For those of us that spend a substantial portion of our day haunting the net, YouTube has been both a wonder and a colossal distraction. One of the early promises of the net was that it would make all video instantly accessible from any connected location, and YouTube was the first big step toward that capability. Now we can see everything from campaign commercials and Superbowl ads to old WFB debates, Monty Python clips, and a heavy metal rendition of the Transformers theme song. It is, to drastically understate things, totally awesome.

And yet it’s also still rather amateurish. Net video is still in its infancy. The speed has improved (the first time I dowloaded a movie trailer it took several hours), but the quality is generally poor (except for those glorious Apple HD movie trailers—but even on a speedy connection they can still take a while to download). Getting movies or other feature length programs—especially of any quality—has been, to say the least, a hassle. Now that’s changing. Apple has begun to offer TV and some full length movies through iTunes (though still not at full DVD quality, much less HD); Amazon has started a movie download service, which the company just announced it will begin offering through TiVo; even Wal-Mart has stepped into the ring. For net video addicts, this is a good thing.

But although the quality is better than YouTube, none of these services are offering movies in HD (though Xbox plans to offer such a service soon). As that transition occurs, the load on the net’s infrastructure is only going to get heavier, meaning that we’ll need to continue to build it up. Yet it appears that Democrats are going to continue to push for so-called “net neutrality” legislation, which threatens to put a serious damper on the development of the net’s physical infrastructure and, subsequently, the roll out of whatever futuretastic video services might’ve been developed in an unregulated net. Sean Captain wrote a helpful piece for Slate explaining why prioritization, which would be banned under neutrality regs, is so important for the deployment of HD video, and the Editors weighed in on the topic last year. (Obviously, the real reason I want instantaneous high quality video on the net is so I can watch Roger Corman’s ultra-campy, unreleased Fantastic Four flick on something bigger than a two inch YouTube screen. A true classic like this deserves better!)