Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help Preserve the Open Internet
(This comment is a little bit disorganized, so I apologize for that.)<p>Far too many people don&#x27;t seem to understand the arguments against net neutrality as it has been proposed... There&#x27;s been much made about the &quot;astroturfing&quot; and automated comments on the FCC website that go against net neutrality-- but what about the reverse? John Oliver doesn&#x27;t know what the hell he&#x27;s talking about. Reddit and HN provide warped perspectives on the issue.<p>Don&#x27;t you guys realize that no matter what policy is chosen, someone is getting screwed and someone going to profit? Don&#x27;t get me wrong, the ISPs are not exactly benevolent organizations. But I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re evil either. Plain and simple, if you think this is a cut-and-dry, good-versus-evil, conglomerates-versus-littleguy issue, I think you&#x27;re not hearing both sides of the issue. This issue is between content providers that serve far more bits than they take in, and ISPs, and there are billions of dollars on both sides.<p>In other words, don&#x27;t think for a second that this is about protecting small internet websites from having to pay ransom. That&#x27;s not what is going to happen. The only people who are going to be squeezed are the giants like Google, Netflix, etc., and it&#x27;s no surprise that these are the people who are making such a fuss about it today.<p>The particular event that made me reconsider net neutrality was digging into the details of the Comcast&#x2F;Netflix&#x2F;Level3 fiasco a couple years ago. Everything I had heard about that situation made it sound to me like Comcast was simply demanding ransom. The reality of the situation is that L3 and Netflix acted extremely recklessly in how they made their deals, and IMO deserved everything that came to them. Much is made about &quot;eyeball ISPs&quot; and the power it gives them. In reality, I think Netflix has more power in swaying consumers, and I think they used that power to bail themselves out of a sticky situation by badmouthing Comcast.<p>I don&#x27;t see how compensatory peering agreements would work out well in a net neutral world. Specifically, the FCC proposal for Title II classification (paraphrasing here) said that the FCC would step in when it believed one party was acting unfairly. It is far too open-ended, doesn&#x27;t list any criteria for what that means, and it&#x27;s not the FCCs job anyway, the FTC should be doing that.<p>But in general I don&#x27;t think net neutrality is a good idea. I think that people are out of touch with internet access in rural parts of the US, and I don&#x27;t think NN is beneficial for that situation at all. My grandmother pays $30&#x2F;mo for internet access that she barely uses, and I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s right to enshrine into law that Comcast can&#x27;t offer her a plan where she pays $5&#x2F;mo instead for limited access to the few sites she uses.<p>As a bandwidth-hogging internet user, a lack of net neutrality will probably mean that I will pay more. But maybe that&#x27;s how it is supposed to be. The internet didn&#x27;t turn out to be what the academics once hoped it would be. And that&#x27;s okay. The internet should serve everyone, however they want to use it, and the market should be built around that principle-- not around decades-old cypherpunk ideals.<p>I think it&#x27;s incredible that behemoths like Google have the nerve to paint this as if they care about an open internet. It&#x27;s obvious that their dominance is what makes an open internet irrelevant.