Make no mistake, this is not just aimed at the big internet advertisers. Giving telcos non-Net neutrality will allow them to shape YOUR traffic as well. SIP/VOIP calls? You can bet those will get dropped to the bottom of the Quality of Service classes they create for network traffic.
Got anything that can compete with their telco businesses like video conferencing ? That will get dropped to the bottom of the heap as well.
Got material critical of the telco's ? Wonder why that doesn't load quickly?
If the telco companies want to regulate google, yahoo etc ... let them charge more for advertisers high bandwidth links.
It's their communications backbone - they build it and they pay for it. Government attempts to "fix prices" by regulation instead of the market only leads to market dislocations which show up in reduced services and/or higher costs in other areas.
I already have to pay more for DSL service as opposed to modem service, as well I should, it's faster.
If Google and Yahoo want to make $billions dumping huge quantities of their product on the backbone, with pricing making no distinction between their volume and mine, we will all suffer in the long run with a telecom capital investment cycle that will run out of steam.
As the "net nuetrality" price fixing schemes proliferate, the profit margins of telecoms will continue to diminish. At some point they might be in such disrepair that the Google's will buy one of them. Then who do you think is going to charge you more for faster downloads, as the "market" means to re-build the capital for an ever improving backbone? Google.
Congress should stay 100% away from this and force the telecoms and the Google/Yahoo/Microsoft to come to their own market terms, not politically mandated terms. We will all be better off for it. If the telecoms create financial problems for Google and Yahho, then like I said, Google and Yahoo will just charge their advertizers more.
Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are just blowing scare tactics at us to protect their own financial empires.
Again, it is their backbone, bought and paid for out of their meager corporate profits (6.7% for 2005).
If they are losing money on a service I hope to hell they charge more for that service so that they can earn the revenues to improve it, otherwise THEY WILL drop an unprofitable service, as well they should.
I have no moral right to demand they provide any service to anyone at a loss or at less than what the market for that service will bear. If you think they can create unbreakable cost fixing monopolies on anything then you understand neither markets nor technology. Any such attempt by them will only gender additional technological innovations that will, at some time, bypass any such monopolies. That's how markets work.
Again, congress should not be trying to "regulate" anything about any of this. Get out of the way and let the competition compete.