[seebs]

FWIW, I hate "net neutrality" as a proposed kind of legislation -- and interestingly, I don't know many network operators who feel otherwise.

The foundational problem is that bandwidth is hugely oversold, and as people start using it, it becomes impossible to keep up with what they were offered. It's not a question of profit margins narrowing -- it's a question of simply not being able to keep the pipes running.

Many solutions are on the table. Lower reliability, less bandwidth, more expensive bandwidth, and so on. All of these have plusses and minuses.

Unfortunately, the big proposed solution, "net neutrality", is contrary to about ten years of existing practice. Virtually no one runs a neutral net in one key way: Spam. And yet, nine times out of ten, when someone proposes "net neutrality", the wording adopted is such that it would allow spammers to sue me for degrading their "service" -- their access to my network, which they are not paying for. That's bad.

Frankly, though, even if we could get the words right, I don't want legislation on this. I have a great deal of confidence in the ability of the Internet to route around morons. I have very little confidence in the ability of the US government to correctly legislate network administration.

And really, we didn't already pay for most of the network expansions that would be needed to really provide everyone with the 10Mbps they've been sold, all in use at once. Broadband has always relied on the fact that, if you sell 2000 10Mbps connections, you don't really need to provide 20Gbps of bandwidth upstream -- more like 200Mbps. People use about 1%-2% of their bandwidth.