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Comment by kerkeslager | Hacker News Reader

If net neutrality dies, the web absolutely becomes centralized. Facebook and Google aren't the web, but they will be the web if they're the only ones that can pay to have their data passed over the wire.

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Net neutrality would be nice to have, but the way it's been overhyped is silly. The internet developed without it. We've never really had it -- people like to cite a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented and did not notice it going away. It certainly didn't prevent anything Google or Facebook wanted to do.

If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.

> Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.

"crowd out" is a vague term. Maybe they make the most money, but money isn't the only thing that matters. The forums I frequent and the DuckDuckGo are doing just fine, but I'm not sure they would be if net neutrality falls apart completely.

>The internet developed without it. We've never really had it

We did have it. Defacto net neutrality, enforced by a competetive ISP market. It worked. And once we started to lose that, consumers absolutely did feel the impact. Remember when Comcast throttled bit torrent?

>If you're worried about centralization, net neutrality won't help much. Facebook and Google are large enough to crowd out other players with or without net neutrality.

Sure, they can still dominate under net neutrality. It's just significantly easier without it.

The Net Neutrality law that was pushed recently did nothing for actual net neutrality, which was already preserved by existing legislation.

Also, if these laws were so obviously needed, why did they need to shovel $196M toward promoting them [0]?

0: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/soros-ford-foundation-sho...

>...a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented.

The whole point of net neutrality is that you shouldn't notice it, because you should just be able to use your network connection for whatever you want.

In 2005 a Republican appointed FCC commissioner under a Republican president ordered an ISP to stop blocking VOIP services on their network. This is a real thing that happened and I think plenty of people have noticed how useful VOIP and related services like Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, Discord are even if they aren't aware that the ability to use them has only been enabled by regulatory intervention.

If that's the case I was thinking of, that was a single regional ISP in North Carolina. VOIP would have happened anyway.

One of the original reasons that Bittorrent clients started sending encrypted data was to get around ISP packet inspection that tried to throttle torrents. That worked for a while, until ISPs started throttling based on torrent-like transfer patterns.

That wasn't a single regional ISP; it was a pretty common behavior. It's also something that would be fixed by either having a range of different ISPs available in a region, or enforcing net neutrality (in the sense of treating data as an opaque payload to be delivered).

I'm in full support of net neutrality (as it seems everyone but the telecom companies is yet here we are, but I digress) but I like to think if this "doomsday" scenario were to happen then the outcry would finally be swift and effective in tearing that down for good. People won't accept it because they have already experienced what the open web can be.

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