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Comment by Dig1t | Hacker News Reader

I used to REALLY care about net neutrality. Growing up in California, especially in high school and college, it was probably the number one thing politically that I cared about. All the other political issues I felt were too complicated with too much history for me to feel strongly about, but net neutrality I really understood and felt strongly about.

Growing up and moving to SV, I eventually just stopped caring. Data caps and mediocre bandwidth were good enough for me, I was too tired and concerned with building a life. Now I live in a city with Google Fiber and have amazingly fast internet with no data caps, and I have a newfound gratitude for good, unbiased internet.

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The spirit of net neutrality isn't about caps or bad bandwidth per se. It's about a couple of small groups getting to choose what content you do or don't see, and at which speeds, completely arbitrarily based on whatever the underlying goal is.

It's one thing to have algorithms for assuaging populations or disseminating cycles of information per an order or a routine. That's great. It's another thing entirely when Joe Schmoe over there at some crusty ISP is going to slow down your internet because they don't like that you're researching how to build a competitor ISP on Youtube.

Information must flow freely and be neutrally accessible by all. Networks must be built and maintained for this purpose, so that information moves at the flow that is maximally supported by hardware.

Right now some networks are artificially constrained for no real reason.

Is that a concern that has caused significant problems in reality? Because in the same spirit, internet search, advertising, and social networking all have a far bigger influence on what people do and don't see an one that they actually exercise in reality and employ to influence the political opinions of the population to advance the agenda of the owners and operators of these corporations.

Yet there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap between people who care about both. I think both are real concerns, but it seems like most of the noise was just astroturfed political wrangling.

See this comment[1] which explains why an ISP expressing their preference for a company has anticompetitive effects on the market.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064398

I'm not asking why it could be bad, or even necessarily a single isolated case where it has happened. I'm asking about significant problems that have actually been caused by it.

When far bigger actual abuses in censoring and limiting and influencing speech and opinion on the internet are overlooked or even cheered on by many of the people who were advocating for net neutrality, I kind of question the purity and motives behind it, certainly for those people they are not motivated by any ideals of freedom.

Not that it's necessarily a bad policy to have, but so might thousands of different policies and regulations that limit private enterprise so I'm much more sympathetic to regulation that is designed to solve observed problems. Hence my question about whether it solved any real problems (or caused any since its repeal).

You are correct that it was a lot of astroturfed political wrangling. But the visionaries back then were correct to worry about it. If you were to project current trends out 100 years from now, one could conceive of a future where these platforms are much more powerful and the politically correct of the future subjugate everyone else by stunting their intellectual development via administrations of cheap content at higher speeds or higher recommendation frequency than the quality stuff, simply because you hate someone's religion or color or sexuality or view and wish to reduce their viability.

It may not be a problem now, but if the platform power goes up then so does the risk that we need to have these systems being built now.

It does. Imagine if Netflix bandwidth were prioritized over an upcoming new company called Disney+. Netflix would cost $18/month and you still would have no choice.

For the record, Netflix for this very reason was an antagonist to net neutrality

I think it ended up turning out that after everyone watched everything on Netflix, and the price was double what it used to be, everyone cancelled their subs. So it didn't really even matter if Netflix installs servers at Comcast and Charter because D+ will still get its customers.

That only matters for video. If it's low bandwidth it doesn't matter. South Koreans don't even have loading online, and they are a very censored society. It's a non issue.

It does what? I asked if it has caused actual problems, not imaginary ones.

I'm aware of some of the hypotheticals. Just curious about yours though, what's happening there? Netflix paid ISPs to prioritize their traffic over other video traffic, rendering Disney+ unusable? What would prevent Disney+ paying the ISPs as well if they wanted to be a competitive video streaming service? That seems like it would allow choice.

It might also capture some of the externalities that high bandwidth users impose on non-video users by having the ISP get some more money from them.

This. Net neutrality mattered more when the net sucked less.

> It's about a couple of small groups getting to choose what content you do or don't see

See I think this is a big part of why this died out. The boogeyman NN was to save us from was corporate censorship, which is now widely regarded - in particular by formerly energetic NN advocates - as a good thing.

What city?

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