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Comment by mikedmiked | Hacker News Reader

Oh man this submission confused me - I use "miked" as my username on tonnes of sites, but not this one, and did a double take when I saw the name.

Good article too.

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What exactly is good about it?

Because 10 years from now when there is another administration that you don't agree with and they decide to impose something like fairness rule, impose content decency restrictions, dictate which sites may be accessed from the U.S or any one of a dozen other awful things, you'll know that this week the foundation was laid for that authority.

I am in favor of the result, but this is a Faustian bargain. Broadband providers brought it on themselves by not getting their act together enough to create standards of service and instead were trying to milk the cash cow as much and as quickly as possible.

That claim is thrown out in the article, but as far I can see there's nothing to back it up. If anything it's the opposite. ISPs want to control and meter based on whatever rules they come up with (i.e. whatever increases their profits) while the government argues for neutrality. If we use the telephone industry as blueprint of what may happen, what aspects of the current policies worry you?

Not all members of the government argue for neutrality. Some are strongly in favor of censorship:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Joe_Bide...

In other words the ends justify the means, and you are 100% sure those you like will always be controlling the means.

I can't be sure of what will happen, but I can tell you that ISPs want to control it now. There's something we can do about government, but very little about corporations (when they have a monopoly).

And what gives them a monopoly? The government(s, local, state and less directly Federal).

You're saying the answer to bad government is more government....

In cases where a monopoly was given to them is because ISPs demanded it; otherwise they would not have entered the market and lot of folks would've had to go without Internet. So who's the bad guy again?

> In cases where a monopoly was given to them is because ISPs demanded it

Sweet, we can just demand things from the gov't? Who knew? BRB, need to stock up on unicorns...

Yeah because every time I say the f-bomb on the phone there party on the other end hears a bleep.

Let's be serious about what the FCC could do when regulating the internet. Anything they try to do will have to pass 1st amendment muster.

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