Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

It's unfortunate you don't seem to appreciate the difference between rhetoric and a question. I skipped your baseless accusation of "feigning this absurd obtuseness" since it was flamebait and wasn't worth addressing. Being insulting isn't really appreciated in this community.

I'm not American, so please correct me if I'm wrong but I have yet to see any proof of this whole 'sell your internet history' complaint that seems to be blatently copied by everyone without any research.

The way I understand it is that ISPs can sell anonymized data from groups of users. Like: people who visit news.ycombinator.com generally also visit stackoverflow. I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual internet history if the website uses HTTPS.

Yes, I am a strong supporter of NN and I was appaled when the EU diluted it, but this reply is directed at your 'ISPs who are allowed to sell users' browsing history' part.

I don't think this has anything to do with net neutrality and much more with the absence of geographic barriers.

> 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc)

Facebook and Microsoft are able to leverage network effects. A social network were your friends aren't is not very good independent of the features, similar with Microsoft and the available software. I dont't think, that there is an effect from net neutrality at play here.

> 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free.

This is mostly about the absence of a good micro-payment system, plus the internet forces in many relevant areas everybody to compete with free. (The free newspaper is just a click away, same with youtube etc.)

> 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country.

Is that the case? In cases were you can leverage scale effects certainly, Google has the largest database of websites and as a result the best search engine. Similar for facebook. However, is the relevant metric youtube or is the relevant metric number of people who can live from youtube. Same with Amazon market place and ebay. (Not really arguing either way, I am not really sure what the answer is.)

> 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million).

Compare that to the barriers of entry for a shipyard or hardware manufacturing.

> I think there's still a lot of potential to open up new markets with different policies that would make the internet a much better place for both consumers and entrepreneurs - especially the small guys. I'm just not 100% sure maintaining net-neutrality is the best way to help the little guy and bolster innovation. Anyone have any ideas how we could alleviate some of the above mentioned problems?

Yes, however no net neutrality should benefit the large guys. I can put a video on my server, but I can certainly not negotiate with all the ISPs that they should deliver my video. So in the absence of net neutrality youtube has an additional lever to compete against me. I don't really see any scenario where absence of net neutrality benefits the upstart competition instead of the incumbent.

However, the platforms we see today look in many ways more similar to either infrastructure or states than to competition, so an rather interesting question is, how does one ensure that they are not evil. (To borrow an old Google slogan.)

> I guess you wouldn't need to as long as the ISP market is competitive

How would it be competitive? If my ISP released its own Netflix and throttled my connection to Netflix to the point where Netflix seemed extremely slow but my ISP's version of Netflix was super fast, there would be no competition. My ISP would dominate.

> You might go to another competitor and convince them your product is good or your product can help/augment the service they are currently providing.

Do you mean go to another ISP? There aren't that many consumer ISPs around, so what happens when they've all made a deal with someone's Netflix, and a new company wants to revolutionize/reinvent their own Netflix? Now it's even harder for them to do so, because the existing players already have contracts to make themselves very fast and everyone else very slow.

Currently, this stuff can't happen (legally) due to NN, but if you remove NN, you enable this stuff, and you prevent new competition from coming up.

Many of these articles are missing an easily exploitable position. The key term is "bandwidth" which is the resource at stake. What is being fought over is how to define this "bandwidth" in a way that will be enforceable against the citizen and favorable to the corporation (i.e. "government").

One way they could do this is to divide it like they did the radio spectrum by way of frequency, where frequency is related to "bandwidth". The higher the frequency, the greater the bandwidth. With communication advances, the frequencies can be grouped just like they did with radio, where certain "frequencies" are reserved by the government/military, and others are monopolized by the corporations, and a tiny sliver is provided as a "public" service.

This way would be the most easily enforceable for them to attack NN and the first amendment, as it already exists by form of radio.

* It is already being applied by cable providers through "downstream/upstream" where your participation by "uploading" of your content is viewed inferior to your consumption of it. i.e. Your contribution (or upload) is a tiny fraction of your consumption (or download).

* Also, AWS, Google and other cloud services charge your VPS for "providing" content (egress) and charge you nothing for consuming (ingress). On that scale, the value of what you provide is so miniscule it is almost non-existent to the value of what you consume.

tldr; NN is already partly destroyed.