Okay, imagine that you are the executive of some big cable company and net neutrality rules have just been relaxed. What’s the first thing you need (and are legally required) to do? Maximize profit (the goals of large corporations are a topic for another time), and you can use your new rights to do this. What you now have the ability to do is to decide who has the power on the internet; you become its kingmaker. Why do you think Netflix, Google, and all the other huge internet companies are massively in favor of Net Neutrality? Because they know that if the rules are eased, then they can be extorted. This is not hypothetical, you can see graphs of Netflix streaming speed before and after entering talks with Comcast, in the time before Net Neutrality.
https://2h7qju2c3qvcc3s86ekn8n0-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/philly/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/05/wapo-netflix-comcast-graph.png
Now if the Net Neutrality rules are reversed, you, the big ISP executive can go back to what you were doing in 2014. Online video accounted for 63% of in 2015, and that number is expected to grow. So you target Netflix and Youtube, who are the dominant ones in this field (in the safe for work category, at least), you can slowly, over a period of several months, tick down downstream speeds, until both sites become basically unusable. Think your users will go somewhere else? Nope! You’ve reached agreements with other cable companies to avoid direct competition. The FCC’s Internet Access Services report in 2016, shows that 58% of Americans have 1 or fewer choice in ISP that provide internet speeds of 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. It’s 88% for 100Mbps down and 10Mbps up (These numbers were 78% and 90% in 2015; the report is unavailable from the FCC’s website, as of around November 2016, from what I can tell, but conspiracy theories aside, it’s likely just a scheduled maintenance process).
Suffice to say, your customers must choose you, or much slower speeds. Now this is where I acknowledge the fact that you (the ISP exec) have spent large amounts of money (public and private), on your infrastructure, and that those costs give you an de facto monopoly in the regions that you invested in (this is both a good thing and a bad thing) Regardless, you, the ISP, in a world where Net Neutrality is null, have unlimited unchecked power in the region you service and can feel little repercussions for extorting these services until they agree to pay you to return normal service (remember, this happened, in 2014, between Comcast and Netflix, before Net Neutrality had been mandated by the FCC)
Undoing these regulations puts us back in that world, where ISP retain all of the control. In any system, it is incredibly unwise to put all the control into the hand of one, as when one has power, they tend to use it until they lose it. Losing the regulations puts you in a world where you in caught in the middle of a large mafia-like threat (Wouldn’t it be a shame if your users weren’t able to stream the latest season of House of Cards?) But most importantly, the FCC restrictions protect small sites who do not have the capital to pay for the ‘fast-lane’. Do you not like that YouTube is able to unilaterally exert control of self-produced video? Its next competitor will not have the spending ability to bias speeds like that of Alphabet, one of the richest companies in the World, and thus will never be able to overtake them. Do you want to see the bright future of a decentralized Internet where everyone has perfect control over their privacy (In fact, the Mozilla Foundation just announced a $2M prize pool for those able to provide decentralized internet solutions)? These solutions will never be viable in a system where a private corporation, whose only obligation is to its shareholders has the ability to decided what is popular on, arguably, the most important communicative device in the entirety of human history. We cannot let the Internet go the way of TV, we must protect it before we find ourselves using an Internet Tim Berners-Lee would have never imagined
