Did you Google it? Because plenty of legitimate news sites have stories on Netflix getting slow, they were losing customers, and they paid Comcast to speed it up.
Slow Comcast speeds were costing Netflix customers - Aug. 29, 2014is just one, it even has graphs.
One problem at a time? I mean, every place that is getting Google fiber, the cable is suddenly faster. I live in a place that now has fiber (not Google) and cable upped the speeds and lowered the prices when it happened. We're way behind other countries in the quality and pricing of our internet and we have bullshit like ISPs blocking towns from installing their own fiber and being their own ISP, basically treating is like a utility, but preserving net neutrality is all a part of the SAME war, this is just one fight.
Uh, yea, I googled it and all I see is 'Netflix payed more money and got faster speeds'. Well, no shit.
Look at this choice quote:
After its February agreement, Netflix speeds have soared on Comcast's network. The company has since entered similar deals with AT&T (T, Tech30), Verizon (VZ, Tech30) and Time Warner Cable.
Everyone must be traffic shaping now?
Without a technical understanding, this is all bullshit ghost hunting. Unequivocally, any company can spend money to gain increase in service speeds. What if Comcast ran out and dumped 5 billion in fiber lines to the giant Netflix Acme Server buildings? There, money for speed!
Net neutrality is a very important theory, but the technical implementation of it is far more nuanced. Is an MPLS line not ignoring net neutrality? You are circumventing routing tables to speed up packets from one specific source to another for a price. You are giving your packets priority over a specific network segment not available to others. Aren't fixed routes on a public LAN/MAN (say at a university) circumventing 'neutrality' as well? Shouldn't all packets be subject to the woes of whatever cached routing tables are available at any given time? What about the fact that if you buy an SLA connection the ISP might have QoS set up to give you your packets priority over say, Gram Gram who uses her 5 Mbit home connection used for knitting research that goes into the same edge router?
The arguments I've seen regarding neutrality boil down to whining that everyone should have identical speeds and infrastructure regardless of pricing and/or a diatribe about why net neutrality is the cornerstone of the internet and getting rid of it will break everything. Well, that's fairly ignorant because net neutrality is already gone. Maybe you have to go up a rung on the TCP/IP or OSI models to find where it is no longer applicable, though.
What really needs to happen is ISPs need to be classified as utilities to begin creating and enforcing the aspects of neutrality that make sense for the modern internet. Neither the 'viva net neutrality, do nothing!' approach or the 'let cable companies rape us!' approach hit either of those issues on the head.
Net neutrality at
everylevel no longer makes sense in a completely digital world. Should packets to get a streaming video to 120 fps instead of 60 fps be equally as important to a 911 call? What about your credit card transaction versus some asshole's DDoS spam? This needs to be agreed upon by a consortium and then enforced. Unfortunately a lot of internet 'luminaries' are decrying the end of net neutrality while at the same time benefiting from it selectively. Keep in mind, if net neutrality conceptually made the most sense in all situations, QoS wouldn't even exist as an idea - everyone and everything would just have to get fucked together like overbooking a CRJ by 820 passengers.
I can make a high level analogy by comparing two transportation networks.
Trains are forever fucked because the government forced a bunch of passenger lines together to 'be equal' but the business end (freight) kept all the infrastructure. There's thousands of tiny companies that own tiny parts of rail that you have to get permission to use individually. Even the government Amtrak can't open certain rail service in areas because they can't come to a use agreement and they can't get enough contiguous land to build new rails.
Compare this to air travel with federal airways and controlled airspace. Yes, some traffic does have priority (AF One or medevac choppers, for example). But there are international standards in place and while it certainly isn't perfect, aircraft get around just fine. There are plenty of tiny companies that start small and can grow based upon their own offerings (Southwest or Air Wisconsin, for instance) using 'public' infrastructure.
Rails are an example of how to fuck this up. Airways are an example of an imperfect ideal but a pragmatic and generally fair solution that ultimately works out much better.