Part of the problem 'net neutrality' faces is its name. The average US citizen has no idea what 'net neutrality' means when they hear it, and can't be bothered to learn about it.<p>If it had been branded 'internet freedom' then we wouldn't even be having this discussion because it would be toxic for politicians to mess with something called 'internet freedom.'<p>Source: Sat through way too many focus groups testing communications concepts in my life...
Isn't this what happens when you do everything through the executive, rather than legislative, branch? If net neutrality were required by law, the FCC chairman would to some degree be compelled to enforce it.
It's amazing how much money influences these politicians. I would be amazed if any of the people who voted for this bill even fully understand what it is.
Part of me wants to make a really nice website to shine a spotlight on these corporate shills and track their offenses. Obviously, we can legitimately argue about the merits of some laws and regulations, but others are obvious corporate power grabs that objectively leave us worse off. And to officials who sell us out but are sure to be re-elected, like Marsha Blackburn, she needs to know that there are people who recognize her as a traitor to the interests of the American people.
Is there anything that can be done here? Pai and his little buddy O'Rielly have an easy majority on the FCC here, and I doubt they'll listen to any comments. Short of like, the Trump government being dismantled before then, how do you get rid of such a transparently corrupt head of a federal agency?
Can we have another day without most common internet sites?<p>No facebook/google/netflix/amazon/youtube. 2 days if necessary. Show a video explaining what net neutrality is and why many of the arguments it are so dumb.
This is a somewhat unpopular opinion on HN, but I think net neutrality is only a mediocre local optimum. We can do much better without it.<p>Look at Denmark; they top the global ITU ITC ranking for internet service, and how do they do it? By totally deregulating ISPs while setting government policy to allow for competition (instead of trying to force ISPs to follow some arbitrary notion of good behavior in the abject lack of competition). They removed many ISP regulations (nominally antitrust regs) back in 2006 and it worked so well that they completely dissolved their rough FCC equivalent (NITA) in 2011.<p>We don't need the FCC ham-fist to improve or preserve the quality of our internet services. All we need is to set local and regional line lease policy to encourage actual ISP competition. Every X years, have an open auction to sell shared cable leases to Y different ISPs or something. Now instead of having to force net neutrality, some of the Z different ISPs that now service your house will use privacy guarantees as a cheap competitive advantage.
Cable television periodically has "channel blackouts" where the cable operator feuds over price with the content provider. I guess we can expect to see this now for internet. Imagine going to Netflix to find an error 5xx instead: unavailable until they agree on payments to the cable company.
IIRC a well thought out idea has long been to have <i>privacy,</i> in various forms, handled by the FTC. Then the recent change for the FCC was to go ahead and get the FCC out of <i>privacy</i> and move, hand over, transfer what the FCC was doing on privacy to the FTC.<p>I have read nothing and have no idea what the consequences will be for privacy. E.g., maybe the FTC will, net, give us better regulation of <i>privacy</i> or maybe worse.
And once again, this is why representative democracy is worse than this:<p><a href="http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=212" rel="nofollow">http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=212</a>
When it comes to net neutrality, all I can think of is what Jimmy Wales once said about the lesson he learned from Neupedia: "Don't make rules people are not breaking."<p>No one has really broken net neutrality principles yet. But there are ideas out there and innovation out there, where this net neutrality is turning out to be a hindrance to it all.<p>Why cannot cable company provide cable TV over cable Internet? Because of net neutrality! Why cannot T-mobile provide TV experience on its network for everyone without breaking its network? Because of net neutrality. Why cannot Verizon offer free stuff for its customers over its network? Because of net neutrality.<p>Net neutrality was not supposed to prevent ISPs from doing great stuff. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from making alliances with certain companies and enemies with other companies. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from harming innovation. It was supposed to prevent ISPs from hurting content providers and content types.<p>Yet, now it is preventing ISPs from offering better services.
A part of me wonders if net neutrality ending would be unintuitively beneficial. Right now we are depending on policy decisions to protect the internet's privacy and neutrality. This has been a flawed approach for over a decade.<p>At some point we need to solve this with technology in a similar way that E2E encryption is a step toward solving chat privacy. Maybe the selling of browser histories and then end of net neutrality will be the kick that finally gets us moving.