We're essentially arguing sides in a commercial dispute, because we've been led to think that using Google is akin to running software under our control.
How did that end up working out? What does passion and experience matter if the only real voice is a pile of money and favors in the hands of a lobbyist? The FCC is so corrupt/captures that it didn’t make a bit of difference, unless you count catharsis from speaking against it as a positive result.
I suspect general age-based conservatism also makes many write off the currently appearing problems. For example, interpreting this recent censorship push as well and good, rather than as a direct dismantling of the revolution of two decades ago.
And sure, it's great that Reddit et al did that blackout. But realistically that is primarily marketing for their customers and employees. Most of the energy in the Net Neutrality battle is about who will be commercial winners and losers. For instance, Netflix would have no problem with regulation that would defend their position yet say allow discrimination of BitTorrent traffic - this is the hazard I'm highlighting with the thinking that companies are going to stand up for individual rights.
I would imagine most people arguing about this have no illusions about how under their control Google is. They're arguing the same reason people argue about other policy questions: because it will affect them, either positively or negatively, and because it's fun.
> lack of Internet champions, but plenty of Web champions
Pedantry. A web champion is a subtype of an internet champion. The US has plenty of both.
It's not pedantry. It's disingenuous to equate Web Giants as standing up for Internet rights, when they're really just optimizing for their bottom line. While the two concepts start off aligned, what happens is that the companies compromise in a way that preserves their profits, yet still destroys the freedom. This actually sets up a barrier to competing with them, called regulatory capture. Witness that it wasn't enough for Google to simply suffer the DMCA, they went beyond and created a whole slew of systems to proactively police their users' activities.
The obvious difficulty is there's little money in it, as the benefits are distributed throughout society rather than captured by a centralized company. My overall point is that looking towards the tech giants to defend our own rights is folly.
(They do interface with several early Internet protocols such as SMTP. But that's better looked at as mining content from non-web protocols, which they'd have no intrinsic problem deprecating like XMPP)