Monday, May 19, 2014

Something that bugs me about net neutrality

(If you don't know anything about Net Neutrality (NN) find yourself a good primer on Net Neutrality.  The Wikipedia article is pretty decent as is this Medium article.)

If you read anything about net neutrality you will undoubtedly include references to "fast lanes" or how Netflix will have to pay more to get good service for video or other tiered service concerns.  Tiering is NOT the problem...  No one would complain about a tiered service model that drives prices down like the tiered/bulk pricing models for online services like AWSMailChimp, Dropbox, or myriad others.

The problem is that there isn't enough competition among internet service providers and in the absence of more competition and/or regulatory power the consumer (innovative start-up OR end user) will lose.