Joho the Blog
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This is one of the difficulties in making the Net neutrality case: Violating Net neutrality benefits particular services that customers may want, but it has a systemic chilling effect on innovation.

On the contrary, I think that is the Net neutrality case, or at least a very important part of it. The only counter-argument is "oh but we wouldn't do that..." which is mostly rhetoric rather than logic. (Not that that makes it any less effective in practice, sadly.)

Perhaps I'm being dense here and underestimating your distrust of Verizon.
But more chilling to me is the idea that you develop this hypothetical medical service. Verizon doesn't have to do it better than you (asterick not withstanding). They can simply put up an equal service and throttle your customers' traffic.

That having been said, I believe there are two things standing in the way of practical net neutral legislation: defining net neutrality in legislation, and regulatory capture. The first should be fairly obvious, but the second is more pernicius. Any highly profitable regulated entity has more incentive to monitor and shape (ok, purcahse) the levers of regulation than the customers of the regulated entity. (e.g review any tax code at any level for reams of exceptions for favored entities).
I'm afraid I don't have any solutions, but I haven't seen the discussions around either question. Perhaps it's time to use a Republican tactic and start discussing the details of how it will be regulated. Leave the implicit assumption that it will be regulated off the table.

mawado

I've been thinking that this whole net neutrality debate is grounded in "Scarcity Thinking" Scarcity of bandwidth, ISP resources, upstream bandwidth, etc etc. Except there is no scarcity. And we are only a small amount of routine investment (more, faster routers/switches and enabling dark fibre) from abundance.

The one place where there is scarcity is in the last mile connection. We have telephone wires, cable and the beginnings of wireless. So all the focus should be on that. The rest is a red herring. So how do we get from a government mandated duopoly to some government mandated free market competition?
1) Tax incentives for last mile Fibre and other alternatives
2) Government mandated sale of wholesale bandwidth to 3rd part ISPs
3) Government mandated LLU to 3rd party ISPs

Let's stop talking about how to keep the incumbents from abusing their monopoly (by differential prioritization) and start talking about how to force them to invest and open up so that 3rd parties can flourish.

Mawado, you're not being thick. I'm being badly written, so to speak. I meant that Verizon's version would "work better" because its bits would get preference. So assuming that my service's functionality is on a par with Verizon's, mine would be at a disadvantage because it would move more sluggishly. In other words, I meant to say exactly what you're saying. That was my point. Sorry to have put it so badly.

Julian, that's the right approach: More bandwidth subverts the main technical justification for discriminating among bits (AFAIK). But we're facing a particular bill in America that isn't considering ending the duoploy but is considering ending Net neutrality. As a practical political question, there's no hope of addressing the duopoly issue in the legislature at this particular moment. Plus, the government (including the courts) have slapped down most of the attempts to crack it open.

On the other hand, people like Esme Vos and Dewayne Hendricks are pretty convincing that we're already successfully routing around the duopoly via muni wifi and other efforts.

More bandwidth subverts the main technical justification for discriminating among bits (AFAIK).

That's like saying that more landfills subverts the need for recycling.

The real question behind the regulation of broadband is whether network providers are permitted to fully implement the Class of Service architecture the Internet has had from Day 1. The purpose of the Internet, you see, isn't simply to move bits, it's to serve the human needs expressed in applications.

As all applications don't have the same needs, the Internet shouldn't pretend they do. Think of it was Affirmative Action, not "discrimination" if you must use political metaphors to describe the operation of a machine.

Has anyone demonstrated that Verizon or the other carriers can in fact do what they claim, i.e. prioritize traffic from the device in the last mile, over the internet core, and to the device in the other last mile? I don't think they are able to do it, but am willing to read sources that demonstrate otherwise...

Several NSPs have announced peering agreements that include QoS, so all it takes to make end-to-end QoS is service agreements between ISPs and the relevant NSPs. QoS on corporate and campus networks is already commonplace, and we've had specialty NSPs that provide QoS routes for a long time. WiFi networks based on chipsets built in the last five years support QoS as well. It's pretty much everywhere in the real world, but for some reason our "visionaries" have missed the build-out.