There is a growing gulf between the public perception of the internet and the greedy desires of those who actually own it.

How would you feel if I-95 announced an exclusive deal with General Motors to provide a special "rush-hour" lane for GM cars only? That seems intuitively wrong. ... And if highways really did choose favorite brands, you might buy a Pontiac instead of a Toyota to get the rush-hour lane, not because the Pontiac is actually a good car. As a result, the nature of competition among car-makers would change. Rather than try to make the best product, they would battle to make deals with highways.

A more correct analogy for the current debate would seem to be this. If a certain town has a local GM plant that builds Pontiacs, and that town has an ordinance that says that all speed limits in and near the town (including the interstates that go through and around it) are 50% lower for any vehicle that isn't a Pontiac. Now other vehicle manufacturers can get in on the deal, but they have to pay the town a special fee to allow their products to travel at the best possible speed.

Now, I agree that the result of the loss of network neutrality will be bad for the average consumer. If the content providers (Google, Amazon, etc.) have to pay a premium to obtain acceptable performance on local networks, that will be less money that they have available to spend improving, or aven maintaining, their products and/or services. I believe that the network owners are being incredibly short-sighted in even considering this. In the end, consumers are fickle -- having already had high-speed access to Amazon, they will just as likely change ISPs to continue to get what they want, rather than nagging Amazon to pay up so that they can maybe get it with their current ISP. Just ask the cell phone industry how fickle their customer base is.

Since about the 17th century, there's been a strong sense that basic transport networks should serve the public interest without discrimination.

It is also true that the roads, highways, and interstates are not privately owned -- and never really have been. The government contracts out for any construction or maintenance work that needs to be done, but the highways themselves are a public asset. This is not true of the internet backbone. A few big companies actually own the physical cabling that make up the internet backbone, and I do not believe that the government is going to get away with (or is really interested in) nationalizing it.

But there's a long-standing rebuttal that goes like this: A broadband company already has incentives to make the network neutral, because it's a better network that way. If AT&T makes money on an exclusive deal, they'll lose it somewhere else. Whatever money AT&T earns by prioritizing Google rather than Yahoo!, it will lose by making its product—broadband service—less attractive to consumers. By this logic, regulating the Bells is a waste of time.

The problem with this is that business in general seems to have lost the capability to see what their actions mean to their customers. Or maybe they just do not care anymore, and see us as merely sheep who will flock to their products no matter what they do to us (the RIAA especially seems to have this attitude). I think that they will be surprised to find that there is a limit to consumer tolerance, and beyond that limit we decide that we do not really need their products at all.

I cannot say that I have any special insight into how this will end up, but I do think that it will be a bumpy road getting there. The map for that section of road just says, "here there be dragons."