Questions about net neutrality and fairness

If you live in a building and you are not a heavy user of hot water, but there is someone in your building who uses it all the time, how would you feel when your access to hot water is limited? Or how would you feel if your rent was increased to pay for the cost of the extra hot water that someone else is using a vastly disproportionate amount of?

Of what about if you live in some place where a lot of people share an Internet connection. But the Internet starts becoming more and more slow. It turns out that one person in the place is hogging the Internet and downloading (or uploading) a disproportionately vast amount of stuff compared with you. How would you feel about your limited connection? Or how would you feel if you had to pay extra because it became necessary to upgrade to a higher-bandwidth connection because of all the use?

Are these examples valid for the discussion of net neutrality?

I would guess that it goes further than all this. What if it turned out that the person hogging all the hot water was running a for-profit spa and making money off it? Would it still be fair to just regular users to have to pay for it? I don’t think most people would think so. But of course its not that simple. What about a company like YouTube (a.k.a. Google) where the content is user content but its still a company making profit?

I think there are clear answers and solutions behind all this if one sticks to the basic principles that we, society, we the people, fundamentally own the “airwaves” a.k.a. lines which transmit data. They exist because of and for us. Companies which make profit and use those same lines, it seems fair, should pay for what they use.

There needs to be differentiation between companies that make profit and also how those companies make profit. Many companies are providers of some type of service such as video streaming. But other companies are more neutral. There should also be strong incentives for non-profit services, that is non-profits which provide equal functionality to what companies do. There should be a push from a policy standpoint towards free and open standards and services. Non-free should be the lowest, least-preferred tier and free and open should be the most preferred, subsidized tier.

It seems to me that not charging large, for-profit companies for their disproportionate use of resources is not fair. Somehow all the equipment – the routers which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and all the physical networks which cost millions to outlay – had to get paid for. We as a society should agree that we want to provide such infrastructure as a social service, as a public good, but with limits for those who want to use it for profit.

But it is even more complicated, because the infrastructure is owned by private companies too. Perhaps that is part of the problem.