Opinion of Net Neutrality

[muon2]

That would be true if the first time, the money went to build an 8 lane Interstate and the Oregon trail got built instead.

Compared to what came before, it was an 8 lane interstate,  I doubt that there are many here who remember when a 2.4Kbps was a high speed home computer connection.

I very much remember that day. But what concerns me more is how connections through ISPs worked back then. Before the World Wide Web in 1992 most users signed up with a service like Compuserve, the Source, Prodigy, or AOL to connect to the internet (I had subscriptions to all of those at one time). These were private providers and they featured links to their partner services. If you wanted to get to some other website you had to know what you were doing, since the ISP didn't make it easy to go away from their partners.

When the WWW came along with its standardized page format and transfer protocols it became much easier. All you had to do was get to any search engine that was equipped for the WWW and you could easily navigate to other sites beyond those featured by the ISP. Before long the ISPs gave up trying to feature partner sites and those sites migrated to the WWW format. Instead ISPs and search engines switched to an advertising-based model and used page placement ads to cover costs.

What I would not like to see is a return to the pre-WWW days when navigating to non-partnered sites becomes difficult or unusually slow. I prefer to see the internet as a form of a common carrier, recognizing that there is information modification and storage at each end, but that the transaction that moves the data from place to place is more like telephone service than not.