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Comment by pdelbarba | Hacker News Reader

Is it normal for these proposals to read like a plagiarized high school report?

They repeat "open internet" 43 times (disregarding the fact that the proposal is for quite the opposite) and copy-paste whole sections around the document, over and over again.

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By "open internet" they mean, "open to becoming monopolized" or "open to the highest bidder".

ISPs (at least around where I live) pretty much are already a monopoly. Can you tell me how this is will be worse then our current situation?

Comcast/NBC will be able to put things like Hulu in the "fast lane" and other services like Netflix will not. Unless of course Netflix is willing to pay Comcast/NBC more. In which case the ISP will be able to charge twice for the same service. The consumer pays the ISP to access the internet, and the service pays the ISP to deliver their content to the user.

The aspect of this that people are mostly taking issue with is the ability for ISPs to try to extort money from hosts and more money from users by throttling traffic if they don't pay. The famous example is when Comcast attempted to force Netflix to pay more for the distribution bandwidth that they use (not the upload bandwidth necessarily, but the load that Netflix was imposing as users downloaded streams). This resulted in Comcast throttling data from netflix servers until some sort of deal was reached. The legislation this proposal would remove protects consumers from this behavior.

That fact is the basis for the problem.

Net neutrality prevents ISPs from abusing their customers.

Without net neutrality, the free market must react by creating alternatives.

Since these ISPs are essentially monopolies, the free market cannot react.

Thanks for the ELI5! :-)

Romania is fantastic in this respect. Somehow during the first decade the government didn't take this internet thing all too serious resulting in a decade long free-for-all when it came to internet providers. You can have incredible speeds for very little money there.

I've been correlating this sort of anecdata with countries that meet other metrics I'd ideally have met on nomadlist (its 'internet metrics' don't really go into granularities like cost, net freedoms, or so on), I'll add Romania to the running list. Thanks

Yeah, this definitely has the feel of "A ten page paper is due, and I've said everything I needed to say in three pages."

It's very much on purpose: the language is carefully crafted to protect the new rules against future lawsuits.

How so? I'm genuinely curious.

Future lawsuit will refer to this NPRM as evidence. As a result, the FCC's lawyers spend a lot of time trying to protect themselves, which means the text of the NPRM is worded in an overly complicated way.

Although my data is very limited, I am beginning to suspect that quite a bit of new documentation produced by the current administration looks like high school work.

As admittedly minuscule evidence, I present the I-130 USCIS (was the INS) PDF form[1], which ballooned from 2 well-designed pages to a hideous 9 page effort, which has amateurish field validation and vast expanses of unfilled boxes into which one cannot even type "N/A" (because it's generally a bad idea to leave blank text fields on important forms)

[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/form/i-130.p...

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