What is Net Neutrality? Why should anyone care?

     First thing to mention -- net neutrality does NOT guarantee that you have equal ease of access to all websites nor that you can transmit to, or download from, a particular site just as fast as all other sites. The speed of a connection, and the ability to access a site, depends on many different factors (including, but not limited to, net neutrality).
     The current primary differences occur at the physical site of a website. What kinds of hardware do they have? What types of software (and how up-to-date) are they running on their servers (the computers that host the website)? What is the bandwidth of the website's connection to the rest of the Internet? Consider the bandwidth to be equivalent to the diameter of a water pipe -- it limits how much data can be transmitted. The transmission medium will determine the speed.
     We are now at the border of the "cloud" of the Internet. Once upon a time, there was still a lot of unpredictability once data had reached what we now call the Internet (or, at that time, the various Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) protocols such as TCP/IP, supporting the DARPAnet) because the connectivity was neither available all of the time nor did each connection (or "hop") have the same speed and bandwidth. If your data went via one path it was pretty quick. If it went by another path it might take hours.
     By the time of the transition to what we think of as the Internet had taken place (marked by use of the first freely available browser, "Mosaic", more than anything else), there were still differences in the speed of different data paths through the network. However, we are talking about an overall speed that would now be considered unusable. Within this very slow network, the differences between different data paths were not as noticeable.
     Fast forward to the Internet of today and the data access from home or business into the Internet and out to the website's server is largely taken care of by a homogeneous set of connections provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). There are common, "backbone", data paths that may be used by multiple ISPs -- but you largely get the bandwidth (total amount of data) and speed that you pay for from your ISP.
     And that is at the heart of the issue of Net Neutrality. Right now, you pay for a certain amount of data and a certain access speed (possibly different for each direction). But, the ISP is neutral to the contents of the data and the destinations of each transfer of data (with the exception of potentially examining the data streams for viruses and other hazardous information). Whether you are streaming a movie from Netflix™ or accessing the on-line catalog of the Library of Congress, you will get the same service (up to the access point of the website).
     Elimination of net neutrality means that it CAN matter just what data you want to access and from where you want to access it. There are two categories of how this can affect the general consumer. The first is primarily a business purpose from the ISP -- to increase profits from their services. If you just use the Internet to access mail, then there may be one service level. If you use social media, that may be another service level (for more money). If you stream movies on a regular basis then that could be yet another service level. In addition, if the ISP had a working partnership with a streaming company (or was owned by, or owned, it), then access to streaming service A might have a higher fee than for access to streaming service B (from which they already directly leverage profits).
      In this first category, the general intent of removal of net neutrality is to increase profits. Some people might pay less for low-end access and service. Others will pay more. The net effect is expected to be an increase in profits -- the concept of removal of net neutrality is NOT "revenue neutral". If it were, the ISPs would not care -- net neutrality is actually easier for them.
     The second category is one that is often considered to be "something that cannot happen here" (but it certainly happens in countries that do not have a policy of net neutrality). If you are treating different data and different destinations differently, this is just another way to define censorship. While it may not occur, it is very hard to prove just what is happening once net neutrality is removed. Did a website "fall between the cracks" or was it deliberately made slow, and difficult (or impossible), to access? Is it coincidental that the political leanings of the website are counter to the desires of the owner(s) of the ISP? How is a small website going to enforce First Amendment (in the U.S.) rights? Can they? Can the Net still be regulated?