It matters because the service provider can dictate costs at both ends of the connection independent of the amount of data.

This is to the benefit of narrowband users, who are at the bottom of the spectrum and would pay the least of all tiers. Recall that you originally said it’s a problem for everyone, not just broadband users.

Buying solar from a neighbor is not paying a neighbor to use their power company provided power.

The point was that the local energy supplier has lower revenue. They don’t recuperate the loss of neighbors colluding to buy less of their supply. e> There are other taxes than income tax like sales tax. Besides not paying doesn’t change anything when you are still using it, “I don’t pay for electricity to save the environment. I use my neighbors who pay the electric company. They let me connect for free.”

I’m not sure how you’re not grasping this. If Bob sells excess solar power to Alice for less than the grid power, that’s strictly a loss for the energy company. It’s not a zero-sum scenario. The energy company does not recover that lost business.

You doing it alone doesn’t hurt the library

Of course. And hurting the library is not the goal or idea anyway. So no problem there.

The problem is with this claim:

The article is about EVERYONE doing it. If everyone used the public library internet, they’d have to increase their service.

First of all, libraries have fixed budgets. They cannot simply upgrade on a whim. Even if they do upgrade, there is still less /fat/ (oversold bandwidth). Library management is more clever than you think. When demand and supply curves start to cross, the library brings in quotas. PC users have a 2 hour timer, or more, depending on supply and demand. People who get cut off for the day have generally accomplished everything necessary by then anyway.. they are just watching videos for amusement or doom scrolling, in which case no real compromise with sending them home.

ISP’s already oversell bandwidth. A neighborhood of 100 homes each with 1Gbs service doesn’t have a 100Gbs connection. When I ran and ISP, it was 20 to 1. We’d monitor bandwidth and everyone got “full bandwidth” because statistically everyone wasn’t simultaneously using the full bandwidth. It’s the same bandwidth for the provider whether there are separate under-utilized lines at homes or a giant pipe at the library.

You seem to have a chance at understanding considering you’re aware of this much. That oversell shrinks as people share (which is effectively the same as using the library). IOW, the fat that lines their pockets shrinks.

Which doesn’t matter because a lack of Net Neutrality still hurts everyone whether they use the library or use it at home.

If you’re willing to acknowledge that netneutrality is harmful, then you should be boycotting. The boycott action is using your consumer power to push back. If you do not boycott, then you are the one supporting it. You are then part of the problem.

“I throw my trash on the sidewalk and it’s gone the next day. It’s not a problem.”

For this analogy to work, it would be a case where I am the only one on my block littering, and I stop, so the street cleaner no longer needs to traverse my street. The street cleaner would lose revenue due to being paid by traversal distance. I would then be putting my litter on another block, by this analogy. And that other block would be routinely littered anyway, so the street cleaner would still get paid for the other block but not for mine. And since he is not paid by weight, but by distance, his net revenue is less. He can try to increase his prices per kilometer if he wants, but that has consequences. His competitors may not allow it. And governments have budgets.

Also realise that I have been offline for several days now, since libraries were closed the past few days and I did not have access. So my consumption is less as a consequence of this lifestyle of boycotting. Even if the library were open 24/7, I’m not going to stream Netflix or something in the library like I would at home. So my consumption drops inherently in the change.