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I know there’s a gun pointed at my head, but listen, nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine.


Sounds like your position is one where no empirical evidence could convince you otherwise, because even if the apocalypse did not come to pass you would use the "gun pointed at me but they didn't pull the trigger" excuse.


We can turn this around though, can't we? If the ISPs have no designs on violating network neutrality then why do they oppose it?

If you repeal the law against burglary and then burglary doesn't immediately skyrocket, would you say that we shouldn't have a law against burglary? Of course not, because regardless of how often it happens, you'd like it to never happen and would want to prosecute it any time it does regardless of how often.


Huh?

> "Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to stop."

This is literally what the article is about. It's happening now, it's been happening, it will continue to happen unless the laws get restored.


1. If your claim was that the net neutrality doomsayers from 2017 were correct, then your original comment of "[...] nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine" does a terrible way of conveying that. Any reasonable person reading that comment would interpret that as you conceding that the the doomsayers' predictions have failed to pass, but nonetheless refuse to admit the predictions were incorrect because it was only a matter of time before the predictions would become true.

2. "Net neutrality" is a term that doesn't have a precise meaning, and I'd rather not get into a fight about what it really means. That said, in the context of this discussion about the net neutrality fight in 2017, and whether the doomsayers' prediction came to pass, I think it's fair to compare to the pre-2017 net neutrality regime. In that context it's not clear whether "degrading video quality for mobile users" would be illegal. For instance "network management" was explicitly allowed, and only "pay for priority" would be banned[1]. Moreover there was a court case a few years before where FCC fought to prevent bittorrent being throttled, and lost the case on appeal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...


Your link has a definition of Net Neutrality in the first paragraph. If you recall, one of the big points that groups like Comcast kept trying to make was that they weren’t just a dumb pipe for the internet, and instead had enough value-add for consumers that people would choose them over a competitor with the same internet service. And NN would prevent them from offering these competitive services.


Mobile ISPs like T-Mobile are quite open about wanting to offer plans that privilege certain services over others.


> I know there’s a gun pointed at my head, but listen, nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine.


It's been 7 years, but any day now we'll wake up to broken online video, random timeouts, paltry data caps, and skyrocketing costs.


> Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to stop.

"Not with a bang but a whimper."


This is like the folks who compare the covid death rate with treatment, mitigations, and vaccination to prove we could have let it run its course in 2020.

Public sentiment was pretty high and we actually had network neutrality for the first 40 years of the Internet not to mention the over 100M people who live in states that adopted laws.

https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/net-neutra...


This is like the folks who think the rapture is coming, any day now. just be ready, its coming.




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