A few criticisms: 1. It's inaccurate to refer to "the backbone" as though it's a single entity--it's a large collection of diverse networks owned by a variety of players. 2. The network neutrality debate should be about the third segment, but most of the bills in Congress define broadband more broadly so that they potentially affect all three categories of pipes (mistakenly, in my opinion). 3. The fact that consumers also post content doesn't by itself change the eyeball/content provider distinction. Much consumer-posted content (YouTube, Google Video, blog posts, message boards, etc.) is put on servers on content providers. It's pretty easy from a backbone provider perspective to see the difference between an eyeball customer and a content provider customer--the eyeball customers are pulling in a lot more data than they're pushing out, and vice versa for the content customers. The big exception is peer-to-peer filesharing, which ends up being a wash from the backbone provider perspective because it's eyeball-to-eyeball traffic that doesn't hit the content provider networks (though it will cross backbone provider networks as it transits between different eyeball providers). BTW, you're still blocking any comments or trackbacks from me that reference my blog in the content URL.