(Posted by John.)
There are certainly better-qualified voices out there to go over the intricacies of the whole net neutrality debate than I. For example, Matt Stoller has been doing yeoman's work at MyDD.com. (One of the latest posts, about the rhetoric of the big telcos, is here.
One of the most depressing things about this debate is the childish rhetoric being used by Big Telco.
First of all, there's the ridiculous: The accusation by the telecom lobby that what we're talking about is government "taking control" of the Internet. What we're talking about is government regulation, not forced nationalization. At the most extreme, you'll even hear idiotic telco spokespeople compare net neutrality to Soviet Russia.
The fact of the matter is that what Neutrality activists are asking for is the government to maintain the principles that served the Internet well through most of its history. The reason for this is simple enough - until the explosion in broadband use, most Internet users used dialup. Phone lines are already forced by government regulation to operate on principles of neutrality.
This was originally true of high-speed fiber as well, until telcos got the government to waive those regulations to encourage investment in broadband.
The second, related assertion by the telcos is that we don't need government regulation because "the Internet hasn't been regulated thus far and it's working fine." The partial response to this is above, that the Internet was de facto regulated by the same rules that governed telephone exhanges. The fuller response is to say that past performance is no guarantee of future success. This is especially the case if telecom companies are already trying to break the Internet as we know it.
The third assertion is that there's no evidence that ISPs are actually filtering traffic. This isn't exactly reassuring, because these companies refuse to allow any kind of investigation in to their methods.
The fourth assertion totally contradicts the third one, which doesn't stop telecom reps from using it: ISPs already filter Internet traffic in any number of cases - spam, viruses, etc. This is really a red herring - no proposed regulation would inhibit network administrators from properly maintaining the network.
Assertion #5 is that "somebody has to pay" for high-speed broadband, and it's either going to be companies like Google and Youtube, or it's going to be you and me. Nobody advocating for neutrality expects a free lunch, but this assertion has a number of problems. The first is that engineering partiality in to the network is expensive - more expensive than simply adding enough bandwidth to make partiality unnecessary, according to the people who built Internet 2 (the Abilene network.) The second point is that Google and Youtube, as well as you and me, already pay for both ends of the network. This business model works, and was sufficient to build every previous network in use today - electricity, telephone, cable, etc. It's highly doubtful that this business model won't suffice for broadband.
This is by no means meant to be an exhaustive list of the talking points used in this debate, nor do I expect to be the final word. But these are certainly the most common arguments used by the bad guys in this fight, and they're being used to totally misconstrue the debate.
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