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by omon 3134 days ago
He is specifically talking about blocking web traffic, "The answer to the first is we're not sure", not fast lanes. Repealing NN will do that, every time you have regulations you have to hire another team of lawyers and accountants; which only large corporations can afford––it's just another barrier of entry to market.
3 comments

The barriers to entry in the ISP market right now are the large corporations, which keep doing adorable things like suing would-be municipal competitors out of existence. The claim that regulation is the problem here, rather than a matter of mere ideological opposition, is a claim desperately in need of some kind of substantiation. And the idea of empowering oligopolists even further, by relaxing restrictions designed to prevent them engaging in rentiership, is an idea in desperate need of anything concrete to show it's worth implementing.
He was asked two questions then began his response with “the answer to the first is”, I think it’s much more reasonable to interpret that as the first question.
Except we have seen cases of blocking before in the US, so even by that interpretation he's misleading people: in 2005, North Carolina-based ISP (and phone company) Madison River blocked customers from using Vonage. More recently, Verizon blocked its customers from installing Google Wallet on their phones and AT&T tried to block its customers from using Skype on iPhones...