Daniel Miessler's Blog, page 108

Struggle as the Center of Happiness

To benefit from the work I put into my typography, read natively at: Struggle as the Center of Happiness.

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I think a lot about happiness and how to achieve it.—both as individuals, and as societies. I can think of nothing that’s as important, once the more tactical issues are out of the way.

I believe I’ve come into some ideas recently, spawned by reading as usual, that I hope have brought me closer to the truth.

That truth is something like happiness being based on overcoming.

“Overcoming what?”, you might ask.

Well, that’s the thing. Evolution wasn’t super specific on that point. And evolution is absolutely the one who’s handing out the happiness trophies. We experience happiness, at the most basic levels, from achieving two things:

Survival
Reproduction

The highest happiness comes from almost failing at those, and then succeeding. And the moment you succeed, evolution rewards you as only it can: by filling your brain with a deep and powerful happiness.

I’m just so happy to be alive!

Indeed. Nothing’s better, if you’ve recently faced death and overcome it.

Similarly, if you’re trying to get with a person you love—romantically, sexually, whatever—and you finally make it happen, that too produces profound happiness. Another great example is reproduction in the more literal sense, where you’re a couple trying to have children and you’re somehow unable. Then, once you finally get pregnant, or the baby is born, there is just nothing like it.

The magnitude of the struggle, and the pain it causes, equates to the magnitude of the happiness once you overcome it.

So the key point here is that struggle is required for happiness. Not philosophically, or religiously, or due to any other other-worldly power. It’s our biology, crafted by evolution, that makes it so.

And what of society?

So that’s the situation with individuals. What about civilizations? How should we create organizations and governments that produce or enable the maximum amount of happiness?

Again I think he answer lies in overcoming.

But then we have to ask once more, “Overcoming what?”, and with societies the answer is a bit more elusive. It used to be that happiness in a large society was still tied pretty strongly to the same two challenges: survival and reproduction.

Early society was essentially a large group of people going through that struggle together but individually, and if they didn’t die, and were able to have kids, then they were the lucky and happy ones. They survived the winter, or kept the invaders out of the town, and were able to have kids that didn’t die of disease or hunger.

Those things seem simple, but so many people died from war, starvation, and sickness that just being alive and having a family was the pinnacle of bliss.

But then technology came along, and it became easier to have children that lived, and it became less common for people to die of disease. But it was still hard to survive because you had to make a living for yourself. If you live in society, you need money for food, shelter, safety, transportation, education, and all the things that allow you to raise a family.

So then we have the idea of a profession, that, if you do it well, grants you access to those things. So you would do work, which was a form of struggle, that granted you tokens (money) with which you could purchase your happiness (providing for the needs of your family).

I’m not attacking all of what Marx said, by the way, because I think a big part of his point was that we need to find a new way to be happy when machines can provide for our basic needs.

That all seems to check out based on the hypothesis that happiness comes from overcoming struggle. And work is just a proxy for it, one step removed. Strangely, it also quickly addresses the flaw with various implementations of Communism, i.e., you can’t simply give people things they need to produce happiness because you’re omitting the essential part of overcoming a challenge which (poverty and suffering notwithstanding) they need to experience themselves to receive the benefit.

That brings us to modern day, where we have a unique problem forming with achieving happiness.

The new problem is not that we cannot overcome the challenges that are put in front of us, but rather that there are no clear challenges to be had.

In a world where you won’t actually die from exposure to the elements or from sickness (because the government will take care of most of your needs) the principle threat to happiness in the modern and approaching world is a shortage of meaningful work for people.

No starvation? No struggle.
No shortage of mates to have kids with? No struggle.
No meaningful work? No struggle.

Since we’re not likely to reintroduce (at least on purpose) the first two challenges into a modern society, we’re left with meaningful work as our only option.

And that work is precisely what is being removed by technology, computers, automation, and increasingly—artificial intelligence.

Experts disagree on the speed at which this is happening, and whether blue or white collar jobs will go first. I think the answer is fairly straightforward: blue collar jobs will go first if they can be automated like factories (such as manufacturing plants), and white collar jobs will go first that can be done better by AI (such as day traders and fund managers). But many of both types of jobs will remain, such as plumbers and artists, for quite some time.

Anyway, the point is not the exact speed that this is happening, or who it will affect first. The point is that it is happening, and faster than most think. I’m reading Player Piano right now, which is a stunning book by Kurt Vonnegut. His first book, actually. He writes:

To the people who were going to be replaced by machines, maybe. A third one, eh? In a way, I guess the third one’s been going on for some time, if you mean thinking machines. That would be the third revolution, I guess—machines that devaluate human thinking. Some of the big computers like EPICAC do that all right, in specialized fields.

SOURCE: Player Piano

Automatic Pianos Are Only Good for Non Pianists

He wrote that in 1952, and I can think of no more applicable text to what we’re facing now with machine learning and other forms of AI as they relate to human work.

The potential false prophet of Universal Income and other leisure-based solutions

I discovered in some recent reading that there has been a fundamental difference in the way Americans approach happiness vs. how Europeans approach it.

Europeans seem like they’re trying to reduce reduce their work and maximize their leisure. And Americans have evidently been obsessed for quite some time with working. More work, longer hours, more responsibility, more promotions, higher pay, etc. It’s been something Europeans have always judged Americans harshly about, even if some also admired it.

Many people describe this attributes as industriousness. The drive to work. The drive to improve at the work you do. Maybe it’s differentiated from work ethic by adding creativity and ambition to the mix, as opposed to just showing up consistently and as much as possible to do the same thing.

Either way, this industriousness and work ethic seems to be in some way tied to America’s success. It seems like those who came here were the most industrious throughout the world. They were the ones who were attracted to that marketing message, and did what they had to to get here.

And the country thrived—especially so in the late 40’s and 50’s after that same drive helped win the war, and our people came home to enjoy Evolution’s rewards of survival and reproduction.

But now the jobs, the threats to basic life, and (hopefully) the wars, are going away, and with them go the possibility for sustained happiness.

Boredom is the unpleasant tension that’s neither struggle nor happiness.

Many, including myself, have hailed Universal (or Basic) Income to be a relief from this unhappy state of being. But I think there’s a lot of confusion here with regard to what problem we’re trying to solve. Here are some problems that might have vastly different solutions:

There are no jobs for people who want to work.
Low-end work saps time and energy that could be spent on more creative pursuits.
People have no money for basic necessities, and thus need some type of assistance.

That’s why this is confusing. Some people are talking about Basic Income replacing welfare for the third problem. Others are talking about it providing a way to give people their necessities so that they can work on something they actually care about, and that can provide more value to the world.

There’s a significant literature on this. Some of the effect is here simply not being any good work for them to pursue, but some is actually people losing their desire to work entirely.

The problem with believing that giving people money will make them more creative is that it implies the person wants to do something else with their time. It implies, in other words, industriousness, which might not be a solid assumption to make for everyone. Especially with growing numbers of adults simply deciding to leave the job market completely, or not enter it at all.

Building struggle into society

My takeaway from all this is that the main challenge seems to be figuring out how to build a society that can keep people striving. But what will they be striving for? Where is the struggle that we need to overcome?

I think the best way to view this is in stages:

The first stage was survival and reproduction.
The second stage was work and utility.
And the third stage will be discovery and art.

I think we’re coming to the end of the work and utility phase. There will still be plenty of work to be done, of course, and that work will still be respectable, but increasingly we’ll transition away from a time where people just mechanically performed a task that had little meaning on its own. Those tasks will be left to the robots, computes, and algorithms.

In the next stage we’ll be free to pursue a new struggle, which is finding a way to maximize the enjoyment of others.

Finding ways to colonize the solar system. Finding ways to reach other star systems. And preparing for catastrophic events such a global diseases, asteroids, magnetic field changes, and even the extinguishing of our sun. And in the meantime, we’ll be creating stories, drawing, painting, poems, etc.

Many of us will be living inside virtual realities with their own new sets of Evolution-approved struggle loops that keep people happy. We’ll be princes and princesses, superheroes and super-villains, good guys and bad. But these proxies may ultimately prove hollow unless we can directly link that reality to our own in a tangible and sustainable way.

For people on the outside not engaging in an Alternative Meaning Loop like a virtual reality universe, the only path will be discovery and art.

Importantly, this path for meaning attainment is even further separated from Evolution’s ideal than Work & Utility, so it’ll likely be less sticky and less rewarding without being constantly reinforced by society, peers, and possibly government.

People will be socially rewarded for being scientists, astronomers, teachers, musicians, story-tellers, etc. Magnifying happiness for other humans will be the highest calling and the highest honor, followed closely by more supporting roles that enable those pursuits.

All of this depends on people believing themselves to be in a struggle. It used to be a struggle to survive, then it was a struggle to do well in society, and soon it’ll be to discover. But we cannot let ourselves be convinced that struggle is bad, or that the goal is to remove it completely.

Because removing that, unfortunately, also removes our ability to experience true happiness. Any civilization looking to create policy must keep this foremost in mind: the primary goal of any incentive system must be to keep people striving and overcoming. The nature of the struggle will change, but the fact that there’s a challenge and an impetus to overcome it must remain constant.

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Unsupervised Learning: No. 103

To benefit from the work I put into my typography, read natively at: Unsupervised Learning: No. 103.

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This is episode No. 102 of Unsupervised Learning—a weekly show where I curate 3-5 hours of reading in infosec, technology, and humans into a 30 minute summary. The goal is to catch you up on current events, tell you about the best content from the week, and hopefully give you something to think about as well…

This week’s topics: Uber’s mess, Google tracking users, AI finding missiles, drone disclosure, net neutrality, tech news, human news, ideas, discovery, recommendations, aphorism, and more…

Listen and subscribe via…

Read below for this episode’s show notes & newsletter, and get previous editions…

Security news





Uber revealed that, over a year ago, researchers found sensitive credentials in a public GitHub repo, and used those credentials to gain access to systems and extract customer data on 57 million people. There is a lot of confusion around this story right now. If you have complete clarity in your mind one way or the other, you should discard it and wait for more information. The key point of contention is around the fact that Uber paid these researchers / hackers 100K to not go public with their findings. The media took this to mean a payoff, like hush money, like you would see in extortion. But further details made it look like this could have been much more like a bounty, where essentially the same exact things happen: researchers find things and they are paid not to tell anyone else. The line between these two things is not nearly as bright as most people think or want it to be. My advice is to hold your strong opinions for more information.



The relationship between researchers and companies continues to be volatile, with DJI recently coming after a bug bounty researcher and threatening him with legal action. The researcher was initially submitting issues as part of an official bug bounty program run by DJI, but after getting repeated pushback  from them he pulled out of the program and went public. He published his results as a blog/paper titled Why I Walked Away from $30,000 of DJI Bounty Money.



Google has been tracking Android users' location even after they turned off location tracking. Android continues to be a security nightmare and I think it's because it was literally created by an advertisement company to expand its ad business. Think about that. The entire Android ecosystem is there so that Google can sell more ads. In that light it seems a whole lot more obvious why they continue to have constant security problems. They're a multi-billion dollar company. They could address security if they wanted to. I think it's simply good enough for them, which is fine. But it's not good enough for me, or arguably anyone else who needs security from their mobile platform.



Amazon has launched a new Secret Region, meaning it is designed specifically for the purpose of allowing sensitive information up to and including the Secret classification. They claim that they're the only provider that can go all the way from Unclassified to Top Secret.



Princeton researchers are reporting that significant numbers of websites are using session replaying to capture both the exact contents of the page you're on, plus the exact mouse movements and keyboard strokes. This means they can do things like capture what you type before you even submit forms. Some companies are sending these recordings to third parties and even linking them to specific users' identities.



AI is being used to find Chinese missile sites. Like information security operation centers (SOCs) this is going to be another situation where AI will make massive headway simply because of a numbers game. Basically, there aren't enough good analysts, and AI can look at a lot more data, and do it continuously. This will give AI a massive foot into the door in places like satellite imagery analysis and security event analysis. The advantage is that they can be pretty bad and still be better than nothing. If the AI can at least find some nuggets to show an L2 analyst, it's provided some value. And if/when they actually get better than an L1 analyst, well, that'll be a whole new conversation.





Technology news





Twitter has been on fire regarding Net Neutrality, and this piece from Wired gives quite a good summary of what can go wrong once we lose it. One of the key points is that we are already seeing advantages given to certain services based on their affiliations with internet providers, e.g., AT&T customers accessing DirectTV Now and not being charged for the data. And that we should expect a lot more of that if the FCC gets its way. Here's are my thoughts on the debate.



Bitcoin has passed $9,000. 



QR Codes have been growing in popularity in Asia, and the trend is expected to expand to Europe and the U.S. iOS 11 now includes native QR Code processing, by the way. Just open the camera and point it at one, and it'll show you what site it points to and ask you if you want to go there.





Human news 





A study has found that people who voluntarily seek out solitude are more creative. This isn't surprising to me, and I find it interesting that they make the distinction between solitude (willful), vs. loneliness, which is undesirable. Basically, if you wish you weren't alone, you're lonely. But if you like being alone you enjoy solitude, and tend to be more creative. That's what I took from it, anyway. It's easy to oversimplify these studies, though, especially when you're reading an article that's already been filtered once.



American doctors make twice as much as doctors in other rich countries, and it could be in part due to something like a cartel controlling every part of the supply and demand.



HealthIQ is a startup that collects health data from healthy people so they can save an average of $1,238 on life insurance per year.





Ideas





Why We'll See Security Operations Centers Sooner Rather Than Later. This is my response to so many security people saying that AI can't do InfoSec analyst work, how all the current products are garbage, and how it'll be a very long time before this changes.



I wrote an essay titled Simplifying Net Neutrality to capture my opinion on the topic. I think I actually worked my opinion out while writing it, which often happens. Writing as a process for discovery. Interestingly, I decided not to name the piece until I was done, which works well for this type of thing.





Discovery

Why We’ll See AI in Security Operation Centers Sooner Rather Than Later

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Art by Pinguino Kolb

I’ve had a few debates with InfoSec colleagues of mine about the current and future efficacy of AI within the security field.

Their general stance is that AI for InfoSec is crap, garbage, and snake oil, and that it will continue to be so for the foreseeable future. It’s basically too hard of a problem, to emulate the complexity and creativity of what an analyst does, etc.

I agree that this is the current state, but I believe this will change very quickly. I also can’t help but notice that these are the exact noises that were made about Chess, Go, and Poker, and in the span of around 11 seconds of time we’ve seen those challenges go from insurmountable to trivial.

They have an advantage of having messed with a lot of these bad products, while I’ve not. I think I have the advantage of reading a ton of books about AI, and watching the field closely. And not just reading the stuff myself, but consuming what the best minds are saying about how quickly improving. I recommend What to Think About Machines That Think for getting some of that perspective. I’m also quite familiar with the challenges of being a security analyst.

Anyway, let’s call that a draw for the sake of argument, since I believe I have a winning play.

The standard for AI to become useful (and therefore prolific) within InfoSec is not being better than humans—it’s being able to do just about anything at all.

Just as with satellite imagery analysis, audio recording analysis, security camera monitoring, log data analysis, and other similar disciplines, the case against humans (and for AI) is multidimensional.

First, and most importantly—there aren’t enough humans to look at the content.
The marginal cost of training humans is the same as training the first one, whereas it’s virtually zero for adding additional AIs.
Humans are trained inconsistently.
Humans get tired and bored.
Humans have biases that can vary their analysis even if the training were consistent.

The list goes on, but the most important points are that there aren’t nearly enough humans to look at the content that needs to be seen, and even if there were we wouldn’t be able to see near the same amount of content—and as consistently—as a fleet of AIs.

The straw man everyone is attacking is the idea of AI security agents becoming smarter and more creative than a fully trained L1 or L2 analyst. That could take 5, 10, or 20 years—or could never happen at all. I believe it will happen much sooner, but I’m agnostic on this point.

But it doesn’t matter.

What matters is the value that AI can bring to the thousands upon thousands of companies generating terabytes of log data that nobody is looking at.

If AI agents can be unleashed on all that data and find something—anything of value in the mess—and then surface that to a human, then it’ll be invaluable and the market around AI security analysts will thrive.

In short, it’s a low bar because of how much data is currently not being analyzed at all, and because that bar is so low I think we’ll hit it sooner than most think.

So my prediction for this is that we’ll see companies using AI analyst technologies pointed at IT and IS exhaust data in significant numbers within five years. That doesn’t mean replacing L1 analysts. It means needing to hire fewer of them, or hiring them to be L2 analysts instead.

And, importantly, it means a whole lot more of the data produced within a company being seen by someone—even if that someone is an algorithm.

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Daniel

Punctuation Rules & Quotation Marks

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I recently had the worst feeling that I’d been doing punctuation near quotation marks all wrong—for like 7,000 posts—since 1999. I probably have, but I can start doing doing the right thing now if I just capture the basic rules.

So I did some reading and here’s my summary.

By the way, make sure you’re using quotes correctly.

Periods, commas, semicolons, colons, and dashes are always outside the quotes.
Question marks and exclamation points require you to think about who is asking the question or being emotional. Is the question or emotion part of the quote? If it is, put it inside. If it’s part of the outside sentence that the quote is in, put them outside.

Seems simple enough: outside unless it’s a question mark or exclamation point in the quote itself.

Hope this helps someone.

Notes


American English says you should put periods and commas inside the quotation marks, but I’ve always thought that looked horrible, and recently just learned (for this post) that the British put them outside—you know, where they belong.

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Daniel

Punctuation Rules Around Quotation Marks

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I recently had the worst feeling that I’d been doing punctuation near quotation marks all wrong—for like 7,000 posts—since 1999. I probably have, but I can start doing it right now if I just capture the basic rules. So I did some reading and here’s my summary.

By the way, make sure you’re using quotes correctly.

Semicolons, colons, and dashes are always outside the quotes.
Periods and commas go outside the quotation marks.
Question marks and exclamation points require you to think about context a bit. Is the question or emotion part of the quote or not? If it is, put it inside. If it’s part of the sentence that the quote is in, put them outside.


Notes


American English says you should put periods and commas inside the quotation marks, but I’ve always thought that looked horrible, and recently just learned (for this post) that the British put them outside—you know, where they belong.

—

I spend 5-20 hours a week collecting and curating content for the site. If you're the generous type and can afford fancy coffee whenever you want, please consider becoming a member at just $10/month.

Begin Membership

Stay curious,

Daniel

How to Run the Latest Version of Nmap on Ubuntu

To benefit from the work I put into my typography, read natively at: How to Run the Latest Version of Nmap on Ubuntu.

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Trinity doing her Nmap thing

Nmap is constantly upgrading, so it’s best to have the latest version. Especially when you factor in its application identification and NSE functionality, which benefit significantly from being fresh.

The problem for us is that while new versions of Nmap have .rpm files ready to go, there are no .deb versions released for Debian/Ubuntu users.

TL;DR: Download latest, .rpm, convert with alien, and install with dpkg.

But there’s a solution. All you have to do is an extra step using a command called alien that converts RPM files to DEB files. So here’s the whole sequence.

Download the latest RPM package

Change the package name according to whatever’s latest.

wget https://nmap.org/dist/nmap-7.60-1.x86...

Make sure you have alien installed

You can also just install from source as well.

You might not probably don’t have alien installed. So let’s get it.

apt install alien

Convert the RPM file to a DEB file using alien

Now alien is installed and you can use it to convert the RPM into a DEB file.

alien nmap-7.60-1.x86_64.rpm

Install the DEB package

You may have to uninstall ndiff if you have it installed. apt remove ndiff.

So now you have a working .deb package that you can install.

dpkg -i nmap-7.60-1.x86_64.deb

And now you should have the latest version of nmap.

nmap –version

Nmap version 7.60 ( https://nmap.org )

Happy scanning!

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I spend 5-20 hours a week collecting and curating content for the site. If you're the generous type and can afford fancy coffee whenever you want, please consider becoming a member at just $10/month.

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Stay curious,

Daniel

5 Ways to Instantly Upgrade Your Online Typography

For the best reading experience, I recommend you view this content natively at: 5 Ways to Instantly Upgrade Your Online Typography.

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Typography is the visual component of the written word. ~ Eric Spiekermann

Using good typography is an easy way to upgrade your writing. While you can do a lot to make it beautiful, this short guide will show you how to avoid major mistakes that detract from your writing. Doing these five things will make your content far more attractive to your readers.

I really wish I knew these before I wrote around 7,000 posts going back to 1999.

Here are the most common errors to avoid, in the order of severity and frequency:

Using a small, sans-serif font for your body text

Small Sans vs. Larger Serif

The Serif bit means that the characters have little connectors on them that link them to the next. This lets your eye more easily flow from one character to the next.

TL;DR: Use a lager, serif font for your body text.

Using the wrong quotation marks

From Butterick’s guide to quotes

TL;DR: Good typography traditionally used curly quotes, but we had to ditch them during the typewriter days because there wasn’t enough space on the keyboard.

Using hyphens and dashes incorrectly

In Markdown, three hyphens make a full dash, and two make a short one.

TL;DR: Hyphens are for words that break into multiple lines and for multipart words. Short (en) dashes are for ranges of values or connection/contrast between words. Long (em) dashes are to indicate a shorter pause within a sentence than a colon, semicolon, or parenthesis.

Using three dots instead of an ellipsis

TL;DR: Three periods together are too close together, and three periods with a space in between are too far apart. An Elipsis is just right, and (as a bonus), it’s only a single character.

Overusing bold or italic

Too much cowbell

TL;DR: Accent only works if it’s uncommon. If everything is important, nothing is.

Recommendations

If you’re using a CMS, I recommend installing a plugin that lets you write using Markdown.

Butterick already has the perfect list of key typography rules, but the goal here is to focus on just a few. Here’s my own, curated list.

Use a larger, higher-quality, serif font for your body text.
Use “curly quotes” instead of straight quotes.
Don’t confuse hyphens and dashes.
Use the actual Elipsis character instead of multiple periods.
Don’t overuse bold or italic.

Doing just these few things in your online writing will make it far easier to read and more attractive.

Notes


If you are into typography, the single best resource online is Practical Typography, by Matthew Butterick.

Read or comment at 5 Ways to Instantly Upgrade Your Online Typography.

Switching from the Native Apple Podcast App to Overcast

For the best reading experience, I recommend you view this content natively at: Switching from the Native Apple Podcast App to Overcast.

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I prefer using built-in apps whenever possible, and it requires a significant functionality delta for me to switch to a third party option.

I just hit that escape velocity for my podcast application.

Apple’s redesign of the Podcast application wasn’t great for me. I tried to make it work, but the main competitor—Overcast—has simply become too compelling.

They just rolled out some new features, including a dark and black theme, and that combined with things like smart listening speed, pretty much make the decision for me.

To get to your Smart Speed settings, open your full player view and swipe right.

I particularly like the black theme because it goes so well with the iPhone X in Space Grey, and I like my Smart Speed to be set to almost 2x for most things. Here’s a screenshot from mine just now.

My Overcast Settings for a16z

If you’ve been unhappy with the native podcast app in iOS, but weren’t sure if you should switch, now might be the time. Overcast has enough better features to make it worth it.

Read or comment at Switching from the Native Apple Podcast App to Overcast.

Simplifying Net Neutrality

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I’m annoyed that I don’t have a perfectly clean opinion about net neutrality.

It’s not that I don’t have a strong opinion—it’s that I feel like I could be missing some major counterpoint.

To me it’s matter of ideal vs. non-ideal worlds, where in an ideal world net neutrality would be a bad thing because it limits the freedom of companies to behave the way they want to. In that reality, a company could easily encourage various services that it has affiliates with, and could throttle or block access to their competitors.

But in that ideal world it wouldn’t matter, because the consumer could simply go to a competing internet provider that either has affiliations they like better, or no preferences whatsoever.

That makes sense to me as someone who understands how a free market works, and understands that businesses should be free to annoy their own customers if they want to. It’s their business and it’s up to them what they do with it.

The problem seems to be that we don’t live in that world.

Instead, we in the U.S. don’t have much choice when it comes to internet providers. The big companies have largely consolidated and pushed out the smaller offerings. Some very large number of consumers have only one (and maybe two) options to pick from. And that changes the calculus significantly.

Because then, instead of it being a smartphone camera app that you can just swap in and out based on having 100 options competing on features, we instead have more of a utility situation. That is to say, internet providers in the U.S. are functioning more like a utility for a critical service—namely internet.

So it’s more like food, or heat, or drinking water coming into your house, where you don’t have the option to switch providers. And if you’re receiving food shipments from your provider, and they only allow you certain foods based on relationships that provider has with various companies, that would be a problem.

Same with internet. The examples there are numerous: not being able to use your preferred search engine, being forced to use a certain streaming service, having limited connectivity to a non-preferred option, etc.

I’m not an expert on the subject, so I’d love to hear from anyone who can show me where I’m missing something in the discussion.

The entire issue seems to reduce to whether internet service providers are smartphone camera apps or power utilities.

If internet providers are smartphone camera apps, then Net Neutrality is a kludge of a regulation that harms innovation and freedom. But if internet is a critical service, while consumers have little choice in what provider they use, then Net Neutrality is an absolute necessity.

It sure feels to me like the reality—at least right now—is the latter.

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Clarity on Net Neutrality

For the best reading experience, I recommend you view this content natively at: Clarity on Net Neutrality.

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I’m annoyed that I don’t have a perfectly clean opinion about net neutrality.

To me it’s matter of ideal vs. non-ideal worlds, where in an ideal world net neutrality would be a bad thing because it limits the freedom of companies to behave the way they want to. In that reality, a company could easily encourage various services that it has affiliates with, and could throttle or block access to their competitors.

But in that ideal world it wouldn’t matter, because the consumer could simply go to a competing internet provider that either has affiliations they like better, or no preferences whatsoever.

That makes sense to me as someone who understands how a free market works, and understands that businesses should be free to annoy their own customers if they want to. It’s their business and it’s up to them what they do with it.

The problem seems to be that we don’t live in that world.

Instead, we in the U.S. don’t have much choice when it comes to internet providers. The big companies have largely consolidated and pushed out the smaller offerings. Some very large number of consumers have only one (and maybe two) options to pick from. And that changes the calculus significantly.

Because then, instead of it being a smartphone camera app that you can just swap in and out based on having 100 options competing on features, we instead have more of a utility situation. That is to say, internet providers in the U.S. are functioning more like a utility for a critical service—namely internet.

So it’s more like food, or heat, or drinking water coming into your house, where you don’t have the option to switch providers. And if you’re receiving food shipments from your provider, and they only allow you certain foods based on relationships that provider has with various companies, that would be a problem.

Same with internet. The examples there are numerous: not being able to use your preferred search engine, being forced to use a certain streaming service, having limited connectivity to a non-preferred option, etc.

I’m not an expert on the subject, so I’d love to hear from anyone who can show me where I’m missing something in the discussion.

The question really does reduce to whether internet service providers are smartphone camera apps or power utilities.

If internet providers are smartphone camera apps, then Net Neutrality is a kludge of a regulation that harms innovation and freedom. And if internet is a critical service, while consumers have little choice in what provider they use, then Net Neutrality is an absolute necessity.

Read or comment at Clarity on Net Neutrality.