For one, Chinese ISPs are state owned (China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Great Wall). They do not have much of a profit motive outside the typical corruption of people at the top. Even with these state owned ISPs there are multiple choices for each address as these companies share infrastructure. The sharing of infrastructure in itself is similar to local loop unbundling, which does not exist in the US.

Another thing is that the tech community thrives at the behest of the government. Every time something happens it is generally due to changes in party policy that shift favor between companies.

Partitioning services is also not necessarily good. For example, large American ISPs generally have regional monopolies if not duopolies. They also own TV channels and movie studios. What is to prevent them from offering packages of their own services that are zero rated while charging extra for others (say, Steam or a new streaming service)?

I'll note that the FCC also regulates what can be said. Anyone remember when they investigated Stephen Colbert for his remarks on Trump?

The UK does have net neutrality. The UK internet is still loosely censored. I understand that a monopoly might mean a non-neutral net could be privately censored, and therefore functionally similar, but this is a distinct issue from state censorship.

Do we have any protection of that? As best I know (which isn't much), UK net neutrality is more along the lines of a polite understanding than anything enshrined in law.

(And it seems to be wobbling - cf. Three now offering you free data for Netflix/Spotify streaming, etc.)

Until an ISP starts preventing universal access nothing needs to be done, zero-rating (while bad for competition) does not do that.

A good question would be why aren't the competition petitioning the government to outright ban zero-rating? Current EU law has zero-rating loopholes, it'd be up to a post-brexit government to close them. Perhaps it's not popular with current ISPs and their customers? I don't think a large survey on net neutrality has been done in the UK.

I've never managed to connect anti-globalization with no net neutrality.

Please explain how you made that connection.

I am a fierce proponent of net neutrality, and I don't understand how you can reasonably conclude that I must therefore be pro-globalism.

Or how you can say that someone who is anti-globalist is probably also anti net neutrality.

That's the connection I don't understand. How do you make it?

Of course, a non-neutral net ends up with the ISPs as natural monopolies instead, but these are local and a lot closer to the state in most places.

How well this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear. The issue is obscured in America because the big players are American, but I think it plays better in Europe where privacy concerns about exporting data matter.

I'm not sure I know of an intelligent right-leaning person who thinks monopolies of any kind is a good idea, but I can see the argument being used in a "stepping-stone" sense towards a Republican ideal less regulated environment that would "naturally eradicate" monopolies.

I can see it used like that, but I've never heard of it. Of course, that might be because I'm not from the US.

Also, I don't necessarily agree that ISPs are closer to the state in most places, but that's not worth talking about because as far as I can see, neither of us agree with the argument anyway, you only enlightened me to its existence.

But like you said yourself, how this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear.

The original poster said, > "It goes along with the Trump political theme of anti-globalization."

So that's really the question at hand. At this point, it feels to me like the original poster is just virtue-signalling, which baffles me.

Depends on the structure, but a lot of them are inheritors of telcos, which were often nationalised and/or subject to state control, surveillance and censorship. I was thinking particularly of BT and its heir Openreach, which owns all the wires. While they may be privatized the oversight is a lot closer than that of SV startups.

Owning a lot of physical infrastructure and needing to dig up roads requires having a good working relationship with the authorities, at least. Whereas to be Facebook you don't even need a local presence in the country.

Or there are the various US telcos which effectively lobby for either direct monopoly grants from cities or laws against city-level broadband. This kind of thing: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...

I'm not sure what we are discussing, or if there is any point of contention between us that I can't see.

Perhaps you're not as much replying to me as simply being informative for posterity. In which case I'll thank you again, and stop writing now as to not drown out the information with drivel :-)

China is not a democracy so it is irrelevant that they are the leading economy on the planet?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...

That doesn't say that they don't want to block anything, it's just that they are fighting what they don't like on the Internet using different means.

To elaborate on that with one specific example from Bosnia, there was a case in which a government wanted to cut the access to a site spreading ISIS propaganda in a local language. They've successfully shut down a top level domain they were using, after which they've switched to a *.wordpress.com domain. That lasted a really long time (years I would say), but a court order managed to shut down that one as well (individual reports to WordPress, including mine, did not). And after all of that, they've arrested the founder of the website.

EDIT: Here's a screenshot of WordPress' response to me when I reported the website: https://i.imgur.com/suHPZeF.png