Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bilbo0s | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe someone could tell me why Pay-As-You-Go Internet would be a bad thing. I am genuinely confused as to why net neutrality and Pay-As-You-Go are bad.

We would have net neutrality, and with this new payment plan, you would get all of the bandwidth that you pay for. If you want to spend lots of time watching movies or doing voice chats while playing online games, then you would pay for that. More importantly, your neighbor would not feel the bandwidth pinch when you are doing these things. Neither would your neighbor be paying for your extra bandwidth usage. This entire system seems win-win all around. This is not my area of expertise though.

Is there someone who could tell me what I am missing?

You're missing cognitive psychology. Due to risk aversion, people would rather pay a higher fixed price than a lower but variable price. Odlyzko has several papers on this topic: http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/networks.html

It has also been argued that setting the marginal price of Internet traffic at zero encourages innovation, although this innovation is subsidized by the people who don't use it.

Also, metered pricing would impose extra costs on all the people infected with botnets or Skype supernodes since they'd have to either pay a high Internet bill or pay the Geek Squad to disinfect their computer.

I don't know that pay-as-you-go would be bad and wouldn't say that it is. It basically represents the normal choices consumers would expect to have in a free market.

I cited the WSJ article just to round out the debate on the net neutrality issue. Pay-as-you-go may be a scare tactic, and it may not even be a bad thing, but it will affect pricing going forward if implemented and is therefore relevant to the debate.

It's not. It's just another tactic to scare the general public away from the issue of net neutrality.

"Oh no, my internet fee will raise? F___ net neutrallity. I don't even know what that is."

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