Is being against net neutrality that bad?

Some people think if net neutrality is taken away, that society would collapse. I’m not so pessimistic. Access to information, like a lot of things, is a privilege. Information is like a weapon, it can be used to harm. Certain people need to be restricted from information in order to protect society.

Like all powerful things, information should be regulated. Therefore, people should not have equal access information on the internet.

Think about it.

We have insane amount of competition for job positions. If certain people had less access to online info, that would narrow competition. An uninformed person would blow job interviews. Same with college admissions and school performance. Would it be nice to have less people in college? We would have much more individual attention from professors. The less people who make honor roll or deans list, the higher the value.

Decreased access to the internet would solidify the world hierarchy. United States at the top, Europe next, and then east Asia. Then we have those at the bottom at the world hierarchy. Too much information on their hands would be risky. The West did some bad things, unfortunately. Given enough information, the bottom countries/continents can band together and get revenge.

Last, the idea of reversing net neutrality just sounds good in general. Those with all access can use info as a currency. That is great power. Want something from someone else? Trade info for whatever you need!

Yes, only rich people deserve information.

Except that removing net neutrality would have the opposite effect from what you describe. In a neutral internet, those with information can use it as a currency. But without neutrality, the backbone providers (who don’t actually have any information) can decide how information is transferred, and from and to whom, which prevents that happening.

As for your first argument, it sounds like it’s just “take power away from the Wrong Sorts of People”, and I’ve a hunch that the people you consider the Wrong Sorts are the ones for whom it would be the greatest benefit to society to increase their power. But that’s mostly irrelevant, because to the people who would actually be making the decisions, you are also the Wrong Sort of Person: That is to say, you’re not a majority stockholder of a cable or telephone company, and everyone who’s not a major stockholder of a cable or telephone company is the Wrong Sort of Person, to them.

Whatever you are railing against, it’s not net neutrality. You should probably figure out what the term means.

That is the most sad commentary on this world view I have ever heard…less people in college…wtf…Less or uninformed people not being able to compete for jobs…that is just not American or nice , for that matter. NOOOOO!

I read the OP as satire. Each point was phrased so over-the-top that I figured the OP was actually supporting net neutrality. But I guess I could be wrong.

Oh…I hope you are correct.

Yeah, we don’t want those uppity poor people thinking they deserve to watch “Big Bang Theory” sans buffering!

That’s a privilege for rich folk!

And we should probably burn down public libraries while we’re at it. Don’t want them poor people learn’n something.

Yeah, just what the world needs: more stupid people!

Maybe, except what he was talking about wasn’t even what net neutrality is about. It seemed to me like he was ranting against his misunderstanding of “net neutrality.”

This. Net neutrality does not mean what the OP thinks it means.

I think that Net Neutrality is more restrictive a set of regulations than is optimal. Two examples of things that violate net neutrality that I’m fine with.

I think it’s reasonable to charge different costs for different quality of service (video calls have high real-time requirements, bittorrent, not so much).
I think it’s reasonable to allow content providers to pay for part or all of the cost (I have no problem with Facebook paying the data cost for people to get to Facebook).

To be clear, I’m not saying we should not have internet regulations. There are lots of shady things that we shouldn’t let ISPs do.

I agree the OP seems to be arguing about something else entirely.

This is already the case. Your ISP has several tires of speed at different rates

This is totally NOT good, in fact it’s a terrible idea. Your ISP should only care about the speed they promised you. Where you go is none of their business.

This is the real meat of the Net Neutrality law, to disallow this kind of thing. What will happen if this is allowed is that your ISP will see many of its customers accessing Facebook, and shake down Facebook for some money. Hey Netflix, that’s a real nice streaming service you got there - I’d hate to see something happen to your customers’ access to it. Let’s talk about ways we can insure that for you. Sorry, we prefer Fox News, so we’re going to drop random packets for anyone streaming MSNBC or CNN.

The problem is that it would give ISPs control over Internet access. The libertarian view is that customers would just choose a different ISP that doesn’t restrict, but it’s not that easy, there are transaction costs with customers on long-term contracts and having to have installation work done in their houses. It’s better to let ISPs compete on giving you a good pipe to the Internet, and not let them control access to which parts of the Internet you have access to.

And the fronts of buses are so damn crowded these days. I don’t remember having any difficulty finding a seat back in 1955.

Or more likely, dear customer, I’m sorry that it takes 3 days to stream a half hour netflix video why don’t you try our Xfinity streaming service instead only $24.99/mo?

This. This is what would happen.

Ah, that’s not what I mean.

I mean, given a single connection, it is reasonable to be able to say that I want a high-speed, low-latency lane for my Skype traffic, and a slow, whatever-latency lane for my overnight backups. Not all of my bits require the same quality of service. Making that a requirement is suboptimal. I either overpay (and the network must be overbuilt) so that all of my data is fast, even though most of it doesn’t need to be, or I am underserved (and the providers of things like internet telephony do worse) because I am not willing to pay for all of my data to be fast even though only 2% of it needs the speed.

I pay $10 per GB of data for my phone. If, say, Netflix wants to make a deal with my phone company that they’ll cover the cost for the data from them instead of it counting against my allotment, that seems fine to me.

The response seems to be that this gives my phone company tremendous power over Netflix, since they can threaten to make connections to Netflix terrible unless Netflix pays extra. But there’s no reason we can’t have regulations against that behavior that still allow cost shifting.

I find that analogies to shipping services are very useful. Imagine that the USPS, instead of selling a-la-carte shipping on a per-box basis, sold monthly subscriptions. They varied in price, but all you could choose was how much weight you wanted to ship and receive each month, and whether you wanted overnight shipping or 3-day shipping. “What if I want to send a few boxes overnight, but I’m willing to wait longer for others?” Sorry, Mail Neutrality says that you can’t do that.

Imagine Amazon comes along, and says to the Post Office: “Hey, we really want more people to try buying stuff from us, but we’re worried that they’re not going to because of the shipping cost. Can we pay for some shipments to customers?” Sorry, Mail Neutrality says each customer has to pay for what they receive. And you should be happy it’s this way, says the proponent of Mail Neutrality to Amazon. After all, if we didn’t require this, the Post Office might realize that you depend on shipping things to customers and try to shake you down. “Nice web store you have there, Amazon”, they might say, “shame if we were to randomly delay packages to your customers, or accidentally drop a few of them off the back of a truck.”

“Wait”, says Amazon, “Isn’t that already illegal? Why do we have to make our customers pay for mail just so the Post Office won’t destroy it?”

What is this “choose a different ISP” of which you speak? You mean people actually can do that? I have one to chose from. I cannot think of anyone that has a choice in my part of the world. Actually there is, the [del]un[/del]restricted phone plans - run a house with several gaming teenagers through that - competing with the one hardwired ISP.

I’m curious how you think paying your ISP for a high-speed low, latency lane somehow translates into a high-speed, low-latency lane for the other end of your Skype sessions?

Okay. First, let’s see those regulations and implement them, then we can talk about getting rid of net neutrality. The Republicans are trying to eliminate net neutrality without bringing in alternate regulations to protect consumers from predatory behaviour by ISPs. How do you think that’s going to work out?