"net neutrality" was a laundered form of kony2012-type slacktivism and people still won't accept that to this day
Net Neutrality is funny bc it was literally just Obama imposing price controls & product bans on the internet by underhanded regulatory fiat in ways that bizarrely benefited Netflix & YouTube & Reddit, & then—when the judiciary & Trump/Pai rolled this back—Netflix & YouTube & Reddit whipped up an insane moral panic about how this repeal of absurd recent regs would end “the open internet” (& then Obama’s coalition actually censored the web in completely unrelated ways).
It was maybe the 1st of the “whole-of-society” mobilizations which defined Woke1 & ResistLibs, & it oddly presented as “apolitical” & “nerdy” & “libertarian” while promoting an obviously politicized & retarded & socialist narrative. Infographics about how undoing Obama’s brand new “rent control but for bandwidth” would cause “walled gardens” & censorship, as the libs retreated into walled gardens & censorship; John Oliver propaganda claiming to be tech-savvy, to claim that it’s *actually* tyranny if tenured “apolitical” bureaucrats *can’t* lawlessly impose their party’s policy preferences on the web indefinitely; lefties all rebelliously marching in lock step against “corporations maaan,” by fighting for the right of Netflix & YT & Reddit to freely clog the commons without even being allowed to pay for or create private plots…
The basics: in the 1990s, Congress updated its 1930s laws on telecom regulation, specifically to create a relatively unregulated “Title I” category, specifically for internet providers like ISPs (to insulate them from the heavy regs that controlled eg phone lines); partly thanks to this permissive regulatory environment, the internet grew like gangbusters, so in 2010 Obama had his tenured bureaucrats at FCC tell ISPs that even tho they’re *by law* “Title I,” they should “act like” they’re “Title II” heavily-regulated “common carriers” (like phone lines) in certain respects, “or else”; the courts repeatedly threw this out (eg in 2010’s Comcast v FCC & 2014’s Verizon v FCC, which were among other things literally about whether it was legal for ISPs to charge Netflix more for using way more bandwidth), so in 2015 Obama’s Netflix-Occupied Govt (NOG) had his tenured bureaucrats at FCC redefine ISPs as Title II Common Carriers.
Except, well, even that skips over how Obama’s own appointee to head FCC began the process of (re-)legalizing “fast lanes” in late 2014, leading to the first wave of John Oliver Netflix Reddit moral panics about “ending the open internet,” so then Obama released a slick YouTube video publicly instructing this unaccountable tenure-protected “independent” agency to explicitly reclassify ISPs as Title II common carriers, despite Congress explicitly classifying them as Title I; so the FCC reversed course again, & in 2015 “net neutrality” began (& lasted less than 3 years total, but was presented as “immutable” & “fundamental” to the internet as we know it). Was arguably the opening salvo in the aggressive politicization of tenure-protected “independent agencies” during Woke1/Resist.
What “net neutrality” actually means is that ISPs are banned from eg asking content providers to pay more for capacity at certain speeds (eg if they use more of it), & banned from eg asking content consumers to accept slower speeds for certain content (eg if it uses more capacity); so video platforms like Netflix & YouTube & aggregators like Reddit use *way* more bandwidth than eg emails & wikis, but can’t be charged more or slowed down for using more, & consumers likewise can’t be given carrots or sticks based on the composition of their data usage. So in practice you just get Netflix et al clogging the web for everyone, & getting subsidized by every bandwidth-light use of the web, & everyone’s thus under-incented to build out capacity; & consumers are banned from getting cheaper data plans if they agree to not use it for streaming. No wonder Netflix etc fought for this big subsidy—even tho it slowed internet for everyone (continued below).