[bo1024]

Yes, that's a good assessment. You can think of it this way: ISPs act like roads between people's houses and the sites they want to access. People currently pay ISPs to reserve a certain amount of road, and net neutrality says they can drive whatever cars they want over that fraction of road without being discriminated against in pricing or speed.

The ISPs say things like "xx% of traffic is Netflix -- that uses up an unfair portion of bandwidth". But a more accurate phrasing is that xx% of people on the road choose to fill their purchased slots with Netflix traffic.

Right now, since all traffic on the road is routed fairly and equally under NN, all video services can compete on a fair footing. But after eliminating NN, ISPs will be able to charge users a big premium based on what kind of traffic they route down the road, even though there's no difference given that they already paid to reserve that portion of the road. So ISPs can route their own video service faster and everyone else's slower (or charge you extra to regain equal speeds), which squashes competition.

> I have no idea why republicans would support this.

I don't get it either. I think that most republican politicians have little understanding of the issue and how anti-competitive it would be to eliminate NN. Instead, they just hear superficial arguments that "NN is a regulation, and regulations are bad for competition" and since this comes from other Republicans, they trust and believe it. Unfortunately the ones it's coming from are lobbied really hard by ISPs, perhaps they believe their own propaganda.

[carry_bit]

> People currently pay ISPs to reserve a certain amount of road, and net neutrality says they can drive whatever cars they want over that fraction of road without being discriminated against in pricing or speed.

In the case of roads, heavy vehicles like big rigs cause more wear-and-tear than light vehicles like compact cars. It would be fair then to charge heavy vehicles more so users of light vehicles aren't paying for users of heavy vehicles.

[artursapek]

...but it wouldn't be fair to charge people using the same car more or less depending on where they are driving.

[carry_bit]

Some roads have weight limits, so you're actually banned from driving certain places depending on the car you have.

[thisacctforreal]

Right, so they'll have to split it up into vans instead of semis, like a 5Mb/s plan versus a 1Gb/s plan. But you pay for access to x vans/second--and potentially y vans/month.

Netflix shouldn't be charged more on the basis that they gave people a reason to use their vans.

[Can_Not]

But it's based on the weight of your car, not whether or not you're spending money at establishments the toll road owner also owns or based on the toll road owner's financial relationship to your car's specific manufacture.

[bo1024]

Sure, you can take my exact analogy, but where "fraction of road" is interpreted as "fraction of the weight the road can take". The key point is charging fairly by usage (e.g. weight) not by brand, for example Netflix trucks costing more than Comcast trucks of the same weight.