I think it's time to split AT&T up again.

The says fox we need more chickens in the coop...

Furthermore, I would like to submit a study that my company paying me $1 million dollars a year will guarantee it winning all bids it currently has out.

Wow. That is slick on AT&T part.
By equating capacity to the electrical grid (This was done VERY subtly at the end "during peak hours of usage.") it will bring a sense of logic to their arguement.

This peak hours of usage is commonly referenced by the electrical company.

Old congressmen can't understand how the web works by they get electricty.
With this argument I fear Congress may be swayed to agree if by no other reason then their lack of knowledge.

i really don't understand whats so wrong with charging content providers (google, yahoo, etc) higher rates to access the internet than John Q's website that only gets 10 hits per month. Or even charging more for the type of content that is provided. Content like video streaming is very strenuous on a network because it has to be sustained and hogs a lot of bandwidth all at once (think charge more for an oversized load on a narrow toll highway, versus a lower rate for a number of vans carrying the same amount of cargo)

Google/Amazon currently pay their ISP $x for their connection, just like you do. Every ISP has a peering agreement with those they connect to.

ATT charges you for your download connection the same way they charge you for your upload connection. It's not like one costs them money and the other is free.

ATT simply wants to send video over their network and they don't want to pay to increase the capacity in order to do it.

Do you think ATT will charge Google and MSN/Microsoft the same fees? Do you think MSNBC/MSN will cover ATT in a negative light if they get a cost break from ATT?

One very simple reason why the telecoms shouldnt charge more this website: THEY ALREADY DO IT! If your website gets only 10 hits a month your bandwidth can be very low, and you pay low rates for that. Now try paying yourself for a website that gets thousands of hits a day, man, you are in trouble ($$$). In the two ends telecoms get paid for bandwidth, you pay for your cable/dsl based on download/upload and websites servers pay for their links by mbps (or gbps).
Isnt this enough, charge more for their links! Dont divide internet in a poor/rich pathway!

Hosting/bandwidth for big websites already costs a ton, it won't impact them significantly.

Where this will help out is generic speed-up for everyone and the way internet traffic is handled - it will simply be more efficient as opposed to how packets are routed these days.

It will also help out a great deal in terms of troubleshooting why your internet connection to a specific server sucks. In the past our packets could be routed in multiple ways while in a logical tiered environment the shortest path is very evident.

Anyways, I'd have to look in more detail at exactly what they're proposing.

Well Meh... Net Neutrality is nice in concept but hardly good for consumers as a whole in practice.
The problem with charging more to content providers (i.e. Google, Yahoo, etc) translates to these providers passing on the costs to the average consumer. It is true that video streaming demands a lot of their bandwidth, but where do you leave VoIP services? A multi-tiered Internet would make most (if not all) of this services that depend on it more expensive.

What AT&T is proposing would allow ISPs to put a price tag on their QoS policies, and QoS is something many already have in place.

Many content providers have huge pipes in order to service their clients. Pipes that are already very expensive. Also, don't forget that as a user you would have very little priority in their QoS policies, so forget about high speed downloads using BitTorrent once something like this is in effect.

I know they haven't mentioned anything about user priority, but who's to say that they wouldn't do it once this is in effect, remember that this would segment the Internet pricing in many tiers, the higher the tier, the higher the priority, and the higher the price. Obviously, as consumer, we would be at the bottom tier.

..or was is weapons of mass corruption? I forget :)

The reasoning is good, but can be used to make so much money and prioritize richer company. Like WMV content provider can stream way faster than like RA supplier because M$ can subsidize WMV content provider for extra speed.

AT&T, you're on the axis of evil, along with math, iran, venezuela, and one of the koreas.

How come, providers in other countries can survive without a tiered Internet and at the same time give higher DSL speeds to their customers than the AT&t does in the US?

German providers offer 16 Mbps for residential homes for a comparable price to my current AT&T offer, and I only get 3 Mbps.
And then I read in another article here that the Japanese get like 60 Mbps?! I am mad.

There is something wrong in AT&Ts calculation.
I have to agree with 'G' (see comment 'Greed and censorship' above) and assume that AT&T is just greedy and wants to grab the most mony for the least service. And it's probably easier to take it from the big boys like Google and Yahoo because they have the dough, but nobody thinks ahead and eventually WE the customer will pay for it as Google and Yahoo will just pass on that cost to us.