RodeoX and jaysabi, I can not fathom how you can write so astutely in this thread, and yet have favored Obama's pleas to regulate net neutrality. How can you write the above and not understand the
regulators are always captured by the regulated as matter of mathematical certainty as well as historical evidence?
The only way we will protect net neutrality is obscure the content with anonymity and so consumers can vote with their feet without fear of retribution from the State.
Only the free market works in the end, and anonymity is absolutely crucial to making it work. We don't have a free market, so you can't claim it doesn't work. We don't have it, because the technology hasn't been implemented to free up the market.
Always technological solutions (paradigm shifts) are the only real solutions. Politics is always a morass and entire waste of time.
We already have the system being proposed. The proposal is to keep it. If all the doom and gloom you're predicting hasn't happened yet, that's a pretty strong indication your fears are overblown. The internet will be less free and more expensive under a pay-lane scenario. We've already seen how big ISPs will throttle companies they are in negotiations with (Netflix/Comcast, Netflix/Verizon) in order to extort more money out of them. There's no doubt in my mind now that they've seen that it works, we'll see far more of it in a pay-lane system. Net neutrality makes these abuses illegal.