A necessity? Really? How soon after your internet goes down do you start dying? If the internet is a necessity then it's only a necessity to this culture, something I hold in contempt on the best of days. Most other businesses offer a range of products, even public utilities have tiered pricing, but apparently internet providers are not to be permitted this.
Tiered pricing for utilities is not comparable to throttled bandwidth. You'd be correct if you made the correlation between up/downlink connection speeds to possible kilowatt usage price breaks, but you didn't. The underlying issue with the repeal of NN is that, at it's core, it's anti-competition. AT&T, Spectrum, Comcast, *local ISP*, etc all offer you internet speeds and similar rates. They put in money to build their infrastructures and so, occasionally, one company becomes the only area's ISP. You pay them and you get your service. This is where the similarity stops and the anti-competition starts. AT&T decides it wants to have it's own content streaming service. Now they throttle Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and any other provider that people actually want. AT&T says here, pay for our service, we'll give a bit of a discount on your internet, and it won't be throttled. After awhile they'll say, wait, here you can have unthrottled access to Netflix for an additional cost too. Or Netflix may decide to pay AT&T a premium to get on their fast lane. This is not something we want. We don't want a creator/provider monopoly. Or in other words, we don't want monopolies.
Another example of this is, lets say Major Franchise Sign Co. pays AT&T to have all it's franchise websites full speed while all our other independent shops get throttled and customer's on AT&T can't upload artwork to us anymore. (No, this isn't like paying Google to list your add first. That's advertising. Another company advertising doesn't hinder another company's ability to still do business) As of currently, everyone
should have the same opportunity when it comes to water, electric, gas, etc. MFSc can't pay my electric company to get better electricity than I do nor can the electricity company can't say "we'll give you enough electricity to run two of your machines for a few hours." Internet has become enough of a necessity that it should be offered with those same protections. The internet is a contributor to quality of life. Without it, people would die, because it's now the backbone for communication, money handling, logistics, etc.
