What about the companies' filthy hands? Notice that they (Google, Facebook,
Verizon, Comcast, etc.) then collaborate the government's secret services, as
Snowden showed.
USA's Internet is terrible. You are lucky if you have a choice between two
ISPs in your city. Here is the result of the "invisible hand of the market":
a gang-like division of the territory!
Although Europe is becoming worse, it has a much better Internet than the
USA. With competing ISPs, prices are lower and the bandwidth broader. In
France, for less than 30€/month, you get a fiber connection, unlimited
phone calls to most of the world and literally hundreds of TV channels. And,
as always, the situation in Scandinavia is even better.
Net neutrality has nothing to do do with "review[ing] the fairness of
Google’s search results, Facebook’s news feeds and news sites’ links to
one another and to advertisers (...) forcing Apple and Netflix to offer apps
for BlackBerry’s unpopular phones, oversee[ing] peering, content-delivery
networks and other parts of the interconnected network that enables
everything from Netflix and YouTube to security drones and online surgery".
You should not blindly believe what the Wall Street Journal publishes. The
rest of the article you publish is no better. I would even say it is full of
lies/absurdities like "[net neutrality] is, states, employing coercive means
can seize goods and services and allocate them according to certain political
goals and the goals of people in positions of political power".
Net neutrality means technical intermediaries (such as ISPs) are not allowed
to discriminate packets (based on who sends them, receive them or their
content). They must act as simple pipes: nothing goes slower/faster, nothing
is modified in the way. Nothing more. An important consequence is: a
dominant actor (e.g., Netflix) will not remain dominant simply because it can
deal with ISPs to get a faster connection to its site, a slower connection to
its competitors, a slower BitTorrent protocol, ads on Web pages that the ISP
adds, etc. That, is real free market: the best actor wins, playing fair.
