Net neutrality will be enforced in New York under orders from governor
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Let's say Comcast & all the others violate net neutrality in some small ways. (I.e. A plan where you normally have 100mbps, but youtube can go faster because their servers are well-spliced with the internet backbone. That's a thing that violated net neutrality.) And then-- well hey, they're violating it. And most other businesses end up violating NN because of other optimizations to delivering internet content.
As a cynical libertarian, I love this. There's the potential for state government to lose internet access. That would be _so good_.
But now that the government created a situation where most of us only have one choice in ISP thanks to using taxpayer money to build all but the last mile and refusing to let smaller players in... Now you want the regulation to end? Huh.
The risk I'm avoiding is not "slightly worse consumer product". The risk I'm hoping to avoid by lobbying for anti-NN is China/Singapore/German-style censorship.
Obviously preventing speeding up video delivery with no negative impact to quality is not the intent of Net Neutrality. The intent also, however, is not to prevent “a slightly worse consumer product”. Corporate censorship of the Internet for financial gain could do as much damage as government censorship for political gain. But the common element in both cases is one party having too much control because they’re the only game in town. And the people pushing for “public Internet” absolutely terrify me.
That said, I don’t think preventing title II government regulation of the Internet would prevent government censorship of it. I’d remind you how willingly companies like AT&T worked with the NSA to enable their wiretapping in the early stages of PRISM. They gave them a freaking secret wiretapping room in their building with a fiber optic splitter. Why would we think they wouldn’t be just as compliant with government censorship under similar threats or incentives?
I have hopes for mesh Internet providers to solve all of this. Competition is the only answer I see, and I think our philosophies align there at least.