What's the endgame to this? If we assume that corporate lobbyists eventually manage to buy enough entertainment industry democrats and cult of free market republicans to end net neutrality, then we'll switch from public internet highways to toll roads.
Except we’re already using toll roads. Instead of having free-ish municipal wifi, we’re already paying upwards of $100 per month to one of the cable/DSL duopolies in each city.
The question we should be asking ourselves is, does it have to be this way? What are the alternatives? I see two possible futures:
1) Work towards keeping the internet free and open through civil discourse, working at city, state and national levels to keep our elected officials honest in how they represent our interests.
2) Roll out the darknet - use onion routing, mesh nets, blockchains and other p2p technologies to effectively circumvent the internet, under the assumption that it’s been compromised.
There is a third option, which I think is the least likely but is all anyone seems to talk about. That’s the status quo option - the loss of net neutrality leading to a doubling or tripling of prices every decade or so, poorer a la carte service like with cable TV, maintaining the illusion of second class netizens as only consumers, and so on. But I think it’s not going to happen because technology doesn’t stand still. Look at what smartphones do today compared to even a decade ago. Technology will always.. find a way as they say.
So I don’t know about you, but I am deeply concerned that the loss of net neutrality will lead to option 2. I don’t think that corporations have the foresight to know the lengths that technology will go to to give people what they want. And I think we in the tech community only barely graze the surface of how far the intelligence community will go to track everyone as more and more people go dark. So what we are really talking about here is dystopia.
Maybe we need a new phrase for net neutrality. Net freedom? Net survival? I don’t know.