A Visual Guide to Net Neutrality and its Importance

McDonald's could serve french fries that taste like gravel! Malls could charge you $1 to go to the bathroom! Circuit City and others could sell DVDs that self-destruct after 48 hours! Apple could offer singles only in an onerously-DRM-protected format rather than MP3s!

There are plenty of awful products that are possible. What protects us from their infinite variety is not the FCC/FTC/FBI/FHA/etc., but competition and consumer sovereignty.

The spook-scenarios of net-neut advocates, like the oft-repeated 'internet sites charged like cable channel packages' (appearing again here), probably wouldn't even be tried. But if they were tried, they'd fail in the marketplace. Perhaps immediately to consumer ridicule, like the case of disposable DVDs mentioned above; perhaps after a few years, like the case of Apple and DRM'd music.

Further, it's important to let this battle be played out. The give and take generates information about what people really want, at what prices. Preempting it with regulation based on scary bedtime stories, such as this page, means parts of the solution space that could be exciting for consumers die in uncertainty over legality or as collateral damage of overbroad rulemaking.

(My favorite hypothetical: why shouldn't an ISP be allowed to offer a free service that's a measly 128Kbps to the 'whole internet', but 6Mbps+ to preferred partners, as a way to extend basic connectivity to households that can't pay otherwise? Is such cross-subsidized non-neutral service, which could 'bridge the digital divide' and 'serve underserved communities', so self-evidently evil we need to ban it by law before it's even tried?)

All the long-term trends are for more access, cheaper. The internet already defeated a slew of walled-gardens and then gardens-plus-internet (classic AOL, CompuServe, others). Bandwidth to every point is increasing. The ability for upstarts to launch giant challenges to incumbents – in bandwidth and services – is increasing. The techniques for putting any traffic in any 'pipe' – bits is bits – are growing.

Don't believe an infographic written at an elementary-school level that tells you the internet is a delicate flower about to be trampled. The internet is a rampaging monster. Its logic will crush the DRM, bit-discrimination, and pipe-monopolization schemes of corporate dinosaurs – if we just let it. The worst thing to do is move any discretion at all into the DC 'halls of power' where AT&T, Comcast, and other big lobbies have disproportionate voice.

There are much better arguments for net neutrality than this one.

The only thing missing is a "take action" section at the bottom.