I'm afraid I'm singularly unimpressed by www.savetheinternet.com. It certainly failed to convince me.

It looks to me like they want to legislate against QoS/diffserv simply because it's possible to abuse it. And they have examples of bad things that have happened but they're all about blocking content entirely, which is orthogonal to differential service. They don't seem to be advocating banning content-based firewalls...

I'm really not sure that legislating away a technical solution is the correct answer when the problem is social. Do you really think that carriers aren't already using QoS right now? Does the fact that they surely are mean the net is already too non-neutral? Do you want to make it illegal to get better service where it IS appropriate? If you pay to get a streaming video or something do you mind that it'll skip because your neighbor hit big-wallpapers-all-on-one-page.com? (Paying for things to get them when not everyone has them is inherently non-neutral, I suppose...) If your video preempted him entirely that would be a loss of the service they have a contract to provide to HIM, but that's not what QoS is for. It's more for arranging to delay one of his packets if it arrives when the video needs to be there. Networks are generally very underutilized; this example is a timing issue more than a bandwidth issue.

But perhaps I missed something. Since I didn't find any technical discussion from your links aside from the usual slashdot melange, I'm still very much left wondering just how savetheinternet thinks things work now and how they would change in the future in this regard. It just reads like FUD to me. But they claim to have Vint Cerf on board, which is something going for them. At least I can trust that he'll have the technical understanding of the ramifications one way or the other.

I hope I missed something, or maybe my problem is that I'm looking for technical understanding in something that is actually 100% politics.