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The doomsday "propaganda" didn't come to pass because several states and localities promptly passed their own net neutrality laws after it was deregulated at the federal level. The larger ISPs couldn't find a workable way to implement their non-neutral bullshit in some markets but not others, and the local ISPs in places with no net neutrality laws never really had enough clout to do crappy things in the first place.


I didn't know that. That's actually a good explanation for the why.


If that didn't happen, and the ISPs started profiting off non-net-neutral tactics, it could have been permanently fucked.

Once someone depends on a legal source of income, if that source of income gets banned in the future, they generally get to keep that source of income "grandfathered in" if they take the issue to court.


> Once someone depends on a legal source of income, if that source of income gets banned in the future, they generally get to keep that source of income “grandfathered” forever if they take the issue to court.

That’s… not true.

Otherwise, all the people depending on selling drugs that were later banned would have been grandfathered in when the drugs were prohibited.

Even when there is a regulatory taking (that is, government regulations eliminate the value of existing property in a way that is considered a taking under the 5th amendment), the remedy is compensation for the lost value of the property, not a lifetime exemption from the regulation.


So the FCC Net Neutrality is inconsequential.


Localities experimented with a policy, a federal agency agreed with the outcome of the policy, so the agency adopted the policy.

It's a functional example of letting states be experimentation grounds for policy.

Could you explain what makes this process "inconsequential"?


The internet with FCC Net Neutrality was the same as the internet without FCC Net Neutrality.

Ergo, FCC Net Neutrality is inconsequential.




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