Some quotes from Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) from 7 Nov 2006:

“Sometimes I think Net Neutrality, who knows about it?,” Waxman said at that meeting. “What’s going on now in the communications area is we are moving to a duoplet. We’ll have the telephone companies. And we’ll have the cable companies. They both have wires that go into the home. You’ll have a choice of one or the other for your telephone services, cable services, and Internet services. Those are going to be provided by one or the other.”

— Silenced: Progressive Sites Censored, by Kriss Perras Running Waters, Malibu Arts Reviews, 8 April 2007

So there’s at least one elected representative who sees a duopoly.

Waxman also said:

“Competition would be better for the consumers,” Waxman said then. “But both are united right away on saying that services over the Internet could be taxed by the cable company or the telephone company. Well the great innovations we’ve seen in recent years have been through the Internet. People with start-ups in their garages have made fortunes or at least broken new ground with new ideas through very skimpy investments to figure out new ideas to use the Internet.”

They want to go to Google, Yahoo and very successful Internet companies and make them pay to get on the Internet service or to be featured in a prominent way, Waxman said.

“The ones who will be bred out of it are the ones who are struggling to get started,” Waxman said. “The idea of Net Neutrality is, phone companies, cable companies, will deliver Internet services but won’t dictate those Internet services. That is what I believe in, and it’s called Net Neutrality.”

That sounds like a good idea to me, and more competition in service provision would be even better.

-jsq