Net Neutrality matters. Without it, the Internet will be rendered useless to our economy - as Comcast is trying to prove. If the lobbyists get their way, we won't have "premium" content that some content providers choose to pay for - we'll have the open, equal space that we the Internet-using community have been building together for over two decades now rendered sterile and inert. Don't believe me? How do you like your Facebook now that the algorithms are throttling the visibility of your friends, connections, and favorite pages as they move to a pay-for-access system that throttles post visibility unless you pay them money? It sucks, right?
The Net Neutrality rules being considered at present have taken an appropriately free-market perspective and unfortunately applied it exactly backwards. While, yes, it appears that the claims by Comcast and others that they would like greater freedom to offer different products and services at different price points should be worthy of consideration, their consideration does not come from within a free market and thus should not be assumed to have an appropriate free-market outcome.
Even before this rule change has been considered, the outcome that would follow from this rule's approval and implementation has already been tested in the real world. Recently Comcast applied a non-neutral stance to the Internet's largest source of traffic by data volume, Netflix, "throttling" their connection speeds lower than they do for any other connection they make across the entire Web. (A synopsis, including a graph of the connection speed data, can be found here.) The business models of these ISPs has traditionally been that they charge end users for access to content at whatever speed they negotiate in their service contracts - but since Netflix's business model is heavily reliant upon subscribers continuing to pay for access to streamable content, any disruption to the quality and speed of their connection to users has a direct and tangible impact on their bottom line, such to the point that when Comcast offered to reverse this "throttling" in exchange for funds via an agreement with Netflix, Netflix felt they had no choice but to acquiesce.
Now Comcast has shifted its commercial model, receiving funds twice to perform the same task they had contractually agreed to perform with their end users - providing access to content at the agreed-upon speeds, equally and efficiently. In short, they have extorted money from Netflix by using a non-neutral connectivity speed arrangement to inflict material harm upon Netflix against the wishes of (and contracts they entered into with) their end users, their millions of customers.
In a truly free market these efforts would never succeed. If I did not like how Comcast's connectivity was affecting my Netflix subscription, I could choose another Internet service provider such as Time-Warner Cable, moving my business to another competitor that was not "throttling" Netflix or any other website I might wish to access. Instead of a free market, we see a clear case of an established trust - large market players who have set up their own areas of hegemonic monopoly, and who have a standing agreement to respect each others' established hegemony rather than enter into competition within each of these districts. While they cut themselves off from customers by agreeing to treat each other in these regards, they make considerably higher profits per customer they do maintain, in the classic hallmark of a monopoly: extracting higher prices for a service than the market would bear if competition were to exist.
These companies are now seeking to merge, which will grow their already-entrenched monopolies even firmer - instead of proposing rules that would allow the extortionary use of connection speeds in a non-neutral fashion to charge content providers in addition to end users, we should be proposing to block the merger of Comcast and Time-Warner Cable. These two providers should be forced to actually compete with each other by breaking the trusts - likely by fracturing each firm into several smaller firms, as we saw with Bell Labs in the early Eighties - so that these many smaller entities would actually compete with each other for market share and create an actual free market that was responsive to customers and to market forces. Instead we see two corporate monopolies that refuse to compete with each other, are too monolithic for new firms to break into effective competition with, and are lobbying state and local lawmakers to keep their existing municipal fiber optic infrastructure from competing with them as well - we have far more high-speed internet capacity available than is being used, because of non-compete agreements or local and state provisions that prevent these infrastructure projects from connecting with residents or other commercial customers these internet service providers sell their services to, a textbook symptom of a firmly entrenched monopoly.
If we make the mistake of forcing content providers to pay for preferential treatment in their access to customers - customers who are already paying these internet service providers, mind you - we will find the Internet stagnates into just the very few largest firms who can assemble enough of a customer base to justify the capital expenditures it takes to reach such an agreement while all other firms are throttled out of existence, never able to grow large enough to even reach their customer base because of the necessities of this pay-to-play arrangement. There will not simply be a normal lane and a "fast lane" that can be provided as a perk if you pay for it as a content provider - we've already seen that the "new normal" is slowed down to the point of uselessness, as a means to extract (some might say "extort") a revenue stream from a service provider who wants "premium" access to their clients. Thus the only lane that will be usable will be the fast lane - functioning at the same speed as the internet service provider used to give them for free.