The US government should implement a Net Neutrality policy.

Before I move onto refutations, I'd like to draw attention to the style the negations last argument adopted. Small chunks of arguments were taken, out of context of the larger argument. Those arguments were then either weakly refuted, called irrelevant despite it being brought up by the negation and being quite central to the resolution, or had the definition of net neutrality shifted to try to invalidate the argument. And don't forget the latin and logical fallacies. This was in an attempt to create the illusion of this case being completely torn apart. So first, let me restate the definition of net neutrality, as given three lines into the debate. Net neutrality: ISPs who charge for internet access must provide a service that enables users to send and receive packets using the Internet in a way that is indifferent to the contents, source or destination of the packets. Net neutrality is not access rates, it is not an "explicit price control mechanism", it is about how packets are treated and delivered. The neg decided to refute almost all of my points with a variation of the same argument, that being that traffic is sent over private property and thus should be allowed to be manipulated and used however the ISP wants. In doing so, my opponent has granted the arguments on a technical basis, opposing them only morally on the basis of the private property argument. To list those arguments opposed morally, thus granted technically. -The end-to-end design of the Internet needs to be preserved -ISPs have motivation to grant multi-billion dollar companies favored treatment over smaller enterprises -Control of the Internet will be in the hands of a handful of large companies that control the Backbone Network. "It ignores the nature of what the Internet is" The Internet is a egalitarian, decentralized system for the free exchange of information. To grant control of that system to those few companies, you must ignore the nature of what the Internet is. "It means the cost of users who do use high amounts of data transfer must be costed by all. If, as was the case with Comcast, an ISP is forced to devote a large portion of its bandwidth to a minority of its customer base" *This* is a contractual issue, when a company sells plans that they cannot deliver on, that being the access rate these torrenters use, the fault does not lie with those who use their package, it lies with Comcast. "Absolutely it is. The available income diminishes exponentially once you implement net neutrality as a *price control mechanism* for ISPs which is an *explicit* goal of net neutrality." Again, I point to the definition of net neutrality, and this arguments nature as a contractual issue. Net neutrality is about how packets are treated and sent. If ISPs oversell their product, it is their responsibility to either handle the packages they sold, or re design those packages. "dumb internet" This is refuted by the private property argument, addressed lower down. "Irrelevant. The call for net neutrality is the ability to administer controls *to the ISP* not the end user." The ability for customization by the end user is in response to his argument of the inability to tailor access to consumer needs. This is part of the end-to-end design, and is used to show that traffic shaping isn't needed. ""entrepreneurial nature of the internet" Again, unrelated to how business interests work, " This is the motivation of companies to side with multi-billion dollar companies over garage companies yet again. It is in the ISPs obvious benefit to side with google over that kid with an old lunix computer running a search engine to get some ad revenue. "I covered this already in R1. Source code and protocols are for the majority, open source." You ignored the giant pipeline that most internet traffic will eventually flow through (see http://en.wikipedia.org...) "Why censor when you can charge differentiating rates?" Multi-billion dollar company = more profit The private property, and reduced income argument. Our governments responsibility is to protect its citizens. Part of this is to ensure that they are not exploited at the expense of profit. Take Goldman Sachs for example, we defiantly reduced their ability to profit by adding regulation, and preventing more of the trading that cause the economic downfall, but we did this because they were taking advantage of the consumer to make that profit. In the same vein we must protect the Internet from being exploited at the cost of the consumer in the name of profit. We are still buying that package from the ISP, and to say that ISPs are allowed to invade upon the property we have purchased in the form of data transmission, much less in the name of private property, is ridiculous. especially when this access rate argument can be negated by buying high access rate packages. Gah procrastination, 20 seconds remaining!