> I'm skeptical of introducing federal intervention preemptively as it seems like a natural extension would be censorship.
Slippery slope fallacy.
The most natural side-effect from lack of net neutrality is throttling, ISPs can throttle high-bandwidth applications and ask them to pay up, if competitors pay up they have an advantage so it forces everyone to pay up for access to non-throttled customers. Smaller companies/startups will be in absolute disadvantage.
Now imagine throttling for almost any kind of application: game providers not paying for "premium access" get a 500ms delay, messaging apps not paying will have media delivery throttled (good luck sending a 20MiB video to your family when the ISP throttle it to 256kbps), it opens a new way for ISPs to monetise their networks, it opens a new way for bigger players to subjugate competition that doesn't have deep pockets.
ISPs experimenting with throttling has already happened, when data caps were a bigger thing they also sold "partnerships" with apps that wouldn't be counted towards the data cap.
it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope. Netflix was the most obvious example. As well as ISPs benefiting their own streaming services over others (borderline censorship).
And it can't really be contested by customers because many only have 2-3 choices in their area. If they all collude...
> it's not really a slippery slope when we're already this far down the slope
My slippery slope comment was about their jump to censorship being the end result, I completely agree with you as I said the same on the other paragraphs.
Slippery slope fallacy.
The most natural side-effect from lack of net neutrality is throttling, ISPs can throttle high-bandwidth applications and ask them to pay up, if competitors pay up they have an advantage so it forces everyone to pay up for access to non-throttled customers. Smaller companies/startups will be in absolute disadvantage.
Now imagine throttling for almost any kind of application: game providers not paying for "premium access" get a 500ms delay, messaging apps not paying will have media delivery throttled (good luck sending a 20MiB video to your family when the ISP throttle it to 256kbps), it opens a new way for ISPs to monetise their networks, it opens a new way for bigger players to subjugate competition that doesn't have deep pockets.
ISPs experimenting with throttling has already happened, when data caps were a bigger thing they also sold "partnerships" with apps that wouldn't be counted towards the data cap.