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Comment by Simon_says | Hacker News Reader

Basically anybody with unpopular opinions or opinions that the powerful fear should support net neutrality.

Except under the current "Net Neutrality" rules, we've seen Cloudflare shut down Stormfront because the CEO woke up in a bad mood.

If Net Neutrality really worked the way everyone described, it would be great and I would be all for it.

As is, it appears to be more of a religious mantra instead of an actual policy.

Cloudflare isn’t an ISP.

Cloudflare is not directly an ISP (they do operate their own network and BGP though, so they are) for this case, rather, they were the hosters and Stormfront were the customers.

While I'm personally not happy that they killed a site they don't like, the site was still just a customer and it has nothing to do with Net Neutrality.

So if a service provider can take any content offline, it doesn't matter if ISPs block content or not.

That renders the entire "it protects controversial ideas!" point seems moot.

If you self host, no one can take your content offline.

The rules are about distribution not storage.

Or opinions that ever could become unpopular. Like privacy, you have to defend against the future, too.

this is the inverse: a small minority (tech elites) squelching popular opinion. owning a gun IS objectively popular in the US (there are more guns than people)...even in Silicon Valley. at my current startup roughly half of the developers visit the range regularly. at my local range I always see people with Google and Facebook garb. Bass Pro Shop in San Jose sells out of bulk 9mm ammo within hours of putting it on the floor.

> there are more guns than people

That statistic is not super relevant when talking about how people feel about guns. Something like one-third of American households have a gun in them, and if you talk about individuals, it'll be modestly less than that.

Um no.

3% of Americans own more than half our guns. THEY are an elite group.

Only 22% of Americans own any guns at all.

They really are not popular in any sense of the word.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/09/22/study-guns-ow...

Or just people with one or two possible broadband internet providers (80% of Americans?).

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