I think their walled-garden approach, if it received an overwhelmingly positive or at least unquestioned reception, would have set an even more dangerous precedent.
Governments don't (AFAIK) set up internet services as social welfare for the poor in other countries. Facebook doesn't have any borders. Unless they're actively told to keep their rabid growth in check, they will just keep going.
Nothing directly against Facebook here, but I definitely think it's better that the poor and uneducated throughout the world are not normalized into a Facebook(TM) world of knowledge. We've seen what's happened with a much milder and more open situation in the United States (and elsewhere) quite recently.
I disagree. The argument isn't sound anywhere.
For an ISP to limit its users to a subset of the internet causes several problems:
1. It forces users to use one set of services. That means a user with Facebook-only internet has no hope of avoiding Facebook and its abhorrent data-collection.
2. It prevents competition. Google+ would be unable to compete, since it does not exist on Facebook internet.
3. It stifles free software. The vast majority of free software projects have little to no budget. If they must pay for competitive bandwidth, they face an uphill battle against proprietary products produced by wealthy corporations.
4. It favors centralized networking. If all of your users are constrained to a subset of the web, that likely means they cannot connect directly to each other. This totally rules out mesh networking, bittorrent, private voip, etc. On a non-neutral web, users will be constrained in their ability to run there own servers. This is already a problem with many ISPs disallowing public IP addresses.
> Key findings include the following: 10 percent of all Americans (34 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps service. 39 percent of rural Americans (23 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps. By contrast, only 4 percent of urban Americans lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps broadband.
Majority do have broadband access but it’s still a problem for some
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progr...
The most convincing argument IMO is that it hurts people's internet access by sniffling innovation. It happened in India when Facebook tried to provide free "basic internet" access to poor rural Indians [1]. It was blocked on the ground of net neutrality since although it would provide access to very useful sites (weather, news, wikipedia, and yes, facebook), it was a sort of walled garden. Considering the alternative of no internet access or limited internet access, I think most people would agree that basic internet could have been a life saver to these people.
The other strong argument against net neutrality is that it's a trojan horse for internet regulation. When you have a legal framework for a regulatory body to tell and ISP you have to provide equal aaccess to "legitimate" content, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider that the natural extension of this is to tell the ISP they must block all "illegitimate" content
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/NoNetNeutrality/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics