2 HN users recommended this commentary2 months2017score 2
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN points people to it as a good plain-language explanation of net neutrality during the 2017 FCC fight.
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on net neutrality, explaining the stakes of the FCC's push to roll back the rules and urging viewers to file comments. It is a comedic but substantive explainer.
“John Oliver found a good way to explain it” (HN, 2017)
2 recommendations · 4 citations · Commentary · news from the time
The FCC Chairmen wants to get rid of net neutrality the only thing keeping the internet open and free. He doesn't apparently have the same idea. Here is a video to explain everything: [this video]
Explains net neutrality and the FCC push to remove it
John Oliver found a good way to explain it: [link] [this video] The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.
Good explanation of net neutrality from John Oliver
Looking what you write, I think you misunderstand what NN does. The monopolies you mentioned have very little to do with NN. Someone already gave example how Facebook replaced MySpace, similarly Google, replaced Yahoo, AltaVista etc, I suppose Amazon did not replace anything, but started e-commerce (and currently creating other markets, like cloud computing), but it is getting higher and higher competition. Apple and Microsoft existed before Internet and are just using their old position to leverage their existence, but the fact they face competition. > EDIT: another question :) If net-neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the tech monopolies maintaining their power position then why do they all support it? [ [link] ] Simple, because it expands powers of existing monopolies making them relevant. Perfect example is Netflix. They providing service to stream movies. They pay also pay large amounts of money for Internet access and ability to send content to their users. On the other side users similarly are paying for Internet access to be able to receive the content. You would think it's double paying (and it kind of is), but it's normal, why users should subsidize Netflix costs or why Netflix should pay for users' access (since they are not only using Netflix) they just pay for their access to the network. But, regional ISPs (in this case Comcast) started having "problems" where packets from Netflix were dropped, because "Netflix was sending too much data to them", ignor
Did someone happen to save the John Oliver original video? It shows "This video is not available" for me. [this video] EDIT: was blocked in Canada, thanks NegatioN
I thought this was quite high, since the net neutrality issue had a lot of coverage in the media, see for example the two John Oliver talks about it: [link] [this video]
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
6 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more