10 ms·

Common response on HN for the past two months has been nothing short of hyperbolic. "The world will end if NN is repealed". Speaking as a conservative: When Ob

Common response on HN for the past two months has been nothing short of hyperbolic. "The world will end if NN is repealed". Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse. I have no reason to believe this is "the beginning of the end" of anything. Life will carry on as normal. Disproportionate reactions (like HN is doing right now) is not good for anyone. Take a step back from politics. Take a deep breath. Take a walk outside. This isn't the end of the world.

lcfcjs2 9y ago
Wow, typical response from an ignorant Republican. Read about net neutrality so you can comment on it intelligently.
wvenable 9y ago
The ACA was actually a conservative plan that is actually good for people. In some sense, you could argue that everybody agreed with it until it became a partisan issue. NN is also good for people and also has bipartisan support (from constituents) but just got repealed. Yes, the sky won't fall but it is now a little darker.
- noetic_techy 9y ago
  Depends on how you spin it. Yes it was a conservative plan originally. The reasoning went something like: "Too many poor people are showing up to hospitals without health insurance and getting treated for free, driving up the cost for everyone else. We need to FORCE them to buy health insurance or else there is a penalty!" Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got. Change the way you talk about it, sprinkle in a couple keywords like "affordable", mix in some coverage for pre-existing conditions, and suddenly its more palatable to liberals.
  - sliverstorm 9y ago
    As unpalatable as you think that sounds, it's also exactly what we do with car insurance, and has worked mostly fine there for decades, excluding enforcement problems and illegals.
    - xienze 9y ago
      It works for car insurance because it’s actually, you know, _insurance_. Health insurance is more of a weird discount club for an industry where there’s zero price transparency and competition.
      - CalChris 9y ago
        Car insurance has deductibles. ObamaCare has deductibles. They're still both insurance.
        rlanday 9y ago
        Car insurance doesn't cover oil changes though.
      - H99189 9y ago
        And also because costs are relatively predictable with Auto Insurance, unlike Medical, where costs skyrocket very quickly. Also, Car Insurance requirements also stipulate clear minimums that the insurance must carry. IMO Auto Insurance is a lot closer to Dental than Medical.
    - noetic_techy 9y ago
      Not saying its unpalatable to me, I actually agree it was necessary to force everyone to buy health insurance. I'm simply pointing out how the SAME legislation can be demonized or embraced, depending on how its spun. I bet if this were some alternative universe where Republicans were pushing ACA, it would get demonized as an attack on the poor by the other side.
      - 9y ago
savanaly 9y ago
I totally agree with you. I believe group polarization [0] causes forums on the internet such as this one to exaggerate how bad something is going to be and this is one of those times. My biggest concern is if something actually world-ending were to be about to happen it would be sort of hard to tell by reading Reddit and Hackernews. Because the users of those collectively dial the alarm severity up to "catastrophic" several times per year, and it is a case of crying wolf almost every time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization
- simplify 9y ago
  That's not an argument, that's bulverism. How about you explain why repealing Net Neutrality is necessary in the first place? Who actually benefits from it?
  - savanaly 9y ago
    There's not any point in debating it in the comments right here and right now. Time will tell if my enjoyment of the internet is severely degraded to the degree predicted by the most upvoted comments on Reddit/HN. I was simply expressing my prediction that it won't be.
    - asdffdsa321 9y ago
      You simpleton
    - H99189 9y ago
      That's precisely why I'm NOT in a frenzy over this decision. Immediately, it means nothing to anyone, and even though I don't like seeing protections removed, it's possible that consumers may just win at the end of the day. IMO the big tragedy here is that we even needed NN in the first place, violators of the original Internet openness philosophy should be campaigned at the corporate level to bring them in line.
      - 9y ago
slantedview 9y ago
ACA was a mechanism for private insurers to grow their market share with the side effect of increasing coverage and saving lives. NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce. Not completely applies and oranges, but if you don't think this is very very bad, you're not thinking.
- jimktrains2 9y ago
  > NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce. Um, what? That's literally the opposite of NN.
- chrisbennet 9y ago
  "NN is a mechanism for internet.." In case you want to edit, did you mean "Repeal of NN is a..." ?
tobyhinloopen 9y ago
USA democracy is failing and this is something to freak out about.
- ghrifter 9y ago
  USA is a democratic republic... Also, USA is the world empire AKA superpower.
- new-account-9 9y ago
  It's not failing. North America is fine; people still want to move from other places to our place. Let's not be drastic. Let's sit down and listen and be calm.
  - aroberge 9y ago
    The comment you replied to mentioned the USA. North America is a continent that includes 23 countries, only one of them is the USA. Living in one of the other 22 countries and looking at the USA, I would tend to agree with the comment that you were replying to, as the USA is becoming more and more an oligarchy, and less like a democracy.
    - new-account-9 9y ago
      Fair enough, I should not be saying North America when it includes so many other countries, I should be saying USA and Canada which is what I mean. Look, it's not an oligarchy, it is a democracy. It seems to me that everyone thinks that just because Trump won the election that it is somehow not a democracy. I fear that the heavy anti-republican, anti-business sentiment will morph into a call for communism which will absolutely destroy the future of the human race.
      - chrisbennet 9y ago
        Socialism != Communism. In the US we have socialized fire departments, police departments, water departments, highways, and things like Medicare.
beal 9y ago
The hyperbole around NN on here and reddit has been annoying. My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like. I do think the market for ISPs has failed. Regulatory patching won't always be able to stay up to date. The government should make it easier to start an ISP.
- illumin8 9y ago
  > My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like. Like what? You do realize that we're all paying $1 more a month for Netflix because Comcast decided to go "rent seeking" and throttled their traffic until they paid up? Our Netflix bills were increased shortly after. You're being fucked by anti-NN, whether you realize it or not.
  - H99189 9y ago
    They just announced another increase the other day, what caused that?
    - wtf_is_up 9y ago
      They probably need to fund some more awful originals.
  - wruza 9y ago
    If users were fucked by Comcast and now pay $1 more, but still do pay, then why didn’t Netflix fuck them earlier himself?
- Azkar 9y ago
  > My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like. What happens when they start doing things you don't like?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
xienze 9y ago
Yeah the reactions here and elsewhere are absolutely ridiculous. It’s almost as if these people have no idea what life before NN was actually like.
- illumin8 9y ago
  I know exactly what it was like. Look at the graph in this article, and tell me you weren't fucked by lack of NN several years ago, if you were a Comcast customer: https://technical.ly/philly/2014/05/09/graph-shows-netflix-speeds-changed-comcast-deal-comcast-roundup/ https://technical.ly/philly/2014/05/09/graph-shows-netflix-s... Then, shortly after Netflix agreed to pay Comcast's extortion money, they had to raise rates by $1 a month. So, we're all paying extortion money to Comcast. Learn some recent history before you form an opinion.
  - jtuente 9y ago
    Good, all of the damn Netflix traffic is affecting my online gaming. /s People can bluster all they want about price increases, but this is something that's been a long time coming. Netflix has increased the scope and variety of their offerings over their lifetime, especially the addition of Netflix originals (the real ones, not the per-market-originals). I would expect an increase in price.
- Can_Not 9y ago
  Net neutrality has already been around implicitly since the beginning of the internet. Life before NN was life before internet.
okreallywtf 9y ago
Just to make sure I understand, conservatives said that it would be a disaster if the ACA signed into law? Assuming that is what you meant: just because that was not true doesn't mean that NN is not important. Granted, there is some fear mongering and worst-case thinking going on, but in the end I think that there is valid reasoning behind NN fears, just like the claims about the ACA were provably exaggerated at the time. This kind of reminds me how the Iraq war is being used to sow distrust of the intelligence services now. Because there were mistakes made during a republican administration that was hell-bent to go to war in Iraq, we shouldn't trust them now when there is immense agreement about the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.
devmunchies 9y ago
Repealing NN benefits the Telecom companies and the large content companies (ie. Disney). We know the telecom companies were dumping money into the republican party to repeal NN, but I think if the Democrats were in power then Content companies would be dumping money into them. The dems just have the option of playing as sheep because they don't have enough voting power anyway. I'm cynical that either party cares that much about the public and think that pointing fingers just allows the elites to continue their games.
dingoonline 9y ago
The FCC and Ajit Pai have done a truly shit job of managing PR on this. Instead of addressing concerns and actually speaking to the angry. He went on The Daily Caller to make... this... http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/ajit-pai-wants-you-to-know-you-can-still-harlem-shake-after-net-neutrality-video/ http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/ajit-pai-wants-you-to-know... The pro-NN crowd have turned this complex debate over an imperfect policy to a good-versus-evil battle over flipping a single legal switch and Ajit Pai is completely fueling that.
chasing 9y ago
> Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse. (You need to find better people to listen to.) And when things get bad, what do you expect that will look like? Mad Max-style desert hellscapes? No: It'll look pretty much like now. Except things will be a little worse. You'll have less money. Less freedom. You'll find yourself making a few more trade-offs and concessions than you were before. Harder work. Less money. And you'll wonder why there's a small ruling class that seems to get all of the gains of society. You'll wonder why things never ever seem to break in your direction anymore. Always towards them. Oh, and fun fact: Much of the country is already in this position. Especially in minority communities. You just happen to not be feeling it. But make no mistake that that is the future the Republican Party has envisioned for this country and is currently enacting piece by piece. Breaking net neutrality -- something that will affect the poor and downcast of society much more than it will affect you or I -- is just a piece of the puzzle.
- wtf_is_up 9y ago
  Sounds like San Francisco.
adventured 9y ago
You can just add it to all the other hyper insane responses going around in the US right now, including: - Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously finally. - Tax cuts are going to destroy the country and impoverish the middle class. In fact, the middle class will see their already staggeringly low taxes go even lower. The lower US corporate income tax rate will finally make the US more competitive with dozens of other major economies, including Britain, Ireland, China, Canada, Sweden, Finland, etc. - Hillary lost because of Russian collusion with Trump. Over a year later, zero evidence of any of that. The only election tampering that looks to have gone on, is high ranking FBI agents & officials that were looking to throw the election in favor of Hillary. The fact is, Hillary lost because she took voters in the blue wall states for granted and refused to aggressively court them as advisers close to her recommended. It was educated white women that threw the election in Trump's favor. - Trump wants to be a fascist dictator. No, there's zero evidence of that sort of behavior. He's a jerk, he may be a mediocre President, there's absolutely no indication he can or is in the position to seize more power. He is wildly unpopular both among the majority of polled voters and his own party (which he only joined to run for President). The odds are pretty good he's a one term President, and that one term will deliver the Senate to Democrats and rebalance things in DC. - Trump's environmental policies are going to get us all killed and make global climate change dramatically worse. No, the few policies he has rolled back from the Obama era, will not in fact do anything meaningful as it relates to global climate change or harming the environment in the US. The dramatic shift from coal to natural gas, will continue to reduce CO2 emissions in the US, and the gradualy move to solar, wind and electric vehicles will continue with or without Trump.
- mamon 9y ago
  >> Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea That's actually quite probable, because: - both countries are openly hostile towards each other - both have leaders that are mentally unstable and unpredictable.

lcfcjs2 9y ago

Wow, typical response from an ignorant Republican. Read about net neutrality so you can comment on it intelligently.

wvenable 9y ago

The ACA was actually a conservative plan that is actually good for people. In some sense, you could argue that everybody agreed with it until it became a partisan issue. NN is also good for people and also has bipartisan support (from constituents) but just got repealed. Yes, the sky won't fall but it is now a little darker.

noetic_techy 9y ago
Depends on how you spin it. Yes it was a conservative plan originally. The reasoning went something like: "Too many poor people are showing up to hospitals without health insurance and getting treated for free, driving up the cost for everyone else. We need to FORCE them to buy health insurance or else there is a penalty!" Doesn't sound that great in those terms, but that's exactly what you got. Change the way you talk about it, sprinkle in a couple keywords like "affordable", mix in some coverage for pre-existing conditions, and suddenly its more palatable to liberals.
- sliverstorm 9y ago
  As unpalatable as you think that sounds, it's also exactly what we do with car insurance, and has worked mostly fine there for decades, excluding enforcement problems and illegals.
  - xienze 9y ago
    It works for car insurance because it’s actually, you know, _insurance_. Health insurance is more of a weird discount club for an industry where there’s zero price transparency and competition.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      Car insurance has deductibles. ObamaCare has deductibles. They're still both insurance.
      - rlanday 9y ago
        Car insurance doesn't cover oil changes though.
    - H99189 9y ago
      And also because costs are relatively predictable with Auto Insurance, unlike Medical, where costs skyrocket very quickly. Also, Car Insurance requirements also stipulate clear minimums that the insurance must carry. IMO Auto Insurance is a lot closer to Dental than Medical.
  - noetic_techy 9y ago
    Not saying its unpalatable to me, I actually agree it was necessary to force everyone to buy health insurance. I'm simply pointing out how the SAME legislation can be demonized or embraced, depending on how its spun. I bet if this were some alternative universe where Republicans were pushing ACA, it would get demonized as an attack on the poor by the other side.
    - 9y ago

savanaly 9y ago

I totally agree with you. I believe group polarization [0] causes forums on the internet such as this one to exaggerate how bad something is going to be and this is one of those times. My biggest concern is if something actually world-ending were to be about to happen it would be sort of hard to tell by reading Reddit and Hackernews. Because the users of those collectively dial the alarm severity up to "catastrophic" several times per year, and it is a case of crying wolf almost every time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_polarization

simplify 9y ago
That's not an argument, that's bulverism. How about you explain why repealing Net Neutrality is necessary in the first place? Who actually benefits from it?
- savanaly 9y ago
  There's not any point in debating it in the comments right here and right now. Time will tell if my enjoyment of the internet is severely degraded to the degree predicted by the most upvoted comments on Reddit/HN. I was simply expressing my prediction that it won't be.
  - asdffdsa321 9y ago
    You simpleton
  - H99189 9y ago
    That's precisely why I'm NOT in a frenzy over this decision. Immediately, it means nothing to anyone, and even though I don't like seeing protections removed, it's possible that consumers may just win at the end of the day. IMO the big tragedy here is that we even needed NN in the first place, violators of the original Internet openness philosophy should be campaigned at the corporate level to bring them in line.
    - 9y ago

slantedview 9y ago

ACA was a mechanism for private insurers to grow their market share with the side effect of increasing coverage and saving lives. NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce. Not completely applies and oranges, but if you don't think this is very very bad, you're not thinking.

jimktrains2 9y ago
> NN is a mechanism for internet providers to completely take over delivery of the internet whereby they can effectively censor information, kill or allow companies to kill their competitors, and charge artificially higher premiums for information they do not produce. Um, what? That's literally the opposite of NN.
chrisbennet 9y ago
"NN is a mechanism for internet.." In case you want to edit, did you mean "Repeal of NN is a..." ?

tobyhinloopen 9y ago

USA democracy is failing and this is something to freak out about.

ghrifter 9y ago
USA is a democratic republic... Also, USA is the world empire AKA superpower.
new-account-9 9y ago
It's not failing. North America is fine; people still want to move from other places to our place. Let's not be drastic. Let's sit down and listen and be calm.
- aroberge 9y ago
  The comment you replied to mentioned the USA. North America is a continent that includes 23 countries, only one of them is the USA. Living in one of the other 22 countries and looking at the USA, I would tend to agree with the comment that you were replying to, as the USA is becoming more and more an oligarchy, and less like a democracy.
  - new-account-9 9y ago
    Fair enough, I should not be saying North America when it includes so many other countries, I should be saying USA and Canada which is what I mean. Look, it's not an oligarchy, it is a democracy. It seems to me that everyone thinks that just because Trump won the election that it is somehow not a democracy. I fear that the heavy anti-republican, anti-business sentiment will morph into a call for communism which will absolutely destroy the future of the human race.
    - chrisbennet 9y ago
      Socialism != Communism. In the US we have socialized fire departments, police departments, water departments, highways, and things like Medicare.

beal 9y ago

The hyperbole around NN on here and reddit has been annoying. My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like. I do think the market for ISPs has failed. Regulatory patching won't always be able to stay up to date. The government should make it easier to start an ISP.

illumin8 9y ago
> My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like. Like what? You do realize that we're all paying $1 more a month for Netflix because Comcast decided to go "rent seeking" and throttled their traffic until they paid up? Our Netflix bills were increased shortly after. You're being fucked by anti-NN, whether you realize it or not.
- H99189 9y ago
  They just announced another increase the other day, what caused that?
  - wtf_is_up 9y ago
    They probably need to fund some more awful originals.
- wruza 9y ago
  If users were fucked by Comcast and now pay $1 more, but still do pay, then why didn’t Netflix fuck them earlier himself?
Azkar 9y ago
> My network carrier already does some anti net neutral things that I like. What happens when they start doing things you don't like?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

xienze 9y ago

Yeah the reactions here and elsewhere are absolutely ridiculous. It’s almost as if these people have no idea what life before NN was actually like.

illumin8 9y ago
I know exactly what it was like. Look at the graph in this article, and tell me you weren't fucked by lack of NN several years ago, if you were a Comcast customer: https://technical.ly/philly/2014/05/09/graph-shows-netflix-speeds-changed-comcast-deal-comcast-roundup/ https://technical.ly/philly/2014/05/09/graph-shows-netflix-s... Then, shortly after Netflix agreed to pay Comcast's extortion money, they had to raise rates by $1 a month. So, we're all paying extortion money to Comcast. Learn some recent history before you form an opinion.
- jtuente 9y ago
  Good, all of the damn Netflix traffic is affecting my online gaming. /s People can bluster all they want about price increases, but this is something that's been a long time coming. Netflix has increased the scope and variety of their offerings over their lifetime, especially the addition of Netflix originals (the real ones, not the per-market-originals). I would expect an increase in price.
Can_Not 9y ago
Net neutrality has already been around implicitly since the beginning of the internet. Life before NN was life before internet.

okreallywtf 9y ago

Just to make sure I understand, conservatives said that it would be a disaster if the ACA signed into law? Assuming that is what you meant: just because that was not true doesn't mean that NN is not important. Granted, there is some fear mongering and worst-case thinking going on, but in the end I think that there is valid reasoning behind NN fears, just like the claims about the ACA were provably exaggerated at the time. This kind of reminds me how the Iraq war is being used to sow distrust of the intelligence services now. Because there were mistakes made during a republican administration that was hell-bent to go to war in Iraq, we shouldn't trust them now when there is immense agreement about the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.

devmunchies 9y ago

Repealing NN benefits the Telecom companies and the large content companies (ie. Disney). We know the telecom companies were dumping money into the republican party to repeal NN, but I think if the Democrats were in power then Content companies would be dumping money into them. The dems just have the option of playing as sheep because they don't have enough voting power anyway. I'm cynical that either party cares that much about the public and think that pointing fingers just allows the elites to continue their games.

dingoonline 9y ago

The FCC and Ajit Pai have done a truly shit job of managing PR on this. Instead of addressing concerns and actually speaking to the angry. He went on The Daily Caller to make... this... http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/ajit-pai-wants-you-to-know-you-can-still-harlem-shake-after-net-neutrality-video/ http://dailycaller.com/2017/12/13/ajit-pai-wants-you-to-know... The pro-NN crowd have turned this complex debate over an imperfect policy to a good-versus-evil battle over flipping a single legal switch and Ajit Pai is completely fueling that.

chasing 9y ago

> Speaking as a conservative: When Obama was president, I got told the same thing about the ACA. The world will end, the sky is falling, America is finished. But eight years later, here I am, nothing's that much worse. (You need to find better people to listen to.) And when things get bad, what do you expect that will look like? Mad Max-style desert hellscapes? No: It'll look pretty much like now. Except things will be a little worse. You'll have less money. Less freedom. You'll find yourself making a few more trade-offs and concessions than you were before. Harder work. Less money. And you'll wonder why there's a small ruling class that seems to get all of the gains of society. You'll wonder why things never ever seem to break in your direction anymore. Always towards them. Oh, and fun fact: Much of the country is already in this position. Especially in minority communities. You just happen to not be feeling it. But make no mistake that that is the future the Republican Party has envisioned for this country and is currently enacting piece by piece. Breaking net neutrality -- something that will affect the poor and downcast of society much more than it will affect you or I -- is just a piece of the puzzle.

wtf_is_up 9y ago
Sounds like San Francisco.

adventured 9y ago

You can just add it to all the other hyper insane responses going around in the US right now, including: - Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea. You can't argue with that kind of hysteria. North Korea has been threatening to genocide the US and South Korea for 20 years in one form or another. Now they can actually do it, maybe someone should take the threat seriously finally. - Tax cuts are going to destroy the country and impoverish the middle class. In fact, the middle class will see their already staggeringly low taxes go even lower. The lower US corporate income tax rate will finally make the US more competitive with dozens of other major economies, including Britain, Ireland, China, Canada, Sweden, Finland, etc. - Hillary lost because of Russian collusion with Trump. Over a year later, zero evidence of any of that. The only election tampering that looks to have gone on, is high ranking FBI agents & officials that were looking to throw the election in favor of Hillary. The fact is, Hillary lost because she took voters in the blue wall states for granted and refused to aggressively court them as advisers close to her recommended. It was educated white women that threw the election in Trump's favor. - Trump wants to be a fascist dictator. No, there's zero evidence of that sort of behavior. He's a jerk, he may be a mediocre President, there's absolutely no indication he can or is in the position to seize more power. He is wildly unpopular both among the majority of polled voters and his own party (which he only joined to run for President). The odds are pretty good he's a one term President, and that one term will deliver the Senate to Democrats and rebalance things in DC. - Trump's environmental policies are going to get us all killed and make global climate change dramatically worse. No, the few policies he has rolled back from the Obama era, will not in fact do anything meaningful as it relates to global climate change or harming the environment in the US. The dramatic shift from coal to natural gas, will continue to reduce CO2 emissions in the US, and the gradualy move to solar, wind and electric vehicles will continue with or without Trump.

mamon 9y ago
>> Trump is going to get everyone killed in global nuclear war related to North Korea That's actually quite probable, because: - both countries are openly hostile towards each other - both have leaders that are mentally unstable and unpredictable.