Well technically ignoring the laws by executive order doesn't really change what you're talking about. You still won't be arrested if you don't break the law, you just sometimes also won't be arrested if you do break the law, and there's nothing in the constitution that I'm aware of requiring the executive to enforce every law anymore than there is anything requiring the congress to actually vote to pay for the programs it's already voted to run.
Knowing the way the law works, failing to file suspicious activity reports will be the crime with the most jail time. It's piss easy to prove, where's your activity report, needs no intent and tends to make a lot of the other fraud harder to accomplish.
Not really, it's just the common way of denoting places in those places. They do the same thing with "New York City, USA" in a lot of films and leaving aside the fact that to the best of my knowledge there's only one New York City in the world (as opposed to a very large number of cities and towns called Paris), more people probably know where it is.
Even if what you're saying is true, then for one texture, for another actually using your jaw muscles. Not having the reasonably severe gastro intestinal problems that are associated with tube feeding.
On another note, if you really are completely unable to use one of your five senses I'd suggest you see a doctor about it, it could be a symptom of something serious and even if it's not you might enjoy life a little more if you got it fixed.
If OP is not lying through his teeth he 100% has a medical issue. He's talking about having one of his core senses basically not functioning at all, that's a medical issue.
And what exactly else would it be? It's an artificial nutrient cocktail which essentially means that in it's native state it pretty much has to be a brown slurry. They could potentially bake that brown slurry into some form of loaf, or add some form of stabilizing agent to give it texture, they could bleach it, but in it's native form it will be sludge, because sludge is actually made up of the same stuff this is.
And eating heavily processed sludge will be better for you?
You can't distribute this sort of stuff without preserving it in some way and whatever way you do it is going to either add things to it or take things away(freezing or cooking), etc.
You think you don't care about food, but when you've had nothing but tasteless sludge for a month or so you'll most likely realize that you actually do care about food. You care about texture, you care about taste, you care about the things that the act of eating does to your body. Maybe not a lot, but at least a little.
You are aware that the "carrots help you see in the dark" thing was a lie the Brits told to try to cover the fact that they had radar? As far as I'm aware there's zero evidence whatsoever that carrots or any nutrient in them does a damned thing for your eyes.
The frequent argument from "hands off my money" people against any kind of redistribution of wealth center around the concepts of "earning" and "deserving", these are therefor concepts which are worth investigating. How much of what you have you "earned" and how much you "deserve" and by contrast how much of the misfortune of others is "earned" and "deserved" is really rather important.
You seem to be a textbook example of what this actual article is about. Just because life was easy for you and I, doesn't mean that it's easy for everyone. I had parents who could provide me with enough food to eat so I could grow up, I wasn't exposed to lead paint, my mother didn't drink or smoke when she was pregnant. I got to go to good schools and live in safe neighborhoods. I was able to go to a high quality public university that I could afford due to the assistance of the taxpayers in providing a guarantor for my student loans. I'm also of above average intelligence, though I'm nothing special. Life has always been reasonably easy for me, there have never been any barriers which I could not overcome with a little bit of perseverance. Throughout my whole life people have been working to help me succeed. Many people, both in the US and elsewhere do not have these opportunities, not because they are bad people, or even lazy people. Many of America's working poor work much harder than I or in all likelihood you, have ever done in my life.
TL;DR YOU ARE NOT BETTER, I AM NOT BETTER, WE BOTH ARE EXTRAORDINARILY LUCKY AND THAT LUCK COULD DISAPPEAR TOMORROW.
The laws about medical privacy are ridiculously strong, and to a certain extent that's actually justified, but most of it is how we feel about medical records as opposed to how dangerous they actually are. Most of the cases you put up are either untrue or there are easier ways to get the same information.
Your health insurance company already has your medical records, they have them because they paid the bills, your life insurance company will refuse to pay out if you have any relevant medical secrets you don't make them aware of. Your mortgage company doesn't give a shit about your health so long as your house is worth more than you owe, if you die they'll sell it and recoup the money. The credit card company doesn't care because the last thing they want to do is refuse credit cards to poor unhealthy people and their rates are already usurious.
The job is an issue potentially, but it's pretty difficult to hide chronic health problems for very long anyway and most employers presume that if you're a women under 50 you're planning on getting pregnant in the next 6 months. More importantly your employer isn't going to pay for stolen medical records, which is more of what I meant about "no one gives a shit". On the issue of an abortion, odds are I could show you and all the members of your church a stack of medical records one of which contained an abortion and you wouldn't be able to tell me which one it was, and that's leaving aside the fact that the same clinical codes are used for non termination procedures. Sometimes Catholic hospitals will perform the procedure and the people running the hospital won't know that's what got done
There are certainly people who would read your medical records if they were in front of them, there are even people who would misuse them if they were available, but very little that's in your medical records can't be determined in other ways and more importantly I can't think of anywhere you could sell bulk medical records for enough cash to be worthwhile. Medical records have been lost in their millions in the last 20 or 30 years but as far as I'm aware no one has done anything with them.
Nope, Google doesn't make your life a living hell, at least as far we're aware, not can't. For the most part the government doesn't either.
Leaving aside the fact that Google is just as capable of blackmail, extortion, and other forms of abuses as the federal government is, they can turn over any information they have directly to the federal government and get them to make your life hell.
This is sort of what I'm trying to say, every single thing the US government can do to you with your private information Google can do or get done to you. They're also one hell of a lot less accountable both in theory and in reality. I can't vote for CEO of Google or file a FOI request for their plans and records. Google isn't answerable to me in any way shape or form. All I can do is attempt to stop using their services which by this point is probably a useless move anyway.
Honestly, no one gives a shit about your medical records, the vast majority of the information isn't useful or even interesting to anyone and even the most embarrassing stuff isn't actually very good blackmail material. I would assume there's some value in the records of celebrities, but even then not all that much. The records from your shrink could potentially be interesting, but even the medical stuff you can actually understand without a medical degree just isn't that interesting.
A heavily regulated monopoly is just about the worst option you can pick. It combines all the worst aspects of the most inefficient government agency imaginable with all the worst bits of the most greedy gigantic private mega corps. The company can't be allowed to actually make any real decisions about pricing, maintenance, services or upgrades and yet they still have to make an annual profit. Just a terrible terrible idea.
No no no. My phone line is VoIP with AT&T, those limits are artificially imposed at the switch level. In fact, the copper lines for my house only run maybe a hundred feet, and then it switches to full fiber (it is all cat 5e+, I have actually seen the box that it transitions to fiber). The copper that is running can easily run 1 gbps+ if they didn't have bottlenecks further upstream.
I am friends with several techs at AT&T that do installs and have discussed this with them. You can limit the traffic volume coming from a location really easily without "shaping" traffic like you say at all. This has been done for years and will probably continue to be done for a long time. Hell, it can be done at a SOFTWARE level pretty easily and I know because I have seen source code for doing it. I really don't know how to explain this any differently. Google bandwidth throttling I guess?
All bandwidth throttling is done by dropping packets or causing timeouts. It can be done in software, it can be done in hardware, but it's done by dropping or delaying packets. It works that way because that's how TCP's congestion control algorithms work. I've not only seen source code to do it, I actually had to implement some TCP congestion control algorithms at uni. TCP is designed to use as much bandwidth as the link between you and the source can handle. It sends more and more data until it's either sent everything it has to send or packets start failing to return before they timeout. Yes you can easily throttle connections, but you do it by dropping packets and if the algorithm you use to determine which packets you drop isn't very good it basically wipes out the network connection. Most high end switches have pretty decent algorithms which don't entirely suck(so long as the link isn't saturated anyway), but those are fixed, not ad hoc. That is, it's not too terribly to reduce you to 24 mbps all the time, but limiting you sometimes is much harder. It'd be possible for you since you've got FTTP, but for connecting to a DSLAM it's pretty well impossible to actually implement in hardware.
This has been practiced for a while and does not fall under net neutrality guidelines. Net neutrality simply states that all traffic should be treated equally and they can't do premium servicing etc.
What exactly do you think throttling some connections and not others is if it's not treating traffic differently?
Net neutrality has nothing to do with them putting a limit on how much data you can draw and at what speeds. How exactly do you think they enforce speed and bandwidth packages now? Physical limitations? If I downgraded my speed package to 12 mbps now, AT&T makes no physical changes, they change configuration on their end only and it just limits how much data I can request.
You have FTTP which is a completely different situation from most people and offers control which isn't available in most cases. Why exactly you would build FTTP out to any large number of customers just to offer them speeds they could get on ADSL I'm not sure, but apparently they have.
You can't have any meaningful level of net neutrality without preventing filtration based source and destination, if the directives truly didn't protect against doing that then we've lost not a damned thing by having it overturned. Want to get people using your own system instead of Netflix, downgrade traffic to Netflix, you're not filtering on content, you're filtering on destination. Don't like Google, same deal. You can't have any kind of conditional traffic shaping while still maintaining meaningful net neutrality.
Net Neutrality policy requires that all packets are treated equally, regardless of source, destination or content, you cannot implement any kind of traffic shaping while being compliant with this guideline. The fact that your home telephone line is not capable of transferring more than 24 mbps is due to the physical limitations of the copper, not anything they are doing, they could provide you with the entire trunk line just for yourself but you'd never actually be able to see any of it because ADSL can't transfer that much data.
Physical limitations aren't anything like virtual limitations. Essentially the way that TCP works is that there is what is referred to as a window, which defines how many packets the system will allow at any given time which have yet to receive an ACK. If packets are dropped or time out, the TCP stack will reduce the size of this window until they stop being dropped, if packets aren't being dropped then it will gradually increase the size of the window until they start to be. In this way the TCP stack finds the maximum sustainable throughput you can achieve at any given time. When an ISP shapes your traffic(your home line and the cable modem ARE NOT SHAPED) it does so by deliberately dropping packets until the TCP window shrinks to the desired speed. This plays merry havoc with anything that is expecting low latency(not high speed) and actually impacts a whole bunch of other stuff. The fact that these algorithms are usually poorly implemented exacerbates, but does not cause this issue.
At the router level you can often configure what is known as Quality of Service which is queue jumping for packets of certain kinds. Doing this is again a violation of net neutrality, but even ignoring that, unless your network is dangerously oversubscribed QoS won't reduce your speed from 35 mbps to 1 mbps, it also tends to be configured into the router settings(which is why it doesn't break connections as badly) which makes it awfully difficult to create adhoc rules. If you were going to use something like that to implement traffic shaping in the manner you describe you'd have to take network infrastructure offline every time someone changed their plan.
No, having someone like the OP pretend that you can actually share your private information only with "some" gigantic corporate entities is what is nonsensical.
The author of the article has a point, whether you agree with him or not. There are services which can only be delivered by letting people know a gigantic amount of information about you. Either you're happy with having pretty well anyone know that information about you in exchange for those services or you're not. You can't have it both ways. Either Google knows where you are so they can tell you where the nearest coffee shop is or they don't and they can't. Either you have a convenient GPS device in your pocket or you don't. We need to stop pretending that we can share this information only in a way that we're comfortable with. If it is collected it will be shared, if it is collected it can be obtained with or in some cases without a warrant, if it is collected someone else can collect it to.
A lot of the problem is just that we have this gigantic black hole in our thought processes where the government is seen as a gigantic terrifying evil but gigantic corporations are not. However much I distrust my government(s) I'd sure as hell rather the NSA were looking at my medical records than Google, the NSA is at least nominally something I can vote to change, but there ya go.
It's not so much that the free market is a fairly tale but that the "perfect" free market is and the US government is for any number of reasons unwilling to accept this(not that other countries aren't just as stupid). Network infrastructure is horribly expensive to build and maintain and anyone with the tiniest bit of common sense can see that if we make every single service provider lay their own cables we will end up with a dozen crappy networks all of which are trying to pay off huge infrastructure investments. Simultaneously of course having your competitor own the infrastructure you operate your service on is also ridiculously stupid because they'll either screw you or have to be so heavily regulated they can't actually function (as an Australian I'm looking at you Telstra). What you actually need to do is have an entity build, own and operate the network who is not a participant in the market which actually uses the infrastructure. If you could get that entity to be primarily interested in community benefit as opposed to profit and be willing to operate the network at cost, so much the better. The issue of course is that though that entity exists, it's called the government and free market nutters will never accept letting them operate in this capacity.
It's true that costs have gone down, but usage has gone up dramatically. Streaming video and stuff like Steam allows people to use traffic levels that were basically unseen outside of serious pirates in 2009. Before all the streaming video stuff anyone using the internet for legal purposes was going to be lucky to use up a couple of GB. Watching a single HD movie will burn through more than that.
In this particular case it probably doesn't actually have any impact, though net neutrality and data tiers are actually related. Under Net Neutrality traffic shaping(which is the more acceptable way of dealing with data overages) would have been prohibited.
That's sort of the problem with Net Neutrality. Treating all traffic exactly the same regardless of its source is actually broken and stupid, but at the same time the doomsday scenarios net neutrality advocates talk about are actually plausible in the US(though they oddly don't happen in other countries where Net Neutrality doesn't exist).
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Well technically ignoring the laws by executive order doesn't really change what you're talking about. You still won't be arrested if you don't break the law, you just sometimes also won't be arrested if you do break the law, and there's nothing in the constitution that I'm aware of requiring the executive to enforce every law anymore than there is anything requiring the congress to actually vote to pay for the programs it's already voted to run.
Knowing the way the law works, failing to file suspicious activity reports will be the crime with the most jail time. It's piss easy to prove, where's your activity report, needs no intent and tends to make a lot of the other fraud harder to accomplish.
Not really, it's just the common way of denoting places in those places. They do the same thing with "New York City, USA" in a lot of films and leaving aside the fact that to the best of my knowledge there's only one New York City in the world (as opposed to a very large number of cities and towns called Paris), more people probably know where it is.
And once you've driven your 77 miles how are you going to turn on your lights?
You'll probably maintain the vision you have until you die of malnutrition, give or take a few hallucinations.
Even if what you're saying is true, then for one texture, for another actually using your jaw muscles. Not having the reasonably severe gastro intestinal problems that are associated with tube feeding.
On another note, if you really are completely unable to use one of your five senses I'd suggest you see a doctor about it, it could be a symptom of something serious and even if it's not you might enjoy life a little more if you got it fixed.
If OP is not lying through his teeth he 100% has a medical issue. He's talking about having one of his core senses basically not functioning at all, that's a medical issue.
Then what precisely is the point of it?
And I presume you don't eat it as a powder? You add water and create what? Sludge.
And what exactly else would it be? It's an artificial nutrient cocktail which essentially means that in it's native state it pretty much has to be a brown slurry. They could potentially bake that brown slurry into some form of loaf, or add some form of stabilizing agent to give it texture, they could bleach it, but in it's native form it will be sludge, because sludge is actually made up of the same stuff this is.
And eating heavily processed sludge will be better for you?
You can't distribute this sort of stuff without preserving it in some way and whatever way you do it is going to either add things to it or take things away(freezing or cooking), etc.
You think you don't care about food, but when you've had nothing but tasteless sludge for a month or so you'll most likely realize that you actually do care about food. You care about texture, you care about taste, you care about the things that the act of eating does to your body. Maybe not a lot, but at least a little.
You are aware that the "carrots help you see in the dark" thing was a lie the Brits told to try to cover the fact that they had radar? As far as I'm aware there's zero evidence whatsoever that carrots or any nutrient in them does a damned thing for your eyes.
The frequent argument from "hands off my money" people against any kind of redistribution of wealth center around the concepts of "earning" and "deserving", these are therefor concepts which are worth investigating. How much of what you have you "earned" and how much you "deserve" and by contrast how much of the misfortune of others is "earned" and "deserved" is really rather important.
You seem to be a textbook example of what this actual article is about. Just because life was easy for you and I, doesn't mean that it's easy for everyone. I had parents who could provide me with enough food to eat so I could grow up, I wasn't exposed to lead paint, my mother didn't drink or smoke when she was pregnant. I got to go to good schools and live in safe neighborhoods. I was able to go to a high quality public university that I could afford due to the assistance of the taxpayers in providing a guarantor for my student loans. I'm also of above average intelligence, though I'm nothing special. Life has always been reasonably easy for me, there have never been any barriers which I could not overcome with a little bit of perseverance. Throughout my whole life people have been working to help me succeed. Many people, both in the US and elsewhere do not have these opportunities, not because they are bad people, or even lazy people. Many of America's working poor work much harder than I or in all likelihood you, have ever done in my life.
TL;DR YOU ARE NOT BETTER, I AM NOT BETTER, WE BOTH ARE EXTRAORDINARILY LUCKY AND THAT LUCK COULD DISAPPEAR TOMORROW.
The laws about medical privacy are ridiculously strong, and to a certain extent that's actually justified, but most of it is how we feel about medical records as opposed to how dangerous they actually are. Most of the cases you put up are either untrue or there are easier ways to get the same information.
Your health insurance company already has your medical records, they have them because they paid the bills, your life insurance company will refuse to pay out if you have any relevant medical secrets you don't make them aware of. Your mortgage company doesn't give a shit about your health so long as your house is worth more than you owe, if you die they'll sell it and recoup the money. The credit card company doesn't care because the last thing they want to do is refuse credit cards to poor unhealthy people and their rates are already usurious.
The job is an issue potentially, but it's pretty difficult to hide chronic health problems for very long anyway and most employers presume that if you're a women under 50 you're planning on getting pregnant in the next 6 months. More importantly your employer isn't going to pay for stolen medical records, which is more of what I meant about "no one gives a shit". On the issue of an abortion, odds are I could show you and all the members of your church a stack of medical records one of which contained an abortion and you wouldn't be able to tell me which one it was, and that's leaving aside the fact that the same clinical codes are used for non termination procedures. Sometimes Catholic hospitals will perform the procedure and the people running the hospital won't know that's what got done
There are certainly people who would read your medical records if they were in front of them, there are even people who would misuse them if they were available, but very little that's in your medical records can't be determined in other ways and more importantly I can't think of anywhere you could sell bulk medical records for enough cash to be worthwhile. Medical records have been lost in their millions in the last 20 or 30 years but as far as I'm aware no one has done anything with them.
Nope, Google doesn't make your life a living hell, at least as far we're aware, not can't. For the most part the government doesn't either.
Leaving aside the fact that Google is just as capable of blackmail, extortion, and other forms of abuses as the federal government is, they can turn over any information they have directly to the federal government and get them to make your life hell.
This is sort of what I'm trying to say, every single thing the US government can do to you with your private information Google can do or get done to you. They're also one hell of a lot less accountable both in theory and in reality. I can't vote for CEO of Google or file a FOI request for their plans and records. Google isn't answerable to me in any way shape or form. All I can do is attempt to stop using their services which by this point is probably a useless move anyway.
Honestly, no one gives a shit about your medical records, the vast majority of the information isn't useful or even interesting to anyone and even the most embarrassing stuff isn't actually very good blackmail material. I would assume there's some value in the records of celebrities, but even then not all that much. The records from your shrink could potentially be interesting, but even the medical stuff you can actually understand without a medical degree just isn't that interesting.
A heavily regulated monopoly is just about the worst option you can pick. It combines all the worst aspects of the most inefficient government agency imaginable with all the worst bits of the most greedy gigantic private mega corps. The company can't be allowed to actually make any real decisions about pricing, maintenance, services or upgrades and yet they still have to make an annual profit. Just a terrible terrible idea.
No no no. My phone line is VoIP with AT&T, those limits are artificially imposed at the switch level. In fact, the copper lines for my house only run maybe a hundred feet, and then it switches to full fiber (it is all cat 5e+, I have actually seen the box that it transitions to fiber). The copper that is running can easily run 1 gbps+ if they didn't have bottlenecks further upstream.
I am friends with several techs at AT&T that do installs and have discussed this with them. You can limit the traffic volume coming from a location really easily without "shaping" traffic like you say at all. This has been done for years and will probably continue to be done for a long time. Hell, it can be done at a SOFTWARE level pretty easily and I know because I have seen source code for doing it. I really don't know how to explain this any differently. Google bandwidth throttling I guess?
All bandwidth throttling is done by dropping packets or causing timeouts. It can be done in software, it can be done in hardware, but it's done by dropping or delaying packets. It works that way because that's how TCP's congestion control algorithms work. I've not only seen source code to do it, I actually had to implement some TCP congestion control algorithms at uni. TCP is designed to use as much bandwidth as the link between you and the source can handle. It sends more and more data until it's either sent everything it has to send or packets start failing to return before they timeout. Yes you can easily throttle connections, but you do it by dropping packets and if the algorithm you use to determine which packets you drop isn't very good it basically wipes out the network connection. Most high end switches have pretty decent algorithms which don't entirely suck(so long as the link isn't saturated anyway), but those are fixed, not ad hoc. That is, it's not too terribly to reduce you to 24 mbps all the time, but limiting you sometimes is much harder. It'd be possible for you since you've got FTTP, but for connecting to a DSLAM it's pretty well impossible to actually implement in hardware.
This has been practiced for a while and does not fall under net neutrality guidelines. Net neutrality simply states that all traffic should be treated equally and they can't do premium servicing etc.
What exactly do you think throttling some connections and not others is if it's not treating traffic differently?
Net neutrality has nothing to do with them putting a limit on how much data you can draw and at what speeds. How exactly do you think they enforce speed and bandwidth packages now? Physical limitations? If I downgraded my speed package to 12 mbps now, AT&T makes no physical changes, they change configuration on their end only and it just limits how much data I can request.
You have FTTP which is a completely different situation from most people and offers control which isn't available in most cases. Why exactly you would build FTTP out to any large number of customers just to offer them speeds they could get on ADSL I'm not sure, but apparently they have.
You can't have any meaningful level of net neutrality without preventing filtration based source and destination, if the directives truly didn't protect against doing that then we've lost not a damned thing by having it overturned. Want to get people using your own system instead of Netflix, downgrade traffic to Netflix, you're not filtering on content, you're filtering on destination. Don't like Google, same deal. You can't have any kind of conditional traffic shaping while still maintaining meaningful net neutrality.
Net Neutrality policy requires that all packets are treated equally, regardless of source, destination or content, you cannot implement any kind of traffic shaping while being compliant with this guideline. The fact that your home telephone line is not capable of transferring more than 24 mbps is due to the physical limitations of the copper, not anything they are doing, they could provide you with the entire trunk line just for yourself but you'd never actually be able to see any of it because ADSL can't transfer that much data.
Physical limitations aren't anything like virtual limitations. Essentially the way that TCP works is that there is what is referred to as a window, which defines how many packets the system will allow at any given time which have yet to receive an ACK. If packets are dropped or time out, the TCP stack will reduce the size of this window until they stop being dropped, if packets aren't being dropped then it will gradually increase the size of the window until they start to be. In this way the TCP stack finds the maximum sustainable throughput you can achieve at any given time. When an ISP shapes your traffic(your home line and the cable modem ARE NOT SHAPED) it does so by deliberately dropping packets until the TCP window shrinks to the desired speed. This plays merry havoc with anything that is expecting low latency(not high speed) and actually impacts a whole bunch of other stuff. The fact that these algorithms are usually poorly implemented exacerbates, but does not cause this issue.
At the router level you can often configure what is known as Quality of Service which is queue jumping for packets of certain kinds. Doing this is again a violation of net neutrality, but even ignoring that, unless your network is dangerously oversubscribed QoS won't reduce your speed from 35 mbps to 1 mbps, it also tends to be configured into the router settings(which is why it doesn't break connections as badly) which makes it awfully difficult to create adhoc rules. If you were going to use something like that to implement traffic shaping in the manner you describe you'd have to take network infrastructure offline every time someone changed their plan.
No, having someone like the OP pretend that you can actually share your private information only with "some" gigantic corporate entities is what is nonsensical.
The author of the article has a point, whether you agree with him or not. There are services which can only be delivered by letting people know a gigantic amount of information about you. Either you're happy with having pretty well anyone know that information about you in exchange for those services or you're not. You can't have it both ways. Either Google knows where you are so they can tell you where the nearest coffee shop is or they don't and they can't. Either you have a convenient GPS device in your pocket or you don't. We need to stop pretending that we can share this information only in a way that we're comfortable with. If it is collected it will be shared, if it is collected it can be obtained with or in some cases without a warrant, if it is collected someone else can collect it to.
A lot of the problem is just that we have this gigantic black hole in our thought processes where the government is seen as a gigantic terrifying evil but gigantic corporations are not. However much I distrust my government(s) I'd sure as hell rather the NSA were looking at my medical records than Google, the NSA is at least nominally something I can vote to change, but there ya go.
It's not so much that the free market is a fairly tale but that the "perfect" free market is and the US government is for any number of reasons unwilling to accept this(not that other countries aren't just as stupid). Network infrastructure is horribly expensive to build and maintain and anyone with the tiniest bit of common sense can see that if we make every single service provider lay their own cables we will end up with a dozen crappy networks all of which are trying to pay off huge infrastructure investments. Simultaneously of course having your competitor own the infrastructure you operate your service on is also ridiculously stupid because they'll either screw you or have to be so heavily regulated they can't actually function (as an Australian I'm looking at you Telstra). What you actually need to do is have an entity build, own and operate the network who is not a participant in the market which actually uses the infrastructure. If you could get that entity to be primarily interested in community benefit as opposed to profit and be willing to operate the network at cost, so much the better. The issue of course is that though that entity exists, it's called the government and free market nutters will never accept letting them operate in this capacity.
It's true that costs have gone down, but usage has gone up dramatically. Streaming video and stuff like Steam allows people to use traffic levels that were basically unseen outside of serious pirates in 2009. Before all the streaming video stuff anyone using the internet for legal purposes was going to be lucky to use up a couple of GB. Watching a single HD movie will burn through more than that.
In this particular case it probably doesn't actually have any impact, though net neutrality and data tiers are actually related. Under Net Neutrality traffic shaping(which is the more acceptable way of dealing with data overages) would have been prohibited.
That's sort of the problem with Net Neutrality. Treating all traffic exactly the same regardless of its source is actually broken and stupid, but at the same time the doomsday scenarios net neutrality advocates talk about are actually plausible in the US(though they oddly don't happen in other countries where Net Neutrality doesn't exist).