I know it might be hard for some net neutrality proponents to believe... but somethings might be a lot more more important than equal treatment on the Net.
I don't think I am going out on a limb to say that the overwhelming majority of Americans would say that prioritizing net traffic or providing a premium tier for telehealth in order to save lives, to get underserved areas access to quality health care support and to better the quality of health care in general -- was a lot more important value than net neutrality.
It may sound appealing in the abstract that all traffic should be treated equally, but in the real world Americans value life, health care, and helping people in need more than they value guaranteeing that each bit of traffic takes the same nanoseconds to arrive as any other.
Doesn't net neutrality sound petty and misguided when they can't even apply common sense or human decency to their policy pronouncements of total egalitarian treatment of bits. So many bloggers are lost in their virtual worlds that they have forgotten that the real world and real needs pale in comparison to this bogus issue called net neutrality.
Getting to the FCC's role, I believe it is interesting that in the FCC's September 29, 2006 order on Rural Health Care Support mechanism, just released last week, the FCC officially acknowleges in the middle of paragraph 8 that: "many of these real-time telehealth applications require a dedicated broadband network that is more reliable and secure than the public Internet." The footnote for this assertion refers to the "Department of Veterans Affairs, Veterans Health Affairs Adminstration, Telemedicine Strategic Planning Document."
Seems like the FCC has its priorities right -- real lives trump virtual equality every time.
