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Comment by npinguy | Hacker News Reader

Use this as a perfect example to explain to people why Net Neutrality matters.

"What incentive does AT&T have to bring you good streaming experience for Netflix, Hulu, or heck even Youtube when they'd much much MUCH rather you were buying DirecTV from them?"

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AT&T - and most major ISPs in the USA - already offer TV service. It's true that these consolidations will only give the big players more power, but the conflict of interest already exists.

And ATT already provides horrible internet service and doesn't care!

Defeatism!

This answers your rhetorical question:

http://about.att.com/story/the_chernin_group_and_att_create_...

Because I'll switch to Comcast or Verizon if I'm an ATT customer and their internet service is bad?

I mean, I don't have an option to switch away from Comcast because their internet service is bad.

That's why they can refuse to upgrade their peering with Netflix in the first place, because they know I'm stuck with them, when I'd dump pretty much any ISP who didn't upgrade their peering with a major website that I visit (in like 3-4 months) if I had the option to.

> Because I'll switch to Comcast or Verizon if I'm an ATT customer and their internet service is bad?

Because Comcast is known for the high quality of their internet service? They all have the same incentive to degrade streaming services that compete with their TV packages. You're assuming that they won't each behave the same way even though doing so is to their collective benefit.

Even if this nightmare scenario plays out, I would gladly trade 5-10 years of bad service that would have VCs and entrepeuners scrambling to provide people what they actually want, and thus creating real new alternatives, as opposed to the Net Neutrality détente that keeps customers and providers antagonistic towards each other. Because thats really what the current plan is, to force ISPs to continue hating their customers and solely providing them with the current level of mediocre service by legislative force.

Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner all serve different cable networks. They rarely overlap, so you don't have that choice 99% of the time.

And it isn't really implicitly evil, because they just own the coax in the area and it obviously is not worth the investment to lay redundant wires.

>they just own the coax in the area and it obviously is not worth the investment to lay redundant wires

Sooner or later, this sort of thing must be addressed with a "public utility" perspective in mind -- not just in US but here in Europe as well. Why can I use different gas providers, or different electricity providers, or even different water providers in some countries, without pipe ownership being a factor? Answer: better laws. A degree of resource-sharing is forced upon providers by law, for the benefit of consumers.

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