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How Big Telecom Tried To Kill Net Neutrality Before It Was Even a Concept
An anonymous reader writes This opinion piece at Ars looks at the telecommunications industry's ability to shape policy and its power over lawmakers. "...as the Baby Bells rolled out their DSL service, they saw the cable industry's more relaxed regulations and total lack of competition and wanted the same treatment from the government. They launched a massive lobbying effort to push the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Federal Communication Commission, and Congress to eliminate the network sharing requirement that had spawned the CLEC market and to deregulate DSL services more broadly. Between 1999 and 2002 the four companies spent a combined $95.6 million on lobbying the federal government, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics, which would rank them above such trade group lobbying behemoths as the Chamber of Commerce and the American Medical Association in total lobbying expenditures for the years. The companies also spent millions to lobby the public directly through aggressive advertising and public relations campaigns."
http://www.freepress.net/sites...
This image tells all you need to know about Cable/Telco promises.
Once you have a monopoly that has no competition there is no reason to improve service or product quality and every incentive to drive it down to as low a level as you can without people rioting outside your offices.
From what I understand, there's been a fair bit of fear-mongering in right wing media related to it. Some of it is fueled by reflexive opposition to the current president, certainly, but a lot of it ties into the general attitude of "private = good, public = bad" that can be manipulated into viewing any sort of (federal) government action as being malign. There's also a degree of confusion fueling some of it, where "Net Neutrality" has been (deliberately) conflated with bringing back the Fairness Doctrine.