> The most frightening to me, is your assertion above: "And ISPs should have the right to use their position to get payment agreements". What I take this to mea

> The most frightening to me, is your assertion above: "And ISPs should have the right to use their position to get payment agreements". What I take this to mean is use their monopoly position to extort data from larger Internet companies. This appears to be what you are arguing for and I don't understand why any Internet consumer, such as yourself, would support such a position. This is a right every enterprise in a market has. And we have been having this good discussion so I know that we agree that ISPs are naturally a monopoly and need to be regulated or gov owned to prevent abuse. I'm just opposed to NN because I think that the appropriate regulatory/ownership level is the municipality, township, etc. federal regulation in this space risks future curtailment of free speech. And as a internet constomer, why are you opposed to google or Netflix paying more and having your bill be less? (If your ISO were locally regulated and had an interest in providing the content you want) > There is some truth to this but an ISP's only concern is it's immediate connections... Exactly, it only has a business relationship with its neighbor ISPs. But if the server is in ISP1's network, as opposed to passing through ISP1s network from a further series of hops, then it is probably cheaper for ISP1 to serve data from its region than the cost of the data associated with its arrangement with ISP2 plus the costs of routing it through its own network. If you were to fight for a world of smaller ISPs with less power, then for that system to function ISP1 would have to be able to charge more for that domain, and then you would probably want city 0 to be allowed to negotiate with that domain directly for the privledge of having access when it is more expensive. Again I want ISPs regulated or municipalized. I am just an Internet customer and a citizen. No Comcast stock or whatever. I don't see why Chattanooga's city ISP shouldn't be able to try and shift some cost from its citizens to large data domains without fearing a lawsuit in that negotiation. We have open standards, it's not like the Internet would cease to function if the federal goverment doesn't enforce that ISPs use tcp/ip. And I would argue it would be less madness to have local ISPs negotiate with a few big companies than to have them track traffic and share routing data with every other municipality or private/state backbone company who may be on the routing paths. Less "collusive" too. Regardless of which way is more difficult, we as a free people should be always trying to reduce the federal government's interaction with enterprises that disseminate information. We shouldn't fight for net neutrality on all battlefields. Only on the level of civic organization that owns the public right of ways, i.e. the size of the natural monopoly.