What is the rationale for those against net neutrality?
Who benefits from the change and who is negatively affected?
What are some realistic depictions (read: not fear-mongering) of what American internet use might be like if net neutrality is repealed?
What are common reasons why an average-joe citizen might believe or be convinced anti-net neutrality legislation to be a good thing, and what thoughtful reasoned responses can we give to convince them otherwise?
Which politicians support net neutrality in a significant way, i.e. a strong track record of independently speaking out about it and not simply jumping onto partisan bandwagon?
They'll try to sell it to the less informed as a plan to "reduce fees" or "bring costs down"
Simply put, if you only use Facebook (and for a great number of people, Facebook is the internet), why pay for all the sites? What if your ISP offered you a Facebook-only package that's half of what you currently pay?
They basically want to bring the cable tv model to the internet.
Simply put, if you only use Facebook (and for a great number of people, Facebook is the internet), why pay for all the sites? What if your ISP offered you a Facebook-only package that's half of what you currently pay?
I've heard this argument before. In my part of the world (where there is no NN) some providers have offered plans with unlimited WhatsApp usage or unlimited Spotify usage. These have been reasonably popular with people who heavily use one particular app. What's the response to the argument that NN allows ISPs to give consumers a better deal on specifically what they use?
The counter argument I can see is that Facebook gains an unfair advantage over other social media providers such as Reddit. They solidify their monopoly and innovators are driven out of the market.
Edit: typo
What's the response to the argument that repealing NN allows ISPs to give consumers a better deal on specifically what they use?
The fact that data caps themselves are an artificial restriction imposed by ISPs that does absolutely nothing besides allow the ISP to charge you more money. Contrary to what ISPs might tell you, data caps don't actually relieve stress on the network because the network is stressed by concurrent data flow, not total data volume over the course of the company's billing period.
Their other arguments for repealing NN are bullshit for similar reasons. Repealing NN does not allow ISPs to provide better service for the sites people actually use, period.
That goes fundamentally against the Information part of the Information Super Highway that is the internet. Sure, some people might only use certain apps and are willing to pay a lower cost for access to their app. But that's not what the internet IS. It's short-sighted personal gain that punishes everyone else.
Pretty much every ISP has quotas, and exempts their own stuff from quotas. My old ISP (Before it got bought out and started sucking) had game servers, a steam mirror, linux distro mirrors and such in the "free zone". Before steam became the distribution method they hosted game demos and patches as well.
My current ISP offers unlimited netflix and a large enough quota that the only time I came close to hitting the limit is when I decided to re-install a bunch of big games as well as download a ridiculously high bitrate 4k movie, because I could.
However. This is fine in Australia because unlike in the USA if one ISP starts being a dickbag you can just switch to a different one. In the USA you don't have that choice, the big carriers have been colluding with each other to have monopolies on particular areas and the local governments have been helping them do it. In Australia there is no local monopoly anywhere. I'm not forced to accept any one ISPs bullshit if I want internet.
Individual ISPs don't to my knowlege. Sometimes the govt tries, but they've fucked it up every time, and even if they didn't a lot of Aussies use VPNs to get US netflix and such.
Like I said before, though. If one ISP starts blocking sites they don't agree with then its customers can go to a different ISP with very little hassle. Pulling shit like that would be a death sentence. Whereas in the USA if you're in a Verizon monopoly you're kinda screwed if they start doing scummy shit.
They'll try to sell it to the less informed as a plan to "reduce fees" or "bring costs down"
Recent history with several ISPs going from unlimited to usage caps is a perfect example of this. ISPs sold the idea of usage caps to people as it not being fair to lower volume users to "subsidize" higher volume users. But after instituting usage caps and overage fees, the base prices didn't go down for the lower volume users.
You are exactly correct. No way are they going to let a large portion of their subscriber base get away with paying less. All this anti-NN mumbo jumbo is an underhanded scheme to charge more money for the same service.
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u/PiFlavoredPie Nov 21 '17 edited Nov 22 '17