You misread Richard. George Ford’s paper wasn’t discussing content providers. It discussed discrimination of various grades of Internet service (which are commodities) that were not comparable and therefore justified differentiated pricing.

On the other hand, as industry lawyers will no doubt be quick to argue, private corporations are not bound by the Bill of Rights, nor do they have any legal compulsion to protect quaint notions like civil liberties. If they provide the venue for communication in the modern world, the rights of the public have no legal protections because these are not institutions of the Federal Government, they are multinational corporations. Ain’t privatization grand?

Once large ISPs are reasonably certain that no serious political roadblocks will be thrown in their way, they’ll start providing all sorts of tiered access schemes that will effectively prevent large parts of the country and the world from accessing certain types of information, while profiting heavily from their own artificial market restrictions, and they will do it in the name of providing “better service” to their subscribers. They won’t need to conspire with each other to do it either, it will just be good business sense. It may well be the only way for some of them to survive during hard economic times.

Regulatory bodies exist to protect the public from such blatant abuses of power, so regardless of what legal precedent in other markets may have to say on the matter, I feel that the FCC is acting properly under its obligations to protect the consumer from abusive communication practices.

74 Democrats (in additional to 34 Republican senators) have sent a letter to FCC chairman Genochowski telling him to stop his efforts to reclassify broadband under Title II.

74 represents only 29% of the Democrats in the House. That leaves 180 (71%) that either have no opinion, or support the FCC. The 34 Senate Republicans is a given, they are anti-regulation under all circumstances and have opposed virtually everything the FCC has done or will do simply to obstruct business.

How much do you want to bet a majority of those House Democrats are Blue Dogs? Even a super majority?

..it’s clear that there is no congressional mandate for Net Neutrality

Perhaps, but this letter has nothing to do with that. These people essentially oppose all regulation out of principle. They always think regulation will cost jobs.

Let the FCC do what it wants. If they are in the wrong, there will be no shortage of billion dollar corporations ready and waiting to challenge it in court.