Well people don't have to purchase Ferraris, there are cheaper alternatives like purchasing a used car. So, false equivalence.

There's no equivalent to the internet, as far as I understand. You can get a level of service, and if you want a faster or more stable connection you can pay more.

The fear around losing Net Neutrality is the fear of losing unfettered access to the internet at large. The fear that an ISP isn't going to offer a "general internet" plan but instead charge the consumer extra for access to various services like music streaming, video streaming, VOIP, or other media. Or even conflict of interest. BigCo may offer their own video streaming, or charge the consumer an extra $20 for the Netflix/Hulu package, an extra $10 for Youtube and Vimeo, and access to any other sites, or sites not paid for, are throttled.

It gives the ISPs more power over what we can or cannot see, what sites we can or cannot go to. When so much of modern day society is on the internet, this is frankly worrying.

At least I hope you are, since that's my point.

Net neutrality means any provider must offer equal service within the network. That simple axiom is what lets a new ISP enter a city and offer service to just one building - because Comcast (for example) is required to give that new ISP equal pricing and priority.

Without net neutrality, Comcast can abuse leverage it's monopoly to kill competition... they aren't going to give new ISP customers equal priority. yThe competition would literally have to build a duplicate network connecting every residential home all the way to a "friendly" ISP willing to peer. Impossible without an incredible amount of capital and labor.

The death of net neutrality is quite literally the death of competition in this space. Ma Bell back from the dead.

Holy cow, you're right! It's almost like they've got monopolistic pricing power or something!

> I absolutely hate the idea of having to pay extra for bandwidth-intensive sites but let's not be under the illusion that we aren't already paying for it, including someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.

This is not a well-formed argument against NN.

ISPs today, and under NN rules, can charge by the GB. Why should it matter if the GB's are coming from Youtube or Netflx or newstartup.com? Just charge by the GB.

Charging by the GB is one of the fairest schemes because if it was about usage (i.e. the non-stop-Youtube-watching-bogeyman), then charging by the GB would let them get a fair share.

That net neutrality means that you can't use the network even though it would be available bothers me from a hacker perspective. In that sense it seem much better if there were no "speeds" or "GB" at all and you or the services pay for priority. (which probably isn't how it would play out)

In such a scenario, I would prefer to be billed by the GB, which in my mind is a honest and transparent mechanism for usage. Loss of net neutrality, in addition to all of the other evils that have been mentioned elsewhere in this growing thread, puts yet another power lever in the hands of the duopoly and away from the consumer hands. Why do I think this is bad? Because I have no confidence that once the ISP duopoly has control of traffic prioritization, they have any incentive to dangle it in front of the consumers when it is likely more lucrative to cut a deal with a content provider to force feed the consumer ad-based content vs. paid ad-free content.

Since you can't favor certain services that mean you can't favor them even if it's warranted. Say you are charged per GB and one video startup only have servers in another country, while the other is using a caching service at a local data center. It would 'cost' a lot more for the Internet in terms of infrastructure to get that data from the other country. But your ISP still have to charge you the same in GB for each service.

Since you can't favor certain service you also can't faster connection for only some data. Say you are paying for a 10 Mbit connection and buy a game for download. Even though you only need a fast connection for a certain amount of time/data and you've already paid something, there's no way to for the provider to buy high speed data to you. Instead you permanently have to get a faster connection just to have a good experience with service you are already paying for.

Not differentiating different traffic and/or paying per GB enforces this old notion of having your own connection to the Internet. Today there's Internet everywhere, there's few reasons why you should be able to access your services or ISP from other connections. If an ISP can't discount, or even bill, some traffic it's harder to share the connection that already exists with other parties.

As long as there's a monopoly/duopoly they will always charge you, but instead of charging you directly for Netflix traffic they charge you for a faster connection or data overages.

The ISP can't choose for you which services/end-points get favored.

You could get a 10 Mbit/s flat and 100 Mbit/s volume with some User interface to choose "Everything to the flat, [super awesome online shop for games] to the volume"

Netflix or YouTube, via their commercial internet providers (or the one used by AWS in Netflix's case) have to pay for the packets they exchange with other backbone providers, one way or another. If they sent too many bytes per second, the backbones providers would adjust their prices accordingly. Those 'backbone providers' have no way of enforcing non net-neutral behavior, they would simply be avoided by everyone else. But consumer-facing ISP would want to abuse their unique position between the consumers and the other ISPs and either take the consumers hostage, or the companies that are trying to reach those customers.

Big tech are starting to take measures to prevent themselves from being taken hostage that way (i.e. Google Fiber), but how do we know 20 years from now these companies wouldn't want to engage in the same behavior as the current consumer-facing ISPs want today. Title II classification would ensure this net neutrality stays.

> someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today.

If this was a big problem, providers could provide non-unlimited internet, where you pay per Gb/s used. But if those Gb come from me watching 4k videos, or someone's grandma downloading the entire Wikipedia pages for offline consumption shouldn't matter, they should all come at the same speed, untethered, for everyone.

[1] http://www.netinst.org/ECONOMICS_OF_THE_INTERNET_BACKBONE.pd...

No, that was exactly my example. In #1, there's a remote surgeon connecting to the robotic surgeon service at the hospital. The hospital should be able to ensure that anyone connecting to their service (i.e., accessing their remotesurgery.stelegius.com endpoint) gets priority over other traffic.

In #2, the example is that the user gets access to Facebook, but not to hackernews (unless they pay extra).

> Assuming you have 10mbit internet access for $N/month:

> * Paying +$20/m for 100mbit internet: OK

> * Paying +$20/m for 100mbit access to "Top 100 websites": Not OK

In your car comparison, it would be like :

Assuming you pay for a VW Golf $10000

* Paying +$200k for a Ferrari: OK

* Paying +$200k for a Lamborghini: OK

* Paying +$200k for a Ferrari but +$200k for an equivalent Lamborghini but with an added +$300k of fee just because the container ship company moving the car from Italy to the U.S. asked an extra $300k simply because the container is filled with Lamborghini instead of Ferrari: Not OK

Container companies would never do this because Lamborghini would simply put its containers on the container boat of a concurrent company, because there's competition. But for consumer-facing ISPs, there's plenty of documentation that shows that in many areas around the country, some ISPs have a monopoly, and so for many users, they cannot go to another ISP if they aren't satisfied with their only choice.

That's more like how the internet is in the USA: there are local monopolies restricting who you can go to for internet service, and now your ISP also wants to restrict what websites I go to (or with what speed). That's why this strikes as so objectionable.

It doesn't matter if you have a Ferrari or a Corolla - the streets don't care. Everyone can use the street and must follow the same laws.

If you have a Ferrari (gigabit internet), you bought the ability to accelerate quicker and go faster... But the same laws apply.

Biased internet is paying to have every light green and kick people off the road...

Anyone can use toll roads - it doesn't matter what car you drive, where you came from, or where you're going, the price is the same for everyone. Price per mile, flat rate, whatever - if it's non-discriminatory, it's neutral!

Non-neutrality is when a toll road charges more because of the car you drive, where you came from, what you're carrying, or where you're headed - or letting certain people jump the queue based on those criteria.

It's not OK to give a discount to BMW drivers because they drive a BMW. If BMW drivers are the only ones that can afford the price - that's OK. But if a Corolla driver comes along and pays the price, they better get exactly the same service.

(The analogy does break down at vehicle weight - cars can be long/short and heavy/light, packets are only long/short)

But that's also the part I don't really care about. I was objecting specifically to the original point that rich people shouldn't be able to buy better treatment.

couples together several axis of debate, rich people can buy better treatment in some areas but clearly not others.

Imagine some natural disaster, and everyone is being evacuated. The local convenience store is selling out of ice, as folks try to pack up enough food and stuff for their time away.

It comes down to the last bag of ice, and we've got two customers. A frat boy got in line first, wanting that ice to keep his beer cold. He takes the ice for $2 and leaves, happy.

The last guy is diabetic. He'd have willingly paid ten or even a hundred times that amount to keep his insulin fresh. But because the convenience store wants to keep pricing fair for everyone, the guy who REALLY needs the stuff wasn't able to signal the greater value he puts on the ice, and so the system fails him.

The ability to use pricing to communicate value, including the ability to substitute other goods or downstream value of goods incorporating a resource, is crucial to the functioning of the market. And the most obvious problem with socialism is that it attempts to forgo this information, making the decisions by fiat or by guess, when it's impossible to centralize the knowledge that pricing derives through an emergent distributed calculation.

Read more in Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society": http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

At least in the USA, this is a solved problem.

The federal, state, and/or local government step in and provide disaster relief, including access to ice and/or medications.

And the diabetic gets to live without parting with his life savings for a cup of ice.

> through an emergent distributed calculation.

Diabetics are not electrons in a calculator.

There's a general pattern to both the argument you're making here and the argument you made about remote surgery. You're dreaming up a completely non-existent and totally hypothetical possible harm that the status quo already has exception handling mechanisms for, and providing it as a reason for ignoring much more systemic and plausible harms.

Yes, my examples were only intended as illustrations. But isn't that also the case with the topic under discussion, net neutrality? I mean, it is not the case that any carrier has unfairly shaped traffic to the extent that they're determining winners and losers, and innovation with new products becomes impossible. This fear is totally hypothetical as well.

the status quo already has exception handling mechanisms for, and providing it as a reason for ignoring much more systemic and plausible harms

I think you're falling victim to fundamental attribution error. It seems like you're damning your opponent for a particular problem, while excusing the same problems for your own team:

The federal, state, and/or local government step in and provide disaster relief, including access to ice and/or medications.

Yes, but the official channels have been frequently shown not to work. Consider Hurricane Katrina. The FEMA help was ... not so helpful, and much of the initial response was actually courtesy of WalMart. I recall one store manager, trying to help people in critical need of medication actually taking a bulldozer and knocking down a wall of the store to get at it.

The government contingencies didn't work. The private sector doesn't always work out either, but much of the time it does a better job. It's silly to pretend that the private sector cannot do it, and the government can be depended on with complete confidence.

But my example of ice in a disaster was all just one example to show the thought process. There are of course examples in plenty other places.

Regarding my example of remote surgery data transmission, the responses from other folks here regarding QoS protocols was pretty constructive. However, I'm left with the view that none of us fully understands how Net Neutrality affects (or doesn't affect) its usage.

TFA: "Censorship by ISPs is a serious problem. Comcast has throttled Netflix, AT&T blocked FaceTime, Time Warner Cable throttled the popular game League of Legends, and Verizon admitted it will introduce fast lanes for sites that pay-and slow lanes for everyone else-if the FCC lifts the rules. This hurts consumers and businesses large and small."

> to the extent that they're determining winners and losers

The saga goes something like this: NN has been the assumed default since at least the late 90's. ISPs recently started to seriously test that presumption. FCC stepped in, and here we are. The NN rule started in 2015, but has been the default behavior of ISPs for decades.

ISPs have been chomping at the bit to take advantage of their monopoly for decades. Comcast and Verizon are blatantly gearing up for this play, including via huge acquisitions.

The "wait until they really screw you" argument is an uncompelling call to non-action.

> This fear is totally hypothetical as well.

Again, no, it's not. ISPs are coming out and saying publicly "yes, we will do this".

> ...Hurricane Katrina... The government contingencies didn't work.

Counter-point: the literally thousands of well-handled hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes.

> The private sector doesn't always work out either, but much of the time it does a better job.

The private for-profit sector doesn't provide systematic disaster relief, anecdotes of charity whipped into a frenzy by mega-corp's PR firms aside. For-profit FEMA just Does. Not. Exist.

Here's a catalog of various forms of actual disaster relief provided after Katrina: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina_disaster_rel...

Read -- actually read -- the overview of that article. Even when the government abjectly fails at disaster relief it still does several orders of magnitude more than private for-profit enterprises.

Katrina was a failure of early warning and evacuation protocols, not a failure of disaster response mechanisms.

Which makes sense -- aside from price gouging, there's no profit to be made on emergency response.

From Wikipedia: "The highway is noted for having a speed limit of at least 80 mph (130 km/h) along its tolled section. The 41-mile (66 km) section of the toll road between Mustang Ridge and Seguin has a posted speed limit of 85 mph (137 km/h), the highest posted speed limit in the United States."

They are also a little different because they are part of the network - your isp deals with peering with other ISPs, and some ISPs do charge more... That price is reflected in what the consumer and end host pay for service.