The National Journal has a really good article summing up the context and current state of the debate over net neutrality. The article did a particularly good job of explaining how it was the words of a telecom executive that really set things off, implying that AT&T and other companies wanted to be able to charge content providers like Yahoo to transmit data over the Internet, beyond the normal charges for bandwidth.
And as Jon Stewart points out, when Congress gets involved in this kind of thing, it’s not always pretty.