swa66 - 10:17 pm on Sep 19, 2009 (gmt 0)

Most of what I've seen surroundingthe net neutrality so far is actually a direct result of too much competition for the customers leading to unrealistic promisses the ISP connecting consumers can't retract all that easily and hence an effort of them to try to find alternate ways to generate revenue.

Pushing them further into a corner will yield either them going belly up, or worse them seeking other -bad for webmasters and the general public- sources.

Examples of the type of offerign them sell their customers that are not sustainable:
FIOS, or any other high bandwidth solution that has no cap on amount of traffic the consumer can transfer in a given timespan. The costs involved for the ISPs are prohibitve from making a profit as the users increase their bandwidth usage.
P2P traffic is about the worst on this as it uses tremendous amounts of bandwidth on provider's backbones that don't run for free.

Examples of such sources we don't want them to be forced into:
- as webmasters: replace our ads with ads of their own, cutting off our revenue
- the general population really doesn't need every typo in a URL leading to a parked service of dubious nature.
- ...

Net neutrality as champion by Google and the like is sensitive from their perspective: They already pay for connectivity to the Internet to their upstreams, they have significant invenstments into content delivery systems to facilitate the delivery of content throughout the world. And then some leaf ISP connecting consumers (who already gets paid for connecting sad consumers want to have more money ?)

So the only solution is simple, but not popular: force ISPs connecting consumers to charge the consumers enough to cover the costs they cause (prohibit them from running the service at a loss). This will mean no "unlimited" use high bandwidth connections for $ 20 or even $50 a month ... and you'll have to accept either a cap on the amount of traffic you can send.receive and/or a significant price hike.