[net neutrality]
The way I see it it isn't as much about giving everybody equal bandwidth, for me the issue is along the following lines: Imagine you travel from hotel to hotel, and this hotel chain provides free wi-fi (or even pay wi-fi, but except for the more expensive US hotels it seems to be free most places now). You use Skype, or possibly Gizmo to communicate with your fellow humans.

Then one day the wi-fi operations in this hotel chain is bought out by a company that is also in the business of selling voip phone kits. The first thing they do is to block Gizmo and Skype. And oh, they sell email accounts to ("sign up for your account at shocksmock.com"!), so they also block access to gmail.com and yahoo. And so on. That's what seems to be happening certain places, to a bigger or lesser degree. This is something that must be stopped, and _now_, or it's too late.

Or you have a choice of 1 or 2 ISPs that will connect your home to the Internet, but lo and behold they both want to sell you their own VoIP so they too block Gizmo (they're not competent enough to block Skype, fortunately.. ). What are you to do?

I know a big telecom in India is trying to block Skype, and one of the larger ones in China (but not the one operating around Beijing, the last time I was there). Both do this because they're in the business of selling phone landlines. Tmobile appeared to be blocking access to my ssl-secured imap server (in a hotel where I had to buy access), at least that was the only hotel (I visited many the last few weeks) where this was a problem.

There's another kind of net neutrality that's up in the news these days, where telecoms want Google and other popular sites to pay lots of money to the telcos. This is also important stuff, although not of direct consequence to us end-users, at least right away. (The blocking described above is quite immediate!) But that to will kill us somewhen in the future, when only the big and rich information providers can get access to a full-bandwidth pipe, and the small ones can't. Then only the rich ones will be left, say goodbye to popular but poor blog sites, for example. I suspect that even some of the rich ones will help fight this though, so for now as a layman I'll keep fighting the port blocking..