No one, and ISPs already traffic-shape and load-balance to maintain quality of service in circumstances like you mention. That’s a technical issue for the ISP and not one that net neutrality addresses. What net neutrality does address is anti-competitive behavior. Traffic-shaping to maintain quality of service will not cease if net neutrality goes into effect.

You missed the last point I made: all of this is only a problem because there is no real competition among ISPs for most customers in most areas.

Net neutrality doesn’t mandate equal treatment of packets on a technical basis.

Yes it does.

One of the issues that gave impetus to the net neutrality movement, was ISPs like Comcast deliberately downgrading peer-to-peer services like BitTorrent. If you were downloading a 3 GB television miniseries, your downloads were slowed. Packet inspection revealed the intended purpose of the packets, and their priority was lowered.

ISPs have also been charged with inspecting packets to ensure that online games, as well as BitTorrent, had their throughput slowed too.

Total network neutrality would put an end to prioritization based on packet inspection. But as I said, the Internet is a scarcer resource than people realize, and such prioritization may be inevitable. Who wants their email or chat to be held up by a huge BitTorrent transfer.

Sinz: Net neutrality doesn’t affect priorities of packets for media, as that’s more of a technical problem than a business/political one. ISPs already prioritize packets of video over more static traffic and have done so for a long time. Net neutrality doesn’t affect that. What it DOES affect is what you discussed in your 4th paragraph.

It extends beyond playing favorites with TV networks. Comcast offers cable TV and digital phone services. Without net neutrality, they could simply shut off competing VOIP services people use on the internet connections they provide, like Skype or online TV services like Netflix or Hulu.

Net neutrality doesn’t mandate equal treatment of packets on a technical basis. It is exactly what Holtz-Eakin mentioned at the end of his post: policing against anti-competitive behavior.

I am not willing to trust the market at all when it comes to internet service. Most people have a choice between their cable company or phone company for internet service. 9 times out of 10, BOTH are unappetizing. Very few people have a viable third alternative (Verizon FIOS isn’t available in very many markets).

While Douglas Holtz-Eakin makes the case for the telecom companies based on a questionable analogy, he does nothing to answer the issues raised by the supporters of net neutrality.

I am always opposed to trying to legislate to cover up scientific truth. In this case, the scientific truth is that the Internet was never designed to handle all media equally well. The basic protocol was never designed to anticipate peer-to-peer transfers or video streaming. Video packets need guaranteed delivery in a finite time (or else you see jittery video); the basic TCP/IP protocol does not provide for that. The only way around that is to give those packets higher priority. And this becomes increasingly important as bandwidth becomes increasingly scarce, as Internet traffic continues to increase. Don’t pass a law which attempts to legislate these realities out of existence.

My compromise solution is this: ISPs should continue to be able to discriminate among different classes of service, and their pricing structure can reflect that if that’s how they can achieve maximum efficiency. Requiring video to be equal to email is as absurd as requiring the Postal Service to consider heavy packages equal to letters.

But ISPs should not be able to discriminate within a class. They should not be able to discriminate between YouTube and Hulu, or between CBS’s streaming video and NBC’s streaming video. That prevents the ISPs from entering into exclusive licensing agreements to favor one source over another, such as Comcast entering into an exclusive agreement with NBC to give NBC’s streaming video better service than CBS’s.

So we would end up with class neutrality, but not full net neutrality.