There are three groups of people opposed to network neutrality. 1) People who don't like government regulation in general, 2) Telecoms lobbyists and 3) People who don't understand what network neutrality is.
Obviously only the first are worth listening to, though the second are the loudest and the third are the most numerous.
And the issue with listening to the first group is that we have to do it in the right order. The principle of not having the government regulate is that the free market will take care of it, but there is currently no free market for telecommunications, in part because the government has given the incumbents access to eminent domain and a trillion dollars in government subsidies over the past century. So the order of things would have to be to first somehow have strong last-mile competition (e.g. more than 20 providers on average) and only then remove network neutrality.
The people who actually believe this also believe that last mile is not a natural monopoly. The proper way to answer it is to give them e.g. Nevada and let them prove it. Then once Nevada somehow has 20 independent last mile providers, we can do the same thing everywhere else and won't need network neutrality anymore. And if they're wrong and they fail, then we'll know for sure and the only people opposed will be the people no one should ever listen to.
In theory they could also fail because they're wrong about something else, but whose problem is that? Either they can figure out how to have competition without regulation, or they can't and we need network neutrality.
Not trying to get involved in the debate around net neutrality, but you'd have to have criteria around what is success and what is failure. Depending on how you measure it, there are very few government programs that couldn't be simultaneously cast as either a success or failure depending on which criteria were chosen after the fact.
Clearly, those in favor will point out its positives and discard its negatives, and vice versa.
The point, I think I'm making, is that for those opposed to net neutrality, maybe some would be less opposed if success and failure were clearly defined, and whatever regulations enacted were the least and most tailored amount of regulations meant to specifically prevent the previously defined failure states. Giving broad and ambiguous authority over something like "the internet" is fraught with both wonder and peril, and until and unless "good" and "bad" are quantified, it seems unfair to castigate "the other side" as shills, or ignorant (not that I'm suggesting that you've done that, but it's definitely been done).
I can actually give you a pretty good definition if you want one.
Competition sufficient so that no last mile ISP has enough market power to charge transit or content providers for access to their customers. That's the exact minimum amount of competition necessary so that you don't need network neutrality regulations -- enough so that the market does the job for you.
We asked you to stop posting like this, so we've banned the account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post civilly and substantively in the future.
As it turns out, it doesn't matter if you're against net neutrality, it's still probably in your interest. Exceptions might include if you're a telecom rentier or an authoritarian interested in policing content.
