• yiliu@informis.land
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    9 months ago

    This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Google is not an ISP. With or without net neutrality, Google could fuck with YouTube users.

    • atrielienz@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Technically false. Google is an ISP. But they aren’t using their position as an ISP to slow down traffic or fast track other traffic in this instance so no it has nothing to do with net neutrality.

    • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Only if we narrow our scope to the commonly thought of types of net neutrality. I think if we had foreseen intentionally treating browsers differently, this type of thing would have 100% been rolled into that original conversation about net neutrality. It’s the same idea: artificially modifying a web experience for capitalist gain.

      I personally wish it could be illegal for them to do this, but I do think it would be really hard to enforce such a law.

      • yiliu@informis.land
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        9 months ago

        Illegal to do…what? Not offer high-res videos? To have any delay before streaming videos? To refuse to serve you videos, even if doing so caused them to lose money? How would you enforce that on Google, much less on smaller startups? Would it apply to PeerTube instances?

        Google sucks for doing this. It’ll drive people to competitors–hopefully even federated competitors. But laws to ‘fix’ the problem would be nearly impossible to craft–and would be counterproductive in the long term, because they’d cement the status quo. Let Google suck, so that people switch away from it.

      • yiliu@informis.land
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        9 months ago

        Well, fair. But even in that case, they have every right to degrade your YouTube experience, as owners of YouTube. As ISP (I mean, assuming NN was still a thing) they couldn’t selectively degrade traffic, but YouTube has no obligation to you under net neutrality.