Supposedly AT&T’s Whitacre backed away from his previous statements in the last day or two (not that I place supreme trust in him).

What’s interesting, though, is that I’m already having to make that business decision, because if I get an Instalanche or Malkinized some people can’t get to me now. To change that, I have to move from VPS to dedicated hosting (unless you know more than I do), and pay about triple what I’m paying now (and hopefully to accommodate a couple of other biz initiatives). So the hosting world is already charging me more for the throughput I need.

Your question is whether one dedicated hosting or VPS customer gets treated differently from another, based on whether the telcos treat ISPs differently or offer multiple speed options to ISPs. I don’t think that will happen, and if you REALLY think net neutrality is necessary to ensure that, I’d have to for the moment disagree, BUT argue that regulation should be an lurking threat if it turns out that it is not happening.

As to VPS, I’m already at the mercy of the others who are sharing “our” computer at the host. If I’m lucky and I have a bunch of companions who do very little, I’ll get great speed compared to if my companions burn through a lot of bandwidth all the time.

If you are a large company, you already pay a premium to initially install your ISP circuit, then the high monthly price for the amount of bandwidth that you need. So ISP’s want to charge more, but in some cases could be offering services that compete with yours. What is their incentive to offer a similar level of bandwidth?

You are a blogger named Tom. People have high speed internet and are looking for blogs. Your blog is too slow, because you are too cheap to pay the ISP’s premium. They visit daily kos instead.