Those very lack of choices is what will foster growth... The competition will move into that area when they see that the market is ripe... The customers should decide not our govt...
We're talking about two different things - we agree on one (data priority), and not the other (ISP availabilty + control).
Customers
should decide, not the government. They should keep the 'net the way it is - neutral data priority. In the long run, I don't want the media coming from motogp.com throttled down because a larger part of the pipe is reserved for Oprah.* The gov't should NOT decide that they're going to control the bandwidth like they do the airwaves, since they aren't comparable (radio spectrum is physically limited, bandwidth is theoretically infinite.) A provider's potential bandwidth should be defined by the amount of servers + connectivity they are willing to afford - not because the government is going to allow them to buy part of the backbone at the expense of others. If a content provider creates and provides content that enough people want and are willing to pay for, then they can upgrade their capabilities and serve more customers efficiently - that's a free market at work.
Immense media companies (Disney, Viacom, Google et.al.) are seeking gov't intervention, and are spending incredible amounts of $$ lobbying for the easing of neutrality - and that's a really slippery slope.
As for lack of choices, if in this case we're talking about internet access, we run into the extremely expensive (financially and politically) "last mile" problem. I'm willing to bet that within a mile of my house there's potential access to an ultra-fast fiber connection, but I can't access it, since nobody (ATT or Time Warner) is willing to pay the expense of laying the fiber to the thousands of homes in my area - it simply isn't worth it - they wouldn't make that money back for a very long time, unless they raised rates astronomically, which would incite a consumer revolt. No other company is going to fix this....so we're stuck in this ironic position where we have a finite amount of bandwidth coming into our homes, and these companies are trying to control how that bandwidth is used...but this would all likely be moot if we had far more bandwidth coming into our homes in the first place...
So where can the lack of choices foster growth in this case? It's really tough.
If it's too expensive for even ATT or TW to be willing to open manhole covers and wire everyone up to faster connections with fiber, then another option is a non-physical connection...and then we're dealing with radio spectrum, which they're also lobbying the gov't to put further controls on.
My personal potential solution (that only works in my locale): I know that I can get a microwave line-of-sight connection to a service that can provide multiple T1 amounts of bandwidth. It's too expensive for one homeowner, but if I could get enough people on my block to go in on it, it could be do-able...we just have to get around running multiple CAT6 lines down the block somehow
Weird as it sounds, it's at least a potential option...but I'm in a city where this service is available, and there's enough density to find a big enough group to do it. In more rural areas, it's unworkable.
If the gov't is going to do something, they should tell the media companies that they're going to do
nothing. The internet is going to stay the way it is, and if the media companies want to compete, they need to compete on a level playing field and let the consumer decide what they want and are willing to pay for.
* No disrespect to Oprah fans, but I'd rather watch Stoner with a 45 second lead for 22 laps and a token fight for fifth place...
:40__s: 
