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RE: dTube: Net neutrality is bad because...the internet is bad?

in #news7 years ago (edited)

Well, it's hard to read much into the caller's message because it was fairly unsophisticated. But there's nothing wrong with that: most people haven't done a great deal of research into tech nor are they particularly polished and glib.

That said, there's no reason we need to be "fanboys" about how the internet has been used by corporations. If you see a free service provided via the internet, it's not "free." It's just that the corporation involved fooled you into thinking that you were the customer, not the product.

Facebook has admitted that it actively pursued ideas and tricks to make people log in more by studying the causes of addictive behavior. Not cool. They've also admitted to receiving ad money from Russians to post fake news stories during the 2016 American presidential election. Worse, they constructed a mathematical AI model about user behavior and made it freely available to Cambridge Analytica and others to target fake "news" stories to those people most likely to find them disturbing and, based on that, change their vote.

And then there's the issue of all of the fake profiles on Facebook and Twitter, cross linking posts to fake "news" items so that Google's SEO algorithms will drive up their popularity (and priority) in Google searches.

To be sure, there's a lot of bad actors out there. But to conflate that with getting rid of net neutrality would have the effect of making a bad situation even worse. It's like complaining that trucks on highways are delivering "bad products," so we need to let corporations convert the roads to private ownership and slow all vehicles down, letting vehicles drive at normal speed only if they bribe the corporation. If anything, wouldn't that just inspire more corruption, and create a new class of bad actors?

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