This bit of regulation is very good if you look into it a bit rather than taking a knee-jerk reaction.
Without it you're looking at a corporate takeover of the internet.
What we had in the past was peering arrangements. Large backbones agreed to transfer each other's content REGARDLESS OF WHAT IT WAS. IE, neutrality.
Without regulation, companies are wanting to drop that. Take your local phone company offering DSL access for example. Some like MagicJack or Vonage hurts their business. Without neutrality, they could simply block access to those sites, forcing you to come back to them for phone service.
Or Comcast for example. It's one of the country's largest internet providers. It's also a major cable provider. Sites like Netflix or Hulu threaten their antiquated business model. Without mandated neutrality, they are free to block those sites, OR, threaten to block them if the providers do not pay up some extortion money. They've already done this to some degree. You have a bandwith cap of 250GB per month on Comcast, but streaming video from THEIR sites does not count against it - giving them an unfair advantage in comparison to other video sites where users are eating through limited resources to access them. Essentially the same protection racket as the mafia has been involved in for years. "This is a really nice website you have here . . . it would be a shame if our customers weren't able to get to it.".
The knee-jerk reaction here is that straight competition via capitalism would solve this, but that's not what we have here. Capitalism cannot function when there is not competition. How many internet providers do most people have to choose from? MANY have only 1. Virtually no one has more than 2 or 3. You can look at Comcast, Verizon, Earthlink, RoadRunner, AT&T, etc, and say there are a lot of providers, but realistically most of those are essentially serving segregated areas where they do not compete against each other at all. If you don't like what they have to offer, you go without internet.
Put it this way: network neutrality is in the best interests of the CITIZENS of the country. It says that when you pay for your internet connection, you get a pipe, and YOU are the one who will decide what and where you want to go. Without that, it only benefits the corporations hoping to extort more money. They want to drag the internet kicking and screaming back into the cable/satellite model where you're paying them for access to each individual service.
Corporatism is one of, if not THE biggest danger to our freedom moving forward in this country. All government regulation isn't bad. Look into the reasons behind things, understand it before you say "OMG REGULATION THE SKY IS FALLING AHH!!!!!!".
powder: I don't think this is what you're thinking of. Net neutrality doesn't restrict a citizen's freedom AT ALL. Quite the contrary. PERFECT example here: lets say that Comcast decided to go anti-gun and figured that they would either block all gun related websites (like this one), or would charge you a $14.95 per month premium to access them. With net neutrality in place, that wouldn't be allowed. They would be required to take a neutral stance as to the content of the site.
What you may be thinking of is the "internet kill switch" legislation, which is indeed evil, but a totally separate issue.
EDIT: After glancing back over the article it appears that it mentions several different items. I'll not posit an opinion on those, but the above most certainly does still stand for the FCC's proposed net-neutrality rules. Mark my words, without that it WILL be the death of the internet as we know it. In the past we had a gentleman's agreement of neutrality. It worked well for the first 30 years of the internet's existence. It's only now that corporations are starting to break those previously unwritten arrangements that we are looking at rules to essentially keep the internet working the way it already did in the past.
