For folks getting their viewpoints from insular sources (StackExchange being one of them), please consider reading these two articles written from a different viewpoint.
In The FCC’s ‘Open Internet Rules’ Make the Internet Less Open, Ian Tuttle, writing for the National Review, asserts:
Relevant portion:
Net neutrality was always a solution looking for a problem. When, in 2010, the FCC announced its first extensive regulations on ISPs (what would become the core of the 2015 rules), it could cite just four examples of anticompetitive behavior, all relatively minor. In 2005, for example, a North Carolina telephone company blocked the Internet phone service Vonage. In 2007, Comcast slowed down (“throttled”) the operations of file-sharing service BitTorrent.
and its potential dangerous impact:
None of this was necessary. There was very little evidence that ISPs were engaging in the sorts of malpractice that net neutrality was designed to prevent — and even if they had been, it would not have followed that reclassification was the proper remedy. In fact, a more honest appraisal of the sequence of events is that the Obama administration and left-wing activists succeeded in pressuring the FCC into a maximal power-grab that is likely to do much more damage to Internet freedom than Comcast was doing. Why is the FCC’s monopoly not as concerning as that of any given ISP?
In A Truly ‘Open Internet’ Would Be Free of Burdensome FCC Regulation, Brent Skorup, writing for the National Review, observes:
The substance of the new rules is almost immaterial, save one, the “general conduct” rule, which with vague language swallows all the others and allows the agency to investigate and prohibit any online service, app, or business practice that it determines is “unreasonable.” When asked which activities the Internet-conduct standard could regulate, the FCC’s then-Democratic chairman replied that “we don’t really know.”
That quote, from then-FCC chairman Tom Wheeler at a press conference shortly after the current rules went into effect when questioned on the general conduct rule, reads in full:
We don’t really know. We don’t know where things will go next. We have created a playing field where there are known rules, and the FCC will sit there as a referee and will throw the flag.
(source: Obamanet’s Regulatory Farrago, L. Gordon Crovitz writing for WSJ's "Information age" opinion section)
