My first exposure to politicization of a purely tech issue was when net neutrality was hijacked and disingenuously recast as government control over the internet.
Two decades later we have the psychosis-like absurdity that "fiber is woke".
Including and between the above has been a steady stream of lobbying cash by US telcos - yielding captured regulators, captured legislators and telco-written, anti-consumer laws.
And while the degree of corruption is somewhat uneven between the two parties (regarding this), both are far too complicit to withhold contempt. The list of who hasn't been selling us out (fed, state and local) is much easier to keep track of.
>My first exposure to politicization of a purely tech issue was when net neutrality was hijacked and disingenuously recast as government control over the internet.
>Two decades later we have the psychosis-like absurdity that "fiber is woke".
As much as it's fun to dunk on conservatives for "fiber is woke", how can you fail to mention how at the time net neutrality was a hot issue, its proponents thought the repeal of net neutrality was going to be the end of the internet as we knew it, and that ISPs were going to have different internet packages depending on what sites you wanted to go to? How did that turn out?
It turned into California and other states making their own network neutrality law, and have that get challenged to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with them only finally ruling it was allowable in 2022. Coupled with an assumption that the Biden admin would probably do things to bring back net neutrality laws it's not too surprising big ISPs didn't change much in the few years after.
Also, the final nail in the coffin of title II reclassification was Looper Bright that essentially overturns the ability for the FCC to reclassify. That was decided last year.
This happens all the damn time when people tout out the "see, nothing bad happened" because they don't know the work that went into the opposition fighting to make the bad things not happen.
My first exposure to politicization of a purely tech issue was when net neutrality was hijacked and disingenuously recast as government control over the internet.
Two decades later we have the psychosis-like absurdity that "fiber is woke".
Including and between the above has been a steady stream of lobbying cash by US telcos - yielding captured regulators, captured legislators and telco-written, anti-consumer laws.
And while the degree of corruption is somewhat uneven between the two parties (regarding this), both are far too complicit to withhold contempt. The list of who hasn't been selling us out (fed, state and local) is much easier to keep track of.
>My first exposure to politicization of a purely tech issue was when net neutrality was hijacked and disingenuously recast as government control over the internet.
>Two decades later we have the psychosis-like absurdity that "fiber is woke".
As much as it's fun to dunk on conservatives for "fiber is woke", how can you fail to mention how at the time net neutrality was a hot issue, its proponents thought the repeal of net neutrality was going to be the end of the internet as we knew it, and that ISPs were going to have different internet packages depending on what sites you wanted to go to? How did that turn out?
It turned into California and other states making their own network neutrality law, and have that get challenged to the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit with them only finally ruling it was allowable in 2022. Coupled with an assumption that the Biden admin would probably do things to bring back net neutrality laws it's not too surprising big ISPs didn't change much in the few years after.
Also, the final nail in the coffin of title II reclassification was Looper Bright that essentially overturns the ability for the FCC to reclassify. That was decided last year.
This happens all the damn time when people tout out the "see, nothing bad happened" because they don't know the work that went into the opposition fighting to make the bad things not happen.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44641464
Pathetic