Your point is valid but I wish you'd framed it better.
Granted, the internet will indeed remain a bastion of knowledge and information but we shouldn't have to look over our shoulders when taking advantage of that.
You're conflating a single anecdotal example with the overall issue. Of course this vote doesn't mean that all websites that are free, open, or focused on knowledge will go away. What it _does_ mean that your ISP can now sell the fact that you post here to Microsoft, who will know that malchow is you (tied to your real name, since the ISP knows that), and now Microsoft can start targeting you in new and exciting ways.
If my argument was impaired, it was certainly less impaired than the parent, who declared that the glorious free and open internet is over (b. 1974, d. 2017) because of this regulatory rollback.
By the way, the fact that you cannot predict Microsoft's "new and exciting" ways of targeting me is a great example of why your argument is unconvincing. Do you really want me to believe that, as long as we kept this rule in place, network providers would never conceive of novel ways to participate in the advertising business using the network-level data they enjoy?
Your best friend, if you are looking for a no-tracking digital lifestyle, is the free market's likelihood of delivering to you just that. It may come at a premium price, which I assume you'll be happy to pay. At the moment, you are just making everyone else pay a premium price for the no-tracking digital lifestyle you prefer, and relying on bureaucrats in D.C. to patch up the rules from time to time to keep up with novel targeting methods.
If you knew the first thing about economics, you would know that the natural, regulation-free state of ISPs is for them to merge together into a single company the way that oil companies merged together to form Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century. In that scenario, what you would get is the choice of one product, and you would pay an unreasonable amount of money for it.
Of course, since you don't know the first thing about economics, what we're treated to instead is some false ideological platitudes about the free market.
You are embarrassing yourself. Care to offer a testable hypothesis? You appear to predict that the market, with this rule repeal, will not yield any non-tracking ISP options. Is that your prediction?
And, again, do you really want to be in the position of saying that the ISP industry will consolidate the way the oil companies have? Do you have any idea how rambunctious the energy industry is at the present moment? At best, you've shown that you are correct for a very short timeframe, and proven that you are wrong on a longer timeframe.
For what it's worth the parent is right. I have a single ISP available to me, as is the case with the majority of the US(or maybe two if you're lucky enough to live in a large metro that hasn't signed exclusivity agreements).
The free market isn't going to bring a solution to this. When the internet started out there were tons of ISPs, now there's only a few large ones that are split by region so they have an effective monopoly.
Also, I was talking about the oil industry 110 years ago, not the modern energy industry. A similar modern industry to ISPs is telecom, and the only reason that those companies haven't all merged together is because of antitrust law (which you would also want repealed if you were consistent at all).
