Sorry, But All You Internet Users Appear to Be Idiots
I am just amazed at how many otherwise smart people are rooting for the government to regulate the Internet:
According to a pair of new reports from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, the FCC chairman Tom Wheeler will soon do what some net neutrality advocates have been clamoring for for ages: Try to officially reclassify internet service as a telecommunications service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. That'd effectively put internet access in the same bucket as landline telephone service, which is treated as a public utility in the United States, and would basically ban the paid prioritization of certain web sites and services over others....
We -- along with many of you -- will be watching the outcome of that vote with bated breath. For that matter, so will representatives and head honchoes of the country's internet service providers. A vote in favor of reclassification means that all of those companies will eventually have to deal with way more intense regulatory scrutiny, and do away with plans to treat some web-centric companies with deep pockets as first-class citizens of the internet while the rest of us wait longer for other stuff to load.
So, out of the fear in the last sentence, that some people will get better service than others -- something that, oh by the way, has never really happened so is entirely hypothetical -- you are urging on a regulatory regime originally designed for land-line phone companies, a technology that basically went unchanged for decades at a time. The phones that were in my home at my birth in 1962 were identical to the one in my dorm room when AT&T was broken up in 1982. Jesus, we are turning the Internet into a public utility -- name three innovations from an American public utility in the last 40 years. Name one.
And all you free-speech advocates, do you really think the Feds won't use this as a back-door to online censorship? We are talking about the same agency that went into a tizzy when Janet Jackson may have accidentally on purpose shown a nipple on TV. All that is good with TV today-- The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Arrested Development, etc. etc. etc. results mainly from the fact that cable is able to avoid exactly the kind of freaking regulation you want to impose on the Internet.
Here is my official notice -- you have been warned, time and again. There will be no allowing future statements of "I didn't mean that" or "I didn't expect that" or "that's not what I intended." There is no saying that you only wanted this one little change, that you didn't buy into all the other mess that is coming. You let the regulatory camel's nose in the tent and the entire camel is coming inside. I guarantee it.
Update: Apparently the 1934 Telecommunications Act imposes a legal obligation on phone carriers to complete calls no matter who they are from. Sounds familiar, huh? Just like net neutrality. It turns out this law is one of the major barriers preventing phone companies from offering innovative services to block spam calls.
They have a department that deals with people trying to stop using their service and its a wholesale customer service nightmare. Companies in industries with strong competition do not treat their customers this way.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2014/07/15/331681041/comcast-embarrassed-by-the-service-call-making-internet-rounds
I'm skeptical that the incumbent ISPs will be difficult to dislodge. Just look at the level of dissatisfaction with TWC & comcast, et al. I think some new blood would be welecomed in most markets.
Oh,I don't disagree at all with you re dissatisfaction and welcoming new blood. But, barring any miracle in the industry, there are very, very few companies to challenge them. And, as long as the dolts at the local level retain the charter power, nothing will change, ever.
Neither did government. They funded private individuals and groups who developed them. All the government did was provide the funding. Do you really think that the funding was the source of the innovation?
In reading other posts of yours, I have to say that I agree that more competition in delivery of Internet services is necessary. I don't think we disagree as much as you think. At least I don't think we disagree enough to merit your insulting epithets you are casually throwing around.
The current system is broken and broken badly, very much due to previous regulation. However, the ISPs right now have an environment where they are able to extort large fees from their customers for very crappy internet service.
The question is how to get other companies in the space offering better solutions. If google fiber were being deployed everywhere, we wouldn't have net neutrality as an issue because google fiber has very good terms of service and offerings and is (as far as I have seen) crushing opponents in areas that they have deployed. But it would take a long time to get google fiber everywhere. Although the SpaceX/Google satellite internet thing would be an absolute game changer, but that's really hard, as we saw that with iridium, but I do think its doable.
Outside of that, I don't see any other options other than than regulation to get the huge ISPs like Comcast and Verizon to play nice. Perhaps if we had a worthwhile Attorney General we could charge these companies for treating their customers extremely poorly (yes I am claiming that the big ISPs routinely violate their contracts with customers). But we don't have that either.
Ok, I hear what you are saying there. But in that case the regulation we need then is for states to not ban local governments from managing the internet service in their town. Too many states have banned that path at the behest of the large ISPs, a truly despicable example of regulatory capture.
There are very few companies to challenge them because becoming a challenger and laying cable is illegal. I don't think the number of challengers will remain low if we legalized competition in this space.
That said, the challenge is NOT in growing competition. That will happen on its own if the laws are changed to enable it to happen. The challenge is in getting the political willpower to override/overturn the anti-competitive laws.
So you've explained what happens if these companies don't pay taxes. Ok.
In addition there are hundreds of other laws companies have to follow that are covered by this same list.
If you are planning to establish a Libertarian paradise where none of your numbered list of problems exist I'd love to see it. Although you probably not let me come there because you'd "own" the letters J and W.
I never said that all the options here are perfect. In a perfect world I'd have 5 companies competing to be my ISP and I'd get fast service at low prices. But the world isn't perfect and yes government has messed a lot of things up.
My personal opinion is that common carrier is better regulation than what was previously tried, and was thrown out in court, or the no limits setup where ISPs are starting to talk and act like they want to charge for not just sending bits my way from someone else's site, but charge them for those bits leaving their site (they're also compensating their ISP for those bits as well). The ISPs are trying to establish double charging for all bits traveling over the internet. If they succeed where do you think those extra charges will come from? From the users.
Oh, and if we don't pay those bills for the ISP they'll go to court and:
1. petition the state to use force against us to make us pay those bills.
Do you understand that the link from the backbone to your home is probably the least important part of this issue? Yes of course local governments across this country have exclusive deals with one phone company (DSL) and one cable company (cable modem) to provide broadband, and competitors must either lease rights to sell on top of their lines or try to run their own infrastructure, requiring not just costly lines and equipment but a huge morass of government bureaucracy and lengthy timelines to do so. Ask Google Fiber about that.
Let's even set aside FCC (that's the government, too, by the way) selling spectrum exclusivity to companies. The thing you are either willfully ignorant or deliberately disingenuous about in this post is "peering." See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering
This is where the Net Neutrality rubber meets the road, and why Netflix traffic prioritization was such an issue last year, despite your glib assertion that "some people will get better service than others -- something that, oh by the way, has never really happened so is entirely hypothetical." That is jaw-droppingly, measurably, provably false, fellow human.
So, your convenience is what matters most. Screw the bigger picture and let's bring on the Bigger State, so you only have to pay those mean old ISPs a half pound of flesh.
Got it. Failing to learn from history and bravely into the future!
Let's make sure that we codify the business model of all the high bandwidth generators, Google, Netflix, etc, at the expense of of ISPs, well, because they're poopy heads. We need to pick winners, here, after all.
um...yes? It's not like there was some private company banging out microprocessors and the government said "hey, what a great idea, let's buy a whole bunch for the F-14!" It's not like Bell Labs invented TCP/IP and then ARPA said "wow, that's exactly what we needed!"
"In short, TCP handles the packaging of the data. IP handles the delivery."
Ummm... you and I are on the same ideological side here, but that's just wrong. I completely agree with you on the magic around compliance with laws. But there's nothing correct about your summary of the roles of TCP and IP.
J_W_W is theoretically correct that to implement neutrality, ISPs have to do nothing with their hardware. But that's not how it's going to end up working. Compliance with any regulation requires proof by the regulated that they are compliant. Which means that they will need to keep strict audit records on the configuration of their routers (which they should probably do already), but then store those records in non-tamperable way and then provide reporting on demand, and then be able to demonstrate that the reporting has not been tampered with. The cost of compliance is far greater than just what must be done on the router.
That's extra process and procedure and hardware and people that have to be funded in order to ensure compliance with the regulation. All of this is overhead on the business. How exactly is this conducive to encouraging new entrants in the market? New entrants need to be focusing entirely on their product and the methods by which their either making it cheaper or better. Forcing new entrants to also pay for compliance costs means there will be almost no new entrants.
That's not what he was saying. What he was saying was that content demand was based on millions of spontaneous actions, not choices on delivery. Stipulated: There really are no choices. We have government-backed crony capitalism in nearly all local US markets.
"The question is how to get other companies in the space offering better solutions... but that's really hard"
While I've cut and chopped your paragraph a bit, I think I got to the heart of what you're trying to say, and IMHO your view is far too shortsighted. Remove the laws that prevent competition and competition will flow on it's own. And you don't have to do this everywhere all at once. The FCC could simply implement a few experiments in some cities where there's an entrenched 1 or 2 providers of last mile service and see what happens.
Maybe I'm wrong and new entrants won't flow out of the woodwork. But it's worth trying before imposing additional regulatory overhead. The latter will make it even harder for competition to emerge.
So which elected officials developed those products? Right. They just provided funding and levereged privately developed labs, and privately developed human capital. The government is more than capable of providing funding through coerced taxation. And it can take those funds and give them to someone else. But whatever ends up being done is riding entirely on the shoulders of private enterprise. The government then usurps that outcome and rebrands it as its own.
It is a fun little exercise to think that the government makes things. But the government only takes money from one group and gives it to another. It must always and everywhere use skills and techniques developed privately. Government is a usurper not a creator.
"How does the government saying that all packets transported over the
internet must be treated and transferred the same, cause runaway
government control?"
1. that's a total straw man. article 2 says a HELLUVA lot more than that. but even net neutrality alone is a horror. it's counter to liberty and counter to good design. the net is used for a great many services that have differing latency requirements. so, if you want to mingle, say, surfing a website, transferring an FTP file, and a VOIP call and you have to treat every packet the same, you run into serious constraints. VOIP needs low latency. if we run the whole network with that little lag, it's massively wasteful as the packets in the ftp file could easily wait a few hundred ms. you're designing the whole system to be a ferrarri when what some of it wants is a truck. or, if you build the system to be a truck, the ferrarri just will not work at all. you'll be unable to make a voice call.
this does not have to be a trade off. you use DPI to determine what a packet is, make voice fast, and ftp slower. this makes the system efficient and lets you build the capacity you need. but under NN, you no longer have a choice. under article 2, it's not even clear you'd be allowed to block packets used in a DDOS attack.
you have this exactly backwards on the "fairness doctrine" which is a name right out of orwell. the fairness doctrine was dismantled by conservatives (fowler) btw. you seem to be just making up your facts here and to lack a basic grounding in who says what and what these issues mean.
you also argue by logical fallacy. everyone would like someone else to pay for them. pointing that out hardly makes your case just. it's just a form of appeal to authority argument, and a particularly tainted one at that as those you put forward as "authorities" are just guys who want to make someone else pay for service they want.
if you want to keep all you can eat internet, then vote against net neutrality. a vote for it and a shift of internet to being a public utility under article 2 will hamstring net providers, fragment the net into private subnets (as ATT has long been gearing up for), and shift us to pay per bit.
there is NO valid case for this change in reguation. there si no problem to fix, just an imaginary hobgoblin.
the fact that you think you can predict all the effects of this change is hilarious. you are exactly the guy warren is calling out. a decade from now, who knows what the overwhelming need will be for the net? could you imagine today's net in 2004? nope. 2024 will be even more different and is even less predictable.
thus, you want flexibility, not regulatory gridlock. it was getting out from under article 2 in 2007 that really set mobile broadband off. before then, no one would invest in it.
you think ISP's are just going to keep investing in a system they can no longer steer? like they do in POTS (hint: they don't and have not in decades)?
this is just a tax grab. moving to article 2 will add $10 a month in taxes to your net bill. watch. it will stifle innovation, fragment networks, and hamstring investment right when we need to to go to native fiber. all to what? to hold some imagined bugbear at bay?
you are inviting the vampire in and seem too poorly informed to understand what will happen.
jww-
that's absolutely false. one net provider? BS. i live in a small town, and we have maybe 5 and that's BEFORE counting cellular guys.
you seem to just be making your facts up.
there ARE millions of consumers for which providers must compete and switching is easy. DSL just uses a phone line. then you have cable. i actually use point to point wireless at my house because i needed something with a real SLA and 5 nines of uptime.
competition for customers is ferocious. price keeps dropping in real terms and speeds keep going up. price per kb of data has dropped by well over 99%.
in 1998 it was $29.99 for 56kb per second of dial up. now you can get 20mbps for $39.99 (comcast) or 4-5 mbps for $19.99 (century dsl).
this is a MASSIVE success story of customers getting unbelievable gains in service per dollar. i doubt there is another industry in the history of man that is even close.
and you want to regulate this because it's somehow predatory and uncompetitive?
seriously, what color is the sky on your world?
You are still lost in the weeds. There are many potential technological solutions for each desired outcome. The various providers of services have to compete for customers by developing the solutions and offering them at competitive prices. Look, the internet has been in use for commerce for nearly 20 years. If not implementing these regulations for so long has not yet caused costs to skyrocket, why will they start now?
By proposing a solution for telesurgery, you explicitly acknowledge that some data does deserve higher priority than other data. So now the "principled" argument that all data should be treated equally falls apart. Why should emails and streaming video be treated equally? Clearly they should not. Data rate matters a lot more for streaming video than it does for email, so consumers of streaming video should pay more per bit than consumers of email.
"If you alllow deep packet inspection and the ISP's classify telesurgery
as special, they'll charge the same greatly inflated prices we pay for
all our "medical" services now."
and if you do not let them do so, then these services simply will not be able to exist. the latency will be too high. or, it will mean that every other service that does not need such speed will have to have it and pay for it, making ALL of those too expensive.
you cannot have it both ways. if you want a fast network, then you have to pay for it and that means things that do not need it pay way more than they need to.
you have no idea how networks work, do you? a VPN over "standard internet" would still be subject to the same rules and would be no faster. what's an "encrypted private network"? do you expect a hospital in boston to own a fiber all the way to LA? what, just to do a few surgeries?
no way. but, they would have to to get out of NN.
you sinmply do not understand the trade offs here. honestly, you do not even seem to understand what the words you are using mean.
there is no "private network" that works cross country or continent save those of a tiny handful of companies.
tcp/ip does not have enough space in the header for prioritization (unlike ATM) but this is easily fixed by DPI which is NOT "crudely bolting a toll road onto the internet". it's widely used today. it is WHY VOIP and FTP can coexist effieiently on the same network.
your analogy is totally wrong. a better one is this:
preventing the use of DPI for traffic shaping is akin to saying that all cars on a road must move at the same speed and that fire engines and ambulances cannot get priority over, say, a mobile billboard truck.
the crude disruption comes from net neutrality. it will massively increase costs or it will wipe out low latency applications. no other outcome is possible.
it creates a trade off where none is needed.
The idea that my property has the same rights as a human is bizarre. Furthermore, even if we accepted that idea, Libertarianism is about freedom from government, not from private entities that someone has contracted services from.
I'm trying to figure out how Libertarians can approve of the government ordering a private business to treat its customers in some desired way. That sounds socialist, not libertarian.
The Netflix actions (which were seriously misportrayed by most of the press) just showed that there was a dispute between two companies. It was a minor inconvenience to a small part of the population for a few months. Why we should claim that the ISP's and not Netflix are at fault is beyond me. Netflix makes huge amounts of money off of the facilities of the ISPs. Why shouldn't Netflix users pay a little extra (higher payment to Netflix that then goes to the ISP) in order to get high priority service on an Internet that was *never* designed for any kind of streaming? And why should the government get involved, other than at the local level that granted the right-of-way and other permits to the monopoly?
I think we should be glad that capitalism, with very little regulation, has produced this marvelous Internet with all of its marvelous services.
Yes... sort of. In the United States there are only two legal levels of government: federal and state. Anything below the state is strictly a creation and creature of the state government, so the state can regulate it any way it wants to - or even simply dissolve it at a whim.
But... it may make sense for states to regulate internet services within certain limits, or to delegate that regulation to counties or cities. However, keep in mind that *any* regulation at any level is subject to regulatory capture, which is why avoiding regulation whenever possible is by far the most prudent course, about which Libertarians and most conservative agree.
"I am of the opinion that telesurgery should be done on a private leased
line from site to site then. Those circuits can be setup and are
secure."
then you have no idea how the network topology works.
there is no such thing. even if there were, it would be the WORST possible choice because one line is a single point of failure. is that what you want for surgery? nope. you need to be able to route around damage.
you stright up have no idea what the architecture of the internet and phone system looks like. a "private leased line" does not exist coast to coast at layer 1, nor should it. and even if it did, it would be incredible expensive. i mean, dazzlingly, incredibly expensive. like $30k an hour kind of expensive for t1 speeds.
better to just pay an ISP more. you'll get a better, faster, more robust service, for less money. except that some clown like you just banned it.
netflix has become one of the biggest transmitters of data online. they are what, 25% of all net traffic.
someone is going to pay to keep networks able to carry it. why not netflix?
they pass the cost on to customers, and bingo, users pays.
the only other option is the ISP passes it on to their costumers. that's indiscriminate. i may stream video, you may not, we both see our costs jump. now you are subsidizing me. how is that fair?
THAT is what net neutrality is really about. it's about forcing some to subsidize others.
the costs do not go away.
someone has to pay. it ought to be users, not everyone.
net neutrality is NOT libertarian. it's the opposite. i subsidize you, the freedom of carriers and customers is taken away, and people do not get to chose their own business relationships.
this is NOT libertarian, it's socialist. user chooses and user pays and we all keep out rights to associate and contract, THAT is libertarian. the current net is far closer to that ideal than NN. NN is command and control, limited liberty, no freedom of contract, and everyone pays for those that use. it's socialized medicine for the internet.
You can probably get those speeds now if you are willing to pay for it. If you are a consumer, I really doubt that there are any speeds agreed to in your contract.
And, yes you could do it with regulation without involving the FCC. It could be regulated at the state or local level. The advantage of that approach is that it doesn't violate the Constitution, and it allows different locations to have different regulatory regimes. That creates competition, which means that, over time, the best scheme should win.
But far better is to not regulate it at all, other than to make sure that government stays out of the way of anyone who wants to compete with the existing ISP's.
jcc-
sure. it's easy. i do it at home. it's called an SLA (service level agreement). you generally need to buy commercial grade internet to get it. it costs A LOT more (maybe 3x as much) , but as i need it for my home office, it's well worth it for me. i get 25 down and 10 up with sub 20 ms latency to the backbone and a 99.999% uptime guarantee where i get paid penalties if they do not hit the spec. so far, they are killing it. service has been flawless.
the "speeds agreed to in your contract" say "up to". very few internet service agreements for consumers have a guarantee.
it's a "best effort" contract. this is because most people are not willing to pay for a real SLA. at $39.99 a month, no way are you getting a 20mb sla. mine costs $199 (but also has autofail rollover to another layer 1 link).
as in all tech: "good, fast, cheap. pick 2."
..
This is true and it is a problem. I'd have to agree that fixing the right of way issues could lead to competition that would alleviate some of these other issues.
Totally, totally agree. What we have now may not be perfect, but anyone advocating anything that requires more and not less government control or involvement is spending too much time with the crack pipe. The fact that Obama wants this is more than enough fair warning. Man oh man. Regulation NEVER makes anything less expensive or more available. This has been true since Noah's day. And I don't mean the stupid movie.
Your points are all valid, but Net neutrality is really a money grab by well connected liberal corporations, notably Google, Amazon, and Netflix, who do not want to pay access fees to cable companies. Little do people realize, that when these big guys don't pay the fees, everyone else connected to the standard backbone still will pay the fees.
The big three basically made their own backbone, and demanded connections for free, while the regular backbone still pays a data fee for connecting. And that is net neutrality, in a nutshell. Big payoff for well connected companies while the little guy pays more. But since it has such a trendy slogan, people are all for it!
Actually QOS is built into TCP/IP. And the issue is companies paying for access to end points. The big guys don't want to pay, and built their own backbones, in an attempt to circumvent payments they were already making to cable companies, so they whine about net neutrality, but the rest of us will still have to pay. It is the small guy who can't build his or her own backbone that gets hurt.
Netflix and Google should pay, like everyone else does.
God GOD, the fees you pay the ISP do not pay for the transit of all the bits you request. That's simply not the way it works. Please, go create a website. Put some content up. If your content is very popular, your ISP will charge you significant bandwidth fees. Why? Because they have to pay for connectivity, and they have to finance increased bandwidth as the users they host expand.
So the way it works is that you pay for connectivity from your provider, and the person who sends you bits pays for their own bandwidth from their hosting provider. And the money that's paid at both ends flows up and down the chain to intermediate providers who charge back for their services. The folks in the middle don't just 'allow' bits to flow across their network. They take payment in money, or in kind.
The problem is that many in government believe that the only thing of value in this world is the government.
Wrong, on many counts. The "big three" as you put it, already pay their access fees for internet connectivity. So too, do home and business customers. What's happening here is that the cozy duopoly of ISPs (one phone company, one cable company) are trying to charge for access to their customers. Had government not meddled in the ISP market early on, we wouldn't have a duopoly with a stranglehold on the last mile.
The cable and telephone companies are trying to extort content providers, and are rent seeking, enabled by their privileged position as the result of poor government policy. This policy needs to be fixed, and in the short/medium term the least worst play I can see is to regulate the duopoly. Longer term, municipal networks, and Google Fiber, will reduce the power of the duopoly.
If you have a better mechanism to break the stranglehold by ISPs, I'm all ears.
Unfortunately you are completely wrong. You haven't been paying attention to what has been going on. All digital connections pay a transfer fee to the cable companies. The big three just created their own backbone and are now demanding hookup without payment (while the small guys still pay the cable companies) some cable companies, which can't really stop the services are fighting back by limiting the bandwidth. It is to the point where Netflix will demand their own servers on location at the cable company without even compensating by leasing the space.
Maybe you believe the cable companies should not be charging anyone for data access, but the Net Neutrality, really is a two tiered system where the big guys get in free and the small guys end up paying for them.
Net Neutrality sounds so nice, kinda like "We are the chosen people"
The current situation is the result of government backed monopolies over local infrastructure. The granting of such monopolies was wrong from the beginning, but we now face the results of that bad decision. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa034.html
Net Neutrality isn't the most libertarian solution to the monopolistic behavior that the cable companies are exhibiting (in holding Netflix customers hostage demanding ransom from the content distributors) but it is the most politically viable at this time.
Net Neutrality works for cable lines in the same way that power line and telephone line are handled, as public utility infrastructure. This guarantees content-neutral service, in the same way the power company can't charge different rates per megawatt for a favored bookstore over a disfavored tobacconist. The infrastructure management company can charge different rates based on usage, with progressively increasing or decreasing prices with usage (depending on the economies of scale) but can't differentiate based on content.
The only worry I have with Title II is that it won't be properly limited to cable infrastructure and could be stretched to cover emerging technologies that aren't tainted by the grants of public monopolies.
We'll probably lose the artificial "unlimited data" business model if they become common carriers and have to pay per gigabyte. But we'll retain control as a customer over the amount of bandwidth we use, instead of being throttled as a bargaining chip to extort further funds from content distributors.
If Google succeeds at getting the internet regulated as a utility, they will NEVER lay another INCH of fiber. What the ISP's should do to fight this type of corporatism is to get a congressman to sponsor legislation classifying GOOGLE as a utility to be regulated by the FCC.
I can't wait for the people who censor TV and radio to start regulating the internet. They've done a fantastic job protecting us from nipple slips and four letter words and I'll feel much better once they start protecting me from the internet.
Finally the same bureaucracy that froze communication technology for 50 years will get to apply that same magic mojo to the internet.
It's a shame they didn't start protecting consumers from the internet 20 years ago because I *really* loved 56kps and dial up connections.
I can't believe how many supposedly educated people still hold a 3rd grader's view of "consumer protection" and don't understand:
1. Consumers ultimately pay the price of "consumer protection"
2. Bigger and older companies fare better under regulation than smaller and newer companies
3. The real forces driving "consumer protection" are industries that want a handout -- in this case Google and other internet firms -- and politicians and bureaucrats who want more power.
Mercy
How long before these regulations are repealed?
To make any network run smoothly requires packet tweaking and prioritization. Not all packets are equal.
Forced Net Neutrality puts government right into that. The rules will get tighter and tighter, written by people further and further away.
Lemme put it this way. Forced Net Neutrality is to the Internet as Forced Mortgage Equality was to the American housing market. Bend over.
Your benighted faith that the Internet will look like a railroad (not the best solution) and not like terrestrial radio.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt kicked Father Coughlin off the air by forcing radio stations to renew yearly, and by implementing the Fairness Doctrine.
Freedom is the only fair.
Net Neutrality will further encumber a system already imperfectly free.
You just argued for a return to POTS instead of a packet switched network.
Congratulations on your return to the primordial ooze. Better brush up on my uucp skills.
The sham here is two-fold:
1) when ISPs are forbidden from shaping traffic, the only way to keep the network running smoothly is investing in more routers and switches. This should be called the Cisco Enrichment Act of 2015.
2) every page is covered with references to "lawful traffic." If ever there were an invitation for snooping, this is it. The ISPs will be forced to examine packets in order to comply. No VPN. No peer-to-peer. None of that underground encrypted stuff that will make the NSA break a sweat.
Enjoy your streaming Netflix. I hear Brave New World is playing. Sign up for the Soma package.