fredo699

Please never talk about politics, HN.

What's this? Someone disagreeing with me? On HN? THIS WILL NOT STAND!

>As a pragmatist, I (begrudgingly) acknowledge that because the system is rigged, net neutrality is likely our only option to prevent the existing telecoms from completely screwing over their customers

I completely agree on this point. We need net neutrality for now. But what I'm worried about is people losing steam after this. We've seen more energy put into rallying people around net neutrality than anything else like it. Now, if and when we get it, people will think the fight's won.

Just because I doubt they'll do it doesn't mean I said it's wrong. I mean... it would suck, but it's not wrong, morally speaking.

Well, it's actually well within their right to do that as a business. It's also well within your right, as a customer not to do business with them. However, this whole situation would be solved if we just focused on what was important, like I said: fixing the monopoly problem rather than the "net neturality" problem, if it even is one.

I am completely against net neutrality. The problem I have is that people think it's a solution rather than a stop-gap. The problem is still, ultimately, that we have monopolies at play. That's the real issue. But for some reason, all of this effort and energy has been focused on getting net neutrality, rather than fixing the actual problem.

I also don't think that ISPs would ever do some of the things that people are spreading fud about. I have serious doubts they would ever block certain sites for business reasons. We already have laws against that. I doubt they'd ever turn sites into a package you need a monthly access fee for either. People don't like paying more for less. They'd never so blatantly piss off their entire customer base like that when they really only stand to lose money. It's much more in their favor to keep things working the way they are now, except to allow some sites that need a lot of bandwidth the speeds they need.