A Net Neutrality Case Study | Hacker News Reader

A Net Neutrality Case Study

avc.com

22 pointsokeumeni11 comments

This connection with net neutrality occurred to me when I heard about this row between Fox and CableVision a few days ago too.

Well... anyway, even if they aren't connected issues, the fact that conglomerates & government have repeatedly colluded makes it difficult for somebody my age to have good faith that they wouldn't do something like that on purpose. Not saying they did...

I had trouble reading past his suggestion for a "bill of rights" for Internet users. Real, important rights are being trampled on all the time in this country. A "bill of rights" that guarantees the right to watch football on your computer insults and minimizes our actual rights.

This seems unrelated to net neutrality. In this case the ISP isn't restricting or preferring any content on its network, rather a content provider is discriminating based on ISP.

That's correct. Fred seems to be arguing for "Content Neutrality", which is to say that any publisher must make all their content available to anyone.

no i am not

if i subscribe/pay for content, i don't want some ISP blocking it because they are in a spat with the content owner

Is that what's happening? It seems like in this case it's the content provider who's blocking access based on ISP. Would any net neutrality law protect against this? Should it?

This is extremely frustrating. I've seen this exact response on a number of tech sites. The people who are supposed to be the most informed proponents of net neutrality don't even understand the basic concept.

i understand the basic concepts

i've read them hundreds of times

this is about discrimination

Net Neutrality about making ISPs and governments treat all communications over the net equally. This creates a democratic platform, a free market of bits.

This situation is a company refusing to provide content to certain customers. Fox (through Hulu) is not providing content to specific IP ranges that they provide freely elsewhere. It is discrimination by Fox, but it is a separate issue from Net Neutrality. This could still happen if Net Neutrality legislation was in place.

If anything it seems like it'd have more to do with antitrust law. It may not actually fall afoul of it in this case, but it gets into gray-area territory when you're using retaliatory actions in one market to put pressure on contract negotiations in a different market. Looks especially bad because Fox doesn't normally have a policy of negotiating per-ISP contracts for Hulu content, but made an exception to specifically block Cablevision.

Net neutrality is about people using their property in ways I don't like. And the fact that I dislike them and still purchase their services is de facto proof of market failure.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com