Exactly. The first thing you will experience is the data plans will become cheaper and your favourite channels faster. Big companies will pay ISP to make their data free and faster. This will leave all smaller competitors and startups unable to compete with the big guys. So the second thing you will experience is the big companies abusing their power, charging more, offering less. But at this point you will not have a choice anymore - there will be no Netflix competitors to choose from, no new social media to experiment with, no fresh dating apps etc, no independent opinions. Ony the big companies will have the money to pay ISP for reasonably fast and cheap data - and they will charge YOU extra for that.

Like the ESPN "tax".

Cable and satellite TV customers pay more than $9.00 per month for ESPN networks whether they watch them or not

http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-satellite-tv-sub-fees-e...

This is one reason for the cable cutters to give up on it and go for internet-based alternatives instead (youtube, netflix, etc). No net neutrality would mean ISPs could start charging extra for premium access to these services - basically going back to the cable system.

> and they will charge YOU extra for that

The non-cynical view is the under NN you are paying for the huge amount of Netflix traffic whether you're a subscriber or not. When that cost is passed to the subscribers directly it's better for everyone, no? For subscribers it's probably a mild hike but but non-subscribers get a discount.

No. Netflix customers pay for their usage by buying their service plan. You don't need to ban NN to have usage caps.

Sure, but consumer 'service plans' are an abstraction on top of the reality that you pay to send traffic through someone eles's network. Why do you think that the rules for last-mile ISPs should be different?

Maybe - but it will also give ISPs an excuse to artificially slow down any website which doesn't pay. And that would hurt all the small websites out there that either don't want to or can't afford to pay off the ISPs.

Today, you can make a new facebook competitor that will run just as fast as facebook.com. You just have to rent some servers and write some software. Without net neutrality, that might no longer be the case.

Nope, big companies don't get their money from thin air, they get it from the consumer. Company expenses === consumer cost.

And even if they did, it wouldn't make the internet cheaper for you - it'd make it "not more expensive". Getting rid of net neutrality will give ISPs and such more tools to make the internet more expensive.

It's not that simple. Google could build a fiber network itself. If it's more efficient, wouldn't this allow Google to lower prices for their own services? Also if Google didn't connect to every consumer, Google could lease lines to ISPs and other businesses. As a result, there would be a complicated market, and consumer data would be subsidized by other businesses indirectly.

(Again, playing devil's advocate)

That's quite false. If expenses equaled prices, there'd be no need no concern about artificial throttling. The concert is monopoly rent profits.