Really it's hard to see how repealing net neutrality benefits anyone with the exception of the ISP cable companies, from the individual, small business and even big businesses, it's why almost every company that exists is against them.
I mean, most people have been focusing on the individual aspect, how it affects us so I don't think I need to tread too much on about it. You'll probably have to pay more money for the same services you get, you may end up getting faster access to some of your favourite websites at the expense of slower access to some of the smaller less used websites. And ISPs will have a lot more ability to block sites, especially torrenting sites and even competitor sites.
Bricket brings up a point that Facebook, Google and Microsoft are all pretty much against the repeal of net neutrality, especially the former 2, and there's a good reason for that. If an ISP starts to declare prioritization services so that a site can pay money to load faster, of course every big business will be forced to pay into that. What that means, overall, is that the big businesses have to pay ISPs more money then they would normally, which isn't a very fun thing to do, so obviously they're against it.
However, this also directly negatively affects small businesses too. We can assume a prioritization scheme would work similar to Google's search index scheme, the higher the cash you pay, the faster your site is relative to your competitors. A small business is never gonna be able to dish out the same amount of money a tech behemoth such as Google or Facebook can muster, so what this means is that all competing small businesses will inevitably load slower than big businesses. This harms their ability to compete, how can they grow if no one is even gonna go to them in the first place because their sites load, comparitively, slower? In a world that's already ruled by tech monopolies, is it something we really wanna continue to foster. I read in the nyt a tech expert coin an interesting phrase which I somewhat agree with, "The internet is already dead, net neutrality just hastens the rot". Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, these people own the internet, but by subduing net neutrality, we'll be strengthening their hold.
So it doesn't benefit large businesses, it doesn't benefit small businesses and it doesn't benefit the individual, it only benefits ISPs directly. They claim some ridiculous arguments, that the fact net neutrality was a regulation, means that it inevitably stifles innovation, but innovation isn't necessarily a good thing and net neutrality literally stifles the bad innovative procedures, innovative procedures to gain more profit at the expense of the consumers. And also I need to quote bricket on something.
you could literally make a site called "drain the net" where people can download massive files with the only goal to slow the infrastructure yet this site should be treated the same as the smallest site.
See this is the kind of stuff that I feel pro-net neutrality people would be spreading, even though it actually makes no sense when you think about it. Infrastructure cannot be slowed down by a size of a file, it can be slowed down in two different ways.
1. If the people downloading the file were given preferential resources over those who didn't: Which is exactly what net neutrality avoids, the people downloading the file, no matter how big the file is, will still be allocating the same amount of resources that everyone else is allowed, so it won't drain resources from other people. (If it's a big file, it'll just take longer to download, rather than more taxing on the infrastructure) Ironically the repeal of net neutrality is exactly the thing that can allow a scenario like this to happen!
2. Everyone is downloading the file: Which is fine if everyone actually wanted to download the file, of course it's not fine if someone made malware that forced infected computers to download the file (in which case yes the infrastructure would be slowed down). But if that was the case then such connection would be illegal, and the former FCC laws already made special exceptions for illegal content (which is why ISPs can still ban illegal websites).
So like, it's that kind of stuff that seems to make sense, but in reality makes no sense. That's the kind of thing I feel the repeal net neutrality people would be promoting towards. In reality it's very hard to see how repealing net neutrality benefits people, the only people who seem to support it are people who either work or have worked for an ISP, or people who listen to those people.
EDIT: Also for the people who are saying that the NN laws haven't been in place in 2015, you are technically correct but there's more context you need to be aware of. It is true ISPs had the ability to throttle and block sites prior to 2015, but they never did use that, and when they did it was usually met with legal action. In 2014, however, there was a push for ISPs to actually start abusing the lack of net neutrality which is what motivated the obama era FCC to pass those restrictions in the first place.
The only reason the restrictions weren't in place prior to 2015 was because they didn't need to be in place, they were an unspoken rule. They were put in place as a reactionary response when ISPs decided they'd try and violate that unspoken rule. In Australia, we don't actually have right to speech, there is no official constitutional or legislative order or act that states that we have freedom of speech, but the only reason is because we've never really had to defend it, the courts generally all agree that freedom of speech exists. If however, a judge decided here decided that, no they'd rule that freedom of speech DOESN'T exist, then I'm 100% sure the parliment would quickly pass legislation overriding that judges decision and saying "freedom of speech does in fact exist". Now, if that legislation was later repealed, that is still a cause of concern, even though Australia had run fine without a freedom of speech legislation for so long. The climate had changed to make having a freedom of speech legislation necessary.
Topic: Net Neutrality (Read 3261 times)