> There weren't any benefits after net neutrality

So the abuses before Net Neutrality suddenly don't count? Discrimination against certain kinds of data is exactly what Net Neutrality prevented, and is the exact category of abuse that people point to when we talk about what Net Neutrality was originally designed to prevent.

Net Neutrality was not only about Netflix.

To be clear, while I have no love for Netflix, arguing that Netflix was bullying ISPs or fighting for extra consideration from ISPs rather than to be treated as a normal equal customer is pure revisionism. It is pure ISP propaganda. ISPs wanted the ability to discriminate against Netflix traffic. The fact that Netflix is itself a crummy company and could afford to pay changes nothing about that. It is unbelievable that Net Neutrality critics are now going to try to just reintroduce the argument that Netflix deserved to be throttled after it was so thoroughly and completely debunked leading up the 2015 rules.

But even ignoring that entire conversation, Netflix was far from the only service that was throttled or discriminated against before Net Neutrality was put in place. Anticompetitive zero-rating of partner streaming platforms, blocking consumer activity such as tethered Internet except for certain applications -- there was a clear direction that the industry was headed. It was headed towards data discrimination.

And if your argument is "NN was never really repealed, states had the same regulations", then I don't know what you're doing here also arguing that the repeal you don't believe happened wasn't a big deal. There's really no way to get around the fact that asking "what about the abuses after 2018" when according to you Net Neutrality was still effectively in-place at the state level post-2018 -- that is an incredibly disingenuous argument to make.

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> NN would not have helped

> 2015 Open Internet Order =/= Net neutrality

The 2015 Open Internet Order was the basis for the new Net Neutrality rules, and a rejection of the 2015 Open Internet Order was why Net Neutrality was repealed. To argue that the two of them are completely separate misses the point of what anti-regulation advocates were arguing at the time and misses what the legal argument against Net Neutrality was: not merely that specifically Net Neutrality was unnecessarily, but that the FCC did not have the authority granted to it in the 2015 Open Internet Order.

From the link that you yourself just posted above:

> The FCC is Now Prohibited From Looking into the Practice of Throttling 4G Markets Services Down to Dial-up Speeds Despite Clear Public Safety Implications

> [...] There Still Might be a Violation of the Net Neutrality Rules, But We Have No Agency to Investigate the Question. That was the point of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. It was to strip away federal oversight over the ISP industry.

And I find "Net Neutrality was different" to be a particularly bad argument because the current reinstatement of Net Neutrality is also not just about Net Neutrality but about a re-acknowledgement of the FCC regulatory power, and the legal arguments are going to once again center around whether the FCC has the authority to regulate broadband.

The two categories are intrinsically tied together, and people who are arguing "we don't need Net Neutrality" should be upfront that they are effectively also arguing for stripping FCC regulatory power in general, because that is the mechanism through which all of this conversation is happening.

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> If your data is throttled or you have bad service you can get another one easily

Just to quickly touch on this -- I almost didn't address this point at all because it's just so clearly wrong, and I feel like anyone reading these comments can just look around them and ask themselves if they feel like they're spoiled for choice in regards to ISPs. This is just not a convincing argument to make, readers know that the ISP market is not competitive.

But it is worth addressing that this also misses one of the key points of Net Neutrality; that it is not just about consumer throttling, but also about anticompetitive effects on the Internet as a whole. For example, zero-rating is broadly speaking something that consumers like. But it's prohibited under Net Neutrality because it harms the market and makes the market less competitive and unfairly privileges ISP-partnered services.

If you are a company getting throttled or blocked from entire swaths of your customer base on the decision of a middleperson, you can't actually just choose to get a different ISP.

So again, the ISP market is not competitive, it's just very obviously not. But importantly, I do think readers should take away that Net Neutrality is about more than whether or not consumers can buy an Internet package that includes fast Netflix streaming,and that phrasing it this way is a large oversimplification of what the rules are designed to protect against.