Where common carriage means "no discrimination between destinations within a service type", it would be reasonable to start charging telcos who don't provide this for rights of way. Rather than compaigning for network neutrality, you can then campaign for a telco tax, which should find plenty of happy takers in Congress -- there's no shortage of public debt to service. In fact, reframing this around "no right-of-way subsidies to telcos" makes a lot more sense than "network neutrality". But discriminating between classes of application (or even specific applications) is a different think. Lumping it into "common carriage" doesn't make sense to me. And if they want to price discriminate between them, what's the big problem with sending out "Monopoly rents over here -- come and get it!" price signals? Why pass laws that entrench the status quo forever by undermining the scope of possible competing business models that may rely on such application price discrimination? And what if you assumptions on how networks are run and finances slowly become obsolete, just as the definitions of the '96 Telecom Act became? (Think of how different Skype Zones are from traditional network payment methods, for example -- should this be illegal? I don't think so.) The idea that the telcos have zero competition (where there's no cable, for example) isn't true, because there's always (at a price) the option for users to collectively revolt and built their own access network. The proposed neutrality regulations are a tonic that soothes the pain of monopoly and ensures that the level of local political outrage never reaches a critical action threshold. Don't throw me into the neutrality patch, Mr Fox!