I understand why HN wants net neutrality: the majority here think that ISPs have undeserved control, and so the government needs to step in to ensure a level playing field. Still, if someone advocated "search engine neutrality", arguing that the govt should regulate Google's search results to ensure everyone had a fair chance, there would be uproar. Similarly, if someone argued for "platform neutrality", holding that every startup that offered some kind of API had to register with the gov't to ensure their services were equally available to all others, the insanity would be obvious.

  arguing that the govt should regulate Google's search 
  results to ensure everyone had a fair chance

  there would be uproar

Additionally, you are completely free to use another search engine and the barrier to switch is minimal. ISPs have come to a détente where they do not build infrastructure in the territories of other ISPs, leading to situations where someone like me -- who lives in Berkeley, home of one of the original 4 'IMPs' of the protointernet -- has zero choice in ISPs if I want >20mbps, which means I have no recourse if my ISP chooses to deny me access to services that do not cowtow to their connection demands.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2013/01/googl...

The idea that organizational entities, whose entire existence is a construct of law, should have the same "freedoms" as human beings is a fairly startling definition of the word. These constructs (aka businesses, etc.), by definition, are far imbalanced in perception, goals, power, and resources relative to individual humans. What "freedoms" we do allow them, are for laudable goals: so that organizations of humans can come together to do more for society than those individuals might do alone. But the idea that the same concept of freedom that applies to individual human beings also applies to a fictional construct created to serve society is preposterous. Such a laissez faire definition seems more like anarchy than any useful form of freedom.

Were they not already benefiting from other forms of regulation that ensure their monopoly status, I would be more sympathetic to their "we are being regulated to death" arguments. As is, they are arguing for regulation only insofar as it enables them to extract rents.

There simply is no comparison to regulation at a platform level and I wish people would stop using that straw-man every time they rush to defend the poor telecoms and their "freedom".

Energy utility rate structures are both complex and unique to the individual company, but at a high level different classes of consumer pay different rate plans, such as residential vs. commercial/industrial vs. agricultural, and which is ultimately determined by the type of and quantity of certain electronic devices installed on premise as is normal for that class.

With that said, as a residential consumer there is little chance that you could ever legally or physically install one of the devices at your home that would necessitate being charged a CI or agricultural rate.

And interestingly enough those rates are all regulated by very heavy weight local/state and federal regulatory commissions.

Net neutrality is a completely different thing. Without it, it'd be as if the electric company could charge more if you used this 700 watt toaster than if you used that 700 watt toaster.

Your "freedom to deal with whoever you wanted" is kind of limited in a market where only there's only one potential counterparty to negotiate with.

As defined where, "originally"? (serious question)

The freedom to make fair and reasonable contracts among parties that all fully understand the terms and do not have a massively imbalanced power dynamic is certainly one I, and many others support and think is fundamental.

The ability to force people into unfair contracts with you under duress by abusing your economic power is not and has never been "freedom" in any sense of the word (rather, it's the opposite of freedom, slavery or indentured servitude) unless you have some kind of sick Ayn Rand redefinition of it where it is nothing more than a code word for the notion that the people who happen to currently have wealth should not be questioned, stopped, or denied anything they wish no matter the consequences.

That's certainly a way of phrasing the 18th Century liberal view, but I'm pretty sure "freedom" wasn't first used by 18th century liberals.

Please could you provide a time and place in history where this has ever been the case?

EDIT: Also, before you downvote, please try to find a fault in the following statement: 'as the body of law grows day by day, already being a completely incomprehensible mess that no human (or company) can abide by.' If you can, please post why. If you cannot, please go back to pondering about this.

The talking points, such as those in the parent, are well-known and popular among large business and its advocates, but being often-repeated doesn't make them true (especially for political talking points).

Personally, I have had little experience with problematic regulations. Some businesses I work with have to follow them, but the ones I'm aware of seem to protect the public from injury and fraud. Certainly I'm glad my water, air travel, roads, financial system, legal system, etc. are regulated.

But neither my personal experience nor the talking points are useful knowledge. It shows how little we know about the subject - and how mindlessly politicized it is - that there is almost no commonly known, serious knowledge about it.

Until you compare to Asian countries where you can visit nice restaurants if you're so inclined, but you also have abundant choice of street food and little diners, which aren't super clean but are cheap and tasty. This also changes the economy - it doesn't take hundreds of thousands of dollars to open a restaurant and obtain the proper licensing, which means that new locations can spring up for cheap. Which means there's an extra source of jobs for people at the bottom of the economy, and so on.

Multiply that by every regulated industry and you start to see the real downsides to gov't control of private enterprise. This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post. As well as ample evidence, there's also the fundamental principle - govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value. All it can (and should) do is define laws to protect everyone - this covers things like fraud, but not decreeing what products can and cannot be sold.

In my defense, I plainly asked about the outcomes and the costs. My point is that we need serious information, not more speculation.

The parent comment omits the costs of a lack of regulation, such as sickness for diners, spread of disease, injury for workers, etc. But the question is not can we speculatively come up with costs and benefits, but how much do these things actually cost and benefit us?

> This has been abundantly studied, contrary to your post

I didn't say that. I said there is no well-known information. Could you point to some?

> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value

I don't agree at all. In fact, government performs much that helps business produce value. Look at the benefits from NASA, medical research, scientific research (Albert Einstein wasn't a private entrepreneur) ... fracking, IIRC, is the product of government research, as is much of the energy industry ... the entire foundation of the Internet and web is mostly from government institutions (ARPA, CERN, U of Illinois, and many more). And for much of the period of the West's greatest growth, the 1950s and 1960s, government ran businesses, and regulated and taxed at rates that seem astronomical today.

Government also provides (produces) systems of laws, regulations, roads, security, education, health, and other things that are absolutely necessary for and greatly enhance business. Without education and health, who would be working for the businesses and buying their goods? Without roads, how would they ship? Without law and regulation, who would feel safe buying from them and how would disputes be resolved? Without the military, how would international shipping lanes supply all those goods?

> govt is not a productive enterprise and so nothing it does can help businesses produce things of value

Governments can offer loans for small business, or work with banks to provide security to banks so that banks can issues loans to small business even though this might not be as lucrative as only focusing on large business.

Governments provide grants for research or results for research directly. Nasa has ton of stuff than just be used directly. There are also programs were an inventor can get money to do research and invent things. There are also government grants for research institutions that do research.

> but you also have abundant choice of street food

Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken. Also good luck having that meal without a side of cholera. Being healthy enough to work is might not be a government service, but a good government certainly encourages it.

Absolutely. Let's be specific.

> Without those government inspectors good luck knowing if that vendor that showed up yesterday is actually serving chicken and not something that tastes like chicken.

That assumes everyone cares if the cheap tasty food is actually chicken. It also has the assumption that without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera.

With regulation, we need to talk about specific instances, and what the positive and negative effects of that instance are.

Doesn't need to be everyone who cares Just someone with an allergy or a moral preference to not eat dog.

> without the government, there would be a dangerous outbreak of cholera

All but the least effective governments have demonstrated an ability to stop cholera. Places with grossly ineffective government and poor education has shown a propensity to have cholera, look at Haiti.

I think these are both good. But if we want another example. There was a Chinese restaurant in Council Bluffs Iowa, a suburb of Omaha Nebraska (The city I am in now) that was serving stray cats. The owner thought it was a cheap alternative to chicken. The FDA shut them down, because stray cats don't get investigated for parasites, disease or poison.

In general it never gets this far because the FDA sets an absolute bottom line and most food businesses strive to be better than as can easy be seen with the whole organic and free range trend recently. But there will always be those trying to drive costs down at the expense of quality and safety.

EDIT - I just realized I skipped examples of value governments can add to business. How about seat belt fabric. Memory Foam, Rocket engine designs and satelite imagining for maps. That is just NASA. NOAA does a huge amount for mariners of all stripes. The SBA gives out loans. There are so many examples.

While the FDA does quite well at enforcing a standard, there is no evidence that the same practices could not happen as a natural occurrence of a free market.

Clearly, the vast majority of people care that those who prepare the food they buy do so in an educated and safe manner. If there were no law demanding such a standard, people would still want to live by that standard. Those people would still demand that those in the food industry find some way to prove that their business lives up to such a standard.

Such a scenario would still leave out the uneducated portion of the populace, who would unknowingly put themselves at risk. That is the only reason I can think of to prefer the current government-enforced methods.

TL;DR Food safety is an example of a problem that has many possible solutions, and while current government regulation is likely the best, there are other solutions that are possible, and even logical.

To bring this back to the discussion of net neutrality...

While there are logical reasons to support deregulation in most scenarios, I can find no honest logical reasons why not to regulate ISPs with the current net neutrality rules.

When we look at the specifics, we can plainly see that net neutrality is an edge case for popular conservative and libertarian ideology. I find it very important to consider it as such, and support net neutrality.

It's a nice idea, loosing regulations because the market will decide, but after a couple days on the toilet, shitting your guts out because regulations hinder innovation or whatever, you know what I'd say? Fuck an unregulated marketplace. I will happily suffer the innovation-suffocating burdens of regulation if it means not having to endure that shit (literally) again.

(Your gut fauna also adapts over time, which is why the locals don't get sick so often).

> because regulations hinder innovation or whatever

How did you get this from my comment? I said that in the case of food, regulations remove cheap options, and remove job opportunities.

To make it concrete: consider a low-income Western neighbourhood. Joe is a young single guy in his 20s working a low-wage job. He's tired after work and doesn't like to cook, but can't afford to eat out. Sally is a grandmother, in her late 50s, and needs a source of income that isn't too demanding. In an Asian country the Sallies could set up fried rice or noodle stalls selling cheap meals to the Joes, for the equivalent of a dollar or two. They've set up a mutual trade for mutual advantage, and they're both better off.

In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.

(Sometimes Westerners do make this trade. On my UK university campus, some local Indian stay-at-home mothers would cook up extra food and deliver meals to students for £2 ($3) a pop. They were breaking a ton of laws, of course).

Heh, this isn't actually true, or not meaningfully so. Where I lived, it was recognized that getting sick regularly was a fact of life. The place I lived had almost no tourism, so people getting sick were, in fact, just getting sick from an essentially unregulated food market.

But hey, freeeeee market, right?

> In a Western country Joe and Sally are banned from making this trade, ostensibly to protect Joe's interests. If Joe wants cheap food, his only option is to go to McDonald's, where they've made everything hyper-efficient and standardised to provide cheap food, while meeting minimum wage laws, hygiene regulations, and so on.

So, if Sally can provide food cheaper than McDonald's, that means:

a. she is more efficient than McDonald's, she being a single woman, they being a multinational corporation, or

b. she doesn't conform to the same hygiene and nutrition standards, making less valuable products.

Which one seems more probable?

Are you saying the economic downsides to regulation have been studied? Or are you saying there is abundant scholarly research that shows the costs of government regulation of private enterprise clearly outweigh the benefits?

Edit: typo

Or: see the UK and Netherlands, where government regulation improved service by forcing more competition in the broadband market [1], i.e. exactly the opposite of your "regulated to death" claim.

In all three of those examples, increased competition seems to have been the real explanation for reduced prices and improved service, not deregulation as you claim.

https://www.engadget.com/2011/06/28/why-is-european-broadban...

ISPs in countries like Romania blossomed because many small providers were able to compete with each other from the outset. In the US, the initially fragmented market (the "Baby Bells" etc.) have congealed into just a few major players that have no incentive to compete.

How do you know that's the reason?

For those interested, I looked up the story:

http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/...

the same World Bank study that applauded Romania’s well-connected cities cautioned about a digital divide. A much larger share of Romanians have ultra-fast internet connections compared to other European countries, yet one-third of the country’s population has never used the internet. Half of all households have no broadband connection—half of households don’t even have a computer, for that matter.

- Services would be tightly constrained by regulation. You should see all ISPs offering the same set of services in all locations, with the same bandwidths and guarantees.

- Services would be tightly constrained on price: the price for 100Mb/s bidirectional service in Philadelphia should be the same as in Pittsburgh or Punxatawny.

- Nobody would care who their ISP was, because the regulated service is about the same everywhere.

- All the ISPs would have mandated interconnection exchanges where they would be forced to settle traffic with each other. When they get to defined packet loss rates with any other provider, both sides need to improve their connection.

- Prices would change every few years, when the public utility commission approved a rate hike. The ISPs would ask for 8% and get 4% and complain that they were going to go out of business. Same as last time.

- ISPs would be very boring stocks, growing slowly and issuing a regular dividend.

- The big news this year would be that IPv6 routing was going to change from an optional extra-fee service to a built-in on everyone's bill.

Basically, look up the way that the Baby Bells acted between 1982 and 1996.

Net neutrality has many benefits for customers.

Net neutrality has no detriments for customers.

Net neutrality is what we are talking about here.

When we conflate "all regulation" with "one regulation", we disregard any meaningful conversation about the "one regulation" with a mess of argument over "all regulation".

Please, help us stop doing that.

If you want to talk about any of the other regulations, I would love to have a conversation about them. Just be specific, please.