If your message doesn't show up on one webpage, you can always publish it on another, or on a webpage of your own. If your ISP decides what webpages you are allowed to visit, that's basically it. If they don't want to let you contact any competing domain registrars, you won't be able to.
I suppose technically that'll never happen; you could fall back to a dial-up ISP. After all, the phone company is not allowed to decide that you can't call their competitors. One tiny part of the Title 2 regulations that cover telecommunications forces them to allow all telephone subscribers to call all other telephone subscribers. It's telephone neutrality. Look up the whole MCI thing from a few decades ago.
Doesn't America have anti monopoly laws? Curious why those don't apply to ISPs . Isn't this an admission that 'net neutrality ' is a bandaid to the problem of ISP monopoly.
Also, Philosophically you won't really care about net neutrality if you have ISP choice. correct?
If nobody wants to dig and lay cable to offer services to a small town what are you gonna do? The US had very low population density so the cost of teaching small communities can be huge.
It got this way because the companies that are dominant ISPs today were not always ISPs; they were cable TV companies. The cable companies were allowed to have regional monopolies where a city would allow one cable company to serve all the people in the city, but they didn't have to share their networks with each other. This wasn't so bad, because the cable companies don't really make TV shows; they buy TV shows from HBO or whoever. In principle, it wouldn't really matter that much which cable company you you paid, because they all would have more or less the same options. Since they only offered broadcast services they didn't qualify as telecommunications services either, so Title 2 doesn't apply (Title 1 does instead). But then the internet was invented, and now the cable companies deliver internet service over the same networks as they provide TV.
And they're still technically not monopolies, because even if they're the only place you can get 100MBps service, you might still be able to get 2Mbps service from the phone company (or dial-up service if you're more than a couple of miles from the POP), and internet service is internet service.
The phone companies also have regional monopolies, but because they have to share their network with everyone there are lots of options. I can buy my DSL from a dozen companies, but the circuit will be provisioned by AT&T. This means that none of these companies are likely to act in bad faith; their customers can switch easily, and the FCC is generally watching.
Having more options is indeed another way out; the cable companies have actually gotten a lot better in the last few years, if you're in a market where there are other choices. In some cities you can get Google Fiber, and cable there has suddenly started competing. In SF you can get Sonic.net's fiber service, etc.
> Doesn't America have anti monopoly laws? Curious why those don't apply to ISPs . Isn't this an admission that 'net neutrality ' is a bandaid to the problem of ISP monopoly.
You are correct in that the root of this problem is that our anti-monopoly laws aren't being enacted here because there's too much money being made by those on top. We should fix that problem as well.
However, I'm not convinced that "just get a different ISP" would work in the US like it does elsewhere. Service companies here are very good at hiding details and the US generally ends up with a small handful of choices that are all terrible. See also: Phones, Healthcare, Transportation
How many ISPs can you choose from where you live ?
They have an effective monopoly or duopoly in many regions in the US.
in addition to that, "but what about google" is no defence for what last mile ISPs are doing. If google ever becomes too ubiquitous as a gatekeeper (it's already at that point according to the EU antitrust commission) they'll also need to be regulated.
Search engines? At least 5 that I've used. Google Bing ddg Baidu yandex. Cost of switching is like 10 seconds.
Phone OS? 3, one of which is literally open source and used by a bunch of other competitors. Cost of switching is about $150 and a day.
ISP in the US I have actually no choice. I'm crossing my fingers that CenturyLink or municipal fiber will become a thing, but I ain't optimistic about it. Cost of switching if there was a second one would be around $200+ for modem, installation fees, etc, and last time I did cus I moved it took like a week.
ISPs are natural monopolies [1]. In the US we're seeing increasing market share concentration by some pretty big juggernauts in the space (Comcast, Verizon). So what you're seeing is a lack of ISP choices for consumers and in many instances only 1 choice and that in my opinion is far more problematic than what Google and FB are doing. I'm not defending censorship by any party here really, but I definitely think censorship at the ISP level is a much bigger problem.
I read that wikipedia page. I'd say I have more choice with ISPs than with search engines. Won't you say 'natural monopoly' applies to google too at this point?
I can get 50-100++Mbps from Comcast, or 1Mbps (maybe) from CenturyLink, and then... no actually that's it. And 1Mbps would not let me do a lot of stuff online anymore.
So effectively I have no choice, unless I want to stop all video watching, downloading games regularly (not gonna soak 18 hours of 100% of my bandwidth to download a new title), etc.
The "top tier" has three options that are all basically equivalent in terms of quality:
google.com
bing.com
baidu.com
Other less popular but in many cases still excellent options include:
yandex.com
gigablast.com
lycos.com
askjeeves.com
duckduckgo.com
qwant.com
And the list goes on and on and on... these are just the "similar to google" search engines. There are also search engines for particular topics, search engines that take a different paradigm ("semantic search"), and with beer money you can even buy search engine+crawler software packages and build your own search engine for the portion of the web you care about.
And major sites like Wikipedia and Amazon and all the social sites have their own search features so you don't even need a third party search engine within most of the big silos.
If you're using google it's because either a) you want to use google; or b) you're monumentally lazy. Not because there aren't other options.
You can also write your own crawler and search engine. In fact, as literally all of these options demonstrate, with a surprisingly small amount of VC cash you could build your own "more than good enough" search engine. The same amount of cash probably wouldn't be nearly enough to build out a Verizon or Comcast competitor in even one city.
Conversely, I have exactly 3 options for ISPs in my area. One of them is the local equivalent of "build your own search engine" (and about similar quality). So actually 2 options -- Comcast and Verizon. There is no long tail of other providers, and what's more, there almost certainly never will be because acquiring the land rights would be enormously expensive. Oh and BTW I live in a major city; outside of cities you're even more screwed.
And even if we just limit ourselves to the "big best in class" search engines -- google, bing, baidu, duckduckgo -- that's still twice the number of options that most people have for ISP in the US.
Net neutrality is vastly different; it's about filtering content in general and can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on a situation. E.g. when Russian government forces ISPs to block certain sites, it's obviously censorship, although it's achieved by filtering. But when a provider limits certain protocols (e.g. BitTorrent) over a narrow-band line, there may be sound technical reasons for this and the overall result may very well be to the advantage of the customers. Such filtering is commonplace in enterprises.
The recent case of GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare is much closer to political censorship; there's no technical reason behind it.
I'm saying it's only censorship if you don't believe that other groups also have freedom of speech and association too. In order for the domain name thing or the CloudFlare thing to be censorship, you have to believe that none of those entities are able to practice freedom of association, or the right to choose who they do business with.
I disagree. I think doing business should be based on business reasons; if Daily Stormer upholds their end of the contract, then Google/GoDaddy/etc. have no ethical business reason to terminate it. If they disagree with what Daily Stormer says, they are totally free to publish their own statement. The only ethical consequence of free speech could be another speech.
And I believe that choosing not to do business is a form of speech.
Also, doing business with Nazis (and I'm not throwing that term around lightly; the Daily Stormer identifies themselves as such) is, especially given recent events, considered bad for business. So I would say they have a business reason there too.
There indeed is such a reason, but it's unethical. It is basically being afraid that the mob will turn against you and thus hurt your business. Somehow nobody blames the mob.
Doing business is a way of living in the modern society. Stopping doing business (including firing an employee over non-business reasons, a very popular measure in liberal circles) threatens your well-being and even life. If everyone stops doing business with a person, the person is very likely to die. This is very close to lynching and is a total opposite of justice.
I completely disagree. I especially disagree that it's anywhere close to lynching, which is a terrible, terrible analogy for you to choose given that the subject at hand is Nazis and White Supremacists.
I disagree that choosing not to do business with the Daily Stormer is unethical. It's no worse than any other reason to not choose to do business with someone, of which GoDaddy does chose not to do business with several other entities.
I disagree that GoDaddy not doing business with the Daily Stormer threatened anyone's well being or life. If anything, not amplifying their signal has likely saved lives, because hopefully fewer people will know that the site exists, and will then become radicalized because of it.
It's about a woman with that tweet about white and AIDS and how the mob response to it ruined her life. The punishment turned out to be completely out of proportion with the crime. Punishments carried out by mobs tend to. Imagine that she were tried by a court for her tweet, given a defender and all the due process; do you think the court would order her to be punished to that extent? So yes, this is very close to lynching; it's social lynching done by well-educated progressive people who think they're humane and are doing the right thing. Projected to its logical conclusion it's meant to deprive the victims of their lives.
Actually, much more people became aware of Daily Stormer; I, for one, I've never heard of them before. I wish I could see what it was about, I prefer to trust my own judgement in such matters, but I cannot. All I can see is a small excerpt in a search engine: "We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, ..." Well, that's all; the information is not available. But it's ironic, isn't it? I'd say this credo is an opposite of that of their antifa opponents who claim it's good to use violence against Nazis and boldly declare that at the pages of New Your Times and whatnot.
Well, did GoDaddy and CloudFlare suppress the Daily Stormer? Or did they choose not to do business with them? I don't believe that they engaged in censorship, because they didn't prevent the Daily Stormer from being accessible. I believe that choosing not to do business with them was a form of speech, and that acting in the way they did was them expressing free speech. Thus, to me, in order to believe that what they did was censorship, that means that they should not be able to take that course of action, and that those companies were obligated to assist the Daily Stormer in getting its message out there.
>Well, did GoDaddy and CloudFlare suppress the Daily Stormer?
Yes they surpassed it on their platform. Censorship doesn't mean "make inaccessible to everyone on any platform". If you censor something on your own platform its still called censorship. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Indian govt censors kissing on movie screens but you can still go watch it on youtube. That doesn't mean what they are doing is not censorship, the govt entity that's responsible for it is actually called "censor board".
GoDaddy and CloudFlare are not government. The Indian Government is. That's a large difference.
And I still don't believe what they did was censorship. That was them exercising their right to free speech. I do not believe that it is possible for an expression of free speech to be censorship.
>GoDaddy and CloudFlare are not government. The Indian Government is. That's a large difference.
I was just using that as an example. So according to you only govt can do censorship?
Thats a definition you made up, not the definition in dictionary. I quoted the dictionary definition from the dictionary and it perfectly matches what google did. Can you tell me how am wrong precisely?
I believe that only those who are obligated to assist or allow speech can do censorship. I don't believe that someone who has no obligation to aid or allow speech can. For example, if I throw away a flyer, that's not censorship.
In regards to censorship, I agree with you. It seems that if your primary opposition to net neutrality is censorship, then you should be equally opposed to Google censoring anything.
But in terms of technical effort and economics, these are not the same. It's much easier to write html and find someone to host it for you than it is to trench in municipalities and lay fiber across the country. Net neutrality restricts ISPs from having a competitive advantage in the content space.
To me it's less about censorship than companies offering services over there internet having to pay tolls to ISPs. This will only make it easier for incumbent companies to defend the market against competitors will can't afford the tolls and thus can't reach their customers.
Net Neutrality isn't about censorship. It's about the distribution of power and hence profit in the emerging new order for communications, media and entertainment distribution. ISPs want to maintain their current cable tv business model where they get to charge the customer for their connection, and also charge the content provider for carrying their content to said user. That business model is contrary to the historical Internet Service model where the customer pays a fee that's supposed to cover the cost of all the traffic they transit regardless of where it originated.
The difference is one of degree (...perhaps "layer" is a better word?), not of kind. There probably is a principled way to draw a line between the two situations, but I haven't seen it. Many people are distracted by the greater empathy they feel for Google than for Comcast.
In my mind there is actually no contradiction here. Net neutrality is undeniably a way for the federal government to pressure ISPs when their opinions differ. Such as on information requests and wiretapping.
If your message doesn't show up on one webpage, you can always publish it on another, or on a webpage of your own. If your ISP decides what webpages you are allowed to visit, that's basically it. If they don't want to let you contact any competing domain registrars, you won't be able to.
I suppose technically that'll never happen; you could fall back to a dial-up ISP. After all, the phone company is not allowed to decide that you can't call their competitors. One tiny part of the Title 2 regulations that cover telecommunications forces them to allow all telephone subscribers to call all other telephone subscribers. It's telephone neutrality. Look up the whole MCI thing from a few decades ago.
> If your message doesn't show up on one webpage, you can always publish it on another, or on a webpage of your own.
Can I just say this then,
If you can't access your website on ISP choose another ISP.
Whats different about this argument? Also, thank you for answering instead of downvoting.
For many Americans(including me) there is only one ISP to "choose".
Doesn't America have anti monopoly laws? Curious why those don't apply to ISPs . Isn't this an admission that 'net neutrality ' is a bandaid to the problem of ISP monopoly.
Also, Philosophically you won't really care about net neutrality if you have ISP choice. correct?
If nobody wants to dig and lay cable to offer services to a small town what are you gonna do? The US had very low population density so the cost of teaching small communities can be huge.
It got this way because the companies that are dominant ISPs today were not always ISPs; they were cable TV companies. The cable companies were allowed to have regional monopolies where a city would allow one cable company to serve all the people in the city, but they didn't have to share their networks with each other. This wasn't so bad, because the cable companies don't really make TV shows; they buy TV shows from HBO or whoever. In principle, it wouldn't really matter that much which cable company you you paid, because they all would have more or less the same options. Since they only offered broadcast services they didn't qualify as telecommunications services either, so Title 2 doesn't apply (Title 1 does instead). But then the internet was invented, and now the cable companies deliver internet service over the same networks as they provide TV.
And they're still technically not monopolies, because even if they're the only place you can get 100MBps service, you might still be able to get 2Mbps service from the phone company (or dial-up service if you're more than a couple of miles from the POP), and internet service is internet service.
The phone companies also have regional monopolies, but because they have to share their network with everyone there are lots of options. I can buy my DSL from a dozen companies, but the circuit will be provisioned by AT&T. This means that none of these companies are likely to act in bad faith; their customers can switch easily, and the FCC is generally watching.
Having more options is indeed another way out; the cable companies have actually gotten a lot better in the last few years, if you're in a market where there are other choices. In some cities you can get Google Fiber, and cable there has suddenly started competing. In SF you can get Sonic.net's fiber service, etc.
> Doesn't America have anti monopoly laws? Curious why those don't apply to ISPs . Isn't this an admission that 'net neutrality ' is a bandaid to the problem of ISP monopoly.
You are correct in that the root of this problem is that our anti-monopoly laws aren't being enacted here because there's too much money being made by those on top. We should fix that problem as well.
However, I'm not convinced that "just get a different ISP" would work in the US like it does elsewhere. Service companies here are very good at hiding details and the US generally ends up with a small handful of choices that are all terrible. See also: Phones, Healthcare, Transportation
How many ISPs can you choose from where you live ? They have an effective monopoly or duopoly in many regions in the US.
in addition to that, "but what about google" is no defence for what last mile ISPs are doing. If google ever becomes too ubiquitous as a gatekeeper (it's already at that point according to the EU antitrust commission) they'll also need to be regulated.
I live in India.. I have about 10-15 options, but not sure if they are subcontracting from the same guy or what. I need to look into it.
>How many ISPs can you choose from where you live ?
Let me ask you this. How many search engines can you choose form, really? How many phone OS's can you choose from?
Search engines? At least 5 that I've used. Google Bing ddg Baidu yandex. Cost of switching is like 10 seconds.
Phone OS? 3, one of which is literally open source and used by a bunch of other competitors. Cost of switching is about $150 and a day.
ISP in the US I have actually no choice. I'm crossing my fingers that CenturyLink or municipal fiber will become a thing, but I ain't optimistic about it. Cost of switching if there was a second one would be around $200+ for modem, installation fees, etc, and last time I did cus I moved it took like a week.
ISPs are natural monopolies [1]. In the US we're seeing increasing market share concentration by some pretty big juggernauts in the space (Comcast, Verizon). So what you're seeing is a lack of ISP choices for consumers and in many instances only 1 choice and that in my opinion is far more problematic than what Google and FB are doing. I'm not defending censorship by any party here really, but I definitely think censorship at the ISP level is a much bigger problem.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
I read that wikipedia page. I'd say I have more choice with ISPs than with search engines. Won't you say 'natural monopoly' applies to google too at this point?
It takes me all of 10 seconds to type duckduckgo.com, and maybe 30 to switch default search engines for the browser.
I don't think I could switch an ISP in 10 days, let alone seconds.
I can get 50-100++Mbps from Comcast, or 1Mbps (maybe) from CenturyLink, and then... no actually that's it. And 1Mbps would not let me do a lot of stuff online anymore.
So effectively I have no choice, unless I want to stop all video watching, downloading games regularly (not gonna soak 18 hours of 100% of my bandwidth to download a new title), etc.
The "top tier" has three options that are all basically equivalent in terms of quality:
google.com
bing.com
baidu.com
Other less popular but in many cases still excellent options include:
yandex.com
gigablast.com
lycos.com
askjeeves.com
duckduckgo.com
qwant.com
And the list goes on and on and on... these are just the "similar to google" search engines. There are also search engines for particular topics, search engines that take a different paradigm ("semantic search"), and with beer money you can even buy search engine+crawler software packages and build your own search engine for the portion of the web you care about.
And major sites like Wikipedia and Amazon and all the social sites have their own search features so you don't even need a third party search engine within most of the big silos.
If you're using google it's because either a) you want to use google; or b) you're monumentally lazy. Not because there aren't other options.
You can also write your own crawler and search engine. In fact, as literally all of these options demonstrate, with a surprisingly small amount of VC cash you could build your own "more than good enough" search engine. The same amount of cash probably wouldn't be nearly enough to build out a Verizon or Comcast competitor in even one city.
Conversely, I have exactly 3 options for ISPs in my area. One of them is the local equivalent of "build your own search engine" (and about similar quality). So actually 2 options -- Comcast and Verizon. There is no long tail of other providers, and what's more, there almost certainly never will be because acquiring the land rights would be enormously expensive. Oh and BTW I live in a major city; outside of cities you're even more screwed.
And even if we just limit ourselves to the "big best in class" search engines -- google, bing, baidu, duckduckgo -- that's still twice the number of options that most people have for ISP in the US.
> If you can't access your website on ISP choose another ISP.
There are thousands upon thousands of webpage hosts on the internet.
In many areas of the US, however, you may have only one option for ISP. You either take it, or you go without internet.
The vast majority of Americans do not have choice in ISP. Where I am, I have a choice between Cox and... well, Cox.
Net neutrality is vastly different; it's about filtering content in general and can be a good thing and a bad thing depending on a situation. E.g. when Russian government forces ISPs to block certain sites, it's obviously censorship, although it's achieved by filtering. But when a provider limits certain protocols (e.g. BitTorrent) over a narrow-band line, there may be sound technical reasons for this and the overall result may very well be to the advantage of the customers. Such filtering is commonplace in enterprises.
The recent case of GoDaddy, Google, and Cloudflare is much closer to political censorship; there's no technical reason behind it.
It's only censorship if you believe other entities are not also allowed freedom of speech and association.
I'm not sure I follow what you are saying here. Censorship is only when your view and others are not allowed freedom of speech?
I feel like I'm not parsing your sentence correctly.
I'm saying it's only censorship if you don't believe that other groups also have freedom of speech and association too. In order for the domain name thing or the CloudFlare thing to be censorship, you have to believe that none of those entities are able to practice freedom of association, or the right to choose who they do business with.
I disagree. I think doing business should be based on business reasons; if Daily Stormer upholds their end of the contract, then Google/GoDaddy/etc. have no ethical business reason to terminate it. If they disagree with what Daily Stormer says, they are totally free to publish their own statement. The only ethical consequence of free speech could be another speech.
And I believe that choosing not to do business is a form of speech.
Also, doing business with Nazis (and I'm not throwing that term around lightly; the Daily Stormer identifies themselves as such) is, especially given recent events, considered bad for business. So I would say they have a business reason there too.
There indeed is such a reason, but it's unethical. It is basically being afraid that the mob will turn against you and thus hurt your business. Somehow nobody blames the mob.
Doing business is a way of living in the modern society. Stopping doing business (including firing an employee over non-business reasons, a very popular measure in liberal circles) threatens your well-being and even life. If everyone stops doing business with a person, the person is very likely to die. This is very close to lynching and is a total opposite of justice.
I completely disagree. I especially disagree that it's anywhere close to lynching, which is a terrible, terrible analogy for you to choose given that the subject at hand is Nazis and White Supremacists.
I disagree that choosing not to do business with the Daily Stormer is unethical. It's no worse than any other reason to not choose to do business with someone, of which GoDaddy does chose not to do business with several other entities.
I disagree that GoDaddy not doing business with the Daily Stormer threatened anyone's well being or life. If anything, not amplifying their signal has likely saved lives, because hopefully fewer people will know that the site exists, and will then become radicalized because of it.
Have you read that piece?
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-t...
It's about a woman with that tweet about white and AIDS and how the mob response to it ruined her life. The punishment turned out to be completely out of proportion with the crime. Punishments carried out by mobs tend to. Imagine that she were tried by a court for her tweet, given a defender and all the due process; do you think the court would order her to be punished to that extent? So yes, this is very close to lynching; it's social lynching done by well-educated progressive people who think they're humane and are doing the right thing. Projected to its logical conclusion it's meant to deprive the victims of their lives.
Actually, much more people became aware of Daily Stormer; I, for one, I've never heard of them before. I wish I could see what it was about, I prefer to trust my own judgement in such matters, but I cannot. All I can see is a small excerpt in a search engine: "We here at the Daily Stormer are opposed to violence. We seek revolution through the education of the masses. When the information is available to the people, ..." Well, that's all; the information is not available. But it's ironic, isn't it? I'd say this credo is an opposite of that of their antifa opponents who claim it's good to use violence against Nazis and boldly declare that at the pages of New Your Times and whatnot.
"examine (a book, movie, etc.) officially and suppress unacceptable parts of it."
that the definition I am using. What does it have to do with freedom of speech?
Well, did GoDaddy and CloudFlare suppress the Daily Stormer? Or did they choose not to do business with them? I don't believe that they engaged in censorship, because they didn't prevent the Daily Stormer from being accessible. I believe that choosing not to do business with them was a form of speech, and that acting in the way they did was them expressing free speech. Thus, to me, in order to believe that what they did was censorship, that means that they should not be able to take that course of action, and that those companies were obligated to assist the Daily Stormer in getting its message out there.
>Well, did GoDaddy and CloudFlare suppress the Daily Stormer?
Yes they surpassed it on their platform. Censorship doesn't mean "make inaccessible to everyone on any platform". If you censor something on your own platform its still called censorship. It has nothing to do with freedom of speech.
Indian govt censors kissing on movie screens but you can still go watch it on youtube. That doesn't mean what they are doing is not censorship, the govt entity that's responsible for it is actually called "censor board".
GoDaddy and CloudFlare are not government. The Indian Government is. That's a large difference.
And I still don't believe what they did was censorship. That was them exercising their right to free speech. I do not believe that it is possible for an expression of free speech to be censorship.
>GoDaddy and CloudFlare are not government. The Indian Government is. That's a large difference.
I was just using that as an example. So according to you only govt can do censorship?
Thats a definition you made up, not the definition in dictionary. I quoted the dictionary definition from the dictionary and it perfectly matches what google did. Can you tell me how am wrong precisely?
I believe that only those who are obligated to assist or allow speech can do censorship. I don't believe that someone who has no obligation to aid or allow speech can. For example, if I throw away a flyer, that's not censorship.
u refuse to answer the question. "how did what google did not fit the definition of censorship in a dictionary" .
Definitions don't depend on one particular person's beliefs .
In regards to censorship, I agree with you. It seems that if your primary opposition to net neutrality is censorship, then you should be equally opposed to Google censoring anything.
But in terms of technical effort and economics, these are not the same. It's much easier to write html and find someone to host it for you than it is to trench in municipalities and lay fiber across the country. Net neutrality restricts ISPs from having a competitive advantage in the content space.
To me it's less about censorship than companies offering services over there internet having to pay tolls to ISPs. This will only make it easier for incumbent companies to defend the market against competitors will can't afford the tolls and thus can't reach their customers.
Net Neutrality isn't about censorship. It's about the distribution of power and hence profit in the emerging new order for communications, media and entertainment distribution. ISPs want to maintain their current cable tv business model where they get to charge the customer for their connection, and also charge the content provider for carrying their content to said user. That business model is contrary to the historical Internet Service model where the customer pays a fee that's supposed to cover the cost of all the traffic they transit regardless of where it originated.
The difference is one of degree (...perhaps "layer" is a better word?), not of kind. There probably is a principled way to draw a line between the two situations, but I haven't seen it. Many people are distracted by the greater empathy they feel for Google than for Comcast.
In my mind there is actually no contradiction here. Net neutrality is undeniably a way for the federal government to pressure ISPs when their opinions differ. Such as on information requests and wiretapping.
Yes they're slightly close. But those sites can much more easily put up their own webserver than run their own network to each customer.