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So... What happened with net neutrality? It's been 5 years since the FCC voted to repeal it in 2017. Net neutrality supporters promised a dystopia where small businesses and individuals are throttled by ISPs, and consumers have to pay for each website separately.
As far as I can tell... That didn't happen? Nothing happened? Did it even matter? I must be missing something, why would anyone bother trying to repeal or keep net neutrality if it doesn't make a difference? Biden apparently made an executive order in July 2021 asking the FCC to restore net neutrality, but they haven't done it. The Wikipedia article doesn't have much on what happened after 2017 other than legal developments (on the national level, there were two failed congressional laws and a failed lawsuit by Mozilla to restore net neutrality).
From a technical perspective, absolute net neutrality was probably never a tenable prospect: there are all sorts of reasons why ISPs want to optimize traffic flows. Interactive applications (Zoom calls, video games) prefer minimal latency, while streaming services focus on bandwidth and can happily buffer enough to handle less continuous data. Legal streaming being a huge bandwidth user, many services were interested in distinctly less-than-neutral contracts where ISPs would host either hardware or data close to customers to reduce bandwidth costs (these are largely mutually beneficial). Some internet plans are cellular, and IRL bandwidth is a very finite resource: do we really want to enforce that wireless providers can't throttle video streaming (not necessarily completely, but perhaps forcing a lower resolution) to make sure your neighbors in any sufficiently crowded space don't prevent you from checking your email. Honestly, some sort of traffic prioritization is probably inescapable, and it's very unclear to me that "neutral" is either well-defined or desirable.
There's also a decent argument that it was only really an argument because the people pushing for it thought they might lose. Millennials and Zoomers with Netflix accounts were scared their ISPs were going to rope them into costly plans to replace falling cable TV package revenue. Sometimes this takes the form of a generic data cap, which exist but aren't universal even on cellular plans. I don't know that those fears were misplaced, but in the past 5 years I think it's clear that between the political will of streaming companies and their (voting!) customers, legislators can't outright ignore their concerns.
I'm sure there are some principled cyperpunk libertarians out there that support Net Neutrality on a purely dogmatic basis, but I am pretty confident that most of the folks involved circa 2017 were probably more concerned about who was going to bear the financial burden of growing bandwidth costs. Personally, I was loosely in favor, since ISPs are often monopolies. Since then, though, high-bandwidth internet usage has gone mainstream (even outside of the pandemic) such that (even self-interested) neutrality advocates aren't a minority.
There's probably also a darker view that the mainstream left that supported net neutrality as anti-censorship when they were plucky upstarts are now in positions of power and their interests against censorship were never principled, just self-interested. I'm not sure I would endorse that view, but I see how someone could argue it, and it's not a great look.
No libertarian can support NN on a purely dogmatic basis - since it's a governmental intrusion into private business and restriction of freedom of association and contract. Of course, some libertarians may still support it, arguing that this is a minimal intrusion that achieves a lot of good outcomes and prevents outcomes that would be less desirable - but that would be pragmatic and not dogmatic basis. Dogmatic basis is that government intrusion can only happen to protect natural rights and enforce contracts. I do not see any natural rights arguments that demand NN, thus on purely dogmatic libertarian basis, NN is treif.
A principled libertarian probably wouldn't support the government mandated service provider monopoly/duopoly that creates the conflict in the first place either. One that accepts the public utility infrastructure principle applied to last mile (libertarians here, not anarchists) would probably want something like local loop unbundling rather than strict net neutrality. But regulating common infrastructure such that it cannot discriminate between private parties isn't heterodox within that philosophical framework. Right libertarians would typically favor auctioning services while left libertarians would favor a common carrier equal service regulation.
There's no such principle in libertarianism. For anarchists, "public" doesn't mean anything at all, since there's no state. For libertarians, "public" means "operated by the government", and the only thing that can be so is the institutions that are dedicated to preserving natural rights (e.g. the police putting murderers in jail) and enforcing contracts (e.g. if you promised to pay your bills, you better pay them or else). I don't see much place for "public utility infrastructure principle" here. Now, you may like the practical benefits of this, whatever it means - but if we're talking about "dogmatic basis", there's just no place for it, and anybody who accepts it may be dogmatic anything, but not a libertarian. Just as somebody who accepts private ownership of means of production is not a communist, even though there are probably much proven benefits to that concept.
They may favor anything they like, but they're not any kind of libertarians then. It doesn't make sense to use the label "libertarian" for somebody that accepts regulation they like and rejects regulation they don't - everybody is "libertarian" like that, the label will provide zero selectivity then.
I think this is an overly restrictive reading. A communist still accepts that capitalism exists. Likewise, a libertarian may accept as a matter of fact that state regulation exists. Then starting from that position, the libertarian may have an opinion on what manner of adjustment to that regulation makes the system more free, or less free, even in a libertarian sense.
The domain of opinion of a political system is not limited to a complete instantiation of that system - and well so, because otherwise it would be impossible to reshape society to your wishes. You have to be able to target smaller steps than complete instantaneous replacement.
Sure, there's a difference between what communist wants to happen, ideally, and what's existing on the ground now. So a communist may push for higher taxation of private business - but always with the ultimate goal in mind that these businesses should eventually be all nationalized and under the control of Gosplan. So if we talk about tactical flexibility, then yes, that's a thing. But if we're talking about dogmatic position - then I can't call someone who accepts capitalism a dogmatic communist. And I can't see any libertarian support regulation of private business on a purely dogmatic basis. On the tactical grounds, as a political move to improve an imperfect situation and make it less imperfect - sure.
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