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Do you think it's free for YouTube or Netflix to upload their content? Is bandwidth free for you when you host a VM on AWS? If you read about the economics of the internet backbone [1], while slightly old (2004), you can get a more informed view. Netflix or YouTube, via their commercial internet providers (or the one used by AWS in Netflix's case) have to pay for the packets they exchange with other backbone providers, one way or another. If they sent too many bytes per second, the backbones providers would adjust their prices accordingly.
Those 'backbone providers' have no way of enforcing non net-neutral behavior, they would simply be avoided by everyone else. But consumer-facing ISP would want to abuse their unique position between the consumers and the other ISPs and either take the consumers hostage, or the companies that are trying to reach those customers. Big tech are starting to take measures to prevent themselves from being taken hostage that way (i.e. Google Fiber), but how do we know 20 years from now these companies wouldn't want to engage in the same behavior as the current consumer-facing ISPs want today. Title II classification would ensure this net neutrality stays. > someone's grandma who only emails and very light browsing, so she's subsidizing my use of Youtube and Netflix already today. If this was a big problem, providers could provide non-unlimited internet, where you pay per Gb/s used. But if those Gb come from me watching 4k videos, or someone's grandma downloading the entire Wikipedia pages for offline consumption shouldn't matter, they should all come at the same speed, untethered, for everyone. [1] http://www.netinst.org/ECONOMICS_OF_THE_INTERNET_BACKBONE.pd... |