Net Neutrality is about taxing content, not charging for it. Right now everyone (you, your neighbor, Netflix, Facebook, Google, ISP themselves) already pay to move bits between each other. ISPs want the ability to extort money from end-nodes of the Internet who they don't currently have any direct business relationship or physical connection with.
Right now it's all just bits come across their network from peers but if they can start blocking traffic from specific sites, like Netflix, they can also make deals to ensure that doesn't happen. Maybe even make those bits move a little bit faster.
In no way does this lead to an ad free future. It would probably lead to more ads as content providers would have additional costs to recoup that they don't currently have.
This is ultimately not about ads, as Zaynep points out. It's about building an architecture of self-reinforcing social manipulation on a large scale, while how it works (and the fact that it is being done at all) remains totally opaque to the persons who are part of somebody's A/B experiment.
That's like saying that because we hate traffic, we should privatize all the roads and let for-profit companies control them and toll them however they want because they might potentially solve our traffic problems!
I mean, it's more like if we had already privatized nearly all the roads, the companies covered them with orders of magnitude more billboards along with tolls, and you say "we should let these companies charge different tolls depending on brands of cars or have preference for drivers going to certain destinations over others, because maybe if we let them do that, they'll take the billboards and cameras away…"
- The ISPs already charge too much and little of it is going towards innovations/network advancement, instead they want to be content creators and ad platforms instead of charging more to get to gigabit and beyond. ISPs need to get back to innovating on providing better/faster internet service, what they are.
- ISPs should not be involved in content/ads/selling private data as that leads to bias and throttling, we need to have a separation of power from ISPs, the network gateway to the internet, and content creators on top of the internet.
When is it a good idea to have content creators own the network outright? All that leads to is bias, preferential treatment and monopolies (furthering them).
We have made immense mistakes in 2017 allowing ISPs to sell your private data, remove privacy protections at the network level AND the removal of net neutrality.
Net neutrality makes the network provider neutral, simple as that.
1. There are other markets than US. Europe probably not follow suit even if US allowed it's utilities more rent seeking
2. Market for adds and ISP:s operate on different levels. Just because the downstream utility offering the datastream becomes more expensive, it does not mean content providers would echew ads. Sure, the ISP might want a cut of the third party add but that does not translate to any consumer benefit
ISPs are paid to handle the connection between you and the WWW. The bandwidth they charge you for is the highway. Them throttling services is not fair because you're paying for that highway. What about them charging more would make you think the rest of the internet will eliminate ads?
Right now it's all just bits come across their network from peers but if they can start blocking traffic from specific sites, like Netflix, they can also make deals to ensure that doesn't happen. Maybe even make those bits move a little bit faster.
In no way does this lead to an ad free future. It would probably lead to more ads as content providers would have additional costs to recoup that they don't currently have.