It's tricky this bill - On the one hand, I believe that Government should be a minimal institution and not have its hand in so much stuff; We have far too many laws and things now as it is and every law made is one less freedom.
On the other hand, I don't think ANYBODY should pay twice for a connection, which is what could happen here.
The supporters of the bill fear that eventually, their stuff will be throttled unless they pay extra money.
I also do not want this - I don't want Google to be throttled to 5KB/s just because they refuse to pay what is basically an extortion fee.
They already PAID for their bandwidth, so there is NO reason why they should be forced to pay again.
The problem is the bill, like almost all laws (*cough*DMCA*cough*EUCD*cough*etc.*cough*), is too broad.
At the moment, I could pay £17.99 a month for 512MB Unlimited 'net access, or £27.99 for 8MB Unlimited access.
Depending on the interpretation of the bill, that diffrentiation could become illegal, but in my eyes, that is fine - You pay more, you get more. (And yes I know that bill only applies to the US; I'm just speaking hypothetically!)
Same with Google et. al - They pay for a certain amount of bandwidth and data rates, and they get that.
I don't mind if the carriers build some 'toll-road' super-high bandwidth links that cost extra. That seems fair enough.
What I and they DO worry about is if those carriers deliberately 'accidentally' cripple the 'standard' networks to 'encourage' people to pay for the higher-speed links.
It's a difficult distinction to quantify properly, but I hope you get the gist of what I'm trying to say...
But that's capitalism for you.
I personally think the Internet should have stayed like it was in the beginning - A way of publishing and distributing knowledge and information, and made the bloody commerce people make their own 'net to sell crap.
This is why I'm hoping the Internet2 does NOT allow any commercial interests into it, *ever*.
