This comparison is quite useful and got rather popular: «For all the arcana in telecommunications law, there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?». http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/upshot/a-super-simple-way-to-understand-th...
Tim Starling, 01/12/2014 05:21:
But the pipes are fundamentally not dumb -- there is a complex arrangement of transit prices and peering, and the companies that built transoceanic links want to recoup their investment.
I doubt the worldwide internet backbone is (significantly) more complex or expensive than the electricity grid.
What you are saying is that you want the ISPs to provide the necessary cross-subsidies so that the pipes will appear to be dumb, to the end user.
Opinions on this vary. Historically, for instance, electricity grids have been rather fragmented and have been unified only with strong regulations or nationalisations. Only now regulators are seriously taking care of supranational grids. Certainly we don't want to go backwards, because it usually takes decades to progress.
Nemo