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Comment on Ask HN: How realistic are the fears coming from the NN 'day of action' crowd?parent

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Much of it is possible, sure. I don't think most of it is feasible, or likely. Prioritization of classes of traffic is and has been a thing for a long time, and consumers broadly benefit from it (we all want VOIP traffic to have better latency sensitivity than Netflix traffic, and we all want Netflix traffic to have better bandwidth utilization than VOIP traffic, for example). (De/)Prioritization of individual products is a bogeyman that has yet to manifest outside of some products being excepted from mobile data quotas (Binge On, FB Zero, Wikipedia Zero).

Then you have things like the utterly ridiculous "your internet plan doesn't include commenting on this reddit thread!" stunts, which are either blindingly ignorant of the actual aims of net neutrality advocates, or are willfully deceitful (there is no technological way that an ISP could restrict or upsell layer 7 features given that TLS is a thing) - neither of which does very much to produce sympathy in me for the cause.

"Your single ISP could engage in behavior that doesn't benefit you" is an obvious threat - that's the threat of any monopolized market. But the vast majority of nightmare scenarios cooked up to scare the masses into action are, IMO, somewhere between fantasy and outright lies.

I'm not sure if my thought process is even valid, but I remember watching a blackhat presentation on hacking docsis 3 (may have been "hacking docsis for fun and profit"?) and the basic consensus was that docsis 3 security was just swiss cheese. I'm curious how such a system that can barely regulate it's users, could somehow become a totalitarian behemoth overnight. It's like satire being taken seriously.

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