When it comes to paying for broadband deployment, there’s an 800-pound gorilla in the debate: the Net’s rapid evolution into a conduit for data-rich audio and video entertainment. But as NY Times blogger Saul Hansell noted just before the election, all that data carries a price tag:

You are watching a lot more video on the Internet, and you may start to pay your Internet provider more for it.

Few issues bring the Net neutrality debate into sharper focus than a discussion of how to pay for tomorrow’s networks. Hensell’s blog cites participants at a recent seminar at Columbia University business school who commented about the direct link between the amount of data traveling through the country’s network systems and the cost to maintain the quality of these systems.

That’s the gorilla and it takes the net neutrality debate inevitably to why Congress or the FCC could possibly wish to establish a mandate that would shift the entire residential network build-out and maintenance cost onto consumers, instead of allowing for the possibility of “shared financing” involving the Web’s heaviest corporate users.

That’s the issue – and the impact on consumers – that the Net neutrality community refuses to face.