What is this, North Korea?
Wait what? Doesn't everybody want to pay for access, then pay for a service that uses that access, then pay the access provider again for the ability to also access the already paid for service because it turns out it wasn't included in the initial access? How can this not be a good thing? /s
Seriously it's like paying for water, then buying a hot water heater only to find out unless you pay more for the water you can't use the hot water heater you bought because that particular hot water heater company didn't pay ~~kickbacks to~~ off your water provider (which I might add, even if you did buy an approved one the kickbacks are factored into the price).
And good luck finding a different water supplier - the one in your area already bought up all the other water companies decades ago (or came to ~~price fixing agreements~~ "magically paralleled pricing" with them), and then bought the gas companies too so they can raise prices on your hot water from all directions. sigh analogies are too fun.
> and good luck finding a different water supplier
And that's just it. The cable companies are monopolistic. If the market were free and you could choose which cable company you wanted, we probably wouldn't need the protection of Net Neutrality. But it isn't, and undoing Net Neutrality is just as your analogy described it. You can't even get another water supplier if your water is poisoned, and giving them the cable company free reign over your content is like giving them permission to poison the water.
Privatizing a government run program such as the FCC screams "Fuck You" to the consumers who rely on the government to prevent corporate fuckery.
It really does. The Fuck you, I got mine mentality, epitomized. Whatever the cable companies' lobbyists promised the three anti-neutrality dudes expected to do this, it must have been huge, because they're going down in history as some of the hugest pieces of shit ever and they don't even seem to mind.
Indeed, watching the cable companies eat up regional competition and pursue so called "vertical integration" even here in Canada I've long feared something like this to be inevitable. I mean they've made it pretty clear they all (cable/sat/movie/music leeches, 3 lettered agencies) seem to want to regress the internet to a captive portal basically turning it all back into what AOL used to be, where they curate and control the brand and message much like news media of old... and if you don't have the capital up front, good luck with that failed startup. Basically also censorship heaven, where all unique thoughts go to die.
Meantime I'm holding my breath that they'll update these cable set top boxes to something that isn't outperformed by a 3 year old $70 smart watch. But hey, they had record profits in recession years so they must be too poor to invest in further infrastructure unless they bleed everyone some more.
Why is your government even tabling legislation designed to benefit corporations rather than its citizens?