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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."
Unless one of those 100 startups is owned by Vladimir Putin, "Moscow Donald" isn't interested.
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.
And as we all know, Republicans are all about being good for business.
And the businesses of America have always thought about the people of this country, first and foremost, whether importing hundreds of thousands of African slaves to toil on Cotton and Tobacco plantations, to starting wars over bananas, pineapples and guano.
Truly, they are blessed
Seriously, the last thing major investors (the kind that run Goldman Sachs) want is disruption. Just keep the gravy train going and fire off a little war every now and then and they're happy. Nobody wants another Google, Netflix or Square changing the landscape. Well, nobody Congress is listening too anyway.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Dateline SAN JOSE: Special interests make dire predictions of the future to try to gain favorable government policy treatment. "Give us what we want or it will be just terrible," they said. "We'll all die of Silicon Valley ennui!" When asked how many startups would die anyway of unrealistic optimism and poor management, they just glared and sullenly shuffled away, whispering under their breath.
Sadly, we never got the chance to ask them how accurate their other predictions of the future were.
There are approximately 17 million Millennials living at home in their parents' households, so only 800 figured out how to start a business on the internet? Or are we just mercy killing off the bad concepts now before they burn through the angel investor cash?
Always surprising that people are still taking Trump-selected members of the administration at their word, or treat them as someone who would listen to their concerns with a fair mind. These are hard right Republicans. They're in it for the money, not for you peons. Give him a bigger bribe than the next guy if you want him to listen.
...the cable companies might slow down Uber & Breitbart news.
support net neutrality.
"Our business model depends on the fact that we don't pay for network infrastructure upgrades." - Internet content companies.
Nah, they're worried that the telco cartel will see their profits and slow down their packets unless they pay extra.
i.e. "tortuous interference in business" made legal by cash to Republican Congressmen.
And before you go all defending and parisan, those same Republicans just legalized selling your browser history.
...always split the comment between the subject and body?
.
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.
Pai is fully bought and paid for by the entrenched incumbent telecom providers,and is going to do exactly what they tell him to do no matter what the facts are.
Since it increases our costs more than tenfold. Trump is really helping competition on the Internet by not shoving this artificial cost down our throats.
These are big businesses with massive financial backing. Many of them currently dominate their respective markets, and many have business models based on advertising and high bandwidth usage. When they ask for "net neutrality", they are asking for protectionist legislation that cements in their current market positions and protects them from newer, smaller competitors and from non-advertising based revenue models. That's because net neutrality redistributes the cost of providing bandwidth and therefore favors advertising-based revenue and bandwidth intensive businesses.
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 had a sucky sig.
Honestly, do you think the lawmakers in charge are idiots? They know exactly what they're doing. Telling them that they'll kill startups and small business is like telling them that anti-drug laws as they're written will put disproportionately more innocent black men in jail.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I bought this 750ml bottle of wine, it had only 300ml of wine in it, and when I complained to the store, they told to me they gave some of the bottle I paid for to Bob because THEY DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH WINE to fill all the bottles they sold.
How dare I demand a full bottle of wine according to the label I read!
How dare I demand a free 450ml of wine from them! How could I be so selfish!
mby bedpost up my RAM) For about 20
Remember 13 years ago when we all posted links to our American representatives and with their phones and email exploding the DRM trusted PC requirements went away from a potential bill.
Can you all afford 3 minutes of your life
Ok most senators and congressman are too stupid to know what net neutrality is. They gain their information from experts ... experts brought to by lobbyists from Cox, Comcast, Time Warner, to educate our politicians what this issue is. They are simply ignorant.
So here is the link for your congressman. Here is the link to your senator. The people who read these are called scriptwriters and if they get thousands of angry emails I can guarantee you it will at least get your politicians attention.
When I linked this in 2003 or 2004 here Slashdot posted a story a few days later stating congress was confused, dumbfounded, and shocked. The bill died :-D
If you have a Republican write professionally that you do not want big brother government to trample innovation and stop jobs. Explain your I.T. position and career and explain your employer and startups already pay extra for bandwidth and this amounts to a bribe. End it off with if the United States won't allow us to be a leader in technology another cheaper country like China or India will who do not have these problems with Net Neutrality and can operate simply on bandwidth uses without double and triple dipping.
If your senator and or congressman is a democrat explain politely that this is a terrible bill that will hurt lower income internet users and new startups. Explain your I.T. position and career and explain your employer and startups already pay extra for bandwidth and this amounts to double dipping which will hurt America's competitive advantage. Also mention the top 5 technology companies are active Democratic donors to your party including Facebook, Google, and Microsoft and that if America fails to take initiative for regulating tax payer infrastructure then another country with more freedoms like India or China will take the jobs instead and this will help lower income consumers by keeping prices lower.
http://saveie6.com/
Make it a government regulated utility service so it actually has a quality of service, like telephones. Net neutrality is a continuing BS-saga that should become part of law, to avoid this drama in the future.
In 25 comments on this subject, there's hardly a trace of non-partisan discussion but plenty of blatantly fact-free dissing. It's a miracle that nobody has insulted GitHub's mother yet. If this is the way you deal with simple topics like net neutrality, how do you guys expect to keep a country going? You are truly fucked.
If your app needs a big commercial grade internet pipe to get it tested, pay for it.
Dont just use a collection of consumer grade accounts.
Stop with the juice machines, company cars, fancy chairs and wasting investors cash on renting in CA.
Move to a cheaper state with low cost power, low cost local workers, low taxes and spend the savings on bandwidth and testing.
Put all the effort into the app, test it with real bandwidth and get it to market.
Happy investors, happy local workers and the internet provider gets paid for the bandwidth too.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Agreed. We need ISPs to be classified as common carriers. That will solve this problem AND the selling-your-browsing-habits problem.
Go fuck yourselves. All 800 of you.
Oh the irony with Y Combinator. They were in the headlines over Peter Thiels support of Trump.
Better to just make sure the big companies rake in the cash! MAGA!
...back when I worked there. (Not that I ever met him or anything, but when we got bought by Verizon I'm positive he was one of the suits.*)
I haven't looked into Net Neutrality. My issue here is "Truth in Labeling" -- is it REALLY what it says it is (All packets are normally treated equal, with the commonly expected QoS overrides and NAKs and squelches needed for normal operation? -- vs -- Packet loss because we're funneling Netflix thru a single 300 baud modem while it's racked neighbors connect 10G links to V's internal movie servers. You can connect; let's see you actually do it), or is it like the Patriot Act and others, a misnamed law with weird effects? I'm thinking that it IS what "everyone" wants (a level packet paying field) but not positive.
I _DO_ think Pai is not evil -- he's a lawyer after all, it's just his nature to stretch, improve, and (Hi Lisa!) bend all existing laws to his will. I think he is trying to get all of those pesky regulations out of the way so Business can be done. That being said, why bother with any laws at all -- they just get in the way and slow things down.
Here's my take of him after hearing that 800 startups might be shut down: Picture, or Action.
(* OT: during one of the group meetings where our company was being bought out and they were fielding questions, one was: "So what's the name of the new company?" McAdams, the CEO, looked puzzled so the guy continued: "You keep saying this is a merger between equals, so I wanted to know if you had thought up a name for the newly combined company." McAdam scowled at him and said "Verizon." The guy didn't ask a follow-up question.)
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
So, we had a long period where ISPs were classified as Information Services rather than Telecommunication Services. This allowed them to not have to be treated as common carriers and thus not have to be neutral or share their lines. They loved that and this decision is an attempt to bring that back. But why on earth would the courts allow this classification when it's so clearly a lie? Why did they let them be classified this way for a decade?
An Information Service is a service you pay so that they will themselves provide you with information. For example, if you subscribe to a stock ticker service which provides you with information about what stocks have sold at what prices, that's an Information Service. A Telecommunications Service is a service you pay so that they will connect you to a network where you can contact other parties which may be distant from you and communicate with them. For example, a telephone company. It's very, very clear that no one signs up for an ISP to get information from the ISP. We sign up to use the internet to communicate with servers the vast majority of which are not owned or operated by the ISP. When Comcast attempted to argue that they shouldn't be classified as a Telecommunications service, they cited the fact that they provided information to customers because they ran DNS servers. The idea that most customers are paying their ISP primarily because they want DNS service is laughable. So why is the FCC even allowed to classify these services as something they aren't?
Ok most senators and congressman are too stupid to know what net neutrality is.
The head of the FCC is saying it needs to be done away with. Pai isn't ignorant, he knows exactly what he's doing. This isn't an accident, this is malicious.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I'm all for it then!
30 years of experience? Yeah, I agree with you there.
But squeaky clean? She's been corrupt as shit for a long time dude.
If net neutrality goes it will be like trying to start a transport business if the roads were owned by a consortium of existing providers - who were allowed to charge you or impose travel and route restrictions as they liked
If they'll lie about that, what else might they lie about in their own interest?
You expect someone with the name ajit to care what americans think?
Perhaps these guys don't care and are trying to destroy the Internet, to protect the outdated and ineffective business model of the cable and media giants.
Joke's on you, Comcast, RIAA, and friends: I didn't buy your media before, and I won't after your shenanigans, either. If the ISPs want to degrade their own service, I'll simply cut the network cord. My generation knows how to live without the Internet. You can always swing by the library if you need to download or otherwise access something. With a full GNU/Linux distro, there's a ton of things you can do with a computer and a few tarballs.
I don't think a lot of these companies understand that for some people, the Internet is how they interact with the world. They won't suddenly start spending a bunch of money on the big businesses if it's taken away. They'll just completely leave the market.
Of course it will kill them; that's the idea.
With net neutrality dead the robber barons get additional profits--always nice...
And even better a barrier to entry.
Petitioning thieves not to steal isn't going to work. We need to kick them out and get new thieves whose interests are more aligned with our own.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
An end of net neutrality is the best outcome for big businesses. They no longer have to invest in new features and content and can milk their current offerings to the nth degree, same way phone and cable companies do it with their local or regional de facto monopolies. Net neutrality is not an all or nothing, it needs to be service dependent. If a tweet or an email comes through a few seconds later might not matter much as long as it helps keeping video streams from dropping out. Loading a web page half a second slower is likely not that big of a deal as long as VoIP connections are stable. Making an email as important as a block of a video stream is neutral, but that neutrality does not help anyone. For startups the barrier of entry needs to be as low as it can be, otherwise it shuts the door on innovation.
Speaking of third world countries: Here in Uganda, we have nationwide infrastructure sharing that includes towers, 2.4/5G meteo WIFI APs, metro fibre, and backhaul fibre. We have MVNOs, nearly ubiquitous mobile coverage, an extremely competitive market, a healthy interconnection ecosystem, and a growing amount of local traffic. We're in a race to the bottom for prices, and a race for the top in service quality. Glad I don't live in America.
Some roads are "free" (paid for by tax-payers) and some roads have tolls (also paid for by tax-payers...toll changes is just free money for the State). Some roads have "special" lanes that you can use for carpooling (charging people based on content being delivered) or pay above and beyond all the taxes people already pay. If you don't do either, the police will chase you down and ticket you.
Tolls are MUCH higher if you are a truck delivering goods to people (again, content based charging). The excuse is trucks cause more wear and tear on the roads so the money is needed for infrastructure. Sounds just like what ISPs tell us...
I just get tired of the political hypocrisy (both sides). Toll roads are fine but ISP tolls are bad. I guess companies cannot increase profits but it's perfectly fine the government gets richer and bigger.
Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not after you!
1. Make sure Big Business wins over the Little Business
2. Concentrate power to the Big Business over time
3. Take over the Big Business to protect the national security
4. Communism!!!!!!
In order to enforce "net neutrality" the government will have to monitor and regulate and that is the plan. Even if it isn't necessary, they are evil enough to use the pretext. It always sounds innocent. There are evil people in the world.
So .. this group of companies want to use other company's infrastructure in order to make money. And want to do so without having to pay for that ability.
Sucks to be you .... that's not how free enterprise works.
If you want to use someone's labor, be it Facebook or AT&T, there is always a price to pay whether it's up front in expenses or ads for 'free' service'. You pay your provider only to get you to the rest of the network, you don't pay for the 'rest of the network'. But your provider pays for that ability, and some of that gets pushed down to you.
If you want to use the 'best of the network', I don't have any issues with those providers charging something for that privilege. Either through fees on your end for improved throughput or fees to my provider for the same thing.
And if you didn't plan for that in your business plan or can't adapt, it's your own fucking fault.
Businesses are hit with all types of changes in expenses throughout their lifecycle. Adapt or die.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
They need to collectively get the job rolls for those companies and make this a jobs issue. That's a topic that has traction these days and will make it a political issue that has to be discussed.
Warning: Teh poster of this messaeg is lysdexic
To any of these 800 'startups'. They'd demand that the larger spaces be broken up so all spaces were the same size. then they'd probably demand the established businesses pay a higher rent, anyway, to make a 'fair' playing field so they can prosper. Just another socialist/communist economy model straight out of academia.
If you can't afford to grow, get out of the garden.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you want it regulated write it into law. Why would I want a group of un-elected officials declaring what you can and can't do with regards to the internet. I don't and neither should you. They are removing FCC overreach and allowing congress to write it into law instead.
I kid, I kid. 760 would fail anyway.
But really "startups" in the technology sector are supposed to be "disruptors" so wouldn't it be the job of a startup to take the current situation (be it net neutrality or Cable-Company controlled blood-letting) and turn that into a surprising profit model that exploits some weakness or failing of the status quo?
The tighter Comcast squeezes the rock, the easier it should be to wriggle through the cracks in their failing business model.
These startups need to realize that the internet infrastructure a) doesn't belong to them and b) doesn't belong to the government. Neither of them paid for its development, ongoing maintenance, and upgrading. Besides, many of these companies existed before the reclassification. They also need a little history lesson in the fact that deregulation of telecommunications in the 80s lead to the internet as we know it today. Prior to 1985, use of the internet for commercial purposes was "frowned upon in this establishment!"
If net neutrality is such a good idea, then why is AT&T building FirstNet?
How is it going to kill them? Y Combinator, Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, Imgur, Nextdoor, and Warby Parker are going to die because some ISP gives a higher priority to traffic to someone else? That's not going to happen. The websites for these companies aren't going to get blocked by anyone.
GitHubs mother put subversion repos in her CVS! She was mercurial by nature! She so ugly, she used RCS.
I only visit by today's standards low bandwidth websites. I am happy with a 1 megabit/sec internet connection. Frankly, I think mediocre DSL is prevalent, because that is only what most people need, and people tend to be cheap. I have been hearing the warnings of 'net neutrality' for over a decade. The only thing which has been blocked, are high bandwidth websites, such as Netflix. That's it. Yes, LTE has more restrictions, but last mile cell phone data is expensive.
I will support Net Neutrality when websites like the dailykos, or beitbart gets blocked.
Comments here are infantile at best! The lack of vision is stunning, I just wonder at it. The Internet IS NOT public domain, end of conversation. Altho is been advertise as such since it's birth, IT IS NOT!
And to prove that one has to go no further than looking at Jon Postel's saga and early demise. The notion that "winners" make history is bull shit propaganda, the TRUTH ALWAYS see the light for those that have eyes to see it.
They are the owners of this shit... and they want to implement this, so IT WILL be implemented. The answer is: bail out of it! Considering your addition to has not made you totally dependent of it. Once CAN bail out of it. The network will serve no purpose, if no one uses it.
Killing Me, Killing You
Killing all we have
As our loves wither away
Burning Me, Burning You
Burning us to ash
Drowning us in a sea of flames
He's saying the 2015 rules haven't identified or fixed a single problem with the Internet so far, and they're a liability for a free and open Internet.
And he'd be right about that. The 2015 "Net Neutrality" rules contain absolutely no Net Neutrality, but they removed the Internet from classification as an Information Service, which gave it legal protections around privacy, wiretapping, and . The 2015 FCC rules actually had the effect of stripping the FTC of enforcing its privacy rules, and applying obscenity laws that normally only apply to telecommunications services.
But yes, when Pai raises these concerns about how the Government can now wiretap your search history and can't enforce privacy laws, he's being malicious. Obviously. /s
Startups don't pay off the politicians. They don't lobby, they don't contribute to political campaigns, they don't buy influence. They can't because they don't have any money (in relative terms).
Therefore Ajit Pai, Donald Trump and all the rest don't care about startups. They are billionaires who have already made their fortunes (maybe not Pai specifically. Trump has enough billionaires in his cabinet to justify this comment, believe me).
What is the priority of a billionaire? To keep the billions and to make billions more. To be an Important Person, a Mover and Shaker. To think Deep Thoughts and not get their hands dirty.
The Trump team doesn't care about startups, innovation, or any of that. Look at who Trump played to during his campaign. Coal workers and the coal industry. Air conditioner manufacturers. Next I expect Trump to sing the praises of onshore cotton weaving mills, steel mills and copper cable factories. Let's revive the buggy and get those buggy whip manufacturers back to work!
Trump will fail them all and still claim success.
The cities should all lay dark fiber to every house (no not crappy GPON, but dark fiber from the CO to every residence and business). Then rent that fiber to the ISP. They can run 1Mb, or 1 Tb across it, for the same price. A price just high enough to cover the costs of install and maintenance.Your phone company doesn't more to call Dominos vs Pizza Hut, so why should we expect that from our ISP? Net Neutrality shouldn't be necessary. But the companies committing the fraud of unequal access also lie about it. The market can only correct itself with informed consumers.
Learn to love Alaska
We never got Net Neutrality. We got a program for government to take control of the Internet and Obama and the FCC slapped a label on it of "Net Neutrality" but it's not what we expected.
We told you all about this previously.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7WHoqsRuxU
Does this refer to the diluted version of net-neutrality we got in the past few years? Because unless you are a child, the information was available to see that was going to do little to help anyone of us People.
But these companies are whining about the impact of eliminating the diluted rules, while not doing anything about the 62% of the u.s. land-mass which does not have access to high-speed internet.
Hey business dip-shits - you are missing almost 2/3rds of the u.s. geography as customers. Net-neutrality will never get you any % of that business.
We need many more choices to create real competition and we need business to run better infrastructure to all those underserved consumers.
NO ONE can say we cannot serve every home in the u.s. with some decent internet connection.
Because long before computers we ran twisted pair to every fucking residence in the nation.
Silicon valley is increasingly becoming a leech on the success of the rest of country. People voted last year AGAINST retarded statist ideas like "net neutrality" but the coastal liberal elite silicon valley types now demanding ever greater big government intrusion into the free market principles that made internet possible in the first place. Is any wonder these are the people who push and profit off of scumbag Democrat party policies via things like fake news and political correctness shutting down freedom of speech?
So yeah, contrary to the violent, nazi-inspired leftist "collective rule" that undermines "net neutrality", the lack of regulation will make internet cheaper and better for everyone, and not just the wealthy left who are work hard to keep "flyover country" down.
tldr: So-called "net nautrality" is un-American and you all suck for not understanding the issue deeply enough to know that it is Soros funded conspiracy to undermine our nation.
Thank you...I'd been reading all of the posts here, wondering if there might be some petition or other forum to express our anger over this change. But, I'm perfectly happy to do it the old fashioned way.
Just another day in Paradise
Stumbled into tech when IBM was big and blew. Used the open modem line on the raised floors at 590 mad to make free international calls cause it was funny. PSW unlock a hex dump that distracted core or sort your list for free. Made our own index. Inside was really inside and it was funny. AtT was the next block over but still had not replaced the tone switches in deposit ny. Bouncing was bouncing and there was no other way around unless you were a ham. The big pipe is dead so find another way cows.