Did I mention that this was a big mess?

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“Net neutrality arguments have been reduced to bumper stickers,” sighed Craig Moffett of Sanford C. Bernstein, Wall Street’s premier telecom analyst. Mr. Moffett’s point is that like most political slogans that wind up on bumper stickers, the issue isn’t nearly as simple and straightforward as it might appear to be at first. Net neutrality is, in fact, incredibly complicated.

Data networks, after all, have to be managed. The engineering is complex. The capacity is limited. Inevitably, some form of prioritization is bound to take place. Rules also have to be created that will give companies the incentive they need to spend the billions upon billions of dollars necessary to extend broadband’s reach and improve its speed, so we can catch up to, say, South Korea.

Thus, the public interest view that all data traffic on the Internet should be treated the same is unrealistic. This is especially true with wireless Internet, where the rise of such bandwidth hogs as iPhone apps is starting to outstrip the capacity of the network to transport all the data. (That’s one reason the AT&T network, the only carrier for iPhone data, seems so substandard. It is being overwhelmed by all those iPhones.)

The complications notwithstanding, net neutrality, broadly speaking, is what exists now. Among the many benefits net neutrality brings is that it fosters innovation. The great fear of the net neutrality purists, however, is that without federal rules, the Internet providers will begin cutting deals with content providers to give certain traffic priority over other traffic. For instance, Verizon could cut a deal with YouTube that allowed its videos to stream faster than, say, a Hulu video. Or it could even block Hulu. Or it could begin charging consumers extra for Netflix movies that were of better quality than ordinary streaming. As Harold Feld, Public Knowledge’s legal director, puts it: “Companies do what companies do.”

(Which brings up one of the true oddities about the fervor over net neutrality. Cable television distributors make decisions all the time about what people can see and how much they have to pay for it. If special sports-only tiers aren’t an example of placing some content over other content, I don’t know what is. Yet because it is merely television, and not the sacred Internet, nobody seems to view this practice as a crime against humanity. But I digress.)