GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

To keep things simple, imagine an ISP with only one plan: 1 TB of data/month at 100 Mb/second for $50/month.

Note that at 100 Mb/second it would only take 22 hours to use all your allotted data for the month. Because of this they do not have to build their network out to where it can handle everyone doing 100 Mb/second all the time. In fact, building it out to where it could do 100 Mb/second all the time would be prohibitively expensive.

So they just build their network out to where most of the time, most people get their 100 Mb/second, but during some peak times there may be congestion and things may slow down.

Imagine now that it is during one of those congested times. I am trying to watch a video lecture at a free MOOC. You are trying to watch, say, Netflix. Bob is trying to download a video game he just bought. Alice is trying to do a major OS and XCode update on her Mac.

You, me, Bob, and Alice all bought the same service from our ISP at the same price, so it seems pretty reasonable to expect that we would be treated the same. We should share the effects of congestion equally.

If the ISP wants to bring supply and demand into this, they could offer service level agreements for an extra cost. You pay a certain amount per month and they guarantee, say, 90% of rated speed even during congestion. I think this would be allowed under net neutrality.

What they want to do with paid prioritization, though, so go to the MOOC I'm trying to use, Netflix, the place where Bob got the video game, and Apple and say "Hey...if you pay us $X per month, when our network is congested we will prioritize the traffic for our customers of yours".

There are two bad things with this:

1. Suppose that Netflix buys paid prioritization, and nobody else does. That means that during times of congestion you get good service, and the service for the rest of us gets even worse. Even though we are paying our ISP for the exact same service, you are now getting preferential treatment because a company that has no relationship with the ISP other than they and the ISP have some common customers was able to pay to give you preferential service and degrade ours.

2. It may discourage the ISP from building out more network capacity as demand grows. They may instead focus on getting paid prioritization agreements from the most popular internet services. That could mean that those who use smaller services that even if they wanted to could not afford to make prioritization deals with every ISP, might be doomed to perpetual terrible performance, as the ISPs only need to build out their networks enough to provide good service to those who use services that have paid prioritization deals with the ISP.

Essentially ISPs want to reverse their role. Right now, their role is to sell to us (the end users) access to the internet. They want to turn that around, and make their role be to sell the internet access to us. And they still want to charge us while doing that...basically they want to be the pimps of the net, with us as the prostitutes and the websites as the johns.

We should not be ridiculing people for not being ideologues. We live in a time when we need people to not be ideologues.

It has never meant what the words taken together would naively seem to mean.

That's definitely not true in my specific case, and probably isn't true all that often in the general case. Deploying FTTH to existing paying customers who already have halfway decent infrastructure doesn't have a very compelling short-term return on investment even when the local government is doing everything they can to encourage it.