
Ask HN: Net neutrality - monochromatic
We’ve had net neutrality regulations for a couple of years now, but for decades before that we did not, and nothing bad happened. Why should I be concerned about those regulations going away if things were fine before they existed?
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natch
>nothing bad happened.

That is your perception. Maybe you weren't around for Compuserve, AOL, and
similar attempts at walled garden networks that fortunately crumbled largely
because there was an open Internet.

A better way to look at it is that a lot of good happened with net neutrality.
Both before and after the regulations. Before, because we effectively had net
neutrality already without the regulations, as I'll expand on more below.

The Internet thrived, and the blossoming of the entire world of web content
happened.

Small startups had the opportunity to expose new innovative services to
customers and markets that they might have otherwise been locked out of due to
entrenched big companies feeling threatened.

The creative explosion of stuff that ensued has been fantastic.

Not all of it is good, of course, but it's hard to deny that overall it's way
better than what we would have had in a walled garden world.

Some of this happened before net neutrality regulations, but in an era that
had a kind of defacto net neutrality simply because the stodgy old companies
hadn't yet figured out how to get their grasp around the Internet. So when
thinking about this it's useful to look past just the era of actual on-paper
regulation to the previous era of defacto openness of the Internet. The
regulations were about preserving openness which already existed, but which
was threatened by greedy corporate interests as they increasingly gained clues
about how to lock things down and stifle competition.

Why can't we go back to having net neutrality without regulations? Because as
I said big corporate players have now figured out how to exploit the system to
the point where they would quickly threaten the openness of the net. Not that
they can succeed in doing it 100%... the internet is self-healing to an
extent... but without the net neutrality regulations being in place, they can
choke off more of it, which would be bad.

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techman9
I think the responses in this thread explain this quite well:
[https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/933036555001774080](https://twitter.com/bcrypt/status/933036555001774080)

To paraphrase, (as I understand it):

The FCC did have some rules about Net Neutrality (The FCC Open Internet Order
for example), but they were struck down as a result of Verizon Communications
Inc. v. FCC. To ensure the same protections, the FCC then reclassified
Broadband as a utility. Pai's new rules would roll regulation will cause
neither Title I nor Title II to apply to broadband carriers, entering us into
new territory.

