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Comment by siffland | Hacker News Reader

One main difference is anyone can buy a truck and start a shipment company. Unless you have a ton of cash you cannot lay down infrastructure for your own ISP and must pay someone else to sue theirs.

Also I am pretty sure a lot of our infrastructure for the internet was subsidized (via grants or what not) by the government for the big tel-co companies (I have been trying to find legit links to source, but in my quick limited search only found Reddit threads). If this is true, then we, the taxpayers, helped pay for the internet we use and should get at least net neutrality.

Just my opinion, probably wont match everyone else.

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Anyone can buy a router and start an intranet.

Building a shipment company which can reach everyone in a country is a substantial capital investment, which I suspect is higher than that for a nationwide private network, though which is higher is irrelevant to the argument.

The roads, which the trucks require, are subsidized by the government.

In other words, I don't see the differences you're claiming.

Net neutrality, as an argument, applies to Internet; I've never seen a claim that it should apply to private networks, even those which use IP/TCP/UDP.

And FedEx had a huge initial capital investment to buy the planes and pilots they needed.

$50m-ish I think in 70s-80s money before they even shipped a package.

And they still barely made it off the starting line.

> Anyone can buy a router and start an intranet.

Thats more like saying that anyone can pick up a piece of mail and become a mail carrier. There are all manner of legal and practical barriers that require an internet to work outside of your street.

As there are to carry packages.

Perhaps this is true where you live.

Where I am, it's a simple matter of setting up some high-power relays and building a mesh network in the permitted radio band. People do it all the time.

Also, I think you meant courier. Mail is quite tightly regulated at the federal level, at least in the United States.

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