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Comment by ape4 | Hacker News Reader

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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