Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by metalliqaz | Hacker News Reader

Ajit Pai isn't right, but here's why it doesn't even matter: he's ignoring the will of the people.

Under his chairmanship the FCC has (1)intentionally made it more difficult to comment on proceedings, (2) ignored the blatant and illegal automated responses that flooded the comment system without the knowledge of the people whose names were used, (3) tried to suppress participation by faking a DDOS, (4) obstructed investigations into both #2 and #3, (5) used debunked claims with debunked data to justify a rules change, and (6) come right out said that comments would be ignored because they didn't contradict the debunked data.

They are lying, and the ISP-backed pundits that write articles like this are lying too.

The one and only remedy to Net Neutrality is robust competition, but we waved bye-bye to that long ago. ISPs have government-granted monopolies (or duopolies), and they are vertically integrated.

We need the protection of NN, it's the only thing keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive in this country.

>We need the protection of NN, it's the only thing keeping the entrepreneurial spirit alive in this country

Maybe in startup land, but this is blatantly untrue. The entrepreneurial spirit is doing just fine, it's just that people are starting unsexy sustainable small businesses and not SV-style startups. Losing NN isn't going to be an existential crisis for a lot of businesses like that, although it would most likely still be painful.

No disagreements on your larger points regarding the FCC and NN. It's disgusting that there's so much widespread dislike among the populace for the ISP-centric direction everything is going.

The major issue with this "robust competition" (which I would tend to agree with) What do you do when one entity (perhaps unfairly, or with taxpayer's dollars) already been given one heck of an upper-hand? What if they've lobbied to make it impossible for you to dig in the ground and run your "tubes" along side theirs?

Has Comcast proven that they're open to "robust competition"? If I could somehow find another way to pipe data into someone's home, do you think Comcast would _not_ try to find some way to litigate against it? For an industry that started as a community shared antenna, what do you think they'd do to another group that tried to do basically the same thing? (read the result of Aereo court case for the answer)

that's what I meant when I said we "waved bye-bye" to competition. We lost control, now Title II is the only way to get it back.

> The one and only remedy to Net Neutrality is robust competition

Are you saying NN is a bad thing that needs to be healed by competition? Because that is exactly what the article is arguing. More regulation generally burdens potential start-ups, creates barriers to market entry, and disproportionately favors large incumbents? That is even when the regulation is supposed to limit harm caused by large incumbents, such as post-Great Recession banking regulation that only had the effect of destroying nearly all small/regional banks and causing a massive consolidation into what were supposedly already "too-big-to-fail" banks - making them only much bigger.

If we really believe that competition is good, then we should oppose arbitrary regulatory limitations and allow market competition to create alternatives to the theoretical harms we fear from undoing the re-classification of ISPs to Title II companies. That is only if we actually think competition provides better products and services for consumers than heavy-handed regulation.

I'm saying in another world it would work, but there is no robust competition and there can't be. Not in Comcast Stadium.

An open patch of grass is not automatically a level playing field.

Even the mighty Google couldn't break into the game with their fiber offering. AT&T shut them down with regulatory capture.

Ajit Pai isn't right, but here's why it doesn't even matter: he's ignoring the will of the people.

This is not ipso facto a bad thing.

The will of the people is sometimes evil and wrong. I can list hundreds of examples where going with the majority sentiment was wrong.

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