http://wethefifth.com/ https://play.radiopublic.com/the-fifth-column-analysis-comme...
He's echoing the industry on this, the industry that has (succesfully, so far, though the full 9th Circuit will be rehearing the issue) also argued that the FTC is barred by law from regulating them.
Here's the position.
To the FCC: “You shouldn't regulate anti-competitive behavior in our industry, even as a means to serve the clear and precise purposes the FCC is given in statute, because competition in general is the FTC’s job.”
To the FTC: “You can't regulate anti-competitive behavior in our industry, because most major participants are common carriers whether or not broadband is a Title II service, and you are prohibited from regulating common carriers even in their non-common-carrier activities, and any regulation you adopted that only applied to non-common-carrier participants would just concentrate more power in the common carriers.”
Since the internet is instead a broadcast medium, it is much easier for big players to saturate the lines. ISPs naturally believe that _someone_ should be paying for what they interpret as the "extra load" from these big players, and that's not entirely unreasonable when you consider that some households will use 30Mbit/s streaming content to 4 devices for 10 hours per day, and the next household, which pays the same monthly internet bill, uses 5Mbit/s or less to read predominantly-text based sites for 2 hours per day.
Net neutrality is fundamentally large internet companies looking to keep their costs down by using government force to prevent ISPs from charging them usage-based "carriage fees" or similar.
Ultimately I don't know if that's good or bad, but I think it's important we recognize the fight over net neutrality for what it is: an arm wrestling match between industrial juggernauts to decide who is going to pick up the tab for the infrastructure that makes the net tick. The consumer is virtually a non-entity and just watching from the bleachers.
>Since the internet is instead a broadcast medium, it is much easier for big players to saturate the lines
The Internet is _not_ a broadcast medium. Data transfer over the Internet is by nature peer-to-peer.
>ISPs naturally believe that _someone_ should be paying for what they interpret as the "extra load" from these big players
Someone _is_ paying for the load for big players: the consumers who are accessing their sites.
>some households will use 30Mbit/s streaming content to 4 devices for 10 hours per day, and the next household, which pays the same monthly internet bill, uses 5Mbit/s or less to read predominantly-text based sites for 2 hours per day
30 Mb/s residential service already costs more than 5 Mb/s residential service.
>Net neutrality is fundamentally large internet companies looking to keep their costs down by using government force to prevent ISPs from charging them usage-based "carriage fees" or similar.
Net neutrality is fundamentally a consumer protection preventing ISPs from leveraging their natural monopolies on last-mile service to enact rent-seeking policies. Whether ISPs charge consumers directly for access to, say, competing content providers ("Watch Turner Classic Movies for free with Spectrum Basic 10 Mb/s, or upgrade to Spectrum Premium 10 Mb/s for only $19.99 per month to access Netflix, Hulu, and HBO!"), or they charge those content providers extra to peer their traffic and those content providers fold that into subscription fees, we're the ones getting bent over the barrel.
Only in the indirect sense that all expenses ultimately filter down to the customer/buyer. The common trope that businesses never take a loss and always find some creative way to pass each expense onto the consumer is total nonsense, except insofar as it's just a simple tautology that states the obvious fact that a business's revenue must cover its own expenses.
And as sjolsen pointed out, the consumer is the one who will end up paying the tab, either to the ISP directly, or indirectly via an increase in streaming subscription costs.