It's a trick to get someone curious enough to make a post asking about the change, thereby triggering an extensive discussion about the important issue of net neutrality.
Poor consumers may get cheaper options subsidized by firms like Facebook and Google. Wealthy power users will probably wind up paying more to get out of subsidized channels. (Does Usenet already kinda do this?)
I stopped watching cable because I hated paying for a service that made me a product that channels could sell for advertising.
I really should take more control of my online habits anyways. Maybe this would help me do that.
IMHO that's truer as more public offices and services offer or will start offering Internet-only services.
No, we should not. Numbers should be different in every era IMHO.
but can you explain why forcing Netflix (just for an example) to negotiate transit with every provider large enough to demand it helps lower any costs? presumably transit competition?
or how turning 'the internet' from a generic access method into a giant menu with a checkbox by every internet address helps lower cost? maybe because we'd be forced to examine all the options and our spending habits and select only the bundles we need?
and what about transitive services...probably need to shift pretty hard away from the whole micro services model, maybe i don't subscribe to the particular oauth channel your application needs.
doesn't this additional server and client side provisioning requirement create a huge barrier to entry? doesn't that weaken the whole competition argument?
i guess what i'd really love to see is some kind of defense for the cable-tv model of the internet beyond 'regulation bad, free markets good'
There's lots of cases where a lack of regulation causes higher prices. Such as monopolies and oligopolies.
Remember that companies seek to maximise profit above all else. They only lower prices if it helps them to maxmise profits.
Right now, we have user pays.
I think deregulation could/will rebalance these things.
- Our emailer will get a cheaper package.
- The news sites will get pressure to lighten up - more video compression, more care about image sizes.
- Youtube will probably be forced to share ad revenue with ISPs - probably leading to more ads.
- The illicit video streamers will probably be very unhappy as their bandwidth goes way down.
- The torrenters will probably be asked to pay more.
- Maybe we get more infrastructure.
- Maybe we get monopolies busted up.
IDK, all of this is speculation. So are all the loudly trumpeted possible downsides (of which I am truly fearful as well.)
But I just want some non-hysterical even-handed exposition. Is that too much to ask?
aren't all the things you bring up solved by usage based billing in the current model? thats pretty different than selective transit.
There is an optimum somewhere between totally regulated and totally unregulated. As to whether the current situation in the US resembles that optimum I'll leave for the reader to decide but it should not come as a surprise if the incumbents in the 'net sector start abusing their market power as soon as restrictions are lifted.
That may have to do with remembering life pre-Web. It was basically fine. Really. Impulsive consumption was harder and we were comfortable not having constant, instant, total access to all the world's trivia. So it was kinda better.