3 Responses to “Net Neutrality is a Confusing Issue - What Is It Really?”

1. 

   1Derek J. Punaro on Aug 28, 2006 at 10:48 pm:

   Did you bother to read NetCompetiton.org, the site that produced that video? While they spout off things about Net Neutrality being “corporate welfare for dot-com billionaires” they’re backed by “small” companies such as… AT&T, BellSouth, Verizon, Sprint, and Time Warner.

   There are two sides to the Net Neutrality debate, and there are big companies on both sides. But in this particular fight, you have to look beyond that point to see where the real contention is… and that is with what the possible effects of the lack of this legislation are - and that’s allowing the big telecom companies the ability to control who gets the fast lane and who gets the slow lane.

   You like Flickr but use Verizon DSL? Sorry. They couldn’t cut a deal. You get bumped to the slow lane. Instead, try the new super-fast Verizon photo hosting service. Sure it has a third of the features and a clumsy interface and no other ISP has worked out a deal with Verizon to move them to the fast lane, but that’s ok. All your friends use Verizon too, right?

2. 

   2Michael Rebmann on Aug 29, 2006 at 1:41 am:

   There is absolutely no evidence that the telecoms or cable companies are going to leverage their service to give them a competitive advantage. There are already FTC laws to address that. Read the first post I made and follow the links in it. I have been reading about this issue for quite a while now. I originally thought net neutrality was a good thing. The more I learned, the more my opinion changed.

   The simple fact is that improvements in speed and service availability are provided by private companies. They have to recover the costs. If they can’t have the ability to allocate costs based on usage, there are only 2 alternatives. One, service improvements and innovation will suffer. Or, two, the internet subscribers will pay these higher costs.

   ISP are not going to unfairly use this ability to their competitive advantage, too many consumers are able to switch providers if this happens. Competition would keep things under control. Verizon will soon be introducing FIOS here for about the same price as regular dsl. That spent millions of dollars upgrading to do this. Someone will ultimately pay the costs. It will either be you and I or it could be companies which require huge amounts of bandwidth for their everyday operations. I as a consumer do not think I should have to support a service I do not use. Let the companies pass the costs of doing business on to the people using that business.

   It is no different than me willingly paying Flickr for a pro account. It is a service I use, value and pay for. The government can not effectively legislate the value and price of a service. That scenario always results in unintended consequences and bad results.

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