The FCC abandoning this role to the highest bidder who will answer to no one is the worst possible outcome, and the general public won't know what's happening until they start to see their access to sites and services restricted by fees and mysteriously slowing down or site failures.

-C!

-C!

Not exactly a done deal, with various groups like the ACLU taking action, as well as the Gov. of Washington.  I believe Gov. Cuomo in NY is planning action as well.  Congress, has to vote on this too, but, this current group has proved what a joke they are.

Depending on how badly Congress wants to keep their seats, they'll vote what we want, the majority, the people and not for corporate benefits.  If not, I'm sure they'll be out during the next election. Actually regardless of how they vote, they should be out.

Congress and this entire administration.

There was a time where Verizon FIOS was crippling traffic to/from Netflix, which forced streams to use a lower resolution to keep up. I knew this to be true, because I switched to using a VPN to my office network, and then the streams were in full HD. I still relied on the Internet connection coming out of my house, but to Verizon it was no longer seen as Netflix traffic since it was flowing via the office network first (which actually should have been a factor in slowing down speeds itself, but instead it was actually faster).

They stopped that practice, but unless Congress steps in, there will be nothing to stop them from trying to pull this again.

I see both sides of this one.  On the one hand, there are ways that the repeal of net neutrality could negatively effect me.  For example, I get internet from a cable provider, but TV through Sling.  They could, theoretically, throttle Sling and make the service worse for me to incentive me getting television service through them instead.  The fact that internet service is often a monopoly, or close to it, makes the idea of the government intervening attractive.

On the other hand, I don't like the idea of the internet being regulated by a government bureaucracy like the FCC.  We've already seen this year that Trump has threatened to politicize the FCC to try to control media content.  While he couldn't actually do it (yet) there are no guarantees.  And as we just saw with the whole net neutrality debate, the appointed bureaucrats at the FCC are not answerable to us in any way shape or form, and so we have no recourse should they decide to regulate the internet in a way that we don't like.  The internet has grown into what it has, and made all the improvements it has, without government regulatory intervention (net neutrality is only a couple years old), and so its not outside the realm of reason that it continue to improve and overcome various issues without the FCCs intervention.

So its a tricky issue.  I think what I would rather see is a bill be passed by our elected representatives to break up the cable and internet monopolies and increase competition, then let the market take care of this itself.  If Netflix is very popular, and a company decides to throttle Netflix, as long as I have another company (or more) to choose from, its not a problem, and the throttling company will either have to stop throttling or risk going out of business.