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3 ISPs Have Spent $572 Million To Kill Net Neutrality Since 2008 (dslreports.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from DSLReports: A study by Maplight indicates that for every one comment submitted to the FCC on net neutrality (and there have been roughly 5 million so far), the telecom industry has spent $100 in lobbying to crush the open internet. The group found that Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) have spent $572 million on attempts to influence the FCC and other government agencies since 2008. "The FCC's decision, slated to be announced later this summer, will be a clear indicator of the power of corporate cash in a Trump administration," notes the report. "Public sentiment is on the side of keeping the Obama administration's net neutrality policies, which prevented internet companies from blocking, slowing or giving priority to different websites." Congressional lobbying forms indicate that Comcast alone has spent nearly $4 million on lobbying Congress on net neutrality issues from the end of 2014 through the first quarter of 2017.
That a poor analogy.
A more correct one would be "You can't drive on our toll road because you are driving a chevy"
the IS NOT about paying for faster access, This is about them choosing what you can download/watch/stream/play
"If the internet is analogous to a network of roads"
It's not. Next question.
the IS NOT about paying for faster access, This is about them choosing what you can download/watch/stream/play
It's both. They will charge for faster access to sites that aren't in their network, but the plebes won't pay for that, so they'll consume what they are told while the people with money won't even notice that there's a problem.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The agreed upon definition by pretty much everyone other than the ISPs is that net neutrality means making a reasonable best effort to never prioritize traffic based on its eventual destination out on the Internet. The speed of the traffic should be roughly the lesser of the speed that either end is paying for, and should not be throttled by ISP A because ISP B's customer isn't paying them out-of-band for access to ISP A's users, and should not be throttled by ISP B because ISP A's users aren't paying them extra money for access to ISP B's content providers. This definition is simple, straightforward, and achieves all of the goals of net neutrality advocates.
More importantly, this definition necessarily includes both explicit prioritization (through traffic shaping that penalizes a particular destination, such as Netflix) and de facto prioritization (through not buying enough bandwidth to Netflix's ISP, thus providing inadequate service for Netflix users, but conveniently having your own video-on-demand service that's inside your network, and thus unaffected by the inadequate outbound bandwidth).
All other definitions are deliberately flawed in ways that would harm consumers, and are straw men put forth by the ISP industry in a very deliberate and malicious effort to confuse users and government officials about what net neutrality is, thus making it easier to later convince them that net neutrality is somehow harmful to consumers.
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