Comment Not Unreasonable (Score 1) 430
A couple years ago I would have been against a company like Verizon trying to traffic shape. But since working in the telecommunications industry my perspective has changed due to my better understanding of how things really work. Verizon owns a good portion of the network infrastructure in north america but not ALL of it. If they were to traffic shape, it would only be on lines and nodes which they own, which would very well probably affect you since if you talk to a remote server somewhere in north america there is a high probability that somewhere along the way, you will go through a verizon network. You must also understand that ISPs and Carriers are not always the same thing. Carriers are companies which own, operate and maintain the actual infrastructure, while ISPs sell the service. Sometimes they are the same company but sometimes they are not. In the end, the Carriers are the ones with the most power since they are the ones who are doing the purchases of everything else. Everything that is done in terms of network equipment industry and mobile phone industry is driven at least in part by the Carrier. If you work in the telecom or mobile phone industry, your ONLY customer is the Carrier. In the mobile phone industry including iphones, android etc, products are not created to interest you directly as the consumer, they are designed to interest the Carrier. Carriers buy mobile phones from Apple, HTC, Samsung, etc, NOT you. You buy from the Carriers. Say you work hard every day and acquire a large sum of money over a long time and through great effort. You build a communications system using a lot of money so that your friends around you can talk to each other. You never change their messages, however sometimes you prioritize the messages of users you think deserve a higher priority. This is all that traffic shaping is, lower priority packets still eventualy get delivered, just slower. Remember you are the one who owns this communications network. You built it, and you maintain it every day. Net neutrality to you would mean having no control over something that YOU own. If you wan't net neutrality, then the infrastructure should ideally be owned by the government instead of multiple private organizations. As long as the infrastructure is divided among multiple private organizations, the policies of one Carrier affects the whole group of users using the communications network. And as long as the Carriers own, operate and maintain the infrastructure on their own, it's not unjustified that they would want at least SOME control over how traffic flows through THEIR network.