dhayric :
Toms even posted their own piece arguing against NN with very good points.
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/why-us-internet-is-slow-and-expensive,news-26251.html
That piece isn't "against" net neutrality, There's literally a section header titled "Why I'm neutral about net neutrality". It's just saying that Net Neutrality, in itself, isn't going to magically solve all the problems that the ISPs are causing - and that competition in the market is much more important.
However the
problem with the elimination of net neutrality, is that under the current system competition is not only technically impossible - it is actually illegal in most municipalities.
We either need to treat internet like a basic protected utility (honestly I think internet access is far more important than natural gas), or we need to actually open up the market so that anybody can start up their own ISP using any technology they want. Although, since cable and fiber is laid across public land it would still be nearly impossible for a start-up cable company to build out enough infrastructure to enter even a small subset of one market.
The new FCC rules, however, give all the power to a very small number of ISP companies, and makes it legal for them to block access to anything they want - for example disallowing a potential competitor in their region from hooking up to the internet in the first place. The new rules give a market where some of the least-trusted and most-monopolistic companies on earth now have no regulation and no competition. It's the worst possible case.
Comcast doesn't like that people are paying $8 for netflix instead of $150 for cable? Then Comcast can just throttle netflix to the point that the service is useless until Netflix pays ransom to comcast (and passes the cost onto their customers) - There is actually a lot of evidence that this has already happened -more than once. Notice how Netflix doesn't cost $8 any more - 2 of the last 3 price hikes were connected directly to the court rulings, which caused the old FCC to pass the regulations that were repealed. The effective date for the repeal was April 23; and a mere 3 days later Amazon announced that they will have to increase the price of their Prime streaming services by 20%.
Granted, There are a lot of things Comcast wont' be able to do for a little while longer, because they agreed to temporarily follow additional neutrality requirements when trying to get their purchase of NBC approved.
Speaking of which, the companies who own CNBC and CNN now get to arbitrarily decide who is allowed to access sites like foxnews and breitbart - so I have no idea why certain members of the right-wing media are advocating what will lead to the destruction of their own careers / political movement.
Is Verizon annoyed that people are complaining about how their Yahoo/AOL sells the full content of full emails to advertisers? They can just replace the text of news articles about it to something more positive. Expect news sources (well the very few that aren't already owned by an ISP) to start changing their opinions to "make the ISPs happy so they don't shut us down". At this point ISPs can now legally block you from contacting your congressman to express your opinion about the situation, if they want. The could redirect traffic to a political opponent's website to a donation page for somebody in their pocket (on a technical level this one is actually really easy to do).
What would happen if, overnight, one of these ISPs decided that they are jealous of Alphabet's success, so they block access and hold Google (including play store apps) ransom; Or maybe its Apple or microsoft or any of the other top US companies. What if they decide use throttling to extort JP Morgan, Visa, Wall Street, or even the Federal Government itself. It is a major risk to both our economy and national security. - and they can do it LEGALLY. What will you do if your bank's ISP stops them from processing withdraws, deposits, card transactions, etc until you start start putting 10% of your income towards an "internet banking" fee (that also happens to break local real-life transactions). One CEO of a major ISP -one guy- could wake up tomorrow and (legally) destroy our entire economy. He could even argue that his fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders required him to do it - as the first ISP to flip the kill-switch will likely make record-breaking revenue as the rest of the economy collapses around them.
These are the kinds of self-serving "alternative business models" that former Verizon Lobbyist Ajit Pai had in mind when he started pushing for the repeal. They are trying to flip the power from the "anybody who makes money online" back to the ISPs.
I'm not saying any of these doomsday scenarios are likely (other than forcing you to pay more for streaming services since that's already happening), but the consequences are so monumentally huge that even the tiniest possibility is utterly unacceptable.