>AT&T's "concerns" are simply a thinly-veiled threat

I don't even think they are a threat. They're a rhetorical point that their lobbyists and bought and paid for supporters in government are going to drum endlessly leading into the 2016 elections.

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Do you remember how Obamacare said you could keep your policy, but it turned out that there were many horrible policies that wouldn't turn a profit if there were better policies with lower prices available from exchanges, so the insurance companies stopped offering them? Obama 'lied'. Just wait for Obamanet, where Obama told everyone that net neutrality would guarantee equal access for everybody, but AT&T couldn't afford to roll out to your town because of the burden of his new regulations. Regulations that didn't exist during the Internet's rise, and if they had existed would have strangled it in it's crib.

It is simply unprofitable to operate under regulations that micromanage every aspect, every packet that is delivered to every home. The rollout of gigabit internet to 2M homes over the past two years (to wealthy/gentrified portions of a few, big, prosperous cities) shows you how wonderful your internet could have been if AT&T could have figured out to make their original plan to roll that same speed out to 100 cities profitable under Obamanet. They couldn't; nobody could - the only reason they rolled out to the 2M households was as an extortion payment because Obama threatened to hold up their acquisition of DirecTV if they wouldn't do what he wanted.

Obama wants to treat every piece of the internet equal[sic] - hardcore child pornography and stolen music should download exactly as fast as your netflix that you paid for downloads to your TV, or your electronic medical records (that keep your family safe) download to your family doctor. That seems like something that should be managed by the technicians and job creators that actually built the networks, and have run the networks since the beginning - maybe they know a little more about your internet than some jerks in Washington that are worried that their fancy wine and cheese magazine website won't download fast enough because no real people want to read it. They don't like what we like, so their socialist instincts kick in, and they get scared that what they like can't survive in the market without cheating (Solyndra!!! Solyndra!!! They're trying to kill us!!!), so they regulate that their things must always have as much of the internet as everybody else's things do, even if nobody has ever visited those websites in so long that when you go there, you get spiderwebs on your keyboard (chortle!)

It's socialism for their internet, but not for yours. When you hear them talking about this 'net neutrality' being 'fair' for everyone, look at all of those people in Brooklyn with their super-fast internet while your netflix is freezing so long that you can make a sandwich before it comes back and ask yourself - is this fair???.

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If AT&T weren't confident it had the political support, it would do whatever it was told. It would still be absurdly profitable. Profit levels might even end up being written into the law. AT&T knows that they have all of the Republicans (even the libertarians), they have the head of the FCC, and they have plenty of individual Democrats.

I think it's a good thing because the industry is going to pull out all stops and show all of their cards in order to kill this. We'll know who to target politically and who to support. I have little doubt that they will win, though, and this push will be entirely killed for some legislative procedural reason or in the courts on a technicality. Obama is terrible, always loses because he doesn't actually care, and the only reason he's pushing this is political pandering to people like me.

/rant