Ha-rumph. Allow me to call them out on their "three points":<p>1. The networks are running at capacity. Well, maybe they are, I don't have inside information as to the big ISP's networks. What I do know, however, is that other countries have networks with 5x the bandwidth that the fastest internet connections available here have.While it may be prohibitively expensive to roll that out all across the country, there is no real reason not to have it available in major cities, except to create an artificial scarcity of bandwidth.<p>In addition to that, traffic shaping doesn't help the problem, it makes it worse. There are two ways an end user sees the speed of their connection: latency and throughput. Traffic shaping works by lowering the throughput of bandwidth-intensive applications, so that there is more bandwidth left over for the rest of the users. However, if all of the bandwidth intensive applications are being shaping, and slowed down, then the overall throughput the user sees will decline sharply. In addition, latency, or the overhead time it takes for any request to be processed goes up when traffic is being shaped, making it take longer for individual pages to load too, and make the service seem slower in a non-quantifiable way.<p>2. We can't enforce it. This is simply not true. Its relatively simple to check to see if your traffic is being shaped and/or impeded, and several applications have been released to do so. Sure, it would be difficult for the government to do so, but if the average user can quickly and easily check, that is not nearly the problem the article makes it out to be.<p>3. Ok, you have a point there. Having regulations does add bureaucracy into the situation, which is rarely a beneficial thing. <i>Now the FCC is proposing taking a free market that works</i> Except that it doesn't work. The ISPs are already threatening to close down their networks, and make things much more closed off. We already regularly have ISP peering problems, there is little to stop them from just cutting off portions of the internet at their whim. Blind faith in "Free Market" is not infallible, it requires the public to be well educated, both in how the service/product works, and in the alternatives to it. At this point, neither of those are true. Your average user understands how an ISP works to about the point of: "It gets me my Youtube and MySpace". On top of that, there largely aren't alternatives. Want high speed? You have one, maybe two options, depending on where you are. Live out in the country, and you're lucky to have one.Sure, you could have some kind of satellite setup, but that is slow and expensive, and generally harder to set up/keep maintained.<p>I am generally against government regulations, but with something like the internet, I think Net Neutrality is a necessary thing, and that the government needs to step in and make sure ISPs don't start abusing their networks.