19 ms·

The decline of net neutrality activism

• p1necone 4y ago
  I feel like the USA is focusing on the wrong thing with net neutrality. The core problem is that individual ISPs have total monopolies on infrastructure (or at least on the better infrastructure) in a lot of areas, and so can do all the anti consumer bullshit they want without repercussions. Enforcing net neutrality is just treating a symptom of the monopoly. Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP.
  • Uehreka 4y ago
    I’d advise not saying “the USA” in conversations like this, but being more specific and saying “US activists” or “US policymakers”. The former are probably who you are referring to, the latter are who people are generally referring to when they say “the USA” in international policy discussions, but US policymakers are deeply divided on this issue and most either don’t have a strong opinion or are actually against net neutrality.
  • pdonis 4y ago
    > Other countries fix this by having the shared physical infrastructure controlled by a government entity that rents access to any company that wants to sell service as an ISP. Yes, and the problem in the US has been that every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISPs, and since the ISPs have much deeper pockets, the suits never get to the point where they could drive meaningful change with a ruling against the ISPs. That's a big reason why net neutrality has been pushed in the US: because it's the best that can be done given that a better fix has failed.
    • postingawayonhn 4y ago
      > every time a local municipality tries this, they get sued by the ISP It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level. It needs significant regulatory change and a large investment.
      • pdonis 4y ago
        > It's a problem that needs to be dealt with at the state, or ideally federal level. You mean the levels that produced all the sweetheart deals the ISPs currently have? The ISP monopolies are products of state and federal (mostly state) intervention in the name of supposedly necessary things like "enabling internet access".
        • postingawayonhn 4y ago
          All the more reason the issue needs to be fixed at the level.
    • jcampbell1 4y ago
      Using power to tax to directly compete with private investments is a slippery slope and rightly deserves a day in court.
      • AnthonyMouse 4y ago
        You say that like it's unprecedented. That's basically any government spending program that isn't cash payments.
        • jcampbell1 4y ago
          No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. Then some politician needs to get elected and sells the public on a not possible idea of muni internet. Sort of like Biden canceling student debt by executive order when the constitution says congress has the power of the purse. You can assign the blame to Biden, Republican AGs, the Supreme Court, or the authors of the constitution. Doesn’t make much difference, so long as the issue is correctly understood. A day in court makes sense.
          • AnthonyMouse 4y ago
            > No, the municipality agreed to terms with internet provider which included no tax financed competition. There was a contract between every municipality and ISP with an explicit term that the municipality couldn't finance a competitor? That seems unlikely.
    • bee_rider 4y ago
      I’m surprised none of the good states, like maybe NY or one of the New England states, hasn’t decided to help out in this sort of situation. Couldn’t the state say “we’ll step in to do the defense, for our municipalities.”
      • iudqnolq 4y ago
        There aren't really any states in the US that are pro public-ownership at the expense of private profit. The so-called big govt states subcontract to private companies and let them make large profits.
  • chroma 4y ago
    Back when net neutrality was a big deal, there wasn’t nearly as much competition between ISPs. Now that cell data has improved and Starlink has launched, there is a floor on how bad a wired ISP can be.
  • rektide 4y ago
    300%. Heck yeah. "Local loop unbundling" to decouple the (physical-/natural-monopoly) service from the information service! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local-loop_unbundling Alas the US is fucked. In 2004 the FCC agree to Verizon's ask, that FCC exclude fiber to the home because it was expensive to build out. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/technology/fcc-shields-fiber-lines.html https://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/23/technology/fcc-shields-fi... It keeps getting worse. In 2020 the FCC exclude a variety of dark fiber & ds3 owners from unbundling regulations, phased in over 8 years. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25254/modernizing-unbundling-and-resale-requirements-in-an-era-of-next-generation-networks-and-services https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/08/2020-25... Monstrous behavior. Society needs some safeguards. Letting old incumnents do what they want forever is an filthy disgraceful low place to be, especially for such a core utility. Living under this degrading pro-monopoly regulatory environment has been a major heartbreak of my life, and the people who should be doing something to protect one of our most prized embodiments of democracy- our ability to communicate with each other- keep making the situation worse. This is 100x worse than Chicago selling the parking meter system to private interests for 100 years, which they recouped in 6. At least that was a limited area, at least that doesnt control speech & access (there are alternatives to driving then street parking). https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/chicago-parking-meters-75-year-lease-daley-city-council-audit-skyway-loop-garages-krislov https://chicago.suntimes.com/city-hall/2022/5/26/23143356/ch... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988984 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34988984 Absolute travesty. Humanity getting beatten in the face with a stick by shitty corporations forever. The FCC backing them up. I dont even know if it's possible to get these decisions changed.
  • postingawayonhn 4y ago
    The infrastructure can be privately owned too. In New Zealand we have a national fibre network covering about 90% of the population. That was built by four private entities to a set of minimum specifications and with some government subsidies. These companies are not allowed to sell retail services, must offer wholesale access to all ISPs, and have their wholesale pricing regulated.
    • mardifoufs 4y ago
      It seems like new zealand has slower internet speeds than the US, though. It ranks 19th versus 8th for the US. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed Other rankings seem to more or less agree on that too.
      • Retric 4y ago
        Median internet speeds is a terrible metric when comparing infrastructure because it effectively only measures the cheapest to deploy urban populations internet speeds which is basically meaningless now days. 50 Mbps or 500 Mbps all are basically running on the same back haul which is why things fell apart during the pandemic when people tried to actually use their hypothetical home bandwidth. Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.
        • mardifoufs 4y ago
          I don't disagree with your point! But it seems like the same pattern is true for average speeds too (sort by average): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...
          • Retric 4y ago
            It’s a valid point, on the other hand average is much worse. 1 person at 1GBps makes up for huge numbers of people at 1.5Mbps vs 20 Mbps. Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.
  • holmesworcester 4y ago
    This is a common misconception. Competition itself can't protect against net neutrality violations, because even small-marketshare ISPs can break your startup's product for some customers. Almost none of these customers will ever even learn that the failure is the ISP's fault. And even if they do, who will switch ISPs just to use some not-yet-proven product by a new startup? Meanwhile your competitor's product will work well, either because they were too big to mess with or because they paid whatever the ISP was demanding. Maybe you should too! This is why Europe needed net neutrality rules, and actually passed stronger rules than the U.S., even though the system you describe was prevalent there. Amusingly, before the rules existed, the increased competition in Europe had actually led to more net neutrality violations there (specifically, blocking or throttling things like VOIP and BitTorrent) because ISPs in that competitive landscape were under more pressure to cut costs! My source on this is Stanford's Barbara van Schewick, who is a leading expert on net neutrality policy and whose work informed both the U.S. and E.U. rules.
    • holmesworcester 4y ago
      For example, which video conferencing solution would you choose: the one that always works for everyone you invite, or the one that works only for 90% of the people you invite, because the other 10% are on an ISP that blocks it? You'd be under a lot of pressure to choose the solution that you know will just work for everyone. The ISP doesn't need to be anything close to a monopoly to get leverage for extortion and (in the process) mess up competition at the application layer. Yes, we need more competition, but we still need net neutrality rules. Competition improves prices and service. Net neutrality rules protect competition at the application layer, and they ensure that ISPs are really competing on how good they are at moving data, not just on how good they can get at shaking down the application layer.
      • vishal0123 4y ago
        If there is competition, which ISP would you select? One that works with most of the sites or one that works with all sites? And if enough people selects the latter, and assuming blocking small percentage of site doesn't give big monetary gain to the ISP, there is no reason for ISP to behave the way you said in the example.
  • themusicgod1 4y ago
    No they haven't. Kiwifarms experience. shows that they were focusing on the right thing the whole time.
  • a-user-you-like 4y ago
    Wireless tech should help mitigate the natural monopoly that crops up when it’s difficult to build physical infrastructure to someone’s home. Though it would be nice if multiple companies were allowed to lay fiber. It seems existing govt regulation prevents that, thereby creating the monopoly people complain of.
    • iptrans 4y ago
      There is only so much wireless spectrum. Multiple companies are allowed to lay fiver. It’s not regulation that prevents overbuilding but economics.
      • a-user-you-like 4y ago
        Tell that to Google fiber who got stonewalled on multiple cities even after they offered to pay for everything, front to back. It’s regulation causing the monopoly.
        • iptrans 4y ago
          Google fiber had very specific requirements for their build-out. Not all locations were able or equipped to meet those demands. Other than that, what specific regulation are you referring to? More often than not it’s the economics that prevent overbuilding an existing monopoly rather than regulatory barriers.
    • naasking 4y ago
      Wireless can't make a real dent in high speed competition due to congestion issues. It's only competitive in rural/less dense areas.
  • majormajor 4y ago
    It's not just the US, Europe saw a need for net neutrality rules and has them. The problems of infrastructure monopolies and the problems of ISPs messing with certain service providers are not completely the same sets of problems.
  • tshaddox 4y ago
    I mean, having the government own the infrastructure is the ultimate extent of regulation, and strictly a superset of regulating net neutrality specifically. Surely the infrastructure is by far the most expensive part of an ISP, so this is basically just saying “because internet infrastructure is a natural monopoly, we’ll have the government be the only ISP.” I guess other countries set it up so that private companies are technically “the ISPs,” but what do they actually do?
    • pabs3 4y ago
      See the sibling comment about NZ's infra: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35064344
  • EarlKing 4y ago
    Honestly this is a problem that was solved 40 years ago with the breakup of AT&T: the Equal Access mandate.... and it worked right up until institutional capture ensured that it didn't. Now here we are 40 years later and AT&T has virtually reassembled itself and the Equal Access laws have been completely obliterated. I wonder if there's a correlation?
  • ROTMetro 4y ago
    No thank you. I live in a small mountain town in the Pacific North West and I have the choice of high speed cable and multiple fiber providers up to 1Gb. I do not want a non-responsive government entity/goverment observer over everything.
    • iptrans 4y ago
      Oh, sweet summer child, do you think you can escape the NSA? :) More seriously, private ISPs in a (local) government owned open access network does not mean the (local) government controls and observes everything. If you are afraid of the local government, run for office.
      • ROTMetro 4y ago
        I did 5 years in federal prison and was a jailhouse lawyer, I know reality. Doesn't mean I need to volunteer to expand that. But you just give up and give in, that's your right. Personally I relate to the American route of the last 200 years and believe in limited government power (you know, the same government power that abused it's authority when it gave out monopiles on communication infrastructure. I don't see how it's abusing power should result in...giving it more power?????). I posted above about how my house is denied US mail delivery because when my mother was dying of cancer she couldn't get to the mailbox in a timely manner and she dared appeal. Petty tyrants gonna tyrant and there are limited battles one person can fight.
  • nichos 4y ago
    Unfortunately, the solution that comes up to fix bad government policies is more government policies. The intentions is usually good, but the consequences are always bad.
  • scarface74 4y ago
    So it’s “fixed” by giving the government control over physical infrastructure? What could possibly go wrong?
    • iptrans 4y ago
      What could possibly go right? Read the comment about NZ. Or refer to Sweden.
    • goodpoint 4y ago
      If having critical infrastructure under democratic control is too scary for you?
      • scarface74 4y ago
        There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works if you define “democratic” as “one person one vote”. Because of gerrymandering, the electoral college, 2 Senators per state etc, you have less voting power if you live in California than if you live in Nebraska. Besides, a government run by the “majority” tends to trample on the rights of the minority. I don’t just mean racial minorities. I mean anyone who holds minority viewpoints.
        • goodpoint 4y ago
          > There is nothing “democratic” about how the US works So it seems. Then let's not blame governments and democracies in general.
      • ROTMetro 4y ago
        I am currently denied mail service by my local post master because when my mother was in this house (and I was in prison) and dying of cancer she could not get to the mailboxes (at the end of the street and requiring crossing the street using curbs with no handicap ramps) in a timely enough manner. She had the nerve to appeal her mail service being turned off, and so now the post master has a personal grudge with my family. So yes, having government control of essential services is scary to me.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
  For the average person, Net Neutrality with respect to Big Telecom is mostly about contract disputes between multi-billion dollar corporations. Because of the common carrier laws, most people are worried about being censored by their telecom. With Big Tech, there is worry about censorship. A big example is how any discussion of the lab leak was censored as a conspiracy theory. People are far more worried about censorship.
  • kmeisthax 4y ago
    Ok, let me put it to you another way: Comcast could block Truth Social tomorrow or demand Twitter provide a Trump-free version of its site. There is no regulation against it and no recourse for Comcast customers in most of their service areas. They are just as much gatekeepers as big tech is and this whole "net neutrality vs. big tech regulation" thing is a false dichotomy. "The leopards aren't eating my face RIGHT NOW" is not an argument.
• Gigachad 4y ago
  We are starting to see the effects of this. Individual ISPs can cause huge disruptions by dropping packets that pass through them. This was done to kiwifarms recently where middle ISPs would simply drop the packet and break the connection despite not being the user or the hosters isp. Simply a relay.
  • bb88 4y ago
    Assuming that kiwifarms isn't seditious, and isn't complicit in perpetrating hate crimes... I mean you can also just send a TCP Reset packet to both sides. I've seen this done inside corporate firewalls.
    • throwawaylinux 4y ago
      You can't just throw out buzzwords and accuse and convict people of crimes though. Not even if you really really really don't like them. If the legal system rules that their actions are criminal and rules that they should be disconnected from the internet, that's a different matter. ISPs shouldn't unilaterally get to decide what people paying for their service can read or say.
      • hackernewds 4y ago
        The standard I like to apply is - imagine if they did this will phone calls or emails
        • zirgs 4y ago
          Why stop at that. We could also disconnect water, electricity and heating from people that we disagree with politically.
• dilap 4y ago
  Net neutrality went away and as far as I can tell, nothing changed. On the other hand, FOSTA-SESTA killed Craigslist personals and, I think, lots of other stuff. I've seen an almost infinite amount of advocacy for net neutrality and almost nothing against FOSTA-SESTA. People worry about the wrong things.
  • vxNsr 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      Imma be honest of all the Covid restrictions masking is not something I would consider extreme by any means.
    • nicoburns 4y ago
      I can't speak for everyone, and I'm not particularly familiar with FOSTA-SESTA (I'm not from the US). But one possible rationale for differentiating between these two is that the covid restrictions were temporary, whereas FOSTA-SESTA seems like a permanent law.
    • nerdponx 4y ago
      Because they believe masking is more beneficial than harmful, and the opposite for FOSTA-SESTA.
      • mardifoufs 4y ago
        I think they were maybe more referring to the logic that "if it saves even one life" that was prevalent early during the pandemic. Which I guess could be applied to FOSTA? I'm not sure, though.
    • Arainach 4y ago
      > the same people who argue for revoking FOSTA-SESTA also believed in blanket masking policies Source? >restrictions that had much wider and deeper unintended consequences compared to FOSTA-SESTA Source? Please avoid tangents unrelated to the original topic.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  I gave money to Free Press Action years ago to fight for net neutrality. I’ve been absolutely shocked by recent emails from them asking to give them money to pressure companies from not allowing certain individuals on their platforms. Or their complaints that Elon Musk wont restrict certain speech. Like what?
  • thr717272 4y ago
    The thing about free press is some of them at least are pro free press, but only for "respectable" press.
• vxNsr 4y ago
  I think part of the reason that net neutrality advocacy has been neutered is because a lot of the advocates don’t like the idea of tech platforms being beholden to common carrier status and if the FCC can go after ISP and force them to act as dumb pipes then many see twitter/Facebook/YouTube as next. And the types of people who want ISPs to be seen as dumb pipes are generally very against free speech (because they worry that most people aren’t as smart as them and thus while they (the advocates) are above being brainwashed, the rest of the netizens aren’t and will succumb to fascism).
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    Right. It’s like which network layer is the appropriate layer to restrict information on? Let it all be free and open.
  • kmeisthax 4y ago
    > because they worry that most people aren’t as smart as them and thus while they (the advocates) are above being brainwashed, the rest of the netizens aren’t and will succumb to fascism I used to think this, but then I realized that algorithmic radicalization is not a bug that social media companies are working to fix. It is a feature. Social media does not work without an algorithm hyper-focusing your feed onto the most extreme bullshit takes.
• Dig1t 4y ago
  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.
  • 0xGod 4y ago
    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.
    • throwawaylinux 4y ago
      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.
• jsz0 4y ago
  From what I remember neutrality was poorly explained to the public by people with in a somewhat deceptive way trying to slam dunk sell the issue. So the average person ended up thinking they were opposing unrelated things like vanilla peering agreements or even residential bandwidth caps. Many totally misunderstood the real issue and promptly looked like fools when they tried to talk about it. Perhaps this was all done on purpose to poison-pill the issue right out of the gate. Taking a page out of the CIA/FBI's playbooks.
  • mardifoufs 4y ago
    I think it would be more accurate to say that the debate was completely muddied by big tech corporations who obviously had a very specific agenda that had little to do with the grievances that the average joe had with their ISP. Now, that agenda wasn't bad at all, but it was very hard to explain or to get people to care about it as-is. So what we got instead was a very... innacurate debate and a discussion that was centered around the (deserved) dislike for ISPs. Which obviously played in favor of big tech. I'm not saying there was a big conspiracy by big tech against the poor ISPs, just that there was obviously a heavy PR push that took advantage of the mood around ISPs (comcast very bad!) once the debate started. What was more of a business dispute turned into yet another "very important and urgent current event/crisis." Net neutrality is still important, though, but I'm not sure the general population would've been very empathetic towards what could be seen as massive tech corporations not wanting to pay for their utilization.
  • corbulo 4y ago
    It wasn't just poorly explained. The bills going through US Congress had almost nothing to do with it despite the branding.
• marc_abonce 4y ago
  > Net Neutrality can easily be ignored during the pandemic and recession, which does makes sense, people were in a health crisis and now in an economic one. As a counterexample, in 2020 here in Mexico our telecom regulator tried to deregulate net neutrality and there was enough backlash for the draft to be amended to be mostly pro net neutrality (except for zero rating which is still allowed). [1] I still agree with OP though, I haven't really thought about the topic for the last couple of years. [1] Source in Spanish: https://www.forbes.com.mx/red-forbes-que-implica-la-nueva-neutralidad-de-internet-en-mexico https://www.forbes.com.mx/red-forbes-que-implica-la-nueva-ne...
• studentrob 4y ago
  The whole point is to not charge users twice for both the volume AND the rate of flow. It's not hot button because there is no FCC chair. If the dems seat a chair, regardless of who it is, that would allow grassroots campaigns to reactivate. Under Trump, I believe broadband ISPs were implementing data caps, and they backed off on that after Biden was elected. And some telecoms offer zero rated content. It's far more common overseas for telecoms and content providers to partner in providing access, so you get places like the Philippines where Facebook basically is the internet.
  • wankle 4y ago
    > I believe broadband ISPs were implementing data caps, and they backed off on that after Biden was elected. You're welcome to believe as you wish. We've never seen data cap issues, under President Trump or Biden, or any president.
    • ericd 4y ago
      Are you saying that there weren't data caps being trialed? Because there very much were, and they were not generous.
      • wankle 4y ago
        I'm saying we've been with several ISP's and if any one had stopped offering unlimited access, we would have switched to a new ISP. We did switch from Spectrum to AT&T Fiber to get faster speeds up and down but otherwise Spectrum's speeds were fine and we mostly didn't have issues with them.
        • ericd 4y ago
          That’s not representative. Comcast was very actively experimenting with data caps and overage fees. And there were no very good alternatives in our area, it was them or glorified DSL.
    • studentrob 4y ago
• 0xGod 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • kmeisthax 4y ago
    All Comcast has to do is block the ports that Web 3 blockchain tech uses and it's done.
    • 0xGod 4y ago
      That's not how it works. And Comcast has no reason to care about Web 3. Web 3 isn't a threat to big ISPs. It is a threat to some aspects of ad revenue business models though. And it will be competition for cloud service providers. Consider it a public web-scale cloud provider that is eventually just going to be a really cheap public compute layer for anyone who wants to deploy some random little utility or concept without having to go through private interests to do it.
      • thr717272 4y ago
        > That's not how it works. Can you tell me how it works if there isn't a port or a dns name or an ip that can be blocked?
        • 0xGod 4y ago
          There are open standards for browsers to communicate with software deployed in web 3, regardless of what an isp would care about doing. For an ISP to fiddle with that goes far beyond sneaking around net neutrality as a principle. It would entail blatant violations of existing laws. In broad daylight. Not to mention it would accelerate the adoption of Starlink and other alternatives, as well as community-deployed mesh networks that are already covering cities in the United States of America as we speak. And this hardware will get cheaper and better with time and be deployed at larger and larger scales.
          • tsimionescu 4y ago
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bjt2n3904 4y ago
  [flagged]
• Seattle3503 4y ago
  I was a net neutrality supporter, but as the article mentions the feared changes haven't materialized. Also, I moved into a condo in a large city where I have three options for gigabit speeds. If one provider decides to implement a customer hostile policy, I will switch.
• 1attice 4y ago
  Net neutrality is one of those peacetime aspirations that simply does not matter as much as the ongoing culture war, climate crisis, political stability crisis, economic crisis, pandemic aftermath, and the literal (hot/shooting) war in Ukraine. The center has eroded to the point where net neutrality only matters to many people if it has an impact on one of the above. Yet any appeal to one side of the above issues will serve to alienate the other. This means that you can't really get enough oxygen in the room to shout over the shouty people already shouting about the above. I bet you dimes to dollars that other center/administrative issues are similarly affected.
  • eitland 4y ago
    Not spitting on the floor also is less important than a lot of other things. But it is so simple and considered baseline behavior so I would still support yelling at you if you spit at the floor even while the war is still ongoing an we haven't stopped the attackers. Same goes for net neutrality: there is even less effort needed. I mean: complying with the rules is as simple as not introducing a number of rules or devices in your network setup.
    • 1attice 4y ago
      No argument here. I believe that a loss of NN will have tragic, avoidable, predictable outcomes. It is, as you say, not a high-effort policy, so an argument-from-undue-difficulty would not support its dissolution. That said, you don't seem to be interacting with my claim -- I'm not saying net neutrality is unimportant, I'm saying it's undervalued right now. Because of the wars/permacrises. I think upon closer read you'll find our views are relatively aligned.
      • eitland 4y ago
        Ok. You are probably right, in which case you have my apologies!
  • shp0ngle 4y ago
    This is true. It’s hard to imagine in 2023 4chan, reddit and wikipedia all turning dark because of net neutrality. It feels like “we used to care about that?” issue.
• rabite 4y ago
  Net neutrality was fraudulently put forth by Internet giants and the activist organizations they fund as an issue of free speech. It put the most censorious platforms on the face of the Earth in the ridiculous position that if they were made to pay their own bandwidth bills, it would lead to content censorship and the inability of Americans to freely express political ideas. As Ajit Pai's FCC Ruling stated: >This consensus is among the reasons that there is scant evidence that end users, under different legal frameworks, have been prevented by blocking or throttling from accessing the content of their choosing. It also is among the reasons why providers have voluntarily abided by no-blocking practices even during periods where they were not legally required to do so. As to free expression in particular, we note that none of the actual incidents discussed in the Title II Order squarely implicated free speech. If anything, recent evidence suggests that hosting services, social media platforms, edge providers, and other providers of virtual Internet infrastructure are more likely to block content on viewpoint grounds. This statement included a footnote specifically noting the unilateral suspension of The Daily Stormer. Of course, "net neutrality" was struck down, YouTube was made to pay their bandwidth bills, and absolutely nothing changed at all. The corporate censors went on with their work of suspending everything that was bigoted, and then most Trump supporters, and then prominent Bernie supporters during the primaries, and then people who talked about the risks of experimental vaccines. They continue this regime of censorship up to this very day, but they have to pay for transit in places that it is limited. It was an absolutely absurd fraud that went on for years, but the game is over. Why would anyone pretend that Net Neutrality means anything other than a cheaper bandwidth bill for Google at this point?
• zamalek 4y ago
  I went with T-Mobile precisely because they stood with net neutrality when it was first on the chopping block. They are now, by far, the worst offender. The battle is long over, and completely and utterly lost.
• welder 4y ago
  I still remember watching Ajit Pai explain why he didn't want net neutrality at an interview he gave in San Francisco. [0] He was obviously trying to stay on the good side of Verizon, ATT, etc. but his argument against net neutrality never made any sense. I think Tom Wheeler had it right. [1] [0] https://youtu.be/0OydO9GyhVg?t=570 https://youtu.be/0OydO9GyhVg?t=570 [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/13/14266168/tom-wheeler-final-speech-net-neutrality-defense https://www.theverge.com/2017/1/13/14266168/tom-wheeler-fina...
  • rezonant 4y ago
    EDIT: Previous mistake in parent that was corrected leads to this I'm a little confused about the implication that Verizon and AT&T have merged (they haven't). AT&T acquired some spectrum from Verizon back in 2013 [1], and there have been various cases of customer-base horse trading between them, but these two merging at a corporate level would be a massive news story, and it strains credulity to imagine the top two wireless providers merging without being struck down by the FTC for antitrust. Maybe you could shed some light on what you mean? Tom Wheeler did indeed have it way more right than Ajit Pai, though. [1] https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/at-t-completes-acquisition-of-verizon-wireless-spectrum/ https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/at-t-completes-acquisition-...
    • rezonant 4y ago
      Also, at that point I would expect the newly combined company to rebrand to Ma Bell. It would only be right.
      • judge2020 4y ago
        For reference: https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:2376x1740/1440x1055/filters:focal(1188x870:1189x871):format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/7336991/Screen%20Shot%202016-10-24%20at%202.21.23%20PM.png https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:2376x1740/1440x1055... This was before AT&T purchased Time Warner, but as of 2022 they spun off WarnerMedia by selling it to Discovery, so they just want to be an ISP and not a big media company. This was also before Verizon bought all of Yahoo and later sold it.
• yanderekko 4y ago
  My cynical narrative is that as progressive activists came to embrace social media censorship as a mechanism to win political battles, the underlying advocacy not having ISPs meddle with the internet became harder to square with enthusiastic advocacy for censorship at the layer of the internet's actual communication applications (or basic service layer, eg. Cloudflare.) "ISPs must not oppress us, but it's fine when social media platforms do it" probably lacks mass appeal.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • jquery 4y ago
    [flagged]
    • stale2002 4y ago
      > Last I checked Twitter was under the total control of a right wing troll. Zuckerberg isn't exactly a leftist You didn't read the post you were responding to closely enough. The original post was not about who controls which social media website. Instead, it was about whether or not individual people support social media companies censoring whatever they heck they want, and comparing that to supporting ISPs censoring whatever the heck they want. It should be obviously true that progressives, and democrats these days are more in favor of social media companies controlling their platform, compared to, say, a decade ago. "its a private company, it can do what it wants!" Is almost a catchphrase now, of democrat-aligned people on any of these topics, theses days.
      • jquery 4y ago
        >It should be obviously true that progressives, and democrats these days are more in favor of social media companies controlling their platform, compared to, say, a decade ago. I would appreciate some evidence for this claim.
        • stale2002 4y ago
• bandrami 4y ago
  I live in a non-net-neutral country. People really seem to like the fact that Meta is willing to subsidize their data costs for using Facebook, IG, and Whatsapp.
• invig 4y ago
  It's pretty hard to be pro-"safety" on things like social media, news, AI, etc., and then turn around and say with a straight face that infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to be moderated. I long for the net neutrality times when we were still sane.
  • judge2020 4y ago
    How so? That's like saying you shouldn't be able to drive if you like country music (no offense to country music). Infrastructure enables the freedom of association on the internet just as driving enables your freedom of association based on your physical location, so the people that make that infrastructure probably shouldn't be able to say which websites you can and can't visit.
  • smt88 4y ago
    > It's pretty hard to be pro-"safety" on things like social media, news, AI, etc., and then turn around and say with a straight face that infrastructure shouldn't be allowed to be moderated. It's only hard if you're willfully ignoring the distinction people are making, which is that ISPs are "dumb pipes" operating in a government-sanctioned oligopoly. Just like broadcast networks, the privilege of using a limited public resource (underground cabling, bandwidth, whatever) comes with regulations. Social media, on the other hand, isn't borrowing a finite resource from taxpayers. It's a fungible resource and can exist in a competitive environment, which we've seen with the rise of TikTok and everyone else's blatant copying of TikTok. And most importantly, no one is forcing them to censor themselves. They're bowing to protests and market forces. Libertarians are always whining about how there isn't enough competition, and then they whine when the invisible hand makes a decision they don't like.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  It's basically Newcastle coal roads all over again, with the competition from the canal haulers upsetting the rentier sector. The only real solution is the same as with the roads: no limitations on access, and if congestion is an issue, use the tax revenues to broaden to the roads to handle the increase in traffic. The government manages the roads, but if they need to buy material (steel, or fiber), then submit competitive contracts to the private sector. Of course, wannabe fascists and the like will try to control the flow of information for their own reasons, nothing new about that either.
• pr337h4m 4y ago
  Just use Tor.
  • iptrans 4y ago
    Does not help. Tor is heavily throttled and blocked.
    • pr337h4m 4y ago
      Then use Snowflake: https://snowflake.torproject.org/ https://snowflake.torproject.org/
• anonymousiam 4y ago
  I lean more toward the libertarian/conservative part of the political spectrum, but net neutrality is an issue where the conservatives/republicans got it wrong. Somehow they felt that it was analogous to the "equal time doctrine", which it never has been. In some ways companies such as CloudFlare have solved part of the problem, but issues such as the anti-competitive throttling of competing services by ISPs still need to be addressed. We also still have the problem of media monopolies often being the only available consumer "Internet" service providers, but the "Internet" they provide is often highly monitored, filtered, and shaped.
• tzs 4y ago
  I think a big mistake was too many major net neutrality advocates in the US tried to bundle too many things under the "net neutrality" label. Net neutrality should have been this, and only this: > If an ISP customer has a plan that purports to give the customer B bytes of data per month and a data transfer speed of S bits/second, then > 1. The ISP will not limit (unless legally required to) what sites the customer can use those B bytes per month with, and > 2. The ISP will not throttle the user to below S bits/second when using those B bytes/month, except when necessary to deal with congestion. If the ISP does that, they satisfy net neutrality. If they also give you access to their own services without counting that against your B bytes, or make deals to give you access to certain sites without it counting against your B bytes, that may be anti-competitive but as long as you still get your B bytes at S bits/second it would not be a net neutrality violation. If it is anti-competitive it should be dealt with through the large body of law that had been extensively developed for more than 100 years to deal with such things: antitrust law. Trying to shove a subset of antitrust law into net neutrality just because a particular behavior that might be anti-competitive happens to involve in internet service makes no sense.
  • EMIRELADERO 4y ago
    My country's net neutrality law seems to be a great blueprint, and something that can be easily understood. No need for all the "bytes" and "throttling" terminology: "ARTICLE 56. - Network Neutrality. Each user shall be guaranteed the right to access, use, send, receive or offer any content, application, service or protocol through the Internet without any type of restriction, discrimination, distinction, blocking, interference, hindrance or degradation. ARTICLE 57. - Network neutrality. Prohibitions. ICT Service Providers shall not: a) Block, interfere, discriminate, hinder, degrade or restrict the use, sending, reception, offering or access to any content, application, service or protocol except by court order or explicit request of the user. b) Fix the price of Internet access by virtue of the contents, services, protocols or applications to be used or offered through the respective contracts. c) Arbitrarily limit the right of a user to use any hardware or software to access the Internet, as long as they do not damage or harm the network."
    • 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
• lapama 4y ago
  The decline of all forms of activism? Even EU/US can show patterns of totalitarian control nowadays.
• jerkstate 4y ago
  net neutrality was sold to the public as anti-censorship, when really it had nothing to do with free speech. the author of the post seems to have a more developed understanding that it's really about increasing bargaining power of media companies (specifically big bandwidth users like streaming video) and decreasing the bargaining power of telecoms, but most do not understand this. the difference is that now most of those activists are pro-censorship, as long as the censorship is what they like, and those same big media companies are able to enact that type of censorship. as far as I can tell, that's really it. most people never really understood net neutrality.
• est 4y ago
  There's no longer net neutrality, because China. Discriminate technology based on ideology and security is an on-going bipartisan effort happening in the US.
• cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  It would be so nice to have net neutrality as the biggest problem these days, rather than deadly diseases, proxy war between nuclear superpowers, political/cultural derangement on all sides, kids brains rotted by social media... When it comes to net neutrality itself, folks also got to understand that services they take for granted wouldn't exist without sophisticated traffic management. There is a Netflix box inside the ISP data center that streams video to subscribers without going through the Internet. Without it, no streaming HD video for you, no infrastructure to provide it at that scale exists. What if you are a startup that is not Netflix? Good question, but the answer is not as obvious as a slogan and at the moment there are far more urgent matters to lose sleep about.
  • esolyt 4y ago
    > There is a Netflix box inside the ISP data center that streams video to subscribers without going through the Internet. Can you clarify what you mean by this?
    • cat_plus_plus 4y ago
      https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
• hoseja 4y ago
  Strange there's never a complete deadlock then the GOP is in power.
• somenameforme 4y ago
  IMO it was the hyperbole/reality cycle that is common in many politicized issues. Many, and arguably the vast majority, of political issues are built upon extremes of hyperbole. Support this, or oppose this, or the world will end - or something not far from it. And so when some meaningful change does occur on any such topic, and the hyperbole does not play out, the issue tends to more or less die. The ending of net neutrality was supposed to create something like a borderline unusable internet. In reality once it did end [1] and had more or less no impact, the hyperbole obviously proved unjustified. I feel obligated to cite my statement that it ended since I find many don't even realize the US no longer has any notion of net neutrality. IMO net neutrality is inherently and obviously desirable. So I think the moral of the story is more to focus on realistic outcomes, consequences, and justifications for issues. Appealing to hyperbole is a great way to emphasize and grow your cause in the short-run, but absolutely destroy it in the long-run. It feels analogous to how MBAs run companies: optimizing for next quarter, in exchange for long-term implosion. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_by_country#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_by_country#Unit...
  • 462362 4y ago
    The question is who it's actually desirable for. Neutrality, people are realizing, favors nobody because it means incubating causes you disagree with. And the metagame politically for both companies and activists has shifted towards subverting safe spaces for your opposition. Whether it's a commercial 'safe space' or a political 'safe space' is irrelevant. In either case people have come to prefer being able to go on the offensive and that means removing anything that might impede that.
    • epups 4y ago
      >Neutrality, people are realizing, favors nobody because it means incubating causes you disagree with. That favors me, because I believe that's very important.
      • throw2311 4y ago
        Yes, but the majority of current activists want purity tests and circular firing squads. I've seen more cypher punks in board rooms of billion dollar companies in the past 5 years than I have on reddit or hn. The opinion that no number should be illegal gets thrown out the window when you talk about an image. This used to be as common as AOL email addresses 20 years ago.
• olodus 4y ago
  It might also have dwindled because there actually has been meaningful and in my eyes good legislation introduced. Both the EU net neutrality proposition and the California one is very similar and very reasonable imo. I might be in minority around here but I am not for hard line net neutrality - which to me is when you don't think any different kinds of nets / qos can exist. As far as I understand both the laws I referenced earlier makes it possible for an ISP to sell different QoS and innovate on that axis. What the laws forbid is for them to provide that service in a non-competitative way. So they have to offer that option to everyone and in a open way. This to me is the real problem and why net neutrality becomes a necessity in some cases if this is not followed (behaviors like throttling specific sites while boosting own sites for example).
• joecool1029 4y ago
  The Reddit net neutrality campaign started in my office by a friend running a videogame blog posting the right thing at the right time: https://web.archive.org/web/20200315191138/https://redditblog.com/2015/02/26/thank-you-reddit-your-efforts-led-to-an-historic-fcc-ruling-and-this-note-from-the-president-of-the-united-states/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200315191138/https://redditblo... I think it is maybe not an accident that this blog post is deleted from Reddit's official blog, but it happened. It happened in Verizon HQ's congressional district too, where their funded representative lost his seat shortly after. I don't post on this as some great authority, it was purely luck and we were small businesses that could articulate why net neutrality was important at the time. Fast forward to today, far less independent sites like his exist, his is gone now. He went to work for a hosting company that seems to be pivoting away from serving small business as they were acquired by a large enterprise firm. This is the concern of someone who pays for hosting, we are used to paying a quota or port, but at our size we rarely have to consider peering and transit costs. Our main concern has been 'channelization' of the net, where plans get sold with only access to major providers. I think on the consumer side, net neutrality terminology has to be worded carefully because back then calls were still mostly a circuit routed thing. We now have good enough networks where everything is IP data and voice must be prioritized to maintain quality of service. I prefer the current reality on most plans where data is de-prioritized after heavy use works better than the old throttle to a certain speed restrictions. Allows radios to get into lower power states quicker and access resources when it's available. Last mile for everything is the main problem out here, Blightspeed/Centurylink is the copper 1.5mbit DSL provider and there's Comcast cable which has no incentive to price compete unless choosing the wireless route (Which is ultimately what I did). I am wary of advocating changing the regulations from where they are currently because we've already witnessed fallout from Section 230 modifications. In any case it's been a weird time the mostly the past 5 years or so, and I think it's hard to motivate people to care on net neutrality when there's so many other related issues that seem more pressing and a whole new adult generation hasn't really experienced the internet as a ton of small websites/companies/projects, they use apps. It's a hard sell.
• KaiserPro 4y ago
  The US doesn't have a problem with net neutrality, they have a problem with monopolies. as you all know, net neutrality means that all traffic is given equal access. but that is an obscure concept to anyone outside of tech. What consumers want is fast cheap & reliable broadband(that they can actually buy). In Europe, if your ISP is shite, then you change ISP to a better one. This has driven down the price of broadband, and with some cash injections from governments, increased the speed from 512k to at least 20meg in most places(with most suburban places having access to 500meg). Not only that, but ISPs bundle "free" access to things like netflix, which doesn't count against a cap (if you have one). In the US, if you're lucky you have a choice of two ISPs. They are both shite, and both don't bother competing, apart from being more and more shite to you. Despite the FCC's bundling rules, there is no practical way to operate a virtual ISP on resold copper/fibre/coax. So if I was to create a new campaign, it wouldn't be for net neutrality, it would be called "American Competitive Internet" with some nonsense about making america better by going back to what made it strong: competition. Then enforce reasonable resale rates, so that virtual ISPs can be a thing. second I would enforce rules that mean you can only charge for transit, not peering (with caveats)
  • zelphirkalt 4y ago
    In Germany one can change the ISP (only if the one you have is not the only one available though), but I have yet to see an ISP actually measuring the things that often are important for me: A reliable connection. No ping spikes, no drop in throughput. Constant quality. I can live with half the throughput, if only I had at least some guarantees about my connection's stability and latencies. I would gladly pay 5-10 euro more per month for such guarantees. So yeah, you can ISP hop, but might be hopping for a long time or in circles, until you get better than 3rd world country Internet connection.
• amelius 4y ago
  Anything too anti liberal simply doesn't fly in the U.S. of A. Let the big corporations decide what we can/cannot do on the internet; they worked hard for it!
• billpg 4y ago
  There's a cell/mobile service over here that's advertised as "Unlimited Social Media". So customers get limited data but "Social Media" data is unlimited. Exactly what they define as "Social Media", I don't know. (Does my blog count?) That's a curious business model. Why does an Internet Service Provider want to prioritise one particular class of website?
  • QuarterReptile 4y ago
    Probably because social media use is easy to model and a relatively tight distribution, from a bandwidth perspective. The more targeted your pricing tiers, the more you can compete on price without taking a beating from top talkers. Nobody wants to service the top residential users because they cause way more traffic and trouble, but it's probably hard to fire individual customers in most places. It's like zoning in that way. Nobody cares if I have chickens in my backyard, but it's illegal because 15 years ago someone's neighbor had 20 chickens and a few roosters, and the neighbor got a law passed rather than resolving it with the neighbor.
  • acuozzo 4y ago
    This sounds like a fun opportunity to push boundaries. There are several binaries-on-Usenet-esque projects on GitHub to push e.g. yEnc-encoded chunks to Reddit & Twitter. So we just need a few people with unlimited bandwidth via another ISP to act as exit nodes and code to get this madness to hook into a tun interface.
• jlangenauer 4y ago
  I detect a certain decline in almost all activism: You can spend years fighting any issue, but the other side will have too much money, too much patience, and even if, by some miracle, you eke out a temporary victory, you know that the same forces you oppose will rapidly regroup and launch a whole new assault, and you'll have to start fighting it again from square one. In addition to that, you have to work harder than every just to live. The energy gets sucked out of you, and it becomes harder than ever to sustain a fight you know you'll be lucky to win. No wonder people burn out, and simply give up. Everyone has their limits.
  • 323 4y ago
    Or you can get payed to do your activism. There are groups paying for activism on all sides. Just go and find it for your side.
• phpisthebest 4y ago
  I have seen a pattern in "Activism". Since such activities are largely conducted by people generally on the "left" or associated with the Democratic Party almost all activism declines (not gone but much much lower) when democrats are in power nationally. I suspect now that one chamber of the congress is republican controlled we will see a slight increase in activism, and if Republicans take the presidency in 2024 a huge jump in activism, or if they take both the house and Senate While conservatives / republicans will get out for protests the number of issues that will spark that is very much more limited... namely 2, abortion and guns. Outside of that you likely will not see a conservative protest / political activism. In contrast there are 100' or 1000's of issues on the left that will spark protests.
• CE02 4y ago
  What I think is important in looking at the difference in treatment between “big tech” and telecom firms is the political expedience. Not to sound too much like a Mayhew acolyte, it can’t be denied that most legislators have their primary focus on reelection. It comes as a priority before efficacy of legislation. To the voters, telecom companies have always been a priced in annoyance. Additionally, their services aren’t differentiated so although they’re annoying with pricing, the average voter doesn’t see them as quite so pervasive. You pay, you forget. They’re all mildly frustrating to deal with but un-noteworthy . Big tech on the other hand is in your face. I don’t see my telecom but you can be rest assured I see Microsoft, Facebook, etc on a daily basis. This means that a congressman fighting telecom is taking a stand against an amorphous blob that we forget about after our monthly bill. Conversely a congressman fighting big tech is a valiant warrior fighting greed and corruption. I’m sure people here have different views due to a grasp of the nuances but the sad truth is that most of america isn’t all too aware. Big Tech just seems scarier.
  • dsfyu404ed 4y ago
    Telecom wealth is also pretty evenly distributed nationally because at the end of the day all the money is tied up in the infrastructure that's installed across the nation. They gotta pay someone in Kansas to install fiber in Kansas. Tech wealth is far more concentrated and it's concentrated among the "very wealthy" and the "coastal elites". Both of those groups are pretty unpopular outside their own bubbles right now. That further tips the scales in favor politicians targeting tech.
• MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  It turned out that most people actually enjoy the benefits of net non-neutrality. All my friends with T-Mobile rave about how streaming Spotify, Netflix, YouTube, etc. don’t count against their data caps, which is diametrically opposite to net neutrality.
  • blowski 4y ago
    Lots of people love next-day delivery from Amazon, but also complain when all the local shops close down.
• p0pcult 4y ago
  It's simple: Americans have the political attention span of a fruit fly. Of course, it doesn't help when both parties decry everything besides puppies and apple pie to be the end of America as we know it, and the news media amplify it so that they can sell more advertising.
• corporate_law 4y ago
  Censorship is good now, lol
• zoobab 4y ago
  In the EU, we have an ex-CEO of France Telecom dressed as an EU Commissioner (Thierry Breton) proposing to abolish Net Neutrality. Revolving doors between big businesses and politics, thanks to Macron.
• rhaway84773 4y ago
  You don’t hear about anti DRM activism either. Basically the internet geeks have sold out. The moment DRM meant that the money was going to the techies (Spotify, Apple Music, etc) and not the music companies, we were like “what problems”? The only one who didn’t is RMS but we all laughed at him. He’s one of the only real principled geeks left today.
  • willywanker 4y ago
    The DRM fight died the day the EFF, Cory Doctorow, Mozilla and other supposed champions of open data formats kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec, this also killed off the idea of NPAPI browser plugins. Plugins were originally meant for exactly this sort of use - to display proprietary data within a browser by handing it off to another application - Flash and Java were the most popular but there were also media player plugins for DRMed media (both VLC & Windows Media Player for example, had browser plugins).
    • cdoctorow 4y ago
      I literally came out of retirement to rejoin EFF and fight DRM at the W3C. I managed to get the W3C membership to reject DRM twice, only to be overruled by the executive (the W3C's constitution allows for the director to treat votes as advisory). It was the only time in W3C history that anything remotely like this happened. In the end, EFF publicly resigned from the W3C over it: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-direct... Obviously, I failed. But I did nothing else for four years but fight DRM at the W3C. I wrote op-eds. I personally telephoned every single W3C member's rep to talk to them about this - many times. I published hundreds of articles. I did radio interviews. Podcasts. We organized an in-person protest and picketed a W3C event. There was never a "day when EFF, Cory Doctorow...kept mum while DRM was being added to the HTML5 spec."
      • regs 4y ago
        I’ve personally been in a room where you were very much not keeping quiet about it!
• manv1 4y ago
  Activists really tried to push too much crap into the pile of "net neutrality." There were at least a few different issues in the NN bundle: 1 against preferred ISP access 2 against content-based ISP restrictions 3 against charges to upstream content providers based on traffic 4 against paid prioritization 5 no change to the current peering models Most of it was IMO total bullshit. Having worked with ISPs, I can tell you that they have no real interest in being content police, prioritizing specific services, at least in the US. Their real interest for ISPs was making large sources of traffic pay. This is going to conspiracy theory land, but IMO a large part of NN was the content providers (YT, google, facebook, etc) manipulating the public into supporting some bullshit law that prevented them from having to pay ISPs for the downstream traffic they generate. And it's a lot of traffic...and billions of dollars in advertising revenue. All of that was wrapped up in the typical "call to freedom" that is the equivalent of "it's for the kids."
• salawat 4y ago
  What makes anyone think Net Neutrality is less of a pressing issue? Frankly, nowadays, it's even moreso of an issue than ever before! Do you: Ever find yourself wondering if you need to upgrade to a "business" plan to host that service? Ever wonder why it seems one type of traffic ends up running into more problems than others? Wonder why the local network infrastructure always seems to be woefully inadequate for any type of ambitious use? All of that comes from a staunch lack of Net Neutrality. Dumb pipes, as many as possible, connecting everyone to everyone else. No QoS segmentation. no fast-lanes. No zero-rating. No nudging people toward one set of endpoints over another. No inspecting the bloody packet; just routing. Unfortunately; we don't see that, because ISP's are way better at fee extraction and exec/lobbyist enrichment than actually getting bloody wire laid, maintained, and packets routed through the AS anymore. If it's gotten quiet, it's probably because people are still trying to absorb/learn the implications/principles behind user hostile network topology resulting from exploitative business models.
• xbar 4y ago
  California's net neutrality law bars ISPs from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes as of 2021. Fast internet is $50/month from several providers in the state. No further action needed.
• nikisweeting 4y ago
  The recent Peter Eckersley memorial made this fresh in my mind. It was a beautiful collection of many of the net neutrality activists at the Internet Archive building in SF, and gave me renewed hope that the world still cares about this and the people who fight for it.