Net neutrality is back in the news.

As an anti-regulation Libertarian who works for an Internet provider, I have one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat.

From my precariously centrist POV, please permit me to explain something to you: It just doesn’t fucking matter. With or without regulation, you — the consumer — are going to end up at the exact, same place.

If we go the regulation route, yes, Internet providers are going to make more money. And yes, you will be the source of that money if you subscribe to Netflix or a VOD service.

A bit of inside  baseball

Most people don’t realize that different kinds of Internet traffic are already prioritized. For example, if the email from your mistress takes an extra thirty seconds go arrive, no biggie. But if you are on a VoIP phone call with your wife who has just found out that you have a mistress, waiting thirty seconds for each half of a conversation to arrive is a very big deal. So VoIP traffic is prioritized as Priority One traffic. Placing stock trade orders is prioritized. And yes, your Netflix and VOD streaming is prioritized kind of high as well. Not because we’re getting more money for that traffic, but because we know you don’t want Expendables 8 stopping to buffer every three minutes. It just makes sense. You want it that way. We want you to be happy. And if you’re downloading bittorents, we don’t give a flying fuck if you ever get a packet through or not. You suck hind tit for bandwidth.

So, given the current architecture of the Internet, if you do absolutely nothing, regulation wise, you will still end up with a two tiered system when you are waiting a few more seconds for a web page to load because Netflix is bogarting the bandwidth.

There’s a third, fluid factor in play, which is simply — for lack of a better turn of phrase — the “size” of the Internet at any given time. How much signal is waiting for a pipe. How big are the pipes. Debatably, the size of the pipe available for internet traffic is currently growing along with demand. Fiber is going down. Backbones are being added. Tech is figuring out ways to stuff more traffic through less pipe.

How many times have scientists “proven” that we are all going to overpopulate and starve to death by 1892 1918 1929 1955 1973 2010 2024? And how many times has technology made those scientists look like dipshits? Who knows what technology develops five years from now that renders this entire debate laughable?

If/When the day comes when we can’t add anymore lanes to the information highway, you’ll wonder why the Triple Tractor Trailers of Corporate America speeding down the information superhighway aren’t paying more to use the information highway than you pay to run and grab Thai takeout in your Prius, especially when they are the ones creating the traffic backup. Oh, is there anything worse than cold Pad Thai? Grumble grumble corporate sunsabitches grumble.

I’m okay with not sticking-it to The Man who owns the tractor trailers because I’ve figured out that the goods and services that I want to buy at the store are loaded on those behemoth tractor trailers.Taxing them only ends up costing me, the end consumer, money. If you think you’re getting over on The Man, think again. He never suffers. He just turns the screws on the downstream consumers.

We’re a petty, envious, and vindictive society. Those who champion Net Neutrality today will be the same people who complain about Netflix hogging all the bandwidth five years from now.

Neutrality. No neutrality. The end result to the consumer will be the same.  You’re going to end up waiting on prioritized traffic, whether somebody paid for it or not.

My vote goes to whatever solution involves the smallest injection of idiot bureaucrats. Either way I’m eating a shit sandwich. The last thing I want is to pay tax money for a flunkie with a MA in Sociology to lecture me on how lucky I am to have them watching over the quality of the fecal matter.