> - Nobody wants to pay, but if they have to pay, the big corporations are going to do it, and the small business owners are unlikely to be able to, resulting in an inability to compete as fairly in the marketplace as they can now. Don't think even tiny bit of extra delay on page loads won't make a big difference for text browsing sites, to say nothing of streaming video sites, which are even more reliant on performance.

Does network neutrality have anything to do with fair competition? Small, unpopular sites are already hindered by being small and unpopular. Insofar as a site's popularity shifts, the ability of the owners to improve their users' experience will also shift (assuming the owners attempt to derive some revenue from the site). It seems to me like an obviously good thing. Since sites won't be locked permanently into high or low priorities, abandoning network neutrality may actually decrease the inertia that a site must overcome to make it big. But whatever the case, it doesn't seem likely to me that it'll make much difference at all. RinkWorks and Sluggy Freelance have long been my favorite sites, but they have always loaded much more slowly than major sites like Yahoo or Google.