Argument: Net neutrality will harm broadband infrastructure and internet speeds

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Parent debate

The rise of multimedia, and video streaming: Residential broadband providers such as Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T claim that as bandwidth-intensive peer-to-peer applications such as BitTorrent become commonplace, the traditional Internet congestion management system, which was not designed to handle continuous, high-bandwidth usage, may no longer be viable, so alternate methods may become necessary. These alternate methods include bandwidth limits and priority-based Quality of Service for voice and video.
Remote surgery bandwidth demand growth: One of the clearest examples of the need for a highly reliable, low latency, high bandwidth connection, is the developing technology of Remote surgery, where a surgeon can use robotics and communications technology to operate on a patient thousands of miles away.[47] Using dedicated circuits is highly desirable in this situation as the penalty for a communications failure could be death, so they are used in all cases; if they weren't available, prioritized bandwidth would be preferred to normal bandwidth. In a similar category are emergency calls to fire and police.[1]
A Wall Street Journal op-ed described the amount of data produced globally in exabytes, calling the potential bandwidth crunch the "exaflood" [2].
At times internet traffic has already caused internet services to fail (see Wikipedia's articles on congestion collapse and slashdot effect). In such cases, high latency connections result in interruption of services.