Ajit Pai trying to abolish Net Neutrality.

For those who may not know, Net Neutrality is the concept that all internet traffic should be treated as equal by ISPs. They can't deliberately favor or throttle your access speed, with some exceptions. But without Net Neutrality, they are free to treat your connection as they wish.

The X megabits per second you pay for? Presently they have to give you that at all time if are able (though they often can't). Without Net Neutrality? They can give you your X megabits per second...if they feel like it. Why wouldn't they though? Because $$$. They can throttle your access to parts of the web that they don't find to be profitable enough, and worse, they could even block you from accessing some sites at all for whatever reason they deem fit, politics, religion...or maybe you're trying to visit a competitor's website.

Losing Net Neutrality will devalue the internet plan you pay for, and make the internet less accessible, while enriching your ISP, which likely has few competitors or a local monopoly, and probably doesn't give you the full value of what you pay for already.

Why would Ajit Pai do this? Ask his former and future employers, your ISPs.

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Northwest · M

He was appointed to the FCC by President Obama, at the request of Mitch McConnell. President Obama tried to be inclusive.

Mr Pai got his exposure to broadband issues, when he worked for Verizon. He's going to kill net neutrality next week. His excuse is that he favors less regulation.

While I favor allowing competition to drive markets and service offerings, in this case, the duopoly (cable and phone companies) are not going to allow real competition, so all the offers are going to be very similar, and they are not going to favor consumers. These are the same consumers, whose taxes allowed their business to exist.

The reason why we all get crappy service, is that the duopoly artificially restricts it. There should be no reason why Americans need to pay more than $25 per month for gigabit service.

Get ready for higher prices.

Xuan12 · 36-40, M

@Northwest Precisely, the market already has dominant players in it, and deregulation will do nothing to make it more competitive, in fact it'll just give the telecom giants even more cards to play. There won't be new competitors. There'll probably be more "options", but they'll offer less and charge you more comparatively.