This is a great point - the web is a place where anyone can participate on equal footing. If I have the savvy to make a site that people like, there's no reason it can't be the next Google or Facebook or Craigslist.
If we don't maintain net neutrality, we'll start to get stratification. "Oh, you're trying to use Vimeo? Your ISP throttles that. Try Youtube - they made a deal to be fast."
Suddenly the web loses what makes it unique and innovative. Just like I can't buy property on Fifth Avenue for my store unless I'm already rich, I can't deliver fast video to you unless I'm already rich. Goodbye underdogs, goodbye innovation, goodbye internet.
Some of us are already dealing with that on some level ("Can't get a PPTP or IPSEC connection to your office? Might be because your cheap broadband provider blocks them. We know {ISPs 1,2,3} do").
Suddenly the web loses what makes it unique and innovative.
In the same way it lost every endpoint has an IP and can participate equally when NAT came along, and all traffic is equal when spam led to port 25 blocks.
Fast large content does now need some kind of dedicated CDN network which costs more, or in scientific/academic circles GRID and academic backbone connections. And who can compete on equal footing when serving content to more people costs more? We're all depending on the likes of Youtube to swallow hosting costs that we wouldn't want to or couldn't pay. When 100Mb connections are common in some countries and others struggle for 2Mb and others for reliable dialup.
1) Port 25 blocks are just a work-around for the fact that SMTP lacks any decent authentication system.
2) I think we can all agree that an ISP offering only a NAT ip address is evil
3) Fast, large content does not need a dedicated CDN network. I can stream video from my home computer. Naturally, a thousand people can't stream from my home computer all at the same time, but if I want to stream video to a thousand people, I have a huge number of existing choices[1] or I can buy a vps[2] with sufficient bandwidth, or I can use a more buzz-word worthy means of hosting[3]. Yes it it may money, but when youtube started up, they didn't have to cut deals with comcast, cox, verizon and warner in order to operate, and if I want to compete with them, neither do I. You can deliver content to millions of people a month for thousands of dollars or less. Or you can just send video to a couple of friends with even a crappy US broadband connection. This is the point here.
If we don't maintain net neutrality, we'll start to get stratification. "Oh, you're trying to use Vimeo? Your ISP throttles that. Try Youtube - they made a deal to be fast."
Suddenly the web loses what makes it unique and innovative. Just like I can't buy property on Fifth Avenue for my store unless I'm already rich, I can't deliver fast video to you unless I'm already rich. Goodbye underdogs, goodbye innovation, goodbye internet.