Thanks... people forget this. The rest of your post is also well summarized, and is appreciated. But I wanted to really call attention to this because the average person doesn't realize this
Someone mentioned a highway analogy... which is pretty similar... but people already have the option to pay a lot of money for a fast luxury car, can use carpool lanes if they have the occupancy (or pay for it), or can spend less money on something slower.. imagine if the government regulated that every car be exactly 120 hp, accelerate at 3.5 m/ss, etc., always have no more and no less than 4 occupants, etc. Deregulating that wouldn't suddenly mean car companies could screw you, they'd compete for you
If you want to pay more for a fast car, or a "fast lane" than why not? People who want to pay for that will get it. Don't we do that with everything else in life? I also don't think this will price gauge customers... the fear is the evil companies take over and force everyone into squalor with slow internet... but I see the opposite, there will be pricing competition. Take a look at how cheap Target and WalMart's prices are... it's not like they take their monopoly to screw us (even though they easily could since mom and pop shops are all but gone and barriers to entry are crazy hard for a small business.. we know, we started one)
Anyway, maybe I have it all backwards and I don't pretend to be an expert, maybe I'll be wrong.. but I wouldn't take everyone else's hysteria and assume the consequence
This is a mind bogglingly bad analogy, but it is one many people seem to believe, so I'll try to explain why.
The biggest flaw here is that while there are visual similarities, the internet functions absolutely nothing like a highway.
On a highway, the speed you can go is generally limited by the power of your car, your ability as a driver, and the skill and the number of other drivers.
On the internet, the "speed" (bandwidth) at which your data moves is limited only by the hardware that is processing it. Congestion can be a concern, but the number of redundant paths available on the internet, and the intelligent self-correcting nature of the internet, means that the only real choke points exist at the terminal switch that serves your neighborhood, and the data center hosting the server you are trying to reach.
Congestion at the consumer end of the connection is addressed by your service contract, and your ISP is responsible for upgrading the hardware there so that as they add customers, the switch does not become overloaded. This is something that is really easy to do: the network card in your computer and modem can generally process a maximum of one Gigabit per second, while internet switching and routing hardware can process hundreds of Gigabits, or even a few Terrabits. So one switch at your ISP can deliver maximum rate performance to hundreds or even thousands of customers.
The story is the same on the server end, but servers usually have several network interfaces so that they can serve more clients. This means that the ratio of servers to routers must be lower, which is why server hosting connections cost more than consumer connections.
It you've been following this, you should see right about now that there is no room in the way this works for "fast lanes". You pay to access the internet at X rate, and content providers pay to have Y rate. The only reason you should ever see a speed slower than X on a website is if that website is processing so many clients that Y had been exceeded. For smaller sites, this is a legitimate concern. Sites like Netflix, however, are hosted on massively huge distribution networks, so that their Y speed is so fast that it would take millions or tens of millions of X speeds to overload them.
Which brings us right back to "there is no basis for fast lanes on the internet". Fundamentally, it does not work that way.
The reason this is becoming a big deal is that ISPs are owned by massive media conglomerates who are starting to realize that equal access to the internet gives consumers choices, and consumers are choosing in ways these conglomerates don't like.
Comcast, in particular, has a dog in this fight because Netflix and other similar services are cutting into their cable television sales. People are"cutting the cord" in droves, because paying $10/mo for access to exactly what you want to watch, when you want to watch it makes more sense than paying $100/mo for more than you can ever watch, on someone else's schedule.
Comcast believes that they can make up these "lost profits" (different rant) by strong arming people into paying more money to access sites which compete with their non-internet business, or by charging those sites money for delivering more customers.
Of course, this is a fiction. As described above, you already pay to access Netflix as fast as your computer can handle it, and Netflix already pays to have enough bandwidth for all the customers who want to watch movies with them. The only way Comcast can create the demand for "fast line" pricing is by artificially creating a need for it. By illegally (not anymore) restricting the traffic, and then charging money to remove the restriction.
If this business model sounds familiar, it's because you've heard of Protection Racketeering. The FCC had just handed Comcast a right to legally charge protection money.
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