Should we worry about Net Neutrality?

I really, really want to write this quickly before I start work today but here it is:

I was all set to write about how internet “fast” and “slow lanes” — that is, giants like Netflix paying the major internet service providers in order to have its content delivered more quickly, or have its delivery slowed if they don’t pay up — are the wrong solution but that the underlying problem is real:  why should the user who spends their time on the internet reading the news pay higher rates to subsidize the person who watches videos all the time?  It’s the same way, I suppose, with landline phone service, which moved to a “unlimited” model for all except international calls, and I’ve always assumed that the reason for that was that most of the cost to the phone company had become making the service available and that the marginal cost for individual calls was small enough that it didn’t justify the added costs of sending out differentiated phone bills.  But if the heavy users are imposing real costs on the providers, doesn’t it make more sense to charge those heavy users more for their usage, than to charge the source of the content?

Then in googling to find a quick link, I ended up here instead:  “What Everyone Gets Wrong in the Debate Over Net Neutrality,” back from June, which says that internet “fast lanes” are not as simple as decisions by ISPs to give preference to traffic from companies that pay up, but instead:

Today, privileged companies—including Google, Facebook, and Netflix—already benefit from what are essentially internet fast lanes, and this has been the case for years. Such web giants—and others—now have direct connections to big ISPs like Comcast and Verizon, and they run dedicated computer servers deep inside these ISPs. In technical lingo, these are known as “peering connections” and “content delivery servers,” and they’re a vital part of the way the internet works.

This is actually pretty complex and has nothing to do with the “net neutrality” that people are chattering about, for example, in this Huffington Post article, in which people envision Comcast shutting down free speech.  Here’s a summary of their fears, from savetheinternet.com:

Without Net Neutrality, ISPs would be able to block content and speech they don’t like, reject apps that compete with their own offerings, and prioritize Web traffic (reserving the fastest loading speeds for the highest bidders and sticking everyone else with the slowest).

So, to begin with, it’s bizarre to imagine that Comcast is going to censor websites.  And to build a major public policy — and treating ISPs as regulate-able public utilities is pretty major — based on this wildly hypothetical fears is pretty irresponsible.

Is it a matter, then, of needing more competition?  Around here, we do have choices:  besides Comcast (which we use because of inertia), there’s WOW, and AT&T.;  Are there others that I’m not aware of?  Can you get internet through a satellite TV service?  If there are parts of the country where Comcast or another cable company is truly the only option, then that’s a real issue.  Or if, were I to do research, I were to discover that Comcast has an infrastructure advantage that its competitors simply can’t match, that might be grounds for regulation.

Or is Net Neutrality really all about people who actually prefer a monopoly, so long as it’s tightly regulated?