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Comment by wooter | Hacker News Reader

as a card carrying libertarian johnson voter, trump was right.

You can't undo net neutrality without putting in place some serious and real competition though, otherwise it's not going to work. Most people have only 1 or maybe 2 broadband providers available.

Agreed. It’s mostly one land based provider and maybe a satellite option.

You know I would almost be willing to consider scrapping NN if they also had the power to overturn and throw out ALL incumbent laws preventing competition from accessing right of ways, street and utility poles and making it so easy to bury cable you could do it in your sleep at state/city/local levels.

> overturn and throw out ALL incumbent laws preventing competition from accessing right of ways, street and utility poles and making it so easy to bury cable you could do it in your sleep at state/city/local levels.

Let's not forget all the laws requiring fledgling ISPs to build out to entire cities, instead of focusing on areas where they might be able to quickly start turning a profit. Even if you have net neutrality, these laws are still preventing you from getting faster and better options for internet.

Agreed. The regulations we both mentioned have killed any competition in providing, let’s just call internet connection providers what they are, dumb pipes. That’s what they all boil down to. Just dumb pipes to give you access to a network.

And in that context the more providers of dumb pipes we have the better. It’s just a race to the bottom then. Who offers the lowest latency, highest speed and capacity pipe for the cheapest price.

the problem is politicians (mostly local) who sell municipal monopolies in exchange for donations at a time when other parts of the world allow multiple companies to build/lease the dumb pipes to great success (like South Korea). its pure corruption. thats why places like florida (the sunshine state) don't use solar. Government backed monopolies.

we should be investigating these corrupt arrangements (given that the existence of obviously better options suggests fraud and abuse) and forcing the government to undo its shitty decisions. (buy back/sell if necessary) the opposite would be to submit the internet to regulatory capture under NN and the FCC (which effectively killed TV and radio - forcing private cable and streaming content creators to give us the few uncensored options we DO have)

well... I've never been in USA but you must have really great streets. but a lot of streets are already painful to use. and if every internet company could dig holes and put their cabeles in, it would probably be even worse. I mean in germany it's common that the street gets opened 3-4 times. 1. to repair/create it 2. to repair/add everything to do with water 3. to repair/add electricity 4. to repair/add networking/telecom

why? because most often they unify themself, because everybody said that they should pay less, because they do not do much... It happens way too often here. I'm just 27 years old and I already seen it many times a year. this year was especially painful. I've seen streets completly remade - and then after finishing it they opened it again and again 1 month past finish

yes it might probably help the competition. but it could make other things worse. I think land-lines, water, electricity should be in the hands of govt. or some kind of foundatition that manages these things in a escrow fashion and everybody could get a piece if he pays x % for x% of usage.

I totally expect that the next administration will create new regulations. Then the next administration will remove them. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Could we create a self-regulating internet? One where the desired outcome of Net Neutrality is ensured by the protocol itself? What would it take?

I know there are projects like IPFS and Zeronet, but I don't think any of them are targeted specifically at avoiding throttling based on source/destination pair.

because no one wants that. the overhead of those guarantees makes no sense given the diversity of protocols the "internet" is meant to create. people would just use faster protocols for their intended purposes. the beauty is that the degree of Net Neutrality that we do have was created with minimal regulation before 2015. Risking further regulatory capture now, given the issues with local isp monopolies, makes no sense.

So if ISPs are using deep packet inspection to figure out what you are doing to apply some prioritization to your traffic, then using a VPN is a way of hiding that from them. All they would see is a stream of random data flying by. The pessimist in me says they would probably start slowing all encrypted traffic and sell their own VPN service.

Sure you can - if the intent is to destroy the free Internet that exists now.

Follow the money.

When did libertarians became a synonym for monopoly proponents?

The very moment neo-feudalists appropriated the label "libertarian" from the left-anarchists.

I think a lot of self proclaimed "libertarians" have no idea what the term means. Mr. Money Moustache recently had a quote about Uber that made me laugh, regarding the unfair information and pay disparity the drivers exist under: "This was a disappointment to the Economic Libertarian in me, because it seems obvious that an open market between buyer and seller is the key to more efficiency."

Why would that be a disappointment? Uber is the entity with economic power in the relationship, and they are therefore acting in a way that maximizes their own self interest to the detriment of others. He should be rejoicing about that triumph of the free market.

It's funny how individuals who are used to being the ones on top (he's a former engineer) love the free for all Randian idea of unregulated capitalism up until they get the tiniest taste of being on the losing side (he tried driving for Uber and was being paid so little that he was losing money on some fares with no recourse but to stop driving entirely).

when did the FCC fix monopolies in TV or Radio? Never. When did they censor them? Every time.

FCC can't fix monopolies. But what they can do is prevent monopolistic abuse and encourage competition by removing anti-competitive garbage like state laws that ban municipal networks.

Net neutrality was helping to curb monopolistic abuse. Current FCC basically made the market worse by giving monopolists free reign to do their evil stuff unchecked.

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