We live in a republic, and the people of Kansas are free to pass those laws, but placing every state in the Republic under the same laws is unjust.

I don't find any logic in your argument. If I am laying out large costs for infrastructure, I wan to know I am getting a profit on those costs. A large customer like YouTube would be a way for me to guarantee a return on my large investment, even if the per unit price is lower for them than the per unit price charged to a smaller customer, at the end of the year YouTube will make me more total dollars on my investment. This will remain true for all suppliers of such infrastructure, thus YouTube will be able to leverage their large volume to get yet lower prices. Since YouTube has a high volume because of popularity, it means that a great many consumers end up benefiting from this cycle of lowered costs. A supplier could choose to keep prices the same to any sized customer, but they would most likely end up not getting any of the larger customers, such as YouTube, however, they may end up with a very high amount of the smaller customers if their prices to these customers are more reasonable, serving an otherwise under-serviced niche, so I don't see why it would be required to have government cronies come in and screw the whole thing up for everyone.

The article fails to address how Vanderbilt kept competing firms from building bridges, or a bridge company from building their own bridge (as we see companies doing with cell towers).

If this were true, then how does any firm get its start? How did Wal-Mart ever topple Sears? How did Amazon in turn take so much business away from Wal-Mart? The distribution scenario you are describing is hardly different from the distribution of physical goods. So why would we treat it any differently? Why not let FedEx set their own prices for Ground Service? They've made substantial headway competing against UPS. Now, there are companies taking business away from even FedEx - regional shippers like Ontrac are making substantial market share gains. Why wouldn't we want to see the same thing happen in the world of digital distribution?

Actually, corporations do own bridges to important places, it's just that the government rarely allows them to do so. However, it is the government bridges that are falling down, killing people, and disrupting commerce. There are a lot of civil engineers that are very concerned about the condition of a great many bridges, all of them owned by the government, and none them even slated for repairs or upgrades to occur in a realistic time frame. The opportunity to protect the Internet from such future neglect and disaster should be seen as wonderful opportunity to learn from history.

So wouldn't a competing firm offer lower prices to these new firms looking to gain a foothold? Or, if no firm currently will make such policies, wouldn't investors see this activity as an opportunity to create a new firm to service this market?

As I understand it, the FCC is generally comprised of people who have been employed by, or are personally very close to, the 'communications' industry, as is true for most government commissions. The bill, introduced in the House by Waxaman, only seeks to make the FCC ruling stick, so it is most likely that whatever your perception of 'net neutrality' may be, I suspect the people on that board will not be making anything of the sort. Net neutrality is the avenue of revenue being pursued by crony capitalists seeking to capture the Internet.

Are you at all familiar with SoundExchange? Because it is exactly what you are proposing, and they have driven the costs of online radio stations to be higher on a per listener basis than the costs of OTA radio stations. The one I am personally familiar with is SomaFM. I did a back-of-the-envelope comparison of SomaFM with a local San Francisco radio station on a per listener basis and I was amazed to see that SomaFM is paying through the nose to keep their 'commercial-free, listener-supported' radio station up and running, despite the fact that the infrastructure to distribute online is vastly more efficient than terrestrial based radio stations..

It seems like those replying to my argument are using some version of this argument, but as I state, wouldn't someone just come in and build a new bridge? Or, if the bridge truly is that important, it must be difficult and costly to build, thus wouldn't this legislation increase the price the people on the other side of the bridge will be paying, given that the investors in the bridge are expecting a certain level of return?

Wouldn't it largely be huge corporations benefiting from so-called 'net neutrality'? If it is going to be required that owners of private property charge the same price to all-comers, then it is going to be more difficult for small businesses to compete with large businesses, no? It seems true net neutrality would be allow anyone to compete as they see fit - if a company is going to 'over charge', then another company should be allowed to come in and 'under charge'.

Just read the instructions on the carton. You can pick up Graphene at any corner market - it's right next to the Flubber.

It's fascism.

Data centers are not exclusively there for the ebooks, the cost is spread out across tens of millions of customers. Comparing the cost of distributing a paper book with the cost of distributing an ebook is the same as comparing the cost of a paper book and the cost to distribute a web page The web page and ebook are about the same size, yet billions of pages are free, costing a small fraction of a penny to serve. The high prices of ebooks are caused by the middle man, the publisher: the anachronism.

I don't buy the expensive ebooks. Just not at all. There are so many books to read, I move on. The model is changing, and once the authors have finished their contracts and can sell the ebooks directly and the new authors have moved up, the expensive ebooks will disappear.

Also, spreadsheets. I find I dislike spreadsheets that use mono-space fonts, Times New Roman, or Calibri. Arial just seems the natural font for spreadsheets.

Physician assisted suicide is when the doctor puts the patient in a position to commit suicide, usually through an apparatus which provides a lethal and non-painful death and is actuated by the patient. The way Adams describes his father, his father could not actuate anything, so the only option to end his father's suffering is through euthanasia. Euthanasia is what Dr. Kervorkian was actually imprisoned for, not assisted suicide.