Yet even stopped clocks are right twice a day. It is worthwhile to be cautious but automatically discounting anything these people vote for is simply BDS redirected.
Internet Freedom Coalition quotes
Uh huh. Are you going to believe the NAMBLA web pages too? The quotes you cite are what we in the industry call "FUD" -- short for "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt", the emotions they are meant to stir without providing actual facts. Those people have an agenda, and are manipulating you -- making up scare stories and pushing all your hot buttons for their own ends. Instead, look at how what they say is actually not real:
"broad, sweeping new regulations on the Internet" -- uh, let's call that a "mischaracterization." Net Neutrality is just one rule: if an Internet provider agrees to provide service to somebody, it can't pick and choose which packets to give you or how fast to serve them based on who served them, or what's in them. That's it. In other words, Verizon can't choose to give you Yahoo's pages faster than it gives you Google's pages -- or CNN's faster than FR's.
That's how the net works now. It's how the net has always worked. FR web pages get the same priority as CNN ones do. Without NN, FR will be hostage to any -- no, *every* -- major ISP who can charge fees CNN can afford but FR can't. Or how about this -- how about if the major service providers decide they don't like FOX? They can offer other MSM outlets better rates and suddenly FOX has no net presence at all.
Note what this is not: This is not a rule that says it can't offer different speeds to end users. Slow or fast is fine, just as long as all the packets are slow or fast. This is not a rule about costs or controls or anything like that -- just that any email is just the same as any other email, any web page is just the same as any other web page. Democracy in action.
If you believe that "the power to tax is the power to destroy" then killing NN is giving the right to tax not to the government but to every telecom company in the country. And anybody who irritates one of them will suddenly go dark for all of that company's customers.
"put government in charge of the structure and pricing of Internet services" -- no, that's more than a mischaracterization, that's a flat lie. It's just that one rule.
"These regulations would prohibit cost sharing among network users, thereby forcing all the costs of network service and upgrades onto the end-consumer." -- Did you actually read the bill whose link you provided? This is so far outside the scope of the bill that it would be laughable if it weren't such an intentional lie. The bill says nothing about any of these things. There's JUST ONE RULE.
What they are trying to argue, on a very technical level, is that some content providers' packets are more expensive to them than other content providers' packets. That is -- again, on a technical level -- completely bogus. The service provider that originates the packets just sends packets. It's the count of bytes over your pipe that gets charged. A larger content provider -- say AOL -- has to buy a larger pipe. Perfectly fair, and in fact the increase in cost for size purchased doesn't have to be linear; anything over (say) 2GB/day and suddenly your costs per packet double -- that's still perfectly legal. But if AOL and FR are on the same pipe, NN will prevent FR from being charged differently for those first 2GB.
"all dynamic, emerging Internet networks" -- huh? There's one Internet. There won't be more, not for the next fifty or a hundred years anyway. Trust me on that one. (OK, somebody's going to come up and point out IPv6, I know -- but that's not a new Internet. That's a modification of the existing one. Packets are still packets, they'll go over the same wire... etc.)
"fewer service choices for consumers" -- just the opposite, as I think I have already been clear about. As a prior poster said, net neutrality permits the continuation of the great level playing field that is the Internet. Fewer choices would come about because companies feel freer to ZOT(tm) content sources they don't like -- which NN will *prevent*.
I have been a computer programmer for more than 25 years. My Bachelors was in Computer Science and I am currently working on my Masters thesis in Computer Science. You may therefore assume that I am slightly familiar with the subject. If your dislike of the bill is based on the wrong people introducing it and a couple of agenda-steered, FUD-filled, contrary-to-fact websites you have read, you might want to read further.
Thanks for breaking it down. Now I’m definitely for neutrality.