I have a question on this subject that I've been wondering about for a little while now. The following could fairly be argued to be a a crazy theory, and there may indeed be conclusive proof that debunks it, which I wouldn't mind hearing. This is basically a "what if..." borne of lack of information, and I recognize this as potentially a bit "out there".

I live in Australia. I'm admittedly completely ignorant of the laws here, but I don't think we have anything resembling net neutrality locally. This has not really had a impact, but it did allow mobile operators to structure their offerings in specific ways. I'm not sure if the way everything worked here was done similarly in the US.

Back in 2006-2007 when I had a phone with '3' (I stopped in ~2008 for variety of unrelated reasons), I could open the web browser on my feature phone (an SE K608i) for free but by default it would only allow me to access an extremely limited range of websites. By buying a "data pack" for $5/mo I would be given a fixed data cap to use to access the general Internet. To do this I'd need to switch the phone's APN (Access Point Name) from "3services" to "3netaccess".

There were other data packs available; the "news pack" would let me get access to pre-curated news segment recordings (as cute-bitrate .3gp files :P) and the like, for example. I'd need to be on the 3services APN to be able to access this.

Generally speaking, what US ISPs want to do nowadays is honestly not toooo much different from what I experienced literally 10 years ago. An ISP does a deal with Netflix, then I install today's equivalent of the "movie pack" and I can stream as much Netflix as I want. Cool; that honestly doesn't seem that radical. The practical advantages make a lot of sense to me technically and I see the whole thing as pretty benign as I've experienced it and I'm still alive to tell the story. Hollywood loves big fat contracts so they'll likely always play the game this way.

Here's the "....?!" that I'm getting at.

What if, this whole Net Neutrality scare is actually a careful act of social engineering?

What if, someone carefully started up hype about everything being the end of the world - being able to restrict access to websites unless we pay, etc - ?

Bam, you kill two birds with one stone: you've gotten legal approval that ultimately just allows you to shift bandwidth costs around a bit, but you've convinced the people that this has also given you permission to do a lot more. So when it comes time for those extra things to be convenient, you've already dealt with the resistance/backlash that would have come up anyway.

_IF_ I'm right, that turns the "support" of net neutrality into a giant conspiracy ring instead of a freedom-fighter sort of thing.

This is an idea that popped into my head after I remembered my days of having a cellphone years ago, when I stumbled on an imgur post highlighting a recent ad from a random ISP in a different country that offered something that was exactly like what I'd used.

This tiered internet approach isn't a radical idea, and I used it myself to great effect. So I'm kinda suspicious. Maybe this suspicion is out of order and I'm barking up the wrong tree. Or maybe this was a social backlash test.