Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throw10920 | Hacker News Reader

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> In reality, no net neutrality would mean things like Netflix not counting as data on your mobile plan through some kind of sponsorship, or free basic internet like Wikipedia and news at a lower cost.

You seem pretty pro-free-market, so here's the free-market angle: things like zero-rated Netflix on your mobile plan and free "basic" internet are market distortions. Companies are abusing the lack of net neutrality to engage in bundling, discounting, and collusion practices, which are bad for you as a consumer - these are anti-competitive practices!

Everyone likes getting something for cheap/free, but that doesn't mean that it's actually good for you, other people, the market, or society as a whole.

I agree that most of the bad things that net neutrality advocates predicted would happen wouldn't, but the things that did happen are still bad.

What's wrong with bundling or discounting?

There's two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling. Zoom and slack unbundled video chat from places like Google workspace and similar software suites. A company like clickup tries to bundle all that stuff as a one stop shop (tagline is one app to replace them all)

If anything more offers would increase competitiom as it's a bigger vector to make a sale.

Another hypothetical: your isp zero rates the news sites with a given political leaning, but not yours. Reading the news that they want you to costs nothing, whereas reading the news that you want, or getting an alternative perspective on a story costs you something.

> There's two ways to make money: bundling and unbundling

This is pretty obviously wrong - you can sell things to make money, in a way that requires neither.

Now, the problem with bundling itself is that it introduces market distortions. The way that free markets work is that producers make things, and then buyers buy the best thing based on its price and other factors. Bundling impedes this process because it means that consumers no longer buy the best goods based on their individual price and merits.

Plus, bundling is usually used by monopolistic companies to anti-competitively extend their influence from one market to another, in a way that doesn't allow the market to work.

>these are anti-competitive practices

So why can't the solution be that the DOJ files antitrust lawsuits? Like every other antitrust issue. It really doesn't make sense to create a new set of rules when there already exists antitrust regulations.

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