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Google, Yahoo, eBay, and Microsoft continue to try and hide how much the average American subsidizes their market-leading 80-90% gross profit margins. 

Net neutrality is a dressed up name for a regulated average-pricing sheme. Under NN, below-average bandwidth users, the vast majority of Americans, pay much higher broadband prices in order to subsidize the average price that bandwidth hogs pay -- and bandwidth hogs make up a relatively small percentage of Internet users.

What Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, eBay, Amazon don't want anyone to know or figure out is that they are among the largest consumers of bandwidth in the country, and they pay a relatively minscule amount for it. It's certainly easier to be so super profitable if they can sucker everyone into paying their bills for them.     

I continue to be amazed that the neutrality-ites are unwilling to quote AT&T Chairman Whitacre's CURRENT statements on NN. But that would require them to be forthright and that would undermine their cause...

At NARUC, the state regulators conference, Whitacre said according to Communications Daily today, that: "We're not going to block anybody, but we want to offer the right to offer something better. Some companies want us to be a big dumb pipe that keeps getting bigger and bigger for free."

Neutrality-ites love to quote only a 2005 Business Week article to get people riled up, but they conveniently and selectively ignore all the official remarks the AT&T Chairman has made about NN since, which have made crystal clear AT&T has no desire to block or degrade anyone, but that it certainly wants to invest in a better faster Internet and get compensated for that value added service.

VA Senate Democratic candidate, Jim Webb, recently endorsed NN. The text of his statement, which could easily have been drafted verbatim by moveon.org --  is included below.  

I ask Mr. Webb whether anyone has explained to him the "Reverse Robin Hood" effect of NN before he endorsed NN? Does Mr. Webb understand that NN is average-pricing and one-size fits- all offerings?
 
Average pricing means that lower-than-average bandwidth users, like pensioners on fixed incomes, must pay above-average prices for bandwidth to subsidize more well -off high-end bandwidth users? How does such a special interest gift, corporate welfare for the online giants, square with traditional Democratic values of really looking out for the "little guy?" 

The Heartland Institute flags in an article that two prominent State Attorney Generals are now backing NN.

Like the kid that doesn't like what one parent says, goes and asks the other to get the answer they seek, neutrality-ites don't want to hear the "NO!" that they got from the FCC, the DOJ antitrust division, the House of Representatives and the Senate Commerce Committee.
 
In Washington this transparent maneuver is called "forum shopping." It is the common practice for those with weak or losing arguments.

The NN debate between Tim Berners-Lee and David Farber on NPR was useful.

My takeaway from David Farber was two main points: First, no one can define the problem NN is trying to solve; and second, that there are sufficient laws and mechanisms already in place to address any net neutrality concerns, if they transform from being hypothetical to real. 

My big takeaway from Tim Berners-Lee's comments was his over-simplification that left the impression that NN is what everyone has now and have always had.  

To make NN sound less radical and controversial, net neutrality proponents routinely like to imply they just want to restore the situation to the way it was before the FCC's 2005 decision to declare DSL an unregulated information service.

However, if that was truly the NN game plan, and there was no other agenda:

Why are none of the NN bills (Snowe-Drogan or Markey Bills) written as restoring or reinstating what existed in regulation or legislation before if that is truly the case? (Why is it completely new language that applies to all the non-copper technologies it never applied to before?)

Why is net neutrality so hard to define? (If NN is the way its always been, couldn't we just use past definitions?)

Why is the term NN a relatively new term used for the first time on the Internet -- just a few years ago?

For those who are interested in an outstanding Op Ed on the folly of net neutrality I encourage you to read the Op Ed of David Cohen of Comcast in the Philadelphia Enquirer from earlier this week. its dead on.