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Comment by nixos | Hacker News Reader

Again Google is shooting themselves in the foot.

Google Fiber, like Android, is a moonshot to keep their line of business alive. Failure doesn't mean that Google doesn't profit off a new line of business. Failure means that Google can be shut down.

Google lives off open internet. Their profit is primarily off:

1. Android 2. Search 3. AdSense, AdWords.

A closed internet means that 2 out of 3 is dead. All they have in Android.

If AT&T and Cable monopolize the internet (which they are close to doing) without strong net-neutrality laws, they can (and will) slowly migrate to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by them).

In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless.

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>If AT&T and Cable monopolize the internet (which they are close to doing) without strong net-neutrality laws, they can (and will) slowly migrate to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by them).

>In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless.

That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way to bill the owners for serving them. It would cost many orders of magnitude more to create a blacklist and/or to track down and attempt to collect payment from the owners than just to continue serving them as before. It's the 25 GB 4K 6-hour Netflix binge-watching sessions they'd want to be subject to throttling/charges.

Whether that's a good thing for the consumer is debatable — it probably isn't — but there's no reason for fearmongering. Many countries, including the US for most of the past several decades, have no or have not had "strong net-neutrality laws" without "migrat[ing] to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by [ISPs])."

>That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way to bill the owners for serving them

Or you create a white-list (which is slowly being made). Your average Wordpress site counts against data. Want it to be "free"? Pay AT&T some money? Can't because it's too complicated for anyone but CNN? Too bad.

Oh, you only get 200 MB per month? Not a big deal, because CNN/BBC/YouTube pay money not to be counted against data limits.

We didn't have this for decades. Really, it started about a decade ago when dial-up died.

Under dialup, one could switch providers on a dime, so you could switch from anyone pulling such shenanigans.

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