Besides, your downstream ISP is dependent on the local monopoly who provides the links for DSL. There is no competing ISP for cable internet service. All other ISPs are dialup or satellite, which is expensive compared to the others.

The telephone system has network neutrality built into it at the moment. So buying a toll-free number means that, no matter who your local telco is, you can call toll-free and get the same voice quality and chance of being connected as at another telco.

Outside of a few areas, however, there is almost no competition at the local telco level, and what competition there is is enforced by government fiat and assumes that the customer will have the same access to a dialtone if they wish to call Cavalier Telecom to change providers. If there weren’t network neutrality, calls from Verizon to Cingular/ATT would be restricted or blocked. So it wouldn’t matter if you wanted another provider, as your ability to sign up to that provider would depend on you finding a phone that could connect to them.

That isn’t something we’re used to. If you’re looking for a precedent, look to the online world before the internet, when you could choose among the walled-off options of GEnie, Prodigy, AOL, or CompuServe.

Given that telecommunications generally requires various applications of eminent domain to even exist in the first place (to say nothing of the vast public sums that have been spent on its development, I think that the burden of proof lands on those who try to justify something other than net neutrality. Simple tales about pizza delivery just don’t cut it.

As to your first point: um, no.

Excellent, though now I’m wondering what that song-and-dance about pulling down the state in favor of the disadvantaged causing a state in favor of the advantaged was all about, aside from making a false dichotomy.

Let me get this straight: there is no time when the government has supported the disadvantaged. Never?

Ah, but I didn’t say that – you’re strangely overlooking the words “and not the advantaged”. (Or, if I were to say, “Odd, I’ve never gone to a grocery store and had to go through a metal detector,” would you really ask if I’d never been to a grocery store?) Maybe you’ve missed this detail about the world in your smirking at principled arguments, but government always gives and has always given a helping hand to the rich and influential.

If you really think state support of the advantaged only happens when someone tears down support of the disadvantaged, or that the US government has ever supported the disadvantaged and not the advantaged, I’m not sure you can reasonably criticize libertarians on their crazy ideas.

As to your first point: um, no. And as to your second point, um, okay.

Let me get this straight: there is no time when the government has supported the disadvantaged. Never?

I don’t think that libertarians are crazy. Just that they may not totally think all the way through the impact of their principled arguments.

Google can have a billion OC3 lines terminating in its data center with the capacity to connect to the whole world at arbitrarily high speeds, but YOUR ISP (whom you’re paying for your DSL line) deliberately slows down the packets Google routes to it for you, at your request, unless Google pays it a bribe over and above its network fees. In a discriminatory network, every network service (including juliansanchez.com) has to be prepared to give money to every ISP in the world for the privilege of having expeiditous routing to its customers.

So, every ISP, network backbone company, etc. in the world is going to set up a management and billing infrastructure so they can milk every web site in the world for expeditious routing privileges. Consumers will not care if they have any trouble getting to sites they like. And naturally, because every ISP in the world has set up this sort of billing and every web site is paying for good routing, consumers won’t see any difference in routing quality between ISPs. Not seeing any sort of difference, consumers won’t change providers to avoid slowness or outright difficulty reaching sites while surfing. And with consumers not changing providers in response to bad experiences caused by deliberately poor routing, every ISP in the world will continue milking every web site in the world for “bribes”, which every web site in the world will pay.

Also, I hear that if you eat Pop Rocks and drink Coke, you will explode.