Then the big telcos got the game, and started to elaborate among themselves how to remove service and add fees.
Someone saw the non-commercial vanilla clause, and had the great idea of using that premise to shut down inbound connections by the most insanely idiotic assumption that a listening port is a server which is foolproof indication that you have a business.
Then everyone move to the telco that didn't do that, free market at its best. for about 6 months. until all of them did. nobody had any option. and here we are today.
Both the upstream and the downstream systems were shared among the 250 or so homes fed from a fiber-optic node, and the performance of your system was related to what your neighbors were doing with their Internet (this is still the case). When DOCSIS was standardized, they started with the Motorola QAM system. The whole cable system is tailored to deliver information to a home, with a very limited upstream, which is the exact opposite of what's needed for a high-bandwidth server (which needs relatively little downstream and a very large upstream.
Internet as originally provided outside of dial-up was expensive (I was paying $700 per month for 1/3 T1 in the mid-nineties), and the phone companies were pocketing a large amount of money from business customers who were buying Internet OR connecting their facilities with frame-relay. When home DSL became available, the telcos didn't want to cannibalize their business service, so the no-servers, home service tiers there are protecting the (now significantly cheaper) business tier cash flow.
I had a rack of servers in my basement that were Internet connected, and I can tell you that for outbound services (web content etc), my customers/readers/users get much better performance being served by a single $20/month Linode server than they ever did through my line-of-sight microwave connection. Even beyond the last mile, the distribution plant isn't a place for anything but a hobby server.
Clearly defining the point at which the line is crossed hamstrings them when unforseen situations arise. Not clearly defining it allows for capricious enforcement. At either end of the spectrum one party loses out. This middle ground allows for both parties to be happy much of the time, but that's not to say no improvements can be made.
I would hope serious proposals for change would take both parties into account and try to find a better compromise.
Why? Really why? I'm buying a certain number of bits per second. They don't need to know nor should care about the content of those bits.
If they oversubscribe and sell bandwidth "bursting" up to X, but only a small fraction of X for a sustained period then they should have to advertise that clearly and not claim "X bandwidth connection". Rather than burying it in a TOS.
Note that by previous internet usage patterns the sustained usage of an shared upstream connection wouldn't necessarily result in less than maximum speed if provisioned correctly based on usage levels. That may be different now with more video streaming, but only in scale, not in principle.
You are paying for a given usage profile, and the economics are based around that usage profile. A few leaches can exist for a given economic expectation, but beyond that everyone suffers.
Leaches, wtf?
Should the power company be able too ban you from using the electricity they sell you to power a saw? If you do, are you then leeching from the other electricity customers?
Just because you purchased 800 square feet (or 1Gbps), doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it.
Any legal device connecting to any legal service so long as you don't harm the network.
Delineating allowed usage of network infrastructure you pay for based on whethet its commercial or not is a pretty clear net neutrality violation to me.
Blocking users from running servers runs afoul of the blocking rule. As long as my website is lawful why should they be allowed to block it? Nothing in the rules says it has to be a technological means of blocking, a T&Cs block seems like it would be equally covered.
Google Fiber shouldn't care a whit if my server is commercial or non-commercial (what does that even mean?) If my usage hurts the network, then GF can throttle my connection in some way that is disclosed as a policy and which is considered reasonable.
This is a half-assed compromise and it's not in line with either the spirit or the clear language of net neutrality.
(Full Disclosure: I wrote the Wired article that set off this storm.)