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To just equal Comcast's estimated lobbying budget of $20 million, it would require somewhere north of 300,000 people all contributing $5 a month. Given you'd also be fighting against Verizon, Google, Netflix, and any number of other companies, you'd probably need a member count close to a million to make anything resembling headway.

A million members making reoccurring contributions is beyond what is realistic, IMO.




Google and Netflix are both pro-neutrality, not anti-; you'd be lobbying with rather than against them on this issue.


They are currently, but there's an argument that incumbent giants would actually benefit from the end of net neutrality, as it would disproportionately disadvantage startups. So in the long term, don't bet on them staying on the same side.


Neutrality advantages incumbents compared to startups on the content side, but not as much as it advantages ISPs over incumbent non-ISP content providers.

There is not much that has driven Google over the past decade as much as preventing market power at other levels of the stack squeezing them out (it's why they've invested heavily in preventing anyone else from controlling either mobile OS or desktop browser market, and even taken on Windows in the consumer space with ChromeOS.)


I've heard this, but I haven't seen recent statements to this point. In fact, IIRC, they were explicitly questioned by some news outlets with the recent kerfluffel and their responses boiled down to "it will all be OK".

Frankly, given their market positions, Google and Netflix only stand to win with anti-NN.

Google's Public Policy blog [0] seems to back up the no comment stance - their last comment is from 2010, dating back to the orignal implementations. Wired's research [1] appears to back this up as well.

And here's a Verge article on Netflix' opinion [2] that boils down to "it won't matter to us".

Verbatum: Even if the formal framework gets weakened, we don’t see a big risk actualizing, because consumers know they’re entitled to getting all of the web services.

[0] https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/search/label/Net%20Neutr... [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/02/google-net-neutrality/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/20/14960154/netflix-net-neut...


> I've heard this, but I haven't seen recent statements to this point

More recent coverage than your March article on Netflix: http://fortune.com/2017/06/15/netflix-net-neutrality-fcc/

And Google's current (and thus, more recent than your 2015 article) action page on neutrality:

https://www.google.com/takeaction/action/freeandopen/index.h...


Note the lack of two companies on the "day of action" site Netflix supposedly supported?

https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/

Still, good to see they're making statements in favor of NN. Action would be better.


They are, until it benefits them not to be.

It'll never benefit the consumer to go this way. Google and Netflix are allies of convenience at best.




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