I'm all in favor of healthy, competitive free markets with reasonable assurances to protect consumers and control for externalities. Basically your boilerplate

I'm all in favor of healthy, competitive free markets with reasonable assurances to protect consumers and control for externalities. Basically your boilerplate I-took-some-econ-courses-in-college mentality. The problem is only in very large cities is there any internet competition, information asymmetry and deceptive advertising practices harm consumers, and having free and open access to information is in societies best interests. Capitalism requires that everyone play by the same rules, that those rules be fair, and that there be competition and alternatives. Without net neutrality, a single corporation can dictate to an unprecedented degree what information you have access to for any purpose whatsoever with no recourse. This isn't because they're in the business of generating information, but because they put themselves between the producer and the consumer. It's not any different from the anti-competitive practices of the robber-baron era where Standard Oil owned the rail roads, then priced out competition from transporting their oil to gain a monopoly. We know from the past behavior and the current behavior of ISPs in other countries that the reason they want to end net neutrality is so that they can price out and block YouTube to gain a monopoly on video services, or to do the same to any other area they want, simultaneously making more money and the world worse off because of it. I love businesses. But when Standard Oil charges certain companies one rate for train fare and themselves a different one, or when Bell charges you extra fees to connect to non-Bell telephones (or blocks them entirely), then you have a market failure and the government needs to step in and break up those companies and force them to be competitive. Without competitive markets, you don't have capitalism, you have feudalism.