First of all, it's already happened in a very limited way, such as when AOL recently blocked www.dearaol.com because it's criticial of AOL policies. Second, what does the FEC's examination of political speech on the Internet have to do with net neutrality?? What a ridiculous implication. The FEC hardly examined political speech in order to guarantee free speech, or anything of the sort, but rather in order to determine whether to regulate political speech. Third, and closely related, the ISPs are private corporations, so they are hardly bound by the First Amendment...
Umm.. The break up of AT&T is precisely what sparked the telecommunications revolution in the first place, or at least it was a huge factor. AT&T had petrified so much that innovation was virtually nil. As for its merger with SBC, the world has changed, and telcom has moved far beyond just local/long distance; and moreover, AT&T is still not even remotely the monopoly it once was.
I believe the telcos are thoroughly right and Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are thoroughly wrong.
I think "the little guy" is taking the side of Google and Yahoo, as if we need to be together against the telcos. We don't. They are both commercial operations, have commercial instincts and in both cases we are their users and consumers, not producers, not their partners and not their competitors.
I think the industrial analogy is the transportation industry. Think of the Internet as a virtual transportation industry. Think of its products - the products of Yahoo and Google and MSN, etc. - as being shipped on the virtual transportation network in virtual trucks (packets).
In the real, bricks and mortar transportation industry the commodity producers buy their trucks and loading docks, load up the trucks and ship out their product. Ah, but their shipping expense does not end there. Those trucks need fuel and because they are using "the highway" that someone else builds and maintains, we collect taxes whenever they buy more fuel, to pay for the highway maintenance. If they want a faster less congested route, it is often a toll road. Or, if they need tons of bulk, they may even pay to move the containers off the trucks and onto rails.
But, in the virtual transportation world of transporting content on the Internet, Google and Yahoo have become multi-billion dollar companies paying only for the cost of getting their product in and out of their own docking ports; that it is the only place at which they pay for "greater bandwidth". In spite of the volume their "packets" consume (vast, vast amounts of volume), in their very commercially productive enterprise, they pay nothing additional for the virtual network that keeps pushing their product along.
Our use of their product, as consumers does not, as individuals, add so much to the overall traffic, on an individual basis, the way the traffic of a Google or a Yahoo does. In any active segment of the Internet, how much is related to Joe Jones (not very measurable) and how much is related to Google - definately measurable.
If we, the little people, cannot understand the distinction between ourselves and these huge commercial enterprises, we will let their sloganeering drag us into supporting them in what is really nothing more and nothing less than a commercial disagreement between a commercial provider of services (telcos) and a commercial user of those services, Google. If that prodivder (the telcos) thinks that the volume of shipments of a commercial user is so vast that they ought to pay something besides their own docking costs on that network, then I'm all for it.
Google and Yahoo are not defending us or anything intrinsic about the Internet. They are defending their profits.
In truth though, they would not lose anything, even on their current business model. They would just charge the advertisers more.
Don't get suckered into supporting Google and Microsoft and Yahoo on this, they don't deserve it, and they are wrong.
Marked for later read.