wheel - No, consumerist America just got online and started consuming. The group hug principle is still around among true internet enthusiasts. If you aren't awed by the fact that you can communicate to someone half-way around the world in a split second, perhaps you should work on building a time machine and go back in time; it wasn't always so easy. Just because consumerism has swallowed America whole is no reason to argue that there's no longer a purpose to the internet besides commercial viability; in fact the semi-recent explosion of the blog-o-sphere is largely affecting the Presidential race. Granted that blogs still don't capture as many viewers as big-news, the percentage is still such that a much larger percentage of Americans are actually informed this election year. Like, on issues.
I digress back to the topic of spam vs. internet regulation: The key difference here is that when you're blocking emails, it's your mail server that's blocking them, typically based on message content and some sort of blacklist check. Because it is their server, they are welcome to filter messages as they see fit. You're free to set up your own server (if the ISP allows you to, more on that later) or to move your mail services to another provider if you're unhappy.
What Net Neutrality attempts to protect is the connection. Similar to a phone line, these connections are fairly well protected by the law. ISPs are not supposed to interfere with the data being transmitted except when troubleshooting or otherwise attempting to improve/fix the system. By blocking ports or throttling connections, they're violating that protection.
Without a form of net neutrality, ISPs would be able to grant preferrential speeds to certain connections (by effectively throttling others). An ISP could, for instance, grant large amounts up-bandwidth to a high-definition movie server for Company A. If Company B also has a high-definition movie server, but cannot afford the same connection Company A has, or if (through contracts), the ISP will not grant the same connection speed to Company B as it does Company A, then you have preferrential traffic.
Company A can send you ten movies in three hours, but Company B takes about that much time to send you its home page. Where are you going to go?
What the ISPs are hoping to do: Charge you for your connection, charge the company in question for their server connection, and finally charge everyone all over again, but for bandwidth. Not "Data Transfer Per Month" bandwidth, mind you, but the derivative of that equation, or active bandwidth.
How fast can you send your site to your visitors? Most consumers leave a site if the pages take more than a few seconds to load. As a communications pipeline, do ISPs have the right to decide what companies should be able to more effectively communicate with consumers?
