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Comment by H99189 | Hacker News Reader

This is precisely what rubs me the wrong way about the current pitches for net neutrality and why you won't see the right budge anytime soon. NN is being painted as a censorship issue by the biggest censorship-happy organizations in SV. To date, the only threats to consumers have come in the form of possible throttling and not outright blocking of certain speech. The only precedent I know of regarding censorship of the net has been at the hands of Twitter, Google and Youtube, Reddit, and Facebook, who are happily deleting all the political content they feel like at the moment whether it's illegal activity being discussed or not.

As my peer below stated, Comcast was caught disrupting P2P traffic which I hope gets addressed, but that's not how NN it's being sold and sensationalized today.

Edit: Clarifications

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Except each of those companies has competition. Voat and Gab, among others, were born out of the idea that Reddit and Twitter were being unfair. And one had the ability to join one of those alternative platforms, even while still remaining a user of the original, without friction, largely because of having a neutral net. If we get ISPs offering "social media packages", what do you think the odds that Voat, Gab, or even Mastodon will be included?

If you believe that what Reddit and Twitter are doing is wrong, then why on earth would a reasonable solution be to extend the ability to do more of that to actors that one cannot reasonably avoid? I have a grand total of 1 ISP to choose from. The vast, vast majority of Americans have 1 or 2 to choose from. If NN is revoked, and Cox (my ISP) decides they're going to act like Twitter, then I have exactly no recourse. Why do you believe that is the way to go?

I whole-heartedly agree that ISP's shouldn't be outright blocking anything. I'm Pro-Net Neutrality Net-whatever to keep the pipes open and unfettered by greedy corporations.

I'm just pointing out the sheer hypocrisy of the recent campaigns talking about censorship as a possibility when the right has been getting attacked/censored by every big SV company in recent years. Now they're crying about possibility when they're engaged in the very act themselves. I guess they're right, they would know, so yeah i'm pro-NN.

I disagree. If I unleash a horde of spambots on this site, posting spam, and they get removed, am I being censored? If I constantly use slurs and other insults at other users, and I get my account banned because of it, am I being censored?

Yes, in both cases.

Censorship is a problem in certain cases (government, especially viewpoint-based censorship, for instance), but not in all cases.

The example given by Pai was a terrible one. Marsha Blackburn wasn't blocked from advertising a conservative message; she was blocked from committing dangerously unscrupulous libel. Her ad was demonstrably untrue, and was likely to cause some lunatic to hurt someone.

It's true that Rep Blackburn has the right to express her opinion, but libel has always been an exception to freedom of speech in this country. Twitter is under no obligation to accept money in order to help someone spread libel.

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