Kill Net Neutrality and You'll Kill Us, Say 800 US Startups (google.com)

A group of more than 800 startups has sent a letter to the FCC chairman Ajit Pai saying they are "deeply concerned" about his decision to kill net neutrality -- reversing the Title II classification of internet service providers. The group, which includes Y Combinator, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, Imgur, Nextdoor, and Warby Parker, added that the decision could end up shutting their businesses. They add, via an article on The Verge: "The success of America's startup ecosystem depends on more than improved broadband speeds. We also depend on an open Internet -- including enforceable net neutrality rules that ensure big cable companies can't discriminate against people like us. We're deeply concerned with your intention to undo the existing legal framework. Without net neutrality, the incumbents who provide access to the Internet would be able to pick winners or losers in the market. They could impede traffic from our services in order to favor their own services or established competitors. Or they could impose new tolls on us, inhibiting consumer choice. [...] Our companies should be able to compete with incumbents on the quality of our products and services, not our capacity to pay tolls to Internet access providers."

Comments

Why the fuck would he care?

[Anonymous Coward]

He's one of Trump's cronies. They're all in it to get rich together. You think they care about some place where a bunch of hippies share open source code or hipsters try to sell pretty trinkets for peanuts? Fuck no.

Welcome to America made great again. Better get used to it, because it's gonna get a whole lot worse before it gets any better.

Re: Why the fuck would he care?

[Maritz]

should not have to fund these lazy entitled bums at the bottom who buy designer shoes with their salaries and then claim welfare because they can't afford food.

Do you get mad about real stuff, too?

Re: Why the fuck would he care?

[Anonymous Coward]

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” -- Mark Twain

Re: Why the fuck would he care?

[pr0t0]

I'd like to suggest a different approach as to how you view your hard-earned wealth. View it not as a treasure trove to place behind you and defend with sword and shield against the hordes clashing at your gates. Instead, think of it as a wellspring that affords you the privilege of helping others in times of drought.

It's easy to stand where you stand and call people on welfare "lazy". But you couldn't be counted among the top 1% if there was no 99% below you. You are fortunate to live in a world where the education you gained, the knowledge and skills you acquired, and the choices you made, led to doing something that people were willing to pay enough for to put in you in that bracket. There are nearly as many reasons for a particular person to be impoverished as there are impoverished people. To label them all as lazy, is well...that's kind of lazy, and simplistic thinking.

You worked your ass off so you could live a life that wasn't focused on survival. The ability to help others not focus as much on survival is a gift. It's a gift of a society built upon, for good or ill, inequality; the same society that placed a high enough value on your chosen profession to remunerate you in the way it did.

But your money isn't the reward for your hard work. The reward is the ability to help others.

Re:Why the fuck would he care?

[marcgvky]

Amazing that any non-progressive voice on Slashdot gets voted down, as flamebait.

For me, I've been in the Internet business since before most of you had graduated from middle school. And the Net was fine with light-touch regulation, all the while. But suddenly, we get a heavy handed liberal progressive in the White House and the light shines upon the problem and NOW we need to regulate and control everything.... including what you can say and write??? Yeah, that was the next foot-fall, regulation of "equal speech".

My personal belief is that the free market finds a way to convey services that are in-demand and perceived as having value, from the consumers perspective. Look at all of the examples (e.g. the music industry fought digital music and streaming, VoIP, on-demand TV, etc. etc.)

Re: Why the fuck would he care?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the record, also in tech. I'm not a 1%er, I'm a 4%er, so not as well off as you but certainly not entirely dissimilar.

Here is the questions people are trying to guide you to be asking:

How much is your skillset worth in a society with no tech infrastructure?
How is it society can afford to throw so much money and so many skilled people at an activity not related to immediate day-to-day survival?
Isn't it fortunate that a school and materials that teach your skills existed, so you didn't have to personally discover how to build a computer, generate and distribute electricity, or any other number of required factors?
Isn't it fortunate that while you did likely have a school job, you didn't have to spend most of your day hunting and gathering and recovering from injuries sustained while hunting and gathering, while going to said school?

You did indeed work hard for your skills, and did indeed make good choices. But those skills are valuable BECAUSE that market exists and the infrastructure existed to let you even TRY. You are more reliant on the infrastructure of modern society than you seem to realize, and failing to support that same infrastructure closes opportunities for others. We all drive down the same road, and some of us go further than others, be it from luck, good choices, hard work, or usually combinations of the three. But don't pretend you owe the road and the people who pave it nothing for your success.

Re:Why the fuck would he care?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing that any non-progressive voice on Slashdot gets voted down, as flamebait.

Every time someone says something like this you know that THEY are the ones who are biased and are the sort who seek validation in the number of people who think the same way.

For me, I've been in the Internet business since before most of you had graduated from middle school.

What do you want, a cookie?

And the Net was fine with light-touch regulation, all the while. But suddenly, we get a heavy handed liberal progressive in the White House and the light shines upon the problem and NOW we need to regulate and control everything.... including what you can say and write??? Yeah, that was the next foot-fall, regulation of "equal speech".

In the early days of the Internet, there were like 50 dialup ISPs all competing for your business. These days, you're lucky if you have TWO choices for an ISP. Any time a group of people get fed up with shitty service from one of those ISPs, and decides to do the "free market" thing of creating their own co-op ISP, the Comcast and AT&Ts of the region will bury them in lawsuits. Then they'll bribe conservative lawmakers to pass protectionist laws prohibiting anyone other than the incumbent ISP from being able to offer service. Also, companies like Comcast didn't own NBC/Universal, making them both a content PRODUCER and content PROVIDER.

The "light regulation" you talk so fondly about is what led to the situation we have today. In situations like with Comcast, they have every incentive to try and hobble competing services like Netflix and Hulu. So in order for those companies to just be on an equal footing, they have to pay a toll to Comcast to NOT be throttled into oblivion. That doesn't even get into how Comcast's streaming videos don't tend to count against your bandwidth cap, while Netflix does, EVEN IF Netflix has some CDN servers inside Comcast's network -- which they had to PAY Comcast to do, where ISPs that AREN'T content producers were generally happy to let Netflix put some servers inside their network because it provides better service for their customers.

My personal belief is that the free market finds a way to convey services that are in-demand and perceived as having value, from the consumers perspective. Look at all of the examples (e.g. the music industry fought digital music and streaming, VoIP, on-demand TV, etc. etc.)

All of those things are directly threatened by the reversal of net neutrality regulations. I'll just keep picking on Comcast as a stand-in for all major ISPs. Say Comcast wants to promote it's own "triple play" packages with phone and TV service, so they start throttling any other VoIP provider and Sony's TV service competitor to DirectTV Now. Under the free market/light regulation system you're so fond of, there's nothing stopping Comcast from doing this, and in most parts of the country, you don't even have the option to just move to another ISP.

Now you might be able to make an argument that the free market has been stifled in regards to a healthy number of competitors. If you can create a scenario where everyone has at least 3 choices for broadband providers, I think you'd find a lot of the liberals and progressives you like to blame for everything would be happy to revisit the idea of net neutrality and whether it's still necessary.

Re:Why the fuck would he care?

[atrimtab]

So you think that every road should be a toll road where the owner that road can discriminate on who can use that road or crowd out those that won't pay the latest toll?

The free market does not work where a monopoly, duopoly, or a small oligopoly exists. The players will simply set prices and policies in the same way that gas stations watch each others prices across the street from each other.

This is why utilities are all regulated to prevent the purposeful discrimination and market distortions created by rent seekers seeking maximum advantage.

I've been in the ISP business also. Net Neutrality is a good thing for everyone except the toll road owners.

Re:Breaking News

[Anonymous Coward]

[Sorry, your ISP requires a Slashdot® SuperPremiumExpansionPack to view the content of this post]

Current rules flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

The FCC's Obama-era net neutrality rules were far too weak and failed to protect net neutrality when there was a chance. And now that Trump is in place, the window of opportunity will probably be closed for quite some time.

During the whole time that the current regs were in place (since 2015), Verizon and AT&T violated net neutrality about as blatantly as you could imagine with their zero-rating policy that promotes and benefits their own streaming services to the exclusion of all others. The FCC did squat. Of course, things will only get worse now, but the situation was certainly not rosy up until this point.

Re:We need free bandwidth

[The Cisco Kid]

If you think these companies don't pay for their Internet connections, you are deluded.

Re:We need free bandwidth

[sdinfoserv]

meanwhile Comcast, leader of the Cabal, experienced revenue growth of 7.91% from 74.51bn to 80.40bn while net income improved 6.52% from 8.16bn to 8.70bn.
With a gross margin of a mere 69.5%, the CEO could be heard screaming blocks away "MORE MORE MORE", as the board room followed in his lead and a chant broke out.

Tone down the trolls?

[irving47]

I think network neutrality is a good thing. And I'm willing to bet most republicans and even slightly right-leaning people that will read these comments on /. feel the same way. Now might not be the best time to alienate them/us further with "Moscow Donald" remarks and more demonization.

Just a thought, guys.

I paid for them

[goombah99]

They are sending data to me. I paid comcast to get it. COmcast can't say what data I should be able to get. They are a common carrier not a gate keeper.

Re:But but, it'sâ a Republican idea!

[Z00L00K]

Republicans are conservatives so they only care for big established business, never for small business and startups unless they can show a huge profit or impact the trade balance.

Re:big businesses asking for special favors

[Anonymous Coward]

I stand up a server in a datacenter. Then I pay for throughput, do I not?
I install a computer in my home. Then I then pay for throughput, do I not?
Then we've got Tier 1,2 and 3 ISP's all motivated to build a fair and honest market for clearing throughput. If Netflix wants to consume 50% of a data centers throughput, it's all already paid for, lock stock and barrel.

Let me tell you what this debate really is about.

In a world where everyone has a 100Mbps bidirectional internet connection, you can download 3TB of data, or 360, 8GB DVD's, in 3 Days; that's a year's worth of movie watching. What happens when someone torrents the last 50 years of TV and an app to organize it all? That's the hard death of their business model.

I am seeing 2PB (2048TB) of storage in a 2U rack, today; in 8GB DVD's, that's 262,144 DVD's. An 80 year old has 29,200 days in their life. Today, that storage is a million bucks. What happens in 10 years when it's $150? Someone goes into business cloning and selling them for $200. The collapse of their model is inevitable.

We've changed from connecting residential properties to the internet over a public utility, POTS, to connecting residential properties to the internet using a private utility, cable. And these companies want to charge pay-per-page-view pricing to their customers, as well as keep them from blocking ad's. They want to dice and slice the internet and serve it up piecemeal. They want to be the content billing service. Once they have done that, then they own the distribution channel lock stock and barrel, they can do anything they want.

We literally have rural customers none of these companies want to touch with a 10 foot pole being sued for running their own municipal fiber. Why are they so afraid? How does a community running their own internet lines affect them in the slightest? This kind of activity only makes sense in a 3rd world country, and that's exactly where we are headed. If we were getting away from ad's, everyone would have a voluntary supercookie they'd use for billing. Bam. Done. I Guarantee you, you'll pay per page view, and you will still have ad's, but the ISP will prevent you from blocking them. You will have zero privacy, your comments and user-generated content will be confiscated or censored at their whim. All just like a 3rd world country.

Re:Why didn't the courts overrule this last time?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why did they let them be classified this way for a decade?

Because the courts give strong deference to the agencies to interpret the fairly general laws congress writes for them. Ordinarily that makes sense because the agencies are the closest to the issues and thus typically have a better understanding of the details and implications than the court.

But when you get ideological people in charge instead of functional people, then that argument doesn't apply. But the deference is still there.

FWIW, Scalia really hated the ruling in the BrandX case that officially let the FCC decide the classification. He wrote a dissent much like your argument. When his own ideology wasn't applicable to a case he was actually a reasonable guy.

Re:Favorable?

[Maritz]

Why wouldn't we just deal with the issue when it happened rather than making a bunch of rules for everyone to follow and hiring police to enforce them on everyone?

Applied to a wider context, this is pretty much why our species is doomed. No pre-emption. All reaction.

Re:Favorable?

[Maritz]

Everything but the IP header is not addressed to them and therefore interpreting it in any way should be considered illegal wiretapping.

They greased the right palms. End of story.

Re:Why didn't the courts overrule this last time?

[JoelKatz]

Because that has worked well for decades as a delicate balance has been sketched out between content providers and internet service providers. Now, one group wants to get the government to disrupt that delicate, fair balance in their favor. And a bunch of suckers support this massive increase in government regulation because they fear something that, even though it is currently legal, has not happened and is not happening. That is, the free market is working perfectly, and they want to replace it with regulation that benefits information providers and harms ISPs.

Even worse than that

[drinkypoo]

Of course they care if net neutrality will kill off 800 startups. The government loves to kill off small corporations, small business, etc. Big corporations lobby for laws which benefit them and harm new players. These 800 startups would have better stayed quiet, because all they've done is just give just one more reason to kill net neutrality.

Only a total cuck dumbfuck could believe that our government supports free trade.