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Comment by jgwil2 | Hacker News Reader

That's specious reasoning: perhaps the dire predictions didn't come to pass precisely because of the amount of controversy that was generated. The telecoms didn't want to rock the boat; they knew that it was only a matter of another administration change for the policy to get reversed anyway.

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All the disastrous things that proponents of NN said would surely happen without it haven't happened since it was repealed, and also never happened before it was implemented.

It really does beg the question why it was ever needed in the first place.

As I stated above, there was (a) a massive public outcry against repeal and (b) a strong possibility that it would be put back in place in ~4 years if a Democratic administration came in. These both surely must have been taken under consideration by ISPs. Just because certain practices became legal for them does not mean that it would have been good business to implement them.

No way for you to prove your assertions, either. There's a ton of presumption that goes on regarding this topic instead of examining NN from first principles and seeing what its consequences would actually be.

Perhaps it is as you are saying.

Nonetheless, the very charitable "perhaps the dire predictions didn't come to pass precisely because of the amount of controversy that was generated" would be neutrally described as "fake news must be published so that bad things don't happen". That's not a valid civilizational setup: it's both ripe for abuse, and also teaches people to dabble in double-think for sake of the greater good.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. I'm saying that maybe, dire things could have happened, and the only thing that prevented them from happening is the massive amount of attention that was given to the possibility of dire things happening. It is not "fake news" to talk about the practices that would have been allowed under these policies. The public outcry may have had a deterrent effect.

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