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But especially in rural areas, HD and 4K aren't the only things that might be throttled back. Any video service takes enormous amounts of bandwidth. So an ISP might throttle down all video unless the creators paid a "fee".

Could, might, maybe. The fact is nobody throttles anything unless it's to keep their network from getting overloaded. Even if they decided to throttle it would have no effect except on live streams. Anything else can be buffered.

For example: Comcast, which is a partner with NBC, could throttle back conservative outlets and throttle up MSNBC.

What utter nonsense. Use a VPN, end of story.

What utter nonsense. Use a VPN, end of story.

That's... not what a VPN does.

Could, might, maybe. Yup. We're talking about uncharted territory here.

But net-neutrality requires providers to treat all traffic and all content equally. Preventing anyone from playing favorites for either profit or ideology. Removing net-neutrality will allow some ISPs to throttle people up/down for profit, and allow other ISPs to throttle people up/down for ideological reasons. It will happen. Maybe it'll be widespread, maybe not. But it will happen in some places.

If you like the larger corporations and feel like sites that share your ideology wouldn't be throttled back by corporations, then net-neutrality isn't a big deal.

If, however, you suspect that some in corporate America might frown upon your ideology and attempt to silence you or you're interested in making it easier for innovation and competition, then net-neutrality becomes important to you.

Whether you like it or not depends on your prioritization and what's important to you.