Net Neutrality is Essentially Unassailable, Argues Billionaire Barry Diller (broadcastingcable.com) 82
An anonymous reader quotes Yahoo Finance:
The billionaire media mogul behind such popular sites as Expedia, Match.com and HomeAdvisor has a one-word forecast for traditional media conglomerates concerned about being replaced by tech giants: serfdom. "They, like everyone else, are kind of going to be serfs on the land of the large tech companies," IAC chairman Barry Diller said... That's because Google and Facebook not only have such massive user bases but also dominate online advertising. "Google and Facebook are consolidating," Diller said. "They are the only mass advertising mediums we have..." He expects Facebook, Google and maybe Amazon to face government regulation, simply because of their immense size. "At a certain point in size, you must," he said. "It's inevitable."
He did, however, outline one positive for Big Tech getting so gargantuan. Big Telecom no longer has the economic leverage to roll back today's net-neutrality norms, in which internet providers don't try to charge sites extra for access to their subscribers. "I think it's hard to overturn practically," he said. "It is the accepted system."
Even if the U.S. government takes moves to fight net neutrality, Diller told CNBC that "I think it is over... It is [the] practice of the world... You're still going to be able to push a button and publish to the world, without anybody in between asking you for tribute. I think that is now just the way things are done. I don't think it can be violated no matter what laws are back."
He did, however, outline one positive for Big Tech getting so gargantuan. Big Telecom no longer has the economic leverage to roll back today's net-neutrality norms, in which internet providers don't try to charge sites extra for access to their subscribers. "I think it's hard to overturn practically," he said. "It is the accepted system."
Even if the U.S. government takes moves to fight net neutrality, Diller told CNBC that "I think it is over... It is [the] practice of the world... You're still going to be able to push a button and publish to the world, without anybody in between asking you for tribute. I think that is now just the way things are done. I don't think it can be violated no matter what laws are back."
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All your moderators are died to us.
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Because Chris planned on retiring on his Amazon affiliate spam he shitposted here daily. He legitimately thought he was going to extrapolate his coffee money into a million dollar empire.
He originally claimed to be a highly-valued member of Slashdot through the quality of his submissions. His last submission was tagged "spam" and I think it sent him over the edge.
https://slashdot.org/submissio... [slashdot.org]
Chris also has a tremendous ego out of proportion to anything he's achieved, yet paradoxically he also has a very
What does Barry Diller know? (Score:3, Insightful)
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WTF does Barry Diller know about how net neutrality works?
Clearly not as much as quasi-anonymous Slashdot commentator VeryFluffyBunny.
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Clearly nothing. He doesn't think it can be violated while actively ignoring all the examples where it has been violated already. E.g throttling and data caps on video services not owned by the ISP.
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The problem isn't that this guy says something or thinks something, the problem is that we are paying attention to him. He is not the problem, we are.
Quite a lot, I suggest. (Score:2)
Since Net Neutrality is a manifestation of free market economics and his background in business and broadcasting he probably does have an informed perspective. That doesn't make him right, but his perspective and credentials are on the table.
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...his background in business and broadcasting...
His background doesn't appear to cover how net neutrality works, i.e. the telecoms control the medium of communication and, if left unregulated, can impose whatever prioritisation and constraints on any specific packets of data from any source and to any destination they choose.
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To paraphrase Barry Diller "LOOK OVER HERE! OVER HERE!" (while I remove protections and regulations while you are distracted by the vomit coming out of my mouth)
This will not last forever (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems very naive to believe that tech companies will always back net neutrality. Once Google reaches critical market share providing home Internet service, either by deploying their own solution or buying up existing companies, their position on net neutrality will reverse.
Looking at it from another perspective, net neutrality favors startups. If Google and Facebook can work out deals with cable companies that will impede any startup that challenges their market dominance their concern for net neutrality will evaporate.
Re:This will not last forever (Score:5, Informative)
It seems very naive to believe that tech companies will always back net neutrality. Once Google reaches critical market share providing home Internet service, either by deploying their own solution or buying up existing companies, their position on net neutrality will reverse.
Indeed. Facebook already tried to do this with their "Free Basics" service in India, that would have prioritized their own services. Tech companies support NN when, and only when, it is in their interest to do so. Expecting them to be our saviors and protectors from the evil Telecoms is naive.
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And yet I'm not sure I disagree with this. I'm inclined to believe an non-neutral net is preferable to no net at all. However non-neutral has no place in a well connected world.
Re:This will not last forever (Score:5, Insightful)
Google and Facebook don't even need a deal.
Who is going to sign up for an Internet plan in which Google and Facebook don't work well?
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What an idea: an internet without two of the most privacy invasive corporations there is, which are already omnipresent and pervasive, and where extraordinary measures must be taken to not provide them data on your browsing behavior.
That the mere suggestion of not being subject to Google and Facebook data harvesting is to invite flamebait and troll moderation, is also interesting. I didn't realize such an idea was so verboten. Duly noted.
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Who is going to sign up for an Internet plan in which Google and Facebook don't work well?
The day Apple makes a search engine and a social network.
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Google and Facebook don't even need a deal.
Who is going to sign up for an Internet plan in which Google and Facebook don't work well?
Oh, this one's $10 less and Facebook doesn't work well [all else being equal]? Sign me up!
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The big players like Google, Apple, and Facebook already evade the problem of startups by buying them out. I read someplace they've perverted the so-called startup culture by making getting bought out the number one goal.
And when they don't bother, they just take a page from Microsoft's book and add the startup's features to their own product.
Look for motive (Score:5, Informative)
What companies is Barry Diller involved in that will benefit from the loss of "Net Neutrality"?
It looks like USA Network and Fox Network, both of which he helped found. AC/InterActiveCorp, and Expedia. What possible motive would someone whose billions of dollars are tied to such media giants gain from getting people to ignore the issues of Net Neutrality? What control by business lobbyists might be gained if an informed citizenry pays no attention to it?
I believe this also answers the question of "what does Barry Diller know". He knows that the loss of Net Neutrality can benefit his highly capitalized companies in which he has enormous personal investments: favoring particular, paying media companies over other Internet traffic is highly beneficial to his large, existing companies.
Support the sites you like (Score:1)
The more SJW guided tech giants push for censorship, ad control, limit ad payments, the more site will go direct to their users for funds. No more big brand SJW gate keepers only wanting to allow ads on site that SJW approve of.
Users of a site, forum, will just get a wallet code per site and spend some time using their cpu, gpu to create support.
N
cartoon physics (Score:4, Funny)
The price of housing never went down ... at least, not until people starting to go around endlessly repeating the maxim that the price of housing never goes down.
This issue is just a titch too important to relegate to cartoon physics with a broad wave of a feckless "what, me worry?" ostrich paintbrush.
China Has Already Shown the Way (Score:5, Insightful)
For decades now China has poured money into hardware and software to control what people see and how they see it with their so-called "Great Firewall of China". This has created an entire cottage industry in specialized network appliances and software offering all sorts of content filtering, logging, monitoring and re-rerouting of traffic etc. It took time and billions of dollars, but China and other oppressive governments have managed to tame the Internet. Now that same software and hardware is available to private companies chasing more banal objectives, like charging you more for the right to watch Netflix vs their in-house streaming offerings. I don't agree with Mr Diller that Net Neutrality is unassailable. It's being assailed right now. The opening shots in this war were arguably fired by Comcast in 2007 with the spoofed TCP reset packet controversy [wikipedia.org]. The tools now are both more targeted and more effective. The threat is real and people ignore it at their peril. The Internet as we knew it is slipping into history and has been for some time now. If nothing is done, the end result will be something similar to cable television with access to Facebook, ISP branded video streaming and not much else.
I never considered the Internet as "free" (Score:2)
IMHO the internet always was second to an improved Fidonet or something similar. Considering the internet "free" always seemed a little naive. It's 2 decades ago that commercial online services controlled access to the web, you had to be always online, it was hideously expensive and slow and E-Mail has always been a shitty non-private service, as has the usenet.
These days Google and Facebook have taken over the position of AOL and Compuserve for a larger part of the population. Plus we all now that three-le
The Poor shouldn't be able to Post! (Score:1)
Big media needs to lock this shit down. Once the poor are back to read-only, things you read about will be better.
Already happening (Score:3, Insightful)
The telecomms already are charging companies for access, and the big companies like Google and NetFlix are fine with it because the cost for them isn't prohibitively high. That still leaves the small companies facing having to pay for access to end users, and it'll be harder for them because the precedent's already there that having to pay for access to your customers is OK.
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"The telecomms already are charging companies for access, and the big companies like Google and NetFlix"
For Google, the by far largest contributor to bandwidth use is Youtube. And they way I understand it, Google has deploy thousands of caching servers in the networks of most of the world's ISPs. That makes sense, since the ISP don't incur inbound network cost on those streams, and the end-user gets the content faster.
There are stories about a few banana republic ISPs which have tried to charge Google for h
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Network neutrality isn't actually about not charging you more in that case. It's about not trying to charge Netflix to avoid degraded service but more about not deliberately degrading Netflix's traffic just because Netflix won't pay to reach the ISP's customers (as opposed to throttling all high-data-volume streams coming across a network connection point from all sources equally and only when congestion across that point exceeds a certain threshold, which is what you'd expect when throttling was used for t
Convincing (Score:2)
The billionaire media mogul behind such popular sites as Expedia, Match.com and HomeAdvisor
All of those are now mostly obsolete, their business models completely disrupted by new players. I'm not sure that guy is a reference when it comes to predicting the future.
Says the guy (Score:2, Informative)
That also worked for ABC, Parmount, and Fox. He will make a fortune if net neutrality goes away. Ignore the "just give it up" message.
Not Big Tech vs Big Telecom (Score:3)
one word? (Score:2)
...has a one-word forecast...
He sure uses a lot of words in his one-word forecast.
He doesn't think. (Score:2)
I don't think it can be violated no matter what laws are back.
He should have just ended the sentence with "I don't think".
I think it is pretty obvious that net neutrality can and is being violated by many parties already.
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I think it is pretty obvious that net neutrality can and is being violated by many parties already.
Where is your evidence for this?
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I think it is pretty obvious that net neutrality can and is being violated by many parties already.
Where is your evidence for this?
Pick an ISP and let's talk about their practices. We can talk about those charging differently for anyone peering with Netflix. We can talk about download caps which don't apply to their own streaming video services. We can talk about free access to Facebook and only Facebook on mobile phones. And these are just the 3 that my own personal ISPs have been guilty of. I'm sure if I switched ISP again I can find another example to add to the list.
You think the desire for net neutrality legislation just popped up
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We can talk about those charging differently for anyone peering with Netflix
Yes, networks are charging Netflix fair market value for the HUGE amount of traffic they are dumping onto the Internet, and in the process raking in tons of cash from subscriptions. But in truth, these carriers are really just asking Netflix to BUILD THE INFRASTRUCTURE needed to dump their traffic on other networks, including dropping content caches inside end-user ISPs.
And wah, zero rating. Giving someone something for free. Tha
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How about when comcast throttled bittorrent and admitted it. Or when AT&T blocked 4chan. I believe both incidents were covered extensively on slashdot.
Watch the bread and circuses (Score:1)
American public puppets. Watch the show. Enjoy the ride. We will not discuss the internet backbones, and what rules and regulations they run under. No, only the last mile, that's what is important. Debate that, look at the shiny. DNS, caching, edge networks...no no...net neutral net neutral
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Easy for him to say (Score:1)