> We accept the unbounded authority of law to dictate the terms of the internet, or we accept the unbounded authority of Comcast to dictate the terms of the internet.

Ahh, but we accept the unbounded authority of law to dictate far more than our internet: our property, our freedom, and (unfortunately) our very lives. What reason is there to expect the government not to regulate every other aspect of life with data from the internet? At least Comcast can't do that.

The law is bounded by the Constitution and the process of evaluating and passing laws in the government. It may be slow, and unpleasant, and difficult to get ones particular views in place, but there is a defined, if imperfect, process to do so.

The change process doesn't exist at all if the services that are offered by a company are entirely private, except by customer choice. And if there are too few choices, then well a monopoly ISP could ban encryption on all their offered links, and parse all the data going by for resale to marketers and right back to the government too - except perhaps for those inconvenient government privacy regulations (or other regulatory rules) which may stand in the way.

By all accounts the government already has all data from the internet; whether they use it in law enforcement action and whether they regulate ISP's QoS policies are separate matters.

There is every reason to suspect that this will be so regardless of whether the FCC limits comcasts ability to milk us for all we are worth.

The issues are nearly entirely orthogonal. Network neutrality was pretty irrelevant to them installing boxes to spy on all our communications. It was irrelevant to using that data to decide whom is a communi... err terrorist. It will be irrelevant to when they decide to use that same data to limit your freedom.

Those are the things we have already given the government authority over. What we're talking about here is deciding whether to give it power over the terms of the internet.