You’re right–it is complex. Your breakdown above didn’t even mention another aspect I’d read about the issue in my scant research: Verizon tried to disable SMS texting to users from a pro-choice organization. (Any congressman not getting their palms greased enough from Verizon could easily threaten net neutrality to them.) Even though they eventually unblocked them, the excuse for congressmen to rush to declare “net neutrality” is made stronger by these occasions.

There is the issue of treating different protocols in a “neutral” manor. This is essentially the common carrier issue. In order to not be liable for all content carried, the carrier needs to ignore the content. They have to treat bit torrent the same as they treat email or web traffic or child porn. They don’t look, they don’t judge, they just pass it along. The same way you can’t hold the phone company liable for a threatening phone call or the USPS liable for delivering a letter with anthrax powder.

The other issues are where net neutrality starts to look like a “Rail Unification Plan”. Billions of dollars are spent constructing and maintaining the infrastructure underlying the internet. This money has almost all come from private companies. In order for the internet to work, all traffic needs to be able to flow through anywhere. Everyone has in the past agreed to this.

But, the proponents of net neutrality also say that “Taggart Internet” for example cannot give preference to its own customers when forwarding traffic. This is a huge advantage for certain companies (Google, Netflix, streaming porn) because they can get on a local spur connected to Taggart Internet and then dump huge amounts of data onto someone else’s tracks and that other company must carry it with the same priority as their own.

That’s where net neutrality runs into trouble, because many of the proponents want one company to partially subsidize the cost of another company’s business.

Pitiful however, and not at all surprising from those wonderful liberals from Michigan.. (yes sadly.. they at least went to school at the bastion of liberalism that even Tom Hayden attended – well at least one of them..)

This is going to be a tough battle getting through to people if the results are limited to whatever Google sees fit to provide as answers. You all might be interested in this little piece from a friend of mine’s blog:
http://www.chetlyzarko.com/b2e.....n-the-inte

Interesting look at how things develop with the assistance of the “powers that be…”

So I searched out his website, and found that he is acting as a good comrade with the rest of the Dems, claiming that having served for two decades on the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Internet and intellectual property, he now bats for the other team: “Recently, Congressman Boucher has been a leader in ensuring that the Internet remains an open medium by promoting network neutrality.” ( http://www.boucher.house.gov/i.....;Itemid=75 )

It turns out that Rick is an advocate of BitTorrent, as a lot of us are. He didn’t like the fact that Comcast put filters on their lines to block the file transfers using that protocol. Boucher was right. And up until late ’07, Boucher favored free market solutions instead of government regulation:
“Unfortunately for fans of Net neutrality, the congressman said he was not ready to go down this path and instead stressed market-based methods of fixing the problems. Instead of tinkering with packets, the congressman said that in the short term, Comcast should “simply tier their offerings and engage in a pricing structure that allocates more bandwidth to those who pay more, and less to those who pay less.” (source below)

Here’s a link to a terrific article on Net Neutrality from CNET in Oct 07: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1373.....ncol;title

Funny…when I do a Google search for “miserable failure”, I get a return with “Obama’s fathers” at the top. Maybe they are returning true hits.