Re: Canada gets first, bitter dose of metered Internet

On Feb 1, 2011 6:16 PM, "Karl Swenson" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Side note, according to critics, what you have is what we will get if net
> neutrality passes.  Any thoughts?

Net neutrality means different things to different people especially now
that the politicians and pundits are paying more attention to it. In my
experience, advocates are more likely to be strongly against metered billing
of any sort.  Also metered billing is already perfectly legal in every
jurisdiction I've heard of, so I'm not really sure what the critics mean.

I personally like metered billing in principle, but in practice the
last-mile monopoly makes it problematic (as it does with *everything* in
this debate).  If there were competition, metered billing would mean pennies
per GB (i.e. cheaper than we pay for "unlimited" today).  As it is, Comcast
has no desire or incentive to sell me what I want (more bandwidth at a
better price). If there were a viable competitor I would switch tomorrow.
Since they know I probably won't (can't) switch, metered billing would
mostly be a lazy way of extracting profits without adding value.

But (as Bruce also said) the core of net neutrality is content neutrality.
That is, Comcast should not charge anyone a penny extra to download a kb of
Netflix or YouTube content than a kb of NBC content.

-- 
Nick

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