One thing I point out is, a lot of people tooting the horn of amateurism, actually, these people were professionals. Some are professors who are employed full time. Others are marketers or business consultants.

As a citizen I might be well-behaved and have nothing salacious or radical about me, I might be a total bore, but I might suffer somehow if other people are being spied on and blocked from doing important work that might have a collective benefit down the road. The personal doesn't necessarily translate to the social.

I mean look at all these acquisitions and mergers - WhatsApp and Oculus and et cetera. There's no way that you can envision these tech companies as the underdog anymore. They're always presented as though they were these little guys who you should be championing - Facebook will overthrow the cable television complex, blah blah - but it's more likely they will merge with them.

I feel like we're stuck in the former mode of reacting because that's what gains traction in Washington. But I really believe we need a robust public good argument. Net neutrality is not just about creating the next Instagram or Farmville or whatever.

Technology isn't simply addictive - it's addictive because it's a servant to business incentives. There are huge departments in these companies that are devoted to this and staffed by incredibly talented people who have skills that could be put to socially beneficial projects but who are now trying to find out how to make you click and how to maximize your time on a certain site, or encourage teenagers to "friend" more products and constantly engage with them.

It's very complicated. There's been this broader mechanism, an industry, which wants people to use free services, from the old days of advertising-supported papers and magazines, to ad-supported free television.

Advertisers are happy to see the stuff they've branded out there for free, they don't care about scarcity, they want any message they're invested in to be shared and to be abundant and to be passed along.