Boy... I guess I'll go one piece at a time here:
> Bandwidth is a limited amd expensive resource
No, it's not. Bandwidth has been and still is throttled so that it can be perceived that way. Where it gets expensive is in rural america where you have few customers per mile, but those customers have long been subsidized by everybody else and mostly are STILL underserviced. Despite the subsidy, and despite repeated large public investment handed over to providers.
> When government mandated price controls are in effect
There are no mandated price controls. What is mandated is a lack of interference.
> this expense is effectively socialised across the entire country
Infrastructure has, in large part, been laid at public expense on public land. Communication providers always cry poor when they are forced to invest in less profitable areas, but they have repeatedly and consistently charged exorbitant amounts to the public to provide communication services. They have done so to such a degree that stopping these practices has required repeated congressional attention and sanctions.
> It is illegal for a telco to go to a hospital and offer a dedicated nine 9s reliable robot surgery link
It is not illegal to provide high availability service to anyone. It is not illegal to charge a fair economic price. There are highly available connectivity solutions all over the marketplace.
> So the cost gets divided up, averaged out, and smalltime users end up paying a big chunk of the cost while people above the magic median point get massive benefits.
Low bandwidth users are given lower cost service today. High bandwidth users are given higher cost service today.
> YOU subsidise the cost of the BigCorp. video conference call between Sydney and Tokyo every day. You subsidise the cost of your neighbour streaming The Bachelor every night, and make it illegal for me to pay a higher price for the quality of service I need to work.
False. BigCorp pays significantly more for high quality service, support, and reliability. If I don't watch streaming video, I have a lower cost service plan than my neighbor that does.
> Its a total mismanagement of resources.
It's a completely fabricated and misinformed argument.
> If the consumer was forced to bear the true economic cost of their internet usage then of course heavy users (like Netflix subscribers...) would end up paying more.
ISPs would love for customers to pay more, especially considering the popularity of Netflix. They would love to make Netflix pay as well. The fact is that Netflix has found a price point that works for them. Changing the dynamic changes the business model. Their profitability and popularity are not unlimited. The model that ISPs are demanding is that they be inserted as legally required middlemen into an existing marketplace, with the ability to skim profit from every popular online business model. Of course they want it. Of course they lobby for it.
> Not directly to Netflix but the true cost of their product still goes up. This is obviously bad for Netflix/Youtube/the top 1%, who are the ones extracting wealth from this thing we call the internet.
The top 1% of businesses are profitable entities that will suffer a loss of revenue which in the end will be passed onto the consumer, but they will also be provided with the protection of decreased competition and increased cost of market entry. Today, anyone with the gumption can walk into lionsgate and come up with a "Netflix for ..." business. Tomorrow, it will require significant venture capital simply to deal with the connectivity issues. Today that business can prove itself and then seek out investment. Tomorrow, that business needs investment in order to prove itself. That's a huge dynamic shift that knocks out MANY would be innovators of the kind that formed the world wide web into what it is today.
> These whales love having their infrastructure costs socialised. You dont even have to be a Google customer for you to be giving them money, no wonder they're so rich!
Google has paid and will continue to pay plenty of money for bandwidth. Just like consumers already pay plenty of money for bandwidth. The cost that we pay has NOTHING to do with infrastructure or maintenance costs. It has nothing to do with the cost of running that infrastructure. Comcast for example has had significant revenue and profit increases for the last 5 years. While internet usage has steadily increased and the usage of high bandwidth content has steadily increased. There is no resource limit they are running into. There is no financial constraint preventing them from doing anything. They aren't struggling to pay their workers who are frantically trying to squeeze more network out of the network at no cost.
> Blocking freedom of people to publish on the web doesn't have much to do with net neutrality
It has everything to do with net neutrality. So Netflix pays a big chunk to Comcast. Does pornhub? Do they pay more because they are porn? What about SnapChat and other user-to-user video sharing services? What about all the youtubers, camgirls, streaming game players, twitch streamers? How does that all change? What segment of them is going to be cut off because the cost model doesn't make sense or because Comcast has arbitrarily decided that they either must pay a different price or that their content should not be allowed?
> This is big company lobbying and public propaganda from the tech industry.
There is certainly a lot of lobbying going on. And plenty of propoganda. Oddly, though... the lies, misinformation, and nonsensical arguments seem to be all coming from the telecoms and ISPs. Like there's some sort of concerted effort to do what the internet community has repeatedly and loudly expressed that it does not want.
> Tech companies are the new oil barons, in 80 years when the bio lobby is pushing for access to proprietary databases and end "Data detention" (you heard it here first) we'll look at tech giants the way we look at oil companies lobbying for clean coal now.
We _should_ be a long way off from that. If we stagnate today, maybe that will be so. Maybe we have a 75 year future of pop-up ads and click-farms while communication is relegated to single sentence slang laden snippets that are designed to be provocative.
I see a stronger, better future for the web, technology, and communication networks. There is innovation happening all around the world. There are fantastic ideas that are being nurtured and others that have yet to be discovered. Don't advocate for stagnation. We can do so much better than this.
(I can't believe I spent an hour on this. I've been trolled and it totally worked. This was the top comment when I hit reply.)