That’s technically not a net neutrality issue, more of a consumer protection one. The IPSs have no problem advertising one speed but providing another, hiding behind the small print to get away with it. But things like this were part of the latest net neutrality bill.
My wife leaves Netflix or other streaming (Hulu, web radio, etc.) on much of the day, as background noise when cleaning, when actually watching something, or as cartoons for the little one. Plus our older kids can watch in their room and way too often forget to turn it off. I also pull a ton of educational podcasts for the kids and have my own few shows I like. I’m looking into dropping our cable TV completely since it’s rarely used now.
With this many people in my household watching different things it’s easy for us to pull over 8 program-hours per day. That’s a LOT of bandwidth, over 10 GB per day at a SWAG average of 3 Mbps; web radio takes less, Netflix HD takes more. That doesn’t count my gigabytes per month of application and OS downloads (mainly MSDN, Linuxes and VMWare appliances). Luckily, my ISP doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, let’s me use the bandwidth I pay for. I hear others aren’t quite so lucky.
So when I support net neutrality, it’s not out of selfishness. I’m happy with my service. It’s the principle of an open Internet, plus remembering pastor Martin Niemöller, “First they came for the communists...” When I do go fully streaming, then my ISP might decide they want a cut of my business relationship with my streaming company.