Like many NetFolk, I’ve been sporadically following the debate on Net Neutrality with the usual jaded sense of dislocation for polarized argument, especially those that split on party lines.

In this case, the party of business wants freedom to charge for Internet service at both ends. The party of postmodernism wants total freedom of access protected by central government. Some want an aggressive, businesslike approach to drive innovation; others support the monkish Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web from his office at the state-sponsored CERN Science Lab somewhere in uptown Geneva. Both sides are wealthy. Both sides have a point.

That’s the normal Marx-Smith divide, but doesn’t it go a little further than that? I don’t know about you but if I’m logged on during the long U.S. evening, from EST to PT, reception is often atrocious. The reason: Bit Torrent! The downstreaming of movies that American consumers increasingly love to watch on their Media Center Editions. And this will only get worse when some approximation to HD is brought onto the Net.

Who then is going to provide the extra bandwidth for the movies which, as Bob Cringely recently demonstrated, is virtually impossible to provide under current conditions?

Are we, who use limited bandwidth with text and graphics, particularly content providers like Syntagma Media, going to suffer slow service because some companies are raking it in, streaming out movies in industrial quantities? Or should those businesses pay the telco/ISPs so they can finance a massive increase in bandwidth?

In some ways the U.S. is poorly served on bandwidth because the dotcom crash killed off a lot of cable companies and, to this day, their unfinished cable networks lie unused in the ground as the fabled “dark fiber”.

In the UK, where I live, we now have a national 12Mbs broadband system, even in some country areas, though only 8Mbs seems currently usable. But we still get slow service at movie time in America.

What is the answer then? Some form of funding is clearly necessary for the video demand and that can only come from the customers. But how will those funds find their way to the telco charged with building the network? Should the telco “tax” the mass provider? It seems bizarre, but that’s exactly what’s going to happen.

There simply isn’t a fairer system, unless governments subsidize extra, almost unlimited bandwidth. That will happen in many socialist systems, but not in the U.S. where they don’t do that sort of thing.

Net Neutrality is a wonderful concept, but it’s had its day, and technology itself has seen it off, combined with public demand … not always greedy corporations.

This is from News.com: “While the debate over Net neutrality started over whether broadband providers could block certain Web sites, it has moved on to whether they should be permitted to create a ‘fast lane’ that could be reserved for video or other specialized content. Prohibiting that is ‘not a road we want to go down, but that’s what the Markey amendment would do,’ said Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican. ‘The next thing is going to be having a secretary of Internet Access (in the federal government).’ ”

Why does China suddenly spring to mind?

Conversation.