Net neutrality

Everyone who supports net neutrality is a cheerleader for Google, Facebook and Netflix. You all should be ashamed of yourselves.

...seriously? You honestly think it's impossible for someone to both be in favor of Net Neutrality and hate Google and Facebook and all the other countless companies that follow their shitty practices? Be more sweeping in your baseless chastising, dude.

I think hating Google and supporting net neutrality is the equivalent of a communist who wants to "destroy the capitalist machine" using an iphone.

For those who don't understand, here's what losing net neutrality means in a nutshell: Internet providers can block you from going to certain websites or seeing online content that they might not like. So to an extent, the internet will become censored and under the control of big corporations. Your internet connection can slow down to a crawl unless you choose to pay even more. They can charge you extra fees just to use certain websites. So parts of the internet will be behind a paywall. (Example: being almost forced to use Yahoo or Bing as your search engine, while having to pay to use Google) Smaller sites on the internet that are not run by big companies (like this one), will have a MUCH harder time staying afloat and competing against the big guys. So unless your favorite site has a lot of money, that site is as good as gone. Streaming services (that you already pay for) or other video/music streaming sites or apps can become painfully slow. (Have you ever tried to watch a video on a really shitty connection? Imagine that, but all the time) Online gaming will become a much bigger pain in the ass because of all of the extra lag. Pirating anything will become next to impossible. (That includes anime, music, and games) https://www.battleforthenet.com/

Also, if you don't live in the US. don't think this won't affect you. If net neutrality dies here in the US, it could also happen in your country.

The United States isn't Europe, or even Belgium. We have different laws even outside of the 2015 law. The same things can't happen, legally speaking. In the first place, we have a law against monopolies. People who speak of the "AT&T" monopoly are basically repeating what they've heard, but they don't actually have a monopoly on anything, and neither does any of the other companies. The only entity that can legally hold a monopoly in the US is the government, which is what the 2015 law enables in regards to the internet.

Monopolies are "illegal" in America in much the same way Trump has been "legally obligated" to pay taxes the last ~20 years. Theres butt loads of loopholes the rich take advantage of that our politicians dont want to fix. Local ISP monopolies are very real and there are loopholes in those areas that do make them legal.

Local ISP monopolies are a big problem. Too bad none of this matters when companies like Google, Facebook, and Reddit are acting as gatekeepers to the internet and will actively censor it.