The "Net Neutrality" fallacy.

As a software engineer, I find it very depressing that we live in a country where "net neutrality" debates have become a necessary step we need to take before the process of technological advancement can resume. The reason I say that is because the idea of "net neutrality" wouldn't be a topic worth debating if we lived in a country that had a national, state of the art, internet infrastructure rather than the pathetically slow, data capped, overpriced shit we have now.

The ISPs idea of introducing "fast lanes" into their network infrastructure is a deliberately malicious scheme inspired by greed. The ISP's should consider it an ethical responsibility to invest money back into their business infrastructure so they can one day ensure every American home has affordable fiber.

If everyone in America had fiber, all the network congestion caused today by companies like Netflix; would be fundamentally non-existent because it would enable these companies to send their customers a handful of "fat" packets of data, rather than the thousands of little packets they must send now. This would dramatically lower network congestion because the fundamental bottleneck is the fact that data on the wire can't exceed the speed of light and in practice tends to travel much slower than C on average because of the complex circuitry data has to traverse while in route through the network toward it's destination.

Think of it like this. Let's say you had just started remodeling your kitchen and as a result you end up creating a huge pile of garbage after you tore out the old kitchen in order to make room for the new. You know eventually you are going to have to take that huge pile of garbage to the dumps, and that will require a mode of transportation that can haul the trash from point A to point B.

Now, ask yourself this. If you had the option of picking either a small short-bed S10 pick-up truck or a big U haul truck with a 20 ft trailer; as the vehicle used to haul the trash to the dumps; Which choice would be the most logically efficient choice in terms of minimizing the amount of time and fuel that is spent? Something worth noting about the answer to this question is that the logically best choice is dependent on the SIZE of the load.

If the S10 can get the entire load in one trip then it is the most efficient option because it doesn't need to spend more time and gas traveling back and forth because the s10's bed is too small, thus requiring multiple trips to get all of the trash to the dumps. Obviously if we had a huge amount of trash, the uhaul would be the best choice even though it has a far worse fuel economy compared to the s10 because the amount of time spent actually burning that gas is much less time than the s10 ends up having to spend.

Now applying this analogy to data networks only makes the problem exponentially more chaotic because now your entire neighborhood is following your lead and deciding to remodel their kitchens too. Thus they also generate their own garbage piles that need to get hauled of to the dumps.

Now you have a situation where not only do you have to haul your trash from point A to point B, you also have to deal with terrible traffic congestion because the freeway to the dump is 2 lanes too narrow and hundreds of s10s and uhauls are trying to squeeze their way through because they all want to get to the dumps first.

Now, ask yourself this. Is the S10 ever a good choice in this situation? No. Because when you add congestion cost to the formula you are always presented with a situation where s10's that have to take multiple trips are a HUGE burden towards an increase in congestion, because the more time you spend driving on the road equates to the more time you spend being in somebody's way.

Now, given the previous situation where we concluded the s10 would be the most logical choice given a load small enough to haul in a single trip; this also becomes impractical when you consider the fact that a single uhaul could handle your small load, and potentially a few of your neighbors too. You can combine loads together so long as you know how much weight each load contributed to the grand total. (which you need to discern what each neighbor's fair share of the dump fee is.)

One fully packed uhaul that only needs to make a single trip to the dump is always better than 4-5 s10s that also only need to make a single trip when you consider the amount of congestion 4-5 s10s contribute to the network's speed bottleneck.

Now the problem with the "fastlane" ideology is that in our scenario the RIGHT answer to help make everybody's lives better is to widen the freeway to 4-5 lane, because at the end of the day congestion is always going to be the biggest performance bottleneck.

However, the ISPs don't want to do that. They want to build a road off to the side of the freeway that goes straight to the dump and the only vehicles it allows to drive on it are s10s in need of making 10+ trips that day. All so they can charge a toll coming and going both ways each trip the s10s have to make.

The worst part about the "fast lanes" is that it gives the ISPs an incentive to stifle innovation towards America's internet infrastructure because to successfully market the luxury of a "tolled express lane" they need congested double-lane freeways.