Saturday 30 December 2017

Why net neutrality is a daft idea...


And it's not because it hands governments control over the Internet (although that's cause enough to object to so-call net neutrality):
Except that it’s through prices and freely arrived at price signals that we achieve progress. Thank goodness for segregated pricing simply because this lack of neutrality is what will create the incentives among pipe owners to invest in wildly expensive advances that will only be offered to the big and rich. If so, great. As we know from cars, flat-screen tvs, air travel, along with everything else, what the rich enjoy is merely a preview of what we’ll all eventually enjoy if markets are free.
Yep. 

....

4 comments:

Sobers said...

Actually so called 'net neutrality' should be called 'internet socialism' - those who want to make the most demands on the infrastructure demanding to be subsidised by those who only wish to use it occasionally. For that is the effect - if the heavy users (basically the Netflix on demand streaming type services) don't have to pay the full cost of the bandwidth that service requires then the cost will be spread onto all the bandwidth users, regardless of usage.

Imagine if everyone was allowed to have as much petrol they needed every month for a fixed fee. That fee would have to be massive on everyone, even on little old grannies who drive to the shops and post office once a week, to be able to pay for the people who were driving thousands of miles per week, for the same fee. It would never be acceptable, so why is pricing internet access any different?

Woodsy42 said...

No, net neutrality does not have to mean socialism with everyone paying the same, that's an entirely false argument. Your mobile phone data uses a neutral net, but you pay more if you consume more. By all means lets have the big 'broadcasters' of data who use most infrastructure paying more because they use more.
But net neutrality doesn't prevent pricing by use, neutrality means everyone gets the same speed, priority and quality of service, which is much more important. Neutrality prevents big rich corporate users squeezing out smaller competition by paying more for a faster more reliable service. It's like having an extra lane on all roads with no holdups or speed limits but which you must pay extra to use. Nice for some but it removes the pressure to improve things for all the ordinary people using 'second class'.

Mark In Mayenne said...

Nope. Providers can and should charge for bandwidth used, but not provide different speeds against different sites.

The lists of net neutrality is an open door for governments to censor inconvenient websites.

They are already leaning on Facebook and Google to censor content and search results, while hiding behind the claim that commercial organisations can set their own rules.

"Sorry, the UKIP website is not available through this ISP"

Sobers said...

"Neutrality prevents big rich corporate users squeezing out smaller competition by paying more for a faster more reliable service. It's like having an extra lane on all roads with no holdups or speed limits but which you must pay extra to use. "

And if they pay more for a superior service, they'll have to charge their customers more too. Whereas if corporate users can force the broadband providers to take as much of their traffic as they can shove down the pipes without having to pay extra for those pipes to be increased in capacity, everyone ends up paying more for their internet, as someone has to pay for that increased capacity.

If I invent a new internet service that is requires a huge amount of bandwidth for the customers to use, and because its popular is overloading the network, who should pay for the network to be expanded? Me, the person benefiting from that extra capacity as my service is now available to more people, the customers of my service, or everyone else, regardless of whether they use my service or not?

I say that some combination of service providers and customers of those individual services should pay the cost that the service imposes on the network, not everyone else. Netflix would not be able to charge only $10/month if the true cost their service imposes on the network was landed on them. Net neutrality allows them to offload that cost onto the rest of the network users.