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The lack of real consequences really robs credibility from the next big internet cause (that might really need it). What has happened has played out on a reall

• rasz 6y ago
  This is because US Internet was always meh. Its hard to spot the difference between shit and even stinkier shit.
• vegetablepotpie 6y ago
  Not OP but I’d like to say that the real consequences from a big, multifaceted subject, be it government policy, the direction of a large institution, war, aren’t readily apparent until a decade or more later. I’ll use Google as an example. In 2010 they were generally seen as one of the “good” companies. They seemed more supportive of open source, such as developing android, they were going into new business niches where incumbent companies had once dominated, such as with google docs competing with Microsoft office. The promoted less tacky advertising, discouraging flashy banner ads in favor of plain text, And they had free email. Google certainly had its critics back then, but a lot of the criticisms was more abstract, such as its ad based business model, and relationship with China before they left. Now Google has many more critics and many reasons to dislike the company. The company was successful because of its focus on engineering and revenue from ads. What made it successful is leading to its downfall. You have small business owners claiming it commits anticompetitive behavior with ads and search; antitrust regulators are looking at the company. Google has terrible customer service, with paying customers, shutting down access for unknown reasons and provides no avenue for remedy. Android has become a walled garden because of its play store and no cellphone manufacturer is going to develop its own version of android because of fear that they will lose access to googles android. The company comes up with shiny new products only to cancel development and support two years later when it hasn’t been an explosive success. I remember in 2012 talking to group project partners at university about “bubbling” where google would tailor your search results based on tracking. I was laughed at by one of my partners because the consequences seemed trivial. That practice in conjunction with social media enabled the ability for people to live in their own media environment, separate from others. That has since had a profound impact on our politics. I suspect in 5 more years, once the telecoms, their lawyers and business development people fully realize what they can do with peoples growing dependence on the Internet, will we really see the consequences of no net neutrality.
• mindslight 6y ago
  Large companies act slowly. Net neutrality isn't about what they can get away with today, but a culture shift they can create over decades. Just because the effect happens on a timeline longer than a few years does not mean it doesn't exist. If you're feeling "burned", that has more to do with your friends' receptiveness to your presentation than with the topic itself. FWIW with a similar standard of needing to see immediate effects, there would be absolutely no point discussing climate change. And actually that dismissal could be applied to most political topics.
• danShumway 6y ago
  This is a matter of perspective/degree. HBO Max is not a really small-scale thing. AT&T is one of the largest ISPs in the nation, and anyone who's looked at the direction that consolidation goes in scenarios like this where giant companies start favoring their content -- anyone who looks at the historical trends there should be worried. Amazon didn't fundamentally break the Ebook market in 3 years but there were clear warning signs. This is an issue that has had very predictable consequences, that has resulted in mergers that have observably made US Internet worse, and that is following the historical trends of vertical integration and market squeezing that you see in traditional anticompetitive environments. It's about as big of an issue as most other free-market/competition problems that the US is struggling with. But all of that is small scale if you have bigger fish to fry like a global pandemic, or a resurgence of white nationalism, or widespread political corruption, or genocide in China, or a public war on voting rights. I'll concede, today in 2021, net neutrality is not currently the biggest issue that the US is facing. Honestly, there is no market issue in the US that compares to that stuff: not right to repair, not net neutrality, not DMCA takedowns on Twitch, not tech consolidation, not Oracle trying to copyright APIs, not Bitcoin energy usage. But there was a little bit of naivety back when net neutrality was a big deal. We didn't know that we were going to spend an entire year watching half a million people die. That doesn't mean that net neutrality wasn't a big deal or that it hasn't had tangible effects. The US Internet market is really bad, and there's every indication that it's going to get worse. But sure, US ISPs are not going to kill half a million people in a single year. If that's the threshold for what is a real issue, then there's almost no tech-topic that qualifies as a real issue. But nothing about the scale of problem is different. It's just that we're more aware now of how much of the US is just fundamentally broken.