Interesting piece about a spreading rebellion:

Net neutrality strikes me as one of those 'vote Yes if you don't want it' mind mazes - I can't remember from one month to the next whether I favor or oppose it.

I feel the same way... One of these days I should sit down and give it a Think.

In the meantime, I am a big fan of the fellow who throttled the FCC and sent them the Ferengi demand.

Simple question: Do you want unelected officials in the federal government setting prices for you (driven by what they alone determine is "fair")?

Now how long did it take you to answer that?

If I say 'No' am I FOR Net Neutrality (neutral in the sense of unregulated by government)?

There's no legal requirement now for internet providers to give the same price to all its customers, is there? That's what I hear is the main feature of Net Neutrality . . . .

What Net Neutrality requires is that the consumer is provided the same bandwidth no matter the website. For example, your anti-gun ISP can't slow down this board for you or charge the NRA for unthrottled bandwidth under Net Neutrality rules.
Without it, Microsoft might pay your ISP to make Bing faster than Google, or ISPs might take moral/ethical/political stances and slow certain websites for the end user. A Christian ISP might make pornography or Islamic sites slow, a liberal ISP might make conservative sites slow, and a libertarian ISP might let you browse anything you want at the same speeds, trying to sell to more end users.
It's a tough choice, because I like to avoid restricting business owners, but the deep-pocketed companies would likely control what you see online via speed throttling.
The last iteration I have seen actually doesn't completely stop this, allowing for a kind of "fast lane" to be set up for companies that pay...which allegedly isn't throttling the others, but ends up providing a similar effect, as deep pockets can get the high-bandwidth option.

As an aside, I haven't seen anything that mentions pricing for consumers. This is about how they provide access, not how you pay for service.

Unless you are one of a handful of very large companies (Comcast, Verizon, etc), your answer to this should be "Yes", I want net neutrality.

There is no benefit to the end consumer to having their ISP throttle some traffic and not others. All the major ISPs are also content providers to some degree, or have made agreements with content providers. Comcast would rather have you stream content from their services instead of using a service like netflix or hulu. When ISPs can throttle content, your 3rd party viewing experience is degraded and they hope you will switch to their "faster" services.. That or netflix ends up paying for "premium" access to an ISPs customers. This ultimately drives up the price of services like netflix and hulu. So ultimately, the ISPs managing to make you pay more for their service without you knowing it.

That is absolutely NOT what net neutrality is.

Net neutrality removes the ability of internet service providers or the government to discriminate according to their subscriber's / citizen's ability to pay for it, beliefs, affiliations, site content, hardware, platform, operating system, etc.

Read way more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

The short version is, you want net neutrality if you don't want them (providers & government) to be able to discriminate against you or other groups with regard to access to the internet.

Either way,it's just one more example of a government bureaucracy, overstepping it's authority. The FCC was authorized to monitor and regulate airwave broadcasting, the internet is not within the scope of their authority.

drewesque nailed it.

This is one of the times when gov regulation is extremely beneficial to consumers. The internet was built as a "fair" network that made its best effort to deliver all data as quickly as possible within bandwidth constraints, without discriminating based on data content or origin.

Corporations want to break the internet, and then trick you into thinking that they've done you a favor, by doing things like offering lower-cost "discount" internet access packages that would do things like throttle down your access to competitor's content.

Some ISPs have even floated the idea of internet service that ONLY allows access to a predetermined set of sites, with tiered plans offering additional sites, or "full" internet access - just like a TV service.

If that is your idea of how the internet should be run, be my guest and oppose net neutrality.

Once throttling and subscription services become a common thing on the internet, it will cease to exist as a common medium as a voice for individuals, and will continue its downward spiral into yet another corporate-controlles commubications medium with all the quality and fairness you have come to expect from your cable TV provider and cable networks.

Media companies hate that they cannot own the internet. Destroying net neutrality would allow them to begin doing exactly that.

I will be mad if my dirty videos take longer to load.

Why? You'll be able to brag that you lasted longer

Pure gold.

Unfortunately it's us peons vs. media giants with big lobbyist budgets.

We have some big backers in our corner. It is not quite so onesided.