Technology

This is how every ISP in the US has acted for the last 2.5 decades. They got their money handout from the government to kickstart broadband country wide (which is why we ended up with oligopolies with things like Cox operating in one county and Comcast operating in another with a little handshake agreement to stay on each other's side of the imaginary line), under the assumption that those ISPs would continue to maintain and grow those networks as the needs increased. So now everyone has broadband and who gives a shit what the advertised speeds are, because at least they're better than dial up.

Then a few years later, it becomes clear that they need to upgrade to keep up with the growing traffic demands from services like YouTube and Netflix, which highlights that 1) they want to charge customers more for something the government paid them to build and that they had advertised to the customers without ever actually delivering in the first place, and 2) they pocketed all the money they were supposed to be using to do incremental upgrades along the way.

So, now they say they don't have money for upgrades, so they need to hike prices so the customers can find the upgrades (which for the customers means they're paying for something they won't even receive until some time in the future), and they start looking for other avenue for money to find this (or just grow revenue on general, cuz capitalism "up and to the right") which is where net neutrality comes in: ISPs turn around and go "hey man we gotta upgrade our network to serve your YouTube and Netflix content, so you should pay for it! You rake in billions. Where's our slice of the pie?!"

And that sounds like a somewhat reasonable argument.... until you realize that their network has already been paid for twice, once by the government, and a second time by the customers. And now they want to charge the companies making money off the Internet users to pay to upgrade it for a 3rd revenue stream. Their justification being "well they're OUR customers! You need to pay US a cut so you can reach them!" (which is not that far off from the same reasoning the mob or drug dealers use if you try to set up on their turf)

They're shitty scummy companies run by shitty scummy people. It's skipping over the principle of the internet: it's a pay-to-get-on service (or if you consider the fact that most internet traffic historically is porn, a pay-to-get-off service. HEY-OH!...).

Paying for consumption is sensible. Like any other service, it takes money to operate it, and the more someone uses, the more it costs to operate. But to charge the upstream providers of there service those customers want to access is just absurd. It's like your home customers paying for electricity, then the electric company trying to charge Black and Decker a cut of their revenue to have toasters on their electric network.

At this point, I think the internet should be treated like any other utility. It suffers from the same infrastructure problems that gas, electricity, water, sewer, and telephone does: building multiple physical infrastructure networks on top of each other isn't sensible if someone is only going to use one of those networks to provide their service. Lots of those services are privatized in the US already, but they're also heavily regulated compared to regular free market industries. I mean... The government practically bought the ISPs out once already when they gave them the money to build the broadband networks. But because we had a giant swing of "big-gubment bad!" they just forked the money over without any strings attached to determine how those companies operated later.