From Wikipedia:
Net neutrality is the principle that
Internet service providers must treat all data on the
Internet the same, and not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication.
[1] For instance, under these principles, internet service providers are unable to intentionally block, slow down or charge money for specific websites and online content.
The term was coined by
Columbia University media law professor
Tim Wu in 2003, as an extension of the longstanding concept of a
common carrier, which was used to describe the role of telephone systems.
[2][3][4][5]
A widely cited example of a violation of net neutrality principles was the Internet service provider
Comcast's secret slowing (
"throttling") of uploads from
peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) applications by using forged packets.
[6] Comcast did not stop blocking these protocols, like
BitTorrent, until the FCC ordered them to stop.
[7] In another minor example, The Madison River Communications company was fined US$15,000 by the FCC, in 2004, for restricting their customers' access to
Vonage, which was rivaling their own services.
[8] AT&T was also caught limiting access to
FaceTime, so only those users who paid for AT&T's new shared data plans could access the application.
[9] In July 2017, Verizon Wireless was accused of throttling after users noticed that videos played on Netflix and Youtube were slower than usual, though Verizon commented that it was conducting "network testing" and that net neutrality rules permit "reasonable network management practices".
[10]
Research suggests that a combination of
policy instruments will help realize the range of valued political and economic objectives central to the network neutrality debate.
[11] Combined with strong public opinion, this has led some governments to regulate
broadband Internet services as a
public utility, similar to the way electricity, gas, and the water supply are regulated, along with limiting providers and regulating the options those providers can offer.
[12]
My take:
The death of net neutrality allows the ISP to extort a ransom from a website, or risk having traffic from the ISP's customers to the website blocked. The big sites, like Netflix, can afford to pay the ransom, but the end result is that the next Netflix faces an insurmountable barrier to entry. Fairness implies that the ISP charge its customer for the traffic going to the customer, not the non-customer website. It gets very messy when the ISP also has content sites and blocks or throttles access to competitors.