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Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

What about other forms of "neutrality"?

The BBC is required to maintain "balance" over political issues.

Should Google return the same results to all queries (ie no search bubble allowed?)

Should Facebook (indeed any advertiser) be required to serve the same advert no matter what the profile of the incoming request? I mean Billboards are public broadcasts not private to me, why should online advertising be different? I know it is but that's not the point.

I support net neutrality as it is commonly defined, but I think there are many other "neutrality" issues that we gloss over happily. I doubt very much Google will be happy removing the search bubble, and I would be interested in how much it affects the quality of results.

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I think the problem is with choice. I can get either CenturyLink or Cox where I live, and if they both decide to throttle certain services, I just have to live with it.

If I don't like Google, I can use Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc. Same with Facebook.

Or I can start my own. Starting a search engine or social network is easy. Getting any market share is hard, since Google and FB are doing a good job, but they know how easily they could be overtaken if they screw up.

I can't start an ISP because I can't use the existing infrastructure and I can't afford to build my own. But Google Fiber shows that if I could start one that doesn't suck, I'd probably have a relatively easy time getting customers, because the competition is so bad.

I agree though, Google and FB make some choices we probably don't like, but it's impossible to regulate everything (and most people wouldn't want to), so we leave it for cases where the free market has proven not to work.

The word "neutrality" is confusing you.

"Net neutrality" isn't about content neutrality, exactly. It's about common carrier neutrality. Common carriers are essentially required to grant equal access to anyone who wants to use their service. They're neutral in that they can't say "no" to anyone. The idea being that it gives someone too much power to be able to block access to a critical service at their whim. (Say, for example, the phone company wanted to stop connecting phone calls between anyone they thought might be politically against their interests.)

"Balance" has nothing to do with it. If 90% of an ISPs users want to download pictures of cats, the ISP is not required to also force users to download an equal number of dog pics. Or to force content providers to offer an equal number of cat and dog photos.

Parametric advertising doesn't create a class-based system of access to information or business opportunities.

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