Hmm. First, I actually share a reflexive antipathy to government regulation, but there’s actually a fairly long history of just this sort of regulation, though admittedly with different technology. The alternative, leaving this in the hands of monopolists, is equally bad.

I don’t think that there’s much question that routers and network equipment are going to get smarter, with network neutrality rules or not. Moore’s law ought to apply to the processors and equipment that sits in the middle of the Internet just as much as it applies to your desktop computer. If the processors and memory capacity of these routers increase faster than the growth of network traffic, which I believe is true, there are more things that you can do to network traffic. I’m not sure of the history of this, but limited and expensive networking equipment probably contributed to the end-to-end model.

So I’d suggest that the capacity to do deep packet inspection, and to break net neutrality, will continue to grow as infrastructure is updated.

That’s not to say that there isn’t an entrenchment concern that’s valid. What you might be concerned with are business models that start to use these new capabilities in harmful ways.

I simply have no confidence that we can draft a law (or get is passed) that will adequately prohibit socially negative conduct without blocking important innovation.

It’s possible that discretion could be given to an agency, to help sort out the case-by-case problems that Felten suggests. Given the power of the broadband players, though, and the track record of such agencies, I don’t think we’d like that outcome either.