Austine, do you have an attitude problem?
Austine, with all due respect the Internet has not been neutral since the mid-1990es. Cisco and co are defending the possibility for it to continue to develop along the current architectural lines instead of being legislated to go on a strange tangent into the big nowhere.
Even in those prehistoric days every node connected to the backbone was already running either WFQ or some form of priority queueing on the link making it very non-neutral. Every router then (and most now) was prioritising traffic and is still doing so. Every Linux box out there is strictly non-neutral unless you tune it to be. It will perform those obscene and blasphemous prioritisation of traffic by default. This by the way includes all el reg servers including the ones emitting net neutrality rants. It is also by the way one of the reasons why it actually works so good. Not that windows is very different nowdays. Even its rather lame network stack will perform such prioritisation as well.
Anyway, technical realities aside, there are also the business ones. I ran an ISP as far back as 1998 whose business model was based around it being non-neutral and being able to provide a differentiated service for the different types of traffic. Users came to us in flocks from other ISPs because the user experience was way better than what they provided.
If used in the interest of the user non-neutrality is a key in providing better experience.
That is what Cisco and most other vendors are advocating for - not to throw the baby out with the bath water. The Internet is non-neutral at present, has been non-neutral for the last 15 years and better remain non -neutral. There is nothing wrong with it provided that: THE NON-NEUTRALITY IS DRIVEN BY THE END-USER AND IS IN THE END-USER INTEREST.
In order for this to be possible the actual possibility for the net to be non-neutral should not be outlawed via legislation achieved through lobbists misrepresenting the goals and aims. Just like in your subtitle. It is a classic example of what I am talking about: non-neutral != closed and neutral !=open. That is a deliberate misrepresentation. Just like half of the neutral/non-neutral debate.
In fact we should all applaude Cisco, Motorola and the others who finally intervened in this exchanges of lies and misrepresentations. It was about bloody time.