FCC weakens net neutrality rule in a prelude to larger rollbacks

I am with you. It would be better news sites have their own comment system. It's very sad that most US news sites axed their comment section or just include the crud FB comment widget. It's appalling that even sites like IMDb removed their comments and forum. Is this pure incompetence or a war on freedom of human right to speak/write openly? How hard is it to maintain comment section, can't you moderate the comments like it worked fine everywhere for decades? I am more and more the opinion we really need an MySpace successor to balance Facebook. MySpace was always about anon user accounts, express yourself, in internet anonymity, do things you like with people who have the same interests. Facebook is all about real identity, it can create a lot of bad blood and bad mood. It's really cumbersome to use it for anything of special interest like computers (yes nowadays, most just care about smartphones, not how it works) as your friends will see all your interactions and react on it.

See here on HN, lots of insightful comments from anon accounts. What do you get from FB comments section - spam from bots and subjective blabla. Please suggest to your higher up to add a proper comment section.

> And any given company should have every right to sell/filter as necessary those users.

You've been misled. Filtering isn't necessary. If a user is contributing to congestion on an oversubscribed line, you can drop some of their packets to reduce their usage to a fair share, without having to single out any specific types of traffic. ISPs don't have to be non-neutral in order to keep their service running. This is true at any scale, which is why having an exception for smaller ISPs is completely unjustified and is nothing but a foot in the door for those who would dismantle net neutrality entirely. Raising the pointless threshold is just a step toward that anti-consumer goal.

I have skimmed your website at the time and found it really interesting.

I find this “shillcalling” very annoying, but I understand where it’s coming from. If you look at Reddit, for example, it has been an entire two weeks of constant “Bill Gates is great” posts. Astroturfing is out of control.

At the same time it makes discussion impossible. I have myself been called a “shill” on several occasions now (not here), just by disagreeing with the narrative slightly. Any dissent is now seen with suspicion which just pushes everyone more and more to the extremes.

Since you made a post about machine learning assisted moderation, I am wondering if you thought about how ML could be used to bring back discussion to a neutral, or at least merit-based scoring?

It seems everyone wants to apply ML to the content itself (like Perspective), but wouldn’t it be more effective to instead use ML to assign weight to the ratings? For every topic there must exist a subset of people that can judge it by its merit, without immediately succumbing to their biases. It seems if you could identify that subset of users, and weight their scoring more (and that subset might be different per topic), then it should be possible to avoid the usual traps of popularity-based scoring systems, including astroturfing and vote manipulation.

What do you think?

> And you completely failed to do so. All you showed was that there exists somebody who doesn't want net neutrality.

That shows it isn't black and white. You can't have a group of people who has differing opinions than yours and simply write them off. There are various ways of weighing ones position. Maybe it ends up being morally wrong for a large amount of people but that still does not make it "black and white".

Very, very, very little of life is actually black and white. When you show an inability to see something from another perspective you will fail ever convincing them of your side.

> You didn't even show whether they have any non-selfish reasons for that opinion[...]You showed the existence of opposition, not the existence of reasonable or viable opposition.

Irrelevant. To many on the other side your point may not be reasonable or viable. Does that mean they are equally able to say the issue is "black and white" in their favor? No.

> I'd like to know roughly what you would consider to be sufficient justification for calling a politicized issue one-sided with respect to its public policy soundness.

I'm not sure I would call many if any issues one-sided. That's just not how life works and is incredibly rare.

>You're correct but it's irrelevant. A smaller representation does NOT make an issue lopsided in justification.

The issue is lopsided in terms of cost benefit analysis. Nothing more. The benefits to the shareholders and employees of a few corporations are vastly outweighed by the detriment to the rest of society.

Regulations change and companies have to adapt. The risk of changing regulations is part of the cost of doing business. Sure we should try minimize onerous regulation, but often there is no other viable alternative.

A hypothetical situation to illustrate this point:

A company buys land from a local government with permission to use it as a mercury disposal site. 40 years later the federal government passes a law that no new mercury can be dumped within 10 miles of a town of more than 10k people. The company has to close down the site. Sucks for the company. The owner thinks it's not fair, but the cost benefit analysis wasn't even close. In the end I'm not terribly concerned that the people affected by the disposal site weren't empathetic to the owner's plight.

>This isn't true. There are many people, not part of the corporations that are constantly referred to, that also do not want net neutrality as it gives the government control over vital, information sharing infrastructure. Remember Prism?

How does making it illegal for ISPs to favor traffic from some sources over others enable the government to take control over information sharing infrastructure?

Do fair housing laws give the government control over vital shelter providing infrastructure?

This is just a Republican talking point. There is no innate reason that net neutrality regulation should harm individual privacy. Net neutrality doesn't mean government take over of the internet.