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Comment by michaelbuckbee | Hacker News Reader

I feel like the making the examples about Netflix/Google misses the point. This is way more dangerous than that - without Net Neutrality rules there's nothing to legally stop an ISP from "prioritizing" and "deprioritizing" any number of political and social sites.

Digital fundraising for politicians is a very real and active thing. Would they be upset with if their side was suddenly hit with a 30s / page load penalty? DNS blackholed?

The deeply cynical part of me thinks that's exactly what they want.

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A good way to get the right wingers might be to ask them what happens when their ISP blocks "hate speech" (as they or someone else defines it) or political speech that falls far outside well established political views.

This is actually pretty likely to happen.

Of course I suppose it'll be kind of funny to see God Emperor Trump usher in policies that make things like Gab and Voat unreachable. Top Kek!

Or the ISPs will pressure companies like FB and Youtube and Twitter into changing their speech policies to unblock hate speech or face throttling. Those tech companies already 'throttle' users who do not meet their orwellian standards.

The Orwellian standards of not censoring? I am not a fan of hate speech - but I'm also not a fan of corporate oligarchs deciding how it is defined.

The question is which group of oligarchs would you allow this unchecked power? Personally, I'm not a fan of either, but I'd rather see competition in this area rather than government-sanctioned neutrality.

That competition should not be decided by who has the most money, it should be based on the weight of public representation, hence democracy.

Or charging extra, per-page-view if the ISP felt like it, to visit FoxNews.com or NPR.org since they're not the ISP's preferred news networks.

THAT is the reality we're about to enter with this FCC change. Who gives a shit about Netflix being slower? Using that example to fight for Net Neutrality is a guaranteed way to lose.

this isn't a right-v-left issue, it's a top-v-bottom issue.

the clipper chip was a clinton thing, the obama administration was for a long time on the fence, etc.

i will credit that the current administration is 'right', whatever that actually means these days..

Problem is the blocking of politically unpopular speech is already happening, just by the major gatekeepers of social media, Facebook, Google, Twitter etc. instead of ISP's. In fact many of the same people advocating for NN are also cheering on major tech companies censorship policies (while the tech companies still insist that they are Common Carriers and thus not liable for user posted content).

So why would right wingers or anyone else with politically unpopular opinions want to train their ire at ISP's who have no history of political censorship, when censorship is happening right now, under everyone's nose. Where are all the articles demanding Google et al become neutral carriers of information or lose their Common Carrier status? In fact, we are getting the exact opposite, with article after article posted here and elsewhere basically demanding that big tech companies censor Fake News, i.e. propaganda you don't agree with.

The right sees an unregulated approach and naive of the censorship aspects.

But Net Neutrality doesn't fix the censorship of companies refusing services to people it doesn't like. In fact many people praise such censorship.

The proposed Net Neutrality argument is just consumer access to the net, not the person wanting to be a host on the Net. That aspect, it doesn't go far enough to provide an unregulated and uncensored free speech.

It's not hard to imagine 15 years ago Google is a new player on the scene but has a lot of trouble getting traction because their links are being constantly saturated and they have no money to pay the ISP ransoms to provide decent service.

We could still be using Altavista today.

You mean 15 years ago when NN didn't exist? Or 10 years ago? Or 5 years ago? Or 3 years ago? How did Google/Facebook/Netflix even make it when ISPs had all the way up to 2015 to ransom them?

Fifteen years ago Net Neutrality was the de facto policy. Nobody would dare block a site or have paid prioritization because it would topple numerous peering agreement Apple carts, and consumers had actually competitive choices between access providers.

It didn’t become necessary to “make it official” until the consumer access industry was consolidated, giving rise to the idea of “hey, we know our consumers are paying for the entire operation and netting us a healthy profit already, so where can we get even more profit?”

> Fifteen years ago Net Neutrality was the de facto policy. Nobody would dare block a site

The first neutrality enforcement action was almost that long ago (12 years ago) over an ISP blocking access to Vonage (the telephone-over-internet service.)

The first FCC neutrality principles enforced by case-by-case actions were adopted in 2004. While the current Open Internet order is only a few years old, active, official FCC action in this area is not.

Don't you see that Google does this already with zero government/user oversight?

This deeply cynical view has already come true.

Just because Google has huge power doesn't mean we should also allow this and change from really hard to impossible to replace Google.

Lack of NN will allow ISPs to essentially implement censorship in addition to what we have.

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