[riazrizvi]

Mr Schneiderman,

How can you enforce Net Neutrality today? I'm an ATT & Comcast user. It's clear to me that these companies are already throttling my service based on which websites I visit, which I understand is illegal. I have deduced this by switching to a VPN whenever a website does not immediately come online. In over a hundred trials in the last two years I have confirmed that over 80% of the time a website will immediately appear once it is masked to my phone ISP or to my home internet ISP. This is despite the increased distance the traffic must take to route through the VPN server. It seems to me Net Neutrality is a fight we are already losing because we cannot enforce it.

[chopin]

Nitpick: You just described a way to enforce it. For privacy reasons I would go that route anyways.

[riazrizvi]

Yes I can do it. But privacy and net neutrality needs to be in place for the general public who are not so tech savvy. Otherwise data gatherers will use information to destroy competition and sustain monopolies. If I make a new site that competes with some service that ATT sells, perhaps they knock on the door offering some crummy buy out deal. If I don’t accept they can just choke off the service. More likely though, they sell a choke off service to big spenders. Let’s say it’s the 90s. A scrappy website called Backrub, created by two Stanford grads, introduces a new internet search that is vastly superior to a Microsoft owned MSN Search. Microsoft pays ATT to throttle Backrub users. Fast forward back to 2017 and the world is forced to use Bing because Google doesn’t exist. I’m sorry if I created a horrific mental image for you but we need to make net neutrality the default for Joe Public otherwise this capitalist enterprise system will run itself into the ground.