F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating the Internet as a Utility - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/03/technology/in-net-neutrality-push-fcc-is-expected-to-propose-regulating-the-internet-as-a-utility.html <comment><USER2> Pretty impressed with the negativity here. Just a year ago, I remember all the stories on HN with people lamenting that the FCC doesn't have the guts to regulate broadband as a utility under title II [1,2,3] (admittedly with a minority speaking against title II, most prominently rayiner, whose comments I generally look forward to for an interesting contrarian view).

Y Combinator even published an open letter[4]. Quoting:

 _Title II of the Communications Act seems the most appropriate way to properly define broadband ISPs to be offering telecommunications. Speaking on behalf of Y Combinator, I'm urging you to adopt such a rule._

And here we are. It seems to me that the community has always been complaining about the different FCC approaches on the subject, and in favor of title II, until the FCC yielded. Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750036](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750036)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057634](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057634)

[3] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637147)

[4] [http://blog.ycombinator.com/y-combinator-has-filed-an- offici...](http://blog.ycombinator.com/y-combinator-has-filed-an-official- comment-with-the-fcc)

<comment><USER3> Bottom line is that net neutrality comes out of the desire for people to be able to access any site they want without penalties due to traffic shaping or other shenanigans.

The reason they are concerned is that the cable companies and to a lesser extent wireless and DSL companies are doing this.

And why do they have the power to do this? Why don't people just vote with their feet and switch to a competitor?

Because they are all monopolies.

Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees.

Every provider of POTS service to your houses and apartments is a regulated monopoly. And while they have to let DSL companies access the lines and long distance competition, the barriers to entry are still there, and the level of regulation is stifling making it hard to compete.

Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them. And while multiple bands were sold, only 3 max bands were sold for mobile in any metro area, reducing competition. (The government claimed that they had to reduce competition to boost the prices that the spectrum sold for-- probably true-- monopolies are very valuable!)

So, in response, these companies engage in rent seeking, to cover the massive taxes they pay to the federal government but also to maximize the value of the monopoly they paid so much to establish.

And as a result, people get mad at this rent seeking and demand net neutrality.

And what do they propose as a solution? Regulation! Treat it like a utility!

Well, I worked in the electric industry. Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a monopoly over its area.

People pay way too much for electricity in this country as a result. And we have a poor service level-- like the brownouts in California a decade ago that were created when regulations made it illegal to both make and sell electricity, literally prohibiting the provisioning of additional supply. (which naturally the left decided to characterize as "de-regualtion". How making it illegal to provide electricity by regulation is "de-regulation" I'll never know.)

Seeing a lot of green accounts? probably people who know their karma will be killed for daring to speak out against the leftist desire to regulate everything, despite the fact that, once again, regulation is the cause of the problem. (I consider granting a monopoly and prohibiting competition to be "Regulation", though an extreme form of course.)

Nothing better exemplifies the old saying "Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure" then the calls for more regulation to fix the problems of regulation.

Most people won't subject their karma to the onslaught of down votes that daring to take a non-leftist position results in on this site.

But sometimes you have to take a stand.

And really, it's just astounding that people talk about net neutrality and pretend like these aren't government granted monopolies. Such denial!

<comment><USER4> > Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally > granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the > monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees.

In no city is the cable company actually a "locally granted monopoly." Every franchise agreement I've seen points out that it's non-exclusive.

Technologists have a fundamental misconception that leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance and confused reasoning: that building wireline infrastructure is a lucrative business that companies can't wait to get into, and would were it not for "regulatory capture" and legal roadblocks. But it's not. It's a business with large up-front costs, expensive maintenance costs, expensive unionized workforces, etc.

> Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers > over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them

You're punning on the word "monopoly." Anyone who owns property has a "monopoly" over it. But that does not make them a monopoly. In most cities, you have 3-4 options for wireless service.

> Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a > monopoly over its area.

Most electric utilities _are_ monopolies, because it's illegal to deploy competing electrical service.

<comment><USER3> The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two companies offering cable service. If they weren't you other companies would compete.

Regarding wireless, you don't seem to understand how the industry is structured. While it's true there are many brand names on the shelf in walmart, there are only 3 actual providers in a given metro region. Virgin, for instance, uses Sprints network, which is a combination of deals done with the owners of spectrum across the country.

<comment><USER4> > The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two > companies offering cable service. If they weren't you other companies would > compete.

Nope.[1] Exclusive franchise agreements are illegal under federal law since 1996. There is no competition because the business proposition sucks. The only sensible play in most places is to try and target a niche market of wealthy neighborhoods that'll pay for the triple play. That is prohibited under most franchise agreements.

Four nationwide competitors isn't a monopoly any more than Pepsi and Coke are, who own almost all soft drink brands.

[1] e.g. [http://www.wilmingtonde.gov/docs/1320/3716Rev1.pdf](http://www.wilmingtonde.gov/docs/1320/3716Rev1.pdf) (Second whereas paragraph).

<comment><USER5> Some municipalities limit the structure of the entity offering the service however (eg. cannot be substantially and exclusively owned by the ratepayers, or their agent(s)), however the FCC seems to be working on getting those restrictions thrown out.

<comment><USER6> "... cannot be substantially and exclusively owned by the ratepayers ..."

Does that sentence mean that it's illegal for a municipality to form co-ops, and then for example lay their own fiber and then share the costs equally?

<comment><USER7> Yes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The major critique quoted here comes from David Farber of Carnegie-Mellon, who worries that classifying Internet access under Title II will allow it to be taxed.

If that's the worst thing you can think of, we're in good shape.

<comment><USER9> The power to tax is the power to destroy.

<comment><USER10> I don't understand how people can disagree with this. He's perfectly correct. How often does one cite the price of cigarettes to quit smoking them?

<comment><USER11> That's nonsensical. It all depends on the utility of the smoker. Cigarette taxes are, in theory at least, Pigouvian taxes in the sense that the goal is to reduce the harm caused by smoking. They accomplish this in two ways, first, by providing funds to deal with the associated medical costs and two, by reducing the number of people who choose to smoke.

Whether you agree with the assessed level of negative externalities or not (I don't, actually), the tax hasn't "destroyed" anything. Smoking still exists. Fewer people get sufficient utility from smoking to go on doing so, but that's the point of the tax in this case. Too many people were smoking previously due to market inefficiencies. Now the "correct" (again, I believe the externalities were lower than many people believe they were) number of people are smoking.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To me, net neutrality is pretty much a red herring.

I have had good and bad internet service in my life. The least reliable was at my somewhat rural childhood home from TWC.

The best is my current connection from that most reviled of companies, Comcast. I have had no service interruptions, and I get a reliable 50Mbps at all times of day (I check regularly with speed tests and checking Torrent activity).

The reason my internet service (and customer service experience) has been so good here is that I have two viable alternative providers, a high speed DSL carrier offering similar speeds and rates in the city, and a local fiber provider (recently introduced 10Gbps connection - yes you are reading that correctly).

While I would prefer to have no rate limiting based on usage or content, I don't view this as some inalienable right. There is a price I'm willing to pay for that service, but there is also a price low enough where I'm happy to accept rate limiting. I'd like to have the choice.

The problem seems to be that the competition which gives me the service I'm happy with and the regulation regarding whether I am even allowed to reason about my preferences as in the above paragraph keep getting tied up with one another.

To me the biggest benefit comes from having multiple options in providers. A legal monopoly who can't do rate limiting can still give me awful service. Many providers who can rate limit will most likely give me service I'm happy with, even if the plan is rate limited.

The history of utility regulation is rife with cases of legally enforced monopolies.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately some things fall into the naturally monopoly category ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly)). Figuring out what those are is an ongoing process. Government regulated industries get a bad rap these days - mostly because deregulation has been an ongoing fad for the last 30 years or so - but a lot of these have great track records. The California electricity crisis provides an instructive example of what kinds of effects deregulating an industry that was previously govt regulated can have - in short, significantly higher prices for badly degraded service [1]. Many of the proposed fixes are further govt intervention, but this time in the form of subsidies to businesses rather to incentivize necessary expansions rather than outright re-acquisition of the industry.

So in short, competition isn't necessarily always good and doesn't always produce better results. In addition, de-regulated industries aren't necessarily free from government intervention and are opened up to market manipulation and exploitation.

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis)

<comment><USER14> The problem with the CA power deregulation is that it deregulated wholesale while keeping retail rates strictly regulated.

Most states have deregulated power and didn't have similar issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Law does not operate in a vacuum because, in the end, it is closely tied to power - to fine, to jail, to sanction, to regulate and restrict - and that makes it scary when it becomes unhinged from a sense of principle in its application.

Is it wise, then, to grant unchecked, plenary power over the internet to the government in the name of trusting that those who currently exercise the F.C.C.'s power will exercise that power with self-imposed restraint? Lord Acton's dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely comes to mind in considering the implications of this step. Once we grant that the F.C.C. has open-ended authority to do what it wants with the internet, where is the formal protection against abuse and who will exercise it. Certainly the courts will not. The Telecommunications Act being relied upon here certainly grants the formal authority to do this. Those who passed that Act did so 80 years ago and never contemplated that it would be so applied. But the courts will say, it was for Congress to make the law and for the appointed agency to administer it within the bounds laid out by the legislature, and that means this exercise of authority will be upheld. But so too will any attempt by the F.C.C. to impose detailed regulations over pricing, usage, and all sorts of other areas that those who favor a free and open internet clearly do not desire. Once this step is taken, all formal protections against abuses of this type are gone. What, then, is the remaining form of protection. It is that we choose to trust those who exercise open- ended power to use "restraint." They assure us they would never change the way things are. They will never succumb to the power and influence of lobbyists. They will never exercise so vast a power that is given to them without checks for any corrupt motive. After all, governments worldwide and throughout history have demonstrated that they can be trusted with unchecked power without abusing their citizens. And so we can all rest easily knowing that our benign government is and will always remain in good hands and will always keeps its promise. After all, who needs the formal protections of the rule of law when you can give all over to the discretion of leaders who will be wielding the very powers whose potential abuse we all fear. So, for those who want net neutrality at any cost, the end justifies the means and any fear in principle of giving unchecked theoretical power to an unaccountable governmental agency goes out the window in pursuit of the immediate goal of net neutrality and in trusting current leaders who tell us that they really never intend to use all those unchecked powers. I truly hope that is so but I am very saddened that people never learn the lessons of history about what can happen when political leaders suddenly find themselves with vast amounts of unchecked power.

The free internet we know today will be utterly dependent on their good graces. I for one am not so sanguine as others about where this may lead.

<comment><USER16> Except for the part where ISPs were regulated under Title II up until the late 90s.

>The free internet we know today will be utterly dependent on their good graces.

That may be the single most uneducated statement about Title II I've seen to date. What SPECIFICALLY in Title II allows the FCC to restrict what content the ISPs provide to the public? Hint: there isn't any language whatsoever giving them that ability.

<comment><USER17> We were? 90s ISPs regulated by Title II? What? No we weren't.

I started managing ISPs during the dialup era and played shepherd to a field of Livingston Portmasters. I migrated us to racks upon racks of Ascend boxes during the 56k modem wars. I set up ISDN PRIs and DS1 terminations. I turned up our DS3s and set up our first default-free peering. I left just before the DSLAMs went in.

At no point were we ever subject to Title II regulations. We priced however we wanted to price, we shaped traffic however we needed to (we virtually never did that).

<comment><USER18> DSL was covered under Title II until wireline ISPs in general were ruled as an "information service" rather than a "telecommunication service" by the FCC in 2005 in the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in _NCTA v. Brand X_ upholding the FCC's earlier (2002) declaratory ruling finding that Cable modem internet access was an "information service".

See, for instance, [http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2005/20050805a.asp](http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2005/20050805a.asp)

<comment><USER17> I'm lost. EnterAct/21stCenturyCable/RCN, the ISP I worked for --- starting as employee #2 --- wasn't subject to Title II, despite offering DSL service. Is it possible that this DSL ruling was a wrinkle that affected only ILECs? The ILECs were, of course, heavily regulated... hence the emergence of the CLEC market. The upthread comment did not say ILECs; they said "ISPs".

<comment><USER19> Yes, pre-2005 the ILECs were required to "offer that wireline broadband transmission component separately from their Internet service as a stand-alone service on a common-carrier basis" [https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-260433A1.p...](https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-260433A1.pdf)

In addition, back in the dial-up days, how did your customers connect to those modems? Through their Title II regulated POTS service.

<comment><USER17> Sure, but we as the ISP were free to shape traffic, establish arbitrary fee structures, and charge for specific uses of the Internet despite the fact that we made use of Title II regulated phone company PRIs.

I'm not saying that Title II didn't exist in the 1990s. It just didn't govern ISPs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a libertarian who knows tech, I'm on the government's side here, although I'm grimacing while I'm supporting them. It's simply the lesser of two evils.

One thing to help clarify the debate if you're talking to somebody who opposes this move: do not confuse the issue of how the government should be treating utilities in general with whether or not the internet _is_ a utility. We can have a grand old time debating the overreach of a regulatory statist society, but that has got jack squat to do with the issue at hand. Is the internet more like electricity, where you pay so much for a bucketful, and then you can do whatever you want with it? Or is it more like Star Wars, where George Lucas and Disney can charge us 17 times at 17 different rates for different versions of what is essentially the same thing? These are two different discussions to be had; do not let folks conflate them into one.

<comment><USER21> >As a libertarian who knows tech, I'm on the government's side here

That's an oxymoron.

The core reason internet service sucks for the vast majority of Americans is because state and local governments grant monopoly status to the ISP cartels. This move by the FCC does nothing to remedy that and consequently will not solve the problem. If they require higher "standard" of internet without doing away with the monopolies, for the vast majority of people this will only mean a higher bill.

<comment><USER22> Do you think there is any such thing as a natural monopoly?

Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?

<comment><USER21> >Do you think there is any such thing as a natural monopoly?

I am not aware of any.

>Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?

No, otherwise the "natural monopoly" existed before the first company ever laid cables.

<comment><USER22> >> Do you think there is any such thing as a natural monopoly?

> I am not aware of any.

I think, judging by your username (ancap), you are philosophically opposed to the concept, because the existence of natural monopolies would represent a failure of the pure free market capitalism you promote.

I doubt I will convince you, and I doubt anyone else here needs to be convinced that natural monopolies exist.

>> Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?

> No, otherwise the "natural monopoly" existed before the first company ever > laid cables.

This simply does not make sense, which is further evidence that you're opposed to the concept. The high fixed costs of the laying of the cables relative to the small marginal cost of adding a new subscriber once cables have been laid is what _creates_ a natural monopoly in this context. The massive economies of scale which are only available to the company which already has the cables laid make it infeasible for a new company to lay its own cables; that's how a natural monopoly is enforced.

Therefore, it's nonsense to imagine the monopoly existed before the cable was laid.

<comment><USER21> >I doubt I will convince you, and I doubt anyone else here needs to be convinced that natural monopolies exist.

You won't even try to provide an example? Perhaps it is not I who is "philosophically opposed to the concept".

>This simply does not make sense, which is further evidence that you're opposed to the concept. The high fixed costs of the laying of the cables relative to the small marginal cost of adding a new subscriber once cables have been laid is what creates a natural monopoly in this context. The massive economies of scale which are only available to the company which already has the cables laid make it infeasible for a new company to lay its own cables; that's how a natural monopoly is enforced.

You asked whether the cost of laying cables makes a company a monopoly. The question itself demonstrates "nonsense". If the cost of laying cables is an inhibiting factor for the first company, then it is also the inhibiting factor for any companies which follow. The cost of adding new subscribers is irrelevant. If the first company is not meeting the demands of the customer then the conditions are ripe for a competitor.

<comment><USER23> >You won't even try to provide an example?

Well since we don't actually live in an anarcho-capitalist "utopia", governments tend to intervene sooner or later in dysfunctional markets. And I find that regardless of how bad things were beforehand, or how light the resulting regulation, the response from AnCaps is always "You touched it, you bought it!"

Nonetheless, the history of Standard Oil is a pretty compelling example of a natural monopoly.

>If the cost of laying cables is an inhibiting factor for the first company, then it is also the inhibiting factor for any companies which follow.

The difference is the potential ROI for each market entrant.

For the first company, the entry cost may be high, but since there'll be no competition, there's potential for decent profits.

The second company faces the same entry cost, but they also have to compete with the first company, so their potential profits are much lower.

As a result, those who might disrupt the market are much more likely to invest elsewhere.

<comment><USER21> >And I find that regardless of how bad things were beforehand, or how light the resulting regulation, the response from AnCaps is always "You touched it, you bought it!"

I'm not even sure what that means.

>Nonetheless, the history of Standard Oil is a pretty compelling example of a natural monopoly.

I'd wager that what you think you know about Standard Oil is probably mythical and not based on historical fact.

>For the first company, the entry cost may be high, but since there'll be no competition, there's potential for decent profits. >The second company faces the same entry cost, but they also have to compete with the first company, so their potential profits are much lower.

And yet I know of cities which have half a dozen ISPs (none of them publicly owned). As I said previously if the existing company/ies are not satisfying customers, then there is room for competition. The second [or third, or fourth...] need not even compete on the same scale as the existing ISP[s]. A local entrepreneur seeing the need, could just wire up his neighborhood. I know of cases where this has happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Setting aside the ultimate politics and ramifications of this, it is interesting (and kind of scary) to watch the fight between a non-elected bureaucracy and our elected house of representatives to regulate the internet.

Congress seems to be completely incapable of doing more than grandstanding, while the bureaucrats may wind up dramatically increasing their own power with a single stroke of their unelected pens.

It's no wonder we have many times more regulations than laws in this country... If I got to 'regulate' who I had power over on a regular basis, there are a lot of people who would suddenly find themselves inexplicably under Title Darren. Human nature.

<comment><USER8> It's worth noting that these "unelected bureaucrats" are nominated by a President for limited terms and confirmed by the Senate, and that all powers they have are bestowed upon them by Congress and can be revoked, and that their regulations have to fit within restrictions that are defined and may be revised by Congress.

It's certainly not pretty, but it's not unaccountable, and it seems to be moving things in the generally correct direction. We can hope, anyway.

<comment><USER24> >> their regulations have to fit within restrictions that are defined and may be revised by Congress

This is only notionally true, and history is replete with examples of federal agencies declaring their own authority over things which were obviously not envisioned so. While congress could act to change that, they don't, so power collects.

<comment><USER25> That's usually because Congress doesn't object. You may as well say Congress is unaccountable because of public apathy.

<comment><USER26> They largely are. Congress has what, a 93% re-election rate?

<comment><USER18> That's because of (1) limited real choices (yay FPTP elections) and (2) most people are negative about Congress, but that's mostly about the members of Congress that don't represent _them_ ; people tend to have a lot higher support for _their_ members of Congress (in both Houses) than for Congress as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I understand the desire to regulate the internet as a utility, but are they going to actually regulate it like a utility or are they going to call it a common carrier and then just make up a few BS rules that need to be followed.

I have a sinking feeling that all this will result in is a situation where monopolies are given out to the existing players and no one is forced to do anything to upgrade the existing service.

This isn't like a water utility where the product has little variance. Even now in the marketplace there is huge variance in the quality of the product I can buy ( I am one of the lucky few with choices of providers ). I have a feeling my area is just going to get given a blanket monopoly to Comcast and I will have to deal with a crappy connection forever with no hope of another company ever gaining traction to replace them.

<comment><USER10> _I have a sinking feeling that all this will result in is a situation where monopolies are given out to the existing players and no one is forced to do anything to upgrade the existing service._

It's naive to think it would be anything but this. We like the Internet as it is today but for some reason we need to have the FCC control it in order to try to keep it the way it is.

<comment><USER27> >We like the Internet as it is today

Who likes the way things are? I'd like it a lot better if it was more like in Japan, Korea, Latvia, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, France, ...etc.

<comment><USER28> Serious question - how do the median consumer bandwidth speeds in the US compare to France?

<comment><USER27> According to [this]([http://dailyinfographic.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/the-b...](http://dailyinfographic.com/wp- content/uploads/2011/02/the-beauty-of-infographics.jpeg)) France is faster by a large margin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> One part of me hates this because the idea of our government dipping their hands into what has become the major source of information, entertainment, conducting business, etc. is quite scary. We all know their tendency to fuck things up because of politics, money, stupidity, or a combination of any and all of these.

On the other hand, I look at my other utilities and realize I have absolutely no complaints. Yeah, the power goes out from time to time, but that is just an inconvenience. As it stands, my internet is just as reliable as my power in terms of outages (not including the occasional speed fluctuation).

As long as it doesn't turn into a pay for use type deal and sticks with the current model of pay for bandwidth I suppose I'd be ok with this. There are just too many different moving parts for the cynical and rational parts of my brain to agree on.

Edit: Oh, and as long as censorship never becomes a thing.

<comment><USER30> I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm honestly curious: why is pay-for-use bad for internet access but okay for water, electricity, and phone?

<comment><USER31> Pay for use for water and electricity is good because the resources are finite, and you want to conserve them. The advantage of unlimited internet use is it promotes the creation of services that need more bandwidth.

<comment><USER30> Isn't network usage also finite? I.e. wouldn't there be issues if every device connected to an ISP simultaneously tried to stream large data?

<comment><USER28> There's a clear difference between these resources.

If you could use 100 times more electricity and water at the same cost (with no damage to the environment), would you? We might find uses for doing that, if those resources weren't relatively scarce.

If you give an _average_ consumer a 10tb hard drive, will they use it all? Probably not even close. The amount of storage wasted by consumers is beyond epic, thrown away with the next system upgrade (someone want to count how much storage America has thrown away in the last decade?). That's the bandwidth context. We can keep boosting the amount of bandwidth for an exceptionally long time, at little additional cost over what the present infrastructure cost. You can go from 100mbps to 200mbps while not having to rebuild everything. Try doubling the output of or availability of water or electricity like that.

Put another way, bandwidth - like storage or processing power - is a hyper expanding resource; one in which we can even expand just by being clever while using most of the existing infrastructure. Water and electricity are nothing like that.

Humans could easily consume all the fresh water on this planet. We can expand storage, bandwidth and processing power to such an extent that we can never saturate the total capacity. In fact, in the first world, that has already mostly occurred for consumers with storage and processing power (and for the radical majority of all server side use cases). Will 99.99% of all web sites ever need a 1gbps pipe? Nope, and they also won't need 1tb of storage, or 64gb of ram, or a 16 core modern Xeon processor. Those sites will never have enough content to consume such resources, and certainly not in the next decade.

<comment><USER32> The waste is less, if you weight storage by performance or energy efficiency. Then, we're throwing away low-yield storage and replacing it with high-octane storage. The 'waste factor' becomes small.

Also consider most discarded storage is a fraction of the size of what it is replaced by. So the fraction of waste is always small (compared to its absolute value).

<comment><USER28> Right, and that's another way in which bandwidth, storage and processing power as resources have absolutely nothing in common with water or electricity. The ability to waste exponentially greater amounts each generation.

Do I _need_ to watch a late night talk show at 1080 on YouTube instead of 720? No, it has only modest impact on my experience, but I do it anyway because there's no cost associated to doing so. I can freely waste vast amounts of bandwidth (or storage, or processing power) with minimum concern, rather than focusing on conservation.

My phone is another marvel in that regard. It costs $0.50 per year in electricity, about 1% to 2% of what my desktop PC consumes. I can waste my phone's resources freely with very minimum concerns for the environment, especially relative to most other things in my house or life that use electricity.

Water and electricity will never have these properties. It's unlikely the average person will ever be able to waste vast amounts of either without concern.

<comment><USER32> I'm not sure its meaningful to even talk about 'wasting bandwidth'. The cable is doing something all the time - whether or not your meaningful bits are travelling over the wire. So its imaginary to say 'now the cable is in use' and 'now the cable is being wasted' \- its only a different state to a human mind, not to the universe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What a coincidence; I just posted this to my Facebook feed yesterday:

Dealing with ISPs (and mobile providers, for that matter) is a never-ending hell of time-sucking and abysmal customer service. Communications as a business has some unfortunate features that drive its pathologies. The overhead of the infrastructure is very high and the marginal cost for adding a customer is relatively low. When there's more than one option, there's very little practical difference to distinguish the competitors from each other. Whether it's wireless or wired, I suspect we're doomed to be subjected to this kind of bullshit until the businesses in question are treated and regulated as the basic utilities that they have become. I don't know anyone who's frustrated with their electrical or gas service.

<comment><USER24> Wait a second, every single negative you've described here can also be applied to other utilities who have been regulated under title II for as long as it's existed. They've yet to find a way to 'regulate' human decency and good customer service...

<comment><USER34> Adding viable competitors is how.

Title 2 will make it so other companies have a chance to exist on the government sponsored lines. Once Comcast sees its lifeblood spilling into the streets, Im betting their CS will be as sweet as pecan pie.

<comment><USER14> Title II can't force Comcast to share their lines. It can only force ILEC's to share their lines. So Verizon, AT&T, CenturyLink, and Frontier could be forced to unbundle.

But Comcast can't be.

<comment><USER35> Can't Comcast be treated as a comparable carrier under section 251(h)(2) and thus also qualify as an ILEC?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Does anyone know if this would impact the issues we saw between Netflix, Level3 and Verizon? My understanding of the original issues with Netflix and Verizon was that the interconnect between Netflix's peering company (Level 3) and Verizon wasn't big enough to handle the bandwidth that Netflix was attempting to pump out.

In this case, Verizon was just refusing to upgrade that path and wanted to force Netflix to connect with them directly (get them to pay more money in some way.

Is that the general problem Netflix had with Verizon? If so, how would Title II help this situation? Does Title II require these various companies to maintain the interconnects between their networks and other companies out there?

<comment><USER37> I wish I had a link to review this but I don't think that's the case. As I recall, Netflix published data showing that there wasn't actually a bandwidth problem and they offered to upgrade the equipment. They've ended up paying Verizon which is what verizon was really after.

<comment><USER36> Level3 had a number of blog posts under the "open internet" category about their view of it. I believe this is the post where I gleaned the information from[0].

[0] [http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental- mea...](http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> That's a peculiar choice of word for an article title. The FCC can't "regulate the Internet." The FCC can regulate service providers in the US in certain limited ways.

<comment><USER10> They're not changing what the Internet is, only how it's provided.

They don't realize the way that the Internet is provided is the essence of the Internet itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if autonomous local mesh networks and hyper local mesh networks which is essentially a network of networks would fall under the term "Internet" and under these regulations. That would certainly stop innovation on that front (?)

</comment><comment><USER40> I get what they're trying to accomplish, we all want faster more reliable service, but as comparison is anyone 100% happy with their utility (power, water, etc)?

That's where this is headed.

<comment><USER41> My tap water is clean and delicious and I have never, ever had a problem with it. I have never experienced an unscheduled service interruption with my water, and scheduled service interruptions are very rare and advertised well in advance.

My electricity is stable and reliable, and any power outages I've experienced have been brief, and exclusively due to exceptional weather events.

I'm also a Comcast customer, and I would say that I have some sort of partial or total service interruption (internet is completely gone, or set top box stops working) on average, once every other week or so. These outages are usually relatively brief (a few minutes), but at least once a year I lose one or both services for 6 hours or more. Plus the internet speed varies wildly from "high-end dialup modem" at the low end, to "significantly less than the advertised value" at the high end. Needless to say, I have never actually experienced the advertised speeds.

If I got the same service from my utilities as I did from Comcast, I would end up brushing my teeth with raw sewage about once a month, and trying to toast bread would occasionally cause a power dip that would brown-out every other outlet in my house. I probably wouldn't be able to shower some nights because the cold water pressure would be unusably low, and I would have to reset every clock in my house a couple times a month. The one similarity is that I would still be unable to shop around for better service, because Comcast is the only option in my area.

If you want a TLDR, it's that I would figuratively kill to get Internet service that's even just half as good as my utility service, because right now my internet service is much worse than that.

<comment><USER42> Comparing Title II utilities to water and electricity is silly. How happy are you with your landline telephone and cable TV services? You know, the ones that everyone hates and is replacing with internet-carried alternatives?

<comment><USER43> My landline telephone is very satisfactory. I've never encountered any service disruptions with it. In fact, I can't think of a single time in my entire life where I've picked up the phone and not had a usable dialtone on the other end, or where I've placed a call (to another landline) and received a bad connection.

The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.

<comment><USER42> My problem with my landline is price ($35/mo to start) and features (practically non-existent, with huge premiums charged for useful things). The service effectively hasn't changed since the 1980s, while the prices have steadily risen.

I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.

<comment><USER44> > It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of > what my competing local offerings do.

However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down.

Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year).

Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.

<comment><USER42> The landline option I had previously was serviced by my cable company. If my internet was out, so was my landline, despite it _not_ being VOIP. At my previous residence, it was serviced by the local phone company, and ran through a multiplexing box which plugged into my house power. Both that option and my cable modem have battery backups which continue to function in a power outage, but once that's gone, no more service.

That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> The real solution to all this is more competition. Stop the states from suing cities to prevent them from implementing municipal fiber. Open up the field to companies like Google to come in and partner with cities who can provide the last mile, competing with businesses. Even libertarians should say, "well, a city is a large organization and a giant corporation is a large organization, and both are kind of monopolies at this point..."

</comment><comment><USER46> Probably way too late to get noticed here, but while I think the THREAT of Title II might be useful to keep ISPs in line, it would be a pretty rash move to actually reclassify broadband.

The US has painfully little competition in most areas, there is no debate about that. But new technology has been fixing that, albeit slowly, via increasingly expansive and competitive 4G, Satellite, and even improvements in moving data across copper wires or existing phone lines (not going to get you 100mb service, but quite plausibly "good enough" that you can realistically threaten Comcast with quitting service.)

I don't want to get in a libertarian vs flame war, but the fact is, it is far easier to regulate than deregulate when it becomes unnecessary. If the non- competitive market we have now is an artifact of old technology and installation costs, it would be a mistake to set up a regulatory infastructure we won't be able to roll back.

</comment><comment><USER47> Wheeler is apparently basing the 'light touch' Title II regulation on similar regulations applied to mobile video (but not mobile data). Does anyone have some examples of the applications of mobile video being so regulated (The YouTube app on my phone? Probably not?) the kinds of regulations imposed and what the results have been?

</comment><comment><USER48> I think the radio analogy is spot on, and I really believe that the endgame to all this government interest may very well be the same sort of regulatory control that the FCC now imposes in radio stations and content via the [1] Communications Act of 1934.

This can easily been seen as a power grab by plutocrats who want to start filtering and controlling the money making and informational aspect of the web, and while I am, of course, speculating about this outcome, I think in general, it has been on the back burner for years.

You know, to protect the children and all that FUD.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934)

<comment><USER49> To me there seems to be a distinct difference between actively broadcasting a signal(radio) and allowing access to those who request it(internet)

Radio works by beaming signals all over their coverage area. those signals are pushed to everyone. Whereas, a website isn't just sending its html to every IP and port it can find, it waits for a request and responds accordingly.

This seems to be a fundamental distinction to me, but one that would likely be easily obscured by politicking and misinformation campaigns if that were the ultimate goal.

Interesting thought though, as we do see the UK beginning to move towards this more hands-on internet regulation all of a suddden

<comment><USER48> _To me there seems to be a distinct difference between actively broadcasting a signal(radio) and allowing access to those who request it(internet)_

Now, that's a very good point, but can't the very act of turning a radio dial be the 1930's equivalence of typing in a URI or clicking a link?

Wired magazine published an article in the 90's about the parallels between radio and the "new" internet, and it was filled with direct analogies between the two and how governments eventually took control and started regulating licenses and content, for the most part.

I am unable to find a link to that long article, but the ideas contained in it have stuck with me for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Contrarians... gotta love em. They keep the running Looney Tunes reverse- psychology joke going. Counter-cultures are no different than the trend- following cultures they try to polarize themselves from. I guess I shouldn't have been shocked into commenting on this one for the oddly negative responses from some, but I do believe that the formulation of that negativity demands some more research. Has the internet created a society full of contrarian trolls bent on using sheer will to overcomplicate simple subjects?

</comment><comment><USER51> I am concerned about the implications for free speech. And I don't mean the freedom to say whatever I want as long as the FCC approves or that I don't piss off a large enough political constituency. If I start a blog to post pictures of Alah am I going to be shut down? What about forums that discuss illegal drug use? How long till the FBI, DEA, etc. petition the FCC to shut these sites down? What about sites like reddit that carry porn, post pictures of Alah AND discuss illegal drug use? I don't care about these sites but I do care about their right to run these forums and the participants right to discuss any issue openly, even socially unacceptable ideas.

Free speech is a political principle but people pay lip service to it because they don't understand it and how important it is to a free society. If FCC starts to regulate speech on the internet (i.e. actual censorship which only the government can practice) by defining acceptable content and shutting down websites for so-called "hate speech", requiring a government "blog" license, etc. then it is game over for our freedoms and the future of the country.

<comment><USER52> Huh? Which part of the telecommunications act gives the FCC that power, that has not been struck down by the courts?

<comment><USER51> You can't see past your nose I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> The HN title is wrong and misleading. The NYT headline is "In Net Neutrality Push, F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating Internet Service as a Utility".

That's a little different than "FCC regulating the Internet." ISPs provide internet endpoints to consumers. They should be utilities.

</comment><comment><USER54> "Today, 55 percent of online traffic happens on smartphones and tablets, according to the F.C.C.." I did not know this, it's surprising for me. Mobile- first approaches makes a lot more sense now.

</comment><comment><USER55> What could possibly go wrong?

Fears about big companies are legitimate. I just fear what the FCC might do a lot more.

It all seems fine now, but the benevolent regulators in charge now might be replaced by less-benevolent ones later.

</comment><comment><USER56> The net becomes a utility (and ISPs utility providers), and every breach, exploit, or unprotected private data leak becomes a terrorist action at prosecutorial discretion.

Something to think about.

</comment><comment><USER57> Will any of this matter once the global satellite internet networks come into being. SpaceX and o3b are aggressively working on these it seems.

</comment><comment><USER58> I suspect the conversations in this thread will be extremely interesting 5 years from now - should this regulation come to pass.

</comment><comment><USER59> Now we find out who has the deepest pockets.

<comment><USER60> Isn't that always the case, though?

<comment><USER59> Sadly, yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Is anyone else here afraid of this little word called, "regulate"? Maybe I am being naive.

<comment><USER62> One should be afraid of the word unregulated, as in monopoly.

<comment><USER21> "unregulated" does not mean monopoly. In fact, in all cases, monopolies are only possible through government force (ie. regulation).

<comment><USER62> _> "unregulated" does not mean monopoly._

No, but when unregulated happens to be a monopoly, you have a major major problem. Exactly what happens in many areas with big ISPs.

It's not like there is no antitrust law, but no one seems to care about it and monopolists simply get away with ignoring it left and right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> How is complete government regulation equivalent to a "free and open Internet"?

Everyone seems to think that this will just be exactly what we have now, but with more freedom and options. I don't think this will be the case.

It will open the door for any future governments to start regulating things like freedom of speech.

</comment><comment><USER64> Netflix traffic and some hypothetical future tech like Surgery-over-IP traffic should not be prioritized equally.

<comment><USER65> Yes they should.

Usually, I don't like making the 'slippery slope' argument, but it is quite appropriate here.

The dangers are real. We can allow nothing less than forcing IPSs to maintain complete neutrality on traffic type.

In your scenario, an ISP will determine that an organization is using their internet connection for this high-priority operation. The ISP then realizes that they can essentially extort the surgeon/hospital.

This is a mafia-like protection scam. "Don't want to pay up? Gee, it sure would be terrible if that internet connection of yours was to drop out at the wrong time."

Don't think this scenario is possible? I would argue it is probable.

<comment><USER64> You pay to guarantee availability. The urgency of netflix is not equivalent to a surgery. The netflix traffic is a threat to the surgery traffic.

The ISP doesn't extort- the customer pays for service guarantees. This is already what happens today in MPLS vpns.

Savvy technologists are going to demand guarantees that other tenants can't disrupt their service.

This is in no way a mafia-like protection scam. There is a certain allotment of bandwidth available at any given time at any given link. You can allow for reservations so that some tenants cannot encroach upon your guaranteed bandwidth for that link. This shit is already happening all the time on amazon aws, azure, google app engine, etc. These are not new concepts.

Mafia protection is- pay us or we take you down. What I'm describing is- you pay so that a netflix premier doesn't disrupt your service.

I'm having a hard time understanding how you can feel a service like cloudflare is not mafia-like protection.

<comment><USER65> Cloudflare is opt-in.

In my scenario, the ISP purposely degrades the service unless you pay more. This isn't hypothetical as it has been proven they did/do to Netflix traffic.

Cloudflare isn't going to DDoS every site that doesn't sign up for their service.

The value of doing surgery successfully via the internet is high. Are you really that naive that you don't think ISPs will attempt to capture as much of that value as they possibly can?

Do you want to live in a world where an ISP determines the worth of your internet traffic and attempts to bill you based on the content, not the actual bandwidth used?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> Yeah the government's goal is totally a "free and open Internet."

Except that part of the government dedicated to vacuuming up and storing and analyzing every signal from every network-enabled device on the planet.

<comment><USER67> That has nothing to do with whether or not it's a utility. They're clearly already capable of doing so.

<comment><USER66> Explain how the two ideas aren't related.

<comment><USER68> that's not how this works. you're the one that made the original unsubstantiated claim. the burden is now on you to substantiate your original claim.

explain the mechanism by which classifying internet service as a utility enhances the ability of the NSA to record that data.

<comment><USER69> Public safety and homeland security are primary functions of the FCC. When government decides to censor, surveil, or manipulate information in the future it seems likely it will be instrumented through the FCC as that relationship was used to do the same for radio and television in the past.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> That will be a sad day. Internet technology still has a lot of room to improve before the government steps in and kills all market forces that encourage those improvements.

If you don't like your current service levels now, just wait until the government gets involved.

<comment><USER70> I realize HN is full of idealistic kids who never lived through the government taking control of something to "improve" it, so your down votes are forgiven.

<comment><USER71> Whether you're right or not, your point is shallow and tired. But I guess the "groundhog day" nature of HN resetting every discussion to zero every day encourages such comments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Wait, doesn't calling the Internet a utility mean all data will be metered by the MB from now on? Or does that not apply here? If it does, wouldn't that give carriers _exactly_ what they wanted - the ability to charge video providers much more than they would say a news website?

The idea behind the whole net neutrality movement was to have "all you can eat plans" where all data is treated the same. What if now we get the "all data is treated the same" part, but not the "all you can eat" one?

Another issue: government spying. I know the ISP's/carriers have given the government virtually everything they've asked for, including direct access to the cables for the plain-text data + the recent cookie tracking inserted into people's traffic, but some of them have refused to do much of it, like Sonic, and I think Google takes a similar approach, fighting for users' rights, even if Verizon and AT&T do not. So what does it mean now that the government classifies all Internet under Title 2. What can we expect in terms of surveillance? And does it make it much easier to force _all_ ISP's to comply with certain surveillance requests?

<comment><USER73> > Wait, doesn't calling the Internet a utility mean all data will be metered > by the MB from now on? Or does that not apply here?

No, it does not mean metered Internet, which is already increasingly common in the US - though usually in the form of x GB for $y, with $z/GB overages. This has actually become incredibly common. There isn't a single ISP in my state that doesn't have data caps with metered Internet thereafter, or, in the case of my ISP, mandatory upgrades (though even then, the most expensive plan has a cap of 1TB.)

> So what does it mean now that the government classifies all Internet under > Title 2. What can we expect in terms of surveillance?

Nothing changes.</comment></comment>


Stacked Borrows: An Aliasing Model for Rust - <AUTHOR> https://plv.mpi-sws.org/rustbelt/stacked-borrows/ <comment><USER2> There's a talk here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Fh4jRDGLo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9Fh4jRDGLo) and some extra info here [https://github.com/rust-lang/unsafe-code- guidelines/blob/mas...](https://github.com/rust-lang/unsafe-code- guidelines/blob/master/wip/stacked-borrows.md)

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems to me that there are three pieces we'd like to have, to show that we can trust Rust's borrow checker as much as we'd like to:

\- a runtime model of a hypothetical dialect of Rust without a borrow checker, defining which programs have undefined behaviour because they access memory "wrongly";

\- a compiler for that dialect, in practice built on LLVM, that gives LLVM permission to invoke undefined behaviour only in cases where the model says that's allowed;

\- a demonstration that any program in the hypothetical dialect that can invoke undefined behaviour either uses `unsafe` or is rejected by the borrow checker.

As I understand it, this paper is a plan for providing the first, and the compiler people think it's possible to use it to provide the second.

Has the third been done, or is someone working on it?

<comment><USER4> > a demonstration that any program in the hypothetical dialect that can invoke > undefined behaviour either uses `unsafe` or is rejected by the borrow > checker.

This isn't quite what they're doing here. They're trying to define what guarantees the compiler should make about its treatment of unsafe code to strike a balance between usability and the ability of the compiler to optimize.

<comment><USER3> Sure, but we want to be sure that the chosen model fits in correctly with the borrow checker. That's the part I was interested in.

<comment><USER4> My apologies; I misread your original statement to imply that unsafe would necessarily imply undefined behavior.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Didn't really get it. Does it speed programs up, or allow better guessing or when borrow checking isn't actually violated? If the former, what kind of situations is the program sped up in?

<comment><USER6> If I understood it correctly, it just turns undefined behavior regarding aliasing into compiler errors

<comment><USER7> My take on this: There are certain properties all rust code should have.

In safe rust, the compiler gives a mathematical proof this is so. In unsafe code, the compiler does not, but still assumes these properties are holding. The burden to make sure everything is correct falls on the shoulders of the programmers.

But nobody knows exactly what these properties are. There is a big part known, but the edges are fuzzy. So unsafe code is required to follow rules nobody knows.

This effort is part of the work to clarify the rules. If accepted, both the compiler and unsafe programmer knows how far they are allowed to go

<comment><USER8> That's a really good summary, thank you.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft apologizes over 'Smoked by Windows Phone' controversy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/26/2903250/microsoft-smoked-by-windows-phone-apology-sasha-katta <comment><USER3> I find it more interesting how incredibly shady and underhanded the entire "challenge" is to begin with. They get to choose the exact rules and conditions, for which they've specially customized their phones beforehand, even if it's completely outside the bounds of what an average consumer would ever do.

In this case, it was to show the weather of two different cities. The only reason the contestant won was because he happened to need that information enough in his day-to-day life to warrant the two separate weather widgets on his home screen. The Microsoft representative obviously knew what the challenge would be going in, and already had the tiles ready to go.

<comment><USER4> To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt. No one I can see is looking at the results and claiming any kind of objective superiority. What MS wants is just to get you into the store and show you their cool phones -- "Can your phone do this?" stuff. So they dangle a carrot (the prize) to get you in the door.

Where it went off the rails is that somehow the store staff didn't feel comfortable actually _awarding_ the prizes. That is shady, and it implies that the incentives are screwed up internally: if the stores get punished for prize awards, do they likewise get hurt for providing other stuff with dollar values attached (what would normally be called "good customer service")?

<comment><USER5> "To be fair, I think consumers are pretty well aware that this is a stunt."

Does that really make it OK though? Do you feel OK giving your money to companies that use "stunts", if you're aware of the stunt? I don't. I find it disingenuous. It feels like those door-to-door vacuum salesmen who dump crap on your carpet. Blech, no thank you!

Show me the product. Let me try it out. _Trust_ me to recognize where you've done well. Feel free to point out areas where you think you've done well, but these "head to head" contests are just silly, and they can easily turn around and bite you, as we've seen here. Just skip it and let people make their own assessment.

<comment><USER4> I guess. But in a world where you can't even watch a youtube video or read a web forum without getting hit by the same kind of nonsense product marketing, it seems like awfully mild sauce to be condemning Microsoft for pulling the same tricks. The marketing itself (but not the refusal to honor the prize) just doesn't tickle my outrage meter, sorry.

The

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Smoked by Windows Phone? Is anyone else reminded of the funeral procession Microsoft held for iPhone a few years ago?

[http://www.intomobile.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-windows- phone...](http://www.intomobile.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-windows- phone-7-funeral/)

<comment><USER7> Not just the funeral procession, but also the recent Google-salesman ad, and just about every attempt at marketing MS has done in the last few years.

I really have to wonder, how is it that Microsoft is seemingly so _completely_ disconnected from reality? In what crazy world did the Seinfeld ads look amazing and awesome? Where the iPhone funeral procession would look like anything other than premature celebration? Where the anti-Google ad looked anything other than sleazy and underhanded?

Though I have a theory. MS's marketing stunts have been known to be unnecessarily hostile to the competition, overly self-congratulatory, seemingly unaware of why people choose the competitor, has overtones of arrogance... remind you of a CEO? :)

<comment><USER8> I thought this ad was pretty good and makes fun of the old versions of IE: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=4DbgiOCTQts)

<comment><USER9> Well, except that the protagonist is an obsessive ideologue nerd who would rather hate a Web browser than be happy. If that's supposed to be an apology then it's the ultimate "I'm sorry you feel that way".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The point is, how does it sell to your customers to do weird things like "show weather in 2 cities"? Are these valid common uses of the device?

The root issue is the competition itself, seems to be a bizarre way of marketing a mass-produced device OS... done right, it could be a great way to tout the qualities of your devices, but done wrong it has so many downsides.

<comment><USER11> That is but one of the challenges they use. This one might not be of interest to you, but what if the challenge was "open an IDE and create a 'hello world' application"? Microsoft's TouchDevelop just may win out on that.

<comment><USER12> I can build a Hello World app on Android in under 2 seconds. It takes another 2-3 seconds for my phone to compile, install and run the package locally.

<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui> is really, really slick.

I would love to see a race. I very much doubt WP7 could win but I'll be very impressed if it does. Anybody have the appropriate collection of devices and the time to film a demo? :)

<comment><USER13>
      >I can build a Hello World app on Android in under 2 seconds.

Doesn't it take Eclipse at least 20 times that long to even start up? ;)

<comment><USER12> Ha, ha. Very funny. But the beauty of this is that AIDE isn't eclipse, and it takes < 1 second to start up!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> What happens if I go in with a Windows Phone ( yeah, I do have a Windows Phone and I think its good and all, but am sure an Android phone can smoke a Windows Phone in reasonable tasks.)

When I lose, do I get to say - "My Windows Phone was smoked"? :)

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe Microsoft could try a challenge of uploading a review to Yelp from your Windows Phone. The lack of apps and full functionality as compared to their iOS and Android equivalents is crippling.

<comment><USER16> Yelp has a Windows phone app. Even if it didn't, you can do that from a web browser too.

<comment><USER17> Regardless, the point stands, WP7 receives a lot less app attention - <USER2> makes sense since it has 1.7% market share.

For example, the new Angry Birds launched on iOS and Android, and has no plans to port to WP7 due to the need to rewrite it for that platform,

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-22/-angry-birds- space-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-22/-angry-birds-space- edition-skips-windows-phone-in-blow-to-nokia.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Good on them for making it right. Although at first he just told Katta to go in for a rematch.

@therobpoz is probably right, I don't think Apple would have gone back and given him the laptop. Of course Apple doesn't need to give away their products in the first place...

<comment><USER19> Apple does give away their products - they give them to production studios for TV shows and movies.

Why do you think almost every movie and show made over the last few years features a laptop with a glowing Apple on the back whenever a shot calls for someone to be using a computer?

<comment><USER20> It's been said many times that Apple doesn't pay for product placement. That it's just a consequence of the show's writers and designers using Apple products. I tend to believe that. But I still suppose it's possible that providing free products is considered "not paying."

<comment><USER21> I'm not sure how true this is.

If you see the credits roll at the end of the show or movie, there is invariably a line that says "Promotional consideration: Apple" [and others].

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Offering him a phone (presumably a Windows one) seems to be entirely missing the point.

<comment><USER23> What else would they offer? his money back?

<comment><USER24> They could offer a cash prize, which he could use to pay his telephone bills. I agree that it makes no sense to give him a phone he just "beat".

I guess he could sell it on eBay or something...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Kind of failed just like the rigging of Nokia to choose WP over Android right MS? :)</comment>


IRS programming mystery continues - <AUTHOR> https://federalnewsnetwork.com/tom-temin-commentary/2020/01/irs-programming-mystery-continues/ <comment><USER2> Not a mystery, and discussed previously on HN before. The IRS abandoned this technology because it lost key employees, because it was not legally allowed to pay market rates for them. Discussion in 2018: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16377804) .

<comment><USER3> I suspect this is at least half the problem. Imagine the team of software leaders you'd put together to pull off that project. Imagine the team of software engineers you'd need to implement it. These senior positions are paying mid-high six-figures in industry and the mid-level positions are paying $250K or more.

If the IRS is paying under $200K, making you follow government employment rules, work on an antiquated public works project, and giving you a terrible career development experience, it shouldn't be any surprise the recruiting problem they face.

You can't get the talent you need for this project because the talent you need knows that 500 is bigger than 200.

<comment><USER4> Just a datapoint: I (And lots of other people) could readily build and maintain a team of software engineers for $109-$134k salary in the Midwest that would be fully competent in achieving anything the irs needed.

<comment><USER3> I'm confident that that's true in the "bulk construction" aspect of the project, which is of course an enormously important component of the task.

I'm not at all convinced that that's true for the architecture and strategic planning aspect of _how_ to tackle the project. (I'm talking about industry salary rate for top leaders and architects here; I'm not suggesting that people with this profile aren't available in the Midwest; I'm merely stating that they could make wildly more than $134K in industry even in the worst-paid Midwest city.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Can someone explain to me why the IRS even bothered with a patent application on software? Those are taxpayer dollars being used to fund that innovation-- unless it's a classified technology, it should be public domain.

Furthermore, why did the IRS spend time and salaries to reinvent the wheel for a solution that is likely to exist as an OTS product?

<comment><USER6> Which part of the $3.5 trillion dollar-a-year processing system that interacts with 3.5 million businesses, tens or hundreds of thousands of HR systems, paper forms, tax laws, jurisdictions, edge cases, bank transfers, etc, did you expect to come Off the Shelf.

I work for a large bank, and yes, we use OTS software here and there, but that's such a miniscule part of the overall solution (let's completely forget organizational politics out of it). Try a few solutions, pick one, and get down to business because that was maybe 5% of the work.

"Just pick a business rules engine" is easy to say, but the meat of this problem is still the rules: thousand to hundreds of thousands of individual tax codes, jurisdictions. That, and the countless inputs and outputs the IRS presumably already deals with.

Couple that with the fact that politically, where do you think your career is going if you move fast and break things, and mess up $3 trillion dollars of revenue across 143.3 million tax payers, including some of your boss' biggest campaign donors?

Not to say it couldn't be done faster, easier, if you could break through the legacy and politics, but that's a _really_ big if, and it still leaves you with all the complexity of the tax codes to implement on whatever great stack you find.

<comment><USER5> I am not referring to some sort of gateway, ESB, etc. I am referring to the patent application, which would be for a tool to port code from Assembly to another target language, the example they used being Java.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what ALB assembly is, but I do know disassemblers themselves are kinda rare (which this really isn't either; more of a disassembler+transpiler). On top of that, whatever ALB assembly is, it kinda sounds like there might be only a market of one or two places in the world using it.

Remember, they're saying these systems were put in place in the 60s and 70s. In 1960, COBOL was the new hotness -- modern day Go has 5 years more maturity than COBOL had in 1960, and there was no internet yet. Even ARPANET wouldn't be invented for another 9 years. Whatever was being written back then was not written by developers with the kind of access to information we have today. And definitely not with the kind of storage luxury we have today that permit us to document and comment as copiously as we want to.

<comment><USER7> ALC (mentioned in the patent) is Assembly Language Coding, referring to various IBM mainframe assemblers.

Disassemblers aren't rare, and certainly exist for the CPUs in question. But the patent is trying to produce structured Java code from handwritten assembly, which is definitely not something for which many OTS solutions exist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am really confused about something in this article and I hope someone can bring me up to date.

The article revolves around this patent:

[https://federalnewsnetwork.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/01/IR...](https://federalnewsnetwork.com/wp- content/uploads/2020/01/IRS-patent-10_2019.pdf)

The patent is assigned to "Internal Revenue Service United States Department of the Treasury".

The article also mentions that "two other related patent applications remain dormant. They lie abandoned, as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office calls it, because the IRS wouldn't pay the issue fees."

I thought that government work like this was in the public domain. Can the IRS/Treasury _patent_ an invention?

<comment><USER9> You're mistaking copyright and patents.

In principle, issuing patents on government developed technology isn't contradictory to their core purpose, which is to ensure public disclosure of inventions rather than keeping them as trade secrets. It certainly helps establish prior art, which is no bad thing, even for software patents.

I'm not sure whether the US government then ever exercises their option to restrict competing implementations of the technology for the life of the patent.

OTOH, the government produced implementation itself is public domain, as you noted, and not subject to copyright.

In theory, this might make patented government software freely copyable (if released), including into collective works of other software, but unforkable due to patents, even though its public domain status WRT copyright allows derivative works.

<comment><USER10> > I'm not sure whether the US government then ever exercises their option to > restrict competing implementations of the technology for the life of the > patent.

Not directly, but since the Bayh-Dole Act (1980) as a matter of Federal policy contractors can retain ownership of patents and the government routinely grants exclusive licenses to federal employee inventions. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act)

<comment><USER9> I've been aware for several years of contractors generally retaining ownership of the federally funded IP they produce as long as the federal government gets a perpetual licence, but not of the government granting exclusive licences to federal employee inventions. Do you have examples?

<comment><USER10> I guess I overstated the case. AFAIU the _intent_ was for the government to push for commercialization of its inventions using exclusive and non-exclusive licensing agreements. See, e.g.,

[https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/3710](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/3710) (sister legislation to Bayh-Dole: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson- Wydler_Technology_In...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stevenson- Wydler_Technology_Innovation_Act_of_1980))

[https://www.doi.gov/techtransfer/patents](https://www.doi.gov/techtransfer/patents)

[https://www.nist.gov/tpo/incentives- inventors](https://www.nist.gov/tpo/incentives-inventors)

[https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/01/f19/Licensin...](https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2015/01/f19/LicensingGuideFINAL.pdf)

But I couldn't find much evidence that this is common. In fact, this 2017 accounting of royalty payments to federal employee inventors suggests it's not common at all: [https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp- content/uploads/2017/12/10-20-...](https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp- content/uploads/2017/12/10-20-17-OSTP-Patent-Report.pdf)

Perhaps federal employee inventions are typically for basic research and don't lend themselves to direct commercialization. And while use of those basic science patents might be necessary for actual commercial products, nobody in the government is policing infringement--which is probably a good thing. By contrast, even when a federal _contractor_ is doing basic research, they have more financial incentive to aggressively file patents and subsequently enforce them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> That sounds like they wrote a tool to convert assembly into Java....

I don't exactly have high hopes for that.

Am I missing something?

<comment><USER12> I remember reading about a company writing a Cobol to Java translator to migrate their codebase over 10 years ago. It seems it was very successful. They had focused on making the conversion entirely automatic and reliable, so that they could keep on retranslating new / modified Cobol code during the transition process.

<comment><USER13> We did it to replace a Cobol core-banking system. The hard part is not so much the code as all the interfaces (DB, queues, printing, etc).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If there was any way to translate the legacy code running on mainframes into a Java application, naturally, there would be an infrastructure migration issue. The new plan plainly states that the infrastructure is dependent on: "Establish Cloud Management Office and Cloud Governance", which also depends on installing the new "Procure and deliver ECM Release 1 Cloud platform on Treasury Cloud".

This stuff takes a lot of time and they've been preparing for the change since 2015. This is entirely not simple.

[https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- utl/irs_2019_integrated_moderniz...](https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs- utl/irs_2019_integrated_modernization_business_plan.pdf)

See page 29 for details.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love how assembler code is compared to a steam engine. We literally think old code is bad because its old.

<comment><USER16> The entire industry is broken regarding this fact.

Old tested/working software developed for 10 years, dozen contributors spanning the entire history but with a last commit older than 12 months on github? Dead project. Heck reading on HN I've seen this comment even for projects having commits longer than 6 months!

People will favor a buggy/featureless project with a single lead dev all the time, just based on this.

<comment><USER17> The signal is very much not that software with no commits is bad, it's just very common to have half-finished projects or very buggy packages which are no longer maintained. I'd say the quantity of those greatly outweighs the quantity without relatively recent commits which are good. This means that, as a very coarse heuristic, it's probably a good idea to be fairly skeptical of projects without somewhat recent commits, if only they're to keep up with the latest npm update or whatever.

<comment><USER15> No one would need to make guesses like this if anyone knew how our software worked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article is incoherent to IT experts, but it's generally a good thing to bring issues to light.

tl;dr: the IRS wants to convert its assembly language software to Java, but not badly enough to actually finish it after 20+ years.

Advice to IRS: since you have somebody who understands the issues, Jian Wang, incentivize him to do it - while that option is available.

I've done transitions like what's mentioned in the article. It takes somebody to understand and shoulder huge risk, while being a target of naysayers who won't do the same. There are very few people who will do that, especially in government, when you simply don't have to assume any risk.

<comment><USER5> Why port a system from 40 years ago? I cannot imagine those systems are built with flexibility to endure policy changes of today.

<comment><USER19> Because a lot of business logic is probably hard coded and undocumented. Porting it moves it to a platform/language that may be better suited to continuing operations or applying the strangler pattern.

<comment><USER5> You're probably right. This problem just hits different in my mind because implementation is outlined in the IRC. If using the past is any way of predicting the future, I would imagine a history of bills and policy changes could indicate levels of necessary flexibility and where. I am looking at this with rose-colored glasses. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can someone enlighten me? Is Java really the best choice for this? I guess it's too late at this point but I'm still curious.

<comment><USER21> Java is the safest bet if you want to write something that will be maintainable at reasonable cost through the next 50 years.

<comment><USER22> Oracle (i.e. Java) & "reasonable cost" is a surprising pairing.

<comment><USER21> Java licencing is manageable compared to the cost of developing a human resurrection technology in 2100 to bring back to life developers of by then long-forgotten technologies, which were hip in 2020. I bet Java will still be doing fine in 2100. Furthermore, the support of a behemoth such as Oracle is very reassuring for large businesses, which know that they won't be left alone with their tech stack. Can the same thing be said about Python or Scala?

<comment><USER20> Hinted at this before but what makes you think Java will be around in 2100 or even be in a form similar to that of today.

<comment><USER21> There's an unimaginable amount of business critical code written in Java already. Java is seen by businesses as good enough, so, barring some breakthroughs in CS, there will not be much pressure to migrate off it. And even if there were (let's say Oracle starts charging unreasonably much for Java, the way IBM does for mainframes), we can still see plenty of COBOL/MF architectures in the wild today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What's weird is that every 5-10 years, a normal operation that isn't growing exponentially or anything, can easily fit all their digital _stuff_ into another system that's faster, bigger and cheaper. Usually by so much that it offsets the cost of upgrading. The IRS must have experienced a half dozen of these cycles. Can't they just do it all on an Excel spreadsheet running on a disused workstation in the back room by now?

<comment><USER24> I _hope_ they do more... The basic task is collecting the taxes. The hard task is making sure nobody is illegally paying less tax than they should.

That hard task is one where you can throw in more data and compute and get out more accurate lists of people to investigate. Whereas 50 years ago, people might be investigated nearly at random, I hope that today's investigation decisions are based on credit card statements, bank statements, lists of people who have purchased property, shares, details of company directorships, etc.

That's a lot more data from a lot more sources, which has to be fuzzy matched by name - I can imagine why these systems are still big, complex and slow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> > In FY 2019, the IRS plans to cut 2,200 employees.[1] In Rettig's FY 2020 > budget request, he plans to cut an additional 1,800 employees. Since FY > 2010, staffing decreased by about 19 percent, primarily in compliance and > enforcement.[2]

Sounds like the current administration doesn't want a functioning IRS. Less government, less money, less enforcement for those who can avoid obvious fraud. It is everything the current administration wants.

[1] - [https://www.govexec.com/management/2018/05/irs-defends- budge...](https://www.govexec.com/management/2018/05/irs-defends-budget-would- cut-more-2200-full-time-jobs/148415/) [2] - [https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/266/02.-IRS- FY-2020-C...](https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/266/02.-IRS- FY-2020-CJ.pdf)

<comment><USER26> > Sounds like the current administration doesn't want a functioning IRS.

The current administration, and Republicans in Congress for about 20 years before the current administration, including when they had majorities in one or both Houses.

<comment><USER25> Yea, probably. I just only cited data for recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Isn't it fairly well accepted at least by some factions that the tax code needs to be entirely simplified and rewritten?

So maybe there doesn't need to be a translation of the old system. But rather a totally new one that could be much more easily created from scratch. In public, on GitHub or something. In a modern programming language. Possibly attached to an Ether-based US cryptodollar.

Do Chinese taxes interface at all with their new digital currency?

<comment><USER28> > _Isn 't it fairly well accepted at least by some factions that the tax code > needs to be entirely simplified and rewritten?_

Unfortunately not the factions with the power to effect change. The tax prep industry loves a complicated tax code, and spends a lot every year lobbying to keep things complicated and keep the government from preparing our taxes for us. The rich prefer a complicated tax code with loopholes that help them legally hide income from taxation. Some of them are Congresspeople, or at the very least are campaign donors.

> _So maybe there doesn 't need to be a translation of the old system. But > rather a totally new one that could be much more easily created from > scratch. In public, on GitHub or something. In a modern programming > language._

I don't think there'd ever be the political will to start from scratch here, even if that might be the best thing. So we're stuck with what we have, and the legacy system likely has a lot of un- or poorly-documented behavior in it such that it's safer to translate it into a higher-level language where there's more expertise at hand to deal with extending and modernizing it.</comment></comment>