Last year Wired published a must-read article that made the important but inconvenient (for “net neutrality” advocates) point that the supposed neutrality of the Internet is a myth, no more real than the tall tales found at Snopes.com.

Now Forbes has a column from Nick Shulz (among others on the subject) that translates an AEI study about the Internet’s longstanding non-neutrality for non-academics:

Robert Hahn and Robert Litan of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies argue that, contrary to the claims of regulated neutrality proponents, “all bits of information are not treated equally from an economic standpoint.” They argue that “the Internet is not end-to-end now and was never designed to be strictly neutral.”

How can this be? The engineering architects of the Internet drafted the technical rules in informal papers called Requests for Comment.
The early drafters of the Net’s architecture, according to Hahn and Litan, “recognized the need to offer priority to some packets over others.” …

If strict net neutrality is not, in fact, essential to the architecture of the Internet, it undermines the arguments in favor of federal or state net neutrality mandates and suggests the market will do a better job of sorting out the Internet’s future evolution.

Bingo. The abstract of that report, “The Myth of Network Neutrality and What We Should Do About It,” can be found here. Click through to find the whole thing. Even if you’re not a techie or an academic, it isn’t too hard to follow. We just wish the would-be net regulators would give it some thought themselves.