Am I the only person who is cautiously optimistic about the Net Neutrality outcome? I’m interested in hearing from anybody else here who doesn’t think the sky is falling. It seems to me that too many people are coming at this from the point of view that neutral Internet, or any Internet at all, is some kind of human right.

I tried to see how it could be good, but I just can't convince myself it will be.

@jhh2450 we didn't die yet, at least

Well i don't like the outcome but i don't think its going to be overly dramatic even though i do joke about it being so. The internet was fine before it but it being dropped does give incentive for devs to fix the internet where it won't matter. I mean hell i don't like google to a point but its making them look into dns over tls which means other places will also.

@b3b3 Well it also isn't effective immediately, if I'm not mistaken.

I’m looking at it like when NASA ended the shuttle program before it had its own way back to the ISS. At first I had no faith in private aerospace to be able to fill the gap. And now we have more access through private aerospace to orbit than ever. And some other really cool innovations as well. Companies compete on value and there is no value in every ISP turning to a la carte pricing when consumers are used to bundled access. The first one to try it will be put out of business by others who keep the status quo.

While per site access pricing is rather improbable (but not impossible!) at the moment, there are other scenarios that can affect users and companies. To name a few:
- Improved network speed for isp own services while competitors use the slower lane.
- Forcing other companies to pay for the faster lanes or face degraded user experience. Less severe variant of this is already live in form of services that don't count against your monthly cap (mostly mobile data).
- Heavily throttling of content that is deemed 'bad' by the isp.
- Forcing users to use less secure options by degrading encrypted connection performance.
If there is only a single ISP in your area switching providers might be hard. And the amount of cash required to start up a new isp is often prohibitive.