Hacker News Reader

Comment by gameshot911 | Hacker News Reader

>This is government at it's worst.

Is it? Republicans were voted by the public into Congress, into the presidency. They are acting just as anyone voting for them could expect. In that sense they are representing the will of the people who duly elected them.

The FCC ignored the will of a small % of technology-oriented, predominately liberal voters. Just because all the media that you might tend to consume and the people you tend to converse with are vocally against this repeal, doesn't mean that that represents the will of the majority. That same sort of ideological bubble is what caused everyone to be so shocked when Trump actually won, despite all the polls and predictions to the contrary.

View on HN

When you explain what Net Neutrality is, an overwhelming majority of people supported it, including republicans. This isn't just a tech-literate liberal issue.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...

A majority of people support Democrat's economic policies...even though Republicans hold a majority of the seats at both the state and federal level. It seems like people aren't necessarily voting for the party that represent's their positions--or, more likely, there are wedge issues that cause them to vote another way.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/05/2...

From everything I've seen, net neutrality seems to have broad voter support, regardless of party, and even many Republicans in office have voiced concerns. So are they really acting the way voters would expect?

Voter support (a couple of instances here, but there are many), (PDF): https://na-production.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/American_Pu...

It's not that simple.

In an ideal world, people vote in the government they want, and the elected representatives follow the will of the people. We all know such a world doesn't exist [1]. In practice:

* Most voters don't even know what net neutrality is. How will they care if they don't understand that they should care? It's a complicated, nuanced subject even for tech people.

* It wasn't part of the Trump/republican platform at the time of the election. As far as I can recall, it didn't even come up during the presidential debates. Voters might want net neutrality, but they might not have known that voting for Trump/GOP would cause a repeal.

* The last couple of decades show that Congress (and politicans in general) overwhelmingly goes where the money is. There's a huge amount of money and lobbying power on the pro-repeal side, and the current FCC is a classic example of regulatory capture [2], with every indication that the FCC (and the Trump administration) is now stocked with industry insiders.

[1] http://www.bartleby.com/73/417.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

> Republicans were voted by the public

Even this claim is arguable, given gerrymandered congressional districts and inherent overweighting of low-population rural states in the Senate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com