A few answers/comments:

> No one wants a "fast free ride". People want fairness in traffic. It is likely that tiered models will be as much about slowing down or eliminating non-premium traffic as it will be about faster service with higher cost. Think of it this way. You put out a request for a page-view on a non-payee site. Your request will be at the lowest priority, which means any site with a higher priority, i.e., has paid the telecoms, will go before you. If traffic is high you may wait a long time.

Okay, what if there is plenty of bandwidth such that no one HAS to wait. Will the person paying extra be happy? Maybe someone will make sure lower priority traffic must wait a certain amount of time before a request is granted. Net neutrality prevents this.

> Have you flown lately? Notice how some airlines have created fast lanes through security for first class? We all pay for security and it is a government function (TSA, remember?). Why then should first class people get this advantage as well as all the other advantages?

Think of the internet in a similar way. We all helped pay for the internet, and we pay for expansion too. Why should wealth dominate the modern "meeting square"? Money owns politics ($ = free speech still seems a stupid ruling to me, but I guess if I was rich...) and pretty much everything else.

"In late June, Net neutrality received a stunning rebuke in the Senate, when the Commerce Committee tied 11-11 on the Net neutrality provision to the telecom bill put forth by Snowe and Dorgan. The vote, says Scott, "sent a shock wave" through the horde of telecom lobbyists gathered in the congressional hearing room, fully expecting to see net Neutrality read its last rites."

Are you sure that that shouldn't be "In late June, Net neutrality foes received a stunning rebuke..."

It doesn't make sense with what preceeds and follows that paragraph (much less, it lacks internal consistancy...) Those who were shocked, i.e. "telecom lobbyists", should be the ones who were "rebuked", no?

This issue still puzzles me a bit... Please let me know if my understanding/analysis is mistaken: If the "telecoms" get what they want, then you'll have to pay if you want your information to be delivered through the "fast lane" (you being the information providers). Information providers that can't/won't pay... They'll stay the same old, slow internet speeds that they have right now. Not that they'll be slowed down, just that they'll have to pay to have access to the fast lane... No? Sounds like they are whining and want a "free and fast" ride...

Or are the telecoms going to neglect the regular internet and put their resources (including the government subsidies...) into the more lucrative "fast lanes" that they'll charge more for...?

There is a lot of background info that is missing from this piece... Not all of us read WIRED or other geeky (but nice, hip and cool) sources of info... We just use the internet slow lanes and are happy enough with them. Please remember that and allow for the fact that everyone on Salon.com isn't necessarily in the choir when you start preaching to us.

What does it say when this issue generates such a large response when torture, loss of habeus corpus protections for whomever the POTUS deems an "enemy combatant" is in the offing - and how many letters are going to our legistators about that?

Thanks for your consideration.

thanks for pointing that out. it's fixed now.

We have had serious problems with the neutrality of the net since the beginning.

How do you access the world wide web?

Most of use through Google or some other search engine.

How much of the net do they actually spider and allow access to? 11%.

What sites show up in the top end of search results? Those who can afford to pay for a search engine optimization program.

Who gets to publish on the internet? Not the individual. Most cable internet service providers block port 80. This is the port that web sites are served on. What this means is that I can not run a web server from my home computer and "broadcast" my information on to the net in a way that people can easily find it. I would have to pay for hosting. If I want to serve rich media content like youtube, then I have to pay very expensive server and bandwidth fees. This means that publishing on the net is increasing tilted towards those who can afford to publish. This in turn limits the voice and content of the net to information and content that is marketable or assumes a profit. We don't notice the disparity now because a blog looks very similar to Salon.com. Text, images, users. The future holds much richer media types like video, and also much more complex application layers to the sites. In a short time, the published content on the net will heavily skew to the big players who can afford the bandwidth, the servers, the development costs, corporate attorneys, and the search engine optimization programs. Add content packet delivery tolls on top and "we the people" definitely don't have equality in net access and publishing rights.

"fully expecting to see net Neutrality read its last rights."

It's a metaphorical funeral, not a police line-up. Rites.

Otherwise, a pleasure to read.