Ok, but did they actually decide to do such a thing? Has any ISP actually done it? Honestly, maybe I'm blind, but I've never heard of this actually occurring.
I'm willing to be educated, but it sounds like this outrage about "fast lanes," and such is much ado about nothing.
In the USA it has only happened once but the overall context is important to understanding the situation. I've been of the same opinion as the EFF on this issue for the past 15 years, they finally came to the conclusion last year that this FCC action was likely the only way to move forward on the issue.
Back at the end of the last century broadband services where just getting rolling and nearly everyone was on dial-up. At that time network neutrality was not a concern because the connection methods, dial-up, ISDN & DSL were all regulated as common carrier services just like the more commonly used voice and fax on the POTS lines. At first ISDN & DSL weren't required to be open to competitors but rules were changed to mandate the telcos open them up to other companies to encourage competition on those services just like the large variety of competitors for dial-up.
At the close of the century cable systems got into the game but because they were not on POTS lines they were classified as information services and not subject to most regulation beyond technical standards to avoid interference. This led to extensive lobbying by the telcos to have the DSL spectrum of the POTS lines re-classified as an information service to remove most regulation from their services, and they succeeded around 2002.
For a while nobody, including the EFF, was overly concerned with network neutrality because nobody had abused their power yet. However congress was lobbied to put in some protections to ensure every one had an equal chance at getting their data through. EFF and others believed that without congress acting to protect the openness of the Internet someone would eventually abuse it to make more money. Unfortunately the vast majority of congress members ignored the problem and some said that's a job for the FCC. EFF and many other groups were dead set against the FCC getting involved especially because it was troublesome that they might enact censorship against pornography and other types of free speech like they do with broadcast radio and TV.
Around 2005/6 Comcast made the first move to break the concept of network neutrality. They realized that even though their customers weren't violating the terms of service, they could increase their profits substantially by blocking all bit-torrent use on their network. So they configured their routers to block it all and because this was perfectly legal they could not get in trouble for doing it. I suspect they thought that all bit-torrent users were simply content thieves and would have no influence, however the reality was that it was a very popular way to distribute *nix distributions and the public outcry was loud and clear. Comcast bowed to public pressure and removed the blocking.
Having seen this actual breaking of Internet neutrality the EFF and other groups increased their lobbying efforts to get congress to act. Of course congress didn't act and a few other violations of neutrality happened in other countries over the next few years. Congress never did act and eventually the FCC made it's first attempt at imposing network neutrality around 2012. The FCC figured that since no USA broadband providers where currently violating neutrality and where all telling the public they never would that they could get away with a simple rule on information services.
The EFF was certain that the rule would not hold up in court and contrary to the public front they put on Verizon fought it hard through the courts. At the end of 2013/beginning of 2014 Verizon won in court and regained their legal authority to block or limit any content to their customers. This was when the FCC began thinking about re-defining network neutrality to mean the opposite of what everyone else meant. They began proposing rules that would guarantee that all broadband providers could block or limit anything they wanted and could offer special fast lanes for a fee to content providers.
This spurred the huge outcry from citizens and businesses, over 4 million comments to the FCC opposing the proposed rule, and being a public comment driven agency the FCC withdrew it proposal. Even at this stage I, like the EFF, still really wanted congress to act since the only legal way for the FCC to act would leave the potential for over reach on regulations. It was only at the end of 2014 that the EFF finally admitted defeat in getting congress to do their job and they started giving provisional support for Title II re-classification and the neutrality rules based on it that just happened.
At this point the rule changes have only been published for less than a day so there remains much uncertainty about the extent of the FCCs action. Hopefully, as the FCC has stated, they have kept the scope of the rules very narrow and focused but until the experts have a chance to analyze them we can not be certain they didn't over-reach. About the only certainty at this point is that it's a good bet that court challenges will not overturn this new rule due to the re-classification. Another bright spot is that since these are simply FCC rule changes they can be reversed or revised much easier than a law enacted by congress.
