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United, student loans, the internet, utilities, and you


Darth Ender
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I think it is only a matter of time before net neutrality is a thing of the past. The needs of the individual will yield to larger corporate interests. Corporations will pay to have better connection speeds forcing smaller businesses and individual voices and opinions to the side.

 

Net neutrality is really something Congress needs to take up anyway. It's not a decision of some group that pretty much decides they have the power to impose it on the country. If you're going to take that kind of power onto yourself, your name needs to be on a ballot somewhere.

 

I really don't have a dog in the fight and think that it's largely a stupid argument to get excited about. The internet was fine before net neutrality, it seems fine during net neutrality, and will still be just spiffy if it disappears again. Both sides are really about big businesses fighting over each other over whether the government will regulate in their favor anyway. Outside of basic declarations of bureaucratic overreach, color me bored with who comes out on top in that.

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2015 was when they reclassified the internet service as telecommunications and set the rules. So I suppose that's as good a place to start. I remember when they were discussing the proposed rules and there was doom and gloom about what the internet would be like if we didn't have these net neutrality rules put into place and how censorship and internet providers not letting you go on certain sites and I was just looking around the vibrant internet wondering if I was missing where there was a problem. I literally pointed to the current internet at the time and asked a few of them what the problem was and why their predictions weren't happening already and was just told that I didn't understand, which I suppose was right. The worst case scenarios seemed wholly unrealistic just from a market perspective.

 

Like I said, as much as it's presented as a Big Guy vs. little guy issue, it seems to affect Big Guy vs. Big Guy a whole lot more and whether it will be heavy streaming companies like Netflix or providers like Comcast that will pay for the increase in infrastructure to accommodate them.

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It's a concept that I've been aware of for over 15 years, and is credited by many as being the reason the Internet has been successful. It was never in serious danger until recent years, so it didn't hit cable news, but it was an important concept.

 

And most of the defenders of it are the small guys - certainly there are some big companies that want it, but they would benefit significantly more from paying for better access than any up and coming competition.

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It's a concept that I've been aware of for over 15 years, and is credited by many as being the reason the Internet has been successful.

 

The concept's been around and debated for a long time, but it was only made policy recently in the United States (after a couple of false starts were slapped down in court). It wasn't the reason the internet was successful because it couldn't have been. The internet's success predates it.

 

 

 

And most of the defenders of it are the small guys

 

I know that's how it's presented. But that doesn't make it true. It's not like it'd be the first cause célèbre to attract a passionate group over a big nothingburger. Especially when it comes to anything having to do with the way the internet works. People regularly flip out over that.

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I understand that you know nothing about this topic, but don't have the humility to admit that you know nothing, so I'm out.

 

Two posts earlier from me:

 

I literally pointed to the current internet at the time and asked a few of them what the problem was and why their predictions weren't happening already and was just told that I didn't understand, which I suppose was right.

 

See what I mean?

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And just to repeat: I don't have a dog in the fight. Whether net neutrality is good policy or not is something I don't really have a position on. My main points were:

 

1. The FCC shouldn't have just declared it all by themselves, particularly after Congress refused to do so.

 

2. The claims of doom and gloom should the current policy be reversed are overblown. We were doing just fine before, and I rather expect we'd do just fine after. Which is the better grade of "fine" is a separate question.

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