The only way to make the net “neutral” would be to fully return control to the government. Not to regulate it – that will only reduce service levels across the board and drive up prices – but to have governments take over and fully fund the infrastructure. At that point, the Internet’s neutrality is effectively in the hands of the people.

Of course, it still wouldn’t be neutral. In the control of governments one could expect censorship in the form of things like forced Canadian content, or blocking of sites that the Australian government deems objectionable. Such measures would be easily implemented on a government controlled internet.

The internet is a commercial enterprise. It is wholly controlled by the profit it can generate. People who abuse the net by sucking up all the bandwidth with their (usually illegal) file sharing affect the bottom line – they increase infrastructure costs and return very little revenue – and the corporations have a duty to their shareholders and to their less abusive customers to manage the resource in a way that makes it reasonably fair to everyone and turns a profit. That means traffic shaping.

Let’s face the facts here… nobody has to download movies – DVDs are plentiful in stores and quite inexpensive. They don’t take that option because they’d rather steal the movie for free over the internet. At a fundamental level, it makes sense for corporations to put the kybosh on that, since realistically, the government can’t stop it.

Net neutrality is, and always has been, a myth. So too is the “unlimited” internet account. If we need any regulation of the net it would be to require that service providers spell out exactly what any account’s limitations really are.