What is the point of Net Neutrality? Seriously, I’ve never heard anyone tell me why. Why bother? Unless, of course, it’s a Trojan horse. Which no doubt it is. But at least the Greeks gave the Trojans a reason to accept the horse. What the heckfire is the rationale for this garbage?
ISPs are talking about charging web sites (more) money in order for their sites to be "fast" to the customer (that's you).
Net Neutrality is pending legislation (I think), or at least the concept, to ensure that ISPs cannot block, or slow down packets from other ISPs, or web sites that have not paid them payola to keep the sites fast.
Net Neutrality will ensure that Comcast will continue to allow dishnetwork.com to be responsive to customers who may be shopping for an alternative to cable TV, for instance.
To prevent politically-favored industries from leveraging their government-granted monopolies in order to impose even greater government-enforced strangleholds on their competitors.
There are various aspects to Net Neutrality, mostly interrelated. Instead of going technical, I’ll just list a possible scenario.
Let’s say Sprint doesn’t like you using Skype because Sprint wants to push its own VOIP solution. Sprint degrades Skype connections, but offers to stop doing it if Skype will pay them money. They say Skype is “getting bandwidth for free” but that’s wrong. Skype pays for bandwidth, and each user already pays for bandwidth to his ISP. Sprint just wants to get paid no matter what VOIP solution is used.
In addition, this puts up an artificial barrier to entry in the VOIP market. Skype might be able to afford to pay, but any startup is going to be screwed. In the end, the VOIP that anyone used to be able to set up is now reserved to a few large companies.
Net Neutrality wants all content to be transmitted without regard to origin, just like your old phone company didn’t care about what you said or who you talked to over the phone. Now, some traffic shaping is a good thing in routing this traffic. You want low latency for VOIP, but not high bandwidth. You want high bandwidth for video, but not necessarily low latency. You really don’t care about bandwidth or latency for email. Why push an email through with the same priority low latency as a phone call? It would be a waste of resources. Traffic shaping makes sure all this happens well.
The problem is that the same tools and techniques for traffic shaping can be used for anti-competitive ends, such as giving a higher latency to your competitor’s VOIP offering. Net Neutrality wants to disallow that.
Now that you’ve digested all that, translate the concept to other services. Microsoft has to pay for 360 gamers to get good latency for online play, Netflix has to pay for its movies to get through, Apple has to pay for iTunes to work well, Free Republic has to pay for us to be reading this.
So all of these services will get more expensive for us, and all the money ends up in the pockets of the ISPs — in addition to the money we already pay them for our Internet connections.
Speaking of that, this whole issue of some people using too much bandwidth is a red herring. It is only a problem with the pricing structure the ISPs use. Thinking rationally, if someone’s using more of your resources, then charge them more. But they want to offer this massive 24/7 bandwidth at a fixed rate across the board without regard to amount transferred, and then complain when some people actually use it. The simple solution is to change the rate structure rather than complaining.