xkemp

The only thing more boring than government work are tired lazy stereotypes accusing government employees of incompetence/lazyness/wastefulness.

Despite your (and many others in this thread) assertion, this is fundamentally new because it hasn't previously been done in political campaigns in any meaningful scale.

The mere existence of a few private campaigns of the sort doen't diminish how much of a departure this is with what has previously been considered acceptable in the political realm.

If we assume that the widespread every-politician-is-corrupt cynicism goes along with/is rooted in a wish to see less corruption, you are also applying rather harmful tactics: by claiming everyone plays dirty, any differences between the candidates are erased, and so are any incentives to behave ethically. The cynicism is self-fulfilling: politicians only ever getting superficial accusations with no discernable relation to their actual behaviour will soon stop trying, because why bother?

No, it wouldn't help.

The typical scenario is Comcast asking "startup X" for money to allow them to reach you.

You wouldn't have to pay more, nor would you necessarily notice: established sites would be exempt because customers expect them to work. But nobody will be missing a new company they have never heard of.

Since you will not (immediately) feel the impact, there will be no incentive for you to chose a different ISP.

Conversely, that startup doesn't get a choice: your ISP is the only route to get to you, and they have to pay or forfeit the chance to do business with you.

ISPs would be in a position to claim the vast majority of any internet-based business' profits. As a data-intensive startup, you would also be faced with the prospect of negotiating contracts with every single significant ISP. You'd get to make decisions such as "should we fire ten people, or go dark in Florida for the rest of the month?"

None of that has anything to do with NN.

NN is when you can't get to "Social Media Startup X" because they didn't pay your ISP.

You are unlikely to even notice this, because only newcomers would be required to pay ransom. Blocking existing sites would lead to customer complaints and actual competition.

It's somewhat unlikely that there are X ISPs times Y "established players" = a few hundred contracts at least, without any of those arrangements leaking, nor anything showing up in network analyses.

That's not a scenario net neutrality regulation would affect. Larger companies will always have more resources, and with that they will have opportunities to invest in infrastructure and improve service that smaller competitors cannot match. There's a continuum from "choosing a more expensive cloud provider" to CDNs to these edge caches.

> A single pipe can only handle so many providers

A single pipe can handle only so many customers. I don't see how it limits the number of providers?

There actually are countriess with such rules, and they seem to work well. The difficult part is the need to set some uniform price providers must pay for that "last mile" connection to their customer. I seem to remember something like $8/month in Germany. That's actually low enough, it would allow healthy competition even if you set wholesale price 50% higher than neccessary.

The same mechanism is used for competition among power and natural gas companies.

I believe people arguing "politeness" are missing the point, though. What I most value is "dialectics" (not sure if that term is commonly used in English).

I. e. the willingness to entertain the best argument against your position in good faith. Two people who are excellent in doing so (and familiar to HN) would be Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex, and Matt Levine at Bloomberg.

(Someone rather bad at it, usually arguing against some caricature of what he imagines his opposition to be, and generally tending towards the "either unactionable, obvious, or wrong" end of the spectrum is, well, Paul Graham.)

People in this thread seem to mostly not even consider the value that the ability to (sometimes) speak privately has.

As an analogy: would you want your spouse (and vice versa) to hear recording of every conversation you have, including those with close friends/therapists/rabbis etc?

It's not completely absurd to say yes to that question. But it's notable that such a relationship would be a departure from established norms, and that most people feel even healthy and strong relationships profit from the ability to occasionally seek advice or blow of steam in confidentiality.

Oh, that old chestnut. The believe that other countries are bound by what you promised local voters.

I'd quip that politicians making that argument could just as well legislate for good weather. But considering Greece, I'm now wondering if they may have already done that. In which case I owe them an apology.

That's an extremely one-sided point-of-view.

The net effect of the whole saga was Greece getting to spend a lot of money in the 90s and 2000s, and the stronger countries of the Eurogroup ending up paying for (at least part) of that.

Focussing on these countries' motivation is somewhat useless speculation, and arguably unfair if you manage to twist it so far around the people paying end up as the bad guys, and the people spending as the victims.

In any case: French and German banks could have absorbed a Greek default, although it would have been painful. Because these banks held only part of the debt[0], it would have always been cheaper to make them whole again and tell Greece to take a hike.

Considering a decade has passed and some things happen, one might also want to reevaluate the motivations ascribed to, for example, Angela Merkel. Does she still strike people as incapable of aiming higher than just immediate parochial needs?

[0]: around 30% IIRC, can't be bothered to look this stuff up again ten years later)

Please don't use "third-world" as a generic insult for countries.

Even the wrong-yet-common definition of "poor" doesn't fit here, because internet censorship isn't a function of wealth: Saudi Arabia is rather rich yet unfree. Russia and China area also not "third world".

Russia, a leading internet censor, actually happens to be the (current version of) a country that used to be the definition of either "first" or "second" world.

Just look at the ugly violence of nationalistic hatred currently gripping, oh I don't know.. let's say India?

If that's too much recursion, consider the World War I and II (among many others), both being based essentially in nationalism.

I'm starting to believe this meme was really concocted by some of those "big companies". It's quite brilliant, actually: using the public's hatred of big corporation to actively protect them against any changes.