Net neutrality is the way things ran for most of the last 20 years. This is less of a change but a return to what worked well in the recent past. The reason we

Net neutrality is the way things ran for most of the last 20 years. This is less of a change but a return to what worked well in the recent past. The reason we are even discussing this topic is that telecoms are moving away from net neutrality. A) What happens if your ISP blocks all VOIP traffic unless you buy their phone service bundle? Or throttle all streaming video (which competes with their cable offerings)? In other markets these would be seen as an abuse of monopoly power (which, in many local markets, telecoms are). Given that, is indeed a government concern. B) Any workaround is trivially blocked by the ISP. C) It isn't obvious to the consumer why a site is slow, especially if some competing sites do pay the extra fees ISPs are asking for. Again, local monopolies (and oligopolies) mean that telecoms don't have much incentive to make their customers happier: at this point nobody is going to forgo internet service entirely. As far as billion dollar enterprises are concerned, Google, Facebook, or Skype could have been squashed in their infancy. AOL search would be the best we ever got - or the only search engine that AOL users could access: there's no incentive to improve when you're the only option.