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Comment by ainiriand | Hacker News Reader

My opinion is that for the Trump supporter this is not a bad thing, per-se. It is going to be masked under some coat of security mixed with a bit of corporate capitalist liberty. And also, a lot of people is going to make a lot of money filtering and analyzing data.

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The irony here is that eliminating net neutrality regulations are the opposite of security in most ways because without it, ISP's and whatnot are free to shape traffic however they see fit and in doing so introduce risk. Additionally, from a governance perspective the growing consensus, whether we feel good about it or not, is that we are going to need more regulations surrounding the Internet and devices which connect to it. Moving away from net neutrality rules "because regulation" doesn't bode well for getting control of what is by all measures an out of control market. Bruce Schneier covers this pretty well in his testimony to Congress:

http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bruce-schneier-internet-of-th...

> for the Trump supporter this is not a bad thing, per-se

This is a bad thing for all consumers, period.

I think they mean, this will not damage Trump, as it will be spun as a success, even as it causes damage to the average person. Probably applies to many, if not all, of his policies.

He has implemented zero policies and net neutrality is not a topic even currently discussed. It is strange to see people make up something they think is bad, accuse the person they don't like for doing it in the future despite having no indications whether that person will actually do it, and then say that persons supporters are stupid enough to support said action. I think most Trump supporters are watching closely at Trump making sure to fulfill his existing promises like the wall and why Trump backed away from investigating Clinton than thinking about net neutrality, let alone excusing Trump for disabling it (he hasn't), but that's just my observation.

> It is strange to see people make up something they think is bad

(Opposition to) net neutrality is not "made up".

> accuse the person they don't like for doing it in the future

People posting here like net neutrality completely independently of how they feel about Trump. You can go back way before Trump came on the scene and find HN threads in which the majority opinion is largely supportive of NN.

This isn't a "demonize Trump" sentiment, it's a "pro net neutrality" sentiment. And it always has existed as an extremely important issue for SV completely independently of Trump. For decades.

> despite having no indications whether that person will actually do it

...other than his word and the preference of relevant people on his transition team.

> and then say that persons supporters are stupid enough to support said action

No one ever said that voters supporting Trump were stupid. Just that abolishing net neutrality would hurt them.

E.g. it's possible that abolishing net neutrality would hurt a coal miner, but it's none-the-less in that coal miner's best interest to vote for Trump.

I'll be good business for the incumbents. But bad for the regular users, startups, freedom.

How is it bad for those things, especially freedom? Regulation takes away freedom, by definition. An ISP start-up offering services which discriminate traffic now can't exist, and therefore can't give consumers more options. This is why I'm against net neutrality. I also believe that even with NN, companies will do what they want if it's worth the risk of being caught.

Regulation takes away freedom is simplistic libertarian drivel. According to that malarkey the 13th Amendment took away the freedoms of slaveholders:

  Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a
  punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly
  convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any
  place subject to their jurisdiction

TIL that the 13th amendment is a regulation. It's ironic, since you're explaining to others in a post above this one the very difference between "laws" and "rules", so it's pretty clear that you understand the false equivalence you're making.

Nice try, but regulation in the context of mstodd's post (regulation takes away freedom) is:

  the action or process of regulating or being regulated

It's a gerund of regulate.

Your misreading would allow that regulation(s) take away freedom but laws and Constitutional Amendments don't. And that's just gibberish.

To put a more fine point on it, generally speaking, an action that is subject to an adversarial system, is debated upon in plain view, is subject to pressure by consistuents, and is voted upon by the body populace, especially where the bar is as high as a constitutional amendment, tends to be less restrictive than a rule imposed by a regulatory agency that carries the effective force of law. Naturally, there are exceptions to every rule, but the trend tends to be pretty well defined.

But, if your assertion is that they're the same thing now, then that's cool too, I guess.

Nah bro, I was just saying that Regulation takes away freedom is simplistic libertarian drivel because it kinda just like is.

Is there nuance that can be added? Sure. Pretending one thing is the same as the other is not, in my opinion, a nuance that furthers the discussion.

It's really, really hard to equivocate the 13th amendment to, say, the EPA rules overturned by Michigan v EPA, or any of the other thousands of regulations imposed last year.

The 13th Amendment ended slavery by regulating away the property rights of slaveholders and so I can understand that libertarians are a might bit peeved about this reduction in their freedom to own other human beings. I offer my condolences.

Pithy.

The obvious rebuttal being that "laws" allow for the military draft, which is also slavery, or jury duty, which is an admittedly much milder form of the same thing, or the internment of the Japanese, or the infinite detention in Guantanamo, but since you probably already know that libertarians wouldn't be on board with slavery in the first place and are just positing up strawman after strawman, I think it's fair to assume that your arguments aren't being made in good faith, so I'll leave you to it.

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