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Originally Posted by RareBear
Change is good--even if it seems to hurt at first.
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What kind of change are you talking about?
There are any number of net neutrality issues--bit discrimination, port blocking, attaching devices, etc.. Each involves different aspects of NN.
The general principles on which the internet was built and has grown involve treating traffic in a neutral way. That is, when you become a part of the internet, you route traffic regardless of protocol, content, requester, or provider. Barring traffic that damages the network, all bits are created equal.
Both the end user and the content provider are already paying for their bandwidth, so bit discrimination (which is what most seem to be referring to when they talk about NN) is just the telcos finding a way to get paid a third time for the same traffic. (Or a fourth, if you want to count the subsidies that paid for those pipes in the first place.) I can't imagine how that would help advance innovation or be good for consumers in any way.
If you're talking about routing different services differently, there are more compelling arguments for that, BUT this depends on accurately predicting usage and it depends on having some oversight to ensure that the de facto 'owners' of the (heavily subsidized) networks are not simply thinking of new ways to fuck over their competition (like, say, VoIP). First, capacity provisioning is something that's very difficult to do and something that telcos screw up all the time. Despite super-badass cutting edge AI systems and armies of CP engineers at their disposal, most telcos still can't (or won't) even get basic POTS service right--for reasons ranging from incompetence to good old fashioned greed. ILECs are notoriously incompetent and corrupt, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference.
I'm really not sure what sort of innovation you're talking about or what sort of network neutrality you think would stand in its way, but I can't think of any way in which I think the current backbone providers can be trusted.