When it comes to all the fuss over net neutrality, there is a certain amount of confliction over the whole issue.

On the one side there are the people who argue that letting telcos charge different rates for different levels of service to what is essentially a service created by taxpayer's dollar is a bad thing on multiple levels. First of all, it put financial parameters around what is basically a public resource and ultimately would allow companies that could pay for the service to have an edge over smaller rivals that might not be able to absorb that cost, which in turn would be a bad thing for the whole online economy.

But intellectually, what the telcos are actually doing is leveraging innovations in router and switch technology to give customers different levels of service. This activity is taking place at the gateways to the Internet that are provided by the telcos, so from an Adam Smith perspective it's their God given right to charge for different levels of service through their gateways using products that they purchased from vendors such as Cisco and Juniper.

Read the rest of this post on Michael Vizard's blog, Masked Intentions.

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