[ironchef253]

This is not the logic of the article.

The article says that Title II is pointless over-regulation which creates danger for ISPs, which it is. Imagine if I created 700 rules for what you can do every day and promised to “selectively apply” those rules based on how I feel today. Would you be ok with that? Any mood change on my part (correlating with a change in FCC leadership) and I could ruin your life. Those are not good conditions under which to build a long term business. If you had that hanging over your head, you wouldn’t be happy either.

People have been brainwashed to think that Net Neutrality == Title II regulation. That is incorrect. The principal of Net Neutrality is far more important than Title II. Title II is just the wrong tool for the job and causes a lot of additional damage in addition to supporting Net Neutrality.

Watching Facebook, Google and Twitter demoting and removing opinions and websites they don’t like (aka not advertiser friendly) is much more sinister than what the ISPs are able to / are likely to do.

Censorship by search algorithm is far more dangerous than removal of Title II, which has downsides but is not anywhere near as apocalyptic as what people are saying about it online.

I am frustrated at how many people on here do so little research into their own opinions, they just look online and see what Twitter or reddit are saying and say: “ok, sounds good I believe that.”

Please take the approach of trying to poke holes in your own opinions before adopting them.

[pseudalopex]

Title II is the only tool the FCC currently has to enforce net neutrality. It's also what was in place until the mid-2000s. It doesn't change the FCC rulemaking process, which often takes years from start to implementation, is subject to judicial review, specifically disallows arbitrary and capricious changes, and can be overridden any time Congress likes. The claims that Title II classification did/will stifle investment and Section 706 classification did/will encourage it aren't supported by the record of the last 20 years.

[sddfd]

Thanks for your comment. I agree it is important to distinguish between title II and net neutrality.

However, I fail to see how the power of Google & Facebook to "curate" the internet is an argument against net neutrality.

To me it seems that if ISPs are not bound by net neutrality, then the power of big companies will be even greater.

Just another example is a startup competing with Netflix. Without net neutrality, one most likely has to buy a premium Netflix packet from the ISP on top of the Netflix subscription to be able to stream the whole month in high quality. You can look at Portugal, where at least on mobile such packages are already available. Now I don't see how a startup can compete, if its users also have to buy another premium package from their ISPs to use the startups services (in addition to the Premium package the already pay to be able to watch Netflix).