This all started because Companies like Netflix and Google (which are now the same company) were generating a lot of traffic because people out there on the internet want their content. Companies like Time Warner, who would prefer you to get content from them because then they get the advertizer dollars decided that they want to start charging extra tolls for Netflix or slowing down their data. The problem is, the way the internet was designed, all packets have pretty much equal priority (IPv6 has QOS headers, but that isn't widely adopted yet). Anyway, TW is saying, "it's not fair that we don't get money from people watching Netflix." The problem with this, is that it is a lie, unless they are giving away internet services to their customers.
It works like this, you pay for a certain amount of bandwith to/from your house. That is where the local ISP is getting its money. What they are all upset about is that they actually have provisioned the networks on the same kind of basis as fractional banking. Let's say an ISP has a 1GB pipe to a local neighborhood. Rather than selling just 1 GB of bandwith to the farious folks in the neighborhood, they actually sell 10GB of bandwith, knowing that you'll only see 10% from the various customers in use at any given time. Now, as time progresses, people seem to want more bandwith hungry stuff like Video, as opposed to text-based stuff like FR. (FR, except on threads with lots of pictures is very low bandwidth content). So, the actual bandwidth they provisioned starts bumping up against the bandwidth their customers actually want to use so they are going to have to either provision more capacity (which costs money), or charge their customers more, which might lead to those customers who can, switching to someone else. Either way, it's eventually going to eat into their profits. Lord knows we can't have that. You know, people actually using what it is that they are already paying for.
So, they are looking for additional revenue streams. Their attention quickly goes to Google/Netflix because it really looks like those folks have a license to print money. "Excellent", says TW, "let's threaten Google with slowing their packets down if they don't pay us some 'protection money'". After all, if we make Netflix service suck enough, maybe our customers will come to our servers for stuff, so we make more money. They start sending out their shills claiming that Google is somehow getting a 'free ride'. This appeals to conservatives, because we don't like leaches, and people who aren't paying their way. The problem is, it simply isn't true. Google pays a lot of money for their connection to the internet. I don't know the actual details, as I'm not privy to them, but it is well known that they have huge fiber connections to their ISP(s) for their internet access. They, like you, are paying for their bandwidth. However they may not be paying TW, which pisses them off, because they want on the gravy train. They can't charge you thousands of dollars for your internet connection because you'd tell them to stuff it. They look at Google's big wallet and say, "we want some of that".
Trouble is, they are essentiall a commodity service, though most people don't realize it. Data from TW is the same as data from any other ISP. Since they are in the ISP business, they have interconnect agreements with the folks they get their internet service from, up the chain to the actual 'backbone' of the fiber that carries the bulk of traffic (it's actually less decentralized than people generally think). Everyone agreed when they first connected to the backbone to carry everyone else's traffic. The internet doesn't work if packets can be randomly dropped because an ISP wants to act as a private tollkeeper. When you send an email, it may well pass through 10 different servers before it gets to the intended recipient. You don't have to pay each of those servers for handling your mail. They pass the traffic along because they want everyone else to pass their traffic along as well. Otherwise, it doesn't work.
Net Neutrality is the way the internet was designed.
Now, there are other things going on as well. The proposals you're actually seeing coming out of Obama's District of Criminals are anything but Net Neutrality. They are a massive power-grab to give FedGov much more control over how things work on the internet. You've got big media companies (you know, the mainstream media - the ones that hate conservatives and everything we stand for) that are desperate for additional revenue streams, as people realize that with the advent of the internet and DVRs, their revenue streams are dying. People aren't watching commercials anymore (which is the actual content on TV. The programming is just to get you to watch the Ads). They are losing control over information (who the hell actually watches CBS "News" anymore?). In general, they are losing power.
The internet providers are also not happy with simply being a utility, where their bits/bytes are the same as another company's bits/bytes. That's a really low margin game. All of this screaming about Google "not paying their share" is because these companies can't come up with compelling content of their own that you want to see and pay for, so they are trying to get a cut of things they had no hand in.
If you made it this far in this, congratulations. Net neutrality is not a concept that fits on a bumper sticker. Neither side is completely right, but I lean much more towards maintaining the status quo, which is working, as opposed to making massive changes that are of dubious utility to us, the actual customers/consumers of all this.
I'm still amazed at the conservative support for the folks opposing net neutrality, especially given the screws that will inevitably be tightened on any content from our side once the various ISPs can pick their own QOS for individual packets based on source or destination.
Good explanation.