The NN debate online was a massive propaganda warfare campaign between two teams of huge corporations, neither of which had any of our interests in mind. We were squeezed in the middle of it and everyone was pressured to take sides.
And I will also admit that I DID OPPOSE NN regulations, as they were "specified" (if any one remembers, they were only released AFTER being accepted by the FCC). Specifically in the "why fix what's not broken?" sense (ref stratechery for a more detailed consideration than I can give: https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/) . It was not clear to me that they would provide any benefits that propaganda claimed. It was also clear to me that the quite reasonable thing of Netflix to pay Comcast (and other Tier 3 providers) to skip interconnect issues, which was being done before the whole argument came up, would also possibly come under scrutiny by the new regulation. And so I threw up my arms and said "If real technical solutions are going to be abandoned because of some misunderstanding of technology, I'm not on board".
The vitriol that still exists over this from people who this never really effected nor even understood the technical problem. Moreover, I was appalled at the lack of care here to even consider this from a technical perspective. Complete blindness to consideration due to tribalism.
Now were people wrong to use other's info without consent, sure! I 100% agree there.
Downvotes, commense!
The propaganda framed it like sites like Netflix would be really fast because they could afford to pay for it and startup competitors would be very slow, but economic incentives would have actually caused the exact opposite. A startup video hosting site is of relatively no burden to an ISP compared to a behemoth like Netflix so they would have no reason to slow down the startup speeds. If the startup succeeds because it has a competitive advantage to Netflix, then when they become big they get a new customer they can bully into keeping their speeds high.
Yes ISPs will take a cut of the fees they charge content providers, but they will also be able to pass those savings onto the average consumer because the Netflix customer, who is already using most of the internet bandwidth, is helping pay for the service connection. Market forces would force streaming services to go up in price and ISP costs to go down. It would be generally fairer.
The irony is that this is how Netflix already operates. They sign direct interconnect agreements with ISPs to host their servers directly at local ISP network distribution hubs. They have a competitive advantage that is literally built in to the internet infrastructure.
"Investigators also found 9.3 million comments supporting net neutrality that used fictitious identities, most submitted by one California college student majoring in computer science."
For those who don't think that would be possible, then you haven't had the pleasure of watching a law with good intentions ban you from using Drop Box.