Your comment is a Harbinger of days soon to come.  Ah my nation, how I weep for thee.

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&quot;Drain the swamp&quot; means different things to different people.

A lot of politicians go to Washington wanting to drain the swamp. They quickly discover that it isn&#x27;t a swamp. It&#x27;s a jacuzzi with free champaign.

Yes, they believed him. Despite numerous examples from his history that he shouldn&#x27;t be believed.

He did run on &quot;drain the swamp&quot; which meant getting rid of people that do things like this. The problem is that people believed him.

I abstained from voting. I&#x27;m still happy with my decision. People actually care about politics again [1]. Maybe next time don&#x27;t railroad my candidate (Sanders) during the primaries. I will never vote for a neoliberal or corporate Democratic candidate, even if you hold my country hostage.[1] Alabama has a Democratic state senator for the first time in decades.

No. Give me a candidate worth voting for, and I will vote. The current &quot;pick the lesser of two shitheads&quot; is ridiculous. Both parties in the US are to blame.The two party system in the US today means that voting for anyone that is not a Democrat or Republican is a complete waste of time.

I was tempted to not vote seeing as I live in Idaho, I don&#x27;t even have anyone running for local&#x2F;state seats I want to vote for (our state district had republicans running unopposed for house&#x2F;senate) and though I hate the phrase my vote literally meant nothing in the federal elections last year.I still did it, because I firmly believe it&#x27;s my duty (and I personally would go so far as to say we should have Australia-style penalties for NOT voting) - though I did get to protest vote both Hillary and Trump since the latter was going to win my state anyway.

We live in an electoral system. For almost all of the states of the U.S. it&#x27;s actually factually correct that there&#x27;s no difference for whom you vote in the Presidential elections. In many locations, it also doesn&#x27;t matter who you vote for in Congressional ones thanks to gerrymandering drawing boundary lines around you before you even get to the polls.We can discuss ideologically what the differences are between the parties, but as those of us in CA, NY, NJ, etc. well know - it&#x27;s purely academic.[edit:] Folks, it&#x27;s a winner-take-all capital-E Electoral system in the vast majority of states, and in the vast majority of states, the demographic votes consistently in the same way. Thus very few states swing the entire Presidential election process, meaning that they matter. In California, for example, 3 million Democrats could have stayed in bed all day and not voted at all, and still it would have not touched the end result there.

I did not vote, and I see that as a &quot;vote of no-confidence.&quot;At some point, a president will be elected with only like, 10% of the population having actually voted for them, and that&#x27;ll be a crisis that forces us to overhaul some things.

Non-voters &#x2F; people on the “there’s no difference” train also deserve a moment of reflection about whether their reality is true.

This is a bit misleading...He was appointed by Obama, but not as chairman -- and was a recommendation from McConnell.Obama was pretty clearly pro net neutrality.

He was appointed at the direction of Republicans to occupy one of the Republican seats on the Commision.

Pai was appointed by Obama and confirmed by the Senate as a Republican under law limiting the number of members of one party to a bare majority and a long-standing, strong tradition that the President defer to the leadership of the other party in the Senate in appointing members filling the seats which must be filled by members not of the President&#x27;s party. (Which Trump slow followed when renominating Democratic former commissioner Rosenworcel.) [0]Blaming Obama for Pai being on the committee, rather than the Republican Party, is like blaming Elizabeth II for acts of the British Government rather than the parliamentary majority party.OTOH, where no such legal or traditional constraint limited his choices, Trump selected Pai as FCC Chair, so blaming Trump for Pai’s current position and his reasonably direct endorsement of Pai’s long-overt goals for the FCC is appropriate.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;trump-to-nominate-democrat-jessica-rosenworcel-for-empty-slot-at-fcc&#x2F;%3famp=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;amp&#x2F;s&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;201...</a>

Please don’t call out facts a divisive just because you don’t agree with them.

The entire world is made up of divisive politics. Unless you want this to be a place where nothing of substance is discussed, ever, then you cannot escape it.

Please don&#x27;t bring divisive politics into HN.  Fwiw Ajit Pai was appointed to the FCC by Obama not Trump.

The FCC is required to be split with the Executive Office filling in the gap for the Commissioner. 2 R, 2 D, and 1 whichever party wins the Presidency.

Pai was recommended by the Republican party; the FCC has two commissioners for each party, plus the chairman who decides split votes. Obama&#x27;s chairman was in favor of NN, Trump&#x27;s was solidly against, and that&#x27;s all that matters.

Sorry but the two are not correlated, as much as I&#x27;d like to agree.Trump appointed Carr.
Obama appointed O&#x27;Rielly and Pai.This one is on all of us. We let Congress become a swamp in the first place.

&gt; The FCC is required to be split with the Executive Office filling in the gap for the Commissioner. 2 R, 2 D, and 1 whichever party wins the Presidency. (from pythonboi)2 democrats voted against repealing NN. If we had 3 D&#x27;s in the FCC, if we had Hillary, you would have seen the opposite result.Please stop peddling this &quot;there&#x27;s no difference&quot; narrative. It&#x27;s clearly untrue in this case. Otherwise, why would the split be on party lines? Republicans voted to repeal NN, not democrats.

Every FCC vote on net neutrality since the 2010 rules has been straight party-line. The Republican majority is a direct result of having a Republican President. It&#x27;s pretty clear that a Democratic administration would have been different on this issue, whatever other areas there might be where that question would be murkier.

You say this as if Hillary would have been so much better.. No, this ones on all the people who continue to stick their head in the sand and try to blame the other team.

I&#x27;m a little shocked that you removed and commented on this fairly benign comment but apparently don&#x27;t have time to remove outright bigotry that I&#x27;ve flagged in the past. It feels like the moderation here is very much in the pocket of the alt-right.

Please don&#x27;t post political flamebait to HN. Even assuming you&#x27;re right, posting like this destroys this site. Everyone commenting here needs to take responsibility for not doing that.Just like it&#x27;s even more important to guard against sparks when the forest is already dry, it&#x27;s even more important to take this responsibility when the topic is already politicized.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>

If you voted for Trump, this one&#x27;s on you.

Same thing with Obama Care and any other wide reaching law. If this happens enough just the lack of stability will make people and companies leave.

&gt; No, nor will the next congress (likely Democratic or leaning that way) be prevented from passing laws that reinstate it at the legislative level.Merely leaning Democrat isn&#x27;t enough when the president can veto legislation. (I&#x27;m also not so sure it will be leaning Democrat in the first place, but that&#x27;s secondary.)Edit: To everyone downvoting: what did I say that was wrong...?

No, nor will the next congress (likely Democratic or leaning that way) be prevented from passing laws that reinstate it at the legislative level.

That remains one of the arguments against this action.

the alternative means accepting that net neutrality is dead, so... yes.

Welcome to democracy! Political fights can last for generations, and we&#x27;re still relatively early on in this one...

It wouldn&#x27;t, but then what would stop the administration after that from repealing the protections again?Are going to have to take up this fight every four years?

Many of those big, rich companies (Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc.) are in favor of net neutrality.

Would anything stop the next administration from re-instating net neutrality?Money from the even richer companies that want to prevent it from happening.Think of the ad campaigns: &quot;Since have been able to charge content providers for their use of our network, we&#x27;ve kept our costs low - that&#x27;s why you pay only $99.99&#x2F;month for your ultra fast 10 mbit connection , f net neutrality comes back, your rates will skyrocket&quot;

Would anything stop the next administration from reinstating net neutrality?

Correct, a place where innovative companies like Netflix were blocked and throttled by ISPs due to conflicts with their legacy business models.I don&#x27;t know how anyone could honestly say that taking away an important consumer protection is going to help innovation, outside of innovative new billing practices by ISPs.

right, obviously it doesn&#x27;t matter that they went through and voted for something nobody really liked. how ignorant can you be?

NY AG Schneiderman had a good response to this in the earlier AMA (which I&#x27;ve pasted below).&quot;As a preliminary matter, it’s important to recognize that net neutrality principles and protections in different forms have actually been around since 2005 and even earlier. So the flourishing of the internet and everything relying on it during that time occurred under the protections. A few years ago, however, the courts struck down one form of net neutrality protections (those that had relied on Title I of the Communications Act), so then in 2015 the FCC put net neutrality protections back in place under Title II instead (they also expanded the earlier protections, e.g., to include protections against abuses related to interconnection, which had not been the subject of net neutrality protections before 2015). Now, in 2017, the FCC under Chairman Ajit Pai is proposing to repeal net neutrality protections altogether (and the courts’ earlier decisions effectively foreclose a return to net neutrality protections under Title I). So that would be entirely new territory for the internet.Why do we think that’s bad? Well, as I explained in my own public comment in the current proceeding (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ecfsapi.fcc.gov&#x2F;file&#x2F;10717583023587&#x2F;FINAL%20RIF%20Co..." rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ecfsapi.fcc.gov&#x2F;file&#x2F;10717583023587&#x2F;FINAL%20RIF%20Co...</a>), we’ve seen how companies behave in the absence of net neutrality protections, specifically in the area of interconnection before it was regulated in 2015, and their unregulated conduct harmed consumers. In essence, they made a deliberate business decision to let the quality of internet access degrade, knowing that it hurt consumers, to try to squeeze revenue out of edge providers like Netflix and backbone providers like Cogent and Level 3. Plus, we know that many consumers have few ISPs to choose from, so competition isn’t as effective a check as in other markets. So I believe strong net neutrality regulations are needed to avoid harms to consumers.&quot;The AMA: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15853374" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15853374</a>

Computer malware was not a concern many years ago, do you also tell people to not take precautions against them?

Just so we are clear this is what is happening. Removal of regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content.Did they do that before 2015, there are cases of it, but not really that much. Providers mostly want to slowly introduce it now or at least the option to introduce it. I don&#x27;t think they want to switch it quickly, but giving them this power is very dreadful.So saying it will go back to 2015 (basically not really an issue), is looking at things a bit closed minded.

Net neutrality wasn&#x27;t instituted in 2015. It was made law in 2015. Prior to that, Net Neutrality was the standard since it was classified as an information service. It wasn&#x27;t until telecom companies started blocking VoIP traffic that it changed.

A lot of questionable stuff happened before 2015 and net neutrality was put in place to prevent more of that in the future.  Thinking that it will be eternally 2015 is optimistic.

Right, it&#x27;ll go back to being what it was before 2015 when net neutrality was instituted. The dread is unrelatable.

American will no longer be a place of innovation.  Another country will have to lead the world now

Despite how my above comment appears, I really don&#x27;t want to turn this into partisan shit-flinging. I am no Democrat, I fall well to the left of where they live, and I disagree about gun rights and a number of other things.That being said, I think it&#x27;s pretty clear that more harmful policies proposed in recent times have come predominantly from a single source, and I think it&#x27;s more important to work in opposition to that harmfulness than to find a group that perfectly represents you. Especially with a first past the post electoral system in which fractiousness dilutes the value of your vote.

Most people don&#x27;t fit into either party&#x27;s value system.  I hardly think boiling it down to R vs D is going to help anyone, we need to inform our populous.

Yes but any Republican would have taken this action. Pai was appointed because by convention (or possibly requirement) the commission is composed of two Democrats and two Republicans, and is chaired by a commissioner of the President&#x27;s choosing.Saying Pai is Obama&#x27;s fault is disingenuous, because he had to appointment a Republican, and any Republican chair would implement Republican policy.

It&#x27;s been mentioned already in this thread, Ajit Pai was appointed to the FCC by President Obama, a democrat.

Yes I tried to mitigate that in my child comment. It is, as you mentioned, a highly partisan matter though and has been beaten to death on this forum and others. I don&#x27;t know how else to approach the subject when there is such clear malfeasance coming from one side of the debate. Perhaps &quot;not at all&quot; would be the correct choice.

There&#x27;s literally nothing partisan about this topic. The technical and academic worlds are virtually unanimous on the support of net neutrality. Even political support for net neutrality is around 83% across both parties. Don&#x27;t shut down discussion because you personally feel ashamed that your party is complicit in this thing. It&#x27;s not political.

Please don&#x27;t turn HN threads into partisan fights. That leads to information heat death, something we&#x27;re all here to avoid.This topic is already highly partisan, of course, so it&#x27;s all the more important not to make it more so. This is very much a collective responsibility.

Edit: You know what, fuck it. I don&#x27;t think I can say anything here that hasn&#x27;t been said a thousand times already.

Here is my prediction: they will begin slowly, but eventually ISP&#x27;s will be priortizing the traffic of their shitty versions of various internet services (youtube.com, DropCam, etc...)... This will impact small new businesses the worst because large entities will be able to afford to pay... So, we&#x27;ll just have less new internet startups... Will be quite hard to quantify.

I hope all the loud voices that are against this move have codified their predictions in a way that they can look back and see if they were accurate.

Next step lawsuits, hopefully Congress can enact a law to settle the issue once and for all.

In no particular order: Berlin, Lisbon, London, Paris (might need a little bit of French), Amsterdam, Dublin.Each one has different pros&#x2F;cons depending on whats important to you: type of work, money, work&#x2F;life balance. All of them are good (and, aside from London soon, easy to move between once you&#x27;re resident in Europe or here on a long visa).

I really should get the paperwork going for my wife&#x27;s Italian citizenship, the US national archive sent me an un-certified copy of her grandfathers naturalization papers even though I requested a certified copy and I&#x27;ve been too lazy to try again.Anyone have advice on tech hotspots in the EU that are willing to put up with English-speaking engineers? I&#x27;ve thought about Finland a couple times, good schools for my daughter, ample hunting and fishing opportunities and from what I can tell pretty good broadband infrastructure.

My thoughts are similar to yours, but not due to innovation but rather a functioning, humane welfare state. My wife and I have been eyeing up Sweden or Denmark for years. If family wasn&#x27;t here, we&#x27;d have left already.

They also don&#x27;t have equivalent regional monopolies on telecom infrastructure, so the problem is very much mitigated.

&gt; but I don&#x27;t regret moving to London. Not one bit.The UK, along with all other commonwealth countries, has no equivalent rules to repeal or support.

None of those countries have equivalent ISP rules either.

Whenever I become angry about something here in the US and look into emigrating (mostly looking at first-world English speaking countries: CAN, UK, NZ, etc.), my research usually turns up compelling evidence that no country with any sort of socialized health care system (which is pretty much anywhere in the developed world) will accept a person with special needs children.So I&#x27;m stuck here, for good or bad.

Europe has it&#x27;s problems, but I don&#x27;t regret moving to London.  Not one bit.  The innovation here is real and tangible, by and large unencumbered by this kind of crap.

Did anyone really think that public outcry or &quot;blacking out&quot; the web would sway this administration?We have to get Congress to pass that law:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;after-fcc-vote-net-neutrality-fight-moves-to-courts-congress&#x2F;amp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;after-fcc-vote-net-neutrality-fi...</a>

Due to the way contemporary news media works, I think that Democrats (for the time being) have rapidly depreciating political capital after any election.  Last time they regulated health care, despite knowing it would cost them many seats in the coming election.  To say that &#x27;they had a chance&#x27; I think ignores a few important facts about the contemporary US electorate.

Democrats controlled both for a very short amount of time. Al Franken was part of their majority but had his membership delayed by a recount. Ted Kennedy then died and his seat went to a Republican. They never actually had a true supermajority.

That&#x27;s exactly right. This is why we need to collaborate across party lines.

Democrats had a chance to when they controlled both, and they didn&#x27;t. This problem may not be as partisan as you think..

I think you might want to run that thought through followthemoney.org

It is time to make the Internet a utility. Unfortunately, it wont happen until we get Democrats back into the Senate and House.

I can assure you that like all academics, economists are thoroughly reliant on the internet.

yeah....i mean i feel a big part of this is because these people made it without the internet and feel it&#x27;s not as necessary as people rely on it today.

&gt; Net neutrality is a fiction. Hire Akamai (et al.) to mirror your servers worldwide to speed content to your users.- David Autorthis is an infuriating argument. distributing your content throughout a network of servers to decrease rtt and increase cache hits is how the internet is supposed to work. giving priority to powerful corporations in an already congested network infrastructure, on the other hand, is anti-consumer and promotes monopolization.

Do you have links to the IGM polls showing that?

They are also in favour of letting people starve, on environmental externalities to be ignored and to nickel and dime people for short term profit ignoring long term consequences

Exactly. So many people don&#x27;t get that. Really &#x27;net neutrality&#x27; is sort of the wrong battle. I want to be able to write soft real time application on the internet.You are right, the market economist are basically just misinformed about the structure of the market. Most of them are not actually people that know much about the internet or work in that space specifically.My attempt at a solution is to equate packets with real live postal services. The postal service is not allowed to open your packets but they are allowed to look at the stamp. This is how the IP protocol was designed to work, and it would work, but that requires a change in how IP do pricing and so on and so on.

In a fully capitalist market for broadband, I would indeed feel net enforced neutrality is not quite as necessary and would agree with the pro-market economist comments more. Generally speaking, I would expect that consumers could have a choice between various tiers and qualities of service. I&#x27;m fairly sure a &quot;net neutrality&quot; type tier would be one of the options here (there&#x27;s enough for demand for it.)The current marketplace is a different story. In many places in America, Internet service is a defacto monopoly. And the current legal landscape is anti-competitive and protects the big players. States can&#x27;t experiment with their own net neutrality policies [1]; heck, legislation is in place in many states to defacto prevent municipal broadband alternatives [2]. And even with private players like Google Fiber, the &quot;big players&quot; show every willingness to use nuisance lawsuits in attempt to delay that pesky capitalist competition from coming into play. [3]I did notice that a lot of the comments in that survey of economists brought up both the anti-competitive nature of the current broadband market, as well as the worry about vertical integration (which also is a monopoly concern). So it&#x27;s not like they aren&#x27;t aware of some of the strongest reasons (MHO) for needing net neutrality style regulations at the moment.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;fcc-will-also-order-states-to-scrap-plans-for-their-own-net-neutrality-laws&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;tech-policy&#x2F;2017&#x2F;11&#x2F;fcc-will-also-or...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepress.net&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;resources&#x2F;brief_broadband.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepress.net&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;resources&#x2F;brie...</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20171101&#x2F;10474538530&#x2F;att-backs-off-nuisance-lawsuit-intended-to-hamstring-broadband-competitors-like-google-fiber.shtml" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.techdirt.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;20171101&#x2F;10474538530&#x2F;att-b...</a>

It&#x27;s pretty much exactly what paid prioritization is, which is a major part of what NN bans.

Did you read the wording of that survey? It&#x27;s very deceptive to link responses to net neutrality.&quot;Should companies have to pay more for faster internet speeds?&quot; &quot;Probably yes&quot;

Friendly reminder that economists surveyed are far more likely to be for paid prioritization than against<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.igmchicago.org&#x2F;surveys&#x2F;net-neutrality-ii" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.igmchicago.org&#x2F;surveys&#x2F;net-neutrality-ii</a>

Actually, the public has been convinced that regulation on ISPs is a good thing, and that repealing that regulation without replacing it with anything is a bad thing. And I think that&#x27;s a pretty fair thing to think.

&gt; Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing competition among ISPs?The answer is, of course, yes. But people like to think in terms of black and white, ingroup and outgroup, friend and enemy. The public is now thoroughly convinced not only that the reclassification had the intended effects (and it&#x27;s not clear that&#x27;s the case), but that reinstating the reclassification is the only way to address the issue. Anyone who says anything against this norm will be hounded until they shut up.

If there was ISP competition then a Verizon customer could switch ISPs if they disagreed with the throttling of Netflix.  I would compare it to wireless which never had these net neutrality rules.  Is wireless a disaster?  It seems like mobile plans are constantly including more data at faster speeds at a cheaper price.  Some (all?) of the carriers have various anti-net neutrality policies but consumers at least have the option to pick which set of policies they are willing to agree with.

&gt; The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix.No that&#x27;s inaccurate. Title II reclassification happened in 2015. Verizon Netflix &quot;throttling&quot; (controversial what actually happened there) happened in 2017.

That sounds like it might be a disaster for Netflix.  But for the rest of us?

It wasn&#x27;t Verizon, it was Comcast: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;technical.ly&#x2F;philly&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;graph-shows-netflix-speeds-changed-comcast-deal-comcast-roundup&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;technical.ly&#x2F;philly&#x2F;2014&#x2F;05&#x2F;09&#x2F;graph-shows-netflix-s...</a>

Except it was a disaster. The only reason the rule got put into place was because Verizon was found to be throttling Netflix. There&#x27;s no reason to suspect they won&#x27;t go back to it as soon as they can.

This is a really straightforward explanation of a situation I was having trouble getting across, thank you.

This doesn&#x27;t appear to be a problem in any other industry. If I am a farmer, I don&#x27;t have some inalienable right to have my produce on the shelves of the local grocery store. If am selling widgets through a catalog, I don&#x27;t have some inalienable right to have my catalogs delivered to customers without paying a fee.So why don&#x27;t the results you predict occur in those industries? No one worries about grocery stores capturing all of the excess value from farmers because grocers have plenty of competition. No one worries about postage carriers refusing to deliver their goods because the government has promised to provide that service as a public good for a small fee.It seems like you could solve your concerns by increasing competition among ISPs or by increasing the number of government run ISPs. I think this is still a &quot;there&#x27;s only two ISPs where I live and they both offer the same deals&quot; type of problem.

The fear of Non-Net-Neutrality goes far beyond the usual &quot;there&#x27;s only two ISPs where I life and they both offer the same deals&quot;.It&#x27;s something in completely its own category of nefariousness because they could be as anticompetitive as they want, and the market could not solve it.That&#x27;s because the injured party isn&#x27;t their customers, who could take their business elsewhere, or at least loudly complain on the internet (if they have any).It&#x27;s someone not part to the ISP&lt;-&gt;customer contract, namely that unknown video startup in Nantucket, or the e2e-encrpyted messenger app your friend Lauren is working on. They&#x27;re going to be forced into paying ISPs if they ever want to reach the ISPs&#x27; customers. And there&#x27;s no risk to the ISP, because nobody is going to change ISPs for some startup they&#x27;ve never heard about.The result could be ISPs capturing almost every cent of value created by new startups. We will also have a fractured internet, because small companies will have to negotiate contracts with every single ISP. Also want to reach those 500,000 people in eastern Montana? That&#x27;ll cost you $2,000 per week.Anyone not living on the US coasts, and people in other countries, will constantly run into &quot;HTTP Error 469: go suck a bag of..&quot;

Is blocking of VoIP traffic not covered by other anti competitive behaviour regulation?

It&#x27;s not that the state of the internet pre-2015 was a disaster but, prior to the 2015 reclassification, we were already starting to see abuses of net neutrality. When ISP&#x27;s and telecoms started to block VoIP traffic because it cut into their phone services, it was unprecedented because no one had really prioritized data based on the content up until that point. Once that started happening and more companies caught on to it, it became a point of contention. While the 2015 reclassification wasn&#x27;t a perfect solution, it did encapsulate the gist of the argument by saying that, like phone calls, we can&#x27;t prioritize data based on content.

It&#x27;s more of an issue now just because our usage of the internet has become increasingly fundamental to day-to-day life. It was, of course, already on this trajectory pre-2015, but corporate and government understanding of the internet was still very much in its infancy.Few providers abused the privileges they had, because of some combination of uncertainty about backlash, historical precedent, and lack of organization and understanding.

There definitely is a competition problem. Without net neutrality, you will be even more screwed as a consumer when your only good ISP decides to offer you bullshit media packages with fast SNAPCHATZORZ access. Sure net neutrality doesn&#x27;t help the fact that there just isn&#x27;t enough competition, but it has the potential to make things a lot worse.

&gt; It also doesn&#x27;t seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.This is a common inaccurate argument I have seen pushed by the telcos to justify repeal.There are many well-documented cases of how the &quot;big 4&quot; ISPs were increasingly blocking, redirecting (Charter&#x27;s DNS redirection), interfering (injecting javascript and&#x2F;or ads) and throttling traffic to internet services (Netflix) from their networks before the Title II reclassification of 2015.All these abuses happened during a small window of a couple years between the previous FCC&#x27;s Net Neutrality regulations were thrown out by the courts and 2015, when the Title II reclassification happened.

What exactly were the other methods so that we all know?

Pre 2015, the FCC was enforcing NN through other means.In late 2014, a court case declared the method they were enforcing didn&#x27;t fall under the scope of their powers, but strongly suggested, while noting that the ISPs could and would be a danger to the internet if left to their own devices, that they had other means to enact the same regulations.The other means was Title II classification.

&quot;It also doesn&#x27;t seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.&quot;The internet regulatory state before 2015 was pretty much a disaster. The early internet was de-facto neutral with a bizarro patchwork of idiosyncratic local regulations (see the quote &quot;the internet treats censorship as damage&quot;) and a general distaste from network operators for wide-area multicast (with good reason). Neutrality became an issue with major commercialization and particularly when internet services began to compete directly with non-internet services like TV and phones.&quot;As detailed in the survey below, nearly every operator places
limits on “commercial” use, sometimes including limits on Virtual
Private Networks, as well as limits on acting as a server. Why
might an operator put such a restriction on usage? Doing so
obviously makes the service less attractive to consumers who
might want to act in a commercial way, even in a fairly casual
manner.&quot;The simple answer is price discrimination. That this is the
case is not just intuition, but can be confirmed by company policy.
As evidence we can consider Comcast’s reply in 2001 to a user
who had complained about the ban on VPN usage on Comcast’s
network:&quot;Thank you for your message.
High traffic telecommuting while utilizing a VPN can
adversely affect the condition of the network while disrupting
the connection of our regular residential subscribers.&quot;To accommodate the needs of our customers who do
choose to operate VPN, Comcast offers the Comcast @Home
Professional product. @Home Pro is designed to meet the
needs of the ever growing population of small office&#x2F;home
office customers and telecommuters that need to take
advantage of protocols such as VPN. This product will cost
$95 per month, and afford you with standards which differ from the standard residential product.&quot;If you’re interested in upgrading . . . .&quot;-- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;papers.ssrn.com&#x2F;sol3&#x2F;papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863</a> [2003](Other examples available from: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States#Violations" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...</a>, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailydot.com&#x2F;layer8&#x2F;net-neutrality-violations-history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailydot.com&#x2F;layer8&#x2F;net-neutrality-violations-hi...</a>, and <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepress.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;net-neutrality-violations-brief-history" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.freepress.net&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2017&#x2F;04&#x2F;25&#x2F;net-neutrality-vio...</a>).Sometimes network providers got in trouble with their restrictions. Sometimes they were changed via customer and public pressure. Sometimes the complaints went to the government, usually the FCC. Sometimes they were addressed there, sometimes they weren&#x27;t. Some providers were prevented from restrictions by agreements with the FCC, some weren&#x27;t. Sometimes, something you wanted to do was impeded by your ISP or an upstream provider. Sometimes you could pay more to avoid the impediment, sometimes you couldn&#x27;t. Sometimes you could change providers to avoid the restrictions. Usually not, though. (Strike that; try &quot;Essentially always not.&quot;)Increasing competition is a dandy idea, and it was the primary argument at the time. Unfortunately, there are two ways to do it, mostly: force utility-infrastructure plant operators (the phone network, the cable TV network, whatever) to be neutral with regards to actual service providers (which sort of worked for long-distance telephone providers, I guess), or to destroy all of the streets in America by laying more cables. Again.Competition hasn&#x27;t worked before in the US, and I&#x27;m unaware of anywhere in the world where it has worked.

&gt; It also doesn&#x27;t seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.From 2010-2014 similar rules to the 2015 rules were in place, citing a different statutory basis; these ruled were struck down in 2014, with the court pointing to Title II, be basis of the 2015 rules, as the available statutory basis for the kind of rules adopted in 2010.From 2014-2015 there were no open internet rules in place, but the industry was operating in awareness that he FCC majority was drafting new rules with similar objectives.And FCC net neutrality policy existed from 2004-2010, working on yet a different mechanism, which was struck down by the courts in 2010.And before that, things get complicated, because even though there was no net neutrality policy for broadband in general, there was also very little broadband of any kind, and what there was often, for much of the pre-2004 period, fell under different regulatory regimes based on the underlying technology (cable as cable, DSL under telephone related rules.)So, perhaps none of the pre-2015 regulatory states were a disaster, but repealing the 2015 order doesn&#x27;t returns us to any of those states, or even to a condition where the law would allow the FCC to reimplement them. In fact, it gets us farther from any of the 2004-2015 states than the 2015-2017 state was.

Don&#x27;t forget that ISP&#x27;s have been buying up media companies and vice versa, this hasn&#x27;t always been the case. We now have a situation where huge amounts of media have moved from traditional networks (cable, UHF, satellite etc) to the internet. This makes it incredibly appetizing to own the networks being used and offers a huge financial incentive to prioritize your own goods over others.Factor in the way that corporations have been operating over the last decades (shareholder value is the number 1 priority) and you really do have a recipe for disaster for the consumer and small businesses.

There were net neutrality regulations before 2015! The idea that neutrality is this novel thing invented during the Obama administration is as toxic as it is ridiculously false.Pre-2015, the FCC still had regulations to enforce net neutrality, just different ones. It was active in punishing ISPs for violating neutrality under those provisions. Verizon managed to get a court to say that those regulations were inappropriate, but the court also pointed out that if ISPs were regulated under Title II, then the FCC would have the power to set the regulations that had been de facto in place for the past decade. The FCC under Tom Wheeler immediately did just that.The problem with this vote is that it removes all protections without replacing them with anything else. All we have now is &quot;yeah, the FTC might look at it if it&#x27;s egregious... also the ISPs promise really hard to behave themselves.&quot; It&#x27;s not just that the FCC has removed the rules (although that&#x27;s still incredibly important), it&#x27;s that they&#x27;ve totally abdicated their position as the regulatory body for telecommunications.

This has been asked a few times but never fully answered, can someone explain why this vote in particular is a problem?  I understand net neutrality and I am all for it, but there was considerable public doubt before reclassification that this was the proper way to go about it.  It also doesn&#x27;t seem like the internet regulatory state of pre-2015 was a disaster.  Would we better off focusing our efforts on increasing competition among ISPs?  The major problem in all the pre-2015 net neutrality issues was that people often did not have any other ISP to use if their current ISP introduced a policy that was anti-consumer.

does this mean anything yet? i mean with all the lawsuits that will be incoming. can cable companies start their bullshit?

I don&#x27;t care too much for politics, but this one hurts. :(

How do you expect those independent experts to be chosen? Even then, how do expect these experts to &quot;objectively address&quot; the issue? I don&#x27;t agree with partisan politics, but the solution isn&#x27;t demanding independent, magical objectivity, because that doesn&#x27;t exist, regardless, everyone would claim to have it, the liars and the idiots especially.If we want better representation of the facts and the People&#x27;s opinion, we need better representation. The current system lacks nuance and seems to be subject to Elite interests over popular ones.

This whole discussion is missing one point. Why are FCC members supposed to represent some parties, instead of being independent experts? It&#x27;s the root of the problem. Instead of objectively addressing the issue, FCC is dominated by dumb partisan politics.

Why did they solicit public feedback then? And why did they misrepresent public feedback and refuse to acknowledge that most people want net neutrality? Obviously they aren&#x27;t beholden to what the public wants, but the latter is clearly scummy, is it not?

Really funny when people in a democracy believe in majority rule.

Logician and Philosopher Raymond Smullyan had a story about this in one of his books. He had gone on a trip with a woman with a little girl. The adults wanted to eat at colorful local cafes, while the girl wanted to eat at McDonalds. He suggested that they vote, and the little girl replied, &quot;That&#x27;s no fair. I&#x27;d lose!&quot;Our republic isn&#x27;t designed just to do what the people want. It&#x27;s intentionally designed so that good people can sometimes do something unpopular in the public interest. For this to work, it&#x27;s incumbent on the voting public to elect good people.

I was about to say people think in Democracy every vote counts the same. It doesn&#x27;t. Imagine quality of people&#x27;s life in big cities if majority living outside would be playing first violin. The latest Presidential race is great example how Democratic election works.

Just because it&#x27;s not the FCC&#x27;s &quot;job&quot;, it doesn&#x27;t mean that overwhelming support for Net Neutrality is wrong.

You&#x27;re right that it&#x27;s not a referendum.  But the public poll was not &quot;yea or nea?&quot; it was &quot;if we did this, what sort of problems would it raise for you?&quot;  And if they had substantive answers to the problems raised, then it would be logical for them to override the outcry.  But it was instead as if the answer was, &quot;Yes, the feedback solicited was merely our bureaucratic obligation but we are not obligated to follow through.&quot;

Their job is to serve the public interest though. Not sure that&#x27;s funny.

The government exists for and by the people. Funny how fascists seem to forget this.

The FCC&#x27;s mandate isn&#x27;t to give in to the industry, either.

This isn&#x27;t exactly true. There is a reason that the FCC must accept submissions from the public before it makes a major decision -- it&#x27;s part of the FCC charter to consider the input of the public. If a prosecutor can argue that the FCC did not take the public&#x27;s comments into account (or did not take them seriously or the public commenting process was not done properly), then a court should overturn the FCC&#x27;s decision.

This is true with some caveats. &quot;The judiciary&quot; can overturn a decision in some cases. See [0] for a very detailed explaination. Comments to the FCC do MATTER. If half of America says that Net-Neutrality is good and then it gets repealed, then the judicial branch can accept a case examining the decision. Or something, IANAL, but the the dude who wrote [0] is.Specifically, the paragraph which starts with &quot;Another way they&#x27;ll drop their deference&quot; is roughly the section which covers the caveats.[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;politics&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6x0bdy&#x2F;985_of_unique_net_neutrality_comments_oppose_ajit&#x2F;dmcoqey&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;politics&#x2F;comments&#x2F;6x0bdy&#x2F;985_of_uni...</a>

They are required to have public comments, which Pai said he would ignore for the most part.

So, tax payers pay a government agency to get screwed over..?

Let us agree that what you said is True. Let us also agree that this statement is true, and perhaps becoming increasingly at odds with our federal government:&gt; Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

That&#x27;s just not true.  The FCC are appointed by our elected representatives.  Why do you think they even have to pretend they are accepting public comments on things like this?  If the FCC does something bad, like this, we have the ability to elect better representatives, who will throw out these telco stooges and appoint people who represent us, not the large telco monopolies.

What do you suppose the purpose of government agencies is then?Looking at their mandate it seems pretty clear that they are there to serve the interests of American citizens and should be acting in citizens best interests.I think that&#x27;s pretty clear in the use of the phrase &quot;the people of the United State&quot; here:The FCC&#x27;s mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (amendment to 47 U.S.C. §151) is to &quot;make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges.&quot;[1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Federal_Communications_Commission" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Federal_Communications_Commiss...</a>

It&#x27;s funny, the FCC&#x27;s mandate isn&#x27;t to poll the public and do whatever most of them want. Strange how people seem to think it&#x27;s a numbers game, at least when they feel the numbers are on their side

Republican legislators are pretty uniformly against net neutrality. The Republican public is not, with one recent poll showing 3 out of 4 Republicans familiar with the issue voicing opposition to the rollback of regulations. [1][1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-switch&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;12&#x2F;this-poll-gave-americans-a-detailed-case-for-and-against-the-fccs-net-neutrality-plan-the-reaction-among-republicans-was-striking" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-switch&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;12...</a>

Because people voted for someone, doesn&#x27;t mean they fully agree with the elected person&#x27;s whole program. In an election you have only a few candidates for a large number of possible combinations of positions. If you mostly agree with republicans except on a few things, you&#x27;re probably still going to vote republican.

I believe he was referring to constituents, rather than politicians.

bi-partisan? Pretty sure the vast majority of Republican candidates came out against it last November. People knew what they were voting for.

This is objectively true. There are studies that show that the opinions of American voters have a near zero, statistically insignificant effect on policy:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fightthefuture.org&#x2F;videos&#x2F;does-voting-make-a-difference&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fightthefuture.org&#x2F;videos&#x2F;does-voting-make-a-differen...</a>

We live in an oligarchy, the will of the voters hasn&#x27;t been relevant for a long time:&gt; Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;blogs-echochambers-27074746" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;blogs-echochambers-27074746</a>

The fun part is when this goes to court and the veil of secrecy is lifted.

This is being downvoted because it is a grammatical correction which is wrong.

&quot;at its worst&quot; (and yes, it is government at its worst in the lack of competition protection)

&quot;The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. Republicans are the party that says government doesn&#x27;t work, and then they get elected and prove it.&quot;- P.J. O&#x27;Rourke in Parliament of Whores (1991)

&gt; Republicans, moreso than DemocratsDunno. Fighting institutional &lt;word that ends in &#x27;ism&#x27;&gt; is pretty popular on the left.

Well, by saying that Title II was an overreach of the government and stifles competition. (Not my opinion. Just stating that it&#x27;s not exactly inconsistent with their ideology. Just another example of ideology over common sense preventing people from doing what&#x27;s right)

This move decreases the government&#x27;s regulatory power in this area; it completely follows republican ideaology. The government cant screw over citizens if they aren&#x27;t touching an issue.

Which is exactly what cracks me up... Republicans, moreso than Democrats, are always talking about government screwing over the people and yet this vote was completely on party lines. I wonder how they&#x27;re going to figure out that dissonance.

If you&#x27;re interested in further reading I found this analysis [1] of the gap between GOP policy and GOP public positioning pretty interesting. However, it&#x27;s certainly couched as a screed. Depending on your politics that may make it difficult to wade through.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;splinternews.com&#x2F;the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift-is-blowing-up-in-t-1793944216" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;splinternews.com&#x2F;the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift...</a>

Confuse the government and big corps with new technological innovation.

Seriously! I&#x27;m playing the world&#x27;s tiniest violin for 90% of people upset over this.  Reaping what they sow, if you ask me.

Big bureaucratic, un-elected government institutions are problematic?Well color me pink.

When you explain what Net Neutrality is, an overwhelming majority of people supported it, including republicans. This isn&#x27;t just a tech-literate liberal issue.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-switch&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;12&#x2F;this-poll-gave-americans-a-detailed-case-for-and-against-the-fccs-net-neutrality-plan-the-reaction-among-republicans-was-striking&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;the-switch&#x2F;wp&#x2F;2017&#x2F;12&#x2F;12...</a>

From everything I&#x27;ve seen, net neutrality seems to have broad voter support, regardless of party, and even many Republicans in office have voiced concerns. So are they really acting the way voters would expect?Voter support (a couple of instances here, but there are many), (PDF): <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na-production.s3.amazonaws.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;American_Public_Broadly_Supports_NN_3.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;na-production.s3.amazonaws.com&#x2F;documents&#x2F;American_Pu...</a>

&gt; Republicans were voted by the publicEven this claim is arguable, given gerrymandered congressional districts and inherent overweighting of low-population rural states in the Senate.

It&#x27;s not that simple.In an ideal world, people vote in the government they want, and the elected representatives follow the will of the people. We all know such a world doesn&#x27;t exist [1]. In practice:* Most voters don&#x27;t even know what net neutrality is. How will they care if they don&#x27;t understand that they should care? It&#x27;s a complicated, nuanced subject even for tech people.* It wasn&#x27;t part of the Trump&#x2F;republican platform at the time of the election. As far as I can recall, it didn&#x27;t even come up during the presidential debates. Voters might want net neutrality, but they might not have known that voting for Trump&#x2F;GOP would cause a repeal.* The last couple of decades show that Congress (and politicans in general) overwhelmingly goes where the money is. There&#x27;s a huge amount of money and lobbying power on the pro-repeal side, and the current FCC is a classic example of regulatory capture [2], with every indication that the FCC (and the Trump administration) is now stocked with industry insiders.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bartleby.com&#x2F;73&#x2F;417.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bartleby.com&#x2F;73&#x2F;417.html</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulatory_capture" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Regulatory_capture</a>

&gt;This is government at it&#x27;s worst.Is it? Republicans were voted by the public into Congress, into the presidency. They are acting just as anyone voting for them could expect. In that sense they are representing the will of the people who duly elected them.The FCC ignored the will of a small % of technology-oriented, predominately liberal voters. Just because all the media that you might tend to consume and the people you tend to converse with are vocally against this repeal, doesn&#x27;t mean that that represents the will of the majority. That same sort of ideological bubble is what caused everyone to be so shocked when Trump actually won, despite all the polls and predictions to the contrary.

What? If you&#x27;re a staunch libertarian who wants the FCC to go away, how would the absence of FCC help net neutrality?We only have (had!) net neutrality and other important regulatory protections because the FCC exists.Something needs to exist as a protection against corporate abuse. If it&#x27;s not a centralized agency, then what? There&#x27;s no self-correcting mechanism in capitalism that magically prevents companies from screwing with consumers.

Hate to say &quot;I told you so&quot;, but conservatives (sometimes) and libertarians have been warning the country for ever about the pitfalls of centralizing important things like this under an unaccountable federal bureaucracy.  If you&#x27;re opposed to this ruling, you&#x27;re most likely reaping what you sow.

This is proof positive that the current FCC commission has ignored the will of the voters on this issue.Support for Net Neutrality was overwhelming and bi-partisan, yet Ajit Pai just plowed forward without consideration for what the citizens demanded.This is government at its worst.

Keep in mind the FCC is not accountable to the public – we don&#x27;t vote them in. However, we as the public still have power to push our representatives to encode NN as law. Now that NN has unfortunately been repealed, we can cue in Congress to act.

Don&#x27;t give up. Our democracy isn&#x27;t working properly. Too many are complacent.

You&#x27;re just saying your democracy isn&#x27;t working properly, just for different reasons.Most Trump supporters did not elect trump &quot;knowing ... he would end Net Neutrality&quot;, and a statement from 2014 does not disprove that (a cursory glance at r&#x2F;TrumpCriticizesTrump&#x2F; kinda makes the point).The US public is atrociously misinformed as a whole, either due to lack of education or bad media incentives or both. In order to function, a democracy requires an informed public.

Having a good memory is the singularly best way to combat the money corrupting politics.The people just proved with the Alabama special election that they can change the establishment if they feel strongly enough about it.Sadly I think the effects of repealing Net Neutrality will be felt more like a frog in a slowly heating pot of water, and no single change is going to entice the majority of the population to vote. It&#x27;s not the tech industry that needs to be convinced that repealing neutrality is bad, it&#x27;s the general non-tech population that needs to be convinced to care.

Our democracy is hardly a democracy. I kind of wish people would stop discussing it as such. The opinion of the population matters very little to the outcome of legislation, and for those whose opinions it does matter (legislators), they are bought and paid for.Also, if you really think that people who voted for Donald Trump understood the intricacies of net neutrality you must be an incredibly optimistic individual.

the problem with this statement is we weren&#x27;t given a fair choice of options.. It was this or that and they both stunk to high heaven.

While I do not think Donald Trump is turning out to be a great president, his competition was not any better for different reasons. I think there is also a problem with how our Democracy elects people as well.

&gt; One year ago, the states chose Donald Trump as president, knowing they he would end Net NeutralityMore charitably, they chose Donald Trump on the suspicion that he would do &quot;better&quot; than Hillary Clinton on: abortion, immigration, the economy, leading in &quot;the culture wars&quot;, and maybe a few other issues. Net neutrality was a litmus test for basically nobody.

&gt;the states chose Donald Trump as presidentThe states, yet not the peopleSure, he won with our current system, but even school children think our current system is silly

&gt; our democracy isn&#x27;t working properlyDemocracy doesn&#x27;t work through public declarations, it works through elections. One year ago, the states chose Donald Trump as president, knowing they he would end Net Neutrality [1]. If a population wants to send a different message, they must do it in the next election [2].[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;realdonaldtrump&#x2F;status&#x2F;532608358508167168" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;realdonaldtrump&#x2F;status&#x2F;53260835850816716...</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swingleft.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swingleft.org&#x2F;</a>

I am not going to give up on civic engagementPlease don&#x27;t. I mean that very sincerely. The fact that you took the time to do this is very inspiring to me. It reminds me of this guy: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;professional-troublemaker.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;professional-troublemaker.com</a>It kind of blows my mind to think of how much individuals who are focused and determined can really accomplish.

Thank you for doing that. I sincerely hope this fight isn&#x27;t over yet; hopefully your comment gets its rightful fair hearing.

The effort&#x27;s appreciated. I&#x27;d commend you for it even if I disagreed with your position — to take the time to directly express concern and raise issues is key, in my opinion, to enacting real change.

Did you submit a comment on this proceeding, beyond just clicking on some site that auto-generated a comment?I spent several days working on my comment; it was a dozen pages long, it included relevant citations, and it addressed specific questions asked in the NPRM. I took the time to correct a few falsehoods in the NPRM&#x27;s technical analysis.Now imagine what it is like to see that comment being specifically cited and totally dismissed in the draft rules that were just approved. In a way it is worse than just being ignored -- someone took the time to read my comment and comments by like-minded experts, saw the part where we corrected falsehoods, and then replied with, &quot;Well, ISPs say $X so $X is true and your comment wrong.&quot;I am not going to give up on civic engagement but I am sure some of those like-minded engineers and researchers might.

This is false. The United states is a representative democracy, AND a republic. A democracy can be direct (As in parts of ancient Greece), or representative (As in... Every democracy that is not in ancient Greece.)The only criteria for being a republic is that you don&#x27;t have a monarch. The USSR was a republic. China is a republic. Canada is not a republic. Yet, Canada is also a representative democracy, while neither China, nor the USSR are.

This isn&#x27;t a democracy, this is a republic. While we have some power in who we elect, those elected are representing us, and can choose to vote how they want. Whether that screws them in future elections is another story.

&gt; ... as pretty much every site&#x2F;person of significance has stated their opposition to such a repeal ...But what exactly did Google do to oppose this?In my view: doing nothing == being evil.

Any way we could build this into something more large scale? How can we do this in a way that doesn&#x27;t fall afoul of harassment laws?

&gt;PowerlessSame, so as a petty man I&#x27;ve made a personal vow to send Ajit Pai a card every Christmas reminding him he sold his soul to Comcast and that I will never forget or forgive him for it.Totally pointless right now when the whole country is calling for his head and he gets to play the haughty &quot;I don&#x27;t give a fuck, I&#x27;m set for life now, suck it plebes&quot; card.But in 2040, when he has long since moved on, and the rest of the country has forgotten, and he&#x27;s an old man that just wants to spend time with his grandkids and ensure a good future for his family or whatever, every Christmas, still, a card from me - &quot;Hey shithead, remember when you sold out the American people for cash? Fuck you.&quot;I will do this until he or I dies.

Probably because you work in the tech industry which is negatively affected by the decision.

In this instance, it&#x27;s working as intended. Based on the election results, this is pretty much expected.I suspect it&#x27;s more that all the people of significance who have stated their opposition also share the same core political ideology as you, which doesn&#x27;t match that of the party currently in power. So you view the system as not working because you didn&#x27;t get what you wanted by having everyone on your side yell louder.

This has made me feel pretty damn powerless, as pretty much every site&#x2F;person of significance has stated their opposition to such a repeal, and yet they went through it anyway. Just a gut feeling that our democracy isn&#x27;t working properly when such a loud and clear, great majority of the population messaging is completely ignored.

Now, to wait for the EFF and friends to sue.From what I&#x27;ve read, it seems like they&#x27;ve got some pretty good arguments against the FCC, so hopefully something good will come of that.

It&#x27;ll be interesting to see how that goes, whether other progressive states adopt similar rules, and whether we end up for some time in a country where some states are much more attractive to internet users and startups.

Washington state is fighting it:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;seattle-news&#x2F;washington-gov-jay-inslee-promises-state-action-on-net-neutrality-protections&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;seattle-news&#x2F;washington-gov-jay...</a>Washington state will act under our own authority and under our own laws and under our own jurisdiction to protect the very important measure of net neutrality for all Washington citizens,” he said. “We are not powerless.

Obviously a joke, but probably not terribly inaccurate from what we can expect in the future.

Except due to regulatory capture and lobbying of enough municipalities this has become harderSelling a plain service and doing it well for a fair price should have won most consumers but they will switch companies for minor discounts or the shiniest cellphone then complain they get shafter

&gt; another providerThis is laughably naive.

Hand waving and saying the market will correct itself (somehow? someway? someday?) is unhelpful.

In the last ten years, I&#x27;ve lived in 6 different localities and have had a total of 4 options for ISP, never more than 2 at any given time.  In at least some of those cases, I&#x27;ve watched as potential competition to those options was shut down by ISP-lobbied local regulation.  At whatever point there&#x27;s a possibility of competition in this space, I&#x27;ll readily buy the free-market argument that they should be de-regulated.

How exactly are they going to lose subscribers when a vast majority of them have no alternative?

Great! So the competitor can rely on leasing municipal broadband networks to avoid expensive, wide-spread fiber buildout? No, because that’s illegal in many cities thanks to lobbying from Comcast and friends.Ok, so the competitor can build their own fiber network. That’s very expensive and time consuming, but it can be done...if local legislators approve it. Sure hope Comcast and friends don’t have any influence there! This is one of the suspected reasons for the failure of Google Fiber, but hey, maybe it’ll work next time.Incidentally my two options for internet service are:1) Comcast
2) A local competitor offering sub-1MBPSSome choice.

They&#x27;re free to do so; companies exist to make money. Cable internet carriers probably will attempt something like this.The next thing that will happen is, when Comcast goes too far, another provider (cable? wireless carrier? satellite broadband? something new from a startup?) disrupts the market by offering an alternative to Comcasts&#x27; egregious policies. Comcast loses subscribers and is monetarily forced to be more consumer-friendly.

I can also see some of the four horsemen (AAPL, GOOG, AMZN, FB) discussing something along these lines: &quot;We have enough cash and&#x2F;or market cap to buy some of these last-mile companies AND we can block our competitors. Shall we pull the trigger?&quot;

Comcast board meeting (RIGHT NOW): &quot;First things first, how do we charge more for netflix streaming.&quot;

I don&#x27;t think the regulation was limited to http traffic.

No, net neutrality just makes it so ISPs can&#x27;t throttle&#x2F;block&#x2F;charge-extra-for particular websites, like they do in Portugal: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;RoKhanna&#x2F;status&#x2F;923701871092441088" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;RoKhanna&#x2F;status&#x2F;923701871092441088</a>

Is anyone working on market based routing over mesh networks with crypto currencies? Would that have been disallowed under the network neutrality rules?

Oh man, this analogy could be carried much further.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

A relevant and interesting discussion on net neutrality: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hKD-lBrZ_Gg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hKD-lBrZ_Gg</a>

Unless of course you mean innovative new ways of rent-seeking.

R.I.P. innovative America, everything there is dying for people to innovate :-(

We have years worth of instances of telcoms already trying to throttle and filter traffic to their choosing. They were blocked each time. So we know exactly what they will do now that they are legally off the hook.

If &quot;nothing is going to change&quot; then why the repeal? What benefit will this repeal actually bring? Either they pushed for this to be petty and undo an Obama era bill or something dastardly is in the pipeline.

As with any other system where a product is delivered over someone else&#x27;s product, a negotiation will take place, money will change hands, and business will resume. That&#x27;s normal.Google and Netflix wanted to implement rules prohibiting a perfectly normal transaction in business because it would cost them money, and framed it as the public good. I&#x27;m entirely okay with the two giants having to pay more, it provides Google and Netflix&#x27;s competitors additional room to breathe and innovate.

Comcast isn&#x27;t a Tier 1 provider. Cogent, the netflix ISP at issue, claims to be, but that is very debatable. The internet isn&#x27;t built on two T2 or T3 providers doing no-fee exchanges.Net Neutrality doesn&#x27;t prevent peering disputes.

Limiting bandwidth is one thing. My local Cable company is proish-NN (they have publicly stated that they have no plans to implement prioritization even if the FCC passed this vote), they still impose data caps and network management practices on consumer plans. While I hate these practices (hence paying extra for a business connection), that&#x27;s not what the NN issue is about.Comcast refused to upgrade their peering connections to the networks used by Netflix (Level3 I believe was one of them?) to extort money from them. Netflix doesn&#x27;t get service from Comcast, yet Comcast decided it could charge them to get access to their customers.The internet is built upon no-fee exchanges between Tier 1 providers, but since Comcast (and some others like CenturyLink, Verizon, AT&amp;T) is both a consumer ISP AND a major transit provider they try to make arguments like &quot;you&#x27;re sending us more traffic than we send you, this isn&#x27;t fair&quot; even though their customers are the ones requesting the data. It&#x27;s total bullshit, and they will milk this for everything it&#x27;s worth.

You&#x27;ll get the &quot;vote with your wallet&quot; speech. Which for most people, and like myself, your only other option in order to do just that is to buy an LTE wifi or get satellite internet.

Access to information like you describe would be very useful in a free market, but the ISP market is not.If I get a report from my ISP outlining how they throttled me, how am I supposed to act on that information?

Unpopular opinion: Title II is not a great solution to Net Neutrality. The only thing I disklike is there isn&#x27;t a better option already in place.I would rather see the FTC address EULAs. If a company says, &quot;we may from time-to-time limit your bandwidth&quot; I think they should be on the hook to produce a report every month when and why they limited you. This is not much different than the report you get from your investments, or your cell phone carrier report when you place a call or send a text message.

F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules