Neogaf used to post more relevant information. I'm here to give you guys a little history because I'm old enough to remember the good ol' days.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Before the internet, to obtain data, you had to go out and obtain a physical copy of it. If you wanted to sell data, you had to produce a physical copy of it. This was burdensome. Nobody wanted to wait. Everyone was a spoiled child and couldn't handle the drive to the store, and the time to install or otherwise use this data. It was obvious something needed to be done. Enter the commercial internet. Which now all the whiny babies believe they have a right to because you can't actually go buy a disk copy of anything anymore. What a bunch of ninnies.
So now that I've gotten the standard Neogaf idiot language out of the way, I'm going to be serious.
Before MA Bell (AT&T) was the worst monopoly in the world, we had the railroad. Now the railroad was by FAR AND AWAY faster than horse and buggy for delivering goods to people and for transporting people around. Everyone wanted the railroad in their hometown, or as close to it as they could get. Imagine the railroad is the internet and physical media at a store are the horse and buggy. Since the railroads were so extremely expensive to build and everyone wanted one, the peoples (governments) decided to help the railroad guys build out their tracks. The railroad companies received huge swaths of public land for free in return for, well, building a railroad. Free land wasn't enough however and a lot of the rail companies received grants as well as other exclusive rights.
After being constructed out and making a lot of money (as everyone wanted to use the railroads for everything they could), the rail companies decided to invest in other businesses. Let's say they bought into textiles (clothing), agriculture (beef, grains, etc.), and whatever else they wanted. Now nobody stopped these guys because, hey why not, they gave us the railroad and it's a free country to invest however you want.
So now these companies were selling other products that weren't transportation. And in true capitalist form (I support capitalism and free markets 100% btw), these guys decided to maximize their profits as everyone should in a capitalism derived society. They understood they had a competitive advantage and they were going to use it. The discounted shipping charges for their own goods and increased shipping charges or refused to ship the goods of their competitors. Pretty soon there weren't any competitors as they were all run out of business. The free market died. (For reference go wikipedia "robber baron" and see how many on the list are related to the railroads).
Teddy Roosevelt came along with the big trust busting of the early 20th century and regulated, yes I said regulated, the railroad. The result was that a monopoly on distribution was not allowed to exist and all LEGAL distribution of goods and services was required to be indiscriminate. The railroad could no longer use it's monopoly to "add value" to the goods of their choice. The free market returned!! HURRAY!!!
Now with that of the way, the new hotness was the telephone. Everyone wanted a to talk over great distances. Those letter of paper things were for plebians. Every town wanted access to this new awesomeness but it was expensive to build the infrastructure. So once again, the people (governments) gave the land and grants to the people willing to build out the telephone network.
Now because politicians weren't of the fool me once fool me twice variety, they understood now that the telephone was a distribution service for information goods. They created the Title 2 Utility designation forever and a half ago in the early 1900's requiring the telephones to be neutral and non-favoring any customer, nor itself. If they hadn't done this, the phone company could have gotten into equities trading and blocked communication of everyone but those it preferred and royally screwed the free market of this country. They could have stopped the buying and selling of things over the phone (yes that used to happen before the internet) or at the very least favored their own stores. They were never allowed to do so. The free market held strong.
Now the new hotness became the internet. Everyone wanted their internet. It was sooooo cool and amazing. BUT DUM DUM DUM!!! The regulated network was in place for it to exist on. There wasn't any need for public funds and public utility easements. The internet existed over the REGULATED phone lines.
Now, some of you are too young to remember, but imagine this. I once switched my ISP and had it working in less than an hour. True story. The phone companies couldn't give privilege to their own internet service over any joe shmoe that payed their phone bill. Literally anyone could start up an ISP over the phone network without the phone company having any ability whatsoever to stop them in favor of their own service.
SOOOOOOOOOO the internet was born in a regulated environment that provided a free market and choice for the consumer.
Now the new hotness was broadband, REALLY FAST INTERNET!!!! I know, I didn't have it until I was in my 20's and I'd almost have traded my left testicle for 1.5mbps. Now the phone network was built out of old lines and didn't have the ability for modems to transmit much faster than 56kbps. My online gaming was severly limited. I tried bridging modems over two separate phone lines to speed it up even. Where I grew up didn't have better than dial-up until 2005 or so.
Now the cable companies had a network of information services distribution (entertainment TV). Cable TV was only ever in competition with broadcast TV prior to the internet revolution. Nobody was going to regulate cable when you could get TV over the air for free. Competition was already in place.
Cable recognized their infrastructure (which was also built in public utilities easements, sometimes with grant money, and monopoly rights to regions), could provide better internet than dial-up. Along came cable internet. There were some other competition, such as ISDN and DSL that came along as well. Cable internet WAS NOT REGULATED the same as the phone line internet. The cable company itself was not going to let their system be used by independent ISP businesses, they would make the profits themselves.
Now the free internet had set a precedence of free market principles and competition reigned supreme. The cable ISPs couldn't really just handcuff their customers who were used to the freedoms of choice provided by dial-up. So they more or less kept the internet neutral willingly without regulation.
But then Netflix, Youtube, etc. happened. You see, these were in direct competition with the cable companies primary product, which was television. The cable company was in the business of selling content first, internet access second. Because they had monopolies in various regions, they decided to THROTTLE NETFLIX DOWN. The excuse may have been, "it uses most of the bandwidth", but let me remind you that Netflix paid, and pays, good money to get their packets onto the network and Netflix's customers pay good money for an advertised rate of speed from their ISP to receive those packets. Comcast was making a lot of money, just not as much as they'd have liked. Netflix was growing while cable tv was shrinking.
This resulted in a series of lawsuits (I followed all of them as they progressed) that landed ultimately with the FCC deciding to regulate the internet DURING BUSH JR'S term as president. The FCC told cable networks that they couldn't throttle or slow down netflix. This made the cable companies mad. They in turn sued the FCC. After years and years of lawsuits, utlimately ending with the FCC and Verizon, the federal courts decided that while the net neutrality principles the FCC was trying to enforce were in fact the way things should be, the FCC had no ability to enforce them against the ISP (at this time ISP is a different term from what it was during the dial-up era as now it is the owner of the wire and not an independent company). Now the FCC had no choice but to classify the internet as a public utility similar to the telephone. They did so using the law that forbid discrimination with the telephone service. The free market still reigns supreme.
Now along comes Ajit Pai and the Trump administration. They decide goverment is bad. Regulation is bad. The distributor of goods and services being handicapped is bad. They repeal Net Neutrality so that the ISP's can prefer certain people, businesses, products, and services over others. They can behave just like the railroad robber barons.
Now the rhetoric is that they just returned the internet to freedom. That the dark age of the internet was averted. That the internet won't just fail and blow up in a doomsday scenario. That freedom reigns supreme (but they won't mention free markets apparently don't).
I'm a fairly staunch conservative and I've never in my life (well there was the Patriot Act, so maybe I have) felt like my conservative representatives are a bunch of idiots. Nobody vote for anyone who is anti-Net Neutrality and rally everyone you have to get it reinstated. This is the stupidest thing this current administration could do outside of war. Anyone defending this has no clue.
BTW, you can't actually give people "fast lanes". These ISPs are last mile. That's like saying you are paying for first class postage, but the actual speedup of the traffic can only be from your post office to you. They can only slow down and throttle packets after the traffic is most of the way to you already.
