My thoughts:
1. Censorship or dealing with illegal activity is the role of governments, not ISPs.
2. Net neutrality just means that your ISP can't start blocking up one site versus another. Either slowing it or making it inaccessible. Pretty much end of story. The ramifications of that are pretty significant, though.
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Let's talk about roads. Ignoring toll roads (which everyone loves /s), all public roads are available for anyone to go on at any time, leading them to any eventual destination. Mazda owners don't get a special lane, and you don't get put in a bumpy lane with lots of nails because you're headed to Target instead of Walmart.
Private roads are like private parts of the internet: you can't go into any company's intranet and do whatever, just like you can't go on their private roads. It's trespassing in both cases.
(Toll roads don't really have an analogue per se, because they're a way of the government getting funding for a specific road and then getting people who use it to pay for it over a period of time. So hence the ignoring of that one.)
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Back to the internet. Let's address the concerns in a Q&A format, even though these aren't really Q's in all cases.
Q: I don't think scat porn should be easily accessible, or child porn or whatever.
A: Cool. That has nothing to do with this debate. Get the FBI, or Interpol, or whoever else on that. We're talking about the roads here, and "road owners." If someone is doing something illegal in a house (server), then go to the HOUSE and arrest them. There are already laws about all this. Could they do with better or worse enforcement? Again, that's a completely separate topic.
Q: Aren't there already "backdoor deals" for things like Netflix?
A: I don't know, maybe. But probably not, to be honest. It's not supposed to be. They have a conduit into the central backbone that they pay for on their end. Then on OUR end, as consumers, we have our own smaller conduits that we pay for (to our ISP) to get either Netflix content or whatever else we please.
Q: What's the business about throttling sites?
A: If Netflix is slower or faster today is supposed to be either the fault of Netflix, or our general connection speed, or our proximity to the nearest Netflix provider. Aka, these are factors relating to things like how much Netflix pays for its bandwidth (which is between it and its ISP), how much you pay for your ISP (between you and your ISP), and general physical things like the speed of light (seriously) and where Netflix puts up data centers.
There's this whole section in the middle that is public transport that is the "backbone" of the internet, and none of that is supposed to be preferential toward or against Netflix. For that matter, your own small conduit into the backbone isn't supposed to prefer Netflix or not prefer it. It's just data.
Q: Why the fuss if backdoor deals can already possibly be done?
A: Because look at cable TV. They can literally pick and choose what to give you. They can create "packages." You want sports? That's extra money, please. Etc. Right now that's illegal on the internet: your ISP can't charge you for access to Netflix. They might charge you for data usage, sure, but that data could be from Netflix, Youtube, or anywhere else. How much data you use is separate from where you get it from.
Without net neutrality, ISPs can get up to all sorts of hijinks in terms of making certain sites slower or inaccessible. Some you might see, such as "hi consumer, you must now buy the social package to get access to facebook, and facebook gets none of that money by the way," and others you might not see , such as "hi new Netflix competitor, looks like you've got a promising business there, you'd better pay us X amount of extra money or we'll make sure that your data is always transmitted at half the speed that Netflix's is -- to everyone -- making them think you just can't manage your junk."
Q: I like to research both sides of an issue before making a decision.
A: Not a question, I know. And I 10000% agree with that sentiment. This is a super strange issue in that there is literally NO REASONABLE OTHER SIDE for consumers. Comcast and whatnot want to be able to charge various other parties (companies and individuals) more money for things they already provide at a given price.
There are a lot of polarizing issues in the world, like abortion or gun control or whatever, and you can see the rationale behind both sides even if you vehemently disagree with whichever side: if you take the premise of the side you disagree with as true, then you would probably agree with them, but the premise is disagreed-on.
Net neutrality is not like that. The other side is Comcast and friends going "we want to be unfettered in our ability to think up new ways to make money without providing new services." That is demonstrably bad for everyone except ISPs. It's not good for businesses, consumers, or anyone except ISPs and the people they pay off.
The lobbyists against net neutrality have done a super good job of confusing the issue and making it sound like a polarizing issue that people should take sides on. But really this isn't about over-regulation or whatever. It's more of a "we want to hang onto the rules that say you can't poop in the pool and then charge people to clean it up as a way to make money."
