Such shallow coverage, El Reg
For the first 2/3rds of the article, El Reg carries on as this this is a decade-old issue. Only near the bottom do we see that the matter goes back to the 90's. But the stage was being set before that.
In the late seventies and into the eighties, cable was expanding in the US, but the last mile is/was EXPENSIVE. Cable companies sought concessions from local governments to protect their investments, and this resulted in the cable monopolies we have to this day. When the internet came to consumers, it was over the telephone at first.
It was one of those timing things--copyright-destroying (user-to-user sharing--Winamp?) took off just as cable internet was getting started, and was tremendously enabled by it. Big Content was apoplectic, which is understandable, and demanded that these apps be blocked. It did not help that each one of these apps declared that is was so special that it did not need to use exponential back-off--until just the traffic from that on app was enough to congest itself. These new apps were a legal threat, in that the ISPs were enabling the violation of copyright, and a technical threat, in that they were pumping out far, far, more traffic than the switches could handle. The cable companies were already cutting deals regarding content on their networks, so they were ready to do so with the internet they were providing as well.
Which threatened to kill new apps entirely on the Internet.
Up until this point, (late in Bush II era) the US government had taken a very hands-off policy regarding the internet, but this was seen as a crisis. Net neutrality began as a slightly-left-of-center effort to block the ISPs, especially cable companies, from ruining the Internet. When Big Content jumped in, however, we should have realized where this was going.
The fight is almost entirely between Big Content and the ISPs regarding contract clauses. Don't think it is anything else. Breaking up the local cable monopolies would be a good thing for several reasons, but it would mean that Big Content would have way too much power relative to the ISPs. I don't like the implications of trying to redress that imbalance. It may be that the best we can do for consumers is to leave the cable monopolies in place (with more (uggh) regulation) plus NN.