We need strong federal regulation to prevent this, which means voting for people who support net neutrality. For the record, generally it's Republicans who are opposed to net neutrality.
(EDIT: I could have left that last part off, but then it would have been manipulative. Better to acknowledge my biases up front.)
No, what we should push for is NO regulation. Government regulation guaranties differences in services and will hamstring innovation. It always does.
Ultimately? It could mean that in the future you'll have to pay ISPs so they show your website to their customers. And they'll probably collect money a second time from their customers to show them your website.
They already do. You have to pay for business level access to host a website. It takes more bandwidth so you pay more. Will they start blocking websites from being shown to customers on their service? Yeah, that'll go over really well. No, that would be a dumb business model.
Abandoning net neutrality would be a major setback for society as a whole, but i'm afraid people have gotten used to the walled garden approach since they've been buying all the iCrap for so long, that they won't care about net neutrality either.
What the industry would ultimately like to see is completely control over the whole chain of information delivery. The hardware will only display what the hardware producer allows (i.e. what he can profit from) the software will only display the file formats the manufacturer allows (those they licenced), the ISP will only transmit the data it allows (i.e. what they get paid for) and so on.
It's like paying for a cellphone and then you have to pay for the right to call people in Boston, for the minutes you spend talking as well, and the one in boston you called had to pay for the right to be callable by people outside of boston.
And as long as the net remains a free an neutral ground, there will always be a provider to step in who does not constrain content in that way. They'll garner so many customers from other providers that the others will have to change their ways. The problems come in when government regulations make entry into a market so prohibitively expensive that only a few monster sized corporations can enter and play the game. Then you have the collusion problems.
I'm no expert on this stuff, but it seems to me that everything coming out of our government about the internet is either trying to find ways to tax it or trying to implement more government control to protect all of us against the evil Google-type corporations. No, we don't want either. As long as the FCC is blocked from regulating the internet and our current laws are upheld, then we won't have any trouble. We will have trouble if the FCC steps in to regulate.
It's ending? Even if this deal is finalized, the FCC has to allow it. And there are a lot of Democrats pushing for laws that would outlaw this sort of thing.
Whereas there's a reasonable number of Republicans who are strongly against net neutrality.
"Net Neutrality" policy push is anything but neutral. The term "Net Neutrality" sounds all nice, like the Fairness Doctrine, but it's really just a way for government to gain control so they can pick the winners and losers. It is heavy handed government regulation to insure "neutrality". That never happens. Government cannot fairly divide up something that shouldn't be divided in the first place. I think what everybody is panicking about is that some of us don't want the FCC anywhere near the internet. We don't want government regulation because that is the one thing that will guarantee favoritism and the exact things that people fear will happen.
I'm not all warm and fuzzy about these bigger and bigger ISP companies and internet content providers like Google, but as long as there are enough of these guys at each other's throats, the consumer will be fine. Ask government to start regulating and you'll end up with another Ma-Bell fiasco.
I scanned through this policy statement (which is all it is, btw), and I don't see what all the panic is about, really. Basically it says that ISP's can't control what content it allows and that the FCC is not empowered to regulate the internet.
Verizon is panicking because they have so much CDMA infrastructure, which is old tech, that they can't handle the bandwidth that other providers can. So, they're going to limit what you can do with your phone's connection. If you don't like that, drop Verizon.
This whole thing is a storm in the tea cup and if it is kept up and we rally our ever-so protective and wise government to save us, you'll end up creating what you so desire to stop.
