Can someone point to the best ELI5 article, or tell me the best metaphor? I think I don't do a great job trying to explain net neutrality to family members.
Do you know how you have to pay extra to your ISP to watch Netflix or Youtube? You don't because of Net Neutrality.
If they are old enough you can use this metaphor:
Anti-Net Neutrality is for turning the Information Superhighway into toll roads.
If they need further explanation, go with the highway analogy. Imagine if all of the roads in the country were privately owned, but still free to use. You pay your tax and the money is distributed among the companies. Now the company that services your neighborhood decides that they want more money, so they erect tollbooths at the entrance to the neighborhood but tell companies that they'll wave the toll if you're going to a certain company. So Wal*Mart might pay the fee and get you free access, while Mom&Pop shops can't afford it so you have to pay a toll to visit them. They claim it is necessary because the Mom&Pop shop gets too much traffic and they aren't helping to pay for the roads in your neighborhood, even though the shop is in the next town over and the extra traffic doesn't really cost the road company anything.
Do you know how you have to pay extra to your ISP to watch Netflix or Youtube? You don't because of Net Neutrality.
That's a good scare tactic, but isn't very informative (or necessarily true). Net Neutrality only came into effect on June 12, 2015. I don't think people will recall paying extra to watch Netflix or YouTube before that date (because they weren't). And paying extra probably won't be the effect if net neutrality is rolled back, so it will undermine the argument to reinstate it.
The problem is that we need net neutrality to help balance the power against big vertically integrated Media/ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner. But it is more about the future potential abuse, so people won't care until there is some event that really affects a lot of people.
Not even sure this would fall under the net neutrality umbrella. Comcast and Verizon weren't specifically discriminating or shaping Netflix traffic. Netflix was buying and over saturating the cheapest bandwidth they could. The question became who pays to upgrade to accommodate it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current Net Neutrality rules don't address this situation.
It's kind of like a business saying that it doesn't discriminate against a minority, but when one of those people walk in the door they just never get served. It's still discrimination even if it's not overt. It's the kind of thing that Netflix could definitely argue as a Net Neutrality violation over at the FCC, especially once they got a demand to pay up.
It's not like the consumers could switch to a less dickish provider, they're often a local monopoly. You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015, even though many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.
All Cogent traffic was being affected, not just Netflix, so the analogy doesn't hold. Everyone at the restaurant was being served, equally slowly.
You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015
Implicit in that statement is that there have been no paid peering agreements (the Netflix/Comcast solution) since 2015, which I know for fact is not true.
many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.
Examples? What high bandwidth companies appeared after 2015 that have even 1% of Netflix traffic?
No, that money came out of the pot of money that they were previously paying to Cogent for transit through to Verizon and Comcast. Describing an extremely-typical paid peering agreement as a "ransom" is massively intellectually dishonest.
They still payed Cogent for the peering, but they had to also pay Comcast and Verizon for the same peering (just on the other side), because both companies were deliberately undersizing their connections to Cogent until Netflix paid up.
It's not like Netflix moved their servers into Comcast or Verizon data centers and paid for the bandwidth (although they offered and the offer was rejected). How many other internet companies pay the end user ISPs for their peering bandwidth? Why should they? That's what the users are paying for.
because both companies were deliberately undersizing their connections to Cogent
I think a clarification would be helpful here. Were they "deliberately undersizing" or were they refusing to to increase capacity to accommodate the surge in additional Netflix traffic without being paid?
This is how Cogent described it, “Comcast refused to continue to augment capacity at our interconnection points as it had done for years prior.”
Comcast claims:
"Comcast executive vice president David Cohen said Comcast was forced to react when the flow of traffic with Cogent went from roughly equally to Cogent sending five times as much data as Comcast was sending back."
For the first one, even before Net Neutrality, we didn't have to pay extra to watch Netflix or Youtube.
And for the second. Imagine that your neighbors are ordering stuff from Amazon. Amazon is making lots of money delivering to the homes. However, they are overloading our neighborhood roads with their vehicles. Our neighborhood roads have become congested because of Amazon. Now Amazon is saying that this congestion is solely our problem. However, since they are the ones making money from our roads, we want them to pay their fair share for profiting from our roads. We are only doing this for big corporations like Amazon who are not paying their fair share and causing us congestion. We have never tried to make mom and pop stores pay this fee.
This is so simple it doesn't need a metaphor; net neutrality means that ISPs would be obligated to treat all traffic equally. Throttling Netflix, Bittorrent, etc. under net neutrality would be illegal.
What the comes down to is an argument on how much agency a company has to control their service if we've deemed their service "critical to the public good."
This take is probably unpopular, but since I haven't seen many of these points and there are some very big players (IBM, Cisco, Juniper, Intel, Ercisson, etc.) that are against net neutrality with some of this reasoning, I'll fill you in some points that you probably won't hear:
1.) Routing traffic does not have equal cost. Peering, load balancing, and other aspects of routing are complex and carriers have people whose livelihoods revolve around handling these issues. A web request to a backwater site a couple hops away from you has nowhere near the load implications that streaming a 2 hour 4k movie has.
2.) Net neutrality is a bad fix for the underlying issue; local/state governments make it exceedingly easy to get a monopoly going with pole attach and franchising rules. Without this monopoly, neutral connections are a constant danger to the incumbent ISP. It is much easier to break into markets with lax regulation like Texas because of how their franchising permits work.
3.) Net neutrality is largely a power play by advertising/media companies that have no appreciable revenue other than pushing content. Facebook, Google, 4chan, etc. need advertising because they have very little value outside it. This obviously isn't an issue if you're Cisco, Intel, or the like, because they have a product other than you.
Think of it like your cable company, Mime Warmer, also happens to own a broadcasting company called DEF. You pay Mime Warmer $100/month to access every cable channel that exists. The DEF channels come in 4K. Now, because there's no cable company regulation, non-DEF channels only go up to 480p unless you pay an extra $10/month per channel you want in $4k.
The problem with this analogy is that cable already comes in packages. The key here is that you already pay for the access to all channels. But all of the sudden they see a new revenue stream in restricting access to promote their own properties.
So, it's not the internet that is being regulated: It's ISPs (Net Neutrality is the wrong word to use). You already pay for internet access, so does Netflix. Why all of the sudden would you want to let ISPs charge more for what you are already paying for?
And opponents (Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, et al.) all say they totally support NN, but oh, they don't want to be forced to obide by it for "reasons". And there are already examples of ISPs (Verizon, namely) throttling others or exempting their traffic (from data charges). Lawmaker opponents keep claiming it's "regulating the internet", but it's not -- it's regulating ISPs since they have mono/duo-polies.
Except ISPs are planning to charge providers, not the users, so if NN falls and people don't see their bills increase as that suggests, good luck getting them to listen to you again.
I think the high-demand "premium" channel is the best - simply because there is no limited supply.
I used the bridge metaphor for a while, but unlike bridges there is no maintenance required from increased usage or traffic jam generated from high traffic to netflix or google.
The internet isn't run by the government, it's mostly run by private companies. These private companies want to create and enforce a sort of tax policy around internet consumption. Companies can tax you in multiple ways (slowing page load speeds, censoring content, denying access to services etc...) and they can do it for multiple reasons (business interests, lobbying from their friends, censoring dissent etc...) Net Neutrality is the idea that private companies should not be able to create tax policy on core internet infrastructure, and instead it should remain tax-free for all users.
The ultimate irony here, is that this battle is pitched as Silicon Valley vs. the U.S. government, with Silicon Valley fighting for a free and open internet and the government trying to pass legislation to pave the way for private companies to enforce tax policy. But in actuality the battle for a free and open internet has morphed into the people vs. Silicon Valley, with tech companies as the villains in the story.
The arbitrary censorship on social media sites (such as Facebook, and Twitter) has gotten really bad. Platforms like Youtube for content-hosting and Patreon for fundraising have begun demonetizing and delisting their political opponents. Lower level infrastructure such as GoDaddy and Cloudflare have even now begun to enforce political delisting.
Wake up. Private companies are already enforcing a tax on your internet consumption if you are guilty of wrongthink. Whether it's Verizon, Twitter, Patreon or Cloudflare, who cares, it's the same thing.
If they are old enough you can use this metaphor:
Anti-Net Neutrality is for turning the Information Superhighway into toll roads.
If they need further explanation, go with the highway analogy. Imagine if all of the roads in the country were privately owned, but still free to use. You pay your tax and the money is distributed among the companies. Now the company that services your neighborhood decides that they want more money, so they erect tollbooths at the entrance to the neighborhood but tell companies that they'll wave the toll if you're going to a certain company. So Wal*Mart might pay the fee and get you free access, while Mom&Pop shops can't afford it so you have to pay a toll to visit them. They claim it is necessary because the Mom&Pop shop gets too much traffic and they aren't helping to pay for the roads in your neighborhood, even though the shop is in the next town over and the extra traffic doesn't really cost the road company anything.