From the outside it looks like the US political scene is a complete and ridiculous mess right now, led by the Republican Congress.
Further, Congress has a legitimate gripe here. We don't elect FCC commissioners. They're appointed. We should be particularly concerned about them overstepping their bounds. Which a reasonable case can be made for here.
I'm not sure I see what your comment adds to the discussion, other than "the duly elected Republican congress is doing something I disagree with!".
We are indeed in a situation where many companies have invested in their own infrastructure and maybe that requires consideration. I'm absolutely certain that jimktrains2 has a point: the U.S. taxpayers coughed up tremendous amounts of money to invest in infrastructure which makes those lines ours. (Sure, 'legally' AT&T et al own title and deed, but you and I still provided the money.)
Ultimately the point is that it's time to classify access to the Internet as a utility and regulate it as such: separating ownership from operation, mandatory line sharing, various and sundry other mechanisms to make sure the consumer has choice amongst competitors. Then we can say net neutrality is not needed.
This Internet stuff is not really a voting issue for me (health care and education are the big things that make me a Dem and not a Lib), but the candidate that tells me he wants to turn AT&T into Commonwealth Edison has secured a donation from me to his opponent.
Be careful what you wish for.
I think the ideal solution would be an act specifically about net neutrality - but where existing laws allow net neutrality to be regulated, I think that using those measures in the interim is not necessarily a bad thing.
Prosecuting companies that aren't using net neutrality in the interim might be more of an FTC role than an FCC role in terms of current US government structures - especially if they can get a court to agree that non-net neutrality violates one of the anti-trust or consumer protection laws.
Care to elaborate? Regarding electric co. service, mine has been reliable (far more than my cable internet service). Regarding customer service and price, can't really complain about these either and I've had a fair amount of experience on both a commercial and personal level.
Full Disclosure: Personally, I'm an advocate of regulations that would treat the net more like a utility. By diminishing the profit motive for maintaining the infrastructure, I believe that we can better ensure equal access and adequate service quality (e.g. South Korea: http://articles.cnn.com/2010-03-31/tech/broadband.south.kore...).
Regarding rules that could unintentionally retard progress - that's not necessarily a bad thing. In the same sense, the FDA retards progress of the pharmaceutical industry. We should be able to decide that some things are harmful enough to individuals and their rights that companies shouldn't be allowed to compete on them, at least beyond a certain level. At the very least, they should be required to make those things as visible to consumers as price, because consumers can only vote with their wallets on things they're aware of.
The EFF is right about this. Whether you like net neutrality or not, you should hope the GOP wins this one. I don't want to imagine what stupid shit President Romney could come up with for the FCC to do to the Internet.
Consider the current state in Australia: you have ISPs that charge you based on GB of bandwidth used per month. For example, lets say your ISP signs a deal with Hulu so that traffic from them is free for you. Most people would probably not give any consideration to competing services because they will have to pay for bandwidth while using them. This is a huge advantage to already established online tv services that have resources to make these kinds of offers with ISPs. Meanwhile, new services that can't afford them get ignored by users despite perhaps having better feature sets.
(I'm not criticizing you).
From this time last year:
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/83059-senate-sitting-on-29...
Maybe the sky isn't really falling?
The point of a sausage factory is to make sausage, disgusting or not. "sausage factory" is a reference to how it is made, independent of if it's delicious or not. See Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. I apologize if I offended sausage. Sausage, and the people who make it and eat it, will have to come to terms with the fact that it is not filet mignon.
Do government workers and public servants, who have a view from the inside, think that it looks like a functioning government? Because from the outside, according to the past entries on this thread, it doesn't.
There are 307 million people in the United States. That the three million? people of in the original colonies managed to agree on a system of government that scaled this far and this well over so many diverse interests and conflicting worldviews is astonishing.