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Comment by tps5 | Hacker News Reader

> I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual internet history if the website uses HTTPS.

Your ISP can (and likely does) monitor your DNS queries, which (as far as I know) are not encrypted.

Personally I think the net neutrality stuff is a tad overblown. I'd vote for maintaining it, but I've never been particularly convinced by the whole "surveillance state/beyond-orwellian/ISP censoring your speech" arguments that get thrown around on HN, among other places.

I think the problems with ISPs are more practical: they overcharge, provide shitty service, have no incentive to upgrade their infrastructure, and clearly collude with one another. Therefore they need to be regulated.

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> I think the problems with ISPs are more practical: they overcharge, provide shitty service, have no incentive to upgrade their infrastructure, and clearly collude with one another. Therefore they need to be regulated.

Agreed. Though I would prefer that we do whatever we can to identify and implement mechanisms to increase competition. I want new ISP options, and several of them, rather than just marginally better behavior from the one or two ISPs I have in my neighborhood. I'd prefer regulation that increases competition (even if that hurts the incumbents) rather than regulation that assumes the incumbents are fixed and therefore just manages how they conduct their business. The prior is designed to create new ISP options, the latter tends to serve to decrease the incidence rate of new options.

I've always been a voracious Internet consumer. For all of its faults, I really enjoyed the regulatory framework of the Communications Act of 1996 that allowed competitive ISPs to lease physical wires.

How about forcing ISPs to lease the last mile to help bolster competition, they did something similar in the UK [1]. Not quite sure how that worked out for them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling#United_K...

This was a requirement of EU law, and is presumably a reason why there are more ISPs in the EU than in the US (apart from the density issue, of course).

Yes, I think that would be great!

> > I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual internet history if the website uses HTTPS.

> Your ISP can (and likely does) monitor your DNS queries, which (as far as I know) are not encrypted.

HTTPS does expose the domain name in plain-text through SNI. Yes, DNS is not encrypted.

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