I wanted to take one point a step further. You mentioned you own Web sites and would not want to have to pay monthly rates for others to access your sites at premium speeds. I believe that the Internet is a virtual space where I, as a content author, place my content for others to see and it shouldn’t be someone else’s decision as to who gets to see my content or how they get to see it. Unlike other mediums, the Internet has been founded on different, much more open, principles. To now reverse the status quo would be to allow ISPs to begin privatization of things that don’t belong to them. If I own website.com and wish for others to see it, then they should be able to do so without paying an ISP extra money to get access to that content. Not only would such a thing likely result in much fewer hits on my site, but it would also bring income to the ISP as a result of my content, with none of that coming to me. If I want people to have to pay to see my content then I can create subscription-based access through my site directly, rather than have a third party mandate it.

Interestingly enough, of all of these scenarios I have yet to hear of one actually happening. But if the potential is there, ans more profit can be made, an ISP will choose to do so because it’s a company, and that’s what companies do, they make money. While they may have the right to do so, I am already in possession of Internet access which I don’t want to give up, so rightfully or not, I support actions which would limit a company’s ability to restrict that access.

I think you put it best when you said:
“But the US Government has a pretty damn short history of censorship. There’s a much lower likelihood of that happening than for ISPs to start restricting access to content, because they’ve talked about it. In this case, I’ll take the evil of the US Government over the evil that is John Doe ISP Corporation. ISPs have an incentive to censor Internet access, the US Government – not quite as much.”