A list of ways to “Break the Internet” for the 48 hours before the FCC vote

Genuine question: what are some ways in which we can usefully contribute? Seems like there's not a whole lot of options there... Especially for non-US people (because right or wrong, a lot of countries tend to follow in the footsteps of the US. If Net Neutrality officially dies there, it won't be long before it dies in many other places in the world.)

I agree tweetstorms will probably result in a few articles and that'd be that...

I have in the past seen people switch their twitter "avatar" to highlight certain causes, and i guess that for the most part it basically acts like a pacifier for the user as they get to feel they have done something.

1) Throttling sites the ISP doesn't like.

2) Any kind of penalty for heavier users.

3) Charging for access to special pipes that are faster, when both sides want to pay a premium for speed and reliability.

Unless I ask directly I have a hard time discerning what someone means by NN, and even then I don't know how well it maps to what new regulations will actually do.

Edit: Another attempt at clarifying first sentence.

[1] https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/

I don't really think anything will change either way. Even though there are few ISPs to choose from, many areas have both a cable company and a telecom company to choose internet from and I think that is sufficient enough to keep either one from filtering or throttling. Case in point, I know plenty of people that will flip flop between spectrum and ATT every year simply because one has an internet plan that is $5 less than the other one for a year contract. Then rinse,wash, repeat on the next year.

As a paying customer, I'd love the ability for streaming sites not to impact my bandwidth quota. I get 1TB a month. That's it. I've run over that limit once, and you can guess where 90% of it went.

This is especially true on mobile, where the bandwidth cap is literally 100x lower. 10GB is not a lot, and you can burn it on one long train ride.

It's absurd that we have to deal with caps, but... The world has accepted them. So if they're here to stay, why not classify streaming sites into a different mental category? They're bandwidth hogs.

I'd rather keep NN in place, but that's one flipside.

Having strong "net neutrality" means that all bits are equal. It's like imagining that your ISP can't see where the bits go, they just come read the meter. In fact, the analogy to your electric bill is quite apt.

Imagine if your electric company billed you more for using your toaster than it did for using your refrigerator. Imagine if you had to pay to add devices to your electric plan, or if you had to pay extra to be able to use full power on your microwave. Because the electric company just "reads the meter" and treats all "bits" of electricity as equal, you are free to use your electricity as you choose. This means a guy in his garage can run a server and start a business and break into markets (that actually requires both "electricity neutrality" and "net neutrality."

The ramifications of having no net neutrality regulations range from simply throttling certain websites, like netflix, in order to squeeze them for more money, to charging to access certain web sites or selling "packages" of web sites you can access. If that sounds terrifying to you, you're not alone.

A longer article that details some of this: https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/

pros: all of that becomes legal so ISPs can increase profits through anti-consumer practices

cons: ISPs disrupt commerce through anti-consumer practices

- It already doesn’t exist. Google pays a fee to install servers in AT&T datacenters for better CDN performance.

- The bill mostly repeals rules instituted in 2014. I don’t remember the Internet being that bad before 2014.

- Finally, from a classic liberalism PoV, getting the government out of any market is always a good move.

There are basically three different kinds of networks: 1) Networks that primarily host content; azure. 2) Networks that primarily do transit; level three. 3) Consumer Terminating Networks; Comcast. I admit this is a generalization, and some networks fit multiple of these categories, but lets not get too bogged down in the details here, as I don't think it's necessary to understand net neutrality.

Given these types of interconnected networks lets go through an example. Let say a consumer wants to watch Netflix. The consumers pays Comcast to access Comcast's network and get some bandwidth. Netflix pays their hosting network, and possibly a transit network for bandwidth. Comcast either directly, or through another networks connects to Netflix's hosting network. Neither Netflix or Comcast necessarily pays anything to these in-between networks. This works because these in-between networks trade about the same amount of traffic (see Peering). This is basically net neutrality; you pay Comcast for some bandwidth, Netflix pays their host and the content flows freely.

Without net neutrality Comcast can change you, Netflix, or both more to connect to each other. It can make Hulu free to connect to. It can make youtube inaccessible unless you get the super premium package. No one is just paying for bandwidth anymore, someone is paying for individual services on top of bandwidth. This allows Comcast to either pick the winner by making their services cheaper, or lets the company which pays Comcast the most be most available to their customers.

So what it really boils down to is, are you paying for bandwidth that you choose how to use, or not.

Personally, I'd rather just pay for bandwidth.

0. In the US, there's a legal status for telecom companies called "common carrier", and multiple subcategories (Title I, Title II). Basically common carrier status says that you have to abide by certain regulations around who you serve, and in return your company gains some benefits (among them, they're not liable for illegal material transmitted over their networks). So your phone company, a Title 1 common carrier, can't charge you more to call Best Buy than to call Amazon, but if you plan out a bank heist with your buddies over the phone, the phone company CEO doesn't go to jail. Right now ISP's are classified as the less regulated subcategory, Title II.

1. The first question, orthogonal but critical, is whether the FCC has the legal authority to set and enforce policies around net neutrality to anyone at all, or only Title I common carriers. The exact authority to do this was never enumerated to the FCC by congress (because the FCC was set up long before the internet). There's also a question of whether the FCC can just reclassify ISPs as common carriers at will. There is an ongoing legal dispute that the FCC has currently lost at the DC Circuit court level where the court said that the FCC can't regulate net neutrality without reclassifying ISPs as the more regulated category. The FCC then reclassified them, which is in the courts. I bring this up because it's one argument given by republicans who oppose it: They don't believe the FCC has the authority in the first place, some believing it's the FTC's job, some believing that nobody has that authority until congress gives it out. Those who feel this way generally don't think congress should give that out. The most used reasoning i've read is "Things have been fine for 25 years, why add more rules now?".

2. Assuming you think the FCC has the authority here, net neutrality as it's been laid out since 2010 basically says "all lawful bits are equal, with reasonable allowance for quality of service". You can still charge differently for different amounts of bandwidth, but are not allowed to block or modify traffic by type or source. Wiki has a nice summary here: [1]. Peering agreements between bandwidth providers are also still legal. The quality of service stuff is beyond my level of knowledge, but I believe it's intended to allow for things like blocking denial of service attacks or taking links down for maintenance.

Without it, ISPs are free to discriminate based on source, content type, etc. So they can charge you more for just video services, or slow down just netflix but prioritize hulu, etc. The nightmare scenario for many internet advocates is that image you've probably seen of an ISP ad with different packages for allowing gaming, video, etc. [2]. For the record, comcast has promised not to do this.

Another worry of open internet advocates is that the ISPs will go to Netflix, Amazon, etc, and ask them to pay more to guarantee quality of service. This could raise prices for these services. If this included speedups over competitors, rather than just slowdowns of big bandwidth users, it would discourage competition from startups who couldn't pay huge amounts like major companies.

The counter-arguments vary, but tend to fall in a few camps:

a. ISPs have not done this in the past, so why add more regulations and increase their costs of doing business (more legal costs to understand the laws and ensure compliance).

b. Market competition will ensure that if one company starts ripping off consumers, another will move in. Regulation is unnecessary and may have nasty second-order effects.

c. If Netflix is taking up a non-trivial percent of Comcast's total resources, why shouldn't they have to pay more? Same for game networks, etc. This is especially interesting with file-sharing services, which are a big bandwidth suck are commonly viewed as mostly illegal activity (piracy).

d. These companies are afraid to start new lines of business that will employ people and help consumers. I've yet to dig up any good proposed examples, of anyone at HN knows of one that would be cool. Pai in particular has mentioned this a number of times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...

[2] http://www.theharlemvalleynews.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/1...

It's as simple as that. If the ISP is discriminating against certain types of content, then the internet is not neutral, which many think should be illegal to preserve innovation on the web (allowing small companies to rise up as fast as Google, Facebook, and Youtube did, instead of being bogged down by ISPs charging them fees for "access to their customers" or some nonsense).

1.) Transparency. Fixed and mobile broadband providers must disclose the network management practices, performance characteristics, and terms and conditions of their broadband services

2.) No blocking. Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices; mobile broadband providers may not block lawful websites, or block applications that compete with their voice or video telephony services.

3.) No unreasonable discrimination. Fixed broadband providers may not unreasonably discriminate in transmitting lawful network traffic.

In 2014, in Verizon vs. the FCC[1], the appeals court struck down the No blocking and No unreasonable discrimination sections of the Open Internet Order. The court at the time noted that as long as broadband providers were considered under Title I, those sections could not apply to them. However, the court also noted that, in general, the FCC did have the power to enforce the Open Internet Order using Title II, and that the FCC had the ability to reclassify the ISPs under Title II.

Thus in 2015, the FCC reclassified broadband providers under Title II, thus making the No blocking and No unreasonable discrimination sections apply to them once again.

The history goes:

2010-2014: Transparency, No blocking, No unreasonable discrimination

2014-2015: Transparency, blocking ok, unreasonable discrimination ok

2015-now: Transparency, No blocking, No unreasonable discrimination

What the FCC wants to do now is to repeal the action taken to classify broadband providers under Title II, and move them back to Title I. This would again eliminate the ability of the FCC to enforce the Open Internet Order's No Blocking and No Unreasonable Discrimination sections.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....

- In modernity, not having internet is considered untenable. Essential things like applying for jobs, interacting with friends, or performing political activism require the internet. Moreover, a free internet is important for these tasks, becaue only then can the tasks themselves be performed freely. Imagine an internet where the only social network is facebook. This would be extremely limiting, and facebook would love to implement this.

- Many ISPs would use this price discrimination to steal customers away from other ISPs, rather than unlock new customers. This is hailed as "competition". The problem is that all ISPs would steal customers from each other roughly equally. Therefore, the effect would be merely to lower prices (for a lesser product) for certain customers. Without a corresponding lowering of costs, ISPs would have to raise prices for the rest of their customers. To get the same price as today, you would have to purchase a non neutral package. Rather than it being merely grandmas and poor people with a limited version of the internet, nearly everyone would have it.

The major ISP endgame is to have a cut of every single transaction that happens on the internet over their pipes (from both ends)... well... if they aren't already the ones selling the product in the first place, that is.

They are chomping at the bit to flex their monopolist, anti-competitive muscles to achieve that goal. They will go as far as we let them (just as any self-interested party would in their unique position).

Net-neutrality rules helped (somewhat) to stop them. If you think that possible future is bad, you probably ought to support net-neutrality.

It is the idea that an ISP should not treat different data differently. Their job — what I am paying for — is to deliver data I transmit to the Internet, as efficiently as possible.

The only strong-ish argument that I've heard against net-neutrality is that "why shouldn't the ISPs be able to sell off the limited resource of bandwidth to the highest bidder? Does not offering higher-paying individuals result in a more efficient allocation of the resource? I would argue, no, because:

1. Most people don't have a choice about their ISP, and their ISP knows this. Most Americans have a single broadband Internet provider, that's it. The ISP has no competition to encourage setting a fair market price, because no fair market exists. (I think I would be much more inclined on most of these points if ISPs were not local monopolies.)

2. Allowing the ISP to price discriminate (by charging upstream content producers more for getting out of the slow lane) creates a barrier to new entrants to the market. One of the great things about the Internet today is that if someone invents, say, the next YouTube, Google, or Wikipedia, it is essentially on equal footing w/ the other services that exist today. Forcing new services that may be bandwidth intensive to pay up help lock in the established big players who can outbid the smaller fish. This is particularly dangerous in the example that an ISP could sell access to only a subset of the Internet: imagine a package that only allows access to Google, FB, and a handful of other sites. Competitors are now cut off from those customers. (This is not theoretical, either; there are examples of exactly this happening abroad.)

3. ISPs have repeatedly demonstrated that they would like to offer competing products to those offered by non-ISPs, and will abuse their monopolistic position to promote those products. (By offering them at higher speeds, not counting them towards data caps, etc.)

4. The incentives created by content producers paying for bandwidth are perverse: the ISP would get money, but would be disinclined to reinvest that in the local infrastructure. Doing so would increase the available supply of bandwidth, decreasing the price that it would fetch. American's ISP offerings already lag behind the rest of the world, in some cases, by an order of magnitude. This would not help.

Anti (meaning in support of the FCC's plan): https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/

Pro (meaning in support of the 2015 changes to protect net neutrality: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20171127/01044438683/ajit-...

The anti article is by Ben Thomson, who has a deep and interesting insight into quite a number of things about how businesses on the internet work. I don't always agree with him, but he usually states a sane, informed case. His biggest claim to fame is his work fleshing out an economic idea called Aggregation Theory, which was in part a response to/criticism of Clayton Christinsen got wrong about New Market Disruption.

On the pro side, Mike Masnick is an intellectual property attorney who now, I think, runs techdirt full time. He's been working on the legal issues surrounding the internet since the 90s. Interestingly enough, his attitude was similar to Thompson's around 10 years ago, but the way things have evolved, he's come around to seeing things this way.

I find myself unconvinced by Thompson's argument. It's a wait and see argument that basically says, "We know regulation sucks. But we don't know exactly how bad the ISPs are going to be when they are unregulated."

The reality is that Internet Access is the defining technology that will drive the global economy for the next few generations at least. It's not unreasonable to compare it to access to coal, oil, or electricity (at different times in the last few hundred years) in terms of how it enables people and companies to create jobs as well as go about their daily business.

I don't think the electricity analogy is particularly good. It's oversimplified, and it doesn't exactly frighten anyone because no one can imagine anyone charging more for running one appliance rather than another. But it would improve that analogy a little if it went like this: you pay x amount for running your fridge if it's a Samsung smart fridge. You pay 10x if it's not.

I think a better way of explaining it is in a way that really resonates with people's pocket books. The price of gas. Imagine that gas stations charged variable rates depending on where you do your shopping, where you go for entertainment, or where you go to dinner because the companies that provide these things are allowed to subsidize your travel to them.

Want to buy your groceries at Super Walmart this week? Yay! Your gas is free! Oh, you want to go to the local farmer's market? Your gas is $10/gallon. Want to go see a movie at your local AMC GigaPlex 42 in 5D? 50 cents/gallon. You want to go see a small modern dance performance at your local community theater? $8/gal. Hey! Go eat at an Applebee's 40 miles from you. Getting there is free! And you can stop at any of these participating shopping malls along the way to pick up some clothes from Banana Republic. Oh, you want to go to a local diner run by some of your friends? Fuck you. Gas is going to be $50/gal for that.

Worst of all in this analogy is this: If you'd like to go vacation at a Disney resort, gas to get there is free no matter where you are. But wait, you'd like to go to the MOMA and look at art? Well, a lot of artists are pretty shady people. They do drugs and have sex. We're not selling you any gas at all for any price if you're going to drive there.

And to take it mildly political and back to technology, wait until news media companies get a chance to buy in. Do you want to live in a world where visiting Fox News is free and visiting nytimes.com costs 5 cents per click? (Or vice versa depending on your political leanings).

If we're somewhat concerned about the role that advertising and social media are playing in our political discourse now, just wait until you add traffic shaping through cost incentives into the mix.

Not having this regulation is the equivalent of letting a few companies create and OPEC-like cabal that sets the price of a vital resource for the U.S. and the U.S. only. In my opinion, it's a guaranteed disaster for our country economically, politically, and socially.

And by the way, I'm including examples of zero-rating here (making certain internet resources free) because I think that's a vital part of net neutrality. The rules put in place need to be strengthened, not eliminated to maintain a neutral internet service. I think Thompson's arguments on that point are way out of line.

Similarly, people who own the Internet pipes want to claim part of the value of new innovations build on them - to charge differential pricing for, say, streaming movies, vs less profitable types of content. The people building those innovations say, no way - charge us by the bit and it's not your business what those bits are doing.

If you'd like to understand Pai's argument, you're going to need to read unedited interviews with Pai himself. The media in general is giving a very one sided view of this issue. I tend to agree with the desire to keep net neutrality as well, but I think Pai's view is also perfectly cogent and deserving of more than the mob-driven straw manning that it's been given.

So what is his view? Let's start with Google Fiber as an interesting case study. Google Fiber has effectively been a failure. In the ~6 years of operation to 2016 it managed an estimated 0.07million television subscribers, 0.45 million broadband subscribers. They've since rolled back further plans for expansion and engaged in lay offs and downsizing.

Why did it fail? There are quite a large number of reasons but the most fundamental issue is that they didn't attract anywhere near the number of signups they likely anticipated. Why not? The most basic reason is that they announce they're coming to an area. They then spend billions of dollars setting up their infrastructure, advertising, hiring, and getting ready to launch. The day before they 'flip the switch', Comcast/Time Warner announces they are price and speed matching them. Some people sign up out of spite, but most do not.

The thing about competition against a monopoly is that you need to not only be able to beat what they are charging, but what they can charge. Or you need to create a different, somehow more compelling offering. So what does this have to do with net neutrality? Net neutrality in essence requires that ISPs behave identically to one another. Their only distinguishing factor is supposed to be speed and cost. This, in turn, means companies have to be able to offer prices or speeds that Time Warner/Comcast simply could not match. And this isn't really possible. Given their size, these companies could even afford to run at a loss to drive out competition if necessary.

A recent NYT article stated something that seems to contradict everything I just stated. In particular they imply that France and the UK have strong net neutrality, yet also have some 13 and 50+ telecom companies, respectively, competing for business. I asked people why that was here [1]. The responses there are very informative, but I also found them somewhat ironic. It's about bundling, per site performance in some cases, and more. In other words, the behaviors that eliminating neutrality would overtly allow are already what is helping drive competition in these areas.

If Pai is right then disabling net neutrality will help drive competition and investment in telecoms. If he is wrong then instead you'll simply see the doomsday scenarios I described in my first paragraph. So that gamble is disconcerting. There are rules and regulations in place for anti-competitive behavior that could help preempt some of these scenarios, but that's certainly hardly a relief given the current state of telecom operation in the US is presumably completely legal. But on the other hand before you assume the doomsday scenarios do come to pass, how do you think that would change the calculus for competition from an upstart? When Comcast/Time Warner only need worry about the price/speed of things, the determination of consumer perception is simple. When it starts coming down to far more nuanced issues of service management and packages, it's not so easy for them to simply say "We match this, exactly." In some cases that may not even be possible - an upstart ISP with agreements with various companies could create offerings that would be money losers for other ISPs.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15903647

1. ISPs, who without net neutrality get to nickel and dime everyone else. (Subscribe to Internet Plus for +$25/month to get access to Facebook and Reddit! Subscribe to Internet Pro for +$80/month to get access to VPNs!)

2. Literally everyone else, including every individual internet user and every non-ISP business in the world.

All analogies I can think of are a bit leaky, but the closest to my mind is package shipping. Under perfect net neutrality, a resident purchases two mailboxes from last mile provider (ISP) under certain fee. Last mile provider commits to emptying outbound box and filling inbound box two times a day. If everything destined to resident does not fit into mailbox - packages will be redelivered at next scheduled delivery. Obviously resident can only send as much packages at a time as they can fit to the mailbox (connection speed). Last mile provider commits to delivering wherever the packages are destined to be delivered even if the package smells of dead dead bodies and make geiger counter scream. If they have to hand off packages to peers - that is their problem and their expenses. Continuing this analogy, FCC's plan is to allow shipping companies to make clients submit unpackaged parcels (meaning subcontractors can open packages and inspect contents and both last mile carrier and original sender) at packaging station where company can inspect the parcel, source, destination and charge/queue packages differently based on these criteria. Some practical consequences of that could be for example shipping time dependency on retailer/product. You could get a WD drive from Amazon in a day, but Seagate drive in a week. The same company could ship Seagates from Wallmart in a day, but WDs in a week. As a customer you could have no idea.

Net neutrality, on the other hand, does not allow to deliver packages from you to your neighbor (which is obviously cheaper) at reduced price. If your neighbors constantly fill their outbound mailboxes to the extent that pickup truck has to ride back to distribution center, come back to to your street and resume collection, net neutrality does not allow pickup truck to skip packages to pick your once in a month package for faster delivery. If the package is too big to fit into mailbox it has to be split into smaller packages and assembled by recipient. If you received your large machine critical to your business in small pieces over a month, assembled and are only waiting for batteries to arrive, net neutrality does not allow to ship your batteries under higher priority than hair tie to your neighbor who has moved out a week ago.

Net Neutrality regulations that are blind and naive to administrative changes sound great to me. And you can add strong encryption to that as well.

I don't want idiots who don't understand either of those things making laws about them that favor governments and large companies.

I'm not too convinced either way though, so there's that.

Besides let's be honest, 90% of the useful and interesting internet sites, companies, innovation originate in the US(from my personal experience). If it changes, that's bad for everyone.

It will affect startups as well. If you're interested in building an online business based in US, you don't want your site to get throttled.

It shouldn't be terribly hard to isolate the effects to browsers that request language-locale tuples from the US or run the JavaScript conditionally on the browser if the locale+timezone is set to something in the US.

It'll fuck competition in the US even more, resulting in even more monolithic companies from the US flooding our market and killing off competition here. And it will result in my data being sifted through by the ISPs of the webpage owners in the US, whose webpages I visit.

1. https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/

Not justifying CloudFlare's decision at all, just saying that I view dismantling NN as a much bigger threat.

ISPs are different because they are much more prone to monopoly and abuse compared to CloudFlare. For a real life example, consider this: it's one thing for a bakery to ban Neo-nazis, and another thing for the public bus system. Granted, ISPs aren't public utilities, but they are much closer to one than CloudFlare, because CloudFlare provides a service that lends itself to competition. If you don't like CloudFlare, the upfront costs of creating a competitor pale in comparison to the costs of creating a competitor to Comcast or Verizon.

To that end, CloudFlare banning Nazis is just as much the death of net neutrally as me getting fired for calling my boss a "kike" is the death of free speech.

I've been following this administration closely in the past year. It appears that they do nothing in good faith. Just look at how Congress tried to pass the health care bill and tax bills. If you want to fight for net neutrality you better turn out to vote for candidates who support your position. At the end of the day control of Congress is the only way to ensure this.

Other than that, I'm not going to wade into politics here on HN today (learned that lesson the hard way a few times) other than to say I think we are at a point where actual representative democracy is at stake over the next couple years, and net neutrality, while a huge deal, is small potatoes compared to the fights we need to figure out how to win.

Yes, that will fix everything.

Something is breaking in US politics. Or, rather, several things are breaking - decency, civility, honesty, common sense, and probably several other things. I don't know what the root cause is, or even if there is only one.

To start, be reactive, switch to T-Mobile or any telco that is pro-net neutrality

Then start being pro-active. Look for bad patterns in companies and punish them. For example, Google says they support net-neutrality but are happy to block amazon devices from playing youtube. Maybe it is time to give a clear message to Google that behaviors like this are not accepted by you?

Replace Google with any X company. Don't be surprised if in 20 years X-company will only allow you to access X-stuff on X-devices running on X-network.

Money is what makes the world go around. Use your money to steer the world to the direction you want.

Or, you know, just keep using Google and Verizon because it is more convenient. But in this case you lose your right to complain.

So engaging today isn't just about fixing this issue in this moment (which I'd agree is unlikely), but it's also about finding others who believe as you do and maybe crossing paths with them as part of a community protest activity on and offline, and helping to create communication networks that do help flip control of congress (but I'd add also reinvigorate the voice of more regular people) in the future.

The root of the problem is we only have 2 choices: red vs blue. 2 choices is only slightly better than no choice (1 choice). With just 2 choices, almost no one gets what they want. And every 4 years, one party just undoes what the last party did.

What we need is 50 different choices. Let each state do what it wants, give states most of the power. States should get most of the taxes, federal should get a small sliver. Federal government should be small, and only do things that can only be done at the federal level. States having all the power is how the US started out and that's how it was meant to be. We need to get back to that. The US is way too large for a 1 size fits all policy.

The shoestring startups are the ones that will be hurt, not deep pocketed tech companies.

Major tech companies already live in an environment of parasites that sue them daily like non-practicing entities + patent infringements. This will just become another "fee" they pay.

Plus, Ajit Pai has already been seated as FCC commissioner. He already has a Republican majority on the commission. It's basically a foregone conclusion and lobbying Congress now is too little too late. If tech companies with clout were going to do this, they would have done it years ago.

There was plenty of flaming going on before I asked for nonflaming explanations of the issue. And it looks to have not dropped off the front page. So I don't see the harm you are imagining.

Re your edits: There is nothing wrong with noting that noob questions get asked routinely about x subject and that it is problematic when large numbers of people jump on answering such questions. The problem with your comment is in injecting ugly characterizations of the asker and assuming I knew this would get a lot of replies. I didn't. I frequently ask or post things that are utterly ignored.

Holding me responsible for the decisions other people made to reply en masse is ridiculous. Why not hold them responsible for choosing to be the umpteenth person who felt compelled to reply?

I think it's not necessarily a malicious act. Seems like an honest tactic to start a debate.

I think the bigger problem is the unending "It will be just like cable" meme, complete with infographics and blah blah blah.

It turns an issue with many serious consequences into one that ISP companies can "solve" by just not doing that. Are they blocking torrents, banning VPNs unless you get a business enabled account, extorting fees from companies, engaging in zero rating deals, etc... absolutely.

But you can access pretty much whatever site you want. So obviously everything is okay because what reddit said was wrong and we can trust the ISPs.

This is not a charitable opinion. Reading old threads on NANOG¹ has convinced me that net neutrality is more nuanced and technical than the "people vs big-ISP" narrative advanced by campaigns such as the OP. If anything, the reddit and battleforthenet bandwagons have created a hostile environment for actual debate.

¹ AFAICT, the majority NANOG opinion on net neutrality is that it doesn't actually address the underlying issue that prevents natural competition in the ISP market.

falcolas, I was going to ask something similar to Doreen had she not posted first. While I can understand why you might assume that these posts are intended to derail and deceive, I think it's more parsimonious to believe that these HN posters are genuinely looking for discussion and enlightenment.

None of the posts you provided seem sinister. The only thing shared between them is that the posters are hesitant to throw in their support without a detailed argument befitting a complicated issue like net neutrality. An explanation like the following (battleforthenet.com):

    What is net neutrality? Why does it matter?

    Net neutrality is the principle that Internet providers like
    Comcast & Verizon should not control what we see and do online.

¹ From battleforthenet.com:

    We are Team Internet. We support net neutrality, freedom of speech.

    They are Team Cable. They want to end net neutrality, to control & tax the Internet.

You've obviously broken HN's civility rule here. That's not ok. HN is a big place and the things that seem completely obvious to you may well be quite unclear to someone else. This is one of many reasons why the site guidelines ask everyone to assume good faith. Threads occasionally getting derailed isn't great, of course, but that's a lesser concern than people attacking each other.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html