There’s a long, complicated essay at the technology blog Liquid Culture considering the different (and contradictory) arguments made by net neutrality supporters. It’s a bit esoteric and philosophical, but it makes a clear point about why net neutrality is the problem, not the solution:

Net neutralism is in that sense a way to repress, or to postpone that which is unmanageable to the future. It is a safe assurance that the relative statelessness, facelessness and independence from commercial actors that the base structure of the Internet has been able to gain from will remain.

And I can definitely understand them. But the problem is that current services like for example BitTorrent after all create bottlenecks, which affect all users when some users download terabytes of pornography and computer games. The Internet isn’t a superhighway, it is pipes after pipes which all have limited capacity. When they are full, they are full. And you have to wait. If the large majority of consumers want to have that mythological future, repeatedly said to be around the corner, where we can have immediate video conferences and get streams of (undeniably DRM-packaged) HD video directly into our living rooms, well then we also have to grab the bull by the horns and realize that the options we make today in fact might be a side-track which would take us far from the initial idea of the Internet, historically speaking.

In short, net neutrality rules would have unintended consequences that could limit the future possibilities of the Internet. The supporters of government regulation of the Internet would actually cause the problems they claim they want to prevent. As Liquid Culture puts it, “The issue is not, however, entirely without irony…”