunication services. A lot of people really like many things that Comcast owns.

While we've set up a complex representative government to try and hold the people in power to account, that is still much more rigid and manipulable than the fluidity of a highly-competitive commercial market.

We need to focus on making the markets run well organically, not trying to make things happen by fiat.

Net neutrality is arguably part of that, but it's not the only, or even the major, part of it. The biggest part is finding some way to allow open competitive access to the in-the-ground infrastructure that runs modern telecoms. Net neutrality is a band-aid to cover up the fact that most Americans are beholden to a single ISP for data services. In a functioning marketplace, it wouldn't be necessary, because if $ISP_Y slowed down $Site_X, $ISP_Y's users would, in theory, move to $ISP_Z.

In reality, most consumers would probably happily accept a plan that allowed universal access at 5mbps and "turbo access" to some sites in exchange for a lower monthly fee. I understand that makes some people unhappy, but that doesn't mean we should deprive people of the freedom to make that tradeoff if they wish to do so.

Right, but Comcast doesn't imprison people for life and bomb other countries or throw you in jail for not paying for its services.

Also, bureaucrats are responsible to the organizations most influential to them. "The American People" can barely be motivated to vote in a presidential election, because they rightfully perceive that their votes don't matter, and a vote between two shitty options is a shitty vote.

So, businesses (like Comcast) can just earmark a few million dollars a year to keep buying whatever organization has the power to regulate them, and we (the people) can do nothing about it.

The reason I strongly dislike Net Neutrality is _because_ comcast is horrible and hated. It's reasonable to assume that as we speak, the comcast executive team is figuring out how to best wine and dine top FCC officials.

Because that's way cheaper than being a better company.

>So, businesses (like Comcast) can just earmark a few million dollars a year to keep buying whatever organization has the power to regulate them, and we (the people) can do nothing about it.

You are right that this is a big problem, however it is more an implementation flaw than a flaw of regulations. A more strict enforcement of information and financial transparency could address the bribery concerns.

There is another problem that is perpetual in the interaction of government and corporations, which is that the corporation lawyer has many times, 10x or 100x, the financial incentive to make the bureaucrat ineffective, than the bureaucrat himself has to be effective.

I would suggest a (difficult) solution that any governmental office or agency should have their success evaluated in terms of economic impact by something like a team of independent economists every year or two.

The agency's funding as well as staff compensation would then be derived from that, as a fixed percentage of the societal benefit. I have no idea of the exact numbers, but the point is to create the same motivational incentives as the corporations have.

One side is working for themselves and reap the significant benefits of their hard work. The other side is working for all of society and really should also reap the benefits of their hard work.

>But if enough people don't like a company, the company ceases to exist.

This is completely untrue. I'll give an analogy: If enough people don't like a tyrannical government, does the tyrannical government cease to exist? No, it has all the power to keep people in line and also to make life just bearable enough so people tolerate it. Any sign of uprising or resistance will be squished in infancy.

The only way is if the situation becomes so unbearable for the people that there is a massive uprising/revolution, and even then the people are not guaranteed victory. Furthermore, suppose the tyrant is overthrown, without the institutions of democracy in place it's more likely than not that there will just be another tyrant in his place.

This is the law of the jungle, and it is not the best way to run a society. That is why we have laws, and that is why we need regulations for our corporations.

Edit to clarify: On second reading the above may sound to some like hysteria but any entity that has monopoly on a very expensive but vital infrastructure in a completely free and unregulated market, has all the power over its "customers". Hence the tyrannical government analogy.

They have fewer resources and are easier to ignore.

The bureaucrats are easier to ignore?

If you violate some obscure statute, you can be fined. (At best.) If you don't pay the fine, the penalties can escalate until the local police or feds arrest you (at gunpoint, if you resist) and lock you in a box.

There's 180,000 pages in the federal register [0].

How is that "easy to ignore"?

I'll take "business that I can stop paying at any time" over "armed gunmen with the legal authority to arrest me" every time.

[0] https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/sites/regulatory...

I encourage you to ignore the IRS, then. Or, hey, even the FCC.