The idea of net neutrality goes back to the telephone company, IIRC, and even before that. The idea is that the phone company should be neutral to the kinds of information carried on it's network. It was a two-way deal in that it helped the phone companies while providing equal access to a telephone network commons for people and businesses using the network. The phone company could not arbitrarily block certain conversations from happening; and in turn the phone company was not legally responsible for what you talked about. If you planned the next bank robbery of the century over the telephone, Ma Bell could not be taken to court as an accessory to the crime. Likewise, Ma Bell could not play favorites with it's customers, saying this person can have a connection to X but that person cannot. Nor could they single out X and say no-one could connect to X or that X could not connect to anyone.

It was recognized that Ma Bell and the Telephone Network was a commons infrastructure. AT&T was granted a legal monopoly and in trade was barred from competing in other businesses. This way, AT&T could not open up a radio station in some market, and block or otherwise disrupt the telephone lines to the competing radio stations in the market, leveraging it's monopoly on the phone system abusively in it's business practices.

The rationale seems to have come from the handling of ports and lodging. Ports were a limited commons resource necessary for certain types of commerce, so to keep the playing field fair for all businesses (and individuals), ports were open to all commerce. Likewise, if you were running an inn you could had to play fair with travelers.

Another thing worth mentioning that came out of AT&T's restriction on entering other businesses was the birth of Unix. It was developed at Bell but given to the universities, such as Berkley, for operating systems research. Thus the heritage that brings us BSD and other non="Unix (TM)" unix-like systems.

The problem we have now is that many of these carriers are an effective monopoly in their locality. In most cities, the discrepancy in service available between DSL and the speed of cable internet is so dramatic that if you want a high-speed connection there is NO competition in the marketplace. They have the only infrastructure there that can handle it, so the cable companies have virtual monopolies. Just like they had for cable service (you could always get sattelite or an antenna). Not a complete monopoly but for all practical purposes it was and is.

The difference is that the cable companies are also in other businesses. For example, they want to sell you "digital voice", as Comcast calls their VoIP solution. So there is incentive for them to degrade or block VoIP connections to, say, Vonage. Likewise, they are in the content delivery business. So they see sites like YouTube, for example, and it's higher-quality descendants as a threat. Even file sharing is a threat to their pay-per-view and premium movie offerings. The obvious temptation is to abuse their advantage, as any monopoly does. They should be barred from competing in other businesses if they are going to hold the keys to an infrastructure commons, just as AT&T was, if you ask me. Otherwise the infrastucture should become public with equal access to all. I am not a socialist in that I want everything run by the government. Most things don't need to be and are better off without it. But there are exceptions. If the infrastructure is going to be by nature a centralized one, then I would rather it be controlled by a body in which I have some hope of influence through my vote rather than a private company which does not care about my interests and has no incentive to. If there were real competition, I could vote with my dollars. But this is a take-it or leave-it scenario and I just can't win unless I leave it, and suffer far, far inferior options.

As an information commons, there is an element of the rights to free speech. The internet is our bully pulpit now. It is our town square, where you could listen to the opinions of your neighbors and discuss issues of the day. And the internet has done a wonderful job tearing down, just a little, the unbalanced media poligopoly of the big 5 media giants like Viacom. It is the bazzar, where any little-guy can set up shop and do some business. And it is a far more accessible press for reaching large audiences. The folks who were at the top of the media and business real-estate pyramids (remember, location location location is all the same if everyone lives on internet street) are also eager to win back their monopolies. And the larger businesses are interested in using their advantage to compete against one another and stomp out the smaller players. It is bad for commerce and for freedom of speech. Or more like the intent behind freedom of the press... If you could print it, you could distribute it. You couldn't go to jail because you printed something that some business with lobbyists or government boogeyman didn't like, as was the risk under previous regimes.

Either way you look at it, this is an important social and economic fairness issues. So it is a moral issue centering on fairness.

What is even worse is that the ISPs, greedy (expletive held back) that they are, have not only been paid handsomely by you and me, but also given billions in tax breaks (translation - money) and concessions allowing them to run their monopolies for-profit on the promise that they would build us a better and more complete network. All they did was pocket that money. Now, we are running "high speed" internet that would be laughed at in many other countries such as Japan or Norway. Go check out what their average connection bandwidth is. And also look at their dramatic gains in service coverage. We pioneered this stuff!! We should be ashamed of the paltry service we have in this country! I for one am very angry with our internet overlords.

Adding insult to injury, the ISPs want to blame their customers for using too much bandwidth. Never mind that the customer purchaced the service with the understanding that they got a higher data rate so that they could use it. But the ISP does not want you to use what you PAID for, because that screws up their plan to totally rape everyone. The ISP hopes that only a fraction of the sold services will actually be used, so that they don't have to build out the back-end bandwidth needed to support their customers. For a while that plan worked. But now people are using what they pay for, and the ISP has only pocket their money and not re-invested in their networks. So they blame us, even though we paid for it. Once with our service fees, and once with our tax dollars. If the were not a de-facto monopoly, the market would take care of this problem. We could go to a competitor that offered better service and force the ISP to meet it's obligations or lose it's customer base. But they have a lock on the customer base. And it (bleep)ing (bleep)s!!!

Coindidentally, my brother had a conversation with a Direct TV salesman not too long ago. And it came down to this: He does not watch TV or care about it. He only gets basic cable, the cheapest (and he CAN'T refuse that part) so that he can get cable internet. He told the man he absolutely hates Comcast with a passion. But DSL is far from sufficient for him. So he feels stuck. He asked the guy, what do they do for Internet service? The answer? Partner with AT&T DSL. So he says to me, "What am I supposed to do?"

"Just deal with it, I guess."

I wish I had a better answer for him.

Tim LePes