http://consumerist.com/2015/02/24/these-2-charts-from-comcast-show-why-net-neutrality-is-vital/The 2010 neutrality rules — which Comcast, as a condition of its merger with NBC, has promised to abide by through 2018 — forbade blocking, throttling, or prioritizing content. In early 2014, a federal appeals court sided with Verizon and gutted those rules, finding that the FCC didn’t have authority to regulate broadband because of the way it had previously been defined by the Commission.
And so Wheeler’s proposal seeks to reinstate those rules by reclassifying broadband as the vital piece of infrastructure it has become in the last decade.
Scaremongering opponents of neutrality claim it will hurt innovation or create government-run networks. But they gloss over the fact that neutrality rules existed for four years during which telecom and broadband companies spent an unprecedented amount of money developing new technologies.
And reclassification does not in any way turn broadband over to the government; nor will there be any new taxes because the Internet Tax Freedom Act bans state and local taxes on broadband access, regardless of the FCC’s classification of the service.
Net neutrality is about nothing more than keeping Comcast, Verizon and the rest of them from extorting money from consumers and content providers just because they control the Internet off-ramps.
