While I'm pro net-neutrality, lets not delude ourselves thinking that this is some david vs goliath battle about small people vs some nebulous megacorps. It is not a question if web turns into cable tv, it already has.
"Overall, streaming audio and video now accounts for 71% of primetime traffic across North American fixed-access broadband networks — and is expected to increase to 80% by 2020, per Sandvine"
Of that 70ish percent, about half is Netflix alone. Throw in the handful of big players (Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook), and that is essentially what modern web is for large part of population.
I've been thinking if net neutrality is such a big deal in US because of cable tv has been relatively more important there than for example in Europe, combined with the situation that those old cable tv operators have become also major ISPs.
"It is not a question if web turns into cable tv, it already has."
Not really. With cable, different providers have different channel packages, based on negotiated deals with the channel owners. Sometimes people with one cable service will lose access to a channel they like just because of a dispute over a contract renewal:
Thankfully such things do not happen on the web, at least not yet. People are upset about net neutrality because they fear that will actually happen (and mistakenly believe that is the worst case -- I am more concerned about the even worse things ISPs might do, like blocking VPN services, or only allowing devices that are "compatible" with their service e.g. by requiring people to install a special app, etc.)
With streaming, different services have different content libraries based on negotiated deals with copyright holders. Subscribers regularly lose access to movies and shows they like because of disputes over contracts or because the copyright holder is moving their content to their own service.
That is a red herring. If I have Comcast service but the channels I want are only on Time Warner, I cannot simply switch to Time Warner. Switching between streaming services is trivial, because all streaming websites are available to everyone with an Internet connection (one of the things net neutrality is meant to protect).
Yes, a lot of bandwidth used is from streaming by cord-cutters from major sites like Netflix. But a lot of the video streaming is also from small producers hosting on YouTube or streaming on Twitch and elsewhere.
Anyway, all that streaming from major players isn't preventing use of the Internet for other purposes. One concerning change caused by those major players is not with the ISPs but in the browsers, with the adoption of DRM in web standards. It has started with blocking unapproved access to video but could creep into any kind of content, including text.
"Overall, streaming audio and video now accounts for 71% of primetime traffic across North American fixed-access broadband networks — and is expected to increase to 80% by 2020, per Sandvine"
http://variety.com/2016/digital/news/netflix-bandwidth-share...
Of that 70ish percent, about half is Netflix alone. Throw in the handful of big players (Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook), and that is essentially what modern web is for large part of population.
I've been thinking if net neutrality is such a big deal in US because of cable tv has been relatively more important there than for example in Europe, combined with the situation that those old cable tv operators have become also major ISPs.