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Comment by vezycash | Hacker News Reader

Having neutralized net neutrality, throttling a.k.a network decongestion, would become common. And as predicted, these two companies have the financial power to make deals and the smaller guys would get screwed.

Imagine Skype / whatsapp startups - telecom income threats being introduced today.

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Throttling has existed long before net neutrality. Just about any public wifi service, for example, will throttle video streaming to unusable levels.

And why would YouTube and Netflix pay ISPs for better treatment? That would create an escalating fee scenario that would become unaffordable.

> That would create an escalating fee scenario that would become unaffordable.

Never underestimate the power of capitalist greed. See also: education and healthcare costs.

Net neutrality was not stopping this behavior, which has been happening for years * . How quickly do we forget things like the widely publicized NetFlix + Comcast arrangement... Anyhow, in that monstrosity of a net neutrality bill every single rule was qualified with a "Thou shall not [...] except for reasonable network management." ISPs were completely free to throttle so long as they could do so under the pretext of reasonable network management. You'll note that even lacking clear rules, they're still using the same sort of language:

“We do not automatically throttle any customers,” said Rich Young, a Verizon spokesman. “To manage traffic on our network, we implement network management, which is significantly different than blanket throttling.”

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* = granted, in the past years we only had a legally sustained net neutrality for an extremely small window of time, but most people do not realize this and think that we've had net neutrality for years and things only recently changed.

Net neutrality is a principle which is there with or without The Open Internet Order and was there since the beginning of the Internet. How and when the principle of net neutrality is enforced is another matter.

Can't the FCC make some objective measurements and penalize the offending ISPs?

Can they? Certainly. Will they? Not under Pai.

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