Meena, first off my apologies for calling you a randian but (as I have already stated in a pm to you) your reasoning sounded very Randian Objectivist to me, you had referred to Ayn Rand in terms that sounded pretty lauadtory to me in another post, and the two kind of went together.

Seems we are actually on to the same thing by the concept of"net neutrality" - half an hour ago I thought we were just not talking of the same rule - but maybe we do not see the possible outcome of this issue in the same way. I humbly suggest that you are drawing too sharp a line between the businesses that operate on the web and us, ordinary citizens, students, offline workers and our future children. Any one of us, in principle, could become involved in a web-based business one day, and many companies and communities that are well-known on the web have started as small half-amateur projects (e.g. Facebook) The line between "real journalism" and amateur publishing has effectrively been abolished by the web -. before let's say 1995 to publicize something fast you had to get it accepted by a newspaper or a publishing house, and the only people who were called journalists - who merited it - were the ones who actually worked in the media - today you can be a self-employed rookie journalist, a stalker photographer, a web stringer, a blogger/site owner or whatever and publicize your own take on the news, your own story. Besides Yahoo and msn employees spend a lot of office time chatting an dollying on the web too. So the efforts of ISPs to make a bigger share of profits would IMO hit harder on iust as private/non-company users and our needs than on Yahoo but essentially it's a democracy issue.

While everyone travels on railways and highways and these days everyone uses the web network highways - has to use them, lots of real-life services simply presuppose that you can do your bit online - there are differences. An ISP or a web site can make a lot of money by advertising spots or by more or less hidden costs to their users, while there's a limit to how much publicity you can put up by a highway without endangering the traffic (at least here in Europe the rules for wayside billboarding are fairly restrictive). And while both highways and cyberhighways need maintenance, the web highways don't get more worn down as a simple fiunction of how many people are accessing a site,. though a powerful burst of interest can slow the traffic for a while. So when there are common costs of keeping up the main cable networks, I think some of them should be paid, or guranteed, by taxes and under some public control.