I’m a constituent of yours from Newton, Massachusetts. I use the internet every day for business as well as to get my news. I no longer depend on TV or radio for news and commentary. Most TV and radio news available in the U.S. (with the possible exception of the BBC) seems to be contaminated by bias and corporate interests. If we allow the speed of internet access to be determined by the the content (e.g. corporate content valuable to the ISPs being fast, and non-profit or independent content being slow) then that is an effective chokehold on internet freedom of speech. The internet is the last media outlet where freedom of speech truly exists.

The argument that big media “owns the pipes” is ridiculous, since internet infrastructure is heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars. Allowing corporations
to choke access to certain content provides (those that do not provide extra profits to the ISPs on top of what customers are charged for service) would be a bit like allowing Walmart to block roads that do not lead to their stores. Is
that the kind of internet we want?

Companies subject to effective competition don’t go around complaining about getting too much business in the form of “exafloods”. Instead, they’re usually delighted.

It’s not suprising that network monopolies and duopolies not subject to effective competition would attempt to exploit the extra business, since they’re already in the business of restricting output and raising price in the opposite direction of competitive companies.

The “exaflood” myth was an early talking point scripted by the public relations industry several years ago when developing the campaign against net neutrality - a phrase like “bandwidth hogs”, it’s designed to be catchy, understood and repeated often.

The objective is to characterize an “exaflood” as some impending “congestion collapse” from which the internet and its users must be protected by the wonders of a “free market” which is posed to self destruct and convert to totalitarianism if net neutrality prevails.

When challenged about the harms of net neutrality, its opponents fail to validate the claims. No, it doesn’t prevent the management of congestion, the setting of prices and TOS or the technical changes to allocate bandwidth to new applications like P2P. And it certainly doesn’t interfere with enforcing property rights to content or protecting the network from dangers such as hacker attacks.

Net neutrality is no more complicated and repressive than say, a speed limit, an age limit or a law that prevents race and gender discrimination when selling most any goods or services. It simply requires that internet content be treated equally on a level playing field in terms of access and provision by producers and consumers of content.

For example, if traffic is to be “prioritized”, it should be done by making available differences in bandwidth quality between the worst forms of congestion (subject to serious delays or interruption) and the most premium always-on bandwidth - open neutrally to any content that desires to use any particular bandwidth tier.

Opponents of net neutrality turn this proposition on its head by claiming falsely that the provider must control the priority of traffic at any given time based on how certain protocols and applications are tied technically to specific uses of internal bandwidth, but this doesn’t make sense.

Once those decisions are made, then content producers and consumers decide which quality bandwidth tier they want to use. If congestion occurs due to an “exaflood” or any other reason, the structure of the bandwidth tiers determines how it’s managed, with the premium tiers protected the most from congestion and the lowest quality tiers forced to endure it.

Meanwhile, don’t forget from an overall, longer run perspective, the providers have an incentive to restrict capacity and raise price, for example when Verizon lays fiber to the curb and then cuts the copper cable on the way out, even as Homeland Security preaches the virtues of redundant paths in networks.

Many different kinds of congestion and “exafloods” are neutrally managed and controlled and it’s not subjective, suppressive or otherwise difficult to define as claimed falsely by opponents of net neutrality.

Instead it’s a straightforward version of what’s found in competitive markets and that’s the problem - net neutrality stands in the way of access to enormous monopoly profits available to broadband providers through the non-neutral control of content.