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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

If net neutrality is lost, this could inspire a renewed invigoration of decentralized internet, e.g. Tor and P2P style. This may also inspire new ISP startups and create rapid innovation in networking.

The prospect of net neutrality being repealed definitely sucks, but great things can come from hitting rock bottom

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ISP blocking of P2P protocols (notably Comcast and BitTorrent) was one of the acts that accelerated the net neutrality policy efforts; the technologies you point to are at least as likely to be early casualties of the non-neutral net as to take off under it.

Agreed. Instead, I'd hope for more interest in steganography.

I see a comment like this on HN quite frequently. A generic "maybe X will inspire a decentralized solution for Y". While I think this is typically fraught with user experience nightmares, I'm not sure how decentralization of ISPs would even work. Wouldn't that simply mean MORE ISPs, something that is almost impossible to do in the Untied States (and thusly one of the biggest reasons for needing net neutrality)?

"Decentralized ISP" generally means wireless over unlicensed frequencies which requires none of those pesky permits. Historically wireless has been fairly expensive and 10x slower than wired, but maybe next time (60 GHz?) will be different. Probably not.

> e.g. Tor and P2P style.

You are always going to be able to encrypt your data in a way that their filters do not understand. The problem is that anything the filters do not understand will go to the low priority queue. Your Tor traffic will get treated just like Netflix traffic, in the event that Netflix chooses not to pay protection money.

Or the packets might be thrown out entirely, only letting you use a certain set of port, ip ranges and protocols

I doubt they'll ever throw anything out entirely. 2000ms latency and 75% packet loss is as good as blocked and the PR team can keep saying they don't block anything.

First you gonna have to climb from the rock bottom while the entrenched monopolists (and the government) are trying to keep you there.

OTOH American people chose this, so it's not some evil corporations who are to blame, it's the people, your friends, neighbors, etc. People forget that sometimes.

Also IIRC there was a case in the 90s of an ISP not playing ball with the government WRT surveillance IIRC and it ended up out of business and IIRC the CEO in legal trouble.

How did we chose this? The person who appointed the FCC commissioner has no mandate. The majority of people didn’t vote for him. The FCC is on record saying that they won’t listen to comments from citizens.

We the majority have NO voice.

Trump Nov 12 2014:

"Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media."

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...

  The person who appointed the FCC commissioner

If you're referring to Pai, that would be Obama.

I realize this is sort of wishing for the ability to create materials at scale with the tensile strength to make a space elevator but I wonder how far are we really from having "spooky action at a distance" connected devices. Removing the last mile leverage ISPs have now could help break this near monopoly they have over America's communications.

> "spooky action at a distance" connected devices

We have that; it's called radio.

If you're hoping for something spookier and more quantum-mechanical, then see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem which implies that under quantum mechanics as currently understood, entanglement cannot be used for communication.

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