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Comment by boomerango | Hacker News Reader

Puts on conspiracy hat

What if killing net neutrality was a given, but the administration wanted the appearance of due process…

God, I’ve grown jaded.

I mean, the rhetoric for net neutrality was pretty extreme. According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass. Only services affiliated with the big greedy telcos were going to be given a pass while all the other services on the web were going to require additional fees to get adequate bandwidth to/from. That was a major fear mongering argument that hasn't come to pass. All the major tech sites were publishing the same rhetoric.

At the time home broadband wasn't so cheap outside of about a few hundred major cities, satellite internet was a joke, and phones were still on 3G networks with relatively aggressive data caps.

It wasn't obvious whether the telcos were going to keep competing and improving or just become complacent as a cartel. Snowden's leaks were just about to be released. The distrust seemed very reasonable at the time.

In a few ways the "fast lane" idea did get implemented, but in terms of cost rather than the speed of access. Lots of bundles between telcos and streaming services exist now (i.e. Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, ESPN, YouTube TV, etc.).

What did these companies get out of pushing to repeal it then? If the regulation was banning a business model that no one was going to use anyway, I don't see the impetus to commit mass fraud. Does net neutrality prevent anything beyond fast lanes and censorship?

Just to speculate:

- perhaps it includes auditing and reporting measures to ensure they aren't doing this things.

- maybe its really hard to guarantee exactly equal performance for all traffic and they examine the traffic and do different things depending on the domain to balance loads

To overly simplify it I believe we witnessed a battle of big tech vs big ISP. Each had a financial stake. Big ISP didn't want to pay for investments in infrastructure it didn't think would bring a good ROI or the extra costs you mentioned above with having to comply with new government regulations. And Big tech didn't want to pay extra fees for being some of the biggest servers of data on the internet. The fact so many comments here don't acknowledge big tech also had business interests in net neutrality passing like big ISP had business interests in it failing scares me. They are both big business looking out for their own backsides. I'm saying this as someone who grew up in a house that STILL doesn't have access to highspeed landline internet in 2023 because the ISPs did t consider the density of houses in the area worth the investment. I'm not immune to Big ISP or a shill. But this legislation was not the good vs evil it's made out to be by so many. Big tech companies have little problem taking a stand for some opinions they don't seem acceptable. they don't give neutrality to their platforms either.

Big tech has large service costs because a large number of little people are requesting data from their networks. Data for which the transit has already been payed for by the requestor. Despite the 'asymmetries' in throughput vectors, the market value equivalent of a Poynting vector is minimized with settlement-free peering. Paid peering is only enforceable because there are few enough retail providers for large segments of the population that they can wield monopsony power without customers fleeing on masse from degraded service.

It was obvious from the one sided marketing that the entire story wasn't being told.

They want to charge you for access, but they also want to charge who you are connecting to, even if through a middleman.

Just because Netflix paid their providers, your local isp wants their cut as well.

> According to the rhetoric of the time, we would be living in a world of internet "fast lanes" right now if net neutrality didn't pass.

Anything remotely resembling this existed almost a decade ago in a very different landscape, and what you're saying isn't even really reflective of the reality at the time. The vast majority of reasonable people were talking about what would gradually happen if the concept of net neutrality was totally thrown out; in the interim both sides have constructed more nuance, there is more public awareness, more partisanship, and thus different goalposts being fought over.

Now we have a ruling that the FCC can't limit state net neutrality law, because Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE. Less "fast lane," more "death lane." ISPs know that the current environment won't tolerate their unchecked fantasies.

They have a new fantasy where they want a fee from high bandwidth platforms like Netflix and YouTube, because suppisedly they can't deliver what they already charged consumers for. More likely because there's a lot of money moving about and they want a bigger slice.

If a water bottling company moved into your town I'm sure you'd support them paying a little extra. You pay for your water too.

That data is only flowing to me because I requested it, and the ISP already sold me an uncapped service.

Can you explain your analogy? I'm unclear if the aquifer is the ISP, the video platform, or something else.

> Verizon was literally fucking THROTTLING FIREFIGHTERS DURING A MAJOR WILDFIRE

Here are some sources for anybody who doesn't want to believe this happened:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/08/verizon-throttle... https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/verizon-throttled-californi... https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/verizon-throttle-fir... https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/verizon-firefighter-data-s... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/verizon-explains-why-throttle...

I remember back then, it was abundantly clear that this is what it was. Ajit Pai was against it. He’s a corporate shill. They were doing stuff deliberately to sour the process. Also, like 100% of the fake comments were against net neutrality, which was quite telling. The fake comments weren’t even spread in a believable way. The times look very much bot generated. Simple stuff to filter out if you were honest.

I try to ignore the message of bad-faith content instead of penalizing the person who it seems to favor. Otherwise you enable false flag attacks.

What if? That's almost certainly what happened.

/\---- This! In fact, if you were paying attention to FCC proceedings during that time, I'd be surprised if you came away with any other conclusion.

There is a reason that "Fuck Ajit Pai." is a meme.

Are you really positing that the NY State AG was colluding across four years of time with the Trump administration's FCC? That's getting a big beyond "jaded" and into tinfoil territory, to be honest.

No, there's no collusion here. These are just state laws that are insufficient to compel the behavior we want. She got what she could and called it a victory. But a very progressive AG is clearly not in the pocket of the internet content industry.

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