Ok, now the substance. The ad makes a couple of claims. One, that web site operators don't pay for the internet. That is a lie. They pay massive sums of money for bandwidth, on the order of $10 billion last year alone. So does the public in tax subsidies for telecom companies, perhaps as high as $200 billion over the years (though it's hard to tell with all the mergers and weird accounting). Yes, that you read that right. Two, they claim they have never degraded a web site or service. Of course, executives for these companies are on record discussing their plans to do precisely that. The telco sponsored legislation would strip the FCC from being able to deal with degraded service or blocked web sites. Three, the telecom companies claim that net neutrality means intrusive government regulation. This claim is a bit harder to unpack, but it's worth following me here since what they are saying is in fact 180 degrees from the truth.

Here's the deal. The internet has always had rules. One of those rules is that even if you own a pipe, you're not allowed to tell people what they can put through that pipe. You can't block web sites, you can't say 'don't stream video', and you can't dictate what people and can't say. You do have to pay for the pipe you use; Google pays millions a month on one end, and millions of consumers pay smaller amounts ($20-$60) a month on the other. But no one can tell you what you can do with those pipes. It's very much the opposite of cable TV. There are no gatekeepers, and that's by design. This has created a highly competitive marketplace.

Through a series of regulatory decisions from 2002-2005, the FCC stripped these protections for broadband pipes. Now telecom companies can do whatever they want, and they have basically announced business models that depend on their ability to turn the internet into a more cable-like service. This new playground for them is tenous, because the FCC could at any point reverse themselves. To firm this up, the telecom companies want to legislate a change in the rules, stripping authority from the FCC to hold ISPs accountable for degrading service.

So that's what this is all about.