Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think it's odd to see people banding together to defend Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc. Although the companies on the other side are obviously scum as well.
Because ISPs are no longer required to be dumb pipes, they've started charging their customers a premium for access to video content. This is bad for Netflix, of course, because it cuts into their subscriber base.
They crunch some numbers and come up with an amount they're willing to pay the ISPs to exclude their subscribers from this segmented pricing scheme. The ISPs accept this mutually beneficial deal, and everyone's happy, right?
What about Notflix, though? We don't have the capital that Netflix has to pay into this protection racket, so our subscribers must choose between paying the ISP video premium + our subscription fee, or Netflix's subscription fee.
That's an uphill battle and straightforwardly anti-competitive, but is also the precisely the promise of a world without net neutrality.
I also disagree with your assessment that anybody is subsidizing internet giants. All those players pay for the bandwidth they consume to dump their data into the network. The end-user pays for the other end of the connection. Everything is being paid for, proportionally to the usage.
The last-mile ISPs simply want to double-dip. Comcast thinks Netflix should pay both Level 3 AND Comcast for using the pipes, which fundamentally undermines the architecture of the internet.
I know very little about the situation, hence the naive question, that statement was based off all the websites like reddit putting up fake pay walls to show what things would be like without net neutrality.
Why would they demand only the giants to pay? They have zero interest fostering competition against their own products.
How so? Only very large companies are able to pay for getting high enough bandwidth and speed and, more importantly, also negotiate the corresponding deals with the few networks (who already have effective monopolies in many areas). Smaller startups can hardly compete against them when their services are too slow.
I can see no reasonable story according to which giving up neutrality would be beneficial to smaller companies. The best thing a small startup can do is to bundle up with one of a few large corporations, and the result are more quasi-monopolies and cartels, of course.
New offerings would not be able to afford to pay for the fast-lanes used by the established companies, and would thus not be able to compete with them. Supporting net-neutrality is not defending Google, Amazon, Netflix, it's defending the sites that might some day replace them.
2. If NN is thrown out, and pay to play becomes the name of the game, who do you think is going to be able to pay? Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc, or some unnamed startup?
are google's search results neutral?