Quoted from dmbjunky:
The internet has worked great without regulation. I'd say let the companies that provide it, change it and we as consumers will decide if it's for the better.
I don't know who you are or what your background is, but let me give you some reasons you should listen to me. I've been using the Internet since the 80s -- professionally since 1994. I was giving corporate seminars on how the Internet worked back in 1995. I wrote a best selling book on Internet commerce in 1997. I know my TCP packets from my UDP packets, I run my own servers, I've overseen hundreds of web projects with budgets up to 10 million dollars.
I can tell you what the Internet will look like if Net Neutrality is removed, because I've experienced it in two different forms: in the 1980s and just two weeks ago in China.
In the 1980s there were commercially developed alternatives to the Internet - AOL and CompuServe being a couple of the big ones, but other telcos had gateways too like MCI. They were awful, slow, expensive, and limited. If you wanted to send an email from CompuServe to AOL, it cost you $1. For each email. In the 80s. Each little walled garden allowed you to see and do only what each telco wanted you to see and do. There were no pioneers. No small businesses. It was only because of the Internet's success with the openly developed World Wide Web protocol that the telcos were forced to shut down their walled gardens and switch to providing Internet access.
The second place I've experienced what an unregulated Internet will look like is China. I was there just two weeks ago. The Great Firewall of China blocked my access to many services including Netflix and ALL Western news sites all because the Chinese government didn't want me to see them. Oh also the air quality in Beijing when I was there was 905 and in some places 999 (just a reminder that the effect on people is unknown above 500, and 300 is considered so hazardous nobody should be outside), because they don't regulate their air quality you know. On TV they weren't talking about the air quality problem. And if you think food is safe in China, put "poison baby food China" into a search engine you trust. Right now there are a lot of choices. But you better do it fast before access is blocked due to the removal of Net Neutrality regulations.
We all have to remember that corporations in the USA are legally required to put profit ahead of anything else, except the law. Remove regulations and they will be legally required to profit on us any way they can. Is that really the kind of world we want to live in? Is profit so important that it Trumps clean food, clean air, free access to all information?
You aren't seriously saying we should get rid of regulation and go back to what things were like for people in the 1600s, are you? That you're actually cool with "caveat emptor" as the average person's primary defense against corporate greed? You don't think we should regulate food, air quality, and access to information, building codes, highway speeds, healthcare? Before regulation, people died routinely in car crashes (seat belts, mandatory crash tests, airbags), died in fires due to no building codes, were poisoned by pesticides, slowly choked to death in the London industrial smog - I could go on for hours citing examples.
Profit is good but we /must/ have regulation, and the Internet is no exception. The Internet has always been highly regulated ever since it was designed and paid for by our government (specifically DARPA and public universities).
If Net Neutrality is removed you can say goodbye to Pinside. Anything you like that isn't directly produced by a major telco, it will be GONE. Telcos will slow all traffic going to places like Pinside so that only the hardcore or very rich will be able to pay to use them. As a result, this community will die. Just for a moment think about that.
The reason you have things like free email and an incredible Internet filled with such treasures as Pinside are due to the efforts of tens of thousands of people like me. All of us who brought you these amazing things are LITERALLY SCREAMING that it is all going away if we don't stop this. No exaggeration.