>Tomorrow maybe it is price controls in the name of consumer fairness.
It's not clear that's a bad thing, or that it's a worse state of affairs than the fast lane/slow lane rent-extraction schemes the telecoms clearly want. Cornering markets (be they capital, IP/copyright, infrastructure, etc) and extracting rent is a primary strategy of multinational corporations these days, and as wealth is increasingly concentrated into their hands, that is an increasingly viable strategy. The telecoms are working toward exactly this with the Internet.
>Or maybe it is mandated compliance with government snooping orders in the name of national security.
The telecoms running the internet have already brought us that [1]. Net neutrality is orthogonal to that problem.
>It might just work great as long as the good guys are in control. But what happens when it changes some day? And, if you think it cannot, then you have far, far more faith in human nature than I can possibly summon.
You seem to have far more faith in multinational corporate control of national economic infrastructure and the reliability of self-regulation via market forces than I can summon, especially in light of the continuous failures of both of those ideas in recent years - Enron/CA electrical infrastructure, GFC, IP/copyright, patent trolls, etc.
Hard to quantify the following assertion, but many concerned citizens sense the US government is still more accountable to citizens than large corporations are nowadays. The success of the crowd campaign for Net Neutrality is evidence, if not proof, of that. If there's a lesser of two evils here, it's FCC net neutrality rules, not a "free market" for what appears to be an unaccountable oligopoly-owned natural monopoly.
It's not clear that's a bad thing, or that it's a worse state of affairs than the fast lane/slow lane rent-extraction schemes the telecoms clearly want. Cornering markets (be they capital, IP/copyright, infrastructure, etc) and extracting rent is a primary strategy of multinational corporations these days, and as wealth is increasingly concentrated into their hands, that is an increasingly viable strategy. The telecoms are working toward exactly this with the Internet.
>Or maybe it is mandated compliance with government snooping orders in the name of national security.
The telecoms running the internet have already brought us that [1]. Net neutrality is orthogonal to that problem.
>It might just work great as long as the good guys are in control. But what happens when it changes some day? And, if you think it cannot, then you have far, far more faith in human nature than I can possibly summon.
You seem to have far more faith in multinational corporate control of national economic infrastructure and the reliability of self-regulation via market forces than I can summon, especially in light of the continuous failures of both of those ideas in recent years - Enron/CA electrical infrastructure, GFC, IP/copyright, patent trolls, etc.
Hard to quantify the following assertion, but many concerned citizens sense the US government is still more accountable to citizens than large corporations are nowadays. The success of the crowd campaign for Net Neutrality is evidence, if not proof, of that. If there's a lesser of two evils here, it's FCC net neutrality rules, not a "free market" for what appears to be an unaccountable oligopoly-owned natural monopoly.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A