Agreed; I'm a economic libertarian, otherwise a paleocon, except I break with both in "foreign policy"/"defense". And I clearly see the net neutrally problem, most easily explained with the conflict of interest between a telecom company that has it's own TV offerings vs. you using them as a dumb pipe for a la carte offerings they don't get any additional money for.

All that said, I find it extraordinarily difficult to imagine much if any good coming out of proactive government policy; as SamAtt notes, we don't even have to resort to theory to find examples of AngloSaxon (i.e. the most like ours) governments abusing this sort of power.

OpieCunningham's analysis ignores the inconvenient fact that a company or cabal of them can do only so much to me; the government(s) over me can imprison or kill me. And it's largely through government power that they've limited my choices (e.g. if I were to compete with them by setting up a WISP, to whom do have to get spectrum from? That said, they do generally present a nasty problem as the only source of back haul.)

I also don't agree with the Tea Party sentiment but felt this article reflected badly on the author and not the Tea Partiers (I think that's the plural?). The argument itself is a valid one. If you give government the power to regulate what private companies deliver to customers over private lines than it COULD easily lead to censorship. You need look no further than Australia's nation wide content restrictions to realize that.

I'd actually agree with the Tea Party on this if not for two things.

1. I don't truly feel people have a lot of broadband options available to them. Most Americans are still stuck between their phone company and their cable company and that's not enough free market protection.

2. At least in the case of the phone company they have a monopoly on their lines BECAUSE of the Government's half hearted break up of AT&T. Meaning Net Neutrality laws would be the Government undoing their meddling in many ways.