No, you understand it.
The idea of the internet is that it’s an end-to-end system. Anyone with an internet connection should be able to get to any web page anywhere.
What some big ISPs would like to do is charge not only you (for your internet service), but content providers (for the right to reach you). So Time Warner Cable could charge a fee to Netflix (your example) to stream movies to you. You’d also be paying TWC, of course. And they could reach a deal with Netflix under which, for a price, they’d restrict Netflix’s competitors from reaching you (by throttling their streaming, or charging them a prohibitive fee, or various other means).
And, since TWC also produces some content, either on its own or in partnership with others, they could block their competition from reaching you.
Net neutrality requires that the internet be treated more like the telephone communication system. Phone service providers cannot charge you more based on who’s calling you. They cannot decide that they will allow calls from, say, telemarketers to get through with high sound quality (for a fee, of course), while degrading the signal for calls from your Aunt Josephine in Iowa, for example.
Seems like a very good idea to me.
You know, that’s a reasonable analysis of net neutrality as an abstract idea, but there is a big difference between an abstract idea of net neutrality and a specific piece of secret legislation. I’m not really sure that this analysis is correct in regard to the legislation, nor am I at all sure that anyone at all (including me of course) can possibly have an accurate analysis of a bill that we are not allowed to see. It is difficult to see how a bill that restricted throttling internet traffic based on its source could possibly take over 300 pages to say, unless there were more to it. I’d pretty much like to keep the government out of the Internet as much as possible. I can’t imagine they would make it better.
In addition, AFAIK, this legislation is aimed at solving a problem that we mostly don’t have, in case we might have it later. Aside from a few tentative forays into the area, I don’t think the major ISPs are actually doing this. They are fighting the government’s power to regulate them like a phone company (which, by the way, spends a lot of money proving that it is following the regulations–I would expect prices to go up for internet service). But as far as I’ve seen, they aren’t for the most part actually violating net neutrality, they’re just trying to keep their options open.
Frankly, for probably the majority of internet users, there are choices of where to get your service from. IIRC, I have a choice between four different high-speed providers. If one of them started throttling my service, I’d move to another one. If it ever became the majority practice, that would be the time to consider laws on the subject.
This isn’t one of those “letting the genie out of the bottle” situations, where once it happened, you couldn’t stop it. In fact, it would be just as easy, and a lot better, to see what things companies actualy try to do (and keep trying to do–there isn’t any point in making a law against something once everybody realizes that it doesn’t work out and they all stop doing it) before trying to outlaw them. New regulations mean new tax money spent, new bureaucrats, and in the end higher costs for internet services as well. And that’s assuming that the government doesn’t start trying to restrict the internet in other ways, if they have the power to do it.
–Jen
Well, there goes that section of the forum!