Already have net neutrality? Except we don't. ISPs are already prioritizing their own content over 3rd party content. Sometimes via bandwidth limitations, sometimes via throttling.

Companies putting a lot of bits on the net? Yeah, and they're paying for it! And the customers are paying to pull those bits down. Why, again, do those companies have to pay a third time on those bytes?

The Government Still Allows Discrimination In Traffic? Sure, they allow prioritization of (for example) real time traffic over web traffic. The key is that this is done equally across all real time traffic, not just the ISP's VOIP offering.

That article is shoveling BS pretty hardcore.

> To those knee-jerk rejecting the argument based on the Breitbart domain

Breitbart has destroyed their credibility, or more accurately never gained any, through constant lying and intellectual dishonesty (this is when the letter of something is true, but the spirit of it is false).

I can cite any number of disreputable sources saying anything and then demand you parse through them and disagree piecemeal, but that would be a waste of your time. Or we could be reasonable people and cite reputable sources to back our coherent arguments. I am unaware of any fact-based coherent arguments against Net Neutrality.

Had to stop reading after this quote

"ISPs generally do not discriminate against highly-trafficked websites. If they did – holding a figurative gun to the head of those websites by throttling back speed to those websites – consumers would dump those ISPs in favor of others."

I'd believe this true if any of the large cities I have lived in actually had competition between ISPs.

That's the same phantasy they have in health care. They think there is a functioning market with choices where there simply isn't for most of us.

Interesting, I think an alternative to the net neutrality ruling might be to go the way that Canada and the UK did which largely prevented this from becoming a significant issue: force the major ISPs to lease last mile lines to the upstarts. Make a market that works. It also did great good for competition on speed grounds.

Ok well you made it about 10% through the article - at least you made a modest attempt at understanding the other side of the debate.

Oh I get both sides of the debate. I also understand why we put regulations in place. Don't get me wrong, our government has fumbled the ball on a few occasions but generally regulations are only put in place once an industry habitually breaks the trust of our citizens.

> consumers would dump those ISPs in favor of others.

Competition does not exist in the US for ISPs.

> Some Companies Take Up More Bandwidth Than Others.

They pay for that bandwidth and we pay for the connection. Asking companies to pay more so they're not artificially throttled does not make sense in the actual world of the internet.

> The Government Still Allows Discrimination In Traffic.

Saying because there is vague language in NN we need to get rid of it entirely does not make any sense what so ever. You don't demolish a building because the window is broken.

> Barriers to Entry Are Created

NN removes barriers to entry for many startups that simply can't pay the "troll bridge" of the ISPs.

> Technological Stagnation

These ISPs that are for the removal of NN were given billions of dollars in tax breaks to make the internet better in the US. NN has nothing to do with development of the internet, and using Europe as an example is pretty stupid. Europe has NN, they also have heavy governmental regulation in terms of the last mile.

Saying NN is bad because it doesn't solve that problem is like saying oranges are bad because they can't power your car. It's a totally different matter.

> Internet Taxes Could Happen

If these taxes are used to deploy more public owned fiber lines, I'm all for it.

> Content Restrictions From The Government

NN has nothing to do with this.

Citing Breitbart? Really?

Okay, fine. Let's pretend this is a credible argument.

"Companies won't prioritize traffic" - they do, and they have. Cell carriers routinely do, counting traffic to ~their~ paid services as not counting against their data cap.

"Or else consumers will just change providers" - there is very little choice in ISP in most of the country, and almost entirely owned by large, established players. 'Duopoly' it's called. And due to the costs, it makes it hard for a scrappy third party to come in. Also, Pai is pushing for "competitive" to literally mean "at least one other high speed provider providers service within half a mile of a residence". Meaning he'd say there was no monopoly even if you literally had choice of only one ISP. So trying to act like competition will save people, when he's actively trying to fight against competition being required, and the market is too expensive for a non-incumbent to enter, is really disingenous.

"Some companies take up more bandwidth". Actually, no. The -consumers- do. Netflix isn't using that bandwidth; consumers are. They're demanding to use the connection and bandwidth -that they paid for-, on whatever service they want to use it on. To correct Shapiro's analogy, this is like charging the person taking delivery of a truck a fee for a certain number of trucks, then turning around and charging the companies operating those trucks differing amounts -because you feel like it-.

Yes, the network can be 'reasonably managed'. If you want to clarify that, that's fine, and an -entirely different argument-.

"Create barriers to entry" - actually, the reverse is true. Again, see what has already happened with mobile carriers, and their prioritizing their own services (or services willing to pay them money) over others. This is obvious. Heck, the article even negates their own example (which is just...-one- example) by showing that Google has taken both sides of the issue.

"Technological stagnation" - whoa whoa whoa. This says the landscape isn't competitive; didn't this guy just say back in the first paragraph that consumers will just change ISPs, implying the landscape -is- competitive?! Otherwise this is a completely different issue; stagnation was there even before net neutrality. 2015, we were way behind everyone. You can't claim net neutrality is even related.

"Internet taxes could happen" - "could". Or Pai could just say "Hey, we totally support net neutrality, and we're not collecting fees". He's totally able to do that. Same as Wheeler was doing. We're done here.

"Content restrictions from the government" - I believe there's a couple of amendments here, that would lead to a legal showdown. And regardless there's nothing preventing, say, Congress, from passing legislation to mandate this anyway. Again, red herring.

I'm generally in agreement with you, but one minor criticism, cell carriers are not home ISPs and there's a lot more competition in the cell carrier business because cell carriers are not limited by physical lines.

The physical lines are what kills competition in the home ISP business and largely breaks the market. If you look at countries where they've freed the physical last mile lines, the issues are a lot fewer as there is greatly increased competition.

Oh, I know. Cell carriers -have even more competition than landline ISPs-. So when I can point at -their- having flouted net neutrality principles, you can't claim that competition in landline markets will ensure net neutrality principles will be upheld without regulation.

You need merely look at other countries where this is implemented like Canada and the UK though to see its success.

Cell carriers are a completely different case which isn't comparable - bandwidth costs them a lot more than it does to landlines due to air time costs and the associated impact on other customers, the sheer cost of spectrum also prices many smaller players out of the game altogether, limiting the real ability for competition in the cellular space.

Freeing those last mile lines results in plentiful and cheap bandwidth - something unavailable in the cellular space and an easy tool for small competition to use against the big guys.

EDIT: Sorry if that seems contradictory to what I said before, just trying to make the point that the cases are quite different and more appropriate examples would be better, I'd mistakenly oversimplified this before.

Man you really destroyed that guy

Wonder if he's gutsy enough to change his mind.

>you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author on matters of economics

Actually he's not.

"you should know that Ben Shapiro is a very well-respected author..."

Honestly Breitbart has destroyed their name to the point that I wouldn't be surprised if they took a well-respected author's article, rewrote the whole thing, and then published it under false pretense.

Well, there's a great way to ruin your credibility on Hacker News.