[sowhatquestion]

Sure, maybe private companies have a small supporting role in piggybacking on one of the biggest (and highest ROI) government infrastructure projects ever: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System

The real problem here is that many advocates of net neutrality frame their support of neutrality strictly in terms of enabling free-market innovation. Perhaps because they're afraid to lose the support of the many libertarians who still walk among us, net neutrality supporters are afraid to give a fully fleshed-out narrative of what should happen: the government either makes a massive direct investment in increasing information bandwidth (as it has done with transportation bandwidth), or it assimilates the telcos and makes them do so. Finally, the current wave of market-based innovation can continue, supported (as markets always are) by a robust public infrastructure. There is a properly dialectical relationship here: you can't have one of these moments without the other, even though they are contradictory.

Is this plan perfect? No, but it sounds a million times more preferable than Comcast and Verizon picking which startups live or die.