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Comment by Tijdreiziger | Hacker News Reader

> After that Android's deceptively straightforward tethering feature was almost saddening...

Ha - you should've seen early iPhone tethering. Back in those days, net neutrality wasn't a legal right yet (at least here in the Netherlands), so the carriers would push a profile to your phone that disabled tethering. The solution, of course, was to jailbreak your phone and install a tweak that turned it back on.

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I remembered that some apps had passed review and released with hidden tethering feature, then discovered, then banned.

> Back in those days, net neutrality wasn't a legal right yet (at least here in the Netherlands) ...

You must live in the future!

I'm also not aware of net neutrality being protected in Europe yet. I think I recall ongoing initiatives aiming at that but I'm pretty sure even these don't cover cellular data networks. I think that, for example, plans including unmetered access for specific services are still a thing (say unlimited Facebook usage, exempt from regular data plan limits).

> I think that, for example, plans including unmetered access for specific services are still a thing (say unlimited Facebook usage, exempt from regular data plan limits).

Ah yes, the infamous 'zero rating'... this is currently the only hole in the net neutrality regulation. However, apart from that, net neutrality is indeed a legal right in the EU.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

https://berec.europa.eu/eng/document_register/subject_matter...

Carriers still do that. I can only do tethering by running a SOCKS proxy in Termux and forwarding the port with adb.

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