[ExTexasRedhead]

Would it be more accurate to say, Net Neutrality, treating the Internet like a Liberal Police State???

[GraceG]

If comcast limits Netflix and Hulu they risk losing customers to the DSL providers.

But we couldn’t have a free market solution could we???

[bronxville]

Who stands to make money?

[ShadowAce]

[frithguild]

Richardson is on the side of the thieves:

While it is apparent some sort of regulation is needed, what form it should take is less so. <

Net neutrality is theft. The end user did not build the network. The end user does not own the network. The end user does not control the network. As a result, the end user has no reasonable expectation of privacy for the data the network delivers. The relatrionship between the end user and the network access provider is contractual only.

Yet, through the force law, the end user demands that the network access provider comply with certain terms, because it is "reasonable" or "fair" - the very definition of common law extortion.

[mewzilla]

But I can’t get my cable a la carte. Go figger.

[antiRepublicrat]

internet service providers, such as Comcast, should move all data equally regardless of its source or type. ISPs aren’t allowed to look at what’s in a data packet; they just have to move it to whoever requested it.

This is overly simplistic. Proposals for net neutrality allow for reasonable network management. If a packet is email, then it can be "slowed down" because it doesn't need low latency. Nobody's going to complain if an email arrives one fifth of a second later than it could have. Telcos do this with limited resources in order to provide low latency for packets that do need it, like gaming, VOIP or VPN. The telcos can't do this type of smart network management without looking at the packets.

The problem comes from the fact that these smart management tools can also be used to interfere with traffic to the detriment of the customer or content producers. Is this a VOIP packet? It's not from our VOIP service, so let's slow it down. When the user complains, we can tell them to switch to our "better" VOIP service. Is this a streaming video packet? It's from Netflix, and Netflix refuses to pay us, so we'll drop it. Is this peer-to-peer (legal or not)? We don't like the bandwidth that uses even though the user has paid for his bandwidth, so we'll falsely send TCP reset packets to kill the connection. Maybe the user will give up.

[Tribune7]

Net Neutrality would stop improvements to the internet communications almost in its tracks.