The first point makes sense, but it's hard for me to square with breaking up companies. I don't think any of FAANG has played a real censorious role on the internet. I'm just as free to spin up a random webpage to espouse whatever as I was in 1999. People move around the web differently, but I can still send it to whomever I want. I could also see an argument that AMP and similar technologies hurt journalism, but I hardly ever see that claimed.
If it's a question of agency, to me it feels much better to "vote with my feet" and not patronize companies I dislike than to write my congressperson and receive a form response from some intern. You may be right that people just expect better from the internet than federal contracting.
I think there's a slight difference between an intrinsically public matter, like the Comcast issue, and a relationship between, say, a business owner and a customer. In political fights, people on all sides make their best case to the public. Sometimes that best case is deceptive or manipulative and that's a problem, but the fact of activists trying to shift public opinion just goes with the territory and long predates the Internet. We're used to it; we have filters for it.
The other thing is more complicated. If a business owner rips me off, that's bad. In the past, my only redress was the courts, which is a slow, cumbersome, expensive process. Now there's this new avenue where I can try to make the Internet hate the business owner. This can be a useful corrective, but it's very vulnerable to abuse.
It's also about public sentiment towards the companies and their interests. Comcast, for example, as a long history of trying to silence its critics[1][2].
They want to make their critics look like a minority or as if they don't exist at all, especially when much of the criticism is grassroots and organic from actual telecom customers who are often stuck with a monopoly's service.
I think that, if you believe the FAANGs are dominant enough to be considered infrastructure, you can make a case that their putative political bias is worse that other company's lobbying. At least lobbying results in the introduction of bills that can be debated in a legislature with public input (via calling your representatives, as well as protests and counter-lobbying from other interest groups). The FAANGs' decisions on how to regulate their platforms are subject to no vote or other public input before enactment.
Comcast and friends are essentially utility companies. If the internet is "a bunch of tubes", they keep the tubes clear. They don't get involved at the content layer. Comcast may be a crappy provider in many ways, but they've never made the news for politically-motivated network traffic filtering.
FAANG on the other hand all get their hands dirty in deciding what content people get to see and what not, which would largely be a non-issue if there was mainstream competition, but there isn't, so rather than change their behavior and support/make/demand alternatives, consumers (including politicians) want Big Brother to step in, somehow forgetting that rarely solves anything and will simply consolidate more power with those who already have it.
How about going after Comcast and Verizon first, the actual tech monopolies? I already don’t use Facebook, I buy things online from places other than Amazon, and have email accounts that aren’t hosted by Google. However, all of that goes over Comcast’s network because that’s my only viable choice for Internet service. Also, while FAANG occasionally do things I don’t approve of, they don’t actively lobby congress for things that will make my use of the internet objectively worse (NN, SOPA, etc...).
But no, because Comcast has -bribed- donated to way more congresspeople than Google, because they’re better at playing that game.
Curious: Aren't ISPs and payment processing companies also private organizations? Are DNS "name servers"?
I don't disagree with PG's stance here and I don't think it is censorship, but you must admit that these are "just business decisions" for these parties as well (possibly even Congress)
Sure I see a difference, but I don't think it's nearly as significant as you seem to. These corporations wield an immense amount of power, and although they don't (individually) have the ability to completely silence anyone, neither do ISPs.
I would go with corruption. I don’t see how it’s in anyone’s personal interest who works at the FCC to have reduced access to internet, and it’s super convenient for everyone, so there must be some side benefit to go out of their way to juice the numbers.
The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation. I urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years. The plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open internet for everyone.
Disbanding regulations when companies are that much dug in to a market where there can't reasonably be any competition speaks of extremely anti-taxpayer corporatism, especially when these companies are receiving tax money from the government. I'm leaning towards thinking that the FCC is due some sort of investigation into its activities...
I'm usually not a fan of regulation but it really needs to be said that when huge companies that are often bigger than a lot of the world's government basically come to own huge chunks of critical infrastructure, what other bargaining chip does the average tax payer have to have their interests represented?
That being said, the article mentioning that Verizon is cutting 10k people from its media arm is disingenuous. It has nothing to do with net neutrality, it's a case of large companies misjudging the market for VP-funded, artificially grown blog companies. It has nothing to do with anyone's infrastructure. A multi-national with multiple arms in multiple lines of business will make decisions independent of its own arms and dependent on the market.
This doesn't seem like the best outlet to protest the FCC's stance on net neutrality. The people that are going to be affected most by this (if it does work) are going to be the rank and file at the FCC who have no decision making power and only hold a job there. The FCC has 2k employees and most of them don't even work in the relevant bureau that deals with net neutrality.
When news outlets say the "FCC's plan for net neutrality", what they really mean is the plan that Tom Wheeler and his office put together. You're going to hurt the wrong people if you do this and it succeeds. Why not write to your Congressperson instead or think of something that doesn't adversely affect a ton of people who don't have anything to do with the net neutrality debate?
I personally think that some of the actions that they take are evil. A few examples:
Facebook - the emotional manipulation experiment that they ran with non-consenting users was evil. Technically speaking, users agreed to it via the fine print regarding internal testing, and to me, that makes it even more evil. Internal testing typically means A/B testing, and it is not unreasonable to think that internal testing does not include intentional emotional manipulation.
TelCos - their (United States) relentless push, subterfuge and lobbying to continue to rule the laid lines with an iron fist in spite of the government subsidies to help provide fast connectivity to most Americans. Not only did the telcos not upgrade the lines like they were supposed to, but US customers still pay taxes and fees that should go towards these upgrades that most users don't see. Some quick searching shows that the average download speed last year was below 25 Mb/s. I admit that this is actually an adequate speed for every day use in a cable household that only does light browsing. However the plan was to deliver much faster symmetric speeds. The net neutrality decision is just insult to injury (though that's an FCC decision).
FWIW, when the previous FCC chairman was nominated there was concern about his being a former industry lobbyist [1] - but he supported net neutrality strongly. (On the other hand, he and the Obama administration didn't do much to prevent mergers like Charter + TWC, etc.)
I am a strong advocate for privacy, please understand that before you continue reading this. I don't want ISPs to sell my browsing history, and I am continually disappointed in the Republican opposition to net neutrality and online privacy. I'm even working on an open source project involving cryptography and secret protection, so I have skin in the game.
However, this headline is patently false, right? Congress didn't sell anything. They removed protections that were put into place late last year and hadn't gone into effect as far as I know.
Just because companies are legally capable of selling your browsing data doesn't mean that they absolutely will. As far as I know, my browsing history hasn't been sold by my ISP yet, and the regulations that were rolled back were not the reason why this is true.
Maybe I'm just posting because I like being a contrarian, but I do expect a more sober-minded commentary on this site than I've been getting on some recent news items.
If you're interested in the FCC's response, here is a primary source[0]. I don't buy most of it - I know that this is a lot of spin doctoring, particularly that second paragraph. But it provides insight to how the FCC is viewing this, something I haven't seen a lot of in this coverage.
Here[1] is some coverage from 2015 on the FCC/FTC issue that the third paragraph in that presser talks about. Also worth noting is this HN thread[2] from two years ago, where the top comment is a thoughtful critique of putting the hopes of an open Internet in the hands of a bureaucracy. People didn't agree, but that's the sort of commentary that keeps me coming back to Hacker News.
If, like the Democratic senators who signed the letter, I enjoyed mostly glowing media coverage, I suppose that I would be upset when a company dismisses that glowing coverage as being the result of bias - even if I knew they were correct. But that’s a hardly a reason to abuse your power as a senator to attempt to damage the company that is doing that, especially when they are trying to solve a legitimate problem for the public at their own stations. That’s pretty evil if you ask me.
The internet companies need to lobby, sure, but they also need a "hook." And "openness" and "neutrality" which are words that resonate in Silicon Valley on their own are not ones that resonate in Washington.
Hi Eric! It's always great to interact with our politicians, so thanks for doing this AMA. Now onto my question.
About a week ago Republican FCC member Brendan Carr posted this https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/opinions/no-the-fcc-i... opinion piece to the Washington Post. It gives his view on why repealing title II is good and makes some interesting points. I was wondering if you could share your thoughts on it.
Ours? quite the assumption. Again, I have no doubt in my mind that the large Internet providers care little about consumers, and only about their bottom line. Which is fine. Thats what corporations do. Paying off people to get that, is what I'm disagreeing with, and this reeks of that.
You were saying that they (the authors) were entirely wrong? Did you email the authors of the article? I hope so. Conclusions from facts has been a fairly solid method, that journalists (among others) have used to navigate through the understanding of many things, including the sheer amount of BS added in to bills, created by lobbyists on behalf of corporations.
What do you make of the large Corps suing local municipalities over local fiber offerings? Was that for a better technical standard? or was that just plain ole competition stomping? I'm sure their corporate angle has not changed here.
One standard (as you call it), means one office to subvert with lobbying. Why deny it?
The first point makes sense, but it's hard for me to square with breaking up companies. I don't think any of FAANG has played a real censorious role on the internet. I'm just as free to spin up a random webpage to espouse whatever as I was in 1999. People move around the web differently, but I can still send it to whomever I want. I could also see an argument that AMP and similar technologies hurt journalism, but I hardly ever see that claimed.
If it's a question of agency, to me it feels much better to "vote with my feet" and not patronize companies I dislike than to write my congressperson and receive a form response from some intern. You may be right that people just expect better from the internet than federal contracting.
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