1664 points by ghosh 3154 days ago | 433 comments on HN
| Moderate positive
Contested
Editorial · v3.7· 2026-02-28 10:25:20 0
Summary Digital Access & Free Expression Advocates
A corporate advocacy piece from Google promoting net neutrality as essential to preserving open internet access and freedom of information. The content directly engages UDHR provisions on freedom of expression (Article 19) and universal access to services (Article 25). Without access to the article body, evaluation is limited to structural and topical analysis, which consistently indicate a positive directional lean toward digital rights and open access principles.
This has been the weakest day of action I could imagine. I thought sites were going to be throttled. Turns out its just some color changes and, oh, reddit has a fancy "slow-loading" gif for their website name. A real wake-up call!
Thanks in part to net neutrality, the open internet has grown to become an unrivaled source of choice, competition, innovation, free expression, and opportunity.
Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
I think the argument here is the same for any argument of nationalization: To turn a private good into a public one.
Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
Can I contribute without being an US citizen?
It seems to be an US-internal issue, but considering that most of the net belongs to the US, this might actually be a far more global question than is legally coverable/definable by US law.
If Google were actually serious about Net Neutrality, they would use their insane market power to protect it.
How? Well, a simple statement saying "any ISP who abuses net neutrality will have their customers cut off from Google products". No Google search, no YouTube, no Gmail. Have those requests instead redirect to a website telling the customer what their ISP is doing, why Google won't work with them, and how to call to complain to the ISP. Make the site list competitors in the user's area that don't play stupid games.
Is this an insane idea? Yep. Would Google come under scrutiny because of their now-obvious market power? Oh definitely. And Google would probably lose money over it. But it would certainly work.
People don't get internet, and then decide to use Google. They want Google and then get internet for that purpose.
"Net Neutrality" in its final form did not solve or fix any problems with the Internet. The definition of "Net Neutrality" is poorly defined, too vague and does not have any proposed legislation attached to "fix" things. Even when new rules were implemented, ISPs still throttled torrents and manipulated traffic. The only way to fix the Internet is to do so from a technical perspective, not by adding more regulations that ISPs won't obey (they work that into their business model). The "Internet" has never been free and has always been controlled by a handful of entities. The only fix for the Internet is if everyone actively participates in the Internet's infrastructure and we work to create technologies that thwart active threats from ISPs or that gives ISPs competition.
The marketing for Net Neutrality is very poor. Just asked a few non-technical friends about it. A few responded with "Do you believe everything you read on the Internet?". Now if all their favorite websites were shutdown for a day, that would get everyones attention.
I know this is "old news" now, but it's very fascinating that Google is suddenly so concerned about "the open internet" 4 days after EME was ratified (a proposal that they authored and forced other browsers into supporting thanks to their enormous browser share).
It feels like Google (and other companies for that matter) are only concerned about "the open internet" when it benefits their bottom line. In fact, I'm not convinced that Google _does_ care. For SOPA and PIPA they actually did a (lukewarm) blackout of their site for the day of action. Wikipedia shut down on that day. Where has all of the enthusiasm gone?
I don't understand the logic of ISP's throttling certain sites based on the traffic to those sites.
As a consumer on ISP's last mile lines, I make a series of TCP requests and I expect responses. Fill my pipes with those responses as best you can and charge me for the privilege. If you're not making enough money on that, charge me more for the bandwidth.
Market-wise, why would an ISP anything else than fill my pipe with what I'm asking for?
An ISP should make all the money it needs to make off my service subscription. It's not too far of a leap for me to imagine U.S. laws being changed that restrict ISP's to only being able to charge the end-user for their subscriptions with heavily regulated flat fees for peering arrangements and co-location services placed near the consumer.
The obvious shenanagans that are ramping up here will eventually lead to a massive consumer backlash and a regulatory hammer coming down. People are not going to forget what the open internet looked like.
Net neutrality just helps the status quo, and forces the "evil greedy ISPs" to take your money. Yeah let's show them by giving them money and no competition to their business... wait.
Vote for less regulation, not just getting rid of NN but getting rid of the monopolies that exist at the local level.
I can't even enter the USA without a visa that is expensive, hard to get and doesn't guarantee entry but I'm getting all these net neutrality PSAs today telling me to send letters to FCC and Congress... I'm supportive of the idea itself but it's a bit funny and stupid, the Americano-centrism.
In the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (Docket No. 17-108), much is made of the rapid growth of the Internet under the former "light-touch" regulatory regime. The notice overlooks that this was also an environment in which competition among many Internet service providers could and did flourish.
Since then, the provision of connectivity has consolidated among only a few very large companies, which among them have strongly oligopolic power to enforce whatever conditions they please upon their customers, both residential and commercial.
In the late-1990s, early-2000s environment of healthy competition among Internet service providers, utility-style regulation of ISPs, such as that here under consideration of repeal, was not a necessary measure.
However, in the current strongly oligopolic environment, only the regulatory power of the United States Government can continue to provide and enforce sufficient oversight to maintain a semblance of free market behavior.
Internet-powered entrepreneurship greatly benefits the US economy. The small, and occasionally large, businesses thus created have an outsized economic impact in terms of taxes paid and jobs created. Absent a true free market, or even the regulatory semblance of one, for Internet connectivity, these businesses may well find themselves severely hampered in their ability to earn revenue, with concomitant negative effect on their ability to contribute to our economy.
As such, I must strongly urge the new regulatory regime proposed in this filing not be adopted.
I thank you very kindly for your time and your consideration, and trust that you will decide in that fashion which you regard to best serve the interests of your constituents and of the nation which you serve.
(Also, the "Battle for the Net" folks would have done well to hire a UX designer - or perhaps to hire a different one. The lack of any clear confirmation that one's message has been sent fails to inspire confidence. Perhaps there's an email confirmation that has yet to arrive, but...)
As a New Zealander, I find it extraordinarily inappropriate that global infrastructure like the Internet is being shaped by the whims of US politics and corporate culture. The Internet is a global network of global concern and it should be above the manoeuvring of Republicans and American Internet providers
One thing I don't understand about net neutrality. Say I'm a toll road. I built the road when cars were relatively small and light. Now, some cars are getting really heavy and big (think semi trucks) and are the majority of my traffic. Because of this, they beat up the road and cause more congestion. So I want to repair the road and/or add more lanes by increasing the toll on these trucks. But all the trucking companies are complaining and preventing me from doing it, thus ultimately hurting the small personal cars that want to zip through.
Obviously this is an analogy to net neutrality, so why is this reasonable situation fundamentally different? In a free market, shouldn't I be able to increase the tolls on my private infrastructure for those that put the most stress on it?
(Now I will say, the fact that there's only one toll road option for many people is anti-competitive and against the free market, but that's not this topic)
While I don't have a good grasp on the larger issue, I hope we can protect small players from being squeezed. In my limited understanding, there are really two separate things here: Comcast vs Youtube and Comcast vs startup. As I understand it, Comcast gets mad that they have to invest in infrastructure so people can watch Youtube. They think Youtube is free-riding on their infrastructure. Comcast is envious of Youtube's profits and eyeballs. So Comcast wants to squeeze money out of Youtube. A battle between giants.
The other issue is that small sites including startups could get throttled almost incidentally in this war. They don't use much bandwidth, being small, but if Comcast enacts some "bizdev" process where it takes six months of negotiations to get into the fast lane, any deal below $1M is probably not worth their time.
This is how cell phone software worked before the iPhone - get permission before you can develop (IIRC). If we end up with fast-lane preferential pricing, it should really be available to the smallest players. Ideally it should be free, but the Apple app store model would work - $99/year for fast lane access until your bandwidth is really significant. But would the individual have to pay $99 to every major ISP out there?
So glad I live in Utah -- where we have X-mission Pete Ashdown is a huge supporter of EFF and Net Neutrality and anti-NSA -- and Google fiber - google's a big supporter as well. Loved X-mission, but new landlord only has google fiber installed so using that, but both had 1GB connections..
Two great ISP's who WON'T be doing shenanigans like comcast/att when net neutrality is destroyed.
Too bad more people in America don't have good choices... I do think though the biggest thing they could do for 'action' --would be every Monday block all comcast/att users from using Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit in protest... till the ISPs cry and beg and plead w/ the FCC to re-instate net-neurality.
If it's legal to prioritize websites over others... then it's legal for those same websites to prioritize certain ISPs over others...
I know right? The question for me is why? Netflix has gone on record saying "well, we're big enough to negotiate the deals we want so we don't particularly care if the ladder gets pulled up behind us". I imagine many other big corporations/sites are in similar positions. But even so I doubt they'd want to make said deals in the first place, they'd be expensive. So isn't a stronger response in their best interest?
Or perhaps they're all secretly looking forward to fast lanes they can buy...
I would like to see sites with severely limited usage as well but I imagine that would result in angry customers who don't give a rip one way or the other hurting the bottom line.
I'd like to point out that even if you disagree with this video that hearing it straight from the source is valuable. If you want to convince Ajit Pai that he's wrong, knowing what his current (public) opinion truly is (rather than just someone's strawman) makes it way easier.
Hasn't the spirit of the Internet always been about a neutral Internet? That spirit was being threatened and so regulations were put in place to keep it neutral.
So the FCC chairman does not know the difference between a circuit switching network (telephone) and a packet switching network (internet). He then insists in using it as the base example for his argumentation against net neutrality...
Even though there were no explicit rules requiring something, there were nevertheless unofficial norms that were followed. If (almost) everyone does something without a rule, then making a rule is pointless. But when you get enough people skirting those norms, it then becomes necessary to codify them. For instance, the Special Prosecutor law that Ken Starr operated under was put in place in the wake of Watergate and the Saturday Night Massacre, when it became clear that the understanding that a special prosecutor should be protected from firing upon executive whim.
Net neutrality regulations were adopted to protect (and in some degree restore) the net neutrality condition; the internet was largely neutral from its inception; though by the early 00s threats to neutrality in practice were becoming clear, and the FCC began discussion the issue, adopting open internet principles that it first attempted to promote via case-by-case action (which was limited by the courts), then Title I regulation (which was struck down by the courts) in 2010.
There's considerable reason to believe that even without enforceable rules, the attention and active policy activity directed at enforceable rules inhibited non-neutral action by ISPs compared to what it would have been without that activity.
> So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
To say net neutrality regulations have been would be without merit, sure. To say net neutrality has been, OTOH, is factually true.
There were net neutrality actions before 2015, and net neutrality has applied ever since they were using phone lines for internet service (as, for example, those - phones - are where the original legislation was targeted, and where net neutrality came from). The 2015 Title II was a specific decision about specific ISPs (namely mobile data plans).
To state the obvious, this proposal is antithetical to the concept of network neutrality.
Also, the belief that there would be "competitors in the user's area that don't play stupid games" that offer comparable services (eg, within a factor of 5x bandwidth-per-dollar value) seems to be a misunderstanding of the utility/monopoly/duopoly economics in play in many regions of the USA.
I love this idea because I read too much cyberpunk.
Why doesn't Twitter flex its muscle and cause a national crisis by tweeting "watch out China, nukes are coming" from Donald Trump's Twitter? That ruins trust in the platform, but what if they just banned the US president's account for TOS or something? Enormous amount of power.
What if Musk's first ship to Mars had a hidden Railgun on it? "Anybody else that wants to come to Mars must pay equivalent US 100,000 million per vehicle." Alternatively, "I now own mars, who can come as well is up to my whim."
What if Microsoft issued a malicious patch that gave it access to the NSA's servers? What if Comcast slurped up FBI traffic?
In the internet and space age, corporations are getting enough real power that government power can be outright stepped over. Sure, say Comcast slurps data somehow from CIA and FBI, goes to prez, and says "give us x or we sell this to Russia," the US gov can turn around and threaten to arrest the CEO, or fine them, or kick down doors and start tearing apart infrastructure with the US military, but Comcast could easily say "do any of the above and the data is given to Russia, for free."
Musk has weaponised Mars, a state actor says "unweaponise it or be hanged," Musk can say "well, the cannon is automated, has 300 rounds of ammunition, and will not deactivate unless my secret passcode and the secret passcode of another person who I will not name, are provided. Per detected vehicle."
Etc.
Exciting, fun, terrifying. It can go fantastic for us (Google and Netflix telling telecoms to suck it), or absolutely horrifying (Comcast holding the US government hostage).
He lost me at the point where he claimed that there no major issues in 2015. Is he unaware of the throttling that ISPs were doing for certain types of traffic like Netflix?
I love how Ajit keeps saying 'it does not happen' where traffic is limited or blocked. It was limited, we saw this by Comcast with Netflix back in 2014.
This is what we are getting ready to get back into. I do not want to have an internet where the ISP can hold me (the consumer) hostage to other companies to increase the ISPs bottom line. It isn't a good experience for the consumer, it isn't a good experience for providers of media and apps.
He misrepresents the other side's arguments and makes inaccurate claims himself. There has been many examples of telecoms blocking competitors or pushing consumers to use their own (often mediocre) products over competitors.
There likely is room for some reasonable middle-ground that allows for some 'non-neutral' activity to truly benefit consumers but people don't trust that our political system can find it. It's much more likely that unfettered telecoms will further exploit their monopolies to collect data, segment the market (eliminate any consumer surplus), deincentivize competitors, push their mediocre products, or otherwise find ways of increasing revenue beyond being a 'dump-pipe' because they've exhausted the margin in that. They is is almost expected behavior from a commercial entity, it's the government's job to keep them in check.
Using regular folks who are already a captive audience, as foot soldiers against big telecom is not very efficient and probably a non-starter from a PR perspective.
What is the net result of this? People call up and complain to their ISP? Complaining hasn't worked yet and that's the problem. You can complain all you want but when there's no competition it doesn't matter.
A far better idea in my opinion would be for Google to spend money and muscle in partnering to provide municipal broadband.
If people had a choice between a municipal broadband provider that preserved net-neutrality or choosing the existing duopoly that wants to "rent seek" then I think the net-neutrality issue might finally be able to be put to rest.
There are some case studies in successful municipal broadband deployments here:
Don't you find it weird that businesses have to fake that it's an issue by adding gimmicks to their sites like the slow loading gif? Maybe if it become an actual instantiated issue in the future we could expect a real grassroots movement, but as is, the arguments are mostly academic and it's hard to rally people around that.
Went to reddit.com...where's the Net Neutrality protest? Oh I just realized they made their logo a gif that looks like it loads slow...and they made a post...
Went to google.com...the doodle is unrelated and I saw nothing about net neutrality on the site...
Went to mozilla.org and I see absolutely nothing about it. I feel like I must be missing something here.
Hackernews...looks the same but slightly grayed. Oh the black bar is a link, didn't realize that. But no messages or anything obvious.
LinkedIn.com maybe? Nothing
Twitter? They have a hashtag that's trending...that's it.
Facebook? I see nothing. Not even a trending topic.
This is a very luke warm day of technology companies protesting net neutrality. I expected at least a tiny blurb on a homepage SOMEWHERE. So far Netflix and DuckDuckGo are the only large sites that I've notice actually put something on their homepage.
You're correct to ask these questions. The truth is that the entire motivation behind Net Neutrality is predicated on hypothetical behavior by an ISP that nobody has ever actually observed in reality for the exact reasons you describe.
Yeah, wow, Google has written an email to a powerless online community. Bravo, that'll show Ajit!
I remember the mass freakout when Wikipedia shut down--journalists and congressional staffers suddenly couldn't do their jobs and suddenly it was front page news, not just a John Oliver rant.
The problem is that the ISP resources are shared resources. Some day we might all have 1Gbps+ fiber to our houses but today this doesn't exist. Many parts of the network you use to access the internet are common to some other set of people. So if you were to saturate your internet line, your neighbors (or possible more people) would have seriously deteriorated access. There is no way around this problem without upgrading the last mile connections everywhere, which is expensive. You're essentially paying for the most profitable and acceptable internet the ISP is willing to provide.
Maximum throughput and quality of service are not their goals. They want as many people as possible paying for service on a line they paid $X to install. And they get this by being able to throttle their user's traffic in order to allow as many people to use the same line as possible.
What you're saying is basically the same as the "unlimited" argument in terms of internet access or even cell phone plans. You don't have a personal internet connection just for you that you can use in an unlimited way. The internet line run to your neighborhood is essentially zero sum. If you take a huge chunk of the bandwidth, then other paying customers get less. Charging you more doesn't help unless you fund entirely new network lines and installation. They want everyone to have an equal size of the pie. You can't have a dozen households sharing a connection to the internet and all be streaming netflix in 4k. There simply isn't the infrastructure to support that right now, in most places. No matter how much you're willing to pay.
I've mentioned a number of times before, but I'm actually advocating to my friends against their participation today for the reason that I believe, if the Evil ISP acts in a crumby way, that it will create demand for better service. And I think that's the only way to get to a Mesh Internet For The People, By The People.
My position is that: We don't need big pipes (or millions of hours of television piped to us every month), we need the interfaces and hardware for connecting with each other.
Your key assumption is that Google has all this market power. They don't. The only, and truly ONLY, reason that they're so big and powerful is that everyone automatically goes to google when in need of search. Their business would disappear in a hurry the day that changes.
What's one way that could change? Google stops working for millions of people, so they start using another product.
> Unless my history is wrong, and please correct me if that is the case, until the Title II decision in 2015, there were no regulations preventing an ISP from discriminating network traffic. So to say that Net Neutrality has been key to an open internet from 1980-2015 seems without merit.
The net neutrality was not necessary early on because it was not feasible in the past to control it on such large scale.
So between 1980-2015 net neutrality (did not exist as a law) but was there indirectly in forms of:
- the technology at the time did not allow for deep packet inspection
- net neutrality was indirectly present due to telecom regulations. For example telecom could not just block calls as they wished. So during dial-up times anyone could enter that market and provide service and cost was low. During the time of DSL there was a regulation that required telecom companies to lease their lines so again cost to enter and be DSL ISP was relatively low. There's no such thing with cable companies.
> Businesses, local and federal governments, have all contributed to the infrastructure that is the internet. So the private company can't say, "well it was all our investment" and equally the Government can't say "This is a public good."
I think you're misunderstanding it. This has nothing to do with Internet being a public good or not. It's all about controlling access to it.
What net neutrality does in a nutshell is preventing the ISPs (which provide Internet access) from being able to censor at their whim what you can access.
In normal scenario, free market would solve this issue. No one would use ISPs that place restrictions on their service and would move the competitors.
The problem is that we don't have a normal scenario, we have regional monopolies, and if you don't like your ISP, tough luck.
It's also nearly impossible to enter this market anymore, for example Google was attempting to deploy Google Fiber, but even they failed.
We need net neutrality now more than ever, because a single company essentially now will be able to control what content you can access. It would be a smaller issue if each region had its own separate company, but in reality the only companies that benefit on this you probably can count on your one hand.
1. I pay an ISP to provide me with internet service
2. Google cuts off services from my ISP I've already paid.
3. I call my ISP and say "google told me to complain to you," they say, "thank you for your feedback."
4. I look for a competitor. There aren't any, or the competitors don't suit my needs. Which is why this problem happens in the first place. If I could go to a competitor, I would. This is the key assumption that the whole scheme is based on and from what I understand, for most Americans, it is flat wrong.
5. I don't use my ISP's bandwidth cause Google is blocking it. I've paid them money. My continual complaints tie up a cheap call center which inconveniences them very slightly, if at all. They still have my money, plus the costs for the services they're offering me just plummeted cause I'm not using any bandwidth cause I can't access the internet. They win, I lose.
High A=Advocacy F=Open-internet-as-freedom P=Public-participation-enabled
Editorial
+0.70
SETL
+0.37
Title and topic explicitly advocate for preserving 'open internet'—a foundational principle of Article 19 (freedom to seek, receive, and impart information). The 'Day of Action' framing mobilizes readers to protect this right. Net neutrality is fundamentally about preventing gatekeeping of information flow.
FW Ratio: 57%
Observable Facts
Title frames net neutrality as essential to preserving the 'open internet'.
Multiple social sharing mechanisms are prominently displayed (X, Facebook, LinkedIn, email, copy link).
Page is publicly accessible without authentication or paywall.
Article is categorized under 'Public Policy' topic, indicating substantive policy engagement.
Inferences
The advocacy framing ('Help preserve') positions net neutrality as a defense of freedoms, consistent with Article 19 principles.
Structural emphasis on shareability suggests intent to amplify the message and encourage reader participation in information dissemination.
The action-oriented 'Day of Action' language indicates the content is designed to mobilize readers toward collective advocacy.
Net neutrality advocacy implicitly supports internet access as part of an adequate standard of living. Preventing ISP gatekeeping ensures universal access to digital services/information. Topic frames open internet as a public good.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Article is published freely without paywall or authentication requirements.
Topic of net neutrality directly concerns equal access to internet services for all users.
Inferences
Advocacy for net neutrality implicitly endorses internet access as a universal service that should not be restricted by ISP tiering.
The structural accessibility of the page itself embodies the principle being advocated—open, barrier-free information access.
Topic selection (net neutrality/open internet) aligns with preamble's foundational principle that universal digital access supports freedom and justice. Frames preserving internet openness as a collective good.
FW Ratio: 60%
Observable Facts
Page title is 'Net Neutrality Day of Action: Help preserve the open internet'.
Article is published on blog.google with public access and social sharing buttons.
Metadata indicates author as 'Keyword Team' (Google corporate voice).
Inferences
The use of action-oriented language ('Help', 'preserve') indicates advocacy framing rather than neutral reporting.
Public accessibility and sharing infrastructure suggest the content is designed for broad distribution and reader participation.
'Day of Action' in title suggests a call to peaceful mobilization, but substantive content not provided. Cannot assess depth of engagement with assembly rights.
FW Ratio: 50%
Observable Facts
Title includes 'Day of Action' language, implying a call for organized public participation.
Inferences
The framing suggests encouragement of peaceful collective action, though without the article body, the specific nature of the call cannot be assessed.
High A=Advocacy F=Open-internet-as-freedom P=Public-participation-enabled
Structural
+0.50
Context Modifier
ND
SETL
+0.37
Page structure enables multiple pathways for reader engagement: social sharing (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, email), copy-link function, and clear navigation. No paywalls or authentication barriers. Designed to facilitate speech and information distribution.
Page is publicly accessible with no subscription or paywalls, demonstrating commitment to barrier-free access. Blog platform is widely available globally (no obvious geographic restrictions).
GA4 analytics tracking present (data-layer-init-data), indicating first-party data collection. Tension between advocating for internet openness and Google's own tracking practices.
build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 13:57:54 UTC
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