While there might have been reason to not regulate in the past, schemes like the ones advocated by Verizon really strike me as questionable. In 1996, we had to

While there might have been reason to not regulate in the past, schemes like the ones advocated by Verizon really strike me as questionable. In 1996, we had to worry about these networks really catching on. In 2014, it's hard to imagine not having them. Consider a simple ad supported news site. It may run ads hosted on hundreds of sources. When the page loads, the browser requests individual images from different sources. If some are not paying the verizon tax or not paying enough, the page loads slower or with broken content. This is pretty foundational stuff. It really isn't all that different from having different audio quality in a phone call depending if the local exchange operator was paid extra or not. As the result, it seems to me that classification and the additional regulation is warranted.