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'Net neutrality' is an absolute quagmire of confusion and and contraction. I still don't know which side to come down on after listening to several discussions involving experts, such as Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson. It's not quite as simple as Netflix fighting with your isp over traffic. Third parties, such as Level 3 Communications, sit between the two and are also jockeying for increased revenue for providing the huge bandwidth requirements due to the popularity of Netflix.

One thing is certain: net neutrality is a government-branded term, like 'The Affordable Care Act'. Simplified explanations sound good, but there's much to be disturbed about under the hood.

Do some research and learn about the incestuous relationships between lobbyists, the FCC and cable companies/ISPs, especially Comcast. Current FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler was a lobbyist for the cable industry and raised over half a million for Obama's campaigns. That doesn't exactly inspire confidence in me that he's looking out for my best interests...

No matter which way the net neutrality door swings, it will have both intended and unintended negative consequences that heavily impact us, the customers. As usual, we're the last ones to be considered and the ones who will have to foot the bill.

No matter which way the net neutrality door swings, it will have both intended and unintended negative consequences that heavily impact us, the customers.

That's the truth about what will happen.

At the beginning of the net neutrality debate, it seemed as if the ISPs were just trying to squeeze more revenue out of their customers, despite giving them graded service by speed. However, I've heard that at primetime, up to 1/3 of the traffic is generated by Netflix. If that's true, they are taking advantage of the infrastructure provided by the ISPs.

The situation is reminiscent of the 90's, which ended in a humongous telecom crash. In the Telecommunications Act of 1994, the government mandated that central exchange phone companies had to give access to their switching fabric to what were called "co-located exchange operators", or CLECs. The CLECs used this access to provide a variety of novel and often cutrate services, which they could do, because they were piggybacking on the expenditures of the main telephone companies.

So, what happened? Cisco sold a lot of routers, IPOs were done, stocks rode high for a while, and eventually the whole mess crashed.

This is similar, in that once a huge content vendor like NFLX arises, it takes advantage of the existing infrastructure. Great deal for the consumer... for a while.

Eventually, you get pushback, and ultimately, the ISPs will be more than compensated. Probably, big content providers like Netflix will strike a deal on the supply side (for which the Netflix customer will pay), and high-speed users will pay an additional quality of service fee for packet priority.