[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.