I'm on the FCC. Please stop us from killing net neutrality
I dont necessarily agree with the following but its a devils advocate argument I rarely see shared, and it has a lot of merit. Like everything, this issue is shades of grey.<p>Bandwidth is a limited amd expensive resource. When government mandated price controls are in effect (&quot;Net neutrality&quot; is a marketing meme) this expense is effectively socialised across the entire country. It is illegal for a telco to go to a hospital and offer a dedicated nine 9s reliable robot surgery link (technically its just illegal to charge a fair economic price for it but same&#x2F;same). So the cost gets divided up, averaged out, and smalltime users end up paying a big chunk of the cost while people above the magic median point get massive benefits. YOU subsidise the cost of the BigCorp. video conference call between Sydney and Tokyo every day. You subsidise the cost of your neighbour streaming The Bachelor every night, and make it illegal for me to pay a higher price for the quality of service I need to work. Its a total mismanagement of resources. If the consumer was forced to bear the true economic cost of their internet usage then of course heavy users (like Netflix subscribers...) would end up paying more. Not directly to Netflix but the true cost of their product still goes up. This is obviously bad for Netflix&#x2F;Youtube&#x2F;the top 1%, who are the ones <i>extracting</i> wealth from this thing we call the internet. These whales love having their infrastructure costs socialised. You dont even have to be a Google customer for you to be giving them money, no wonder they&#x27;re so rich!<p>Blocking freedom of people to publish on the web doesn&#x27;t have much to do with net neutrality. This is big company lobbying and public propaganda from the tech industry. Tech companies are the new oil barons, in 80 years when the bio lobby is pushing for access to proprietary databases and end &quot;Data detention&quot; (you heard it here first) we&#x27;ll look at tech giants the way we look at oil companies lobbying for clean coal now.