Despite your (and many others in this thread) assertion, this is fundamentally new because it hasn't previously been done in political campaigns in any meaningful scale.
The mere existence of a few private campaigns of the sort doen't diminish how much of a departure this is with what has previously been considered acceptable in the political realm.
If we assume that the widespread every-politician-is-corrupt cynicism goes along with/is rooted in a wish to see less corruption, you are also applying rather harmful tactics: by claiming everyone plays dirty, any differences between the candidates are erased, and so are any incentives to behave ethically. The cynicism is self-fulfilling: politicians only ever getting superficial accusations with no discernable relation to their actual behaviour will soon stop trying, because why bother?
The typical scenario is Comcast asking "startup X" for money to allow them to reach you.
You wouldn't have to pay more, nor would you necessarily notice: established sites would be exempt because customers expect them to work. But nobody will be missing a new company they have never heard of.
Since you will not (immediately) feel the impact, there will be no incentive for you to chose a different ISP.
Conversely, that startup doesn't get a choice: your ISP is the only route to get to you, and they have to pay or forfeit the chance to do business with you.
ISPs would be in a position to claim the vast majority of any internet-based business' profits. As a data-intensive startup, you would also be faced with the prospect of negotiating contracts with every single significant ISP. You'd get to make decisions such as "should we fire ten people, or go dark in Florida for the rest of the month?"
NN is when you can't get to "Social Media Startup X" because they didn't pay your ISP.
You are unlikely to even notice this, because only newcomers would be required to pay ransom. Blocking existing sites would lead to customer complaints and actual competition.
It's somewhat unlikely that there are X ISPs times Y "established players" = a few hundred contracts at least, without any of those arrangements leaking, nor anything showing up in network analyses.
That's not a scenario net neutrality regulation would affect. Larger companies will always have more resources, and with that they will have opportunities to invest in infrastructure and improve service that smaller competitors cannot match. There's a continuum from "choosing a more expensive cloud provider" to CDNs to these edge caches.
> That's not a scenario net neutrality regulation would affect.
I'm not sure that's true. Netflix must pay a premium to the ISP to get prioritized access within the ISP in order to get their edge cache in position to compete against the ISP. That's three ways in which the ISP is not acting as a dumb pipe.
The Wikipedia understanding of network neutrality is: the principle that Internet service providers (ISPs) must treat all Internet communications equally, and not discriminate or charge differently based on user, content, website, platform, application, type of equipment, source address, destination address, or method of communication.
A single pipe can handle only so many customers. I don't see how it limits the number of providers?
There actually are countriess with such rules, and they seem to work well. The difficult part is the need to set some uniform price providers must pay for that "last mile" connection to their customer. I seem to remember something like $8/month in Germany. That's actually low enough, it would allow healthy competition even if you set wholesale price 50% higher than neccessary.
The same mechanism is used for competition among power and natural gas companies.
I guess you are right. You can really put as many "providers" on a pipe as you want. But are they really providers from a competition standpoint, or just the same pipe with a different logo?
The problem is that they can't compete on price (in the downwards direction), and they can't compete on building new infra with latest technology. The minimum price is established by the price the owner of the pipes charges. Which is usually set by the gov't. So the can only compete on value added services (i.e. hey we are not going to sell your data hooray!)
The core competition we want in local infrastructure is faster internet and cheaper prices. I think the dual bid system can accomplish that (i.e. separate bids on building/upgrading infra, and bids on maintenance/support)
As for gas and electricity, I think a similar bid system would work as well.
I believe people arguing "politeness" are missing the point, though. What I most value is "dialectics" (not sure if that term is commonly used in English).
I. e. the willingness to entertain the best argument against your position in good faith. Two people who are excellent in doing so (and familiar to HN) would be Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex, and Matt Levine at Bloomberg.
(Someone rather bad at it, usually arguing against some caricature of what he imagines his opposition to be, and generally tending towards the "either unactionable, obvious, or wrong" end of the spectrum is, well, Paul Graham.)
A clear and even-keeled accommodating of an argument - one very discordant from your own argument - is a rare find these days. People feign even-handedness but what seems a fair shake to them doesnt to others who happen to sit a little further, in the spectrum of opinions.
There's a fine line. PG's essay is about usefulness. An essay is probably more useful if a point can be made just as strongly but in a way that a greater number of readers will receive it well.
It would have been impossible for Greece's GDP to drop by that amount (in absolute terms) before it joined the EU. Because it quadrupled after joining.
It quadrupled after joining because it borrowed money from Germany and other countries to buy German cars and other goods, not unlike the early stage of Bretton Woods. It had the lowest debt level before joining, like a fat cat to be squeezed by EU bankers, which was also why it was fast-tracked in joining the EU when it clearly didn't meet many clauses of the Copenhagen Criteria.
But when push came to shove in 2008, the debts were exploding not in Germany, but in Greece.
GDP stands for gross domestic product. As its name indicates, GDP measures the production of final goods and services. Borrowing foreign money to buy foreign goods has no effect whatever on a country's level of production and therefore it cannot have any effect on the country's GDP either.
> Borrowing foreign money to buy foreign goods has no effect whatever on a country's level of production
And this is where you're wrong. Borrowing money has a direct and deep impact on ta country's level of production, mainly because that cash is dumped on the economy by spending it on buying goods and services.
People in this thread seem to mostly not even consider the value that the ability to (sometimes) speak privately has.
As an analogy: would you want your spouse (and vice versa) to hear recording of every conversation you have, including those with close friends/therapists/rabbis etc?
It's not completely absurd to say yes to that question. But it's notable that such a relationship would be a departure from established norms, and that most people feel even healthy and strong relationships profit from the ability to occasionally seek advice or blow of steam in confidentiality.
First, we can't really compare that to elected officials.
But even so, yeah, I would like to know if my spouse is talking with her friends/therapists/whatever about stealing all my money and screwing my best friend while they hire an hitman to off me. Exaggeration? Yes, but Greece got royally fucked with the Troika 'medicine', so yes, the people should know what led them to that place, and who fought for and against them.
