At today's State of the Net conference in DC (where I was flogging OneWebDay with a lot of help from my friends), BellSouth general counsel Bennett Ross said that, sure, they'd want the freedom to do exclusive deals with internet content providers.  That's the first time the response hasn't been "But why would we have any incentive to have exclusive deals?"  It's refreshing.

A second change in meme came from Vint Cerf, who said [I'm paraphrasing, and I hope accurately] that an option in addition to or instead of legislation to deal with net neutrality would be the ability to monitor whether net performance actually was being degraded from the consumer's perspective.  That's refreshing too. 

So far, all we have are fears and threats:  fears that prioritization will lead to the net going out of business, and threats to control everything with no particular promises.  Some empirical evidence one way or the other, as to whether the net is dimming, might be useful.