You misunderstand the product supplied by residential broadband service providers. What you have purchased is intermittent bursts of 8Mb service, not 8Mb 24/7/365. If you read the fine print on a broadband service contract it includes a "reasonable use" clause. Reasonable use may or may not be well defined. In general it includes reading your email, surfing the web, and watching streaming video. It generally does not include running a web server, mail server, video server, or P2P file sharing.

Here's a price comparison. If you want unrestricted 24/7/365 bandwidth to the Internet you can buy a T1 line. A T1 is 1.5Mbs, both up and down. It comes with an SLA guaranteeding bandwidth and uptime. Current going rate for a T1 is about $500/month.

So for your $50/month you may get a peak rate of 8Mbs, but there isn't enough bandwidth in that network equipment for you and everybody else to send 8Mbs all day long. There isn't enough equipment for more than a few percent of the subscribers to send 8Mbs all day long.

I'm in favor of neutrality to prevent my ISP from restricting access to competing products. For example, my ISP is also the local phone company, but they don't restrict my ability to use VOIP on my broadband service. But I want my ISP to throttle back the traffic of unreasonable users on the network, because I want to get my full 5Mbs on the occasions when I use the web. My understanding is the proposed law would restrict this ability, and hence I cannot support it. As written, it would be bad for about 98% of Internet users, but very good for the remaining 2%.

'Nuff said,

- JimY