I would love this, but can you imagine the gnashing of teeth from the 63 million people who voted for Trump? Not gonna happen. We're stuck with the for-profit Internet thanks to the scary, shouty man on TV.
I think the left are naive to how lazy people are without the right incentives, and how without a monetary incentive office politics can be ridiculously crippling.
Maybe the HN perspective is driven by the fact that open-source in software engineering has flourished - leading many to think that great things can be built without monetary incentive.
Or perhaps its because they are surrounded by very smart people and start believing that the rest of society operates at the same calibre.
There is enough politics involved inside companies where huge monetary incentives are up for grabs, when you take away this monetary incentive, it becomes insanely political.
From the man himself:
Donald J. Trump Verified account @realDonaldTrump
Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media.
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...
Like those millions of people who believed the fake news fed to them, these people don't even know what it means, much less make an informed decision, so the Republicans aren't going to lose many votes over this compared to informed voters who are typically in the cities and vote D anyway.
Totally, I mean, Obama's FCC and internet policy was completely on point, the unceasing vigilance to protect encryption and the snowden and wikileaks affairs really showed us that under his administration internet freedom and protection from dragnet surveillance was absolutely a top priority. The massive focus on these issues both in his campaign after bush as well as the continuation of making these issues a top priority in the Sanders and Hillary camps during the last cycle only proves this point even more, and I can only credit the well informed and highly vocal supporters of each candidate for making this the case.
Glad you made this point, I was thinking the same thing but too intimidated by the sheer number of the overwhelming majority of pro-trump neo-facists on this site!
Do you have any data to back this up? Please don't make sweeping generalizations of the HN membership. There's a wide variety of views held across the people who participate here, and due to each of our own very natural human psychological biases, we tend to view these in a very biased way. In my experience here, and as evidenced by the vigorous debate on any number of topics, it's decidedly unfair to characterize the membership in any sweeping way like this, and it also prevents people from being able to engage in meaningful, constructive conversation.
Given that you've written so much sarcastically, what are you actual thoughts on the political demographics on HN? Often sarcasm is used to express the opposite of the actual belief, so is your belief that there is a wide variety of views, or is it that it's a majority of the opposite of "pro-Trump neo-fascist"? If the latter, my first comment still applies.
"Like those millions of people who believed the fake news fed to them,"
So people using Facebook which includes both Democrats and Republicans? You do realize a lot of Democrats are not technologists right? And that they won't have a better understanding of technology than their conservative brethren?
I know it's popular among my circle to just outright shit on all Republicans no matter what, but it's really not helping our cause.
Technologists believe fake news, too.
Furthermore, look at how much work it took to get net neutrality passed even under Obama. If the democrats are so much on our side, why was it so difficult?
I'm not defending the republican's choices here, I don't agree with what they're doing.
With a new administration, content providers are looking amp up lobbying and give it another go.
We need to forget politics red vs. blue and consider that this may be a bad idea. If we make it an unpopular position for politicians to support, they won't pass it.
Votes beat dollars because at the end of the day, without your vote, politicians supporting a given position don't have the job.
Then let's stop blaming the shouting man for stuff other than being the idiot he is. There's plenty of other folks to blame, and plenty of them were in power before now. There was plenty of scary and stupid Internet regulation discussed under Obama that he didn't react to the way I would have liked AT ALL. There's plenty of stuff Democrats suddenly decided they didn't like and Republicans suddenly decided they like when in reality it's hardly that different at all. There's a bunch of shitty people in Congress and in many other sectors of government, and let's not forget that they're not going to go away once anyone's President-of-choice wins the next election, or that they're not partly responsible for a whole bunch of conservatives feeling disenfranchised and going with a lunatic as an overreaction.
I can't control what other people say =)
> There was plenty of scary and stupid Internet regulation discussed under Obama that he didn't react to the way I would have liked AT ALL
I agree. For example, he was totally wrong about how to deal with everyone having access to E2E encryption in their pockets.
All I can do is advocate for focusing on this one issue. I believe in net neutrality and I think if more people understand how it contributed to today's internet, then more would be on board.
One thing to note is that net neutrality was always built into ISPs until content providers started focusing on subscriptions to data via the internet rather than TV.
At that point, content companies started to see how they could corner markets by using dollars to persuade ISPs to give them better throughput than smaller competition.
So, while the neutrality regulation only came into place in 2015, it was really standard practice up until then.
> There's a bunch of shitty people in Congress and in many other sectors of government, and let's not forget that they're not going to go away once anyone's President-of-choice wins the next election, or that they're not partly responsible for a whole bunch of conservatives feeling disenfranchised and going with a lunatic as an overreaction.
Yes, well, I think in this case we can set aside how inept many in government seem to be. On this issue, I think we can come together and agree that net neutrality is a good thing, and that Netflix or Comcast shouldn't be able to give you faster speeds to certain websites, because that means you'll be paying more to visit sites that they don't own, thus limiting your choices.