Today's the day that the FCC will begin the long and arduous process of hashing out the new network neutrality rules they announced they'd be expanding back in September. You can expect the signal to noise ratio today to be pretty high as lobbyists fire up their bullhorns and the talking points fly, but despite all of the coverage today, actual rules won't really be hashed out until next year. There will be a lot of analysis today, but very little of it is going to differ from the last half-decade of debate you've already observed.

Again, the primary motivation for expanding these rules is so the FCC has the authority to act in extreme cases of anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior. The FCC's currently being sued by Comcast who claims the FCC lacks the authority to impose neutrality restrictions on carriers. Comcast of course had their wrist slapped last year for throttling all user upstream P2P traffic (and lying about it).

While carriers are busy pretending that the sky is falling with the crafting of these new rules, you can be fairly certain that after said rules run the DC lobbyist gauntlet, they'll be something considerably less than tough consumer protections.

Still, the rules will likely require that network management is made transparent to consumers, while giving the FCC a base authority to act in cases of outright anti-competitive action (an ISP blocking a competing service). Consider the rules a foundation of sorts.

If you're interested, a live stream of the FCC hearing is available here. The "guts" of the FCC neutrality rule making process can be examined here (pdf).