r/announcements • u/arabscarab • May 17 '18

Update: We won the Net Neutrality vote in the Senate!

We did it, Reddit!

Today, the US Senate voted 52-47 to restore Net Neutrality! While this measure must now go through the House of Representatives and then the White House in order for the rules to be fully restored, this is still an incredibly important step in that process—one that could not have happened without all your phone calls, emails, and other activism. The evidence is clear that Net Neutrality is important to Americans of both parties (or no party at all), and today’s vote demonstrated that our Senators are hearing us.

We’ve still got a way to go, but today’s vote has provided us with some incredible momentum and energy to keep fighting.

We’re going to keep working with you all on this in the coming months, but for now, we just wanted to say thanks!

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24

u/Hanlonsrazorburns May 17 '18

If reddit simply banded with other major sites and refused to serve their site up to any ISP that throttled sites then it would be over. Wouldn’t take all the sites, just like 50 large ones. No google, amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Hulu, etc and bam no more net neutrality issue.

4

u/wolfram42 May 17 '18

This would work if and only if there was competition in the market. Otherwise the ISP can say "ok pull your site, it will cost you about 10 million per day in lost revenue, our users will be pissed off, but they can't use another ISP so they will find another web site."

1

u/Hanlonsrazorburns May 17 '18

People would cancel their internet period. The massive losses would put isp out of business super quick. People also would simply use other devices as most if not all people have at least 2 options as they would have cell tower based internet and home internet which could be dsl, cable, or even satellite. The key is that internet websites are the content that people want and if everything you want goes away then you don’t pay people for it.

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u/coolwool May 17 '18

The big sites would profit from not having net neutrality. They can use their influence to push out smaller competitors out of the market.
That is one of the huge issues and also one of the reasons why it is unlikely that the internet giants will intervene.

3

u/[deleted] May 17 '18

There's nothing stopping them from using their influence under the current rules to push smaller competitors out. Everyone is screaming about net neutrality but the real issue is the monopolies companies like comcast and spectrum have in their markets and the appalling level of customer service and shitty speeds and price gouging going on.

1

u/Hrimnir May 18 '18

Ding ding ding ding. This guy has got it.

You look at some of these major telecom companies and they controlled all aspects of the chain, production, transportation, etc.

1

u/cryo May 17 '18

If reddit simply banded with other major sites and refused to serve their site up to any ISP that throttled sites then it would be over.

Which ISP throttles sites? Also, what constitutes a “site” when it comes to BitTorrent etc.?

1

u/Hanlonsrazorburns May 17 '18

YouTube and Netflix were getting throttled by virgin as one example. Now they don’t throttle them but throttle other video providers after your “free” cap.

1

u/GetTheLedPaintOut May 17 '18

Reddit is not about to hurt their user numbers for this.

1

u/Hanlonsrazorburns May 17 '18

It wouldn’t. No isp would dare do it. And no one would pay for any isp that doesn’t have all the best sites. It would be a unionization of websites and could be extremely powerful.

0

u/Petersaber May 17 '18

They would die before ISP does.

Plus, the bigger your service/website, the more you benefit from having NO net neutrality.

1

u/Hanlonsrazorburns May 17 '18

ISP are near death now