Here are your two options
[[With NN: The internet is a public utility, gets the benefits of tax breaks, subsidization etc. High traffic sites are free to be freeloaders and murder bandwidth at 5pm. Google,netflix, facebook and the government run the internet. Google & FB being like 60% of internet traffic. Both google and facebook have been caught doing censoring in the past politically so this idea that NN somehow prevents that isn't true.
more on this later.
[[Without NN: Now the ISPs enter the fray and get to challenge the power of these companies based on usage. Google and Facebook lose a lot of power and influence. However traffic prioritization & data cap deals are no longer ((illegal)). though all this stuff has been happening since 2014 so i'm not sure what NN is supposed to be doing besides helping Google grow.
Realistically both options suck, yet you have people convinced NN is the sole barrier protecting them from ISP's enslaving their families. The ideal scenario would be no NN and the ISP monopolies get busted. That isn't an option. So your options are power is consolidated in like 3 entities vs like 6 or 7 entities. Thats all this is about.
No one's charging you pay-per-view internet and pay-per-view internet packages weren't even illegal under NN the ISP just had to make their portugese tiered internet service publicly known. So the clever fucks posting that same portugese tiered-internet image from 3 yrs ago can fuck off.
The idea of throttling sites is also overblown. Yes they've done it in a few situations in the past, and every single time the consumer backlash has forced them to very quickly undo it with absolutely no legal threat at all. As shitty as ISPs are, they do need to maintain a minimum level of "not pissing off half the country." There's no advantage to throttling low traffic sites and telling people to pay, because there's no money in it because they're low traffic.
ISP's haven't even taken legal action against pirates, because they still want them as customers.
Another thing, "fast lanes," which are illegal under NN but no one cares because NN is irrelevant as anything other than a concept.
The whole intial kneejerk was people thinking ISPs were throttling Netflix, but it ended up being something else entirely. Backbones have deals with each other on data exchange, and if one pushes more than they take they end up getting charged for it. So Netflix was pushing data to backbone A, A was transferring it to B, who then pushed it to Comcast. Well B was taking more than it was sending through A, so they send A a bill. A throttles Netflix and tells them they have to pay if they want to get more data through B. Netflix says Comcast should pay because their customers are the ones who need it pulled along that path. Comcast says fuck off, and we all get Net Neutrality to punish them except it doesn't actually do anything in this situation because Comcast was never actually throttling and the FCC can't tell backbones what to do. Torrent sites deal with this on a regular basis, the internet has always functioned like this, data isn't equal and bandwidth isn't infinite. Netflix lost the case and had to create their own content delivery networks (fast lanes, paid prioritization, so evil), pays Comcast to hook into them directly, and bypasses the backbones. Everything worked out, net neutrality did nothing, but we still have it. Hurray.
Meanwhile Google has actively pursued sites like stormfront, 8ch, signs with the DMCA to remove your search results etc. So remind me again how this is about censorship and Google, who had a big lobbying hand in the 2014 Title 2 reclassification so they could try to push fiber in silicon valley is the good guy.
Paid prioritization of youtube destroyed all competition by the way since it's technically illegal for anyone besides google and netflix to have their data prioritized. I'm sure dailymotion has a few choice words about it.
What was coined as "net neutrality" was literally a nationalized utility by any other name, giving regulatory control of the internet to the FCC rather than just letting the FTC resolve disputes. Tell me again about how much you enjoy subsidizing monopolies with your tax dollars
