Hacker News Reader

Comment by rocqua | Hacker News Reader

The argument "We've lost net neutrality because some people refuse hosting / claim domains" misses the definition of net-neutrality. Specifically, net-neutrality is about treating all traffic the same.

It would be horrible if ISPs refused, on their own initiative, to serve certain traffic. However, this is a case of people refusing to host. Now maybe hosting at `web-scale' is only possible with such a small set of providers as to be an issue, but that is not relevant to the net-neutrality discussion.

View on HN

But all of the supposed goals of net neutrality, competition, everyone having a voice, etc. seem to be impinged at the hosting / domain layer. So if the justification for net neutrality is that we might lose those things... and people feel like they already don't have those things, why would they care about net neutrality?

> people feel like they already don't have [a perfectly free Internet where everyone has a voice], why would they care about net neutrality?

The Internet is dominated by Tech Giants, but deregulating ISPs will probably only make the problem worse by allowing Tech Giants to set the price for preferential treatment by ISPs, thereby raising the barrier to entry for competitors and raising prices for regular consumers.

Hopefully you can see how "this will probably only make the problem worse" doesn't quite stir people's stumps the way "this will create a new problem that we've worked very hard to avoid up until this point."

> this will create a new problem that we've worked very hard to avoid up until this point

Sorry, could you elaborate? Not sure what you meant here.

Do you just mean to suggest that the "net-neutrality-is-good-for-competition" argument will not persuade the average person, or something else?

He means that if people already know they're going to die of old age eventually, nobody will be interested in a cure for cancer.

I'm saying people will be less likely to care that repealing net neutrality will hurt them if they feel like they're already experiencing the ill effects while it's law.

I'm not so sure. People with life insurance still opt for medical insurance. :shrug:

The difference is that there's competition in the hosting/domain business. So if you're denied services from one of them, you can still get hosting by going elsewhere. If you can't go elsewhere, then we can all be assured that dozens of people at various companies have looked at it and chosen not to host it.

And if you don't want to accept that, you can probably still get it hosted (with enough money) by building a data center in some place that doesn't care.

In the ISP space, there's no competition for a good many people. One person looks at content, decides it's not worthy, and it's blocked period. No appeal, no asking others for their opinion. And if the end user doesnt like it, they can move, sell their house, find a new job in another area.

That's a much harsher, draconian result.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com