At present the internet is more or less a neutral marketplace in which everyone pays their way to get packets from source to destination. Much of America is served by only one to two members of a small group of huge isps who have more to gain from bilking me and you than from competing with each other.
If we let a cartel of isp who are the only way you can get internet access in a reasonable fashion decide who is allowed to do business on the internet and in what fashion you will find that your basic package ends up costing more than your present open internet and any perceived discount whatsoever is outweighed by the money that people like netflix pay per subscriber for access and must necessarily recoup by charging you for.
If the media companies even let players like netflix survive instead of slowly strangling them this sucks for you and netflix but as for future players they aren't part of the in group that is allowed to do business at a reasonable rate and they just never get off the ground.
The system you are ok with would have strangled kids like youtube and netflix in their cribs.
The basic economics of it is allowing them to decide what is served and at what individualized price changes the economics of the cost of internet companies serving customers from what a competitive market can charge (internet backend) to the most a market can bear under a monopoly (the last mile).
1. Peak bandwidth usage
2. The cost of building (and maintaining, see above) the cables
Killing net neutrality helps with neither of those, so any significant cost reductions (if there are any) will come from bribes from content providers. And guess who'll end up paying for those...
So, it's not an invented hypothetical.
As everyone else has pointed out - we'll be paying for the full cost (and probably quite a bit more based on ISPs previous behavior) of the connection one way or another. Either we pay for it through ISPs charging service owners for the privilege on being on the limited packages (thus upping the cost of the subscription indirectly for everyone) or ISPs forcibly create monopolies by pushing users on to their own web platforms, then raise prices later (as is the end goal of any push to fabricate a monopoly). It's pretty much strictly lose lose from the customers' point of view, at least in aggregate over the long term.
I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that some large internet companies would subsidize plans like "Facebook-only" to connect more people to the Internet (see: to their service). This in turn, well, connects those people, gives them opportunities and access to knowledge they wouldn't otherwise have, and eventually opens them up to the rest of the Internet. It's a stepping stone: obviously, all internet is better than some internet, but some internet is better than no internet. There's an alternative of just giving them the full internet for free/cheap (which I'd love to see), but is obviously way less likely.
In that sense (and, to bring things back to the comment my parent is responding to), I think that providing a cheap plan that allows access to some subset of the Internet targeted at people who wouldn't otherwise have internet is preferable to those people just not having access at all. Is that wrong of me?
I think it's not preferable. I would rather see prices driven down through demand so that full access is affordable to all, then for an artificially low price that allowed access to a Facebook internet to kill the market for cheap plans.
The problem here is that the last part -- the part where these minimal plans lead to a path where the full internet is available in these underserved areas -- doesn't have to happen.
All it does is (incorrectly) teach those users that the internet is just a means to access Facebook and a few other partnered sites. You're teaching them to expect the cable TV model for their internet access, which is precisely what we want to avoid.
It's not hypothetical. It has actually happened.
> I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that some large internet companies would subsidize plans...
Again, you don't have to assume. This has happened.
> I think that providing a cheap plan that allows access to some subset of the Internet targeted at people who wouldn't otherwise have internet is preferable to those people just not having access at all. Is that wrong of me?
Considering they would be losing a cheap plan that allows access to all of the internet in the process, yes, it is wrong of you.
Repeal of Net Neutrality makes his a possibility. Yours not so much.
People, by default, will consume stuff that enables exploitation (Ads, Facebook and its friends, porn etc). Very few ll actively seek out stuff that empowers them, even when provided access.
But when you provide only, say, facebook, in the name of giving Internet, to a population, you open a new channel to that population, that is solely meant to exploit. This is probably what facebook tried to do with India and failed.
How could anyone successfully create a new competing product once the majority of the market uses the cheap Netflix+Hulu-only package, locking them out from any potential competitors?
It seems to me like people who would (and can) otherwise buy internet will continue to buy internet, but people who couldn't afford it or didn't want to afford it might jump on cheaper packages. This is especially illustrated in e.g. third-world countries where we have majorities still not connected to the internet (where a super-cheap Google/Facebook/whatever package would go far), but there are still many, many people in poverty here in America that don't have access to basic things online. Offering them a cheaper plan to access just the parts of the internet they want to use seems like a win-win here.
As long as it doesn't go the other way.