sleepingeights

Why be a bum when you can be an FBI agent? It would only had been a full investigation if they had to investigate surfing, beach life, and women in bikinis.

"Sir! We have reason to believe the pinko bastards are posing and infiltrating beach life! Therefore a hundred million dollars is required to interact and investigate with bikini clad women, as well as surf, and take copies amounts of drugs. All in the name of fighting pinko bastards!"

"Well Pinkos you say? Here's two hundred million! Now get in the case!"

Many of these articles are missing an easily exploitable position. The key term is "bandwidth" which is the resource at stake. What is being fought over is how to define this "bandwidth" in a way that will be enforceable against the citizen and favorable to the corporation (i.e. "government").

One way they could do this is to divide it like they did the radio spectrum by way of frequency, where frequency is related to "bandwidth". The higher the frequency, the greater the bandwidth. With communication advances, the frequencies can be grouped just like they did with radio, where certain "frequencies" are reserved by the government/military, and others are monopolized by the corporations, and a tiny sliver is provided as a "public" service.

This way would be the most easily enforceable for them to attack NN and the first amendment, as it already exists by form of radio.

* It is already being applied by cable providers through "downstream/upstream" where your participation by "uploading" of your content is viewed inferior to your consumption of it. i.e. Your contribution (or upload) is a tiny fraction of your consumption (or download).

* Also, AWS, Google and other cloud services charge your VPS for "providing" content (egress) and charge you nothing for consuming (ingress). On that scale, the value of what you provide is so miniscule it is almost non-existent to the value of what you consume.

tldr; NN is already partly destroyed.

Net neutrality simply means that all content is treated equally by the ISPs, backbones, etc...

As for the massive monopolies, that was born of US businesses. US tech monopolies are not original. Monopolies are a traditional form of how the US does its business. Just because the founders and their employees where shorts and shirts instead of suits, it was sold as "radical and new" when it was in fact the same old game.

Now that these major monopolies have established a significant foothold, they find it in their interest to remove net-neutrality to prevent anything disruptive from occurring to their bottom-line.