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Comment by dieterrams | Hacker News Reader

Survey methodology and all that, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if most of the affected population didn't know.

Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest.

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Net neutrality has to be one of the most poorly marketed concepts of the past decade. When you're head-to-head with global companies with tremendous budgets, it's a good idea to have people trained in PR doing your branding.

The biggest failure of the net neutrality movement was it did nothing to undermine the belief that net neutrality represented a change in the status quo. It would have been better to lead with the idea of big business (telecoms) or the government (FCC) meddling with the Internet.

This highlights an unfortunate aspect of our public sphere. The unvarnished truth is rarely enough to influence public opinion. Those of us in the computers, and engineering must recognize that rhetoric based on emotion is a more effective tool when communicating with the general public. Facts are necessary but not sufficient.

I'm not convinced that facts are even necessary right now. You can literally just make stuff up and make up arguments around it, then scream about it until people start getting onboard.

That's always been true, and frequently been exploited throughout history.

Good point. The telecom industry started this back in the 2000s with their astroturf "Hands off the Internet" campaign, implying NN was about applying new regulations to the Internet. NN's big failure was in not finding an effective way of pushing back against that.

> Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest.

yeah, marketing is nuanced like that and i think this distinction would have made a good difference.

net-favorism, anti-throttling, anti-discrimination, equal-access would have also done better, i think.

I can't think of a hot name, but net neutrality is fundamentally about preserving a free market of information.

You have to be careful about that, because there's nothing in net neutrality that prevents restricted data silos, censorship, takedowns; it's really only about forbidding a specific network management practice that allows ISPs to impose a time cost on sites and services they disapprove of.

While accurate, it's a little misleading to phrase it like this.

Imposing a significant time cost makes certain types of applications unusable.

Notice that "free market" is a contronym: concurrent market and unregulated market are opposite things here.

Anti-throttling is great. It's better rhetorically (who wants their data throttled?) and arguably clearer too, since that's what it comes down to in the end -- the ability for ISPs to throttle some content more than others.

No, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear that is a general bandwidth rate limit, which I think almost nobody has any problems with.

It doesn't correctly communicate that it's different rates for different target sites.

these are all better names than net neutrality.

Net equality - Perfect name to ensure that it becomes a great hot button issue along ideological lines in America when it clearly isn't one right now.

In America, 'equality' is not considered as a universally positive word.

I agree. I think shmageggy's 'anti-throttling' is much closer to something workable.

Heck, anti-racketeering or anti-collusion may be better.

Depends. Equality of opportunity, equality of the vote, equal in the eyes of the law, those are largely uncontested. Income/outcome equality is certainly a hot button issue.

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