In today's New York Times, the editorial board comes out in favor of Network Neutrality legislation.

This comes on the heels of three Senate Commerce Committee hearings discussing Net Neutrality, Municipal Broadband, and video franchising. These intertwined issues are just a few of the topics under consideration as a part of the 1996 Telecom Act rewrite.

The anti-net neutrality folks keep using a rhetorical argument that needs to be squashed. They complain that content providers like Google, Yahoo, and others don't pay to access the network.

But that's just plain wrong. Any content provider needs their own outgoing, upload connection to the Internet. Smaller providers (who host their own servers) pay a premium for a fast upload connection with a static IP address. Large content providers connect directly with back-haul providers -- and two of the largest back-haul providers are AT&T and Verizon.

So they do pay, plenty. It's becoming clear that the push to destroy Net Neutrality is really a push to turn the Internet into a cable-TV like system, where the network owners become vertically integrated content providers.

And to this charge the anti-neutrality folks would say, "no, consumers who didn't like such a change would rebel, and choose another provider." Well, when there is only a choice between two providers, both of whom are walling off their network, the consumer has no real choice.

In Europe and elsewhere, this has yet to become an issue. Why? Well their markets are much more competitive, but also, ISP's concerned about bandwidth issues control things by administering user-fees for excessive downloads. This is the "market-congestion" price signaling that American anti-neutrality folks think should be implemented on the producer side here. The difference is key: producer side fees will limit the amount of independent content, while user side fees won't.

Ultimately both are undesirable. Bandwidth concerns stem from the network owners trying to get by on the cheap. In an all-fiber optic world such concerns wouldn't exist. So the question is, what can policy do to make the market more competitive, and to provide incentives for providers to build-out of fiber networks?