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> Net neutrality is not law. There are valid arguments to be made against it - like with your cell plan, everyone can or perhaps should, pay for the bytes they use, and how much infrastructure (CPU) those bytes use to get delivered fast.

The big question that net neutrality answers is which of the two communicating parties is “using” the bytes: The end user. Of course users should pay for the cost of the resources they use; otherwise, the connection provider would quickly become insolvent, and nobody wants that.

But users shouldn’t need to know the internal business practices of their connection provider in order to understand their billing. Instead, net neutrality says that the provider cannot charge different rates for different destinations; it’s their responsibility to amortize their variable costs into some kind of destination-agnostic price structure for consumers. This is basic risk pooling, where the actor in position to affect the costs (via infrastructure changes) is required to shoulder the pricing risk of their own actions.

> Government overreach is... repealing regulations

Indeed.

> So we don't have a direct democracy for most things

Yes

> The solution is not law

I think no, in this case. Just as I don't want to have to buy a washing machine that only works with my water company, I don't want to have to buy the right internet to go to the sites I want to go to. Internet delivery, like water delivery, should be provided and priced independently of what it is used to do.

> What we need is more competition, so I as a user will pick the ISP that does not slow down traffic for me to sites I want to visit, instead of choosing between people who want to screw me with vs without lube.

I agree, but once ISPs start dealing with expensive contracts to get preferential treatment we’ve already lost. No amount of competition will stop the oligarchs from consolidating even more power if NN is not put into law.

Imagine this scenario, national push to make Internet a utility, incredibly successful. Without NN, the new play for ISPs is to create exclusivity deals & priority packages with websites for access, not just segmenting the web but making it harder for smaller ISPs to compete with un-prioritized speeds to the websites everyone wants.

Choice and competition is important, but choice can only exist in a fair market. And NN is, in my opinion, the next step after turning the Internet into a utility.