Net neutrality

Cringely has an interesting article on how ISPs may actually suffer with the loss of net neutrality:

The result of ending Net Neutrality under this scenario, then, is that the ISPs make money from tiered services but with higher overhead costs and lower priority service levels than one might expect. The ISPs then might try banning BitTorrent to keep it from messing with their tiered services, but we've already establish this can't practically be done on a technical level because torrent encryption can always get around the ban. The only way, in fact, to limit BitTorrent traffic would be to have it made illegal and now we're back again to the clueless Congress that started this whole mess.

I've been doing my best to stay on top of net neutrality lately because I love the internet, but it's difficult to understand what exactly the ISPs really want to do -- probably because even they don't know, short of 'charge more'.

There was an article floating around a week ago (Indie-rock revolution, fueled by net neutrality) spelling doom for independent musicians that raises some interesting points. But I have a hard time buying that because of tiered pricing internet service may degrade to the point where independent musicians like myself can no longer host and sell their own music files at reasonable speeds. If that becomes impossible then just about everything cool on the internet is done as well. So long podcasting, bye-bye online gaming, adios pornography.