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The “sausage” aspect of the Internet is everything beyond the last-mile providers that we all connect to. Sausage is pretty good, but the process of making it happen is ugly. The peering system is working sufficiently well, although there are some problems - just ask Verizon customers about Netflix performance.

Where net neutrality is needed is for the last-mile providers like Comcast, Time Warner and Verizon. Until their monopoly is broken, which doesn’t look to be happening so far, they have potentially far too much power over our Internet experience. The real crisis for them is customers finding enough video content on the Internet to “cut the cable” and stop paying for cable TV.

In a perfect world, there would be ISP competition here as there is (ironically) in Europe. Then, if you didn’t like the way Verizon is “shaping” your traffic, you could just switch providers. I hope something changes to allow this (airborne wireless might be one way) but it looks like it’ll be quite a while before it happens.

We’re all paying good money to access the Internet, enough so the “last mile” providers make a handsome product. We need some kind of club to make sure they provide equal (neutral) access to the entire Internet. It should be up to us how we use it, not them.

There is already an entire generation that has "cut the cable" and get whatever content they want whenever they want it via their ISP or wireless provider. The cable/satellite business model should be required to make their business case based on the free market - provide what the customers want or go the way of the buggy whip manufacturers.

The other thing rarely mentioned in the net neutrality debate is the role of private property rights. The companies that own the infrastructure should be free to charge whatever the market will bear so long as we permit a free market.

People are also not entitled to multiple times more of a product or service for the same price. If you want more, you have to be willing to pay more.