The problem is that ISP's would get too much power in what you see. Or if a company has the big bucks, they could pay to only have their website to have the bandwidth, and your little blog could get blocked, because mister Big Bucks pushed you aside.
Going to an other ISP will not help, since mister Big Bucks is everywhere.

Creating a new ISP is not an option, because that is simply too expensive to do. You need millions of dollars just to set up the company, plus you must create a new network or take over a network (Again a very, very costly thing to do).

Net neutrality ensures that EVERYONE can get the same content and that your own content can be shown, without being pushed aside by mister Big Bucks.

The Federal Government therefor ensures the LIBERTY of the internet.

Why are you against that ?

I like the idea of net neutrality, don't get me wrong. I don't like the government forcing net neutrality.

A bunch of ISPs could get together and say "we have made a pact to follow net neutrality standards" and that would be sufficient.

Instead we believe that the government should fix everything. And that's the wrong way to go about it.

It was a copy and paste of part of the comment above him.

It isn't much better to believe corporations can and will fix everything either. Supply and demand only works when people can choose not to demand.

It's both. It's like a phone utlitiy because it's nature is communications. It's like a power/water utlity because of the monopoly it has over an area.

I lived in Alaska for a long time with GCI-Cable. They were rated the number 3 worst broadband company in the US due to some of their restrictions like... 3 Gig download limit everything over 3 Gig you paid for on a megabyte basis (great for email, sucked for everything else). What other option did someone have? Dial-up.

There are many areas which are in the same boat. They have ONE provider and after that it's nothing.

Is High-speed internet so essential that it needs government regulation? Not yet, but it's getting there. There are people who use high-speed internet for their phone, there are people who use it for their business, people who use it for their entertainment.

Each of these reasons is important. Some of the very first things that are restored (after power/water) are communications and media. The military knows that if you aren't at home watching Oprah, you're going to be restless and upset. They know if you can't dial 911 you'll be in Major trouble if something happens. As for business... it's your livelihood. Seattle up till 10 years ago still had a law on the books to hang criminals for horse-theft. The reason why is you weren't just stealing their horse, you were stealing their ability to make a living. The same can be said for companies who gouge businesses for basic communications services.

I don't care if Bush or Clinton or Obama wants or doesn't want something. I'm not a sheep who simply votes down party lines. I don't agree with the idea that a company whose primary responsibility is making money for itself should have the power over basic communications.

What if your ISP blocked websites which they didn't agree with? Heaven forbid (pun intended) you get yourself into an area where the ISP is owned by a hardcore christian group. Never happen right? What if a church suddenly started paying to prioritize it's traffic or redirect traffic going from Playboy to Vatican.org?

Do NOT give ISP's (a business out to make money) control over how you view the world.

oops. didn't finish reading. nvrmnd

It's not even that simple. The internet is something that connects everyone. If you spent 50 million dollars to connect everyone in Phoenix, that would be the extent of what you could affect. For connections to anywhere else, you would need to sign agreements with carriers with cross-country backbones. Which means you'd have to get the majority of your traffic through one of the big ISPs (telcos, cable co.s) - and they would interfere with your traffic just like they would with any small customer.

Who better to enforce a fairness doctrine than government? Do you really trust the corporations who are making money hand over fist from the labor of the content providers to follow a completely optional "pact"? Their whole reason for existence is to find more ways to extract cash from you for the benefit of their shareholders, and in one way or another they have a sanctioned monopoly to help them in doing it. If a company is allowed a sanctioned monopoly, only government has the ability to ensure that they treat the public in a fair manner.

This type of traffic (internet) is carried almost exclusively through telcos and cable companies anyway - regulated public utilities. AT&T was split up because of their practices and anti-competitive conditions over 20 years ago, and they have only reassembled themselves in the meantime.

Allowing these ISPs to filter/throttle our communications based upon the content and source/destination is no different than allowing the phone company to charge you different rates for both the subject of your telephone calls and the income of the people you are calling. What they really want is the ability to charge businesses a percentage of their profits because they are earning income through the use of their facilities, and these are facilities that both the companies and the end consumers are paying for. Should the plumber be required to hand over a percentage of his profits because he is earning money each time he receives a service request on the phone? Should Amazon be required to fork over a larger part of their profits because they sold a book to someone who ordered online? It's the same thing. Amazon already pays for their internet access, and the customers also already pay for their internet access. Now the ISPs want to charge a third time for the same communication, all for the privilege of receiving it in a timely manner. And they want to reserve the right to censor connections they don't like.

This is something I will not stand for.

I've always been torn on the issue of net neutrality. In my experience surfing the Internet, I got the impression that the right to a neutral web was a near-universal belief, but I recently found out otherwise. When the topic came up in my computing ethics class, I was taken aback to see my classmates unanimously agree that net neutrality is a fundamentally unfair concept. Bear in mind that these are young, Internet savvy Computer Science seniors at a generally left-leaning university.

Both sides seem to use over-simplified and often alarmist arguments, then set them to catchy music and animation:



The argument boils down to two incompatible definitions of fair: "equal" and "free". A lot of conflicts seem to be based on that dichotomy. The conclusion I draw after wading through all this spin is that net neutrality isn't as big of a deal as people make it out to be. I could see it going either way with little effect on the end user.

The problem is that the phone companies are the same kind of problem, and I had to hold back my anger against them in my post. But it's true, they are just as bad. They overcharge for piss poor service. What they need to do is upgrade their infrastructure. They need the money somehow, true, but by working to provide a better service rather than the status quo is a good idea. I'm still very taken aback by the fact that they'll charge 80 cents per text message, and charge per kilobyte (if not, per byte) of data, when the cost of transmitting such data across the network is negligible. In the age of streaming HD video content, a cell phone company should not be gouging the price so high on its network usage.