| Unfortunately absolutely nobody agrees what net neutrality means. EDIT: I can be more specific. People have been constantly talking about Netflix and Verizon in the past year with regard to Net Neutrality, but in fact Netflix was being asked to behave as a big player and to help pay for the costs of running the network. Whether they should be paying for peering is out of scope for net neutrality, it's completely distracting. On a fully neutral net, the traffic from Netflix could kill your visits to HackerNews and PornHub, based on sheer volume. Network operators, though I agree they should have been expanding capacity, took action to ensure the network continued working for everyone. If we had municipal internet _and_ neutrality, you would have a situation where the burden to expand network capacity is on taxpayers, and whoever shoves the most packets into the core network can dominate everyone. The Internet would stop working immediately. I'm certainly not arguing _against_ regulation, I'm arguing against the naivete` of 100% neutrality. There is no greater friend to a small upstart in a garage than network prioritization, but because you rarely have a network service which is _intended_ to be a service provider in your garage, arguments related to this don't much hold water. It's frustrating for me because I largely agree with the intent and am on the same side as people pushing neutrality, but it's a term which has come to mean nothing and is largely talked about and criticized by people who do not know how to run a computer network. :/ |