I am opposed to the Obama-era so-called net neutrality rules.  I want them repealed.  They will stifle innovation and suffocate the internet.

In the early days of the telephone industry, multiple independent telcos had different standards, different voltages, and different protocols.  Yet they learned to interoperate, and standards began coalescing as they are wont to do in free markets.  AT&T began as one of these independent telcos, but embarked on a campaign of predation instead of competition and cooperation, and when the inevitable market basklash and lawsuits showed signs of crippling their predation, they ran crying to the government, begging to be regulated at the expense of all the other telcos and the public itself.

The result was decades of stagnation, stifled and suffocated by the sledgehammer of government regulation.  Few people today remember the boring choice of one black telephone, leased from AT&T because they forbid any independent equipment being connected to their precious lines.  Who knows how much sooner faxes and modems would have become widespread if not for the crony cooperation between AT&T and the government?  Eventually MCI (now Sprint) forced interconnection through the courts, opposed by those two cronies, AT&T and the FCC.

We do not need a repeat of this disaster with the internet.  Comcast and others are stupidly promising all sort sof dastardly, and no doubt inept, modifications to service, with paid higher speed access.  ISPs may try this, they may try censoring content and blocking competitors, they may promote their own services, they wll undoubtedly try all sorts of nefarious schemes.  I am not scared.  I believe in markets and public backlash.  If Comcast and other network providers do cripple their service, customers will react as they always have, voting with their pocketbooks in the usual case and with lawsuits in the worst sort of contract abdications.

Some proponents of so-called net neutrality howl that the usual municipal franchise monopolies make it impossible for consumers to vote with their wallets, that there is no competition.  The solution to one government interference in markets is not another; the solution is to eliminate municipal franchose monopolies.

But even that is not necessary in the long run.  Let Comcast and others enjoy their locked-in municipal franchose monopolies.  Wireless mesh networks loom on the horizon, and will innovate where Comcast would rather not, and Comcast will suffer.  It won't be long.  Let it take ten years -- that's far shorter than how long it took the US telephone industry to recover from AT&T's regulated crony monopoly, and far shorter than any possible innovation under government regulation.