Slashdot Mirror
Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Berin Szoka and Brent Skorup write that everyone assumes that cable companies have all the market power, and so of course a bigger cable company means disaster. But content owners may be the real heavyweights here: It was Netflix that withheld high-quality streaming from Time Warner Cable customers last year, not vice versa and it was ESPN that first proposed to subsidize its mobile viewers' data usage last year. 'We need to move away from the fear-mongering and exaggerations about threats to the Internet as well as simplistic assumptions about how Internet traffic moves. The real problems online are far more complex and less scary. And it's not about net neutrality, but about net capacity.' The debate is really about who pays for — and who profits from — the increasingly elaborate infrastructure required to make the Internet do something it was never designed to do in the first place: stream high-speed video. 'While many were quick to assume that broadband providers were throttling Netflix traffic, the explanation could be far simpler: The company simply lacked the capacity to handle the "Super HD" video quality it began offering last year.' A two-sided market means broadband providers would have an incentive to help because they would receive revenue from two major sources: content providers (through sponsorship or ads), and consumers (through subscription fees). 'Unfortunately, this kind of market innovation is viewed as controversial or even harmful to consumers by some policy and Internet advocates. But these concerns are premature, unfounded, and arise mostly from status quo bias: Carriers and providers haven't priced like this before, so of course change will create some kind of harm,' conclude Szoka and Skorup. 'Bottom line: The FCC should stop trying to ban prioritization outright and focus only on actual abuses of market power.'"
Yeah as soon as I read this I had propaganda bullshit sirens going off in my head.
"No, you shouldn't worry about prioritization, in fact it can help startups."
What? Wasn't that what everyone was worried about to begin with? That those with all the purse strings would be able to lock out these very startups you're claiming will benefit the most from this setup?
You're talking about startup content providers, which the likes of ESPN want to put out of business (do you think they actually want to help their competition?).
ESPN is talking about startup broadband providers, which don't exist. If they did exist ESPN would want to help them as they'd prefer to deal with a bunch of small cable companies and not one big Comcast or whatever. However, the last mile is a natural monopoly, so there won't be any startups.
Really it is about coming up with a bogus argument about helping small business so that they can kill it. The only place you'd actually see startups would be on the content side, which is where ESPN plays.
This is like buying a computer case from Newegg, paying for 3 day UPS shipping, then the UPS driver that shows up to Newegg and demands a tip to pickup the package because it's too big and heavy and without the tip the package could take much longer to arrive.
The shipper shouldn't get to charge twice for a shipment. Likewise ISPs shouldn't be allowed to sell data delivery to its customers then try to also extract fees from the data providers.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.