The mistaken concept that startups would have to pay "for the same" seems to hinge on not understanding that bandwidth cost is relative to bandwidth use. Nobody else even sits on the same order of magnitude as Google and Netflix: These are the only two companies who will need to pay extra. (Combined, Google and Netflix together account for up to 70-80% of all US Internet traffic.) If anyone else was ever to be charged extra, comparatively, it would be ridiculously minimal in comparison.

You are working on an assumption that any charges would be based off of usage in a logical manner.

In reality Netflix might offer to pay a little more to comcast if comcast is willing to up the costs on their competitors, or other such arrangement. The problem with removing NN is that we're inviting oli/monolopy forming to occur, which the free market cannot deal with.

Title II actually exempts telecoms from FTC regulation. Rather than pushing for special-cased laws to mandate how the Internet is operated (which bans a lot of things I don't think are justifiable to actually ban), we should be pushing for a reawakening of antitrust enforcement. Anticompetitive behavior is already illegal, and the tools already exist, in law, to deal with it. Let's get the FTC back in the business of busting up monopolies and fining anticompetitive behavior, regardless of what industry they are.

Anticompetitive behavior is a problem that exists well beyond just telecoms, and getting back into trustbusting would do wonders across the board for consumers.

Google, one of net neutrality's principal backers, obviously is not fond of this approach.

Nope that's not a mistaken understanding on my part at all.

Obviously you pay for what you use. but say a start-up starts blowing up and in the way of things isn't making money yet (as many early stage start-ups don't)

If their niche happens to be a bandwidth heavy one the ISPs can and probably will start levying charges on them as they grow, which the start-up will be in a poor position to pay.

and that doesn't even touch on the possibly anti-competitive aspect.

Say an ISP has a competing service, do you really think they won't try to throttle start-ups in that area using bandwidth charging? Given that US ISPs already have a record of doing exactly that.

First of all, Google and Netflix together are around 80% of all bandwidth use. The amount of cost on them is so insurmountably higher, by the time anyone could ever rival their bills, they would be in a better position to pay it.

And it doesn't have to touch on the anti-competitive aspect: The FCC is not an antitrust regulator. The FTC is. And revoking Title II places ISPs back under the FTC's purview. Anticompetitive behavior should be addressed by the agency charged with ensuring competition.

You appear to be overlooking that the ISP's customers already pay the ISP for bandwidth.

I pay Comcast for 1 TB/month. Why should Comcast be allowed to say that I cannot use some of my 1 TB/month on Netflix and Google unless Netflix and Google (who are NOT customers of Comcast) pay Comcast?

Isn't this kind of arbitrary? You frame it as "paying twice". What about the framing that you're normally "paying half"? If Comcast had Google's margins, we could argue that they're pricing unfairly. But Alphabet has 2-3x Comcast's profit margins. I feel about this argument the way I feel about militancy over airline baggage handling fees. Sure: it's obnoxious. But the airlines used to bake that directly into the fare.

I'm not saying Comcast should hold other video services for ransom; I'm just pointing out an oddity of the argument you're using.

Does it really cost Comcast more if I use my 1 TB to watch YouTube videos or Netflix videos than it does if I use it to watch, say PornHub videos, or instructional chess videos at chess.com?

If it actually does cost them more, then shouldn't they be trying to bill their own customers for what it costs? (I don't believe Pai for a second when his document claims that ISPs cannot figure out how to bill users for bandwidth).

What will they do if Netflix tells its customers on Comcast that their bill is going up unless they switch to accessing Netflix via a VPN? Will Comcast then start blocking VPNs? So then I cannot work at home? (My office went 100% work from home a couple months ago, so that would be very irksome).

How is their cost basis on specific part of their business relevant? We're obviously not entitled to any one price point, much as HN threads seem to believe we are. Comcast's margins hover around 10-12%. If they need to keep them there, they can raise their consumer prices, or find alternative revenue streams. Why is it better that they raise prices for consumers?

My beef is that they sold me what purports to be internet service, not some kind of CompuServe or Prodigy or GEnie like service.

Finding alternate revenue streams is fine...but I don't see why they should be allowed to stop me from using the service they sold me in order to try to convince some entity, which they have no relationship with other than that they and that entity have mutual customers, to pay them something.

I'm fine with it if my ISP wants to find alternative revenue by establishing some kind of relationship with outside sites and selling them something, just as long as the ISP continues to provide the service they sold me, on the terms they sold it to me.

For example, something like AT&T's "sponsored data" is fine. That lets sites pay AT&T to not count data AT&T users exchange with those sites against those user's AT&T plan data limits.

That's fine because AT&T's customers get the service they paid for. If a site buys "sponsored data" some AT&T customers get more than they paid for. If a site does not buy "sponsored data", those AT&T users that use the site still get what they paid for.

The EFF and other leading net neutrality proponents would probably disagree with me on "sponsored data". This is the kind of thing I was thinking of in another comment when I talked about trying to shove things into net neutrality that do not belong there. Yes, "sponsored data" favors bigger, established content providers, so could harm competition. We've got antitrust law to deal with that.

I'd argue Netflix has a more clear impact on their business. As 30% or more of their traffic, any given business decision by Netflix can have a significant impact on an ISP's business. A change by Netflix (like switching to 4K) could have huge impact on Comcast's need to rapidly upgrade lines to handle it. Whereas a smaller provider wouldn't affect them or their priorities as much.

When an airline charges you extra to check bags, they are charging you for a service they provide. This is annoying, but we as a society agree that people generally have the right to do this and it is in society's interest that they have that right.

When an ISP charges a service provider to get access to their customers, they are leveraging their monopoly on those customers to extract rents from other service providers. What is the social value of this behavior?

The main problem with this line of argument is that is can be applied to anything an ISP does, because there is of course no functioning market for last-mile connectivity in most areas. A real fix would be unbundling or something else that split allowed there to be a functioning market over shared infrastructure. That doesn't mean we can't stop them from rent-seeking from other firms in the "short" term. Doing so is in line with Republicans' claimed pro-business stance.