Been following it a little; but my son is home from college this weekend and is all into it, of course he is a tech major. He is against it fiercely. I just don't know as I am sure what ever piece of info you get is slanted towards the group who benefits. That has been the problem for a while in the US all news if filtered through the prism of what agenda X group has. I would love it if one day you could go to a site and they would have the pros and cons listed without the bias.
I get the "less government is good" crowd. I understand how that applies in general. With internet service, it's not that simple. This is a hard one to delve into without sounding like resorting to scare tactics, but some of the "threats" are real and have already happened. I'll list examples and sources as best I can for each argument.
Image a situation where your sources can be dictated to you. You want to access a website? Sorry, your ISP is blocking it for whatever reason they want.
The biggest "pro Net Neutrality" issues that I can see are:
- Censorship: Without NN, ISP's can censor whatever sites they want. News, media, events, etc. We're seeing some services like Facebook blocking certain content from their sites, but can you imagine that on a larger scale and simply being unable to access free information? Imagine how big of an issue this could be in shaping our politics, election time, etc.
- Lack of consumer options: Consumers will have to switch providers to get access, but with current contract systems for "bundle deals", consumers could get trapped into contracts with ever-changing terms and conditions. Add to that, many markets have limited access to ISP's. I'm not sure why this change from FCC would encourage growth instead of stifling it.
- Giant corporation mergers and discrimination: We're in a time where we're seeing lots of powerhouses in media and telecommunication merging. Comcast/AT&T are competitors, but are in the process of merging. I'm sure this won't be the last either. We'll start seeing partnerships for streaming services, or possibly even black balling smaller start-up services to push out competition without consumers having a say. This had started happening before Net Neutrality in US began in 2015. It will continue again.
Imagine if lanes on roads simply switched to being privately owned and operated only. You could only take lanes of the roads that you paid for, and lanes that lead to businesses partnered with road management companies got extra lanes, direct routes. Smaller businesses got less lanes, or indirect routes that forced drivers to pass partner businesses. Imagine that happened overnight and the response was just "If you don't like it, join another road service," knowing consumers had little recourse due to extensive cost for building new roads, local constraints for expansion, etc.
There are far too many other hold-ups that would have to be alleviated at a local level to create the free-market environment where Net Neutrality would not entirely be necessary. One day soon, we may not rely entirely on hard-wired ISPs and maybe personal networks will be able to operate independent of larger corporations. Until that happens, we're entirely reliant on existing infrastructure. I'm not sure there will be the breakthroughs needed to make independent networks viable. Add to that, larger corporations can continue to lobby against and use their resources to block such growth or innovation as it threatens their business models.
It's a lot to process, but there's plenty of examples of what happens with Net Neutrality doesn't exist. While relying on government to protect consumer rights is not perfect, it's better than no protection at this point.
