Paragraph 82 asks for input on whether throttling should be regulated. In the past ISPs have throttled content based on their own determination of what was lawful or permissible, and had to be forced to stop in the courts. Isn’t it possible they could do this again? I’m also concerned by mobile providers who say a plan is “unlimited,” but when you exceed the data cap, only throttle sites and services that aren’t part of their approved zero-rating network. 

ISPs entitled to use their own discretion throttling network traffic by any metrics other than best-effort network performance are granted unreasonable power over the availability of third-party services to their users in subtle yet profoundly powerful ways. Technologies inherent to the makeup of our global data networks will abort or ignore traffic which takes too long to respond. This occurs for a variety of reasons like scarcity of network resources, to mitigate or prevent a number of various network attacks, because of automatic routing behaviors on the various and sundry links among available circuits given the number, size and character of traffic present on each at the time -- the list goes on. 

When Internet Service Providers have latitude to alter which sources, destinations, times, devices, and other conditions lead to preferential, non-uniform service, some amount of accidental censorship and prejudicial discrimination by simple accident becomes unavoidable. Further, the failure of 
an ISP to accurately and precisely map non-uniform service to fair and reasonable business criteria will not appear to end-users with an explanation of the forces at work. Those inequties created will appear in the much more insidious form of degrated network reliability. Telecommunications networks 
are some of the most complex assempblies of equipment and behaviors ever constructed by mankind. They are so geographically expansive that even users technologically savvy enough to understand many of the technical factors in play rarely have more than a local perspective on network conditions. Effects of unfair traffic shaping are practically unprovable to the individual, not to mention virtually anyone else without a huge sample of network performance from a broad cross-section of the network participants. As the network operators themselves are the primary, perhaps exclusive, source of such data, a clear conflict of interests between thrift and institutional rigor arises. 

Without ample oversight to guarantee neutral treatment of my packets alongside those travelling to or from my fellow Americans in different socioeconomic, racial, political, or commercial communities than mine, it becomes inescapable that, by nefarious intent or not, network operators will eventually marginalize certain groups, parties, classes, or other walks of life disproportionately. 

In an age of near-instantaneous telecommunications, words and opinions can be felt around the world in moments. So too, can a conspicuous silence in the process of national policy debate of an endless roster of pressing future issues.

The international community now recognizes internet access as a human right, because we are communally greater in this age than we were individually. Archimedes of Syracuse is credited with saying "give me a long enough lever and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world." To allow network operators carte blanche over our modern means of human communication and collaboration, we provide those relatively few, private organizations both the lever and the pivot to make subtle, far-reaching adjustments to where we will find the world tomorrow. 

To be fair, my fears are not for movie-plot conspiracies for electioneering via digital-demographic Gerrymandering, for brand warefare or collusion harming the American consumer, or for some grand scheme giving rise to wider and wider gaps in markets' efficiency to accelerate plutocratic agendas. These may be possible, but instead my fears stem from a respect for the ever-present specter of unavoidable mistakes, lapses in judgement, and omissions of due diligence which all humans make on occasion. Without regulatory incentive to act mindfully of the great power and responsibility in the hands of ISPs, the explosion of innovation, entrepreneurship, education, and high-speed commerce that America has enjoyed since the rise of the Internet is now at sufficient scale in recent years to have profound and unforseen social and economic impacts on the country. 

More and more, Americans rely upon telecommunications, as I do now, for the means of engaging with the institutions of their governance and policy. If any forces more under human control than the laws of nature and the reasonable costs of operating those telecommunication systems -- the cost of postage, if you will -- cause that civic mechanism to be faster, more reliable, or more available to one segment of society than another, is that not a miscarriage of values central to our great nation? Who will be held to account?

Profits are possible without subverting technologies humanity has come to depend upon. And of course, life will go on if protections for users and organizations in our collected world are eroded (China and the DPRK are still around, after all) but without those guarantees, we diminish ourselves in ways perhaps none of us can yet imagine. 

The American People are more a single diverse tapestry which operates more as a connected, vivacious, sometimes tumultuous being than a collection of disparate persons. As our cash and coinage say, "E pluribus unum."  The national whole is greater than the sum of our lonely hearts, and the electronic ties which bind are no longer a luxury or a curiosity. We've seen this transition before; in the way the telephone became a necessary phenomenon before common carrier legislation emerged decades ago, and in the way developments like antiseptics, open-heart surgery, and rational drug design all went from medical novelty to workaday expectations of the medicine that supports our own lives. 

I’m worried that the protections that are in place will be weakened if we change the way they’re enforced. I would support a new regulation style if it guarantees the same or better protections, but not if we lose any.

Thank you for your time and consideration.