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Comment by nsxwolf | Hacker News Reader

And what if we get tiered internet... and consumers like it? "All the websites I use for one low price? Wow!" Internet nerds assume the public at large shares their romantic ideals of the open web but that might not be true.

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Exactly, most internet consumers like that their internet experience is extremely centralized. For them it's an entertainment system and the more centralized it is the simpler and more fluid it is.

Who cares that monopolized content delivery enables large scale surveillance and manipulation with dire socioeconomic consequences?

Isn't that already the case though, regardless of net neutrality? Seems the large scale surveillance and manipulation will happen, whether it is legal or not.

This is already happening here in the Czech Republic with some of the mobile carriers. They exclude some websites or services from the mobile data limit, spinning it exactly as you said: as a service to the subscriber. Looks like an obvious neutrality violation to me, but the current EU legislation seems to be too weak to strike it down immediately. What’s worse, the media don’t seem to care.

And we all know Czech is the trendsetter for all things technology.

What I meant was that (a) companies are already spinning this as an advancement for the consumers and (b) consumers seem to be happy about it so far.

Yeah the general public can be really stupid at times.

Count me in. I never watch HD video, which is a huge % of all the traffic of every ISP. I wish I could pay less money for an internet connection that was cheaper in exchange for not being able to watch HD video.

Do you really want a slower connection, or just a smaller data package? I'm ok with the latter - pay for what you use. The former, especially if it's bundled by content provider, worries me.

You can already do this.

I think that dystopian vision falls apart when you factor in porn, because that's the #1 use and no ISP is going to add a porn tier. People will flip their lid when they can't get to pornhub.

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