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Death knell for US internet innovation. Other countries with net neutrality might take up the vacuum left by decimated Valley startups. Obviously without the US market accessing your services at full speed you'll not grow as quickly, but the opportunity is there.

(I'm still not in support of repealing net neutrality, obviously)

For fairness, I think I should state the opposing position.

By creating packaged services, internet access (though not "neutral" access to all parts of the internet equally) could become cheaper for a lot of people. FB could choose (they do this, notably in low income countries) to pay the ISP costs so their users can use the service for free. Google could do the same.

Access to the internet could use the same economic levers that exist widely on the internet, which have a tendency to free, and to expansive participation.

The likes of Google & FB stand to benefit most from (for example) connecting the last 50% in low income countries. They have the resources to pay for it. Letting them will (at the margin) mean more access for more people. It's hard to argue that for those people, theoretical net neutrality is worth more than net access.

^I'm on the other side of this position. But, I think it's hard to justify it on "normal" grounds, by analogy to other industries or abstract legal/legislative principles. Effectively, net neutrality means limiting the competitive scope of one part of the internet to enrich the comptetitive dynamics of another part. In practice, I think this is a really good thing. But it's hard to put that into legislatively acceptable terms, which are supposed to be based on general principles.

You need to accept a judgemnt call. The ISPs' job is less important, on the margin. The innovative potential of (for example) the web is enourmous in comparison. ISPs are infrastructure businesses, naturally oligopolistic and with a tendency towards corporate or state cronyism. The web is a platform where you can actually compete for a patch without a global-scale war chest. We have lots of examples of winners that won because they were good, even though they had few resources.

All that said, the internet itself is becoming so centralized that the argument is getting muddied.

> The likes of Google & FB stand to benefit most from (for example) connecting the last 50% in low income countries. They have the resources to pay for it. Letting them will (at the margin) mean more access for more people. It's hard to argue that for those people, theoretical net neutrality is worth more than net access.

If they stand to gain from more people getting on the internet, they can pay for it right now, without scrapping net neutrality.

The only reason to scrap net neutrality first is to make it possible for incumbents to lock people into their service so new disruptors can't challenge them.

People against net neutrality are either paid or have an extremely naive view of what a "free market" is.

Regarding the idea of "packages", here is an example of this in action: https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-...

I wrote about this from a Ugandan startup perspective as well: https://medium.com/numida/a-glimpse-into-the-non-open-intern...

The thing that bugs me is common carrier. Once you start discriminating traffic, you’re not common carrier. You should lose those protections.

You pay more for non-local calls than local calls. You pay more for international call than for domestic calls. This does not break "common carrier". They can argue this is now just being applied to the data packets.

I agree with you, but AIUI the US legislation about common carriers covers discrimination between customers, not between types of content. So you couldn't, for example, charge rich people more than poor people, for the same service. You also couldn't charge people of Indian descent more than you charge caucasians.

What I'd like to understand, though, is: what if an ISP provides customers with more reliable connectivity to HBO (due to payment of a fee), than they provide to an equivalent Hindi-language broadcaster (because they can't afford or don't want to pay such a fee)?

Can the latter's customers claim that the ISP is discriminating against them?

If the ISP's decide to throttle, my guess is GOOGL/FB/APPLE would set up their own wireless ISP's. Largest cities first. Of course they might decide to counter-throttle services the original ISP made shady deals with?

> How can you create a startup competing with YouTube, if most people have a package that gives YouTube faster internet speeds?

In this scenario, is it only competitors of Facebook/Youtube/Netflix that would be slowed down, or would all websites / blogs / other startup sites also slow down?

The proposed systems are pay to play. Everybody slows down until they give the ISP money.

ISP's would first gouge companies for money, only larger competitors that are already established like Youtube or Netflix would be able to pay it. Also, companies owned by the ISP like Hulu would probably be exempt from the gouging.

If they go after Facebook/Youtube/Netflix (Google, etc) and ask them to pay money, they have to slow down everybody else or what are they asking those money for?

They'll also ask money from retail customers. You want Google fast? Buy the Search monthly package on top of the standard internet subscription. Etc.

"they have to slow down everybody else"

No they don't. They could achieve much the same impact by slowing down only traffic that appears to be video or audio, e.g. by allowing everything through at full speed, until a customer has transferred more than, say 10MB, from a particular IP address over a one hour period.

This wouldn't impact blogs or most corporate brochure sites, but would still have negative effects for many startups.

They wouldn't do it at a lower cost. They'd charge you $50 for E-mail, $100 for streaming video, or $120 for the whole bundle. It would match their existing model for bundled services.