The large American ISPs (i.e. cable and telephone companies) have made an enormous mistake with their recent attempts to create artificial network congestion to extract rent, and I'm glad that the FCC seems to think that this isn't acceptable behavior. I still wish that the resolution wasn't government regulation.

Everyone should be able to access the Internet, at a reasonable cost that covers their usage and makes a reasonable profit. No packages, plans, quotas or other nonsense -- no limits whatsoever. The fundamental costs of building a network lie in the instantaneous bandwidth provided and the oversubscription ratio, not in how many bits you move in a month or whether your data is going to this site or that site. This is not how things work right now for a lot of people.

Likewise, everyone should be able to serve content to these users, on equal footing relative to the legitimate costs that are being paid. If I'm YouTube, then I should pay (or make a mutually beneficial agreement to peer) for my transit, and my upstream providers should be incentivized to provide quality service (at risk of being replaced). This is how things work right now for most sites.

I think the root problem is that there is competition on only one side, the service provider side, where you can choose from tens or hundreds of transit partners. This side is undergoing substantial consolidation (not good), but I believe a significant part of that is because they have to keep getting bigger to compete with Comcast, et. al. It's an arms race.

End user connectivity, on the other hand, has already been extremely consolidated since the late 90's. There is almost no real competition in most markets, even if multiple providers exist.

Yes, a lot of people have two or more choices for ISPs at home or work. Generally it's between the phone and the cable company (AT&T and Comcast where I live). AT&T is not competitive on performance with Comcast at all, not even remotely close. There are two other good options (who I always try to do business with, when I can) in the area: Sonic.net and Webpass. They are either limited in terms of performance or in availability (or both), and their respective userbases are a fraction of AT&T's or Comcast's. They both support network neutrality.

Why do they support it when AT&T and Comcast don't? I think it's because they aren't monopolies who were gifted substantial control of Internet at public expense, they aren't trying to be paid two or three times for the same bandwidth, and they aren't trying to prop up giant unrelated dinosaur businesses on the backs of their Internet service fees. They're both in one business, and they compete for that business, and they know that if they fail to perform adequately then they will lose that business.

This is what we need to bring to all ISPs everywhere in the country, and we need it way more than formal network neutrality laws. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner did not build the Internet, so why do they get disproportionate control over it by virtue of having some buried copper that runs to my house? It is inconceivable to me that we might allow any of them to acquire more subscribers and more territories. They should be broken up.

If a company is allowed to have a monopoly in an area, fine. Maybe that makes sense. They should not be allowed to have a monopoly (or duopoly) that spans half of the country though. Chop up Comcast ala Standard Oil: one Comcast for every state (or even better, for every major metropolitan area) they operate in. They may still try to play shenanigans with Internet connectivity, but their bargaining power is now vastly reduced.