[Raion]

So a common tech thing that divides the public and industry in the US is the question of net neutrality. 

For the uninitiated, it's the idea that ISPs cannot negotiate with upstream network companies for bandwidth usage and should be required to treat all network traffic equally. It often is framed from a position of monopoly, censorship, and freedom of choice. 

A lot of people would think as a website owner I automatically support such an endeavor. As a matter of fact, I don't. As someone who worked off and on in the ISP side of things, and in the data center side, there's a lot of issues with the concept.

I see it as forcing a company like FedEx to charge the same fees for shipping regardless of whether it's an envelope or freight. That freight loss gets passed onto consumers who don't ship freight.

Similarly, I see no problem with zero-count systems like AT&T does with HBO streaming, where they inherently favor traffic they either control or have successfully negotiated with. The reason is because as someone who doesn't use Netflix, Facebook, or most of the "commodity" internet that makes up the largest portion of traffic, I don't see it as fair for me to subsidize people who do. Nor is irixnet being so niche likely to ever be charged or negotiated with for bandwidth usage, and if we were, I would cross that bridge when I came to it. The fact is, the largest site I use regularly is Reddit, and I sometimes have an unhealthy relationship with it; I wouldn't mind an excuse to discontinue it. 

Why this all comes about is due to the aggressive BGP networks that moreorless bypass having to use major carrier backbones to the degree that bandwidth and ISPs have no direct recourse for parasitic bandwidth draw. 

It's my opinion it wouldn't result in the cableization of the internet. That's not only ridiculous, but it would immediately be attacked.

The drawbacks of net neutrality are:

It causes localized monopolies. Know how many cable providers are in my town for internet? One. The alternative is slow ADSL or an expensive T1 line. Know why that is? It's because of rules that see part of net neutrality allowing ISPs to dominate the last mile parts of the network. Not only that, but net neutrality passes costs for parasitic bandwidth usage such as Netflix onto everyone equally, rather than onto the heavy users. 

Anyways that's my .02; wouldn't mind hearing from others.