Good points from Doc Searls in "[Net Neutrality vs. Net Neutering[0]":

The carriers' plan from the beginning has been to convert the Net into a paid content delivery system--of some kind. That's all they were ever able to imagine. That's why they've screwed Net Neutrality from the beginning, offering crippled asymmetrical service to customers whom they expected only would consume, never producing much more than clicks that brought down more to consume. Most of us have never known anything but an asymmetrical relationship with the Net, which is why so many of us barely can imagine what it means to be a producer as well as a consumer in the Net's end-to-end world. A couple of days ago, a woman I know--middle class, white collar--told me she doesn't like the Net because "I don't like mass media in general".

ADSL, modems with limited upstream, dynamic IPs for dial-up users without even attempting to reassign the same IP, forced disconnects with IP changes on DSL flat rates - net neutrality does not exist for many users. Sure, you can get a free blog somewhere - but you always remain a second-class network user. The simplest thing - running your own site on your home computer - is hardly available to any network user.

The flip side of the coin: would we (we = sysadmins) want all those people at home to run servers who are not even able to protect their Windows rudimentarily against attacks? What would a network look like in which every user is also a producer and runs the necessary software - would the attacks and break-ins be enough incentive for manufacturers to make the software user-friendly so that the security level would be higher, or would the chaos be even greater, with a few million more zombie computers?

Is it an alternative to encourage people to rent root servers or to pool with friends and rent one together - knowing full well that most of them have no idea about administration and, given the current state of server software, are more likely to catch additional holes than plug them and thus unwittingly participate in spam distribution, DOS and other network nasties? Would server hosts take better care of and secure the systems if they rented more of them to clueless users?

Or would this just be another September that never ends?