I still can't get excited about net neutrality, but maybe that's because I'm from a country (UK) where telco competition is strong enough - and number porting etc easy enough - that anything that's anticonsumer will get punished by the market.
British providers have happily performed deep packet inspection in order to "prioritize" traffic with little to no resistance from the public. Britain just doesn't share this principle.
Real anonymity is hard, and takes a level of paranoia not many can sustain without suffering mental health issues.
The shittiest providers in the UK are usually the vertically integrated players (Sky, Virgin, BT) that optimise their business around selling bundles to consumers (TV, mobile, net and movie subs).
Fortunately, thanks to local loop unbundling providing a relatively level playing field, there are lots of "net only" providers that focus on delivering a technically strong, unadulterated connection to the internet for consumers that value that.
Bonus: VOIP is also really easy in the UK. When I lived there, I ported my landline number to http://www.voiptalk.org (which I still maintain now), had a 4G unlocked SIM from Virgin with virtually unlimited data and an 18MBit ADSL connection from Andrews & Arnold. All monthly contracts, no tie in. Total cost was ~£50/month iirc. Worked beautifully and felt very "free" (as in freedom) to me.
It seems to me to have done reasonably well at encouraging suppliers to compete on price, and on customer service quality (provided you don't take the ISP's word for it).
It hasn't been great at hastening the widespread availability of > 20Mbit broadband, and that is probably in part because of a particular technological and financial internet access model becoming somewhat entrenched, due to the very same regulation.
I tend to be of the opinion that net neutrality is a useful tactic where a functioning competitive market doesn't exist, and is beyond hope of being made to exist. Outside of that, I'm much less certain of how valuable it is.
(I'm not going to address the whole UK internet censorship and data logging thing, because it's orthogonal to the structure of the market. And also because it's really fucking depressing.)
Re: UK internet censorship and data logging - agree not connected to this debate (and, yes, it's fucking depressing).
The situation is a bit like drug addiction. Obviously it's better for a person's health to not shoot heroin. But an addict will always find the immediate benefit of one more hit more compelling than the vague, long-term benefits of getting clean.
Telcos understand this dynamic, and they're trying to play up the short-term pleasure - by offering so-called "free data" - in order to distract people from the long-term harm and drum up support for suppressing net neutrality.
We've always had data-caps that would sound insane to those of you in the Americas or Europe, and we've always dealt with them by not having net neutrality.
As an example, I remember the first time coaxial cable Internet started becoming something that was really purchasable by a large number of residential users. The speed was 10Mbps down, 1Mbps up. The data limit for the month was 10GB. Extra data was available at the low low rate of 14c/MB (or $140/GB, for those who don't want to do the math). The provider, though, maintained a large private mirror of downloads that were "free" -- they didn't count towards your monthly cap. They mirrored things like patches for games, linux ISOs, and they had a fairly large shareware repository.
I couldn't get cable Internet at home -- they never ran the cable down my street -- so I was stuck on 28k dial-up. I would have killed for cable, data restrictions or not.
But that was back then. What about now?
Now? We have companies that deliver data over LTE who do similar-but-different things. I have a cellular plan with Optus (AKA Singtel), which is $80 a month. For that, I get 20GB worth of downloads, but I also get absolutely unlimited streaming of Netflix, and unlimited streaming from most of the popular music services (Spotify, Google Play, I Heart Radio, Apple Music, and maybe others I can't remember). I stream tens of gigabytes of video and audio every month, and I can do this because of the lack of net neutrality here. Some other provides on pre-paid services which typically have tiny data caps will provide "unlimited social media access" -- because that's how they draw in teens, what I assume is the most valuable market segment for pre-paid.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that when a service becomes big enough that it's marketable to with free data, then one of the providers will pick up on it as a value-add. Something they can do that improves their service so they can grab more market share.
Some of you are probably going to argue that this is a symptom of a broken market, and I'm not sure that's the case. Networking in Australia is hard. We have 1/10th the population of the US in a country about the same physical size.
It's possible I'm really very wrong about how this all works. Maybe I'm naive and it's all really terrible and I should be upset. It's just hard to see from here how perfect net neutrality is an issue.
Home-broadband wise, here's a link to Telstra (Australia's largest telecomms company by a large margin) and their policies around free content on their residential "BigPond" ISP: https://www.telstra.com.au/support/category/broadband/manage...
And a link to services available for 'free' on Internode (now owned by TPG, which is I think at this point Australia's second largest ISP) http://www.internode.on.net/residential/entertainment/unmete...
TPG themselves do free Netflix, although I'm not sure what else is unmetered.
That's nightmarish to me. 6 corporations owning 90%+ of media outlets in the US is already bordering corporatist dystopia.
If you don't happen to watch much Netflix, but another carrier offers a deal on something you do use? Switch! Or maybe you don't need the value-add services and just want an overall cheaper plan? You can do that, too! Porting to a different ISP or cellular carrier is a legally enforced right here. 99% of the population of Australia is able to switch at will to a number of different providers, and there's nothing like the regional monopolies that companies like TWC or Comcast have in the US.
There's huge, fundamental gaps in the way different continents provide Internet access. Maybe if there were no competition of ISPs at a local level in Australia, net neutrality would be a huge problem here. It isn't a problem here, though. I don't think it's something that the average Australian in the street has thought much about, and if you explained it to them they probably wouldn't understand what the big deal is. Despite the fact that we don't have net neutrality, the sky isn't falling, and Australian access to the Internet is basically as free-as-in-freedom as it is in the US.
There's more than one way to skin a cat, and the idea that ISPs must only ever be dumb pipes is one way to solve the problem of competition in the Internet provider space, but it's certainly not the only one.
Name just one (in Australia) that isn't owned by Murdoch or Fairfax :P
The way I see things is that having an Internet service that is in high demand is simply incentive for ISPs to peer with you.
Netflix reportedly said (link below) that it regretted offering 'unmetered data' to Australian ISPs, because they feared it would have a chilling effect on the availability of other streaming services.
Their fears were unfounded: Stan & Presto are both available unmetered on certain ISPs. (Quickflix went out of business, but not because of ISP deals, but because they couldn't compete in library size and other major ways -- I suspect there's simply not room for three Australia-based streaming services to license enough content to keep themselves afloat.)
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/netflix...
Stan seems to be a good competitor, but that's only comparing it to the Australian Netflix library. I'm of the opinion that all competition has done is split the market, as they fight over the same set of exclusives.
I'll often browse US Netflix rather than switch between Aus Netflix and Stan to find a movie I've seen previously. US Netflix seems to have 90% of the missing content Stan offers over Aus Netflix.
> that anything that's anticonsumer will get punished by the market
many large telcos are going the way of mobile networks, by tying you in with complex, one-sided contracts, salesmen-sold "bundles" etc.
How many inexpensive, short-term mobile contracts can you get? If internet contracts aren't there now, they will be soon.
For home internet, if you have a choice, it's usually between only two companies with different technology, and often significantly different bandwidth options, there's not much room to compare on price, and very little room to compare on routing or terms of service.
I think people are missing the point of the posted article, or maybe I am. As I understand it, the complaint is that giving free data for the incumbent tech giants' products gives them a distinct advantage in the marketplace over small / startup offerings which do not have deals for free data. This advantage means the "level playing field" of the internet frontier is dead.
I'm not atypical. It's easy to switch in the UK, easy to port your number, and people have little carrier loyalty. Switching home broadband is more of a pain, but switching cell carriers (or, rather, "mobile providers") takes a phone call and a day of questionable connectivity and that's it.