Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how "politicized" net neutrality has become in the last 6 months. A year ago I couldn't find anyone honestly arguing to repeal it. Reddit, HN, everywhere I looked people (and companies) besides ISPs said repealing net neutrality was bad.

In comes Trump and Ajit Pia, and suddenly there is another side, the "against government regulation". It's a talking point anyone who watches Fox News or reads the Wall Street journal can proudly stand behind. Now we have a side, Net Neutrality is a "liberal thing" and ISPs determining what content we can get at what speed is up for debate.

Linked in is a horrible platform to get news on, and especially to read comments on, but the top comments for a NN article were all PRO-REPEAL, what a reversal! And looking at comments on HN & Reddit you can actually see people who fell for the bait and took it as a "government encroachment" argument.

It's truly sad, this particular debate was beautiful for a bit because of the the political spectrum united behind it, that has crumbled to the perennial partisan debate of left vs right.

> In comes Trump and Ajit Pia, and suddenly there is another side, the "against government regulation".

Yup, how horrible that people actually want less regulation. Everyone should just agree with you and we'll all get along splendidly!

It truly is a terrible thing when people want "less regulation" without pausing to think whether the particular bit of regulation benefits them or not. "Regulation" has become a bogeyman you can invoke to reliably get people rallying against it.

As a customer, NN does not benefit me. The opposite. I will lose access to zero-rated services if it's implemented. I don't want that to happen because then I will have to pay more money for the same service.

I don't understand this. Can someone explain to me the argument of "ISPs in the US are monopolies, so more regulation is worse for the customer"?

If your ISP is a monopoly, they can do whatever they want if left unregulated. They can literally charge you whatever they want.

Zero-rated services are zero-rated because you pay for them indirectly. I guess losing access to them would be a downside, and would prevent Facebook from becoming even more entrenched, which they certainly don't want. It doesn't do anything for internet freedom, though. You might as well say "well the internet to me is Facebook, so I don't care if the internet is free, I just want it to run Facebook".

I live in the first world so I have many many choices to get a wired or 4G connection. The government forces ISPs to share their infrastructure. I understand that kind of stuff does not apply to countries like the US, but I'm talking about my own case here.

As you rightly pointed out, ISPs are monopolies in the US. That's the issue. Break them up, force them to compete, remove the monopolies. Trying to fix the monopoly problem, that arose due to government interference, with more government regulation is not right.

PS: an advice: If you cannot think of a single argument against your own position you're not ready to have a dialog.

Breaking them up does not do anything. If there is one cable to your house, breaking up the company that owns it does not change that there is one cable to your house. Last-mile networks are natural monopolies. You wouldn't expect breaking up your local utilities would lead to a choice in sewer pipes, would you?

You do understand that ISPs do implement zero-rated service because it makes them money, right? Who do you think this money comes from if it's not from you? Who is the nice person who decided they wanted to subsidize your internet connection?

If you think that zero-rated services save you money, all that is happening is that you don't understand how you pay for it. So, maybe it is time to find out how you do pay for it?

>Who do you think this money comes from if it's not from you?

The zero-rated services themselves.

Well, sure, but that doesn't really answer the question. Where does the zero-rated service take the money from if it's not from you?

> Yup, how horrible that people actually want less regulation.

You want less government regulation, in favor of more corporate 'regulation'. That does indeed sound horrible to me.

It seems that some people just hear REGULATION and freak out, without realizing that they rely heavily on regulation every day to get safely to work and not have their house confiscated.

The worst thing that ever happened was liberals wrapping their arms around Net Neutrality and claiming it as “their” issue. This immediately caused a knee jerk reaction in conservatives who will oppose anything liberals will support and thus the coalition to repeal Net Neutrality was born and ultimately triumphed.

I think that's a very partisan way of looking at a complex issue. 'liberals wrapping their arms around net neutrality' is not why net neutrality is being repealed, and not why the coalition to repeal Net Neutrailty was created. You can look towards the significant amount of contributions to various politicians and individuals in government that have come from ISP's and see quite a clear picture of the source of NN being repealed.

I just want to raise a couple of points.

It's not necessarily always true that corporate donations are simply to bribe politicians into doing their bidding (which is what I took away when I read your commend). Companies will give money to politicians who are already aligned with their interests.

I watched a video once which tried to address the idea that Ted Cruz was being bribed by Comcast. Once of the arguments put forward was, sure, he may have received donations from some Comcast employees. However we shouldn't conflate that to mean Comcast was paying him money. Other politicians like Hillary and Bernie also would have received donations from Comcast employees.

Also, opponents of Net Neutrality actually do make some good points against the role of government in regulating the internet. Here's a debate where Nick Gillespie (a libertarian) and Michael Katz argue against Mitchell Baker and Tom Wheeler on whether NN is good. By the end of the debate, Nick and Michael are able to convince more people to consider opposing NN than to support:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAJabAjoK08

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7xwknx/republican...

The difference between giving money to change alignment, and 'already being aligned', is appearances. It's still money being sent, and that absolutely influences the individual being funded. It's a complete conflict of interest, and especially in this case it's an absurd amount of money being sent to many politicians, not just one.

I think there are some good points against NN. Such as the FTC's role in investigating unfair practices. But the FTC is always playing catch-up when it comes to the myriad of bad practices ISP's get up to. With the repeal of NN there has been no real replacement to prevent the ISP monopolies from being unfair, as they have done in the past. I generally side with libertarian arguments and that markets can do a better job. But in the U.S, we have monopalies. ISP's grew under non-NN rules, and there are significant anti-competative practices to blame rather than the easy one of 'regulation'.

Is this what politics has come to? If liberals want conservatives to help with an important issue, they have to pretend to be against it so conservatives won’t have a tantrum?

Maybe. Stealth liberalism.

I'm from a country with a reasonable voting system that allows more than two parties to exist. This allows more than two political idea clusters to oppose each other. This might surprise US citizens, but the big parties here don't have polar opposite positions on every issue. Quite the opposite, but once the become similar a voter can actually choose smaller competing party without hurting his own position.

It disturbs me how rarely US citizens criticize their FPTP voting system, even though I understand how hard it would be to get rid of it (only FPTP winners could get rid of it). But still it seems so dangerous, especially now where people more than ever can live their own media environment without common consensus. Anything but FPTP.

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