Finally, someone else makes the argument that I've been making for awhile: "These details are important, but the noise about them only makes the omission more

Finally, someone else makes the argument that I've been making for awhile: "These details are important, but the noise about them only makes the omission more startling: the failure in America to tackle the underlying lack of competition in the provision of internet access." Americans seem to believe that, if a company is granted monopoly status by a government entity or if competition is severely limited, then those companies allowed to operate without free market competitive forces should be regulated. Monthly phone and cable bills are regulated by some combination of local, State, and Federal governments with the presumption that these payments from consumers are the companies' main revenue source resulting from this governmental grant of exclusivity. Now, these same companies are trying to invent another revenue source which will not fall under these guidelines, at least not at first. Great, my bill for "internet service" is still $29.99, but this "service" is now limited to watching high bandwidth video from just a few providers who opted to pay for access to my home. I would not mind so much if there was a neutral tier available with a government-regulated price and a "we sell you on the back-end" tier available in addition. It is that these telecoms are attempting to avoid regulation by changing their revenue model which is so bothersome. Also, I would not mind if there was some method by which I could pick and choose QoS for my traffic and pay based on priority. Imagine some sort of open standard by which a "choose your priorities" app could communicate with my DSL provider's network. Perhaps Google could make watching YouTube more palatable by subsidizing prioritization of its traffic through a transparent back-end rate structure available to all content providers. In a nutshell, I have no issue with tiered rate structures or traffic prioritization. My chief complaint is simply that the telecoms want to circumvent regulation and choose the winners and losers rather than achieving their purported goals in an open, transparent, and nondiscriminatory manner.