I wish he had explored this concept more:

> The concept of Net Neutrality is bound in the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are common carriers like the phone company. Phone companies like to claim they have no knowledge of — and therefore no responsibility for — the words that are carried over their phone lines. They serve Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Russian Embassy alike — just as long as both pay their phone bills. Tony Soprano and Tony Stark are the same in phone company eyes. And this is true of the Internet, too, at least for the next month or so, because the FCC under President Obama declared Internet Service to be a common carrier. That’s about to change, and with it the requirement that all Internet bits be treated equally. People who are willing to pay more will soon get measurably quicker Internet service. And big bandwidth users like Amazon and Netflix will have to pay more to avoid having their signals slowed down.

If the ISPs suddenly become not common carriers, do they then become responsible for all the content? If that is the case, then we can make non-net neutrality really expensive for them.

> If the ISPs suddenly become not common carriers, do they then become responsible for all the content?

No, "common carrier" is an overloaded concept that implies some responsibility for the thing being carried in other contexts (e.g. maritime shipping) but does not imply what you're suggesting in this one. Remember, US ISPs were not classified as common carriers until mid-2015.

DSL started life considered a common carrier, it wasn't until 2005 it was reclassified, to match a previous decision that cable internet wasn't a common carrier.

That was my thought. Are they losing the protection that common carriers get, or are they getting all the protection without any of the obligations?

I imagine the main potential source of expense would be covered by them still being considered DMCA safe harbors. So long as they're still considered a "mere conduit" the most you can compel them to do is stop providing service to an infringer (see three strikes systems some ISPs use today).

This argument doesn’t make any sense. The isps would just deprioritize the zero tier traffic so you couldn’t use it effectively. It’s only faster because of how things work today.

Nobody would care about being able to watch Netflix via zero tier if it’s faster to watch without it (which the isps would most certainly ensure).

I also think it’s nieve to assume that large tech companies want neutrality.

Sure, companies publicly say that they are for it but if they could pay to prevent new competitors (without the same capital resources) from challenging them it’s my hunch that they’d gladly do so.

They aren’t on our side.

This problem is never going to go away as long as ISP are private companies.

Think what would happen if your power/utility company was driven by profit and not solely to provide a critical service.

Internet access should be de-privitized, the free market isn't going to fix this ever and this battle is going to just going to repeat itself every 6-12 months until they win.

Do you realize that most power/utility companies in the US are private and do want to make a profit and pay dividends to share holders? They are just highly regulated due to their monopoly position. Having common carrier status and regulation of ISPs is obviously the rational thing to do for the good of the country, but it looks like we are not going to take that path.

The only positive I can see coming out of this is SpaceX's global satellite internet system looks a lot more profitable in this environment.

> Do you realize that most power/utility companies in the US are private and do want to make a profit and pay dividends to share holders?

You're right, and I don't understand why the discussion here seems to insist that the two options available are having either no NN or having the big, bad gubbmint provide internet services. Among the solutions that lie between these two extremes are private, for profit, regulated utilities.

For example, where I live our electric+gas services come from a company named Avista, NYSE:AVA[1]. It's shareholder-owned, for-profit, and regulated by the state[2]. In fact this private, regulated utility is so private that it's currently busying itself with being acquired by a Canadian company[3], after which it will of course still be regulated by the state of Washington to ensure that the corporation continues operating for the public good.

"Avista's purpose is to improve life's quality by providing energy and energy-related services, as well as certain non-energy related services. We do this by safely and reliably delivering these services at a competitive price and by helping our customers get the most value from their dollar, while providing our investors a fair return."[4]

Fair return, not maximum return.

Our nation's economy, infrastructure, and access to government information and services now rely on the internet. ISPs, whether private or public, need to be regulated in ways that reflect that fact.

[1] https://www.avistacorp.com/about/Pages/aboutus.aspx

[2] https://goo.gl/y54zFV [utc.wa.gov]

[3] https://goo.gl/Av1vx3 [investor.avistacorp.com]

[4] https://goo.gl/fGAAW8 [investor.avistacorp.com]

edit:format

Just FYI... part of that regulation is that they are capped on the max profit they can make. In addition, rate changes must be approved by an elected body (the state's public service commission).

Giving the government near-total control over our internet access is going to introduce more problems that it would solve.

We're already seeing that Western countries too can be just as censorship happy (e.g. the UK where the government pressures ISPs, and is seeking to enshrine in law, the blocking of a huge assortment of content including such ridiculous things to block as female ejaculation)

Just imagine how easy and unescapable that censorship will be if the government is the ISP itself. We've seen repeated attempts in congress to illegalize encryption the government cannot easily break. District Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hinted just this very month that in wake of the Texas shooting the Trump administration will take a harder line against "unbreakable encryption."

Just imagine how stronger their effort against encryption will be once it's the only thing standing between them and completely blocking your access to information they'd rather you not have?

Let's just settle for net neutrality and incentivizing new cable lines and ISPs, rather than open the "nationalize the web" can of worms.

>Giving the government near-total control over our internet access is going to introduce more problems that it would solve.

I love how we are facing a present, practical problem that is the complete opposite of this dystopian hypothetical that people damn near have a fetish over. Yet it still gets brought up as some kind of counter weight to current circumstances. And this kind of attitude is why we're here. We elected a host of representatives that basically ran on "gummit bad!" and when they start handing power over to private entities some of you still don't have the self-awareness to see how absolutely ABSURD it is to sit there and go "But if the government had all the power think about how BAD it would be!" -- all while willfully ignoring that we're still a republic. It's unlikely to be that bad. We're here because we choose to be.

Right now, giving more power to private entities is going to cause far more problems than the government having/had power is/did or maybe even ever could.

Never in the history of this country have we had a problem in where the government has too much power and private entities have too little. Not once. The U.S. government has only had its scope of responsibilities expanded due to the misconduct of private entities over the course of our history. Yeah, governments CAN be bad and they CAN do bad things -- in general. But right now what we have is, in a glorious stroke of irony, people running the government who hate the government.

Basically, TL;DR, the whole censorship boogeyman is just rhetorical misdirection and is completely, utterly, and frustratingly unproductive.

>Never in the history of this country have we had a problem in where the government has too much power and private entities have too little. Not once.

I suspect the American Indian might disagree. I don't recall them being hunted down and massacred by a corporation. Also, black Americans before the 1965 civil rights act might have something to say on the topic of government power vs private entities. As would imprisoned Japanese sent to internment camps. Newspaper editors imprisoned for speaking out against Lincoln during the Civil War probably had a different point of view, as well. Shall I continue?

I like how you blatantly just google'd this and didn't even take the nominal effort to research anything further let alone think about your response, because literally none of it has anything to do with economic/business regulation.

1. Indians weren't citizens. I mean I could stop there, but it's also pretty hilarious that you think the actions taken at the time were somehow not without popular public support. Government as an entity had nothing to do with the expansions, to put it lightly.

2. Yeah, like when we stopped the government from enforcing such laws and gave more protections to people (via the government), all exclusionary practices totally vanished. Totally wasn't a societal problem at that point either. It took the power of the government to alleviate unjust practices, but the power of government wasn't needed to keep them as "virtues" within the society that implemented them in the first place. Something something government, right?

I mean for 3 and 4? Really? You're going to try to use Constitutional powers as an example of the government having too much power?

And no, please don't go on with an aggravating lack luster response like the one you've decided to put on display, I've only responded for the people reading this thread so as to not fall into such disingenuous misdirection.

Censorship isn’t the only concern. The NSA and Big Brother are as big a concern if not bigger in my opinion. Of course, a private company Big Brother (Google??) isn’t that much better. But it’s easier to escape a private company than it is to escape the government, especially if you’re just a normal guy and not being specifically targeted.

>But it’s easier to escape a private company than it is to escape the government

I find this statement suspect in the current U.S. landscape.

Prove that your concern somehow is more real under Net Neutrality than without. Seriously. I am sick of this lie being tossed around. Did you completely forget the NSA just setting up shop inside AT&T's switch room? What about Net Neutrality or the lack thereof would change any of that?

I’m all for net neutrality. I’m not for the government being everyone’s ISP as was mentioned.

NSA in an AT&T closet should not be happening. It would be the default situation for everyone if we all had government ISP.

I fail to see any reason why, or any reason that a municipal ISP would somehow be easier for the NSA to operate. However, they are far more responsive to customers, and provide better service than the incumbent private ISPs.

The government here collects fees through nationalized institutions like vehicle insurance and licensing, so if you get a police ticket/fine for anything including jaywalking you have to pay it before they will let you renew insurance. I would imagine a nationalized ISP would do the same, seize your access to the internet in exchange for paying off city/state/provincial fines or even student debt.

Another problem of public owned utilities is the ruling regime raiding the coffers for party funds, which forces the utility to jack the rates every year since they are a corporation that operates without any savings. They also parachute in a new regime crony every election to be the well paid CEO and fill the board with party hacks as well, ensuring the public utility never goes against the wishes of the regime (and gives their friends huge salaries in the +1m range). Public ISPs would have to operate at the city/local level and no higher for the public to retain any control over it and not have it turn into yet another fine collecting branch.

What we should really have is municipal fiber running to each home the same way as we have municipal roads and water/sewer lines. Then anyone could set up business as an ISP and provide service over that publicly owned infrastructure.

That would be nice, but a lot of cities have contracts with companies, which I'm pretty sure have a clause saying the city will not create their own network.

I would gladly pay a substantial premium for an ISP that was a co-op (i.e., subscribers are also 'owners') or run as a not for profit. Not for profit is probably easier.

Hell, I would donate my time as a lawyer to helping out.

How serious are you about this? I've built networks for small to medium sized ISPs using wireless and some wired technology and the Internet co-op idea is something I've thought about a lot. Happy to chat more email in my profile.

Are there inexpensive technologies that allow line of site communication across 5-8 miles? Something that could be erected on the top of a barn or windmill, that would mesh and route among adjacent nodes?

Something like that would allow communication across the countryside and allow communities to interconnect irrespective of the existing monopoly infrastructure.

Yes, what you're describing is a WISP* and they're fairly common in suburban and rural communities in the US (and other places I just know the US best). Some of the companies that make equipment for this are Ubiquiti, Mimosa, BaiCells and Cambium.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov...

Because we should trust government to provide Internet access? That would certainly make it far easier to monitor. And instead of fixing the problem that not everyone has a choice of ISPs, that would ensure that no one has a choice of ISPs, so when the one ISP that exists is terrible there's no recourse.

I do think it might make sense to treat fiber as infrastructure, so that we could then have numerous competing ISPs everywhere that just need to light up the fiber that's already there. That seems like an improvement.

I liked the idea that cities/towns should own their own last-mile infrastructure, then you get the choice of ISP you wish that plugs into your area instead of me being forced to use X ISP because they're the only monopoly that could afford (or had enough influence) to lay fiber. Since it's local you retain some level of control over it as well instead of a nationalized abstraction.

I wonder how MVNOs for cell phone services came to be. There you have multiple companies competing while using the bigger networks. I would like to see the same for ISPs where Comcast would rent their infrastructure to other companies that then can compete with different plans. 1

Be careful using mvno as the model. In the US, many of the mvnos have shaky financials and often end up as a subsidiary of the carrier (Virgin Mobile USA, Boost, Cricket)

At least there is some competition and variation in plans. For example, I have a 2GB plan with unlimited voice and text on T-Mobile. Not bad.

This is somewhat close how Germany handles it. When the monopoly of the state-run telephone service was destroyed, Telekom was allowed to keep the physical lines, but had to rent them out to any company that wants them, at a rate set by an official oversight organization. I think this was a great success.

How could we be more comprehensively monitored than what ISP’s and the NSA are willing and able to do?

ISPs actually serve two distinct functions that we should separate to get the best mixture of public private. Net neutrality laws are only necessary because we conflate these two functions, but there's no reason that both functions need to be served by the same company.

If we mandated separate ownership for last-mile infrastructure and heavily regulate that to ensure open access to all ISPs, then we can have a market with healthy competition and let consumers decide whether they care about neutral networks. Ideally, that last mile infrastructure would be owned by communities/municipalities who'd contract out maintenance and pay for it with open access fees added to ISP bills. Then any ISP could connect to the municipal network and serve any customer without ever having to install anything at the customer location.

Free market competition works well in an environment where its hard to build a durable advantage and customers can easily switch to competitors with a more compelling offering. Separating the part of an ISP that gives a durable advantage from the part that doesn't would allow us to lean on the free market to handle the rest.

> Think what would happen if your power/utility company was driven by profit and not solely to provide a critical service.

Southern California Edison reporting in! Bilking consumers for all their worth!

It's the obvious next step, but the issue there is that the current US government is likewise profit driven.

Net Neutrality wouldn't have been an issue again in the first place, otherwise.

> This problem is never going to go away as long as ISP are private companies.

What would be wrong with an ISP co-op?

My understanding is that several small cities are doing this to generally rave reviews.

Regulating them should work too. The problem is a broken political system, exacerbated by Citizens United basically legalizing political bribery, hence leading to regulatory capture like the current FCC.

I don't see why you'd have to de-privitize the market. Why not offer a public service alongside private providers?

This analysis collapses because the OP fails to realize that the big players (FB, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc) don't benefit from net neutrality nearly as much as the long tail of sites and services. ISPs know that an internet service without FB is worthless, so they're motivated to work out deals and create bundles. It used to be ESPN and HBO, now it's Google and Netflix.

> realize that the big players don't benefit from net neutrality

Yeah, the big players don't realize this is stupid.

Who says they won't get fleeced by the ISPs?

Having your business rely on a monopolist that could antagonize you will most likely backfire.

"Oh but they are the incumbents" who do you think is easier to extort, the small startup or the bigger company? I hope Fb is charged for all their auto play videos

The assumption that they won't simply block VPNs "because China does that" seems naive. "VPNs are only used by {pirates|terrorists|pedophiles|etc}!" could easily be deployed as a smokescreen for this change.

And, if you have a valid work use case, simply get the "Enterprise" package for your home network, where the exorbitant cost is covered by your employer!

I think its more simply a matter of them everything everything slow/inaccessible unless you buy the _advanced video_ package that includes Netflix, Hulu, YouTube" Which service tier is going to include the ZT VPN option?

And what if you're NOT a tech worker who has an employer to cover the "Enterprise VPN" tier? Good luck with that.

I don't see how handing one company a monopoly over all internet traffic is going to be better in the long run.

What the US needs, is competition. Monopolists can afford to screw their customers, competitors in an open, transparent market can't. Let ISPs advertise that their connection to Youtube/Netflix/etc is not throttled like it is with Comcast/etc, and chances are many people will switch.

Except that isn't an option for the overwhelming majority of people. Odds are you have one choice for broadband, maybe a choice for dsl, and that's about it.

Competition cannot occur without low (or ideally 0) entrance costs. The investment required to lay cable, let along bother to run your ISP, is such that there will never an open market.

When people talk about broadband competition, they're generally not suggesting a second physical line to your house, they're talking about requiring telecomms with subsidized last-mile infrastructure to rent access to it to their competitors at cost.

That is (oversimplified, but not wholly inaccurate, I think) how they do it in South Korea, where the average home has only one physical data line but a choice of three big ISPs to service it. By some sort of wacky cooincidence, South Korea also has the best broadband access in the world.

(How good? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_South_Korea a typicaly 1000Mb/s line is $20/mo. I have one choice, Comcast, and I pay 4x that much for 1/100th of that speed.)

That's exactly the problem I'm addressing: the lack of competition. But competition is vital to a free market. There has to be competition. If it's a natural monopoly, it needs to be in the hands of the community, the government, or at least very tightly regulated.

But competition is possible. I have a choice of many broadband options. It used to be (20 years ago) that cable and phone where the only options to get internet, but now both the phone company and the cable company have fiber networks, and there's a community fiber network that's accessible to many ISPs. Companies that own their own last mile may be required (or are incentivised) to allow other providers to use it.

Of course if only one company owns the last mile, then that company needs to be tightly regulated, government controlled, or required to share. But with the switch from phone or cable to fiber, everybody needs new infrastructure, and everybody needs to lay new cable. That also evens the playing field a bit.

It's bizarre to see the free market fail so hard in a supposedly strongly pro-free market country like the US.

Wireless spectrum is limited and either exclusively owned or subject to congestion. Dedicated ine-of-sight direct links are possible and avoid some broadcast problems, but still have property rights issues (they manifest a little differently, since you can smoke a connection without establishing property rights to the whole route, but then you are at risk of someone on the route interposing a temporary or permanent obstruction at any time.)

The existence of wireless connections does not change the fact that broadband last-mile service is a natural monopoly.

That isn’t realistic in this decade for rural/remote areas. Satellite internet also failed because of the unusable latency incurred. The only way to guarantee bandwidth is a physical connection because spectrum bandwidth is finite, whereas point-to-point bandwidth scales nearly linearly with more physical channels.

> That isn’t realistic in this decade for rural/remote areas.

Not OP, but I recently lived in a rural area and had 3 options for Internet:

  * Mediacom cable with permanent 20-50% (or more) packet loss

  * CenturyLink DSL at 1mbps (not a typo)

  * Local wireless company, 7mbps, no packet loss

About 2 decades ago I worked for a different wireless ISP (same rural area) that delivered the best local service by FAR. (Cable wasn't yet an option, and satellite had crazy latency.) So wireless was superior ~2 decades ago in that rural area as well as recently, for many people. So I don't know what you mean by wireless being "[unrealistic] in this decade for rural/remote areas."

My position is that municipal fiber is the way to go, but give wireless ISPs credit because they're helping a lot of people get on the Internet who would barely have connectivity otherwise.

They still need access to a (relatively) local backbone. If they started collecting any significant market share from the local mono- and duopolist providers, I suspect that they would simply be banned from those backbones, which are (mostly) maintained by those same providers.

Yes, they're a thing. A shitty thing.

Wireless ISPs would immediately collapse if they had to serve the amount of Netflix traffic wired internet connections use in an evening. They simply aren't a viable alternative for the population at large.

You might want to check out Webpass, which is now owned by Google Fiber. They can and do deliver high speed internet. Webpass specifically targets dense population centers.

Dense population centers are the easiest to cover and already have the most choices. Furthermore, Google Fiber has a history, like most Google municipal projects, of failing to finish and then languishing. They never finished deploying to Starbucks, and what was deployed was still slow. Also, Mountain View Google WiFi, a wireless repeater mesh, was horrible, useless and poorly maintained.

> Webpass specifically targets dense population centers.

The solution nobody needs, effectively. It's already economically sound to run cable/fiber in dense population centers, because the number of customers you reach with every mile of new cabling is huge.

Don't get me wrong, Webpass is very cool. But it's point-to-point and requires you to build a lot of infrastructure on the top of buildings, which requires a lot of permissions, which isn't always easy to get. The wireless ISPs that do exist outside of urban areas have to use cellphone networks, and they are not ready for the amount of data transfer required. Yet.

>Webpass specifically targets dense population centers. That, in itself, is the problem. Nobody competes in rural areas.

This would be a better article if it didn't read like an advertisement for ZeroTier. It could easily be replaced with a generic recommendation to use a VPN at all times (which I already do), and the end-result would be the same.

I'm the founder of ZeroTier and just saw this article. I've spoken to Bob a few times in the past and while we appreciate the mention there wasn't any coordination. (We'd have timed it to not be right before a holiday. :)

I think what he's arguing is that fully encrypted p2p overlay networks would be the next step beyond privacy VPNs, and would be more powerful. Basically if we "encrypt all the things" then ISPs will only see opaque encrypted traffic and will be unable to effectively implement really fine-grained traffic prioritization/de-prioritization.

What he suggests would be possible. People and services could join public ZeroTier networks and you'd have this flat "meta-Internet" where everything was encrypted and all traffic looked the same.

I don't think this is a silver bullet. ISPs can still make deals with big players like Netflix, Google, Facebook, etc. and offer them at a higher speed on the "clearnet." Other traffic would be relegated to the "other" category that would be slow-laned on non-premium plans. This applies to more conventional privacy VPNs and anything else just as much as it applies to ZeroTier.

I think there's a fundamental technical problem here. ISPs theoretically provide you with the shortest, least congested route. Overlay networks either go straight to the same destination (subject to the same throttling), or bounce off some other host for privacy laundering. Then you're dependent on that host to have a good connection to Netflix instead.

It's always going to be worse than going direct.

Mostly agreed. The only real hope is to more substantially disrupt the ISP market.

> Basically if we "encrypt all the things" then ISPs will only see opaque encrypted traffic and will be unable to effectively implement really fine-grained traffic prioritization/de-prioritization.

Wouldn't the ISP's default in that case be to de-prioritize all opaque encrypted traffic?

Completely unrelated: EPIC username!

It's actually my initials: Adam Paul Ierymenko

First and last initials are AI.

I agree, though I got the feeling that ZT is superior over VPN because of the IPv6 metanet.

If you use just a regular VPN then the traffic at the other side of the VPN will still be slow.

So, the problem I can see with this is that (by my understanding) ZeroTier will naturally try to set up a direct connection between the two communicating endpoints, encapsulated in whatever encryption. This means that all the NetFlix traffic will still be originating from NetFlix IP addresses. Therefore, even though the content is encrypted and non-inspectable, it can still be identified as NetFlix, and throttled.

Makes sense. The only hope left is a "Hero ISP" who voluntarily decides to not participate in the prioritization.

ISPs want to turn the internet into TV. You tell us what sites you want to visit and we'll tell you what that will cost.

How far can the ISPs go before Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, just offer an always on VPN service to get around the ISP's blacklisting of sites you haven't paid to visit?

Android on Nexus and Pixel phones has a wifi assistant that secures the connection when you're connected to public wifi; which kinda sounds like an automatically initiated VPN.

Let's kill it by having semi local wireless mesh networks. That would be enough for basic web (mail, irc, average website).

using whose spectrum?

So the answer is to for everyone to use a VPN? That won't happen.

It seems to me that if the ISPs are no longer common carriers, then they are able to choose what content they transmit.

That choice must surely come with responsibility, and they are therefore responsible for the content they transmit.

I suggest another way to remove their profits; flood them with illegal content and sue.

I immediately thought of cjdns[1] being used to implement this idea. Dos anybody know how ZeroTier compares to it?

[1] https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a compelling reason that it should be illegal for me to buy a "Facebook Only" internet service.

The reasoning I understand is that it enables the sort of monopolistic practices that historically have been restricted. Offering $20/mo "Facebook only" or $10/mo "Just email for Grandma" plans has providers competing more on what destinations they (don't) restrict in their Internet access, and less on actual speed/latency of the service. Larger providers could then roll out near-$0/mo "Email-only" plans at below cost, specifically to squeeze out the smaller providers previously trying to eek by on their equivalent $10 plans, and then retire those plans once competition is gone. Selling at below cost to kill competition is predatory pricing, which has spawned antitrust claims in the past in other markets.

Because that would not be "internet" access, it would be Facebook access. If it were marketed as such, I can see your point. But it should not be labeled "internet" access, and should not receive the subsidies that the FCC provides for Internet access.

Why do you have to pay for road maintenance in your whole town, if the only streets you drive on go to your job and the mall? Because roads aren't a bunch of separate things you pay for and benefit from individually, they are one thing ("the roads") that you pay for collectively and benefit from as a whole. Living in a town with good roads improves your life in all sorts of subtle ways that more than offset the short-sighted savings you'd see from refusing to fix potholes on streets you never visit.

Same deal with the internet. When you pay your broadband bill, you're not just paying for the cables and routers between your house and Facebook, you're paying for the maintenance of "the internet", a collective thing which benefits you indirectly even if you don't visit most of it. And using an internet that prioritizes the routes to Facebook and Youtube would be a lot like living in a town where the only good roads lead to your job and the mall.

Yeah, cause that's what's going to happen. Remember the heydays of cable TV when you could pay for just what you wanted!?

Yes. If only we'd made it illegal for cable companies to sell cable packages back then.

If only we'd have required line owners to wholesale access to other service providers. We wouldn't have had to made packages illegal because there'd have been actual competition.

If we allow you to buy "facebook-only" service which only serves FB, Twitter, and related services...what happens to Gnusocial, which isn't on that list? By permitting discrimination by content, you are implicitly allowing an ISP to cripple services at their discretion. Perhaps a better example: would it be fair for Comcast to cut any connection to AT&T or Time Warner's sites?

I'm taking should to mean "why it should be that way", not "why it currently is under current laws/regs".

Generally laws concerning infrastructure are made on the basis of public policy outcome concerns. Having cable-style menus of internet access has negative public policy outcomes, and no good public policy outcomes. The open internet as it stands delivers economic benefits and provides opportunities for more equitable information and service access.

The internet has become critical for education, research, finance, and also for a whole host of frivolous things that we don't want to regulate away. It's become where we expect innovative products to emerge from and the non-existent barriers to entry are why that is so. It's also become an equalizer for access to information. Sure, the majority of the country doesn't take advantage of that, but enough of us have and the country has received real economic benefit from that access. The fall of net neutrality will end up preserving the access to the frivolous things (FB, Netflix, Twitter, Gaming) while restricting access to the parts of the web that have strong societal good associated with it (all the varied large and small services and sources of information that don't exist for click farming and ad pushing).

Allowing Facebook only packages would pretty much trap the poor and tech illiterate into an information ghetto. Right now they're simply voluntarily staying in said information ghetto, but there are no monetary or technological hurdles to them leaving. How is a poor student with the FaceFlix only internet package going to do research for their history paper? There aren't many posts on Facebook walls that would make for useful sources. But they can just use the library because we've decided no one needs the internet! Surely this won't result in a further bifurcation of education in this country.

I don't think that many on HN currently would be negatively impacted by a FaceFlix option being available, many of us have to have full internet access for work or would personally shell out for it anyways. The thing that would impact our community directly is that there would certainly be those who will never find their passion or affinity for technology because they'll grow up with a FaceFlix plan and never stumble upon that thing that piques their curiosity. They won't become our future classmates or coworkers or conference speakers, they won't make interesting new technology, and we'll all be poorer for it.

I'll sell you facebook only service. You can just mail me your statuses and I'll mail you back their replies. It's 50 dollars a month.

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with a compelling reason why that should be a thing.

Whether there is a reason or not for it to exist is a moot point. Why must it be illegal to sell such a service?

Why should it be legal? Your phone service doesn't work that way. Your water or power doesn't work that way.

why ZT tho? like, you could accomplish the same type of overlay system using i2p. there's performance issues to work out to be sure, but if its literally impossible to tell who is talking to who it gets a lot harder for isps to control anything.

Write your representatives and ask them to repeal the FCC