The fight for net neutrality may not have been as public anymore, but it kept going over the last 5 years. Plenty of court cases challenging the FCC's ruling have been ongoing and California even passed their own net neutrality law. Congress attempted to pass a bill that would enshrine net neutrality as well, though of course the Republic majority never allowed it to get to a vote.
All this is to say despite net neutrality technically not being federally required between 2018 - 2024, it wasn't feasibly for ISP's to roll out metered plans that would go unchallenged. I suspect most were stuck in a "wait and see" stage, and likely expected this eventual rollback anyway given the landscape is still so rapidly changing.
So the protests and constant pushing back against NN did have a positive impact on our eventual outcome, even if it's not obvious or a direct line from reddit blackouts. Like most things, the truth is complex.
This is a bit like removing a traffic light from an intersection and then after a day saying "see, nothing happened, we don't need regulation from traffic lights". Laissez faire, everything will be alright.
ISPs don't exist in a vacuum. Why would Comcast spend millions of dollars implementing some anti-NN consumer ratfuckery when they'd have to revert it once the next administration came into power? If Comcast knew that it wasn't going to get overturned, then they would take advantage.
> How long are we supposed to wait for your doom prophecy to realize?
We shouldn't have waited at all, and in fact shouldn't have allowed it to be repealed in the first place. We have been extraordinarily lucky to have not had to deal with any nonsense from ISPs in all this time. California having their own NN law helped a lot. Now that we're back on track we can call it crisis averted, no harm no foul.
Do you remember when we used to self host content and now we have to use a central provider and/or pay a premium to a VPN/CDN?
Net neutrality fucked the internet and its really actually upsetting to me how quickly we as a society had become complacent with the enshittification.
You're being down voted for telling the truth, which is extremely inconvenient. Notice all the debate in this thread is about partisan score keeping and no one is able to explain why they want these rules back after all their predictions of terrible doom failed to happen. They need them back so they can claim doom was just around the corner if they hadn't been passed. The longer they went without being in effect, the more difficult it would be to explain why the doom never came to be.
It is 100%, Grade A partisan score keeping to preserve future doomsaying without being called out on this absolutely failed predictions. Looks as bad for the doomsayers as a Bush administration's doomsaying about Weapons of Mass Destruction piling up in Iraq, ready to attack the US if we didn't invade. Incredible what people will let their partisan brains twist reality into. Of course, when this is used against them in the future, they'll scream like banshees, claiming it's unprecedented. This is the power of a brain addicted to partisanism.
The boy who cried wolf...again.