Most of my career has been technology-oriented, and Internet access is absolutely central to my life.  Essentially everything I do except cooking and grocery shopping involves the Internet in some way.  It is my lifeline to the world; after power and water, there is no service more important to me.  Trying to live without it would be extremely difficult; I'm not entirely confident, at this point, that this would even be possible.  Water interruptions of a day or two are actually somewhat less disruptive for me than Internet failures.  (Over the long-term, water loss would be more serious, but over the short term, Internet outages hurt much more.) 

When I buy service from an ISP, what I expect is this: a working IP address, and unfiltered access to the Internet as a whole, limited by the amount of bandwidth I'm paying for.  I expect to be paying for the size of the pipe, not how much I use it.  I moved to Chattanooga explicitly to get into the EPB service zone, a municipal ISP that offers exactly this service, with very high bandwidth limits because of the fiber-optic network they have built here.  

And that's it.  That's what I buy from my ISP.  I run everything else from there.  I run my own domain.  I run my own DNS, my own webserver, my own email.  I manage my own online presence, and expect to be able to buy any service offered online that fits within my bandwidth constraints. I depend on the ability to talk with anyone, anywhere, and to deal with any provider of services freely, without having to worry about my ISP's opinion. 

Crucially, I believe it's part of the deal that all my traffic is treated the same as everyone else's traffic, and is handled with the same priority no matter where it's going.  It's not my provider's business how I'm using my connection. I've paid for my megabit limits, and from there, they have no business monitoring or decreeing who I talk to, for how long, or about what.  Any upstream throttling on their part, in my opinion, means that they were lying to me about what they were selling.  If they're selling me a gigabit of data for $70/mo, which is the deal I'm getting now, then it's their responsibility to provide me a gigabit of data on demand, from anywhere.  If they can't provide that, then they were misrepresenting the service they were selling me.  Just like with any other professional service, this should not be allowed. 

This is what the net neutrality debate really comes down to; providers are lying about what they are selling.  They don't *really* have enough bandwidth to deliver what they promise.  They could, if they chose, through the simple expedient of accepting lower short-term profits to bring in more bandwidth, or the even simpler solution of making smaller promises in exchange for their monthly fees.  

Instead, they're trying to lie about how much bandwidth is available, and then choke people off who use "too much", despite the fact that the ISP is the one who controls the entire process.  An end user CANNOT USE too much bandwidth.  They can only use what their local pipe provides.  If they are using too much, that means the ISP failed in its most basic task, provisioning its upstream supply to match its downstream demand.  Both supply and demand are 100% within the control of the ISP, and any failure on either end is THEIR fault, not the customer's.  

Underprovisioning is a perfectly fine thing for ISPs to do, as long as the paying customers can't tell that it's happening.  As network engineers, it's their responsibility to fulfill the promises they've made, completely and exactly.  If the contention ratio is high enough that customers can detect the loss of speed, then it's their responsibility to provision more backhaul, reducing contention until it becomes invisible again.  As professional sellers of bandwidth, that is their job.  This is their *entire* job.  It is the reason they exist. 

But that's expensive.  And it requires marketing to be honest about what customers are actually buying, which is typically something more like "a 2 megabit commit, burstable to 50mbit."

If the FCC simply required all bandwidth be sold in this matter, with commit and burst ratings, the entire net neutrality argument would disappear instantly.  Customers would know what they were actually buying, and ISPs would have hard performance metrics they needed to meet. The problem would be gone overnight.  No more bandwidth caps and overcharging, no more zero-rating to play favorites with some providers, just a simple commit/burst rating.  This encourages competition, it gives customers an exact figure they can depend on, and it gives ISPs an exact target to meet.  

I don't expect you'll adopt this permanent solution, however.  It's obvious to me that this neutrality repeal process is pre-determined.  You're not actually listening to these comments; instead, you are gathering them because you are required by law to do so, and will proceed to ignore everything the public is telling you, in favor of paying attention to the high-powered lobbyists for the firms you plan to work for when you're not with the FCC anymore.  

You're going to loot us and put the money in the pockets of big ISPs, so that you can go get a big paycheck in your next 'consulting' job.  You are corrupt, and bilking the public for your own benefit.   

Unfortunately, we probably can't stop you, but we can see what you're doing, and despise you for it.  This is not government, this is kleptocracy.