Network Neutrality Is Law In Chile

An anonymous reader writes "Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality, according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission's Blog from Spain. The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking."

Comments

If Chile can do it, why can't we do it?

[LinearBob]

In one word -- GREED!

Re:If Chile can do it, why can't we do it?

[hairyfeet]

Well Mr Anon Coward, or AC for short, the problem we have seen again and again with the whole libertarian "let the market take care of it" philosophy is this- without regulation one or two players will simply use their wealth to crush everyone else and then destory any free market that once existed there. If you would like examples I suggest you look into how Intel was able to force the higher electric and heating bills of Netburst onto the public by bribes to OEMs and thus removing free choice, or for an oldie but a goodie how MSFT crushed competition by tying windows to computers sold and not computers installed with Windows.

When we are talking about things with huge startup costs as barriers to entry, such as CPU fabs or in this case millions of miles of cable or fiber, it really doesn't take much for the biggest player to simply wipe out any competition and lock the market up for themselves. Thanks to the massive deregulation that has happened in this country we have gone from the tons of little players we had under dialup to a few massive regional monopolies, that can simply use predatory pricing to crush anyone that dares to enter a market or simply refuse to allow them access to the backbones (which they own).

In my own area I have watched three different smaller ISPs be crushed by getting screwed out of backbone access, and talking to one shortly before it went under their lawyer made it clear that while there was a good chance they could win, it would cost them in excess of 10 million in lawyers fees and a decade of litigation to find out. THAT my dear AC is how come we need the government to open up broadband to competition. Because as it is now you will simply be destroyed by the local incumbents if you try to compete. Sadly instead we will most likely see guys like you demanded even more deregulation and we will fall farther and farther behind as ISP impose caps rather than upgrade infrastructure, because they know their "customers" simply have nowhere else to go.

Re:A Law That Guarantees

[LiquidPaper]

Well, yes. We are part of America. I believe you are thinking of USA.