The basic free market case against net neutrality rules is articulated pretty well here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020448830457442....
"The new policy is a big political victory for Google and other Web content providers whose business model depends on free-loading off the huge capital investments in broadband made by others."
Anyone who could write that either is not in possession of the facts, or has chosen to disregard the facts. Lies and inaccuracies do not a cogent argument make.
Unless I'm misunderstanding, and your point was to claim that free-market arguments must be based on lies?
That is the free-market case. You can disagree with it, but that doesn't mean it is based on lies (though the Google reference is a cheap shot).
It is a philosophical disagreement: one either has faith in centralized authority being benign and protective or one is skeptical of that premise. The free-market view is skeptical and doesn't just assume that government regulation will wind up being benign. Once established, the only limit to such authority is . . . nothing more than the discretion of the regulators themselves (what has the FCC done to warrant placing faith in its future decisions in this manner?).
Government mandates tend to morph over time and they are backed by institutional power as to which individuals are often powerless to resist. There is no gain in freedom when a society cedes control in ever-larger amounts to a central authority without proper checks on such authority. Again, anyone is free to disagree. But this is a principled position that reasonable people can adopt, and it has nothing to do with being a shill for AT&T or any other telco.
Remember, what government can regulate, it can also tax. Will that be a benign outcome if some future administration starts to tax the hell out of Internet-based transactions? What principled argument is left once it is ceded that this is the government's domain to do with it what it will (whether on behalf of some lobbying group or not), even if this means stepping on the property rights of companies or individuals.
I realize I am going against the grain here when it comes to what is obviously a tidal wave of emotional support for this initiative within this community. But what spirit of comity exists when it cannot even be conceded that reasonable minds can differ on such an issue?
I'm likely to agree with the argument you come up with. I'm just pointing out: you haven't come up with anything yet.
It'd be like getting three paragraphs into a scientific paper and finding a reference to creationism as "a scientific theory with strong support"; it undermines the credibility of the article so badly that it's not unreasonable to question the value of reading further.
Second, Google buys a specific kind of bandwidth. Last mile costs dominate over backbone costs.
Finally, and from a political perspective most simply: they're AT&T's circuits, AT&T's DSLAMs, AT&T's routers, and AT&T's operating expenditures. They should be able to do with them what they want.
On that last point, even though I support net neutrality, I sympathize pretty strongly with the argument. At what point does the government get to say "your business is so important that we're going to start regulating how you price it even though you operate in a competitive market"?
I want to say clearly that I agree with you that Google isn't in fact "freeloading", and I think the argument the op-ed makes for that claim is dubious. But I don't think you can declare, cut-and-dry, that it's a bad-faith argument.
Also, large amounts of infrastructure were created back when AT&T was a government-backed national monopoly, and even today one would have to be extremely charitable to describe the US telecommunications market as "competitive". Not to mention that there's a strong argument to be made that access to communication is so vitally important to society (in the sense of having very large positive externalities) as to justify government intervention, but that's a largely separate issue.
I like market solutions as much as anyone else but in a market that's already, and perhaps inherently, deeply dysfunctional it's not obvious that "less regulation" means better overall results. Markets and economies do not exist to be decorative or to promote political goals, they exist to create value for society, a point that seems to be lost on many people on all sides of the political spectrum.
Anyway, I'm not claiming that it's clearly an argument in bad faith--it probably isn't. What I'm claiming is that the statement is sufficiently absurd to cast doubt on the reasoning of the entire article, and having since read the entire article I saw little to persuade me otherwise.
As for why neutrality is a good thing, well, the simple argument is that I've paid $X/mo. for a particular service. That service is an Internet connection at a certain speed and up to a certain amount of data transferred. Not "an Internet connection unless I use Skype or watch lots of Youtube videos, in which case it gets throttled -- sorry, 'quality-ensured' -- down to a trickle".
And that's as it should be, because that's what fosters innovation: if new and interesting uses for an Internet connection have to contend with throttling and degradation imposed by companies which are already being paid to provide the bandwidth, well, it seems to me that there won't be nearly so much innovation.
Is that reasonable grounds for regulation? History seems to think so; we've been enforcing common-carrier status on various related fields for quite a while now, and it doesn't seem to have caused floods of lawsuits or hampered innovation or infrastructure as the free-market argument says it should. And it should of course be noted that the cozy relationship AT&T had with the government (which regulated the hell out of it for many years) made it profitable enough to sink huge amounts of money into R&D, giving us Bell Labs, etc., further putting the lie to the free-market argument.
And, of course, that's without getting into things like subsidies provided to telecommunications companies to get them to build out infrastructure (since one consistent claim is that there's just not enough bandwidth to go around, this is particularly relevant) -- so far as I can tell, they've yet to hold up their end of that bargain, but I think the people who've had to foot the bill for them have a right to expect them to.
I'd love if I could get an internet connection like this, provided it was substantially cheaper. Now you may think this is silly as why don't I just buy a lower data cap. The problem is I live with people with whom it is very hard to enforce any sane usage policy on. We go over our cap regularly. Now if I could "outsource" the enforcement to the ISP that would be different.