It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations? Whose lives have been made better? Compared to what?
Net neutrality advocates are utterly unable to give convincing answers to these questions.
People who will be harmed is anyone who doesn't want their media coming from sources controlled by large corporations such as TimeWarner, Facebook, News Corp., etc. Such conglomerates will get special deals that make it harder for more "alternate" media sources to compete.
If you sign up for an internet plan that promises not to throttle certain sites and then that provider throttles those sites, you can sue them.
If you sign up for an internet plan that makes no such promises, why would one expect anything different?
This may sound like a harsh reality, but it's called "taking personal responsibility" and "voting with your feet". Switch to another internet provider.
The appeal to paternalistic regulatory bodies to restrict the choices of other consumers (who may want to purchase cheaper, more restricted internet plans) is creepy.
That's not an option for most Americans, and part of the reason why net neutrality is necessary.
Most households have multiple internet providers.
The other internet providers, Bell and Telus, had an opportunity to distinguish themselves here.
But they didn’t. They had bandwidth caps too. There was a smaller ISP (TekSavvy) which offered 300GB bandwidth caps (still ridiculous by US standards), which they could offer as a result of a law requiring Canadian ISPs to resell infrastructure to smaller providers (meaning TekSavvy has access to all of Rogers’ customer base). Around 2015, Rogers started introducing plans with higher bandwidth caps, and bandwidth restrictions have relaxed (but they still exist).
It took pretty much a decade for innovation-stifling bandwidth restrictions to stop being a thing in Ontario, and arguably only because of a law (i.e. government interference) letting smaller ISPs use big ISP infrastructure.
I think that if you are in a market with caps, and you go offer a subscription without a cap, you end up with a bunch of subscribers who will saturate their line. So it makes more sense to slowly compete on increasing the caps, quite like we see in the mobile industry as well. Plus, network capacity goes up (hence I said date context matters).
Personally, I got nothing against caps, as long they're clear and the subscriber is informed about it beforehand. A FUP has a cap as well. If you download 24/7/365.25 on broadband then many ISPs will complain. Not all, but many will. Although nowadays less than say in the 90s or 00s.
In Chicago, I had Comcast and AT&T DSL. Neither was very fast, and Comcast was really expensive (something like $90+ if I wanted decent speeds). Again, very fortunate of me. I chose to go with AT&T because I was a poor college student. Trying to watch Youtube on that was a complete nightmare. I was also very unlucky if one of my online courses required watching an instructional video or a lecture.
So many options! Expensive and slow internet vs. cheap and really crappy internet. Both with data caps, awful customer service, constant connection issues, expensive+aging equipment--gee wiz we're so lucky.
OK.
That means my speed options are 300mbps, 3, or 1.5 with 400ms latency.
Such great "options" if my cable provider decides to upcharge me now.
Oh man, I wish. I live in the heart of SF and the only option I have is Comcast. I suppose I could try Monkeybrains, but I'd have to get landlord approval and that may be an issue.
The point is, in the US, even in the tech capital of the world, we are still encumbered by private ownership of internet infrastructure.
It's fucking pathetic.
To be clear, I'm a supporter of Net Neutrality, but more so a more built-out municipal fiber system across the US.
Internet should've been made a utility a decade ago.
Would you be happy if your electricity provider was free to block access to, I don't know, refrigerators?
We wouldn't need net neutrality if the ISPs didn't have a monopoly.
How can you sue your ISP if there is a clause that you must go through binding arbitration instead?
How can you switch to another internet provider if AT&T is the only game in town?
It's not that these regulations didn't exist, it's that they hadn't been formalized as regulations. Net neutrality is how the Internet has worked for over 30 years, and is what made it such a success.
Do you watch Netflix? If you don't, that's ok, because most consumers do use it or a competing service. Internet Companies absolutely did try to charge Netflix extra, and in some cases throttled them. This was well documented.
I don't know if you're a corporate shill or just genuinely lack the ability to comprehend how bad this is. Spectrum, Verizon and their ilk have absolutely shown zero regard for consumers and there is no reason to believe that pattern of behavior is going to change anytime soon. If they can screw over their consumers for a dollar, they will, just like they have continually done so in the past.
I believe most of the cases where Netflix ended up paying were also to deal with the effect of the large traffic on peering arrangements. You have networks that have a peering arrangement where neither charges the other for transit for the other's traffic, relying on the fact that each is sending on average about the same amount through the other, so it all balances out. Netflix traffic greatly upset that balance.
I'm not sure that even now the Internet can really handle a Netflix-like service well. Netflix at least partly addressed the problem by putting their content in a CDN, often making arrangements to host their machines right in ISP data centers, so that the Netflix load would be coming from all over instead of just a small region.
That can work for Netflix, and the next few things that get big, but how far can that go? We can't have everyone that gets big putting machines in ISP data centers, can we?
I am attentive to Net Neutrality arguments because I care about an open internet, but I have yet to hear one that doesn't betray a total lack of understanding of how the internet actually works; i.e., peering. Perhaps counterintuitively, the FCC is right on the money about rolling back Obama's populist regulations.
My ISP doesn't have a right to throttle streaming video content because they want to sell me a $90 cable package.
Those regulations existed for most of that time because ISPs then were dial-up over phone-lines, and the phone-lines were under Title II, so de-facto all internet was.
> It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies
It was coined in academia in 2003; the concern was raised (without the term) at least as early as 1994, well before most of the “large tech companies” embracing it existed.
> to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
No, while it was largely an abstract concern when the issue was raised in the 90s, and even perhaps when the term was coined in 2003; by the time in 2004 that the FCC defined it's “Network Freedom” principles concrete threats were visible, and for years before the first effort to adopt regulation (starting shortly after the Network Freedom principles) the FCC responded to numerous concrete problems with case-by-case actions, which provided the direct experience with real, existing problems on which the regulatory efforts of the two Open Internet orders was based. The idea that the regulation efforts were preemptive ignores the well-documented history f the issue.
Stopping them from doing that was one of the reasons that first Congress and then the FCC took up the net neutrality issue about 10 years ago.