I saw this quoted on Gab

Story: Defending Net Neutrality: A Day of ActionTotal Replies: 5
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jdixon

Jul 12, 2017
10:25 PM EDT
Being anti-netneutrality means siding with huge unaccountable ISPs that charge you money and spy on you can cooperate with the feds.

Being pro-netneutrality means siding with huge unaccountable dotcoms that sell you as a product and spy on you and cooperate with the feds.

Sounds about right.
mbaehrlxer

Jul 13, 2017
3:30 AM EDT
we depend on the ISPs for the internet to function. we can sidestep the dotcoms and use alternative services which also depend on the ISPs for their service to be available.

or put differently, ISPs as a whole have a monopoly on internet access. dotcoms, no matter how much they capture the market can not force me to use their service.

we can provice alternatives for dotcoms, but we can't (easily) provide alternatives for internet access.

therefore it is more important to ensure that ISPs power is limited.

greetings, eMBee.
penguinist

Jul 13, 2017
3:55 AM EDT
Excellent point eMBee.
gus3

Jul 13, 2017
2:13 PM EDT
Did Bell Telephone have these issues in their early days? Something tells me they didn't.

There seems to be very little discussion of "common carrier" status. ISP's want the immunity that goes with it, but not the responsibilities. The main responsibility of a common carrier, is to offer a service without prejudice regarding the customer's purpose. That is to say, the phone company is obliged to let their subscribers use the phone lines, even when a subscriber is using it to transmit a criminal threat.

So, would non-prejudice applied to ISP's correspond to net neutrality?
jdixon

Jul 13, 2017
2:52 PM EDT
> ISP's want the immunity that goes with it, but not the responsibilities.

Yep. So how do we force them to accept the responsibilities? Normally that would be handled by the courts, but they've become pretty much useless against large corporations.

> So, would non-prejudice applied to ISP's correspond to net neutrality?

Pretty much, yes.
BernardSwiss

Jul 14, 2017
12:10 AM EDT
gus3 wrote:There seems to be very little discussion of "common carrier" status. ISP's want the immunity that goes with it, but not the responsibilities. The main responsibility of a common carrier, is to offer a service without prejudice regarding the customer's purpose.


Which is, of course, why the ISPs went to such effort to be classified as (non common carrier status) "Data Services" instead of as (subject to common carrier regulations) "Telecommunications" companies...

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