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I use a privacy VPN, which makes all of the traffic opaque to my ISP.

I'm aware of the basic issue of NN, but I'm not convinced it will become so rapacious as you describe. What you describe is a dystopian internet where all ISPs collude to limit consumer and provider freedom.  I guess we'll just have to see.

At the user end, a VPN (or at least the one I use, PIA) can alternatively use user-defined ports for traffic. So if you set it to use 80 or 443, how does the ISP know that it's not ordinary website traffic? And the destination of access is encrypted.

@ Gorn:  Just one quick question about VPNs and I'll be done.  I don't want to hijack the thread.  What is your normal bandwidth and what do you get with the VPN?

I use/have PrivateInternetAccess.com. The service consists of a subscription to their service for $40 per year, along with client software that installs in Windows (I am presenting using a Linux client for PIA that looks and acts _EXACTLY_ the same as the Windows incarnation.)

I've downloaded quite a few movies and with enough peers to leach off they stream down at up to 4 mbytes/second which is ~32 mb/s. I think it's almost matching the speed of my cable internet or at least in the same ballpark.

For average non streaming web or email access it's indistinguishable from the bare connection, at least for me. No perceptible extra delay.

@benali:  Thanks for the summary about what ISPs might do if NN goes away.  I read somewhere that it's not a done deal yet.  The FCC has gotten a lot of negative comments and will vote on ending it in December.  Trump supports ending NN, but the FCC is an independent agency  --  i.e. no direct control by the executive branch.

I see ending NN as a power and money grab for the content companies and the ISPs, but I honestly question how much they will tinker with decent access to the millions of random websites out there.  If SpectrumATTTimeWarner decrees that thou shalt only have a decent experience with NetflixHuluAmazon, then you're almost at the media monopoly levels prior to the internet.

Here's my reasoning for my negative prediction --

One-third of U.S. consumers have only a single broadband provider; one-third can choose only between 2 ISPs; and one-third more than 2 providers.

I keep seeing articles arguing "the market" will stop ISPs from rigging their pipes. But there is no "market" when two-thirds of U.S. consumers have no real choice of internet service provider.

I also read about how some say "they wouldn't dare".  But they are daring. They've taken over the FCC and getting their way in spite of the fact that over 90% of public comments to the FCC are against them.

I agree with your reasoning completely.

Here's my sheer opinion.... ISPs and cable companies just aren't that competent. They aren't Google. They aren't brain trusts. They aren't data scientists so much when it comes to how their customers use their residential or commercial connections. They do well to keep internet running for most people most of the time, period.

My point is, I just don't see them devoting that much brainpower to figuring out how to monetize the choking of bandwidth. They would have to have very intelligent routers that know when customer deviate from the straight and narrow of preferred content providers. And they'd have to keep them continuously updated.

How would they monetize this choking of bandwidth? They'd offer tiers of better access to customers for "off menu" sites. I don't see that as being a large enough market to deserve the effort of attempted monetization.

They already have a hard enough time explaining why their packages magically inflate in price once your startup rates expire. The kind of dystopian bandwidth shaping that you envision is an order of magnitude of sophistication beyond what they currently do.

I think it is actually a lot simpler than that.  Think of Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or similar sites.   All they need to do is to restrict bandwidth access to selected specific sites in order to extort heavy payments from those sites in order to get their normal bandwidth access back.   They wouldn't go after individual subscribers but would go after the primary sites with deep pockets to get money from them for bandwidth access for their customers.

Ok. I was describing preferred access for big successful sites and lesser access for small niche sites.

You're saying it could be reversed from the scenario I described. They could monetize access to the major content providers. Everything else is "normal".

That would be technically a lot simpler (fewer sites to handle in a special case.) I wonder how consumers would react to a scenario where they're told "you have internet access in theory but you really don't have complete access unless you pay even more."

Even the mobile networks don't do anything this petty. What mobile does is enter into special arrangements with certain sites, such as "free" Netflix or Youtube that doesn't cut into your mobile data allowance.

Right now, the big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast and Verizon are publicly pledging they'd never impose differential pricing.

But ... they're paying buck bigs for their lobbyists to kill NN.

They're also purchasing content companies. This is why Verizon bought Yahoo and AT&T is trying to buy Time-Warner. Vertical integration only makes sense if you can apply differential pricing to the pipes.

Right now none of us have any idea what (if any) end game has been cooked up or what form it has taken. This conversation is a little like someone in 1996 trying to understand how click tracking of ads would be monetized, or to appreciate the problems of search engine spam.

I'll make one vaguely optimistic prediction, not that I'm living in denial, but just that tech today is pulling very very hard away from all forms of lockdown and I don't see how even an industry consortium defies that kind of pressure successfully.

The ISPs may simply want to be able to make their own decisions on the best use of their pipes and bandwidth, especially if new bandwidth hogging uses of the internet come into play, and without the government dictating fairness doctrine for every user and provider of content they serve.

IE, this may (and I am not certain) be nothing more than ISPs protecting their right to control their infrastructure as they see fit.  Not motivated so much by revenue potential as by cost control and infrastructure tuning.

Lastly I think the current state of ISPs is bullshit. Net neutrality is a halfway measure. They should be treated like a public utility, like sewer or water. Obliged to serve without differential rates for non functional reasons. The internet is certainly as important to our society as the phone network or the radio & TV spectrum were in their peak years. It should be governed the same way.

The thing I remember about Net Neutrality is that it puts the government in charge of the internet and under Obama, the US would give up control of the internet to a global governance.  That didn't seem like a good thing to me.

Without NN, the free market would handle it and there wouldn't be international involvement.  It would be like it always was, the wild, wild west.  Personally, I'd rather see this.