Ajit Pai is right - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2017/why-ajit-pai-is-right/ <comment><USER3> This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - <USER2> it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN!

The beauty of the internet has been the ability for new things to pop up and create a real impact on the world economy starting with just a website.

If the rules Ajit Pai wants in place were to be in place when Amazon got started its likely Wal-Mart could have paid to simply make them disappear for most internet providers by "buying" the right to e-commerce traffic.

That's not a world I want to live in - and its not one you should want to live in either if you believe in dreaming and creating something larger than yourself

<comment><USER4> Did I miss some new proposal that Ajit Pai has put forward?

It is my understanding that "The rules Ajit Pai wants in place" were in place from sometime during the ninties or earlier, until 2015. That is, Ajit Pai merely wishes to undo a rule that was only in force from 2015 to the present.

Am I mistaken? Because I think the world you say you don't want to live in is the one we actually did live in for most of the history of the Internet, unless I'm missing something.

<comment><USER5> The fundamental flaw in your argument is that you're failing to ask one very important question. Why was the rule put in place in 2015?

Most regulations, like laws, are reactive in nature.

If our existing laws and regulations were good enough then why would we need to elect new law makers? Why would we even need them at all?

The fact is that people are constantly finding new and creative ways to exploit others and or ever evolving laws and regulations are a response to this exploitation.

<comment><USER4> Actually, I am asking that. Several other commentors have asserted that "the world changed" a few years before the rule passed, yet nobody has really explained in detail how. So far I've gotten a hypothetical about Wal-Mart paying ISPs to destroy Amazon, which didn't actually happen. (Though I haven't read other responses yet, so maybe there's something more here I just have missed.)

But, let's take a closer look at what you just said here. You are correct that many laws and regulations are reactive in nature. That doesn't automatically justify them. As a matter of fact, it is often the case that the most reactive laws and regulations can be some of the worst, as has constantly been demonstrated from September 11, 2001 to the present day. I mean, there is a real problem with terrorism, but that real problem doesn't automatically justify banning travel from 8 majority-Muslim countries, does it?

At least in the terrorism example, I have some understanding of how terrorism exploits people, and that makes it possible to debate how to use the government to protect people from that exploitation (or to protect other people from exploitation by the government, in the name of protecting people from explotation). Individual acts of terrorism have been clearly identified and publicized, so it is possible to have a coherent public policy discussion. But in the net neutrality case, everyone either discusses:

1\. Hypotheticals, like Wal-Mart paying Comcast to destroy Amazon 2\. Court cases that... actually were resolved in court under anti-trust law 3\. Assertions that new censorship will take place like we've never seen before, even though we'd be going back to the pre-2015 status quo.

Despite sounding flippant about it, I don't actually mean to. People here are pretty smart, so if they're all worked up about it, I must be the one missing something. I would just like someone to coherently explain what that is.

<comment><USER6> The reason FCC made change in 2015, because in 2014 court ruled that with prior classification, FCC had no authority to enforce anything unless they reclassify the Internet.

Before the ruling, the companies were still respecting what FCC said (here are some cases that happened between 2002 (when FCC reclassified Internet as a telecommunication service) and 2015[1]), now the cat is out of the bag.

Also note that 2015 change essentially brought back what was changed in 2002.

[1] [https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality- vio...](https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations- brief-history)

<comment><USER7> So in all of the cases listed in your citation, was it the FCC that censured them in order to get the corrective behavior?

I'm cherrypicking here, but as an avid Bittorrent user, I remember there being significant debate with the community about the extent and methods that Comcast was using to "throttle" Bittorrent. (And I can honestly say that I was never impacted by them.) And I say this as someone who despises Comcast (regretfully, I'm stuck with them even today).

In any case, it doesn't pop out at me that many of those violations were actually mitigated by the FCC. E.g. Google Wallet got blocked, but Isis(sic)/Softcard was just terrible. By the time it was dying, carriers were letting Google Wallet through and then Apple Pay paved the way for Android Pay.

And actually a few of them (like zero-rating in the case of MetroPCS), aren't negative in my mind. I get the "startups can't compete" thing, but particularly mobile data cabs are still necessary today, and I'm okay with innovative, pro-consumer pricing models that get mobile internet into the hands of more people (which is intuitively going to happen when non-incumbents are the ones doing the innovating).

<comment><USER6> Net neutrality doesn't prevent data caps, all it does is stating that ISP has no business prioritizing/blocking one site over the other.

Essentially makes ISP just provide access to the Internet, and how you going to use it is all up to you.

From the examples you gave, how do you feel about blocking VoIP, tethering (even though they already had data caps, why do they care how I'm going to use the data allocated to me?) how do you feel about telus blocking access to site that was about labor strike by their employees, what if that would be used for political gains (blocking sites company doesn't agree with?)

As for bittorrent, question. If a company is offering internet connection with specific parameters and they then fail to deliver on that promise that's in my opinion a false advertising.

If they have so many consumers that they can't guarantee the speeds they provided it means they oversold, and they should be advertising it as a lower speed than they actually did.

As for MetroPCS I'm not sure what the zero rating thing is, I guess you're talking about them blocking all streaming except youtube. That's once again a false advertising. They do that so they could say they offer "unlimited" plans, even though they didn't.

As a consumer I want companies to be honest with me, what they are providing so I can know ahead when I make decision. Saying something is "Unlimited*" is misleading, because it's not really. The FCC also introduced "food labels" for ISPs which reduced their ability to lie to customers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Ajit Pai isn't right, but here's why it doesn't even matter: he's ignoring the will of the people.

Under his chairmanship the FCC has (1)intentionally made it more difficult to comment on proceedings, (2) ignored the blatant and illegal automated responses that flooded the comment system without the knowledge of the people whose names were used, (3) tried to suppress participation by faking a DDOS, (4) obstructed investigations into both #2 and #3, (5) used debunked claims with debunked data to justify a rules change, and (6) come right out said that comments would be ignored because they didn't contradict the debunked data.

They are lying, and the ISP-backed pundits that write articles like this are lying too.

The one and only remedy to Net Neutrality is robust competition, but we waved bye-bye to that long ago. ISPs have government-granted monopolies (or duopolies), and they are vertically integrated.

We need the protection of NN, it's the only thing keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive in this country.

<comment><USER9> The major issue with this "robust competition" (which I would tend to agree with) What do you do when one entity (perhaps unfairly, or with taxpayer's dollars) already been given one heck of an upper-hand? What if they've lobbied to make it impossible for you to dig in the ground and run your "tubes" along side theirs?

Has Comcast proven that they're open to "robust competition"? If I could somehow find another way to pipe data into someone's home, do you think Comcast would _not_ try to find some way to litigate against it? For an industry that started as a community shared antenna, what do you think they'd do to another group that tried to do basically the same thing? (read the result of Aereo court case for the answer)

<comment><USER8> that's what I meant when I said we "waved bye-bye" to competition. We lost control, now Title II is the only way to get it back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > There is no evidence of systemic abuse by ISPs governed under Title I, which > means there are not immediate benefits to regulation, only theoretical ones

False. They've tried in the past I believe. There was something with AT&T and iPhone users around 2010 (IIRC it was about Facetime)? There were more.

Also the thing about Portugal and Euros. Yeah that graphic has been circulating for a while now, it predates this discussion. It's an illustrative graphic, not like a screen shot. Kinda like when you post a MFW picture but it's not actually your face when.

Also, as a side note, what's stratechery.com? I've seen it posted a lot. I read the wiki, but idk why I should care about this guy's opinion.

<comment><USER11> I found this list [https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality- vio...](https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations- brief-history)

MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today.

COMCAST: In 2005, the nation's largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers.

TELUS: In 2005, Canada's second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites.

AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such "over-the-top" voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009.

WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream's own search portal and results.

MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon's court challenge against the FCC's 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency's authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices.

PAXFIRE: In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person's search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service's results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites.

AT&T, SPRINT and VERIZON: From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis, which all three companies had a stake in developing.

EUROPE: A 2012 report from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications found that violations of Net Neutrality affected at least one in five users in Europe. The report found that blocked or slowed connections to services like VOIP, peer-to-peer technologies, gaming applications and email were commonplace.

VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon's $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots. By blocking those applications, Verizon violated a Net Neutrality pledge it made to the FCC as a condition of the 2008 airwaves auction.

AT&T: In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers' iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text- and-voice plan. AT&T had one goal in mind: separating customers from more of their money by blocking alternatives to AT&T's own products.

VERIZON: During oral arguments in Verizon v. FCC in 2013, judges asked whether the phone giant would favor some preferred services, content or sites over others if the court overruled the agency's existing open internet rules. Verizon counsel Helgi Walker had this to say: "I'm authorized to state from my client today that but for these rules we would be exploring those types of arrangements." Walker's admission might have gone unnoticed had she not repeated it on at least five separate occasions during arguments.

<comment><USER12> Every single item in this list was rectified prior to 2015. This is effectively showing title 1 is sufficient to address these harms.

<comment><USER13> Except that at least two of these resulted in Comcast and then Verizon suing and getting to continue doing each of them because the courts said they couldn't regulate against those practices unless they became Common Carriers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v._FCC_\(2014\))

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Arg. I feel like articles like this are calling me stupid with some statements. Like this doozy:

"T-Mobile treats all data the same, some data just doesn't cost money"

I guess I'm too stupid to understand what "same" means. Or:

"Zero-rating [...] Customers loved it"

That's not enough. The argument is about small providers conforming to T-Mobile. What customers think is irrelevant I'm afraid. Then the author goes on to explain how it lowered prices. It's like arguing the FDA shouldn't regulate food at all, customers love unhealthy food, and the prices are lower on unhealthy food, so everything's perfect right?

I will say I somewhat agree on the earlier part of the article. I don't generally prefer premature regulations. But instead of asking "why do we need these when ISPs are mostly self-regulating?" since that cat is out of the bag we should be asking "why do we need to repeal these if they aren't harming the situation?" Of course the latter question won't be answered truthfully. The real answer, "so we can violate net neutrality" (or the "spirit of" or whatever).

It's strange to see someone argue against being prematurely reactionary whilst arguing for being reactionary in the other direction for something already on the books. Want a different approach w/ the FTC or congress or something? Then do that first, and then repeal the rules. Otherwise, leave well enough alone unless, as I suspect, the true motive is that the rules are preventing things ISPs want to do.

<comment><USER15> Exactly. This is like listening to Trump talk about Obamacare. Oh, he agrees with the principles — more than the next guy! — but we've taken a massive step in the wrong direction and need to repeal it.

I lost track of all the slimy rhetorical techniques in this article. FUD about the "cost of regulations" by talking about restaurants in SF. Saying that T-Mobile's rise was good for competition, so I guess zero-rating is a good thing after all (without arguing that it was specifically zero-rating that led to T-Mobile's rise). Saying the "only future we have to fear" is one where these regulations stay... really?? Just because he has a hand-wavy argument they might be bad, or at least unnecessary?

Oh, let's not forget, the argument that regulations as written don't eliminate all possible ways to violate the spirit of the law, so they don't do any good at all. Law can be updated. If there was a legal loophole that let people murder each other, would we say the laws against murder are pointless?

Zero-rating is not aligned with net neutrality, even if it's currently allowed by a loophole, and if it benefits some customer or some company in some way. Hemming and hawing about it is just kicking up smoke.

The author wants to drive a wedge between the positions of "net neutrality" and "ISPs are telecommunication carriers," and I don't see it. Or he wants them to be neutral carriers but not have it be legally enforced. Or first repeal the current enforcement, and then talk about enforcing it some other way. Slimy, slimy, slimy.

<comment><USER15> I forgot another: I think at one point the author attributes the uproar over net neutrality to "the media."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > It is worth noting, by the way, that BitTorrent users were free-loaders, > using massively more bandwidth than the vast majority of Comcast's > customers.

I don't think that's how a service agreement works. If I'm paying for a certain bandwidth and latency, I should get that (to within reasonably improbable outages) if I use it 100% of the time or 1% of the time. If the ISP can't keep up, they should be penalized for it or change the labels on the thing they're selling. You don't see a cloud storage provider saying "you get 100 Gb of storage, but only if you don't use 99 Gb of it."

<comment><USER17> There's also the reality that the problem is _peak_ bandwidth, not total bytes moved. It turns out... BitTorrent users use less bandwidth during peak _and_ bandwidth caps discourage people from pulling down data they might not use in advance and instead grabbing it just in time _during peak bandwidth periods_.

<comment><USER18> There's also the reality that there's miles and miles of taxpayer funded black fiber that they _choose_ not to light up so that they can claim a bandwidth shortage.

<comment><USER19> Can you expand on this?

<comment><USER18> It's part of this whole thing which is a rabbit hole unto itself:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...](https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/eli5_how_were_isps_able_to_pocket_the_200_billion/)

tldr version: There were very large subsidies paid to expand broadband as well as the Universal Service Fund. The companies actually built out broadband lines to a lot of areas with minimal coverage and then didn't build the last mile because it was expensive and provided "separate but equal" services such as WiMax, UVerse, or other less equitable services.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Then you read about how San Francisco requires 14 permits that take 9 months > to issue (plus a separate alcohol permit) and you wonder why anyone opens a > restaurant at all (compounded by the fact that already-permitted restaurants > have a vested interest in making the process more onerous over time). > Multiply that burden by all of the restaurants that never get created and > the cost is very large indeed.

so...either San Francisco has no restaurants at all, or this argument is complete garbage.

> This argument certainly applies to net neutrality in a far more profound > way: the Internet has been the single most important driver of not just > economic growth but overall consumer welfare for the last two decades.

Two decades where Comcast did not own Universal did not own NBC, Time Warner Cable did not own Warner, HBO, Turner, CNN, AT&T did not own them, and people watched TV on about 50 cable channels and not at all on the internet, rented DVDs/VHS from the video store and not at all on the internet. Cord cutting as a viable thing for not just movies but also TV has only begun in the last couple of years. [edit]: the conflicts of interest in modern ISPs, being that they now produce and own huge slices of the content itself that they serve, in fierce competition with just a few other giants, are orders of magnitude greater than they were even five years ago.

> Given that all of that dynamism has been achieved with minimal regulatory > oversight, the default position of anyone concerned about future growth > should be maintaining a light touch.

A hand-wavy "regulations! killing business!" argument. Regulations have a purpose and you will notice it every time you notice buildings having working fire exits and your dairy product at the supermarket not killing you.

> I'll say it again — who can be against net neutrality?

Comcast, who has tried to block certain services already.

<comment><USER21> _so...either San Francisco has no restaurants at all, or this argument is complete garbage._

Or maybe you only get rich people and already successful chains opening new restaurants. Maybe you don't get a lot of first-time small business owners and innovative concepts because the barriers to entry are too high.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Sure, except just about every example of companies doing the right thing had the flame of regulatory action and fines burning underneath them. If there was no risk of severe financial backlash, they'd keep pushing harder.

Not to mention the huge swaths of the US where there is either effectively or actually only one carrier. These companies don't act nationally - they will target their efforts to desperate areas where their customers will have no choice but to accept their terms. What incentive would they have to "innovate" or "improve service?" None.

</comment><comment><USER23> _> Again, zero-rating is not explicitly a net-neutrality issue: T-Mobile treats all data the same, some data just doesn't cost money. _

False. Some data is not capped, while other is. So data is not treated the same. Q.E.D. Net neutrality means - either don't cap it, or cap it all. No preferential treatment. India for instance explicitly bans zero rating as part of Net neutrality laws.

 _> There is evidence that pre-existing regulation and antitrust law, along with media pressure, are effective at policing bad behavior_

There is also tons of evidence of existing anti-trust laws doing nothing to stop monopolistic abuse. Data caps you brought above is an example in itself (mostly in case of Comcast and the like). Despite complaints and bad PR, Comcast pushes data caps on users, because they are monopolists and users have little choice but to comply. Where was anti-trust law to stop that?

</comment><comment><USER24> His restaurant example actually undercuts his argument: despite the "burdensome" licensing and safety requirements imposed by San Francisco, the city is flooded with restaurants.

</comment><comment><USER25> > There is no evidence of systemic abuse by ISPs governed under Title I, which > means there are not immediate benefits to regulation, only theoretical ones

No, there are many cases including blocking peer-to-peer, hijacking search queries, blocking video streaming, blocking mobile payment, blocking tethering, numerous cases of blocking voip and even blocking a union website they disliked.

[https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality- vio...](https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations- brief-history)

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't want an ISP to push ANY apps that won't count against your data cap. How does that serve to promote competition? How is any company going to win over Facebook/Spotify/Youtube/etc. when every single ISP offers an internet plan that doesn't count data when used with those apps? That's outrageous, on top of the obvious fact that ISPs will tend to push their own services over others, or price-gouge apps to be promoted.

More importantly, I don't want this to be left up to good faith between ISPs, antitrust regulation, and the media. I'd rather take away their ability to be shitty right now as opposed to waiting until Comcast/Cox/Verizon/AT&T decide they've had enough and that they need to implement slow/fast lanes and whatever crappy things they want to do. It's not like they've ever proven to be kind and trustworthiness. Please. The fact that people are still trying to spin this around in their favor is pure insanity.

There's ABSOLUTELY NO chance that these companies are lobbying to get rid of net neutrality THIS HARD and be doing it for the good of anyone. Garbage companies, garbage intentions.

<comment><USER27> How is any company going to win over Amazon with Prime free shipping and 2 hour delivery?

Being a big incumbent comes with advantages in every market. Even with Net Neutrality and no zero rating, how are you going to come in and beat Netflix, Google, or Amazon with their thousands of edge servers and exclusive content?

<comment><USER26> Those issues are inherent to competition, not to the infrastructure. The ISPs shouldn't be deciding who gets to stay or go. Their infrastructure should be neutral, just as water pipes don't care if they're going to my house or to a giant industrial corporation that has a stronghold over the steel industry.

I think my example is bad. I'll try a slightly better one: My water pipes don't care if they go to my ABC brand dishwasher or another.

<comment><USER27> Why not? Why shouldn't the best usage of a limited resource be determined by who is willing to pay the most money?

Does this extend to other industries? Should we force Fedex/UPS to ship at one speed only?

<comment><USER26> Because I don't want an ISP to decide how much to charge one service or the other, which ones should be blocked or not blocked, and which services to promote or not promote. They have a monopoly, and a conflict of interest when it comes to services they own (partly or whole).

Plus, ISPs can and do charge similar to UPS/Fedex. If you want a higher level of service, faster speed, better hardware, etc. you can pay an ISP for a business package, fiber, etc. That's similar to UPS charging for Overnight Air, 2 day, etc. But UPS can't say "Oh you're Spotify, I'll charge you more to deliver your mail." And there's also the fact that UPS, Fedex, USPS, and DHL all compete with each other, whereas ISPs have literally agreed not to compete with each other and have set up regional monopolies.

<comment><USER27> See this is the problem with the pro NN side. It's littered with factual inaccuracies and outright lies. ISPs, in the US at least, have not agreed to not compete with each other and there's no regional monopolies. The majority of the country has 2 or more broadband providers plus a plethora of wireless and satellite options.

<comment><USER26> Oh! Here are some lies for you: [https://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/28/cnbc- exclusive-cnbc-transcri...](https://www.cnbc.com/2014/05/28/cnbc-exclusive- cnbc-transcript-comcast-chairman-ceo-brian-roberts-speaks-with-cnbcs-squawk- on-the-street-today.html)

> ROBERTS: FIRST OF ALL, BOTH IN VIDEO AND IN BROADBAND WE DON'T COMPETE WITH > TIME WARNER. WE HAVE TO START WITH THAT VERY FUNDAMENTAL POINT. THEY'RE IN > NY. WE'RE IN PHILADELPHIA. THEY'RE IN L.A., WE'RE IN SAN FRANCISCO. YOU > CAN'T BUY A COMCAST IN NEW YORK, CAN'T BUY A TIME WARNER IN PHILADELPHIA. SO > THERE'S NO REDUCTION IN COMPETITION.

Is that by chance? I wonder.

Here's a map of competition: [https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what- lack-of-broadb...](https://consumerist.com/2014/03/07/heres-what-lack-of- broadband-competition-looks-like-in-map-form/)

Here's the Department of Commerce's study on competition [PDF]: [http://esa.doc.gov/sites/default/files/competition-among- us-...](http://esa.doc.gov/sites/default/files/competition-among-us-broadband- service-providers.pdf)

> The typical person also has the option of choosing between three mobile > broadband service providers at 10 Mbps. At even higher speeds, however, the > number of providers drops off dramatically. For example, only 37 percent of > the population had a choice of two or more providers at speeds of 25 Mbps or > greater; only 9 percent had three or more choices. Moreover, four out of ten > Americans did not live where very-high-speed broadband service – 100 Mbps or > greater – is available. Of those with access to broadband at this speed > level, only 8 percent had access to two or more providers; 1 percent had > access to three or more. Only 3 percent of the population had 1 Gbps or > greater available; none had two or more ISPs at that speed.

And no, satellite and wireless do not count as competition in broadband. Sorry. Wireless is expensive, comes with very small data caps (unless you're lucky enough to be grandfathered into old data plans), and there are NN exceptions in wireless (e.g. TMobile). Satellite comes with low bandwidth, higher latency, and higher costs.

Plus, according to the study, YOU'RE the one with inaccuracies. "For example, only 37 percent of the population had a choice of two or more providers at speeds of 25 Mbps or greater" 37% of the population is not a majority. If you have updated stats, please link them.

The ideal here is to have 3+ for 98% of the country, with options such as: municipal broadband, Comcast, Google Fiber, and Grande/Sonic/other regional options.

<comment><USER27> From your own cite:

>At download speeds of 3 megabits per second (Mbps), which is the Federal Communications Commission's current approximate standard for basic broadband service, 98 percent of the population had a choice of at least two mobile ISPs and 88 percent had two or more fixed ISPs available to them.

And you're doubling down on nonsense. There's no regional agreements not to compete and your quote isn't any proof of it.

<comment><USER26> > However, as multiple household members increasingly consume video streaming > services music streaming, and online games, the adequate broadband speed bar > has been raised. To understand just how slow 3 Mbps is, it takes about 2.25 > hours to download a 6 gigabyte movie. The same movie would only take 16 > minutes to download at 25 Mbps

The FCC later increased their definition: [https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7932653/fcc-changed- defin...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7932653/fcc-changed-definition- broadband-25mbps)

We both know 3 Mbps isn't enough these days, and it hasn't been enough for many years.

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/09/comca...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/09/comcast-says-its-too-expensive-to-compete-against-other- cable-companies/)

The previous PDF I linked, from their FCC filing, discusses the reasons why they don't compete with each other.

Sorry, I'm still stuck at work.

<comment><USER27> Ok, I'm still not sure what your point is here. Even if we use a higher limit my statement that most Americans have at least two companies to choose from is accurate.

<comment><USER26> 37% is not most, though. And the choice is still between two shitty companies, usually. Right now I have either Time Warner, I think Comcast (haven't checked but probably), and Google Fiber. That, to me, is still not ideal. As I said in my previous comment, the ideal would be two additional options for me: a smaller, regional-based ISP, and a municipal ISP. Prior to Google Fiber, there was no fiber at all here. I had to pay Time Warner $90 for 1/10th of what I get with Google right now.

Just two companies is not ideal because, as we have seen before, Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon don't compete enough to improve their infrastructure. We've seen that just Google Fiber alone is enough to get the current ISPs to drop their prices, improve speeds, and get Fiber going: [https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/04/googl...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2015/04/google-fiber-plans-expansion-then-twc-makes-speeds-six- times-faster/)

But that's not enough. Google Fiber isn't ever going to spread enough to become widely available, and I think they stopped altogether, didn't they?

Maybe if Google Fiber was planning to roll out everywhere in the US, I'd be more okay with letting NN go but at this point, it's too risky IMO.

And I just want to make it clear that the ideal scenario is for competition to determine ISP policies and behavior, not legislation. But we're not getting competition any time soon, so I see legislation as a last resort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> His restaurant examples of the burden of regulations aren't exactly swaying me here. Where are the examples of the burden the ISPs have had these last few years? It seems like knee-jerk anti-regulation without any concern for the specifics of the industry. In fact, these regulations should make it so burdensome to start new ISPs, but instead they have entirely separate legislation to prevent them.

</comment><comment><USER29> this is a bit off-topic, but... ben makes a good point when he says regulations is about trade-offs, but the kind of knee-jerk "i hate regualations" sentiment in this article is a real turn off. case in point:

> "A classic example of this phenomenon is restaurants: who could possibly be > against food safety? Then you read about how San Francisco requires 14 > permits that take 9 months to issue (plus a separate alcohol permit) and you > wonder why anyone opens a restaurant at all (compounded by the fact that > already-permitted restaurants have a vested interest in making the process > more onerous over time). Multiply that burden by all of the restaurants that > never get created and the cost is very large indeed."

yes, regulatory capture sucks, but y'know, just kinda maybe, most of those restaurants that would have been created in a lax regluatory environment are exactly the ones you don't want? the kind that don't care about structural integrity or food safety or having a bathroom? he's focusing only on the costs, not the benefits, to justify his argument that regulations are bad. trade-offs have 2 sides: costs _and_ benefits.

the problem isn't the 14 permits (which represent the things we want) but the 9 months it takes the bureaucracy to issue them. that 9 months, representing pure negative cash flow, is the onerous bit. make regulatory agencies issue/deny permits within 2 business days (so maybe it takes a month to get all your permits in place) and we won't see this kind of misplaced hate for regulations.

</comment><comment><USER30> What worries me is that this is the easy to notice stuff that is brought up (AT&T blocking Skype, etc.) what is really pernicious are things like network "optimization" where there is a huge potential for abuse.

Want to influence the next election? Delay requests for a particular party's website by 10s each.

Want to promote your new streaming service? Make competing ones timeout on every 10th request.

Concerned about journalists writing bad articles about your company and your abusive practices? Make their site take twice as long to load.

ISPs are in a position of immense power and in the US there is inadequate competition for a pure market solution/consumer choice. This is something that needs government protection.

<comment><USER31> With you all the way until your last sentence, which seems to contradict the rest. When there is an immense concentration of power and concern about shady figures subtly influencing and corrupting things, the emphasis should be on diffusing that power out over a variety of diverse vessels instead of centralizing and condensing it further. Governmental apparatuses are just as, if not more, susceptible to corruption and influence than commercial ones, and I suspect the symbiotic relationship of regulatory capture and "government oversight" plays a major role in the interest in maintaining the status quo.

The best answer to our telco issues is to use government influence to make sure that the power is evenly dispersed among the people.

Babysitting the 5-6 major entrenched players is a stopgap at best and probably just a waste of time. Have to change the market circumstances so that the natural fluid, self-healing, and self-monitoring rhythm of the free market is in full swing.

<comment><USER30> So, I'm in agreement, but I'm not sure how to get from here to there. I think I'd rather a stopgap solution than one that would put me in a bad spot for the next decade+ while deep infrastructure issues are addressed.

What I really wish is that Internet was just another boring utility like electric or gas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really the argument is what type of service do these companies provide? It should forever be just a "dumb data pipe". Many interests are attempting to bastardize this and call the Service something else to eek out more profit.

I as a consumer should simply be able to purchase "access". That is, I should be able to purchase a pre-defined pipe from my provider. I should be allowed to pass as much traffic in and out that pipe as much as possible to any destination without discrimination. If the ISP sells me a pipe @10Mbps then I should be able to fully utilize it (save for latency/jitter/loss to destinations, etc..). I am paying to pass _data_. It is akin to my power company, I am paying for electricty (say 200 Amp service). My ISP should only look at it as _data_ and nothing more. The moment they put their fingers into my _data_ they are not supplying me a service I paid for.

<comment><USER33> That's a pipe dream - there are no services built this way, not even the electric grid you referenced. If everyone in your neighborhood fully utilized their 200A service, guess what happens? Yeah, you all lose power.

ISPs are built the same way - resources are built out to provide service levels acceptable to most customers most of the time, but they can't be built so everyone gets all of their bandwidth all of the time and still be sold at consumer prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> > In other words, it wasn't a net neutrality issue at all: it was an early > prototype of what is known as "zero-rating."

I read and agree with most of what Ben writes but he is grossly wrong here. How is 'zero rating' not a net neutrality issue?

He justifies it by saying

1) It is common across the world and 2) It helped mobile carrier industry to be competitive.

On #1, some countries have banned 'zero rating'(e.g. India) under net neutrality laws.

On #2, it was not only zero rating which helped T-Mobile and the industry to be competitive. It was primarily because of BYOD and getting rid of contracts when buying a new phone.

</comment><comment><USER35> "...it wasn't a net neutrality issue at all: it was an early prototype of what is known as "zero-rating.""

Zero-rating is a net neutrality issue. It gives preference to one service over others.

</comment><comment><USER36> You post this when india just got the toughest laws on Net Neutrality in the world [1]. This guy is clearly fishing for clicks (outrageous headline!) and wants to invite the trolls to comment pages.

He's not right, he never has been, and never will be. And the idiots that upvoted this are also idiots.

[1]: [https://redd.it/7g3aaq](https://redd.it/7g3aaq)

</comment><comment><USER37> The only argument here is "it might not be necessary, so it's not worth the costs." Can anyone think of any actual costs? Unfortunately there is no substance in the "THE COST OF REGULATION" section.

<comment><USER38> New ISPs will have to, from day one and on top of all other laws and regulations they need to follow, comply, and be able to demonstrate compliance, with net neutrality.

People with more of a network background will please chip in whether this is easy?

Also, more speculatory:

Free-you're-the-product services are dominant in large swaths of the internet. Free-and-you-don't-pay-for-the-bits-you're-still-the-product could be up-and- coming, but Net Neutrality regulation would kill it off as obviously evil. Who knows, it could be an essential stepping stone towards people being _paid_ for all the data they feed tech companies. Maybe Net Neutrality will lock in free- you're-the-product indefinitely.

<comment><USER39> Obviously complying with net neutrality, unless the law is stupidly written, is trivial. Compliance simply means blindly passing on tcp/ip packets without looking at to whom and where they are going. The only way to fail to comply is if you actively stop a packet and say "hey there, pay a toll to go through". There is negative cost to compliance, failure to comply requires an extra layer of technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I really hate what seems to me a new trend of co-opting terms to muddy the waters and confuse the issues. This guy is not in support of NN. That's it.

Ideally we'd have so much ISP competition that NN wouldn't need be as necessary because the first company to propose splitting up the net would be laughed out of business.

But we've screwed that up, because there's hardly any ISP competition in America. NN makes sure they don't split up the net. Because we've seen before that they don't really care about the end consumer.

</comment><comment><USER41> An article completly broken by it's fundamental assumption; a NN internet is some how _more_ expensive than a non NN one.

What impossible regulatory burden is the FCC really applying to the _poor_ ISPs? The reason NN has been the default for all these decades is it's _more_ work to manually inspect packets to provide these artificial tiers of service and the ISP gravy train is way too good as it is to risk exposing their monopolies to consumer outrage.

The internet is a utility as much as electricity, and yet you don't see the power companies saying it's important for ~competition~ to charge variable rates for your power delivery (though, recent advances means this is possible so, once NN is killed expect Grid Neutrality to be next).

Sacrifice the internet for profit for all I care, just don't fucking try to say it's a good thing for consumers.

</comment><comment><USER42> I find it alarming, and somewhat ironic, this article was removed from HN temporarily for it being repeatedly flagged. I don't fully agree with the article, but using a mechanism to prevent abuse to hide an opinion that you disagree with is akin to the forms of censorship net neutrality is meant to prevent.

<comment><USER4> Welcome to the HN echo chamber.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Yawn. Another libertarian who believes "The Market will Regulate itself." No matter how much proof you have to the contrary, you'll still have those claiming less regulations are better.

Companies exist to make money. "Social Good" they claim are facades. Because at the end of the day, if "Illegal_fine*percentage_caught < Illegal Gains", they're going to do it. And we have not much further to look than Google/Amazon/Microsoft/Apple/Facebook about that. And wouldn't ya know, those are the big players on the Internet, the least regulated thing across the world.

<comment><USER21> EDIT: deleted

<comment><USER43> Right now, they already do.

With NN gone, you could have Facebook not just paying to zero-rate traffic, but to actively "double-rate" or "elimi-nate" traffic to competitors.

Hard to get in if your traffic's killed weeks or months in. And it makes acquisition nice and cheap - "Well, nobody's using your services, I'll give you $50k".

<comment><USER31> This is already how it is _de-facto_. Anyone who has done web promotion knows that if Google decides you shouldn't get traffic anymore, you don't get traffic anymore. Platform control is at the center of every tech company's goal because it makes them the kingmakers, and if there's a killer new feature from an up-and-coming startup, they can and will shamelessly copy it into their platform and neuter the startup in the next release. Getting "Netscaped" is just routine business in tech now.

<comment><USER43> Yep. And its treated as a "Rights issue" with the respective companies whom do this. Of course, only the behemoths' rights are protected.

          "Google's not required to index your site."
          "Facebook isn't required to allow you to talk to people."
          "Microsoft doesn't have to allow your website to exist on Azure."
          "Amazon disagreed with your business plan as it competes with them. You're kicked off AWS."

Sure, they have the "right" to maintain their business. The problem is, when they run as Kingmaker, they should be held to a higher standard of law. We already have this jurisprudence, known as Tortuous Interference. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference) . Lets start enforcing it, when they do things like "Interfere/Clone/Absorb" or "Embrace/Enhance/Extinguish".

Getting "Netscaped" should qualify under Tortious Interference, and should bring swift remedies. Because when the big players provide a stable interface and set of service, without discrimination, that levels the playing field for more players to get in and do cool things. With their Axe hanging over others heads, why bother playing the game?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Honestly I would have no issues with this if we actually had competition. My state forbids local municipalities from forming internet companies, so I am left with a single speed from cable company or a single speed, half of the cable companies, from ATT with data caps.

I can guarantee the cable company will all of a sudden charge more, for the same service, by tacking on tiered plans, while doing _nothing_ to upgrade reliability, bandwidth, or really anything. Why would they? Where can one go, when ATT will do the exact same thing.

Ajit is wrong, based on the assumption that the free market will correct this issue.

</comment><comment><USER45> Is this right given that ISPs have local monopolies?

<comment><USER46> Yeah, the whole comparison to T-Mobile is baseless.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> You need electricity to power everything you do online. I don't think anyone would support being charged different rates based on what you plug into a power outlet.

<comment><USER33> And yet here we are - [https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate- plan-o...](https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/rate-plan- options/electric-vehicle-base-plan/electric-vehicle-base-plan.page)

<comment><USER47> Wow. And this:

[https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy- money/help...](https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/save-energy-money/help- paying-your-bill/longer-term-assistance/medical-condition-related/medical- baseline-allowance/medical-baseline-allowance.page)

I really don't want utilities making value judgements for me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> I'm surprised this is getting so many upvotes, there are a lot of problems with the statements and arguments in the article.

It almost entirely rests on a bogeyman of high "costs of regulation", with no argument or evidence that these costs under NN are actually high. NN is trivial to comply with and we've had two years under it but no evidence presented that it is burdensome.

Then, many of the arguments boil down to "Net neutrality is good, but regulation is too costly so let's hope the free market enforces net neutrality on its own without regulations." This is backed up by a claim that there have not been systematic violations of net neutrality, but this does not match the facts and has been addressed multiple times in this thread.

Also, the author several times incorrectly claims that zero-rating does not violate net neutrality, but actually, it is one of the primary examples of a violation. Perhaps they are confused with the fact that cellular companies like T-Mobile are not classified as common carriers? But this refutes one of the main points: For companies like T-Mobile not subject to NN rules, we do see systematic violations of NN, for example, zero-rating.

</comment><comment><USER49> So the author is saying "look at this thing which people say violates net neutrality but not the net neutrality regulations as written" and uses that as an argument to get rid of the net neutrality regulations altogether? Does this make sense to anyone else? Zero rating is equivalent to charging more for non- zero-rated bandwidth.

</comment><comment><USER50> > Equally difficult to measure is the inevitable rent-seeking that accompanies > regulation, as incumbents find it easier to lobby regulators to foreclose > competition instead of winning customers in an open market.

Yeah, really strong move by Pai, going against all ISPs wishes to keep Net Neutrality.

This story does not compute in its own logic.

</comment><comment><USER51> > _Remember that ISPs bear massive fixed costs, which means they are motivated > to maximize the number of end users. That means not cutting off sites and > apps those customers want. Moreover, even in the worst case scenario where > ISPs did decide to charge Google and Netflix and whatnot, they could price > discriminate and charge the Netflix competitor nothing at all!_

I don't really get this argument. If the ISPs are able to get another revenue stream from content providers, such as Netflix, etc, then this doesn't really follow. There could even be a world where they care more about content providers than consumer! Also: they're not necessarily going to "cut off" these other apps, they could simply throttle them, making that app seem to work poorly. So, the consumer just stays with Netflix, who is paying the ISP.

</comment><comment><USER52> _" So to recount: one Portugal story is made up, and the other declared that a 10GB family plan with an extra 10GB for a collection of apps of your choosing for €25/month ($30/month) is a future to be feared;"_

So, to recount: this author doesn't understand the concept of phasing something in, and thinks that if something doesn't appear all at once then it will never appear.

</comment><comment><USER53> This guy is not in favor of Net Neutrality.

This piece is striking for it's clever dishonesty. He says he believes in NN while arguing in favor of zero-rating, which is by definition contrary to NN.

Dude totally ignores the fact that during the growth phase of the internet ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner did not also own major internet content and therefore had little incentive to be anticompetitive (HBO and Hulu).

</comment><comment><USER54> > "And, I'd add, if neutrality and foreclosed competition are the issue net > neutrality proponents say they are, then Google and Facebook are even bigger > concerns than ISPs: both are super-aggregators with unprecedented power and > the deepest moats ever seen in technology, and an increasing willingness to > not be neutral."

I've advocated this is a much larger threat

</comment><comment><USER55> "We promise we won't systematically abuse this, we double promise with a cherry on top. But we need to be able to, for reasons. But we won't. Swear down. But the option is nice, you know?"

<comment><USER56> I can't tell if you're talking about the FCC promising Forbearance with Title II classification, or if you're talking about ISPs.

<comment><USER8> He's talking about the ISPs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> 1\. QZ (nor Tim Wu) never claimed that the screenshot in their article is from Portugal. That false premise alone takes a significant amount of introduction to the article. In fact, QZ's article even explains the same thing that this article does (see my second point).

2\. I completely agree with the author that the Portugal example is a bad one. That example shows zero rating, not "pay $5 to access certain websites", as most people assume once it circulates through the NN debate. Still problematic, but not as quite as those who share it make it seem. "Pay $5 to use social media" and "pay $5 to use your data plan for anything you want and have additional data specifically for social media" is not the same.

3\. I disagree with the overall premise of the article (that Pai is right) and there was nothing in this article to prove me otherwise. It puts into a question the FCC decision from 2015. Okay, understood. But I fail to see what the author thinks is the appropriate action _after_ the 2015 decision gets reverted. As such, my belief that the 2015 decision shouldn't get reverted is still going strong.

</comment><comment><USER58> Re: food safety...

> Ayn Rand and Ron Paul walk into a bar. The bartender serves them tainted > alcohol. They die. The market reacts and the bar closes because nobody goes > there anymore. Ayn Rand and Ron Paul are still dead.

<comment><USER59> The bar has some stairs where you could fall and break your neck. Do you need a government regulation outlawing stairs in bars?

Bar furniture could break and impale you. Should the bar have a furniture- owning license where they need to learn how to maintain their chairs?

And absurd made up examples can go on...

<comment><USER58> [https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab...](https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=interpretations&p_id=24960)

Well...

Also, let's be clear that regulations about the bar for food quality you will commercially sell to others and what you do in your own home (the furniture example) is obviously a false comparison. Besides the OSHA case for handrails there is, in fact, rules and regulations around the quality of, for instance, mattresses and their potential for catching fire.

Ultimately my point is that there is a clear and fundamental difference between regulating what you can sell commercially and what you do in your own home. In addition there is plenty of precedent (and good reason) for regulation that you used as some sort of straw man but in fact actively reduces injury and makes businesses more accessible and available to more customers.

<comment><USER59> Yeah I remember California's fire-retardant regulation, which turned out to be a carcinogen. More regulations solved that too.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cancer-linked- fla...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cancer-linked-flame/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Well, at least it's a nice break from the incessant talk about Facebook from Ben.

I think his newsletter could be renamed "facebookanalysis.com"

</comment><comment><USER61> Just a single look at the governments who actually do regulate their Internet will lead you to the same conclusion. You don't want your Internet to be like Portugal? Is China or Russia more of your taste? As someone who lives in Russia, I would never trust the government to regulate the Internet. It's obvious what this control will end up being used for. You should be thankful that Trump of all people doesn't want to control your Internet.

<comment><USER62> So your argument is essentially that, given the way Russia enforces laws, you rather wouldn't want governments enforcing laws?

<comment><USER61> Do you think Russia enforces its laws in any special way or what? No, there are just more laws to enforce. First make everything illegal, then put anyone you don't like behind bars.

Don't give your government more tools to oppress you, is what would be my advice.

<comment><USER62> > Do you think Russia enforces its laws in any special way or what?

Yes, very much so.

> No, there are just more laws to enforce. First make everything illegal, then > put anyone you don't like behind bars.

Which already is telling you that it's not the rule of law. Selective enforcement is not a thing that should exist under the rule of law, and it exists to a much lesser extent in other countries.

> Don't give your government more tools to oppress you, is what would be my > advice.

Well, that's fine. But the solution is not to therefore have a powerless government. Because if your government is powerless, others will take over and oppress you instead. Power doesn't care whether it is exercised by what is nominally your government or any other entity that can in fact exercise power.

The solution to oppression is to keep power distributed, and government absolutely can be a very helpful entity in keeping a healthy power balance. In this case, ISPs want to use the power they have due to their monopolistic position to oppress their customers and internet companies, which is a case where balancing that power of the ISPs with power from the government is a pretty good idea.

Also, I think you might be confusing network neutrality regulation with network content regulation, which are two very different things, if not polar opposites. If you don't have network neutrality, that creates an environment where ISPs can in fact just implement content regulation at will, be it for their own uses, for advertisers, or also as a service they can sell to the government. Network neutrality, on the other hand, is what allows one or two branches of the government to stop anyone else from doing any of that, including the other branches of the government.

<comment><USER63> Only the government has the power of 'legitimate violence' so they have to be considered in a different manner.

<comment><USER62> Really, "the power of legitimate violence" doesn't compute. If someone has the actual power to use violence against the population, what difference does it make whether it is somehow nominally illegitimate? Giving all the power to private corporations is not a solution to that problem, because then those corporations ultimately will also end up with the power to use violence. Your only hope is to keep power distributed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> anyone with common sense know that this is false... it would break the internet if ISPs would take advantage of the absence of a net neutrality requirement. I think that whoever passed this law gave the ISPs a pretty bad idea (not that the law is bad).

</comment><comment><USER65> Ajit Pai did nothing wrong and shouldn't be attacked with as much personal vitriol as we're seeing.

<comment><USER66> He's on the verge of turning the internet into cable TV. That necessitates significant attack. And he seems to be doing so for personal gain. His supposed justifications are demonstrably false.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I have a few issues with his reasoning.

> "The most famous example of an ISP acting badly was a company called Madison > River Communication ... Vonage quickly complained to the FCC, which quickly > obtained a consent decree that included a nominal fine and guarantee from > Madison River Communications that they would not block such services again."

Basically his defense of the old regulatory framework in this instance is that the FCC took action. I don't have much confidence that Ajit Pai would have the FCC take action if he were faced with this same scenario.

> "Another popularly cited case is Comcast's attempted throttling of > BitTorrent in 2007 ... The FCC ordered Comcast to stop in 2008"

Once again his defense of the old framework is that the FCC will take action should this scenario recur. Chairman Pai doesn't exactly engender confidence in his willingness to take on ISPs.

> "if the furor over net neutrality has demonstrated anything, it is that the > media is ready-and-willing to raise a ruckus if ISPs even attempt to do > something untoward"

So the author acknowledges that what the ISPs are trying to do with net neutrality is "untoward"? Not sure why he's written this article then... But even so, what good has that furor caused? It has become clear that the ISPs are going to succeed regardless of the ruckus. So this doesn't really support the idea that the media can successfully regulate ISPs.

> "it is an acknowledgment that ISPs can and will self-regulate."

The author may be right that they can and HAVE self-regulated in the past. That does not mean they WILL self regulate in the future.

> "ISPs bear massive fixed costs, which means they are motivated to maximize > the number of end users."

Not exactly. They are motivated to maximize profits. Maximizing the number of end users is certainly part of the equation, but monopolies tend to engage in other profit maximizing practices such as price discrimination (which is mentioned shortly after this in the article). However the author seems to assume that ISPs will only engage in price discrimination with regards to companies, and not consumers ("they could price discriminate and charge the Netflix competitor nothing at all!"). I find that unlikely. It is not unreasonable to think that blocking user access to some sites unless the user purchases a certain "package" will be used in service of price discrimination.

> "Ajit Pai is right to RETURN REGULATION [emphasis added] to the same light > touch under which the Internet developed and broadband grew for two > decades."

In my opinion this is a false equivalency. Though it may nominally be the same regulatory framework, there are differences between the regulatory environment then and now; primarily the FCC's and Chairman Pai's willingness to take on ISPs and support the principles of Net Neutrality.

</comment><comment><USER68> The article attempts to make logical arguments from false premises.

* _What makes evaluating regulations so difficult is that the benefits are usually readily apparent ... but the costs are much more difficult to quantify_ Why should that be so? The actual costs of implementing and conforming to a regulation are easier to measure than the benefits. The benefit of NN is harder to quantify than the cost of enforced nondiscrimination.

 _future innovations ... are far more difficult to calculate_ Predictions are hard, especially about the future. If some future innovations are difficult to predict consequent to a regulation, others are hard to predict in its absence.

* _regulation always has a cost far greater than what we can see at the moment it is enacted_ Why should that be so? Because we can't know the future? If that's the case, it's equally true for benefits: we can't know the full benefit of a regulation, either, because not all the behaviors it forestalls have been invented yet.

It has been estimated that many EPA regulations have benefits worth 100 times their cost. Those benefits far exceed EPA's original estimates.

A regulation is a law. We hear a lot about them as "bad" because corporations have the money and time to complain about them in the press and to congress. They say the problem is costs, but when it comes to intangible goods like banking and communications, the "problem" is often the regulator's interference with the corporation's ability to exploit imperfect information. If you don't think your phone company or credit card is two steps ahead of you, read your terms of agreement sometime.

Good regulations squeeze out bad actors. Worldcom did significant damage to AT&T and their customers: by publishing fraudulent financials, it pushed AT&T to make deep cuts to services that -- by honest accounting -- were profitable and competitively priced.

A good contemporary example is airline pricing. Not long ago, the price you paid for you ticket was the price for getting from A to B. Then the airlines started charging for drinks, then food, and now bags. The real price can be $100 more than the published price. When searching for fares, there's no way to look for an "all in" price, so all airlines are forced into this deceptive model. Only regulation could successfully return us to a normal system where the price is the price.

The Internet exists because of taxpayer-sponsored research to create standards and place them in the public domain. Anyone who used MCI Mail or Compuserv or Prodigy knows what a privatized Internet would look like.

The idea that the telephone company (or cable company) should be allowed to determine, in any way, how we use their service or what we use their service for has no analog in any other industry, which is why every supporting argument is specious or disingenuous or just false.

</comment><comment><USER69> Ajit Pai is wrong and so is the author. He's confusing safety and soundness regulation with economic regulation, and incorrectly asserting they're equal. They are not.

Net neutrality is about the safety and soundness of the internet. What he's saying is "hey it has been okay so regulation is bad until we have to have it. Because all regulation is bad." That's a pretty fucked and ignorant way of looking at regulation in my opinion.

It's quite sad to see this getting upvotes.

<comment><USER70> > _It's quite sad to see this getting upvotes._

Upvotes don't necessarily mean agreement, it means that the community is interested in discussing the contents of the article. And including jabs like this does nothing but worsen that discussion.

<comment><USER14> I'm afraid the "flag" feature has been abused to mean disagreement in this case sadly. Hopefully the article becomes unflagged.

EDIT: no longer flagged, yay.

<comment><USER71> Without asking the members who clicked "flag", it's hard to know why they did so. I can think of at least three other reasons why users may have flagged it besides disagreement: there have been quite a few submissions on the topic already and they've had enough of the topic for now; whether or not they agree with the topic or think it needs to be discussed, they don't think HN is a constructive place for such a discussion; they don't think the given submission has anything to add to what's already been discussed. Please note that I'm not saying that any of these are why members flagged it. I'm just suggesting it's not useful to jump to a particular conclusion without more information. In this case, I don't think it's possible to know definitively given the information at hand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> no he's fucking not

</comment><comment><USER73> So many things wrong in that article, I don't know where to begin.

I will begin with the part where he contradicts himself in the article, implying the Portugal style zero-rating is no big deal in the first half of the article, and then saying zero-rating could potentially be the biggest threat in the second half.

The second stuff he's wrong about is he conflates (poor) European country prices with the U.S. prices, so from his point of view it looks like the Portuguse have sort of a "first world problem" when they complain that the _next_ 10GB costs only 5 euro if they buy an app package.

His mistake here is that he's not putting things into the local context. Many European countries have 1Gbps cable internet that costs somewhere around 15-30 euro. To Americans that looks "dirt cheap". But to the people in those countries it's just regular prices. It's not cheap for them, which is why most have stuck on the "much slower" 100 Mbps lines and such. So saying that Portuguese don't have anything to whine about because their internet is already "cheap" or whatever, is just wrong.

Another thing is that today's 1GB data plan is tomorrow's 10GB data plan on mobile devices. Data usage is exploding. Without net neutrality (and strong competition), ISPs could leave everyone on the 1GB plan 5 years later, even though they now need 10GB of data for their daily needs, while overcharging them for "app packages".

This way, carriers could move us from a world of "I can visit 100% of the internet on my data plan" to "I can visit only 10% of the internet on my data plan..for the other 90% I will have to buy various data packages, where the internet is split into groups of services."

And again, competition IS the ultimately solution. But net neutrality is there to ensure things don't go terrible when there isn't any competition. If the US wants to get rid of net neutrality, then it should _first_ try to foster much stronger competition at a local level. Then we can begin discussing the repeal of net neutrality, if still necessary.

Also, Ben must have a short memory. Before the previous FCC started arguing for net neutrality, Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon started _slowing down_ Netflix and Youtube. I was constantly seeing people on Reddit complaining that their 50 Mbps Comcast connections can't seem to handle the 3Mbps Netflix traffic.

[https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/02/netfl...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2014/02/netflix-performance-on-verizon-and-comcast-has-been- dropping-for-months/)

But seriously, do we really need to spell out why the U.S. ISPs want to get rid of net neutrality? Does Ben actually believe that the ISPs are doing this because the rules have been "oh so hard on them"? Or is it because they want to screw the consumers nine ways to heaven, and having no rules in place, just like when they repealed the privacy framework recently banning them from collecting user data, will help them do that?

</comment><comment><USER21> EDIT: deleted

<comment><USER74> Yes, competition would be nice. And you won't find a single NN proponent who would be opposed to increasing competition.

But you know what? That's a completely orthogonal argument. Because we do not currently live in a world with that level of competition, and repealing NN would do absolutely nothing to change that. Not an iota. The world we currently live in, is one where the vast majority of Americans have access to maybe one or two broadband providers. There is no competition. You can argue why that is, but in reality, it doesn't matter. There is not competition, and there won't be for quite some time. So if you repeal NN now, you repeal NN in that anti-competitive environment. There is nothing preventing the things that you claim won't happen, but have absolutely nothing but the "good faith" of the ISPs to go on.

You want to increase competition. We all do. But please don't make the mistake of repealing NN before that happens. It will do nothing but strengthen the incumbent ISPs, making it that much harder to compete with them. Instead, work for policies like Local Loop Unbundling, or municipal broadband. Then, after we've created a competitive market, then look at NN.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best way to secure on-premise servers? - <AUTHOR> My client asks me to put my servers in their private (non-internet connected) network.
This server contains proprietary code and deep-learning models.
What are the best practices to prevent any data theft? <comment><USER2> You should talk to a lawyer, not a sysadmin, because your remedy is going to be contractual rather than technological. Technologists thinking rationally will tell you that anyone with physical possession of an operating device wins, every single time.

If your lawyer cannot sufficiently derisk this for you then _don 't take on this business_. (I would expect them to say, as part of that conversation, "Look, enterprises generally don't give a #$'(%# about the IP of their vendors. If it were available in an envelope labeled Please Take This Valuable IP they'd pass it by because they have a business to run and you're just a distraction to them." And they're right.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Echoing, what I believe is the underlying premise of patio11's advice:

The potential client -- anyone who isn't currently paying you is a prospect, not a client-- is asking you to _change_ your business model. That may or may not be worth doing depending on the amount the prospect is willing to pay and the opportunity costs that accompany the new business model versus the previous business model.

Patio11's point that this is a bespoke contractual negotiation surfaces the idea that the prospect is really looking for a consultant rather than a product. In that context, the services offered under the contract ought to be priced so that the client pays for the risk associated with misappropriation of the intellectual property whether or not it occurs -- or conversely pays for extended access to the IP.

All of that is friction for a business structured to operate on a different model. In my experience, losing a good prospect is easier to recover from than accepting a bad prospect by a substantial margin.

Good luck.</comment>


Formalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/formalism-mathematics/ <comment><USER2> The working mathematician is a Platonist on weekdays, a formalist on weekends. On weekdays, when doing mathematics, he's a Platonist, convinced he's dealing with an objective reality whose properties he's trying to determine. On weekends, if challenged to give a philosophical account of this reality, it's easiest to pretend he doesn't believe in it. He plays formalist, and pretends mathematics is a meaningless game

Reuben Hersh

<comment><USER3> This seems paradox. Did he perhaps say that on a weekend?

Most paradoxes are actually solvable, so I take issue with this metamathematical dissonance. I'll take it as a humble admission of ignorance and a resolution to (syn-)tactfully avoid getting into philosophical (sem-)antics to, instead, teach the first ground truth of the fight club by example (don't talk about it, do it).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics: Mathematics as the Science of Quantity and Structure" by J. Franklin.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nice article, but too specialized and it can be a bit complicated to read it. So, if you need problems with understanding it, write me at [https://handmadewritings.com](https://handmadewritings.com) and I will explain to you any tough moments!

</comment><comment><USER6> Let's not forget constructivism. [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics- constructive/](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-constructive/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Argh..too much jargon, had to stop reading..</comment>


How Do You Pronounce GIF? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/02/tech-etymology-animated-gif/70504/

<comment><USER2> Not the most important question of the day, but I like etymology.

tldr: both hard-g and soft-g are correct (though the originators of the format wanted the latter)</comment>


Show HN: IPLocate.io – a free IP geolocation service - <AUTHOR> https://www.iplocate.io <comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN! I've developed IPLocate.io, a super simple IP geolocation service to return data like country, city, timezone, etc. for IP addresses.

It's free up to 1,500 requests per day, beyond which we have a couple of paid plans to accommodate higher limits.

We've got some code samples for various languages on the home page as well as documentation by Apiary.

It's a super simple Rails app powered by MaxMind data.

I've been developing in the web and mobile space for years, but this is my first web project I'm finally releasing to the public - I'm not expecting it to be a money maker but just wanted to get a feel for reaction from the hacker community!

<comment><USER2> Congrats on the launch! Looks very similar to my service, [https://ipinfo.io](https://ipinfo.io) :) I launched that around 3 years ago and at the time there weren't even any paid plans. It now handles close to 500 million API requests a day.

I'd recommend killing the unlimited plan - you'll lose out on revenue with that.

Good luck! Feel free to reach out to me if there's anything you think I could help with.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! And congratulations on 500m requests per day - that's insane!

Thanks for the tip on pricing, the plans are essentially guesswork at the moment until I see some real users with real usage. I checked out some other services (including yours ;) ) and saw a wide range of pricing, some that had unlimited plans and some that didn't. Will definitely be something to revisit in the future.

<comment><USER3> I think coderholic gave you a good advice. If you're on amazon with a pay per use plan, you should immediately do the math of what it's going to cost you if someone does 1M request a day.

Let's say someone who make an equivalent service, sells cheaper plans, and uses yours for example.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm...

The output is practically the same as [https://freegeoip.net/json/](https://freegeoip.net/json/)

But their free limit is a whooping 240x yours (and it's been very reliable for a client of mine). Are you piggybacking/bootstrapping off this?

Why iplocate.io rather than the reliable freegeoip.net

</comment><comment><USER5> How is this different from

[https://db-ip.com/api](https://db-ip.com/api)

[https://ipapi.co](https://ipapi.co)

[https://freegeoip.net](https://freegeoip.net)

[http://ipinfodb.com](http://ipinfodb.com)

[https://www.iplocation.net](https://www.iplocation.net)

[http://neutrinoapi.com](http://neutrinoapi.com)

[http://www.ip2location.com](http://www.ip2location.com)

[https://www.telize.com](https://www.telize.com)

and a few dozen more....?[1]

[1] Source: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681118](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14681118)

</comment><comment><USER6> What is the redundancy on this service? CloudFlare in front. How about the backends? Are you cross zone? Cross region?

Also, nitpick, but using `X-` headers are deprecated, even though everybody still does it. Recommend changing auth header to `IPLocate-API-Key`.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's currently hosted on AWS, multi-instance in a single AZ. It has the ability to scale across zones easily, but my priority was to make sure I'm not hit with unreasonable costs for my small side project while it has 1 user. :)

Thanks for the tip about the header - I didn't know that! I can certainly change the name.

<comment><USER6> Good luck. I'm running a Go app ([https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip](https://github.com/fiorix/freegeoip)) on a single f1-micro in Google Cloud for my startup. It works, no problems, no fuss, but certainly can see lots of people paying for GeoIP. Maybe focus on creating a Heroku plugin?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> how is this different from ipinfo.info?

curl ipinfo.io gives me the same info.

</comment><comment><USER8> Have you talked to MaxMind about becoming an authorized data reseller? The downloadable data file (which I assume you are using), does not allow selling lookups as a service.

[https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-faq/geoip2-and-geoip- legac...](https://support.maxmind.com/geoip-faq/geoip2-and-geoip-legacy- license/can-i-set-up-a-website-where-my-clients-can-enter-an-ip-address-and- get-geoip2-information-back/)

<comment><AUTHOR> The database being used is under a licence that allows commercial use :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wonder how these services will work with ipv6, my address from hurricane electric just returns "North America"

</comment><comment><USER10> I would pay for an API that will let me lookup company name based on IP address, anyone providing this type of service?

<comment><USER2> We have a company details API that does exactly that at ipinfo.io - get in touch at email@example.com if you'd like more details or see [https://ipinfo.io/products](https://ipinfo.io/products)</comment></comment>


Show HN: DevFeed - <AUTHOR> https://devfeed.io <comment><AUTHOR> A simple, customizable dev news feed for your team delivered via Slack, Email, Mobile, or RSS.

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi! Are you planning on providing an API for it? And when is your expected release?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes. I should have an MVP ready in 2-3 weeks

<comment><AUTHOR> If you haven't already, sign up for early access and I'll keep you posted on the progress.</comment></comment></comment>


Category Theory for Promises/A+ - <AUTHOR> http://brianmckenna.org/blog/category_theory_promisesaplus

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is a really important post, and I hope the suggestions are implemented. This will give Promises in JS a clean and simple API.

The current proposed API is full of corner cases, justified on the basis that providing a single method, `then`, is simple. Unfortunately this is too simple, hence the corner cases.

Unfortunately it seems the people in charge of the promise spec are not open to change, or even to rational argumentation. If you want to see some really pathetic behavior read this thread: <https://github.com/promises- aplus/promises-spec/issues/94></comment>


Dhamick: Alternative to Facebook? - <AUTHOR> https://www.dhamick.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> A friend sent me this site that i find it could be a viable alternative to Facebook and the problems that we are tired of (data breach, etc). I am sharing this to help the site get popular.

He said they got 677 users in its first 2 days. I still have few friends on the site so if you want a friend to interact and etc just post your username below.

<comment><USER2> It would be nice if you can contact the owner of the site so we can ask some technical questions here.

I guess the first request is to have a few screenshot of some usual cases. Does the site have some public pages that can be seen without registration?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes it does. I guess you can see some profile pages and groups that are not listed as private. You can also see pages of topics like this: [https://www.dhamick.com/topic/thebesttopic](https://www.dhamick.com/topic/thebesttopic)

Also the about and contact pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have a feeling that OP made the site

</comment><comment><USER4> Where are the Terms & Conditions?

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't there there are.</comment></comment>


Transcriptic for YC biotech startups - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/transcriptic <comment><USER2> This is really remarkable.

I've used Transcriptic in a research setting for a while now. From a user's perspective, it's like looking into the future, and it's awesome.

From the business side, this makes YC a more attractive option for biotech startups. The life sciences are still very capital intensive. While the New YC Deal helps in this department, many businesses still need to look toward an STTR/SBIR grant from the NIH to get to the stage where they have a product to show investors.

Moves like this probably won't change that for a ton of companies, but there are a few on the margin who may be able to pursue an idea through YC with the benefit of the extra $20K in fuel.

<comment><USER3> How does Transcriptic stack up in terms of price? Is it prohibitively expensive for lots of stuff or is it a viable option?

<comment><USER2> We find it to be pretty competitive for our needs (PCR, genotyping, long-term storage).

PCR is something like ~$1.50/rxn with our standard genotyping protocol, which works out to ~$0.30-0.40 more than the same reaction run in house. If I recall correctly, the cost per rxn goes down if you run more in parallel, because they share the same instrument time.

Setting up that reaction might take me ~0.5 hours base, and 0.05 hours for each subsequent reaction prepared in parallel.

Grad students are cheap, but even valuing my skilled labor at minimum wage, it's cheaper to use Transcriptic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hey, I'm the founder of Transcriptic. We're pretty excited about this. Happy to answer any questions!

<comment><USER5> The biggest pain point I see in this market is that experimental parallelization is an intervention-heavy process. Ignoring the equipment costs, it's also capital-intensive (unlike say deploying to AWS). And finally, obtaining usable data still requires experiential knowledge. There's something about _knowing and feeling the data_ (yeah, that's awfully fuzzy) that is still an important part about obtaining good results [0]. So for any biologic process that is parallelizing the operators are going to want to own the machines anyways.

In order to capture a real market, you're going to have to figure out a way to offer parallelization services - be given a non-parallel experiment with certain parameters and scale it up on behalf of the users. So, the user has an experimental plan and just 'hands it over' to transcriptic. I still worry about the experiential knowledge part, putting the experimenter one step away from the experiment is potentially counterproductive.

[0][http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2339/full) In this paper, the grad student (and lead author) who had spent four years of her graduate work on a previous paper had a nagging feeling that the data were strange. By actually looking at the wells, she figured out post-publication (with nothing to gain) that the protein was sticking to sides of the 96-well plate and causing the observational data to be artefactual. Then there was the question of how to do more experiments to _prove_ that was going on. And then the political problem of convincing her grad advisor to publish a retraction (well at least it was a retraction worth a 10 page paper and a new citation. The story has a happy ending; she got a position at a pharma company largely on the back of her due diligence).

<comment><USER4> I think the opposite is actually true: you get better data when you don't feel the samples. This is a highly unpopular view right now but I have to wonder what's going on when things like Amgen getting 11% reproducibility of foundational papers ([http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v483/n7391/full/483531a.html)) are happening. There are things that are hard to automate because of their mechanical nature, but I think that for the reproducibility of science somewhat distancing the human from the process is a good thing. Of course, this adds short-term costs (which may sometimes be unacceptable) and requires a lot of behavior change for how people are used to working. I will say that we put a lot of thought into giving you the fidelity of interaction such that you can still make "breakthroughs from your errors" on Transcriptic, and improving those reporting capabilities are an ever-ongoing process.

I'll also say that this challenge is bigger than just one company. Some things may make more sense to do via Science Exchange, for example if the method requires some very customized hardware or there are only a few experts in the world who are sufficiently familiar with an unusual method's sensitivities. I'm also excited to see what Riffyn comes out with to help labs understand where reproducibility comes from. We're just getting started, but I can't see a path forward that puts more humans at benches rather than less. The humans should be free to do real science.

<comment><USER5> I have exactly the opposite opinion. Even scientists are captiviated by scientism - the idea that there is something poisonous about human subjectivity and imprecision and that removing subjectivity (and gathering more data) is necessarily a good. Sydney Brenner, for example has a 'money quote' about the path that biologists take: "low input, high throughput, no output science". Note that this quote doesn't make sense in an environment that doesn't faddishly flock to high througput 'big data' solutions.

Your example is greatly flawed. The biggest consumers of highly parallelizeable workflows is the pharmaceutical industry. Highly parallel medchem was a big fad and the number of drugs that it produced for its efforts is disappointing. The fact that 11% of Amgen's results are irreproducible is if anything a condemnation of parallel scaleup, at least in the context of an operator with a strong motive for selective interpretation.

Another big problem is that when you bring your numbers up, you 'get what you are looking for'. Precision optimization can optimize for an artefact. I joke I like to make is that sloppy science is good, because if you keep seeing the same result under a noisy platform, what you're seeing is probably real and, more encouragingly, robust.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Any interest in working with expression re fermentation down the line? CROs working specifically with .25-2L tanks are very tricky to find, price and deal with, and are not local to many biotech firms in the bay. About 25% of my time is spent just managing our CRO/CMO, and they only have 4x2L tanks. I used to work for a place with multiple parallel tanks (30+) that made DoEs expedient and was a great resource - but sadly not something I can tap into at my small biotech firm.

Combining what you're building with something with a ambr250 or even just a bunch of Applikon micros or wellplate fermenters could see a lot of action (though something like the ambr250 would fit your business model better, robotics > people).

I'll be contacting you for information about FACS, protein quantitation and cell viability work. Stuff I definitely want to farm out.

</comment><comment><USER7> So someone would ship samples to you guys, then your LIMS/robotic automation handles data-flow and actual physical work? Where are you guys storing all the data?

I have two hesitations to point out:

1) I worked in DNA, and the small little issues that cropped up on every major platform (MiSeq/HiSeq/iontorrent,454,etc) seems like it would make automation of fixes difficult. I guess if you are keeping a stricter list of reagents, parameters, etc, then you could help prevent this, but then people aren't pushing the edge science quite as much.

2) So much data! My systems used to generate over 200gb per day. Good luck downloading that via any api if you have anything but fiber. Do you intend to allow computation to be run on data as a cloud service? If so, I can see this going big places... as long as you allow full control of the VM for all the bio-hats and their custom wizjangles.

I'm out of the industry and have one year left on my non-compete, but I wish you the best of luck! Especially on the LIMS integration: a good LIMS is freaking expensive!

</comment><comment><USER8> This is the first I've heard of Transcriptic, but it sounds amazing.

Initially I was sceptical of YC working with startups which would have more conventionally come out of universities etc., but this is the sort of technology that has the ability to completely revolutionise scientific research.

</comment><comment><USER9> Great move Max!

This is Omri (founder of Genomecompiler.com). I'm always amazed about how many biologists think their work is pipetting small amounts of liquids and performing massively low productivity experiments rather then their real work of increasing our understanding of nature and finding solution to real world problems (like disease, hunger, aging, running out of civilization critical commodities, etc) using the best available tools.

Robots aren't taking our jobs - they help us be more productive so a biologist Ph.D. might in the future get paid like a CS undergrad!

</comment><comment><USER10> Very cool concept! I guess it's also another point to show that the number of jobs (in this case, lab assistants) that can't be automated away is getting smaller and smaller.

Just an observation though, I'm not a luddite about this.

</comment><comment><USER11> Just to let people know, Transcriptic isn't the first startup in this market. Emerald Cloud Lab is another, and I'm sure there are others.</comment>