Networks cost money. A lot of money. Particularly the "last mile", the connection between the internet backbone and your home or business is expensive to build, expensive to maintain, expensive to repair and expensive to operate.
Net Neutrality is a question of who pays for the network.
Net Neutrality is a question of who pays for the network.
There's more than one way to pay for a network. The landline telephone network, for example, is paid for on a subscription basis. Everyone pays a set price per line, which is supposed to pay for the network, and have the option to purchase various add-on products and services. The cable television financing model is similar.
Back in the bad old days before the Internet, if you wanted a data connection between two sites, you leased a line. The leased line is a physical wire and associated equipment that is dedicated to your use. You pay on a monthly basis whatever price you've agreed to with your ISP. If you don't have enough bandwidth, that's your problem, which our friendly sales associates would be happy to help you with.
On the internet backbone, whoever puts the bits on the wire pays. But backbone is cheap. It costs only a little more to run and operate a 50-pair or 100-pair fibre connection than it does to run a plain old copper telephone wire. Limited points of access mean that the cost of facilities, equipment, and maintenance is minimized.
Finally, you can have the recipient pay, as in cellular data plans. You pay for the bandwidth you think you'll use, and you pay extra if you exceed that quota. Your home water or electrical utility also works this way, where you pay based on how much of the product you used.
There is a real disconnect in the Internet Services world between what people think they are buying and what they are actually buying. When ISPs sell a certain speed, they are selling a performance metric, not a volume. You have gig internet? Well, yes you do, but no you don't. You are probably getting the bits down off the wire at 800-900 Mb/s. But try using all that bandwidth and see how fast you get dropped from your Internet service. The plain fact is that the ISP network is not provisioned for full usage, but expected peak usage. Full provisioning would be very expensive and drive Internet service prices up by 3x or more.
When the ISP business began, ISPs looked at the cost and pricing of carrying each other's traffic and came to the conclusion that the traffic to and from another ISP's network usually worked out to a rough equivalence. It wasn't worth the cost of metering, so they wrote up interoperation agreements, giving each access to the other's network, and everyone was happy.
With the proliferation of high-bandwidth, high-QOS services with direct backbone connections, like video distribution, that model has fallen apart. Somebody has to pay the cost of moving those bits over the fibre.
So we, as an industry and a country, have to decide who pays the cost. Net Neutrality is a sophisticated public lobbying campaign put together by the content providers like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, Google, "giant corporations", to use their own language, to make sure they don't have to pay the cost of carrying their own traffic. They want the cost carried by the ISPs, which ultimately means a huge increase in Internet service subscription costs.
The ISPs, who sadly don't have a catchy name for their campaign, like "Net Freedom" or "Net Sexytime", don't want to raise their prices and alienate their customers, so they want to push the cost back to the content providers, who are (often only theoretically) making money from the content.
Ultimately the choice, as always, comes down to who pays.
