[ewillbefull]

The only thing that needs to be enforced is anti-trust law. Monopolies are what give ISPs the ability, and perhaps the incentive, to filter and editorialize the Internet. The FTC should be involved in defending consumers against those behaviors.

Net neutrality arises naturally. It didn't need enforcement 30 years ago. In some contexts, like exotic network protocols, it may not even make sense.

I wouldn't care much if it was a limited authority granted to the FCC, but they are claiming an authority which is limitless in scope and using net neutrality as an excuse to exercise it.

[wpietri]

Wait, 30 years ago? Actually, net neutrality needed substantial government help. The parallel at the time is the long distance market. Read about the history of Sprint, MCI, and the like.

And it goes back further. At one point, you weren't even allowed to connect your own phone to the network, let alone an answering machine; AT&T claimed it was too dangerous. So you had to rent everything from Ma Bell. It wasn't until the Carterphone case in 1968, where the FCC told AT&T to knock it off, that you saw things get better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory_...

As much as I would like anti-trust law to help here, you don't need collusion or a monopoly to ruin net neutrality. As long as you have an oligopoly, which is the general state of the US residential ISP market, then that's plenty. As we see in the article as soon as one ISP starts a shakedown, the other big ones will try the same thing.

[dkuntz2]

I suppose using it as a claim for unlimited authority isn't a good situation, but I don't know if I see breaking net neutrality as being a trust.

Considering where the term anti-trust came from, ISPs who block certain sites without customer consent aren't really being monopolistic in nature. Which makes, to me, defending net neutrality a separate issue than breaking trusts and monopolies...