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mlamat

I'm not convinced. Why am I supposed to take sides in a fight between two industries?

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Because the ISPs control your Internet access.

They don't compete with each other.

Without net neutrality, they can prioritize, slow down, or block any site or content they want to.

Many people cannot simply switch away.

They have only one ISP to choose from.

You can switch away from Facebook whenever you wish.

Next logical question: net neutrality has existed for a very short amount of time. The Internet & Web did extremely well before net neutrality, with few instances of abusive carrier restriction over the prior decades. What is the very strong supporting evidence to demonstrate your scenario is the likely outcome? If you want to regulate something so important on the premise you're suggesting, you need to present equally significant proof of harm.

The very strong inevitability of industries, relationships and societies to develop, change and adapt over time, and in such a way that lessons learned in the past inform strategies used in the future.

Those prior decades were the infancy of the internet. When children go 16 years without wrecking a car, it doesn’t mean they are perfect drivers.

As far as I'm aware, net neutrality was assumed to apply up until a court ruling that went in Verizon's favor.

So it's not a case of "It only came into law 3 years ago!" but rather "We put it back into law after being considered law for 30 years because of a court case that demanded clarification".

What is the very strong supporting evidence to demonstrate your scenario is the likely outcome?

https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-formally-rules-comcasts-thrott...

That's effectively what lead to the situation we are in now. FCC said it's illegal, appeal ruled FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate at the time, FCC makes attempts at making "net neutrality" a thing they can control, and now we are on the verge of having them roll it back.

Basically, ISPs starting pushing the boundaries and a war directly against the concept of net neutrality and that fight is the one we are currently talking about right now, this is just the latest battle.

If you're unconvinced, you should default to supporting net neutrality. It's the status quo, the null hypothesis. The burden of proof is on the people wishing to make this fundamental change to the structure of the internet.

Net neutrality has only existed in actual law for an extremely short amount of time.

Or put another way, for about 90%+ of the Web-Internet combo's active existence in the US consumer market, net neutrality has not been law.

Even when it wasn't the law, Net Neutrality existed in practice, and there was little interest shown by then ISPs to break that. Now there is a lot of interest by current ISPs to not be neutral, which makes it necessary for Net Neutrality to be the law.

It's not the null hypothesis the rules were implemented in 2015. The fact that some people assumed net neutrality when it did not legally exist makes NN the exact opposite of the null hypothesis, unless you discard the entire internet prior to 2014/2015

What makes you think you're taking sides between two industries?

The way I see it, and probably why Google et al don't seem to be throwing up a recent fuss anymore, is that the big tech companies and industry giants can cut deals with the major ISP's to avoid throttling or provide services/expertise to the ISP's. So the end result is turning Google et al into their OWN monopolies. (e.g. Comcast partners with Youtube to deliver streaming video!)

Now you get telecom monopolies AND service/content monopolies.

Truly the best of both worlds.

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