SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
San Francisco: Building Community Broadband to Protect Net Neutrality and Online Privacy
Like many cities around the country, San Francisco is considering an investment in community broadband infrastructure: high-speed fiber that would make Internet access cheaper and better for city residents. Community broadband can help alleviate a number of issues with Internet access that we see all over America today. Many Americans have no choice of provider for high-speed Internet, Congress eliminated user privacy protections in 2017, and the FCC decided to roll back net neutrality protections in December.
This week, San Francisco published the recommendations of a group of experts, including EFF's Kit Walsh, regarding how to protect the privacy and speech of those using community broadband.
This week, the Blue Ribbon Panel on Municipal Fiber released its third report, which tackles competition, security, privacy, net neutrality, and more. It recommends San Francisco's community broadband require net neutrality and privacy protections. Any ISP looking to use the city's infrastructure would have to adhere to certain standards. The model of community broadband that EFF favors is sometimes called "dark fiber" or "open access." In this model, the government invests in fiber infrastructure, then opens it up for private companies to compete as your ISP. This means the big incumbent ISPs can no longer block new competitors from offering you Internet service. San Francisco is pursuing the "open access" option, and is quite far along in its process.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Saturday February 24 2018, @11:35PM (2 children)
I find it striking that the comments on this story are of a much different tenor than the discussion on the same subject [soylentnews.org] three weeks ago.
It seems odd that the same topic would lead to such a different mix of comments. I wonder why?
Both stories were published on the weekend, so that's probably not it.
I know TMB does similar stuff from time to time, so perhaps he could look at quality measures for comments (upmods vs. downmods) in different dimensions (day of week, subject matter (e.g., science, tech, politics, etc.), number/length of comments, number of commenters, etc.) and break things down.
Not sure if that would be too much work to ask of TMB, as I know he's usually pretty busy fixing bugs, keeping things running smoothly and making his presence known when he isn't fishing.
The results might be interesting.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 25 2018, @12:11AM (1 child)
Discussions are group conversations, and the group for any one article over the course of a day is not always the same, or people don't care about it. Possibly tied to the early troll posts derailing into extremity.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Sunday February 25 2018, @01:22AM
It's still disappointing *to me* though. Especially (IMHO) when discussing municipal broadband (not specifically in SF, but in general), as *I* think it's a pretty important issue.
Quite possibly any or all of those things. That was kind of my point.
Which is why I thought it might be interesting to understand (via the data) the who, what, when, and possibly why of differences in the quantity/quality of comments attached to various types of stories.
That said, I'm not condemning any particular commenter, even^W especially if they're trolling (if we block/censor them, who decides what is appropriate/inappropriate? Better just to use the moderation system), as they have just as much of a right to say what they want to say (even if it shows them to be assholes) as anyone else.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr