I was never 100% sure about "net neutrality" (99% maybe) till I read the opposing view by Mike McCurry. What a blatant piece of hired hackwork. The side that needs to employ someone to write things like that must be the wrong side.

I find some of the Cato (Libertarian) arguments against Net Neutrality quite persuasive:

"There is no evidence that broadband operators are unfairly blocking access to websites or online services today, and there is no reason to expect them to do so in the future. No firm or industry has any sort of "bottleneck control" over or market power in the broadband marketplace; it is very much a competitive free-for-all, and no one has any idea what the future market will look like with so many new technologies and operators entering the picture."

http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-507es.html

Any Broadband provider who blocks Google will immediately lose all their customers. And will create a market in "100% Free Content" ISPs. I also think it's a good thing to be able to choose a hypothetical service where guaranteed high quality VOIP packets are charged differently from P2P traffic.

There's also the old assumption that business will tend to be evil and government will tend to be good.

My knee-jerk reaction was to agree with Cato, but the problem is that broadband isn't a free market. The telcoms have been legislated into monopolistic conglomerates. The damage caused by those laws is already done; repealing them now wouldn't help. So, although in a perfect world I'd be in favor of competing telcoms and against net neutrality laws, a government-created, government-regulated monopoly is better than a government-created, unregulated monopoly.

Why would repealing laws not help now?

Because the big telcoms already monopolize the infrastructure so no new startup is going to be able to compete with them head-on.

But repealing the laws would allow them to compete with each other.

"There is no evidence that broadband operators are unfairly blocking access to websites or online services today, and there is no reason to expect them to do so in the future. "

That is a rather controversial statement. Dear AOL and the attempts to blackmail Google come to mind.

Could you provide some links to this? I'd be interested in reading about it.

The wikipedia article on Network Neutrality has some of the accusations (dearaol). I believe the ISP trying to blackmail Google was on Slashdot at some point. I didn't provide links before as I didn't have the time to check them for accuracy.

yeah. whoops. didn't realize it was a dupe cause the other one is the 37signals writeup.