Readit NewsNovel? What?
The practice has been around a really long time, and it has been around on the internet long enough that the term "astroturfing" was coined decades ago. And the term "paid shill" has been around longer than that. Today it's very common in several places including Amazon product reviews and political discussions.
Wikipedia gives (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing#History_of_incide...) an example from way back: 'an early example of the practice was in Act 1, Scene 2 of Shakespeare's play Julius Caesar. In the play, Cassius writes fake letters from "the public" to convince Brutus to assassinate Caesar.'
I'm not a big fan of the practice (it involves ulterior motives), but the most unique thing I see about this is they did a clumsy job of it.
The mere existence of a few private campaigns of the sort doen't diminish how much of a departure this is with what has previously been considered acceptable in the political realm.
If we assume that the widespread every-politician-is-corrupt cynicism goes along with/is rooted in a wish to see less corruption, you are also applying rather harmful tactics: by claiming everyone plays dirty, any differences between the candidates are erased, and so are any incentives to behave ethically. The cynicism is self-fulfilling: politicians only ever getting superficial accusations with no discernable relation to their actual behaviour will soon stop trying, because why bother?
The typical scenario is Comcast asking "startup X" for money to allow them to reach you.
You wouldn't have to pay more, nor would you necessarily notice: established sites would be exempt because customers expect them to work. But nobody will be missing a new company they have never heard of.
Since you will not (immediately) feel the impact, there will be no incentive for you to chose a different ISP.
Conversely, that startup doesn't get a choice: your ISP is the only route to get to you, and they have to pay or forfeit the chance to do business with you.
ISPs would be in a position to claim the vast majority of any internet-based business' profits. As a data-intensive startup, you would also be faced with the prospect of negotiating contracts with every single significant ISP. You'd get to make decisions such as "should we fire ten people, or go dark in Florida for the rest of the month?"
What is the expected gain from Net Neutrality at this point?
NN is when you can't get to "Social Media Startup X" because they didn't pay your ISP.
You are unlikely to even notice this, because only newcomers would be required to pay ransom. Blocking existing sites would lead to customer complaints and actual competition.
When you think to yourself, why do I put up with youtube, why isn't there an alternative... that's the 'thing happening'.
(Side note: one more good reason for Netflix to be in the content creation game)
Netflix gets to pay whatever rate to get priority infrastructure at the telco, you get to pay more to Netflix, and you blame Netflix (not the telco) if the content delivery is botched / not as good as what your "cable subscription over the Internet" delivery is.
That doesn't line up perfectly with the narrative about fast lanes that we were sold, but it does show some of the power being wielded by the telco today as more than just a dumb pipe, and how they leverage their position against competitors.
Local infrastructure will always be a winner takes all economic game. So its pointless to play it. (side-note: Elon Musk's Starlink might change the economic game)
The only way for people to "vote with their wallets" on local communication infrastructure, is BEFORE the winner "settles in", not AFTER.
A bid system, allows 100's of companies to compete to set the price for 2-3 years. Rather than 2-3 companies competing to set the price for perpetuity. It also creates an incentive to produce quality service, because they will be competing for another contract in 2 to 3 years (i.e. they have 2-3 years to demonstrate they are a competent provider).
A single pipe can handle only so many customers. I don't see how it limits the number of providers?
There actually are countriess with such rules, and they seem to work well. The difficult part is the need to set some uniform price providers must pay for that "last mile" connection to their customer. I seem to remember something like $8/month in Germany. That's actually low enough, it would allow healthy competition even if you set wholesale price 50% higher than neccessary.
The same mechanism is used for competition among power and natural gas companies.
Someone was telling the author that he would achieve more if he phrased his point in a more "polite" way, just because the certainty of the writing made the critic mad. Thankfully, the author was here in the comments responding, and he didn't budge.
That interaction was very refreshing for that very reason: The author was right, knew he was right, someone didn't like that the author knew he was right, but the author remained steadfast.
I. e. the willingness to entertain the best argument against your position in good faith. Two people who are excellent in doing so (and familiar to HN) would be Scott Alexander of slatestarcodex, and Matt Levine at Bloomberg.
(Someone rather bad at it, usually arguing against some caricature of what he imagines his opposition to be, and generally tending towards the "either unactionable, obvious, or wrong" end of the spectrum is, well, Paul Graham.)
Here, check out this graph, which rather obviously shows the benefit of joining the EU in 1981: https://www.google.com/search?q=greece+gdp&oq=greece+gdp&aqs...
Let us not forget the pressure the ECB (and other european institutions) put on some countries that have come to light after the fact. (Like only allowing emergency liquidity assistance to be used based on bailout conditions, thus interfering and blackmailing supposed sovereign governments)
edit: And to be fair, while I don't like Varoufakis, the fact his party wants these recordings to come to light, means there is probably something there are is damning to someone
As an analogy: would you want your spouse (and vice versa) to hear recording of every conversation you have, including those with close friends/therapists/rabbis etc?
It's not completely absurd to say yes to that question. But it's notable that such a relationship would be a departure from established norms, and that most people feel even healthy and strong relationships profit from the ability to occasionally seek advice or blow of steam in confidentiality.