(a) INGENERAL.—A network operator shall—

(1) not interfere with, block, degrade, alter, modify, impair, or change any bits, content, application or service transmitted over the network of such operator; 

[...]

(6) treat all data traveling over or on communications in a non-discriminatory way;

This language means a provider would not be able to prefer latency-sensitive applications, such as VOIP – their own offering or others – over high-bandwidth, latency-insensitive applications such as BitTorrent, Gnutella, or other peer to peer clients which make up well over half of the traffic on the Internet today.

Ultimately, this means providers would have to completely re-evaluate their network capacity models.  The cost for the neccesary upgrades would undoubtably be passed on to the consumer. 

The Save The Internet folks seem to have some very twisted ideas of how things actually work:

With net neutrality, the network’s only job is to move data — not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

If it weren’t for the fact that nearly every major provider does traffic shaping – that is, choosing which data to privilege with higher quality service – to limit the amount of bandwidth that can be taken up by Peer to Peer networks and worm-ish traffic, your $50 Comcast connection would be more like $250.  The proposals being pushed by some of the “Net Neutrality” need some serious technical scrutiny and careful word-smithing to ensure they don’t stop providers from being able to manage their network to provide the best experience for their customers.

Those providers that choose to throttle access to certain services would lose customers of those services if they had options.  But they don’t.  The issue to be concerned about is not “Net Neutrality” but the fact that there are too many exclusive owners of the last mile.  Wireless is slowly but surely changing this and making the owners of the wires less relevent.  The short term solution to this problem though, is not to limit what providers can do which will just raise the cost of doing business, and therefore the cost to the consumer, but to consider returning to the open-access policies of the late 90′s which required facilities-based providers to open their facilities to other providers, while encouraging wireless broadband development.