Very good points made by Sagar V in his answer about India and how net neutrality came into focus in India.

I don't understand why such companies act in a way that leads towards destruction of net neutrality? Surely, they have got intellectuals who are as much aware as anyone here about the consequences of such schemes/acts.

This should be opposed at all the corporate levels from where such ideas emerge about compromising net neutrality.

Or do these intellectuals just don't care and want to maximize profits at any cost?

Why should I care about net neutrality if I can't watch Netflix from my country?

I seems to me that the ISPs want to make their business model somewhat similar to how courier companies work today. Basically they have different prices depending on how quickly you want to receive the packages. Only those that pay for premium services get the merchandise they want to be shipped to their home quickly. Thus, it's the end user whom ends up paying those costs instead of the merchant.

If one sees companies like Netflix as merchants of multimedia content, where only those that pay for a premium service can enjoy those contents at their full capacity of service. The only difference that I see with how courier companies work is that the ISPs currently don't receive a cut of the profit Netflix makes for delivering premium services.

Even more, why should I care if I can't even watch Netflix, Hulu, or HBO Go from my country.

Glad to see SE is standing up for this. It's a nonpartisan issue which needs everyone's support.

We need to present the pros in a public forum where non-technical people will see it and understand the advantages (and if any, the disadvantages) of net neutrality. Something like MYC's The FCC Should Pass Laws To Preserve Net Neutrality, but with more exposure and a little TLC on the site. With exposure to the point that the press will see and raise awareness, and have a prioritized list of pros to draw from like that site to make the case to politicians.

What can we do? The most visible thing we can do is have clear tracking of those people in charge who depend on the public's votes. If a well informed public is able to identify individuals they have the power to keep in/out of office, no amount of funding from another source will allow them to keep such a position of power.

I foresee that ISPs will work directly with Content Providers to maximize their profits. Businesses will do whatever it takes to make their money, if necessary the Content Providers may take over the ISPs as well. All these will happen with or without net neutrality.

I'm against net neutrality and luckily meta points don't matter that much as I know I will get downvoted. The problem isn't neutrality, the problem is granted monopolies, formal cartelization, over regulation, and lack of competition. You pay for electricity, you pay for water, why not pay for bandwidth? "Oh but bandwidth is too cheap!" That doesn't matter, AWS charges fractions of cents, but it does add up. Water is underpriced too - that's why we have shortages! If you don't like your ISP blocking something, just switch service providers!

For a quick lesson on the nature of competition, read this article. But before you do, answer this question: How many electric light companies do you think were operating in New York City around 1890? How many gas companies were operating in Baltimore around that time?

https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly

When you refactor something, you don't go breaking it further, you work towards the real solution, which is increase competition. Even Somalia has the best telecommunications in Africa.

Somalia now offers some of the most technologically advanced and competitively priced telecommunications and internet services in the world.[2] Funded by Somali entrepreneurs and backed by expertise from China, Korea and Europe, these nascent telecommunications firms offer affordable mobile phone and internet services that are not available in many other parts of the continent... these firms now offer the cheapest and clearest phone calls in Africa.[3] These Somali telecommunication companies also provide services to every city, town and hamlet in Somalia. There are presently around 25 mainlines per 1,000 persons, and the local availability of telephone lines (tele-density) is higher than in neighboring countries; three times greater than in adjacent Ethiopia.[4]

My answer is really simple:

The network is the network. It should not be tampered with. It is layer 1 - the transport. It works, so don't fix it.

If a company like Netflix pays to install caching servers at ISP sites all around then that is just the way it works. Anybody should be allowed to do that. I'm glad they do.

But as for layer 1, the transportation medium, my message is easy and clear:

HANDS OFF

Shut up about QoS as a reason to mess with the network. Look at how Netflix does it. It costs them money but gives us all better service. Having a closer server provides a better QoS. It does not require messing with the transport medium at all.

Leave the Internet alone. It works.

The ISPs should be regulated like other carriers like the phone companies. Monopolies should be broken up, for instance. 5G is about to bring total convergence anyway, so we need to be ready for that part. But this has nothing to do with actual net neutrality, hence the FCC's position.

I would love to see an international authority of some sort that can block such bills disregarding the local laws in the country which makes these. The EU (as burouchratic and heavy-weight it is when it comes to decision making) is a nice example for a possible solution. The moment your government (that is part of the EU) starts producing bills that hinder the rights of its citizens (including but not only Internet freedom, freedom of speech, religion, market etc.), a procedure is triggered, funding is reduced or stopped depending on the severity.

The US government tries to push such bills every couple of years. The problem is that such changes affect not only its citizens but also everyone else around the world. But even if it was just a restriction to the rights of its citizens, it would still be an example of malpractice when it comes to law making.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons for rolling back Net Neutrality that are overlooked here. If you "really" want to understand the issue from both sides then the article below is a good read to better understand some of the cons of NN (that is, not the cons of the concept itself, but of letting the FCC enforce it).

Normally I wouldn't just copy a link to an answer like this... but given the nature of this forum I don't see any reason to copy the text of this article here when it's formatted much better on the site.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/25/net-neutrality-is-a-problem-not-a-solution/

Who wants to really fight for net neutrality - should we not pay our bills, cancel ISP services, stop going to movies, listen to music. Sabotage these companies and services so they themselves vote for net neutrality?

I'm not going to "stand up" nor am I going to "raise my voice" - what the hell do they mean anyway?

First of all, as a technophile kind of guy, my first concern is, "is this a technical issue?" if it is, then good, solve it at a purely technological level and be done with it.

If not, I ask the 2nd question: who has the rights to the property involved? If they are government operated and run then the FCC can regulate the heck out of it for all I care, if they are private then I'm completely against FCC doing anything. The roads to hell are all build with one noble intention after another paved with naivety and a complete lack of insights and meticulousness and prudence. Just because you make your cause sound good and "hip" (stand up? You are implying we are all down on our knees shivering in fear like a coward?) doesn't automatically guarantee that it DOES GOOD.

And as far as I know, the whole matter comes down to throttling bandwidth, no service provider in their right mind will be stupid enough to deliberately block certain sites. That means A. you are giving your competition a leg up and all your competition has to do is to do... well, nothing. and B. it means service providers looking into the contents which you are transmitting over the internet, it costs money and labor to get that done and it's counterproductive. The best thing they can do is to manage traffic based on destination, which can easily be circumvented.

At worst, your visiting Salon.com will be significantly slower than before, while visiting Amazon.com will be as slower as usual. None of which can't be solved by paying a tad bit more on purchasing better packages.

Like I said, I'm not going to "stand up" nor am I going to "raise my voice", we are living in an age of a sickening anti-intellectual trends where slogans and empty, shallow, superficial activism like "Women's March" absolutely champions over cool-headed, careful and prudent logical reasoning. Say what you want, I wish not to be a part of that. I have a valuable asset which weighs a good 4 pounds and it took a good 8 million years for it to came to be. I intend to use it as much and often as I can.

Keep your WWJD armband to yourself.

It's pretty clear that Net Neutrality is about companies vs customers. On the one hand, you have effective monopolies who want power to screw over their customers. On the other, you have choice-less customers. You could decide that having monopolies screw over their customers endlessly is just fine, or you could decide that maybe you should do something about that.

In any case, although I think that you have to be either incredibly stupid or tremendously bad faith to be against Net Neutrality, I already have substantially more powerful net neutrality regulations in my country, an abundance of ISPs offering ever better speeds for ever lower prices, and a glut of competition.

The only thing I can suggest, since I am not American and therefore cannot participate in the regulatory process, is that Stack Exchange move their servers from the United States. For the Day of Action, simply shut down all US servers and force your users to access the website through foreign servers (ideally also shut down Canadian servers since they might provide an acceptable experience). This should provide them with an adequate taste of what their experience will be like.

I have to admit a lot of my viewpoints are clouded by listening to the No Agenda show on the way to work. But I'm not a democrat or a republican, just a contrarian so I have to respectfully disagree that we should ever ask the Federal government to pass any laws respecting business, entertainment, health care and education as a matter of principle.

I've had the same dumb DSL modem for 11 years and have done just fine with it. There are no shows I can't watch on Roku, no websites I can't visit and I frequently work from home with several remote desktop and putty sessions running concurrently over a VPN.

I live in a rural community and utilize a universally reviled ISP - I should care about this, but I don't. So personally, I guess I don't care because I don't think my situation is going to get worse or better.

The arguments I've gleaned from Adam and John on No Agenda are as follows, and you can take them or leave them, but they might as well be presented and discussed so I can know better whether they're just full of hot air.

1. There are certain things that should receive priority, namely doctors performing surgery over the Internet. http://naplay.it/928/2-06-00

2. There have frequently been provisions about legal and lawful content (legal and lawful are apparently two different things)

3. Loosely interpreted, regulating content for its lawfulness could lead to massive amounts of censorship, take downs for perceived hate speech and licensing for Blogs and Podcasts.

4. Strictly interpreted, regulating content for its lawfulness still means relying on ISPs to do meta-data analysis which is still an invasion of privacy.

Use: https://search.nashownotes.com/ to find some info, it's hard to point links straight to the content, but there's a lot of articles (and the text of many bills).

The recent bill is a good step forward towards net neutrality.

This bill will classify the internet in a way that lets the government control what the ISPs can send over their networks rather than companies. In the united states, I do not fear the corruption of government nearly as much as the wrath of large companies.

Internet lines will be classified as government infrastructure, and tampering with them will be a federal crime. This deters malicious middlemen because now the internet companies aren't the ones pressing charges. It's the feds.

The government doesn't have nearly as many ways to abuse your data as big companies do. As a matter of fact, big companies are PAYING to get your data as you read this. This bill won't solve that problem though. It WILL solve many of the insecurities we have with ISPs collecting data, however.

The government has no incentive to censor or throttle the internet. With plenty of third party software that could censor anything the government would censor 'as a service', There's no reason that the government would need to censor anything. Letting them take the internet into their own hands won't cause any difference in browsing, aside from a better future.

From how I read the proposal (and I read all of it), all this sets out to do is revert regulations to a pre-2014 state, with additional (not less) oversight from the FCC.

In 2013 ISPs were not abusing their power, what is there to make us believe they will do it now?

All this action truly seems like unneeded fear mongering to me.

why should or shouldn't we all head over to https://www.battleforthenet.com/ right now and use the handy form to send a letter to the FCC?

Because we're not all Americans?

Even folks who aren't based in the US have probably benefited from the work of those who are at one point or another

This is irrelevant to net neutrality.

if nothing else, this is where our servers live

Then this is a problem with Stack Exchange as a company and has nothing to do with any of the Q&A sites. You may write a blog post or make a public statement, but don't drag politics into the Q&A sites. They're not soapboxes: they're not for righting wrongs or for promoting an agenda.

Your post and most of the answers are written for Americans, with "foreigners" as an afterthought. Your recent survey shows that about 75% are not from the US.

By all means, go public, protest, blackout your corporate web site or your blog, but leave the Q&A sites alone.