However, if telcos decide to start charging things on a different basis than packets are packets, then David All will be correct.

There is some middle ground between letting telcos charge people out the ying-yang for what are now basic services and having the government take things over.

As for neutrality, yes, providers have the right to limit a customer’s bandwidth in order to maintain a basic quality of service for all customers. But, if I have purchased (on the free market) service with unlimited access to the internet, and a company I choose to do business with (Google, Vonage, etc.) has done the same, then so long as both I and that company conform to the terms of our access, we should be able to conduct business.

The real issue of net neutrality, is providers interfering with this relationship because they feel threatened by it. The interesting case for this was for people who were both Comcast internet customers and a Vonage VoIP customers. When people started (all of a sudden) having problems with my Vonage service, they called Comcast to see if they were having service issues. They were told point blank that Vonage “isn’t authorized to use our pipes.” As far as these consumers were concerned, they’d payed for internet access; what they did with it was their business, and Comcast’s problems with its own VoIP service were just that–its own problems.

This is a matter of simple free market economics, which (in a sense) makes it a an issue of conservative politics. As we’ve (arguably) benefited the most from a free and open internet, we should be concerned with providers breaking their own terms of service with their users.

Should we mandate equal access to data regardless of service agreement? Of course not. There is no circumstance under which the Government should interfere with the relationship between provider and customer, and if a provider chooses to offer a premium service or establish a fixed bandwidth per user, they are entitled to do so.

But by the same token, we cannot indulge providers who choose to treat customers with the same level of service unequally, depending on the legal content they choose to access with that service.

I find the idea that this kind of restriction would result in a politically biased result somewhat vapid. But, we could find content which eats into a provider’s additional businesses harder (or impossible) to access. In the case of cable companies, the ones they have actively fretted about are online video (HotAir, YouTube) and VoIP (Vonage). Those could have some indirect implications for the netroots but more for individuals simply trying to do as they wish (legally, and within their terms of service) on a service they paid for. That’s essential freedom and fairness.

• Ashamed of Bush
• Bush is dmba*s
• Bush lied.
• Worst year for republican party
• Landslide for democrats
• Libertarians are splitting from Republicans
• Conservatives are disappointed…

This is identity politics coated by hypocrisy.

The sad thing is that many Republicans have forgotten their principle as stated by Pres. Reagan that “we should only fear if we do nothing”. And many of us did nothing to defend our President from hecks and lies that have been spreading by the enemies since 2004.

And look at the solution of some pebble-minded people: “Let’s form a new party away from Bush”. And they promote their party as pure libertarian and conservative principles. They are fools who believed that the past can still be rewritten and revised.

For me, the last two paragraphs in above constitute the what we call “Republicans for Convenience”.