This title is a little misleading...not your fault, since it's the same headline the article has.
The Justice department told the FCC they're against net neutrality. The decision rests with the FCC and from what the article says it doesn't look like they've decided anything yet.
From a consumer point of view, net neutrality is what we're paying for. Let's say I pay $50 a month for a certain connection speed. I expect to be able to surf on the internet at that speed.
Unless I'm incorrect about how it would work, I'd be pretty pissed if certain types of sites or content were throttled by my ISP simply because they didn't pay up. I mean, I already paid money to reach that content. I don't see why an ISP should make money off of the content providers too.
I've been following this "net neutrality" debate for a long time, and both sides have made some decent points. I used to be a hardcore in the camp of pro net-neutrality, but the more I think about it, the more it seems that there are some things that regulation does not solve efficiently. I guess the most frustrating thing is that _lack_ of regulation is not going to solve anything either.
One thing that lack of regulation on this issue does is make it substantially more difficult for small innovators to reap the benefits of their efficiency. Those tiny, seemingly insignificant increases in efficiency go practically unnoticed by the large monolithic telecos, but the people who are in the position to innovate further upon those marginal efficiencies (increasing rate of return on efficiency, if that makes sense) cannot do so when the ISPs themselves are taking more than a reasonable share from the people who are doing the innovating (whether the innovators are customers or competitors is important to the ISPs in that I imagine most ISPs would rather have innovative customers than innovative competitors). And that is essentially why I think that a Laissez-faire approach cannot be good news for the tiny, tech-oriented startup whose lifeblood depends upon an Internet connection.
This all goes away with bigger pipes. If there's enough room to provide all of the content customers demand, then this whole debate won't matter. But if the FCC stays out and the netops are allowed to decide how they want to manage the tiny pipes they currently have, they can stave off upgrading them for a lot longer.
Networks want the right to decide which packets they send and which they don't (right now, all packets are "neutral", sent at the same speed and priority).
If granted, it would allow networks to extort, essentially, payment from any web site, to make sure their service is accessible by its users.
Except there's little to no competition in the ISP industry right now. In my area at least, you either have Comcast or Verizon, there's no other options.
"Competition" may or may not take care of the problem. As imgabe points out the market for high-speed internet connections is an oligopoly. Depending on the specific scenario an oligopoly can be almost as efficient as a free market (competition is taking care of problems) or almost as inefficient as an unregulated monopoly (competition is not taking care of problems).
A non-neutral network is one possible outcome of an inefficient oligopoly structure of the high-speed internet connection market. If we want to avoid that inefficiency it behooves us to at least threaten regulation of the market. Hopefully the threat will be enough but if not then regulation becomes more of a requirement if one is concerned with economic efficiency.
Remember the POTS network was built-out using a government-sponsored monopoly (AT&T). If such an unwieldily structure could bring copper wires out to every rural farmhouse in the country surely the "free market" will be able to provide high-speed internet connections just as universally without having to resort to inefficient extortion of high-tech companies.
