Is global net neutrality NOW really at risk ?

[Zelig]

I did. I even provided numbers. It isn't my problem if you reject common business practice and common sense. I'm really not proposing a groundbreaking theory here.

You provided completely irrelevant numbers about why Netflix would raise pricing in India. It isn't my problem if you can't actually recognize common business practice or common sense.

The price of and obstacles to creating product in a primary market absolutely do influence that business in a tertiary market. Netflix may provide a product to most countries on the planet but their actual service and their investments aren't nearly as decentralized. What happens in the US impacts at least 55% of their business.

Lack of net neutrality doesn't affect the cost of creating the product or delivering it to Iceland.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I used resistbot to send messages to my congresswoman in the Senate and House as well as the governor over this issue.

The roll back of net neutrality is going to go forward and as @warpus pointed out, it will be very hard to undo after 60 days due to the interplay between congressional and presidential jurisdiction. For sure we will have it until 2020 and even then if the Democrats can't retake both houses and the Presidency, we may be stuck with it for a few years after that.

As with so many other corporate give always, the end of net neutrality will allow the rich shareholders to fleece the poor and middle classes even further than they already do.

We're at a point where an entire generation of young people are going backwards economically - to the extent that it's become a joke that millenials are somehow irresponsible because they're all broke and still buy avocados. That joke only means something because of how precarious this generation is. Imagine when everything tied to the internet goes behind some form of paywall as the ISP ratchet their rent-seeking behavior? How will they afford their avocados then???

We're screwed.

 

[Verbose]

I just saw on Dutch news, that the Dutch media tycoon John de Mol, of Talpa and Big Brother, etc is heading to set up an alternative for Google and Facebook, because he does not like the power of those two.

https://nos.nl/nieuwsuur/artikel/2204243-john-de-mol-wil-concurreren-met-google-en-facebook.html

Well, good.

What gives me the gyp these days isn't actually Google. Sure, too much power, too little perspective, BUT...

There is nothing Google does that Baidu doesn't also do. And in effect Baidu in the end services its customers in the interest of the CCP. What the Chinese are now rolling out is this exciting new "social currency" system, where the Chinese government gets the opportunity to rank its entire population according to the online choices they make.

The EU's problem is that unlike China, or Russia, it has allowed its assumed fundamental common interests with the US to allow US tech-giants, like Google and Facebook etc., to completely control that part of the digital landscape in the EU (only going after monopoly-like market distortions). Consequently no European equivalents/alternatives/serious competitors have appeared.

The way the digital world seems to be heading, related to the off-line one, these days, the EU might have widening "search engine & social media" gap relative these other major players. The Chinese in particular clearly are practicing a successful (due to China's sheer size to begin with) form of protectionism here. Baidu and Huawei are not everybody's friends.

And the moment what the Chinese are doing can be interpreted as indicating a relative advantage from, it the debate will circle around to whether other countries are not obliged by necessity to do the same...

 

[Kyriakos]

Apart from net neutrality (which seems to be an isp to site issue? ie sites being able to command favourable stance from isps?) there is a possibly even worse issue with some huge sites (eg google) effectively forcing stuff on unrelated sites. Eg the google supposedly 'non-sexist' attitude , which affected even our little cfc corner of the web
This is quite dangerous, though. How is google not liable to be broken as a monopoly or near-monopoly?

 

[Commodore]

Imagine when everything tied to the internet goes behind some form of paywall as the ISP ratchet their rent-seeking behavior?

Guess we're just going to have to nationalize the internet in the US along with the health insurance industry. I'm not too big a fan of nationalization, but with each passing year these corporations keep acting more and more like feudal lords than private organizations that exist to provide goods and services for a fair price.

 

[Kyriakos]

I think that the main share of the isp market here is controlled by the state telecom company (although itself is partly privatized anyway). Most of the other isps died out when actual broadband became available.

Not that web-use here is cheap; it is (through the state provider) roughly 30 euros/month for web + phone services. Some private isps i use are similar in price.

 

[uppi]

Guess we're just going to have to nationalize the internet in the US along with the health insurance industry. I'm not too big a fan of nationalization, but with each passing year these corporations keep acting more and more like feudal lords than private organizations that exist to provide goods and services for a fair price.

There is no need to go that far. What needs to be nationalized is the access network, i.e., the part of the network that connects the individual customers. It doesn't make economic sense to lay several cables to one customer, so this is a natural monopoly for whoever gets there first. There is no hope of the market being of any benefit there. Once you get to the part of the network that serves many customers, there is a need for multiple connections and space for several providers competing for the best network.

 

[Hrothbern]

There is no need to go that far. What needs to be nationalized is the access network, i.e., the part of the network that connects the individual customers. It doesn't make economic sense to lay several cables to one customer, so this is a natural monopoly for whoever gets there first. There is no hope of the market being of any benefit there. Once you get to the part of the network that serves many customers, there is a need for multiple connections and space for several providers competing for the best network.

I am not sure whether I do understand what you say.

In my mind is the comparison with the public street network.
In general streets and motorways are owned and regulated by the state, and free !
I can go from my home to the entrance of any other home, shop, entertainment centre.
With the physical space limitations of a road I have to accept traffic jams or queues, but with electrons this is avoidable with proper infrastructure
Once inside a shop or entertainment centre it can very well be that I pay money, but that is without the cost to get there in the goods or services rendered.

So why not nationalise that infrastructure completely ?

 

[uppi]

So why not nationalise that infrastructure completely ?

Because it would remove any pressure on the national provider to be efficient. A competitive market demands efficiency and drives drown prices. If there are 5 devices at one location, each serving 500 customers, each of these could be operated by a different company and the company who services its device most efficiently could offer the lowest prices. If customers can be easily switched from one device to the next, they would go to the company offering the lowest prices or the best service. Nationalizing everything would remove that.

However, this can only work when there is actual space for competition. If there is one cable serving one customer, no company would start laying a second cable, because it couldn't be sure whether it could ever recoup that investment. After all the customer could still use the old provider and never switch.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Sheer (sp?) seems to be doing some things right, but he seems to lack substance, personality, and a platform. I'm not worried about the conservatives, for now, and I'm not convinced that their party would find enough suport in their voter base to want to push something like this through. Although to be fair maybe I'm a bit in the dark about the views of Canadian conservatives on net neutrality. I'd think enough canadian conservatives understand the importance of net neutrality - and if it is axed in the U.S. I'd hope that Canadians pay attention to the fallout and would want to prevent the same thing happening here. Having said that, special interest groups have become really good at convincing conservatives of voting against their interests, not only in the U.S. but also elsewhere.. So.. I'm hopeful, I suppose, for now.. but remain skeptical of our whole political system and its efficiency in delivering what's best for the populace

I'm curious as to what Scheer has done at all, let alone done right.

You're correct in saying that he lacks substance, personality, and a platform. He's basically Harper 2.0-in-training. His followers on CBC.ca are constantly praising him, while complaining of CBC's "bias" in not posting "nice" pictures of him (are there any? He looks like a combination between a younger Stephen Harper and a clown).

Keep in mind that the Reformacons tend to vote against whatever the Liberal Party votes in favor of, just because. They put the party first, rather than their constituents.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

Guess we're just going to have to nationalize the internet in the US along with the health insurance industry. I'm not too big a fan of nationalization, but with each passing year these corporations keep acting more and more like feudal lords than private organizations that exist to provide goods and services for a fair price.

The sad thing is that we, the taxpayers, paid for a large portion of the infrastructure for the internet in the first place. I'd like to think of it as less nationalization and more the eviction of bad tenants from our property. We can find better ways to manage this sector of our economy and the longer we put off a shift away from private ISP's the worse the eventual, inevitable shift will be as the internet gets further entrenched in our economy.

 

[innonimatu]

The legislation on this is already lacking. Throttling is a big deal and is hand-waved away as a matter of infrastructure although it could be construed as breaching net neutrality. A total lack of regulation on this, however, would allow ISPs to outright provide certain sections of the internet as though they are cable packages. For example, buying internet and then buying a package that lets you access a handful of social media sites. Everything else would either not be accessible or you would load it at a fraction of your bought speed. You would, in essence, switch from buying global access at a sustained rate to buying limited access at a paid-use rate.

That then enters bribing territory, where a company with a website can pay an ISP to give their site priority. Facebook could, for example, pay Comcast to make any Facebook-owned site get accessed faster on Comcast networks at the cost of other websites. And there is nothing you could do about it except pay the ISP more money to add more sites to your package.

This "threat" makes no sense. An ISP cannot easily "downgrade" service for specific content, because such content is a moving target. If it were easy the "intellectual property" lords would have stamped out "piracy long ago. Content is a moving target, and it is also widely distributed through caches hosted by content delivery networks.
What an ISP might be interested in doing would be to offer "better service" for some specific content that is very well-defined, for which they are contracted. But they already do that anyway now, what is TV channel subscription and delivery? They already prioritize some white-listed traffic. This will not "cost" other websites, because those websites will remain available along with everything else.

The whole "net neutrality" thing is a set of regulations that favor certain companies over others - something for which Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc have lobbied hard because it favors them. They are by far the biggest users of network capacity and do not want to pay proportionally for the upkeep of the infrastructure they use.
Why should I as an ISP customer, who do not use any of these high-bandwidth services, be paying for the necessary one (or even two) orders of magnitude increase in network capacity that the services peddled by these corporations require? "Net neutrality" is a hidden subsidy paid to this handful of "big content" corporations and to its (mostly well-off) users.

What really gets to me is this. The whole frontpage of reddit was filled with threads about net neutrality yesterday. Practically every subreddit had a thread about it, no matter if the subreddit had nothing to do with the US or the internet. Moderators would mostly allow it. Now, if activists would try the same with an actual global issue such as global warming, or something local that causes large-scale human suffering such as the ethnic cleansing in Myanmar, no way that would fly.
Moreover, a moderator at one subreddit that closed a thread about net neutrality with the justification that it had nothing to do with it and that most of its users weren't American got flooded with downvotes. Probably one of the most downvoted posts on that site. Other people in that thread that objected against it received similar treatment, although such lynching-type behaviour is supposed to be illegal on that site.

The whole things reeks to heaven of first-world problem blow out of proportion, and then only a part of it, and along with that you had (have) this mob behaviour towards dissenters. It pisses me off and its frightens me./rant

It's not just first world-problem. It's a damn propaganda campaign and people are falling for it.

The impact will also be on smaller sites. I help run a major fansite in another fandom entirely, and the general assessment is that we're not sure at all we can survive the traffic and related advertising income hit we could potentially take if we get throttled (and we don't have independent means of avoiding throttling).

Hey, look there, worry about getting throttled and the evil IST.
Don't worry about the fact that the "web advertising market" has absolutely been turned into a duopoly, don't look behind the curtain!
And love your Alphabet overlords who are doing the good fight for "net neutrality"...

This is the exact same thing as "free trade, yay, love that". It "empowers" you. Never mind that it creates an environment where transnational corporations prosper (and acquire political power) by arbitrating on differences in wages and disposable income. Never mind the long-term consequences of that. Just keep loving the Amazons of this world.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Here is CBC.ca's take on this issue.

Yes, this is an issue that could have a very noticeable effect on Canada.

 

[Commodore]

Well this is interesting:

Data scientist Jeff Kao says that more than a million public comments in support of the FCC’s planned rollback of net neutrality rules are likely fake. Kao also, by removing the fake pro-repeal comments, concluded that more than 99% of the unique, human-authored comments on the system favored maintaining current net neutrality rules, which prevent internet service providers from charging more for some kinds of data than others.

Kao used a technique known as natural language processing, or NLP, to scan more than 22 million comments submitted to the FCC’s website. He found that more than 17 million were duplicates or close parallels. But many of those were, he writes, “legitimate public mailing campaigns,” which provide boilerplate text for real people to submit.

Intriguingly, the comments that Kao ultimately concluded were ‘fake’ were actually quite diverse in their specific phrasing – but that variation was only superficial. As an example, Kao highlights the anti-net neutrality phrase “Individual citizens, as opposed to Washington Bureaucrats, should be able to select whichever services they desire.” The system used to generate the fake comments swapped out words in such phrases again and again – for instance, switching “people like me” for “individual citizens” and “products” for “services” – to produce 1.3 million superficially distinct variations on the same basic block of text.

Kao sums up the approach as being “like mad-libs, except for [political] astroturf.” And it would have been nearly impossible to spot without NLP, a form of artificial intelligence trained to understand language rather than just detect identical text strings.

Kao’s investigation adds to prior evidence of fake comments on the FCC system, some made using stolen personal information from real people. Another investigation found that many comments supporting net neutrality used fake emails and physical addresses, and were generated using forms such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dear FCC. Fortune’s Aaron Pressman has argued that undermining the public comment system would give a tactical edge to industry opponents of net neutrality, and that seems to be the thinking of the Trump FCC itself, which has refused to cooperate with an investigation into the fake comments by the New York Attorney General. That leaves the public comment process clouded in confusion, rendering real comments from concerned citizens politically meaningless.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/more-1-million-fcc-comments-185030526.html

So basically, the ISPs are now engaging in a massive disinformation campaign to make it look like there is more support for repealing net neutrality than there really is. Words fail me right now. What really gets me is something like this should be completely illegal, yet nothing will happen to ISPs for doing this. Especially since they are using stolen personal information to engage in this disinformation campaign.

And before anyone comes in with a "there's nothing that says it's the ISPs that are doing it" I'll just ask: Who do you think is doing it then? Who else, besides ISPs, have a vested interest in repealing net neutrality regulations?

 

[civvver]

This "threat" makes no sense. An ISP cannot easily "downgrade" service for specific content, because such content is a moving target. If it were easy the "intellectual property" lords would have stamped out "piracy long ago. Content is a moving target, and it is also widely distributed through caches hosted by content delivery networks.
What an ISP might be interested in doing would be to offer "better service" for some specific content that is very well-defined, for which they are contracted. But they already do that anyway now, what is TV channel subscription and delivery? They already prioritize some white-listed traffic. This will not "cost" other websites, because those websites will remain available along with everything else.

The whole "net neutrality" thing is a set of regulations that favor certain companies over others - something for which Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc have lobbied hard because it favors them. They are by far the biggest users of network capacity and do not want to pay proportionally for the upkeep of the infrastructure they use.
Why should I as an ISP customer, who do not use any of these high-bandwidth services, be paying for the necessary one (or even two) orders of magnitude increase in network capacity that the services peddled by these corporations require? "Net neutrality" is a hidden subsidy paid to this handful of "big content" corporations and to its (mostly well-off) users.



It's not just first world-problem. It's a damn propaganda campaign and people are falling for it.



Hey, look there, worry about getting throttled and the evil IST.
Don't worry about the fact that the "web advertising market" has absolutely been turned into a duopoly, don't look behind the curtain!
And love your Alphabet overlords who are doing the good fight for "net neutrality"...

This is the exact same thing as "free trade, yay, love that". It "empowers" you. Never mind that it creates an environment where transnational corporations prosper (and acquire political power) by arbitrating on differences in wages and disposable income. Never mind the long-term consequences of that. Just keep loving the Amazons of this world.

I agree with you, the whole original case stemmed back from when Verizon started throttling netflix because their network couldn't handle the traffic. Basically in their defense they said our network capacity was absolutely fine until netflix came and crushed it so we're asking them to pay some of the costs to upgrade it. Everyone went ape saying verizon was favoring certain content over others, when that wasn't the full truth.

You gotta remember 3 years in the tech world is a long time. These companies weren't quite the behemoths they were today and infrastructure has come a long way. There's no reason for comcast or anyone to throttle netflix anymore, it just wouldn't make sense. They have even upped their arbitrary data caps due to user outcry.

So when people start lameting the fate of netflix and saying how a $1 price increase is going to make them quite netflix, you're being dramatic and not looking at the real issues. It's not like netflix is the good guys and comcast are the bad guys. They're both corporations out for as much profit as possible.

The reason netflix has raised costs is because their spending on content, especially original content, has gone up dramatically. I read somewhere they spend about 8 billion on their original content a year. Compared to around 3.5 billion hbo spends. That's a lot of money. You pay that $1 more cus netflix has more top notch shows now so it's worth it.

What this could hurt is the little guy, but there really aren't any more little guys. No ones coming along to make a digital marketplace that can compete with amazon or a streaming service that can compete with netflix. It just can't be done unless you're already comcast and launch your own. I've heard disney is considering a streaming service. But honestly those guys can't compete with or without net neutrality. I see it as just such a non issue.

If government was truly concerned about us it would be pushing on a municipal level more competition for the physical lines. That's where the issue lies. Most customers, like 50% in the us, only have access to one cable internet provider. Choices are usually dsl through phone lines, one cable provider or satellite. That's not many options so these isps can charge almost whatever they want for internet access. Forget the content and throttling and all that, just basic access they can set their own prices pretty much. The gas company can't do that, they got exclusive contracts to lay pipes to my house and prices are regulated. Same with electricity and water. But cable no one cares. Most municipalities they have exclusive deals to run their lines and no pricing contracts. It's garbage. It's why the us pays the highest prices for average at best internet speeds. Just compare us to Europe and you'll see the difference. We're as fast or maybe a little faster on average but costs are double.

 

[Truthy]

What this could hurt is the little guy, but there really aren't any more little guys. No ones coming along to make a digital marketplace that can compete with amazon or a streaming service that can compete with netflix. It just can't be done unless you're already comcast and launch your own. I've heard disney is considering a streaming service. But honestly those guys can't compete with or without net neutrality. I see it as just such a non issue.

Disney could compete. They own lots of original content under the Disney brand, plus ABC, ESPN, the Star Wars franchise, and all of the Marvel franchises. They can keep buying up more franchises and making more original content like Netflix. But yeah, I doubt net neutrality has much of an impact on Disney's ability to do so.

 

[hobbsyoyo]

I agree with you, the whole original case stemmed back from when Verizon started throttling netflix because their network couldn't handle the traffic. Basically in their defense they said our network capacity was absolutely fine until netflix came and crushed it so we're asking them to pay some of the costs to upgrade it. Everyone went ape saying verizon was favoring certain content over others, when that wasn't the full truth.

You gotta remember 3 years in the tech world is a long time. These companies weren't quite the behemoths they were today and infrastructure has come a long way. There's no reason for comcast or anyone to throttle netflix anymore, it just wouldn't make sense. They have even upped their arbitrary data caps due to user outcry.

So when people start lameting the fate of netflix and saying how a $1 price increase is going to make them quite netflix, you're being dramatic and not looking at the real issues. It's not like netflix is the good guys and comcast are the bad guys. They're both corporations out for as much profit as possible.

The reason netflix has raised costs is because their spending on content, especially original content, has gone up dramatically. I read somewhere they spend about 8 billion on their original content a year. Compared to around 3.5 billion hbo spends. That's a lot of money. You pay that $1 more cus netflix has more top notch shows now so it's worth it.

What this could hurt is the little guy, but there really aren't any more little guys. No ones coming along to make a digital marketplace that can compete with amazon or a streaming service that can compete with netflix. It just can't be done unless you're already comcast and launch your own. I've heard disney is considering a streaming service. But honestly those guys can't compete with or without net neutrality. I see it as just such a non issue.

If government was truly concerned about us it would be pushing on a municipal level more competition for the physical lines. That's where the issue lies. Most customers, like 50% in the us, only have access to one cable internet provider. Choices are usually dsl through phone lines, one cable provider or satellite. That's not many options so these isps can charge almost whatever they want for internet access. Forget the content and throttling and all that, just basic access they can set their own prices pretty much. The gas company can't do that, they got exclusive contracts to lay pipes to my house and prices are regulated. Same with electricity and water. But cable no one cares. Most municipalities they have exclusive deals to run their lines and no pricing contracts. It's garbage. It's why the us pays the highest prices for average at best internet speeds. Just compare us to Europe and you'll see the difference. We're as fast or maybe a little faster on average but costs are double.

Some thoughts -
Another point in favor of forcing competition for physical connections is the fact that ISPs have routinely taken government money to build out the networks. Not only that but they have actively swindled and cheated taxpayers at every corner. I can't remember the exact details but I believe Verizon was given what was essentially a massive giveaway to build out high speed internet in New Jersey under the conditions that it had to be above a certain speed and they had to connect everyone.

Is anyone surprised when the speed produced was a fraction of what was in the contract and that they deliberately avoided running lines into poor neighborhoods? Now, if this was solely a private effort, they could do whatever they want. But it wasn't - it was a public-private partnership with a lot of public money on the line and Verizon did everything they could to take the money and deliver below the minimum. They calculated that the risk of fines and the cost of said fines was low enough that they could cheat the system, get caught and still come out on top financially.

Obviously, this is one company but the point is that these ISPs want to roll back net neutrality on the premise that they some how have to in order to compete when in reality they are anti-competitive, state funded monopolies that have abused the public trust in the name of investor profit.

I do take strong exception to the notion that there are no viable 'little guys'. The cost barrier to entry to most internet-focused businesses is so low (absent net neutrality repeal) that there will always be lots of little guys. It costs very little and takes very little expertise to build up a thriving internet based business compared to the cost of opening a physical store. Those little guys can become the next big guys but not if they are forced out of the market by this anti-competitive, monopolistic behavior.

@Commodore -
The ISPs are taking a page from Russia's playbook on this. Flooding message boards with fake comments is a cheap and effective way to create the illusion of consensus or create chaos. It's particularly effective when your target is effectively a regulator that has already been captured by the industry it regulates and is accepting and welcoming of these sorts of spambot attacks.

Unfortunately, I don't know that there is any laws against these actions that the ISPs are taking.

 

[civvver]

I agree with you about the public monies thing. It's ridiculous and why they are so much like public utilities in my opinion.

I think ultimately this will never get solved on a federal level though because I'm certain the telecoms have powerful lobbies. What it's going to take is a major metropolitan area invoking some kind of eminent domain and taking those lines, which I'm not sure is even legal, and then leasing them back to the isps at fixed rates. Alternatively they could pay to have their own lines installed and then lease them out at fixed rates. I mean surely someone would jump on to get that contract as it's basically free money. I guess it's all about cost and whether a municipality could do this cost effectively where the taxes needed to pay for this save the consumer money on their internet bill. I have no idea what it would cost, but would you be willing to pay an two hundred bucks a year in property taxes if your cable bill dropped from $70 a month to $20? Of course you would, and that's what I'm talking about here, municipalities becoming creative in this way. The problem is they are also greedy, they want money but don't want to raise taxes so it's easier to give exclusive contracts to companies and then just let them do what they want.

I just feel like the net neutrality issue is overblown as long as they don't straight up censor. There are way more serious offenses.

 

[innonimatu]

Yes, the problem of the communications infrastructure is that (as with roads, water distribution, power lines) it makes no economic sense to build it competitively. These are natural monopolies, cheaper to build and adequately maintain if they are handled as a single network, by a single entity.

If laws were optimized for the best use of resources they'd encourage monopolies handled by local governments (more efficient because they can better ascertain the local needs), with the use of the infrastructure leased to whomever needed it for business or whatever.

 

[uppi]

This "threat" makes no sense. An ISP cannot easily "downgrade" service for specific content, because such content is a moving target. If it were easy the "intellectual property" lords would have stamped out "piracy long ago. Content is a moving target, and it is also widely distributed through caches hosted by content delivery networks.
What an ISP might be interested in doing would be to offer "better service" for some specific content that is very well-defined, for which they are contracted. But they already do that anyway now, what is TV channel subscription and delivery? They already prioritize some white-listed traffic. This will not "cost" other websites, because those websites will remain available along with everything else.

What would be the point of prioritizing traffic if it is not at the cost of other websites? If the networks had enough capacity for everything, nothing would be delayed and there would be no need to rank traffic by importance. But in reality, ISPs do not want to spend too much and overbook the lines as much as they can get away with. Once the customers actually start using what they paid for, the available bandwidth per customer is reduced to a trickle. If the ISPs start to prioritize traffic in such a situation, everything else will be throttled. As long as the prioritization is only for a small amount of the traffic, there is not much impact. But without net neutrality, they will come to an agreement with every major content provider and implement priorities for those. Once almost all traffic has a priority, every content provider that does not have a deal is going to be throttled to oblivion, because there will be very little bandwidth available next to all the prioritized traffic.

The whole "net neutrality" thing is a set of regulations that favor certain companies over others - something for which Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc have lobbied hard because it favors them. They are by far the biggest users of network capacity and do not want to pay proportionally for the upkeep of the infrastructure they use.
Why should I as an ISP customer, who do not use any of these high-bandwidth services, be paying for the necessary one (or even two) orders of magnitude increase in network capacity that the services peddled by these corporations require? "Net neutrality" is a hidden subsidy paid to this handful of "big content" corporations and to its (mostly well-off) users.
.

If you don't use any high-bandwidth service, then don't order a high-bandwidth plan. That way you won't have to pay for it. The cost for expanding the network will be paid by the internet users one way or the other. Be it directly to the ISPs by subscription fees or indirectly to the ISPs via the content providers. If you dislike the services of one content provider, you can choose another. But without net neutrality, too much power is put in the hands of whoever owns the cable to your house and nobody else is going to want to lay another cable.