To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet (vice.com)

In light of reports that FCC plans to announce a full repeal of net neutrality protections later this week, Jason Koebler, editor-in-chief of Motherboard, suggests that it is time we cut our reliance on big telecom monopolies. He writes: Net neutrality as a principle of the federal government will soon be dead, but the protections are wildly popular among the American people and are integral to the internet as we know it. Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors, net neutrality must be protected by a populist revolution in the ownership of internet infrastructure and networks. In short, we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States. There has never been a better time to start your own internet service provider, leverage the publicly available fiber backbone, or build political support for new, local-government owned networks. For the last several months, Motherboard has been chronicling the myriad ways communities passed over by big telecom have built their own internet networks or have partnered with small ISPs who have committed to protecting net neutrality to bring affordable high speed internet to towns and cities across the country. Update: FCC has announced a plan to repeal net neutrality.

Comments

If you want me to join, there are conditions

[El Cubano]

we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States

If you want me to join this effort, there are some conditions. First, no Google, Facebook, or the like. Second, no government involvement in setting policy or in enforcement.

You know what? Forget it. I think what I am actually looking for is FidoNet.

Re:"leverage the publicly available fiber backbone

[mfh]

Also, unless there are massive advances in satellite internet (which there very well could be), the reliance upon massive corporations who own backbones will always be there holding us back.

We need advanced technology to free us but the problem is that R&D projects are always going to be hamstrung by lobbyists and big corps.

The other big issue here is student debt, tbh. Take any PHD and unless they sell their soul to big corps, they are penniless. It reminds me of guys like Tesla, who despite all of his advancements for human technology, died alone and completely depressed and broke.

If we could eradicate reliance upon educational institutions for furthering human knowledge, we could then start seeing more and more open source solutions to big problems.

AI is going to somewhat solve this problem. The AI arms race will be all about computing power. As quantum computers advance and become more accessible, an average person will eventually be able to do way more than they could today, including research and also personal protection, on the same level as large corporations or governments. But even then, we have the problem that everything we use for computing is sourced by massive corporations. Sure, eventually 3d printing will make home computer construction a possibility, but that's a long ways away.

If the world starts embracing a fair universal income standard, we could also see huge advancements happening from basements and garages at a much higher rate than today but still these efforts will face roadblocks designed by massive companies like MSFT and Apple who prefer to keep us in the dark about most of their design and getting worse every day for selfishness.

Today? Students are caught within the politics of old boys networks. That also is a huge obstacle. That said, most of these kinds of problems could potentially change dramatically as we further deplete our natural resources and our governments continue to be terrible examples of human beings.

But if you look at Health Care, for example, in many countries where a proper health care standard exists where people aren't bankrupted by hospital bills, that is always a public service and never is there a case supporting 3rd party health care where citizens are better off short term or long term.

I guess if there was a state security element to health care, we might see worse results with a public health care system, but overall the private healthcare systems are just terribly corrupt.

Parallels what's happening with Rust versus C++.

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me a lot about what we're currently seeing happening with the Rust programming language. It's following a very similar path, and I think the outcome could be the same in the end.

So there's the incumbent. In the case of Rust, the incumbent is C++. It has been entrenched for decades, and has become very successful.

Then we have these Rust upstarts come along, who want to do things their own way. It's not necessarily the case that they can do any better; they're more interested in just being different.

So a huge amount of time and effort and money is invested in creating Rust. Lots of infrastructure, such as compilers and standard libraries, are built. Meanwhile, the incumbent, C++, continues to evolve.

Now it's several years later, and after much turmoil, Rust finally hits its 1.0 release. It's widely hyped as being able to compete with the incumbent, C++.

Yet by this time the incumbent, C++, has also undergone some significant changes. C++14 is bringing some huge benefits, and there's even more great stuff in progress with C++17.

Despite being different, it turns out that Rust isn't so great after all. In a lot of ways it has far more flaws and warts than the incumbent, C++, has. It turns out that it isn't "better" in any meaningful way, and is actually a lot worse in many respects.

You're right when you say "infrastructure is not cheap". This doesn't just apply to networking technology, either. It applies just as well to programming languages, and the Rust versus C++ debacle is a perfect example of how such a situation almost always turns out in favor of the incumbent, and not the upstart.

C++ beat Rust at its own game. I don't see why the same couldn't happen with the Internet versus any other upstart.

Re: Last Mile Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a lot of cheap options for trunks, it's the last mile that's the issue. Just using advertised prices, I would cost about $28k/month to lease dark-fiber to a major IX ~300 miles away, where I can buy up 100Gb connections to Netflix, Amazon AWS, Hulu, and others for $5k/month/port. I'm not entirely sure about the pricing for a DWMD line card, but I see they go all the way up to 70Tb/s per fiber and I don't need more than 1Tb/s. I figure less than $100k/m for the ballpark of 1Tb/s for 95% of typical bandwidth usage. Major trunk providers also peer at the IX, where I can buy tier1 transit at a rate of about $0.1/mbit.

The real problem is the tens to hundreds of millions to run the last mile fiber, the red tape around it, and the man-hours to install and support such a network. General rule of thumb is 97-99% of the cost of a medium or larger ISP is support.

PUD/County-Level solutions work

[Strider-]

I've said this multiple times on slashdot, but in my experience, the best option is to resolve this issue at the County/PUD level. My favourite example is what is available in Chelan and Douglas counties, in Eastern Washington state. In both of these counties, the PUDs have built out nearly ubiquitous FTTH networks.

The trick is that the PUDs only provide the last mile service, they don't provide the content (in the case of TV) or Internet service. When a local resident wants to sign up, they have the choice of some 8 or 9 ISPs, and 6+ TV providers, all of whom in turn transport that service over the County network. Businesses can also buy transport from Zayo, Cogent, and some other peering provider. For the resident, it's easy... Their bill for TV or Internet (or both), has something like a $6/mo line access charge which covers the fiber connection, and the rest is for service. On the flip side, the service provider doesn't need to maintain the last mile.

The PUDs themselves are responsible to their residents through elections, and from my observation are very responsive to faults in their systems. I was involved in the summer of 2015 when a wildfire burned through and knocked out a significant chunk of their infrastructure, both power and fiber. They had the fiber truck rolling right behind the power trucks, and had the system back up and running as soon as they could source and plant 50+ replacement power poles.

This kind of thing really does work.

Your interests aren't necessarily mine

[rsilvergun]

maybe you support abortion, maybe you don't. Maybe you want to take my guns away. Maybe you'd like an end to mass shootings. Maybe you'll raise my taxes and I'm barely making it as is. Maybe I need my schools federally funded because my property values tanked when the jobs went overseas and there's not enough tax base left.

The working class is fighting among itself for scraps while the elites take everything from us. But I have no idea how to stop that fighting. In the 30s, 40s and 50s churches were used to organize the working class. The right wing picked up on that in the 70s and 80s and took them over with wedge issues and mega-pastors. We need to get people to stop clawing at each other's throats, but I'll be damned if I know how to do that around stuff like gun control and abortion.